Spider Legs

"Shade of the Tree is set in Stephen King
country.. .A fine and unpredictable tale."
-The New York Times Book Review
on Shade of the Tree by Piers Anthony
Millions of readers have enjoyed the books of
Piers Anthony, including (but certainly not limited
to) his undeniably popular Xanth and Blue
Adept series.
Now, in collaboration with celebrated nonfiction
 author Clifford A. Pickover, he brings us a
disturbing tale of our own world, and the
strange creatures with whom we share it.
"Pickover has published nearly a book a year in
which he stretches the limits of computers, art,
and thought." -Los Angeles Times
"Bucky Fuller thought big, Arthur C, Clarke thinks
big, but Cliff Pickover outdoes them both."
-Wired
It is said, and truly said, that there are more
things under heaven and earth than there are
almost anywhere else; true as well that many of
them lurk, unsuspected, far below the surface
of the planet's ocean.
For thousands of years, mankind has simultaneously
 trusted in the sea's proverbial generosity,
and used it as a dumping ground, trusting that in
its vastness his garbage will be swallowed up
and forgotten.
But that was never really true. And now, in
an age when the overcrowded Earth swarms
with hungry inhabitants whose waste chokes
even the sea, whose greedy demands overtax
(continued on back flap)

TOR BOOKS BY PIERS ANTHONY
Alien Plot
Anthonology
But What of Earth?
Demons Don't Dream
Gets of the Gargoyle
Ghost
Harpy Thyme
Hasan
Hope of Earth
Isle of Woman
Letters to Jenny
Prostho Plus
Race Against Time
Roc and a Hard Place
Shade of the Tree
Shame of Man
Steppe
Triple Detente
Yon In Wind
WITH ROBERT E. MARGROFF
Dragon's Gold Serpent's Silver Chimaera's Copper Mouvar's Magic Ore's Opal The E.S.P. Worm
The Ring
WITH FRANCES HALL
Pretender
WITH RICHARD GILLIAM
Tales from the Great Turtle (Anthology)
WITH ALFRED TELLA
The Willing Spirit
WITH CLIFFORD A. PICKOVER
Spider Legs
PREVIOUS WORKS BY
CLIFFORD A. PICKOVER
The Alien IQTest Black Holes. A Traveler's
Guide
Chaos in Wonderland:
Visual Adventures in a
Fractal World Computers, Fractals, Chaos
(Japanese) Computers, Pattern, Chaos,
and Beauty Computers and the
Imagination Future Health Computers
and Medicine in the
21st Century Fractal Horizons. The
Future Use of Fractals Frontiers of Scientific
Visualization (with Stu
Tewksbury) Keys to Infinity The Loom of God Mazes for the Mind:
Computers and the
Unexpected Mil den Augen des
Computers The Pattern Book: Fractals,
Art, and Nature Strange Brains and Genius Spiral Symmetry (with
Istvan Hargittai) Time:A Traveler's Guide
Visions of the Future:
Art, Technology, and
Computing in the 21st
Century Visualizing Biological
Information

A torn DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in
this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
SPIDER LEGS
Copyright © 1998 by Piers Anthony Jacob and Clifford A. Pickover
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or
portions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
A Tor Book
Published by torn Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor Books on the World Wide Web:
http ://www. tor. corn
Tor® is a registered trademark of torn Doherty Associates, Inc.
Design by Maura Fadden Rosenthal
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anthony, Piers.
Spider legs / Piers Anthony & Clifford A. Pickover.-1 st ed.
p.    cm.
"A torn Doherty Associates book."
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-312-86465-5
I. Pickover, Clifford A.    II. Title.
PS3551.N73S59    1998
813'.54-dc21 97-29854
CIP
First Edition: January 1998
Printed in the United States of America
098765432

Contents
Intro 7
PART I: PHANTOM RISING
1. Pycno 11
2. Friends 15
3. Ice 20
4. Spider 28
5. Dream 30
PART II: PHANTOM HUNTING
6. Head 45
7. Environment 50
8. Nathan 56
9. Hospital 61
10. Call 67
11. Research 69
12. Pilot 76
13. Date 80
PART in: PHANTOM LOVING
14. Fish Store 103
15. Coma 110
16. Restaurant 116
17. Population 121
18. Come By Chance         129
19. Monster 142
20. Lisa 152
21. Hatch 159
22. Storm 162
PART IV: PHANTOM KILLING
23. Mission 181
24. Hunt 193
25. Ferry 197
26. Captain 202
27. Teens 206
28. Prey 213
29. Shop 223
30. Hunger 229
31. Snack 231
32. Siege 240
33. Snout 248
34. Attack 264
35. Battle 269
36. Decision 276
Epilogue 279
Author's Note
(Piers Anthony) 291
Author's Note
(Clifford A. Pickover)         297

Intro
For thousands of years it was believed that
ghosts, good and bad, benevolent and malignant,
 weak and powerful, in some mysterious
 way produced all phenomena; that
disease and health, happiness and misery,
fortune and misfortune, peace and war, life
and death, success and failure, were but arrows
 from the quivers of these ghosts; that
shadowy phantoms rewarded and punished
 all mankind; that they gave prosperous
 voyages, allowing the brave mariner to
meet his wife and child inside the harbor
bar, or sent the storms, strewing the sad
shores with wrecks of ships and the bodies
of men. Formerly, these ghosts were believed
almost innumerable. Earth, air, and water
were filled with these phantom hosts. In
modern times they have greatly decreased
in number. The remaining ghosts, however,
are supposed to perform the same office as
the hosts of yore.
-ROBERT G. INGERSOLL (1881),
The Ghosts and Other Lectures,
14th Edition. C. P. Farrell:
Washington, B.C.

PART 1 
Phantom RISING

The history of life is written in creatures that
we've barely begun to get acquainted withjellyfish,
 the sponges, starfish-creatures
that are found in fossil records back, in some
cases, a billion years.
- SYLVIA EARLE

CHAPTER !
Pycno 

IT CRAWLED ALONG the hell-black ocean floor, searching with
its five large dark eyes. It was not a crab-rather it was more spiderlike
 in appearance with obscenely thin long legs. Its mouth
was a triangular opening at the end of a sucking appendage
longer than its body. So ravenous was the creature that its body
was not sufficient to contain its entire stomach; it carried its digestive
 and reproductive organs in long branches packed like
sausages inside its legs.
The early morning light began to penetrate the darkness. At
its current depth in the water, the phantom creature could see
clearly for perhaps thirty feet. Beyond that was just a blur of
blue-green. The water attenuated the red and orange colors first,
giving its environment a curious cyan sheen. Beneath its feet
the ocean floor was a tangled mass of vegetation, sea sponge, and
shell.
As the thing walked, a small fish swam by. The spiderlike creature
 was of such Olympic porportions that the small fish did
not realize that this was a living, potentially dangerous entity.
Suddenly the creature stood still, not because it cared about the
little fish, but because it sensed the presence of a larger multitentacular
 intruder. It began to move with a stalking, 
purposeful intent and then swam toward the other animal by treading
water.
About twenty feet away, a giant octopus was feeding on a
spiny dogfish shark. Disdaining the skin, the octopus ripped the
shark open behind its gills, in order to remove its internal organs.
The spiderlike creature watched the carnage for a few seconds,
and then with surprising speed it snatched at the large octopus.
With a sudden contraction of its body, the octopus turned
brown and jetted for safer water. Black ink billowed but did not
confuse the attacker. It followed its prey.
The giant octopus was once the stuff of legends, a monster
that ravaged sailing vessels and lifted horrified men from the
decks like bite-sized appetizers. Now the mature 500-pound
male was fleeing for its life-the last large octopus of its kind in
these cold waters. Unfortunately there were relatively few octopuses
 left, even though the harvesting of octopuses, favored as
bait by the local Newfoundland fishermen, was officially
banned. This was not entirely the result of local poaching.
The spiderlike creature made a second attempt to grab the octopus,
 which reacted by sucking water into its baglike mantle,
and expelling it though a siphon. As the octopus jetted along the
sea bed, the tips of its arms sometimes brushed against the ocean
floor, making a slight rustling sound like leaves scraping on asphalt.

Suddenly the huge spider-creature snatched at one of the octopus's
 arms-which broke off and sank to the ocean floor.
Unfortunately for the sea spider, the arm was quickly snatched
by a smaller octopus. Cannibalism was common in the sea. Octopuses
 were known to eat their own kind, and when under
stress, as when confined to a small aquarium tank, some octopuses
 even ate their own arms, which grew back in a few
months.
The giant octopus would never have time to grow another
arm. The sea spider grabbed it in a muscular bracelet of death.
It began feeding on the soft parts and sucking out the body
juices. For a few minutes there was an undulating umbrella of
20-foot-long tentacles as the octopus struggled. Its body colors
darkened. It wriggled and shook as it sensed itself being slowly
absorbed by the frightful proboscis, and its primitive brain felt a
little of the terror of being eaten alive, of being imbibed while
struggling. Even though the octopus had a beak as hard as a
parrot's and could pierce Crustacea shells, it had no chance. So
strong was the sea spider's body, that the octopus was a tiny toy
in its pair of pincerlike chelicerae.
In one last futile escape attempt, the octopus contracted its
body to a fourth of its normal diameter, distorted its pliable eyeballs,
 and removed one of its arms through a gap between the
spider's pincers. The sea spider responded by drawing the
baglike mantle of the octopus deeper into its own sucking appendage.
 The octopus's body took on a white hue, then a dark
red. The octopus lifted its weary arms as it died of oxygen starvation.
 Finally, it stopped moving.
Unlike the octopus and other reclusive creatures of the sea
that preferred to hide in a rocky crevice or empty shell when
menacing intruders approached, the huge sea spider-the pycnogonid-never
 felt fear. It had no natural enemies. But while
the sea spider was fearless, it was certainly not stupid. It had several
 large, highly developed brains and was among the most intelligent
 of invertebrates. The pycnogonid not only learned
quickly but remembered what it learned. It also revealed behavioral
 repertoires resembling emotion: irritability, aggression,
rage-but never fear.
The surrounding ocean was a noisy place: the creature's environment
 was bathed in a medley of chirping, bubbling sounds.
Here sound traveled at quadruple its speed in air, and it carried
much better. Lately even the deep oceans were becoming polluted
 with the chemicals and sounds of humans, so the creature
sometimes became disoriented and sought the source of the offending
 stimuli. The local transgressors were broad-beamed offshore
 service vessels which shuttled between Newfoundland and
the Hibernia oil field, 170 nautical miles east of the island. Unfortunately
 for the pycnogonid, all the oil in the North Atlantic
was in "iceberg alley", the pycnogonid's home, where the
Labrador Current pulled icebergs southward from Greenland.
Ample food supplies which once had been plentiful were now
becoming scarcer. The spider began to move toward the surface
in search of food. Occasionally it swatted at nearby small fish
and watched them die-as if for the sheer pleasure of seeing
smaller, weaker animals suffer. Again and again it thrust at
nearby sea creatures, too small to serve as food.
And so, swimming with its eight gigantic legs, the psychotic,
serial-killing invertebrate rose slowly in the frigid darkness. It
was hungry. Its digestive organs spasmed. It wished to eat.
Like a phantom rising from the depths of a dark dream, or a
ghostly submarine rising from an oceanic abyss, it quietly ascended
 into more fertile territory. The realm of humans.

CHAPTER      2
Friends

NATALIE SHEPPARD BLINKED. "What is that?" she murmured,
surprised.
Her friend followed her gaze from the wooden dock to the
dark ocean. "Something in the air, or in the water?" Garth James
asked, not seeing it.
"It's gone now. It-it must have been a reflection from a
wave," Natalie said. "I shouldn't have spoken. I'm so accustomed
 to looking for suspicious things, I must be imagining
them."
He smiled. "I doubt it. You strike me as an exceptionally levelheaded
 woman. Could it have been an iceberg fragment?"
"More like a whale. Something alive, I think. But it wasn't a
whale, or anything I recognized, really. I-" She shrugged.
"You could join us on our new schooner, the Phantom, and
we'll look for it," he suggested.
Natalie smiled. "I'd love to. But I'm on duty, and my lunch
break is just about done." She looked at her watch.
"Don't let him get you alone on that boat," a new voice said
cheerfully. It was a beautiful young woman. "He's a demon lover
on the water."
Natalie, embarrassed by the implication, was momentarily
flustered. She did not know how to deal with pseudo-passes.
For the stunning creature was Garth's wife, Kalinda. Natalie
had encountered them routinely a week ago, and liked them immediately.
 She privately envied their easy marriage. It was obvious
 that they had no fears of alienation. She knew she could go
out all day alone with Garth, and not only would he be a perfect
gentleman, Kalinda would have no concern. Oh, to have such
mutual trust!
"You promised not to tell," Garth said, smiling at his wife.
"But seriously, Natalie, maybe on your day off. We'd be glad to
have you."
"For sure," Kalinda agreed warmly. "There's just nothing like
going out on the Phantom."
Natalie was sure it was so, and not merely because of the boat
or the experience. Anywhere these folk went would be pleasant
for all concerned. "Maybe I will," she agreed, reluctant only because
 she did not wish to impose. "How much longer will you
be here?"
Garth shrugged. "As long as we choose. But perhaps a week,
if that's convenient for you. I need to spend a bit more time with
my little sister before moving on."
"Your sister?"
"Lisa. She works at Martha's Fish Store. Do you know it?"
Natalie nodded. "Yes. I've never been inside, though. I hear
that-" She hesitated.
Kalinda laughed. "It has an eerie proprietor," she said. "That's
what you've heard, isn't it?"
"Yes. But I'm sure that's an exaggeration."
"No, Lisa filled us in. She wouldn't work there, except that
she needs the money."
"Why? Does Martha mistreat her?"
"Not exactly," Garth said. "But she can be very strange. Lisa's
always afraid that one day something truly weird will happen,
and she'll have to quit. But I think it's all right. Lisa's young, and
hasn't met all the strange folk she's going to."
"All she meets are men hot to get into her pants," Kalinda
said. "I know the feeling."
Garth patted her bottom. "So?"
"So she doesn't know how to relate to someone who isn't hot
for her."
"But Martha's a woman!"
"So?" Kalinda retorted in the same tone he had used.
He looked thoughtful. "No, I don't think Martha's of that
persuasion. She's just more interested in fish of any type than in
people of any type."
Natalie made a mental note: check out the interior of that
store, when she had a pretext. She wanted to know just how
weird the proprietor of Martha's Fish Store was. Just in case
something did happen. It was always better to be prepared with
accurate information before a crisis occurred.
Garth reached out and touched Natalie's forehead with a gentle
 knuckle. He had an easy familiarity that amazed her, because
she accepted from him what would have infuriated her from
anyone else. "You can just about see those criminal assessment
thoughts churning in there," he said, smiling. "You'd know she's
a cop even without the uniform."
"He can be so obnoxious," Kalinda remarked fondly, gazing
away as if addressing a video camera. "He gets worse the longer
he spends on land."
Natalie put her hands on her hips. "But you were sailing just
this morning!" she said.
"All of three hours ago," Kalinda agreed. "We're approaching
the danger zone for his tolerance."
"I don't see why there has to be land anyway," Garth growled.
"It should all sink under the sea, and take its landlubbers with
it." He smiled winningly. "Present company excepted."
Natalie laughed, which was something she did not ordinarily
do in public. There was something about these people that made
laughter easy, even when the interaction was routine. "Well, I
shall just have to suffer through the rest of my shift," she said, 
rising. "Do keep an eye out; I'd certainly like to know what I saw
out there, if I saw anything."
"We will," Kalinda agreed. "See you soon, Natalie."
"And bring your bikini," Garth said.
"My-" Natalie paused. He had succeeded in startling her. It
was a verbal trap; if she said she didn't have one, he'd suggest
nude sunning. Natalie would not care to expose her body in either
 fashion; she was simply too lean. But his implication that
she was otherwise was unsubtly flattering despite being unwarranted.
 "Some other decade," she said as she walked away.
"There was a day when I was the only one you teased," she
heard Kalinda say to Garth.
"But we've been married ten years!" he protested. "You're all
teased out."
"Nine years. There's still a year to go."
That was all of their banter Natalie was able to hear. Nine
years? She had not guessed it was that long, because they still
acted like almost-newlyweds. Probably it was a show for others.
Still, it evoked desire in her-desire for a relationship like that.
But she didn't ever want to get serious about a policeman, and
what other type of man would tolerate a policewoman? The
hours, the crises, the occasional dangers-he would surely insist
that she quit her job, and she simply wasn't ready to do that. Not
for anybody. Because she liked her work. It gave her life definition.

She put that disquieting thought aside. But it was immediately
replaced by another: what had she seen in the sea? Probably just
a piece of driftwood. But for an instant it had looked almost like
a giant, gross, insect leg. Impossible, of course. Yet her fleeting
glimpse had been so camera certain, until her rational mind corrected
 it. If only someone else has seen it too, to identify it as an
unusual bit of flotsam, caught at an odd angle. As it was, the
foolish image remained to haunt her. She couldn't afford to start
seeing things that weren't there. It could play merry hell with her
job performance.
Natalie knew she'd be watching the sea again, hoping to see
the thing, and identify it, and dissipate the trick her eye had
played on her. Maybe she would take Garth and Kalinda up on
their offer to sail briefly, just to reassure herself that there wasn't
anything fantastic out there. She didn't like foolishness, especially
 in herself.

CHAPTER 3
Ice

THE SMALL PLEASURE boat was dwarfed by the strangely
shaped icebergs floating nearby along the Newfoundland coast.
In the fractured sides and grottos of these massive chunks of ice
were strange rich blues and weathered aquamarines. The ocean
surged into the cavernous bellies worn at the icebergs' waterlines
and exploded in steepled and gabled sprays of foam. In this part
of Newfoundland icebergs frequently changed shape under the
chisels of the swift Labrador Current.
From far away, the small two-masted schooner blended in
perfectly with its surroundings and looked like a long thin piece
of ice drifting through a chilling white mosaic on the celadon
sea. Closer, an observer could easily discern the boat's name
engraved in golden letters on a wooden plaque hanging on the
back. The sign read: PHANTOM.
The boat's occupants looked at a map of the area which
showed that Newfoundland comprised two main areas, the Island
 of Newfoundland and the Coast of Labrador. The Island of
Newfoundland, roughly triangular shaped, was separated from
the Canadian mainland by the narrow Strait of Belle Isle on the
northwest, the seventy-mile-wide Cabot Strait on the southwest,
and the broad Gulf of St. Lawrence on the west.
The early morning rain had stopped, but the deck was still
slippery near the engine hatch where oil had soaked into the
wood. Garth James sat in the cockpit of his boat with one bare
foot resting on a spoke of the wheel. In his right hand was a
cup of coffee. Garth was big, fairly muscular, dark-haired and
swarthy, and appeared to be in his early thirties. He wore boldcolored
 Hawaiian swim shorts and a denim windbreaker. As he
gazed across the horizon, the boat rocked gently in the deep
swells. An invigorating whiff of pungent sea air filled his nostrils.
Garth turned on the boat's engine and pointed the craft in the
direction of a peculiarly shaped iceberg which contained a myriad
 of exotic wave-cut patterns. At one moment the crevices
were filled with green water. The next moment they were throwing
 white, foaming water back into the ocean. For the few seconds
 between the inrushing and outrushing of water, the caverns
displayed thousands of pieces of pointed ice like sharks' teethwhite,
 green, and aquamarine.
Garth's curiosity about the ocean overwhelmed him at times.
At 16, he had dived for the first time, donning an old helmet,
weights, and compressed air to explore a Maine river bed. While
at Yale University studying marine biology, he was introduced to
sophisticated scuba gear. Even after his marriage at 21 to
Kalinda, and the birth of their child Alan, he kept his attention
focused on diving deeper and discovering the way the oceans
worked.
Kalinda came up through the hatch and handed him an
apple.
"Thanks," he said. Kalinda stared at the man with her
sparkling eyes and then hooked her thumb in her shirt pocket
and cocked her hip. He gazed at her and took her hand.
"Like your outfit," Garth said. Kalinda wore his flannel shirt,
and nothing else.
"I better get something on before I freeze to death," she said,
shivering. She was a slim woman, 27 years of age, with honeycolored
 hair, and eyes the darkest green.
"Why don't I warm you up first," Garth said as he kissed her
on the lips.
"At least the weather's a bit warmer today than yesterday," she
said with a charming smile that involved her eyes as well as her
mouth. Like Garth, Kalinda was interested in the sea. Three
years before she had been invited to join the National Science
Foundation's research vessel Anton Bruun for a three-week exploration
 of the oceans near Madagascar. Together Garth and
Kalinda had gone on expeditions to the Juan Fernandez islands
and the Galapagos Islands. Their parents, ever supportive, took
care of their four-year-old during these trips.
"You really must be cold." He patted the crease of her bottom
through the shirt. "Shall I follow you into the cabin?" He drew
back enough to stare at Kalinda's nipples, which rose like goose
bumps from beneath her inadequate outfit.
"I better put a coat on," she said, winking.
He placed his fingers under her shirt and felt her naked buttocks.
 He began to stroke her. She was right: her body was cold,
like the anatomy of a statue. It was an interesting experience.
"Galatea," he murmured.
"But I'm no ivory statue," she said. For Galatea, in mythology,
was a beautiful statue later animated by the prayer of her lover.
"That's because I'm bringing you to life," he said, massaging
her projecting flesh.
"Mmmm," she purred as he followed her to the cabin.
Garth had convinced Kalinda that the ultimate in unusual
vacations was the North Atlantic where they could spend some
time traveling among the awesome floating mountains, the icebergs.
 He had explained to Kalinda that the weather was fairly
mild near Newfoundland. The presence of the sea moderated
the temperature in the winter. The average temperature in January
 was about 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and 55 degrees F weather
was common in the summer. However, only the south coast was
ice-free throughout the winter. At first she thought his vacation
idea was crazy, but when he showed her some photographs the
U.S. Coast Guard supplied of magnificent ice giants plodding
through Baffin Bay, she gave into the crazy adventure. They
started in Quebec, traveling along the St. Lawrence River in
their schooner, and continued through the Cabot Strait into the
Atlantic.
Occasionally they docked along the coast of Newfoundland
where weathered bald mountains rose almost from the water.
Newfoundlanders affectionately called their Island of Newfoundland
 "the Rock." Battered by the Atlantic Ocean at Canada's
easternmost point, it sometimes seemed a harsh place-remote
and watery. Until the early 19th century, fish merchant monopolies,
 piracy, and international rivalry fiercely discouraged permanent
 settlement. Recently, however, Newfoundland had both
modern amenities and rural values. In the past decade the government
 had begun to pursue an economic policy based on
forestry, fisheries, and hydroelectric power. The fisheries remained
 the largest resource-sector employer, providing full-time
work to 20,000 fishermen.
They had come to St. John's, checked in with Garth's lovely
little sister Lisa, and now were on one of their side jaunts, forging
 north along the east coast of the island. The wind had been
wrong on prior days, and that could make a difference, but this
time it was right, and they were going against the current to see
the icebergs. They were in no hurry.
"Are you warm yet, Galatea?" he inquired.
"Alive, but not warm," she replied. "Maybe if you heat me
from the inside . . ."
There was silence while he did his best. In due course she
confessed to having been warmed throughout.
An hour after making love, Garth and Kalinda emerged from the
cabin to look at the coast with its charming village ports and
then back at the large floating chunks of ice. "Do you think it's
such a good idea to get so close to the glacier?" Kalinda asked
as she turned her head. The light caught her silky hair turning it
into the color of a Hawaiian sunset.
"Nothing to worry about. We'll go slow," Garth said as he tiptoed
 his fingers from her calf to her knee. There was usually 
little danger when sailing in these seas due to the number of Coast
Guard boats in the area. Ever since the steamship Titanic collided
 with an iceberg and sunk, ship lanes near Newfoundland
had continued to be patrolled by one or two American Coast
Guard boats during the seasons when icebergs were drifting.
Several nations helped to defray the cost of this patrol service.
"There must be hundreds of icebergs!" Kalinda said. Some
looked like gigantic pyramids, hummocked in places to form
the frigid likenesses of yawning lions. Garth turned to Kalinda.
"The location of every iceberg in these waters is radioed to
the ships in the neighborhood. We can't get lost even if we
wanted to."
"Let's be careful," Kalinda said. "I'd hate to collide with an
iceberg."
"You're always such a worrier," he said, smiling.
"If I didn't worry, I think you'd have killed yourself by now,"
she said, perhaps thinking of the time he had nearly crashed the
schooner into a coral reef a year ago.
Garth nodded as he edged the two-masted, motor-powered
schooner even closer to an iceberg. Even though he realized that
eight times as much of the ice was under the water than above,
it was hard to fully appreciate that the beautiful blue waves concealed
 a mass of ice much larger than the behemoth before their
eyes. Flashes of sunlight began to reflect off the berg's crystalline
surfaces, producing an astonishing collection of scintillating orange
 and blue colors.
"Magnificent," Kalinda said as she pointed to the icefields,
which glimmered like mercury. "The colors remind me a little of
the sparkling crystals on the chandelier in my mother's home."
"Look at that one," Garth pointed. "Those kinds of glacial ice
are known as 'dry docks' because of their deep U-shaped indentations.
 See the sparkling ponds of water at the bottom of
the U?"
"Wouldn't want to get trapped at the bottom. How much do
you think it weighs?"
"Probably around two million tons."
Suddenly the iceberg broke into several huge pieces, as if
someone had exploded dynamite in its icy interior. It made a
noise like thunder, which could be heard for several miles.
"Grab onto something," Garth cried. Kalinda ran toward the
mast as rings of large waves began to radiate from the berg in all
directions. The schooner began to pitch and roll as if it were in
a great storm.
"Ahh," Kalinda cried as cold particles of salt spray splashed
and ran down her legs. Part of the berg began to die with a
crackling and crumbling. There were such roars of agony that it
sounded as if the Phantom were under siege by cannons. When
the waves subsided Garth decided he better be the first to speak.
"Everything OK?"
"I thought you said this was safe," she said sarcastically.
"Sorry. The bergs sometimes do that. Didn't realize how powerful
 the effect could be." After hours of direct sunlight had
melted the surface ice, internal strains in the frozen water were
manifest in what Newfoundland fisherman called iceberg
"foundering"-the bergs exploded into huge chunks of ice. With
a horrifying roar, blocks of ice bigger than a house sometimes
broke away from the ice mountain.
But as Garth and Kalinda guided their craft among the icebergs
 for a few hours, they grew accustomed to the cacophonous
sounds and sight-even grew to love them. They learned to navigate
 the boat among the icebergs with the grace of a downhill
skier gliding back and forth between trees.
"Most of these icebergs come from the west coast of Greenland,"
 Garth said.
"Right, I read about that. They also drift for around three
years before reaching their deathbed in the warm Gulf Stream."
Occasionally Kalinda liked to remind Garth about her own
knowledge in marine geology, something Garth every now and
then seemed to forget when he got into his scientific lecturing
mood.
Now the sea was calmer.
"Care for a drink?" Garth asked.
"No thanks."
"A nap?"
"Maybe later." Although she might be tired, Kalinda evidently
didn't want to miss the wonderful sights all around her.
Garth picked up a newspaper and began to leaf through it. "It
says here that there are less codfish in the seas for the fishermen
to catch these days, and that the Canadian government is subsidizing
 the fishermen. Wonder what could cause the sudden decline
 of fish?"
"Maybe they simply were overfishing the limited local
supply."
Garth turned the pages of the newspaper. A colorful advertisement
 caught his eye: it was for Martha's Fish Store, which
purported to be the largest marine and freshwater aquarium
store in Newfoundland. It also claimed to have a tank with over
one thousand neon tetra fish. He handed the advertisement to
Kalinda.
"Let's take a look at Martha's Fish Store when we get back to
the land. No sense in depending on Lisa for all our information."
"I'd love that."
As they traveled along the coast, with a few dozen icebergs in
sight, the frequent roar of foundering icebergs made an otherwise
 serene setting more exciting than a roller coaster ride. At
times even the noise of their ship's six-cylinder diesel engine
couldn't be heard over the thunder of the bergs.
Garth yawned.
"Why don't you let me steer for a while," Kalinda said. "You
take a nap below."
"Not a bad idea." Garth got stiffly to his feet, ducked under
the boom, and checked a few ropes. Then he went to the hatch.
He turned to Kalinda. "Come down if there's any problem."
Below, in a small, cozy room with a soft bed, a refrigerator,
and other amenities, Garth checked a few maps and a compass.
Then he examined his new chart drum navigator which enabled
him to use traditional paper charts with loran or Global Position
Satellite navigations systems.
Garth was always amazed at how well the loran system
worked for determining his vessel's position. Like radar, this
electronic system for long range wavigation was a World War II
development. Unlike radar, loran required no special transmission
 from the ship. Instead a radio receiver operating on a low
frequency gave loran the capability of receiving signals at great
distances. Loran transmitting stations on shore operated in pairs;
one was called the master, the other the slave station. The time
difference between arriving signals allowed the ship to be located
 on a loran chart. Loran stations throughout the world afforded
 extensive loran coverage, but a ship had to be within 700
miles by day and 1,400 miles at night to receive the loran signals.
Earlier in the morning he had slipped a chart of the Newfoundland
 waters under a plastic overlay on the chart drum navigator.
 The drum rotated to keep the part of the map he was
using in view. A moving red bead marked his boat's current position.
 So far, so good. They should be back in Bonavista Bay in
another few hours.
Without removing any of his clothes, except for his sandals, he
dived into bed and stretched out like an old dog. Before he fell
asleep he thought about the sea. In spite of its dangers, humans
were always attracted to the mystery and beauty of the ocean, the
challenge of its unpredictability, from placid calm to raging
storm. Since prehistoric times, humans' personal relationship
with the ocean had been unique, unlike ties with other natural
surroundings. Perhaps long before scientists realized that the
sea was the mother of life, humans intuitively realized that the
salty solution, so much like the chemistry of their own blood,
was the source of living things.

CHAPTER      4
Spider

THE CREATURE WAS alert as it treaded water near heart-shaped
corals that grew like mold from the sea floor. A crimson blob
with light splotches rose from the mud in the wake of the pycnogonid.
 As the sea spider swam its large eyes fixed themselves
on a brilliant red nudibrach mollusk, and then the spider
crushed it with one of its gigantic legs.
In recent years various pollutants were causing species to mutate
 at a rate faster than normal. Medical wastes containing
growth hormones, bacterial plasmids, and mutagens were being
consumed by the local sea species. Many organisms were entirely
 unaffected, while some of the primitive invertebrates produced
 offspring with deformities and strange new physical
characteristics. Many animals died. Others survived but with
size and shape alterations: there were lobsters the size of pigs and
with dozens of legs, two-headed crabs, and a multitude of new
worm species with bioluminescent throat appendages and eyes
the size of almonds. Marine scientists were becoming aware of
these mutations and changes, and concern was rising. But they
did not yet appreciate the magnitude of what was happening, or
guess that not all of it was either natural or by chance. They
would have some strong hints, however, soon enough.
As the sea spider stepped on a reef, the reef came alive: large
numbers of jelly-roll creatures fled from the crevices. Above was
an iceberg. Below glided small sharks and large rays. These were
routine.
Suddenly the pycnogonid sensed vibrations emanating from
somewhere near the sea's surface. Something big was approaching
 from above.The terminal claws on the creature's front
legs quivered in unison with its huge chelicerae as it decided to
climb the iceberg's shelf. Two impulses drove the sea spider: its
desire to eat and its innate rage.
It rose for another few minutes and hit the underside of the
glacier with a big bump. Crash! A soft explosion of ice was set
off by the sea spider. After the vibrations subsided, the pycnogonid
 gracefully positioned its head downward, flipped its body,
and began to walk upside down on the flat underbelly of the
glacier-defying gravity with the aid of buoyancy. The sea was
its ceiling, the ice its floor. It didn't care. It just wanted to get
where it was going, whatever way that worked. It walked along
the underside of the glacier until it reached its edge.
In just a few minutes, the body of the pycnogonid broke the
water's surface and scrambled up an area of the iceberg which
had a relatively gradual slope. Just like its arthropod cousins, the
lobsters and crabs, the huge sea spider could live for some time
in the fresh air. Its gills began to work in overdrive with what
moisture they still contained, sucking in life-giving oxygen from
the atmosphere. As it gazed out over the water in the direction
of the sound and movement, the creature saw a moving object
seemingly about its own size. The fact that the object was large,
that it was alien, caused the sea spider no fear. It crept down the
precipices and glacial snow-fields into a glacial valley, and then
reached the edge of the iceberg which touched the sea. It prepared
 itself to attack.

CHAPTER 5
Dream

ALTHOUGH AN ICEBERG could be as big as an entire village,
any sailor would have rather been shipwrecked on land than on
such ice. Aside from the cold, the sides of an iceberg were often
very steep. Hidden holes, crevices, and caverns added to the
danger. Even if a sailor wanted to explore an iceberg's glistening
surfaces and caves, it was usually too difficult for most sailing
vessels to dock alongside such a mass.The unfortunate ship that
crashed into one of these islands of ice usually sank, and the
water was so cold that even an Olympic swimmer would have
died from exposure.
Kalinda had no intention of being shipwrecked on an iceberg
and took extra care to stay clear of the mammoth chunks of ice.
She carefully steered the boat into a narrow channel between
two icebergs, and then in the direction of an impressive
rhinoceros-shaped berg with a huge arch in the middle. It was
wide enough to hold a football field. On the northern side of the
berg was a huge, upward pointing prominence that reminded
her of a rhinoceros's horn. From this distance it seemed that a
chunk of ice was missing from an area of the rhino's face, forming
 a dark area which composed the rhino's eye. Kalinda got
out her new expensive sophisticated camera and snapped a few
pictures. The camera had special protections against water
splashed from any direction.
After a minute, she put the camera down. The dark area forming
 the "eye" on the iceberg seemed a bit strange, she thought,
so she decided to take the boat closer for a better look. Just as
people enjoyed watching clouds and finding animal and other
shapes in their random patterns, sailors often looked at ice formations
 and imagined sea serpents and mermaids, and other
more provocative patterns. She wondered if she should wake
Garth up from his nap to see the berg with its pinnacles towering
 more than fourteen stories high. But of course it wouldn't
evaporate before he got his chance.
Kalinda reached over to a radio on the bridge, turned it on,
and began bobbing her head to the rhythm of the golden oldie
"Please Mr. Postman" by the Marvelettes. Another few minutes
passed; then a sudden wild scream startled her. It came from
above. She looked up to see a large seagull circling with wings
outstretched and motionless. Just a seagull.
The rhinoceros-shaped iceberg now loomed above her, more
beautiful than any sculpture created by the hands of humans.
The sun gave a kind of smooth brilliance to the whiteness of the
iceberg hulk. Wherever there were cracks there were also veins of
pale violet melt water that had flowed into the cracks and had refrozen.
 Again she gazed up at the ice horn pointing up at the
blue sky like a hitchhiker's thumb. But where was the dark area
that formed its eye? She looked some more. There it was, to the
left.
The eye formation on the iceberg moved. Kalinda gasped. As
the craft edged ever closer to the berg, her hands slipped on the
wooden steering wheel. They were cold and clammy.
The eye moved again.
"Garth, wake up." There was no noise from below the hatch.
She killed the engine. "Garth?" As she walked to the hatch, she
felt a nervous shiver go up her spine. She poked her head inside
and saw her husband motionless on their small bed. His eye-
lids fluttered with the rapid movement of his eyes. Garth was
dreaming.
Kalinda hesitated. She was alarmed about what she had seen,
but she knew it was probably some natural phenomenon that
Garth would immediately explain. On the other hand, his
dreams were often special. If she let him wake naturally, he
would share his dream with her before it faded, and they would
both be richer. For a long time she had been interested in the
rich and largely untapped realm of dream symbolism. Kalinda
had taught Garth certain psychological methods for momentarily
 awakening to report his dreams to her before he fell back to
sleep to continue his dreaming. They both practiced and enjoyed
 remembering their dreams. The sharing of dreams had
improved their understanding of themselves and brought them
closer as a couple. So she stifled her probably baseless fear and
waited; she knew it would not be long.
It wasn't. In a moment he opened his eyes, saw her, and immediately
 spoke his dream, knowing that she would remember
it better than he would, because she was fully awake and rational.
 Freshness was everything, because the details faded like
morning fog, leaving no trace if not caught early. And indeed it
turned out to be worthwhile.
He had dreamed that he was a child back at his parents' house
in Asbury Park, New Jersey. He had just purchased a strange
new aquatic animal for his 110-gallon tropical fish tank. The
tank was in the basement, already filled with a dazzling array of
marine species: orange clown fish, long-snouted coralfish, powder
 blue surgeonfish, and wimplefish-all from the Indo-Pacific.
When he dropped the newcomer into the tank, it immediately
settled to the bottom. It looked a little like a tube worm with a
sludge-green, chalky outer tube. When threatened, or at night, it
retracted its pinky tentacles and hairlike projections, and closed
the hinged lid at the top of its inch-thick tube. It seemed to eat
the same prepared flake food that the other fish enjoyed-except
it ate a lot more than other fish. Occasionally, he supplemented
the diet with freeze-dried krill, blood worms, and brine shrimp.
So voracious was the tube worm that over the next few weeks
Garth went through several cans of food. Each day the animal
grew in size until one day it was so large it climbed out of the
tank and waited in the corner of the room. When Garth came
down to feed the fish, he saw that his hairy specimen was no
longer in the tank. He looked around the room near the tank,
and then a movement caught his eye. From the corner of the
room, it came at him, with large saberlike teeth. Young Garth
screamed and ran up the basement steps, the animal hot in pursuit.
 As he reached the basement door, he found to his horror it
was locked. On the door was a computer keyboard and computer
 screen. The screen had the words:
PLEASE   KEYPRESS   CORRECT   PASSWORD   TO   OPEN   DOOR.
Garth typed one password after another on the keyboard, desperately,
 but none opened the door. The worm came closer and
closer as it navigated the basement steps. Its moist body undulated
 along the carpet like that of a snake. It was only three steps
away. Two steps away. One step away. Garth then suffered a
fevered flash of inspiration and typed the password "DEATH,"
the door finally opened, and"And
 that's as far as it goes, right now," he concluded. "I'd
better finish it." At which point he closed his eyes and returned
to sleep. He'd trained himself not to fear his dreams.
This was too much. He might sleep for another hour, now,
and the continuation would be lost in the welter of the following
 dreams. They had gotten all they could. Her concern for
what was outside returned, perhaps augmented by the horror of
the dream itself.
"Garth? Wake up," Kalinda called.
For a moment Garth was disoriented, trying to shake off the
ashes of his weird dream, but then he realized where he was.
Kalinda was heading outside the moment she saw him sit up.
He stumbled after her, out of the hatch and on to the bright
deck.
"What's wrong?" he asked, his attention shifting to the iceberg.
 "Wow, you discovered a magnificent berg."
"There was something on it that moved. It's not there any
more."
"Maybe it was a chunk of ice that slipped." As Garth watched
the iceberg he seemed not fully focused, and she knew he was
trying to recall details of his weird dream and the atmosphere of
impending doom. She would feed those details back to him as
soon as this other thing was checked.
"It couldn't be," she said. "It was something dark. It looked
like it was alive."
"The light plays tricks. Could still be ice."
"Garth, I thought I saw legs."
"A bear? I think most of the bears this far north are white."
"It was as big as this ship. Maybe bigger."
He looked at her. "Just which one of us was dreaming?" he
asked, smiling.
She remained serious. "I got your dream. But this was no
dream. It alarms me. I don't know what I saw."
"Natalie saw something in the sea," he said, remembering. "I
wonder-?"
"Maybe so. She was shaken. So am I."
He did not try to joke any more, realizing that something
strange was happening. She was relieved. She still hoped that he
would come up with a natural explanation.
They looked around at the iceberg and the glittering water but
saw and heard nothing out of the ordinary. Perhaps there was a
smell of low tide and crawling things, but nothing more. Now
and then long streaks of sunlight shot through the cloudy sky
and glimmered on the multihued facets of ice in the surrounding
 sea. "Whatever it was," Garth said, "I guess we can't do too
much about it now. It still could have been a trick of the light."
They sat in silence for a few minutes listening to the strong
tonal contrasts of the sea and the gulls. In the distance they saw
a few men riding on 16-foot-long fiberglass boats. The sleek
crafts resembled outrigger canoes. One of the men pushed and
pulled on the boat's sweep oar and moved his feet as if he were
pedaling a bicycle to move the craft forward. Garth changed the
subject.
"How about we get something to eat?"
"OK, would you like a tuna sandwich?" Kalinda asked. There
was obviously no point in worrying further about what she might
have imagined.
"Sounds great."
"Onions, paprika, mayonnaise?"
"Perfect." Even though he had had a late breakfast of eggs,
bacon, homefries, and buttered toast, the cool fresh air had an
invigorating effect which made him particularly hungry. She had
seen it before. After such a cholesterol-rich meal, she thought he
should have a few fruits and vegetables.
"How about another apple?" he said, agreeing.
"Coming right up."
Kalinda suddenly started and cocked her head in the direction
 of one of the boat's railings. She ran toward the bow. "What
was that?"
"What?"
"I heard a scraping noise. Sounded like scratching."
"Where?"
She slowly made her way to the aft rail. There was a creeping
uneasiness at the bottom of her heart. Her emotions reminded
her of the times her neighbor's dog ran after her when she was
only seven years old. The dog was a large one, a German shepherd.
 Often Kalinda would come home crying to her mother as
the dog outside barked and barked. Her mother complained to
the dog's owner and finally the dog was kept inside the house
when Kalinda walked home from school.
"Maybe a chunk of ice brushed against the boat," Garth said.
Kalinda feared she was beginning to give him the jitters, instead
of being reassured by him. He looked all around. His tension
seemed to rise a few percentage points. Still nothing unusual.
But she didn't like this at all.
Boom. Boom. The scratching noises turned to dull thuds
which grew in volume. Now there was no doubt at all that something
 was up. She tried to suppress her wildest and most unreasonable
 fears, with little success.
"Maybe we should stay in the cabin and shut the door,"
Kalinda said.
"I think it will be OK. It's probably a baby whale. Won't
hurt us."
Then a strange expression crossed his face. He was staring at
her, or beyond her, eyes wide, jaw slack. "What is it, Garth?" she
asked, feeling a tight knot of panic.
The ship began to rock back and forth. Water splashed onto
the deck. Garth's mouth worked without producing sound as he
looked around the ship. It was as if he had a pressing need to
confirm he was on his own boat, that the universe had not just
swiveled into some insane new dimension. He gazed at the familiar
 rails, gleaming deck, weathered ropes, as if willing some
horror to go away. But whatever it was remained.
"Garth-" she said, clinging to a semblance of equilibrium.
"What's happening?"
One quarter of the vessel's railing disappeared off the side of
the ship, as if torn away by some colossal hand.
"Get away from the rail," Garth cried. She stepped away from
it, then slowly turned. Before she looked back, Kalinda suddenly
felt numb, as if her feelings were paralyzed. What could possibly
be there? She forced her eyes to focus.
Slowly, a huge jointed leg appeared from the water near the
lost rail. When she turned toward the rail, trying to make sense
of this phantom, she saw the leg lift high, coming toward her.
Kalinda threw back her head and screamed a guttural cry of
terror. She pirouetted back toward Garth but slipped on the wet
deck. Now two more legs appeared as the monster tried to
clamor onto the deck. There was a brittle crack of weathered
wood, as the engine was torn off the boat. So sharp was the
chitinous exoskeleton of the sea spider, that it left inch-deep
scratch marks on the planking.
For that was what it was, she realized. An impossibly 
enormous spider in the sea, a creature vaguely like that of Garth's
dream, only much bigger and more horrible in form. Now she
saw its awful snout emerging from the water, coming over the
deck, dripping sea water or saliva. She saw its gangly body heaving
 up. This was worse than any nightmare!
Kalinda crawled away. The sea spider came closer. It loomed
over her. Ice-cold water ran off the crevices in its body onto
her-water so cold that it felt like an electric shock to her skin.
She dragged her body forward a few steps, but was seconds
too slow. The sea spider's leg came down on her foot with a
tremendous force and tore half of it off with a crunching sound.
She didn't even feel the pain, just heard the crunching as she
wrenched her leg away. She looked back as if mesmerized. The
multilegged attacker used it chelicerae for seizing and carrying
Kalinda's half-foot to its mouth. There didn't seem to be much
bleeding, oddly.
"Gaah," Kalinda choked and shoved her fist into her mouth.
She did not yet go into shock but continued to struggle, desperate
 to squeeze herself behind one of the large wooden boat
masts, determined to place the mast between her and the monster.
 She held onto the mast with all her strength, only partially
aware of the stinging pain in her fingers when she tore her
thumbnails.
The sea spider continued to suck on her foot, and then, without
 warning, cracked the mast into two pieces. Blood oozed
from the stump of her foot as she tried to tear a piece of her shirt
to make a tourniquet. But the shirt would not tear. Kalinda felt
as if her eyes had become as sunken as the eyes of a cadaver.
A vile ammonia odor filled the ship. Garth threw a fire extinguisher
 at the alien creature, but it continued to come toward
Kalinda. It did not hesitate or seem concerned by Garth's movements.

"I'm coming," Garth said as he stepped closer to grab her.
But the spider was too close to Kalinda to allow him to reach her
without himself being trampled into human hamburger. The
ammonia smell burned their nasal passages, made their eyes
tear. Ridiculously Garth ran to the monster and gave a swift, vicious
 kick to one of its legs.
"Look out!" Kalinda screamed as the leg responded by shoving
 Garth into a piece of the mast. His eyes were flecked with
pain as he toppled sideways. A spine on one of the legs ripped
into him, so devastating that he dropped to the deck, surely feeling
 pain like nothing he had ever known. As he lay there stunned
for a few seconds his mouth worked, and she heard him speak,
as from a distance.
"Oh, Kalinda," he gasped. "I love you, and I will protect you!
You can't die, you aren't going to die . . ."
Tears came through her horror as she struggled to her feet, ignoring
 the lancing pain from her mutilated foot. In the face of
this dreadful threat, all he was thinking of was her!
The creature came swiflty up from behind Kalinda. She
stepped to one side to let the creature pass and almost blacked
out with pain as one of its leg spikes skewered her, its tan and
white tip slicing red hot into the flesh of her chest, scraping
along her sternum like fingernails on a blackboard and emerging
 five inches from the point of entry. She twisted with the force
of the blow, taking the spine with her. A pain shot like lightning
from her chest to her skull. At the same time she reacted instinctively,
 smashing the knuckles of her stiffened right hand
into a softer area right at the creature's leg joint. The spider
seemed surprised, but that was about all. It rose slowly above
her, its huge black expressionless eyes staring into her own.
There was no doubt it intended to consume her.
Garth screamed. Having no weapons aboard the Phantom to
protect himself and Kalinda, it seemed likely that the monster
would succeed in making Kalinda its next meal.
Now the cold water and air was beginning to have an anesthetizing
 effect on Kalinda. The sea water splashed on her by the
spider left her with a fraction of her sense of touch. Her face was
numb. She saw Garth look at her, and knew that she seemed
more like an apparition, unreal, lost, already on the threshold of
death.
Kalinda's heartbeat accelerated as she looked back and up at
the creature's multiple bulging eyes. It loomed over her like a
giant hideous balloon in a Thanksgiving parade. The balloon resemblance,
 however, was only superficial: vile black liquid oozed
from the creature's pores and several lesions of decay. Kalinda
smelled its fetid body as it edged ever closer. Its eyes looked her
over with the compassionless, hungry practicality of a vulture.
Yet she remained aware of peripheral things. From overhead,
gulls swooped in large arcs across a sky filled with vague perpetual
 clouds.
"Garth-" She ended in a gargle of blood and collapsed to
the deck as she began to choke. She could no longer move or
talk, yet she remained conscious, able to see and hear. It was as
if she had entered another realm, as a nonparticipant. She was
aware of what her husband was doing. She wanted to cry to him
to get away, to hide in the cabin, to radio for help. She was done
for; she knew that. But maybe while the spider consumed her,
Garth would have time to save himself.
Garth licked his lips. She knew he had tasted his own blood
and realized he had bitten into his tongue. Somehow he managed
 to get to his feet, dragging his battered body backward. He
stood frozen for a moment but then must have remembered that
there was a large pole downstairs in the hatch. Perhaps he could
wedge this into the pycnogonid's sucking appendage or stab at
one of its eyes with it.
She heard him get up and stumble toward the hatch. He
grabbed the doorknob, but the hatch door was jammed. "Open,
damn you," he cried. He banged on it. He tugged again, and the
door sprang free. He barged in.
Now Kalinda moaned, hoping that Garth could not hear her.
She didn't want him to be distracted as he fought to save his own
life. Blood was pulsing past the sharp bony spine in her chest.
What remained of her shirt was soaked, and she could feel the
sticky warmth spreading. She began to feel totally disorientedand
 icy cold.
But she remained aware of Garth, hearing his footsteps,
knowing what he was doing. She knew he loved her; she loved
him just as passionately, and knew his ways. She could track
him by the tiniest sounds and pauses. He quickly surveyed the
cabin and found the six-foot pole lying against a life preserver.
She knew he was desperate, that her situation was a nightmare
beyond anything he had ever encountered. She didn't want to
make it worse.
So as the dreadful spider legs closed on her, she didn't even
try to scream or struggle. Probably she wouldn't have been able
to anyway. She played dead, knowing it was her only chance. It
wasn't far from the reality. She let the legs haul her up and away
in silence. She remained attuned to Garth, not because she had
any further illusion that he could save her, but because his image
was her best and fondest link to sanity.
He grabbed the pole and ran back toward the deck. He burst
through the cabin door, his face the color of oatmeal. She knew,
without seeing. He stood there on deck, trembling with fear.
But Kalinda was gone. There was no movement. He looked in
all directions, calling out, "Kalinda!" He looked over the rail; the
surface of the tomb-deep ocean was opaque, impenetrable.
Garth reached out with his right hand toward the spot where
Kalinda last stood. "Kalinda." He needed to hold her, and she
wished she could oblige. "Kalinda?"The mahogany trim on the
boat was splashed with blood, and the fabric of some of the sails
was sodden and crimson. The desire to find her was so intense
that his body began to shake. His legs became rubbery. She
knew.
Reality shifted for a few seconds, so there was not even the
whisper of a sound. Then the world came tumbling back into
focus. There was the muted crack of icicles from the nearby
glacier. Swallowing hard, Garth ran back to the cockpit, pulled
the door shut, grabbed hold of a microphone attached to the
radio and shouted, "Newfoundland radio-this is the schooner
Phantom! We have no engine. Our masts are destroyed. We need
help . . ."
Garth stopped suddenly, too full of sorrow and shock to 
continue. He heard the radio squawk a bunch of meaningless noise.
After a few minutes he went back on deck, gazed into the sea,
and called again: "Kalinda?"
Don't look behind the cabin, she willed him.
He heard a sound, but did not see what made it. Something
flicked forward and landed on the nape of his neck. Everything
went dark as he fell into the cabin below.
The last thing he heard came from above. It was the endless
cries of seagulls. He was trapped on a ship in a prison of ice
and sea.
But perhaps he would survive.The spider hadn't actually killed
him. It might forget him by the time it was through with her.
Kalinda, suspended in the absentminded grip of the spider
legs, finally let her consciousness ebb. Her one remaining regret,
 oddly, was that she knew she would never get to tell him the
content of his dream.

