ONE

Peter Hubbard was bent over a microscope when Elizabeth Carr came out of the kitchen into the laboratory. With the lunch things tidied up, Bonnie had gone to lie down for a rest. The Yarkie men were all off on their assignments. The expected storm was in higher gear, rattling the windows now, nearing full strength. The woman could see the driven sea beating at the shore outside. The waves had become threatening breakers, and the gale was whirling sand and leaves all around the creaking lighthouse. Sand was gritty on the floor in every room, sifting in through the cracks everywhere. But there was no rain yet.

Elizabeth asked, “Where’s Wanda?”

Hubbard spoke without taking his eyes from the instrument. “She’s phoning Chatham, trying to reach Craig­. We need some special supplies.” He explained no more. The harsh crescendo of the wind brought his head up. The building was machine-­gunned with shells and stones whipped by the storm. He asked anxiously, “Can Craig get back in this weather?”

Elizabeth smiled confidently. “He’s got the power under him and the know-­how on top. This isn’t half as bad as it sometimes gets. He’ll be here, with whatever you asked for.”

“You people are terrific,” Peter Hubbard applauded genuinely. Elizabeth noted that he included her among the Yarkie group. Well, he was right.

What the two scientists had already done with the long-­unused room reflected their own special teamwork. Every kind of glass apparatus was set out neatly on the scrubbed tables. Liquids of different colors were boiling everywhere, sending curlicues of steam over the retorts and jars that rested on tripods above Bunsen burners. Tubing of glass and rubber twisted and turned in intricate patterns. From titration apparatus, which Elizabeth recognized from her sophomore lab work, colorless drops were falling slowly into a receptacle of liquid turning darker purple.

On shelves along one wall, empty flasks and cages awaited the specimens the scientists hoped the men would bring in.

Elizabeth returned Hubbard’s praise. “You and Wanda have done a fantastic set-­up here.”

“We’ve got the reagents ready,” the biologist commented. “We’ll be able to analyze the poisons, for one thing.” He gestured at some of the boiling flasks. “And Wanda is trying to determine the pheromonic possibilities . . .” Hubbard left his stool and approached Elizabeth. “We ought to have a talk, you and I.”

Elizabeth looked away evasively. “About what?”

He smiled. “Something’s wrong with our pheromones.”

His manner disturbed the woman, and she moved to leave. “I don’t want to interfere with your work.”

He said promptly, “I’m talking about the freeze you’ve been giving me, Elizabeth.”

“Freeze?”

“Aside from your travelogue about Yarkie last night, you’ve conspicuously managed to avoid a direct word.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be unfriendly.” But the coldness of her voice belied the sentiment. Elizabeth felt stiff and uncomfortable. The warmth in Peter Hubbard’s voice was confusing in a situation already too confused. She wished Wanda Lindstrom would come back into the lab. To keep the conversation impersonal, Elizabeth pointed to the roach specimen the biologists had taken from the rabbit and placed in a covered jar. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

The misbegotten bug was scuttling about, unpausing. Its antennae were straight up, like two trolley poles reaching for an invisible power line. The roach kept trying to climb up the side of the container. Sliding back, it sometimes landed on its back. Then its feet and antennae and mandibles went into a frenzy; its body arched in spasms of instinctual determination until, somehow, without any real purchase on the slippery glass, it regained its normal position. Shivers ran up the woman’s spine. That damned thing will climb out of there yet! she thought with goose pimples.

“No,” Peter Hubbard smiled grimly, watching her. “It won’t manage. Don’t worry.”

“I’m worried about the men,” Elizabeth told him. “Suppose they do find a nest. Won’t they be in terrible danger?”

“I’ve given them specific instructions. They’re not on ‘search and destroy,’ ” he said. “They’re on ‘search and reconnaissance.’ ” He used the phrase from his Air Force service. “But what I want to tell you is how glad I am we had a chance to be together on the beach last night.”

