Geoffrey and Thatcher skipped like a stone across the globe, landing twice before taking a Lear jet to Pearl Harbor, where they boarded a different C-2A Greyhound and found themselves in the same place they had started, sitting in the window seats behind the plane’s wings.
“Imagine a world where there is no intelligent life—where there is no mankind,” Thatcher droned on to a numb Geoffrey. “Imagine, Doctor, how nature would advance only in exact proportion to the resources available and retreat with perfect modesty as those resources became scarce. There was a stretch of time that lasted for millions of years before the arrival of so-called ‘rational’ apes, when the rain forest covered continents, and countless species of more humble apes flourished. Life intelligent enough to enjoy interacting with nature, but not intelligent enough to challenge it, to harness it, or to attempt to control it: the golden age of primates. Surely this step, just before Reason, was the most sublime reached by life on Earth, wouldn’t you agree, Doctor? The ‘rational animal’ is the most grandiose oxymoron in existence: a ventriloquist’s dummy that mimics and mocks nature with its mysticism and science.”
Geoffrey had been enduring Thatcher’s droning Jeremiad for the better part of six hours now on this last, unbearably long leg of their trip. He had been spared only by a fitful nap two hours earlier, and even then he had dreamed an infinite loop of the scientist’s dreary doomsaying.
It was bad enough having the Redmond Principle wielded at him, but if Geoffrey had to suffer one more oblique reference to Thatcher’s Tetteridge Award, or the big fat check that would accompany the Genius Grant he was suspiciously so certain of receiving, or the Pulitzer Prize he was laying odds on winning, or another celebrity he’d had lunch with, Geoffrey would probably need to use the barf bag affixed to the back of the seat in front of him.
Geoffrey heard something clunk loudly on the roof of the plane. “Excuse me, Thatcher.” Grateful for the distraction, he climbed out of his seat and walked forward.
When he got to the cockpit he saw a gleaming KC-135 Stratotanker detach its fuel probe and pull away from the Greyhound in a graceful display of aerial acrobatics.
The Greyhound pilot gave a thumbs-up to the Stratotanker. “Muchas gracias, muchacho!” The pilot glanced back at Geoffrey. “Sky bridge!” he explained. “This is one of two C-2As the Navy fitted for aerial refueling. They’re the only aircraft that can reach this place and land on an aircraft carrier.”
“So that’s how this thing can fly so far in one leg?” Geoffrey asked.
“Correct. We had to set up the sky bridge as soon as the carrier group was in place.”
Geoffrey grinned, marveling at the circuit that had been put into place to reach the incredibly remote location.
“Speaking of, I think that’s your island right there!” The copilot pointed.
Far below, Geoffrey saw dozens of huge naval vessels ringing a brown-cliffed island on the distant horizon. As they drew nearer, Geoffrey thought the island resembled a wide Bundt cake, slightly glazed with white guano around its rim.
The pilot hailed the Enterprise’s control tower.
“You better get back to your seat and strap in, Dr. Binswanger. If you’ve never landed on a carrier deck, when the tailhook catches us you’ll be glad you’re facing backwards.”
“OK.” Geoffrey hurried back to his seat. “We’re about to land,” he told Thatcher.
Thatcher was irritated at the interruption. He tossed a few sunflower seeds into his mouth from a vest pocket. “As I was saying, if this isn’t a hoax, perhaps it’s Mother Earth’s perverse way of eradicating us—a little curiosity out here waiting to kill the cat.” Thatcher chuckled.
“Mm-hmm,” Geoffrey said.
“Intelligence, wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Binswanger, is the snake in the Garden of Eden? The fatal virus planet Earth was unlucky enough to contract? Or is that too heavy for you?”
Geoffrey shook his head and looked out the window. Seeing a few of the gray leviathans of the Enterprise Joint Task Group, the seriousness of the situation they were about to enter finally struck him.
Thatcher continued, seemingly intoxicated by his own baritone voice. “Unfortunately, I doubt Henders Island will live up to the hype. Island ecologies are wimpy. No offense, Doctor.”
Geoffrey wondered what Thatcher was driving at now, but then he remembered he was wearing his T-shirt from Kaua’i that said “CONSERVE ISLAND HABITATS” in faded green letters on the mud-red fabric. He shook his head. “None taken, Thatcher. Island ecologies are wimpy. That’s why we can learn so much from them. They’re the canaries in the coal mine. Which is why I doubt we’ll see anything to write home about here. Canaries rarely eat cats.”
Thatcher raised his bushy eyebrows. “Ah, but don’t you admit a certain morbid hope? I mean, what if this were some thing world-changing? After all, giant dodder from the island of Japan is spreading across North America. You know, the stuff that looks like yellow Silly String? If you’re not aware of the study a three-inch cutting produced a growth the length of three football fields in just two months during an experiment conducted in Texas in 2002. When you attack it, it germinates. If you chop it up, every part grows into a complete plant. And the most amusing thing about giant dodder,” Thatcher leaned toward Geoffrey confidentially, “is that it kills any plant it infects, whether it be the lowly weed or the mighty oak.” Thatcher giggled with genuine joy.
“I’m familiar with dodder, Thatcher, but I’m not sure we’ll find anything quite so dramatic here.” Geoffrey pointed out the window. “Especially if that’s the island we’re talking about.”
The airplane had rapidly lost altitude. Now, it made a low pass around the island’s cliff as they approached the carrier. Geoffrey noticed the trimaran yacht anchored in a cove cut into the western wall of the island.
“Hey, that’s the ship from the show! I guess that much wasn’t faked. They really did come all the way out here.”
“We’ll be landing on Enterprise and a Sea Dragon will Charlie you to Henders Army Base,” the pilot called back to them. “There’s a top-level meeting at seventeen hundred hours.”
Geoffrey adjusted his watch to the time-zone uncertainly. “That’s less than an hour from now. Right?”
“Right,” the copilot said.
“Can’t we stretch and get something to eat first?” Thatcher wadded up the plastic wrapper of his sunflower seeds and stuffed it in pocket number twelve.
“Attendance mandatory, sir,” the pilot replied. “The President called the meeting!”
After a sharp involuntary intake of breath, Thatcher smiled. “I never imagined I would be summoned by the President. Did you, Dr. Binswanger?”
Geoffrey looked out the window as the carrier deck rose beneath them. He braced for impact. “No.”
“Hold on, guys!” the pilot shouted.
Thatcher gasped. “Dear Lord!”
Still buzzing from the adrenaline high of the tailhook landing on the nearly five-acre flight deck of the Enterprise, Geoffrey clung to a handle inside the cockpit of the thundering helicopter as it made a dizzying ascent over the island’s sheer putty-brown palisade. Both Geoffrey and Thatcher wore blue hazmat suits, their helmets in their laps.
Scanning the cliff’s overhanging face, Geoffrey noted the metamorphic banding and buckled red layers of rock, deeply corrugated by eons of erosion. They appeared even more weathered than the ancient shores of the Seychelles that had been isolated 65 million years ago at the edge of the age of dinosaurs. As the helicopter cleared the rim, a green bowl opened under them. At its bottom, a broken ring of jungle spread outward like a dark wave from a bald central mesa of weathered rock.
“Looks like a creosote plant,” Geoffrey observed.
Thatcher nodded.
“How so, Doctor?” asked one of the helicopter crewmen.
“Some individual creosote plants are probably the oldest multi-cellular living things on Earth,” Geoffrey answered. “From the air you can see large rings of vegetation across the floor of the Mojave Desert in California. Fossilized root systems show that the rings are from a single plant growing outward for ten thousand years.”
“No kidding!” the young pilot exclaimed, impressed.
Whether it was the geology, the deeply sculpted weathering of the topography, or the strange growth pattern of the vegetation— or all of these cues taken together—Geoffrey’s instincts and training told him that this remote island was considerably older than he had first assumed.
Below, they glimpsed the four sections of StatLab at the outer edge of the jungle. The NASA lab’s first two sections appeared to be dissolving under a wave of multicolored growth, and the other two sections were strangled and encrusted with vegetation. The jungle seemed to be literally consuming the lab and a plume of swarming bugs poured out of the end of the last section.
“That’s the old lab,” the crewman told them. “We had to abandon it last week.”
“Last week?” Geoffrey asked. The ruin looked like it must have been there for decades.
Farther up the slope they saw the Army’s base of operations on the island, a mobile theater command center. NASA had clearly had its chance and failed.
“That’s the Trigon,” said the pilot. “That’s where we’re going.”
The new facility was made up of three olive drab sections joined together in a triangle.
“That baby’s blast-resistant, has virus-proof windows and magnetic-pulse-protected power and communications systems,” bragged the pilot. “It’s a mobile theater base designed to survive germ warfare as well as high velocity direct fire, direct hits by mortar bombs, and a near-miss from a twenty-five-hundred-pound bomb. You’ll be safe as a baby in a cradle there, guys!”
The new base had been established on a level tier carved into the green slope about four hundred yards away from NASA’s crumbling lab. Twelve Humvees and three bulldozers sat in neat rows near the Trigon on the freshly graded terrace.
The Trigon was encircled by a moat lined with butyl rubber and filled with seawater hauled in by helicopter, the pilot informed them. Every thirty seconds powerful fountains sprayed a white wall into the air around the base.
Twenty-two 300,000-liter demountable water storage tanks rested on shelves graded higher up the slope, sprouting PVC pipes that fed moats and sprinklers around the base. Geoffrey recognized the tanks from his visit to Haiti after Hurricane Ella—the giant tanks could be transported to disaster areas anywhere in the world within twenty-four hours—by land, sea, or air—to provide safe water supplies.
As they approached the base, Geoffrey wondered why there were so many tanks. Why did they need so much water? He watched a helicopter filling one from a distended hose, like a robotic Pegasus relieving itself.
“Time to get those helmets on. We’re about to drop you two off. After you hear the click just twist them clockwise till you hear another click.”
The Sea Dragon descended over a landing zone, and the rear hatch opened, admitting a gale of hot wind and the urgent pulse of the helicopter rotors.
Geoffrey and Thatcher braced themselves for the ramp to touch down, but instead it hovered about five feet off the scorched and salted ground.
“We’re not allowed to land!” the pilot shouted. “Jump! Then run down the path to the building. You’ll be all right.”
“Er—OK.” Geoffrey poised himself for the jump.
But Thatcher balked. “You must be joking, young man.”
“Jump NOW, sir!”
As the ramp dipped, they both jumped and Thatcher took a tumble. “Fuck!”
Geoffrey hit the ground on his two feet, his knees flexing with the impact.
The helicopter rose and the downwash of its rotors pounded their backs.
Geoffrey helped Thatcher scramble to his feet and they both ran down a wet path of glistening rock salt bordered by fountains that sprayed a tunnel of cold water over them.
“I’ve had friendlier welcomes,” Thatcher groused, panting.
The fountains subsided for a moment and for the first time Geoffrey looked out across the island they now stood on. “What are they? Triffids?” He remembered the old science fiction movie in which experimental plants invaded the earth. The desperate humans discovered that saltwater killed the vegetation only moments before it had strangled the entire planet.
“What, pray tell, are ‘triffids,’ Doctor?” Thatcher wheezed as they ran.
“Never mind,” Geoffrey answered, and a thrill swelled inside him—what on Earth had they found here?
Chlorine dioxide gas was replaced with filtered air, and the hexagonal entry hatch inside the Trigon’s germ-warfare-proof air dock swung open.
Standing before them was a slender redheaded woman in a T-shirt, jeans, and Adidas sneakers. “You can take the helmets and suits off now,” she instructed in a crisp voice.
Geoffrey pulled off the helmet and his ears popped as they adjusted to the higher air pressure inside the base.
Geoffrey cocked his head; she was not only attractive, but seemed very familiar. “Do I know you? Oh, SeaLife—of course. You were on the show! Sorry.”
She forgave him with a nod and a friendly smile. “They wouldn’t let me go home, so I persuaded them to let me hang around and help. In real life I’m a botanist, though not as esteemed as the ones they’ve shipped in.”
He extended his hand. “Geoffrey.”
“Geoffrey…?” She took his hand.
“Binswanger.”
She frowned. “Hmm.”
Geoffrey smiled. “Problem?”
“I could never marry you.” She smiled.
“Oh really?”
“My name’s Nell Duckworth. The only reason I ever wanted to get married was to change my last name.”
“Ah.”
“Sorry.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You could always hyphenate it,” Thatcher interposed drily, clearly unhappy at having his presence disregarded.
“That’s funny, Thatcher. You with your great name. By the way, Nell, this is Thatcher Redmond.” Geoffrey presented Thatcher with a regal flourish.
“Pleasure,” Thatcher said with a curt dip of his head, but he avoided eye contact with Nell and moved on toward a cluster of others gathered farther down the corridor.
She shook her head. “Another Nobel Prize winner, no doubt.”
“Tetteridge, as a matter of fact,” Geoffrey said. “Nobel Prize winners are much nicer. You could always just keep your own name, you know.” He winked.
She reached out to poke him in the ribs but hesitated. Geoffrey sensed that her moment of levity had passed, and her eyes drifted as some sadness caught up to her.
Geoffrey smiled, curious. “What’s going on, Nell?”
“I was hoping you were going to tell me.”
He detected a surprising fear under the irony. “Seriously?”
She sighed. “A lot of people have died here. And they were my friends.” She looked at him.
Geoffrey was alarmed, and also intrigued by the intelligence he saw working in her eyes. “I see.”
Thatcher returned, walking briskly up to them. He gave Nell an up-and-down look and then addressed Geoffrey. “I believe we’re being summoned, Doctor.”
“Don’t call me Doctor, Thatcher,” Geoffrey sighed, and smiled encouragingly at Nell. “Come on.” He gently jabbed her in the ribs with a finger. “Let’s crash this party.”
The conference room, which doubled as an observation bay when the table was pushed against the wall, occupied most of the north side of the Trigon.
The tilted window of laminated glass overlooked the lime-green slopes that rose to the straight edge of the island’s rim against the blazing blue sky.
Seated around the conference table were a scattering of military brass and about twenty American and British scientists, some quite well known, some Geoffrey did not recognize. He spotted Sir Nigel Holscombe, a favorite of his, who had hosted many a classic BBC nature documentary series.
A satellite-uplinked teleconference screen dominated the western end of the room. In the Oval Office, the President sat behind his massive desk with his advisors seated nearby, among them the secretaries of Defense and State.
“I hope we’re coming through all right,” the President began. “I apologize for the delay.”
Geoffrey glanced at Nell with wide eyes.
But Nell’s focus was on the screen, her expression intent.
Dr. Cato answered, “Yes sir, Mr. President, we hear you fine.”
“Good. As everyone here knows by now, I trust, the tragic incident on SeaLife was unfortunately not a hoax. The cover story was invented to buy us time to make an important decision. I wanted to share what we have now learned with the most distinguished scientific minds we could assemble before having to make that fateful decision. Dr. Cato, please bring us all up to speed on the situation as it now stands.”
Thatcher munched on a peanut from a bag he had stashed in pocket number eight. He observed Dr. Cato with contempt. Suffering from an apparent bout of professional jealousy, Cato had roundly snubbed Thatcher at the Bioethics Convention in Rio last winter, and Thatcher, for one, had not forgotten it.
