“Here,” Faiz said, touching the screen and leaving a smear. “And here, and here. See how there’s a rhythm to it, but every tenth one’s a little bigger.”
Dr. Basu scrolled to the beginning of the pattern and then counted. She frowned, jotted down some numbers, and then chewed on the end of the pen. It was a habit she’d developed in graduate school and one that, despite having more than a few pens break in her mouth, she’d yet to kick. “They stay bigger.”
“No, it’s only on the tenth rumble that they get big.”
“No, Faiz, look.” Dr. Basu handed him the pad of paper and then pointed at the computer screen. “See?”
Faiz shook his head. “Nope.”
“This is why I’m in charge and you have to get the coffee,” she said, taking some comfort in Faiz’s slow chuckle. She clicked the mouse and isolated the points, then drew a line to plot the changes. “Here. Every tenth event it amplifies, and though it doesn’t keep the entirety of the amplification, each set of nine that follows is slightly stronger than the previous set, until, again, the tenth.”
Faiz leaned back in his chair. “You’re right. I missed that. If it keeps up, though, keeps growing like that, we’re going to start getting complaints from New Delhi. They won’t be able to feel it yet, but sooner or later somebody is going to call us and ask what’s going on.” Faiz lifted his glasses and perched them on top of his head. He thought it made him look smart. Ditto stroking his beard, which he did as he mused, “Hmmm, every tenth one.”
Dr. Basu took the pen from her mouth. “But what’s it mean?” She tapped the end of the pen on the desk and then spun the pen away from her. “Drilling?”
“No. Wrong pattern.”
“I know, but sometimes it’s just good to get confirmation that I’m as smart as I think I am.”
Faiz snatched her pen from the desk and started flipping it. One rotation. Two rotations. Three rotations. On the fourth he fumbled it and had to reach under his chair to pick it up. His voice came out a little muffled. “Maybe the military?”
“Maybe,” Dr. Basu said, but it was clear to both of them she didn’t really believe that either. “Any other ideas?” she asked Faiz, because she had none of her own.
American University,
Washington, DC
“Spiders,” Professor Melanie Guyer said. She clapped her hands, hoping the sound would carry to the top of the auditorium where at least one student appeared to be sleeping. “Come on, guys. The answer in this class is always going to be spiders. And yes, they do molt,” she said, pointing to the young woman who had asked the original question. “But no, they aren’t really that similar to cicadas. For one thing, spiders don’t hibernate. Well, not that cicadas exactly hibernate.”
Melanie glanced out the window. She wasn’t about to admit to the class that she found cicadas creepy. One time she had a bat get stuck in her hair while she was looking for a rare beetle in a cave in Tanzania, and another time, in Ghana, she accidentally stepped into a nest of western bush vipers. She’d gotten stung by a tarantula hawk wasp in Southeast Asia, which she thought was the most painful thing there was until she got bitten by a bullet ant in Costa Rica—that felt like having a nail gun fired into her elbow followed by a dunk in acid—but none of that really scared her like cicadas did. Oh, cicadas. The clicking sound from their tymbals, the ones with the red eyes, the way they swarmed and fell from trees and littered the sidewalks. And the crunching. Jesus. The crunching. The live ones underfoot, the discarded exoskeletons. Worse, the sheer number of them. Predator satiation was brilliant from an evolutionary perspective: all the cicadas had to do was breed in such numbers that anything that fed on them just got full. The survivors got on with their business. And then, after a few weeks, they died out, and there was just a graveyard of husks, which was also totally creepy. Thank all fucking everything that she was going to have another decade or so before Washington had its next big swarm of cicadas. She was going to have to plan a vacation. It wasn’t really an option for a biologist who specialized in the use of spider venom for medicinal purposes to admit to being so afraid of cicadas that she couldn’t go outside when they were swarming.