Part 2
Phantom Hunting
The sea sheltered ample dragons to fuel the
nightmares of the entire human race.
- PETER BENCHLEY, Beast

CHAPTER 6
Head

ELMO SAMULES, ONE of the fisheries officers for Trinity Bay,
always told visitors that the Island of Newfoundland was a rough
coast to make a living on. Recently, however, offshore oil had
begun to offer a promise of employment for thousands. Elmo
had seen many changes to the area around Bonavista Bay since
his boyhood. When he was only three years old, his parents emigrated
 from Milan to Canada after his father joined an unsuccessful
 fishing business. After that, the elder Elmo prospered in
Bonavista Bay as a shingle manufacturer and later in the lumber
business. The younger Elmo's formal schooling was limited to a
year, followed by five years of instruction by his mother. He was
an entrepreneur at age 17, leading fishing and whale watch boats
in Bonavista Bay.
Elmo always loved the sea and had an early and avid interest
in fish and other sea life. His interest and exploration of the
nearby oceans was helped by his minimal requirement for sleep.
Since his teenage days, he acquired the habit of going for long
periods of time with little sleep, sometimes requiring a few hours
each night to be fully refreshed. Elmo was not unlearned in science;
 his prodigious reading had carried him through numerous
scientific and popular articles on the sea.
Today Elmo was taking Nathan Smallwood, curator of fishes
from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, on a tour
of the eastern coast in a fiberglass patrol boat that hopped between
 wave crests like a flying fish. Smallwood was determining
the extent to which oil companies' submersible catamaran
drilling rigs and the huge towers of Petro-Canada drill ships
were damaging the local food chain. He was also here to enjoy
the beauty of Newfoundland's coasts and rivers.
Physically the two men were very different. Elmo was a large
man with muscular arms wedged into a black T-shirt. He could
throw a football like a cannon shot, despite an unusual configuration
 for his fingers. Behind the athletic facade was an encyclopedic
 mind, a dynamic force. Smallwood, on the other hand,
was adjutant in appearance, tall, thin, quiet, swarthy. His light
brown walrus mustache complemented his gray-brown hair. He
wore stonewashed cotton twill trousers and a tan cotton-canvas
workshirt.
They flew past trap skiffs, the traditional 25-foot Newfoundland
 inshore boats. Elmo waved to a group of young fishermen
who hand-hauled gill nets from Trinity Bay. Orange-brown crabs
clung tenaciously to the wet nets as they were pulled from the
water.
"Let's go see some icebergs," Smallwood shouted to Elmo.
"Sure."
They headed out to sea. Elmo pointed upward. Above was a
flock of raucous northern gannets, goose-sized birds that were
themselves fantastic fishers. Occasionally a gannet plunged into
the sea after prey.
Elmo turned off the engine. "You might think that Newfoundland
 seems a bit primeval, but it has a rich history," he
said. They were now in the area of the iceberg floes. "Maritime
Archaic Indians arrived 5,000 years ago to hunt seals and walruses.
 In 1610, the first Europeans settled on the Avalon Peninsula.
 Later Britain and France disputed the sovereignty of
Newfoundland. I think that was in the 1700s, but today 95 percent
 of Newfoundland's 582,000 people trace their ancestry to
Britain."
They watched the icebergs gleam intensely blue. "You really
can't appreciate the beauty of the ice and snow until you see this
for yourself," Smallwood said in pleased surprise.
They heard roaring and booming from some of the snowy
mountains that lined the coast, punctuated by the explosive
sounds that the larger icebergs made. Baffin Bay and Greenland
 were the factories that produced the icebergs of the North
Atlantic. Ice sliding down the valleys constantly shoved the preceding
 ice masses out into the paleo-crystalline seas.
"It's been estimated that some of the ice may be over two
hundred thousand years old, having accumulated until it is two
miles deep," Elmo said. "The Labrador Current carries them
down past Newfoundland where they encounter water and
winds which blow them toward England. The life journey of a
Greenland iceberg is about two thousand miles and lasts two
years."
"Now I've seen some of Newfoundland's coast, which is fantastic,"
 Smallwood said. "But I've had little time to explore the
mainland. What's the interior of the Island of Newfoundland
like?"
"Well, with the settlements clustered on the coasts, our inland
areas are pretty much wilderness solitudes. Lots of nice forests.
Caribou often cross our highways."
They neared Bonavista Bay and had a close encounter with
two humpback whales which splashed their small craft with
water as they slapped the sea with their tails. They were curious
creatures and protected by Canadian law.
"That happens often," said Elmo. "They seem to take a perverse
 pleasure in getting us wet."
"Did you see that big scratch near its tail?"
"No, missed it."
"I wonder what could have caused it?"
"Ship propeller?"
"The cut looked too straight and narrow to have been made
by a propeller."
Elmo resolved to watch more closely for tails hereafter, be-
cause his guest was right: an unusual scratch on a whale could
signify something going on in the deep water, and it was his
business to know about it. It was probably nothing, but he preferred
 to be sure. If, for example, some pleasure craft operator
was experimenting with a power harpoon, something would have
to be done.
They continued to travel among towering iceberg mountains
of white glory. "You know, things live on those icebergs," Elmo
said. "Inch-long ice worms-Mesemchytraeus solofiugus-feed on
algae and pollen in the tiny air pockets in the ice. The worms
were once thought to be mythical."
"Didn't know you were such a fine biologist, Elmo." Smallwood
 was obviously impressed with the big man's zoological
knowledge.
"We fisheries officers study a lot," Elmo said, smiling. Both
men seemed to be thoroughly enjoying their time together.
They admired a reddish iceberg tinted crimson by a summerblooming
 algae. Suddenly something floating nearby caught
their attention.
"Look over there," Smallwood said. "It's a boat. A schooner.
Looks damaged."
"Let's take a look." As they got closer they could make out the
schooner's name, Phantom.
"What kind of name is that?" Smallwood asked.
"It does seem a bit eerie. You know what the most common
boat name is?"
"Tell me."
"Serenity."
There were scratches all over the vessel. Some were just an
inch long, others a foot or two in length. When they were alongside
 the schooner, Elmo put down an anchor, threw a rope, and
jumped onto the other boat. "Anyone here?" he called.
There was no answer. "Surely not a derelict vessel?" Nathan
called, smiling. "I thought those existed mainly in ghost stories."
"They do," Elmo agreed somewhat tersely. His eyes tracked
grooves in the deck that led to the hatch. A wave of grayness
passed over him, a kind of dark premonition. "I see a lot more
scratch marks here," he yelled to Smallwood. Then he stooped
to pick up a camera which rested on the wooden deck. Perhaps
it held some clues as to the former occupants of the schooner.
For a few minutes there were no sounds from the schooner.
Just silence. The more Elmo studied this, the less he liked it.
"Anything the matter?" Smallwood called from the patrol
boat.
"Something's wrong here. Dead wrong."
"Don't keep me in suspense, Elmo. What do you see?"
But Elmo was not eager to tell what he saw. Not immediately.
This was real mischief.
There was blood on the deck. The railing was torn off in
places. There were signs of struggles. Heroic ones. A broken
mast. A torn off engine. More blood. Something resembling an
esophagus.
And there was a human head. A head with carotid arteries still
dripping. The head of a woman. A head evidently torn from its
missing body with incredible strength.

CHAPTER 7
Environment

MARTHA SAMULES LOOKED up as the door to Martha's Fish
Store opened to admit a solid man. She was in the back, but
could see the door without being readily seen, because of the
shadow. This was no coincidence; she preferred to have better
knowledge of her customers than they had of her, especially
when they were strangers. This could make a difference, when
trouble threatened.
This man was no stranger; she recognized him. Oh, no!
Martha dreaded the coming encounter, for the man was her
brother Elmo. They were so similar yet so different. All they ever
did was quarrel, yet they couldn't let go of each other. She would
have faded to the back room, leaving the store to her hireling
Lisa. But Lisa wasn't due to report for another twenty minutes.
Martha was stuck for it.
She stood, approaching him. She was determined to keep
things positive, this one time, but knew that she would fail as she
always did. She forced a smile. "What can I do for you, Elmo?"
"There's been some trouble," he said gruffly. He walked
around the store, gazing at the fish tanks, as if he were a customer.
 By that token she knew that he was not any more comfortable
 with this meeting than she was. But that gave her scant
comfort, because he was not a shy or evasive man. Something
was really bothering him, and it was bound to bother her in a
moment. "I have a meeting coming up. But that's not why I'm
here. Mother's in trouble again. She may or may not make it.
Will you come?"
It was just as bad as she had feared. She knew she had no reason
 for guilt, yet he made her feel it. "You know I won't, Elmo."
"I know how you feel, Martha. But-"
"Oh, do you!" She stifled the rest, clinging to her resolve.
"But she is your mother, and she is a human being. She never
meant to hurt you, or knew that she was doing it. She may have
allowed you to be hurt, but she was blameless in intention. I
know it would please her just to see you, even if you don't say a
word." But his eyes remained on the fish, not on her. "Can't
you raise enough compassion to let her imagine, before she dies,
that-"
"Compassion!" she snapped. She tried to hang on, but knew
that she was losing control. She didn't want to make this scene.
So she performed an evasive maneuver. "Do you know how many
species are killed each year by humans?" Martha asked him.
The big man looked away from a tank of neon tetras and back
at Martha. "No," he said, with a slightly quizzical expression on
his face. She knew he was momentarily confused by her tack, not
certain what she was up to, and no more eager for a confrontation
 than she was.
She started to lecture him. "Although it's probably impossible
 to know how many are killed with any accuracy, because no
one knows how many species inhabit the Earth, it is clear that
each year two percent of the world's rain forests are destroyed,
and at this rate they will be gone in 50 years." Martha began to
ramble a bit, unconcerned with the fact that her brother listened
politely but neither cared nor fully understood what she was trying
 to say.
Since adolescence Martha had had little regard for ordinary
folk, but much regard for other creatures of the planet. She saw
humans overrunning the world, blithely extirpating thousands of
other species, promising to render just about every other crea-
ture extinct in the next fifty years before her fellow humans finally
 extinguished themselves in a final orgy of pollutive destruction.
"Oh, the environment," Elmo said, recognizing the theme.
"That's not-"
"Humans are destroying the planet," she yelled at him, as if he
were personally responsible. "They pollute. They overpopulate
their land."
"Look, Martha, we've long since agreed to disagree on this.
Oky, so you feel for the animals. So do I. Who doesn't? But I believe
 in the wise use of the resources of the world-"
"Wise use! That's an obscenity! That's the buzzword for unfettered
 exploitation. It's the obliteration of every species except
our own."
He shook his head. "There may be some that deserve to be
obliterated, such as the malaria carrying mosquito or the parasitic
 blowfly. However-"
"Deserve it?" she demanded. "What can you be thinking of?
Nothing deserves extinction!"
But Elmo's mouth tightened. She knew he thought she was a
nut on this subject. "Something does." He said no more.
That aggravated her further. "Animal species are disappearing
 due to habitat destruction, pollution, and the introduction of
exotic species into natural environments where they don't belong.
 And you think that's all right? Elmo, do you know what an
exotic species is?"
"Of course. But I don't care to-"
"Didn't think so. Know how many species could be extinct in
the next fifty years?" Elmo started to move away, reminding her
of a rabbit with part of its nervous system removed, despite his
bulk. Yet he wasn't quite ready to leave. He had never been a
quitter; she could say that much for him. He wandered down
the rows of tanks, as if searching for a few small fish for his own
fish collection. She knew he was actually searching for some way
to convince her to come to see their mother. She had to head
that off.
"We just got a shipment of beautiful discus fish. Could I interest
 you in a few?"
"No thank you," he replied, troubled. "Martha-"
"Did you know that about twenty percent of the world's freshwater
 fish species are in dangerous decline?" Elmo looked back
and listened. His eyes grew wide in frustration. She knew she
was treating him like an idiot, considering that he was a local
fishery officer who probably had such statistics memorized as a
matter of business. But she couldn't stop.
Elmo looked as if he were about to bring up the matter of
their mother again.
"That's why I buy my fish only from fish farms so that the natural
 lakes are not interfered with," Martha said, more forcefully
than the subject warranted.
"Someone's coming," he said, relieved.
Martha glanced at the door. "That's only Lisa. She works
for me."
Evidently giving up his mission here as a bad job, Elmo
moved for the door, passing Lisa, who gave him a quick smile.
Lisa thought he was a customer, and it was part of her job description
 to smile winningly at customers. Sometimes it made a
difference in a sale, for she was a pretty girl. Of course the effort
was wasted in this instance, but Martha wouldn't tell her that;
she was glad he was going.
Yet her emotions were mixed as she heard the door close after
him. She always fought with Elmo, and he fought with her. But
they were two of a kind, for all that, and he was perhaps the one
human being she cared for. Naturally she wouldn't tell him that.
If only he weren't such a straightlaced conventional man. Wise
use, indeed! Elmo had a fine brain, but it remained firmly in
human-chauvinist channels. If only he had seen and learned
what she had.
For Martha had observed, firsthand, the extinction of many
species of freshwater fish in Africa and Asia, the decline in bird
populations in the United States, and the rapid disappearance
of the Brazilian rain forests by cutting and burning. She had

watched the Brazilian fires spew out millions of tons of carbon
and carbon monoxide into the air. She had clenched her fists
when she had seen the great plumes traveling eastward across
the Atlantic. The forests were being destroyed at the rate of a
football field every second, or the size of Florida every year.
Those weren't mere trees; they were a vital component of the
world's system of atmospheric restoration. The rainfall pattern
was changing, bringing more deserts, and the globe was warming.
 When it reached a certain unknown trigger point there could
be a drastic change in climate, causing agricultural havoc on
land and turmoil in the seas. It had happened before, from natural
 causes; this time it would be unnatural. The extinction of the
dinosaurs had been an extreme example, though not the most
extreme.
Her most recent trip to Cebu in the Philippines had pushed
Martha over the edge. When the forest was completely logged,
she found that nine out of ten bird species unique to the island
were made extinct. She considered incidents like this as miniature
 holocausts. Like a hemorrhaging of the earth. Harvard
zoologist Edward O. Wilson, her mentor and hero, estimated
that the number of rain forest species doomed each year was
27,000. Each day it was 77, and each hour 3. Human actions
had increased extinction between one thousand and ten thousand
 times over its normal background level in the rain forest.
Martha was continually depressed by the fact that the richest
nations presided over the smallest and least interesting biotas,
while poorest nations with exploding populations and little scientific
 knowledge had the largest number of animal species and
incredibly intricate, vast ecosystems. If only she could make
Elmo see, recruit him to her Earth-saving mission. He was just
about the only person she could trust, if he were on her side. But
he wasn't. He wasn't against her, exactly; he was just one of the
apathetic throng who chose to believe that there wasn't a looming
 crisis. The absolute fool!
Now, belatedly, it occurred to her that if she had been more
accommodating in the matter of their mother, her brother might
have been more receptive to her own interests. She had missed
a golden opportunity. Because she was just as pigheaded as he
was. What a pity.

CHAPTER      8
Nathan

ST. JOHN'S, THE capital of Newfoundland, was a few miles
south of Bonavista Bay. It was a port, a commercial and cultural
center, and it served a population of 170,000. After Elmo and
Nathan reported the grisly death on the schooner Phantom to the
St. John's police, Elmo had the film in the camera developed.
Nathan paced back and forth around a large oak table in the
corner of a mahogany-paneled police conference room. Elmo sat
on a chair, resting his large arms on the table in front of him, as
they both waited for a meeting with officials from St. John's police
 department. On the table, spread out in an array of seven
photos, were large color prints made from some of the negatives
 in the camera they had found on the destroyed schooner.
Nathan looked at one corner of the genteel room that contained
 a brown-lacquered cabinet with oriental panels. "Nice
furniture," he said. In another corner was an all-glass fish tank
containing about fifty Zanclus cornutus fish, better known as
Moorish Idols. On each of these marine fish were two black bars
crossing a white and yellow body. Their caudal fins were black.
The most prominent part of their anatomy was a long, trailing
dorsal fin that protruded many inches beyond the fishes' tails.
Nathan got up and wandered over to the tank.
"Beautiful fish," he said. "But isn't it kind of strange for a
police department to maintain such a beautiful tank?"
"Not for Newfoundland," Elmo said. "We're all fond offish
here."
"I always wanted to have a big tank like this at home but my
ex-wife always objected," said Nathan. "She said it was too much
trouble. Too much money. Said we didn't have enough room in
the house. Why is it that most spouses object to, or merely tolerate,
 the aquarium hobbies of their husbands?"
"I don't know. But I think you're right. Maybe that's why I
never married."
Nathan smiled faintly, sure that the man had more substantial
 reasons to have missed marriage, such as the length of his
fingers. But of course he wouldn't remark on that. "These Moorish
 Idol fish are pretty difficult to keep. They're reluctant feeders
 and never breed in an aquarium. Whoever is in charge of the
aquarium must be pretty good with fish."
"Why thank you," said a woman who had just walked into the
room.
Policewoman Natalie Sheppard and Police Chief Joseph
Falow shook hands with Elmo and Nathan. Natalie had anthracite
 eyes and hair as black as Manchester coal. She was currently
 out of uniform, wearing a watermelon-colored cotton
sweater dress. Nathan wished immediately that he had some
pretext to get to know her better. But of course he concealed
this, and turned to the other. Police Chief Falow had iron-brown
eyebrows, thick sandy hair, and a lanky frame without an ounce
of spare flesh. After shaking hands, they took seats around the
table. Falow's thick hand pinched a cigarette. His other hand
drummed the table top with a pen.
"OK, gentlemen," Falow said. "Why did you call me? What
news have you got for me?" He had a masculine force about
him, a great presence born of certainty.
"Take a look at these," Elmo said to Falow and Natalie. He
handed the prints to the officers.
"Look like icebergs," Natalie said as she held the photos in her
hands. Her voice was soft and eminently reasonable. Falow
looked at the photos, but withheld judgement. He sat with the
ramrod posture of a British brigadier.
"We got these from a camera we found on the Phantom,"
Nathan said. "Take a look at the dark area at the lower left." He
rose from the table and pointed at the photos.
"You shouldn't have taken the camera from the boat," Falow
said with irritation. He then looked at the photos. "Looks like a
crab or a spider." Falow spoke in a flat, inflectionless voice as he
carefully examined an iceberg photo. "What's this have to do
with the deaths on the schooner?"
Nathan said just one word: "Pycnogonid." He sat with his
sneakers angled on the floor like frog's legs. There was a brooding
 quality about his voice.
"What's that?" asked Natalie.
"Pycnogonid," he repeated. Now there was a certain thrill of
alarm in his voice. "PICK-no-GO-nid. It's a spiderlike marine
animal. Pycnogonids occur in all oceans, especially the arctic.
They usually dwell on the bottom."
"How big is it?" Falow asked.
"We couldn't tell just from looking at the photos," Nathan
said. "So we went back out to sea to take a look at the berg firsthand
 to estimate the scale of the features in the photo. This sea
spider is big."
Natalie seemed to be listening with rapt attention. Even the
air seemed to be holding its breath. Falow stripped off his jacket,
and the brown leather straps of his shoulder holster stood out
like large suspenders on the starched white of his shirt. They
were all beginning to appreciate the magnitude of the problem.
"Today there are more than six hundred different species,
and we have fossils of these creatures which demonstrate they
also lived during the time of the dinosaurs." Nathan took a drink
of water and continued. "They usually range in size from four
millimeters in such forms as the littoral Tanystylum to about
sixty centimeters in deep-sea species of Colossendeis. Little is
known about the deep-sea species, but larger sizes have been
hypothesized. . . ." His voice trailed away ominously.
"Don't keep us in suspense, Doctor. How big?" Falow spoke
in a powerful editorial voice. He stroked his cheek with great tender
 fingers. Nathan didn't speak, trying to gather his words.
"Get to the point," Falow said with the temperament of an
underfed grizzly.
Well, he had asked for it. "This one was as big as an adult elephant,"
 Nathan said. "It killed the people on the schooner. Tore
them to shreds. We also think it was responsible for the death of
an Inuit family a week ago several hundred miles north in Nain
on the subarctic Labrador coast." Nathan went on, blithely ignoring
 the sudden silence in the room. "We think it will kill
again, although there's a slim chance it will leave the coast and
go out to the deep sea and leave humans alone."
"Sounds like a bunch of crap," Falow said. His cheek muscles
stood out as he clenched his jaw. "Is this guy some kind of nut?"
Falow turned to Natalie expecting her to say "yes," even though
she knew as little about Elmo and Nathan as Falow did.
"We're not nuts," Elmo said. "Look at the photos yourself."
"Those photos are so fuzzy you could see anything you
wanted in them."
"Then look at this," Nathan said. He withdrew a six-inch
spine from his pocket and held it out to Falow, who did not take
it. "We found this on the boat. I know it's from a pycnogonid."
"Hey, how dare you remove more evidence from the scene of
a crime?" Falow got to his feet.
"What do you suggest?" asked Natalie. "Can we capture or
kill it?" She turned to Falow, who was calming himself. "Whatever
 we do, we don't want to alarm the public, the tourists, the
fishermen."
"You had better alarm someone," Nathan said. "It's fast,
strong. It has a voracious appetite, and it's smart. It would probably
 be killed if someone fired enough gunshots at its head and
brain. The hard part is to catch the creature in the act before it
retreats back into the safety of the sea."
"What do you mean probably be killed?" Falow demanded.
"The nervous system of a pycnogonid is composed of a supraesophageal
 brain or ganglion and a chain of six ventral ganglia,"
Nathan said.
"In plain English, Doctor," Falow said with a suspicious, sideways
 squint.
"It has more than one brain," Elmo said, a cold hard-pinched
expression on his face. "Destroy one brain and the others may
take control of its body."
There was a momentary silence. They were beginning to understand
 the nature of the problem.
"How does it attack?" Natalie asked.
"If we can extrapolate from what we know through observations
 of smaller specimens, the pycnogonid will grab its victim
with its front legs and claws and bring the victim toward its
mouth," Nathan said. "Its triangular-shaped mouth is at the end
of a long sucking appendage, a proboscis. It sucks out the body
fluids of its victims. It drains them alive. Like a spider."
"The question now is," Natalie said, "how should we respond?"

"How about offering a reward for its capture?" Nathan suggested.

Falow stood up and slapped his fist into his other hand with
a thud. "That's the worst idea I can think of. It would cause a
panic. It would turn into a media event. I can just see the posters
now: $1000 Reward For Killer Sea Spider!" Falow paced back
and forth for a few seconds. "Looks like we should set some
traps and wait to see if it attacks again. Let's just hope the media
don't get wind of this. We don't want panic in the streets."
Nathan nodded. He didn't much like the police chief, but the
man was right. Panic would accomplish nothing worthwhile. So
it was best to go along with Falow's dictate. But Nathan hoped
that his future contacts with the police would be limited to Natalie
 Sheppard. She seemed reasonable as well as being attractive.

CHAPTER      9
Hospital

Now, ON HIS way to the hospital, Elmo had time to ponder
personal matters. He was sorry his sister still refused to make up
with their mother, but he really couldn't blame her. He just felt
obliged to keep trying, lest Mrs. Samules die without a rapprochement
 that he might have arranged. If she lived through
this siege, he would try again next time. Martha was not a bad
woman, she was just isolated from her own kind, and the most
likely wedge to begin the ending of that isolation was their
mother. A hopeless cause, probably, but still worth pursuing.
He had been tempted to tell Martha about the gruesome discovery
 on the sea, but something had held him back. Of course
the news wasn't supposed to be given out yet, but Martha could
keep a secret as well as anyone. Her input could have been valuable,
 because of her extensive knowledge of the creatures of the
sea. But maybe he hadn't wanted to mix that in with the subject
of their mother, lest the gruesomeness somehow be transferred.
So he had tried to stay on the one matter. He had delayed his departure
 from the store, trying to find some avenue, but none had
offered. Then he had encountered Lisa, only in passing, andShe
 was beautiful, even ethereal, with a musical voice. Her
eyes were somewhere between hazel and dark aquamarine, like
the sea on a rainy day, and strangely soothing. She had reminded
him of a lost college love-who had never known he existed, because
 he had known better than ever to approach her. He had
learned early-very early-about the effect his appearance had
on others. It had been years since he had so far forgotten himself
 to smile openly at any other person, and he normally kept his
hands to himself, their fingers curled into loose fists. He had
learned to get along.
Indeed, he had gotten along well, in every respect but socially.
Others appreciated his memory and abilities. But womenhowever
 polite they were, however they masked it, they remained
absolutely off-limits, emotionally. So it would be completely
foolish of him to suppose that a creature like Lisa would ever see
him as other than repulsive.
Yet he could dream. He had known of Lisa before, and had
seen her on occasion in the shadows of the store. But this time
it had been different. Her sudden lovely smile had caught him
offguard, and struck through to his fancy. Cupid's dart, finding
the momentary crevice in his emotional armor. He would have
guarded against it, as he routinely did, had he not been distracted
 by his problem with his sister. Now he had been
wounded in the heart. He would survive it, but it was too bad it
had happened right now, when he couldn't afford to be distracted.
 But that was a full circle; his distraction had allowed the
wound.
But perhaps there was a positive aspect to this situation. He
was about to endure a negative experience. His idle fascination
with a girl whom he had met, literally, in passing, might help take
the edge off what was to come.
For after his meeting with officers Sheppard and Falow, Elmo
was visiting his 85-year-old mother in the local hospital at Petit
Forte, a few miles west of St. John's. He hated hospitals. He'd
spent too much time in them as a child while doctors struggled
to cope with his ulcerative colitus. Surgery had cured him, but
even after all these years hospitals continued to make him feel
like a nervous child.
Elmo's mother suffered from polycythemia vera, a disease in
which the bone marrow mysteriously began producing large
numbers of red blood cells. As a result, her blood was unusually
viscous. Elmo had personally hand-delivered requisitions to get
the best blood specialist in the hospital to consult on her care.
"There's not much we can do," the doctor on call told Elmo.
They stood in the white corridor outside Mrs. Samules's room.
"When the red cell count skyrockets, we insert a needle into a
vein and simply drain blood into a bottle on the floor. This helps
a little."
Of course she was old, he reminded himself. Everybody had
to die sometime, and old age was the best way to go. But he was
discovering that it wasn't any more pleasant this way than when
it happened to a younger acquaintance. He owed so much to
her, and he didn't want her to go.
Elmo went inside the room. "How you doing, Mom?" he
asked. He hid a thick swallow in his throat and turned away
from all the nearby IV bottles. On the wall were some framed
posters of tropical fish amidst lush freshwater vegetation: tiger
barbs, cardinal tetras, and firemouth cichlids swimming among
an almost comical over-abundance of duckweed, Java ferns, and
giant Indian water stars. Evidently the hospital administration
thought these natural scenes would have a calming effect on patients.
 On each of the posters were the word's "Martha's Tropical
 Fish Store." If only Martha could have been here to see this!
But of course she probably knew all about it. It wasn't that Mrs.
Samules was trying to surround herself with evidences of her
alienated daughter, but that the hospital had this ready source
for anything relating to fish.
Martha's store-where he had met Lisa. A girl he knew almost
 nothing about. Except for her brilliant smile.
"Could be better. There's a pain in my left side," his mother
replied. It took Elmo a moment to reorient; in the time she had
taken to answer, he had suffered a lapse of proper attention. He
resolved to correct that immediately.
Mrs. Samules was an unstylish, soft little woman. She leaned
forward, grasping her legs just above the knees. As they talked for
the next half hour, the pain got worse and she said that she felt
she was going to pass out. Elmo called for the doctor.
"Mrs. Samules," the doctor called, and shook her slightly.
"It's Dr. Carter; remember me?"
Mrs. Samules's eyes lifted just a little and she spoke in a whisper.
 "I feel lousy."
As Dr. Carter lifted her hospital gown, Elmo saw that something
 inside her was bulging, visibly stretching the skin of the
upper abdomen.
"Am I going to die?" Mrs. Samules asked with apprehension
and anxiety.
"You'll be just fine, but we have to remove your spleen." As
the doctor left, Elmo followed him into the corridor and pulled
him aside.
"What are her chances?" he asked.
"Unfortunately her chances of dying on the operating table
are 70 percent."
"And if we choose not to operate?"
"Then she will be dead in a day." The doctor brought out a
medical pamphlet on the spleen by the renowned Henry Draper,
M.D. The book was illustrated with impressive daguerreotype
microphotographs showing various diseases of the spleen. As
Dr. Carter explained Mrs. Samules's condition to her son, most
of the words simply went in one ear and out the other. The moment
 was filled with so much grayness and unrest. First the horror
 on the sea, then Lisa, and now the likely death of his mother.
Elmo could not concentrate, so just shook his head as the doctor
 spoke.
Then he was alone in the hospital, though others were constantly
 going back and forth. He wished Martha had come, not
merely for their mother, but for himself. His sister was one tough
woman, but she would understand the ache of this awful business.
 As it was, unbidden mental images of his mother's wizened
face alternated with those of Lisa's lovely one, and of the decapitated
 woman. Individually, each was disturbing; overlapping
like this, they were horrible. It was as if old age illness could
suddenly convert to lustrous beauty or horrible death. But his
imagination refused to let the pictures go.
He had given his permission for the surgery, of course. But
had he merely hastened his mother's demise? What choice had
he had? Martha could have helped ease the burden of decision,
had she attended. Yet suppose the two of them had differed on
this, too?
Within 45 minutes Mrs. Samules was in the operating room.
The doctors removed her spleen. The surgery went well, but in
the recovery room she began to bleed. For the next few hours the
doctors tried to stem the bleeding, but to no avail. She was slipping
 into a coma.
As Elmo paced back and forth in the waiting room, his attention
 turned to a red TV playing near the back of the room. A
group of newspeople were pouring out of a dark van with
WNBT CHANNEL 9 ACTION NEWS written on its side. The
object of their interest was a group of witnesses standing on a
stone jetty by the pounding surf. Just hours before, a group of
teenagers had disappeared from the jetty at Terra Nova National
Park. The group of witnesses reported supposedly seeing a huge
spider.
"How can you be sure it was a spider?" a red-haired newswoman
 asked one of the witnesses. "Did you actually see it?"
"Yes I saw it. Actually I just saw a few of its legs. Looked like
a spider or a crab. Big as an elephant!"
Local fisherman were organizing search parties for the spider.
One tall man in a zip jacket with military insignias shouted into
the TV camera.
"We're going to get it." He held up a rifle and waved it around
like an oversized phallus. As Elmo watched the TV, he noticed an
old lady in the hospital's waiting room tracked the rifle back and
forth, her eyes bouncing like a metronome in a strange mixture
of excitement and fear. The TV camera then panned to another
member of the search party, a teenage boy in a long robe with a
fractal pattern on it. He held a crystal in his hand. He gazed at
it for a second, then held it up to the TV camera, and mumbled
something about the end of the world and God's divine wrath.
The news story ended, and a commercial with a comely actress
selling shampoo blasted onto the screen. It made an odd contrast
 with the boy's shtick about divine wrath.
A monstrous spider? He would have laughed it off as tabloid
fakery, had he not seen that woman's head. There had to be a
connection.
Elmo shifted uneasily, then ran to the phone and called the
police station and Nathan Smallwood. He left the hospital minutes
 later, thanks largely to his natural dislike of hospitals, disinfectants,
 corridors, and laboratories. Now at least he had a
pretext.

CHAPTER      10
Call

THE PHONE RANG. Nathan picked it up. "Yes?"
"Dr. Smallwood." The voice was pleasantly familiar. "This is
Officer Sheppard."
The lady policeman he had met at the meeting. "in, what
can I do for you?" He pictured her holding the phone handset
close to her windblown, sunny face. She might be wearing a cotton
 twill shirtdress in burnished gold, and she could have on just
enough lipstick to show that her mouth was perfect. His image
of her was wickedly familiar, but there were no penalties for hidden
 thoughts.
"I was wondering if you'd like to go for a walk downtown and
discuss this sea spider problem?"
"Police business?" As if it could be anything else, in real life.
"No, personal. The whole spider incident is giving me the
creeps. I also love smart men with mustaches." In his fancy she
exuded a refreshingly ingenious warmth.
"Sounds good." Nathan chuckled. It seemed a long, long time
since a woman called him on the phone and showed interest. Of
course it was his knowledge of sea life she was really interested
in, nothing else. Still . . .
Nathan had been born with a harelip, and although it had
been surgically corrected, he thought the mustache enhanced his
looks. Before Natalie called, Nathan was spending his Saturday
in his cozy motel room by the sea trying to watch the New York
Giants on TV as he read the local newspaper. As he spoke on the
phone, he put down Newfoundland's weekly newspaper, The
Dispatch, where there was a small article on mysterious deaths
near the coast. The article was surrounded by a fuzzy border
and below the printed matter was a drawing of a giant tarantula
attacking boats. Natalie said something. Nathan listened as he
fished breakfast cereal out of the box and rapidly munched the
flakes.
"Where shall we meet?" he asked.
"How about we go for a walk along Main Street by the coast.
Do you know where Martha's Fish Store is?"
"Yes. I'll be there." Nathan shut the football halftime show off
on his TV.
"OK; see you at 7:00?"
"Sounds good." As he hung up, he marveled at this development.
 People met all the time to discuss business, but Natalie
was perhaps the one he had most wanted to see again-and she
had called him. Who said miracles didn't happen?

CHAPTER      11
Research

THE WORDS "CANTERBURY Crossing" were carved in a decorative
 wooden sign that hung outside by the street, floodlit from
the front and backed by pine trees. Natalie Sheppard was reclining
 on the sofa in her attractive garden-apartment in the
Canterbury complex, holding the telephone with one hand and
eating a piece of raw broccoli with the other while she sat and
watched The People's Court on the TV. A 110-gallon freshwater
fish tank stood against a wall of the living room. The tank contained
 only a single species offish: the tiger barb. About seventy
of these two-inch-long fish swam in schools back and forth, forth
and back. With their red-brown bodies fading to silver on the
underside and their four distinctive black strips, they formed a
moving wall of color, a magic aura of living stripes and fins.
She hung up the phone. Had she just done something foolish?
She had met Nathan Smallwood only the one time, but rather
liked what she had seen, and she had the impression that the
feeling was mutual. His first glance at her-his pupils had dilated
 in seeming appreciation. Did she fit some physical image
he liked? No matter; she found that she liked being liked, for
whatever reason. So she had found a pretext to see him again,
hoping that she wouldn't strike him as forward. It was probably
an idle fancy that would soon fade, but why not play it out? Her
social life here on the island was not exactly rollicking.
Meanwhile, on the horror front, things were hardly dull. A
giant deadly spider ripping people apart? A creature with several
brains? She definitely needed to know more.
Natalie had heard of pycnogonids, but only vaguely, so she
canceled her chess class, slipped on a hip-hugging jacket in green
napa leather, left her condo, and went to the local library to find
out more. All around the library were trees of varied species,
ages, and colors. A sparse stand of autumn-stripped maples and
birches pushed their branches to the blue sky. To her left was a
grove of scarecrow trees, gnarled and black, with an occasional
leaf as an epitaph to warmer days of the summer. Ancient Indian
laurels flanked the canted parking lot and lent a note of grace to
the old building.
Some men with shovels were digging some of the soil in a
nearby field. As Natalie parked her car and walked along the
black slate stones to the library's entrance, she noticed the library
 was having its annual book fair. A local band was playing.
An elderly man wearing a gray jacket approached her.
"Would you like to enter a raffle for this homemade quilt?" the
man inquired as he pointed to a huge colorful quilt hanging on
a wooden frame. "Only costs a dollar to enter."
"Sure," Natalie said. She didn't mind supporting the local library.
 The man handed her a piece of paper which read:
BENEFIT: JOHN C. HART MEMORIAL LIBRARY
WIN A HANDMADE QUILT
DRAWING: NOVEMBER (WINNER NEED NOT BE PRESENT)
DONATION: $1.00 EACH OR 6 FOR 85.00
PAY AND MAIL TO: HART LIBRARY, 1130 MAIN STREET
TWILLINGATE, NEWFOUNDLAND
Oh. It wasn't precisely local. Twillingate was a generous two
hundred miles to the north by road. But their library needed
support too, and the raffle was valid regardless. She'd do it.
"What's the digging all about?" Natalie said to the man.
"Do you remember the story of the German scientist who
discovered the fossil tooth of a giant ape-was it at an Eskimo
pharmacy where fossils were ground up for traditional medicines?"
"Yes. But that was in 1935." Since then, scientists had sporadically
 looked for the remains of prehistoric, giant apes that
weighed 2,000 pounds and loomed 11 feet tall. Natalie thought
it was a pipe dream, but who could say for sure? She would have
said that a sea spider the size of an elephant was a pipe dream
too, before today.
"Well, guess what they found in that field by the library?"
"You're kidding?"
"Several jawbones and more than 2,000 teeth were found of
the species Gigantopithecus."
"Wow, any chance they'll find an entire skeleton?"
"Several Newfoundland scientists and a paleoanthropologist
from Yale are coming. They think that they'll find the remains of
Giganto in nearby caves used to hide military supplies from German
 bombers. I've heard that some of them think that Giganto
lived about three hundred thousand years ago. Ancient humans
may have killed them off by hunting them or competing with
them for scarce bamboo which the humans used for tools and
this ancient ape used for food."
"Fascinating." But she found it hard to accept for a new reason:
 the climate would have had to be a lot warmer here in those
days for bamboo to grow. That was possible, of course, but she
would have to see more solid evidence before believing it. Natalie
 looked at her watch. "Got to go."
The library was fairly crowded as a result of the book fair. Natalie
 reached for the black and white door and noticed a few
wasps hovering nearby. She stooped down to avoid them, entered
 the library, and approached a librarian who smiled back
at her.
"in, I'm looking for biology books," Natalie said. One of the
wasps had followed her inside and quickly headed for a 
window, which unfortunately was closed. She watched the wasp for
a few seconds.
"Anything in particular?"
"Invertebrates. Sea spiders."
The librarian raised one of her eyebrows, then smiled, and
said, "Come this way."
Natalie gazed out the library's rear windows, past the wasp
that continued to dive bomb the thick pane of glass. Outside the
window were motor yachts and sailboats bobbing up and down
in the water alongside the harbor docks. Most of their sails were
furled, their engines quiet. The library was one of her favorite
hangouts, with its hardwood floors, antique Persian carpets and
cream walls. It was like no library she had ever been in before,
and she was happy that a good chunk of the township's taxes
went to it. She didn't care if she didn't win that quilt raffle; it was
for an excellent cause.
She returned her attention to the pile of books and journals
at her table. Her hand moved to a nearby Tiffany lamp with its
hand-blown tulip shades, and moved it closer to her reading
area. She lost herself in the joy and frustration of spot research,
following up several false leads for every true one.
As Nathan Smallwood had indicated at their meeting, pycnogonids
 lived during the Jurassic Period, about a hundred fifty
million years ago. Natalie pictured monstrous sea spiders carrying
 on and cavorting with a tribe of brontosauruses, now called
apatosauruses. No, that wouldn't work; the thunder lizards had
turned out to be upland walkers, not water waders, so wouldn't
have encountered the sea spiders.
Deep water species of the sea spider could be huge although
tropical shallow water species could be as small as an ant. The
pycnogonid's digestive and reproductive system had many
branches that penetrated deeply into the creature's many legs.
Most species had eight legs but some with ten or more legs were
not uncommon in Antarctic regions.
The librarian came up from behind her. "I found something
else," she said to Natalie, and handed her Lockwood's Biology of
the Invertebrates and a computer printout.
Tap, tap, tap, went the wasp on the glass.
"Thanks."
The scariest part of the creature was its proboscis, or sucking
appendage, which was longer than the rest of the creature's
body. The mouth looked like a triangle at the end of the long
trunk of the proboscis. Natalie found very few pictures of the
adult creature, but she did find several diagrams of the baby larval
 forms which looked nothing like the adult.
Natalie heard some high-pitched voices and looked up. Some
nursery school children were leaving a room with an adult volunteer.
 They had just finished listening to the children's story
Ants Can't Dance.
"How did you like it,Terrie?" one mother asked.
A beautiful little girl wearing a sweater with a golden phoenix
on it replied, "Great. Can ants dance?"The girl shook her blond
pony-tail with excitement.
Natalie smiled and thought that maybe someday she would
get married and have a little Terrie running around her condo.
Someday. She tried to return to her reading. Unfortunately the
overhead bright fluorescent lights were just turned on and the
white Formica surfaces of her table were a little hard on her
eyes, like looking into an icy arctic lake shimmering under a
bright winter sun. The room was getting chillier-perhaps the librarian
 had reduced the heat because it was near closing time.
Tap. Tap. Tap. She really ought to get a cup and catch that
wasp and take it outside.
As she read, some of the gorgeous Chinese bowls and vases
that decorated the library shelves were being stored in locked
cabinets for the night by a member of the custodial staff. It was
almost time for her to go meet Nathan. She gazed down at her
book on the table, and tried to wrap up her reading.
In some species of pycnogonid the young larvae invaded the
interior of jellyfish where they lived parasitically until they
emerged as sea spiders. The larval stages of Nymphonella tapetis,
a Japanese species, lived parasitically inside the cavity of clams.
But these were small spiders; what about the big ones? Surely an
elephant-sized creature couldn't live in a clam, not even in larval
 stage.
Natalie continued to search for information on the larger
species in an effort to find some clues to help them in the present
 predicament. Unfortunately the life cycle of the huge deepsea
 species, especially members of the genus Colossendeis, were
unknown.
This lack of knowledge by scientists was not too surprising.
There was still much to learn about the marine life off the coast
of Newfoundland. The submerged ice structures, the chemical
and geological structure of the ocean floor, the extent and affect
of pollution . . . Unfortunately, recent dumping of heavy metals
and souvenir hunting had caused some depletion of fish and invertebrates
 off the Newfoundland coast. So not only was much
of the story unknown, it might become impossible for it ever to
be known, because of inadvertent extinctions.
The wasp at the window had ceased its relentless tapping on
the glass and slowly crawled along the base of the window as if
defeated. Its stinger undulated. Natalie was beginning to feel a
little like the wasp-nervous and tired.
As she finished her reading, Natalie, like most people, was
amazed to learn of the vast marine zoo that lived beneath the ice
in the Arctic. She had thought it would be a virtual desert. But
marine life was plentiful. Her books and magazines showed
photos of bright red shrimps filled with parasitic isopods, zebra
striped amphipods, bulbous anemones with foot-long tentacles,
sea fleas, football-shaped ctenophores, sea snails with iridescent
shells, tiny isopods resembling daddy long legs with long, fragile
 forelegs to walk on silty bottoms and paddle-shaped rear
legs to propel them through the water. Some of the most interesting
 species looked more like plants than animals: Violet
holothurians-sea cucumbers-thrust out branching tentacles
in search of animal prey.
She shook her head, bemused. There was just so much there,
but humans knew so little. It seemed that the northernmost continental
 shelf of Canada covered almost a million square miles,
but scientists had seen less than a few of those miles of this vast
maritime estate.
As closing time loomed, Natalie had found what she was looking
 for in the scientific journals. She photocopied five articles,
folded them, and stuck them in her purse. Then she fetched a
paper cup, went to the window, and used a sheet of paper to
catch the wasp in the cup. She carried it out with her, and freed
it outside. The wasp hesitated for a moment on the rim of the
cup as if considering how to thank her, then flew away. There
was her good deed for the day.
Cheered, she walked to the car.

CHAPTER      12
pilot

AT THE SAME time Natalie Sheppard was leaving the library,
June Holland was piloting a low-flying Hercules HC-130B
above a monstrous hook of ice which protruded from an iceberg
floating in the sea. In the distance she saw a vast herd of caribou
thunder past the shoreline. After a few minutes, she brought the
plane lower and cut two of the four engines. 700 feet... 600 ...
500 ... ever closer to the ceiling of the mammoth iceberg below.
Holland radioed that she was descending to 300 feet.
"OK, drop it," she shouted to her crewman.
On her signal, a young ensign hurled a soft-drink-can-sized jar
full of dye down on the ice. "Got it!" he screamed to Holland.
The jar hit silently. Looking back she saw a crimson stain
spreading down the canyons of the berg. To June Holland this
was just another routine operation by the United States Coast
Guard. They were marking the icebergs for rapid identification
in studies of their drifting patterns. The dye, a mixture of calcium
 chloride for penetration and rhodamine-B for the crimson
hue, spread a swath of color several yards in diameter across the
cliffs of the ice.
Reports of all the icebergs' positions were radioed to nearby
vessels at sea to help prevent collisions. Ice patrols like this dated
back to 1912. The United States and 16 other maritime nations
shared the cost of the ice patrol. The United Kingdom paid the
largest share, but the responsibility for carrying out the assignment
 rested with the U.S. Coast Guard alone.
"Let's get back," Holland said, "Our fuel is low." Her gazed
shifted to a small stereo system resting on the short-nap gray carpet
 of the cockpit's floor where there were stacks of Suzanne
Vega and Peter Gabriel CDs, just the right mix of background
music for a pilot flying over the sparkling ice landscapes. As she
gazed out of her cockpit window at the sea and ice, her eye was
caught by a motion on the windshield: a tiny brown spider
crawled along the bottom of the glass and began to spin a web.
The ensign offered her a cup of hot chocolate, and she gulped
down its warming contents. "Thanks," she said. "Do we have
anything to eat?"
"How about a hot dog?"
"OK, slip it into the microwave oven." The small brown spider
 stopped for a few seconds and then began to crawl all the
way to the top of the cockpit window. It raised its front legs as a
thin, shiny web strand poured from the spider's bulbous abdomen.
 Holland saw that the spider's legs had dozens of fine
hairs and that its multiple eyes never winked. It gave her the
creeps.
A minute later the ensign returned with a hot dog with the
works-relish, onions, mustard, ketchup, and chili. She wolfed
it down. The airplane meandered back and forth over the patrol
zone. It was now lighter by 4,000 gallons of fuel. The ensign
made a final tabulation of iceberg sightings for dispatch by radio
to the Coast Guard ships.
Holland was humming to the haunting tunes of Suzanne Vega
and thinking about her dinner plans. She hadn't seen any movement
 outside, but the jerk of the ensign's head and the look of
concern on his face was warning enough.
"What's wrong?" Holland said as she turned in her seat and
looked out the left window.
"I thought I saw something moving," the ensign said. His eyes
were small pools of light set in a field of dark flesh.
"Where?"
"On the iceberg."
"An animal?"
"Yes."
"How big?" She squinted through the smeared windshield.
"The size of a man."
Suddenly Holland looked down at the ocean, which was now
covered by a moving crust of ice. The salt-water ice reflected the
sunlight back in her eyes. Then out of the corner of her eyes she
caught a movement on an iceberg. An almost-naked bleeding
man was crawling on the iceberg. At least she thought he was
moving. It was too far away to be sure. At first it seemed only a
dream image without real substance. Something cold crawled up
her back.
"What in the world?" she said to herself. Her heart beat fast
as she threw herself back against her seat. The snowflake-caked
windshield wiper blades left streaks of moisture on the glass
through which she was trying to see.
She got out her field glasses and trained them on the ice
below. She gasped, took the microphone from its mounting, and
called to a nearby Coast Guard ship. She adjusted the focus of
her field glasses. Was this possible? She had to make an accurate
report.
Below on the ice lay a body which looked as if it were very stiff
with rigor mortis. She guessed that he'd been dead for at least a
day. The odd angle of his arm suggested he'd died a painful
death. She brought the plane lower, keeping her eye on the fuel
gauge of the plane. Moisture had accumulated on the plane's
window, which she wiped away with a gloved hand, and then she
looked again.
"Can't see," she whispered to herself as tendrils of ice formed
on the windows of the plane. She leaned forward and let a trickle
of de-icing fluid swish the frost away from the glass. She squinted
and took a last look at the unpleasant sight on the ice.
The naked man moved. From the palms of each of his hands
protruded a large bony spike.
June Holland swallowed deeply in a mixture of horror and a
little fear. She pressed her feet to the floor of the planes' cockpit
and gripped the steering lever as if she were trying to fuse her
flesh with the metal alloy, because she felt as if she would fall
out, straight down on the man if she did not will her body to stop
trembling. She felt as if she were being dragged down a long,
dark tunnel, and only now was beginning to see the horrible
things at the end.
Who could he be, and how could he have gotten there? What
had happened to him on the way? She doubted that the answers
would be pleasant.