Surprised, Elizabeth turned away from the roach flask. She remained silent. Her heart was beating faster than she wanted it to.

“I thought about you for a long time—” Hubbard stopped and looked deeply into her gray eyes. “I’m glad I’m seeing you here, this way, instead of in your father’s house.”

Elizabeth was suddenly and unhappily conscious of how much she looked like a housemaid, hair tied up, apron around her slacks. She knew what he meant. In Cambridge, she had been just Professor Carr’s “kid.” Now Peter Hubbard was seeing her for the first time as the woman she had become, a woman of her own mind and values.

His gaze was penetrating, and he was saying, “As a scientist I prefer things orderly, Liz. I don’t like false theories cluttering up the place.”

Elizabeth found herself more uncertain and perplexed. What was he driving at?

“Some people call me blunt,” he smiled at her. “And especially right now we don’t have time for beating around bushes, do we?”

Elizabeth nodded, though she wasn’t sure what she was agreeing with.

Hubbard blew pipe smoke toward the flask holding the roach and watched the insect shake its antennae as its atmosphere thickened through the air holes in the cover. “So I would like to tidy up our relationship, yours and mine . . .”

“Do we have ‘a relationship’?” Elizabeth let herself smile. She untied her apron and tossed it onto a chair. Her hands pushed back her long brown hair. She knew her cheeks were flushed, and suddenly she didn’t mind.

The man brought her up with a frank, unexpected declaration. “Liz, I am not now nor have I ever been in love with Wanda Lindstrom!”

Elizabeth was shocked. His was a directness indeed, beyond any preparation or anticipation. He was demanding, “You have believed that, haven’t you?”

Elizabeth Carr’s head came up and she answered him with her own gathered force. “I have never considered it any of my business.”

“Well, I would like to make it your business.”

Elizabeth’s heart raced anew as Peter Hubbard’s words flowered in her mind. He was adding, “We are going to see a lot of each other, not just here but when we get back to Cambridge.” He was blowing smoke at the cockroach again. Elizabeth thought it was the damnedest way for a man and a woman to be reaching toward each other. “If you want to,” he said quietly.

She did not hesitate. She could be as honest as he was. He was right. If she had misunderstood about Wanda Lind­strom, there wasn’t enough time, or energy, in life itself for hypocrisy now. “I want to, Peter. I want to very much.”

She hoped he would kiss her. She had feared he might in the moonlight the night before, but she would welcome it now. She was glad when he brought her to his chest, and she yielded in a quick confession of her long-­suppressed feeling for him.

Peter Hubbard’s lips on Elizabeth Carr’s young mouth were firm and tender. His kiss stirred the woman in ways she had for years forbidden herself to imagine. Now it was real. Her own lips let the man know her emotion.

In their embrace, neither one heard the door open.

“Excuse me!” The door slammed shut before they could separate. It had been Wanda Lindstrom’s voice, clearly shocked and distressed.

Hubbard kept his arm around Elizabeth. “It’s all right, Liz. Wanda is a good friend and a good colleague, but she knows it’s nothing more.”

Elizabeth rubbed a finger over her mouth doubtfully. “This won’t bother your work—?”

“Nothing will interfere with Wanda’s work. It’s one reason she’s so great at it.”

The door opened again. The biologist entered as if for the first time, except that her face was ashen. Business-­like, she said to Hubbard, “I couldn’t find Craig, but the police chief at Chatham will try to get the material we want. He’ll reach Craig at the fire department with it.”

“Good!” Hubbard said, equally businesslike. “Thank you.”

Elizabeth hurried to the kitchen door, picking up her apron.

Dr. Lindstrom called after her quickly. “You don’t have to leave, Elizabeth!”

But Elizabeth found herself deeply disquieted. She made an excuse. “I don’t like being in the same room with that cockroach. It gives me the willies.” Having made the statement, she realized it was more than an excuse. Every time she looked at the endlessly scurrying insect she felt a malign force emanating from the flask. Peter could say all he wanted to about the creatures being mindless automatons, but she intuited a power that would not rest until it had its way with them, all of them.

