Missile Gap

Poor Prognosis

Maddy visits John regularly in hospital. At first it’s a combination of natural compassion and edgy guilt; John is pretty much alone on this continent of lies, being both socially and occupationally isolated, and Maddy can convince herself that she’s helping him feel in touch, motivating him to recover. Later on it’s a necessity of work—she’s keeping the lab going, even feeding the squirming white horror in the earth-filled glass jar, in John’s absence—and partly boredom. It’s not as if Bob’s at home much. His work assignments frequently take him to new construction sites up and down the coast. When he is home they frequently argue into the small hours, picking at the scabs on their relationship with the sullen pinch-faced resentment of a couple fifty years gone in despair at the wrongness of their shared direction. So she escapes by visiting John and tells herself that she’s doing it to keep his spirits up as he learns to use his prostheses.

“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” he tells her one afternoon when he notices her staring. “If you hadn’t been around I’d be dead. Neither of us was to know.”

“Well.” Maddy winces as he sits up, then raises the tongs to his face to nudge the grippers apart before reaching for the water glass. “That won’t”—she changes direction in mid-sentence—“make it easier to cope.”

“We’re all going to have to cope,” he says gnomically, before relaxing back against the stack of pillows. He’s a lot better now than he was when he first arrived, delirious with his hand swollen and blackening, but the after-effects of the mock-termite venom have weakened him in other ways. “I want to know why those things don’t live closer to the coast. I mean, if they did we’d never have bothered with the place. After the first landing, that is.” He frowns. “If you can ask at the crown surveyor’s office if there are any relevant records, that would help.”

“The crown surveyor’s not very helpful.” That’s an understatement. The crown surveyor is some kind of throwback; last time she went in to his office to ask about maps of the northeast plateau he’d asked her whether her husband approved of her running around like this. “Maybe when you’re out of here.” She moves her chair closer to the side of the bed.

“Doctor Smythe says next week, possibly Monday or Tuesday.” John sounds frustrated. “The pins and needles are still there.” It’s not just his right hand, lopped off below the elbow and replaced with a crude affair of padding and spring steel; the venom spread and some of his toes had to be amputated. He was fitting when Maddy reached the hospital, two hours after he was bitten. She knows she saved his life, that if he’d gone out alone he’d almost certainly have been killed, so why does she feel so bad about it?

“You’re getting better,” Maddy insists, covering his left hand with her own. “You’ll see.” She smiles encouragingly.

“I wish—” For a moment John looks at her; then he shakes his head minutely and sighs. He grips her hand with his fingers. They feel weak, and she can feel them trembling with the effort. “Leave Johnson”—the surveyor—“to me. I need to prepare an urgent report on the mock-termites before anyone else goes poking them.”

“How much of a problem do you think they’re going to be?”

“Deadly.” He closes his eyes for a few seconds, then opens them again. “We’ve got to map their population distribution. And tell the governor-general’s office. I counted twelve of them in roughly an acre, but that was a rough sample and you can’t extrapolate from it. We also need to learn whether they’ve got any unusual swarming behaviors—like army ants, for example, or bees. Then we can start investigating whether any of our insecticides work on them. If the governor wants to start spinning out satellite towns next year, he’s going to need to know what to expect. Otherwise people are going to get hurt.” Or killed, Maddy adds silently.

John is very lucky to be alive: Doctor Smythe compared his condition to a patient he’d once seen who’d been bitten by a rattler, and that was the result of a single bite by a small one. If the continental interior is full of the things, what are we going to do? Maddy wonders.

“Have you seen any sign of her majesty feeding?” John asks, breaking into her train of thought.

Maddy shivers. “Turtle tree leaves go down well,” she says quietly. “And she’s given birth to two workers since we’ve had her. They chew the leaves to mulch then regurgitate it for her.”

“Oh, really? Do they deliver straight into her mandibles?”

Maddy squeezes her eyes tight. This is the bit she was really hoping John wouldn’t ask her about. “No,” she says faintly.

“Really?” He sounds curious.

“I think you’d better see for yourself.” Because there’s no way in hell that Maddy is going to tell him about the crude wooden spoons the mock-termite workers have been crafting from the turtle tree branches, or the feeding ritual, and what they did to the bumbler fly that got into the mock-termite pen through the chicken wire screen. He’ll just have to see for himself.