CHAPTER      13
Date

NATHAN SMALLWOOD TOURED Newfoundland on a rented
sport-touring motorcycle. He loved the reduced nosedive and
lower center of gravity. The cycle's front end transmitted braking
 force straight back through its massive suspension arm into
a C-shaped frame near the engine. This made the bike exceptionally
 quiet and easy to stop, even on wet or snowy roads. As
he guided the vehicle in and out of the small winding streets
and coast roads, he listened to K-Newfoundland 92.1 FM from
Bonavista though headphones in his helmet. He smiled, singing
along with golden oldies like "California Dreaming" and "Time
of the Season." It reminded him of his days in a college rock
band, when he played organ for similar songs.
He arrived on Main Street at about 6:00 in the evening. Main
Street was not too hard to find, and he soon guided the cycle to
a small parking space. He was early, but that was fine. Because,
as it turned out, so was she.
Natalie Sheppard and Nathan met on Main Street in a town
with a yawning pace. A storm had passed by recently, and now
the sun was breaking through the clouds with a thousand beams
of golden light. The sky was amber and shimmering with a tangle
 of reflections like a painting by van Gogh.
"Hello, Miss Sheppard." She was wearing an orange twill
dress, just about the way he had imagined her.
"Natalie." She smiled. "Good to see you again." She glanced
at him with the hint of a question.
"Nathan," he said immediately.
The single traffic signal on Main Street splintered in liquid reflections
 beneath their feet. Martha Samules, the lady who ran
the tropical fish store, was standing out on the sidewalk with
hands on her large hips, looking at the couple with an expression
that seemed to be equally puzzled and admiring. Nathan was
aware that he and Natalie, both tall and slender, made an unusual
 pair. Martha's pale complexion and sharp features were
enlivened by large eyes, full of interest and intelligence as she
gazed at them.
"Seems like a nice town," he said. "Reminds me of that Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow poem:
"Often I think of the beautiful town
That is seated by the sea;
Often in thought go up and down
The pleasant streets of that dear old town."
"I know that one," Natalie said. "I think he wrote that in 1855
and called it 'My Lost Youth.' The town used to be like the
poem, although the economy has suffered a lot in recent years.
But there are still many beautiful parts of town."
They walked down the wide, cobblestone street lined on both
sides with a curious amalgam of restaurants, and tourist and antique
 shops. From somewhere in the distance came the sweet
sounds of the romantic melody "Before the Next Teardrop
Falls."
"Watch your step," Nathan pointed to a deep puddle. As if on
cue, brief winds started to churn the puddles between the cobblestones,
 so they appeared to be frothing like miniature oceans,
as if a subterranean volcano were melting the cobblestones from
underneath.
Nathan could hear drips of water coming through nearby aluminum
 downspouts. "The air feels so fresh here," he said. He
looked all around him, smiling. An occasional ancient evergreen
poked its tall branches from the backyards of some of the stores.
Large brown wooden mailboxes were conveniently nailed to the
side of each shop. Many of the shops had short flagstone walks
leading to their front doors.
As they walked, his thoughts turned to himself. This wasn't
narcissism, but his spot self appraisal: how would he seem to this
delightful woman? If she knew him better, would she be interested?
 He did have some assets, yet wasn't sure they were worth
mentioning. Such as his writing.
He had been amazingly prolific, over the years writing over a
hundred books and papers on his favorite subject: the invertebrates.
 His most famous papers described the shallow-water
pycnogonida from the Izu Peninsula of Japan. Invertebrates,
animals without backbones like worms and crabs and insects,
were everywhere. He always marveled over the fact that more
than 90 percent of the animal species on earth belonged to the
invertebrates.
But others had quickly been bored or even repelled when he
had gotten into this in the past, so maybe he had better let her
ask directly for what she wanted. She had said that she wanted
to know more about sea spiders, but her interest might be far
more limited than his.
So what about his personal history?
Nathan's boyhood had not been an easy one, although he
showed signs of genius at an early age. He was born in 1957 in
the Soviet Union near Smolensk. At the age of three, he was
brought to the United States by his parents and was naturalized
a few years later. He taught himself to read before he was six
years old, using the signs on his Brooklyn street. A couple of
years later, with a little help from his mother, he taught himself
to read Yiddish. When he was 8 he taught his younger sister to
read. Nathan was never content to stay with his peers, and he
skipped several grades, receiving a high-school diploma when he
was 16.
Nathan's interest in invertebrates could be traced to his discovery
 of science fiction on the magazine rack at his father's
store. All those wild images of huge octopi and killer squids from
Planet X! At first Nathan's father objected to his interest in this
fanciful subject matter, but when Nathan sold his first story at
the age of 18, his father was proud. In 1982 he graduated from
Harvard University with a Ph.D. in biology. And the next year he
accepted a position to teach invertebrate zoology from Yale University's
 School of Medicine.
No she wouldn't be interested in any of that! So he would
keep his mouth shut, unless he was sure she wanted information
on some specific thing. That way maybe he could avoid turning
her off before the hour was out.
"I understand you're interested in aquaria," Natalie said.
"Sure am." Keep it simple, keep it safe. "Want to get a big one
for my home."
"Let's take a look in Martha's Tropical Fish Store. It's back
where we started from." Natalie had a quiet air of authority and
yet a rare warmth. Nathan noticed how nicely she dressed-she
could have been a fashion model, he thought. He supressed his
urge to take her hand as they walked.
"Great idea."
The sign hanging on the door read OPEN. They entered the
store with its bubbling tanks and brightly colored fishes. A small
bell jingled over their heads as they closed the door behind them.
Soft light spilled in through curtains across the store front.
Nathan saw a large woman was bending over one of the aquaria
filled with suckermouth catfish. She looked up when the bell
jingled and smiled at Natalie and Nathan. Yes, that was Martha,
who had stood outside her store before.
The store was divided into four main sections: cold fresh
water, tropical fresh water, cold marine, and tropical marine.
They meandered down row upon row of tanks containing bleeding
 heart tetras and honey gouramis. Martha came up to them.
"May I help you?" she asked. A few of her teeth were missing
and the ones that were left looked rather brown in the dim light,
but Nathan found the smile entirely charming. On her blouse
was pinned a large blue button with red letters proclaiming:
"FISH ARE FUN."
"We're just browsing, thanks," Nathan said. "We-"
Martha raised her hand to silence him. "Let me show you the
latest in fish tanks. Ever hear of the super-thin tank craze?"
"Can't say that I have," Nathan replied.
"Follow me," Martha said. They came to the area of the store
which had the super-thin tanks.
The aquaria reminded Nathan of the ant farm he had as a
child. The colony of ants tunneled within the sand contained between
 two plates of plastic about a quarter inch apart from one
another. The super-thin fish tanks were similar. They consisted
of two plates of glass separated by a half-inch space for the water.
The narrow region of water in which the fish swam essentially
limited them to a two-dimensional world in which they could
not turn around. The tanks were hung on the wall like a picture.
Little bubbles of air were forced through the tank by a small air
pump powered by what Martha assured them was an exceptionally
 long-lasting zinc-air battery.
"Gaah," Nathan choked. "How can they live in there like
that?" He had seen many, many fish tanks during his career, but
this struck him as on the verge of barbaric. Fish needed some
freedom, just as people did. Many of these fish were congregating
 toward the right and left of the tanks because it was not so
easy to swim backward.
"I agree," said Martha. "I think that once I sell these tanks I
won't restock them. However, if you want to buy one of these
tanks remember to place about half of the fish facing right, the
others facing left. The swimming patterns look strange when all
the fish face in the same direction."
"I think I would fashion turning circles at either side," he
said, and was rewarded by Natalie's smile of agreement.
In one of the super-thin tanks were three-inch-long tin foil
barbs. Their shiny silver bodies reflected the store lights producing
 a living wall of little mirrors. Natalie sighed with compassion
 for the confined creatures.
"OK, even if you don't want these tanks, surely there must be
something for you?" Martha said. "A few discus fish?" Nathan
noticed that Martha's fingers were extremely fat yet not short.
He also noticed that all of the fingers were of the same length,
except for the ring finger which jutted out longer than the rest.
Just like Elmo's. "Are you looking at my hand?" she asked. Before
 Nathan could respond, Martha answered, "Don't worry, I
don't shake hands. I have a condition known as ambidactyl syndrome.
 Nothing fatal."
"Glad to hear that. I mean I'm glad to hear it's not fatal." Suddenly
 his curiosity about Elmo's hands had been satisfied, and
he had avoided the embarrassment of inquiring.
"I'm glad you're glad. Interested in buying a few new fighting
fish?" She smiled again and this time revealed inch-long teeth in
a scary grin. Her long teeth reminded Nathan of a story he had
read as a child in a book called In a Dark, Dark Room. The old
illustrated tale had scared him. He still remembered the opening
 lines: / was hurrying home in the dark when I saw a man walking
 toward me.... He grinned at me. His teeth were three inches long.
When I saw them, I ran. Nathan felt a shiver run through him
now as he gazed at her teeth, as long as a beaver's, but his outward
 countenance was cool and collected.
"Thanks again. We're just browsing. I'm thinking of starting
an aquarium at home, but unfortunately any fish I bought here
wouldn't survive the long trip back to Massachusetts."
"Massachusetts?" Martha's eyes seemed to grow to the size of
Ping-Pong balls. "What's your occupation, if you don't mind me
asking?"
"I teach at Harvard."
"A Harvard man? Oooh, policewoman, you picked a good
one this time." Martha's chuckles had a hyenalike quality-her
face now had all the charm of a sawfish. Nathan suspected that
she was considered by the ladies of St. John to be more than a
little eccentric, and she was proving this to be the case.
"It must be difficult to run a fish store with your hand condition,"
 Nathan said, clumsily trying to change the subject. He
tried to discipline his voice, to maintain complete control.
"Not at all. I'm quite agile." With the swiftness of a great buck
she plucked a hair from Nathan's head. "See?" Natalie and
Nathan blinked in astonished silence.
"Good to see the inside of your store, Martha," Natalie said,
evidently trying to end the conversation. She then grabbed
Nathan's hand and led him away down the aisle of aquaria.
"Interesting woman," Nathan smiled slightly, not sure what to
make of the situation.
"Very. I've seen her only passingly before, but I know about
her reputation. It's hard to believe she has a doctorate in molecular
 biophysics and biochemistry. She always had tropical fish
as a hobby, and after she got her Ph.D. she decided to open an
aquarium store rather than go into the competitive world of academic
 science."
"Can she make a good living with this store?"
"I think so. They say her mail order business is thriving."
"Come on. Let's look at what else she has in her store."
"What would be your 'dream' fish tank?" Natalie asked.
"Would you like to have a tank with a few large fish? Hundreds
of small fish?"
"My favorites are the elephantnose fish, with their long trunklike
 snouts. They're from Africa. I'd like to have a huge tribe of
a hundred or more in my dream tank. That would be quite an
impressive sight."
"Ah, I know those weird fish well. Ganathonemus petersi. You
have rather bizarre tastes. They come from the Niger and Congo
Rivers. Their snouts are adapted to grubbing in the bottom for
worms."
They wandered over to the salt-water section of the store.
Bubbles were forced through airstones to circulate the sea water.
In some of the tanks were little tiny men who walked around the
sand as if they were alive. "Here's a nice undulant triggerfish,"
Nathan said. The green body was covered with wavy orange
lines. Its pelvic fins were absent, being reduced to primitive
stumps. "Triggerfishes can lock their dorsal fins straight up to
avoid capture. They have strong jaws and will eat invertebrates.
At rest they point their heads down or lie in the sand."
He stopped, realizing that he was doing what he had resolved
not to: going off the deep end about his interests. He feared that
Natalie felt a bit confused as he rattled off the chain of facts,
showing off his knowledge about the fish. Something special
about the fish intrigued him, however.
I've encountered these fish before, was the first clear thought to
come through Nathan's mind. It was deja vu, he supposed, that
false feeling that this had all happened before in his past.
He turned and looked in the next tank and saw something
which was enough to give anyone the screaming meemies. His
whole body tightened as he felt a whisper of terror run through
him. In the tank were seven small pycnogonids resembling
daddy long legs spiders. They were feeding on a severed human
hand which rested on the bottom of the aquarium. One pale
finger still had a gold wedding ring on it.
"Natalie, take a look at this!" Nathan screamed, almost choking.
 She came closer and looked into the 15-gallon aquarium.
"My God. How could the fish store not have noticed this? Let
me get Martha." As she ran to Martha one of the pycnogonids
used its claws to rip a piece of flesh from the thumb.
"Hoped you liked my joke," Martha said as he arrived. Her
voice was light, trivial, like a rose bloom falling into silence without
 a sound, without any weight. Then she opened her mouth
wide and started laughing. Natalie turned and stared at her.
Martha's laughter stopped, as though Natalie had turned off a
valve in her chest.
"Joke?" said Nathan.
"The hand," said Martha. "It's fake. Made out of compressed
fish food. You should see the looks I get."
"Very funny," Natalie said.
"Where did you get the pycnogonids?" Nathan asked.
"They're all over the place now. Lots of little ones. They get
trapped in all the local fishing nets these days."
There was a loud noise at the front of the store. Martha
jumped quickly and ran to where the noise was coming from.
Nathan and Natalie followed. Three young men stared back at
them. Their heads were shaven and two of them wore black
leather jackets.
"How are you today, freak?" one of the men said, leering at
Martha. He wore barbaric jewelry around his neck and arms,
and an ugly cloth coat fastened in front with wooden toggles.
Martha said nothing but watched him closely. She looked into
his protruding eyes shadowed by thick brows. Nathan was
alarmed, but didn't know what to do.
Another man went to a tank of tiger barbs, placed his hand inside,
 and scooped up a handful, which he threw on the floor. His
eyes were hard and cruel and pitiless. The three men laughed
and started toward Martha.
"Why don't you get out of here," Natalie said to them. Nathan
 wondered whether she had her police gun with her. Surely
not, because this was more like a date than a professional mission.

The fish store continued to echo with hoarse laughter. Before
Natalie could intervene, Martha shifted all her weight to her left
foot, tensed, and kicked out at one of the hoodlums' shoulders.
The shoulder cracked with a brittle sound and the man dropped.
The other two men opened their mouths in shock. So did
Nathan. Had he seen what he thought he had?
"Hey freak, want to die?" one of the two uninjured gorillas
barked.
"Oh, my shoulder is killing me," their friend moaned on the
floor.
The two uninjured men moved toward Martha. She reacted
automatically, smashing her fist into one attacker's solar plexus.
With a twist of her body, she tucked in her right leg and then
lashed out at the remaining goon's jaw with her foot. She kicked
him hard enough to put him on an apple sauce and pudding diet
for about two months, Nathan thought.
"It's time to leave," she told the three. She crouched low, her
long calloused fingers rigid and extended toward them like knife
blades.
Apparently the men were not convinced by her obvious fighting
 skills. The first one came at her again. She caught him on his
fourth step, grabbing his right foot and lifting it. He landed on
his side with a thud. He got up, but was very nervous now. He
lunged at Martha and she hit him with a canister filter she had
ripped from the tiger barb tank. His face smacked into the filter
with what reminded Nathan of the satisfying sound of peanut
brittle cracking.
"Son of a bitch," the man mumbled, and then all three of
them ran from the store.
For a moment there was silence in the room. Martha smiled.
"Did I mention I have a black belt, first Dan, in karate?" she inquired.

"No you didn't," Nathan said.
"Very helpful for those unable to accept my physical deformities."

"Yes, you were-" Natalie tried to think of the right word.
"Amazing."
Nathan and Natalie looked at each other and decided to leave
the store. As they reached the door, Martha pointed to a sign. It
read:
I DO NOT ISSUE REFUNDS.
"Thank you very much," Natalie said to her as they walked
out into the cool evening. Martha Samules stood in a slanted oblong
 of light from the fish store and waved goodbye.
"I knew she was weird, but I think I underestimated her,"
Natalie muttered as they got clear.
"Yet she knows how to take care of herself, and she had ample
provocation," Nathan pointed out.
She changed the subject. "Do you think there's any relationship
 between the sudden rise in the pycnogonid population that
Martha spoke of and the abrupt appearance of the giant pycnogonid?"
"It seems like too much of a coincidence for there not to be a
correlation." But he knew that this was only conjecture, not
proof of anything.
As they walked down Main Street, they passed a drugstore,
chiropractor, and bakery. The bakery was having a sale on devil's
food cake. A big Santa Glaus kind of guy, obviously the baker,
stepped outside and smiled at them. His front was draped with
a whipped-cream splashed apron.
"Care for a piece of cake?"
"No thanks." Natalie smiled, as if she wouldn't have minded
some on another occasion. They heard jazz music leaking out of
the bakery. A few of the people in the bakery laughed excitedly.
"Please sit down," the baker insisted. In his hands were three
large china plates. A raven-haired waitress came out and smiled.
"Maybe later," Nathan said. The baker's welcoming smile
faded when he saw the expression on Nathan's face, /s this whole
town a little weird? Nathan wondered.
The two of them continued down the street and looked into
an antique shop. Directly behind the window were battered,
charmless teapots, some marble chess sets, carved African
masks, and a selection of "Ugly Stickers" from the 1960s.
"Hey, I collected Ugly Stickers when I was a kid," Nathan
said. Each card contained a picture of a creature's head with a
name like Joe, Sy, or Bob printed below the science-fiction physiognomies.
 Joe had wormlike appendages coming from his nostrils.
 Sy had prodigious teeth the size of cigarettes.
"How would you like to meet someone like that?" Nathan
said. Natalie smiled.
They walked along Main Street, which became narrower and
had fewer stores as they walked. Christmas-style lights outlined
some of the roofs of the buildings. "By eight o'clock on a summer
weeknight, most of Main Street is locked up as tightly as a safe,"
Natalie said. Bronze street lamps, governed by some master photosensor,
 began to throw rectangles of yellow light on the sidewalk
 and the fronts of old stores. Quite romantic, Nathan thought.
They cast tall shadows across the front of a barbershop and
auto parts store. They looked into the barbershop and saw a
slender gray-haired man sweeping the floor. Some of the shiny
cobblestones he swept glistened like hand-finished English
porcelains. Natalie waved to the man.
"Look at the apartment up there." She pointed to a small
window above the barbershop. "I shared that little apartment
with an older woman until she died of a stroke three years ago."
Nathan nodded, not sure exactly what to say. "She had a pretty
good life and enjoyed Newfoundland."
They stopped at a small truck with green twinkle lights that
lent a festive sparkle to the vehicle. Inside a woman sold them ice
cream cones dipped in chocolate and rolled in crushed nuts.
"Not bad," Nathan said as he licked his lips. He sniffed at the
air, which became scented by roasted peanuts and popcorn. This
was more like a date than ever. They hadn't even started to talk
business, and he wasn't going to push it.
Suddenly he heard a noise. A big Eskimo in a hunting jacket
walked past them, weaving slightly, his brown eyes fixed on the
sidewalk before him. Tattooed on the back of his hands were
codfish. Natalie nodded to him as he passed.
"Who was that?" Nathan asked.
"A fisherman. An out-of-work fisherman. Eskimos, known
today as Inuits, used to have a cheerful view toward stress. But
now alcoholism is caused by a new kind of stress-cultural upheaval."

They paused and watched a pair of inebriated Dutchspeaking
 dwarfs pass by, followed by a man who looked as if he
had just come from a flophouse on the Bowery.
"Your town certainly is different, eclectic," Nathan remarked.
"I take it that you don't see many drunk Dutch dwarfs in
the U.S.?"
"Sorry, I didn't mean to stare."
"So what did you think of those ultra-thin fish tanks of
Martha's?"
"Crazy." He shook his head. "Would anyone really buy
those?"
They both chuckled, and people on the streets turned to look.
That made them laugh harder.
As they walked, Nathan noticed that the stores stocked tropical
 fruits such as lemons, but the foods were expensive-$5 for
an orange-because of the high shipping costs. Some of the
stores accepted payments in pelts and whale meat in addition to
the common currency of the country. In this part of town many
of the apartments and stores had an Italian-Mediterranean look
with cream-colored stucco and Mexican tile roofs. Various
hedges flanked the front walks. Malibu lights often revealed
small spruce trees.
They continued to walk as the streets became more desolate.
A few more inebriated Dutch dwarfs walked by, as Nathan
scratched his head wondering where they were all coming from.
The two of them began to take a few steps along the slate
sidewalk and looked into an alleyway where there was a small
garden from which all the vegetables, with the exception of a few
pumpkins and squash, had been harvested. Near the sidewalk
were the dying remains of pretty chrysanthemums and cimicifuga.
 The heavy rain of the previous night had turned the garden
 into a swamp. Some squash were submerged. In the corner
was a decayed doll whose face bobbed in the water. In another
corner was a dead, gray Scandinavian cat. Its mouth was wide
open, its teeth exposed to the rain and dirt. Lodged in its throat
was an ornamental cabbage. Natalie looked a little sickened by
the sight, and shivered.
"Let's keep walking," Nathan said. He found the alleyway too
depressing to linger by.

"What's that?" Natalie asked as she saw something crawling
through the mud. She backed away and looked at Nathan. He
looked closer and smiled.
"I think we're both a bit on edge," he said. The movement in
the mud was just a floating tree branch. At the far end of the
alley was a fence with the graffiti:
THE SPIDER IS COMING
written in pink spray-paint.
"Looks like the town is preoccupied with the spider," Nathan
said.
"Aren't we all?"
As they walked, Nathan looked uneasily at the paintless walls
of abandoned stores overrun by climbing ivy. The wood was
peeling from a few of the nearby balconies. The cracked windows
stared back at them like the eyeless sockets of a giant skull.
Soon Main Street changed direction and ran along the coast.
The mood seemed to change as sharply as the direction of the
street. A cool sea breeze tickled their hair, and Natalie said,
"Ah." Nathan took in a big breath of fresh air. Sand from the
beaches came right up to the road, which glimmered like a great
swatch of silk. On the side of the road away from the ocean there
was grass.
They looked out toward the ocean and saw thousands of macaroni
 and chinstrap penguins congregating on a faraway iceberg.
When viewed from the air the dark birds formed a pointillistic
canvas on the white ice. The penguins were probably feeding on
small shrimp, krill, which populated the frigid North Atlantic
waters in vast swarms. Many years ago, Nathan had heard, seafarers
 killed millions of the penguins and boiled them, sometimes
 alive with wings flapping, for their oil. Babies and adults
were thrown into steaming black caldrons, screaming for a few
seconds, until shock and death overtook them. Today, near the
top of the Newfoundland coastal food chain, the penguins' primary
 land-based predator was man.
"I've found that each penguin has its own personality," Natalie
 said as they paused to watch the noisy birds.
"You wouldn't want one as a pet."
"I know, they bray and squawk-and produce a prodigious
amount of smelly guano."
"Of course, they're good to have around in Newfoundland.
Did you know that the guano of chinstrap penguins fertilizes
the algae, and invigorates the ecosystem?"
"You're a wealth of facts," Natalie said, sucking her mouth
into a rosette. In repose, she was almost plain looking, but in animation
 she was beautiful. "What should we do about the giant
sea spider?" she said, finally coming to the subject. "Tourism is
declining. Everyone's a bit nervous. Some creeps at the north of
Bonavista Bay are dropping randomly placed bombs into the
sea, hoping to hit the monster. At the same time, they're destroying
 thousands of fish."
"I think we have to wait for it to attack again and quickly get
to the scene before it gets away. Probably we should also set
some traps with bait. But it would be hard to trap something that
large. Maybe big cage-like traps could be constructed and set on
the ocean bottom."
"Good idea. I'll make sure the police department sets up
some huge spring-loaded cages with chunks of meat."
Main Street started to break up: the asphalt had potholes,
and sand covered vast stretches of road. Everywhere small weeds
grew through the cracks in the pavement. After another few
minutes of walking they could barely perceive the road. Oh,
there were a few scattered pieces of asphalt here and there, a few
charred board-ends, some road-litter, and an occasional hard
patch of ground that delineated the road from the sand and
weeds to give the tired traveler some guidance. But an occasional
 chunk of asphalt did not make a road any more than a few
organs made a body. It was as if the street gradually grew weary
and finally gave up, ending in a small gravel path.
Mists fell across the path like steam from a bubbling kettle. It
was as if the entire coastline were boiling, and whole waves were
turned to steam along a volcanic beach. Their footsteps echoed
hollowly through a place where children once played and
tourists once traveled. A few pieces of broken colored glass twinkled
 in the waning light. In the faraway western hills was a
panorama of golden light that filled the lowlands as far south as
they could see. Nearby long fingers of land stretched into the
sea. Massive black rocks roared up from the water's edge. Dusk
was approaching as Nathan kicked at long strands of kelp which
lay like dead worms on the gravel way.
"Look at that." Nathan pointed upward. A shimmering, gossamer
 curtain called the aurora borealis, or northern lights, hung
above them.
"Looks like a streamer of light! The aurora!" she agreed. The
name "aurora" came from the Roman goddess of the dawn,
often represented as rising with rosy fingers from the saffroncolored
 bed of Tithonous.
"This is really beautiful. So much different than the American
coast," Nathan said. He thought he saw the constellation Orion
as he gazed past huge green rocks that loomed at their sides. Unusual
 weathering of the rocks resulted in a green web of copper
tracings.
He looked toward Natalie. She smiled. Nathan's heart beat a
little faster: he found himself attracted to her on several levels.
She was a woman he would never find boring.
"Let me show you the forest before it gets too dark," Natalie
said. The two turned slightly and walked along a trail full of pine
needles. Main Street was far in the distance. Yellow birch, white
birch, black spruce, white spruce, and balsam firs rose above a
profusion of pink bougainvillea and yellow hibiscus. Beyond was
a scrim of dark mist. The shadows looked like stalking gray cats.
Daytime was dying.
After another ten minutes of walking, they saw the trees became
 scarce. Faint puffs of vapor hung over the sodden fields.
They looked across the barren lands and bogs; the only signs of
vegetation were mosses, lichens, grasses, and stunted trees.
"What animals live around here?" Nathan asked, stopping for
a minute to catch his breath.
"The Island of Newfoundland teems with wildlife and freshwater
 fish. The chief fur-bearing animals are the otter, beaver,
muskrat, fox and lynx. Game animals include hares, moose, and
caribou, and black bear. I should know, I once came face to face
with a black bear and had to shoot it."
A cloud reached out and grappled with the moon for possession
 of the night. As they walked down the forest trail, Nathan
looked into a bank of snow and saw a sled dog's body preserved
by the cold. Its rib cage was white, with bits of hair and flesh.
"Wonder whose dog that was," he said.
"Good question."
"Let's find our way back to Main Street."
When the end of Main Street was in sight, they saw a wood
bench facing the bay.
"Shall we sit for a while longer?" Natalie suggested.
"Sure." Nathan consciously strived to make himself as kind
and easygoing as his father was high-strung, hoping that Natalie
 noticed and liked such calmness. Even though he had
known her for just a few hours, Nathan liked everything he knew
about Natalie, and hoped that the sentiment was being returned.
"May I make a rather personal remark?" she asked softly.
He forced a laugh. "I hope it's not that I smell bad."
"I think you are perhaps the nicest man I've met."
He was stunned. All he could manage to say was "Thank you."
Even at night the bay displayed a remarkable panoply of life.
Elegant black-browed albatrosses floated in the air currents and
squabbled over what was probably fish head. Arctic pigeons in
dazzling brown and burgundy plumage swirled close to where
Nathan and Natalie sat. Far away in the distance a group ofWilson's
 storm-petrels dabbled their wings in the sea as they hunted
for tiny prey. Such exuberance of life, coming after months of the
barren emptiness of the North Atlantic, had led early explorers
to believe that the bay possessed infinite fecundity. Today, 
unfortunately, hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel all too often fouled
beaches and destroyed wildlife.
They got up and walked closer to the sea. They looked up at
the stars shining between a few wisps of clouds. On their left
were long blades of Deschampsia and tufted Colobanthus. It
was difficult for these plants in the winter, he was sure: temperatures
 often held all moisture hostage in ice.The grasses were as
high as their knees, lush from recent rains. A father and his son
were sitting on some large rocks with a tackle-box between them
and a big yellow thermos at their feet. Occasionally the father
said something to the boy as he held a rod with one hand and a
cup of coffee in his other.
"Look at that yacht." Natalie pointed to a swiftly moving craft
near the horizon.
"That's something." Nathan whistled.
"It's the Italian yacht Destriero. I read about it in the local
newspapers. It's built out of light alloy and equipped with three
gas turbines that drive water jets. I think it broke the world
record for fastest eastbound crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. It
can cruise at more than sixty-nine miles per hour."
"I wouldn't mind owning that one. But it's a little hard on a
professor's salary."
They took off their shoes and socks and dug their feet into the
sand, making small puddles. The water was cold and clear.
Nathan wiggled his toes and felt the sand crumble slowly. The
day was ending beautifully-a lovely beam of moonlight pushed
through the cumulus clouds. The air stirred under a light northerly
 wind; the sea was calm. They walked some more, as the
Destriero disappeared over the horizon. In the distance, Natalie
saw a moose calf with its watchful mother. The mother's coat
was fluffy and gray. Her hooves were scratching at the thin snow
cover and soon she uncovered a meal, perhaps a lemming.
"Do you think we should go so close to the ocean with the sea
spider on the loose?" Natalie asked as her feet crunched clam
and scallop shells which lined the white beach.
"There's no need to worry. What's the chance that the pycnogonid
 would pick this time and this beach to make an attack?
Near zero, I think."
Rapidly moving clouds delicately laced with snow soon
blocked the moonlight. A cool sea wind whispered through the
grasses and sand dunes. Occasionally a few night birds passed
overhead or swooped to a nearby jetty.
Nathan wished he could put his arm around Natalie, but was
wary of presuming and ruining the moment. She had complimented
 him, but that was perhaps because of his diffidence.
Above, the celestial light fringed the moving waves in a curtain
of stars. As they stood together near the gray-green gloom of the
sea Nathan couldn't help hearing in his mind the words of his favorite
 20th-century poet, John Celestian. "I'd like to carry this
moment of time on forever," he murmured.
She turned to him. "Pardon?"
"Sorry," he said, embarrassed. "I was remembering a poem."
She smiled. "Will you quote it for me?"
"Why certainly, if you wish," he agreed, surprised. He focused
his memory, and recited:
"I'd like to carry this moment of time on forever...
Hanging on to joys which spring out into misty airs ...
I must learn to stare upon your beauty without seeing,
Listen to your speech without hearing.
I must wear my protection like clothes
Never to be caught undressed again.
I must leave the silence ... with its solitary candle,
Before my puzzle falls, leaving strange patterns upon my head."
"That's lovely," she said.
Shadows sprang up about them as if they were living creatures.
 Tidewater seeped into their footsteps, and they heard the
sounds of water crashing on the nearby jetty. He finally made
what seemed like a supreme gamble, and took her hand. She did
not withdraw. The silence was broken by nothing louder than the
fragile chirps of shorebirds. The only illumination came from
the green and red light emitted by the bioluminescent bacteria
coating the wet rocks sticking out of the sea. It was if they were
standing in an ice and rock cathedral of stained glass.
It reminded him of Christmas.

Part 3 
Phantom Loving

The first great step towards progress is for
man to cease to be the slave of man; the
second to cease to be the slave of the monsters
 of his own creation-of the ghosts and
phantoms.
- ROBERT G. INGERSOLL,
The Ghosts and Other Lectures

CHAPTER      14
Fish Store

THE LITTLE CARD on the wall read:
The average person
sheds one-and-a-half
pounds of skin a year.
Martha Samules was fond of such curious facts and had
dozens of notecards containing trivia taped to the back wall of
her fish store. Another read:
If continually suckled,
a lactating woman will produce
milk for several years.
Indeed, in some primitive tribes even today women nursed
their children for up to five years, and could go longer if circumstances
 warranted. Nursing was one reason that third world
children often did better than those in "advanced" nationsuntil
 they got off the breast and started eating degraded western
foods. Similarly, babies in poor regions who slept with their
mothers had lower rates of sudden death than those who had to
sleep alone. Wherever man interfered with nature, man suffered.
But not enough for Martha's taste.
Today she was in a small, lightly soundproofed laboratory.
Inside there was an array of aquarium filters, air pumps, and various
 tubes leading to a water-filled tank against a wall of the lab.
The tank looked big enough to hold a large shark. On a dissecting
 table in front of her was a fist-sized pycnogonid. It lay dead
on its back in a metal pan with a cork lining. The sea spider's legs
were pinned to the cork to stabilize the body.
"Here goes," Martha said as she cut a small square opening
in the body's hard exoskeleton using a dissecting scissor. The
long legs reminded her of her own fingers. In some strange way,
Martha felt that the bony sea spider was a kindred soul.
"Careful," she said to herself as she attempted to complete the
cuts without damaging the underlying tissues. Finally she removed
 a postage-stamp-sized plate of shell from the creature's
belly.
"That's interesting," she said to herself. After placing the
square hatch to the side, she probed at the white, fleshy interior
of the sea spider with her long finger and found a cavity, an air
pocket, big enough to fit a sugar cube. Perhaps the air pocket
aided in buoyancy when the animal rose to the surface of the
water, she thought. Did it contain air or some other gas when the
spider was submerged under the sea? Or did the body tissues
simply shift into the cavity when the pressure of the sea compressed
 the pycnogonid's body?
This was of course not the first time she had made this discovery,
 but she liked to verify it in different species. She wanted
to know as much about sea spiders as possible, and sometimes
a routine dissection could lead to a significant breakthrough.
The pycnogonid was a truly remarkable creature in its own right,
and with her help it was becoming more so.
Martha Samules was born into a comfortable, happy household
 in a rural town in Prussian Silesia, about twenty miles south
of Warsaw. She was the only daughter and third child of Ismar
Samules, a respected but somewhat eccentric Jewish distiller,
innkeeper, and tropical fish hobbyist. She inherited her father's
characteristics-excitability, intelligence, and deformities of the
hands. At the age of six, Martha entered the local primary
school, and at the age of eleven she went to the St. Maria Magdalena
 Humanistic Gymnasium in Breslau. Her favorite subjects
 were biology and Latin. She was always near the top of her
class, despite the cruel teasing she suffered from the children as
a result of her long fingers and teeth, and her sometimes strange
behavior. At times she felt she was living with dark tormenting
clouds around her. The clouds were the bullies, the teasers, and
the embarrassed looks of her few friends.
There was a knock on her lab door. Irritated, Martha set
down her scalpel, rinsed her hands, and went to it. There was the
teenage girl whom Martha hired to work for her in the store
during the week. "Lisa, I told you I don't want to be disturbed
for less than an emergency," she snapped at the girl.
"The people-they-they want a refund," the girl stammered.

"Well show them the damn sign!" Martha snapped. "You
know the policy. I do not give refunds."
"I-I know. But-"
Martha looked more closely at the girl. Lisa was too young
and pretty for her own good, but she did have a certain talent for
inducing smiles and sales, and she didn't make many mistakes.
At the moment her eyes were puffy as if she'd been crying.
Something was going on. Maybe she had lost a boyfriend, been
foolishly distracted, and made a mistake in the store. This required
 a direct investigation.
Martha pushed by her and went into the store proper. There
was a plump woman and a brat of a boy. "What's the problem?"
Martha demanded.
"My son bought a fish here, and it ate our other pet fish and
then died," the woman said.
"Where's your sales receipt?"
The woman produced it. Martha saw that it had been issued
to one Brenda something or other, and that Lisa had handled it.
It was for a lovely but predatory fish that had to be isolated from
smaller species. An Aruana, a long silver fish resembling a snake
or eel with a pair of barbels projecting from the mouth. It was
cute in its fashion when small, but would quickly consume other
fish and attain lengths of several feet if the aquarium was large
enough. "You put this in with your others?" Martha inquired
grimly.
Brenda nodded. "And it-"
"I know what it did. Weren't you warned not to do that?"
Both Brenda and her son shook their heads.
And Martha couldn't prove that Lisa had told them. The girl
had probably been thinking of something else, so could have
overlooked that vital detail. She was stuck for it, because she
just might have been placed in the wrong.
She went to the cash register. "What was the value of the
other fish you lost?"
Brenda told her. Martha dug out the money and paid for the
refund and the other fish.
Brenda was evidently amazed. She surely had expected a hassle.
 "Well, thank you-" she started.
"Just get out of my store," Martha said tersely. "And don't
come back."
"But we didn't know what would happen."
l "You should have asked." Martha turned her back and stalked
away.
She spied Lisa. "That will come out of your pay, you know."
Lisa gulped. "I know. I'm sorry I-"
"Don't be sorry. Just see that it never happens again." Martha
went to the lab and closed the door.
The problem with Lisa was that she was typical of her generation
 and indeed the human kind. She just didn't think far
enough ahead. As far as Martha was concerned, the whole lot of
them could be dispensed with. There were just too damned
many ignorant, thoughtless, garbage-generating hairless apes in
the world, ruining it for all the natural creatures. She had to do
business with them, because she needed money to finance her
researches, but she was disgusted by the necessity.
Martha put the matter aside, and returned to her work. This
was what she lived for: research, discovery, creation. It had taken
her time to get here, but now she was making real progress.
After receiving her Ph.D. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry
 from Harvard as a result of her studies on the invertebrates
 in the North Atlantic oceans, Martha had been unsure
where to go next. After some soul searching, she decided not to
pursue an academic career with the accompanying pressure of
fighting for tenure and grants. Instead she set up a small private
laboratory in a rented flat near Bonavista Bay in Newfoundland.
This was an incredible change of life for her, but she enjoyed it.
The variety of fishes and invertebrates in the bay were a source
of constant pleasure.
After a few years of research and teaching at the local high
school, Martha had a touch of the entrepreneurial spirit and
opened a tropical fish and aquaria store. She still maintained a
small marine biology laboratory in a room in the back of the fish
store where she dabbled in a variety of breeding and other smallscale
 research projects. Of course she kept this quite limited,
because the store wasn't sufficiently private. She knew better
than to risk the disaster of premature discovery. Her most significant
 work was scrupulously hidden elsewhere. She couldn't
afford to have Lisa make a stupid mistake and let someone in
there.
"Where did I put the growth hormone?" Martha whispered to
herself, as she paced back and forth in the small lab like a caged
tigress. This lab was an afterthought, tucked away between a
bathroom and a supply closet. The shelves were covered with
various scientific paraphernalia: test tubes, litmus paper, large
Fluval canister filters, and worm feeders. In one fish tank were
African cichlids. Another contained a vat of corrosive goo, the
composition of which still eluded her. She was saving that particular
 challenge for an off moment, when she didn't have more
important work to do.
"There it is." She grabbed a vial of green fluid and dumped
it into a small aquarium filled with plants but devoid of animal
life. Since Martha left Harvard she had decided to become an inventor
 of sorts. After some disastrous attempts to build the
world's best fish tank filter, she did receive $30,000 from a
prominent filter company for the rights to a canister filter which
permitted mechanical, biological, and chemical filtration all in
one filter medium for optimum water purification.
There was another knock at her lab door. She knew what that
was for, because of the time. Martha reached for a single light
bulb which hung down from the tile ceiling on a cord. She then
shut the light off and left her lab, closing the door behind her.
On the side of the metal door facing the fish store, stenciled in
orange paint, were the words:
NO ADMITTANCE AUTHORIZED   PERSONNEL  ONLY
"I'm going home now," said Lisa. Sometimes Martha wondered
 why she bothered with the stupid girl. But she reminded
herself again that Lisa made it possible for Martha to fit in extra
research sessions during slow times in the store. Still, she had
been a nuisance today.
Lisa backed up when the smelled the stench of decay coming
from the lab. Perhaps it was Martha herself who exuded the
pungent aroma, she thought with satisfaction. She liked getting
into her work, and the smell didn't bother her at all.
Lisa was the long red-haired cheerleader type. Hardly the
kind one would expect to be working in a fish store, but she
clearly needed the money and enjoyed the exotic sea life in
the store. Those were motives Martha trusted. She would not
have hired someone who could quit with impunity at any time.
"See you tomorrow." Lisa looked at Martha. There was something
 very fragile in her swollen eyes. That, too: Lisa was the
type who could be pushed quite far without resisting. Martha
did not want indepence of spirit here. Her brother had entirely
too much of that, which was part of her problem with him.
"See you tomorrow," Martha said as she grinned. Martha
knew that her teeth reminded Lisa of bicycle spokes. "Before you
go, did you feed all the guppies?" Martha began to drool slightly
as she looked at the splashes of water on Lisa's ivory linen short
pants. Lisa followed her glance.
"I spilled a little water from the guppy tank on my pants," Lisa
said as she gestured to herself. Then she pushed her shiny hair
away from her face. Yes, she definitely was distracted today. As
if she had any real concerns.
"Did you feed the guppies?" Martha asked again, stepping a
little closer. Lisa opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it.
"Stop that," Martha said. "You're beginning to look like a
gold fish."
Lisa began to recover her composure and smiled a little.
"Sure," she said with a quick intake of breath. "I fed them."
Martha grabbed Lisa's hand and gave it a shake. She held the
hand in a clammy grasp for about five seconds. Then Martha
held out one bony forefinger and tapped it on Lisa's chest for
emphasis.
"Hey," Lisa said, perhaps noticing for the first time that
Martha's fingernails were long and fat and almost brown. Some
seemed as sharp as razors. Martha was proud of the effect. Had
she had to get really rough with those punks who invaded her
store the other day, those nails would have been useful.
"Be careful of the sea spiders," Martha told her. Then her
voice turned cheerful and she said, "OK, have fun." Lisa scurried
 from the store like a rabbit fleeing a fox.
Martha started to laugh. Great big laughs. Her voice rose in
intensity until it was a high-sonic stiletto. Black mollies in a
nearby tank felt the vibrations of Martha's laughter and quickly
retreated behind a rock. A tin foil barb floated belly up. Martha
took off her "FISH ARE FUN" button and tossed it on the
counter. It was closing time at Martha's Tropical Fish Store.

CHAPTER      15
Coma

ELMO'S MOTHER WAS still in a coma. Various plastic tubes in
her natural and human-made orifices sustained her life like a
parachute slowing the descent of a falling body. But the tubes
merely delayed her descent into her oblivion; they did not stop
it. She dozed in and out of near consciousness as condensation
collected on tubes in her nose. Outside her window bawling
winds and continuous rain imprisoned visitors and staff without
umbrellas.
"Any chance she can recover?" Elmo asked Dr. Carter, as he
shifted his gaze nervously from his mother, to her tubes, to the
rain-spotted hospital window. He was wearing a hospital gown
to protect his mother from any germs he carried on his clothing.
On his head was a plastic hospital cap.
"Possible, but unlikely," Dr. Carter said. "All the signs suggest
brain injury." Her pupils were dilated and did not constrict when
Carter shone a light into them. She had no reflexes. "When we
tried to take her off the respirator, her body made no attempt to
breathe on its own."
"What does that mean?" The question was mostly rhetorical;
Elmo had enough of a general notion to know that he was likely
to be making funeral arrangements before long. He wished again
that he could have gotten Martha to come when there had been
time. Even a partial rapprochement would have been infinitely
better than none.
"The contraction of the diaphragm for breathing is a primitive
 brain function orchestrated by cranial nerves three, four,
and five.The fact that she could not breathe on her own suggests
extensive neurological problems." Dr. Carter went to a light
board and studied a series of head Xrays. Then he bent down
again, close to Mrs. Samules's face, and began to examine her
unresponsive eyes with an ophthalmoscope, checking for the
telltale signs of dangerous intercranial pressure.
An EKG machine in the corner of the room started to show
chaotic electrical activity in the woman's heart. The machine
transmitted the electrical status of her heart to the nurses' station
 down the hall. Elmo tensed as he gazed at two clear bottles
of fluid which hung from a rack by her bed, feeding an IV line
in her right arm.
A nurse came in to take Mrs. Samules's blood pressure. "Her
pressure's so damned low . . ."
"Give her some oxygen. Make it fast," Dr. Carter said.
Elmo stayed for a few hours and sometimes there were moments
 of hope. His mother's eyes occasionally moved from side
to side, although she did not appear to be aware of her surroundings.
 Her diaphragm started rhythmic contractions, so she
could be removed from the respirator. But her favorable progress
did not continue. She drifted in a shadow world, straddling life
and death like a tightrope walker.
Elmo gazed at his mother's blood, more brown than red, flowing
 through a clear exsanguination tube and into a vibrating bypass
 machine.
"It's feeding time," a nurse said. She turned on an array of
halogen bulbs on the ceiling to help her see more clearly, and
then she walked past Elmo and funneled liquid food through a
feeding tube that ran into Mrs. Samules's stomach through her
nose. The nurse then removed the urine that accumulated in a
bag attached to a pole by the side of her bed. As she leaned over
the woman's face, she began to apply a lubricant to her eyelids.
"What's that for?" Elmo asked the nurse.
"It prevents the eyelids from sticking together."
"Why is that a problem?" He hated this whole business, but
was compelled to learn all he could about it.
"Comatose patients don't blink.They also secrete fewer tears,
even when their eyes are closed."
A wave of sadness passed over Elmo like a dark swell of ocean
water. He watched as the nurse filled a syringe with a cocktail of
free radical scavengers and lazeroids and then injected the solution
 into a port in her intravenous line. Blood, heated to 99 degrees,
 moved with phenyl tertiary butyl nitrone though the IV
lines and into her body through a vein in her arm.
The nurse dimmed the lights. Before Elmo's eyes adjusted to
the reduced illumination, all he could see was the red blinking
bulbs on the cardiac monitors. Mrs. Samules was almost invisible.

Elmo walked down the hallway to a coffee machine, his massive
 arms swinging back and forth, his eyes sandy, his bones
aching. His feet were still clad in elasticized hospital slippers
and they made a scraping sound. His large shoulders slumped.
He walked like a slug on the cold white linoleum floor.
It seemed that this end of the hospital held a startling array of
patients with strange ailments. As he passed by each room he
read from explanatory cards taped to the doors. In one room was
a boy with Prader-Willi syndrome. He was a short, fat, and snaillike
 individual whose compulsive eating had caused his parents
to put a lock on the refrigerator. The syndrome had a distinct genetic
 cause: the boy had two chromosomes 15 from his mother,
instead of one from each parent.
"What is this wing of the hospital?" Elmo whispered to himself
 as his depression deepened like a twilight sky. The only
sounds he heard were the soft groans of the wind at the hospital
 windows and the loud tapping of the rain against the glass of
the skylights.
In the next room was a girl with Angelman syndrome caused
by two chromosomes 15 from her father. Her head was small,
like a softball; her teeth were spaced inches apart; her movements
 were clumsy. Occasionally she laughed uncontrollably for
no apparent reason. The man sharing her room seemed equally
unusual. He suffered from osteogenesis imperfecta which caused
an abnormality of his collagen-the main structural protein of
the skin and bones. The famous painter Toulouse-Lautrec also
had this disease which had made his bones fragile and stunted
his growth. Elmo had to remind himself that each of these patients
 was more than a clinical specimen but a distinct individual
 loved by someone. Just as his mother was.
In fact, these people made Elmo himself seem relatively normal.
 All he had to worry about was keeping his mouth closed so
as to conceal the length of his teeth, and keep his hands curled,
and he could pass without much disturbance. Of course that
wouldn't work the moment he got close to a normal woman, especially
 a girl like Lisa.
"It's hopeless, you dope," he muttered. "Turn it off." Yes,
sure-as he might turn off his breathing. He might as well have
stepped into a bullet, as into that smile of hers, unguarded. He
had taken his injury, and might as well let himself dream until he
recovered.
As he passed by Room PI6 he heard a funny sound, and
Elmo could not help but peek inside. In the room was a policeman
 talking to a man in bed. The dark-haired man kept repeating
 the words, "It was a spider. It was a spider." Each time he
repeated the four words, his voice rose in pitch and intensity. As
Elmo listened, a soft ripple of goose flesh traveled up his arms.
He poked his head farther into the room just as a 200-pound
hawk-faced policewoman approached him. Her name tag said,
"Ms. Phat." She was certainly a contrast to that tall, lean Ms.
Sheppard who had been at the meeting. Policewomen, like policemen,
 came in all types.
"Can we help you?" the policewoman said to Elmo in a voice
as cold as her eyes. Both the policeman and the dark-haired patient
 turned and watched Ms. Phat and Elmo.
"Did he say spider?" Elmo asked.
"What's it to you?"
"I'm helping Captain Falow on a case involving what we believe
 to be a large sea spider," Elmo said. He saw the policeman
raise his eyebrows.
"We found him naked on an iceberg," the policeman said.
"He was covered with scratches and blood. Said he was attacked
by a giant spider and that he was looking for his wife. Name's
Garth James."
James! That was Lisa's last name. This was her brother! Suddenly
 this tragedy was considerably more personal than it had
been. Lisa must really be broken up.
Elmo looked over to the man on the bed. He recognized him
from photos he had developed from the camera found on the
schooner. Never in his life had Elmo felt so confused and
scared. The entire sea spider business was beyond his ability to
assimilate. But he had to be sure. "Were you from the schooner
Phantom?"
The man in the bed seemed to be drowning in a dark sea of
madness. He turned his head toward Elmo and began to scream.
He raised a bandaged arm with no hand above his head and
started to point it to Elmo. He continued to yell.
The policeman stood up and pressed the buzzer to summon
a nurse. An orderly in gray-green fatigues sprinted from the far
end of the hospital corridor and into the room of the screaming
 man.
"It's-out-there," Garth chanted. Then he began to thrash
around and then jumped out of the bed with the speed of a
jackrabbit.
Ms. Phat blocked the only exit from the room with her fat
body. The orderly came up from behind, grabbed Garth, and
held him until the nurses came to inject a tranquilizer into his
throbbing veins. Outside the rain drove against the hospital window
 with sudden fury.
Elmo left. He had learned something significant: that there
had been a survivor. Garth James would surely have valuable information.
 But there was scant comfort in this discovery. Who
would tell the man about the fate of his wife? What effect was it
having on Lisa?
And Elmo couldn't even try to comfort her. Because she
didn't know he existed.

CHAPTER      16
Restaurant

MARTHA SAMULES LEFT her tropical fish store and walked
down Main Street to her favorite restaurant, Terrie's Place. The
outside of the restaurant looked like a graceless mausoleum,
f drab and cold. The only cheerful aspect of its front was a small
canopy to the street which had rows of tiny red lights defining
the roof line. On the door were the words:
SHRIMP NIGHT-THURSDAY, ALL YOU CAN EAT
She ascended the soapstone steps large enough for only one
person at a time to pass.
"Good evening, Miss Samules," said Gertie, a tall waitress in
a slim skirt in stone wool and angora.
"Good to see you," Martha said as she walked briskly in, elegant
 as a knife.
"Usual table?"
"Sure." The interior of the restaurant was in vivid contrast to
the stark exterior. The noise level was congenial, not annoying.
An opulent carpet covered the floor in an elegant floral pattern.
Around each table were overstuffed chairs strewn with needlepoint
 pillows. There were mirrors everywhere. After Martha sat
down, Gertie handed her a large menu.
Martha studied it for a minute. "Black bean soup is our soup
of the day," Gertie said.
"Thanks. I think I'll have a lobster with a small side order of
linguini with mussels, scallops, and clams," Martha said to Gertie.
 Her voice was soft and eminently reasonable.
Suddenly Martha saw Natalie Sheppard sitting alone in the
far corner of the restaurant. She got up and walked over to the
policewoman.
"Natalie, good to see you here," Martha said as she smiled.
"Good to see you too," Natalie agreed reluctantly.
"I'd love you to join me at my table."
"Well-" Natalie arched her eyebrows.
"Please. I rarely get to eat with friends." Of course Martha
had no friends among the human kind, but she had seen the policewoman
 often pass her store, keeping order in the neighborhood,
 and regarded her as worthwhile.
"OK."
Natalie walked with Martha to Martha's table. Gertie came
over and took Natalie's order, chicken cacciatore. Martha sniffed
with satisfaction at the entire arrangement. A single radiator
near the table began to hiss and clank and constantly spit out a
warm moist trail of vapor.
"Wish they would fix that thing," Natalie said.
"I agree."
One of the waitresses insisted on serving refreshments.
Martha took a soft drink. Natalie took mineral water. When their
meals finally arrived, they ate in relative silence, occasionally
making small talk. Martha frequently had to pick out a piece of
linguini caught between her long teeth. Natalie looked uneasy.
"How do you like this place?" Martha asked as she gestured
toward the mahogany-paneled, antique-filled room.
Natalie shook her head. "This room is a bit dark for my tastes.
The only reason I came was to try the food; I've heard so many
good things about it." She looked around at the strange decor.
The restaurant was loaded with antiques. The table upon
which they ate appeared to be a Napoleon in. The table nearest
them was banded by ormolu and stood on toupie feet. Lining
the shelves were beautiful 18th-Century Mandarin-pattern
bowls made of porcelain.
"Watch this," Martha said as she reached into the lobster and
pressed one of its nerves in the abdominal cavity. Natalie
watched with curiosity. Suddenly, the lobster's claw opened and
closed ever-so-slightly.
"My God," Natalie screamed. "How could you do that?"
"Anatomy, my dear. Anatomy," Martha grinned. "It's knowing
 just what nerves and muscles to press to get a particular response."
"Impossible! That lobster is dead and boiled."
"Actually it's broiled, not boiled. But it doesn't matter. Even
the dead can move. It does, however, work better with live specimens.
 You just have to know the right pressure points. It's like
acupuncture."
Natalie didn't seem to believe Martha. It must be some trick,
she surely thought. That was of course why Martha had done it.
She couldn't help showing off her bits of knowledge.
"Care for a mussel?" Martha lifted a spoon filled with some
of the bivalve's tan flesh and waved it in Natalie's direction.
Bright red tomato sauce dripped from the seafood and onto the
amber table cloth. One piece of the flesh shot out of Martha's
mouth and onto a nearby 19th-century Italian table with an intricate
 marquetry inlay. Another splattered against the limestone
column supporting the roof. Martha realized that she was going
into one of her moods and was about to make a scene. Well, so
be it.
"No thanks." Natalie looked increasingly uncomfortable.
Martha caught her own reflection in the shiny glass of a cabinet.
 In silhouette, in the dark light, she seemed an ominous figure,
 like a great vulture or dangerous vampire. She liked that.
"Personally, invertebrates are my favorite foods. Mussels, squid,
octopus, snails-I love them all."
"I prefer fish." Natalie's tone suggested that what she really
would prefer was to be somewhere else.
"Fish have backbones. I hate those backbones. I choke on the
spinal cords and ribs."
Natalie looked apprehensive about the direction the conversation
 was taking. She didn't seem to know whether to laugh at
the absurdity of the conversation or get up and leave. Now the
room seemed darker, more depressing. Rancid grease hung in
the air like a wet rag. Oh, yes, this was going to be a good scene.
Martha began to point out some of the anatomical features of
the food she was consuming. Natalie pretended to be more interested
 in the rosewood pedestals with inlaid jade in the far
corner of the room. But she couldn't keep it up. She hesitated
and then picked up her fork. She wanted to eat instead of listen
to Martha. Well, Martha intended to see about that.
"Look at this," Martha said. "It's the clam's stomach. And this
is its aortic arch." She started dissecting the various specimens
on her plate. She pushed aside the shells to give Natalie a better
view. Natalie put down her fork, giving up her effort to eat. She
tried to swallow some of her drink, without much better success.
Martha continued as Natalie looked regretfully at her plate.
Her food was getting cold, and the sauce on her chicken was
congealing. She sighed. "It's been interesting Martha, but now
I have to leave."
Oh, really?
Natalie started to get up.
Martha screamed. "I see parasites in my clam. Look! Hundreds
 of protozoa." Martha turned in the direction of their waitress.
 "Gertie!" she screamed in a high screech.
Gertie scurried over. "What's the matter?" she asked timidly.
Gertie's father had been a tyrant, always quick to anger, always
quick to subdue his wife and daughter with verbal abuse. This
did little to give the waitress confidence when confronting abusive
 customers.
"I see parasites in my clam!" Martha repeated.
"I can't believe this is happening," Natalie said, looking ill.
Gertie stared in amazement.
"Look at all these parasites," Martha yelled as she smeared
the digestive contents of the clam's stomach on the table cloth.
Tomato sauce was everywhere. "Look at this. It looks like the
adrenal glands of sheep and cattle." A few other people in the
restaurant were staring intently at the unwholesome scene. Others
 were looking at their own plates with similar apprehension.
Natalie stood up.
"I'll get the manager," Gertie whispered.
"Speak up, Gertie, I can't hear you!" Martha shouted.
"I said I'll get the manager!" Gertie's mind seemed to snap
and she began screaming, "I'll get the manager," over and over
again at the top of her lungs as she fled.
From somewhere in the room, a diner dropped his fork. Another
 diner overturned her glass of water. There was something
like a panic riot in the making.
Natalie slapped some money on the table and ran from the
restaurant.
Martha was sorry to see her go. But once she got into one of
her moods, nothing would stop it.

