Leo Frankowski

publish.
     
    A first-generation
larva had been laid on the wing of a DC-16. Unnoticed in the course of three days,
it ate its way into the tubular aluminum wing strut. There it metamorphosed into
a mosquito, which was unable to fly out of the two hundred-foot sealed chamber. It
laid its thousand eggs along the length of the wing and died.
    Two days later a
thousand larvae were contentedly munching away. Eleven hundred passengers were
aboard the Qantas airliner, with a crew of forty taking them from Los Angeles where it
was midsummer to Melbourne in the middle of its whiter. Skirting a hurricane
south of Hawaii,
the left whig sheared off. There were no survivors.
     
    *
    Another
first-generation egg was laid on the side of an aging space shuttle. It was just
burrowing its way into the cabin at takeoff, and the small air leak wasn’t
noticed until
the ship was in orbit. The larva ate its way into the cargo compartment and
then into the chassis of a strip-chart recorder. With its cargo unloaded at a
station in a low polar orbit,
the shuttle returned. Its departure left the
wheel-shaped space station with only one small ship capable of landing on Earth. The larva
metamorphosed in a biology lab
during a sleep period and laid eight hundred
eggs before an astronomer swatted it. None of these eggs reached maturity; many of them were blown out into
space when they ate through the outer walls. The
rest died when the station became airless.
    Thanks to automatic
alarms, 820 of the station’s 957 people aboard were able to get into intact
space suits in time.
    By then no
spacecraft on Earth was able to take off, primarily due to punctures in their fuel
tanks.
    Due to their low
polar orbit, no other station could help them in time.
    The station’s only
functional ship was capable of landing a cargo of only twelve thousand pounds.
The station commander, a 180-pound man, decided to save the maximum number of people,
and so ordered the ship to be filled on the basis of weight. There were no acts of violence, and only
minimal objections to the plan. One hundred and nineteen persons, mostly small women, were loaded aboard.
    The ship made it
safely to Earth. Seven hundred and one people in orbit died with dignity.
     
    They would have
received more sympathy if those on Earth hadn’t had troubles of their own.
    The metallic larvae
ate thin sheet metal along its entire thickness, cutting irregular slashes in
car fenders, aircraft wings, and missile hulls.
    Fuel tanks were among
the first components to be rendered useless. While two percent of the world’s aircraft crashed and
one percent of the land vehicles were wrecked due to mechanical failures, the great
majority of them sat on their runways and driveways and simply fell to pieces.
     
    The left engine on Lou
von Bork’s Cessna 882 Super Conquest died within a second of the right.
    “Seat belts, gang!” He shouted
over the intercom: “We are going
down.”
    Senator Beinheimer
had been dozing in the copilot’s chair. “What? What’s up, Lou,
boy?”
    “It looks like
we’re out of fuel, Moe.” Von Bork tried to restart the turbo props, then
gave up and feathered his propellers.
    “Out of fuel?
But we just tanked up at Fort Scott!” Beinheimer said.
    “I know, but
for the last ten minutes the fuel gauges have been moving left like you wouldn’t
believe. I was hoping that it was an electrical problem until the motors quit. We must have
sprung a leak.”
    “Oh. My.
God.”
    “It’s not that
bad, Moe. We’re still at thirty-one thousand feet, so we have ten minutes to find a
soft place to land. And in Kanssas, that’s not all that hard to do. At least I think we’re
still in Kansas.”
    “You think? I
thought that Loran gizmo of yours was supposed to tell you where you were
within a hundred yards.”
    “It does,
usually, only it started to act up just after takeoff. It’s trying to tell me that
we’re over Kentucky.”
    “You gotta
believe your instruments, boy. First rule of instrument flight.”
    “Moe, we left
Fort Scott, Kansas, fifty-five minutes ago. I have been flying into the sunset
since then. This plane cruises at three hundred forty knots. Those are wheat fields down there. I’m not going to
believe that I’ve flown five hundred forty
miles due east.”
    “Well, hadn’t
you better radio for help?”
    “The radio’s
quit working, too. Both of them.”
    After hearing the
news about the attempted bombing of Life Valley, von Bork had spent a