were left, withering in the network shadows of the bare branches. Maybe the Thumper had killed it; or maybe it had just run out of life, like everything else seemed to be doing these days.
“Nobody’s blaming you,” said the Grounds Dean. He had come up behind us unnoticed and put his hand on Carl’s shoulder. “To tell the truth, Carl, we’ve been having funding problems. I’m not sure how long we could have afforded to keep the ground feed going anyway. What would you think of going to videoleaf? Or we could even try silicy-berbud branch implants, at least for a season or two. But don’t worry, we’re not going to take out these stately oaks until we absolutely have to. They’re like old friends to the students, Carl. Do you know what they call the Grove?”
The Dean looked at me and winked; I guess because he thought I was young. “The students call it the Kissing Grove!”
“It’s not a question of blame,” Carl said. I’d never seen him so depressed. I wasn’t feeling so hot myself.
“You should send this girl home, Carl,” Lord Byron said when we stopped for lunch. “How long has she worked for you? Gay, honey, have you ever taken a sick day?”
“She lives in the greenhouse,” Carl said. “She doesn’t exactly work for me. And leave her cap alone; nobody wants to look at a bald head.”
We spent the afternoon pulling IV fittings. The Delaware Valley Golf Club is one of the fanciest clubs in the Garden State, and the fairways as well as the greens had been organic not so many years ago. This year we had finally lost the battle on the greens. Thursday was the deadline for us to get our hardware out so they could lay the permaturf.
Carl drove the pickup straight up the fairways, ignoring the angry shouts and curses of the golfers. The greens looked like the moon. Carl angrily unscrewed the nozzles and the fittings and threw them into the back of the pickup, but left the pipes under the ground; they weren’t worth the trouble it would take to get them out, at least for one person working alone. I was too dizzy to do much more than watch.
“Every spring it gets worse,” Carl muttered as he bounced across the last fairway, through the ditch, and onto the county road. “Are you okay? Do you want me to pull over?”
I tried to throw up but nothing would come.
Friday I could barely get up. My once dark skin looked pale reflected in the windows of the greenhouse. Carl was tapping on the glass with the truck key. It was already ten o’clock.
“Code Eight, Gail!” he said. “I’m getting the truck.”
It was the Barbers. “I couldn’t understand what she was saying,” Carl said as he pulled out into traffic. He gave me the emergency flasher to plug in and set up on the dash. “But it must
It was a bright, hard spring day; the sky was cruel blue. Route One was jammed and Carl turned on the siren as well as the light. He drove on the shoulder, with one wheel on the asphalt and the other on the green-painted rocks.
By the time we got to Whispering Woods I could see it was already too late.
The neighbors were standing around the edges of the Barbers’ front yard, watching the grass turn yellow, then yellow-green, then yellow again, flickering like an alcohol fire in sickening waves. There was a faint crackling noise and a thin dying smell.
“Sounds like cereal when you pour the milk on!” said one of the kids.
Carl knelt down and pulled up a clump of grass and smelled the roots; then he sniffed the air and looked over at me as if for the first time. “Code Ten,” he said in a curiously flat voice. Hadn’t we both known this day had to come?
“Look out!” one of the neighbors shouted. “Get back!”
The brown at the edges of the yard was starting to darken and spread inward. The crackling grew louder as it closed on the still-green center; it pulled back once, then again, each wave leaving the yellow-green grass a little paler. Then the grass all darkened at once like an eye closing, and there was silence. I felt my knees give out, so I leaned back against the truck.
“It’s not too late, is it, Carl?” asked Mr. Barber, coming to the end of the walk. His wife followed him, sniffling with fear, keeping her feet on the center of the walk, away from the dead ground. The thin dying smell had given way to a foul, wet, loathsome ugly stench as if some great grave had yawned open.
“What’s that smell?” a neighbor asked.
“Hey, mister, your boy is falling over,” said one of the kids, tugging at Carl’s sleeve. “His hat came off.”
“She’s not a boy,” said Carl. “And her name is Gaea.” I’d never heard him get it right before.
“What’s that smell?” asked another neighbor. She was sniffing not the lawn but the wind, the long one, the one that blows all the way around the world.
“Excuse me,” Carl said to the Barbers. He ran over and tried to pick me up, but I was too far gone.
“It
THE MESSAGE
The voice on the phone was distinct if faint: “Our call came through.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Although I had wanted this for years, had anticipated it, had worked for it and dreamed of it even when working for other things, it was still hard to believe. And harder still to explain to Janet.
“That was Beth on the phone,” I said.
“And you’re leaving.” It was a statement, not a question.
“We both knew this might happen.”
“Don’t bother coming back.”
“Janet…”
But she had already rolled over and was pretending to be asleep. I could almost hear the fabric ripping: the seam of an eight-year marriage that had held us together from small colleges in the Midwest to oceanic exploration centers, to the long winters at Woods Hole.
Once it started to tear, it tore straight and true. I took a cab to the airport.
The flight to San Diego was interminable. As soon as I got off the plane I called Doug at Flying Fish.
“Remember when you said you would drop everything to take me to the island if what we were trying to do came through?”
“I’ll meet you at the hangar,” he said.
Doug’s ancient Cessna was already warming up when I got there. I carried two coffees, the black one for him. We were in the air and heading west over Point Loma before we spoke.
“So the fish finally got through,” he said.
“Dolphins aren’t fish and you know it,” I said.
“I wasn’t talking about them; I was talking about Leonard. He spends so much time underwater he ought to grow gills.”
Doug flew out to the island twice a month to deliver supplies to my partners. As the mainland diminished to a smudge behind us, I thought of the years of research that had brought us to this remote Pacific outpost.
Our funding had been cut off by the Navy when we had refused to allow them to use our data for weapons research. It had been cut off by Stanford when we had refused to publish our preliminary results. Grant after grant had fallen away like leaves; like my marriage, which I now could see was only another leaf hitting the ground. Janet and I had been going in different directions for several years, ever since I had turned down tenure in order to continue my life’s work.
The Project.