Wanda Lindstrom gave her a smile. “It won’t get out, Elizabeth.”

They were interrupted by the appearance of Elias Johnson, returning from the village. The noise of the wind and the blowing sand against the building had masked the sound of his engine pulling up. Taking off his mackintosh, he snorted, “Wish it would get to the rain! Damn wind blowing to tear your hair out, but those tarnation clouds won’t let go!” He came to them rubbing his gnarled hands. “Anything new here?”

Hubbard answered crisply, “Yes, Elias. Wanda and I have done some more work on the specimen. It’s no ordinary roach. We have got a mutation, without question. It’s not one of those horror-­movie inventions—these insects remain quite close to normal. The changes are well within the parameters of minor adaptive alterations, like the greater power in the leg and body muscles, the stronger mandibles and teeth. What really gives us concern is that these changes are coupled with a much more mature nervous system than anything we have ever seen in this or related species.”

The old man sat down heavily, and passed his hand over his forehead. “Everything you said has been going around in my head over and over, but I still can’t believe it.”

Hubbard understood the man’s difficulty in coming to grips with the extraordinary development. To impress him with the enormous number of biological “curiosities,” he added another textbook fact, “You know, Elias, there are some ants with so strong a bite that if you try to pull them away, the ant’s head will separate from its body before its teeth will let go!”

The old eyes widened. “Thunderation!”

Elizabeth gasped, “I never heard of that!”

The scientist said wryly, “African natives take advantage of it. When they’re wounded, they get an ant to bite them to hold the flesh together.”

With a sour smile, the old man said, “A living Band-­Aid, eh?”

Wanda Lindstrom concluded for Hubbard, “People simply don’t realize how inventive Nature has been through the millions of years of evolution.”

Elias Johnson turned puzzled eyes to the scientists. “Could these big bastards be what you call ‘communicating’ with the regular cockroaches we have around the village?”

The woman looked to Hubbard. “The Bra­tella germanica?”

Johnson grunted, “Huh?”

Hubbard said, “That’s the ordinary household cockroach. No, I don’t think so . . .”

Johnson told him, “People are complaining about cockroaches running around in broad daylight.”

Wanda Lindstrom frowned to Hubbard. “They might be sensing some of the new pheromones, Peter. They wouldn’t quite connect up, but it could make them abnormally restless.”

“Possibly . . .”

Elizabeth was impressed again by the immediate rapport between the two. There was a relationship that could not be denied.

Johnson said, “But the big buggers are out there in the woods! Miles away!”

The woman told him, “Pheromones can travel great distances. There’s a female moth, for instance, that sends out just one hundred millionth of a gram—and you can’t get much smaller than that. With it she can excite a billion males a mile away. Another species can reach as far as seventeen miles! Who says we humans are ahead of insects?” It was her way of telling Elizabeth that she understood the embrace she had witnessed. Elizabeth was relieved. The last thing she wanted was unnecessary tension in the lighthouse. The common problem was too pressing, the stakes too high. Right now a love triangle, if there was one, seemed of small importance.

A sharp clanging outside interrupted the group. There was a thumping, clattering, and grinding of heavy metal that shook the building. Through the window there came a whooping and shouting. The alarm in the room turned to quick laughter when they saw it was Russell Homer. He was in his yellow machine of triumph, his great bulldozer chariot, standing jauntily on the seat, waving his hat in circles of victory.

The group hurried out, cheering the man. He lowered the bulldozer scoop with the delicacy of a chef handling a soufflé. “There’s a thousand of your specimens in there!” he crowed.

Inside, Peter Hubbard took over. “What I’m going to do,” he instructed Wanda Lindstrom, “is punch one hole in the cover, so the roaches can get out only one at a time. You hold the trap jars over the hole, tightly.”

