The Taking

  20

  WITH THE CALCULATED CARRIAGE OF A DIGNIFIED landlubber trying to cross the deck of a yawing ship without making a fool of himself, Derek Sawtelle traveled from the camp of the swillpots to Molly’s chair among the fighters. He bent close to her. “Dear lady, even under these circumstances, you look enchanting.”

  “And even under these circumstances,” she said affectionately, “you’re full of horseshit.”

  “Might I have a word with you and Neil?” he asked. “In private?”

  He was a genteel drunk. The more gin and tonic that he consumed, the more mannerly he became.

  Having been a casual friend of Derek’s for five years, Molly knew that he had not been driven to the bottle tonight by the contemplation of civilization’s collapse. Managed inebriation was his lifestyle, his philosophy, his faith.

  A long-tenured professor of literature at the state university in San Bernardino, nearing sixty-five and mandatory retirement, Derek specialized in American authors of the previous century.

  His novelist heroes were the hard-drinking macho bullies from Hemingway to Norman Mailer. His admiration for them was based partly on his literary insights, but it also had the quality of a homely girl’s secret crush on a high-school football star.

  Lacking an athletic physique, too kind to punch people out in barroom brawls or to cheer the bloody spectacle of a bullfight, or to dangle a wife from a high-rise window by her ankles, Derek could model himself after his heroes only by immersion in literature and gin. He had spent his life swimming in both.

  Some professors might have made fine actors, for they approached teaching as a performance. Derek was one of these.

  At his request, Molly had spoken to his students a few times and had seen him in action on his chosen stage. He proved to be an entertaining teacher but also an excellent one.

  Here with the drums of Armageddon beating on the roof, Derek dressed as if he were soon to enter a classroom or attend a faculty reception. Perhaps mid-twentieth-century academics had never favored wool slacks and tweed jackets, harlequin-patterned sweater vests, foulard handkerchiefs, and hand-knotted bow ties; however, Derek had not only written his role in life but also had designed his costume, which he wore with authority.

  When Molly rose from the table and, with Neil, followed Derek Sawtelle toward the back of the tavern, she saw that once more she had the full attention of the nine dogs.

  Three of them—a black Labrador, a golden retriever, and a mutt of complex heritage—were roaming the room, sniffing the floor, teasing themselves with the lingering scents of bar food dropped in recent days but since cleaned up: here, a whiff of yesterday’s guacamole; there, a spot of grease from a dropped French fry.

  Since the rain had begun, this was the first time that Molly had seen animals engaged in any activity that seemed right and ordinary. Nevertheless, while the roaming trio kept their damp noses to the plank flooring, they rolled their eyes to watch her surreptitiously from under their lowered brows.

  At the quiet end of the bar, where they could not be overheard, Derek said, “I don’t want to alarm anyone. I mean more than they’re already alarmed. But I know what’s happening, and there’s no point in resisting it.”

  “Derek, dear,” Molly said, “no offense, but is there anything in your life that you ever found much reason to resist?”

  He smiled. “The only thing I can think of was the disgusting popularity of that dreadful cocktail they called a Harvey Wallbanger. In the seventies, at every party, you were offered that concoction, that abomination, which I refused with heroic persistence.”

  “Anyway,” said Neil, “we all know what’s happening—in general if not the specific details.”

  Gin seemed to serve Derek as an orally administered eyewash, for his gaze was crystalline clear, not bloodshot, and steady. “Before I explain, I must confess to an embarrassing weakness you know nothing about. Over the years, in the privacy of my home, I have read a great deal of science fiction.”

  If he thought this secret required confession and penitence, perhaps he was drunker than Molly had realized.

  She said, “Some of it’s quite good.”

  Derek smiled brightly. “Yes, it is. Undeniably, it’s a guilty pleasure. None of it is Hemingway or Faulkner, certainly, but whole libraries of the stuff are markedly better than Gore Vidal or James Jones.”

  “Now science fiction is science fact,” Neil acknowledged, “but what does that have to do with living through tomorrow?”

  “In several science-fiction novels,” Derek said, “I encountered the concept of terraforming. Do you know what it is?”

  Analyzing the word by its roots, Molly said, “To make earth—or to make a place like the planet Earth.”

  “Yes, exactly, yes,” said Derek with the enthusiasm of a Star Trek fan recounting a delicious plot twist in his favorite episode. “It means altering the environment of an inhospitable planet to make it capable of supporting terrestrial life forms. Theoretically, for instance, one could build enormous machines, atmosphere processors, to liberate the composite molecules of a breathable atmosphere from the very soil and rock of Mars, turning a nearly airless world into one on which human beings, flora, and fauna would flourish. In such science-fiction stories, terraforming a planet takes decades or even centuries.”

