A Touch of Infinity (6 page)

Judge Billings telephoned him. “Drop by about four, Herb,” he said. “A few people in my chambers. You'll be interested.”

Billings had already indicated to Herbert Cooke that he considered him an excellent candidate for Congress when the present incumbent—in his middle seventies—stepped aside. It pleased Cooke that Billings called him Herb, and he expected that the summons to his chambers would have something to do with the coming elections. Whereby he was rather surprised to find Chief Bradley already there, as well as two other men, one of them a Dobson of the FBI and the other a Professor Channing of Yale, who was introduced as an entomologist.

“Herb here,” the judge explained, “is the young fellow whose wife swatted the thing—the first one we had. Now we got a round dozen of them.”

Channing took a flat wooden box out of his pocket—about six inches square. He opened it and exhibited a series of slides, upon each of which one of the tiny folk was neatly pressed. Cooke glanced at it, felt his stomach rise, and fought to control himself.

“In addition to which,” the judge continued, “Herb has a damn good head on his shoulders. He'll be our candidate for the House one of these days and a damn important man in the county. I thought he should be here.”

“You must understand,” said the FBI man, “that we've already had our discussions on the highest level. The Governor and a number of people from the state. Thank God it's still a local matter, and that's what we're getting at here.”

“The point is,” said Channing, “that this whole phenomenon is no more than a few years old. We have more or less mapped the beginning place of origin as somewhere in the woods near the Saugatuck Reservoir. Since then they've spread out six or seven miles in every direction. That may not seem like a lot, but if you accept their stride as a quarter inch compared to man's stride of three feet, you must multiply by one hundred and forty-four times. In our terms, they have already occupied a land area roughly circular and more than fifteen hundred miles in diameter. That's a dynamic force of terrifying implications.”

“What the devil are they?” Bradley asked.

“A mutation—an evolutionary deviation, a freak of nature—who knows?”

“Are they men?” the judge asked.

“No, no, no, of course they're not men. Structurally, they appear to be very similar to men, but we've dissected them, and internally there are very important points of difference. Entirely different relationships of heart, liver, and lungs. They also have a sort of antenna structure over their ears, not unlike what insects have.”

“Yet they're intelligent, aren't they?” Herbert Cooke asked. “The bows and arrows—”

“Precisely, and for that reason very dangerous.”

“And doesn't the intelligence make them human?” the judge asked.

“Does it? The size and structure of a dolphin's brain indicate that it is as intelligent as we are, but does it make it human?”

Channing looked from face to face. He had a short beard and heavy spectacles, and a didactic manner of certainty that Herbert Cooke found reassuring.

“Why are they dangerous?” Cooke asked, suspecting that Channing was inviting the question.

“Because they came into being a year or two ago, no more, and they already have the bow and arrow. Our best educated guess is that they exist under a different subjective time sense than we do. We believe the same to hold true of insects. A day can be a lifetime for an insect, even a few hours, but to the insect it's his whole span of existence and possibly subjectively as long as our own lives. If that's the case with these creatures, there could be a hundred generations in the past few years. In that time, from their beginning to the bow and arrow. Another six months—guns. How long before something like the atomic bomb does away with the handicap of size? And take the question of population—you remember the checkerboard story. Put a grain of sand on the first box, two grains on the second, four grains on the third, eight grains on the fourth—when you come to the final box, there's not enough sand on all the beaches to satisfy it.”

The discussion went on, and Herbert Cooke squirmed uneasily. His eyes constantly strayed to the slides on the table.

“Once it gets out …” the judge was saying.

“It can't get out,” the FBI man said flatly. “They already decided that. When you think of what the kids and the hippies could do with this one—no, it's a question of time. When? That's up to you people.”

“As soon as possible,” Channing put in.

“What are you going to do?” Herbert asked.

“DDT's been outlawed, but this will be an exception. We've already experimented with a concentration of DDT—”

“Experimented?”

“We trapped about eighteen of them alive. The DDT is incredibly effective. With even a moderate concentration, they die within fifteen minutes.”

“We'll have forty helicopters,” the FBI man explained. “Spray from the air and do the whole thing between three and four
A.M.
People will be asleep, and most of them will never know it happened. Saturation spraying.”

“It's rough on the bees and some of the animals, but we have no choice.”

“Just consider the damn kids,” Chief Bradley pointed out to Herbert. “Do you know they're having peace demonstrations in a place like New Milford? It's one thing to have the hippies out every half hour in New York and Washington and Los Angeles—but now we got it in our own backyard. Do you know what we'd have if the kids got wind that we're spraying these bugs?”

“How do they die?” Herbert asked. “I mean, when you spray them, how do they die?”

“The point is, Herb,” Judge Billings put in, “that we need your image. There have been times when it's been a damn provoking image—I mean your wife riding around with that
Mother for Peace
sticker on her bumper and holding the vigils and all that kind of thing, not to mention that petition she's been circulating on this ecology business—it's just dynamite, this ecology thing—so I'll be frank to tell you it has been a mighty provoking image. But I suppose there's two sides to every coin, and I'm the first one to say that you can't wipe out a whole generation of kids; damn it, you can't even lock them up. You got to deal with them, and that's one of your virtues, Herb. You can deal with them. You have the image, and it's an honest image and it's worth its weight in gold to us. There'll be trouble, but we want to keep it at a low level. Those crazy Unitarians are already stirring up things, and I'm a Congregationalist myself, but I could name you two or three Congregationalist ministers who would stir up a hornest's nest if they were sitting here. There are others too, and I think you can deal with them.”

“I was just wondering how they die when you spray them,” Herbert said.

