The roach paused at the edge of the toaster's shadow. It twitched its antennae at the nearby microwave dinner carton. Blobs of congealed gravy glistened on the cardboard edges. The decision was made; the roach hurled its flat body out across the formica expanse, up the side of the carton, to the gravy.
There was a shadow and a hint of motion in the distance. Suddenly, a monolithic yellow envelope bulging with third-class mail descended from above, a portent of destruction. The roach skittered off the box, fleeing safely and easily into a flat space behind the refrigerator.
The envelope impacted, sending the fork inside the box spiraling through the air. Blobs of gravy spattered the destroyer, speckling his thick eyeglasses. A yelp of frustration escaped him as he swung about, glaring at the table, then at the dishes drying in the rack. He yanked open a cupboard door; half a dozen roaches stared back at him. "Ya! Ya!" he roared, stabbing clumsily at them with the battered envelope. Dishes clattered and clanked.
"More roaches?" asked his wife from the living room.
Dr. Cedric Murray stomped in, sweaty and furious. "Yes, more roaches." He flung his weapon down on the coffee table. "They don't even run from me anymore! They...stroll. Saunter. Sashay. They're sneakier, smaller, and... and..."
"Smarter?"
"No! Adaptable! They adapt. They adapt to everything. I set out poisons; they develop an immunity. We try to keep our kitchen cleaner; they learn to come out immediately after we're done, before we throw the garbage away. And most maddening of all..."
"Don't work yourself up," said his wife quietly as she turned the page of her magazine.
"Most maddening of all is the fact that they have learned exactly how fast they have to run to avoid my swat! Just so fast and no faster! They flaunt it!" He twisted and mangled the piece of third-class mail. "I don't know what more can be done!"
"We don't let anything rot," said his wife. "If these roaches are living off our food then they're clean roaches."
"Joyce," said Cedric impatiently, "that's an oxymoron. There's no such thing as a 'clean roach'. They are the physical manifestation of Disease, the spawn of Hell..."
"You're getting worked up," said Joyce.
"I have a brain," mused Cedric, "an extremely complex, logical, adaptable brain..."
"If the roaches are adapting," said Joyce, "then why don't you just adapt right back at them?"
Cedric stared at her for a moment. "Well. I would," he said, "but they outnumber me. They breed faster."
Joyce tossed her magazine aside and glared at him. "Why do you always find a way to relate everything to sex? Why?"
Cedric leaped to his feet and drew his pudgy, balding form up to its full, unimpressive height. "Because everything relates to sex!" he cried, jabbing his finger in the air. "Sex is the basis of all things! Chromosomes! Germ plasm! Mitosis and meiosis!"
Joyce groaned and hunched down behind her magazine. "Cedric, I'm tired. If you want, we can move to a place that doesn't have roaches. Would that make you happy?"
"Our DNA," he continued, "tells us who we are. Makes us who we are! Eye color! Agility! Preferences in books and music! Sleep patterns, speech patterns..."
"I've heard all this before, you know," said Joyce, massaging her eyelids with her fingers. "I know you keep talking about moving. Well, why don't we?"
"Why always sex, you ask? Why do you think I became a genetic engineer? Because if you understand genetics, you understand everything! If you can control genetics, you can control everything! The blueprints of life..."
"Cedric. Do you want to have sex?" asked Joyce resignedly.
"...the cogwheels of creation... beg pardon?"
Joyce looked at him from under her hand. "I would rather have sex than hear this again."
Cedric tucked his hands into his back pockets. "Oh. Well. If you're really wanting to..."
"If you promise," said Joyce, "not to keep worrying about those dumb roaches."
The idea came to him the moment he awoke. The sunbeams seeping in through the blinds seemed to pour into his brain and fill him with inspiration.
"I have it!" he screeched in a stage whisper to his still slumbering wife. "Joyce! Wake up! Listen! I have the answer!"
"Cedric... can you tell me later? Please?"
"But Joyce! I have the answer to our roach problem! You yourself gave me the answer!"
"Oh." She frowned into the pillow, eyes closed. "You want to move, then."
"No no no no! 'Adapt right back,' you said. Remember? That's the key! Fight fire with fire!"
"Uh oh," murmured Joyce as she drifted off to sleep.
"It's so perfect," he said, leaping out of bed far too quickly. Instantly he sat down again and put his head between his knees while he waited for the blood to reach his brain. "An anti-roach, that's the answer. A creature which adapts faster, breeds faster. But," he said, raising his head, "a creature which has an insatiable appetite for roaches!" He chuckled evilly. "Matching them move for move... ever vigilant... destroying them in their own gruesome little burrows."
