Polaris (15 page)

Admiral Stewart broke the silence. “I didn't expect to ever see both of you in the same room. Certainly not
this
room.”

He turned to Pete and pointed at McCallister. “How much does he know?”

“You might want to ask me the same thing,” said Pete.

“We're here for the cure,” said Finn. “The epidemic.”

“The disease that killed my wife.”

The admiral looked at Pete with concern. “You may have come to the right place for the cure,” he said. “But that disease didn't kill Pamela.”

Pete was confused. It was one of the few things he thought he knew, the memory that had anchored his actions. “But…”

Stewart looked at him with a seriousness that gave way to sympathy. “Pete, the disease didn't kill Pamela. The drones did.”

And with that, everything came back to Pete.

 

BOOK

TWO

THREE YEARS EARLIER

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Pete's small fleet of experimental drones could fly, and they could even kill, accurately dropping their small bombs on targets of all shapes and sizes. But they couldn't talk. This final problem was critical. With their small, ten-pound bombs, they could work effectively only in swarms. They were designed to overwhelm their targets with sheer quantity, pouring hundreds of bombs on targets from hundreds of directions. At the same time, any kind of traditional radio communication could be jammed or intercepted by the enemy, making the drones useless or, worse, able to be turned against the Alliance. After a brief but fantastically expensive failure with laser communications—one drone convinced another to crash into a boathouse on the coast of Northern California, near the testing range—Pete left the smoldering wreckage on the beach too tired even to feel defeated. He was nearly ready to declare the entire dream a failure while it was still in the experimental phase. His career would be ruined, but the Alliance would be saved a few million dollars, and they could move on to more promising weapons platforms.

He'd begun working on the autonomous drone five years earlier. At that time, it was a highly experimental project that the Pentagon had indulged with a few million research dollars. That indulgence was largely the result of Pete's imaginative proposal, in which he envisioned an autonomous armada of low-cost drones that could dominate a battlefield, region, or, perhaps, an entire ocean. Drones had been around for decades, so putting an unmanned plane in the sky was no longer extraordinary. But Pete Hamlin prophesied a day when hundreds of them would work together with deadly effectiveness, and this promise was enough to ensure a steady trickle of research dollars.

Two years into his project, the war began, followed soon after by the formation of the Alliance. The trickle of dollars turned into a river of money. The Allies had been startled to discover at the start of the war that they'd lost control of the seas. They had giant, advanced ships, planes, and submarines, but Typhon had numbers, seemingly endless flotillas that quickly seized control of the sea lanes from their outnumbered opponents. So long had the Allies gone without a meaningful shipbuilding program that even the shipyards had disappeared, taking with them the welders, engineers, and mechanics who actually knew how to construct ships of war. The smallest Allied ship took almost a year to build. Typhon turned out a ship a day from its noisy shipyards. The paltry Allied construction program couldn't keep up with the losses they were taking at Typhon's hands. For lack of alternatives, Pete's old proposal steadily rose to the top of the Alliance, a potential way to seize the initiative without building a thousand ships.

But as the money and the focus increased, so did the pressure, and the disappointments. Pete simply couldn't get his drones to communicate intelligently with each other, a failure that was represented vividly by that smoky crater on a California beach.

Back at his hotel, he ordered room service: an overpriced rib eye steak and a beer. It was an extravagance, but he didn't want to leave his room, knowing the drone crash had made the news—he didn't want to see it on television or overhear any local speculation. While he waited for his food to arrive, he logged on to his personal computer, something he rarely did both because he was nearly always at work and because it wasn't secure. His life hadn't had room for leisurely Internet browsing.

He was about to check out college football scores when he noted curiously that his Internet browser suggested to him a series of articles about someone named Tom Healy. Healy was a Cornell professor who was making waves in popular culture with his books about honeybees. His most recent had the catchy title
Hive Democracy
. It was his browser's mistake, Pete realized with a smile, brought to him by the word “drone,” common in both his work and the work of Professor Tom Healy. He almost skipped the links, but it was late, and he didn't have the energy to look up anything on his own. He clicked through and began reading. Pete read the introduction to Healy's book, and watched a video in which the professor explained the sublime, efficient ways that bees communicated.

It was called the waggle dance. Supremely simple and elegant, engineered by millions of years of evolution, the bees could communicate the exact location of a food source, or a potential hive site, with amazing accuracy. Moreover, they could actually vote on hive locations, invariably picking the best, most strategic location. All of this strictly with their movements and their vision.

At some point, Hamlin let the room service waiter in, and the food grew cold on the room's small table as Pete continued to read.

At 3:00
A.M
., he had booked his flight to Ithaca, New York.

*   *   *

Pete had actually been to Cornell once before, recruiting engineers for his program as he had from all of the nation's finest schools. He remembered it being filled with Gothic architecture, a beautiful place, a Hollywood set designer's idea of what a college campus should look like.

The Dyce Laboratory for Honeybee Studies was nothing like that.

It was a thoroughly utilitarian building, one story of turquoise-colored corrugated metal, with garage doors on one side and few windows. It looked more like a small-town welding shop than it did part of a prestigious university, and in fact, it was well north of the campus. There were no ivy vines in sight, no clock towers, just pine trees and rolling hills. And everywhere, a low but persistent buzzing.

“Professor Hamlin?” The professor was walking toward him as Pete got out of his rental car on the gravel drive.

“Just Pete,” he answered. “I'm not a professor.”