CHAPTER      17
population

BACK IN THE store, Martha Samules was ashamed of herself.
Not for making the scene in the restaurant, but for alienating a
potential friend. Natalie Sheppard seemed like a decent sort, despite
 her profession. Martha seldom admitted it, even to herself,
but she would have liked to have a friend or two. But somehow
she never could resist the temptation to make others uncomfortable.
 She even did it to her brother, when she wouldn't hurt
him for the world. And to their mother.
There it was. Elmo had called her and told her that Mom was
in a coma after surgery. She should have gone with him to see
her. Yet she couldn't. Her alienation had been too deep, too long.
Even if it didn't make a lot of sense.
From the beginning, Elmo had been the ornery one. He had
fought those who tried to tease him, and he had learned the art
of fighting well. Let a boy say "finger" in that sneering tone, and
he might soon enough feel that finger, curled with the others into
a surprisingly solid fist, against his flesh. Let him curl his lip
back to emulate too long a tooth, and he might find his own
teeth loosened. No, boys had not teased Elmo for long! But that
did not make them like him. Neither did the teachers, some of
whom seemed to think he was a sending of the devil. More than
one school had found pretexts to discipline him repeatedly, iso-
lating him from his classmates. Their mother had protested, but
it kept happening, and Elmo's fighting attitude didn't help his
case.
She remembered the trouble when he severely hurt another
boy. It didn't seem to matter that three boys, all larger than he,
had jumped him and pummeled him mercilessly, and neither
classmates nor the teacher had come to his rescue. He had finally,
 in desperation, managed to throw one clear, grab another
around the waist, and heave him into the third with such force
that their two heads cracked together, rendering both unconscious.
 That had been lucky and unlucky for him. Lucky because
 he hadn't been trying for anything so effective; unlucky
because of the consequence. One boy had a concussion; the
other wound up in the hospital for stitches. Elmo was expelled
for violence.
After that Mom had tutored Elmo at home. Martha, who
tended to internalize, rather than externalize in the manner of
her brother, remained in school, keeping her fingers folded and
her mouth closed, literally, so that her teeth didn't show. She got
along despite the jeers. She didn't give anyone any concussions,
though she did take some licks. And gradually her confusion
and doubt congealed into the realization that she wasn't inferior,
just different, and that she would never be accepted by others.
All her efforts to conform, to be nice, had been wasted; she
could do her very best for a century and still be a target of
ridicule. Just because of her hands. Because of her teeth. Because.

Today some of her acquaintances asked her why she didn't get
corrective plastic surgery. Why didn't they just mind their own
business? When she was growing up, plastic surgery in her town
had not been sufficiently advanced, and in any case was too
costly. And although today doctors could make some improvement,
 Martha had an acute phobia toward dentists, hospitals,
and the like. That was part of what had stopped her from going
with her brother to see their mother. Even if she were to have all
her teeth removed and wear dentures, her jaws would be very
misaligned and would require even more surgery with no guarantee
 of the results. No way. All that surgery was not for her.
Martha continued to reminisce. It took her some time to
make her internal adjustments, but by the time she finished
school her heart had, as it were, become a crystal of ice. Only occasionally
 did she encounter someone with the potential to be
liked, and then it always went wrong. Just as it had with Natalie
Sheppard. Something in Martha just couldn't allow an artifact
as dangerous as friendship to hatch from its reptilian egg. So her
emotional censor cut in and broke it up before it could spread.
Sheppard would avoid her like the plague, after that scene in the
restaurant. Yet one faint, lonely vestige of Martha's original longing
 to be liked felt the pain of that necessary surgery. If only, that
vestige thought, there could be just one exception. A faint
thread, a tie to someone who was a friend. But the solid majority
 of her feelings were disciplined, knowing that in friendship
was ruin. Only in complete emotional alienation from all human
beings could she be what she had to be, and accomplish what
she had to accomplish. Alienation from all except Elmo.
Elmo. He had thrived on the home tutoring, and learned a
phenomenal amount. He had been able to keep his illusions
about the decency of the human kind, because he was no longer
subjected to the refutation on a daily basis. There might have
been some justified bitterness in him, but it was overmatched by
the constant overflowing love of their mother, who lavished her
attention on him. Elmo, in withdrawing from human society
physically, had been returned to it emotionally. Martha, remaining
 among humans, had become completely alienated from
them. It was in its fashion a paradox. But it had allowed her to
draw from the human society all the intellectual things she
needed to accomplish her purpose.
For she, with the objectivity of alienation, had come to comprehend
 the fundamental problem of the world. It was being
overrun by a single species. Like rabbits breeding without predation
 in Australia, and in England before that, humans were
thoughtlessly consuming the resources needed for the future.
The notion turned her stomach, and so she had continually
searched for a way to stop mankind's destruction of the environment.
 Wouldn't it be nice, she had thought, if she could devise
 some way to limit the number of humans on earth. If she
could somehow craft a "Purple People" monster like that of the
old humorous popular song, that did not confine its appetite to
purple people. Something that liked to eat people, and could not
readily be stopped. Perhaps a million or so such monsters would
exert the necessary population control on human beings, particularly
 if they could be engineered to selectively destroy humans
 and invade above land for brief excursions before they had
to return to the sea for their own survival.
For of course she thought in terms of the sea. That was her
specialty, the home of the best the natural world had to offer.
Something once confined to the sea, but freed from it so that
the job could be done. Maybe she could enlist an army of
ecomonsters-but no, no natural creature could be as smart as
the humans were, and so any such monsters would soon be destroyed.
 They had to have human intelligence and know-how,
and that would be possible only by having them work with selected
 humans, ecosoldiers, one soldier to guide each monster,
perhaps through nerve and muscle stimulation. It should work
if the monsters were always hungry, so they would gladly cooperate
 with their human hosts because they would always lead
them to food-nice, fresh, raw, delightfully squealing humans.
"Mmmm," Martha moaned in pleasure at the image of armies
of monsters descending on coastal cities. Even with no humans
with them, they could probably kill millions of people.
Martha grinned as she fantasized. As the monsters foraged in
the sea and responded to guidance from the advisors because
such guidance normally led them to food, they could explore the
ocean depths as no mechanical contraption might. What mechanical
 subs or robots could crawl through crevices and hug the
ocean floor with the agility of natural creatures? She, along with
a few dozen hand-picked ecosoldiers, could build dome-cities
under the sea by using the monsters. The ecosoldiers could mon-
itor sea pollution as they patrolled the sea and the coastlines
and attack the offenders wherever they found them. If more than
one passenger could ride a monster, each could ferry several
passengers under the sea to faraway dome-cities and coasts. She
supposed that the ecosoliders could also carry weapons which
would protrude from tiny holes in the monsters' bodies, but too
many protruding objects would give away the fact that the monsters
 were under human guidance. She preferred that the origin
of the monsters remain a mystery.
She imagined hiding her team of ecosoldiers in Terra Nova
National Park. Their monster hosts would remain in Bonavista
Bay until they were summoned by the ecosoldiers in diving suits
giving the proper arm signals. She and her teams would link up
in the shallow waters and fan out south and west to ChannelPort
 aux Basques and then set up another base at Gros Morne
National Park on the western coast of Newfoundland. They
could perform a few test runs on the small coastal towns of
Newfoundland, and by the summer they could spread south to
Nova Scotia and finally her main goal: New York City, a major
source of pollution, overcrowding, and environmental cruelty.
The human-monster hybrids could be unparalleled opportunity
 for science and humankind, but her only goal now was to
destroy humans. She would continue to engineer enormous
monsters that could take on humans when they entered the sea
and also for short periods of time in their own technological
habitats-oil drilling rigs, ships, and coastal towns.
Martha paced around her store, dreaming on. The need was
great; the human population simply had to be reduced, one way
or another, and there seemed to be a poetic justice to the notion
of having monsters eat people, instead of people eating all other
creatures. And think of the good it would do the world, getting
those bunny-breeders under control at last! Because there literally
 wasn't room in the world for unlimited humans. Many researchers
 knew that, but none of them were taking the kind of
action that was needed.
A fifth or more of the species of plants and animals could be
made extinct by the year 2020, Martha thought, unless she personally
 made efforts to save them. But if she and her monsters
could be ready to gobble up the surplus human population of
the world-ah, then it would be different. The monsters would
be a little like wolves in the woods which prevented deer and rabbits
 from overrunning the forest and then starving en masse.
The presence of wolves was better than the alternative of uncontrolled
 reproduction and the ensuing pain of starvation for
the deer. Humankind had no predator to stop it from overrunning
 the planet and starving. Unless she made one.
By the year 2002, there would be 21 "megacities" with populations
 of greater than 10 million or more. Of these, 18 would
be in some of the poorest nations in the world. Calcutta already
had 12 million people and Mexico City 20 million people. Some
African cities were growing at a rate of 10 percent a year. Perhaps,
 whenever they were ready, the monsters could be sent to
Calcutta and Mexico City to stem the rising tide of humanity.
During her summer years at Harvard, Martha had made it a
point to tour some of the troubled megacities of the world. As
she traveled through some African countries, such as Zaire and
Egypt, she found conditions ghastly. Five-year-old children dug
through clots of ox dung for undigested kernels of corn. Newborn
 babies were dropped into garbage bins by drug-addicted
mothers. Many of the cities were kleptocracies, with looting a
common occurrence.
A year after the African trip she traveled to Europe. In Upper
Silesia, Poland, she discovered indiscriminate dumping of toxic
wastes poisoned the water to such an extent that 10 percent of
the region's newborns had birth defects. When she decided to
take action and make a fuss with local officials regarding the
pollution, she was jailed for a week. So much for working within
the system.
Mexico City was the worst for her. The fumes of three million
cars and 35,000 industries became trapped by the high ring of
mountains that surrounded the city. It was then she decided that
she would someday have to help the planet and somehow 
control the rising population and ensuing degradation of the environment.
In the early 1990s the number of people on earth was about
six billion. If the birth rates remained what they were, with accompanying
 small declines in death rates, by 2025 the world
would have nearly 11 billion people, double the number in 1992.
Of course this increase in population would come at the cost of
most other species. Martha hated this most of all. She cared
about the animal species and the environmental disasters more
than the continued poverty of most of the world. What had the
burgeoning human population ever done for her, anyway?
Yet another doubling of population would take around
twenty-five years. At that rate, by 2175, there would be around
700 billion people! This meant that there would be 12,000 people
 for every square mile of land-or 3,500 people for every
square mile of Earth's surface including the oceans. Bunnies galore!

Martha sighed as she began cleaning some of the glass on
nearby aquaria. Her mind continued to race with environmental
 facts and figures. Sometime she found it hard to stop the
barrage of thoughts. She now began to think of the latest hunger
estimates from Brown University. Their World Hunger Program
had recently estimated that the world could permanently sustain
either 5.5 billion vegetarians, 3.7 billion people who got 15 percent
 of their calories from animal products or 2.8 billion people
who derived 25 percent of their calories from animal products,
as in the wealthy countries. Of course, those snotty Americans
and Canadians and most of the world's elite continued to insist
upon eating animal meat. So the human population was already
beyond the carrying capacity of the world. Now it was their turn
to be eaten.
But she had strayed from her initial line of thought: her relationship
 to her brother and her mother. Elmo she could forgive,
to a degree, for he was a child of the same arena she was. He was
flesh of her flesh, sharing her unusual physical attributes. She
still had some hope of recruiting him to her grand design. But
their mother-she was of the "normal" human kind, incapable
of understanding. She was expendable, along with most of the
rest of her species. So it was pointless to go to see her; it would
just make things more difficult. It was time for the old woman
to go.
Martha shook her head. There was still some lurking emotional
 weakness. But if she could make it past her human
mother's death, she should be secure against all else. She intended
 to make it.

CHAPTER      18
Come By Chance

NATALIE SHEPPARD PACED the floor of her efficiency apartment.
 Normally she appreciated her days off, using them to explore
 the neighboring countryside for special plants or simply to
catch up on sleep. This time she was unsatisfied with anything
she contemplated.
"What's the matter with me?" she asked herself rhetorically.
It was a way she had of getting to the root of a problem, interrogating
 herself as if she were a suspect. "What's bugging me?
The big spider? Yes, but I don't think that's it. That scene with
Martha in the restaurant? That, too, but it doesn't account for
this. My date with Nathan Smallwood?" She paused. "Bingo!"
Because there was no getting around it: she liked that man,
and had enjoyed the time she had spent with him. She liked
Nathan for the humor that glinted behind his eyes. Most of the
men she met seemed rather superficial, whereas Nathan's passion
 for his work and his obvious kind manner had immediately
attracted her to him.
Yet she had resolved not to get involved with a man that way,
unless she knew him for years beforehand. Well, for months,
anyway. She had met him just this week, in the middle of an ugly
situation. It was way too soon to judge his real nature, and 
failure to do so could be as bad a mistake as not frisking a suspected
assassin for weapons.
Yet again, how could she get to know him better, when he
might return to Harvard at any time? She could not depend on
him remaining in Newfoundland for two months just so she
could study him like a species of plant and see how he blossomed.
 So this was a foolish fancy best dismissed.
"Damn," she muttered. "I'm going to do something I'll surely
regret." She reached for the phone.
Maybe, she thought as she dialed, he wouldn't be in. The
chances of catching him immediately were not great. And if he
were in, he would probably be busy. He was not here, after all,
on vacation. And if he was in and not busy, why would he care
to spend any time with an off-duty policewoman who was neither
 beautiful nor eager to rush into bed with any man? She was
not exactly bargain entertainment. So maybe it would be just as
well if she got no answer.
She heard the emulations of the phone ringing. Three, four
five. He wasn't in. Six. Time to hang up. Seven. So why wasn't
she doing it? Eight. This was inane. Nine. Her hand wasn't answering
 to reason. Ten.
Then he picked up. "Sorry, I was in the shower. I mean, this
is Nathan Smallwood."
She had to laugh. "At least put a towel on, stupid!"
He was silent a moment. Oh, no-had she ruined everything
by her impulsive impertinence? This really wasn't like her.
Somehow she was stumbling over her own feet when she least
wanted to. Messing up like a teenage schoolgirl. "Uh, I'm sorry,"
she said haltingly. "I didn't mean to-uh, this is Natalie Sheppard,
 and-"
"Sure, Natalie, I recognized your voice. I was just putting on
that towel, so as not to embarrass you further."
"You mean you were-?"
Then he laughed, and she laughed too, and her feeling for him
surged. "This isn't business," she said after it subsided. "Not
even a stupid pretext." She took a breath, gathering her nerve.
"I-I liked walking with you the other day, and-" She couldn't
quite say it.
"I liked it too," he agreed. "I wanted to call you, but I know
you're busy."
"I have two days off now," she said quickly. "I-I was wondering
 whether you might-" She stalled out again.
"Are you asking me for a date?" he asked.
She felt herself blushing. "Yes."
"And to think I didn't have the nerve to ask you!" he said.
"Natalie, I'd love to spend some time with you, no pretext necessary.
 You are the one bright spot in a somewhat trying excursion."
"Thank you." This seemed inane, but she didn't trust herself
to say more.
"Shall I come to your apartment? I mean, to meet you, of
course, so we can go somewhere."
"But you don't know where my apartment is," she protested.
"Yes I do. You pointed it out to me. The one you shared with
the older woman, before she died."
Had she done that? Pointed it out to him? She must have.
"Yes, that will be fine. You-you are free now?"
"Yes, as it happens. We are waiting for some test results, and
there's not much for me to do until something new breaks. So I
have time on my hands. But even if I didn't, I would try to make
some for you."
The man was trying to charm her, and succeeding. "Thank
you," she repeated.
Soon he was there. He was wearing jeans and jacket, evidently
preferring informal wear even on a date. She liked that. She
went down and out to meet him.
"Do you have anything in mind?" Nathan inquired as they
came together. "I enjoyed our walk, but I think we may have seen
most of the town already."
She wrestled with her discretion, and lost. "Well, normally I
go out of town in my time off. I like to explore for plants, and
sometimes I pick up interesting stones I might use for a rock
garden. I thought we might, um, see the natural sights."
"That appeals to me," he agreed. "Where do you have in
mind?"
"I have been gradually exploring outward from here," she
said. "We're on the Avalon Peninsula, which I have pretty well
covered in the past year. But there are some interesting formations
 and lakes in the main part of the Island of Newfoundland.
The edge of that is about ninety miles away by road, so about as
much time would be spent driving as exploring, but-"
"I'd like to see it. This entire region is far more interesting
than I anticipated, and of course I'm interested in any fish there
might be in those little lakes."
"There's an inlet of Trinity Bay that comes right up between
Sunnyside and Come By Chance. There could be fish there."
He spread his hands. "I'm afraid you lost me. The inlet comes
accidentally to where?"
She had to smile. "Small towns along the route, just north of
the isthmus connecting the Avalon Peninsula to the main island.
Sunnyside, and about two miles south, Come By Chance. I'm
not sure how it got named."
"Oh. Come By Chance. I like it. It pretty well symbolizes our
encounter."
"Between a policewoman and a specialist in fish?"
"Don't say it! I get so tired of those 'something's fishy' jokes.
Between two people who ordinarily would never meet."
"Well, every encounter between people might be taken as a
random event," she said. "Still, I agree, and if you don't mind the
distance-"
"I am satisfied with the distance, and the company."
"Then I'll rent a car for the day," she said, gratified.
"Rent a car? Oh, I didn't realize-but I should have. Of
course you would use a police car on duty, and wouldn't have a
lot of use for a regular car. But you know, I have already rented
a good motorcycle for the duration of my stay here. If you cared
to trust my driving-"
Ride double on a sports motorcycle? Natalie had never cared
to try anything that chancy. But this seemed to be a day for
throwing caution to the winds. "I'd love to."
So it was they rode out on the cycle. Nathan handled it competently,
 and soon Natalie didn't feel as insecure as she had anticipated.
 In fact she was rather enjoying it. Her rump was
wedged on the seat behind his, her spread thighs embracing his,
and she was holding on around his torso. It was a way to be
much closer to him, physically, than would have been acceptable
in any other circumstance, without implying any sexual interplay.
 In fact, considering her present state of attraction and diffidence,
 it was ideal. She laid her helmeted head against his back,
sheltering it from the wind of their velocity, and was marvelously
content.
The road wound southwest, then west, crossing the peninsula.
Then it vectored northwest, heading into the narrow connection
to the "mainland." This was the bridge of land between Trinity
Bay and Placentia Bay, hardly more than five miles thick. Newfoundland
 was a world in itself, fascinating in its convoluted detail.

It took about three hours to reach Come By Chance, because
Nathan was a careful driver, not trying to push any limits. She
appreciated that. In fact she appreciated just about everything
about him. They passed through the town, deciding to start at a
lake and work their way back. Nathan found a suitable place to
pull off and park the cycle.
They dismounted. Natalie found that her legs were stiff; the
ride had stretched her thighs in unaccustomed ways. As if, she
thought naughtily, she had just had endless sex with a monster.
The shaking of the motorcycle had also put her kidneys into
gear; she had to find a bathroom. Naturally she had not considered
 that before guiding him here to the uninhabited countryside.
 They could so readily have stopped in Sunnyside.
But he understood well enough. "Let's take a brief break," he
said. "Apart. Choose your region."
She chose a gully with good bushes for concealment. He went
somewhere else. It was a great relief.
In due course they met again at the parked motorcycle and
commenced their exploration. "There should be a small lake up
this way," she said, pointing the direction. "I believe I saw it
from the road once, but couldn't pause then to explore it. I'll
look for stones and you can look for fish."
"Fair enough."
Natalie had an immediate problem: there were stones all over.
Quartz, mica, marble-she wanted to take it all, but considering
 their carrying capacity on the cycle, she had to limit it to only
the very smallest, choicest fragments.
Nathan saw her hungry glances. "We should have rented the
car," he said, smiling.
"No, I have to practice economy anyway," she demurred. "I
don't want to crowd myself out of my apartment."
"I had heard that little girls like pretty stones. I guess big girls
do too."
"It's hard to outgrow," she agreed, picking up the nearest
stone. It was a nondescript aggregate with patches of white,
brown, and yellow, weighing close to a pound. Too big to take
with her, really; she could take a dozen smaller, purer, and more
varied stones for that weight.
She was about to put it down when Nathan spoke. "It resembles
 Newfoundland. The island, I mean, as seen on a contour
map, with colors denoting the elevations and lakes. See, it's
roughly in the shape of a right angled triangle. We should be
about there." He touched a spot near its southeast base. "I wonder
 whether we could see us, in miniature, if we had a magnifying
 glass?"
She looked at him, trying to keep a straight face. "I think your
imagination is dangerous." But now she found herself unable to
put down the stone. It had become special. So she carried it
with her despite its heft, hoping that soon she would find more
suitable stones and be satisfied to exchange this for them.
They found the lake. It turned out to be too small to support
fish, being hardly more than a wet weather pond. But Nathan
was good natured about it. "I can survive for a day without spying
 a new species offish. I'm enjoying the exploration."
But that reminded her of the way Kalinda James had teased
Garth about not being able to be away from the water for more
than three hours without becoming obnoxious. They had gone
back out to sea-and now Kalinda was dead and Garth was
raving in a hospital.
"If I said something-" he said, concerned.
"Oh, no, not your fault," she said quickly. "A chain of thought.
I was talking to Kalinda James just hours before-before she
died. She had spoken of her husband's need to get out to sea, as
if it were an addiction, and your reference to needing to see
fish-it was just a foolish connection my mind made, and it
dumped me into a mire."
"I'm sorry. I had forgotten that you knew them. Of course this
is a bad time for you. I shouldn't have asked you to come out
here today."
She had to laugh, somewhat weakly. "/ asked you, Nathan!"
"Well, I shouldn't have accepted."
"You're way too generous. I should have realized that I'd be
moody and distracted, and not bothered you."
"If this is your moody and distracted phase, I'd love to know
you when you're cheerful and focused!"
She looked at him, suspecting irony, but there was no evidence
 of it. He just seemed to be a remarkably easygoing person.
She experienced a surge of awkward emotion. "Can we talk?"
she asked suddenly.
"Certainly. I enjoy talking with you."
"Let's find a place to sit down."
They found a low outcropping of rocks that provided nice
places to sit. They faced each other. Natalie hesitated, not sure
how to begin. She held the stone in her lap, running her fingers
over its contours. Nathan had the sensitivity not to prompt her.
He looked entirely relaxed.
"The other night, you told me a good deal about you," she finally
 said.
"I may have talked too much."
"No, I found it interesting. I liked listening. And that's my
problem. I-find myself getting intrigued with you in a malefemale
 way, and it really isn't fair to continue this dialogue if-"
He smiled. "I'm interested. I'm not married. I was once, but
it didn't work out. She found me too diffident about practical
things, and too interested in invertebrates. I hope you aren't
going to tell me that you are married."
"Not exactly. I-was. Married. And I didn't like it. It was a
bad experience that I wouldn't care to repeat. So I really haven't
been shopping for a man. But-am I embarrassing you?"
"You are delighting me. I think you are trying to say what I
lacked the nerve to say to you."
"I'm saying that I'm not exactly virginal."
He laughed. "I should hope not! If you were once married-"
She had to smile. "I mean emotionally.The-the bloom is off.
I don't know how my experience would affect my association
with another man. It might doom any compatible relationship."
He nodded. "May I be impertinent, Natalie?"
"Please. I'm nervous about being too serious."
"There's a song from the musical The King and I that came
into my head just now. It is titled, if I remember it correctly,
"Shall We Dance?" and it describes how a dance can lead a couple
 to romance by a number of stages."
"I am familiar with it."
"It concludes 'With the clear understanding that this kind of
thing can happen, shall we dance?' So the implication is that
they are not going entirely blindly into the possible consequence
of the event. I always liked that line." He met her gaze for a moment.
 "So with a similarly clear understanding, shall we talk?"
Now she had to laugh. "Yes, let's talk," she agreed gladly. He
had made it easy, again.
She marshaled her memories and plunged in. "I might as well
start at the beginning. Stop me when I get boring, and I'll try to
cut to the chase. It-it's just not entirely comfortable getting
into this particular matter."
"It would be a dull life indeed that had no discomfort. There's
a Chinese curse: 'May you live in interesting times.' "
"I fear it is possible to live in boring times, and still be
spoiled." She took a breath. "I was born in Ossining, New York,
and moved with my family to New York City when I was eight
years old. My father was a physician and chemist. My mother,
the former Antonia de Paiva Pereira, was the daughter of a high
ranking official in the Brazilian government." She glanced at
him, but he showed no sign of boredom yet. "So it was a mixed
family, of a sort, but fairly bright."
"So your intellect did not appear from nowhere," Nathan
said. "I hadn't really supposed that it had."
He seemed to know just what to say! Or maybe she was
primed to react positively to any remark he made. That notion
made her nervous. She knew she had to get this done with soon,
and suffer the worst before she allowed herself to get in any
deeper emotionally.
"I was stimulated by the intellectual climate of New York City
and did quite well in my school classes. When my family returned
 to Ossining during my high school years, I was at first depressed.
 But when I graduated second in my class from Ossining
High School, my spirits improved, and I went on to Franklin and
Marshall College in Pennsylvania where I double-majored in
criminology and botany."
"And you thought this was routine?" he asked with a lifted
eyebrow.
She smiled. He really did seem interested. "No. I always loved
the look on friends' faces when I told them of my odd mixture
of interests. Unfortunately, my father grew ill at the same time,
and I had to drop out of college early to help support my family
 and pay the medical bills. My parents died when I was in my
early twenties, at which point I was more interested in support-
ing myself than in returning to college. So at the age of 21 I
moved to Las Vegas where I worked as a self-employed horticulturist
 who did work for several of the casinos."
"You majored in criminology and associated with casinos?"
"I didn't touch their business. I hate gambling. But they paid
excellent money for suitable plants. It was a living, doing what I
liked. But I wasn't satisfied. I'm-" She paused. "I have a great
need for affection, love, and physical pleasure. I didn't like living
 alone. So maybe I was too ready to find romance. To convince
 myself."
"Aren't we all," he said.
She was glad for the pretext to delay her conclusion. "You got
into something?"
"I was really too busy. But I confess that on occasion I might
have wished to know one of the female students better. But who
would want to share a life with a man whose passion is sea creatures
 without backbones?"
She had a ready answer for that, but this was not the time.
"Did you ever actually inquire?"
He grinned ruefully. "Not after my first failure. I couldn't
find the words, ironically. I was never at a loss for words in the
classroom or on field trips, but the moment I strayed from zoology
 I lost my tongue. Especially in the presence of an interesting
 woman."
"Well, that explains why you've had no such difficulty today!"
He actually blushed. "That's not-I didn't mean-it's been
so natural with you that-" He shook his head. '"I guess I put my
foot in it. I apologize. I do find you-that is-" He stalled out.
She realized that he was having extreme difficulty telling her
that he liked her. He really did lack ready words in this connection.
 She hadn't realized it before because she had pretty much
carried the ball to him, so far. He wasn't short of feeling, just
nerve. And-she liked that too. "No offense taken," she said,
keeping her gaze on the stone. "I shouldn't have teased you."
Such teasing had come so naturally to Garth and Kalinda, but
obviously Natalie herself lacked the touch for it.
"I think I have just sufficiently clarified why I never married
again," he said. "Or even came close to it. It was not for lack of
desire. It's simply not a specialty of competence for me."
He didn't realize how attractive that made him to her. But it
was best to cool it until she had said her piece. She didn't want
the kind of disappointment she would otherwise risk. "At any
rate, I was too eager," she continued. "I married a tall Dutch
chef for the John Ebersole Restaurant in Vegas." She swallowed,
then hurried on. "But the marriage ended after two years. Despite
 his pre-marriage promises to stop smoking and drinking,
my husband continued. In fact, he began to drink more and
more, and paid me less and less attention."
"What a waste," Nathan murmured.
"Maybe I was too demanding," she said, trying to be fair. "I
had always been smart in school instead of popular. I simply
may have expected too much of marriage."
He shook his head. "He was an alcoholic. They can be very
good at placing the blame for their condition elsewhere. That
marriage was surely doomed, regardless."
"Maybe so. I tried so hard, but the Dutchman seemed totally
uninterested. How could someone change so abruptly after marriage?
 I wondered. I was finally happy when I had the courage to
end it."
Nathan looked at her penetratingly. "I have had no personal
experience with this sort of thing, but I think I ought to ask.
Was he-?"
"Abusive? Yes. I didn't really understand the way of it at first.
I blamed myself. And I think I am scarred."
"Emotionally," he said.
"When it started moving from the verbal to the physical, Iwell,
 I had had training in self defense, of course. So he didn't
actually beat on me. I beat on him, technically, when he tried it.
But the whole thing disgusted me so much that I lost my taste
for any kind of romance for some time. Now I-I would like to
have a relationship with someone. With you, perhaps. But I'm
just not ready for-"
"I understand," he said quickly. "I had too little; you had too
much."
"But you see, if you have hopes of-of an affair-I'm probably
 wasting your time. I'm not saying that I wouldn't be willing to
try, just that it might lead to disaster. Because of my-reactions.
! i For example, the moment I smell liquor I get tense. Arresting
drunks is fine, but I don't-don't-"
"You don't have to kiss a drunk," he said. "I well understand
the aversion."
"I thought I should tell you that up-front. To free you, in
case-"
"I think I am not at all like your ex-husband," he said seriously.
 "My problem is the opposite extreme. You need have no
fear of any untoward expectations. I'm quite satisfied just to be
looking for rocks and lakes with you." He considered. "But I
must admit that I would like to hold your hand again."
"My hand you may have," she said, smiling. She set down the
rock and put out her hand with a little flourish, and he took it.
"The rest is readily told. After I left the Dutchman, I once again
packed my bags. This time I took a vacation in Newfoundlandwhere
 I have been ever since. I love the land, the people, the sea,
and everything. I joined the police force two years ago when I
was 28. And that's my life history."
"I wasn't bored at all." He smiled ruefully. "In fact, I think this
is the closest I have ever been to a woman. Emotionally. I realize
 that sounds odd, considering my onetime marriage, but
there's the matter of rapport." He shrugged. "Perhaps I exaggerate."

"I don't think so." She considered a moment. "I was mostly
satisfied, until-" She shrugged, deciding on candor. "Until
Garth and Kalinda showed me how marriage could be. I was
coming to understand what I had missed. Then I met you." She
nerved herself again. "I have been considerably more forward
with you than I ever thought I could be. If you wish to go now,
please do it quickly." She glanced at the motorcycle. "Figuratively
 speaking. I'd rather not be stranded here physically."
Nathan laughed. "I don't think I could leave you now, literally
or figuratively. I spoke too much, the other night, because somehow
 I just wanted you to know me. I think you wanted me to
know you, similarly." He looked down, then met her gaze. "Are
you repulsed by fish or invertebrates?"
"Not any more, I think. As long as they don't drink whiskey.
Though some of those exhibits in Martha's Fish Store-"
"/ was repulsed by some of that." He looked around. "Let's
continue our explorations, of whatever nature."
She glanced at the sky. "That may not be wise. I see a cloud
on the horizon."
"No bigger than a man's hand," he agreed. "We had better
start back after all."
"Yes," she said with regret, picking up her rock. It would have
to do. They walked toward the motorcycle.

CHAPTER      19
Monster

IT HAD BEEN several years ago that Martha Samules began experiments
 with pycnogonids in her modest lab in back of her fish
store. So little was known about any species living near Newfoundland,
 as well as deep-sea species in general, that Martha
thought she could make an interesting contribution to science,
at the same time satisfying her own curiosity. She also considered
 the possibility that one day she might use them for her own
personal purposes, the nature of which became clearer as she
performed various biochemical experiments over the years.
Initially, she was simply curious about their life cycles and
how they traveled so elegantly with their long, gangly legs. Subliminally
 she felt a connection with them on an emotional and
physical level: both Martha and the sea spiders were fairly ugly
and misunderstood, they both had long appendages, they both
possessed a stout body and will-a will stronger than a casual
observer might ever discern. Only later did she begin to formulate
 a plan for using the pycnogonids for her own terrible purposes:
 to control world population.
Each day during the cool summer, she went to Trinity and
Bonavista Bay with her scuba gear, and roamed the sea floor in
search of specimens. For some reason, sea spiders were more
common in the cold waters of the Arctic and Antarctic seas than
they were elsewhere, although they were found in all seas. This
fact made the cold waters of Newfoundland a particularly nice
place in which to search for the creatures. Once she spotted a sea
spider, Martha slowly crept up behind it and then grabbed it
with her gloved right hand. Then she tossed the writhing creature
 into a metallic cage. She usually came home with two or
three pycnos a day for her experiments.
Back in her van, Martha submerged the cages in a large plastic
 vat of salt water she kept by the van's back doors. The ride
from the coast to her fish store took around five minutes. The
pyncos usually tried to escape by climbing the cage walls, but
the cages were perfect prisons of hard metal wire. Once back at
the lab she dropped them into salt-water aquaria with larger
filters to keep the water clean.
Martha began to operate on the pycnos while they were still
alive, after pinning them upside down on a dissecting pan. She
did have reservations about cutting and probing them while they
made terrible mewing sounds and waved their long proboscises,
because she really didn't enjoy inflicting any pain on innocent
creatures. However her need to learn more about the pycnos
was greater than her hesitancy regarding any discomfort they
might feel, or the ghastly sight of their writhing legs as she removed
 some of their shell-like exoskeletons and peeked inside.
After discovering a small air cavity at the base of the creature's
abdomen, she began to probe at the muscles and nerves that
lined the cavity, through the internal hatch door she had cut in
the exoskeleton.
"Ooh," she squealed, as the creature's legs responded when
she pressed certain pressure points inside the abdomen. What
worked for lobsters worked for sea spiders too. Through the next
few weeks she found that by pressing particular muscles and
nerves in the abdomen, she could trigger certain specific leg motions.
 Through the next month a plan began to form in her
mind. If she could obtain and train some specimens of the
Colossendeis species of sea spiders, which normally could attain
the size of an adult human, and somehow get them to grow to
elephantine proportions, she could actually use the creatures as
submarines. She could make an artificial hatch in one of the
creatures' abdomens, crawl inside, and guide it under water. A
crazy idea, she thought. But it might just be possible.
Although specimens of Colossendeis could attain sizes close to
that of an adult human, Martha continued to be interested in
creating even bigger versions of the animal. After reading articles
by University of Maryland researchers on the use of human
growth hormone in salmon to produce fish that were two to
three times their normal size, she attempted to do the same with
the pycnos. The process was called genetic engineering.
For starters, Martha knew of researchers who had isolated
growth hormones from tiny fruit flies called Drosophila. When
the level of the hormone was increased it had made the flies
grow to three times their normal size. Since pycnogonids and
fruit flies were both members of the same phylum, the arthropods,
 Martha hoped that the fruit fly hormones would be similar
 enough to have a noticeable effect on pycnos.
Starting with tiny pycno eggs, each a little larger than a grain
of sand, she microinjected little pieces of microscopic bacterial
DNA known as plasmids, which contained a copy of the growth
hormone gene. The plasmid DNA would be acting like little
drug factories, producing small amounts of the hormone in the
pycno on a daily basis. Usually, hormones were naturally occurring
 trace substances produced by glands-they served as chemical
 messengers carried by the blood to various target organs. In
the genetically engineered organism, the tiny plasmid DNA took
the place of the glands. The plasmid DNA would integrate itself
into the host animal's normal genetic sequence, and the growth
hormone levels would rise.
To obtain the proper plasmids, Martha wrote to the University
 of Maryland and asked for a small sample of the bacteria
containing the growth hormone genes. She told the researchers
she wished to sequence and study the entire plasmid but not to
use it in any test organism. She of course was lying.
Within a week she received a package marked
NON-HAZARDOUS BIOLOGICAL SPECIMENS
in bright red letters. A few years ago, packages of this type were
marked "BIOHAZARD," but this tended to make the mail departments
 dangerously excited and, as a result, packages were
often never shipped. In any case, the bacterial strains Martha
had requested were not really considered hazardous because
they did not contain any agent infectious to humans. The brown
box she received contained a small plastic vial of soft agar along
with the bacterium E. coli. containing growth hormone plasmids.The
 box also contained a note which reminded her it was
illegal and potentially dangerous to use the plasmids in a host
organism without governmental approval. The Maryland researchers
 also asked that their names be on any scientific papers
Martha might publish as a result of her sequencing work.
"Sure." Martha chuckled when she read the last part of their
letter. It read:
Of course should any patent arise from your use of our plasmids,
or any commercial use of the plasmid be discovered, your legal
department and ours would be expected to sign a contractual
agreement.
Martha's idea to transform the sea spiders into bigger specimens
 depended on the theory that the growth hormones from
flies should have an effect on the pycnos. Not a crazy idea, she
told herself. After all, Auburn University scientists recently had
shown that genetically engineered catfish containing extra copies
of the human growth hormone gene grew at abnormally fast
rates. And the Department of Agriculture had been experimenting
 with transgenic carp and succeeded in breeding fish
that were twice the normal size. If it worked for catfish and carp,
why not for the pycnos?
Martha scraped the contents of the vial into a glass petri dish
which contained a nutrient gel on the bottom. Inside the dish,
the bacteria containing the growth hormone plasmid genes
would reproduce. Interestingly, the petri dish contained an agar
gel that was laced with an antibiotic called ampicillin. Not only
did the plasmids carry the growth hormone gene but they also
contained antibiotic resistance genes, so any bacteria that grew
in the disk were guaranteed to have the plasmid with the growth
hormone gene. Any other bacteria that would try to grow in the
dish would simply die. Martha also created huge stocks of E. coli.
with the plasmid by growing giant bacterial colonies in gallon
size flasks of liquid growth media.
After she had a significant stock, she microinjected purified
DNA from the plasmids directly into fertilized pycnogonid eggs,
some of which integrated the fly growth hormone genes of the
plasmid into their own cellular genetic code. She carefully
worked under a microscope, slowly manipulating a microneedle
as it punctured an egg and allowed the new DNA to flow into
the egg. If the method worked, Martha could mate the genetically
 engineered pycnogonids. Some of their offspring would
contain the extra DNA coding for growth hormone and also
grow to colossal proportions.
Normally when pycnogonids reproduced, the male fertilized
the eggs as they passed out of the female. Then the male collected
 the eggs into masses on his smaller ovigerous legs. Glands
on the femurs of these appendages formed a secretion for attaching
 the egg masses. It was at this point that Martha removed
eggs, microinjected them, and then placed them back on the father
 pycno. Unfortunately, this was much easier to plan than to
accomplish; the pycnos did not understand what she was doing,
and were decidedly uncooperative. She could tie the spider
down, and collect the eggs, and she could replace them. But
when she released the creatures, they sensed the foreign nature
of the eggs, and scraped them off. She got so angry once that she
squashed one flat-then spent days in remorse. These were not
human beings, after all; they didn't deserve to be destroyed out
of hand. She had to find a way to anesthetize the rebellious spiders
 for long enough to let the modified eggs settle in, as it were,
so that they no longer seemed foreign.
After a few months of trial and error, Martha found that genetically
 engineered fly growth hormone did produce pycnogonids
 that grew at rates much faster than normal. She estimated
that if the current rates of growth continued, they would mature
to elephant size in just two years. Sometimes she found it remarkable
 that hormones from a fly could have any effect at all
on a pycno. It seemed a little like substituting water for gasoline
in a car and expecting it to have a beneficial effect. However, the
growth hormone molecules apparently were similar enough so
that the fly molecules would have a noticeable effect on a member
 of this related, but different, species.
This was not to say that Martha's goal of producing huge
pycnos was a simple or straightforward one. She soon found
that when the pycno got very large, it had difficulty breathing,
because the amount of surface area available for exchanging
oxygen and carbon dioxide became smaller in proportion to the
huge volume the creature now had. Not all the cells inside its
body could satisfy their need for life-giving oxygen.
To solve this problem, Martha selectively bred species which
contained, as infants, an unusually high level of hemocyanin,
the compound which carried oxygen in the blood of pycnos.
Just by chance, about 1 out of every 100 infant spiders had a
slightly elevated level of hemocyanin in its blood. She bred these
creatures to one another, and their offspring also had a slightly
higher level of hemocyanin. The process was repeated for several
generations of pycnos until the final specimens had very high
levels of hemocyanin and blood corpuscles. Of course, all of this
selective breathing was done with normal sized specimens to
make the process quick and easy. It was with these better
breathers that Martha again began her growth hormone experiments.
 The process of selecting these better breathers was not
unlike the methods used by agriculturists to select diseaseresistant
 plants or plants that could tolerate drought.
Martha also found it necessary to strengthen the hard outer
material which served both as skin and skeleton for the creature.
Unlike mammals and other higher organisms which had an in-
ternal skeleton, many creatures such as insects, lobsters and pycnogonids
 wore their skeleton on the outside.This outer skeleton,
or exoskeleton, served several functions. It gave animals their
external shape-particularly important for larger arthropods
which needed rigid skeletons to retain their shape out of water.
Secondly, the exoskeleton provided support for the muscles. Finally,
 it provided protection against predators and various forces
of impact, buckling, and bending.
As a student of biochemistry in college, Martha learned that
the hard bony exoskelton of arthropods was made of chitin-a
long polymer, or chain, of N-acetylglucosamine molecules.
Martha knew that although chitin was pretty incredible stuff, the
heavy load that would be placed on the exoskeleton for an
elephant-sized creature made it impossible to simply grow the
pycnos to elephant size and expect them to function normally,
particularly out of water. Their buoyancy in water would normally
 help support the weight of the creatures. The exoskeleton
would simply not be able to bear the stress unless she could
make it stronger or thicker.
Martha found, however, that she could produce a super-hard
armorlike exoskelton by accelerating the rate at which the enzyme
chitin synthase built the final chitin polymer. She also added
chemical variants of the small molecule, N-acetylglucosamine,
which were linked together to form the final molecular chain.
This helped to further strengthen the pycnogonid's external coverings.

"Eureka," she screamed when she first hit a fist-sized pycno
with a hammer and found she could not crack its exoskelton.
The hammer bounced off the body as if it had struck a creature
made of metal.
That had led to mischief. Her hireling Lisa, then somewhat
bony and awkward, in contrast to what two years were to do for
her, heard her cry and thought there had been an accident. She
dashed back to the lab section, and it was all Martha could do
to persuade her that there was no emergency. Fortunately the
adolescent was not unduly inquisitive, and had no interest in
spiders of any kind, so the secret of Martha's researches was
preserved.
Unfortunately for Martha, the stronger exoskeltons were so
rigid that they sometimes confined the body tissues in a vise-like
prison that did not permit proper growth. Normally, during the
pycno's growth, the hard exoskeleton allowed little room for expansion
 and so, like with other arthropods, pycnos had to shed
their coverings periodically by molting to permit additional
growth. A new skeleton then had to be secreted to replace the
one discarded. This molting process was under hormonal control.

With the new, stronger exoskeletons, baby pycnos had great
difficulty periodically shedding their skeletons. To solve this problem
 Martha placed the naturally occurring molt-accelerating
hormones on the same bacterial plasmids as the growth hormone.
 The elevated levels of molting hormone did the trick, and
the molting and growth process occurred fairly normally. Occasionally
 there were mishaps: pycnos with body tissues bursting
through the joints of the exoskeletons which did not shed at the
proper intervals, or animals with so much exoskeleton that they
looked more like spherical lumps of marble than functioning sea
spiders. But such things were part of the normal course, and
were routinely selected out.
There was another type of problem. The defective things were
horrible, but how could they be blamed for this? They reminded
her too much of herself: freakish, compared to the common
mode. Surely they would be cruelly attacked by their more normal
 fellows, if ever put in with them. She wished she could spare
them death, but she lacked the facilities to maintain her failures,
 even if they should prove to be capable of survival. So after
considerable and pained reflection, she gently put such misfits
out of their misery by overdosing them with anesthetic, with an
uncharacteristic tear in her eye.
Her last step in creating the pycnogonids of monstrous proportions
 was to increase the pycnos' strength so that they could
move their huge bodies. To create more powerful muscles,
Martha strengthened the actin and myosin molecules which
were the basis for all muscle actions in animals. As a result, the
muscles were several times as strong as in normal pycnos. Naturally,
 these stronger muscles needed additional energy to function
 so Martha also increased the levels of the energy rich
substances phosocreatine and the enzyme phosphocreatine kinase.
 Phosphocreatine supplied the energy for muscle contraction.
But before they grew to their full new size, she put the more
muscly versions through their paces: stress tests, pulling objects,
finally even showing them off to the girl Lisa, who was suitably
appalled. Lisa had no notion of the significance of these creatures;
 all she knew was that spiders were horrible. She came
close to freaking out more than once, and that pleased Martha.
"If you ever tell anyone else about my private experiments, I'll
put some in your underwear," she said, and was gratified to see
the girl almost faint. Of course it was a bluff; the little pycnos
couldn't survive for long out of the water yet, and would be
just as freaked out by human underwear as Lisa was at the idea
of having them there. But Lisa didn't know that, and anyway,
a dead water spider would frighten her almost as much as a
live one.
All of her biological manipulations had initially been enhancements
 to the pycnogonid's natural body architecture and
biochemistry-and did not actually provide any new biological
features. She did, however, want to make it possible for the
pycno to easily see above water without having to lift its entire
body out of the ocean. To do this, she had a plan to add two new
functional eyes near the end of the proboscis. The process required
 a few months of experimentation to solve. In the end, she
simply implanted pycno eye tissue under the exoskeleton of the
proboscis when it was beginning to form during its embryonic
stage. The additional tissue sent out biochemicals to the surrounding
 tissue and began a cascade of biochemical and physical
 events that eventually induced the formation of retina and
optic nerves beneath each new eye.
The process of biochemical induction occurred normally during
 the course of embryonic development. One embryonic tissue
had a chemical effect on a neighbor so that the developmental
course of the responding tissue was drastically changed from
what it would have been in the absence of the inductor. One of
the classic examples of embryonic induction was the formation
of the lens of the eye as a result of the inductive action of the
optic cup upon the overlying tissue.
With the pycnos, nine out of ten times, the new optic nerves
were able to grow and find their way back to the creature's forward
 brain, where they made a functional connection. Although
Martha could have extended her discoveries and technologies to
the implantation of new eyes in humans, she was not very concerned
 with humans. She didn't like humans very much. But she
loved her new pycnos.

CHAPTER      20
lisa

ELMO NEVER MADE a third trip to the hospital. A hospital clerk
called him with the news that his mother was dead. "We'll need
your authorization for the disposition of the body," she said with
marvelous insensitivity.
"I will have to check with my sister," he said numbly. He had
known this was coming, but still found himself unprepared.
"Of course," the clerk said disapprovingly.
He made his way to the store. He didn't know what Martha's
reaction would be, but he had to tell her. She was in a general
way alienated from the species of mankind, having suffered more
rejection at a more formative age than he had, and the death of
their mother might have the effect of cutting her the rest of the
way free. Or it might not affect her at all, she being long since
alienated from Mrs. Samules. But he had to have her okay to
arrange for the cremation; she was after all the closest blood kin
available.
He approached the store, paused, nerved himself, and entered.
 The young woman, Lisa, was behind the counter, talking
to a customer. Elmo hung back, waiting for the store to clear before
 getting to his ugly business. "You will have to speak to
Martha," she was saying.
"Well, where is she?" the man demanded.
"She's out at the moment, but I expect her back in an hour."
"I can't wait a damn hour! These are bad fish she sold me, and
I want a refund now."
Bad fish? Elmo had his differences with his sister, but one
thing she would never do was sell inferior fish. This had to be a
confusion. But it wasn't his business.
"I'm sorry," Lisa said, evidently flustered. "I'm not allowed to
give refunds. It's against store policy." Her eyes flicked to the
posted sign, but the man ignored the signal. "They have to be
handled by Martha herself," Lisa continued somewhat doggedly.
"If you can just come back in an hour-"
"No! These are bad fish, and I want my money back now."
Lisa blinked. Elmo was surprised to see that she was evidently
near tears. She was young, and innocent, and didn't know how
to handle obnoxiousness. She had also suffered a recent bereavement.
 So he stepped forward, knowing that he would probably
 regret it. "Perhaps I can help," he said.
The man whirled on him. "Who the hell are you?"
"Elmo Samules, a fishery officer for Trinity Bay."
The customer didn't seem to pick up on the name, perhaps
because Martha Samules seldom used any but her first name.
"You got a refund?"
"No, but I do know something about fish." He looked at the
plastic container the man held. "When did you buy those?"
"Two days ago. And now they're dead."
"You left them in that container throughout?"
"Yeah. Got to take them on the ferry south tomorrow. But not
any more. They must have been diseased."
"No. They died from oxygen deprivation. You should have
put them immediately into an aerated aquarium. Didn't Martha
tell you that?"
"Of course I know fish need oxygen to survive. I opened the
container every four hours. And no, Martha didn't say a thing
about the fish being in a sealed container."
"She did!" Lisa interjected. "I remember. And anyway, opening
 the container once every four hours is far too seldom."
"Well, when I get home, she said. But I'm not home yet. I live
in New York. So I kept them here."
Elmo shook his head. "Sir, you killed those fish. No sense
waiting for Martha; she won't give you any refund. In fact, I'd
advise you to be far away when she learns of this. Those are
valuable fish."
"I'll say! I paid a mint for them! And I want it back. Now."
"You are out of luck," Elmo said firmly. "You should not be
buying fish until you learn something about them."
"What I learned is that this is a gyp joint!" the man said, getting
 red in the face. He turned back to Lisa. "Now listen, you little
 bitch-"
Elmo reached up, gripped the man's shoulder with thumb
and fingers, and squeezed. "There is no call for that kind of language.
 Please leave now."
"Listen, buster, you can't-" But the man broke off as Elmo
increased the pressure of his grip. It was becoming apparent that
there was a lot of power in that hand. Then he dropped the container,
 turned, and stalked out. Elmo let him go.
Lisa was already rushing to the fish container. It was stoutly
constructed, and had not burst. She picked it up as if it were a
baby. "Thank you, sir," she said gratefully. Then her eyes brightened
 with recognition as she stood, hugging the container.
"Haven't we met?"
"Yes. I was just leaving the store the other day when you arrived.
 You smiled at me." Understatement of the decade! She
had conquered him with that devastatingly innocent expression.
"Oh, yes, now I remember." She squinted. "But apart from
that, you look familiar, somehow."
Elmo smiled, carefully, not parting his lips. "I should. I am
Martha's brother Elmo. I have the same oddities of form she
does." He held up one hand, opening it and spreading the fingers
 to show their unusual configuration.
"Oh, the name! Samules. I didn't make the connection." Now
she smiled radiantly, as she had before. He could have sworn the
whole store brightened in that moment. "I'm Lisa James. You
saved me some real trouble, I think. I didn't know what to do."
"Glad to do it for a lovely damsel," he said, hoping this would
come off as clever praise rather than oafish exaggeration.
She flushed, evidently taking it the right way. "I-I have to
take this to the back room. If you can wait a moment."
"Gladly, Lisa." It was an unexpected pleasure to be talking
with her like this. Sheer luck, but he would take any luck he had.
She carried the container to the back room. She returned in
a moment, brushing back her long reddish hair with one hand.
She was a breathtakingly lovely creature whom Martha probably
 demeaned. Martha did tend to resent pretty people. But of
course Martha resented all people. "I really appreciate how you
helped me," she said. "Now what can I do for you?"
Oh. She assumed he had come here for a reason, naturally
enough. As indeed he had. He would have liked to ask her for a
date, but knew better. She surely saw him as a grim older man,
as he was. "I came to see Martha."
"She's not in. She-"
"I heard."
"Could I take a message for her?"
"I don't know if this is a suitable message. There has been a
death in the family."
Lisa's face clouded. "Oh, I know how that is."
"You do?" he asked before he thought. Of course she did; he
had known that all along.
"My brother Garth-I mean his wife Kalinda-the monster
got her. She was a really nice person. She made my brother very
happy."
The right woman could do that for a man, he was sure. A
woman like Lisa? "You're Garth James' sister? I saw him in the
hospital." It was easier not to try to explain how deeply involved
in that whole business he had been.
"Yes. He-he's delirious. But what happened-it's so horrible."
Elmo wished he could put his arm around her trembling
shoulders, to comfort her. But he couldn't. "I don't believe he is
delirious. He's speaking the truth. There's a giant sea spider out
there. Something unknown to science. It's my job to find that
thing and kill it before it wreaks any more havoc."
"Oh, I hope you do, Mr. Samules! It's so awful."
"We're going to ride the ferry to where the thing struck, the
day after tomorrow. We're organizing a party. We need to know
more about it. Exactly what it is, where it ranges, and what is
likely to stop it."
"Why not just shoot it, Mr. Samules?"
He hesitated, then gambled. "Call me Elmo, if you wish. After
all, I didn't call you Miss James."
She smiled hesitantly. "All right, Mr.-Elmo."
Score one for the home team! "But as to why we won't just
shoot it," he continued. "We might kill it, and it might sink out
of reach, and we would never know exactly what it was. That
would be a loss to science. And there might be others of its kind.
We must try to immobilize it. To capture it, if that's possible. We
need to come to understand it well enough to deal with any
number of its species, if the occasion requires it. That's the only
truly practical course."
"Oh, I see," Lisa said, her face lighting with comprehension.
"Yes, of course you're right. I hope you do catch it."
Another notion occurred to him. "Perhaps you would like to
join us on the ferry, when we make our search. You certainly
have a personal interest in this matter."
"Oh, I do! But won't it be dangerous?"
"Yes, it may be, if we locate the creature. Of course it's more
likely that we won't see anything, and it will be wasted effort. We
may have to try it a number of times before we connect, if we do
connect. It's likely to be a cold, nervous vigil. I shouldn't have
mentioned it."
"Oh, I'm interested," she protested. "I just don't want to get
in your way. I wouldn't be any help at all in a crisis, I know it.
And I wouldn't know any of the people."
Was fate tempting him to overreach himself, and lose everything?
 He had to play it out and see. "You would know me,
Lisa. And perhaps others we hope to have along, like Nathan
Smallwood-" But she looked blank. "And Natalie Sheppard."
She brightened. "The policewoman! Yes. She's nice. But if
anything happened, I'd probably just scream and grab on to the
nearest person. I'm not very brave."
"I assure you that I would not mind having you grab on to
me, Lisa. Not that you would want to." He held up his splayed
fingers again, reminding her of his ugliness.
She looked at the fingers, visibly set back. "Do you also-the
teeth-?"
"Yes," he said, not showing them. "But in other respects
Martha and I are not at all alike. I don't have anything against
ordinary people."
"That's nice," she said uncertainly. It was clear that she was
somewhat in awe of him, and not in a wholly complimentary
sense. Then she decided. "But I think I would like to go. My
brother-" She clouded up again.
"I understand." It was time to leave, before he messed up this
phenomenal chance. "I think I will leave my message for
Martha. It is that our mother has died, and we must approve her
cremation so the hospital can release the body."
"Oh. Yes. I'll tell her. She should be in soon." She looked up,
meeting his gaze for a moment. "I'm sorry. For your mother."
"Thank you. I'm sorry for your brother and his wife. But I
think he'll make it."
"Thank you." She tried to smile again, but didn't succeed.
Her effort was touching, however.
Elmo turned resolutely and left the store. He did not want
Lisa to suspect how interested he was in her, lest he turn her
completely off. Probably it could come to nothing, but he would
spin out the dream as long as he could. The death of his mother,
the discovery of Lisa-they did offset each other, in their peculiar
 fashion, and that helped stabilize him.
It was a dark cloud, he thought, that lacked a silver lining. This
cloud was exceedingly dark, but the lining was very pretty.