  Molly at once understood his theory. “You’re saying they aren’t using weather as a weapon.”

  “Not primarily,” Derek said. “This isn’t the war of the worlds. Nothing as grand as that. To these creatures, wherever they may be from, we are as insignificant as mosquitoes.”

  “You don’t go to war with mosquitoes,” Neil said.

  “Exactly. You just drain the swamp, deny them the environment in which they can thrive, and build your new home on land that no longer supports such annoying bugs. They’re engaged in reverse terraforming, making Earth’s environment more like that on their home world. The destruction of our civilization is to them an inconsequential side effect of colonization.”

  To Molly, who believed that life was a gift given with meaning and purpose, the perfect cruelty and monumental horror that Derek was describing could not exist in Creation as she understood it. “No. No, it’s not possible.”

  “Their science and technology are hundreds if not thousands of years more advanced than ours,” Derek said. “Literally beyond our comprehension. Instead of decades, perhaps they can remake our world in a year, a month, a week.”

  If this was true, humankind was indeed the victim of something worse than war, denied even the dignity of enemy status, viewed as cockroaches, as less than cockroaches, as an inconvenient mold to be rinsed out of existence with a purging solution.

  When Molly’s chest tightened and her breath came less easily than before, when her heart began to race with anxiety, she told herself that her reaction to Derek’s premise was not an indication that she recognized the ring of truth in his words. She did not believe that the world was being taken from humanity with such arrogance and with no fear of the consequences. She refused to believe such a thing.

  Evidently sensing her innate resistance to his theory, Derek said, “I have proof.”

  “Proof?” Neil scoffed. “What proof could you possibly have?”

  “If not proof, at least some damn convincing evidence,” Derek insisted. “Follow me. I’ll show you.”

  He turned away from them, toward the back of the tavern, but then faced them again without having taken a step.

  “Molly, Neil…I’m sharing this out of concern for you. I don’t mean to cause you any distress.”

  “Too late,” Molly said.

  “You’re my friends,” Derek continued. “I don’t want to see you waste your final hours or days in futile resistance to an inevitable fate.”

  “We have free will. We make our own fate, even if it’s figured in the drift of stars,” Neil said, for so had he been taught, and still believed.

  Derek shook his head. “Better to seize
what pleasure you can. Make love. Raid Norman Ling’s market for your favorite foods before the place is underwater. Settle into a comforting haze of gin. If others want to go out with a bang…well, let them. But pursue what pleasures are still available to you before we’re all washed into that long, perfect, ginless darkness.”

  He turned away from them once more and went to the back of the tavern.

  Watching him, hesitating to follow, Molly saw Derek Sawtelle as she had never seen him before. He was still a friend but also other than a friend; he was now the embodiment of a mortal temptation—the temptation to despair.

  She did not want to see what he wished to show them. Yet the refusal to look would be a tacit acknowledgment that she feared his evidence would be convincing; therefore, refusal would be the first step on a different road to despair.

  Only by seeing his evidence could she test the fabric of her faith and have a chance to hold fast to her hope.

  She met Neil’s eyes. He recognized her dilemma, and shared it.

  Pausing at the archway that led to a short hall and the public rest rooms, Derek looked back and promised, “Proof.”

  Molly glanced at the three lazily roaming dogs, and they looked at once away from her, pretending to be enthralled by the history of dropped food written on the stained wood floor.

  Derek passed through the archway, disappearing into the hall.

  After a hesitation, Molly and Neil followed him.

  21

  WHEN DEREK HAD ASCERTAINED THAT THE men’s room was unoccupied, he propped the door open with a trash can and motioned for Molly and Neil to enter.

  A strong piney scent rose from the perfumed cakes in the two urinals. Under that astringent fragrance, the odor of stale urine persisted.

  The room had three inner doors. Two offered access to toilet stalls, and the third opened on a janitorial closet.

  “I had just washed my hands,” Derek said, “and realized there were no paper towels in the dispenser. I opened the closet to look for some….”

  A light came on automatically when the closet door was opened, and would go off when it was closed.

  The closet contained metal shelves laden with supplies. A broom. A sponge mop and a rag mop. A bucket on wheels.

  “I noticed the leak at once,” said Derek.

