The largest of the three was still partially encased in a mottled
brown-black-gray mineral crust.
“They’re diamonds?” Bobby said, playing ignorant.
“I’ve never seen red diamonds.”
“Neither had I. So I went to another professor, a geologist who happens
to be a gemologist as well, got him out of be at midnight to show these
to him.” Bobby glanced at the would-be Irish Sumo wrestler, but the man
did not rise from his chair or speak, so he evidently was not the
geologist.
Manfred explained what Bobby and Clint already knew that these scarlet
diamonds were among the rarest on things earth-while they pretended that
it was all news to them.
“This discovery strengthened my suspicions about the creature, so I went
straight to Dr. Gavenall’s house and woke him shortly before two o’clock
this morning. He threw on sweats and sneakers, and we came right back
here, and we’ve been here ever since, working this out together, unable
to believe our own eyes.” At last the round man rose and stepped to the
side of the desk.
“Roger Gavenall,” Manfred said, by way of introduction.
“Roger is a geneticist, a specialist in recombinant DNA, and widely
known for his creative projections of microscopy genetic engineering
that might conceivably progress from current knowledge.”
“Sorry,” Bobby said,
“I lost you at ‘Roger is…” We’ll need some more of that layman’s
language, I’m afraid.”
“I’m a geneticist and futurist,” Gavenall said. His voice was
unexpectedly melodic, like that of a television game-show host.
“Most genetic engineering, for the foreseeable future, will take place
on a microscopic scale-creating new and useful bacteria, repairing
flawed genes in the cells of human beings to correct inherited
weaknesses and prevent inherited disease. But eventually we’ll be able
to create whole new species of animals and insects, macroscopic
engineering-useful things like voracious mosquito eaters that will
eliminate the need to spray Malathion in tropical regions like Florida.
Cows that are maybe half the size of today’s cows and a lot more
metabolically efficient, so they require less food, yet produce twice as
much milk.” Bobby wanted to suggest that Gavenall consider combining
the two biological inventions to produce a small cow that ate only
enormous quantities of mosquitoes and produced three times as much milk.
But he kept his mouth shut, certain that neither of the scientists would
appreciate his humor. Anyway, he had to admit that his compulsion to
make a joke of this was an attempt to deal with his own deep-seated fear
of the everincreasing weirdness of the Pollard case.
“This thing,” Gavenall said, indicating the deconstructed bug in the lab
tray,
“isn’t anything that nature created. It’s clearly an engineered life
form, so astonishingly task-specific in every aspect of its biology that
it’s essentially a biological chine. A diamond scavenger.” Using a
pair of forceps and the scalpel, Dyson Man gently turned over the insect
that wasn’t an insect, so he could see its midnight-black shell rimmed
with red markings. Bobby thought he heard whispery movement in many pa
of the study, and he wished Manfred would let some sun into the room.
The windows were covered with interior shutters, and the slats were
tightly shut. Bugs liked darkness and shadows, and the lamps here
seemed insufficiently bright to dissuade them from scurrying out of the
shallow draw over Bobby’s shoes, up his socks, and under the legs of
pants.
Hanging his pendulous belly over the desk, indicating crimson edging on
the carapace, Gavenall said,
“On a few Dyson and I shared, we showed a representation of this pattern
to an associate in the mathematics department, and he confirmed that
it’s an obvious binary code.”
“Like the universal product code that’s on everything you buy at the
grocery store,” the entomologist explained.
Clint said,
“You mean the red marks are the bug’s number?”
“Yes.”
“Like… well, like a license plate?”
“More or less,” Manfred said.
“We haven’t taken a chip the red material for analysis yet, but we
suspect it’ll prove be a ceramic material, painted onto the shell or
spray-bonded in some fashion.” Gavenall said,
“Somewhere there are a lot of these thing industriously digging for
diamonds, red diamonds, all of them carries a coded serial number that