The Hephaestus Plague by Thomas Page

Author:Thomas Page [Page, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906527204
Publisher: Trashface Books
Published: 2011-01-27T08:00:00+00:00

PART 2

WINTER

November

The photographs showed chains of fuzzy balls on a limbo background. Parmiter read the attached reports. The information had been sent by Wiley King, and it detailed the results of electron microscope studies of the genetic structures found in the saliva of Hephaestus parmitera.

One of the first things that Parmiter told his classes was that Drosophila, the common fruit fly, had four pairs of chromosomes so clearly defined that they were ideal for laboratory study. The chromosome count held true for nearly all insects. However, it was not true for Hephaestus parmitera. The roaches had seventeen pairs. Human beings had forty-eight chromosomes. Twenty-four pairs.

Contained within the chromosome chains were the genetic possibilities that determined the structure of an animal. Seventeen pairs of chromosomes shown to a scientist without telling him where they had come from would convince him that the organism was at least a primate. Certainly not an insect. The genetic count alone made Parmiter exultant. It confirmed what he had suspected after learning that the roaches could survive off pure carbon. The roaches had the greatest potential for mutation of any insect in existence.

The night Parmiter had set up the pressure tank in the basement, Madilene and Clarence had begun a dance with each other, as slow, suggestive, and graceful a ballet as any human passion could express. Facing each other, antennae waving like seaweed in a river current, the two insects circled slowly in the tank. Parmiter, sitting on the edge of his cot, wrote down every movement they made.

Like the common German roach, Clarence tried to slide under Madilene’s belly to present the pheromones on his back for her tongue. Like the Madeira roach, Clarence danced to seduce the female by hypnotism. Blindness was something he did not know he had; millions of generations had made sight useless for him.

Parmiter tiptoed over from the cot. He turned on a tensor lamp, shining it directly into the faceplate. The roaches paused immediately. This told Parmiter something else. Without eyes, Clarence sensed light. Madilene must have sensed Parmiter’s presence, too. They did not move during the rest of the night.

During the next several days, Parmiter’s basement came to resemble a prison cell. A chest of drawers held his clothes. An old Army cot was moved down from the attic. He propped a small woman’s compact mirror over the laundry sink to shave by.

Parmiter left the house only for classes. He noted various effects of the plague around Bainboro and forgot them immediately. Slender poles with speakers nestled in the campus shrubbery. Police cars added speakers to the roof and sides of buildings, disguising the speakers to make them look like machines with strange exotic flower petals.

The plague was worse than ever and it was a measure of his distraction that Parmiter did not notice certain unpleasant things. Smoke in the air. Spectacular sunsets caused by the presence of smoke in the atmosphere from the city fires, much like the effects seen during the dust bowl days. The

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