“Thank you, Mr. President. I’m Wayne Cato, chairman of Caltech’s Biology Division and project leader of the Enterprise research team. To give us all some crucial background, Doug Livingstone, our on-site geologist, will explain how we think Henders Island got here in the first place. Doug?”
The tall geologist with a wing of salt-and-pepper hair over his craggy face rose and introduced himself in an upper-class British accent. “This graphic put together by the geologic team on the Enterprise illustrates what we have been able to reconstruct about the origins of Henders Island.”
An animation of the Earth appeared on a presentation screen behind him.
“Seven hundred and fifty million years ago, a supercontinent known as Rodinia split into three pieces. One hundred and fifty million years later, these pieces smashed back together. They formed a second supercontinent we call Pannotia.”
On the screen, the Earth rotated as a sprawling supercontinent cracked into three continents and slammed together.
“Another hundred and fifty million years passed. Then, just as the Cambrian explosion of life introduced an astonishing variety of multicellular species on Earth, Pannotia tore into four vast segments. These pieces would become Siberia, northern Europe, North America, and the supercontinent geologists call Gondwana, which included Antarctica, South America, Africa, India, and China.”
Livingstone waited as the animation caught up.
“Tens of millions of years passed as the new continents converged to form Laurasia, which slammed into Gondwana two hundred seventy-five million years ago and formed the super-continent known as Pangaea, where dinosaurs emerged. Pangaea started breaking apart a hundred and eighty million years ago into the seven continents familiar to us today, which is why dinosaur fossils can now be found on every modern continent.”
The geologist flicked through some stock images of the violent coasts of Cornwall and Alaska.
“Over the eons, landmasses continued to split and collide, dragging mountain ranges under the sea and shoving ocean beds up to create the Andes, Rockies, and Himalayas. Fragments of land continued to break off continents. Some drifted thousands of miles. We know that Alaska, for example, is a train wreck of giant chunks cast off from China and other parts of the world.”
Livingstone clicked to the next animation, which appeared to be a tighter detail of the previous globe.
“We now believe that there was a fifth fragment of Pannotia. Probably about the size of New Zealand, this fragment somehow managed to dodge the geological pie-fight for half a billion years, riding up and down the Pacific rim while being relentlessly ground down between tectonic plates. All that remains above water of this fragment today is Henders Island, which seems to have been upthrusting just faster than erosion can melt it under the sea.”
Livingstone clicked to an image of a geological cross-section of the island. It looked like a jagged pillar or a tapering candle rising from the sea floor.
“We put together this profile from sonar mapping data collected by Navy subs during the past few weeks. Rock samples from the cliffs indicate that this island is a continental microplate with a craton or basement core composed of prelife Archean-aged rock. Excavations for this command center and rock samples collected during a mountaineering expedition indicate the overlying younger rocks to be freshwater stream and lake deposits that contain fossils of completely unknown organisms with no parallel in the rest of the world’s fossil record.
“So, Mr. President, this small island’s humble appearance disguises an epic legacy. The fluke of its natural history has helped hide it from the eyes of science. Its remoteness has kept it out of the path of human beings. From the air, it looks like the typical caldera of a volcanic island. Its imposing cliffs have fended off tsunamis from meteor impacts, as well as the few travelers who may have come across it, for millions of years. Recent seismic activity, however, indicates that the island’s substrate is weakening. This accounts for giant fissures in the island’s escarpments that have allowed access to the island’s interior for the first time.”
The lanky scientist pointed toward the window.
“The vegetation covering the majority of the island seems to be a bacterial symbiont that absorbs a variety of minerals and photosynthesizes. Combined with other organisms that use acid to scour the vegetation off the rock, this is probably what carved out the island’s bowl-shaped topography, disguising it as a volcanic island in satellite images.”
Livingstone glanced at Geoffrey and the other scientists seated around the table. “When the supercontinent Pannotia existed, the ocean was nearly fresh. Many believe this played a role in the rise of complex life during the Cambrian explosion. Complex life might also have evolved in the vast freshwater inland seas of Pannotia before migrating down rivers into the open seas. This island seems to have carried life on a separate journey from that evolutionary explosion all the way to the present day.”
“Don’t give me the labor pains, just show me the baby, Dr. Livingstone,” the President said, to some laughter around the table. The President’s advisors did not laugh.
Livingstone cleared his throat. “To put it in perspective, Mr. President, Australia was isolated seventy million years ago, and look how weird kangaroos and platypuses are. Life on Henders Island has been isolated almost ten times that long. For all practical purposes, it might as well be an alien planet.”
Geoffrey felt almost physically dizzy. Thatcher, he saw, was looking at Dr. Livingstone with an expression of awe that bordered on delight.
The Secretary of Defense spoke for the first time. “So I guess that means we can rule out biowarfare programs—this isn’t the Island of Doctor Moreau?”
There was a general release of laughter.
Dr. Cato nodded. “Right. And it’s not from outer space, or a so-called lost world frozen in time, or a land of radioactive mutants. Scientists in Romania recently discovered a cave sealed off for five million years. The cave contained an entire ecosystem of thirty-three new species. The base of their food chain is a fungus growing in an underground lake in total darkness. Thermal vents at the bottom of the sea have revealed ecosystems previously unimagined that might reach back to the first single-celled organisms. The ecosystem on this island has been evolving much longer than any other land-based ecosystem on Earth.” He gestured toward Nell. “Dr. Nell Duckworth, one of our project leaders, will now summarize what we know about life on Henders Island. Dr. Duckworth?”
Nell rose and Geoffrey looked at Nell in surprise, after the humility of her introduction, to discover her authority here.
Nell’s expression was quite serious, grim, even, to the point of bleakness.
“Normally, island ecosystems are fragile and vulnerable to ‘weed species’—alien flora and fauna that destroy native species.” She advanced through some images. “Mosquitoes, mongoose, gypsy moths—even house cats have decimated island ecosystems.”
She clicked the wireless mouse and brought up a blue screen that read PLANT TESTS. She clicked again: six potted plants appeared in split-screen on the large monitor. “Here is some time-lapse footage of some of Earth’s most formidable plants— like kudzu, leafy spurge, giant dodder—after being exposed on Henders Island.”
In speeded-up motion the specimens on the screen were strangled, dismembered, dissolved, and devoured by Henders vines, clover, clovores, bugs, and animals. The pixilated massacres resembled stop-motion scenes from the original King Kong movie. Specimen after specimen shown in the windows on the screen was raided, razed, and replaced with sprouting Henders varieties.
Grumbling rose from the audience.
Nell raised her voice, keeping it authoritative and firm. “None of the over sixty plant species we tested lasted more than twenty-four hours. Most perished in less than two hours.”
Geoffrey noticed that many of the scientists at the table looked as shocked as he felt, and many of the military officers had clenched their jaws defiantly. The President and his advisors, he noted, seemed to have seen this incredible footage before.
Nell clicked the mouse. A title appeared: ANIMAL TESTS. A split screen showed a series of animals filmed in slow motion as they battled Henders counterparts.
“After matching common Earth animals with Henders species in artificial laboratory conditions, we found the same result. Rattlesnakes, pythons, scorpions, jumping spiders, tarantula hawks, cats, army ants, cockroaches…None of these lasted more than a few hours. Most lasted only a few minutes.”
The officers, civilians, and scientists alike were agitated and indignant to see the familiar monsters hunted down and slaughtered so easily. Even if they were deadly and troublesome species, they were our deadly species, and a certain loyalty was offended by the sight of their swift destruction. The Henders species seemed to move at a different speed, always attacked first, and responded to any resistance or counterattack with a frightening escalation of violence.
Thatcher glanced at Geoffrey and then looked back at the screen. A smile widened under his red mustache.
“Jesus H. Christ!” said one of the Navy brass across from Geoffrey. “Sorry, Mr. President. I hadn’t seen this until now.”
“That’s all right, Admiral Shin.” The President nodded. “That’s why you’re here. I’m seeing some of this for the first time myself. I empathize with your sentiment.”
“Laboratory conditions are not ideal tests,” Nell continued. “Henders species are even more lethal in the wild. As we found when we released some common specimens equipped with cameras.”
Footage of the ensuing carnage played behind her.
“Mr. President,” interposed Brigadier General Travers, who sat across the table from Geoffrey. “This is potentially more deadly than any military threat we have ever encountered, sir.”
Thatcher forgot to chew his last peanut as he stared at the screen: he swallowed it whole as a Henders rat bit off the head of a pit viper.
Geoffrey kept looking from the screen to Nell and back. He could not believe what he was seeing—but it seemed impossible to him that this could be faked or that this woman would be participating in some deception.
He blurted out, “Is this how every species on the island—I mean, there must be something that is nonaggressive in this ecosystem! I’m sorry, Mr. President—Geoffrey Binswanger of Woods Hole.”
Nell answered Geoffrey’s question directly and calmly. “Henders Island’s entire ecology consists of weed species, Dr. Binswanger. Earth’s most lethal flora and fauna are no match for any of the Henders species we have tested. If any of them were to spread to the mainland, they would soon wipe out everything in their biological niche. And each species here can occupy a wide variety of niches throughout its life cycle.”
High-speed and slow-motion clips on the screen showed a pine tree, a praying mantis, a flat of wheat, Africanized bees, crab grass, and a mongoose—all ravaged and scavenged by Henders opponents.
“Every insect is outmatched. Every common plant is shredded. Every predator from our world is slaughtered and consumed, bones and all,” Nell told the hushed room. “There are animals that reside in the island’s lake that are bigger than T-Rexes, and there are land predators twice the size of African buffalos. There are mite-sized creatures equally lethal. We haven’t even been able to find nematodes in the soil—in their place we found tiny armored worms that eat detritus and aerate the soil. These armored worms devour nematodes for breakfast. We have found no species from the external biosphere here at all except for a few fungi, molds, and bacteria that appear to have adapted to subsoil environments.” Nell was silent a moment. Then she added: “Nothing from our world can survive here.”
“Now, come on!” protested Sir Nigel Holscombe. “You’ve got to be joking!”
“Sadly, no,” replied Dr. Cato. “Extrapolating from the data we’ve collected using the most conservative computer model projections, if this biology mixed with ours, human trade would distribute Henders species to all five continents within a decade. Every living thing the human race takes for granted, from cows to apple trees to dogs and the fleas on their backs, would go extinct within a few decades.”
“We would be the oddballs, living on islands with kangaroos, kiwis, and giant tortoises, Sir Nigel, praying that species from the mainland never reached us,” said Nell.
Exclamations of shock, awe, and disbelief exploded around the table.
Geoffrey leaned forward, fascinated by what he’d seen and heard. “So why hasn’t it happened yet?”
“Yes, and are we safe on this island?” Sir Nigel chimed in. The old scientist looked deeply rattled and excited, simultaneously.
“Fourteen hundred miles of ocean surrounds Henders Island in every direction,” Dr. Cato replied. “I’m told that a cameraman is the one who discovered that saltwater is toxic to Henders biochemistry. Like insects and birds, these species invaded the land by switching from excreting ammonia—which is very soluble in water but toxic if stored in the body—to excreting uric acid. As a result of their terrestrial compromise, Henders creatures lost their ability to hypo-osmoregulate—to keep their blood less salty than seawater. Since they can’t get rid of excess sodium, calcium, or magnesium, exposure to saltwater causes a magnesium buildup in their blood like a fatal dose of anesthesia.”
“Many Henders species spray pheromones when they sense salt to signal danger,” Nell told them. “This is what is known as a Schreck reaction. It has been observed in rainbow trout that release an olfactory marker when one is attacked, triggering the whole school to scatter.”
“A pheromone repellent,” Dr. Cato continued, “saved the cameraman when he jumped in a saltwater pool and was coated by it. Saltwater is a reliable secondary repellent to Henders animals, hence the perimeter of fountains we have set up around the base. So, Sir Nigel, to answer your question, we are quite safe here, and our vehicles are now equipped with tanks of seawater as well.” Dr. Cato gave his friend a reassuring nod.
Geoffrey shook his head, still unable to reconcile this with everything he knew about sustainable ecosystems.
“Dr. Cato.” The President’s face was grim. “What is your bottom line?”
Dr. Cato glanced darkly at Nell before answering. “Sir, the bottom line is this: if the oceans had not continued to get saltier since Henders Island was isolated about six hundred million years ago, life on Earth would probably be extremely different today.”
“So far we’ve been very, very lucky,” Nell said.
All turned to look at the President.
“Well, we obviously can’t cover the world in salt,” he said.
“No, sir,” Nell agreed.
Thatcher Redmond looked around at his colleagues. “Mr. President, are we actually contemplating the destruction of this ecosystem? If that is what you’ve asked us here to condone, sir, I simply cannot think of a more horrific legacy for America. Or for the human race!”
Geoffrey found himself agreeing with Thatcher. “This ecology might yield benefits we cannot even begin to imagine, Mr. President.”
“It is a matter we have considered, Dr. Binswanger,” the President said. “Unfortunately, I must weigh potential benefits against potential hazards, which in this case appear to be extremely serious. Don’t you agree?”
Geoffrey frowned.
Thatcher bristled. “If the Navy were to keep guard around this island, how could anyone transport live specimens off it? How do we know these computer models are correct? We have not had nearly enough time to make such scientific conclusions with any certainty, with all due respect to Dr. Cato and his team!”
The President nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Redmond. I’d like us all to hear what the Secretary of Defense has to say about the capabilities of the United States against this threat.”
The secretary, a spry silver-haired man wizened by warfare, looked irritated as the camera panned from the man behind the big desk to him.
“Well, we can’t simply strand and support such a large investment of assets in the middle of nowhere indefinitely,” he stated. “There are other threats in the world and a limited budget to deal with all of them. And no matter what we do, there are innumerable ways specimens could be smuggled off the island. High altitude airdrops and balloon-released specimen carriers would be exceptionally difficult to detect. Corruption of those entrusted to keep guard, even accidental transference…” He shook his head grimly. “The variables are too many. And even one incident, judging from what we have just heard here today, would be sufficient to compromise global security. No one could ever put the genie back in the bottle.”
“Dr. Cato,” the President asked, “what do your computer models project might happen if even a few of these species reached the outside world?”
Dr. Cato nodded at Nell and she clicked a handheld mouse that put a new graphic on the screen.
Next to a silhouette of each Henders organism was a computer-generated globe over which spread a series of graphic wildfires from different points of origin: Portland, Los Angeles, Panama, Sydney, Nagoya, Hong Kong, Kiev, Morocco, Durban, Salerno, Marseilles, Portsmouth, New York Harbor. The spreading crimson waves left a blackened Earth that represented total extinction of native species. A date ticked in the lower right corner showing the estimated year that each species tested would cause global collapse: 2037, 2039, 2042, 2051.
Nell gestured at the terrifying countdown. “Computer models generated by the Enterprise team have predicted that any one of these species could be enough to topple our ecosystem like a house of cards.”
“God help us,” muttered one of the Navy brass. Someone else cursed softly.
“Mr. President,” Nell said, “to the native life on Henders Island, the rest of the world is a banquet table. Not even our parasites, microbes, or viruses have been able to invade this island. Most Henders species can alter the pH levels of their blood chemistry almost instantaneously in response to infection. They have existed, on a continuum, much longer than any animals in our biosphere. They have survived atmospheric changes, ice ages, global warmings, and extinction events that replaced the dominant species on the rest of the planet half a dozen times over. If any of these animals made it off the island…” Geoffrey saw the intensity in her eyes as she addressed the President on the conference screen, “virtually no other ecosystem on Earth could survive it.”