CHAPTER      21
Hatch

AFTER DONNING SCUBA gear and an oxygen tank, Martha
climbed into one of the huge pycnogonids that waited for her in
the shallow waters off the coast of Bonavista Bay. It did not fear
her because it had become accustomed to her presence since
hatching. It saw her as the source of its food, and of pleasure and
pain.
To gain entry to the beast, she approached it from its front
and waved her arms back and forth in a signal she had worked
out so that it would recognize her. As if taking a cue from a director,
 the pycno squatted so that Martha could lift herself into
the hatch. Inside, there was room enough for her to sit comfortably.
 A battery powered light on her helmet illuminated the
eerie cavity, casting shadows off the glistening gray walls that
surrounded her. Various fibers and muscle groups contracted
along the walls as if in anticipation. The scene gave a whole new
meaning to "living room." Entirely satisfied with her cozy home
away from home, Martha closed the chitin hatch door.
The door to the pycno had been relatively simple for her to
engineer. One day she had gone to her local department store
and purchased some door hinges and knobs. Later she had cut
a hatch in the sea spider using an underwater circular saw, and
then screwed the hinges on one side and the doorknob hardware
on the other. Before she affixed the hinges she painted them the
same color as the pycno so to camouflage their presence. The
pycnogonid did not move when she cut the hole, because it had
become thoroughly accustomed to her constant cutting and
probing since its origin.
Now that she was comfortably seated within the spider she
quickly oriented herself, intimately familiar with all the bumps
and ridges of the living room. First, Martha pulled out some optical
 fibers she had implanted in the floor of the creature. The
fibers functioned as periscopes. She had mounted two such fiber
optic periscopes about a month ago. They protruded ever so
slightly from the beast's abdomen, so that she could get a crude
image of the pycnogonid's surroundings while still inside it. If
the primary periscope should break or become dirty, she could
use the second as a backup.
She stuck one end of the periscope to her specially designed
diving mask and with her hands began to rotate and twist the
tube to see all around her. Yes, all systems seemed operative.
Finally she pressed upon the ceiling of the living room to give
the pycno a signal to begin walking away from the coast and
into deeper waters. As they descended, bubbles of spent air from
the scuba tank began to accumulate in the internal cavity she sat
in and made their way out of the spider via the small cracks between
 the chitin hatch door and the main body.
Training of the pycngonid to do her whims seemed like a lifetime
 job. Gradually, as a result of rewarding the sea spider by
leading it to food within a half hour of opening its hatch, she
conditioned it so that it gladly submitted to her invasion of its
body. She also could stimulate some of the nerves which enervated
 its reproductive organs, thereby giving it a pleasurable
feeling when it did as it was instructed. She also found various
pain centers, which she used only seldom when the pycno misbehaved.

But then she found a more immediate way to influence it,
though this had its risk. She tested it once, then saved it for the
time she had need. All she required was a hypodermic and a
particularly potent drug.
The cocaine shot into the pycnogonid's dorsal tubular heart
in a concentrated injection from the syringe. Suddenly, the spider's
 plasma enzymes called cholesterases attacked the cocaine,
splitting many of the molecules to render them inert. However
the chemical onslaught was simply too great for the pycno's natural
 defenses. Within five seconds, the cocaine was coursing from
the hemocoel, a blood cavity consisting of spaces between its
muscle tissues, into the legs and returning to the heart by the
dorsal hemocoel. The pharmacological effects of the cocaine
were intense and instantaneous. The creature's tubular heart
started thumping like a conga drum played by a jazz musician.
At the same time, the cocaine molecules streaked to the brain.
Like a hot poker boring through an ice block, the cocaine penetrated
 the blood brain barrier and stimulated the primitive pleasure
 centers. Hundreds of neurons began to pulse their own
neurotransmitters in a chemical dance of pleasure. However,
the biochemical orgy lasted for a few minutes, soon to replaced
by a more ominous emotion-rage.
Yes, this would do. If natural hunger did not encourage the
creature enough to do what needed to be done, this should make
the difference. She would keep a sufficient supply with her when
she traveled with pycno.

CHAPTER      22
Storm

THE STORM DIDN'T wait.They had hardly started traveling on
the motorcycle before the seemingly small cloud shoved up past
the horizon and revealed itself as the leading edge of a monster.
Stiff gusts of wind preceded it, becoming bad enough to make
Nathan Smallwood distinctly nervous. He pulled over to the
side of the road, perforce. "I'm afraid we'll be blown into a
ditch," he said over the rising howl of air.
"Me too!" Natalie agreed immediately. "It was starting to feel
like drunken driving."
And she would be especially sensitive to that, he realized, because
 of her alcoholic ex-husband. "I'm afraid my notion of
using the motorcycle wasn't a good one."
"No, it was a good idea, just bad luck."
"Maybe we can find shelter close by. We're not far from Sunnyside,
 though I'm inclined to suspect at the moment that this
name is a misnomer." He was trying to ease the tension of an
event gone bad, and feared he wasn't succeeding.
"I don't remember any houses in this vicinity," she said. "We
had better just wait it out."
"But we'll get soaked."
"I confess I don't relish the prospect. But I'd really rather not
ride on that cycle right now."
He appreciated that; he didn't want to ride it either, in this
treacherous weather. "Maybe we can take shelter under a tree."
"No way; that's the first place lightning would strike."
She was right. So they waited as the first drops of rain spattered
 around them. Then, having tasted earth, the storm got serious,
 and there was a sudden downpour. They were completely
soaked in a moment.
"Damn, I'm sorry," he said miserably.
"Not your fault, Nathan. I suggested this region. If I'd been
satisfied to scout around closer to home-"
"If I'd been satisfied to use a car-"
"If I'd kept an eye out for the weather, instead of talking so
much-"
"I wanted to learn about you."
"We were careless, and we got soaked," she concluded. Indeed,
 her hair was sadly bedraggled and hung in lank black
tresses across her shoulders.
"I can't think of anyone with whom I'd rather get soaked."
Again he was making an effort at humor, but he realized as he
spoke that he meant it literally.
She rewarded him with a wan smile. He wished he could kiss
her, but of course anything like that was out of the question. So
they just stood there in separate islands of discomfort.
After what seemed like an interminable time there came a lull
in the storm. "Shall we risk it?" he asked her.
"Maybe we can get into Sunnyside," she agreed.
"To somewhere we can get warmed and dried."
They got on the cycle and proceeded cautiously south. But
the storm, as if realizing that they might escape, revved up again,
threatening to blow them away. Worse, there seemed to be
nowhere to stop in Sunnyside. The sky wasn't sunny, he thought,
so Sunnyside had turned its back on the world. They had to go
on to Come By Chance.
And there, just as the rain got serious, he spied an inn, or the
equivalent. A sign said VACANCY. He pulled in.
"I don't mind paying for a room, if there's a washer and
dryer," he said. "We could take turns getting our clothes fixed,
and go on when the storm abates."
"Good idea," she agreed. "We'll go Dutch." He saw that her
lips were slightly blue; his own were probably similar. They had
to get dry.
He parked the cycle under cover, hoping it would survive the
wetting it had already had. Then they entered the house. "Do
you have a-"
"Yes," the woman said immediately. "And bathrobes you two
can borrow while you're getting those things dried."
"How much-"
"Double occupancy, one night," she said, pointing to a posted
sheet with the rates.
"Oh, we'll pay for it, but we aren't staying the night," he said.
"Yes you are."
"No, we just got caught by the storm. We'll be riding back to
St. John's when it passes."
"And it will pass in the night," she said. "This is an eight hour
storm; you can see its spread on the TV weather. You don't want
to be out in it on that little cycle. Not to worry; supper and
breakfast are included in the tab, and nobody's ever complained
about our food."
He exchanged a glance with Natalie. They were obviously
stuck for it. "Two rooms, then, please," he said.
"One room is all we have."
"But we're not married," he blurted.
The woman's glance moved from him to Natalie, appraisingly.
 "But close enough to it," she decided.
He looked helplessly at Natalie, who was now shivering.
"Close enough," she agreed.
So Nathan paid for double occupancy, and the woman
showed them to the room. "The washer and dryer are down the
hall, there," she said. "I'll bring robes. Don't run the TV too
loud, too late. Supper when you're ready."
In the room, Nathan faced Natalie, quite out of sorts. "I never
anticipated-"

"I know it. Now we'll both have to strip completely, and we
can take turns using the shower. We're adults, after all. Suppose
we flip a coin for first shower?"
"You can have it," he said quickly. "You're shivering."
"All right. You take care of the bathrobes, meanwhile."
"Gladly." He turned to the door, resolutely facing away from
her. But his imagination pictured her peeling the sodden clothing
 off, stepping naked into the shower. He felt guilty for not restraining
 it.
Soon the woman came with the robes, and he accepted them
with thanks. He closed the door, but did not turn around until
he heard the shower starting. Then he took the robes to the little
 bathroom and hung one within easy reach of the shower stall.
He saw her wet jeans lying on the floor, about the only place
where they wouldn't be in the way.
He retreated to the main room and stood gazing out the window,
 not daring to touch any of the furniture in his present state.
The rain had intensified; certainly they did not want to be out
in that.
He jumped as something touched his shoulder. "Your turn,"
Natalie said. She was in her bathrobe, decorously tied. Her hair
was still wrung out straight, but looked much better now. So
did she.
"I didn't hear you," he said, bemused.
"Water is flowing outside at the same rate as inside. You would
have heard me if you had turned it off outside."
"Surely so," he agreed, smiling. He liked her humor, especially
because it was occurring in a situation that would have brought
out the worst in most women. He went into the bathroom,
peeled away his sodden things, laid them on the floor by hers,
and stepped into the shower.
The hot water was glorious. It washed away the clammy misery
 and restored the joy of living to his skin. Natalie had experienced
 the same restoration, he realized. It was intriguing to think
of her as having been so recently naked in this same shower.
This was about as close as he was ever likely to get to a naked
woman. He would not care to admit it to others, but during his
brief marriage he had never seen his wife naked. She had
changed in locked-bathroom privacy, and had worn a negligee
under the covers even for sex. He had known that wasn't normal,
 but had lacked the fortitude to protest it. And even if he had
protested, what good would it have done? A person couldn't
make another person want to have sex, or to be sexy, simply by
protesting. But Natalie was not of that type, he was sure. If she
gave herself to a man, it would be completely. He envied that
man, whoever he might be.
If only he could have the ability to make the kind of impression
 he wanted to, instead of losing altitude and crashing every
time he got near a woman he might like. He had been gratifyingly
 fortunate in being approached by Natalie, but once she
won free of this disaster she would have only a bad memory of
the occasion. Fortune always canceled out in the course of time,
as with the flips of a coin. How fitting that it happen in a place
called Come By Chance!
He turned off the shower, shook himself, reached out, found
his towel, and rubbed himself dry. He donned the other
bathrobe, drew it closed, then looked for his comb. It was beside
the sink along with his wallet and other items of his pockets. He
realized that his clothing was gone. Natalie had taken it for
cleaning. Now he saw that her rock and other items were sitting
on the other side of the sink. She had emptied her pockets similarly.
 Indeed, there was an accumulation of what must be the
contents of the belt-packet she had used in lieu of a purse; she
must be cleaning that too. It all seemed so intimate, so homey.
His side, her side. Of the sink.
Then he saw the gun. It had to be her police pistol. Where had
she carried that? He had never suspected. There it was, clean and
dry, lying on the counter beside the other things. He realized that
its holster would have gotten soaked too, so she had to fix that
before being able to carry the gun on her person again. So she
had left it with him for safekeeping, perhaps.
An emotion passed through him that he couldn't define immediately.
 He focused, and managed to get an approximate registration:
 it was the peculiar pleasure of being trusted. That gun
wasn't for any protection from him; it couldn't be, if she had left
it with him. She knew that he was the last person she had to
fear.
He went out into the room. She wasn't back yet. She would
be taking care of the laundry, his clothes and hers. It seemed best
simply to wait for her return.
He turned on the television set. In a moment he found a
mixed news/weather station, and verified what the landlady had
said: they were caught in a huge mass of rain that would take
hours to pass. He realized that he should have had the common
sense to check the weather before making an excursion like this.
But he had been so intrigued by the prospect of a day alone
with Natalie that it had never entered his mind.
Or hers either, evidently. That pleased him, despite the consequence.
 Actually, now that he was warm and dry, the consequence
 did not seem bad at all. It was merely extending his date
with Natalie, and giving it the semblance of greater intimacy
than was warranted, but pleasant for all that. However sterile this
night with her might be in reality, he would remember it with
fondness for its might-have-been quality.
She returned. "I have them in the dryer," she reported. "It
seemed pointless to take the time for a full washing cycle, when
it was only water that was the problem. So I just did a quick
rinse."
"I should have done my own," he protested.
"Do you know how to operate a dryer?"
"Yes. I'm a bachelor, remember?"
"Then if we ever have to go through this again, you can dry
the clothes. But you know, it will be a while before those trousers
are dry enough. We might as well see about supper."
"In bathrobes?"
"The landlady knows the situation. They're her robes."
He shrugged. "I'm game if you are. Though I admit I would
feel a bit easier if I had something on under the robe."
She made a quick smile. "Yes. The underwear will dry soonest.
 But let's live dangerously."
"What about your gun?" he asked.
She grimaced. "That's not a gun. It's my service revolver. A
Llama .32 automatic. But you're right; I shouldn't leave it behind."
 She stopped into the bathroom, and returned in a moment.
"But I don't see it," he said.
"Of course you don't; I don't want to advertise it. What would
the landlady think?"
What, indeed! He had no idea where or how she was wearing
it; nothing showed. That impressed him more than the fact of the
gun itself.
She led the way to the front room of the house. He followed,
bemused.
It turned out that the landlady had fixed them platters of
peas, potatoes, and roast that could be taken back to the room.
There was also a bottle of inexpensive wine. Nathan pushed it
back on the table, not taking it.
"No, it's paid for," Natalie demurred. "Might as well have it."
"But alcohol-"
"I'm not a teetotaler. I just don't like the strong stuff. Especially
 in a man. Anyway, I'm trying to discipline my aversion, so
as not to be ruled by it. This is as good a time to start as any."
"You're sure?"
"No. But take the wine."
He shrugged and took the bottle. They returned to the room.
They pulled out the small table there and sat on opposite sides,
their knees almost touching.
The meal was good. The landlady was right: there would be
no complaints from this quarter. Nathan hesitated to pour out
any wine, but Natalie went ahead and did it. She lifted her glass
in a defiant little toast and drank. He followed, reluctantly. He
feared that this was treacherous territory.
But they got through the meal without untoward event.
Nathan really enjoyed it, despite the awkwardness of having to
avert his gaze when her robe started to fall open. Fortunately she
realized what was happening and drew it closed before anything
showed. Then their knees touched again, and he was off on another
 flight of guilty fancy.
"Penny for your thoughts," she said.
He shook his head. "I was just wishing this were real."
"Things seem real enough to me. It's hard to forget that rain."
Indeed, it was still beating against the windowpane.
"I mean that our relationship would be-I don't know."
"You would like to have an affair with a woman."
"No. Well, yes, I suppose. But not a casual one. I'd like toto
 love and be loved."
"Oh. As if we were a married couple, doing this routinely."
"Yes. To have a woman in my life, without stress. A woman
like you." Then he feared he had said too much. "I mean no offense.
 It's just an idle fancy."
"Offense? It's a compliment."
"A dream."
"A good dream. Finish your drink."
He realized that he had hardly touched his wine. "I really
haven't much taste for this, tonight."
"Because of what I said this afternoon?"
"Yes. I wouldn't want you to think I would ever be that way."
"Then drink it and show me you aren't that way."
Surprised, he saw her logic. Her husband might have been a
nice man, until he drank. So she wanted to be sure that Nathan's
character didn't change for the worse when he did drink. It was
the kind of calculated risk a woman might take if she were considering
 getting serious about a man. Better one bad night, than
a bad relationship.
He lifted the glass and drank, hoping that he had read the situation
 correctly.
Natalie stood and collected the platters. "I'll return these to
the proprietor."
"I can do that."
"The landlady thinks we're on the verge of married. If we
were, I'd be doing this sort of thing. Let's not disabuse her."
"I really don't believe in relegating women to the kitchen," he
said. "I don't care what the landlady thinks."
She smiled. "Peace. You can take the breakfast dishes back."
She left the room.
Out of sorts, Nathan turned on the TV again. The evening
programs were starting. He seldom watched them, normally
having better things to do with his time, but didn't care for the
awkward silence that might otherwise come.
Natalie returned. She glanced at the TV. "I don't think there's
anything worthwhile at this hour."
"I wouldn't know," he said. "I haven't watched much TV in
years. I can turn it off."
"No, let it be. It will make us resemble normal idiots. I'll go
fetch the clothing; it should be dry by now."
"I can do that."
She shook her head. "Try to act like a normal man, Nathan,
painful as that may be." She flashed a smile, making sure he
didn't misunderstand.
He returned the smile. "One who would rather watch a rerun
of a brain dead comedy than read a new text on invertebrate paleontology."

"Exactly." She disappeared.
Soon she returned with an armful of clothing. "All dry, except
for your pants in the crotch."
"That figures." He accepted his pants, finding just a trace of
dampness in the pockets as well.
She looked at the bed. "You can have that. I'll make a place
on the floor."
"No, the bed is yours. I never meant to deprive you of comfort
 for the night."
"No, all I'll need is a pillow and a blanket. I've roughed it outside;
 this will be no problem at all."
T
71 Piers  Anthony  and   Clifford A    Pickover Spider  Legs in
"Natalie, I couldn't let you do it. The idea of you being relegated
 to the floor-"
"Because I'm a delicate violet?" she asked sharply.
"I didn't say that." But something of the kind had been in his
mind. He had never questioned her right as a woman to have the
softest place to sleep.
"I'm a policewoman. I've got a service revolver. I'm not going
to faint at the sight of a mouse. Give me the extra blanket on the
bed." She went to the bed and took hold of the blanket folded
at its foot.
He intercepted her, catching the other end of the blanket.
"No, I can't allow this!"
"Since when is it your prerogative to allow me anything? Is
this sexism in action?" She pulled on her end, making it a small
tug-of-war. In the process her robe fell open, and not to any
token degree this time.
"No! It's just that-" He paused, bemused by the distraction
of her shadowed breasts. "Well, maybe it is. I do see you as a
woman, a most appealing one, and it's just not in me to dump
you on the floor while I take the best place to sleep. Call it sexist
 if you will; I confess to it. Please, Natalie-"
She let go of the blanket. "Oh, God, I think we're having a
lovers' quarrel."
"And we're not even lovers," he agreed ruefully, trying not to
look where he shouldn't.
She paused, cocking her head as if making a decision.
"Well . . ."
He stared at her. "I meant that as a joke."
"I know you did. / didn't." Now she seemed to become aware
of the state of her bathrobe, but didn't touch it.
"What are you saying?" he asked, knowing very well what it
was, but afraid to believe it.
"Nathan, I do know what it's all about. I was married, remember.
 I had a good deal of experience. Bad experience,
mostly, but nevertheless enough to dispel a number of illusions.
There's a sexual tension between us, and maybe more. Maybe
it's time to tackle it head-on."
He hardly knew how to proceed. This was new territory for
him. "I won't deny I'd like to-that I find you attractive-very
much so-but that's just the glands. I have no intention of taking
 advantage-"
"As if I'm an innocent creature to be protected from being
dirtied by any man's lustful glance. As if I have no will of my
own, no power of decision."
He nodded. "I think you have me dead to rights. All those
courtly archaic male attitudes-I've got them. I'm guilty. At
least close up your decolletage and stop teasing me." He finally
got his eyes clear, for a moment.
"Do you know something, Nathan? I think I like those attitudes.
 I wasn't exposed to them in marriage."
"You had a bad marriage," he agreed. "As did I, though in a
quite different way."
"And you don't want to make love to a woman unless you are
prepared to marry her."
"Yes, of course."
"Then with the clear understanding that this kind of thing can
happen, let's end this quarrel and share this bed."
Nathan froze. Suddenly a phenomenally new course was
opening out before him, almost too good to be true. "If you're
sure."
"No, I'm still not sure at all. But I do like you, Nathan, more
than is wise at this stage. I think perhaps I won't freeze up with
you. It's time to find out."
He remembered her warning: that she could have an adverse
reaction to sex, because of the abusive nature of her prior sexual
experience. While he had lacked the gumption to force the issue
when his wife had denied him closeness. Closeness-what Natalie
 had said she needed a lot of. "Then perhaps you should
lead the way," he suggested.
She glanced at the TV. "Maybe leave that on. We don't know
whether the walls have ears."
"Point made." He hadn't thought of that. If they weren't supposed
 to play it too loud, that suggested that the sound did carry
to other rooms. "But the light out?"
"Yes." Then she paused. "Unless you'd like to look at me first?"
"Oh, I would, but not if it embarrasses you. I-"
She opened her robe, flashing him. It was only for about one
and a half seconds, but the startling image seemed photographic.
She was tall and slender, but definitely female throughout.
And-she had just given him more in that respect than he had
ever had before. She had not only shown him her body, she had
shown him her attitude, and that counted for an incalculable
amount.
She turned out the light as he stood, stunned. "Last one to the
bed's a rotten egg!" she exclaimed.
Oops. He hadn't thought of the problem of making his way
through the darkness. He turned toward the bed and took a
step-and banged into it immediately. It was closer than he had
judged. Overbalanced, he put his hands down to catch himselfand
 they encountered her body. He jerked them back, but that
left him unbalanced, and he fell half onto her.
"I-I'm sorry," he said awkwardly, trying to get clear. But
one hand got tangled in her robe, and brushed what surely was
interesting flesh. "I fell." He managed to haul himself somewhat
off her.
"I think I beat you, because I'm below," she said, hauling him
down again.
"Yes. I didn't mean to-to handle you like that."
She laughed. "Nathan, what do you think we're here for?"
That set him back again. "True. But I mean, shouldn't there
be some-some discretion? This is so awkward."
"You are delightfully awkward," she agreed. "You really don't
know what to do."
"Yes. I'm not at all good at this."
"In fact you may be worse than I am."
"Oh, no! That is, you're not bad, you're terrific. So much
more than I ever deserved."
"Here, let me get us clear for action." She ran her hand across
his side and shoulder, to the neckline of his robe. "Urn, no, I
can't just take it off you. We'll have to stand again. You take yours
off and I'll take mine off, and we'll meet again here in a moment.
Is it a date?"
It was his turn to laugh. "A wonderful date," he agreed.
They distangled, and got to their feet beside the bed. He drew
off his robe and let it drop to the floor, as he wasn't about to try
to cross the room to find a chair.
Then she stepped into him, her naked body addressing the
length of his. "How do you like me now?" she murmured.
"Oh, Natalie! This is a dream."
"Then kiss me, Nathan."
He wrapped his arms around her and found her lifted face.
He kissed her, transported by the sweetness of the act. Yet in a
moment he became aware of her tenseness. He drew his head
back and dropped his arms. "I think I shouldn't have taken you
literally," he said.
"Yes you should have. Kiss me again."
"But you're not ready for-"
"I'll be the judge of that. Kiss me."
He embraced her again, much more gently, and lowered his
lips to hers. This time her body slowly relaxed, melting into him.
Her arms came around him, tightening. The kiss lasted longer
than the first, and was correspondingly sweeter.
Then she broke it, moving her face to the side. "Move your
hands," she murmured. He immediately released her. "No," she
said, smiling against his cheek. "Like this." She slid her hands
down across his back and to his bare buttocks.
"But I couldn't-" He broke off, for she had firmly squeezed
one of his nether cheeks. Realizing his foolishness, he slid his
own hands down and did the same to her. He felt delightfully
naughty, and his desire for her intensified.
"Perhaps you can appreciate the appeal of such interaction,"
she said, tickling him where it counted.
"I-" He stalled out for a moment. "I think you're teasing
me, Natalie. Am I really that stuffy in my language?"
"Not really." She moved her face back into place for another
kiss. "I never realized what fun it could be to seduce an innocent
 man."
"Do what you will with me," he agreed sincerely.
"It's time for the bed."
"Yes. But will you tell me one thing first?"
"Perhaps. What's your question?"
"Where the hell are you wearing that gun?"
She burst out laughing. "And here I thought you were interested
 in my flesh! You were looking for my service revolver all the
time?"
"No. But I thought it should have been evident when you
stripped."
"I set it down under the bed a while back."
"Oh." He felt foolish.
"But I suppose I could put it on again, if that's really the way
you prefer to-"
"No need," he said quickly.
"I understand that some folk consider firearms to be quite
erotic. Masculine symbols, and all that."
"Are you teasing me again?" he demanded.
She pinched his bottom. "Nathan, would I do that to you?
Don't you trust me?"
"Can't we just forget about it?" He was both amused and embarrassed.
 "I'm sorry I asked."
"Maybe sometime I'll show you how I wear it," she said. "But
we do have other business at the moment."
"Yes, I think we do." He disengaged. But he remained mightily
 curious.
They climbed back onto the bed. But this restored his diffidence;
 he wasn't sure how to get close to her again, because the
horizontal dynamics differed from the vertical. He hesitated.
"You haven't gone to sleep?" she inquired mischievously.
He forced a laugh. "Ah, no. I'm a bit nervous."
"You realize that any other man would have done it and been
asleep by this time?"
"Yes," he said, ashamed.
"And I would have been tense and hurting," she continued.
"Instead I'm loose and laughing. You could not have found a better
 way to put me at ease."
"I would gladly take credit, if I deserved it. But-"
But she had rolled up against him and caught him with a solid
kiss. "Just close your eyes and think of peaceful green fields," she
said after a moment.
"What?"
"Advice to virgin brides. They're supposed to just lie there
and let the man have his way, they being so innocent they think
it is his kiss that makes them pregnant. They aren't even aware
of anything happening below the neckline."
"Pregnant!" he exclaimed. "I never thought of-"
"Relax, Mister Naive. I told you I'm experienced. I'm prepared."

"You are? You mean you knew we would-?"
"Hoped, perhaps. Routine precaution."
"You're so far ahead of me, I feel like a babe in the woods."
"Not to me you don't."
He was embarrassed again. "It's impossible for me not to
react, when I'm with you like this."
"I know it, and am glad of it. I doubt you'll be ignoring me
tonight."
"Ignore you!" he exclaimed. "That is beyond my imagination."

"I like the limits of your imagination."
"You have surpassed them, you seductive creature."
"The funny thing is that that was pretty much the way it was
with me, at first. I didn't know about genitalia. I did indeed go
numb below the waist."
"I don't think I could ever be unaware of the rest of your
body. I'm merely uncertain how to address it."
She rolled him over, climbing on top of him. "Fortunately I do
have a notion about that." She paused. "Do you mind my acting
or talking like this?"
"Natalie, I don't mind any aspect of you! You're the most
lovely, fascinating, exciting creature I've ever encountered. I
think I set foot at the verge of heaven when I met you, though I
was too dull to realize it right away. Now I'm well into it."
"Into what?" she inquired, wriggling competently.
"Into heaven. Just being with you-"Then he realized what
she was doing. "Oh, that was double entendre, wasn't it!"
"Tell me more about heaven," she said.
"Gladly. Being with you like this-I think I could remain this
way forever, and never leave paradise. Oh, Natalie-will you
mind if I say I love you?"
"Not at all," she said. She found his mouth for a kiss so ardent
that he was transported again. There seemed to be nothing in
the universe except the two of them and their merged lips and
bodies.
"Then I'll say it, and say it, and say it!" he said when the kiss
eased. "And not because we're in bed. It's wonderful being with
you whether it's in town or on a motorcycle or looking for
rocks."
"I wouldn't care to try this on a motorcycle."
"I mean that I'm happy to be with you no matter where we
are or what else is happening. Just waiting for the storm to pass
is great, if it's with you, or-"
"Or getting soaked?"
"I'd rather get soaked with you than be dry anywhere else," he
said fervently. "Look where it has gotten me!"
"All the way through sex," she agreed.
"Through-?" He reconsidered. "Oh, my! I didn't realize!"
He felt himself flushing. "That is, I wasn't thinking of it in exactly
 that way."
She began to laugh, her breasts shaking against his chest.
"First we had a lovers' quarrel without being lovers," she gasped.
"Then we were lovers without knowing it."
"There's just so much going on, it's hard to keep track," he
said, bemused.
"I love it." She lifted her head. "And I love you, Nathan. I'm
right here in heaven with you."
"You certainly are," he agreed, kissing her yet again.

Part 4
Phantom Killing

Let the phantoms go. We will worship them
no more. Let them cover their eyeless sockets
with their fleshless hands and fade forever
from the imaginations of man.
- ROBERT G. INGERSOLL,
The Ghosts and Other Lectures
Life is a narrow vale between the cold and
barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in
vain to look beyond the heights. We cry
aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our
wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the
unreplying dead there comes no word; but
in the night of death hope sees a star and listening
 love can hear the rustle of a wing.
- ROBERT G. INGERSOLL,
The Ghosts and Other Lectures

CHAPTER      23
Mission

LISA WAS NERVOUS as she approached the car.Then she saw the
policewoman Natalie Sheppard at the wheel, as promised, and
relaxed. She quickly opened the back door and got into the back
seat. There was a man up front beside Natalie. Both were in
civilian clothing, and looked more like a dating couple than professional
 people.
"Have you two met?" Natalie inquired as she put the car in
motion. "Nathan, this is Lisa James, who works at Martha's Fish
Store. Lisa, this is Nathan Smallwood, a zoologist who is investigating
 the monster sightings."
"Hello," Lisa said awkwardly, smiling as the man turned his
head back to see her. She was not socially adept, but her smile
normally made up for it.
"Hello, Lisa," he said. "Martha's Fish Store? I understand
that Martha can be a bit difficult to work with."
"I need the money. And I do like the fish; they're interesting."
"Uh-oh," Natalie murmured.
"Did I say something wrong?" Lisa asked, alarmed.
Nathan smiled. "By no means, Lisa. It's just that fish are my
specialty; I'm the Curator of Fishes at the Harvard Museum of
Comparative Zoology. Natalie's afraid I'm going to talk for four
hours about obscure fish."
"Oh, that's all right; Martha does that all the time. And invertebrates."
"And invertebrates," he agreed. "But I'll try to stifle it, for
now." He paused. "Forgive me if this is unkind, but I understand
that you are related to the victims of the sea spider?"
"Yes. My brother. His wife was killed, and I don't know what
he's going to do now. He really loved her."
"I know," Natalie murmured. "They were the loveliest couple
I've encountered."
"Well, we hope to catch the monster that did it," Nathan said.
"Though this may be complicated because-"
"Because you need to catch it and study it, in case there are
others like it," Lisa said, remembering what Elmo had told her.
"Exactly. Normally creatures like this do not exist in isolation,
unless this is a remarkable fluke. So while we certainly need to
protect ourselves from it, it is also a potentially remarkable bonanza
 to science."
"I just wish it hadn't gotten Kalinda," Lisa said, the hurt returning.

"Let's change the subject," Natalie said. "We have a four hour
drive to Twillingate, and we don't want to get depressed."
"Of course," Nathan agreed. "I couldn't get depressed, because
 we'll be passing through Come By Chance."
Lisa was happy to latch on to a new subject. "What's there?"
There was another silence, worrying Lisa. Then Natalie
spoke. "Might as well tell her. It's not as if there's any secret to
keep."
"As you wish," Nathan said. He turned back to Lisa. "Natalie
and I visited Come By Chance recently, and found love. We are
now a couple."
"That's nice," Lisa said. "I wish I could find that there."
Natalie laughed. "All you have to do is get caught out in a
storm on a motorcycle with the man of your choice."
"Oh-you mean like wet T-shirts?" Lisa asked dubiously.
Nathan laughed. "That would surely do it, for you. No offense."

"No offense to whom?" Natalie asked.
They all laughed. It was obvious that nice as Natalie might be,
her strength was not in her T-shirt.
"Seriously," Natalie said after a moment. "If you have a man
in mind, the key is getting with him and doing things."
"Every boy I date wants to do things," Lisa said, frowning.
"Because I'm-" She hesitated to continue.
"Because you're one strikingly lovely girl," Natalie said. "I see
the problem."
"But I don't have a man, anyway," Lisa said. "Though-"
again she hesitated.
"Oh, you do have a prospect?" Natalie inquired. "We have a
long drive, and romance is always interesting. Will you tell us
about it?"
Lisa mulled the matter over, uncertain whether to let others
know her concern. But she did need some advice. "No, not a
prospect. Trouble, maybe."
"That's even more interesting," Nathan said. "Someone's
stalking you?"
"No, I don't think so. Just-I don't know."
"There's no need to talk about it if you prefer not to," Natalie
said. "We don't mean to pry."
"It's not that. It-he's-maybe I'm imagining things."
"I doubt it," Nathan said. "A man who looks at you is bound
to have notions."
"Really?" Natalie inquired. "Maybe you had better stop looking
 at her, then."
Nathan winked at Lisa. "She's a jealous creature," he confided.
"Oh, I don't want to make any trouble!" Lisa protested.
"Lisa, we're joking," Natalie said. "We're newly in love, and
just overflowing with it. I think it's the kind of love your brother
and Kalinda had. They showed me how it was, and then I found
it for myself. Don't take our games seriously; you'll be sick of
them by the time this trip is done."
Oh. They were indeed acting much the way Garth and
Kalinda had. "It must be nice."
"Very nice," Nathan agreed.
"Well, maybe you can help me. There's this older man, and
I-I think he likes me, maybe. I don't know what to do."
"If he bothers you, call me in my official capacity," Natalie
said. "We don't have to tolerate any stalkers here in Newfoundland."

"No, he's very polite. And he's never actually said anything, or
acted fresh. So maybe it's nothing. He's a responsible person.
I'm sure he wouldn't-do anything bad."
"That depends," Natalie said. "If he's staring at you, making
you uncomfortable, it could lead to worse. A man's position
means nothing; a judge can harass women. We've had cases-"
"No, no, nothing like that. I think if I just told him to go away,
he would. But-" She lost her way again.
"But you're intrigued," Natalie said wisely.
"I guess-maybe. I mean, he's an important person, I think,
and strong, very strong. So I can't think why he would even notice
 me."
"I would tell you why, but this jealous female would put me
out of the car," Nathan said. "So just take my word, Lisa, that
there's no particular mystery there.The questions are the extent
of his interest, and your reaction to it. Do you like him?"
"I'm not sure. I would have said no, never, because there are
things about him that are pretty weird. But then he helped me
in the store, and I appreciated that, and then he left, and when
I got to thinking about it, I started wondering. It's just a feeling
that sort of grew on me. Can a man be interested in a girl, and
not give any sign?"
"Yes," Nathan and Natalie said together.
"But why? Why not either say something, or go away?"
"I can readily answer that," Nathan said. "Because he may like
her, but be afraid she will reject him if he gives any sign."
"And sometimes she feels the same way," Natalie added.
"But I'm nothing at all, and he's a fishery officer-"
"Oh my God," Nathan said. "You're not speaking of Elmo
Samules, Martha's brother?"
"Yes," she said, abashed. "How did you know?"
"I was with him when we discovered your brother's boat. I remember
 his hands. That's what bothers you, isn't it?"
"Yes. Of course I'm used to it, with Martha, and the teeth. I
know they're just the way they are. I mean, they're not monsters
or anything. But still, the idea of those hands touching me, or
kissing-"
Nathan and Natalie exchanged a glance. "We see the problem,"
 Natalie said.
"But you know, Elmo is a good man," Nathan said. "He's not
the way his sister is; she's maybe a bit twisted."
"A bit twisted?" Natalie asked. "You should have seen the
scene she made in the restaurant!"
"She does get sort of mean, sometimes," Lisa agreed. "But
she's never actually done anything to me, just made me feel real
uncomfortable. I think she doesn't much like people. Any people.
 But she treats them fair, and she does love the fish. She
spends a whole lot of time in her lab, making new fish or something.
 She can do some really weird things with sea creatures.
But Elmo doesn't seem to be like that."
"He isn't," Nathan agreed.
"What would Martha do, if her brother took an interest in
you?" Natalie asked.
"Oh, she'd fire me, for sure. I think he's the only person she
likes, though she fights with him too."
"So if he likes you, he wouldn't want to get you fired," Nathan
said.
"I suppose. But I don't know that he likes me. It's just a
feeling."
"You're in doubt because he is perhaps twice your age, and
well established," Nathan said. "And because he is careful not to
show anything."
"Yes."
"What kind of reaction do you suppose he gets from other
women?" Natalie asked.
"Oh, they wouldn't like him. Because-you know."
"So it's not surprising he figures you wouldn't like him either,"
 Natalie continued. "His course is entirely understandable.
The question is, what about yours?"
"My course?" Lisa asked, baffled.
"When I got interested in a man, I asked him out," Natalie
said. "I think in retrospect that was a good decision."
"But I couldn't-I mean I don't think I even like him. I just
don't know what to think."
"Let's look at this logically," Nathan said. "Forget about his
age; men often are interested in younger women, and it often
works out if other factors align. Let's assume that he likes you,
and if you smiled at him he'd float away on a cloud of bliss. That
he'd marry you, if you were willing. In that case you hardly need
to worry about your job; he's got a good one. You would never
need to see Martha again, so her ire wouldn't mean much."
"Though Martha might simply be wary because she doesn't
want to see her brother hurt," Natalie said. "She might change
her mind if you married him. Did you resent Kalinda?"
"No! Never!"
"So the consequences aren't necessarily bad," Nathan continued
 relentlessly. "The question is whether you can see any of
that happening. Could you learn to live with his hands and teeth,
for the sake of love and security?"
Lisa hadn't thought of it that way. If such a man were actually
within reach, and he really did love her, and marriage was possible,
 would she be able to ignore the hands? She pondered the
matter carefully, and from her depths the answer welled up: "No.
Those hands-they freak me out."
Nathan nodded. "Then I think you have your answer. Avoid
him, or tell him to go away, and it will be over. Just as long as you
know your own will."
"Yes, I guess." She saw that it did make sense. She didn't
need to worry about how Elmo might feel, if there was no
chance for a relationship anyway. She was a little sorry about it,
because she realized that it wasn't his fault, but that was just the
way it was. "Thanks."
"We aim to provide your money's worth," Nathan said, smiling.
 "We specialize in only the best quality romantic advice."
"We being sudden experts in the subject," Natalie said. "Having
 both failed in marriage before, we figure we know exactly
what to avoid."
"We have an avoidance relationship," Nathan agreed. He
leaned over and kissed her right ear. Lisa thought again of Garth
and Kalinda. How nice it must be!
They rode in silence for a time. Then Natalie spoke. "Come
By Chance."
Nathan peered out the window. "It looks less romantic in sunlight."

"We could close up the window and turn on the shower to
sound like rain," Natalie said.
"Yes! Let's do that."
"Not now," she said, laughing. "We're on business. And what
would Lisa do, meanwhile?"
"We could put her in the shower."
Lisa kept her mouth shut, not entirely comfortable with this
banter.
Natalie reached out to punch his shoulder. "You'd like that,
wouldn't you! One woman in bed, and a backup in the shower."
"One is all I could handle, I fear."
"So you'd go to the shower?"
He glanced back. "We'd better stop. I think someone's
blushing."
Natalie glanced back herself. "Make a note, Lisa: when you're
that sure of your man, you'll know its love."
"OK," Lisa said, wishing she could stifle her flush.
They passed through Come By Chance and Sunnyside and
moved on north toward Clarenville and Shoal Harbor. "These
are like the places of dreams," Nathan remarked.
"Just because you found your dream doesn't mean it's all
dreams," Natalie said.
"I found only one dream here.The other I'm still working on."
"You are looking for another woman?"
"No, the other is a literary dream. I've always wanted to write
decent-selling science fiction. I've written hundreds of strange
short stories in my spare time, but most of them are too strange
for the market."
Lisa perked up. "You write science fiction? I read that, sometimes."
"You haven't read mine, because only about one in a hundred
ever sees print."
"What are they about?"
"Oh, everything. One's about a big black bug that mates with
an old computer."
"A computer with a bug in it?" Natalie asked. "Are you punning?"
"Not in this case. This was a BIG bug. It tried to mate with
an old broken computer, but that didn't work very well. Then it
found a functioning portable computer, and mated, and died.
Then hundreds of smaller bugs flew out from it, looking for
more computers."
"So what happened?" Lisa asked, interested.
"That's where the story ends. You can figure that there's going
to be a whole lot of mischief coming up."
"/ can't. I want to see it happen."
Nathan shrugged. "Maybe that's why that story didn't
make it."
Lisa wasn't satisfied. "Maybe another one will make more
sense to me."
"OK. I wrote an absurd and mysterious story about a man
who woke up in the center of a big field of cows. Some were real
and some were robots. The robot cows protected the living ones
from being killed, but didn't worry about little things, such as if
the man just cut a bit of meat to eat from a living cow. So he survived,
 but he couldn't find his way out of the field. The funny
thing was that a number of the cows were rather odd, having
extra feet or tentacles or whatever. And the man seemed to be
gradually turning into a cow himself. He tried to pile the cows
into a mountain he could climb to see if there was any way out,
but all he could see was more cows. Then he slipped and fell
down the mountain and hit his head, losing consciousness."
"So what happened?" Lisa asked, as before.
"That's it. The reader's supposed to work it out for himself."
"Not this reader," she said, annoyed. "I like to read how it
ends."
"I think we're zeroing on your problem," Natalie said. "You're
not properly addressing the needs of your reader. This isn't like
love, where the other party eagerly makes up the difference."
Nathan shook his head, frustrated. "I thought I was."
"But you never say how it ends," Lisa repeated. "You just sort
of start it, and let it fade."
"Hear the voice of your literary critic," Natalie said without
malice. "You know, if you find a way to score on her, maybe
you'll have your key to success."
Nathan considered. "Very well, let's see if I can score on you,
Lisa," he said with half a smile.
She was getting used to their banter. "OK, do it to me," she
agreed.
"What kind of story do you like?"
"Do you have any with princesses, magic, adventure, and romance?"

"But that's not science fiction-it's fantasy."
"You asked what I like."
He pondered. "How about one with a princess, science, adventure,
 and romance?"
"OK."
"It's the year 2030, and I'm on beautiful Ganymede."
"Where?"
"Ganymede. Jupiter's major moon, about three and a quarter
thousand miles in diameter."
"How big is that?"
"You should have told her how big it is," Natalie said reprovingly.

"But-"
"In her terms, dummy."
He paused, assessing the situation. "About twice as big as
Earth's moon, measured across its disk."
"Oh, now I understand! It's big."
"Yes. I'm with lovely Princess Tau. We walk toward a green
ocean with glittering fairylike nodes of life dancing on its translucent
 surface."
"Yes," Lisa breathed.
"We are looking for advanced creatures who might share their
food with us. Then five green-skinned creatures come, riding
massive black horselike things. We fight."
"Yes. Unicorns."
"Finally I kill the last one. Princess Tau tends to my wounds.
Then we walk on to a Royal Palace. A creature comes out and
leads us into a swamp. In time I realize that he is not our friend,
and I make ready to fight him. But he attacks first, using a
weapon of chaos, and the princess and I are killed."
There was a silence.
"That's it?" Lisa finally asked.
"Yes."
"But he never even made it with the princess!"
"Well, he might have, offstage."
"And they both got killed."
"Yes. They miscalculated. Life is rough on Ganymede."
"Too rough. That's not a romance, that's a tragedy."
"I fear you aren't scoring," Natalie said.
Frustrated, Nathan faced Lisa squarely. "How would you
write it?"
She concentrated. "Gee, I don't know. I'm not a writer."
"Suppose he arrives on Ganymede, determined to explore it
and claim it for his country," Natalie suggested. "And there's
Princess Tau, who looks-well, like Lisa. But she's really an
enemy, so he better watch out."
"Yes," Lisa agreed. "So she's out to seduce him, to get his
guard down, so he can be killed, like Samson and Delilah."
"Only every time she starts to really tempt this innocent slob,"
Natalie continued, "something happens to interfere."
Spider Legs 191
"Like those five green-skinned ogres he has to fight," Lisa
said.
"And at the end she finally succeeds in seducing him, and
absorbs his body into hers," Natalie said. "He realizes as he expires
 that this is how she mates."
"So it was true love after all," Lisa finished triumphantly.
"But he dies!" Nathan protested. "I thought you didn't like
that."
"But he dies romantically," Lisa said. "If you wrote a story like
that, I would like it."
"See-you can score with Lisa," Natalie said. "All you have
to do is die for love."
Nathan sighed. "I'll think about it."
They laughed. "Maybe we have just shown him the way to ultimate
 literary success," Natalie said. "He will be world famous,
and no one will ever hear of us women, his true reason for greatness."

"Maybe," Lisa agreed, enjoying it.
They drove on, and it really didn't seem like four hours before
they reached the town of Twillingate, where the ferry to St. Anthony
 and points north was.
Elmo met them there, with Joseph Falow, the police chief.
They had come by boat. Elmo seemed hardly to notice Lisa.
Had she been wrong about him? She hoped Nathan and Natalie
would not embarrass her by saying anything about the matter.
They walked to the ferry. Lisa was always surprised by the size
of such crafts. In childhood she had somehow confused a ferry
with a tugboat, and had a mental picture of a brave little boat
trying to haul monster ships into the harbor. In reality the ferry
was massive and powerful, capable of forging through the sea
waves at amazing speed.
But the monster that had attacked her brother's boat had been
huge and horrible indeed. Suppose it attacked the ferry? Lisa
shivered, fearing the very thought.
She saw that a number of other people were boarding, including
 a party of teenagers. But they were not from St. John's,
and she didn't know any of them. So she preferred to stay fairly
close to Natalie Sheppard, if she could.
It was early evening, and the cold sea air was closing in. Lisa
was glad she had had the sense to put on blue jeans and a waterproof
 jacket. Some of those other teens were bound to get
cold before the ferry trip was done.
Soon they were all aboard, and the boat cast off its line and
moved out of the harbor. They were on their way.
But on their way to what? she wondered. Now she hoped that
they would not after all find the monster.

CHAPTER      24
Hunt

THE PYCNOGONID QUIETLY waited beneath the ferry lane between
 Twillingate and St. Anthony on the Island of Newfoundland.
 The creature was hungry: its multiple eyes trembled as
they surveyed the environment for signs of food. Fish were becoming
 scarcer.
Above the sea spider was ice-red ice. Internal pigments in
tiny plants called phytoplankton on the bottom surfaces of the
ice gave it a reddish hue and the appearance of a raspberry ice
pop. Beneath the ice was a brilliant three-dimensional cosmos
overflowing with a zoo of translucent organisms. Some looked
like jellyfish which glittered like jade. Others called tintinnids
looked like glass paraboloids. The tintinnids propelled themselves
 with hundreds of thin evanescent tentacles. Tiny krill also
swam about and fed on the red phytoplankton. The krill could
live without food for a year and survive, a much needed defense
against seasons in which phytoplankton were not plentiful. Unfortunately
 for the pycno, these organisms were too small to satisfy
 its hunger.
All around the pycnogonid were silica-spiked sponges, bright
amber spiny crabs, and ultra-thin invertebrate animals that
looked like yards of intestines. In the last few years waves of
immigrant organisms had begun to colonize the local waters,
threatening the harmony and existence of local species. Strange
species of zebra mussels, daphnia, and ruffe fish were among the
intruders. Most stowed away in the ballast water used to balance
and stabilize large ships. As the big freighters loaded their cargos
in faraway waters, they filled their ballast tanks with water from
the local seas. Later, in Newfoundland, the crew released the
ballast and any freeloading aquatic life the ship was carrying
into the local waters. The new creatures, initially coming from
places like the Caspian Sea and New Zealand, became firmly established
 along the Newfoundland coasts, competing with and
displacing native species.
The sea spider had changed over the past three years. As the
pycno matured, optic nerves were induced to grow out along its
long flexible proboscis, 20 feet in length, by various processes of
which the pycnogonid was unaware. Just in the last few days, increased
 cellular activity was occurring at the ends of the nerves.
Today the spider felt a tingling along its proboscis and suddenly
it had additional sensory input. Each optic nerve now bore a
huge eye at its end. The spider could see with less light. It was
with these new eyes that it viewed the colorful world in its nearby
environment.
Recently, beautiful red and azure sponges were beginning to
dot the ocean floor. They never moved, never visibly responded,
even as the sea spider trampled them to death in the mud on the
sea bottom. Although the sponges could not flee from the
pycno's crushing limbs, they were complex animals with a repertoire
 of behaviors. Fifty years ago, marine biologists considered
the sponge to be a plant. More recent studies showed that the
sponges were active animals, their bodies dotted with small holes
through which whiplike appendages beat and pumped water.
The holes filtered food morsels from the surrounding ocean.
For their sizes, sponges were in many ways as voracious as the
pycno. Before a sponge could gain even an ounce in body
weight, it had to filter a ton of water.
The sea spider treaded water and began to rise from the deep.
As it ascended, it fed on drifting jellyfish, white-tipped sharks, a
few blue marlins and a rare Chaenocephalus aceratus which
wore a crocodile-like nose. It particularly enjoyed the slim male
pipefish which carried the fertilized eggs of the female in its
stomach pouch.
As it continued to rise to the surface in search of more food,
a fish known as Pseudochaenichthys georgianus swam by. It oozed
slime and bared saberlike teeth. The pycnogonid did not stop to
ingest the fish. It ignored the fish, not because it feared the fish
or found it unwholesome, but because it grew bored with small
animals, which could not come close to satisfying its insatiable
needs.
The sea spider finally reached the surface where larger specimens
 might be more plentiful. Its head and proboscis rose out
of the water like a sub with a periscope. It saw a large moving object.
 Its proboscis began to undulate and twitch, as if it had a life
of its own. As if it were a separate, sentient organism.
The prey was larger than the pycnogonid. Faster than most
fish. It was a ferry boat.
About a mile away from the ferry the spider patrolled a few
feet beneath the surface of the sea. Clinging to one of its right
legs was a creature that looked like a spiral soda bottle, except
that its reproductive system flared away from its body like tendrils
 of flame. Its eyes were translucent globes filled with a luminescent
 milky substance. Although the pycno hunted using all
of its eyes and keen sense of smell, it was not aware of the spiral
creature's presence. Its multiple eyes could not see objects directly
 beneath its belly.
The sea spider was not here by accident. It had come up from
deep water as dark as blood, attracted by the ferry's lights and
engine vibrations. For a minute it became disoriented because it
had lost visual contact with the ferry's lights. There was just
darkness. Its proboscis began to dance up and down like a child
on a pogo stick. Then the creature ascended to the surface so
that its eyes poked out of the water. Its whole body began to re-
volve slowly until its eyes locked onto the ferry, and then the
creature began to swim toward the source of the sounds and
lights. It followed the ferry for a few minutes.
Its long legs were built so that it could swim as fast as the
fastest fish in the sea. Now it was using its swimming prowess to
track the ferry. To the pycno, the ferry was a big fish or sea mammal,
 and the creature followed the boat with one emotion:
hunger. Its claws contracted spasmodically. It was not intimidated
 by the ferry boat's size. The sea spider was built to feed on
all the fishes of the sea, even the largest sharks and killer whales.

