SEVEN

The column of smoke marked the immolation of the fearsome Yarkie misbegotten. It was the funeral pyre of demonic creatures, mutations that turned out evil dissonances in the hidden mysteries of evolution—“dissonances” at least to humans, Peter Hubbard thought.

On his feet, with his bandaged hand on Elizabeth Carr’s arm, the scientist watched with a swelling of regret as well as abhorrence as The Nest went up. The threat had to be demolished, as he had acknowledged. Yet, the natural power that had created this roach colony was an imperial force beyond Man’s right and wrong.

After all, as he taught his classes, there are a billion billion insects on earth, nearly a billion for each human. Mass extinctions occurred in Nature—like the close of the Cretaceous period, when death came to dinosaurs, plankton, ammonites, and other forms of life. Theories included disease, copper poisoning of oceans, climatic upheavals, even asteroid collisions with earth.

Maybe, a scientist had to consider—maybe Nature had created destructive creatures like these roaches precisely to start wiping out the world as it had come to be. Maybe Nature wanted a clean slate, to destroy what Man had become and done to the earth. Maybe the roach hunger which he, as a man, so readily deplored as “feral” was in more universal fact Nature’s yearning to start over.

There was a point of view from which he himself had undertaken a terrible responsibility in this destruction. To humans, this roach mutation was intolerable. But for a naturalist, it was superficial to view the creatures simply as vile. He himself had lectured the Yarkie people that the insects had acted out of their inner essence, not from “malice” or “enmity” or “malevolence.” So, a cancer on Yarkie, yes—from the human point of view; but from Nature’s view—who could know?

Hubbard wanted to share his thoughts with the woman standing beside him. He took in her grace and beauty with new gratitude for the warmth he felt from her and toward her. That was Nature, too. But he knew she would not want to hear his speculations, not yet. She did not have his training, his objectivity. She would not be wondering, as he was wondering, whether this mutation of cockroaches was a form of Nature’s own antennae stitching the air of infinite time in search of new organic forms, new expressions of the life force.

He could not still his mind and its agnosticism.

The purposes of life, their own and all the plants and animals on earth, were beyond a man’s understanding. Who should say how far Man’s dominion properly extended? It was an essential riddle of both biology and theology: In the contentions of the species, did Man have the unlimited, absolute right to assume he was the lord of the earth, that his well-­being was paramount and unqualified?

In human laws, there was the canon stated by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Your right to swing your cane ends where my nose begins. Did mankind have a God-­given right to swing its cane regardless of the noses of any other living beings? But then there was the vice versa of it and, inwardly, watching the cremation of the roaches, the scientist had to admit his own, primeval enjoyment of the sounds of the insect bodies sputtering in the flames to oblivion. Whatever his rationalizations, people simply could not tolerate such a colony of butchers in their midst. Intent was irrelevant.

In a nutshell, Peter Hubbard concluded grimly, if Nature’s rule was indeed the survival of the fittest, men did have a natural right to impose their intelligence against these challengers.

And so the scientist joined with Elizabeth and Bonnie and the Yarkie men as they expressed their loathing of the intruders with unrestrained cheers, hoots, and cries of triumph.

It was too bad, Hubbard thought, that Reed Brockshaw and Craig Soaras especially could not be with their Yarkie fellows to witness the victory they had now finally achieved. The Task Force had won in the end. The price had been high, the way perilous and troubled. It was more than right for eyes to be shining with achievement through their fatigue and tension.

Hubbard saw that even Bonnie’s tears had ended. Her back was straight and her head was high as she watched the flames dying down. There was some consolation for her and for all the Yarkie victims in this fiery retaliation.

They could turn now to leave. The threat was past and gone, the suffering was over at last. Yarkie Island was finally free again.