“Fuck me!” exclaimed Sir Nigel. “Apologies, Mr. President.”
“It is extremely doubtful that we could survive it, either, Nigel,” said Dr. Livingstone.
Geoffrey raised a hand. “I still can’t believe there aren’t any species that don’t pose a threat here. I just got here, so I may be speaking out of turn, but, surely, something must be benign on this island and can be preserved in controlled conditions for future study! I have to agree with Dr. Redmond: computer models and algorithmic projections seem like a pretty flimsy standard of evidence when you’re condemning an entire ecosystem.”
“I’m interested in preserving any life that we can here, Dr. Binswanger, and that’s one of the reasons you are here,” the President told him. “Ladies and gentlemen, unfortunately, we have precious little time. Mr. Secretary, I’d like you to fill everyone in on recent developments.”
The Secretary of State did not look comfortable with the President’s request. He cleared his throat after a stern nod from the Commander-in-Chief “We have already had to rebuff Chinese and Russian warships from this area, and both of these confrontations have been… hairy, I think is the word I’m officially allowed to use.”
The scientists present registered disgust at the military brinksmanship.
The military brass looked grim.
“The British are claiming this island as their territory since it is named after a captain in the Royal Navy who discovered it 220 years ago—we have respected that position and so have included eminent British scientists in the investigation team. However, this quarantine we have imposed is hatching conspiracy theories. It is also fomenting a worldwide diplomatic backlash against the United States and Britain. International relations are rapidly reaching an unsustainable level of destabilization.” The Secretary looked at the President. “We must decide if we should sterilize the site with a tactical nuclear weapon. And we must decide now. The human race may never have another window of opportunity.”
An eruption of furious exclamations burst from the scientists.
“Dr. Duckworth,” the President said, ignoring the interruptions.
Nell was startled at the acknowledgment. “Yes, sir?”
“You were the first person to witness these species. You are also one of only two who survived that first encounter. You have experienced firsthand the destruction the life forms on this island are capable of. What is your recommendation?”
“Nuke the island,” she answered without hesitation, astonishing herself with her bluntness. Her cheeks colored faintly, but her gaze met that of the man on the screen steadily and without flinching.
The scientists around the table gasped. Geoffrey was stunned that a colleague would take such a position; most of the military appeared gratified by Nell’s bald statement.
“And how do we know nuking it won’t blow pollen or regenerative cells from its organisms into the stratosphere?” Geoffrey demanded, standing. “How do these organisms reproduce? We could be spreading the threat across the entire biosphere!” He crossed angry glances with Nell as he sat back down.
“Mr. President,” interrupted the Secretary of Defense, “we had a chance to destroy smallpox forever, and we know now that the Russians didn’t do it and we didn’t either, just in case the disease might be used as a weapon. Now we chase rumors that terrorists may well have gotten their hands on it. I do not like the idea of what terrorists might do with a few samples of life like this!”
“How do these animals reproduce, Dr. Cato?” the President wanted to know. “Is there any danger that a nuclear weapon could spread these organisms beyond this island?”
Dr. Cato shook his head. “There is nothing to suggest anything here procreates by means of pollen. That’s one of the reasons it has remained biologically isolated. All the animals on the island appear to be hermaphrodites that mate once for life and reproduce indefinitely. Even the plantlike life produces eggs that stick to mobile organisms for only a few seconds before falling off. That’s why birds have never transported species off the island.”
“Is there any species that is benign, as Dr. Binswanger suggests?”
“All of these creatures have been swimming in the same shrinking pond, so to speak, Mr. President,” Dr. Livingstone replied. “I’m afraid that to make it here they’ve had to become tougher than any common Earth species—far tougher, in fact.”
Geoffrey suddenly noticed a light outside the window, flashing about halfway up the north slope.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the President said, “I’m afraid I cannot, in good conscience, allow even the American government to have the opportunity to weaponize life from this island. The results could be catastrophic.”
Thatcher rose now, his face flushed with anger. “Mr. President! If we destroy this ecosystem we will be committing the greatest crime in the history of the planet. And we will only be foreshadowing what we are well on the way to doing to our own world, as well. Nothing could illustrate the thesis of my book more vividly than such a wanton and total annihilation of a completely unique branch of life purely for our own selfish benefit!”
The man in Washington did not flinch. “It may surprise you to know that I accept your verdict, Dr. Redmond. And I won’t stop you from yelling it from the mountaintops, either. Unfortunately, the question is which crime to commit, not whether to commit one. I do hope I have your sympathy, if not your agreement, on that. Because I sincerely wish to have it.”
“I’m not sure I can give it to you, sir,” Thatcher retorted, glaring at Cato. “I think this atrocity will only prove humans far more dangerous than anything on this island. I’m sure Dr. Binswanger agrees with me!”
Geoffrey heard Thatcher with irritation, but he said nothing. The flashes on the ridge, he thought, were not an accidental trick of light: they appeared to be a regular and repeating signal. But from whom?
“Nevertheless, Dr. Redmond,” the President said, “my responsibility and allegiance must be to the human race and the life forms that sustain it. I’m afraid I must give the order to sterilize Henders Island, within forty-eight hours. This should allow twenty-four hours for final specimen collection and documentation of the island and twenty-four hours to evacuate and achieve a safe distance from the blast. I will not impose a gag order on any of you after this matter is resolved. I will not silence academic debate, even though I realize that I will probably be eternally condemned for this decision, especially by the scientific community. The notion that a President should put a limit on the appetite of science, which by its very nature must be limitless, is against everything I believe in. But to put a limit on nature itself is an even more grievous and permanent act of destruction. That is the burden I have to bear alone. I caution you all now, however, that you should understand how seriously this course of action will be carried out.”
Geoffrey nudged Nell urgently, pointing to the flashing light on the far slope. Nell could not imagine why he was distracting her at a moment like this but she turned, angrily, toward the ridge to which he pointed.
“Any attempt to smuggle life off Henders Island will be met with deadly force, with no questions asked,” the President pronounced. “In the interest of science, however, we must collect as many euthanized specimens as possible in the time that we have left. Dr. Binswanger, I fervently hope that you and your colleagues can find a benign species that can preserve a living legacy of this world for future generations. But any live specimens must be put under the heaviest guard. They can be transported for off-site observation only after approval by Dr. Cato, the joint chiefs, and myself. And such specimens, if they are found and verified, may only be transported to the U.S.S. Philippine Sea for quarantine. Is that understood, Dr. Binswanger?”
Nell mouthed the Morse code as she read the flashing light on the distant ridge. S… O…
“I’m sorry, Mr. President,” Geoffrey said, rising. “There seems to be a signal, sir, on the north ridge of the island!”
“It’s an S.O.S.!” Nell confirmed, rising beside him.
The room broke into commotion as everyone turned toward the window. The light blinked on a step of what looked like a stairway of rock reaching out of the dripping jungle, halfway up the northern slope.
“Well! Thank God. Let’s get a rescue party over there pronto, people,” the President ordered.
“Yes, sir,” Dr. Cato said. He turned to Nell, but she was staring at the flashing light, her face pale with desperation.
“You have twenty-four hours, people,” the President said. “I hope that we will all use them well, and that God may forgive us for what we are now called upon to do. Godspeed!”
The screen went black. Then everyone rose and rushed from the room.
Geoffrey followed Nell. She seemed to be ignoring him now as she strode behind the others through the clogged corridors to the hatch.
“Wait, Nell! Where are you going?”
“Out there.”
Several other scientists had started zipping into hazmat suits. She reached for the hatch control console on the wall.
“Hey, aren’t you going to suit up?”
“No feedbag for me, thanks. Anyway, the only reason to wear them was to protect the island from our germs, and that’s a moot point now. I see the military stopped wearing them a while ago.”
“Yeah,” one Army staffer said. “Some of the scientists like to wear them.”
Sir Nigel Holscombe, who had started zipping in with his camera crew, overheard them. “Balls!” he said. “If she’s not wearing one, I’m not wearing one!”
A wave of zippers unzipping followed as the others stepped out of their suits.
Thatcher and several others crushed into the air hatch. Geoffrey was pressed up against Nell’s back as more squeezed in behind him.
“Still there?” she asked as the hatch was closed.
Her icy tone made him wince. “Everything I know about successful ecosystems suggests that they evolve toward cooperation and away from predation,” he said to her stiffened back.
“You can’t be a vegetarian if there aren’t any plants.”
Thatcher overheard them from the back of the airlock, having squeezed in at the last second.
“But the growth on the fields,” Geoffrey said. “Something must eat that?”
“Everything eats that, and it eats everything. Everything eats everything here.”
“That’s impossible!”
“On Henders Island, Dr. Binswanger, I’m afraid you have to think outside the box,” Nell said crisply, as the outer hatch unsealed and opened. “Either that or you better stay in the box and hope like hell nothing gets in.”
She strode out onto the path outside without turning back to see if he was following.
Army personnel were mobilizing within the base perimeter. They were assembling a search-and-rescue convoy to investigate the distress signal, which still flashed steadily on the island’s northern slope.
The challenge lay in bringing a ground vehicle to the survivor. Two helicopter teams searched the craggy jungled slope, but so far had been unable to spot the source of the signal. And besides, helicopters were forbidden to land, drop anyone down, or pick anyone up. Dangling from a rope over Henders Island had proven to be a fatal mistake.
Under the saltwater drizzle of the fountains, scientists and soldiers hurriedly prepared for a last blitz of specimen collecting. They loaded saltwater tanks and cannons, aluminum specimen traps, and as much video and scientific equipment as they could cram into the remaining Humvees. They ran hunched over, shielding the gear and their eyes from the rain of seawater, as they quickly fueled and loaded the train of vehicles.
The High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles, or Humvees for short, had been fitted with “Mattracks,” individual tank treads for each wheel that made them sit a few feet higher off the ground than they would have with tires. An engineer had designed Mattracks after his eleven-year-old son Matt drew a picture of a truck equipped with tank-treads on each wheel. Young Matt’s idea had turned out to be quite ingenious. The tracks could be retrofitted to any vehicle, and the treads chewed through rough, flooded, and steep terrain with equal ease. The U.S. military had gleefully bolted them onto nearly every kind of field vehicle in their fleet. Only Mattrack-fitted Humvees had been airlifted to Henders Island after the disaster with the XATV-9’s tires, which had led to the deaths of two scientists, a diplomat, and their driver.
The three Humvees assigned to investigate the distress signal were ready to roll at the head of the line. Behind them, Sir Nigel Holscombe and his camera crews frantically loaded their two Hummers.
Nell climbed into the backseat of the first Hummer, and Thatcher followed her. Thatcher smelled a triumphant sequel to his book, and the prospect of that payoff charged his soul with a form of courage: nothing could stop him from tagging along on this expedition.
Geoffrey opened the door on the right side of the Hummer and climbed in next to Nell. “Mind if I join you? Oh, hello, Thatcher.”
“Still hoping for a benign species?” the botanist asked.
Geoffrey smiled. “Nell, it just seems impossible to me that something from this island can’t be preserved.”
“I felt the same way, Geoffrey. I don’t anymore,” she said. “More than a dozen people I knew have been killed on this island. If you expect me to apologize for wanting it nuked, forget it.”
The driver barked responses into the radio. He wore green camouflaged Army fatigues, body armor, and a helmet. Nell saw him kiss a gold crucifix that hung around his neck and tuck it under his armored vest.
Then she recognized the man sitting in the shotgun seat, holding a camcorder. The cameraman also wore body armor and Nell noticed the NASA headband camera on the photographer’s head with the viewfinder retracted over his ear.
She tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hey, Nell!” Zero Monroe shouted, and he turned toward her with a big grin.
“Back for more?”
“You, too, darlin’?”
Nell squeezed his arm. “You OK?”
“Yeah. They patched me up. The poison wore off. I can even move my leg again.” He laughed.
“Does Cynthea know you’re here?”
“No, not this time—when I heard this was going down I came straight from the Enterprise sick bay.”
“Somebody’s out there,” she said softly.
“I know.” He nodded. “I keep wondering if someone survived that first day… But that’s impossible.” He shook his head, grimacing, remembering the sound of the shrieks inside the crevasse.
Someone tapped on the window next to Zero. Zero opened the door.
“Got room for one more?” Dr. Cato asked.
“Sure, but you’ll have to sit in the middle. I need the window,” Zero said, jumping out.
The white-haired scientist climbed in and greeted Nell in the backseat. She frowned.
“It may not be safe, Dr. Cato. Are you sure you want to come along?”
“Well…” Dr. Cato sighed. “It looks like the last chance I’ll get to see this island up close.” He seemed a bit distracted. “I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t take the opportunity, Nell.” Then he turned and met her gaze. “Besides, somebody should look after you and make sure you don’t do anything too dangerous out there, my dear.”
Zero climbed in and slammed the Hummer door.
“OK, listen up!” the driver yelled to get their attention. “I am Sergeant Cane! You scientists have been embedded on this mission, but it is my mission, and I do not like the idea. So you all need to know that I make the rules here, and my rule is FINAL. Is that understood?”
“Yes,” Geoffrey said. “That’s cool!”
Cane glared at each of the others. “Does everyone else understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Dr. Cato nodded.
“You got it,” Nell said.
“Very well, Sergeant,” Thatcher sighed.
“Yup” came from Zero.
“Good!” the sergeant said. “So here’s rule number one: do not open any windows. We don’t even want one of those wasps gettin’ in here. Because they will MESS YOU UP. Is that understood?”
“Yes!” everyone said, except for Thatcher.
“Rule number two: do not go near the jungle. Do I hear an ‘OK, Sergeant Cane’?”
“OK, Sergeant Cane,” they all said.
“Does this thing have rubber tracks?” Zero asked.
“Kevlar and steel.” Cane hit the gas and the rescue convoy left the safety of the base.
The signal, which appeared to be reflected sunlight, continued to flash intermittently from the highest visible ledge of the rock stairway. As the sun sank behind the western rim, the shadow it cast across the island spread toward the sunlit ledge. They knew the signal would be doused all too soon.
Thatcher gazed out the window at the swarms of insects flying into and out of the roof of the jungle below, and the strange animals that streaked over the open ground.
“Hey, Helo One and Two,” Cane said into the radio. “Have you guys spotted anyone? Blue One over.” Cane pointed at the two helicopters circling the north ridge.
“Still negative, Blue One, infrared vision shows warm-blooded creatures all over the ledges. We can’t pick out anything human down there.”
“Thanks, guys. The cavalry’s coming.”
The three Hummers rumbled toward the north slope in single file up a curving grade of strata that made a natural road.
“That was quite a power play back there,” Thatcher sniffed. “The President as God! But I can’t say that I’m surprised.”
“It seems that either way we’re playing God, Thatcher.” Geoffrey gazed out in wonderment at the green slopes rising to the edge of the bowl. The buckled strata ringing the island gave it the appearance of an enormous ruined coliseum. The broken rows seemed to have been carved for giants.
“Maybe God’s playing God here,” Dr. Cato mused, sadly scanning the landscape around them.
“Geoffrey’s right,” Nell said. “If we don’t do this, we’ll be unleashing Armageddon. It would just be a matter of time.”