CHAPTER      25
Ferry
IN THE COFFEE shop on the ferry's deck, Nathan sat with Elmo
and the two police officers Falow and Natalie around a feltcovered
 table. Natalie's hair caught the light from the overhead
bulbs and was illuminated with wild drama. She appeared tense.
In this light, she seemed tall and formidable, with a shiny smile
that was the softest thing about her. She looked out the windows
at the fading panoramic view of turquoise waters and snowcapped
 mountains, at the wondrously intricate lacework of bays,
islands, and coves. A whiff of pungent sea air drifted through the
windows. Her dark eyes moved to Elmo's.
"Do you think all of us going to the scene of the last attack
will help?" Elmo said. "What can we learn?" They all felt some
of the rough sea winds that swept like lost souls through the
open windows of the coffee shop. Nathan rose and closed a few
windows.
"If we can learn how fast the sea spider moves by interviewing
 some witnesses, it might help us to prepare some kind of
defense-or attack," Nathan said. Their destination was somewhere
 out in the darkness of the barnacled pilings and rotting
timbers of the forgotten Grey Islands 50 miles south of St. Anthony,
 near the northern tip of Newfoundland.
As the ferry pulled away from the island, all four of them
looked out the window and watched a party of cross-country
skiers gather in the town of Twillingate. The skiers were celebrating
 the completion of a 40-day, 500 mile journey across
Newfoundland, from Cut Throat point in the northern tundra
region to Twillingate on the Notre Dame Bay. By sheer luck,
they had arrived only two days after the anniversary of that bitter
 day when British explorer Robert Schmid discovered that
Norwegian explorer Gary Login had beaten him to Twillingate
by 10 days. Login survived and won fame. Schmid and his five
fellow explorers perished and won glory.
On the other bank were a number of teenagers in snow vehicles.
 Each vehicle had a large snow ski attached to the front.
Half dirt bike, half snowmobile, the vehicles made it possible for
the kids to whiz around the hills like hockey pucks on smooth
ice. Fog, with a clammy feel of something dying, rolled in from
the sea. Pine trees and railroad tracks disappeared as if dissolved
by turpentine poured on an oil painting. Faraway street lamps
became tiny eyes which blinked on and off in the gathering
gloom.
Natalie got up and went to the food counter paneled in knotty
pine. Behind it was a teenager wearing a red and white uniform.
He was brewing some coffee. "Can I get you something?" he
asked. The teenager reminded her of some of the perfect faces on
a TV show. The boy's name, Bill, was written on his uniform in
bright red letters. On the shelf behind Bill were row upon row of
fruit drink bottles. The lime green, lemon yellow, and bright orange
 colors created a miniature rainbow of glass jars which
sparkled in the fluorescent counter lights.
"What's left? Any flame-broiled salmon?" Natalie asked.
"No, just junk food," Bill said. "And a few frozen dinners."
"I'll take the cookies."
"That's a dollar,"
Natalie withdrew a dollar bill from her pocket, dropped it, and
almost banged her hand on the edge of the counter. She then
looked back over her shoulder at the three men.
"There are still some Devil Dogs at the counter, if anyone is
hungry," she yelled to them as she paid the boy for the chocolate
 snack. "Also some chocolate and honey-glazed doughnuts,
Yodels, Ring-Dings, Fez, and other healthy snacks."
"No thanks," the others said in unison.
Natalie looked up, and Nathan's gaze followed hers. High
above the counter was a small color TV. Geraldo was on.
Nathan's gaze shifted to the wall on the right where a small plaster
 crucifix hung. He wondered what that was doing there.
A poster taped to another wall of the coffee shop caught
Nathan's eye. "Look at this," he called to Natalie. The poster
showed Martha Samules, the fish store lady, wearing a floaty
peignoir shimmering with large pearls. Around her waist was an
African mud-cloth belt. Pinned to her peignoir was her famous
red button with the words FISH ARE FUN.
Natalie walked over, took Nathan's hand, and smiled. "She
sure is everywhere," she said. "I guess this is an advertisement
for her tropical fish store."
Chief Falow looked out a window and breathed deeply, perhaps
 hoping it would ease his apprehension. It didn't seem to.
They could smell decomposed wood along with the odors of
creosote and lime which frequently drifted from the paper mills
inTwillingate. Falow began to pace.
In contrast to Falow's agitated actions, Elmo sat quietly at
the table leafing through the local newspaper. Nathan and Natalie
 looked out another window, Nathan noticing the remarkable
 ice-sculpted valleys, numerous lake basins, and rounded
rock knobs-the classic signs of glaciation. In the distance he
saw a few men wearing goggles against the icy wind as they
tracked caribou, using snowmobiles.
"What are those men doing over there?" Nathan asked. From
the deep chilly waters of Newfoundland, the men were pulling
an unusual treasure: huge, century-old logs of virgin timber.
"The bottom is covered with pine," Elmo said. "Thousands of
logs sank in the harbor during turn-of-the-century lumber op-
erations. The timber is knotless and fine-grained from slow
growth. Worth a lot in today's market. The lumber is well preserved
 by low oxygen levels and the cold temperatures."
"Look over there," Falow pointed to their left. "It's a MOG
canal boat."
"Are those solar panels on the top?" Nathan asked.
"Yep, it has twenty 60-watt solar-cell modules, enough to
charge 16 lead-acid batteries."
"How long will the power last?" Elmo asked.
"The batteries should power the boat for 10 hours," Falow
replied. "The boat's not too fast. The 30-foot-long craft is designed
 for intercoastal waterways and goes only five miles per
hour."
The ferry ride started to get bumpy. The ship rocked back and
forth as if it had Parkinson's disease. Nathan glanced nervously
at Elmo.
"Why's the ride so bumpy?" Nathan asked.
"Could be the wind," Natalie said.
"Shouldn't cause a ship this big to rock," Falow said. A few of
the diners pushed away their food, no longer interested in their
hamburgers, french fries, and fish sandwiches. A glass of orange
juice fell to the floor and shattered. "I don't like this," Falow said
as he stood up and began to pace again.
"Look, some of the passengers are going to the rail of the
ship," Elmo said. "Maybe they're seasick or just curious about
the rocking motion."
"That's the worst place to be if the pycnogonid is in the vicinity,"
 Nathan said. "What if the sea spider is attracted to the hum
of the engines? Should we slow down or speed up?"
"How can we get those kids away from the rail without causing
 a panic?" Elmo asked.
"Get a hold of yourselves," Falow said. "Set a good example."
Before anyone could comment further, the captain's voice
came over the ferry's loudspeakers: "We're experiencing some
turbulence in the waters and think it best to continue at half
our usual speed. No need to worry. The crew will keep you advised
 when we know more."
"Sounds more like an airline pilot than a ship's captain," said
Elmo. "What's he mean by experiencing turbulence?"
The MOG canal boat, now about a half-mile away, seemed to
be unaffected by the water "turbulence." Whatever the problem
was, it seemed localized to the vicinity of the ferry.
"Sheppard, go to the car and get your gun," Falow said. "I'll
go find the captain and see if he can announce to the passengers
that it's best to stay away from the rails."
Nathan hoped that would be sufficient. He did not like the
feel of this at all. They had come to spy on the sea spider; was it
possible that it was spying on them?

CHAPTER      26
Captain

LISA, NOT FEELING easy about joining the others in the coffee
shop, because Elmo was there, elected to stay outside and see the
sights. She had not been on this route before, and was interested.
The sea was fairly calm but had an occasional swirl and swell.
The large ferry sloshed toward St. Anthony through gathering
veils of darkness and mist. She understood that this was actually
one of the warmer areas of Newfoundland. For four months of
the year, more northern regions were virtually inaccessible. Further
 south were the lakes and bogs, and then the big cities like
L'Anse au Meadows and Parsons Harbor.
She spied the ferry captain, and approached him. Concerned
that he would order her out of his way, she protected herself
with her most useful armament: her smile. "Hello," she said,
catching him with it as he turned at the sound of her voice.
Captain Calamari was a big man, surely rarely fearful. He
stood six feet two inches tall on the bridge and was dressed in a
seafarer sweater patterned with clipper ships. Emblazoned on
the shirt was the proud insignia of the Newfoundland Merchant
Marines. With one hand he sipped on a steaming cup of good
Jamaican coffee to jump-start his heart. He was clearly satisfied
with his job. The roar of the ocean waves invigorated him. Lisa
had heard that he was the only captain the new ferry had ever
known.
Now, spying Lisa's smile, he softened somewhat. "What can
I do for you, Miss?"
"Lisa. I'm Lisa James. I'm here with the-the monsterhunting
 party. But I'm really just a spectator. I was just admiring
 the ferry. It's such a nice boat."
If her remark lacked something in precision, it nevertheless
evoked a warm response.
"She's on her last ride of the evening," the captain said affably.
 "She's a Norwegian-built UT-904 ferry combining the speed
of a catamaran with the smooth ride of a hovercraft when traveling
 at faster speeds. Two fans beneath the craft create a fivefoot
 air cushion that is trapped by the rubber skirts at the bow
and stern section. She's a slim 128-foot-long craft that slices
through the water with little drag. She could theoretically hold
360 passengers, and her top speed is fifty knots, about fiftyseven
 miles per hour."
"Really?" Lisa asked with her eyes evincing rapt wonder. It
wasn't entirely an act; she was impressed despite her inability to
follow all of the description.
Calamari shrugged. "Such high speeds, however, are rarely attempted
 in the icy waters."
Lisa forced a laugh. "Maybe if the monster chases us."
The captain pulled a cord which activated a horn to produce
one long whistle followed by three shorts. The whistle echoed
weakly against nearby cliff walls. For almost half a minute the reverberations
 could be heard from the tall pine trees. The echoes
rolled off the fragile houses cradled between the wind-scoured
land and the wind-tossed waters of the Labrador Sea.
"That's something," Lisa breathed. "It just goes on and on."
"I don't like all the fog around my ferry," Calamari confided.
"Thick fog, created when the warm Gulf Stream and the cold
Labrador Current come together, occurs between March and
June. Today's fog in autumn, however, is unexpected and un-
usually murky. Fog used to be the quiet killer of the sea, robbing
sea captains of their most important sense: vision. Although I
prefer to use my own two eyes, the ferry is equipped with two
radar scopes to help me at times like this. Today nature seems
alive, like a phantom or an angry predator."
"You know so much," Lisa said. "No offense, but I thought
someone who ran a ferry wouldn't be, well, smart."
The ensuing discussion evoked the captain's life history. Calamari
 was the son of a Somerset Quaker and lived at Westsonsuper-Mare
 in England during his childhood before coming to
Newfoundland. His schooling was fortunate, having several exceptionally
 gifted teachers who imparted to him a keen interest
in the sea and a love of good literature. Quiet and studious by
nature, Calamari was also athletic, playing cricket and enjoying
long bike rides through the Mendip Hills. When he was 15 his
family had moved to Newfoundland, where they remained ever
since.
Meanwhile, he was busy running the ferry. He let Lisa tag
along as he did, and she appreciated that. She was learning a lot,
and much of it was interesting in ways she hadn't expected.
A bank of fog now stretched ahead of the bow of Calamari's
ferry. He strode back to the wheelhouse, issuing orders to the engine
 room to reduce speed to 20 knots. Although a ferry's captain
 was evaluated on his ability to meet the ferry schedules, he
explained, the tent of dense fog and waves demanded caution.
The danger of actually running into an object and sinking was
remote, since the ship contained eight watertight steel doors
below the A deck. This compartmentalization made the ship virtually
 unsinkable should they hit something. The ferry theoretically
 could remain afloat if three adjacent chambers were
flooded. The steel doors would keep the remaining compartments
 dry. That was comforting to know, because Lisa knew
that the monster was truly awful and powerful.
As Calamari looked out to sea a light drizzle began to mist
down. He reached for his binoculars, which he said combined an
infrared range finder and an electronic compass. Even with his
high-tech instrument, he could see very little into the night. His
spirits, like the Titanic, were sinking rapidly. Lisa's worries were
increasing accordingly.
Up on the bridge, Calamari stared at the sonar screen but
did not see any signs of the sea spider. If it was periodically flattening
 itself out near the ocean bottom with its legs spread wide,
it might avoid the sonar. So he wasn't at all sure that this monster
 chase would work. But he didn't like that inexplicable
bumping they had felt; that had never happened before.
Rudolph, the engineer, joined Calamari. They stared at the
screen for a few more minutes and looked warily at each other
like condemned criminals. No, Lisa did not like this at all.

CHAPTER      27
teens

THE COLD GUSTS of wind made the ship's Newfoundland flags
flap like ghosts in a graveyard. Keeping her hands in her pockets
 to protect them from the chilly air, Natalie Sheppard walked
over to the several people near the ferry's cold gray metallic
rail. Some were peering out into the mist. Others were actually
hanging over the rail and dangling their legs into the fog. "I'm
a police officer," Natalie said. She adopted an aggressive
machine-gun-like tone to insure compliance. "Please move away
from the rails. The seas are choppy and it's dangerous to stay by
the edge of the ferry."
They looked at her, and several began to move. Their apparent
 eagerness to stay near the rail surprised her. Although she
made no mention of the pycnogonid, certainly some of the travelers
 must have read about it in the newspapers or seen the stories
 on the local TV news. Apparently the stories provoked
curiosity rather than fear.
Natalie gazed at the motley group remaining before her. There
was a big man who looked like a lumberjack with a beer belly.
His hair glistened with grease, and he drank from a bottle of
soda pop. Most others were teenagers. One girl rocked to the
acid beat of her radio. She wore a very short skirt, and Natalie
could see the blur of her panties as she moved to the music. An-
other kid was trying to read a book by the dim light provided by
the ship's incandescent fixtures.
One teenager, wearing aviator glasses with dark gray lenses,
played aViotar, a six-stringed instrument that looked like a cross
between a violin and a guitar. He played it with a bow, as he
swayed back and forth. The Star Trek T-shirt he wore was stained
with perspiration. As he played, his glasses fell from his head
and onto the deck as a result of his gyrations. The boy was evidently
 not too skilled. Natalie usually loved Viotar music, but the
boy produced sounds like a parakeet being vacuumed out of its
cage.
When the boy finally finished his song a few of the girls
clapped. A braless woman, about eighteen years old, bobbed
along the ferry's rails toward the boy and then gave him a kiss.
He stooped down to pick up his glasses and tucked them into
the V of his shirt. He looked around with an expression of
amusement. He then popped a few peanut butter candies into
the girl's mouth and smiled.
Natalie was losing patience. With the exception of a few punk
teenage girls wearing body fatigues and fluorescent makeup,
most of the other travelers had complied with her request to
move back from the rail. One of the teenage girls' pants was so
heavily encrusted with rhinestones, it might have stood alone.
The girl looked at Natalie and raised her hands in a don't-shoot
pose.Then she brushed back some hair that the wind had blown
out of place.
"Are you hard of hearing?" Natalie said. "Move away from the
rails." The girl looked up and said, "Are you going to shoot me
if I don't move?" She spoke with a thick, clotty voice with an uneducated
 accent. If Falow were here, he probably would have
picked her up bodily and moved her. Instead Natalie decided to
let her do what she wanted.
"OK, it's your life," Natalie told the girl, using a tone of voice
one might use to intimidate a dog.
Natalie walked away and then gazed out to sea. The boat
started to rock. Then it made sounds like those of a boar being
slaughtered. Something was scratching the hull. Natalie backed
up a hasty half-step while she looked out to sea. It was so dark
out there, so forever. Well, she had done what she had come to
do, as far as feasible. She made a hasty retreat back toward the
coffee shop.
Then she spied Lisa, standing near the bridge. Was the girl
bothering the captain? She detoured to check on that. But as she
got there, she paused, seeing the men distracted by something.
She had a sick suspicion what that something might be. She
came to stand silently beside Lisa, eavesdropping.
Inside, she saw Calamari check his sonar screens, and saw a
strange green blip on the luminescent sonar display. "What is
that?" he said out loud in an expression of bewilderment to
Rudolph, a blond, stocky engineer.
"It's big," Rudolph said. "And it's moving." He seemed frustrated
 by his inability to do anything about the lurking unknown
object. Natalie knew that sonar could tell them only so much.
She knew that the term "sonar" was derived from the initial letters
 of the words sound, navigation, and ranging-and it worked
by transmitting spurts, or pings, of high-frequency sound waves
through the water. By examining the echoes from objects in the
water, Calamari could determine their distance and size. Sonar
was used in World War II as an antisubmarine device, but the
peacetime value of sonar was safe navigation in the presence of
shipwrecks, icebergs, and other submerged obstacles.
"Too big for a school of fish or a large mat of submerged seaweed."

"Perhaps a whale, but it's so close." Rudolph's pale Teutonic
features were slowly taking on the coloration of pimento cheese.
Natalie couldn't tell whether his new complexion was due to
anger or fear.
"It's right under us!" the captain exclaimed.
Natalie had seen enough. "Come on, Lisa," she said, and
started off. But the girl didn't follow. Well, maybe she would be
as safe near the captain as in the coffee shop. And now it 
occurred to her that there were other places she should check before
 seeking her own comfort.
Natalie stumbled down the steps to the ferry's parking deck,
which contained about twenty cars. Even though the area was
enclosed on two sides, she was still constantly assaulted by acid
air and brine. The ferry was new, but some of the walls of the
parking area looked old: rust bloomed like a skin rash in great
brown blotches.
Natalie moved in and out of the rows of cars with a quiet
economy of effort that would have been unusual in a woman not
trained for efficiency. Suddenly there was a heavy shaking of the
deck that made her lose her footing. She fell across the hood of
a canary yellow passenger car and finally steadied herself with
one hand against the window of a pickup truck. The truck had
a rack holding four bicycles and six pairs of skis. Natalie almost
knocked the skis off as she regained her footing.
"You OK?" a woman asked as she leaned over in the passenger
 seat of her car. Another family was huddled together in a silver
 station wagon. They looked at Natalie with nervous eyes.
"Yes, OK. Thanks," Natalie said even though she had more
than a premonition of danger. The parking lot was taking on a
new, manic quality with the approach of darkness.
Natalie turned to look out to sea-and she saw what had to
be the pycnogonid coming toward them. The spider did not
seem to hesitate as it treaded water and accelerated. Somehow
Natalie realized that the spider had no fear at all and would do
as it wished. That would not be what any human beings wished.
She withdrew her service revolver and ran upstairs to the
upper deck. Most of the passengers were looking in the opposite
direction so did not see the spider's dreadful approach. She
shouted only two words in a voice that could cause a hearing impairment:
 "It's here!"
The pycno closed fast astern. As Natalie assumed a defensive
position with her legs apart, with her gun pointed at the sea spider,
 she saw its triangular mouth open and close spasmodically,
and she saw its myriad polyhedral eyes. There was another
sound: the clicking chop of its chelicera. The spider's head was
out of water. The all-swallowing sucker waved in Natalie's direction.
 It was a hateful organism, bad smelling, a scavenger as
well as a killer.
I "Brace yourself," Natalie screamed to the passengers in the
| parking lot.
The pycno reached out of the water and cast a leg onto the
ferry's deck. Then it cast more legs, embracing the ship. It hauled
its impossibly huge body up close, like a phoenix rising from
the burning ashes. But this was the opposite: freezing water. The
gross head came up to the level of the deck. It moved its proboscis
 from right to left as if scanning the deck for signs of life.
When it ascertained that the ferry was a virtual banquet of
warm-blooded mammals, it seemed to feel something akin to
pleasure. Its legs trembled in anticipation.
Nathan and Falow appeared and ran next to Natalie. No one
fired a shot; they waited for the perfect time to aim at the primary
 brain. They all knew that careless shooting would be worse
than none, because it would only aggravate the monster.
"Colossendeis," Nathan whispered in a mixture of fear, surprise,
 and awe. "I know that species. It's a huge Colossendeis."
Natalie looked at the creature, as if mesmerized. She couldn't
shake the feeling that the huge beast was evil Fate clutching the
ship in embodied form. This was Death, Satan, Lucifer, the
Grim Reaper, the Beast. She realized her thoughts bordered on
madness, and she quickly tried to channel her emotions to something
 more productive.
Natalie edged closer to the beast. It seemed to be carefully
studying them with the cold black orbs of its multiple eyes. One
eye swiveled to Natalie and then the creature reached for her, its
multiple legs moving in such fluid harmony that it sometimes
seemed more like a perfectly functioning robot than a living,
breathing creature.
Falow raised his service revolver and fired three quick shots in
succession at the creature's body. A series of dry, sluggish reports
echoed from across the hills. Natalie drew her own revolver,
aimed, and shot. The gun barked four times, and bullets ricocheted
 off the deck peppering the spider with splinters of wood
and metal. The bullets hit the creature with a cracking sound.
Black ichor looking like tar began to ooze out of an opening in
one of its legs. The pycno proboscis shot upward to the sky and
let out a low mewing sound, and then the creature slid off the
deck and into the sea.
A split second later the elephantine pycnogonid's wake hit
the ferry, causing it to roll and toss its passengers to the deck.
Natalie grabbed for the railing, missed, and fell down on her
wet butt. The sea rose up and snarled.
Then silence. There was a faint moaning of new ice on the
edge of the sea. A miasmic mist. The oily fumes of diesel fuel and
the faint ozonic smell of rain.
Some of the passengers broke down and screamed. Others
wept. Some applauded Natalie.
"Is it dead?" Falow yelled.
"Don't know," Natalie said. "Probably wounded to the point
where it can't scramble on deck again. I wish we had a .44Magnum
 with us. These smaller caliber guns are close to useless
against a thing like that."
"Hope it can't come back," said Elmo. She hadn't seen him
arrive. He was already going back up to the deck.
They waited. The silence was eerie. Everyone was afraid to go
to the rail and peek over the edge into the water. Captain Calamari
 gazed down from his position high on the bridge.
"I don't see it," Calamari shouted. He was looking through
binoculars.
"You better radio for help," Natalie said.
"I will in a minute."
"Did you see those large eyes at the end of its proboscis?"
Nathan asked. "Normal Colossendeis don't have them. But we
know so little about the deep-sea pycnogonids. Maybe this is a
mutation. It must be able to see better than I expected."
Before Nathan could finish his thoughts, the sea spider's legs
shot out of the water and onto the deck like a cannon ball fired
from a cannon. They scattered the passengers away like pigeons.
One boy, as he ran away, shoved an older man who then
bounced off the deck as his upper dentures shot out of his
mouth. The dentures flew through the air and into Natalie's long
hair.

CHAPTER      28
Prey
BACK ON THE deck, Elmo Samules glanced at Lisa James. He
should have had more pressing concerns, considering the horror
of the situation, but in this instant he seemed able to focus only
on her. He wanted to shout warning to her as the monster's
snout loomed at the side of the ship, but was afraid he would
merely cause her to jump backward-into it. So for the moment
 it was as if he saw a snapshot, a still picture, with a little bit
of animation superimposed.
Lisa stood just a few feet away from where the creature
loomed. She was silent, with a radiant smile, somehow unaware
of the mayhem about to take place. Apparently she had been
watching the increasingly frenzied activity by the captain and his
engineer, and never thought to look out to sea. Oddly, a bright
blue butterfly seemed to follow her every step, fluttering happily
near her hair and eyes. She grinned as she let the arctic butterfly
 land on the top of her hair. She did not see the pycnogonid
behind her, but now she felt the ship tilt in its direction. The blue
butterfly fluttered away.
The monster's snout loomed above Lisa's head. Still Elmo
couldn't find the words he needed. The universe remained almost
 frozen.
Something liquid dripped on her. Drip. Drip.
Lisa suddenly revealed her incredulous fear as greenish goo
oozed from the sea spider's proboscis and splattered onto her
cheeks, hair, lips, and white coat.
And Elmo dared not move or shout, lest she react by fleeing
him and blundering right into the monster.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The pycno's two front black eyes peered at Lisa with an alien
intent. As the proboscis got closer, its unwinking eyes fixed on
hers. Someone on deck had slapped on a flood light and pointed
it at the creature. Elmo saw that its body was a bristly beige. Its
legs made a horrible clattering sound.
"Aaah," Lisa screamed as the digestive fluid burned into her
skin, putting her into extreme agony.
So close were the spider's front legs that they dripped salt
water onto her white windbreaker and blue jeans. The punk girl
with the rhinestones immediately took action and threw a chair
at the spider, which had no immediate effect. She threw another
chair. After a few seconds' pause the spider reacted, as if it were
surprised at resistance, at a defense. One of its leg spikes caught
the girl in the shoulder, slicing above her ribs and puncturing
some major blood vessels. Then the entire leg came down on the
rhinestone girl's head with a terrible raking that seemed to take
much of the hair and skin off.
Lisa collapsed to the floor in near shock, and lay motionless.
She was pale, like an angel sculpted in white marble in a giant
cathedral. Her white coat spread open like wings. Her beautiful
shiny hair trailed along the deck like golden seaweed floating in
a still sea. Elmo couldn't draw his attention from her.
Another woman watched only a few feet away but did nothing.
 Her hair, a lifeless shade of black, was mostly covered by a
chador. She surveyed the scene for a moment, her granite eyes
locked on the pycno. She screamed something in Arabic, but
did not run. She found a bucket with some water and dashed it
onto Lisa, diluting and washing away the burning digestive
juices. But that brought her into range of the spider. One of the
legs came down on her arm, severing major nerves and render-
ing her arm useless. She took one look at the arm flopping at her
side and continued to scream.
Finally Elmo broke out of his weird stasis. He took a fire ax
and ran toward the sea spider. "Haa," he bellowed as the ax
came down on one of its legs. The pycno quickly moved its leg,
carrying with it the ax, which had sunk a few inches into its
flesh.
The spider's proboscis started to shake as the creature now
went for Elmo. Elmo backed up, slipped, and was struck on his
ribs by one of the thing's legs. The ax cut might have taken some
of the power out of the spider's strike, which would ordinarily
have killed him. A leg spike bounced off his rib cage, and he felt
something snap inside. He rolled away, got up, and was struck
again in the ribs. The throbbing hurt exploded into a lightning
bolt of seemingly scorched nerves. He bit his lip and started to
scream.
"Damnnnnn!" Elmo bellowed. He tasted blood and was getting
 dizzy.
Lisa came out of her stupor and started to crawl away. Her
pert nose wrinkled as the odor of the creature hit her.
Now Elmo saw Nathan looking for a weapon. Elmo himself
was weaponless and hurt, but he edged closer to Lisa, needing
to try to help her. He was already so close he thought he could
see the girl's pulse pounding rapidly in an artery in her forehead.
Or was he imagining it, in the stupor of his pain?
Meanwhile Nathan was there and charging in. The man certainly
 didn't lack courage! But in his distraction he tripped over
a gull that had frozen solid to the deck. Its mouth was opened in
a horrible rictus as if caught in a scream. Its eyes bulged as if in
protest against a Newfoundland chill too cold for even arctic
gulls to survive. As he tripped, Nathan hit his knee on the gull's
beak.
"Damn," he cursed.
Elmo knew how he felt. Everything was going wrong. They
were trying to help each other, and only getting themselves hurt.
The trained police had been better, on the parking deck below;
they had taken time to aim and fire their guns, driving the monster
 off for a moment.
Elmo looked back to Lisa. Another of the pycno's legs moved
toward the girl, and then its terminal claw scissored forward and
pinched her outstretched hand. Her thumb seemed to unhinge
in a horrible spray of blood. A scream bubbled in her throat,
frothing on her tongue like specks of sea foam. Elmo thought he
felt the amputation in his own hand. He tried to get up, so as to
lurch forward and reach her, but could not. All he could do was
watch her.
Another leg scratched her forehead, and blood began to
trickle down into her eye. For a second Elmo saw the spider as
if through her eye, through a crimson lens.
"Help me," Lisa screamed as she wiped the blood away. She
dodged as a leg crashed to the deck near her. Another leg
crashed down behind her, and she dodged again. It was as if the
creature were toying with her as it tried to smash her face, break
her teeth, shatter her legs, making it impossible for her ever to
walk again. Actually, Elmo realized, it simply couldn't locate her
readily, because of the awkwardness of having to reach up across
the deck and haul its snout up there. The monster was working
hard to hold on to the ferry, so was clumsy about grabbing
morsels from its deck. But they could not depend on that for
very long, he feared.
The creature simply ignored Elmo, who could not move to
help Lisa. He needed not only more strength, but some effective
weapon. So for the moment he successfully wedged himself behind
 a table. He cast frantically about for something, anything
that might do. Anything to throw, to prod with, or merely to
heave into the maw and perhaps block it.
The pycno turned its full attention to Lisa. "Please!" the girl
implored. Elmo realized with horror that it was her sounds it was
orienting on, as much as anything; every time she screamed or
cried for help, it closed on her more accurately.
The spider then grabbed Lisa around the waist. Her left arm
was twisted at an odd angle. Her lipstick-red lips peeled back
from her teeth and a long howl burst from somewhere deep
within her throat: "Aaaaah." The pycno's listless black eyes
stared into her own. Blood was running from her forehead and
her windbreaker was mostly torn off.
"Please," Lisa screamed. Elmo tried to lurch to his feet, but
collapsed before getting anywhere. He had to watch the confrontation,
 helplessly. A claw like a pair of wire cutters reached
out and grabbed her arm and turned her toward the creature's
proboscis. The proboscis opened wide and Elmo could smell
the stink of ammonia and rotting meat. He knew it would be
much worse for Lisa. She held her arms in front of her in an automatic
 defensive maneuver which had little effect. Seconds
seemed to turn to hours.
Next he saw the proboscis touch her arms, at first gently like
a moist warm rag, but then more forcefully.
Suddenly, up, up, up the proboscis carried her into the air.
She screamed again, despairingly. Then the pycno threw her into
the ice-cold sea. It happened in just an instant. The girl had no
time to react. The pycno looked at the passengers on the deck,
seemed to hesitate, but then let go of the boat and sank back into
the water, in search of the girl.
Elmo's whole body seemed to go numb, as if the water were
chilling him to insensitivity, instead of her. Lisa-dying! He staggered
 to his feet, determined to do something, anything, if only
to throw himself into the sea after her. If all else failed, at least
he would die with her.
"Get the passengers inside the parking area or the coffee
shop," Falow shouted to Natalie and Calamari. Even though
Falow wore a wool cap, the sweat on his scalp looked icy. Shivers
 wracked his body visibly as he ran to the rail and looked
over.
Elmo followed him, clutching at his side. He might not feel
the pain, but his body did. He reached the rail and stared out at
the roiling water. Lisa, Lisa-where was she?
The boat bumped. Jellyfish creatures with purple bladders
floated to the surface of the black sea, swirling in an eddy cur-
rent. They looked a little bit like Portuguese men-o'-war. Seconds
 later a vast white mass, perhaps their mother, joined the jellyfish.
 Its myriad long arms curled and twisted like a nest of boa
constrictors.
"What are those weird things?" Elmo shouted as he scanned
the ocean for the girl. He had spent a great deal of time at sea,
but never seen anything like this before.
"The seas around here seem to have a lot of strange organisms
lately," Natalie said through clenched teeth.
Then his desperate gaze caught a glimpse of white. Her tattered
 windbreaker! It had to be!
"There she is!" Elmo screamed. He saw Lisa about fifteen
feet from the ferry. The gloom was tenebrous, making it difficult
to see her against the dark waves, despite her bright jacket. She
was still quite conscious and trying to swim to the boat. Cold
drops of sea water stung her face as the freezing wind drove
them against her cheeks and forehead. She screamed in surprise,
 this time because the arctic bath chilled her bones. Her
long red hair glimmered under a lacework shawl of ice crystals.
Each stroke of her arm and each kick of her legs seemed to be
slower than the last. The intense cold of the water was rapidly
draining her strength. She was losing her energy amidst the jewels
 of ice which drifted by like a slow swarm of bees. Again the
shock of the frigid sea against her face made her wince with pain
and sapped her strength. It was if her limbs were run by hidden
clock springs which needed to be rewound.
Without thinking further, Elmo climbed down a rope ladder
at the side of the ferry. The crippling effect of his injuries was
fading; he knew he had to act right now if it was humanly possible.

"Quick, swim to me," he cried to the girl. He held out his
hand, the oddly shaped fingers stark against the heaving background
 of the sea.
The sheer physical smoothness of the jellyfish near the girl
was alien, intimidating. The pycno was nowhere in sight. Soon
something resembling a green and red mobius ribbon with
blue eyes and a twist of greasy hair came out of the depths
and wriggled closer to the girl. The girl swam as fast as she could
to the edge of the ladder where Elmo knelt. She came closer
to him.
Closer. But still out of reach-and he couldn't go to her, because
 he depended on his hold on the ladder. If he lost that hold
with his other hand, they would both be helpless in the water.
Her arms were out, reaching for Elmo; her eyes pleaded for
help, and she was moaning. Several spiral soda-bottle creatures
also emerged and drifted toward her. The translucent globes of
their eyes grew slightly in size as they approached.
Then the pycno emerged and treaded water. Now its eyes
looked like dark plumbs. Its proboscis pointed in the girl's direction,
 as the orifice at the end dripped a pale fluid.
The harbor seemed even colder, and Elmo knew that Lisa
felt the last vestiges of heat leaving her body. Her fear became
panic as her screams escalated in volume. Her eyes were sunken.
But she was still moving forward, finally coming into the range
of his long fingers.
Just as Elmo got hold of the girl's hand, their grips locking, the
pycno grabbed her left leg. She kicked, weakly. The vein in her
leg started to leak more blood into the ocean. The shoe on her
other foot came off and floated in the waves like a gull on the
water.
Elmo pulled. The pycno pulled. The girl moaned.
"Elmo, take this," Nathan shouted. Elmo's breath caught in
his throat as he saw a crowbar. The girl was now holding onto
him with both her frozen hands. Below her, the sea appeared
bottomless, like a black hole in a vast space.
"I can't! I can't let go of the ladder or Lisa!"
"But the legs!" Nathan cried, as if this were new information.
"They're pulling on her!"
"I can't hold her much longer!" Elmo yelled. Sea water
poured out of the girl's mouth along with vomit that was now
rising from her stomach like lava from a volcano.
The pycno started to grab her thigh.
Nathan bashed ineffectively at it with the crowbar. He
couldn't reach it from above.
"I'll shoot it," Natalie said and took a few shots at the creature
from her position on deck.
This wasn't getting them anywhere. They couldn't win a tugof-war
 with the monstrous spider. Elmo realized that he would
have to gamble. Suddenly he let go of Lisa for a second, grabbed
the crowbar from Nathan with his right hand, and swung it
down onto the pycno's retreating leg. But nothing seemed to
stop the sea predator.
A slimy brown thing flapped out of the dark sea and pulled at
the long hair of the woman. It was the pycno's bumpy tongue.
Lisa moaned, then started making little sounds of horror, like
the bleats of a sheep being led to slaughter, as the pycno yanked
on her, forcing her to gaze into black eyes on the end of its long
pulsating proboscis.
Elmo looked where she looked, sharing her horror. The proboscis
 was smooth and fleshy. As he gazed into the enlarging
opening before her he thought he saw something scurrying frantically
 within the opening of the sucking appendage. Was it a
parasite, or the living remains of some non-digested prey? He
saw how Lisa's revulsion increased, her mind shattered. The
ocean level was just below her chin as he saw cakes of ice floating
 away on the currents and waves. He saw her became drowsy
as hypothermia took effect.
Water gurgled and foamed around the girl's mouth, and she
stopped struggling against the deadly undertow. Elmo almost
felt linked to her mind, sharing her dying thoughts. Keeping her
head above water seemed a pointless task. Above her the dark
sky looked like an ocean, as cold and dangerous as the one
below. The beats of her heart bounced round like a marble in a
roulette wheel: this was cardiovascular destabilization. Both her
body and mind were shutting down. In her hypothermic stupor,
the murmuring waves seemed to beckon to her like the voices of
angels.
Finally the pycno pulled Lisa into the cold ebony sea. As she
plummeted down into the darkness, bubbles rose to the surface.
The last thing he saw through his cold disoriented eyes was the
blue glow of bioluminescent jellyfish. They swarmed around her
face, eerie and supernatural, like a mysterious radiance of a divine
 presence.
"No!" Elmo hurled the crowbar away, let go of the rope ladder,
 and dived after her. He didn't even feel the shock of the
water; he had been half immersed in it anyway. But his dive
wasn't effective; he realized belatedly that he should have done
it from the deck, so as to gain some momentum to carry him
below the surface. In a moment he was gasping for air amidst the
waves.
"Elmo! Here!"
Dazed, he turned his head. There was Joseph Falow, in a
lifeboat. The man had a coil of rope. Good idea!
The boat nudged up to him as he faced it. "Tie rope around
me!" Elmo gasped. "Get me dead weight!"
"Got it." Falow quickly looped the rope around Elmo's trunk,
then handed him the anchor. Elmo took a breath, clutched the
anchor to him, and sank down into the freezing brine.
In a moment he saw Lisa. She was relaxed in her unconsciousness,
 her hair floating around her head in a reddish cloud.
Beautiful even in death. Except that he wasn't going to let her be
dead.
He kicked with his feet, still clinging to the anchor. He was
falling through the water, but able to move laterally this way. He
had to get over the pycno. He saw the monster's action, in slow
motion. One huge spider leg was drawing the girl in to the snout.
The monster didn't seem hurried, being certain of its prey.
Elmo reached the leg. He hooked the anchor over it and let
go. Of course the anchor could pull on the elephant-sized leg just
slightly, but it was enough for the pycnogonid to take notice. As
the creature grew curious about the anchor, Elmo caught hold
of the girl by her nearest extended arm and hauled her in to
him as hard as he could.
The leg felt the jerk and moved. It caught at the anchor, per-
haps taking it for the girl. Lisa came free. Elmo kicked his feet
and stroked with his free arm, heading upward, hauling the girl
along with him. He was aware that the spider could readily intercept
 them and eat them both. But it was an animal, and
tended to focus on one thing at a time. Right now it was the anchor.
 He used his fading energy to get them as far as he could,
saving nothing for the future.
He reached the surface. He lifted Lisa as high as he couldand
 his last strength gave out. He found himself fading, his sight
dimming. He would drown-but he had saved Lisa. That was
what counted.
Then she was roughly hauled from his flaccid grasp. He realized
 that he had failed after all, and now he had no reserves to
summon. The agony of his rib cage, suppressed for the duration
of his effort, was now surging back to overwhelm him. No choice
but to let it happen.
"Get him up!" And hands were on him, hauling him out of
the water. Falow, on the lifeboat-but where was Lisa?
"Lisa," he gasped as he flopped into the boat.
"We've got her," Falow said. "We stopped the bleeding. Giving
 her artificial respiration. She'll make it."
That was all he needed to hear. Elmo let go of the last vestige
of his consciousness.

CHAPTER      29
Shop

"THAT WAS A brave thing he did," Natalie said. They all looked
over the rail as the lifeboat was hauled up to the deck. There was
no sign of the sea spider. Occasionally they felt jerking bumps
coming from the underside of the ferry, but they did not want to
think about what it probably signified-meat being torn away
from the body, and limbs torn asunder. Lisa and Elmo had been
saved, but they were not the only ones who had gone overboard.
The captain was trying to make a survey, but all they knew was
that there were several people gone. Their body parts now made
a trail through the cold sea as wide as the ferry lane, for all
sharks.
"Get this boat out of here fast!" Falow shouted to Captain
Calamari as he clambered out of the lifeboat.
"Top speed is 50 knots. It will take a minute," Calamari
shouted back.
"Do you have any explosives or flare guns?"
"Just a few flare guns."
"OK, get them out; we may need them."
Many hands took hold of the unconscious man and girl and
carried them across the deck. "Take them to the coffee shop,"
Falow directed. "It's the best place to attend to them."
"It's warm," Natalie said.That was the most important thing,
for people who had been almost fatally chilled.
The ferry's engines made a humming noise, growing louder
and louder, passing through a cry and into a scream. Natalie saw
Captain Calamari looking at Rudolph the engineer.
"Something's slowing the ferry's forward motion," Rudolph
said.
"I can guess what it is," Calamari said with an exasperated
sigh.
Natalie followed the bodies into the coffee shop. Both were
breathing, but neither looked good. Lisa was missing her left
thumb and had scrapes all over her raggedly clothed body. There
was blood on her leg from the cut vein. Elmo had a great bruise
on his chest, and his breathing was labored; he probably had
several broken ribs. "I'll tend to Lisa," she said, kneeling by the
girl as the others cleared back. "You check Elmo, Nathan." She
tuned out the others.
She checked Lisa's hand. There was little bleeding; that was
one benefit of the freezing water. But the girl would never have
a thumb again. Then she felt around Lisa's body, heedless of
any proprieties; she needed to know whether any bones were
broken or skin torn. There didn't seem to be any such damage,
apart from scrapes across her abdomen where the spider had
picked her up. Then she bandaged the rip on the leg, stanching
the bleeding there. It would have been worse, but for the numbing
 cold.
As Natalie was about to do the same for the shorn hand, Lisa
groaned and opened her eyes. Natalie shook her head in appreciation;
 the young had marvelous powers of recovery. "You're
safe," she said soothingly. "Elmo rescued you."
"Elmo," the girl repeated. "I saw-his hand. Coming to
save me."
Now Elmo stirred, hearing his name. "Lisa?"
"I gotta get up," Lisa gasped, trying to sit.
"Relax," Natalie said, pushing her back down onto the mat.
"It's over. You're in the ferry, in the coffee shop."
"I know. Gotta. Get to. Elmo." She struggled up again.
Natalie sighed, and helped her, providing support. Lisa made
it to her hands and knees and crawled over to where Elmo lay.
She winced as her thumbless hand ground into the deck, but
didn't stop. She halted with her head over his. "You saved me,"
she said.
Elmo managed a smile. "I had to," he replied.
Lisa put her head down to his. She kissed him on the mouth.
Then she collapsed, exhausted.
"I think Lisa has changed her mind," Natalie murmured.
"I agree," Nathan said, handing her a bandage.
Elmo's eyes moved to her, questioningly.
"She was aware of your interest, but she didn't like your
hands," Natalie said, sure that she was not now betraying a confidence.
 She lifted Lisa's mutilated hand and got to work on it.
"Now she has lost her thumb, and I think it's safe to say that she
believes you will not hold that against her."
"That, too," Lisa breathed.
"But-" Elmo protested weakly.
"I think the two of you need to talk. Can we get you to a
chair? I think you'll be more comfortable, if you can manage it."
Nathan helped Elmo sit up, and then to stagger a few steps
across the room. Natalie helped Lisa similarly.
Natalie checked the bandages on the abrasions which covered
 Elmo's right side, where the pycnogonid scratched him.
The man was sitting in a metal chair as he planted his feet flat
on the floor and gripped the edges of his seat.
"Ouch," Elmo said. As Natalie adjusted the last bandage on
his skin, the flesh around his cheeks went white. His head was a
dull red, gorged with blood. That was one reason she had
thought it best to get him vertical.
"Just sit there for a while and rest," Natalie said. "I'm sorry
we don't have a medic here, but in my first-aid opinion you
will survive if you take it easy until we can get you to the hospital."

"I don't think I could move if I wanted to," Elmo replied. His
long teeth were clenched tightly together and his voice was
shaky.
Lisa, now sitting beside him, reached for his hand with her
bandaged hand. "When I was drowning, I had a vision," she
said, her voice getting stronger. "I saw myself, six years of age,
at play in the pine forest by my white and brick colonial house.
The pine needles on the forest floor rustled as I walked through
them with my sneakers. My parents held my hands. My frisky
German shepherd dog, Princess, wagged her tail and followed
us. It was sort of nice. Then I woke on the boat, feeling awful,
and I knew you had saved me."
Elmo smiled wanly. "Sorry about that."
Falow, Nathan, and Natalie retreated to a table far enough
distant to give the couple some privacy, though near enough so
that they could offer help swiftly if necessary. At their table was
a huge ashtray. Natalie looked with distaste at the smoking cigar
sitting in the ashtray but did not get up to remove it. She became
aware of the tension in the coffee shop. The ferry passengers
were now well aware that they faced a threat as horrible as any
they could have imagined.
Bill, the teenage boy behind the counter, produced a giantsized
 pink bottle of anti-diarrheal medication. He stared at the
label for a few seconds, shook his head, and put the bottle back
on the stand full of medicines. One of the men on a stool at the
counter pealed nervous laughter so loud that other people at
the counter-fishermen and tourists for the most part-craned
around. The laughing man looked as if he were going to have a
nervous breakdown.
"Look, we may only have a few minutes before it attacks
again," Nathan said. "Even with the ferry moving at full speed,
it may be able to catch us." He sketched a diagram on a piece of
paper showing the anatomy of the sea spider. "Here's what I
think the insides of this monster look like, according to what I
know from smaller species."
The others listened intently as he pointed to the diagram with
his pencil. "I've circled areas which you should aim for," Nathan
continued. "The small palp legs are located just behind the chelicerae
 and have sensory hairs. If you hit these, the animal will
probably be in extreme pain and unable to attack. The small leg
just behind this is the ovigerous leg. It's used by the male to
carry the female's eggs. If you knock this out, it will prevent the
monster from breeding. The nervous system is made up of a
dorsal brain, circumesophageal ring, paired ventral gangila, and
ventral nerve cords. If you hit the cord, it will probably paralyze
some of the legs. But try to hit the main brain."
"How about the legs?" Natalie asked. "Can we cripple it by
taking out the legs?"
"Each of the huge walking legs contains eight independent
segments. They're quite tough, and the pycnogonid can survive
and walk even if a few of the legs are completely destroyed.
Don't bother aiming for the big legs."
"What about the eyes?"
"Its five eyes are located far apart, helping it to triangulate on
prey. Very efficient. But it's doubtful you'll be able to knock out
all five of them. Go for the brain or those strange eyes on its proboscis.
 It evidently uses them to zero in on people on the deck."
When she was sure she understood their best strategy of attack,
 Natalie walked over to the counter, away from Nathan and
Elmo, curious to hear what the passengers were talking about.
Bill motioned her to join them.
"Coffee?" he said.
"Please," said Natalie. The boy placed a cup on the chipped
Formica counter and poured hot coffee into it. A few of the
other men at the counter had sodas. The lumberjack with the
beer belly was eating from an aluminum frozen dinner tray.
"How about some pumpkin pie to go with that?" The boy
spoke quickly, obviously nervous. "Homemade. Pumpkins from
Tiffany's orchard over on Main Street. Picked today."
"No, thanks," Natalie said. "How can anyone think about eating?"
 The boy did not answer her, and just nodded his head.
"Why don't we all just stay in the coffee shop until morning?"
 another passenger asked. "It can't get us in here."
"That's just what we're doing," said Bryan, the lumberjack,
in a pensive tone. Bryan was a big, almost handsome man with
the ruddy complexion and strong presence of a man who often
worked in the woods. "Just stay in here until someone rescues us."
"Good idea," Natalie said. "You should stay in here with the
others. But we're going to try to destroy it if it attacks againbefore
 it has a chance to destroy parts of the ship or break
through some of the wooden doors and glass windows. Assuming
 that we don't get moving fast again soon, and leave it behind."
"Think you'll kill it?" the boy asked.
"Yes," Natalie said. But she was afraid the boy detected a hesitancy
 in her voice that was not at all reassuring.

CHAPTER      30
Hunger

UNDER THE SEA, delicate, evanescent sea anemones flowered
beneath the pycnogonid's legs. Polyps were in bloom, undulating
 to some unheard rhythm, combing the sea water with long,
slender tentacles. Nearby were strange corals. Some had convoluted
 surfaces, like the sulci of a human brain. From within the
convolutions rose thin worms resembling red strands of rubber.
The sea floor looked like a living carpet. A few small fish patrolled,
 searching for food, but shied away from the spider whenever
 it moved its legs. Some were large-barracudas and the
like.
The sea spider looked up and saw a golden cone of light cut
through the water. It was the light from a high-powered flashlight
 held by a passenger on the ferry. As the light penetrated the
clear waters it reflected off a school of small fish, which sparkled
like stars.
Suddenly the billowing skirts of a lion's mane jellyfish glimmered
 beneath a small vault of ice. The jellyfish was a mobile
restaurant for small crustaceans, which snatched scraps of food
from the jellyfish's open maw. This area of the sea seemed to be
a zoo of life, because of the abundant nutrients and rich oxygen
concentration.
As the jellyfish drifted, its skein of stinging tentacles touched

the pycno's back leg, but the sea spider did not feel any pain.
More important were the distressing signals from other parts of
its body. For the first time, the spider felt pain from some of the
gunshot wounds. A new experience. No critical nerve paths had
been destroyed, so it retained full mobility.
But the pycno was still hungry. The moving cone of light from
the ferry acted as a magnet, a beacon, for the creature. It rose
again from the frigid blackness to intercept the ferry.
The sea spider rose through a cloud of four-inch ctenophores,
which looked like a herd of half-inflated footballs gliding in the
icy sea. It rose through cigar-shaped shell-less snails known as
sea butterflies.
It ascended through a world of teeming life, but its only purpose
 now was to cause death.