"What about when the roaches are all gone?" asked Joyce, very awake now.
He began a few stretching exercises. "Be grateful you're married to a genius, Joyce," he said. "I've already considered that angle. I'll simply build a cannibalistic self-destruct mechanism into their genetic makeups. When they run out of roaches, they'll eat themselves into extinction. A perfectly clean, environmentally sound exterminator that tidies up after itself." He bounced on the bed. "Besides getting rid of our roach problems," he whispered, poking her nose gently with each word, "I'll probably make millions marketing it." He swung his legs back out over his side of the bed and trotted to the bedroom door. "Start making your wish list, Joyce," he said over his shoulder. "I'll be at the lab all day if you need to get a hold of me."
Four weeks later, Cedric led an uncertain Joyce up to the glass wall of an enormous terrarium that filled one corner of his lab. Soil, dead twigs, leaves, and bits of garbage covered the bottom. Dead cockroach bodies also littered the floor of the cage. "Look at that," he whispered. "Beautiful."
Joyce leaned over, lifting her hair out of her eyes with one hand. "What are the ones with the little 'V' on their backs?" she asked.
Cedric adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. "Well. You're looking at it upside down. It was supposed to be an 'A', for 'Anti-Roach'. I was unable to isolate a gene that controlled markings across the grain of the wing coverings, so I couldn't make the cross-bar." Suddenly he straightened with a puff of indignation. "Beside the point! What does it matter what they look like? It works. Look at them."
"But they're all dead. Roaches and anti-roaches."
"Well, of course. You're seeing the final stages. My creations destroyed the roaches utterly, outbreeding them, out-adapting them. Move for move. Eventually the roaches were gone and the anti-roaches' self-destruct gene activated itself. They fought among each other and killed themselves off. Perfect."
Joyce pointed. "There's one still alive, there."
"Yes, but he's dying of mortal wounds. See-- "
"Hi there, Dr. Murray!" called Cedric's lab assistant as he burst through the doorway. "Nice to see you, Mrs. Murray. What are you doing?"
"Nothing," said Cedric, intercepting him. "Showed up early for a change, I see. Now why don't you scamper off and fix me up a new batch of agar?"
"Well, gee whiz, Dr. Murray, I just got here--"
"Don't you enjoy your work? Of course you do. Hurry now; don't keep the bacilli waiting." He steered the youth back out the door, closing and locking it behind him. "Should have taken more security precautions," he grumbled.
Joyce was frowning at him. "You don't have to be so mean to your students just because you've invented something. You could have let him look."
"I'm astounded, Joyce. Aghast. Let that graduate feast his grubby eyes on my life's work and steal it away?"
"This isn't your life's work, Cedric. It's only taken you a month."
Cedric put his hands on his wife's shoulders. "My dear, you're forgetting the tremendous money-making aspect of this experiment. Millions of dollars are still millions of dollars whether it took four weeks or forty years." He polished his glasses briskly. "Now be a good girl and indulge me in a little cloak and dagger."
"Well, I'm sorry I'm not as enthusiastic as you about little mutant bugs."
"You'll be more enthusiastic when we're fondling the deposit slips for our Swiss bank accounts."
"Is that all you think that I think about? Money?"
"Don't be coy, dear. Men think about sex; women think about money. A man makes money so that women will marry him and have sex with him. Elementary sociology."
She rolled her eyes. "Either that or typical male shallowness." She kissed him. "I do love you, dear. Now what are you going to do with these bugs?"
Cedric turned towards the terrarium, cracking his knuckles. "What indeed. The lab test was overwhelmingly successful; I believe the next step indicated is a limited field test in a domestic scenario!"
Joyce glanced uncertainly at him. "Domestic? Do you mean..."
"Yes. Our house."
Joyce walked to the other side of the cage and peered in. "Ugh. With or without a little 'A' on their backs, they still look like roaches to me. I don't want them living with us. I don't like the looks of them."
Cedric chuckled with vengeful menace. "The roaches," he said, "will like their looks even less."