Thatcher looked avidly out the window at the jungle below. A pack of four enormous spigers loped over the clover fields with their back legs pumping like locomotives as they tried to head off two Army Hummers along a lower road near the jungle. The lead Hummer opened machine-gun fire and felled one of the beasts. The others immediately turned on their wounded comrade and ripped into its flesh. “That just might be the best thing that ever happened to this planet,” the zoologist murmured.
Geoffrey groaned and Dr. Cato shook his head.
“Excuse me?” Nell said, glaring at Thatcher.
“Armageddon might just save the world from humanity.” Thatcher turned to face her with a paternal smile. “Of course, I’m only joking, Dr. Duckworth. But if what we’ve heard so far is true, no intelligent life could ever evolve in this environment. It’s no wonder this ecosystem has lasted so long, evolving on an unbroken continuum since the Cambrian explosion itself. We may have discovered the perfect ecosystem!”
His eyes twinkled, but Nell looked away in disgust.
Zero turned from the window where he was shooting and gave Thatcher a deadly look. “I think you need a little quality time with the local wildlife, Professor.”
The Humvee climbed the natural road all the way up to the northeast edge of the island. As the vehicle crested the rise at the cliff edge, Sergeant Cane pointed out the right window.
“Check out these critters, Dr. Redmond!”
Thatcher leaned over Nell to see.
Sprawled and tangled on the sheer cliff of the island’s rim, dry tendrils swirled to form what looked like nests, occupied by hundreds of birds’ eggs and hatchlings. Geoffrey saw chicks suckling at appendages that rose from the tangled mass—bulbous pods shaped disturbingly like birds’ heads. “What the…?”
“Hatcheries,” Dr. Cato told him, peering out the window in awe.
Thatcher grunted as he nearly flopped across Nell’s lap to peer out. “Really?”
“Could you explain that?” Geoffrey said.
“Some seabirds migrate here to breed,” Dr. Cato replied.
“The plants eat the parents, and the nestlings hatch and imprint on their new mommies. Later they return here all fattened up as adults to nest, lay their eggs, and get eaten. The circle of life.” Nell smiled darkly at Geoffrey, who looked back at the hatcheries, speechless.
“We’ve even discovered a subspecies of frigates that has adapted its juvenile beak to fit the nipples on these things,” Dr. Cato told them. “So apparently these creatures have been good bird mommies for a very long time.”
“My God,” Geoffrey whispered, his heart racing at the implications. “A predator-prey relationship in which the prey is evolving to improve the predators’ chances? I think I’m going to be sick. These things have hijacked the frigate’s natural selection. They’re fricking breeding their own food!”
“Just like we do,” Thatcher drawled. “Haven’t you seen a chicken? The difference is that this has carefully evolved in tandem with its prey to preserve just what it needs to survive and not expand beyond its resources. You could devote a lifetime to studying any one of this island’s organisms.”
“A short lifetime,” Zero muttered.
Sergeant Cane chuckled sourly as they passed the squawking nesting grounds rimming the high cliff.
Zero videoed intently, cursing when a stream of cloudy juice sprayed the window, obscuring his shot.
Sergeant Cane laughed. “The vines around the nests squirt concentrated salt-juice at your eyes. They can zap wasps right out of the air at twenty feet.”
Geoffrey noticed an adolescent bird flung out of a nest. Each time the bird tried to climb back in, a spring-loaded plant stalk flung it back out.
Thatcher was ecstatic. “Fantastic!” he crooned, leaning fully across Nell now as he looked at the bird breeders.
“OK, enough,” Nell said, shooing Thatcher back into his seat.
The ramp of exposed strata sloped down from the island’s edge as it continued around the island. Cane pushed the throttle, and the train of three Humvees accelerated down the natural ramp.
Geoffrey gripped the back of Zero’s seat and watched Nell, who stared at the shadow of the island’s rim as it reached the ridge and doused the flashing light.
Eventually they reached a flat lower stratum. They continued around the bowl to the north, leaving brown tracks in the clover that gradually turned green again behind them.
The shelves of the high slopes were melted soft by erosion like the terraced hills of the Peruvian Andes, pelted with green, gold, and purple clover.
Ahead, patches of jungle topped the succession of rock ledges that erupted from the slope.
“See that highest ledge there?” Cane said, pointing through the windshield.
“Yep, that’s where I made it out to be,” Zero said.
“Good, no jungle on that ledge.” Cane spoke into the radio: “Blue Two and Three, we’re going to start on the highest shelf. Suggest you guys search the next two down for the survivor. Over?”
“This is Blue Two. We copy you, Blue One.”
“This is Blue Three. Sounds good.”
“Looks like we got a swarm, guys,” the first voice said.
“Copy that, thanks.” Cane twisted the handle of a crudely retrofitted valve on the ceiling of the cab as a swarm of wasps attacked the caravan of Humvees.
They could hear the squeak and hiss of faucets spurting to life.
Sprinkler-heads telescoped on the roofs of the Hummers, and a fine umbrella of water sprayed over each vehicle.
Sergeant Cane chuckled. “Bastards don’t like saltwater.”
Zero turned his head and gave a deadpan look at Nell.
“I see that we’ve already adapted to this environment,” Thatcher drawled, “and dominated it with our technological defenses.”
Cane chuckled. “It’s like the Marines say, ‘improvise, adapt, overcome.’ The Army just does it better.”
“Exactly,” Thatcher sneered.
Cane turned off the Hummer’s sprinklers after the swarm retreated. Blue One dug in its four Mattracks, powering up the steep incline beside the giant stairs.
The other Humvees followed close behind, each one peeling off at its assigned ledge. Blue One rumbled onward, rising fifty more feet to the highest ledge, a curving tier of rock jutting out of the slope.
They turned onto the flat lip of rock. On the left side swayed the palmlike crowns of trees rising from the lower tier. On the right side stood a sheer, three-story rock wall, which the ledge hugged, curving around a bend and out of sight ahead. Above this thirty-foot escarpment, the green fields rose unbroken to the island’s rim.
A fallen tree blocked them from driving farther onto the ledge.
Cane tried to drive over the log, but it was five feet thick, too much even for Mattracks to climb over: it looked more like the neck of Godzilla than the trunk of a tree.
“That’s the outer cuticle of a giant arthropod,” Dr. Cato pointed out. “The trees are actually related to the island’s flying bugs.”
“Good God,” Thatcher chuckled.
“Looks like a rockslide brought it down.” Geoffrey pointed at the fresh chunk missing from the cliff above. “So this island’s pretty unstable?”
“Yeah. There’s been a lot of seismic activity,” Nell replied.
Cane eased off the throttle and they heard something so incongruous they didn’t register it at first: a dog was barking.
“What the hell?” Cane muttered.
A bull terrier sprinted out on the ledge from around the cliff, yapping wildly. Then it darted back around the corner and disappeared.
“Copey!” Nell cried.
“I don’t believe it!” Zero said as he steadied his hand on his camera.
Copepod sprinted out from around the cliff once again, barking furiously, then ran back around the bend out of sight.
Nell grabbed Cane’s shoulder. “He’s trying to get us to follow him. Let’s go!”
Cane throttled forward against the trunk one more time, then stopped. He shook his head. “We can’t get over this tree in the Hummer. And no way are we getting out of this vehicle, not with that jungle so close.”
“Somebody signaled us and needs help, Sergeant! If Copey survived here, so can we! There’s somebody there!”
“No way. I’m not going out there.”
“Zero.” Nell turned to the cameraman. “You survived out there. Can we just run down quick and have a look around the corner? And then run back?”
Zero frowned. “Do we have any weapons?”
“Super Soakers,” Cane said. There was a moment of stunned silence. “Seriously. Full of saltwater. And if you leave the Hummer you have to put sterile booties on. In those packets. And before you get back in the Hummer take them off and throw them away.” The sergeant looked at Nell and shook his head. “But I don’t like it. That jungle’s too close.” He pointed off the side of the ledge, where the trees waved in the wind.
“It’s just a few treetops,” Thatcher said.
“Super Soakers?” Nell said. “Give me your gun, Cane.”
Cane locked eyes with her, hesitating.
“OK.” He finally nodded, and gave her his M9 Beretta handgun. “It won’t do much good out there,” he cautioned as he slid off the safety.
“Nell!” Dr. Cato turned around in the front seat and glared at her disapprovingly. “You can’t go outside!”
Nell smiled sadly at him as she clicked on the safety and tucked the gun into her waistband. “I’m sorry, Teach. I have to.”
The elderly scientist shook his head. “It’s too dangerous!”
“Someone’s survived here,” she said.
Cato reached out a hand, squeezed her arm.
“I don’t want anyone else to die on this island,” she said fiercely.
He sighed, knowing better than to try and order her. “Neither do I!” he pleaded.
“I’ll be careful,” she promised him.
Dr. Cato closed his eyes.
Geoffrey was already opening a foil packet of sterile footwear. “Wow. Rubbers.”
“Safe socks.” Nell winked as she pulled on a plastic booty over her Adidas tennis shoe. “Coming along, Dr. Binswanger?”
He nodded. “I’m still looking for a benign species,” he reminded her.
Nell touched his knee and looked into his eyes. “Just don’t look too long, OK? What about you, Thatcher?”
“I’ll watch from the car,” the zoologist replied.
“Douse yourselves with saltwater,” Zero instructed, spraying himself with one of the Super Soakers.
“Hey, not in here!” Cane growled.
“Sorry,” Nell said, pumping spray over Geoffrey. “In here! It may not help much but it should trigger a bug to spray repellent if it lands on us.”
“The water already has bug repellent in it,” Cane told them. “It’s taken from the moat around the base.”
“That’s good,” Zero said. “You can dry-clean the upholstery later, Sergeant. Do my back, Nell.”
“Any advice on how to move out there?” Nell asked, spraying Zero down as Geoffrey soaked her with the spray gun.
Thatcher cringed, sniffing the noxious musk mixed with the smell of seawater.
“Don’t run in a straight line,” Zero answered. “Zigzag. And never stop, not even for a second.”
“Zigzag?” Cane shook his head, bewildered. “You scientists are all fucking nuts. Good luck, man. I got absolutely no responsibility over this.”
“Yes, good luck,” Thatcher said.
Cato squeezed her hand. “Be careful, young lady!”
Zero gave Nell and Geoffrey a hard look. “Ready?”
Soaking wet and armed with their saltwater rifles, Nell, Zero, and Geoffrey climbed out the door of the Hummer and over the reptilian tree trunk.
Geoffrey instantly smelled sulfur and a sweet, cadaverous reek wafting out of the vegetation below the cliff. The air was damp. The growth covering the ground was surprisingly flimsy and tore apart under his feet. The intensity of the insect noise coming from the jungle below the ledge shocked him—it was a thick sonic mat of whistles, buzzing, shrieks, and clicking.
Zero tapped on the NASA headcam over his temple as they jumped from the log onto the ledge.
Copepod dashed away, barking as he once again vanished around the curving wall.
“Keep moving,” Zero whispered.
The three men in the Humvee watched the three run full speed after Copepod. The dog darted out of sight, then reappeared as the ledge curved back into view farther ahead—then Copey disappeared into a crack in the cliff.
Watching from the Hummer, the sergeant muttered, “Don’t go in there…come on, don’t go…oh no.”
Before the gash in the cliff wall, Zero, Nell, and Geoffrey stopped in astonishment.
Ten feet inside the shadowy crack stood a skinny figure in a bright tie-dyed T-shirt. He had a black eye and his broken glasses had been crudely repaired. His blond mop of hair was dirty and tangled. “Get away! STAY BACK!” he yelled.
Stunned, Nell gaped at him with disbelief. “Oh my God!”
Zero laughed. “Hey, how the hell—”
“STAY BACK! THEY’RE COMING!” At Andy Beasley’s heel, Copepod hunkered down and growled. Andy pointed at the edge.
Zero pivoted immediately, pumping the water-rifle; but the nozzle was clogged with salt crystals. It put out a pitiful squirt.
The jungle noise roared like a hurricane as a horde of creatures poured onto the rocky, sunlit ledge from below. The flood of predators swept toward the small cave, a tsunami of leaping, flying, running, buzzing, spinning shapes and colors.
Nell, Geoffrey, and Zero ran toward Andy and squeezed into the uncertain sanctuary of the slashing fissure.
Zero turned and dropped to one knee. He banged the water-rifle’s nozzle against the rock, jarring loose the salt clumps, and pumped the trigger. Finally getting a spray, he swept it high and low through the entrance at the advancing swarm.
The wall of wasps retreated in a wave of warning pheromones, but one wasp slipped through into the cave.
It buzzed above them, bouncing off the walls, and then dropped down before Copepod. The dog grabbed it with a snapping growl, chewed it in his powerful jaws, then spit it out, barking vigorously at the remains.
Watching from the Hummer, Dr. Cato gripped the dashboard, trying to peer into the gloom of the cave on the far curve of the ledge. “They’re trapped!” he shouted.
“I knew this would happen,” Cane yelled furiously.
Thatcher watched in fascination over Cato’s shoulder.
Geoffrey and Nell sprayed their rifles over the crouching Zero’s head at the cave entrance, and a sunlit mist of water fell in the opening between them and the swarm.
Outside the spray curtain, a mass of voracious creatures continued to fly and leap over the cliff, gathering in front of the cave. The mass swirled in dizzying, constant motion, the flying bugs whirling in figure-eights and circles as they advanced and retreated. Any creature that paused too long among them was descended upon and torn to pieces. With each blast from the soakers, the swarm retreated and then re-surged.
“OK,” Geoffrey said. “I’m ready to concede there are no benign species on this island, so let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Nell merely gasped, which didn’t reassure Geoffrey.
As if coalescing from the light and mist and the jungle behind it, a spidery shape suddenly appeared, hanging in the cave entrance before them. Its thick silvery fur seemed to reflect the colors of the sky and jungle. What seemed to be a face became visible at the bottom of its body, a wide mouth slowly opening above two large oval eyes, staring at face-level at the four humans. Its cello-shaped body dangled by one slender tendril as it unfolded six long limbs to either side of the cave, trapping them inside it.
From inside the Hummer, Cane and Thatcher saw the animal suddenly shimmer into existence, hanging on the cliff face between the advancing swarm of creatures and the cave’s opening.
The sergeant cursed and reached for his rifle. “I told them not to go!”
“Wait!” Thatcher peered through the windshield at the strange animal, which seemed to fade in and out of the shadows.
“Oh my God, Nell…” Cato muttered.
“It’s a trap!” Zero hissed, crouching inside the fissure. “Andy was the bait!”
Nell fought off the fear that threatened to paralyze her as she stared at the grinning face of the creature in the cave entrance. She grabbed the Beretta and raised it.
The monster’s head emitted a loud, warbling voice: “It’s VEEE-EEE-DAAAAAAY!”
Nell, Geoffrey, and Zero were dumbstruck, uncertain if their captor had spoken or simply made sounds that resembled words.
Zero remembered the animal he had heard echoing his own voice in the jungle. He turned to Nell. “Shoot it!”
Inside the Hummer, Thatcher’s fascination turned to alarm at the piercing voice.
“Oh no, no, no…” Dr. Cato murmured.
Cane’s mouth gaped open in surprise, his grip tightening on his rifle.
The door opened and Cane and Thatcher saw the old scientist jump out of the Hummer.
