NINE

Elizabeth came to consciousness in her own bed in her grandfather’s house. It took time for her eyes to focus. She wondered whether she was on the other side of life, but the sound of Peter Hubbard’s anxious voice was no illusion, and her grandfather’s hovering face was no mirage. There were no angels or devils, no harps or pitchforks, only the two beloved countenances, and dear Bonnie behind them, distraught.

“We have the doctor coming over from Chatham,” Elias Johnson said as soon as he saw his granddaughter’s eyes open.

“Oh, Liz!” Bonnie wept. “You’re going to be all right!”

Peter Hubbard did not speak, only held her sore hands tenderly, and looked his love into her eyes.

Elizabeth found the strength to say, “I—I’m all right.” Her voice sounded strange to her. It seemed underwater, coming from the bath of pain in which she was swimming. She said no more. Her head hurt from her fall, her body was a mass of stinging needles—like the time she had stepped on sea urchins, she thought, only this was every inch of her skin, not just her feet and legs. She gave up talking, it was too difficult to form words.

But Hubbard saw the questions in her eyes, and knew she impatiently wanted answers.

He explained, in a soft voice. “We got to you in time, Liz, yes. And we got the damn things off you with lights.”

The curiosity in the woman’s face increased.

“You know the firemen have what they call Wheat Lights—portable but extremely powerful. To the roaches, it was almost like fire. They couldn’t take the beams. They scattered the hell away.”

“Thank God!” Elias Johnson muttered from the foot of the bed.

“We killed as many as we could get to,” Hubbard went on. “We got you safely out, and I went on with some of the men to follow the roaches. They ran from our lights, directly into their nest . . .”

Elizabeth gasped, “Another nest?”

“You were right this morning, Liz! Those confounded roaches in the flask were pointing to another lair. I know just what happened . . .”

Bonnie interrupted Hubbard bringing coffee to the bed. She lifted Elizabeth’s head to help her drink it.

The scientist went on, “It turns out the first nest wasn’t large enough to hold the expanding colony. In the same way that a rival queen will appear in a crowded bee hive, a rival brain apparently developed or split off. The original tribe battled the others until they were driven out. The ‘exiles’ were the roaches that attacked you. They formed a new home base in the graveyard at the Cannon house. The graves provided convenient, ready-­made excavations in which to start up the new community.”

The coffee helped clear Elizabeth’s head and throat. Her voice was still uncertain. “Then there could be other nests?”

“No! I am certain of that,” Hubbard declared without qualification. “I don’t even have to look, though we will as a precaution. You see, this has been exactly what ants and bees do. They spin off one new colony, not more. There isn’t vigor enough for more, and here there certainly hasn’t been enough time. In fact, one reason you survived is that these roaches from the new colony were weaker and slower than the older society—and hadn’t yet fully developed the kind of brain that directed the original group. We’re lucky to that extent.”

Elizabeth needed to know, insistently if weakly, “But they’re still out there?”

She saw both men shake their heads negatively.

“No,” Hubbard stated again. “We fired the nest.” He added sadly, “We had to burn the Cannon house, too, I’m afraid, but we had no choice.”

Elizabeth took it unhappily. She recognized the necessity, knew it bitterly, but the house had meant so much to her as a child. To all of Yarkie it was a symbol of the wealth and security of the island.

Security? Not in the universe of Nature’s whims, Elizabeth considered astringently. The reality of life was not lovely houses on High Ridge but earthquakes, tidal waves, cyclones, volcanoes, meteors, epidemics, massacres—mutated insects!

Elizabeth Carr groaned inwardly with her own confrontation of Nature’s indifference to the individual. Now the Cannon house was gone, as Hildie and the girls were gone. Sic transit gloria, and all vanity. How grievously true we find those old clichés to be, the woman contemplated unhappily.

But she should be thankful that she herself was safe, after giving herself up for lost. Peter Hubbard was her renewal in so many ways. It seemed she was to be granted the years she had thought were eternally gone. She, prayerfully, would never forget how closely death had come to ending it all. She would praise God—even while asking endlessly in the recesses of her soul how and why He came to create such evil. Job’s never-­answered question, she remembered as her tired eyes closed in welcome sleep again.