He was in the kitchen when he first saw real action. An empty cake pan, cluttered with clumps of chocolate, was waiting by the sink. Beneath the sullen glare of the kitchen light, a roach advanced toward the treasure. He had nearly made it to the edge of the pan when the anti-roaches struck. They streamed out of the cracks behind the safety of the stove, moving with impossible speed, looking more like drops of mercury than insects. The roach, suddenly realizing its predicament, fled the pan but was intercepted long before he could reach the stove. Cedric clearly heard the crunching sound of jaws breaking through chitin. Almost before he realized what was happening, the anti-roaches carried their prey away to their own hidden burrow. He suddenly became aware that he was holding his breath, and now let it out in a long whistle. An impressive display of superior adaptability.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw his old weapon, the wrinkled yellow envelope, leaning against the bottom of the refrigerator in its familiar place. With a flourish, he snatched it up and dropped it in the trash. There was a war on-- a modern war, for a change, instead of the age-old battles of sneaking and swatting. A war he was winning. He laughed. "Well, what did you expect?" he said, addressing the roach whose demise he had just witnessed. "That's what you get for messing with Man." As he left the kitchen, an unexpected spell of ancestral pride overcame him. "For messing with a Murray!" he added over his shoulder.
"Well, dear," said Joyce, looking slowly around the kitchen, "you did it. You really did it. I haven't seen a single roach in a week now." She came around behind him where he sat and kissed the bald spot on top of his head. "Maybe I married a genius after all."
Cedric put aside the patent application and craned his head backward. "Yes, my dear, you married a genius, and when you let me complete this application, you will have married a millionaire as well. Now where would you like to move?"
"Move?" said Joyce. She looked around again. "I thought that's why you made those things, so we wouldn't have to."
"Tut tut, Joyce. Think bigger. There's no need to stay in a ramshackle hovel like this. Where will the servants live?"
"Mm," said Joyce, resting her chin on his bald spot. "A house by the ocean would be nice. No power lines or night traffic."
"Nothing but the tranquil sound of breaking waves. An excellent choice." He teased his lower lip with the end of his pen. "But now I must think about what to name my creation. Environmental Exterminators? Hot Roach Death in a Box? Slaughterhouse Roach? Or... Murray's Mighty Mutants...?"
And then two more weeks passed.
"Well?" asked Joyce, and her voice was like the last half inch of water in a glass of ice. "What happened?"
Carefully Cedric filled his glass with iced tea. A few stray drops splashed on the table; the surrounding circle of anti-roaches marched in and began drinking the spilled liquid. He lifted the lid of the sugar bowl and gingerly peeked inside. A solid mass of writhing anti-roach bodies covered the sugar. "Ah," said Cedric weakly and without inspiration. "Well. Sugarless iced tea does have a rather pleasant tang to it, I suppose."
"Don't change the subject," said Joyce, her arms folded across her chest and her legs wrapped securely around the chair, well above the floor. Beneath her, anti-roaches scurried along established trails. "I can't imagine you're still thirsty." She nodded towards Cedric's glass, the rim of which was now lined with anti-roaches. One teetered and fell in with a tiny splash.
Cedric made a sound of vague agreement. "The problem, of course--"
"Of course?" echoed Joyce. "What do you mean, 'of course'? What kind of obvious problem did you forget about?"
"Let me finish, dear, I'm trying to tell you. It's just that self-destruction isn't a quality beneficial to the species..."
"So what if it isn't? You made them that way, didn't you? Forced their little genetic things to do what you said?"
Cedric chuckled rather explosively and adjusted his glasses. "Well, yes, absolutely. But at their accelerated breeding rate, along with an increased possibility of mutation-- so that they could out-adapt the roaches, you know-- well..." He paused to flick an anti-roach off his shirt. "Heh. Well. Apparently there must have been a few mutations where the self-destruction gene was, er, weakened somewhat. Appeared in a less dominant form. The others killed themselves, as we know. The mutations, well, remained alive, to, uh, breed more..." He attempted a grin and shrugged crookedly.
"I'm still listening," said Joyce, a funeral pyre blazing in her eyes.
"There did, of course, remain the problem of an, er, environmental niche for them to fill. The niche that the roaches had recently occupied was now, uh, conveniently vacant, so..."
"So they took the roaches' place."
"So to speak."
"Leaving us with better roaches."
"Well, better in the sense that they're harder to kill, breed faster, eat more, so forth..." His voice trailed off.
"What are you going to do about it, Mr. Genius Millionaire? Ugh!" she screamed as she frantically beat two anti-roaches off her leg.
"Now, Joyce, let's be reasonable. Let's be fair. Reasonable and fair. We tried my way, now we'll try your way."
"My way?"
"Your way." Cedric took off his glasses, polished them briskly and replaced them. "Weren't you the one who was so anxious to move?"
Copyright 1998 Derek T. Jones