  The ceiling Sheetrock at the back of the closet was saturated. A blister had formed, then broken, and rain had dripped down through the open metal shelving, gradually saturating the supplies stored there.

  When Derek removed the bucket, broom, and mops, the closet proved large enough to allow the three of them to crowd inside.

  At the sight of Derek’s promised evidence on the wet tile floor, Molly drew back a step, bumping against Neil. She thought the thing must be a snake.

  “It’s probably a fungus,” said Derek, “or the equivalent, I think. That would be the closest word we’d have for it.”

  On reconsideration, she realized that a colony of mushroomlike fungi lay before her, fat and round and clustered in such a way that they resembled the coils of a gathered serpent.

  “It was the size of a round loaf of bread when I first saw it,” Derek said. “That was hardly an hour ago, and already it’s half again as big.”

  The fungus was black overall, as shiny black as oiled rubber, with bright yellow ameboid spots edged in orange. That she could have mistaken it for a snake was no surprise, because it looked poisonous and evil.

  “The rain isn’t a weapon,” Derek said, stooping beside the fungus. “It’s an instrument of radical environmental change.”

  Crouching behind him, peering over his shoulder, Molly said, “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “The water is drawn out of the ocean and processed…somewhere, I don’t know, maybe in hovering ships more immense than we’re able to comprehend. The salt must be removed because the rain isn’t salty. And seeds are added.”

  “Seeds?” Neil asked.

  “Thousands of millions of tiny seeds,” Derek said, “microscopic seeds and spoors, plus the nutrients necessary to nourish them and the beneficial bacteria needed to sustain them—all washing down across the world, on every continent, every mountain and valley, into every river, lake, and sea.”

  In a near whisper, his voice thickened by a fearful awe, Neil said, “The entire spectrum of vegetation from another world.”

  “Trees and algae,” Derek speculated, “ferns and flowers, grasses and grains, fungi and mosses, herbs, vines, weeds—none of them ever before seen by any human eye, seeded now ineradicably in our soil, in our oceans.”

  Shiny black with yellow spots. Glistening. Fecund. Infinitely strange.

  Had this unwholesome thing indeed grown from a spoor transported with much planning and purpose through the dark cold and the empty desolation of interstellar space?

  The chill that spread through Molly was different from any that she had experienced previously. It was not a quivery thing localized along the spine or the nape of the neck, did not shiver through her like a vagrant breath of eternity, but lingered. A coldness seemed to be spawned in the very cavities of her bones, in the red-and-yellow mush of marrow, from which it spread outward to every cell in every extremity.

  Derek said, “If these extraterrestrial plants are aggressive—and judging by this creepy specimen, I suspect they’re going to be relentlessly incursive—then they will sooner than later crowd out and perhaps even feed upon every species of flora that’s native to Earth.”

  “This beautiful world,” Molly murmured as the chill spreading through her carried with it a piercing grief, a sense of loss that she dared not contemplate.

  “All of it will vanish,” Derek said. “Everything we love, from roses to oaks, elms and evergreens—eradicated.”

  Black and yellow, the plump fungi coiled upon one another, tubular mushrooms nestled in the form of an eyeless snake. Smooth, glistening with an exuded film of oil. Luxuriant. Proliferous and merciless.

  “If by some miracle,” Derek continued, “some of us were to survive the initial phase of alien occupation, if we were able to live in primitive communities, furtively, in the secret corners where the world’s ruthless new masters wouldn’t see us, how soon would we be left without any familiar food?”

  Neil said, “The vegetables and fruits and grains of another world wouldn’t necessarily be poisonous to us.”

  “Not necessarily all of them,” Derek agreed, “but surely some would be.”

  “And if they weren’t poisonous,” Molly wondered, “would we find them palatable?”

  “Bitter,” Derek guessed. “Or intolerably sour, or so acidic they would sicken us. Even if palatable, would they nourish us? Would the nutrients be in chains of molecules that our digestive systems could break down and utilize? Or would we fill our stomachs with food…and nevertheless starve to death?”

  Derek Sawtelle’s cultured voice, reverberant by nature, rich with dramatic technique polished by decades in the classroom and on the lecture-hall stage, had half mesmerized Molly. She shook herself to shed the bleak spell that his grim words had cast upon her.

  “Damn,” he said, “I talked myself sober, and I don’t like it on this side of the gin curtain. Too scary.”

  Desperate to refute Derek’s vision of their future, Molly said, “We’re assuming that this thing, this fungus, is from another world, but we don’t really know that. I’ll admit I’ve never seen anything like it…but so what? There are lots of exotic funguses I’ve never seen, some probably stranger-looking than this.”

