written by Thom Garrett
edited by Danna Colman
The top left corner, the first in a row of fifty, was the size of a dime and scarlet red. The last one on the bottom right corner was as big as your fist and black as night. Beetles, pinned in precisely arranged rows and columns, each so similar to the ones on either side that you might not notice the subtle differences, but taken row by row they morphed from red to orange, from green to blue, from indigo to black. One thousand individual and distinct beetles in one glass-fronted case that covered half the wall. The other half held a similar case lined with butterflies and moths, the Lepidoptera like stained-glass mosaics, the Coleoptera like priceless jewels.
Scratch Yoblanski scratched his red forehead, red as a tomato, as it had been since birth. He pursed his lips, impressed in spite of his lack of interest. “This is one of every kind?” he asked.
“Hardly. There are as many as 400,000 species of Coleopterans, many as yet undiscovered. If you numbered every animal species on the planet, a full twenty-five percent would be beetles.”
“Hell of a lot of bugs.”
“Yes,” the man in the suit replied with a chuckle. “As Darwin famously said, someone had an inordinate fondness for beetles.”
