Missile Gap

Anthropic Error

As the summer dry season grinds on, Maddy finds herself spending more time at John’s home-cum-laboratory, doing the cleaning and cooking for herself in addition to maintaining the lab books and feeding the live specimens. During her afternoons visiting in the hospital she helps him write up his reports. Losing his right hand has hit John hard: he’s teaching himself to write again but his handwriting is slow and childish.

She finds putting in extra hours at the lab preferable to the empty and uncomfortable silences back in the two-bedroom prefab she shares with Bob. Bob is away on fieldtrips to outlying ranches and quarries half the time and working late the other half. At least, he says he’s working late. Maddy has her suspicions. He gets angry if she isn’t around to cook, and she gets angry right back at him when he expects her to clean, and they’ve stopped having sex. Their relationship is in fact going downhill rapidly, drying up and withering away in the arid continental heat, until going to work in John’s living room, among the cages and glass vivaria and books feels like taking refuge. She took to spending more time there, working late for real, and when Bob is away she sleeps on the wicker settee in the dining room.

One day, more than a month later than expected, Dr. Smythe finally decides that John is well enough to go home. Embarrassingly, she’s not there on the afternoon when he’s finally discharged. Instead, she’s in the living room, typing up a report on a sub-species of the turtle tree and its known parasites, when the screen door bangs and the front door opens. “Maddy?”

She squeaks before she can stop herself. “John?” She’s out of the chair to help him with the battered suitcase the cabbie half-helpfully left on the front stoop.

“Maddy.” He smiles tiredly. “I’ve missed being home.”

“Come on in.” She closes the screen door and carries the suitcase over to the stairs. He’s painfully thin now, a far cry from the slightly too plump entomologist she’d met on the colony liner. “I’ve got lots of stuff for you to read—but not until you’re stronger. Don’t want you overworking and putting yourself back in hospital!”

“You’re an angel.” He stands uncertainly in his own living room, looking around as if he hadn’t quite expected to see it again. “I’m looking forward to seeing the termites.”

She shivers abruptly. “I’m not. Come on.” She climbs the stairs with the suitcase, not looking back. She pushes through the door into the one bedroom that’s habitable—he’s been using the other one to store samples—and dumps the case on the rough dressing table. She’s been up here before, first to collect his clothing while he was in hospital and later to clean and make sure there are no poisonous spiders lurking in the corners. It smells of camphor and dusty memories. She turns to face him. “Welcome home.” She smiles experimentally.

He looks around. “You’ve been cleaning.”

“Not much.” She feels her face heat.

He shakes his head. “Thank you.”

She can’t decide what to say. “No, no, it’s not like that. If I wasn’t here I’d be…”

John shuffles. She blinks at him, feeling stupid and foolish. “Do you have room for a lodger?” she asks.

He looks at her and she can’t maintain eye contact. It’s all going wrong, not what she wanted.

“Things going badly?” he asks, cocking his head on one side and staring at her. “Forgive me, I don’t mean to pry—”

“No, no, it’s quite alright.” She sniffs. Takes a breath. “This continent breaks things. Bob hasn’t been the same since we arrived, or I, I haven’t. I need to put some space between us, for a bit.”

“Oh.”

“Oh.” She’s silent for a while. “I can pay rent—”

This is an excuse, a transparent rationalization, and not entirely true, but she’s saved from digging herself deeper into a lie because John manages to stumble and reaches out to steady himself with his right arm, which is still not entirely healed, and Maddy finds herself with his weight on her shoulder as he hisses in pain. “Ow! Ow!”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

“It wasn’t you—” They make it to the bed and she sits him down beside her. “I nearly blacked out then. I feel useless. I’m not half the man I was.”

“I don’t know about that,” she says absently, not quite registering his meaning. She strokes his cheek, feeling it slick with sweat. The pulse in his neck is strong. “You’re still recovering. I think they sent you home too early. Let’s get you into bed and rest up for a couple of hours, then see about something to eat. What do you say to that?”

