For a second, Melanie thought she had misheard him, but then she realized that no, Patrick had indeed said the phrase nuclear explosion. And yet, their reaction seemed more in tune with Melanie’s having shut the laptop during the halftime show at the Super Bowl; it was something they wanted on in the background, but not their primary concern. None of the three looked particularly frazzled. No more frazzled than graduate students normally did, particularly after spending a night in the lab. There was nothing to indicate nuclear Armageddon. Patrick had some sort of smear on the corner of his lip, maybe chocolate, and Julie’s hair was looking like it could use a good round of conditioning, but none of them seemed ready to set out for the hills, and as far as she could tell, none of them had been crying. Still, Patrick really had said that they were keeping the laptop open because of a nuclear explosion. She let her fingers fall back on the lid of the laptop and played them over the notch that opened it. “Uh, anybody care to fill me in? What the hell is going on? Exactly how long was I asleep?”
“We’ve been keeping the temperature steady and had video on the egg sac at HD resolution, and really there wasn’t much of anything—”
“No,” Melanie said, cutting Bark off. “Holy biscuits on a fucking stick. Are you serious? Not the spider. A nuclear explosion?”
“Oh, it’s not really that big a deal,” Patrick said. “It happened last night, but we just found out about it a little while ago. I mean, I guess it was a big deal, because it was a nuke, but it was an accident. It was a large nuke, but it wasn’t a super-populated area. At least that’s what the news is saying. It’s not like it’s the end of the world or anything.”
“It happened in China,” Julie added helpfully.
“Like a meltdown?” Melanie didn’t open the laptop. Their blasé response to this nuclear thing had already turned her away from it and toward thinking about the egg sac. The way the three students were standing made it difficult for her to fully see the insectarium, but a piece of the egg sac was in her vision, and she could see it was moving. No. Vibrating, really.
She walked to the other side of the students and slid the cage containing the rat, Humpy, down the counter a bit so that she could have a clearer view of the egg sac.
“Oh, no,” Patrick said. “Not a meltdown. An actual nuclear bomb. Or a missile. I’m not actually sure which. But either way, it was an accident. Maybe a training mission or a crash or something?” He looked at Bark. “Were you listening?”
Bark shrugged. “I mostly tuned it out after the president made her comments.” He lightly touched the glass of the insectarium with the tip of his middle finger. “This thing has been really interesting. It’s humming,” Bark said.
That was enough for Melanie to take her hand off the laptop and turn fully to look at the egg sac. It was big. That had been the first thing that struck her the day before. Just how big it was. There was no question it was an egg sac, but she’d never seen one that size before. Bigger than a softball. The size of a small melon. And it was hard. Calcified. Or something else. She wasn’t sure what had happened to it, and that was one of the things they were going to have to figure out once the spiders shucked their shell and they could analyze some of the pieces. It didn’t have any give to it, and the feel of it was almost chalky. She realized what it reminded her of: those hard, sour, knobby candy balls she used to get from the quarter machines at the mall when she was just a kid. It looked chalky too, and they noticed the egg sac left a gritty white powder behind, something that looked like baking soda but was textured and grainy, like sand, when she rubbed it between her thumb and fingers.
It was, as Bark so unpoetically put it, really interesting.
Melanie realized Bark was right about the humming. Or, not humming exactly, but something like that. Maybe buzzing? Whatever it was, it wasn’t steady. It seemed to be cycling, low and strong and then moving into a higher pitch but fading, and the vibrating of the sac seemed to alternate with it. She reached through the open lid and put her hand over the sac, and at her first touch she almost snatched it back. “It’s hot.” She looked up at Julie.
“Yeah, the temperature has been going up consistently. I didn’t even notice at first. We tracked it,” Julie said, nodding at the screen on the other laptop on the bench behind her, “but it wasn’t super obvious initially. It was so gradual that at first I didn’t really register that I was adding a degree, adding a degree. If you look at the data, there’s clearly a pattern.”
Melanie let her fingers wrap over the top of it, palming the egg sac just as she used to wish she could palm the ball back when she was in college and still thought there was a chance in hell she could dunk a basketball someday. Maybe if the hoops had been at nine feet instead of ten. And if she’d been able to go off a trampoline. Six feet was tall for a woman, but she’d never had great hops.