  “I’ve another thing to show you,” Derek said, “something much more disturbing—and unfortunately more sobering—than what you’ve seen so far.”

  22

  ON ONE KNEE IN THE JANITORIAL CLOSET, with Molly crouching more at his side now than behind him, and with Neil standing over him, Derek withdrew a Swiss Army knife from a pocket of his tweed sports jacket.

  Molly could think of no one less likely to be carrying a Swiss Army knife tha
n this bow-tied academic. Then she realized that among the tools included in that clever instrument were a corkscrew and a bottle opener.

  Derek employed neither of those devices but instead extracted the spear blade. He hesitated with the point of the knife above one of the clustered fungi.

  His hand shook. These tremors weren’t the consequence of either intoxication or alcohol withdrawal.

  “When I did this before,” he said, “I was pleasantly soused, full of the giddy curiosity that makes dipsomania such an adventure. Now I’m sober, and I know what I’m going to find—and I’m astonished that I had the courage to do this the first time.”

  Having steeled himself, he poked the blade into the tubular cap of one of the fattest of the fungi.

  The entire colony, not just the pierced specimen, quivered like gelatin.

  From the wound, a puff of pale vapor escaped with an audible wheeze, suggesting that the interior of the mushroomlike structure had been pressurized. The malodorous vapor reeked like a concoction of rotten eggs, vomit, and decomposing flesh.

  Molly gagged, and Derek said, “I should have warned you. But it dissipates quickly.”

  He slit the membrane that he had already punctured, revealing the inner structure of the fungus.

  The interior was not solidly meaty, like that of an ordinary mushroom, but a hollow chamber. A graceful architecture of spongy struts supported the surface membrane that Derek had slit.

  A wet mass, the size of a hen’s egg, lay at the center of this chamber. At first glimpse, Molly thought of intestines because these looked, in miniature, like ropey human guts, but gray and mottled as if corrupted, infected, cancerous.

  Then she saw that these coils and loops were slowly moving, sliding lazily over and around one another. The better comparison was to a knot of copulating earthworms.

  The reeking vapor lost, the black-and-yellow membrane slit, these worm forms continued their sensuous writhing for only three or four seconds—and abruptly disengaged, bristled to every curve of the chamber. They became a dozen questing tentacles much quicker than worms, connected to something unseen at the bottom of the hollow, as quick and jittery as spider legs, frenziedly probing the knife-torn edges of the ruined canopy.

  Molly tensed, shrank back, certain that the repulsive resident of the fungus would spring out of its lair and, loose, would prove to be faster than a cockroach.

  “It’s all right,” Derek assured her.

  Neil said, “The fungus is a home to something, like the shell of a conch.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Derek wiped the blade of his knife on his display handkerchief. “You can strain for earthly comparisons, but there really isn’t one. From what I can tell, this squirmy little creepshow is part of the fungus itself.”

  The frenetic lashing of the small tentacles subsided. They continued to move quickly, but now in a more calculated manner.

  Molly sensed that they were embarked on some task, though she could not at once discern their purpose.

  “The rapid movement,” Neil said, “the ability to flex at will and manipulate appendages…those things indicate animal life, not plants.”

  Molly agreed. “There’s got to be muscle tissue involved, which plants don’t have.”

  Discarding his soiled display handkerchief, Derek said, “On the planet they come from, there may not be as clear a division between plant and animal life as we have on this world.”

  Beginning at both ends of the torn canopy, the tentacles had begun to repair the gash.

  “I’d need to look more closely than I care to,” Derek said, “and perhaps with a magnifying glass, to be able to tell exactly how they knit the wound shut. The tentacles appear to be exuding a bonding material…”

  Molly could see a pinkish ooze seeping from the tips of some of those busy appendages.

  “…but I think I also detect microfilaments, as well…as if the damn thing is stitching itself shut much the way a surgeon might close an incision.” He shrugged. “All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.”

  With a fascination equal to her disgust and dread, Molly could not look away from the self-repairing fungus—if that was the right name for it.

  “Imagine,” Derek proposed, “a world filled with a variety of hideous plants that all present a still exterior…but teem with secret internal life.”

  Molly knew that on the distant world from which it had come, this fungus had been as natural and unremarkable in its environment as a dandelion in an earthly field. Reason did not allow her to attribute a moral value to it any more than she could rationally ascribe conscious intention to a carrot.