“Your caterpillar, Miss Wilson.”
“My gratitude, Mr. Kent.”
Then we both began snickering, and Mrs. Kent, who watched the whole exchange, rolled her eyes and told us that we wereboth ridiculous and that caterpillars did not belong in the kitchen.
I did not use the ether bottle for this specimen. There was hardly any point—the average speed of a hornworm caterpillar is only slightly faster than a rock, provided the rock is not feeling motivated. It lived in a large jar on the studio table for two days, and I only bothered with the jar because Smiley was extremely interested in what I was doing.
When I was finished, I released the caterpillar back into the garden. There was no real reason to do so—it had been doomed from the moment that a wasp found it. The larvae would devour it from the inside, leaving it a limp little sack of green hide. Perhaps it would have been more merciful to kill it outright. I don’t know how much pain a hornworm caterpillar feels, but surely that cannot be a pleasant experience.
Still, who am I to sit in judgment on when a caterpillar’s life is worth living? Did the doomed relish the taste of a tomato stem any less thoroughly?
“Well done,” said Dr. Halder, when I presented him with the illustration. “This has been drawn many times before, of course, but it is important to include it in my work as one of the classic examples of parasitism. Did you know that the wasp larvae will deliberately avoid the vital organs of the host as long as possible, in order to preserve its life, and thus, presumably, its freshness?”
I had not actually known that. I kept my face expressionless. “How do they know what organs are most vital to the caterpillar?”
“It is instinctual, of course. The wasps are hardly given an anatomical chart. They have simply evolved blindly over the course of millennia, growing more and more attuned to their hosts.” He tapped his fingertips together. “We pity the caterpillars their suffering, but in truth, the wasps are trapped more than the caterpillars are. Their species is unable to survivewithout the specific host. Their fortunes are intertwined. Anything that wiped out the caterpillar would wipe out the wasp as well, but if the wasps were to go extinct, the caterpillar would neither notice nor care.”
My suspicion was that Halder did not pity either caterpillarorwasp, but it hardly seemed politic to say so.
“Charles Darwin believed that the existence of theIchneumonidaewas proof that a beneficent God had not designed all of creation,” Halder said musingly. “For surely He would not have deliberately created something that required such unspeakable suffering in order to survive.”
I made a noncommittal noise. I was actually rather inclined to side with Darwin on this one, but I had no more wish to debate theology with Halder than I had with Phelps. Besides, Halder had not hired me for my opinions.
Still, it was something of a relief, when I went back to the specimens, to work on something other than caterpillars.
CHAPTER 10
Scritch… scritch… scritch…
Something was scratching to get in the bedroom door. “Dammit, Smiley,” I muttered. I opened one eye, saw only the vague outline of my own hand on the pillow, and closed it again.
Scritch…
The sound was insistent, and must have been going on long enough to wake me up. I poked my head up from the nest of blankets, yawning. Moonlight was coming in through the narrow glass door of the bedroom. I squinted. Was that where the scraping sound was coming from? The door to the studio was open, and it sounded too loud to be coming from the hall.
Sure enough, there was a dark shape just at the door, right at shin level. As I watched, it stretched up on its hind legs and pawed at the glass.
“Smiley, you twit, did you get stuck on the balcony?”
Smiley reached up even farther and tapped the doorknob, which only proved that a cat could be highly intelligent and rather dim at the same time.
“It’d serve you right if I let you sleep outside,” I called. “Maybe then you wouldn’t lurk on the balcony and get cat hair in my paint.”
Smiley obviously heard me, because this statement precipitated a whole volley of scratches. He actually hooked one paw around the doorknob and hung from it for a moment, as if trying to work out how to open the door himself.
I sighed. The last thing I needed was for the cat to figureout doorknobs. One of my father’s friends had a cat who could work doorknobs. There hadn’t been a safe place anywhere in the house. He was particularly fond of barging into the water closet to stare at you while you attempted to attend to personal business.
“Fine,” I muttered with ill grace, sitting up. “I’m coming.”
I had one foot on the floor when I heard a quietmrrrp?from the foot of the bed.
I looked down. Smiley looked back at me, probably wondering why I was disturbing his nest in the middle of the night.
The scratching from the door was suddenly very loud.
…scritch… scritch… SCRITCH…
I stared at the dark shape against the glass. It didn’t look all that much like a cat, now that I was really looking. The ears were wrong and the legs were short and the tail was much too thin.