“I shouldn’t need nursing,” he protests faintly as she bends down and unties his shoelaces. “I don’t need… nursing.” He runs his fingers through her hair.

“This isn’t about nursing.”

Two hours later, the patient is drifting on the edge of sleep, clearly tired out by his physical therapy and the strain of homecoming. Maddy lies curled up against his shoulder, staring at the ceiling. She feels calm and at peace for the first time since she arrived here. It’s not about Bob anymore, is it? she asks herself. It’s not about what anybody expects of me. It’s about what I want, about finding my place in the universe. She feels her face relaxing into a smile. Truly, for a moment, it feels as if the entire universe is revolving around her in stately synchrony.

John snuffles slightly then startles and tenses. She can tell he’s come to wakefulness. “Funny,” he says quietly, then clears his throat.

“What is?” Please don’t spoil this, she prays.

“I wasn’t expecting this.” He moves beside her. “Wasn’t expecting much of anything.”

“Was it good?” She tenses.

“Do you still want to stay?” he asks hesitantly. “Damn, I didn’t mean to sound as if—”

“No, I don’t mind—” She rolls towards him, then is brought up short by a quiet, insistent tapping that travels up through the inner wall of the house. “Damn,” she says quietly.

“What’s that?” He begins to sit up.

“It’s the termites.”

John listens intently. The tapping continues erratically, on-again, off-again, bursts of clattering noise. “What is she doing?”

“They do it about twice a day,” Maddy confesses. “I put her in the number two aquarium with a load of soil and leaves and a mesh lid on top. When they start making a racket I feed them.” He looks surprised. “This I’ve got to see.” The walls are coming back up again. Maddy stifles a sigh; it’s not about her anymore, it’s about the goddamn mock-termites. Anyone would think they were the center of the universe and she was just here to feed them. “Let’s go look, then.” John is already standing up, trying to pick up his discarded shirt with his prosthesis. “Don’t bother,” she tells him. “Who’s going to notice, the insects?”

“I thought”—he glances at her, taken aback—“sorry, forget it.” She pads downstairs, pausing momentarily to make sure he’s following her safely. The tapping continues, startlingly loud. She opens the door to the utility room in the back and turns on the light. “Look,” she says.

The big glass-walled aquarium sits on the worktop. It’s lined with rough-tamped earth and on top, there are piles of denuded branches and wood shavings. It’s near dusk, and by the light filtering through the windows she can see mock-termites moving across the surface of the muddy dome that bulges above the queen’s chamber. A group of them have gathered around a curiously straight branch: as she watches, they throw it against the glass like a battering ram against a castle wall. A pause, then they pick it up and pull back, and throw it again. They’re huge for insects, almost two inches long; much bigger than the ones thronging the mounds in the outback.

“That’s odd.” Maddy peers at them. “They’ve grown since yesterday.”

“They? Hang on, did you take workers, or… ?”

“No, just the queen. None of these bugs are more than a month old.” The termites have stopped banging on the glass. They form two rows on either side of the stick, pointing their heads up at the huge, monadic mammals beyond the alien barrier. Looking at them closely, Maddy notices other signs of morphological change: the increasing complexity of their digits, the bulges at the back of their heads. Is the queen’s changing, too? she asks herself, briefly troubled by visions of a malignant intelligence rapidly swelling beneath the surface of the vivarium, plotting its escape by moonlight.

John stands behind Maddy and folds his arms around her. She shivers. “I feel as if they’re watching us.”

“But to them it’s not about us, is it?” he whispers in her ear. “Come on. All that’s happening is you’ve trained them to ring a bell so the experimenters give them a snack. They think the universe was made for their convenience. Dumb insects, just a bundle of reflexes really. Let’s feed them and go back to bed.”

The two humans leave and climb the stairs together, arm in arm, leaving the angry aboriginal hive to plot its escape unnoticed.