Missile Gap

Collecting Jar

It’s noon, and the rippling heat haze turns the horizon to fog in the distance. Maddy tries not to move too much: the cycads cast imperfect shadows, and she can feel the Venetian blinds of light burning into her pale skin. She sighs slightly as she hefts the heavy canvas sample bag out of the back of the Land Rover; John will be needing it soon, once he’s finished photographing the mock-termite nests. It’s their third field trip together, their furthest dash into the outback, and she’s already getting used to working with John. He’s surprisingly easy to get on with because he’s so absorbed in his work that he’s refreshingly free of social expectations. If she didn’t know better she could almost let her guard down and start thinking of him as a friend, not an employer.

The heat makes her mind drift: she tries to remember what sparked her most recent quarrel with Bob, but it seems so distant and irrelevant now—like home, like Bob arguing with her father, like their hurried registry-office wedding and furtive emigration board hearing. All that makes sense now is the stifling heat, the glare of not-sunlight, John working with his camera out in the noonday sun where only mad dogs and Englishmen dare go. Ah, it was the washing. Who was going to do the washing while Maddy was away on the two-day field trip? Bob seemed to think he was doing her a favor, cooking for himself and taking his clothes to the single overused public laundry. (Some year real soon now they’d get washing machines, but not yet…) Bob seemed to think he was being big-hearted, not publicly getting jealous all over her having a job that took her away from home with a male superior who was notoriously single. Bob seemed to think he was some kind of progressive liberated man, for putting up with a wife who had read Betty Friedan and didn’t shave her armpits. Fuck you, Bob, she thinks tiredly, and tugs the heavy strap of the sample case over her shoulder and turns to head in John’s direction. There’ll be time to sort things out with Bob later. For now, she’s got a job to do.

John is leaning over the battered camera, peering through its viewfinder in search of… something. “What’s up?” she asks.

“Mock-termites are up,” he says, very seriously. “See the entrances?” The mock-termites are what they’ve come to take a look at—nobody’s reported on them from close up, but they’re very visible as soon as you venture into the dusty plain. She peers at the foot of the termite mound, a baked clay hump in the soil that seems to writhe with life. There are little pipelike holes, tunnels almost, emerging from the base of the mound, and little black mock-termites dancing in and out of the holes in never-ending streams. Little is relative—they’re almost as large as mice. “Don’t touch them,” he warns.

“Are they poisonous?” asks Maddy.

“Don’t know, don’t want to find out this far from the hospital. The fact that there are no vertebrates here—” he shrugs. “We know they’re poisonous to other insectoida.”

Maddy puts the sample case down. “But nobody’s been bitten, or died, or anything.”

“Not that we know of.” He folds back the lid of the case and she shivers, abruptly cold, imagining bleached bones lying unburied in the long grass of the inland plain, where no humans will live for centuries to come. “It’s essential to take care out here. We could be missing for days before anyone noticed, and a search party wouldn’t necessarily find us, even with the journey plan we filed.”

“Okay.” She watches as he takes out an empty sample jar and a label and carefully notes down time and date, distance and direction from the milestone at the heart of Fort Eisenhower. Thirty-six miles. They might as well be on another planet. “You’re taking samples?”

He glances round: “Of course.” Then he reaches into the side pocket of the bag and removes a pair of heavy gloves, which he proceeds to put on, and a trowel. “If you could put the case down over there?”

Maddy glances inside the case as he kneels down by the mock-termite mound. It’s full of jars with blank labels, neatly segregated, impassable quarantine zones for improbable species. She looks round. John is busy with the mock-termite mound. He’s neatly lopped the top off it: inside, the earth is a squirming mass of—things. Black things, white things like bits of string, and a pulp of half-decayed vegetable matter that smells damply of humus. He probes the mound delicately with the trowel, seeking something. “Look,” he calls over his shoulder. “It’s a queen!”

Maddy hurries over. “Really?” she asks. Following his gloved finger, she sees something the size of her left forearm, white and glistening. It twitches, expelling something round, and she files her gorge rise. “Ugh!”

“It’s just a happy mother,” John says calmly. He lowers the trowel, works it in under the queen and lifts her—and a collection of hangers-on, courtiers, and bodyguards alike—over the jar. He tips, he shakes, and he twists the lid into place. Maddy stares at the chaos within.

What is it like to be a mock-termite, suddenly snatched up and transplanted to a mockery of home? What’s it like to see the sun in an electric light bulb, to go about your business, blindly pumping out eggs and eating and foraging for leaves, under the eyes of inscrutable collectors? She wonders if Bob would understand if she tried to tell him. John stands up and lowers the glass jar into the sample case, then freezes. “Ouch,” he says, and pulls his left glove off.

“Ouch.” He says it again, more slowly. “I missed a small one. Maddy, medical kit, please. Atropine and neostigmine.”

She sees his eyes, pinprick pupils in the noonday glare, and dashes to the Land Rover. The medical kit, olive green with a red cross on a white circle, seems to mock her. She rushes it over to John, who is now sitting calmly on the ground next to the sample case. “What do you need?” she asks.

John tries to point, but his gloved hand is shaking wildly. He tries to pull it off, but the swollen muscles resist attempts to loosen the glove. “Atropine—” A white cylinder, with a red arrow on one side: she quickly reads the label, then pushes it hard against his thigh, feels something spring-loaded explode inside it. John stiffens, then tries to stand up, the automatic syringe still handling from his leg. He staggers stiff-legged towards the Land Rover and slumps into the passenger seat.

“Wait!” she demands. Tries to feel his wrist: “Did one of them bite you?”

His eyes roll. “Silly of me. No vertebrates.” Then he leans back. “I’m going to try and hold on. Your first-aid training.”

Maddy gets the glove off, exposing fingers like angry red sausages, but she can’t find the wound on his left hand, can’t find anything to suck the poison out of. John’s breathing is labored and he twitches; he needs the hospital but it’s at least a four-hour drive away and she can’t look after him while she drives. So she puts another syringe load of atropine into his leg and waits with him for five minutes while he struggles for breath hoarsely, then follows up with adrenalin and anything else she can think of that’s good for handling anaphylactic shock. “Get us back,” he manages to wheeze at her between emphysemic gasps. “Samples too.”

After she gets him into the load bed of the truck, she dashes over to the mock-termite mound with the spare petrol can. She splashes the best part of a gallon of fuel over the heap, coughing with the stink. She caps the jerry can, drags it away from the mound, then strikes a match and throws it flickering at the disordered insect kingdom. There’s a soft whump as the igniting gas sets the mound aflame; small shapes writhe and crisp beneath an empty blue sky pierced by the glaring pinprick of S Doradus. Maddy doesn’t stay to watch. She hauls the heavy sample case back to the Land Rover, loads it into the trunk alongside John, and scurries back towards town as fast as she can.

She’s almost ten miles away before she remembers the camera, left staring in cyclopean isolation at the scorched remains of the dead colony.