Tom Healy shook his head. “I wasn't sure,” he said, smiling. “And some people get uptight about those things.” The professor's appearance suited the plain surroundings: rumpled shirt, cargo shorts, thin hair grown long and combed over a balding scalp. Pete knew his rumpled appearance masked a stellar academic career: he was a world-class authority on neurobiology, a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and, in what he claimed was his most enduring honor, he had a species of bee named for him:
Neocorynurella healyi.

The professor led him to his small, cluttered office and offered him a cup of tea, which Pete declined.

“Come on!” said the professor. “It's just an excuse to use some of our fresh honey! I'm not helping you until you try it.”

He pulled out a small decanter, and Pete relented with a grin. The professor poured into his steaming mug a generous dollop of honey.

“God,” said Pete after a taste. “That really is good.”

“Told you,” said the professor. “That's our ‘last taste of summer,' batch, you're lucky you got here in time.”

Pete put down the mug on the corner of the professor's worn desk, and pulled out his copy of
Hive Democracy
from his briefcase.

“Ah,” said Healy. “Another fan.”

“It was fascinating,” said Pete. “Truly. Obviously I'm not the only one who thinks so.”

The professor waved his hand in the air. “It's my third book on the subject, but the first time I've ever been asked on the
Today Show
. I'm the beneficiary of a provocative title, and I can thank my editor for that.”

“But you believe it, right?” asked Pete. “You believe the bees actually practice democracy like we do?”

The professor nodded his head skeptically. “Actually, I think they practice it a little better than we do. They almost always make the right decision, as a group; I've proved it experimentally.”

“And why do you think their system works so well?”

“This is something I've thought a lot about,” said Healy. “For one thing, the bees all have a common goal: survival. They are making life-and-death decisions together. And secondly, while they don't all have the same information, they all have the same preferences. So when they truthfully communicate their information to each other, they always agree on the correct path.”

Pete nodded, waiting to hear more.

“This is your area of interest, correct?” said the professor.

“It is,” said Pete.

“And you're with the Department of Agriculture?”

“Yes,” said Pete, almost forgetting his cover story. The Department of Agriculture had a sizable presence at Cornell, and provided large amounts of funding to the university. It was both a plausible cover story and one that would encourage Healy to cooperate.

“How long have you been there?” asked the professor.

“Less than a year,” said Pete. “And I'm a consultant. Haven't really learned my way around the bureaucracy yet.” He was trying to head off any obvious questions about the agency that he wouldn't be able to answer.

“I see,” said the professor, nodding. “Well, you must be important. Or working on an important project. I've worked with a lot of Ag Department folks over the years, and this is the first time one of them was able to take a charter jet to see me on one day's notice.”

Pete didn't respond. He doubted he could bullshit a man as smart as Healy, so he decided to let it hang there, and let the professor decide whether he wanted to help or not. While Pete's motives might be a little mysterious, the professor couldn't doubt his influence, or the power of his backers.

He sipped his tea and continued to look Hamlin over. “How about we go for a walk?” he said. “I can't leave them alone too long out there,” he said.

“The bees?”

“No,” said Healy. “Grad students.”

*   *   *

They walked across an expanse of grass to where a path entered the woods. Pete followed the professor into the trees. The air cooled instantly when they stepped into the shade, and Pete could tell that just as the name of Healy's honey had indicated, the end of summer in upstate New York was rapidly approaching.

“How much do you know about bees?” asked Healy.

“What I read in your book,” he said. “Queens, workers, and drones.”

A bee flew by them in the air.

“So what kind is that?” said the professor lightheartedly, pointing.

“A worker?”

“Good guess!” he said. “Odds are very good. Queens rarely leave the hive, and drones wouldn't be flying around out here looking for pollen.”

“They don't?”

“No. Drones are the only males in the hive,” he said. “Their only role is to impregnate a queen. Consequently, they are the only bees in the hive without a stinger.”

“Really?” said Pete. He was struck by the irony, the drones of the hive being the only “unarmed” members. Without giving away his real reason for visiting Cornell, that made him curious. “So how did the word ‘drone' come to mean—”

“What it means now? In ancient times, we thought drones were lazy, because they didn't leave the hive to seek food or do any work. The term came to be synonymous with a lazy, idle worker. Subsequently, the name ‘drone' was given to mindless machines. Of course now—”

“Drones have evolved.”

“And the term along with them.” The professor was staring hard at him now, and Pete was eager to keep the conversation moving.

“What happens to the drones after they impregnate the queen?”

“They die. The penis and abdominal tissues are ripped out after successful mating.”

“Jesus.”

Healy knelt down and pointed to a bee on a purple flower.

“One of yours?” asked Pete.

“It's not marked, but quite possibly.” They watched it climb over the outside of the flower for a few seconds, and then take off. It spiraled into the air and flew down the path.

“My old mentor, Professor Martin Lindauer, used to actually run after the bees when he observed them. They fly about six miles per hour, so you can keep up—although it's not easy running through the woods while trying to keep your eye on a bee.”

“I can imagine,” said Hamlin. “Do you do that?”

“I used to,” he said. “Not so much anymore.” He stood up from the flower, and looked Pete up and down. Assessing him. “So you want to learn the language these bees use to communicate?”

Pete nodded. “I do.”

“You know what we call it?”

“The waggle dance.”

“Good!” said the professor, happy with his pupil. “That's exactly right. But the waggle dance was discovered decades ago. By Karl von Frisch. He won a Nobel Prize for it. It's been studied thoroughly ever since, well documented, debated, revised. You've got decades of research to draw from. What do you need me for?”

“My understanding,” said Pete, “is that the waggle dance is how they communicate the location of food supplies. But I want to know how they make decisions as a group, decide on objectives, prioritize their work. The democracy of the hive, so to speak. That's what I want to learn about.…”