o’clock in the afternoon, and she’s attacked by some guy. Knocked down, hits the concrete, loses consciousness, beaten and raped. When she comes to, she has retrograde amnesia, she can’t remember anything about the attacker, how it happened, what he looks like. Nothing. One day in the hospital and they send her home.
“So there’s a guy in the firm, a partner, he has scratches on his throat, and she thinks maybe it’s him. Some guy in her own firm, followed her out and raped her. But she doesn’t remember, she can’t be sure. And she’s just so uncomfortable. Eventually she leaves the firm, moves to DC, has to start again at a lower-paying job.” Karen held up her fist. “All because she didn’t carry her keys like this. She was too nice to protect herself. Bullshit.”
Peter was trying to imagine whether Karen King would really stab someone with the key, or gut them with a knife. He had the uneasy feeling that she would. In a university setting, where so many people just talked, it seemed she was ready for action.
They came to the storefront martial arts studio, the windows papered over. He could hear shouts in unison from inside. “Well, this is my class,” she said. “I’ll see you later. But listen: if you talk to your brother, ask him why drug companies put up so much money for micro-botics, okay? I’m curious.” And she went through the swinging door, into the class.
Peter returned to the lab that evening. He had to feed the cobra every three days, and he usually did it at night, since cobras were by nature nocturnal. It was eight p.m., and the lab lights were low, when he lowered a squirming white rat into the cage and slid the glass shut. The rat scampered to the far side of the cage, and froze. Only its nose twitched. Slowly the snake turned, uncoiled, and faced the rat.
“I hate to see that,” Rick Hutter said. He had come up behind Peter.
“Why?”
“So cruel.”
“Everybody’s got to eat, Rick.”
The cobra struck, burying its fangs deep in the rat’s body. The rat shivered, stayed on its feet, then collapsed. “That’s why I’m a vegetarian,” Rick said.
“You don’t think plants have feelings?” Peter said.
“Don’t start,” Rick said. “You and Jenny.” Jen’s research involved communication among plants and insects via pheromones, chemicals released by organisms to trigger responses. The field had made enormous advances over the last twenty years. Jenny insisted that plants had to be seen as active, intelligent creatures, little different from animals. And Jenny enjoyed annoying Rick. “It’s ridiculous,” Rick said to Peter. “Peas and beans don’t have feelings.”
“Of course not,” Peter answered, with a smile. “It’s because you’ve already killed the plant-heartlessly dispatched it for your own selfish meal. You just pretend the plant didn’t scream in agony when you killed it, because you don’t want to face the consequences of your cold-blooded plant murder.”
“Absurd.”
“Speciesism,” Peter said. “And you know it.” He was smiling, but there was truth to what he was saying. Peter was surprised to see that Erika was in the lab, and so was Jenny. Few of the graduate students worked at night. What was going on?
Erika Moll stood at a dissecting board, carefully cutting open a black beetle. Erika was a coleopterist, meaning an entomologist with a special interest in beetles. As she said, that was a conversation-stopper at cocktail parties. (“What do you do?” “I study beetles.”) But, in fact, beetles were very important to the ecosystem. A quarter of all known species were beetles. Years ago, a reporter had asked the famed biologist J. B. S. Haldane what could be deduced about the Creator from the creation, and Haldane had answered, “He has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”
“What have you got there?” Peter said to Erika.
“This is a bombardier beetle,” she said. “One of the Australian Pheropsophus that sprays so effectively.”
As she spoke, she returned to her dissection, shifting her body so she was touching his. It seemed to be an accidental contact; she gave no indication that she had even noticed. But she was a notorious flirt. “What’s special about this bombardier?” Peter said.
Bombardier beetles got their name from their ability to fire a hot, noxious spray in any direction from a rotating turret at the tip of their abdomen. The spray was sufficiently unpleasant that it stopped toads and birds from eating them, and it was toxic enough to kill smaller insects immediately. How bombardier beetles accomplished this had been studied since the early 1900s, and by now the mechanism was well understood.
“The beetles produce boiling-hot benzoquinone spray,” she explained, “which they make from precursors stored in the body. They have two sacs in the rear of the abdomen-I’m cutting them open now, there, you see them? The first sac contains the precursor hydroquinone along with the oxidant, hydrogen peroxide. The second sac is a rigid chamber, and contains enzymes, catalases, and peroxidases. When the beetle is attacked, it muscularly squeezes the contents of the first sac into the second, where all the ingredients combine to produce an explosive blast of benzoquinone spray.”
“And this particular beetle?”
“It adds something more to its armamentarium,” she said. “It also produces a ketone, 2-tridecanone. The ketone has repellent properties, but it also acts as a surfactant, a wetting agent that accelerates the spread of the benzoquinone. I want to know where the ketone is made.” She rested her hand lightly on his arm for a moment.
Peter said, “You don’t think the beetle makes it?”
“Not necessarily, no. It might have taken on bacteria, and let the bacteria make the ketone for it.” That was a fairly common event in nature. Making chemicals for defense consumed energy, and if an animal could incorporate bacteria to do the work on its behalf, so much the better.
“This ketone is found elsewhere?” Peter said. That would suggest it was of external bacterial origin.
“In several caterpillars, yes.”
“By the way,” he said, “why are you working so late?”
“We all are.”
“Because?”
“I don’t want to fall behind,” she said, “and I assume I’ll be gone next week. In Hawaii.”
Jenny Linn held a stopwatch while she watched a complex apparatus: leafy plants under one large flask were being eaten by caterpillars, while an air hose connected the first flask to three more flasks, each with more plants but no caterpillars. A small pump controlled air flow among the flasks.
“We already know the basic situation,” she said. “There are 300,000 known species of plants in the world, and 900,000 species of insects, and many of them eat plants. Why haven’t all the plants vanished, chewed down to the ground? Because all plants long ago evolved defenses against insects that attack them. Animals can run away from predators, but plants can’t. So they have evolved chemical warfare. Plants produce their own pesticides, or they generate toxins to make their leaves taste bad, or they release volatile chemicals that attract the insect’s predators. And sometimes they release chemicals that signal other plants to make their leaves more toxic, less edible. Inter-plant communications, that’s what we are measuring here.”
The caterpillars eating the plants in the first flask caused the release of a chemical, a plant hormone, that would be carried to the other flasks. The other plants would increase their production of nicotinic acid. “I’m looking to measure the rate of response,” she said. “That’s why I have three flasks. I’ll be cutting leaves from various places to measure nicotinic acid levels in them, but as soon as I cut a leaf from the next plant…”
“That plant will act like it’s under attack, and it will release more volatiles.”
“Right. So the flasks are kept separate. We know the response is relatively rapid, a matter of minutes.” She pointed to a box to one side. “I measure the volatiles with ultra high-speed gas chromatography, and the leaf extraction is straightforward.” She glanced at her stopwatch. “And now if you’ll excuse me…”
She lifted the first flask, and began cutting leaves from base upward, setting each aside in careful order.
“Hey, hey, hey, what is going on here?” Danny Minot entered the lab, waving his hands. Red-faced and rotund, he was dressed in a tweed sport coat with elbow patches, a rep tie, and baggy slacks, and looked for all the world like an establishment English professor. Which was not far wrong. Minot was getting a doctorate in science studies, a melange of psychology and sociology, with liberal doses of French postmodernism thrown in. He had degrees in biochemistry and comparative literature, but the comparative literature had won out; he quoted