“Be careful!” Elizabeth couldn’t help blurting. The image of scuttling insects in the can was nightmarish.

There was a sudden lull in the wind beyond the windows, and the rattling of the giant cockroaches against the can could be plainly heard.

“Can I help?” Johnson wanted to know.

“Just stand by,” Hubbard said tensely. “Wanda and I will handle this.”

Before Peter Hubbard could take tools to the project, the roar of a wildly racing automobile stopped him. Brakes shrieked, a car door slammed, the lighthouse door was banged open, and Amos Tarbell pounded into the room. His face was ghostly. His big body was shaking like a boy’s. He didn’t know which of his terrible messages to tell first. “On my radio just now! The Tub is on the rocks! Off Dickens Point. They can’t raise the Coast Guard station in the storm! Call Chatham on the phone!” The man’s heavy voice broke. The news of the Laidlaws must wait.

Reed Brockshaw, coming in just behind the sheriff, turned to stone. His question was an unbelieving whisper, “The Tub?—The rocks off Dickens Point?”

Amos Tarbell nodded in misery, and turned to Elias Johnson. “Can we use your boat to get over there?”

“Sure! Craig has the Bertram, so we can take the Jessica! What are we waiting for?” The old man was limping to the door.

Reed Brockshaw cracked. He thundered at Johnson, “The Jessica will take an hour to get around the island in this storm!” He ran to his car. “We have to use the shortcut over High Ridge!”

Amos Tarbell grabbed at his old friend. ‘“You can’t go through those woods, Reed!”

“Get your hands off of me!”

“Those roaches are out there today! I just saw them!”

Reed beat at the sheriff with hard fists. “Damn the roaches! My kids are on that boat!”

Tarbell held on to him despite the painful blows. “The roaches! They’re all over everything in the woods! You’ll never get through!”

“My KIDS!” the man kept yelling. He broke violently from the sheriff’s grasp and darted to a pile of old flares Elizabeth and Bonnie had stacked neatly in a corner of the room. Good!—These were the Roman candle type, Brockshaw knew, not the fireworks rockets. He shouted at Amos Tarbell. “I’ll use these. I’ll get through!”

The sheriff pleaded as the man grabbed the flares like kindling. “These are awful old, Reed! They won’t light!”

Tarbell desperately needed to tell Reed, tell them all, the horror he had just seen in the Laidlaw jeep. He needed to tell everyone that Yarkie was in more calamitous and gruesome danger than anyone had dreamed. He needed to set in motion the complete evacuation of High Ridge and every house anywhere near the trees. But this shipwreck emergency had to come first. He raced after Reed Brockshaw and tackled him. Brockshaw kicked out. Tarbell swung his own sea-­hardened fists. The man had to be stopped, didn’t realize the peril he was heading for.

His face bleeding from the sheriff’s blows, Reed Brock­shaw lowered his head like a football player and rammed his friend. The sheriff went sprawling. His large body struck the garbage can and knocked it over. It was only Peter Hubbard’s reflex pouncing on the cover that kept the captive cockroaches from spilling out all over the laboratory.

By the time the dust of the confusion settled, Reed Brockshaw’s car was burning rubber toward High Ridge and the shortcut he planned to take to Dickens Point.

The commotion in the laboratory kept the people from noticing how the introduction of the garbage can into the room had galvanized the roach in the glass jar. Its wings were buzzing frantically. It kept flying up against the glass cover. The lid held fast, which seemed to infuriate the insect more.

At the same time, a heavier odor seemed to be coming from the insect through the airholes in the flask. It was faint in the laboratory air, but with a definite scent of its own—vaguely caustic, intermixed with a loamy or even herbal aroma. Without realizing it, the people were taking it in with nervous exhalations of their own breath.

Had the people not been racing about in their own new urgency, they would have heard the sharp repeated cracking of the captive roach’s shell on the glass, hitting the sides and the top harder and harder blows. Fortunately, the glass was shatterproof, and held.