tray, revealing the mains of Frank’s insect. The head, a couple of the
legs,of the highly articulated pincers, and a few other unidentified
parts had been cut off and put aside. Each grisly piece rest on a soft
pad of what appeared to be cotton cloth, almost a jeweler might present
a fine gem on velvet to a prospective buyer. Bobby stared at the
plum-size head with its small reddish-blue eye, then at its two large
muddy-yellow eyes that were too similar in color to Dyson Manfred’s. He
shivered. T main part of the bug was in the middle of the tray, on its
back. The exposed underside had been slit open, the outer layers of
tissue removed or folded back, and the inner workings revealed.
Using the gleaming point of a slender scalpel, which he handled with
grace and precision, the entomologist began by showing them the
respiratory, ingestive, digestive, and excretory systems of the bug.
Manfred kept referring to the
“great art” of the biological design, but Bobby saw nothing that equaled
a painting by Matisse; in fact, the guts of the thing were even more
repellent than its exterior. One term-“polishing chamber”-struck him as
odd, but when he asked for a further explanation, Manfred only said,
“in time, in time,” and went on with his lecture.
When the entomologist finished, Bobby said,
“Okay, we know how the thing ticks, so what does that tell us about it
that we might want to know? For instance, where does it come from?”
Manfred stared at him, unresponding.
Bobby said,
“The South American jungles?” Manfred’s peculiar amber eyes were hard
to read, and his silence puzzling.
“Africa?” Bobby said. The entomologist’s stare was beginning to make
him twitchier than he already was.
“Mr. Dakota,”
Manfred said finally,
“you’re asking the wrong question. Let me ask the interesting ones for
you. What does this creature eat? Well, to put it in the simplest
terms that any layman can understand-it eats a broad spectrum of
minerals, rock, and soil. What does it ex-”
“It eats dirt?” Clint asked.
“That’s an even simpler way to express it,” Manfred said.
“Not precise, mind you, but simpler. We don’t yet understand how it
breaks down those substances or how it obtains energy from them. There
are aspects of its biology that we can see perfectly clearly but that
still remain mysterious.”
“I thought insects ate plants or each other or… dead meat,” Bobby
said.
“They do,” the entomologist confirmed.
“This thing is not an insect or any other class of the phylum
Arthropodan for that matter.”
“Sure looks like an insect to me,” Bobby said, glancing dow at the
partly dismantled bug and grimacing involuntarily.
“No,” Manfred said,
“this is a creature that evidently e through soil and stone, capable of
ingesting that material i chunks as large as fat grapes. And the next
question is, that’s what it eats, what does it excrete?” And the answer,
M Dakota, is that it excretes diamonds.” Bobby jerked as if the
entomologist had hit him.
He glanced at Clint, who looked as surprised as Bobby t The Pollard case
had induced several changes in the y and now it had robbed him of his
poker face.
In a tone of voice that suggested Manfred was playing the for fools,
Clint said,
“You’re telling us it turns dirt into diamonds?”
“No, no,” Manfred said.
“It methodically eats through vein of diamond-bearing carbon and other
material, until it find the gems. Then it swallows them in their
encrusted jackets minerals, digests those minerals, passes the rough
diamond into the polishing chamber, where any remaining extraneous
mortar is worn away by vigorous contact with these hundreds of fine,
wirelike bristles that line the chamber.” With the scalpel he pointed
to the feature of the bug that he had just describe
“Then it squirts the raw diamond out the other end.” The entomologist
opened the center drawer of his desk,moved a white handkerchief,
unfolded it, and revealed three red diamonds, all considerably smaller
than the one Bobby had taken to van Corvaire, but probably worth
hundreds of thou sands, maybe millions, apiece.
“I found these at various points in the creature’s system.