Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

Dar felt his stomach sink as he watched the chopper land in a cleared area along the shoulder. LOH, he thought. Light Observation Helicopters, they had called them in Vietnam, lo those many years ago. Dar remembered that the officers loved buzzing around in them. Now they used this type for traffic reports and police work. Probably a Hughes 55.

“Darwin!” Sergeant Cameron and another patrolman jumped out of the helicopter and moved out from under the whirling blades in a half crouch.

Paul Cameron was about Dar’s age, in his late forties. The sergeant was large and quite black, barrel-chested, and sported a neatly trimmed mustache. Dar knew that Cameron would have retired years earlier if he had not started late in his police career. He had joined the Marines just when Dar was leaving the Corps.

There was a younger patrolman with him: white, in his early twenties, baby-faced, with a mouth that reminded Dar of Elvis.

“Dr. Darwin Minor, this is Patrolman Mickey Elroy. We were just talking about you, Dar.”

The younger patrolman squinted at Dar. “You really a doctor?”

“Not a medical doctor. A Ph.D. Physics.”

While Patrolman Elroy thought about that, Cameron said, “You ready to ride up and see the puzzle, Dar?”

“Ride up.” Dar didn’t bother to hide his lack of enthusiasm.

“That’s right, you don’t like to fly, do you?” Cameron’s voice only had two tones—amused and outraged. He was in his amused mode now. “But hey, you have a pilot’s license, don’t you, Dar? Gliders or somesuch?”

“I don’t like to be flown, ” said Dar, but he grabbed his camera bag out of the NSX and followed the other two men toward the helicopter. Cameron sat in the front copilot’s seat and there was just room on the back bench for Dar and the young patrolman. They buckled in.

The last time I flew in one of these goddamned things, thought Dar, it was on a Sea Stallion leaving the Dalat Reactor.

The pilot made sure that they were all strapped in and then twisted one stick and pulled up on another. The little chopper lifted, fluttered, and then tilted forward, climbing for altitude at the mouth of the canyon before buzzing back, hovering a minute over the wide shelf of stone and sagebrush, and then settling down carefully, the rotors no more than twenty feet from the vertical rock wall.

Dar walked away from the thing with shaky legs. He wondered if Cameron would let him rappel down the canyon wall back to the highway when it was time to go.

“So is it true what the sergeant says about you and the space shuttle?” said Patrolman Elroy with a slight twist of his Elvis lips.

“What?” said Dar, crouching and covering his ears as the chopper took off again.

“That you were the one that figured out what made it blow up? Challenger, I mean. I was twelve when that happened.”

Dar shook his head. “No, I was just an NTSB flunky on the investigatory committee.”

“A flunky who got his ass fired by NASA,” said Cameron, tugging on his Smokey hat and securing it.

Elroy looked puzzled. “Why’d they fire you?”

“For telling them what they didn’t want to hear,” said Dar. He could see the crater here on the ledge now. It was about thirty feet across and perhaps three feet deep at the deepest. Whatever had struck here had burned, flared against the inner rock wall, and started a small fire in the grass and sagebrush that grew along the ledge. A dozen or so CHP people and forensics men stood and crouched near or in the crater.

“What didn’t they want to hear?” asked Elroy, hurrying to keep up.

Dar stepped at the edge of the impact crater. “That the Challenger astronauts hadn’t died in the explosion,” he said, not really paying attention to the conversation. “I told them that the human body is an amazingly resilient organism. I told them that the seven astronauts had survived until their cabin hit the ocean. Two minutes and forty-five seconds of falling.”

The kid stopped. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “That isn’t true, is it? I never heard that. I mean…”

“What is this, Paul?” said Dar. “You know I don’t do airplane accidents anymore.”

“Yeah,” said Cameron, showing strong white teeth as he grinned. He crouched, rooted around in the burned grass, and tossed a scorched fragment of metal to Dar. “Can you ID that?”

“Door handle,” said Dar. “Chevy.”

“The guys think it was an ’82 El Camino,” said Cameron, gesturing toward the forensics men in the smoldering pit.

Dar looked at the vertical rock wall to his right and at the highway hundreds of feet below. “Nice,” he said. “I don’t suppose there are tire marks at the top of the cliff.”

“Nope. Just rock,” said the sergeant. “No way up from the backside, either.”

“When did this happen?”

“Sometime last night. Civilian reported the fire about two A.M.”

“You guys got right on it.”

“Had to. The first CHP boys here thought it was a military plane down.”

Dar nodded and walked to the line of yellow accident-scene tape around the pit. “Lot of shards in there. Anything not belonging to an El Camino?”

“Bones and bits,” said Cameron, still smiling. “One person, we’re pretty sure. Male, they think. Scattered because of the impact and explosion. Oh, and fragments of aluminum and alloy casings that don’t have anything to do with the El Camino.”

“Another vehicle?”

“They don’t think so. Something that was in the car, maybe.”

“Curious,” said Dar.

Patrolman Elroy was still eyeing him suspiciously, as if Dar were a joke the sergeant was pulling on him. “And are you really the guy they named the Darwin Award after?”

“No,” said Dar. He walked around the crater, making sure not to get too close to the edge of the cliff. He did not like heights. Some of the Accident Investigation men nodded and said hello. Dar took his camera out of the bag and began imaging from different angles. The rising sun glinted on the many thousands of pieces of scattered, scorched metal.

“What’s that?” said Elroy. “I’ve never seen a camera like that before.”

“Digital,” said Dar. He quit shooting pictures and video and looked back down the highway. The entrance to the canyon was visible from up here, directly in line with the highway stretching out east toward Borrego Springs. He looked at the tiny viewfinder monitor on the camera and shot some stills and video of the highway and desert lined up with the crater.

“Well, if the Darwin Award isn’t named for you,” persisted the young patrolman, “who is it named for?”

“Charles Darwin,” said Dar. “You know, survival of the fittest?”

The boy looked blank. Dar sighed. “The society of insurance investigators gives the award to the person who does the human race the biggest favor each year by removing his or her DNA from the gene pool.”

The boy nodded slowly, but obviously did not understand.

Cameron chuckled. “Whoever kills himself in the dumbest way,” he translated, and looked at Dar. “Last year it was that guy in Sacramento who shook the Pepsi machine until it fell on him and squashed him, wasn’t it?”

“That was two years ago,” said Dar. “Last year it was the farmer up in Oregon who got nervous shingling the roof of his barn and tossed the rope over the peak of the roof and had his grown son tie it to something solid. Turned out the something solid was the rear bumper of their pickup truck.”

Cameron laughed out loud. “Yeah, yeah. And then his wife came out of the house and drove to town. Did the car insurance people ever pay the widow?”

“Had to,” said Dar. “He was attached to the vehicle at the time. Under policy rules, he was covered.”