He shook his head. She turned the volume higher. The music itself became a broken, crackling noise, but she could still hear the drum.

“This is just a hint of how the bat heard it. Loud and thumping.”

“Okay. But there had to be thousands of radios on along the way, a lot of beats. Why would she respond to this particular drum?”

“The drumbeats in music change, don’t they?”

“Most do, I suppose.”

“This doesn’t. It’s constant.”

He listened.

“Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Hear it?” Joyce asked.

“Yeah.”

The legend finished, and the game began. The drums continued.

“The beat keeps going when the introduction ends,” she said with growing excitement. “The sound probably continues through the entire game. Don’t yousee?”

“No.”

“Robert, that sound is in the audible range. When would the bat have been exposed to a regular drumbeat like it?”

“I have no idea.”

Joyce rose. She shut off the video game and started toward the door. “In the womb, Robert. The bat came here looking for her mother.”

Thirty-Six

Gentry and Joyce went back to the car and continued downtown. Joyce was revved up again. Gentry was not. He had some major problems with what Joyce had come up with.

“You really believe that a bat flying through a subway tunnel heard a video game that sounded like her mother-”

“Her mother’s heart.”

“Like her mother’s heart,” he said. “She heard that and she flew over to check it out?”

“Yes. It’s very possible.”

“One sound in a city of millions upon millions of sounds.”

“That’s right. Again, think like a bat. Its hearing is extraordinarily sensitive and multidirectional. A bat can pick up and follow a distinctive sound the same way a shark sniffs blood in the water.”

“But even if that’s true, her mother died eight years ago,” Gentry said. “How could the bat remember that?”

“It’s not in the conscious mind, but it’sthere, ” Joyce said. “The sound triggered some kind of memory. Think about it. She left at peace, without hurting anyone, without stirring up the small bats again. She was obviously calmed by whatever happened here.”

“All right. Assuming that’s true, why didn’t she get angry when she saw that her mother wasn’t here? She was in a rage when she left the museum.”

“You just said why.”

“I did?”

“All the giant bat knows is that her mother wasn’t in the playroom,” Joyce said. “As far as the bat knows, she might still be alive somewhere. But when the bat came to the museum laboratory, shesaw that her mate was dead. She didn’t see or smell anything to suggest death here in the shelter. Maybe one of the kids accidentally pulled out the cable when the bat came in. Maybe the bat did. So the video sound stopped suddenly, and the bat-”

“-thinks that mommy may still be alive?” Gentry said.

“We’ve got a name for that at the zoo,” she said. “It’s called the Dumbo effect. We use smells and sounds to wean animals from their parents.”

“ Nancy, I just don’t know.”

“Robert, it’spossible. As far as our bat knows, this is the same thing that happened once before, a month or so after she was born.”

“Abandonment.” Gentry rose. “How did our lady bat find the dead male bat?”

“She probably traced it by smell.”

“By smell. So wouldn’t the big bat also have smelled that her motherwasn’t here?”

“Olfactory memory doesn’t work that way. Bats, people, most animals recognize a smell if they encounter it again. But they can’t summon it up like they can sounds or images. If she heard something that sounded like her mother, she would believe it was her mother, smell or no smell.”

“And you’re saying this is theonly sound that ever reminded her of her mother’s heartbeat?”

“Why not? Until yesterday this bat lived her entire life in the wild. And she was with her sibling. They were brother and sister, mother and father to each other, mates.”

“Death, incest, and Oedipus,” Gentry said. “This is a goddamn Greek tragedy.”

“That’s the way some mammals are. And now, for the first time, the bat’s alone. When better to listen for her mother?”

Gentry still had problems with it, problems with all of it. Big mutant bats. Little bats driven mad by echolocation. But it didn’t change the fact that New York was under siege, and that the bats had to be dealt with.

“So how does this help us?” Gentry asked.

“I’m not sure,” Joyce said.

Once they crossed West Houston Street, the city was deserted except for police officers patrolling in cars and riot gear-and bats. They were hanging from streetlamps and awnings, from walk signs and traffic lights.

A tired-looking Marius Pace met Joyce and Gentry in the lobby of the new Office of Emergency Management headquarters. Pace took the pair directly to the elevator; on the way to the eighteenth floor, he reported where things stood as of one hour before. That was when Gordy Weeks had come out from his meeting and briefed his deputies during a short recess.

“The impact assessment is obviously pretty grim.” Pace consulted a legal notepad that was spotted with round coffee mug stains. “The subway patrols obviously weren’t able to deal with the bat, so all of New York ’s roadways, rails, and bridges have been shut down. Nothing leaves or enters the borough. All businesses here and in Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx are closed except for food-service and health-care providers, but the roads are still open. The area airports have also been closed from Westchester down to New Jersey, and all incoming traffic is being diverted to Hartford, Philadelphia, and Buffalo. Only emergency aircraft can come or go locally.”

“Have there been any incidents?” Joyce asked.

“Yes. Not attacks per se, but two aircraft had to be evacuated just before takeoff, after they sucked groups of bats into the engines. The towers at all the fields are reporting radar problems due to the bats. If we haven’t cleared this up by tomorrow night, the National Guard will be mobilized to get food and medical supplies into the city. An immediate curfew will be in effect from six-thirtyP.M. until six-thirtyA.M. We’ve got a good group of people working with the media to keep the public informed, and each of the officials you’ll meet upstairs has teams dealing with problems involving health, fire, looting, sanitation, and other issues. As it happens, your timing is very good. When I E-mailed Director Weeks to tell him you were here, he informed me that they’d just started discussing what kind of offensive the city is going to mount.”

“Who’s in charge of going after the big bat?” Joyce asked.

“That information,” said Pace, “I do not have.”

They emerged in a brightly lit hallway decorated with framed newspapers of disasters going back to the blizzard of 1888. It was almost as unsettling here as it was in the streets. People were moving quickly in all directions, shouting into phones and passing papers, folders, and diskettes like batons in a relay race. The conference room was in a corner on the southwest side of the building, overlooking the Hudson River and Upper New York Bay. After they entered, Pace closed the door and left. The room was refreshingly quiet. There was artwork on the walls here, very loud and busy expressionistic prints of New York landmarks.

“To bring you up to speed, I have declared a state of emergency,” Mayor Taylor said as Joyce and Gentry took empty seats at the far end of the long table. Everyone chuckled.

The mayor was seated at the head of the table, his back to the door. He was the only one in shirtsleeves and the only one without a laptop or cellular phone in front of him.

Gordy Weeks was seated to his left. Al Doyle was on his right. Weeks introduced the others who were present: Police Commissioner Veltre, Fire Chief Pat Rosati, Department of Health director Kim Whalen, Emergency Medical Services head Barry Lipsey, and the mayor’s press secretary Caroline Hardaway.