“That's just it,” Channing said eagerly. “There may not be much explaining to do. The DDT appears to paralyze them almost instantly, even when it's not direct, even when it's only a drift. They stop movement and then they turn brown and wither. What's left is shapeless and shriveled and absolutely beyond any identification. Have a look at this slide.”

He took one of the slides and held a magnifying glass over it. The men crowded close to see, and Herbert found himself joining them.

“It looks like last season's dead cockroach,” said Bradley.

“We want you to set the time,” Dobson, the FBI man, told them. “It's your turf and your show.”

“What about the dangers of the DDT?”

“Overrated—vastly overrated. We sure as hell don't recommend a return to it. The Department of Agriculture has put its foot down on that, but the plain fact of the matter is that we've been using DDT for years. One more spray is not going to make a particle of difference. By the time the sun rises, it's done with.”

“The sooner the better,” Chief Bradley said.

That night Herbert Cooke was awakened by the droning beat of the helicopters. He got up, went into the bathroom, and looked at his watch. It was just past three o'clock in the morning. When he returned to bed, Abigail was awake, and she asked him:

“What's that?”

“It sounds like a helicopter.”

“It sounds like a hundred helicopters.”

“Only because it's so still.”

A few minutes later she whispered, “My God, why doesn't it stop?”

Herbert closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

“Why doesn't it stop? Herb, why doesn't it stop?”

“It will. Why don't you try to sleep? It's some army exercise. It's nothing to worry about.”

“They sound like they're on top of us.”

“Try to sleep, Abby.”

Time passed, and presently the sound of the helicopters receded into the distance, faded, and then ceased. The silence was complete—enormous silence. Herbert Cooke lay in bed and listened to the silence.

“Herb?”

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I can't sleep. I'm afraid.”

“There's nothing to be afraid of.”

“I was trying to remember how big the universe is.”

“To what end, Abby?”

“Do you remember that book I read by Sir James Jean, the astronomer? I think he said the universe is two hundred million light-years from end to end—”

Herbert listened to the silence.

“How big are we, Herb?” she asked plaintively. “How big are we?”

4

The Hole in the Floor

“You must have a lot of clout,” Robinson said.

“I haven't any clout. My uncle has clout. He's a friend of the Commissioner.”

“We never had anyone in the back seat before.”

“Except a perpetrator,” said Robinson, grinning. He was a black man with a round face and an infectious smile.

“If I had a brain in my head,” McCabe said, “I would be a writer and not a cop. There's this guy out in the L.A. police force, and he's a writer. He wrote this book and it became a best seller, and he's loaded but he still wants to be a cop. Beats the hell out of me. I didn't read the book but I saw the movie. Did you see the movie?”

“I saw it.”

“Good movie.”

“It was a lousy movie,” said Robinson.

“That's your opinion. L.A. isn't New York.”

“You can say that again.”

“You been to L.A.?” McCabe asked me. He was older than Robinson, in his late thirties and going to fat, with a hard, flat face and small, suspicious blue eyes. I like the way he got along with Robinson; there was an easy give and take, and they never pushed each other.

McCabe took a call, and Robinson stepped on the gas and turned on his siren. “This is a mugging,” McCabe said.

It was a purse snatch on 116th Street, involving two kids in their teens. The kids had gotten away, and the woman was shaken and tearful but unharmed. Robinson took down the descriptions of the kids and the contents of the purse, while McCabe calmed the woman and pushed the crowd on its way.

“There are maybe ten thousand kids in this city who will do a purse snatch or a mugging, and how do you catch them, and if you catch them, what do you do with them? You said you been to L.A.?”

“A few times, on and off.”

“This is a sad city,” Robinson said. “It's hanging on, but that's the most you can say. It's just hanging on.”

“What's it like?” McCabe wanted to know.

“Downtown it's like this, maybe worse in some places.”

“But in Hollywood, Beverly Hills, places like that?”

“It's sunny. When there's no smog.”

“What the hell,” said McCabe, “no overcoats, no snow—I got six more years, and then I think I'll take the wife and head west.”

We stopped, and Robinson wrote out a ticket for a truck parked in front of a fire hydrant.

“You go through the motions,” he said. “I guess that's the way it is. Everyone goes through the motions.”

“You ever deliver a baby?” I asked him.

He grinned his slow, pleasant grin and looked at me in the rearview mirror.

“You ask McCabe.”

“We did seven of them,” McCabe said. “That's just since we been together. I ain't talking about rushing them to the hospital. I'm talking about the whole turn, and that includes slapping them across the ass to make them cry.”

“One was twins,” Robinson said.

“How did you feel? I mean when you did it, and there was the kid crying and alive?”

“You feel good.”

“High as a kite,” said Robinson. “It's a good feeling. You feel maybe the way a junkie feels when he can't make a connection and then finally he's got the needle in his arm. High.”

“Does it make up for the other things?”

There was a long pause after that before McCabe asked me, “What other things?”

“One son of a bitch,” Robinson said slowly, “he put his gun into my stomach and pulled the trigger three times. It don't make up for that.”

“Gun misfired,” McCabe explained. “Three times. A lousy little Saturday night special—happens maybe once in a thousand times.”

“It don't make up for being black,” Robinson said.

We cruised for the next ten minutes in silence. Possibly it was the last thing Robinson said; perhaps they resented having me in the back seat. Then they got a call, and McCabe explained that it was an accident in a house on 118th Street.

“It could be anything,” Robinson said. “The floors collapse, the ceilings fall down, and the kids are eaten by rats. I grew up in a house like that. I held it against my father. I still hold it against him.”

“Where can they go?”

“Away. Away is a big place.”

“You can't just write about cops,” McCabe said. “Cops are a reaction. A floor falls in and they call the cops. What the hell are we supposed to do? Rebuild these lousy rattraps?”