“Are her thumbs on the inside or outside?”
“Inside.”
“Well, then, my boy, you are golden.”
Dylan smiled.
“Okay. Why do elephants paint the undersides of their feet yellow?”
Dylan worked it over. “You got me. No idea.”
“So they can hide upside down in bowls of custard.”
“That’s stupid.”
Liam shrugged. “Have you ever found an elephant in your custard?”
“No.”
“Then it clearly works.”
Dylan laughed, then focused on a spot a few feet away. “Pop-pop? Something’s wrong with Mickey.”
Mickey the MicroCrawler stood motionless a few rows over, frozen in place like a statue. Liam leaned over, nudged the Crawler with his tweezers.
“He can’t fix it?”
“Nope.”
“He’s completely, utterly dead?”
“Afraid so.”
Dylan’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve never seen one die before.”
“Crawlers are robust little buggers, but they’re not immortal. Nothing is.” Liam put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “What do you say we give Mickey a proper sendoff?”
Liam went to his computer, the Crawler still in hand. He clicked his way to iTunes and queued up the old Irish dirge “Lament for Art O Laoghaire.” He gave Dylan a wiggle of his eyebrows, but Dylan suddenly looked serious.
The dirge picked up:
“Let’s find you a nice spot,” he said to Mickey. He chose a diminutive patch of earth near the center of the gardens. He dropped the Crawler there, on its back, legs in the air. Liam noted the coordinates of the plot where he had placed Mickey and typed them into the computer.
Dylan watched closely. “What are you doing, Pop-pop?”
“Patience, little man. Some things can’t be rushed.”
Three MicroCrawlers appeared, zipping along the grid of passageways that cut between the plots like rows in a farmer’s field. They arrived at Mickey’s location and immediately began tossing aside bits of dirt, digging a hole. Within seconds they had created a cavity large enough to hold their fallen comrade. Then they descended on him, tearing off his silicon legs, his head, ripping him thoroughly and completely apart.
Dylan was spellbound. “Oh, wow. This is so freaky.”
“Keep watching.” The Crawlers tossed Mickey’s assorted bits into the tiny grave. Next came two more Crawlers, which disgorged their contents onto Mickey, vomiting up tiny water droplets filled with spores.
“Pop-pop? You made a fungus that can break down a Crawler? How?”
Liam smiled. “I borrowed genes from a bacterium that makes an acid. It can etch silicon.” He used his tweezers to dig at a nearby plot. Inside was an older Crawler, half gone, covered with a thin film of fuzzy growth. “See? Not bad, eh?”
Dylan watched with a focus reserved for the weightiest of matters.
Back at the original site, the MicroCrawlers began filling the hole, and after a few seconds Mickey the Crawler was almost entirely covered. They patted down the earth with their silicon legs and skittered away. All that was left was a quarter-sized lump of soft earth and a solitary leg poking up like a tiny blade of silver grass.
“And that’s that. Except it’s not. A couple of months from now, Mickey will be thoroughly broken down to its atomic bits. Ready for another go.”
“But he won’t be Mickey anymore. He’s dead.”
“I like to think he’s still alive,” Liam said. “A bit of his aliveness in everything. Now. Back to boy-girl relationships. What’s the latest with your mom’s boyfriend?”
Dylan pulled his gaze away from the tiny grave.
“Mark? He’s history.”
Liam whistled. “That was quick. What happened?”
“She said he wasn’t right.”
“What do you think?”
“He wasn’t right.”
“Then off with his head.”
Dylan turned and looked at his great-grandfather. “What about Jake?”
“For your mother?”
“Yeah. Why not?”
“Why not?”
“No reason. Just not.”
He tried to be straight with Dylan whenever he could. Dylan was a smart kid, understood more of the world than most kids his age. But this was something beyond his reach.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, THEY WERE WITH MAGGIE OUTSIDE of Clark Hall in the brisk autumn night. She stood waiting by her car, in jeans and a brown pullover sweater, looking lovely, as always, her blond-red hair framing bright, intelligent eyes, a small upturned nose, and pale lips.
“Mom, guess what? We had a Crawler funeral.”
“Care to explain that one?”
Dylan told her about the fungus that could decompose a MicroCrawler. Then he jumped into the car, put in his earbuds, and turned up the music, a kid just like any other. Liam watched her reaction, taking joy at the flash of excitement in her eyes. “Let me guess: you stole a few genes from an archaeal bacterium?”
Liam nodded. “An alkaliphilic.”
Maggie kissed her grandfather on the cheek. “Congratulations. Now come home with us. Have a late dinner. Tell me all about it.”
“Can’t. I have a northern blot running. And an RNA assay to finish.”
“Pop-pop. Come on. You look like you’re about to collapse.”
“I always look like this. ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat-’
“ ‘-upon a stick.’ Don’t be like this. It’s late. It’s almost nine.”
Liam kissed her on the forehead. “Go.”
LIAM RETURNED ALONE DOWN THE EMPTY HALLWAYS. MAGGIE was right. An eighty-six-year-old man should be spending every second he had with his family, not in a research lab alone, shuffling genes in and out of fungi. But this was the way it had to be. His work was not yet finished.
Liam stopped at the door to his lab and listened. No sound.
He was worried, not without cause. The woman, the one who had been following him, was getting more brazen, less and less worried about being seen. He’d had fame-struck stalkers like this twice before-an unfortunate side effect of the kind of notoriety Liam had achieved-but nothing had ever come of it. The police had talked to them, and they’d faded away. Liam had dutifully reported this one to the campus police, but they had yet to identify