“Fuck!” said the soldier.
Dr. Cato slammed the door shut and vaulted over the log.
Thatcher watched with amazement as the scientist ran around the bend of the cliff, shouting “Hey! Hey! Hey!” and waving his thin arms.
“What the hell does the old fart think he’s doing?” Cane yelled.
Nell ignored Dr. Cato’s shouts. She kept her eyes locked on the eyes of the spider-like animal that now imprisoned them in the fissure.
A second wave of beasts leaped shrieking onto the ledge from the jungle below, including two spigers the size of African lions.
Dr. Cato suddenly appeared, shouting near the edge of the cliff.
One of the spigers swung toward the scientist.
“Come on! HEY!” Cato shouted, and in a micro-second the nearest spiger stabbed a two-meter spike straight through his polo shirt and out his back.
“Noooo!” Nell screamed.
A surge of creatures swarmed the old man’s body, temporarily distracted from the humans in the cave.
Nell’s scream drew them back.
Like a wall of eyes, teeth, and claws, the stampede, led by the spigers, one of which was still swallowing Dr. Cato’s right leg, rushed the humans in the cave.
Nell pointed Cane’s Beretta with shaking hands at the dangling creature that had trapped them. Closing her eyes, she squeezed the trigger.
“No!” Andy screamed, shoving her hand, but it was too late.
The gun fired as the creature spun on its tail in a blinding motion toward the oncoming rush of animals. With six arms, it flung six dark disks through the air.
The curving disks thudded one after another into the two leaping spigers, which dropped instantly, their hindbrains severed. The dying spigers shrieked like erratic police sirens and convulsed, gouging their spiked forearms into the ground as they struggled to drag themselves forward toward their spiderlike attacker.
The entire mass of rats, badgers, wasps, and drill-worms swerved back from the cave to tear greedily into the writhing spigers.
The hanging creature dropped to the ground. It rolled from its four spidery arms onto its two multi-jointed legs as its tail coiled into a cavity under its belly. Standing nearly seven feet tall, it flung four more disks: four smaller animals went down.
Then the creature crouched, standing only five feet high as its “knees” bent like muscular grasshopper legs to either side. Walking forward on second calves that extended where a human’s ankles would have been, its “legs” ended in flat, furry hand-feet. White fur shimmered with rainbow colors over the entire creature, which Nell thought now resembled a crablike kangaroo crossed with a praying mantis.
Copepod ran to the creature’s side.
Nell darted forward to protect the dog.
But then she stopped as the dog wagged its tail.
The creature patted Copey with two left hands, swiveling its eyestalks to observe the humans in the cave. With a cupped hand, it gestured at them, then it trotted toward the Hummer on its two springing legs. Copepod stuck right by its side.
“He wants us to follow.” Andy ran forward, then turned to look back at the others. “You need to come with him if you want to live.”
Zero looked at the others, his mouth open. Then he ran, following Andy’s lead.
Geoffrey hesitated only a second, then followed, pulling along Nell, who seemed to be in a state of shock.
Andy nodded toward the ravenous pile of creatures squirming by the cave entrance as he ran toward the waiting Humvee. “They’ll be finished feeding soon. Then they’ll multiply. You don’t want to be around the babies, believe me.” He glanced back at Nell and Geoffrey. “Move it!” he urged.
They glanced over their shoulders at the snarling riot as disk-ants began rolling in white lines over the ledge into the explosion of red and blue gore.
Sergeant Cane froze as the bewildering creature climbed nimbly over the fallen tree, the dog leaping and scrabbling at its heel. It pushed itself up with two hands on the hood of the Hummer and looked through the windshield right at Cane and Thatcher. As he lifted the radio mike, Cane could swear the damn thing smiled at him.
“This is Blue One. We found a survivor. Repeat, we found a survivor. Copy?” Cane’s voice quavered. Over the radio, he heard the others cheering at his words.
Andy appeared right behind the creature and opened the passenger door, and the creature, to Cane’s amazement, climbed inside the Hummer. Copepod and Andy jumped in behind it, as the others scrambled into the back, squeezing Thatcher against the window. Cane grabbed his gun from Nell’s hand and pointed it at the creature.
“Is the survivor OK, Blue One?” came a voice over the radio.
Sergeant Cane, with the radio mike in one hand and his pistol in the other, could hardly breathe as he looked at the large thing that now sat beside him and folded its multi-jointed arms and legs. Turning its long neck, it studied him with colorful, swiveling eyes and its mouth opened wide, revealing three curving teeth as wide as hatchet-blades on its upper jaw. Cane was too frightened to know whether it was grinning or snarling at him now.
“Blue One, do you copy? Is the survivor all right?”
“I’m all right, tell them!” Andy urged.
“Uh—affirmative! We… will uh…we’ll bring him back to base,” Cane managed.
Thatcher peered at the animal from the backseat, a strange chill gripping him and cold sweat breaking out on his forehead.
Rats began thudding like softballs against the sides of the Hummer. Drill-worms landed on the windows, twisting their maws into the bulletproof glass and actually leaving scratches.
“You better turn that faucet on,” Geoffrey warned from the backseat.
“That’s great news, Blue One! Great news! In that case, I’ve got a lot of scientists who want to do some specimen-collecting down here. Copy?”
Cane remained frozen as the creature began touching the roof and steering wheel with four hands while its eyes darted rapidly in different directions.
“Uh, copy that, Blue Two,” Cane muttered into the radio.
“Come on, Cane, turn the water on!” Nell said.
Confused, the sergeant set down the radio mike and opened the roof-faucet, spraying saltwater over the Hummer, keeping his gun on the creature. After a moment, the bugs scattered and the creature pointed excitedly at a drill-worm the size of a locust stuck to the windshield. The struggling worm’s three wings had popped out of the panels under its head and were pressed flat against the glass by the water’s surface tension. The writhing arthropod sprayed some kind of oily chemical from its abdomen, creating a rainbow sheen on the glass as the windshield wiper knocked it off.
The creature in the front seat nodded at Cane and made a kind of thumbs-up sign to Andy using both thumbs on four hands. It turned its head on its twisting upper body and widened its mouth at Cane, nodding rapidly. Its bristling, translucent fur flashed with stripes and dots of colored light.
“Blue One? Are you there? Copy?”
“Answer them, Cane!” Geoffrey said.
Cane picked up the radio mike. “Um… we might… uh … uh …collect some specimens, too. Blue One out.”
“Go where he’s pointing!” Andy yelled.
“What in the FUCK is going on!” the soldier hollered.
The creature hummed as its six-fingered hands traced the contours of the dashboard, stroking the words on the controls and gauges.
“I do not like this!” Cane continued.
The creature recoiled a little from the sergeant. Then it grasped his wrist with two hands and plucked the gun from his fingers with two other hands with such speed and strength that Cane was disarmed before he could even think of squeezing the trigger. With one protruding eye, the creature peered curiously down the weapon’s barrel.
“No, Hender! Here, give me that, OK?” Andy said. “Very bad!”
The creature turned its head to Andy. Then it tossed him the gun, which Andy caught nervously.
“Oh my god,” Nell murmured. “He understands us?”
“Give me my weapon!” Cane screamed as anger ignited the adrenaline in his bloodstream.
“Don’t worry!” Andy assured him, handing him back his gun.
The creature made a zither sound from the small sagittal crest on its head as it stroked the brown, tan, and green pixels of camouflage on Cane’s uniform. For an instant the pattern seemed to be projected over the creature’s plush coat.
“Come on, you guys, you’ve got to see where he lives!” Andy told them.
“Does that thing…speak English?” Thatcher asked in a hoarse whisper. He sat frozen and staring with wide eyes at the beast in the front seat.
“No, he doesn’t speak English!” Andy rolled his eyes, and smirked at the ruddy scientist. “This isn’t a Star Trek episode, dude! He saved my life, that’s all I know. And he saved Copey. He makes great chili, too.”
“No way.” Zero laughed, a wide grin fixed on his face as he videoed feverishly from the backseat. “Sir Nigel Holscombe, eat your heart out, baby!”
Cane kept his gun on the creature, which made musical noises as it investigated everything around it while continuing to look at Cane with one motionless three-striped eye.
“This animal,” Thatcher spoke with slow, quiet urgency, “is more dangerous than anything on this island.”
Geoffrey, who was only now shaking off the shock of their close call on the ledge, watched in astonishment as the creature patted the panting bull terrier on the head. “You were just saying what an atrocity it would be to destroy life on this island, Thatcher. Change your mind?”
“This is different.”
The Hummer rocked gently as a powerful earthquake rumbled through the ground.
“Come on, let’s go,” Zero said. “We shouldn’t stay in one place too long!”
The creature put all four hands on its head and its eyes retracted under furry lids.
“You guys feel that?” The voice of Blue Three’s driver crackled over the radio.
“Yeah, that was a bad one,” the driver of Blue Two answered. “Whoa, check it out!”
A piece of the unbroken rock wall on the south side of the island crumbled and crashed down, leaving a fang of blue sky in the island’s rim.
“We might have less time than we thought, guys,” Blue Two’s driver said.
“Keep on task till they call us back to base,” Blue Three crackled.
“Roger that,” Cane replied. “Out.” He turned to the others. “I’m not sure what we’re doing driving around with one of the things we’re supposed to be nuking, God damn it!”
“What?” Andy looked at Nell, bewildered.
“The President gave the order to sterilize this island, Andy,” she explained.
“Great,” he said. “But what about the people?”
Sergeant Cane was sweating visibly. “You call that… a person?” He stared warily at the creature that was examining him. “Are you sure it doesn’t speak English? I mean I swear we heard it speakin’ English back there, God damn it!”
Andy looked at Cane’s uniform suspiciously. “So is he in charge now? Are you the guy with the nukes, Commander G.I. Joe with the karate grip? How much have I missed here, anyway?”
“It’s OK, Andy,” Nell soothed. “The President also asked us to see if any life on this island could be saved.”
Geoffrey stared at her in surprise. “Change of heart, Nell?”
She looked at him as tears welled in her eyes. “This is different …”
“Come on,” Zero yelled. “We gotta check this out! This is fricking amazing! Go where he says, man! Go! Go!”
“We need to find out what we have here and then report to the President as soon as possible, Sergeant,” Nell said. “Everything depends on it. OK?”
Cane gritted his teeth. The creature’s hands ceaselessly tested everything around it, including Cane’s helmet. He closed his eyes, breathing hard. “All right. But I’m under strict orders about not allowing anything unauthorized off this island alive!”
“Does that include us?” Andy wanted to know, seething. “Are you going to nuke us, too, Commander BUTTHOLE?”
“Don’t push me, sir.”
“Yes, don’t push him, Andy,” Nell agreed.
Geoffrey nodded. “Let’s all just get along, now.”
Cane backed the Hummer out slowly and then he gunned it up the slope.
“Wheeeeeee!” the creature fluted.
The Hummer’s Mattracks rolled to a stop beside a towering baobab-like tree at the north rim of the island. About a dozen of these gargantuan trees clung to the edge of the island. From a distance they’d looked like toadstools, with vast umbrellas of dense green foliage.
“It lives here?” Cane was staring.
“Wait till you see his hobbit hole,” Andy said. “Oh, hey, if we’re going to transport them off the island before all the nukes go off we better take something to pack their things in!”
“Them? Pack their things?” the soldier said.
Andy nodded.
“We can use the specimen cases in the back here.” Nell glanced at Geoffrey; he nodded and reached for them.
Copey barked enthusiastically and jumped out first. Up here, near the island’s rim, the air was considerably fresher. The sound of the jungle below was a buzzing high-pitched white-noise.
The scientists each carried one of the aluminum specimen cases from the back of the Hummer.
Now that he was outside the vehicle, Cane carried his M-1 assault rifle, glancing warily at the branches overhead. They were far away from the teeming jungle at the island’s heart—but what lurked in the giant tree above them was anyone’s guess.
“Are you sure we’re all right, Andy, next to this thing?” Zero pointed his video camera up into the tangled canopy.
“Yeah, we’re fine if we stay close to the tree.”
A perimeter of salt seemed to have been excreted into the soil around the tree’s trunk. This seemed to hold back the Henders clover from attacking the creamy gray surface of its trunk, which was as wide as a house. Stepping stones led over the salt perimeter like a Japanese rock garden.
Though it had originally appeared to them like a spider with six legs radiating four meters, the creature now seemed compact. Two legs folded up in back like a spider’s. Its middle arms apparently acted as forelegs, and its upper arms tucked up against its long neck so that the first joints or “elbows” resembled pointy shoulders from which surprisingly human arms hung down. The hands on all six of its limbs had three fingers and two opposable thumbs. The scientists and the cameraman drank in the details of its anatomy and its elaborate and effortless motion with speechless wonder.
The long elastic tail from which the creature had dangled over the cave was now coiled inside a potbelly. A sheen of color played over its thick fur like the Aurora Borealis. Its head was onion-shaped, with an understated sagittal horn on top. It had a high-browed forehead over a wide and graceful mouth, and no sign of a nose. As it looked at them, its large oval eyes had a sly, feline look, moving independently in different directions. The eyes blinked with furry eyelids whenever their stalks retracted. Slanted triangular lobes projected to either side of the creature’s sagittal horn like brow-ridges over its eyes.
The shape of its wide mouth and lips had a duck-like friendliness, with smiling corners and an eager peak on its wide upper lip. Its expression had an elegant confidence that the humans found disconcerting. Reaching out one of its upper hands, the creature touched the barrel of Cane’s assault rifle with delicate curiosity.
Cane jerked the barrel back and aimed the weapon at its head.
“No!” Nell shouted.
Copepod barked frantically.
“Chill, dude!” Zero said, lowering his camera.
“You can trust him, Hender,” Andy told the creature.
“It has a name?” Thatcher sounded bemused.
“It’s cool, Cane.” Geoffrey spoke with more confidence than he felt. “This thing just saved our lives, remember?”
“It’s cool, Cane!” the creature sang, freaking the soldier out. Cane felt cornered. He darted a glance at Thatcher, who nodded at him discreetly, signaling patience. Cane backed down, and nodded back at Thatcher.
All watched in astonishment as the shimmering creature stepped delicately onto the stones, then turned toward them and gestured for them to follow. It opened a round door that was nearly imperceptible in the bulging trunk of the ancient tree.
Inside, engulfed by the flesh of the vast tree, they stepped into another surprise.
“It’s the fuselage of a World War II bomber,” Zero murmured.
Andy nodded. “Yep!”
Only the nose of the plane poked out of the massive trunk, hanging over the cliff at the far end. Through the twisted frame of the cockpit window, which seemed to have been covered by a stitched patchwork of clear plastic, they saw the sun setting over the sea.
“The house that Hender built,” Andy announced.
“‘Hender’?” Nell said.
“That’s what I call him. Or her. Or both.”
“Hender didn’t build this B-29,” Zero said. He canvassed the scene in broad pans.
With four hands, “Hender” pantomimed a plane trying to pull out of a steep nose dive and failing. It made a noise that was an uncanny approximation of an explosion.
“Do you suppose he saw it crash?” Geoffrey asked the others.
“That had to have been at least sixty years ago.”
“I think Hender’s old,” Andy told them. “Really old.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Geoffrey agreed. “Is he a solitary animal? Does he live by himself?”
“Yeah,” Andy said.
