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.As soon as she left to get ready, I spoke to Damien and radioed Curtis to tell them what they had to do.They were very surprised, of course, but I insisted, and they had to agree.‘Bob took us back out to the Pyramid, and Luce and Damien went ashore and climbed up to Gannet Green with food and hot drinks for the other two.Something about the way they were behaving made Luce suspicious, and she noticed Damien passing Curtis a pack I’d given him.When Curtis said that she and Damien should return to the boat while they cleared up their things, she sensed that something was wrong.She asked them what was going on, and said she wanted to look in the pack.They refused, but she grabbed it.They tried to stop her opening it, but she was too quick for them and pulled out the container inside.Curtis grabbed it and in the confusion it fell to the ground and burst open.’ He shrugged, took a sip of his drink and shuddered.‘What was in it?’‘Black rats,’ he said softly.‘A large breeding pair.Harry Kelso had caught them in the traps he has set, and I persuaded him to let me have them.They jumped out and scuttled off into the rocks.’We both stared at him, stunned, imagining the scene.‘But … why?’ Anna finally managed to gasp.But I thought I knew.‘Supply and demand,’ I suggested.He smiled, as at a satisfactory student.‘The merchant banker is correct.My dealer friend didn’t just want some phasmids, he wanted all of the phasmids, the only ones.That was his demand, the last living phasmids on the planet.He wanted to corner the market.He didn’t want someone coming back later and finding more.He made it plain that life would be very uncomfortable for me if I didn’t oblige him.I really hadn’t seen that side of him before.’I tried to imagine Luce’s reaction as she watched those rats scuttling off among the rocks, trying to come to terms with the extent of the others’ treachery, Marcus’s most of all.‘She wasn’t running away from the others,’ Anna said.‘She was trying to catch the rats.’‘Exactly.I was worried she’d have an accident, and I told them over the radio to try to reason with her, tell her the truth.But it was too late for that.Far too late.’I felt sick, still finding it hard to absorb the extent of Marcus’s fall from grace.‘So there’s a breeding stock of phasmids somewhere in the States, is there?’‘No, no.I’d already told Curtis and Owen to kill the ones they’d captured.I told my friend that we’d had no success, that it was plain that there were no phasmids left alive.Which was now in fact true.’Now we just gawped at him.The man was unbelievable.‘You killed them all? You exterminated a whole species? In God’s name, why?’‘So you didn’t really know the story.Well, no matter.I’ll tell you, then you can judge.’The rain was picking up again outside, pattering against the glass of the French windows.‘The Lord Howe phasmid was a very special creature.I’d been studying it for years.’‘How could you study it, if it was supposed to be extinct?’ I objected.‘There were a number of records from the time when they were plentiful on the island, up until the arrival of the rats.People were clearly fascinated by them.They believed that the females could reproduce by parthenogenesis, cloning themselves without the aid of males.And they wrote of their longevity, how a favourite phasmid living tamely in a family garden, almost as a pet, would survive from generation to generation.‘I also got hold of phasmid remains.Harry had found some on his treks across the island and made them available to me.I carried out tests to establish their age, and found they were extraordinarily old.I could see a good evolutionary reason for this.Imagine you are a very well-adapted creature, living on a tiny island, remote from the rest of the world and with no predators.How should you reproduce? If you do it the normal way, frantically breeding every spring, you risk overpopulating and upsetting the balance of your habitat.One response would then be to evolve a shorter and shorter life cycle, so as to restrict your numbers by speeding up the natural process of death.Or you could go the other way—you could restrict your breeding to cover the minimal replacement of accidental deaths, and extend each individual’s life span almost indefinitely.That’s what the phasmids had done.Over the millennia, they had evolved their own immortality gene.As long as their habitat remained unchanged, they could live pretty well forever, but as soon as the black rats arrived, they were doomed.They simply couldn’t breed their way out of extinction.’I said, ‘So your dealer wouldn’t have been able to breed them?’‘Oh, that wasn’t the problem.I’m sure he could have created conditions favourable to faster breeding.No, the problem was what would happen when he discovered that he had the world’s sole supply of a creature with a built-in immortality gene.A rare insect is one thing, but this … Its value would have been beyond anything.‘Did Luce not tell you about Arne Naess’s eight principles of deep ecology, the principles that must underlie any part that we may have in sustainable life on this planet?’‘I think she did mention …’He shook his head.Bad student.‘The fifth principle states that the flourishing of both human and non-human life requires a substantial decrease of human population.As I said, we are a plague, and our population is out of control.And we don’t want to die.Imagine the discovery of the immortality gene, and its transfer to the human genome.It would be a catastrophe, unimaginable …’He let that sink in for a moment, then he murmured, ‘That’s why the phasmids had to die.’ And then, almost a whisper, ‘That’s why Luce had to die.’‘What?’‘What if she killed the rats? What if she and the phasmids survived out there, and she was rescued? What if she came back and told the world? We simply couldn’t risk it.’‘So …’ I hesitated, knowing that we’d finally reached the cusp, the moment of truth, and that the next seconds would change our lives forever.‘So, what did you do?’‘On the fifth day, when the search had moved far out to sea, I sent Damien and Curtis out to the Pyramid in a Zodiac from my friend’s yacht.Owen didn’t have the stomach for it.I must say I didn’t blame him.They found her eventually
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