CHAPTER      31
Snack

A LEG CAME over the rail. Then another, followed by the great
snout. Another siege was starting.
Natalie saw it. She had her Llama .32 automatic, but only one
more bullet. Her mouth opened wide, making a short guttural
sound. The muzzle of her gun wandered back and forth. She
trained the gun at the head as it appeared, knelt, and fired.
She missed. The head had made an unpredictable jerk, dropping
 back down into the water. The pycnogonid couldn't have
timed it better if it had tried. It was as if fate was with it.
The boy with the viotar had just removed his hexagonal rimless
 glasses, cleaned them, and put them back in place, hiding
two pink spots high up on his nose. Suddenly he saw the sea spider
 and his glasses dropped as he screamed. One lens cracked.
He should have run immediately, but instead he got down to
scramble for his glasses.
The creature's sinewy organs of manipulation groped for the
boy and grabbed him around the thigh. The pycno's leg tapered
from a thickness of a human hand at the point where it held the
boy to more than two feet in diameter where it disappeared over
the rail and descended into the sea. It was brown on top and
pearl white on its underside, where various sharp spines protruded.
The boy looked to his right, seeing what had grabbed him. His
eyes opened wide. "Get it off me! Take this friggin' thing away!"
"Oh God," Nathan whispered.
The leg began to pull the boy toward the rail. From the boy's
pocket fell a small aerosol bottle of breath freshener. The deck
began to leave splinters on his arms. As he was just about to be
pulled into the sea, he grabbed onto the rail and yanked himself
back onto the deck.
"Help," he yelled as he looked at his hand. A sharp crescent
of metal on the rail had torn the nail on his thumb right off; all
that remained was a bleeding half-circle of ragged flesh. The leg
pulled some more.
"Hey, help me. Do something," he cried in shock and pain. As
he opened his mouth, some of the smooth bristles from the creature's
 leg entered it, caressing his tongue and gums. A quick
gagging noise came from his throat. "Damn it, do something."
One of the bristles abraded his lips, surely igniting sparks of pain
all the way to his skull.
"Christ," Nathan said as he came out of the coffee shop to see
what was happening.
Natalie was the closest, and she grabbed the boy around
under his armpits and pulled as hard as she could. For a second
 she made some progress, but than the leg began to exert
even more force. The spider might be somewhat haphazard
when it cast about, but once it had something, it had enormous
 power. Both Natalie and the boy were drawn across the
deck. A half empty pack of chewing gum fell from another of
the boy's pockets.
Nathan joined them and pounded on the pycno's leg with a
ballpoint pen. It was all he had at the moment. For a second it
seemed to have an effect, surprisingly, but he realized it was
probably because the spider was trying to take stock of this
minor distraction.
Then another giant leg rose out of the water toward them. It
grabbed a chunk of Natalie's hair and pulled it out by the roots.
Just as suddenly as it appeared, this second leg disappeared back
into the water, with the black hair still in its grip. Natalie thought
of all those shampoo commercials about split ends, and started
to laugh, and then to scream.
The leg appeared again and began to make scratching sounds
on the ferry's deck. The tip of the leg slapped Nathan in his side.
It felt as if he had been hit by a cold hammer. Then it slammed
Natalie and grabbed her arm.
"Someone give us a hand," Nathan shouted, not having time
to consider how strange those five words sounded in this context.

But no one came. Those who hadn't sensibly fled remained
too terrified to respond effectively. They just stared, backing
away. Where was Falow? Nathan thought.
Natalie looked down and saw the first leg around the boy's
hips. It was working its way into his skin. The boy grimaced in
pain as some of the spikes tore like razors through the fabric of
his Star Trek T-shirt. The spikes dripped some clear liquid. Where
the liquid touched the boy's shirt, tiny holes appeared. One spike
dug deep into his shoulder and blood began to ooze from the
deep hole the leg spikes left.
Natalie tried to wedge her hands beneath the creature's leg to
dislodge it. Nathan saw her grit her teeth; she should have had
heavy gloves for this, because the surface was rough and spiked
throughout.
Meanwhile the motion across the deck continued. Now the
boy's legs dangled over the ferry's side. One of his sneakers fell
into the sea. Natalie and Nathan continued to pull at the boy
while trying to avoid the creature's legs. Nathan wished he had
the crowbar that had been lost in the sea.
From out of the ocean appeared the pycno's proboscis. It was
black and muscular like an elephant's trunk, except it was much
bigger. It slowly made its way to the boy like a snake crawling toward
 its prey. Halfway from the end of the proboscis were two
large death-bright eyes, which began to swivel in the direction of
the boy. The beast hung there, half on the deck, much bigger
than an African elephant-still, fierce, colossal.
The pycno waited a moment in all its majesty, and then it
slowly moved. When the proboscis was a foot from the boy's
face, his screams became continuous. Then he just gave up,
stopped screaming, as if he could scream no longer. His eyes
bulged. He collapsed on the deck, as far as the leg's grip on him
allowed. Other legs were closing in, forcing both Nathan and
Natalie to let go of the boy and retreat, lest they suffer the same
fate. The power of the monster seemed overwhelming.
The proboscis stroked the boy's belly-then seemed to reach
into it and started sucking on him. The boy let out a single shallow
 gasp. His fingers twitched, an involuntary nerve reaction.
Green goo oozed from the sucking appendage, perhaps digestive
 enzymes, and poured out onto the boy and the deck of the
ferry. The lidless, clear-glass eyes seemed to radiate hatred and
hunger.
More legs were rising from the deep. Some were small, others
 thicker than the trunk of an oak tree. The bigger ones had little
 claws on their ends. Natalie and Nathan charged in again
and pounded on the proboscis, which started to withdraw from
the boy's belly. But then it re-established its position and they
saw it was sucking his organs and blood, eating him alive. The
legs closed on them again, and again they had to retreat.
"God almighty," Natalie murmured, horrified. The pycno
seemed totally unconcerned with all but the boy. It ignored the
man and woman and continued to feed as if they were not there.
The boy began to cough, and an ugly blue color began to spread
to his cheeks.
"Take this," said Bill from the coffee shop as he handed
Nathan a broken cola bottle. Nathan grabbed the bottle and
tried to shove it into the pycnogonid's body, but the hard exoskeleton
 resisted all his efforts to puncture it.
"Falow, where are you?" Natalie screamed. The tension was
building to a crescendo. She touched the boy's face, but he did
not move.
"I have another idea," Bill said as he ran back to the coffee
shop. A minute later he came running back with a hot dog in his
hand. He shoved it into one of the leg's pincers, and jumped
quickly back. Maybe the hot dog would distract the sea spider
from the boy, Bill evidently thought.
The pincer squeezed the hot dog and brought it into the sea.
For a moment the proboscis withdrew from the boy's belly and
quested for the hot dog. The spider wasn't well coordinated,
with the snout seeming not quite to know what the pincer was
doing.
As the proboscis left the boy, a loose slew of the boy's intestines
 spilled from the hole in his belly. The boy's face was
ghastly with its colorless lips and waxen skin.
Unfortunately, the creature soon figured things out, swallowed
 the hot dog in an instant-and immediately went back to
feeding on the boy. Natalie approached again and touched the
boy's neck, attempting to find a pulse. The boy seemed sunk in
a deep level of unconsciousness and did not react to either Natalie
 or the pycno. He was limp, every muscle unresponsive.
"There is a pulse," Natalie said as the legs drove her back
again. "I think his heart is oscillating strangely and occasionally
exhibiting severe tachycardia."
"What?" Nathan asked.
She almost smiled. "Sorry. I mean it's beating excessively
rapidly. It's a bad sign."
"Because his guts are being consumed," Nathan said. "And
we can't do a thing about it. I hate this!"
"Here, tie this to his body so he can't be pulled off the deck
into the ocean," yelled Bill. He handed Natalie a half-inch,
hawser-laid nylon rope with a breaking strength of one thousand
 pounds.
Falow came out of the coffee shop and when he saw what
was happening he started to run. He grabbed a nearby chair
and flung it across the deck at the pycno. The shattered pieces
of the chair fell to the floor: instant junk.
Other legs began to rise from the sea and to grab at Natalie
and Nathan, so they retreated farther from the boy and dropped
to their hands and knees.
Falow pondered a moment, watching one of the spider legs
spasm, then ran to within six feet of the creature. He had his
gun. The spider did not have an instinctive fear of the man or the
gun, but it was evidently capable of cold caution in these unusual
circumstances. Perhaps it remembered the sound the gun made
and the pain it had caused. Maybe, Nathan thought, its bowels
undulated nervously within its body and legs as it prepared to
finish imbibing the boy.
Meanwhile the boy seemed in a coma as deep as the ocean.
Nathan saw his body shuddering with the force of its own heartbeat.
 His heart rate might have risen to over two hundred beats
per minute.
"Get away," Falow shouted to Nathan and Natalie who still
crawled along the deck. Falow then fired at the pycno and probably
 hit a ventral ganglion. As a result, nervous information to
and from the spider's fourth walking leg was halted. The creature's
 leg hung limply at its side.
"Got you," Falow cried, his voice rising with the increased
pounding of his heart.
"Score one for the home team," Natalie muttered.
The boy's body remained on the deck. The boy was not yet
dead. His arms moved and his blood dripped like raindrops
onto the wet floor. Sometimes his eyes rolled back into his head,
as if he were having convulsions, but these episodes were now interspersed
 with near lucidity. A low moan escaped from his
barely moving mouth. His gaze met Nathan's and had a pleading
 look. Then his deep-set eyes dilated in sudden pain as more
of his intestines were yanked from his body by a spike in the
creature's leg.
Bill then grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprayed it at the proboscis
 eyes, and the creature immediately responded. Its leg shot
out at the rail, tearing it off as the proboscis lifted the boy into
the air, broke the nylon rope, and tossed him into the sea. There
was a dull snapping sound as the boy hit the water. He was probably
 still conscious as his broken body floated on the cold ocean
waves.
Nathan saw the boy's eyes look at him, cold blue eyes barely
alive, bleak with the pain of dying. A few snowflakes frosted his
eyelashes. This was no longer a carefree musical teenager; this
was a person who had aged a lifetime in a few awful minutes.
Suddenly he fell forward into the swelling waves, swallowing a
mouthful of salt water so cold that it might have made his tongue
ache. His face was shriveled, the skin of his fingers blanched of
all color. Deep water, impenetrable as ink, stretched all around
him, with no possible escape. He seemed to struggle for a second
 and Nathan noticed three pale gray slugs as big as men undulating
 toward him. Their mouths were full of needle-like teeth
that quivered like quills on a porcupine. A moment later he was
dragged beneath the water.
Nathan turned away, his own eyes wild and searching. He felt
a lump in his throat that presaged considerable emotional turmoil
 to come. Then his eyes met Natalie's, and he realized that
she was near tears as surely as lightning bugs were a sign of approaching
 dusk.
But Natalie could not afford to go into emotional retreat now,
any more than he could. She was looking for Falow. When her
eyes finally met Falow's, Nathan could see that they were radiating
 both anger and despair. "Where where you?" she screamed
at him, as if she were the chief and he a deputy. Nathan hadn't
seen this side of her before, but he understood her anger. If
Falow had been there when the pycno first grabbed for the boy,
they might have saved him.
Indeed, Falow recognized his error. "I was in the bathroom,
didn't hear what was happening-" He was cut off by a splashing
 sound in the sea. It was the pycno.
From high above on the bridge, Captain Calamari shone a
bright spotlight into the pycno's eyes, trying to further blind it.
The deck below smelled of death.
"Look at its eyes," Calamari whispered. Anyone who cared to
look over the deck saw the furious reddened orbs of the pycno
peering out from inflamed, irritated sockets. Falow shot a few
more times. They were good shots, considering the fact that
Falow had a bad angle leaning against a table and was firing at
shadows which moved against a bright background. Brains number
 two and four were soon destroyed by the gunfire.
For a moment, the beast seemed as if it were paralyzed and
unable to move its great mass. However, within a minute ganglion
 seven evidently took over, and the spider began treading
water again. Its motions were more jerky. It began to submerge
like a submarine.
A deep cry came from Falow's mouth. "If we ever survive
this, I'm going to kill that son of a bitch, no matter where it tries
to hide." The anger and despair seemed out of place on Falow's
face, like a splattering of ink on a Mondrian painting.
Captain Calamari was on the radio to the Coast Guard. "Get
out here now!" he screamed into the microphone. Rain started
to fall from the sky, streaking through the floodlit section like
sugar threads from a cotton candy machine.
"What is your position now?" said a voice on the radio. Before
Calamari could respond, Nathan looked to his left and saw the
pycno rear up on its posterior legs, catch hold of the boat, and
begin to climb up to the bridge. As he watched, he caught a
whiff of the fragrant melange of blood and ammonia. When the
creature came to the smooth metal surfaces of a tower, it hauled
itself up with the agility of a spider. Its legs were near the ferry's
antennas as it pawed obscenely at the metallic projections.
Nathan saw a black bird take off from a small nest on the antenna.
 He saw Falow shoot the creature again. It backed up,
mashed the antennas, taking with it a guidance computer for the
ferry's engine, and fell into the sea again. The black bird's nest
floated on the waves, but there was no sign of the pycno.
"Newfoundland Coast Guard!" Calamari shouted into the
microphone. "Do you read me?" There was just static. All communications
 with the mainland were cut off as a result of the absent
 antenna. He paused for a second, as if hesitant about
speaking his next thought. He replaced the microphone in its
holder, surely dismayed at the prospect of guiding a ship with no
communication. He tried to start the engine, but could not get
it to respond. He looked to his left and saw a pipe from the engine
 belching blue smoke and roaring like an old lawnmower. He
probably couldn't get over the obsessive sense of everything
going wrong. Nathan understood perfectly.
Nathan slumped with Natalie against a chair on the deck and
noticed a piece of paper by the rail. At first he simply rolled his
hands into fists and placed them on his hips, ignoring the paper.
But he kept thinking that something was peculiar about it. It was
wet with sea water and didn't seem to have been there before the
pycno arrived.
Then Falow walked over to the paper, picked it up, and read
the words to them all:
THE AVERAGE HUMAN ESOPHAGUS IS 1O INCHES IN LENGTH.

CHAPTER      32
Seige

THE SEA HAD become a black meringue of foam and froth. Occasional
 waves vaulted over the ferry's sides and crashed down
on the deck with a shattering force. Whoosh. A swirl of gray fog
curled up along the outsides of the ferry's coffee shop windows
like an old cat. The mood inside was tense. A five-year-old boy
and his mother joined Natalie, Bryan, and Bill. She introduced
herself as Brenda.
Bryan stood up, stretched his big body, and put his hands together
 making a tent of strong, hairy fingers. Bill looked out the
windows, his large eyes filled with fear. In order to distract the
little boy from the scary atmosphere around them, Brenda, his
mother, brought out beautifully crafted wooden jigsaw puzzles
and placed them on the Formica counter.
"Want to put together the Mickey Mouse puzzle or the Star
Wars puzzle?" Brenda asked him with forced cheer. She was in
her late twenties, a quiet woman, with smoke-blue eyes that
tilted catlike. She had surely been quite striking a few years back,
but now her ample bosom was becoming matched by a solidifying
 body.
"Star Wars," the boy replied as he clutched a tiny, ragged blanket.
 His eyes were enormous as he watched his mother dig
through an assortment of toys in her large pocketbook. Their
small white poodle snuggled up to the boy with affection.
The lumberjack had finished his greasy meal and tossed the
aluminum dish into the garbage. "How about a beer?" he said to
Bill. Bill smiled and pointed to an old sign on the wall. It read:
ABSOLUTELY NO ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES SERVED!
"No exceptions, even now?" Bryan leaned his big arms on
the oatmeal-colored chair. He looked around, perhaps belatedly
noticing how the recent deaths weighed heavily upon the passengers.

"I'd be happy to make an exception now," Bill said. "But we
don't have anything except soda and orange juice. Try this." He
handed Bryan a cola. Bryan popped it open, tilted his head back,
and took a swig. Then Bryan walked over to the window and
gazed outside. There was no sign of the spider. Outside the
moon was like a lacing of quartz on the black-velvet sea. He
began to pace back and forth.
"I'll take an orange juice," Natalie said, as she handed the
boy a dollar bill. He went to the refrigerator and poured a drink.
"It's on me," he told Natalie. "No charge today."
"We can't just sit here and do nothing," Bryan suddenly
yelled. He pushed a coffee cup blindly to the side. It fell off the
counter and shattered on the hard vinyl floor.
"We're waiting for the Coast Guard to come," Natalie said. "It
should be here soon. Try to stay calm."
"If I were any calmer, I'd be in a body bag," Bryan said. Natalie
 winced; all they needed now was a hysterical lumberjack!
"Our engine's dead," Bill said. Natalie cast the boy a look
that said, Why did you have to say that? Bill began to fill a water
cooler with a plastic jug labelled FRESHWATER.
"I know that," Bryan said, facing the boy but not looking directly
 at him. "The engine's dead. But Captain Calamari mentioned
 that the ship had something called a radio direction
finder. Maybe that helps." Natalie did not tell him that the radio
direction finder was used to help the ferry determine its own position
 at sea rather than for the Coast Guard to find the ferry.
A shy looking Inuit woman came into the coffee shop and sat
by herself, away from the others, in the corner of the room. She
never said a word as she looked outside the coffee shop windows.
"Actually, I think we could all use a little coffee," Bill said.
"Good idea," Natalie agreed quickly. Anything to break up the
mood of apprehension and gloom.
Bill brewed a pot of coffee, and soon the delicious aroma filled
the air. It had a tranquilizing effect on the passengers, taking
away some of the horror of the night.
Suddenly from the bathroom at the side of the coffee shop
came a muffled cry. Natalie's heart skipped a beat. But then she
reluctantly walked to the bathroom door. At first she knocked on
the dried-up wallpaper which covered the door. As she knocked,
the wallpaper curled itself away from the door's metallic surface.

"Anyone in there?" Natalie said, as her hand rose to her quivering
 neck. The door slowly opened. From inside came a gust of
hot, oily-smelling air.
"Smells like a pack of skunks," Bill whispered.
The bathroom began to exude a smell of disinfectant that
could not mask a melange of putrid biological odors. For a moment,
 Natalie didn't see anything in the shadows. The place was
eerie and damp. It reminded her of the pendulum pit of Edgar
Allan Poe. Brenda's poodle started to growl.
As her eyes adjusted to the dim light Natalie saw movement.
A shadow, perhaps a leg or arm. She found it easy to imagine
that the shadows on the walls moved like tarantulas which
dripped poison from their fangs. Then from within the dark interior
 emerged a long hand with fingers all the same length, except
 for the ring finger, which was a good seven inches in length.
They all had large bile-green nails at their tips. "Elmo!" she exclaimed.
 "What happened to you?You gave me a scare."
"Sorry, I got stuck in there," Elmo said. "I'm still pretty weak.
The stench didn't help."
Indeed it didn't. The skunk smell followed him like a cloud of
pestilence. Bryan cried out in disgust. Brenda looked bewildered.
 The little boy looked as if he were about to say something
naughty, but caught his mother's warning look and didn't.
But Elmo merely smiled and went to rejoin Lisa. Natalie was
surprised at how good-natured he was, considering the discomfort
 he was in. Was it an act? Did Elmo and his sister Martha
suppress an anger which would one day explode in a fit of sudden
 fury or in a warped act of revenge? Martha, perhaps, but she
had seen too much of Elmo's courage in adversity to believe
that he had any such problem.
Natalie returned to the counter, along with Bryan, Brenda,
and her five-year-old. The child had finished the Star Wars puzzle
 and started the Mickey Mouse one. Brenda brought out The
Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss and an old-fashioned kaleidoscope
to keep her son occupied after the puzzle was finished.
"Could I have a cookie, Mom?"
"Sure." Brenda handed her son a bag of Oreo cookies, from
which he withdrew two. The boy carefully separated the chocolate
 wafers and licked at the white icing. "Good," he said as the
sweet icing dissolved on his tongue.
Without a warning, Bryan withdrew a steak-knife from his
pocket and threw it across the coffee shop at the wall. It landed
precisely on a large stag beetle that was crawling along the white
woodwork of one of the windows. The knife protruded from the
black beetle's back like a skewer in shish kebab.
"Why did you do that?" Natalie asked, rolling her eyes in total
incredulity.
"I hate bugs," the lumberjack replied.
Natalie let it go. This was going to be a long night.
"Wow," the boy exclaimed, forgetting about the kaleidoscope.
"Can I touch the knife, Mom?" He looked at the steak-knife in
the wall and then back at his mother.
Nathan exchanged glances with Bill, indicating they thought
Bryan was off his rocker. "What a nut case!" Bill whispered.
"Brenda?" Nathan said. "You look a bit pale." His face was
furrowed with genuine concern. "Let me get you a drink of
water."
"I'm OK," Brenda said as a single tear dripped from her nervous
 eyes. Nathan handed her a glass of water. She continued to
run her finger around and around on a water spot on the glass.
Bryan persisted in playing with his large knife. "Put it away,"
Natalie said to him. Her fist slammed down on the Formica surface
 of a table. A bottle of ketchup in the center of the table
teetered, rolled, and fell to the floor.
"You mind if I stack a few chairs behind the windows?" Bill
asked Natalie. "Might help if the spider shows up again."
She shrugged. "Go ahead." She seriously doubted that chairs
would stop the pycno, but if this made for greater confidence
among the passengers, it was worthwhile. In fact, if it just got the
freaky lumberjack settled, it would be enough. The sea monster
was bad enough; panic would double or triple its effect.
Bill began methodically placing chairs against the many windows
 in the coffee shop. Brenda watched him and then whispered
 to Natalie.
"Think he's dangerous?"
Natalie smiled, preferring to interpret the question as humorous.
 If it referred to Bill, it was; if to Bryan, it wasn't. "Probably
 harmless, but I'll have to watch him."
A beeping sound came from behind Bill. It was the microwave.
 "I made some popcorn," he said as he gave a small
dish to the little boy. The boy looked up from his puzzle and
smiled. "Thanks," he said, as his mother nudged him.
Natalie looked at Brenda and the child and was surprised to
find herself suddenly on the verge of tears. She turned away and
walked to one of the windows that Bill had not yet barricaded,
trying to get herself under control. If she broke under the strain,
who else would keep the situation under control? She loved
Nathan, but he wasn't the type, and Falow couldn't do it alone.
She looked out into the darkness and a queer, all-consuming
feeling of being watched stole over her. She pressed her face
against the glass window and cupped her hands in order to see
better, but nothing was visible out there. Nothing but heavy
banks of clouds, which were coming in their direction. For a
moment she thought she caught sight of some nearby movement,
 and she took a step back before realizing the movement
was just the reflected blinking of her own eyes. She almost
smiled a little at her own nervousness.
"Everything OK?" Nathan asked her as he followed her to
the window.
"OK, considering what we've been through, and the fact that
we don't know if it will attack again." She was relieved to find
that her voice sounded normal. The passengers would lose confidence
 if a police officer even sounded strained.
She held Nathan's hand but rather than receiving comfort
she felt as if she were doped with Novocain. Fear did that, sometimes.
 Fear was the drug which numbed touch. Still she required
closeness, so she took his hands in hers and pressed the side of
her face against his. There was, after all, no need for secrecy;
they had become a couple, and if the whole world didn't yet
know it, that was because the world was a bit slow on the uptake.
 Nathan was being careful not to interfere when she was
performing her police duties, but right now was an interstice.
Others would assume that it was merely affection she was showing
 for him; her own awful fear and need of comfort was being
masked.
"No," she murmured. "This can't be happening. Real life is
not like a science-fiction novel." The words came out with a
trembling moan. Tears filled her eyes. Nathan understood; just
so long as no one else caught on to her weakness.
With all the chairs blocking the windows of the coffee shop,
Natalie was beginning to feel like a caged animal with claustrophobia.
 "I'm going to go out on the deck and grab a few minutes'
 breath of fresh air," she told Nathan, disengaging. "You
should stay here, and let me know the moment anything starts
coming unglued." Her eyes flicked toward the lumberjack meaningfully.
Nathan nodded. "Please stay away from the rails," he said. He
placed his hand on her arm comfortingly, a small kindness that
seemed huge to Natalie. Her feelings for Nathan were still deepening.
 He stirred her heart with his little ways as much as his
large ways. She felt her tears coming again, but then stopped
herself.
"You don't have to tell me that." But of course he had been
joking, in his sometimes ineffective way. "I'll stay right next to
the coffee shop door. I just need a little fresh air to snap me out
of this."
But at the door she hesitated. Thunderheads were stacking up
on the northern horizon. Loud boomings muttered over the
ocean waves from that direction. More trouble brewing. Unless
the storm caused the monster to go away.
She turned, glancing back at Nathan, changing her mind
about going alone. She saw him nod, catching on immediately.
Bless the man!
"I think I'll go up to the bridge and see how Captain Calamari
and Rudolph are doing," Nathan said.
"Don't go out there!" Bryan screamed. The five-year-old boy
dropped his kaleidoscope and its glass shattered. Brenda and
Bill turned around to see what the lumberjack would do next.
Natalie thoughtfully evaluated the man's mental state. Could
she afford to leave the coffee shop even briefly? She decided to
risk it, because not only did she need to get out of here for a
while, she needed to know exactly what the situation was outside.

"Something's-out there," Bryan repeated.
As if that were news! "We'll be out just for a minute," Natalie
said reassuringly.
"Don't go out there! I feel its presence. Walking death," the
lumberjack said, slurring his words as if he had been drinking
something stronger than pop. An artery on the left side of his
neck visibly throbbed. Brenda and Bill looked at him with impatience
 and irritation.
"Why not keep your mouth shut," Bill said. Bryan looked at
Bill and kept quiet. The lumberjack might have weighed twice
what the waiter did, but now had none of the youngster's poise.
Natalie realized that the business with the chairs had helped Bill
recover confidence in the safety of his bastion.
The other teenager laughed, but then decided it was best to
be quiet. The little boy began to cry. Yes, she had to leave nowand
 return soon. Before things came apart.
Natalie opened the door to the coffee shop, letting in a gust
of cold wind that spat drops of rain on the linoleum floor. Various
 gray mists rose off from the sea in big steamy columns, enclosing
 the occupants of the coffee shop in their own private
world. The rumbles of the approaching storm cooled the air a
few degrees.
The sea grew choppy and seemed to be in the hands of
demons.

CHAPTER      33
Snout

NATHAN STOOD ON the bridge with Captain Calamari, Falow,
and Rudolph while Natalie checked the decks. Outside thunder
boomed as an occasional streak of blue-white lightning stabbed
the ocean near the horizon. Mists flowed onto the bridge, making
 the ferry's steering wheel the only solid reality in a shifting
world. To their left were several cigarette butts which had been
crushed in the congealing gravy on mashed potatoes. Some of
the men from the engine room had been smoking more than
usual.
"Uggh," Calamari said. "My stomach's grumbling with acid
indigestion and I'll be lucky if I don't get diarrhea. I don't need
this."
"You do look tired, Captain," Falow said. "Dark circles under
your eyes."
The captain's face was white, his eyes listless. "You don't look
so great yourself, Chief," he retorted.
"The weather is not helping matters."The ferry seemed to be
swallowed up in a murky olive-brown fog, shot here and there
with shimmering streaks of an ochre tint. Falow quickly grabbed
hold of a life preserver that the wind had torn free and was about
to toss into the sea.
"How does a man as big as you move so quickly?" Calamari
asked. He winced as a cramp evidently wracked his bowels but
luckily passed. Outside there were little lines of lightning that reminded
 Nathan of a sparkler. The flickers continued.
"Years of practice."
They talked about inconsequential, perhaps trying to distract
 themselves from the horror of their reality. Like most Newfoundlanders,
 the captain said, he usually enjoyed all the local
wildlife-both the animals and the plants. He particularly liked
the flowering plants. In Newfoundland, beautiful wild flowers
bloomed, seeded, and died all in a rush; plants flourished and
perished quickly in areas of short summers and longer winters.
In northern areas of Newfoundland, he remarked, where
flowers were less plentiful, the sea ice buckled into canyons of
blue and turquoise pastel, and Eskimo women searched for
crabs. A herd of reindeer would sweep across the tundra by the
Labrador sea, food for the Eskimos and wolves. Bowhead whales
were still caught and butchered. Their skin was cut into strips
called muktuk, considered a delicacy. When a local entrepeneur
had approached Calamari and the ferry line management to
open a muktuk bar on the ferry, they declined, pointing out that
muktuk would not appeal to the tourists or ecologically-minded
tourists. Nathan understood how that could be the case.
Suddenly Rudolph cried out, "Big object on the sonar screen,
closing fast."
"Any chance we could be running into an iceberg?" Nathan
asked.
"Ice is a poor reflector of radar waves," Calamari said. "Even
with a strong signal, which we don't have, we can't definitely
identify icebergs. I wish we had one of those microwave radiometers.
 That would have told us more."
"So it could be an iceberg," Falow said. "Let's hope we don't
run into it."
"On a clear day," the captain said, "I can see a berg from this
ferry more than ten miles away. Tonight of course, we couldn't
see it until we had hit it."
Calamari picked up the intercom microphone and spoke just
two words to the passengers, "Brace yourself." He then turned
toward Rudolph. "'Tell the men to get the life-rafts ready."
The captain's orders rang through the ferry. Aft and forward,
the small crew snapped into action. The ferry's clock chimed out
10 P.M. in nautical couplets. Calamari studied the incredible
maze of gauges arid dials before him-manometers, shaft revolution
 indicators, vent opening indicator boards and various
levers glistening with elbow-grease. He looked so helpless.
Nathan knew that there was little he could do without working
engines.
A small electrician crawled down into the battery pits under
the compartment decks and was able to get some of the backup
power restored to> the ferry. As the dwarf Dutchman rose from
the pits he sneeze'd from the acid fumes but gave Calamari the
thumb's-up signal. The lights on the ferry's control panel lit up
like a Christmas tree and then began to dim slightly.
The captain turned on a nearby sodium-vapor light and
aimed it at the muirky ocean waves. A urine-yellow glare reflected
from the waves, but there was no sign of the leviathan. Calamari's
 light penetrated into a gray fog that hid the ocean and
made it seem to Nathan as if he could invent any shape in the
water that he wished.
The reports carne to Calamari's control room over intercoms.
Unfortunately all but one of the life-rafts had been destroyed. Simultaneously,
 the intercom poured out an incredible message:
the engine rooms were flooding.
Nathan saw Rudolph go into action automatically. He knew
what a flood of water in the engine room meant.Time was of the
essence. Rudolph opened the high pressure air pipes to the main
ballast tanks. The air roared into the tanks with the force of a tornado,
 expelling the ocean water in a bubbling spray. The entire
ferry shook from the inrush of air.
The intercom signal was fading. Instinctively, Calamari
pushed his ear near the speaker with a violence that must have
made his ear ring, straining to catch any further information
from forward anid aft. "Ready the one remaining raft," he
barked. Nathan knew that the order was a formality. The men
were already lowering the raft. The captain then turned to an Eskimo
 junior lieutenant. "Please gather some of the passengers towards
 the raft."
Rudolph had connected a radio transmitter to the batteries in
the pits, and he tapped out word to the Newfoundland Coast
Guard that the ferry was in trouble. He hoped that some of his
S.O.S. message would go through despite the broken antenna.
Forward and aft, the passengers and crew settled down and
waited.
The dwarf Dutch electrician drank a little brandy from a
metal flask he carried in his hip pocket. He pulled a photo from
his wallet. Nathan conjectured that perhaps now that the man
thought death was knocking at his doorstep, he was beginning to
wish that he had treated his beautiful wife a little better over the
last year, that he had paid more attention to her, and had been
a little more loving. Of course Nathan didn't even know whether
the man was married, but it seemed reasonable.
It was time for him to return to the coffee shop; Natalie was
probably already there. Once they had gotten out into the open
air she had felt better, and gone about her business efficiently,
checking for lost or injured people, and for signs of the sea spider.
 Apparently having a definite task to do restored her; it had
been the tense inactivity inside that had gotten to her. He hadn't
wanted to hamper her; he wasn't a policeman.
The first tiny drops of rain began to patter down on the glass
windows of the coffee shop, whose occupants nervously waited
for the approach of the pycnogonid. Inside there was little place
to hide. Nathan was with them now, but Natalie was still outside
on deck somewhere. He tried not to let it bother him too much.
And he decided that the direct truth was best, for the people
here. "The shaking of the boat was the pressuring of the ballast
tanks," he reported. "But there is something coming." He looked
around, trying to judge how they were taking it. Apparently they
were OK; confirmation was better than doubt.
He went to Elmo and Lisa, but they seemed to be all right,
though both were pale. Someone had found them a blanket, and
they were huddled together under it.
Bryan was the first to hear a noise beyond the coffee shop
door-a slurping wet noise accompanied by scratching. "It reminds
 me of the noise my mother's garbage disposal made after
putting soft garbage inside," he said. He seemed to have steadied
 down in the interim, which was a relief, and his analogy
seemed apt: that was what it sounded like.
"Can it get through the doors or windows?" Brenda asked.
Nathan saw the front of her full blouse quivering rhythmically,
and realized that it was echoing her pulse; her heart must be
beating like a jackhammer. She reached inside her pocketbook
for a tranquilizer to calm her escalating anxiety. After a minute
of searching, she gave up. "I took the last pill weeks ago," she
muttered. Instead she began to pace back and forth but stayed
very close to her son. That didn't do it, and soon she was back
in her chair.
"I checked a window," Nathan said. "It's inch-thick plate
glass. Maybe if we are quiet and don't move, the pycno won't
know we're in here."
Now Nathan had the feeling that he was being watched. He
quickly looked toward the windows but saw nothing. His heart
skipped a beat because the dark windows reminded him of a
row of black dead eyes. The door and windows were filling up
with shadows, making his nervousness increase. But until Natalie
 returned, he had to put on the confident front, so as to
keep the others calm.
Suddenly the ferry began to tilt rapidly to stern. Brenda lost
her footing as the angle of the ferry reached 30 degrees, and she
was propelled from her seat, like a pellet fired from a shotgun.
Salt and pepper shakers crashed to the vinyl floor. A quiet Inuit
woman held onto a table, but then tumbled to the floor when the
table began to slide. Elmo and Lisa were holding onto each
other, seeming stable, physically and otherwise.
The steady white noise of the air conditioner suddenly
stopped. Water began to pour from the air conditioning vent in
the side of the room, dousing Bill with bitterly cold salt water.
Nathan knew what was happening: sea water was coming down
the ship's air conditioning system, and the pipes that normally
carried air out of the coffee shop to the outer deck were now
alive with frothing ocean water.
But understanding it didn't solve the problem. Several hundred
 gallons of sea water roared into the coffee shop, hitting
Brenda full in the face, sweeping her across the floor and bringing
 her hard against the glass door. Even as the icy water cascaded
 into the coffee shop they heard some sounds coming from
outside.
"It'll stop in a moment!" Nathan cried. "Get out of the flow!"
Brenda's white poodle, dripping with water, laid back her ears
and whined. The rush of water slowed to a trickle in a few minutes.

"Mommy, what's out there?" the little boy said. He started to
tug nervously on his cartoon T-shirt. Brenda hugged him closer
as she shivered in her wet clothes. Water continued to gush,
churning up foam that refracted the light from the ceiling bulbs
like garlands of silver tinsel.
"Nothing we should worry about," Brenda said bravely. "Let's
read one of your books. How about Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and
HamPYou love that Sam-I-Am."
"How about The Cat and the Hat?" said her son.
Nathan continued to gaze at the windows of the coffee shop,
trying to shake the feeling that reality was on the verge of slipping
 out of control. Bill and Bryan followed Nathan's gaze
around the periphery of the room.
"OK," Brenda said as she rummaged nervously in her bag of
toys and books. The poodle wedged herself between Brenda and
her son.
Bryan carefully stirred the cup of tea in front of him. The
sound of the fork bounced off the sides of his cup and grated on
Nathan's nerves. But the last thing he wanted to do was set the
lumberjack off again, so he ignored it.
Seconds later the sea spider's large proboscis stuck its open-
ing to a window as if it were searching for food. Right at the
pinkish end of the proboscis were little shriveled black lips that
pressed and flattened on the glass like two balloons. Green goo
poured from the opening and dripped down the plate glass like
a river of mucus. Several feet away from the window, Nathan saw
the glittering black eyes of the proboscis. One eye swiveled toward
 Brenda as the incandescent bulbs of the coffee shop threw
white rhomboids of light on the dark, shiny orb.
"Ahhh," Brenda screamed. The boy whimpered like a homesick
 puppy.
"Shut up," Bryan said. "It might not know we are in here."
"Look at that thing," Bill whispered in a sickened voice.
As if it had overheard them, the pycno stopped moving, then
turned slowly toward the plate-glass window and raised its huge
sucking appendage in what looked like a slow, sarcastic wave. A
whitish-brown vapor poured from the snout; it was the methane
by-product of digestion-flatulence-hitting the ice-cold Newfoundland
 air. Outside thunder boomed and lightning sparked,
as if sounding an entry fanfare for the monster.
The large proboscis withdrew from the window, stopped for
a few seconds, and then thudded into the glass hard enough to
make the whole frame shake. In a moment it repeated the strike.
Thud. Thud.
Bill looked at the window with mounting fear.
The door burst open, startling them all, but it was only Natalie.
 "The spider's-" she started, then paused as she saw the
thing at the window. She tried to smile. "But I see it's already
here."
Nathan went to her and took her hand. "We're OK here, so
far. Brenda got soaked by water from the air conditioning vent,
but the monster can't get in that way."
Thud! Thud!
Natalie's hand tightened in Nathan's.
"The window won't stand up to much more of that," Bill said.
Lightning flashed and gave the window the look of a shiny yet
gloomy black eye.
The banging on the window became louder. Brenda started
to scream. She had been doing well, but now was losing it.
"Shut up," Bryan shouted at Brenda again. The poodle
started to bark.
Things were coming unglued, but Nathan didn't know how to
stop the process, and it seemed Natalie didn't either. His testicles
 contracted in fear. Bill slid behind the counter as he looked
for some defensive weapon but found only a ketchup bottle.
Brenda's mouth opened and closed. For a second, she reminded
Nathan of a kissing gourami in an aquarium.
As the banging became louder, Nathan's mind was filled
with all the images of the science-fiction films he had watched
with his father in his boyhood. Several small shivers ran up his
spine.
For a moment, the coffee shop door opened a few inches.
Nathan looked at Natalie, then at wide-eyed Brenda, and back
at the half-open door, wondering what would happen next. Natalie's
 grip on his arm became extremely tight. He looked at her,
and saw sweat beading her forehead. What was out there?
The thudding on the window had stopped. All was quiet for
the moment. Then slowly the coffee shop door opened to its
maximum extent. Now they saw the massive, horrible snout,
questing, trying to get in. The dooway, however, was too small
to permit the proboscis to enter the coffee shop. After a moment
 it withdrew from the door in a seeming fit of rage.
"It can't get at us," Nathan said, relieved. "The angle is
wrong, the snout's too thick, and the thing's not smart." He
went to the door and pushed it shut, hoping the latch would
hold if the monster tried again.
Thud! This time the sound of the proboscis banging on the
glass windows was louder than a shotgun blast. The smooth
curves of the giant snout gleamed under the overhead fluorescent
 lights.
The next moment a glass window shattered, the thick plate
glass pulverized to diamond-like pieces and projections which
scattered colored light in all directions. A few pieces hit Brenda
in the face and she screamed, perhaps blinded by the exploding
glass. Natalie immediately went to her.
The big black sucking appendage started to squirm its way
through the jagged hole in the plate glass. Long triangles of glass
which pointed inward from the window frame did not seem to
slow the creature.
"What do we do now?" whispered Bill. A few tiny shards of
glass were sticking to the proboscis and forming a dark obsidian
sparkle. No one had an answer.
It was heading toward Bill. Bill retreated as they continued to
hear the scratching of the sharp glass against the strong proboscis.
 The thin lines that the glass made in the appendage were
apparently so shallow as not to be even noticed by the creature.
The long sinewy organ of destruction suddenly hurled itself
through the hole in the glass like a striking cobra. Remaining
pieces of glass in the window flew apart in a million shards. The
glass fragments showered up, rained down, and tinkled against
the floor like little Christmas bells.
"Oh God," Brenda whispered. Her face was scratched and
bleeding, but she seemed to still see well enough. "Oh God,
oh God."
The coffee shop was filled with the heavy aroma of ammonia
with the underlying scent of decaying meat. At first, the passengers
 were still, each one afraid to move. Their worst nightmare
had come.
Suddenly Bryan grabbed The Cat in the Hat book from the little
 boy, ran to the snout, and began to slam it with all his might.
The proboscis simply vomited some green digestive goo onto the
Dr. Seuss book, and then it grabbed the mucilaginous Seuss
from Bryan's hands and threw it across the room. Bryan wiped
some of the green gel onto his pants and then ran from the undulating
 proboscis of death.
Nathan stared at the stuff on the floor. Within the goo were
tiny skeletons, no doubt the remains of some partially digested
fish. The small bones of the fish began to curl as if magically still
alive. Their small, bony mouths seemed to open in a silent cry.
The proboscis began to make its way to the little boy, who was
now crying wildly. Nathan couldn't blame him; he felt like doing
the same.
Bill grabbed a garbage can and threw it at the sucking appendage.
 As the can hit the floor, a big chunk of watermelon rind
fell out. This was eagerly gobbled up by the pycno.
"Don't go so close to it," Nathan yelled, distracting the pycno.
The creature started to overturn a small refrigerator, reducing a
multitude of soda bottles to dull green shards. It seized some of
the food in the refrigerator and started heaving it against the
ceilings and walls as if frustrated by the minuscule samples of
food. These could never satisfy its appetite. Everything was broken
 and crushed.
Bill searched for something else to throw at the creature,
found a chair, and then broke it across the proboscis with little
effect. The proboscis banged Bill on his arm, and he cried out in
pain. He rose to his feet with great effort. His legs surely felt like
spaghetti. Slowly the proboscis made its way to the food counter
shelves which were stocked with health drink bottles. With one
mighty swing, it knocked the shelves to the ground. Puddles of
orange and lime liquids mixed on the floor like a fading Miro
painting.
It then made a strange hungry humming sound as it propelled
itself through the counter and exited on the other side. Bill
ducked, but not quite in time. It hit his face, and his gashed and
battered forehead started bleeding copiously.
Brenda screamed again. A bag of Cheez Doodles was knocked
off the counter, and some of the orange contents scattered across
the vinyl floor. As the proboscis pulled itself out of the crumbling
remains of the counter, electrical wires were ripped out of the
wood and began to pop and sputter, sending up clouds of black
smoke from the burning insulation. The live wires began to
dance back and forth like whirling dervishes.
"Get away from the salt water on the floor," Bryan said to the
Inuit woman, who stood sallow-skinned against the rear wall of
the shop. She stood still as if paralyzed with fear and confusion.
Her hands opened and closed around a crucifix she wore around
her neck.
The poodle started to bark and growl and snap at the proboscis.
 Brenda screamed for the poodle to get back. Then, in one
single, fluid motion, the pycno flung the poodle through the
glass of a window. Brenda and the boy screamed in unison.
The wires on the floor continued to sputter and spark. It
looked like a swarm of fireflies.
"Get away from the water," Bryan shouted again to the Inuit,
but could not seem to make her understand that the danger of
electrical shock was equal to or greater than the danger from the
pycno who had trouble reaching her.
Bryan tried to walk along some dry spots on the floor to reach
the girl. Suddenly she understood the problem but it was too
late. The wires entered the water, and her scream was burned
out of her vocal cords by a few thousand volts of electricity. Her
body continued to twitch for a few seconds but gradually
stopped as the electrical current locked her joints, muscles, and
tendons. There was the smell in the air of fried meat.
"Get some salt," Bill said to Bryan as he pressed a pack of
napkins against the wounds in his forehead.
"Where? Why?"
"We can throw it at the creature's mouth or eyes."
"Where?"
"In the storeroom. On the left."The proboscis had left a dark
maroon weal on Bill which ran from his wrist to his elbow. An
exposed region of flesh on his wrist was sweating small beads of
blood, and a sick throbbing in his arm seemed to distract him
from the pandemonium around him.
Bryan ran to the storeroom and opened the door. Styrofoam
cups, burger packages, packets of ketchup, and paper napkins
lined the shelves. "Where's the damned salt?"
"On the left," Bill called. "Behind the napkins." Bryan immediately
 saw a few shakers filled with salt, and removed them
from the shelves and threw them to Bill. The proboscis was only
a few feet from the crying child.
"We're all going to die!" a woman screamed.
"Shut your trap," Bryan said. Now that there was an immediate
 problem, he was doing well.
"We're all going to die!" she screamed again.
Brenda was at first paralyzed with fear but then tried to pull
the boy away. As she pulled him she slipped on ochre jellylike
muck which oozed from the proboscis. She tried to scream and
pull away from the creature, but she continued to slip and slide.
The snout swung around, seeking.
"What in hell is that?" Nathan muttered as he gazed into the
interior of the proboscis and saw something inside, something
scurrying frantically in the large cavity.
"Something's inside it!" Natalie cried.
Then they heard a sound Nathan could not quite identify,
coming from within the beast. A soft hungry licking. Even as he
was seeing it, he couldn't believe it. This was not like any pycno
he had studied.
A frigid breeze blew through the broken window, drying
rivulets of perspiration on Brenda's face.
"What did you see?" Nathan cried to her.
"I don't know."
"Probably an internal organ, or a parasite, or something it
ate. Could it have been a fish or crab?" He was hoping that she
had a better answer than he did.
Brenda stopped talking. She and her son were backed into a
corner of the shop with little room to move. Both were staring
at the snout as if mesmerized.
Bill took off the top of the salt shaker, ran to the proboscis,
and dumped it into its opening. The snout responded by beating
 the floor of the coffee shop, as it attempted to scrape off the
salt in its sucking appendage. The covering membrane of the
proboscis glistened with a shifting phosphorescence, and dark
brown chromatophores on its exoskeleton exploded into bright
crimson. It began to yo-yo up and down like a broken marionette.
 In doing so the snout banged into Bill's crotch.
"Oooh," he screamed, as he backed up, bent over, and 
covered his aching testicles. The probocis gave Bill a shove into the
counter, fracturing his collar bone.
"Oh God, oh God," Brenda whispered. Her hands clenched
and unclenched like the pincers of a lobster.
Nathan was not much better off. He could see the big black
eyes of the pycno as they rolled in their sockets and fixed their
attention on the woman. A piece of goo flew at her from the
creature's drooling sucking appendage and hit her on the arm.
"Jesus," she screamed. It reminded Nathan of warm petroleum
 jelly, although it had the exact color of lime gelatin. Brenda
quickly wiped her arm briskly on the leg of her jeans, trying to
dislodge the gruesome material, which stuck to her skin like flypaper.
 "Get off of me," Brenda spoke to no one in particular. She
continued to wipe even after the last traces of goop were gone
from her skin.
Nathan glanced at Natalie, but she seemed to be as revolted
and helpless as he was.The monster was just so big and so awful
that it was almost impossible to organize any coherent plan of
opposition.
Brenda looked at the thick liquid shimmering on the linoleum
floor as if it were luminous paint. Her heart seemed to be
thumping rapidly again behind her ample bosom. The proboscis
slowly came toward her, and she raced away with her son, her
low heels tip-tapping on the linoleum floor. The creature's eyes
were as shiny as diamonds as they pursued.
Then the sucking appendage was upon her. Nathan saw a
conga-line of squirming bristles ascend her thigh under her
dress. The large eyes fixed on hers again.
"We're all going to die!" the woman screamed again.
"We've got to do something!" Natalie said. "Maybe I can get
something from the deck." She went out the door.
Nathan cast about for anything that might make an effective
weapon. He found a fragment of broken chair. He hefted it like
a spear, trying to locate a vulnerable spot on the immense snout.
But the situation seemed hopeless.
The opening of the proboscis widened in what seemed like a
yawning snarl. In a few seconds, Brenda was standing on her
toes, the proboscis wrapped around her neck. The whites of her
eyes were marbled with crimson, while the dilated pupils opened
up and stared at the others in the coffee shop. Her pupils were
like dark circles painted on paper by an avant-garde artist. A
few wisps of her hair were damp with sweat.
Nathan struck at the proboscis, but could make no impression.
 He used the spear to shove against the monstrous living
column, but he might as well have been pushing at a mountain.
It ignored him.
The digestive walls of the esophagus turned inside out, making
 it appear as if a tongue were being formed from the inner
folds of flesh. It happened ever-so-slowly, in much the way of a
ketchup commercial where the ketchup seemed to take minutes
to ooze from the bottle.
From about ten feet away, Bryan pointed at the creature.
Then he got the steak-knife, aimed it, and threw it into the interior
 of the proboscis. A fist-sized chunk of the wet walls of the
proboscis's interior fell from the muscular organ and onto the
cold tile vinyl floor of the coffee shop. The flesh began to wiggle.
Then it started to croak like a frog. The wounded proboscis unwrapped
 and withdrew from the window, and for a few minutes
there was silence in the coffee shop.
Brenda dropped to the floor and curled her body into a tight
ball. Her elbow popped with a metallic sound of tearing tendons.
She ignored the pain, covered her face with her hands, and
peeked out through the cracks between her fingers.
Bryan came closer to the chunk of pink tissue on the floor,
which convulsed as paroxysm after paroxysm ran through the
dying flesh. Then it began to flap around on the floor, like a bird
taking a dust bath, and then to wiggle like a caterpillar. The lumberjack
 raised his huge boot and crushed the living flesh beneath
 his heel. It lay there limp, like a dead worm.
"Thanks," Brenda croaked to him over the boy's screams. She
sounded as if she were speaking with a mouthful of marshmallows.
 Her bruised voice box must have felt as if it had been
pushed back into her esophagus.
Then her eyes took on a wild look as if the enormity of what
happened had just hit her. She ran to the chunk of tissue and
pounced upon it, spat on it, kicked it. A piece of its flesh flew off
from her shoe and struck Nathan on his chest. Another piece
catapulted to the chipped Formica counter of pastries and assorted
 candies and stuck there for a moment, a few of its blood
vessels still pulsing feebly, before it loosened and fell with a
splash into an open jar of lime drink. Another piece struck Bill
on his face and splattered open in a clot of viscous glop. Bill
began to gag.
Nathan dropped his useless stick and went to the woman.
"That's enough, Brenda." She collapsed into his arms.
Bryan retrieved his steak-knife from the shiny vinyl floor,
cleaned it on a paper napkin, and placed it back in his pocket.
An ammonia smell continued to fill the air.
"Let me get rid of that stuff on the floor," Nathan said. He
found a mop and bucket in the bathroom and pushed the dead
piece of flesh into the bucket. The stench of the pink flesh was
maddening. As he scraped some of the remains, he broke a few
pustules of flesh, which began to emit a vague banana-lemon
smell. Nathan walked quickly to the broken window and tossed
the bucket out onto the deck. Brenda broke into tears, and Bill
handed her some napkins.
"Thanks," she said, her red eyes still streaming tears. Bill
stayed next to her. After a few seconds of silence, she caught another
 whiff of the banana-lemon odor.
"I'm going to throw up," she said, unable to hold her churning
 gut back any longer. She ran to a corner of the room, opened
her mouth, and vomited.
"Mommy, Mommy," her son cried.
"It's OK," she said from the corner of the coffee shop, to
comfort the boy. Billy went over and handed her some more tissues.
"Mommy, what was that thing?" the little boy said. "I want to
go home. I'm scared."
"It's over. All over. We don't have to worry."
"Where's Natalie?" Bryan asked, remembering that the policewoman
 was no longer with them.
"She went outside for some fresh air," Bill said.
Nathan knew better. He went to the broken window and
shouted, "Natalie?" There was no answer; in fact there was little
 sound coming from the deck area. "Natalie? Are you there?"
Suddenly he sensed that Natalie was in grave danger.
Still no answer, but he thought he heard a cough. What if the
cough were not really a cough but the sound of the spider dragging
 its legs along the deck? What if the spider was silently stalking
 Natalie or other passengers? Worry escalated to fear. Nathan
walked to the door.
"Don't go outside," Brenda said. Her voice trembled. Her
eyes twinkled with madness.
Brenda was concerned about him? As if she hadn't just had
the world's most horrible experience! "I'll be careful."
As Nathan reached for the door's handle, he stopped. His
heart hammered in his chest. From outside came the screams of
women which rose like prayers to the night sky. One scream
stood out above all others in intensity and volume. It was Natalie.