“What’s that got to do with how old he might be?” asked Nell, intrigued, as she glanced at Geoffrey.
“I’ll explain later,” Geoffrey said.
“Good.”
“It’s a radical theory.”
“Good.”
“Way outside the box.”
She gave him an appreciative glance, then smiled.
None of the humans could take their eyes off the remarkable creature for more than a moment as it moved gracefully toward the nose of the plane in which it had made its home. The fur on its body emitted soft fireworks of color as it pointed at the control panel in the cockpit. Like a weird recording, it spoke:
“This concludes the Pacific Ocean Network broadcast, May 7, 1945. Once again, it’s VEEE-EEE-DAAAY! Victory in Europe!”
Geoffrey and Nell glanced at each other in speechless astonishment.
“He must have heard that on the plane’s radio,” Zero whispered.
“Yeah,” Andy told them. “And I’ve heard him do Bob Hope, too.”
“I thought you said it didn’t speak English,” Cane snapped.
“He doesn’t. I’ve taught him a few words. And he repeats things he heard on the radio back then, but he doesn’t understand them.”
It was pleasantly cool inside Hender’s lair, and the air had a faintly sweet and spicy smell, somewhat like Japanese incense, Nell thought. She could see that Hender had collected a variety of wine bottles, bell-jars, fishing floats, a peanut butter jar, a mayonnaise jar—precious glass vessels had somehow miraculously survived their journey from civilization to Henders Island in cargo containers, steamer trunks, crates, and wrecks across great gulfs of time and distance.
With his three free arms, Hender shook some jars which held insect-like creatures, and their agitated glow filled the shadowy room with a flickering light.
“He catches fresh drill-worms and wasps by putting a piece of meat in each jar,” Andy explained. “You should see his rat trap.”
The glass vessels glowed green as Hender shook them, casting orbs of light. Nell could see scraps of what looked like trash or beach litter tacked to the walls and ceiling.
Hender’s guests seated themselves on crates inside the B-29 fuselage, some of which were lined up like a bench against one wall with an old rubber raft draped over it. Stenciled on the raft in faded black letters was a name.
“Electra?” Nell said in excitement. “This couldn’t really be Amelia Earhart’s raft, could it? That was the name of her plane, wasn’t it?”
Geoffrey stroked the cracked rubber, shaking his head as if nothing could surprise him now. “It seems old enough.”
Hender brought out a gourd of some sort.
“Andy, how did you survive six whole fucking days here, man?” Zero asked.
“That first day, Hender came down from the tree next to the lake and grabbed me,” Andy answered. “I thought I was dead. But I woke up here. I wasn’t dead and he had fixed my glasses with something like masking tape. See?” One arm of his glasses was bandaged at the joint.
The creature served them something in cups of cut-off plastic soda bottles and they were stunned by the dexterity of its multiple hands.
“It’s tea-time,” Andy said.
“Tea-time!” the creature sang.
Thatcher curled a lip as the creature served him a cup.
It handed Nell a cup.
“Thank you,” she nodded. “What is this?” she asked Andy.
“It’s OK. It’s actually pretty good. I call it Henders tea. But it’s more like chili, though. And it has meat in it. Rat meat. It tastes like lobster!”
Nell hesitated, crinkling her nose. Then she sipped, and found the “tea” was more like a tangy salsa than chili and, after the initial surprise, it was good. “Tastes like cherry lobster cinnamon gazpacho… with a hint of curry!”
“Thank you.” Geoffrey accepted a cup as he observed the anatomy of the creature’s two-thumbed hands, longing for a sketchpad or a camera to document them.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” the creature hummed.
Nell and Geoffrey looked at each other, trembling with amazement.
Cane accepted a cup with undisguised dread. It was clear that the soldier would be happier when his mission was over and Henders island was in ashes.
“Thank you!” the creature said, making Cane jump.
“Thanks, dude,” Zero nodded, setting down his camera and taking his cup.
The creature held its head cocked at Zero for a beat. “Thanks, dude,” it echoed.
Geoffrey sipped the “tea” and scrunched his face at the strange taste.
“He makes it from eggs that grow on this bonsai plant he feeds rat-meat to,” Andy explained.
“Not bad,” Zero decided cheerfully, chugging the contents. “Oh hey! I almost forgot!” He unzipped a pocket in his cargo pants. “This is for you!” He presented a still-sealed plastic bottle of Diet Coke to Hender.
“Oh hey,” the creature trilled, its arms unfolding in an “X” of delight.
Thatcher sneered as Zero twisted off the top and handed Hender the Coke.
“It’s a little warm, but here ya go,” Zero told the creature.
They watched as the creature tasted the soft drink. Its coat scintillated as it guzzled the sweet liquid down. Both of its eyes pointed at Zero and Cane’s hand tightened on his gun. Then it belched loudly, smiling wide and smacking its lips.
Zero chuckled. “He likes it!”
“Yes,” Thatcher said drily. “I can see the ad campaign already. He’ll make Coca-Cola a fortune.”
Zero gave Hender a thumbs-up. “Cool, dude!”
Hender gave Zero twelve thumbs-up. “Cool, dude!”
“It’s extremely good at mimicry,” Thatcher observed.
Hender swiveled his head to look at Thatcher. “It’s extremely good at mimicry,” it said in a perfect imitation.
“Hender’s good at everything,” Andy declared.
Thatcher cast his eyes around nervously at the oddball collection of recovered objects decorating the walls. The trash seemed crudely grouped by the various alphabets used in the labels— Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, Cyrillic, and Latin. “Not much sign of a culture. Aside from our own garbage,” he remarked.
“I think we’re his hobby.” Andy finished his tea. “I think he’s been collecting our junk for a long, long time.”
Thatcher pursed his lips dismissively “Magpies collect human refuse. And mynah birds mimic our speech.”
Nell leveled her eyes at Thatcher. “Dr. Redmond, there is obviously profound intelligence in this being.”
“Oh, I certainly believe we must consider intelligence as a factor in determining what kind of organism we are dealing with here, Dr. Duckworth,” Thatcher retorted. “This creature may prove to be as deadly as we are, though I sincerely hope not.”
“Whatever Hender is, it’s certainly deadly to your theory, Thatcher,” Geoffrey remarked. “Your perfect ecosystem seems to have produced intelligent life, after all. And it managed not to wipe out an environment that’s lasted longer than any other on Earth. Hender here is living proof that you’re wrong, old boy! Looks like you might not get that Genius Grant, after all.”
Thatcher’s face turned deep red. “There is absolutely no shred of proof that this organism has intelligence equivalent to human beings! It—”
“Wait, wait!” Zero interrupted. “Look!”
Hender had been scratching the burnt tip of a thorn on the back of what appeared to be a candy bar wrapper.
Hender handed it to Sergeant Cane.
The wrapper trembled in the soldier’s hand as he read what appeared to be a scrawled word: “Signal.”
When Hender heard Cane read the word out loud, his head bobbed up and down, and his coat flushed with kaleidoscopic patterns of color. Hender grabbed the wrapper from Cane’s unresisting hands. With one of his eyes looking at the wrapper and one focused on Cane, the creature said: “Sig-nuhl?”
Startled, Cane recoiled.
Hender grabbed the charred thorn and with it, wrote on the inside of a clamshell.
He thrust the shell at Nell.
She looked at it in astonishment, then read the word out loud: “‘Coke.’”
She showed the shell to Geoffrey.
The creature gestured to his mouth and then to her mouth, then to Cane’s mouth, and then to the shell, excitedly.
Nell nodded. “Coke,” she said again.
Hender’s fur burst with colors as he took the shell from Nell and sounded out the syllable. “COKE!”
The creature rose on his bottom legs, pressing his back against the roof and making a variety of high-pitched noises. Then, with all four extending hands, he pointed at various items of litter tacked to the walls and ceiling of the fuselage.
Nell laughed in delight at the first item Hender pointed at on his wall.
“Tampax!” she and Geoffrey exclaimed simultaneously.
The creature extended all four arms in an asterisk of excitement over them. “Tampax!” Hender echoed, indicating a foil condom packet.
Nell, Geoffrey, Andy, and Zero yelled, “Trojan!”
“Wonderful.” Thatcher rolled his eyes. “I see our garbage has already exposed our most intimate biological details to this creature.”
Hender pointed to other items.
The scientists called them out: “Kodak! Yoo-Hoo! Vegemite! Bactine! Fresca! Fanta! Nestlé Quik! Wrigley’s! Milk Duds! Milky Way! Purina Cat Chow! Orange Crush! Thera-Flu! Mylanta! Zagnut!”
The creature lifted a hand and squeezed his eyes shut. “Stope,” he said.
Hender must have heard, Geoffrey realized, examples of how every letter in the Latin alphabet was pronounced.
Hender opened his eyes. They flicked in different directions as he scanned the downed plane’s dusky interior. With two hands he jostled the hanging jars. They immediately lit up to generate some light, then, with a third hand, he pointed at a scrap and gestured silence with his fourth. In a humming voice that warbled like an oboe, he said: “Fro-zun Myoolet.”
The six humans were shocked into silence for a few heartbeats.
The creature was undeniably applying the rules of pronunciation on his own now: he could not be merely copying what he heard them say.
“Frozen Mullet,” Geoffrey corrected.
The creature’s eyes fluttered and his mouth pinched downward at the corners. “Mullet?” He held one hand up and closed his eyes. “Stope.”
Geoffrey corrected him again: “Stop.”
The creature’s eyes opened and swiveled toward Geoffrey as he placed four hands on his four hips. “Stop?” he honked. He sounded irritated.
All but Thatcher and Cane nodded vigorously.
“I really don’t see the point of this,” Thatcher objected. “When we obviously have to—”
“SHUT UP!” Nell, Geoffrey, Zero, and Andy shouted.
“He’s learning to read,” Geoffrey said. “So shut up, Thatcher!”
“Shut up, Thatcher,” Hender fluted, and his wide mouth seemed to smile at the red-faced zoologist.
Thatcher looked at Hender with dread and then at Cane. The soldier sat rigid, with eyes fixed in an inward stare.
“It doesn’t know what it’s saying!” Thatcher scoffed.
The creature pointed to a series of sun-bleached aluminum cans lined on a shelf: “Coo-ers, Bud-wee-izer, Fahn-tah, Hawaye-ee-an Punch!”
“Yes! Coors, Budweiser, Fanta, Hawaiian Punch!” Nell encouraged.
Cane’s eyes squeezed tight and he grasped the gold crucifix on the chain around his neck as he gripped the stock of his assault rifle.
The creature waved four arms at the ceiling, then leaned forward. “Dane-jer. Cah-ooti-own. Hazar-doo-us mater-ee-als. In case of ee-mergens-ee open escap-ee hatch. Abandun sheep!”
Geoffrey nodded, thrilled. “Yes! Danger. Caution. Hazardous. Emergency. Escape! Abandon ship!”
Hender nodded at each of Geoffrey’s corrections. “Yes, danger caution hazardous! Escape! Hender signal ah-thers. Hender signal.”
Geoffrey’s mouth fell open.
“He means it!” Zero said.
Nell leaned forward with sudden urgency. “How many others? How many?” With her fingers she counted slowly. “One-two-three-four—”
Hender nodded. “Four others.”
Thatcher sank back against the wall of the plane, a grim conclusion visible in his expression. He glanced again at Cane, who was now whispering over his crucifix.
The creature hurried toward them suddenly and they shrank away before they realized he was motioning for them to follow. He stepped through the biggest of several round holes that were cut into the side of the wrinkled B-29 fuselage.
“Time for a tour,” Andy said.
“Tooouuur!” the creature grunted, nodding his head on his bobbing neck.
They followed Hender up a spiral stairway that seemed half-natural and half-carved inside the massive tree.
In niches beside the stairway, various man-made glass vessels glowed faintly green. Hender flicked these jars as he passed them, and each brightened as bioluminescent bugs swirled inside, illuminating the passageway and revealing more signs, trash, labels, and artifacts tacked to the walls and hanging from the ceiling.
Hender paused before a chest-high niche and tapped a bug-jar inside it. Inside the niche the humans saw a propped-up coconut. It wore a somewhat askew scarlet cap and bore a crudely carved human face blended with eerie elements of Hender’s anatomy. Lying next to it was a pocketknife with an ivory handle, which Hender picked up and handed to Nell.
“It looks like scrimshaw,” she said. “A name’s carved on it here, see?” She showed it to Geoffrey.
Hender took it from her and read it out loud: “Hen-ree FERRR-reeeers.”
“No way,” she whispered. “Henry Frears?”
“Yes, OK!” Hender warbled.
“What’s the matter, Nell?” Geoffrey asked.
“Henry Frears was the name of the man the Retribution lost while collecting water on the island,” she said.
“Huh?” Geoffrey said.
“Captain Henders recorded it in his log when he discovered the island in 1791.”
“Where’d Hender get a coconut?” Zero muttered.
“If this is Frears’s hat,” Nell said. “Then Hender may have actually seen him. That would make Hender over 220 years old!”
“I told you,” Andy said. “I think he’s a lot older than that.”
Hender whistled and gestured with three hands for them to follow.
They passed another niche displaying another carved coconut. This one wore a WWII American officer’s cap. A long gouge in the side of the coconut was smeared with red pigment.
“Maybe the captain of the B-29?” Zero suggested grimly.
They passed more rooms, peering into them with frustrated curiosity, as they hurried behind their tour guide up the winding passageway.
In another niche, an uncarved coconut gazed out at them. This one was faceless. It had dried red seaweed for hair and wore a Mets baseball cap.
“Hey, my cap!” Nell exclaimed. She reached for it and put it on her head with a half-smile at Hender. “I left it behind on StatLab.”
Hender’s head swiveled down toward her on his long neck, and he nodded. “Nell, yes!” he croaked, seeming to awkwardly mimic her smile.
She glanced back at Geoffrey with wide eyes. “He said my name!” she whispered.
Strung along the corkscrewing ceiling was a collection of glass fishnet floats and plastic buoys. More random garbage, battered and bleached, seemed pinned to every available square inch of wall space. As they came around a curve they saw, mounted above them and illuminated by a freshly-riled jar of bugs, what appeared to be the faded figurehead of a Spanish galleon, a mermaid carved in wood, half human and half fish.
“Looks like a cargo cult,” Thatcher mused as they came around another bend in the stairs and amidst the flotsam saw a life preserver stenciled with faded dark blue letters: R.M.S. LUSITANIA.
“Thank you, God!” Zero laughed as he videoed it with his handheld and head-mounted cameras.
Nell glanced at Geoffrey behind her, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Geoffrey nodded and impulsively squeezed her hand.
As they came through a level passage they saw artifacts that were clearly more recently acquired: pieces of ROVs, an Army helmet, even an Incredible Hulk action figure.
Hender opened a door. They emerged on a huge branch under the umbrella of the tree’s canopy.
Below, attached to the trunk of the tree, hung an enormous waterwheel-like structure.
From the wheel spooled a thick cable of braided green fiber. The cable ran through a pulley on a branch that reached over the cliff.
A basket the size of the Trident’s large Zodiac hung at the end of the cable against the orange glow of the setting sun, swinging slowly in the steady wind that blew seven hundred feet above the sea.
Hender pointed at the basket and then at some of the garbage stacked in piles on the wide branch.
“Hender’s got an elevator,” Andy told them.
