The Darkling Wood by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, fantasy, beetles
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VII

The four of them walked back along the future road toward the A303. Margaret Dunstable didn’t bother suggesting yet again that Hazard ought to go to A&E to be checked out. She knew the answer. It was Claire Croly who asked him: “Why do you think the beetles didn’t show up tonight the way they did last night and the night before?”

“Perhaps they got what they wanted,” Hazard said. “If it was some kind of pheromone mimic that brought them, it would only be a one-time thing. It wouldn’t keep bringing them back repeatedly. Beetle sex-drives don’t work that way. It might not happen again until next year—by which time….”

“It might never happen again,” the reporter finished for him. “It’s the bloody X-Files syndrome.”

“What’s that?” asked Helen Hearne.

“The curse of paranormal research. Every week, while the TV show was running, Mulder and Scully had to be confronted by some bizarre phenomenon, for which the bizarre explanation always turned out to be true, but the evidence for which had to disappear completely, so as not to change the backcloth to the series, that being the world we supposedly live in. It was the same with the old Night Stalker series: every week a new monster, every week all the evidence has to disappear at the end of the episode, so as to leave the world fundamentally undisturbed. It’s the great curse of paranormal research. Things happen, but when the witnesses are summoned to see it, the events aren’t repeated, so everyone goes home believing that they never happened the first time around—that it was just a hallucination or a hoax. Even when there is residual evidence, like that jar of insects in the boot of my car, it doesn’t prove anything definite.”

“The reason that TV series work that way has to do with the demands of fiction,” Margaret Dunstable pointed out. “It’s always been the same. Tall stories can’t change the world, so they have to end by tidying away their innovations. In the real world, though, there’s no such requirement. The phenomena ought to be repeatable and consistent, if they’re real.”

“Not according to what Dr. Hazard just said,” the Fortean insisted. “Some things are essentially irregular—and not just the sex lives of beetles. Isn’t there some kind of marine worm that only spawns one day a year, on a day fixed by the phases of the moon?”

“The Palolo worm,” Hazard put in, helpfully.

“And it’s not necessarily every year,” the reporter persisted. “There are days when lots of cicadas hatch out all at once, not every year but at longer, irregular intervals—it’s the same with locusts. And there are plants that only flower once every hundred years or threreabouts, and no one can tell when in advance. Right, Dr. Hazard.”

“The plant example is outside my field,” Hazard said scrupulously, “but in population dynamics, the examples of the Palolo worm and locust plagues are the tip of a very big iceberg. There are a great many phenomena that seem to follow approximate cycles, but which aren’t precisely predictable.

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