CHAPTER      34
Attack

NATALIE HEARD A flapping noise from behind her, a liquid
sound, like something from an X-rated movie, but several octaves
 too low. She knew what it was.
"Ahh," she said as she felt liquid on her shoulder. She wiped
at it with her hand and saw it had turned dark sepia and crimson
 with syrup of some unknown composition. The sepia syrup
smelled like ammonia. It was beginning to sting like burning
lava. With praying-mantis speed, the pycnogonid had somehow
hauled itself onto the deck with little sound. Of course, despite
its silent entry, its massive bulk could not be hidden and the
boat now rocked with the additional weight.
Water cascaded from its monstrous body. Its huge eyes were
afire, its colossal pincers working and gnashing back and forth.
In a moment it oriented on her.
"Nathan," she screamed as the huge creature rose in twitching
 terror against a starless, black sky. She had become relatively
ineffective since her gun had run out of ammunition. She had
simply stood and watched as others reacted to the predations of
the monster. She had hoped to clear her head out here, and return
 ready to act like the policewoman she was supposed to be.
But the sheer size and ferocity of the thing, and her lack of fire-
power, unnerved her, leaving her emotionally feeble. She was
disgusted with herself-but also terrified.
The ghostly mass of legs began to reach for her. She retreated
a few steps and slipped on a burger wrapper. Her knee crashed
into a discarded beer can, causing a sharp pain to climb her leg.
"Damn," she said as her empty automatic skidded away from
her and clattered on the wet deck. She reached for it, hoping she
could use it as a kind of club, but could not get to it in time. She
was not normally a woman who cried readily, but she sobbed
now. Her hair was plastered against her head like a wet, straggly
wig, surely making her look exactly as messed up as she felt.
"Falow," she screamed, trying to quell her rising panic as she
breathed harshly from her open mouth. The spider was only a
few feet from her. She felt as if her eyes were taking on a dull
sheen as of plastic pottery.
Something thick and soggy pressed against her legs. It felt
like a cold, sticky tongue caressing her. What is that? she thought
as beads of perspiration formed on her temples. But her thought
was rhetorical; she knew what it was, having seen it with Brenda
in the coffee shop.
It was a segment of the sea spider's digestive tract, which had
evaginated through its proboscis like an inside-out balloon. As its
digestive walls made contact with her, the creature trembled
with anticipation. It made a slurping sound.
"It's trying to eat her," a passenger screamed. "Help!"
Natalie felt a burning on her skin, like a high fever. It had to
be from the digestive fluid. She tried to twist away from the
fleshy thing looming in front of her.
Like a scene out of an adventure movie, Falow leaped from an
upper rail near the bridge and landed on his feet on the deck
about thirty feet from Natalie. Without a moment's hesitation, he
emptied his gun into one of the spider's eyes and legs closest to
her, and the pycno backed away.
But it paused for only a second. Natalie got up, her right ankle
striking a deck chair. It was only with the greatest effort that she
continued to rise to her feet and steady herself by holding onto
the back of a table. She was only vaguely aware that her leg was
bleeding as she cast a horrified glance back over her shoulder in
the direction of the creature.
Before she could think of what to do next its long proboscis
shot out of the main mass of its body with the speed of a
chameleon's tongue and enveloped her. Dark stars of light
skated across her field of vision. One of the spider's leg spikes
ripped through the remains of her shirt like a razor and punctured
 her left lung. A growing numbness spread through her
chest.
"Gah," she choked as she gasped for air. She fought with all
her waning strength, knowing that she had to tear herself from
the beast's embrace because soon she would be unconscious.
Dull drum sounds, harbingers of approaching asphyxiation,
began to bang in her ears. Her weakening screams rose and fell
with the thumping of her own heart.
Fear drove her to try a final attempt to dislodge herself from
the creature. First she bit at it, tearing away a mouthful of horrible
 urine-stinging flesh. She bit down again and something
crunched like the cartilage and gristle from a chicken bone.The
warm, sour taste of aging bacon filled her mouth.
She tasted vomit in the back of her throat. Then she poked the
nails of her right hand into the fleshy interior of the proboscis as
hard as she could.
This had a momentary effect. The pycno's grip relaxed, as
brown juice oozed from its injured flesh. It was evidently not well
equipped to deal with a creature who fought back from the inside.
 But this was probably more like a mosquito trying to sting
the inside of a frog's mouth; it was hardly a fatal strike.
Natalie continued to chew and gnaw at the interior of the
creature's sucking appendage. She would not give up. Not give
up, no matter how little it ultimately counted.
"Ummph," she grunted through a mouthful of blood. Her
lips felt as dead as bone.
"Keep shooting at it," she heard Nathan scream to Falow as
he gazed at the tattered rags of Natalie's shirt. She caught a
glimpse of his face. He looked as if his stomach was twisted with
nausea. But at least he was here!
"I don't have any more bullets," Falow yelled back. Him, too!
Why hadn't they thought to prepare for the worst? They had
come to this fray like rank amateurs. Had they thought that a few
little bullets would scare away the monster? What utter folly!
Falow was evidently on the edge of exhaustion, astonished as he
saw Natalie continue to fight, and her angry refusal to relinquish
 hope. He didn't know how weak-kneed she had been, until
she had to fight for her life.
Natalie's eyes caught Nathan's for a moment. / will not let you
die, his gaze promised her as he searched for a weapon with
which to attack the beast. But he had to be wondering whether
it was a promise he could keep.
Then the pycno must have suffered a lapse of attention. For
a moment Natalie broke free. She stood unsteadily, not quite believing
 it, trying to get sufficiently organized to run to safety.
She looked back at the passengers on the ferry boat. The burnt
bacon taste lingered horribly in her mouth. Stroboscopic flashes
of lightning made the scene seem like something out of a horror
movie. She knew she had little time to get away. But her body
just wasn't responding well.
As she tripped again, she saw some of the passengers staring
back at her with the red bloodshot eyes of little rabbits. All
around her was the stink of sulphur, rotting meat, and the smell
of her own half swallowed vomit.
But she tried. She was on hands and knees now. She crawled
about six feet. Then she heard the horrid scraping of its legs
against the deck. Close, way too close.Then, to her right, she saw
a leg inches from her face, a bristly tan limb with multiple spikes.
She looked up, looked into the charred hole where one of its eyes
should have been.
For some reason, Natalie had a vision of her friend and the
apartment they had shared over the barbershop on Main Street.
Then of the house she had lived in before her parents died. She
wanted her mother. She missed her mother. For a moment she
heard a piano playing. Again it was her mother, this time playing
 the old baby grand piano in their house; the song was Moonlight
 Sonata.
The vision was suddenly cut off. With a muted screech, the
sea spider grabbed her torso and lifted her high up into the air.
It was wrapped around her, smothering her. It waved her body
round and round like a rodeo rider twirling a lasso. She would
have screamed if she could, or fainted, if she could. Why hadn't
she fled the monster faster, when she had the chance? Or had it
freed her deliberately, playing cat and mouse with her?
Her mouth broke free from its muscular surroundings for a
moment. She gasped for breath and continued to scream. The
pycno applied pressure to her head, and then her body began to
convulse and jerk like a puppet guided by an amateur puppeteer.
She saw the skin on her hands changing colors, and thought
that her face must also be changing colors like a traffic light,
from red, to orange, to a sickly green. She stopped screamingand
 the monster dropped her limp body onto the deck like discarded
 rubbish. She never felt the landing.

CHAPTER      35
Battle
A FEW PASSENGERS far away from the pycnogonid ran forward
to help Natalie, but the monster twitched and frightened them
away. Some peered over the rail as if expecting to find her in the
water. There was only a faint glimmer of light from some exotic
bright-eyed fish which swam near the murky surface.
Nathan ran toward the body, but the legs and snout oriented
alertly on him. He knew that they would grab the moving target
first-but that there was no guarantee he could distract it permanently
 from Natalie. It might simply hurl him into the water
for later consumption, as it had Lisa. So he had to find a way to
distract it that would keep its attention indefinitely, or at least
until others could get to Natalie and drag her to safety.
Assuming that it was not already too late. She had been
wrapped in that awful proboscis, and then had taken a bad fall
to the deck. Was she all right? He thought he saw some motion,
but the lights from the boat were too dim to reveal her clearly.
She was only a shadowy shape against the dark deck. She had to
be alive-but wouldn't remain so unless he got her clear very
soon.
What could he do? He gazed wildly around, seeking something,
 anything that might offer itself. His frantic eye crossed the
dark water. For a moment he thought he saw her body out there,
with albino mutant crabs crawling on her outstretched arms. A
few grasped her hair with large wicked claws, and then she was
pulled under.
No! That was horrible imagination. Or maybe it was the body
of a passenger he didn't know who had fallen into the water. But
Natalie, still alive, was clearly on the deck, about to be gobbled
by the spider, and he had to get focused and save her, no matter
 what it took.
"Natalie," Nathan screamed in frustration as he grabbed
Bryan's knife. She couldn't be dead. Not the woman he had just
spent a beautiful evening with in town, in the forest, and on the
beach at night. In Come By Chance, discovering glorious love.
Not Natalie who never had a mean word to say, who seemed so
kind. Who had evoked his love, full-blown, when he had never
expected to find anything like it here.
He looked across the deck, running wildly, brandishing the
knife. He could not lose her. His throat was tight, his eyes watery.
 Maybe he could attract the attention of the monster to himself,
 then cut quickly into the joints between its limbs, its
proboscis, crippling it. Anything, to save Natalie!
The pycno seemed to be watching him. Good! He would lead
its attention as far away as possible. He charged up onto the
bridge.
The monster moved, its legs reaching for Natalie's body.
"No!" Without warning, Nathan suddenly leaped from the
bridge onto the pycnogonid's bony back and drove Bryan's
steak-knife into a line on its exoskelton where the primary brain
joined the spinal cord. He buried it to the hilt, splitting the shell
with a sharp crunch. He knew exactly where to strike a creature
like this. Nathan realized that he looked like a cowboy riding a
bucking bronco, although he was more like a matador thrusting
the barb into the shoulder of the bull.
But he doubted that the knife was long enough to do enough
damage to a creature this size. He had to find a more vulnerable
 target. He withdrew the knife and drove it again into one of
the five black eyes. "Take that, you filth!" he screamed. "Take
your own medicine!"
But the sea spider jerked backward and the knife blade
snapped. He had lost his weapon!
Yet Nathan did not stop. He took the remnant of the large
knife handle and slammed it down with all his might. This time
he felt the spider's exoskeleton near the base of the brain crack,
and he hit it in the same place again and again. A loose slew of
mucus-like substance spilled from the crack. He was getting
somewhere!
The pycno jumped, dropping something like a disembodied
arm from its mouth, and regurgitated the half-dissolved contents
 of its many stomachs. The jellylike substance from its stomach
 churned itself on the deck for a few seconds as if alive. Had
he managed to stop the monster?
The pycno continued to eject various marine and human
pieces in mangled lumps with little form. Then its legs quivered
as if about to descend on Natalie's body. In any other circumstance
 Nathan might have admired its single-mindedness. But
not now. What did it take to stop this horrible thing?
A brief gagging noise came from Nathan's throat. The knife
handle, his main defense, fell out of his hand. He began beating
at the creature's five black eyes with his bare hands. The rage
within him was a living thing. It was as if the spider had awakened
 a sleeping giant within the man. A giant to rival the sea
creature itself.
"Die!" Nathan cried. He rode the pycno, screaming and
yelling as it whipped him around and around and even tried to
turn itself upside down in an attempt to dislodge him from its
back. It had finally recognized that he was dangerous to it; he
had its full attention. But he was riding a tiger. Would he ever be
able to get off it? It hardly mattered, for he had no intention of
getting off. He had come not to ride it, but to kill it.
Lightning shattered the gray heavens and lit up the mayhem
on the ferry. One bolt struck the ship's deck, severing some of
the remaining railing from the boat. The electrical crackle continued
 for a few seconds but did not slow the fury of Nathan's
attack.
The pycno rose up on its posterior legs, pawing obscenely at
the air. Its huge body cast shadows even in the darkness of night.
Nathan realized that deadly as the monster was when attacking
other creatures around it, it was at a serious disadvantage dealing
 with a creature on it. Its legs weren't made for this.
"Yeeeee!" The creature was doing something with its proboscis
 that caused it to emit a high-pitched whine. Its multiple
eyes bulged like balloons being filled with air as it slashed at the
steel hull of the ferry. The wind stung Nathan's ears, made his
eyes tear, and pasted frost on his mustache. He knew that the
creature was trying to get at the source of its pain, and didn't
quite know how. He understood that feeling, for it had been his
own until very recently.
Natalie still lay on the deck. The pycno was distracted, but
had not moved far enough away from her to allow anyone else
to approach. The sight of her motionless body set Nathan off
again.
"Not enough?" Nathan demanded as he drove his hand into
the open wound near the nerve cords. The anger exploded in
him so intensely that his fingers trembled and his teeth were
clenched. He screamed with fury and a hunger for violence. He
reached deeper into the creature and felt some of the tissue tearing
 in his hand as he pulled out gobs of white muscle and membrane.
 "Then have some more!" He jammed his hand in again.
The pycno tried again to dislodge him but could not reach
him. Then its wild eyes met Nathan's. Its strange, alien face
seemed contorted with rage. Nathan hesitated for a second as he
gazed at those gleaming empty eyes that looked more dead than
alive. Did his own eyes mirror that rage, that deadness?
A lightning streak reflected off the colored orb and drove
Nathan to increase his attack. He crushed one eye as he struck
with the flat of his hand: short, vicious, hard. He smashed his fist
into another eye and felt the black globe crush and ooze dark liq-
uid. It trickled down his legs like steaming soup. Step by step, he
was blinding it.
The pycno went wild, with all of its legs attempting to reach
Nathan, but as he had discovered, the thing could not reach him
if he huddled close to its body. Now all he had to do was hang
on and let it lose strength. Just so long as it didn't go for Natalie
again.
Its movements slowed, became imprecise. A pool of green
blood, not yet congealed, bloomed from the pycno's eye sockets
in a small puddle. After a minute, he realized that all of the eyes
on the body had been destroyed. The spider was blind, except for
the two eyes at the end of its proboscis.
It swung that proboscis around to gaze at Nathan, and then
vomited on him. As Nathan wiped the ooze away from his eyes,
a heavy wet thing, its digestive wall, started slobbering its way up
his belly and chest. It then expelled green corrosive substance
from its mouth, but the bulk of the goo missed him.
Now the rest of the world returned to his awareness. "Here,
take this," the captain shouted as he threw a flare gun to Nathan.
Nathan reached for it but dropped it. The gun clattered to the
deck. "Try again!" Calamari shouted. He threw a second gun,
and this time Nathan caught it.
Nathan cried out and shoved his left hand into the digestive
walls, which opened and closed spasmodically. Then he took
away his hand and pulled the end off the flare gun. Orange flame
shot out of the gun, which he jammed with all his might into the
beige mucus walls of the sea spider's digestive tract.
Suddenly the digestive walls withdrew. Nathan smelled an
unpleasant aroma, a cross between burnt bacon and ammonia.
The pycno's legs thrashed madly, but they weren't taking the
creature anywhere. A minute later the creature was motionless,
as if hypnotized with pain and failure.
Nathan reached into the open wound, reached deep, and
pulled out a majority of its primary brain. The creature was now
anencephalic, left with merely a brain stem, a tiny stump of a
brain, and a few minor brains-the ganglia. If it were to survive
it could now exist only in a persistent vegetative state-the remaining
 stalk of its brain allowed the body to perform basic, reflexive
 functions like breathing. Its primitive heart, the hemocoel
cavity, would continue to pump blood, and its flesh would be
maintained, assuming someone fed it. But the spider would
never again be conscious of its environment, never see, never
feel.
As if aware of its state, it began to keen so loudly that it
masked the approaching sirens from the Coast Guard boats.
Rescue was coming at last.
Nathan could have let the pycno "live" in a tenuous vegetative
 existence, but instead he reached deep into its body and
tore out its last vestige of life, the brain stem. The mass in his
hand was gray, slightly wrinkled, the size of a plum. It throbbed,
trailing torn nerves and arteries. It pulsed, not because it was still
alive, but because the torn nerves continued to provide an everweakening
 electrical impulse. He held the beating organ in his
left hand until its metronomic pumping stopped. Then he threw
it to the ferry's deck. It flattened like a piece of dough as it hit
the wet surface.
The spider collapsed. Its muscles trembled, went rigid, and
ceased to move.
Off in the distance the sounds of sirens continued, the lamenting
 wails of Coast Guard boats hopping though the waves like a
small school of fish. They grew louder, winding up like an invisible
 clock spring in the dark autumn air. Reflections from the revolving
 lights atop the Coast Guard boats cast a red stroboscopic
pattern on the deck. The fog looked like a red wounded mist, like
blood on a de Kooning painting.
The passengers did not bother to turn in the direction of the
sirens, but merely continued to stare at the man with wild,
bloodshot eyes on top of the spider's corpse. The storm clouds,
which had covered the sky so densely that no moon or starlight
could penetrate, were starting to move southward.
At first Nathan stood defiantly, gazing up at the dark sky
where several beams of moonlight were beginning to shine like
rays of hope from a beneficent god. But seconds later he collapsed,
 fell to the deck, moaned, and was quiet. He had had the
strength of madness, and now it had deserted him. He felt lost.
Behind him was the dark and broken wreckage of the great
pycnogonid. It look ominous in the misty night, like a ghost, a
skeleton, a grim reaper, a phantom which never moved but only
gazed at the little man who should be bones. No one moved on
deck. They just stared. Nathan realized that he now looked like
a thin old man, never moving, never caring, lying near the creature's
 still brain on the deck, frozen on the edge of fallow fields
forever.
Then there was a groan. "Natalie!" Nathan cried, bursting
out of his trance. He hauled himself past the brain and lurched
toward her.
Then everyone was converging. "She's alive!" Falow cried.
"Alive," Nathan echoed, prayerfully.

CHAPTER      36
Decision

AFTER THE COAST Guard arrived and helped all of the passengers
 off of the ferry, they secured a rope to the battered craft
and started pulling it back to shore with a tugboat. The pycnogonid's
 body was left to sit alone on the ferry's deck, its long legs
trailing back into the sea. Overhead the gulls cried, hoping to get
an opportunity to probe at the rotting flesh of the sea spider.
Around the ferry, the ocean waves seemed to lift to the stars.
The ocean water was beginning to take on a rainbow sheen of
oil that glimmered like mercury on the twilight sea. Above in the
sky was a trailing veil of gold. Dawn was approaching. It had
been quite a night.
From beneath the spider's body there was movement. A
hinged door beneath the chitonous exoskeleton opened downward.
 A hand appeared. The hand's fingers were all the same
length, except for the super-long ring finger. Dr. Martha Samules,
 owner of the largest aquarium store in Newfoundland,
crawled from the hollowed-out region in the dark interior of
the creature's body. She had on a diving mask and oxygen tank.
The skin on her hands looked blistered, as if some of the corrosive
 substance from the pycnogonid's digestive tract had
seared her with some mystical and unknown heat. Her arms
were splattered with blood and brains and tiny broken fish
bones.
"Ahh," she said as she gently pulled herself from some of the
creature's muscles and veins, and let the fresh sea air rush into
her lungs. Her neck was dotted with large beads of sweat despite
the chill of the air.
The dawn grew colder as quick-moving shadows of clouds
skimmed over the water. The drizzle continued. But the woman
seemed to notice neither.
Martha gazed up at the spider's long thin legs, so much like
her own fingers, and trembled. She looked left, then right, and
saw no one. Her wild, exotic sapphire eyes sparkled in the moonlight.
 Her inch-long teeth were clenched in a large sharky smile.
"So one male wasn't enough," she said. "The big female won't
be able to do it alone, either. But what about a hundred-or ten
thousand? Suppose three had tackled this boat, coordinated? I
think we are almost there."
Then she reconsidered, gazing at the hole that had been
carved to remove the creature's main brain. "But stronger protection
 is needed in some sections. May have to implant some
steel plates. And the eyes-how can those be shielded? It's a
challenge."
She walked quietly over to one of the creature's shorter legs
and reached into a small crevice in its underside. As she thrust
her hand in, she felt hundreds of juvenile pycnogonids in their
larval stage of development. She withdrew a handful, and held
the writhing tiny bodies in her left hand. She reached into another
 body cavity and pulled out the creature's cold, dead heart.
"But we'll have to do something about your taste in prey,
too," she said, as if addressing the dead sea spider. "Can't have
you eating all the fish and squid and other creatures in the sea.
Maybe we can give you a special taste for human flesh alone.
Then you'll have to seek the right prey, even when not guided."
She nodded as she pondered the matter. "Oh yes, there's work
to be done yet." She smiled, looking forward to it.
Above she heard the cry of a mournful gull. Her hand still
held the larvae. Then, as quick and quiet as a ferret, she crawled
to the edge of the ferry, gazed over the rusted railing as the noisy
surf flung crystal splinters onto her wrinkled face, and then
dropped into the dark blue sea filled with golden froth of autumn's
 russet.

CHAPTER
Epilog

The human race has been guilty of almost
countless crimes; but I have some excuse for
mankind. This world, after all, is not very
well adapted to raising good people. In the
first place, nearly all of it is water. It is much
better adapted to fish culture than to the production
 of folks.
- ROBERT G. INGERSOLL,
The Ghosts and Other Lectures
"How DID YOU know about this place?" Lisa asked, her wideeyed
 wonder coming naturally.
"Well, I am the local fishery officer," Elmo replied as he
guided the car along the diminishing road to Cape St. Mary's,
at the southern tip of the southwestern projection of the Avalon
Peninsula of Newfoundland. "This is a sea bird sanctuary, and
fish are essential to sea birds."
"Oh, of course." She smiled at him, as she did so often now.
He had told her how her first smile had captivated him, and
now that was important to her. He did not return the smile, and
that was by mutual agreement. Her smiles were performed for
both of them.
He brought the car to a halt. "We'll have to wait here until
they catch up," he said. "They don't know where the sea stack
is. I hope you don't mind the delay."
"Whatever will we do with the time?" she inquired rhetorically
as she unsnapped her seat belt and slid across to hug him. She
planted a wet kiss on his cheek. "Am I boring you?"
"Not unduly," he admitted. "But you know you really don't
owe me anything. I would have tried my best to save you even if
you'd been old and ugly."
"Well, I do expect to be supported in excellent style for the rest
of my life," she said. "Once you get up the nerve to marry me."
"It's not nerve, it's caution. You need time to realize that the
loss of one thumb does not make you unattractive to the great
majority of men."
"But it does make me realize how unimportant hands are,"
she said. "Except when they are reaching out to pull a person
from freezing, monster-ridden hell. So I can focus on things like
decency, security, and commitment." She kissed him again, this
time on the ear. "Love was there waiting for me, only I couldn't
see past the-"
She broke off, for she had spied an oncoming car. The other
couple had arrived.
The car pulled up behind theirs. In a moment Nathan and
Natalie Smallwood got out. They hadn't wasted any time about
getting married, Lisa thought. That was because he had to return
to Harvard, and they hadn't wanted to separate. Police Chief
Falow would have to hire another policewoman for St. John's,
because this one would be working in another state, at least for
a while. Natalie had actually gotten married in a wheelchair two
weeks after surviving the moinster spider. Her first week of marriage
 must have been good for her, because she was on her feet
now. This was technically their honeymoon. They liked going to
obscure places together. In fact, they seemed to like anything at
all, together. It certainly looked like fun, from Lisa's vantage.
Lisa and Elmo got out to join the others. "It's a good thing
you arrived when you did," Elmo said. "This teen was getting
fresh."
Natalie smiled. "Oh? Did she do this to you?" She planted a
kiss on Nathan's cheek.
"Yes, twice," Elmo said indignantly.
"He's lying," Lisa protested. "The second one was on the ear."
Natalie frowned at Lisa. "For shame!" she said severely. "Are
you trying to corrupt this innocent man?"
"I'm trying to get him to marry me," Lisa said. "But he ignores
 me."
"Keep working on him," Natalie advised. "It's just a matter of
trial and error until you find his weak point."
"What was Nathan's weak point?" Lisa asked mischievously.
"His imagination. It was limited."
Lisa was perplexed. "But how could that-?"
"Never mind," Nathan said. "Some things must not be revealed."

They laughed. Then Elmo led the way to the sea stack. This
turned out to be a small steep-sided rocky mountain by the
coast. They had to navigate a trail down the cliff-like shore and
cross shallow water to reach it, but didn't get their feet wet because
 there were stepping stones leading to it. There was also a
crude path slanting up it, so that they could climb without having
 to scramble four-footed. That was just as well, because neither
 Natalie nor Elmo had yet recovered strength for anything
beyond routine exertion, and Lisa was not yet fully recovered either.
 They wouldn't have come out here, if the matter weren't so
important.
"What a place for a mountain!" Lisa remarked. "How did it
ever get here?"
"It was here first," Elmo explained. "The waves of the sea cut
through behind it, washing out the dirt and gravel, causing the
cliff to collapse. So it remains as an island, protected by rock that
was too solid for the waves to defeat. It's a perfect breeding place
for northern gannets, because neither land nor sea predators
can conveniently reach it. It's past the birds' nesting season, but
there may be some remaining."
Sure enough, as they reached the top several goose-sized birds
squawked and took off. The group paused in place, waiting for
the birds to settle. Lisa saw one of them swoop down into the
sea, going for a fish. "I wish I could do that," she said.
"Wouldn't work," Elmo said. "Your mouth's too small."
They found comfortable rocks and sat on them. "Do you
think she'll come?" Lisa asked, concerned.
"She'll come," Elmo said. "She knows I don't bluff. We disagree
 philosophically, but we trust each other. My note was clear
enough."
"Just what did you say to her?" Lisa asked. "I never saw the
note."
"Because you had to remain anonymous, until this time," he
said. "She would have fired you, if she knew that you and I were
comparing notes and fathoming her secret."
"And what a secret it is!" Natalie exclaimed. "We never suspected.
 If it hadn't been for that pycnogonid attack on the
ferry-"
"And for our coincidental acquaintance," Nathan agreed. "We
had a personal as well as professional reason to figure it out."
"And when I looked deep into its snout and saw that thing
moving," Elmo said, "I didn't realize its significance right them.
But later it registered: there was something inside that giant pycnogonid.
 Something that wasn't its natural innards. Something
that seemed almost independent.That started me thinking, during
 my recovery. And when Lisa mentioned how my sister was
able to train small sea spiders in her lab, I started making connections.
 It all started coming together, in an amazing way.
That's why I mentioned it to you, Nathan, when you visited."
"And that got me going," Nathan agreed. "I would not have
believed anything like that was possible, if I hadn't actually seen
and fought that monster. Then it was not if but how-and who.
Who could have generated what we encountered?"
"And there was only one person," Natalie said.
"So I simply wrote MARTHA-YOUR PET ALMOST ATE
ME. MEET ME IN PRIVATE-OR IN PUBLIC." Elmo
smiled. "So she called me, and we said nothing, only agreed to
meet on the stack."
"You threatened her?" Lisa asked. "She gets mean when
threatened."
Elmo smiled. "So do I. We know each other. She knows I
won't bluff. She knows she has to settle with me, or I'll blow the
whistle on her project and she'll be arrested for murder. Because
 of the people that pycno killed." He glanced at her. "Like
your sister-in-law."
Lisa shuddered. How well she understood how savage the
monster was! "But won't she come with a gun or something,
to-so that you won't tell?"
"No. She knows I'll have the information documented and
primed to be released on my death. But she wouldn't kill me
anyway. I'm the one person she would never knowingly harm.
Nor would I harm her. We're two of a kind." He held up one
hand, showing the odd fingers. "So we're here to negotiate. In
complete, guaranteed privacy."
"I don't know," Lisa said. "I've never seen her give way on
something she's set on."
"I'm the same way," Elmo said. "That's why we have to negotiate.
 She knows that."
"You will both have to compromise, you know," Natalie said.
"There has to be some middle ground."
"And you and Nathan will be the judge of it," Elmo agreed.
"And Lisa. We'll probably accept what you agree on."
"I hope so," Lisa said, not completely reassured.
After a while they heard a scraping from the seaward side of
the stack. "She comes," Natalie said. None of them moved.
A head appeared, and then the shoulders and torso. It was
Martha, in her wetsuit. She saw them, and came to sit on a rock
facing them all. She looked at Lisa. "So you're part of this," she
muttered. "I should have known."
"Her brother's wife was killed by the spider the first week,"
Natalie said.
"I didn't think she had the wit to do anything about it,"
Martha said.
"Lisa's with me, now," Elmo said.
"If I had known you were on that ferry-" Martha shrugged.
"You had to know I'd be looking for the giant pycnogonid,"
Elmo told her. "And that I'd find it, sooner or later."
Martha sighed. "I had hoped later." She looked around at the
rest of them. "So you all know. What's your deal?"
"Lisa will explain it," Elmo said.
"Lisa can barely explain a sign that says NO REFUNDS.
Leave her out of this."
"No, she'll do it," he said, his jaw set.
"Why her?"
"Because she will use the simplest, most straightforward language,"
 Nathan said. "There will be no confusion."
Lisa knew that he also regarded it as a good exercise for her
to boost her self-confidence. Fortunately he didn't say that.
Martha nodded. "And no subtlety." She faced Lisa, grimacing.
 "So?"
Lisa tried to quell her nervousness. Never before had she
faced Martha on any basis approaching anything other than servility.
 But this time it had to be done. "You're breeding monsters.
You have to stop."
"Those monsters will stop a worse monster," Martha said
grimly. "The one that's destroying the world. You know that humankind
 will never cease its overbreeding and consequent pillage
 of the animate and inanimate resources of the world until
all other life and all usable features of the globe have been extirpated.
 Then it will be too late. Better to cull that rampant
species now, and save the world as we know it."
Lisa knew the answer to that; they had discussed it carefully.
"That may be true, but this isn't the way," she said carefully. "If
too many monsters attack too many ships, the-the government
of some country will strike back. Like maybe by poisoning the
water, or setting off bombs. They wouldn't care that it hurt ten
times as much as was necessary."
"That's not true," Martha said defiantly. "The governments
wouldn't poison their own waters or use bombs. Countries bordering
 on the oceans know that they need the shipping lanes, the
fish, and the beaches for their own economic well being. They'd
never drop bombs."
"You mean some governments actually care about the wellbeing
 of their ecosystems?" Lisa countered. "Why, Martha, how
could you say such a thing?"
Martha snarled, evidently stung by the sarcasm. Lisa was privately
 thrilled; she had never before dared to speak this way to
her employer.
"Even if you are right that most governments would hesitate
before poisoning their waters, not all governments would be
careful," Lisa continued. "And if you actually managed to exterminate
 thousands of people, there's no telling what the government
 and local people will do to protect themselves."
Martha's lips pursed appreciatively. "I have been too distracted
 by my work," she said. "I should have thought of that.
The stupid government is capable of doing a hundred times the
damage it has to, in pursuit of some shortsighted objective." She
squinted at Lisa. "You didn't work that out yourself, did you,
girl?" The tone was insulting.
Lisa smiled, briefly. She had been primed for this tactic. "Of
course not. Elmo did. But it's true, isn't it? Even if no one knows
about you, they'll do terrible harm to the environment, trying to
kill the monsters. So your program will be-"
"Counterproductive," Martha finished. "I'm trying to save
the world, not harm it myself." She glanced at Elmo. "But since
when does my brother care about the environment? He's always
been a human-first idiot."
Lisa stifled a laugh. She had come to know how extensive
Elmo's knowledge of the sea and its creatures was. He was just
as smart as Martha was, only maybe in a different way. It was
one reason she loved him, as she had come to know him. He had
saved her life, but he was a considerable man regardless. "He
cares about humankind. And the other creatures of the world.
He wants to help them. He just thinks you're going about it
wrong."
Martha looked at Ebmo again, assessing him anew. "If she
turned you around on tlhat, she's a hell of a lot more girl than I
took her for."
Elmo remained silentt, refusing to be provoked into a retort,
because they had agreed to let Lisa speak alone, unprompted.
They believed that wouild be more persuasive. So Lisa had to
speak for him. "It wasn'tt me. He had time to think, while he was
recovering. He realized tlhat humankind is like a monster, maybe,
and maybe has to be sttopped. But peacefully, without bloodshed.
 And he talked witih Nathan and Natalie, and they worked
out a way, maybe." She wasn't saying it well; Martha's remark
about her competence, o>r lack of it, had put her off her rehearsed
words. Exactly as Martina had intended.
"What way?" Martha demanded.
"You-you have a krnowledge about marine life that theythey
 say is genius," Lisa said, cursing herself for her halting delivery.
 But this was the ccrux, and if Martha didn't buy it, there
would be trouble. "You can make monsters no one else could. So
maybe you could make-something else. Like a way to feed humankind,
 instead of-"
"Feed humankind!" Avlartha screeched, startling several gannets
 into flight. "I don't want to make the situation even worse!
Humankind should be sttarved, not fed-especially not at the expense
 of the marine environment."
"A special food," Lisai continued with determination. "Algae,
maybe, a new variety that grows the way the sea spiders do, that
feeds on wastes and oil spills and stuff, to fill whole bays with
high quality green food tthat man can harvest instead of hunting
fish. Like-like manna :from heaven. So people could farm it,
and there'll always be rmore than enough. The fish could eat it
too. You could develop tlhis, and-"
"Of course I could!" Martha snapped. "But why should I? It
would only be helping rmy enemy to quadruple his population
even faster."
"Because-because it would have-have another property.
A secret one. It would reduce fertility. For man, not for fish or
other creatures. The poorest countries, which unfortunately have
the highest birth rates, would be your first consumers. If you
were to manufacture the food in bulk and sell it cheaply, you'd
still make a profit. So the more of it people eat-"
Martha was staring at her. "Good God, girl-this is insidious!
The more people eat it, the fewer babies they'd have. Only they
wouldn't catch on right away, because it would be like red squill,
the rat poison that thins their blood a little at a time, so by the
time they notice it they've OD'd and are dying. A slow, cumulative
 effect, difficult to prove because there would be so many
variables, especially if they weren't looking for it. And even if
they did catch on, they'd still have to eat it because there
wouldn't be much else, and this would be cheaper. Grow different
 flavors, tasting like steak or hamburger or caviar. Maybe
make it slightly habituating, the way cola is, so they don't want
to stop. Mix it in with other foods, so they couldn't readily trace
the reason for the declining birth rate. You know, this could
work! What genius thought of it?"
Elmo, Nathan, and Natalie burst out laughing.
"I-I did," Lisa said faintly. "They-they thought it was a
good idea. And if it wasn't, that maybe you could improve on it."
Martha shook her head. "Out of the mouths of babes," she
muttered. "So you want me to stop breeding spiders and start
breeding algae. And in return you'll keep your knowledge of my
activities secret." She glanced sharply around. "Past, present,
and future."
"Yes," Lisa said. "As long as you concentrate on positive,
peaceful research and development. No more monsters. And
we'll try to find a way to-to market the algae, so that some big
company can get rich on it. Then it will never stop, any more
than tobacco did, because there's money being made. And the
human population will be controlled, because only by staying
low enough so people don't have to eat the algae will they be able
to have babies. The other creatures will have a chance."
Martha's brow furrowed. "I see you folk came prepared. It's
not tight, but I could play with it and come up with a superior
variant."
"For example, just as with the pycnos, you could genetically
insert genes in the algae for biochemicals that would reduce a
man's sperm count," Nathan said. "Weren't the Chinese working
 with an extract from cotton seeds called gossypol that reduced
 sperm viability?"
"I have a better idea," Martha said. "How about I insert a
gene that produces a chemical that ages people prematurely?
Imagine that. By the age of 13, humans would start dying of old
age. Wouldn't it be fun to watch them all start dropping like flies
with Alzheimer's disease just when they were becoming fertile!
Wonder what effect that would have on the social security and
Medicare system of the U.S.? Why I could bankrupt the U.S.!"
"Martha, we're trying to steer you on a more humane
course," Lisa said angrily.
"And we'll be watching and checking on you from time to
time," Nathan warned.
"I was just joking," Martha said. "Your algae idea sounds
pretty good." She squinted at Lisa. "But you, girl-if it were up
to you alone, what would you do?"
Lisa couldn't stop herself. "I'd give the police the evidence
against you, and see you fry for murder. You killed Kalinda, and
almost killed me."
Martha nodded. "But the others want to go for the big prize,
the world. And they made you go along."
"Yes," Lisa said tersely. "You bitch."
Martha seemed satisfied rather than angry. "So you, too, are
telling the truth. You will honor the deal."
"Yes."
"And I can't even fire you, because we'll be partners of a
sort." Martha shook her head as if bemused. "Well, you've got
me in check. I'll make the deal."
Lisa knew they had won, though for her it was a bitter victory.
When she had learned Martha's role in Kalinda's death, she had
wanted to kill the woman. But Natalie had made her face: reality:
 she couldn't bring Kalinda back, but she could help se(e that
no others died that way, and do the world a significant favor. So
she had had to choke back her pain and rage and work, with
them to make it happen. And she knew that despite her amger,
it was the right thing. It was a realistic compromise.
Slowly Lisa extended her hand. Martha took it and shook it
once. Then Martha shook hands with the other three3 con<cluding
 with her brother. This was the kind of agreement that could
not be written. They all knew that.
Then Martha rose, walked to the edge of the stack, and! disappeared
 over it. She was on her way back to her pet monster,
but not to guide it to any more ships.
"It's better this way," Natalie said. The two men murmmred
agreement. And Lisa had to agree too.
"Who knows what scientifically valuable information she will
discover," Nathan said, "if we can keep her in check and make
sure she uses her apparent skills for the good of humanity.'"
"She might even be considered the new savior of humans* and
the earth," Natalie said wryly.
Elmo took Lisa's hand. "Next time you propose to me, I may
accept," he said. She knew he was serious. She had proved to
him that she had what it took.
They started down the steep slope.

AUTHOR'S    NOTE:
PIERS    ANTHONY
MARCH 9, 1992, was an unusual day. I was in the middle of the
editing of my fantasy novel Demons Don't Dream, and learned
that Drew, a close acquaintance of my daughter Penny and the
closest friend of Alan, my research assistant, had killed himself.
Alan had been talking with Drew on the phone, and then there
was silence. When other friends checked, they found that Drew
had shot himself. I knew Drew, but wasn't close to him; my
daughters have many acquaintances, and I try not to mess with
their lives. Nevertheless it was a shock. My awareness had
abruptly shifted from fun puns to death.
So I would hardly have noticed the letter I received that day
from one Clifford A. Pickover of the IBM research center in
New York, except that he enclosed one of his books: Computers
and the Imagination. Now I use a computer, and I have dabbled
with fractals, so have a certain layman's interest in such things.
But it was evident that this man was into such matters in much
the way I am into novels: compulsively. That book had colored
fractal pictures resembling such things as an inner tube with
heartworms, an ocean wave with pustules, the mountains of the
moon overlooking the cataclysmic destruction of Planet Earth,
skull-faces in an electrified pool of iridescent oil, and a knotbodied
 red worm with eyeballs at either end. Strictly routine
stuff, of course, but it showed that the man had imaginary aspirations.
 So I sent him a copy of my Fractal Mode, told him that
I didn't much like IBM as a company, and wished him well.
But Cliff Pickover is not so lightly dismissed. He sent me others
 of his books, containing all manner of notions and illustrations:
 giant fractal sea shells, mobius-strip worms, a golden atom
with two green electrons, a Mandelbrot set fissioning in the Pacific
 Ocean, a fractal Mexican hat, stones with indigestion, and
kaleidoscopic rug patterns. Promising, but not exactly the magic
of Xanth. His text showed a ubiquitous interest in things ranging
 from the Arabian Nights (me too: that's why I wrote Hasan)
to computer generated poetry to prehistoric insects. I continued
to brush him off politely, as I do with any routine fan. So then
he upped the ante: "I've written a sci-fi novel . . ." After I recovered
 from my heartwormy inner-tube-sized wince at the bad
word, I lectured him about the use of obscene terms like "scifi"
 in public, and read his novel. It was promising, but needed
work. So ...
So we collaborated, and this is the result. It gained 40,000
words, a new title, several bit players fractally merged and become
 major players, and the overall theme changed. Aside from
such details, it's the same.
But I had my little adventures along the way. For example, the
conversion from Cliff's ASCII mode to my word processor,
Sprint, was imperfect; it left a number of midparagraph hard
carriage returns in place. Rather than pick them all out individually,
 I devised a macro-that is, a combination of steps performed
 as one-to eliminate those annoying breaks in one swell
foop. Only I neglected one minor aspect. I did a Find and Exchange,
 finding each carriage return [A J] that was followed by
something other than a space [A ]. You know, normally a paragraph
 ends, and the following paragraph is indented several
spaces, so when there's one that has words instead of spaces,
that's an error. I simply exchanged each [A J] for a space: that is,
I got rid of it, leaving the paragraph whole, as it was supposed
to be. I should have replaced it with a space question mark [ ?],
meaning that whatever followed it remained as it was. A minor
omission, of course, but with computers, little things can mean
a lot.
What happened was that I did restore all those fragmented
paragraphs-but with a few leading letters missing. Yes, I know,
my collaborator would never have made such a mistake. But
mistakes do make for some intriguing bypaths. Here are some
samples:
"I'll shoot it," heppard said and took a few hots at the creature
from her position on deck.
uddenly, Elmo let go of the blond girl or a second. "Help," he
yelled as he ooked at his hand.
Brenda creamed again.
Yes, yes, I know: many readers will say that it's more fun that
way. But too much ooking and creaming makes editors nervous.
So I tediously replaced the missing letters as I went through it,
and as far as I know, none are issing ow.
Another thing I did was change the major characters from a
last name to a first name basis. I like things personal. So, for example,
 I did a global exchange of Natalie for Sheppard. But
sometimes the full names were given. Thus every so often I encountered
 Natalie Natalie. Once it came out "her frisky German
Natalie dog."
I needed a new setting for a romantic scene, and I couldn't
wait for my collaborator to work one up, so I drew on a personal
resource. This requires a flashback:
Back in 1990 Alan's grandmother Dot McCulla visited us.
She has always ranged around the world, collecting stones from
many regions. But as she got older, she decided to give some of
her collection to interested parties. Now I happen to be a reformed
 collector. I have collected a wide variety of things in my
day, consistently-some would say compulsively. As a child I
collected boxes, from matchboxes to crates, nesting them one inside
 the other so that they didn't take up too much room. I collected
 bottletops I found on the ground, noting their seemingly
infinite variety, and played a homemade game with them that
vaguely resembled the Chinese Go. As an adolescent I collected
science-fiction magazines, cherishing each one. When I became
a pro writer, and had children (no, the two aren't immutably
connected), I could no longer devote a whole room to thousands
 of old magazines, so gave the collection to serious fans I
knew would properly appreciate it. Something that precious
can't be sold, after all. Now I collect one copy of each edition of
the books I write-hardcover, softcover, American, British, German,
 etc.-and it keeps expanding beyond my shelving, being
somewhere around five hundred now. But I don't think I'll give
that away.
So I know the soul of collecting, and understand the importance
 of saving stones. So she gave several boxes of stones to me,
and one day I hope to make a fancy rock garden with them,
with sections for the stones from Texas, Cape Cod, Hawaii,
Wales, Italy, France, or wherever. When she visited, we had her
identify each stone by location, and we marked them. Thus we
know that the igneous rock is from Hawaii, and that one stone
is a fragment from an old Welsh castle. And some are from Newfoundland,
 including a little town she passed through called
Come By Chance. At that point my ears perked, and I got an
atlas and located it on the map. What an intriguing name and location!

So when I found myself amidst a novel set in Newfoundland,
in need of a romantic setting, I remembered Come By Chance.
I researched amidst the collection and located a stone from
there. And that is the one Natalie found. Yes, it really does
vaguely resemble that island.
So what other distinction does this novel have? Well, because
of the luck of the draw that determines what is finished when, I
am now working on three novels and an anthology, and this is
the first of those to be completed, and so Spider Legs happens to
be #100 in my cumulative total of books written. That doesn't
necessarily mean it will be my hundredth published, but at least
it's a personal marker of a sort. I hope you enjoy it.

AUTHOR'S    NOTE:
CLIFFORD    A.    PICKOVER
I am reminded of a French poet who, when
asked why he took walks accompanied by a
lobster with a blue ribbon around its neck,
replied, "Because it does not bark, and because
 it knows the secret of the sea."
-ANONYMOUS
I love to eat lobsters. I'm eating one right now, and I occasionally
 wipe my messy hands and return to typing on a laptop computer.
Lobsters were my favorite food before Piers and I finished
Spider Legs this week. Now I'm less sure about my craving for
lobster meat. In the past, I could get in the mood for writing this
book by occasionally eating a lobster. As I would eat I examined
the lobster's anatomy, the legs, the claws . . . People at the dinner
 table or restaurant often thought I was a bit odd.
My interest in lobsters, pycnogonids, and various strange
creatures of the sea probably had its origin in an oceanology
course I took during the summer of my junior year in high
school. My specific fascination with pycnogonids peaked about
the time I received my Ph.D. from Yale University, when I read
about a 12-legged pycnogonid found near Antarctica of all
places. Its proboscis was much longer than the rest of its body.
Still, it would have been hard for me to predict that Pickover and
Piers would be collaborating on pycnogonids several years later.
After I read about the antarctic sea spiders, a little time went
by, and computer graphics and scientific visualization soon be|
 came two of my main interests. In the meantime, I published a
number of popular books on the creative use of computers in art
and science. (As Piers alluded to in his Author's Note, my books
contain a weird collection of computer art, games, philosophies,
and mind-expanding puzzles.) My Ph.D. is in molecular biophysics
 and biochemistry, but now I create computer art and
write science fiction. Life is strange that way: it's largely unpredictable.
 So much of what we do seems to develop from chance
meetings with people and what we are exposed to by our families
 and friends. Randomness plays such a great role.
Although my popular science/art books gave me a nice sense
of accomplishment, my real dream was to publish a novel based
on my interest in unusual biological creatures. Hence, this novel.
Spider Legs is based on my explorations, on land and in the sea,
into the rare and dangerous creature known as Colossendeis. Yes,
the deep-sea Colossendeis is real! Pycnogonids are real. Various biological
 descriptions in the novel, such as the packing of the
pycnogonid's digestive system into its legs, are based on scientific
 facts. However, the life cycles of the large, deep-sea forms,
especially members of the genus Colossendeis, are still largely unknown
 to scientists. For a general background on the pycnogonid's
 life and behavior, see Lockwood's Biology of the Invertebrates
(Wiley, NY, 1977).
How does Piers fit into all this? After completing a rough
draft of the novel, I began to search for a collaborator to bring
the book together and add material as needed. My first thought
was Piers Anthony, science fiction and fantasy's most creative
talent-and one of the most prolific. I had been reading his
books for many years, but the idea for collaborating with Piers
started when a colleague lent me a copy of Piers's fantastic
novel Virtual Mode, which had just been published. I had spent
some time working on Spider Legs and decided it would be beneficial
 to contact a real pro in the fiction business to develop the
novel even further. To set the stage, I mailed Piers my book
Computers and the Imagination, and I thought this would prepare
 him to receive further material from me. I waited a week
or two. Then I followed up by sending him a draft of Spider
Legs.
After some hesitation on Piers's part, it seemed like I soon
hooked him on the idea of a collaboration, and what you see is
the result. Collaborating turned out to be quite easy, and, oddly
enough, choosing a title was one of our more difficult jobs. I had
originally called the book Phantom, a title which we abandoned
fairly quickly because the title had been used too many times before.
 Before we finally arrived at Spider Legs, we considered other
titles: PycnoPhantom, Legs, Killer Legs, Sea Legs, Pycnophobia,
Fractal Phantoms, Spider Eating, Spider Hunter, and even 20,000
Legs Under the Sea.
Some of you may be interested in how I got the idea for
Martha and Elmo's long teeth. It came from various children's
stories I had read involving humans with large teeth. In fact
these kinds of stories have had a long history. The scary story
"The Teeth" in the children's book In a Dark, Dark Room by A.
Schwartz (Harper-Trophy, 1985) is one good example. "The
Teeth" is based on a story from Surinam (Dutch Guiana) collected
 in the 1920s by Melville and Frances Herskovitz. In the
story, a boy continues to meet men on the street with large teeth.
Each man he encounters seems to have bigger teeth than the
previous. . . .
There is some precedent in the medical literature for a disease
known as "vampire disease" which gives the impression of longer
teeth because the gums recede. Other effects of this blood disorder
 disease include pale skin, sensitivity to sunlight, and partial
 relief by drinking blood. There's also a disease which causes
long fingers: Marian's syndrome. President Abe Lincoln is a suspected
 case, presently awaiting positive identification of the gene
from his remains. People with Marfan's are also taller than average.

By now you have probably noticed that I love to collect quotations
 of all sorts. In Spider Legs you'll see a number of quotations
 by Robert Ingersoll. I found these in an old, tattered book
at a local library book sale. The book was published in 1881 and
is falling apart now, but hopefully I have preserved some of its
wisdom here. For those of you who collect quotations, here are
two favorites:
You are so part of the world that your slightest action contributes
to its reality. Your breath changes the atmosphere. Your encounters
 with others alter the fabrics of their lives and the lives of
those who come in contact with them.-Jane Roberts
If we wish to understand the nature of the Universe we have an
inner hidden advantage: we are ourselves little portions of the
universe and so carry the answer within us.-Jacques Boivin
You probably know all about Piers from his previous novels
and Author's Note, but if you're interested in some of my hobbies,
 they include the practice of Ch'ang-Shih Tai-Chi Ch'uan
and Shaolin Kung Fu, raising golden and green severums (large
tropical fish found in the central Amazon basin), producing
computer art, collecting prehistoric mammal skulls and carved
African masks, playing piano, and working with the SETI
League, a worldwide group of radioastronomers who scientifically
 search the heavens to detect evidence of extraterrestrial
life.
My professional interest is finding new ways to continually
expand creativity by melding art, science, mathematics, and
other seemingly disparate areas of human endeavor; and some of
my recent books include such titles as The Alien IQ Test, The
Loom of God, Keys to Infinity, Black Holes-A Traveler's Guide,
and Chaos in Wonderland. I also write the brain-boggier columns
for Discover magazine, hold several U.S. patents, and am associate
 editor for various scientific journals. If you'd like to learn
more about pycnogonids, see images of fossil pycnogonids,
or learn more about Newfoundland, please feel free to visit
my Internet web site, which has received over 100,000 visits:
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/home.htm.
Enough about me. I'd like to hear from you readers. If you
would like to send me your comments on this Anthony/Pickover
collaboration, or obtain a photo of a real pycnogonid, or obtain
more information and a complete list of my other popular science
 books, or send me your own favorite quotations, I can be
reached at Dr. Cliff Pickover, P.O. Box 549, Millwood, New
York 10546-0549 USA.
P.S. Although this Author's Note is finished, by now my lobster
 is cold. Shall I put it in the microwave to reheat it, or would
the claws explode under the pressure of the warming fluid? Let's
try the microwave. While we wait: Did you know this decapod
(yes, that's its scientific order) has 19 pairs of legs. The eyes consist
 of a few elongated segments. The number of unfused ganglia
(nerve tissue masses) posterior to the esophagael ganglion is five
thoracic and six abdominal. I'm rambling. I know. I have a tendency
 to do that.
The microwave is beeping. The lobster is now warm, but I
seem to have lost my appetite after thinking so much about its
anatomy. I also keep thinking of the scene in the resturant where
Martha Samules probes at the lobster to make it move. Perhaps
if Martha were here, we could give her a chunk to devour.

(continued from front flap)
its seemingly endless bounty, strange things are
born in the ocean's deeps- strange things that
the ocean throws back upon the land,
"Piers Anthony is one of those authors who can
perform magic with the ordinary... he is a
craftsman, and, like a skilled furniture maker
who can make a chair much more than a
place to sit, he makes a book more than words
to read."
- The Reader's Guide to Science Fiction
PIERS ANTHONY
PIERS ANTHONY is, very simply, one of the most popular
 fantasy authors in the world, and has had
twenty-one novels on the New York Times bestseller
 list. He lives in Inverness, Florida.
CUFFORD A. PICKOVER
CLIFFORD A. PICKOVER, currently a Research Staff
Member at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center,
is an authority on the interface of science, art,
mathematics, computing, and the visual modeling
 of data. He is the author of such highly
regarded books as Black Hobs: A Traveler's Guide,
The Alien IQ Test, and Cnaos in Wonderland: Visual
Adventures in a Fractal World,
Jacket art by Latif Kazbekov
Jacket design by Carol Russo
A TOR® HARDCOVER
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