“That must be how he got his collection! The elevator must go down to a beach where he got all this stuff.”
“Trash,” Thatcher said, glancing back at Cane. “Humanity’s calling card.”
“Um,” Zero looked around nervously, “should we be out here?”
“It’s OK, Zero,” Andy assured him. “The tree gives off some kind of bug repellent. We’re safe here.”
Nell laughed. “This is a plant,” she sighed. “The first actual plant on this island!”
Andy smiled. “Too bad it doesn’t have a flower, Nell.”
“I wonder if they evolved together.” Geoffrey watched Hender climb nimbly to a high branch and extend his arms in a double V. A soulful, lilting call resonated through a chamber in the creature’s cranial crest.
A distant chorus of four similar horn-calls answered from across the bowl of the island.
“We’ve heard that before,” Andy said. “Remember, Nell?”
Tears of shame brimmed in her eyes as she remembered the nightmarish voices the outboard mikes had picked up in StatLab echoing across the island. “Yes…”
“So there are four more of them,” Thatcher said.
“OK,” Geoffrey said, decisively. “We need a pow-wow. Now.”
Hender led them back down to the B-29 fuselage, where Andy managed to tell him with hand signals that he and his human friends needed some privacy.
Hender nodded. He gestured with four hands toward the nose of the B-29, where the humans proceeded to congregate as Hender stayed near the front door, his back turned discreetly.
“We have to save them,” Nell began, standing before the patchwork window in the cockpit. The way the plane jutted over the ocean, she felt almost as if they were flying.
Cane stood with his eyes closed as if this were a bad dream. Words had come out of the mouth of what looked like a prop in a horror movie—it had called him by his name, and now there were more of them coming. He could not piece this together with the world he came from; it seemed like the world was splitting in two beneath him. He did not see the soul of his Creator in this monster. He saw another force, of awesome power, that had acted without any regard for human sensibilities to invest this animal with the appearance of a soul. Cane was convinced he was closer than he had ever been to the presence of the Devil.
“I was about to give up on this island myself,” Geoffrey told the others. “But I think we just found the only benign species possible here: intelligent beings. Think of it!”
“We have to tell the President,” Andy said. “We have to stop them.”
“Absolutely,” Zero said, recording them with both cameras.
“Let’s get to the Humvee and radio the base,” Nell decided.
“Hold on.” Thatcher raised a hand. “We are under extremely strict orders from the military about transporting any species off this island…”
Nell glared at him with a fierce challenge in her eyes. “Are you suggesting that we destroy these creatures? Is that what you’re saying, Thatcher?”
“I’m saying nothing, I’m merely questioning: What is it that makes this species any more valuable than the hundreds of species we are about to incinerate, Dr. Duckworth?”
“I can’t believe you’re even asking this,” Nell said, flushed with anger. “Hender thinks. He knows his past and plans his future. He’s a person—like you and me.”
“Surely, that’s their worst recommendation!” Thatcher shook his head, laughing contemptuously. “It makes Hender’s kind more dangerous than a plague of locusts. Don’t you see?”
“They don’t have to be like a plague of locusts, Thatcher. They have a choice,” Nell argued. “Locusts don’t have any choice.”
“Exactly,” Thatcher agreed, mildly. “Which makes us much worse than locusts. It doesn’t take many of our choices to add up to global devastation on a scale no other creature could ever match. We didn’t have to come to this island, Dr. Duckworth— but we did. And if we hadn’t, none of the creatures on this island would have to die now. Would they?”
“Spare us the irony, Thatcher,” Geoffrey said. “We’re here now, and we have a moral obligation, damn it.”
“Before we saw Hender you wanted to save this island,” Nell reminded Thatcher.
Thatcher jabbed an angry finger at her. “And you wanted to nuke it!” he snarled. He looked at the others, seeking an ally. “Hasn’t it occurred to any of you that this creature is far more dangerous than anything else on this island precisely because it is intelligent? My God, this planet will be lucky enough to survive one intelligent species—but two? Are you all mad?”
Geoffrey scoffed. “Intelligent life must have managed to live on this island in harmony with its environment for millions of years to evolve into Hender. Face it, Thatcher, that theory of yours, that intelligent life must destroy its environment, is wrong—and these beings are the proof. One of my own theories has already been shot down by this island, if that makes you feel any better. I thought an ecosystem with so little symbiotic cooperation couldn’t even exist, let alone outlast every other system on Earth. I was wrong, too. Get over it, Thatcher. Welcome to the wonderful world of science.”
“It’s funny,” Nell mused. “I thought this island would prove my theory that plants pollinated by insects would exhibit extreme genetic drift in isolation. But there were no pollen-bearing plants here. There aren’t any plants, except for this tree.” She looked at Thatcher sadly. “But what we have found instead—it’s like a miracle, Thatcher!”
Thatcher glared back at her, and smiled contemptuously.
“I had a theory,” Zero piped up, “that if you could find the most remote island on Earth, you’d find paradise. Guess my theory’s shot to hell.”
“Henders Island,” Andy said. “The place where theories come to die. Right, Thatcher?”
“What we are doing to this island only underscores the danger of making any special exception for this species,” Thatcher insisted. The edge in his voice was unmistakable.
“This isn’t a chapter in your book, Thatcher,” Zero growled. “This isn’t about winning some stupid scientific argument. We gotta save these guys, come on!”
“They’re people, Thatcher!” Andy said.
“No, they’re not!” Cane spluttered and then fell silent when he caught Hender watching him from the other end of the fuselage.
“Yes, they are!” Andy yelled.
Cane’s grip tightened on the forestock of his rifle.
“Relax, dude,” Zero told him.
“Look, Thatcher.” Nell leaned forward. “It’s no doubt true that without our intelligence this island would never have been found, and none of this would be necessary now. For life’s sake, I regret that anything on this island must be destroyed. But it would be murder to knowingly kill other intelligent beings, just as it would be murder if we were to allow other species on this island to reach the mainland. It would be murder because, unlike anything else on this island, Hender and beings like him can choose not to be monsters. And so can we. That’s why they deserve a chance. Surely you can see that, can’t you?”
Thatcher studied her with smoldering contempt. “That choice produces saints and sinners, Dr. Duckworth. Pacifists and terrorists. Angels and devils. And there is no way to predict which. To bring this creature and his ilk to the mainland will expose the rest of the world to a peril it could never withstand.”
“OK, so who’s for saving them?” Zero asked, giving Thatcher a deadly stare as he raised his hand.
Nell, Geoffrey, and Andy raised their hands. “Yes!”
Cane looked through the window as twilight filled the sky.
All the others looked at Thatcher, waiting for his response.
Behind his eyes, wheels turned, recalculating the odds against him.
Suddenly, the zoologist sighed.
“All right,” he nodded in apparent resignation, and raised his hand. “Of course, I will abide by the group’s decision, as it seems that everyone’s mind is made up. Sergeant, are you all right? I should get you back to the car. Come on.” He took Cane by the arm, and turned him toward the door. “We need to radio the base to tell them what we’ve found.”
“We’ve got twenty-two and a half hours left before we have to evacuate this island,” Geoffrey said, glancing at his watch. “You better tell them we have to start making arrangements immediately to transport these creatures.”
Andy followed them to the door as Hender stepped aside to let them through.
As soon as Thatcher pushed it open, Cane vomited outside.
“Eew, yuck!” Andy pulled the door shut behind them and went back to the others.
“Yuck!” Hender nodded.
Thatcher patted Cane’s heaving back, looking over the twilit fields below as wheels turned in his mind like the gears in a slot machine. He noticed strange shapes were sprouting out of the purpling field below the tree, attracting little clouds of glowing bugs.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into them,” the zoologist said. “This is exactly what the President warned us about, trying to get live species off this island. How are you feeling, Sergeant?”
“Feeling fine, sir!” Cane sounded off, lying.
Thatcher helped Cane over the stepping stones to the Humvee. He climbed in first and reached down to help the soldier, who shrugged off his help as he gripped the doorframe and pulled himself into the driver’s seat.
Cane quickly slammed the door behind him. His face was very pale and streaked with sweat. He squeezed the steering wheel, hanging his head between his arms as he took long, shuddering breaths.
Thatcher looked out the windshield over the island. Glowing swarms drifted like ghosts over the fields below. The ring of the jungle had a dim pink glow as a wispy fog filled the basin around the barren core, which stood out like an island in the fog. “Well, this is far worse than anyone could have imagined, Sergeant. It’s an abomination.” He turned to look at Cane. “Against God.”
Cane closed his eyes, breathing faster and gripping the steering wheel with one hand, his crucifix in the other.
“These freaks of nature were not meant to coexist with humans on this Earth.” Thatcher was an atheist, but this approach seemed like the best bet, he thought, given the circumstances. “Why else would they have been separated from us since the beginning of time, Sergeant? My God, what in heaven’s name are we trying to do? The scientists back at the base are going to want to save this species—precisely because it is intelligent!”
Thatcher glanced at the soldier and then looked back out the window as swarms of bugs moved across the slopes below. “I guess after you win some of the most prestigious awards in science your colleagues just stop listening to you.”
“You’d think they’d listen to you more,” Cane muttered.
Thatcher snorted laughter and stared thoughtfully at the Army base, a mile in the distance. This discovery would certainly derail the entire thesis of his book just as his career was taking off. The fact that he was here when intelligent life was discovered living in the oldest sustained ecosystem on the planet would cause a sensation. And a professional humiliation after his Redmond Principle had predicted intelligent life must destroy its own environment. His Tetteridge Award would suddenly be worthless. Ridiculed, even. It could even be revoked. The other precious awards would never materialize. The markers would come due, the alimony. But there was something else, something irrational pulling him, a primal temptation that he had faced many times, a belief in his luck—which placed him in natural opposition to the world. He could never resist betting against the house.
Thatcher sighed. “I wish I hadn’t won those awards, Sergeant. Maybe if I had never won them my colleagues would listen to me now. Maybe they would listen.”
“I hear you, sir.” Cane’s voice was low and serious.
Thatcher shook his head, not looking at Cane. “Those things will become part of our society now, Sergeant, if they leave this island. They’ll be sharing our neighborhoods, our jobs, our schools—even our hospitals and cemeteries. How are you going to explain that to your children? They’re clearly physically and mentally superior. They probably procreate faster than we do. We’ll be signing our world over to them. What are your orders, Sergeant? I mean, I don’t wish to interfere with military matters, of course. But, what if you were to find someone trying to smuggle live species off the island…”
“My orders are to shoot on sight anyone attempting to smuggle live specimens off the island, sir!”
“Ah, yes. That’s right. Tell me, Sergeant, just hypothetically— if you found yourself in the extraordinary position, if you were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to save life on Earth, even if it meant disobeying your orders—are you the sort of person who would do it? Or are you the sort of person who would obey your orders, no matter what the consequences might be for the human race?”
“Hypothetically how, sir?”
“What if you radioed in and told the base we are collecting specimens but don’t mention exactly what we found? It’s 7:30 now. Could you meet me at 9, down there, out of sight?”
Thatcher indicated a slight rise in the ground about thirty yards down the slope from Hender’s home. It was probably one of the moldered wings of the B-29, long ago engulfed and dissolved by clover.
Cane looked hard at Thatcher. “Then what, sir?”
“Then we might be able to just drive away, Sergeant.”
“Sir?”
Thatcher shrugged. “They have no other means of transportation. And while you’re gone I can make certain that they don’t have any way to communicate with the base.”
“That would be murder, sir.”
“Taking those creatures off this island would be genocide, Sergeant. Of the entire human race.”
After a moment of silence, Cane asked, “Where would I go?”
“Anywhere. Until nine o’clock.”
“What would we say?”
“We could say we got attacked while collecting specimens and that the others didn’t make it, Sergeant. Our companions foolishly insisted on leaving the vehicle and we wisely stayed inside. That almost happened already today, didn’t it? You haven’t yet told them what happened to Dr. Cato. We say they all died with him. In less than forty-eight hours, this whole island is going to be nuked. How much more simple could it be?”
Cane stared ahead through the windshield for a long moment. Then he switched on the Hummer’s ignition. “Rendezvous at twenty-one hundred hours, sir,” he said. But he refused to look at Thatcher.
Thatcher got out and heard the distant din of the jungle below as Cane drove away.
He noticed the faintly glowing swarm on the field below change direction and streak up the slope toward him.
Thatcher turned, tripping, and ran.
Thatcher burst in and slammed the door behind him.
Copepod snarled at him.
“Not good, Thatcher,” Hender said, startling him.
“I agree,” Nell said. “What did they say, Thatcher?”
“Please call off this dog!” Thatcher scowled.
Hender whistled and Copepod ran to his side. Hender stroked the dog with his two right hands, and Thatcher studied Hender for a moment. He didn’t answer Nell’s question.
“What did they say, Thatcher?” Geoffrey pressed.
“The seismic activity must be interfering with radio reception,” Thatcher answered. “Cane said he had to get closer to transmit a message.”
“My God, that guy was scared out of his wits!” Zero said.
“You should have gone with him to make sure the right message gets through to the President,” Nell said, running a hand back through her hair in frustration.
“I wrote it all out for him,” Thatcher snapped. “He said he would be right back!”
A hard earthquake jolted the fuselage.
“Aye-yai-yai-yeesh,” Hender trilled.
“This isn’t good,” Geoffrey said, reaching for handholds and glancing at Nell, who seemed struck by a dawning thought.
They looked around at the curiosities now swaying from Hender’s roof.
“The quakes have been getting worse,” Andy said. “All the hen-dros are upset about it.”
“Hendros?” asked Thatcher.
“I call them hendros,” Andy said. “Short for hendropods.”
Nell looked at her watch. “Cane better not take too long, Thatcher. Considering everything that will need to be done to get the hendros safely off the island, we don’t have much time.”
“We should have enough,” Geoffrey reassured her, and he jabbed a look at Thatcher.
Twenty minutes later, Andy asked, “Where’s our driver, Thatcher?” for the fifteenth time.
Hender was bouncing a blue plastic ball back and forth with Andy, who sat on the floor in front of him as they all waited for Cane to return.
“How should I know?” Thatcher repeated, glancing at his watch again.
“Maybe they’re putting a caravan together or something.” Geoffrey had been marveling at the creature playing ball with Andy, watching how its arms moved and joints flexed, and observing the psychology and culture in its intelligence, its humor, its playful interaction with Andy.
“This place will probably be crawling with the military any time now,” Zero said.
“Can you imagine how this kind of news might be going down back at the base?” Nell asked, her unwelcome thought recurring.
Zero snickered. “Yeah, it must have blown their fragile little eggshell minds.”
“We have to think about how to safely transport them. Andy, you should travel with Hender.”
“Make sure the Army knows that, Nell,” Andy said, batting the ball back to Hender. “People don’t listen to me.”
“They better come soon,” Geoffrey said.
Zero shrugged. “All we can do is wait.”
“We can’t wait too long,” Nell warned.
Despite Andy’s clumsy returns and outright misses, Hender used four hands, even his fifth and sixth when necessary, to save the ball every time in a mesmerizing volley. Copepod sprawled between them, panting with excitement.
When stretching out with all limbs extended, Hender had the appearance of a spider. When seated, however, Hender had a paunch between his pelvic-ring and his middle ring and tended to rest his upper forearms on top of his potbelly. Sitting across from Andy with his upper arms folded up like shoulders against his long neck, he seemed like a cross between Buddha and Vishnu, with widening pink and emerald rings of light effusing on his photophoric white fur.
