A Trip to the Stars Read Online Free Page B

on the roof. He had been born with only eight fingers—no pinkies—and as I looked at him through the refraction of the jar, his long fingers looked even longer. Around five three, he was at least four inches shorter than me and must have hovered near my own weight of one hundred twenty. He was pigeon-toed, with stooped shoulders and a salt-and-pepper goatee. Invariably he wore soft Turkish slippers with silver stitching, a black velvet smoking jacket, and a string tie with a clasp in the form of crossed swords. His wire-rimmed spectacles were thick: without them he could barely make his way through a cluttered room.
    And all the rooms in his house—fifteen of them not counting the enormous basement—were cluttered. With books, magazines, looseleaf folders, specimen jars, slide racks, and filing cabinets packed to capacity. His furniture was of a dark, heavy, rococo design, imported from France by a spendthrift ancestor just after the Civil War: big-legged tables and chairs, overstuffed sofas, deep-drawered cabinets. Musty wall hangings alternated with thickly lacquered oil paintings of Louisiana swamplands, the myriad birds and insects that populated them rendered so realistically—a swooping kingfisher or electric dragonfly—that they often startled me when I passed them.
    “The trap-door spider,” Eboli was saying in his up-and-down-the-scale singsong voice, “a close relative of the tarantula’s, ambushes his prey from a silk-lined burrow covered by a hinged door. His life spanis one year, in which time he never strays more than a few inches from the entrance to the burrow.”
    Wearing the leather gloves with which I handled live specimens, I paused with my back to a tall window where the light from the storm powdered the air like phosphorus. After working in silence for four hours at opposite ends of the second-floor library, I had just stood up to take my one break, for coffee and a sandwich, on the screened-in verandah downstairs.
    Without so much as a glance at me, Eboli knew he had my attention, for he seldom addressed me directly when he was working. Afterward, before I’d drive back downtown, he would sometimes sit on the verandah with me to chat for a few minutes, but in the twin sanctuaries of his study and his basement laboratory the silence was palpable, subliminally fed by the hum of countless heat and sun lamps, infrared bulbs, air filters, miniature humidifiers (for the jungle spiders) and dehumidifiers (for their desert cousins), and of course the constant complex spinning of hundreds of webs.
    “Among all spiders, the trap-door is the most accomplished burrower and the most gifted artisan. Up to three and a half inches in length, he lives alone in a tubelike burrow five to twelve inches deep, which he digs with a comblike rake of spines on his chelicerae. Then he waterproofs it with saliva and lines it with silk. His burrows vary in complexity, from a simple tube secured with a beveled door to a cylinder capped with a trapdoor that has an oblique side tunnel with a second door. Some of these doors are even fitted with a set of bolts. And all the burrows are designed against a single predator: the spider wasp, who is capable of prying open the trapdoor and cornering the spider. With superior sensory equipment and agility, the wasp quickly overpowers the spider and paralyzes him with venom. Then the wasp deposits an egg on the spider’s abdomen and a larva hatches which feeds off the spider before and after he dies.” He lowered the jar onto the table and adjusted his string tie. “His death mirrors the fatal sequence spiders inflict on their prey: ambush, entrapment, paralysis, and slow death.” Preparing to open the jar, he slipped on his own gloves, custom-made without the pinky slots. “Still, the trap-door spider must be counted, among all creatures, as one of the finest natural architects.”
    That afternoon I ate half my pepper-cheese sandwich and dranktwo cups of black coffee on the