Nell and Geoffrey caught each other watching the ballgame. They laughed, sharing their awe, and climbed down to sit on the floor near Andy.
“You know, something may have made it off Henders Island already,” Geoffrey speculated.
“Let me guess,” Andy said, volleying the blue ball. “Stoma-topods?” He missed the return, and Hender saved it.
“Right. Mantis shrimp! You had the same thought?”
“What do you think attacked the NASA rover? Thirty-five-foot mantises came out of that lake.”
“Wow,” Geoffrey said. “Angel should be here!”
“Angel?” Nell said.
“My office mate. Angel Echevarria. A stomatopod freak. He spotted the resemblance to mantis shrimp from the SeaLife footage. Hender has a vague resemblance to them, too, especially the way he folds his upper arms. And his eyes.”
“You think mantis shrimp may have evolved here?” Nell asked.
“Stomatopods probably evolved only 200 million years ago,” Andy pointed out. “This place has been isolated much longer.”
“Right, Andy,” Geoffrey said, “but the South Pacific Ocean is considered to be the center of the mantis shrimp’s adaptive radiation. Henders Island was right here, passing through the middle of it. The superior attributes of the mantis shrimp could be explained by this hyper-competitive ecosystem—and they’re continuing to spread around the world at an amazing rate. They may be the only species that escaped Henders Island.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Andy missed again and again Hender saved it.
“So are you saying this creature evolved from a mantis shrimp?” Thatcher had been silent for a long time, repeatedly checking his watch.
“No, of course not,” Geoffrey replied. “No more than we evolved from a spider monkey, but we may have a common ancestor.”
“He doesn’t look like a crustacean,” Thatcher argued.
“But he might, if crustaceans kept evolving in the same direction lizards and mammals eventually went,” Geoffrey replied. “If left alone, would they have followed a path similar to mammals? Would their exoskeletons shrink and then submerge under a waterproof keratinized epidermis to ward off dehydration, like reptiles, birds, and us?”
“Cuttlefish once had a nautilus-like shell that became internalized over millions of years,” Andy remarked.
“Maybe the same genes that led to cuttlefish color-displays led to this evolutionary branch, as well.”
“I like the way you think, Dr. Binswanger,” Nell said. He smiled.
Hender tapped Andy’s knee impatiently and Andy fumbled for the ball, offering it to Hender.
“That’s absurd.” Thatcher shook his head. “Lobsters are more primitive than stomatopods and are thought to be their ancestors. That would mean that all arthropods evolved on Henders Island!”
“Ha!” Andy said. “Stomatopods and mantises are in the same class of arthropods, Malacostraca, sure, but they’re in totally different subclasses. Only Schram thought they could be descended from the same primitive eumalocostracan ancestor, but most car-cinologists rejected that as a needlessly complicated family tree, Dr. Genius Award! And nobody, but nobody, would say stomatopods descended from lobsters. Jeesh.”
“All right, so my classification of crustaceans may be a bit rusty.” Thatcher’s face flushed nearly as red as his mustache. “The point is, all arthropods could not have evolved here!”
“Not only do I think it’s unnecessary for all arthropods to have evolved on Henders Island for mantis shrimp to have originated here,” Geoffrey replied evenly, “but I also think it’s possible that all arthropods did evolve here, Dr. Redmond. Back when this fragment was a part of the Pannotia supercontinent.”
“Henders Island must have been much larger through most of its history,” Nell confirmed. “God, there could have been an entire civilization of Hender’s kind back then. Who knows how far back they go?”
“Wow, man,” Zero chuckled, sucking it all into his lens. He saw a red indicator light blinking in his handheld camera. “Fuck,” he said, and he quickly switched its memory stick.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Hender sang.
“Don’t teach him that, Zero,” Nell scolded.
“Sorry.” Zero aimed the freshly loaded camera.
“I still don’t see what you’re driving at,” Thatcher said, glancing at his watch again.
“The mantis shrimp is by far the most advanced crustacean on Earth. It may have evolved separately on this fragment of Pannotia before escaping from it 200 million years ago. You have to think outside the box, Thatcher.” Geoffrey smiled at Nell.
“The curse of man.” Thatcher pursed his lips under his thick mustache. “That ‘box’ we’re so good at thinking outside of is the natural order, Dr. Binswanger.”
“That box is conventional thinking, Dr. Redmond,” Geoffrey shot back.
“What is rational is madness to nature. The innocent attempts of the questioning mind invariably lead to re-orchestrating a symphony that has been tuned and syncopated over millions of years.”
“The history of Hender proves you wrong,” Geoffrey retorted.
Thatcher’s jaw tightened. “There are only a few of these creatures now, presumably. How can you predict what will happen when there are a million?”
“How can you?”
“Hold on a minute, I’m troubled by something here,” Nell interposed. “Are you saying that my favorite food—lobster—may have evolved here on Henders Island?”
Geoffrey nodded. “Well, yes, from a first wave of migration, when it was Henders Supercontinent.”
She smiled. “So how could the fact that they live alone increase their life span? You mentioned that before. Incidentally, I love the way your mind works, Dr. Binswanger.” Her mahogany-red hair was tangled and her shirt was still damp after being doused with seawater. Geoffrey’s pulse quickened unexpectedly as she leaned forward, her hands planted one after the other in front of her crossed legs, openly admiring something about him that people rarely noticed as she looked in his eyes.
Thatcher checked his watch, nibbling nervously on a few last peanuts that had slipped out of an airline packet into pocket number four.
Andy caught the ball and turned to Geoffrey. “Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Hender has a fossil collection.”
“What?” Nell, Geoffrey, and Thatcher realized that fossils from Henders Island would be like fossils from Mars.
Andy grinned. “Yep. And they sure look like pre-Cambrian biota to me. He’s got the most primitive Anomalocaris I’ve ever seen.”
“They found some fossils when they excavated the hillside for the Army’s base, but nothing identifiable,” Nell said.
“Since our driver—ahem!—seems to be taking his time getting back here, Thatcher, let’s take a look!”
“They must be arranging a rescue party,” Thatcher said.
“I hope you’re right,” Zero said, glaring at him.
“Where are the fossils?” Geoffrey asked. “We need to make sure they come with us!”
“Hender,” Andy said. “Fossils?”
Hender nodded, turning and reaching under a counter made from the planks of wooden shipping flats lashed together. With all arms he pulled out a stack of four flat hexagonal baskets apparently woven of some tough fiber.
He swiveled like a crane, and with all four arms he carefully lowered the heavy stack onto the floor. Then he opened the flap of the basket on top.
Geoffrey and Nell kneeled on the floor, breathless.
Thatcher could not resist, rising to peer over their shoulders.
“These are soft-bodied fossils,” Geoffrey whispered.
“My God, the detail is exquisite,” Nell murmured as she observed a reddish feather-like worm with snail-stalk eyes profiled as if in a snapshot.
“They look older than Burgess specimens,” Geoffrey said. “Even nearer to the beginning of the Cambrian Explosion—”
“Look! There’s a primitive version of Wiwaxia, and…could that be Hallucigenia?”
Nell pointed at a red cameo of a half-spherical animal with small spikes on its curving back. A tiny spiked worm was embedded in the silvery olive-colored shale.
“They could just be juveniles,” Thatcher said.
Nell lifted the slab to reveal another leaf of stone showing fantastical animals trapped in mid-somersault, mid-glide, and mid-pirouette by a sudden mudslide 600 million years ago.
“Larger,” she said. “But still more primitive.”
“The others may have been juveniles,” Geoffrey told her. “But these adults are still more primitive than any Cambrian fossils I’ve seen. Look at the radial symmetry in these arthropods!”
“Look at this quilted seaweed—my God, these could be the missing links between Ediacaran and Cambrian life!” she breathed.
“This could be the page that’s missing—the moment before the Cambrian explosion before life branched into our world and this one!”
Zero captured it all on video. “I’m sold, kids. Don’t worry about me!”
“Fossils,” Hender said proudly.
“Yes, Hender,” Nell said, extending her hand.
Hender took it carefully in his four gentle hands, his eyes widening, their six “pupils” focusing on her. “It’s OK, Nell,” Hender hummed.
“Yes,” Nell nodded, and laughed. “It’s very OK, Hender!”
“We better pack these away to take them with us,” Andy said. “He’s got more in smaller baskets, too, all around here.”
“Hot damn,” Zero said and looked heavenward with one eye. “With this footage I can retire to Fiji.” He laughed. “Not that I will.”
“No? What’ll you do, Zero?” Nell took the handheld camera from him, turning it around and pointing it at the photographer.
“Well,” Zero smiled, unaccustomed to this side of the lens, his face lighting up. “I’ll probably sail around the world and make some documentaries. Maybe even write a book!”
“Great!”
“I guess we can all write a book after this.” Geoffrey laughed as Nell turned the camera on him.
“And probably all get Tetteridge awards,” Andy said. “Right, Thatcher?”
Nell zoomed in on Thatcher as the older man smirked.
Geoffrey grinned. “I wonder who’ll play me in the movie?”
“Tom Cruise, no doubt,” Thatcher muttered.
“Yeah, that’s funny. ’Cuz I’m black and Tom Cruise isn’t black, and that whole thing. Yeah.”
“Imagine the book Hender will write.” Nell turned the camera toward Hender.
“Now there’s a guaranteed Nobel,” Andy said.
Hender suddenly gestured to Andy and moved to the window of the cockpit.
“He wants some privacy,” Andy translated.
They watched the alien being look out over the sea, where he had so rarely seen the vehicles of human beings passing in the distance.
Nell handed the camera back to Zero.
Geoffrey noticed a World War II signal handbook on the floor beside his foot. It was opened to a page with Morse code. He picked it up, and Nell noticed it.
“Andy,” she asked.
“Yeah?”
“Do you know Morse code?”
“Nope. I was rejected by the Boy Scouts.”
“We don’t have a way to signal the base from here anyway,” Zero reminded them.
Nell took the book from Geoffrey. “Hender must have figured out the word for distress signal or emergency and matched it to the Morse code for S.O.S.!”
“Wait a minute, are you saying Hender signaled us?” Geoffrey exclaimed.
“Impossible,” Thatcher said.
“Hender set off that EPIRB,” Nell breathed. Her eyes glowed with excitement.
“Jesus,” Zero whispered.
“Oh wow!” Andy said.
“What’s an EPIRB?” Geoffrey asked.
“The emergency beacon that first brought SeaLife here,” Nell told him. “The earthquakes might have been worrying him—he may have thought the island was in danger. He could have seen the word ‘emergency’ on the EPIRB in the sailboat that washed ashore and figured out how to turn the beacon on!”
“Yeah, baby!” Zero said.
“‘Help,’ cried the spider to the fly,” Thatcher said.
A shape appeared in one of the dark holes in the fuselage above Nell. She gasped. Another of Hender’s kind peered in warily at the astonished humans. Glowing patterns of blue and green fluctuated on its white-furred body and limbs in the shadow before it emerged into the green-lit chamber.
Thatcher sucked in a breath and took an involuntary step backwards.
Behind the first, another appeared, and then another and another, each with a unique pattern and palette of colors. In their hands and on their backs they carried bundles, pouches, and packs containing an odd assortment of objects—customized tools, toys or weapons made of native materials, and man-made materials collected from the beach and put to original uses.
The four newcomers hopped gracefully down on their springing legs and approached the humans, creeping on four or even all six limbs, their heads downcast, as if approaching deities.
Hender went to greet them. He gave Andy the same hand signals they had exchanged earlier, and then the others of his kind followed him to the cockpit at the far end of the fuselage.
The beings huddled for a whispered, musical conference.
It was dark now in the nose of the plane. Only a starlit sky silhouetted the alien creatures against the B-29’s cockpit jutting over the ocean. From a distance the new arrivals seemed faintly sinister as they darted glowing eyes back at the humans.
Hender shook some glass jars full of jungle bugs to light up the cockpit. Following Hender’s example, all gave friendly waves at the humans, then went back to their discussion.
Nell’s heart pounded. To be in the presence of Earthlings who may have preceded human beings by millions of years made her feel oddly alien herself. It was an extraordinary sensation. “An intelligent species,” she whispered.
“It sounds like each one is speaking a different language,” Geoffrey whispered.
She nodded. “Maybe that’s why Hender’s so good at languages.”
“They’re a little smarter than you thought, eh, Thatcher?” Andy taunted.
Thatcher showed no expression. “Oh, yes.”
“Why would they have different languages?”
“Maybe they’re very, very old,” Nell suggested.
“You’ll have to explain that to me,” Geoffrey said.
“Well, maybe each of them is the last of a separate cultural or ethnic group. Their colorings are fairly distinctive.”
“Maybe,” Geoffrey mused. “But they would have to be incredibly old, Nell, to have that much genetic and cultural variation.”
“Like I said, they are incredibly old,” Andy insisted.
Geoffrey considered his own principle of life span as he watched the alien beings silhouetted against the moonlit window of the seventy-year-old aircraft. Suddenly Fire-Breathing Chats seemed remarkably tame compared to this. “It’s possible they don’t really have life spans,” he blurted even as the thought struck him.
“Huh?” Nell asked. “You’ll have to explain that to me.”
“I will.” He nodded.
“The hendros have tunnels that are probably fossilized root structures connecting these giant trees all around the island’s rim,” Andy put in.
“How many trees are there?” Geoffrey asked.
“Six or seven, I think, and they all live alone in separate trees. That multi-colored guy is a painter. The black and blue-striped one seems to invent traps and weapons and other things. The orange one’s a musician. I think the green-and-blue one is a doctor.”
Nell noticed the combinations of colors effervescing on their fur as Andy pointed each of them out. “How do you know what they do, Andy?”
“I went to a dinner party with them at the doctor’s tree. After dinner they traded some stuff. Hender traded some things he collected on the beach.”
“How cool is that?” Zero said.
“I think the hendros have made up their minds,” Thatcher observed sourly.
The discussion seemed to have been settled and the creatures were now coming back to the humans. Hender approached ahead of the others and spread two arms out. “Henders eat humans now,” he said.
Thatcher stiffened.
Hender held up one finger. “Joke,” Hender said.
“I taught him that word.” Andy laughed. “Don’t panic, Thatcher!”
“Joke, Thatcher.” Hender nodded in agreement.
“He’s got a future on The Tonight Show,” Geoffrey said. The other hendros watched the humans laughing and looked at each other in amazement.
Alien as they appeared, Hender’s kindred were each strangely beautiful, with graceful limbs that expressed different styles in motion. Able to locomote with two, four, or six limbs, either swinging from the ceiling or walking on the floor, each of the beings moved in ways disconcertingly different from the others. It was as if five antelope had discovered five completely different ways of walking using the standard four legs. Their fur varied widely, too—not so much like different breeds of cat, more like people wearing different clothes. Watching them, one could only conclude that each had a unique style, and, in this respect, were essentially human. Only humans—juggling, walking, crawling, swimming, skydiving humans—displayed so much individual choice simply through movement.
“See others.” Hender’s woodwind-like voice had a melodious tone. “Thank you thank you thank you. Emergency exit. Hazar-do-us!”
“Yes, Hender. Hazardous!” Geoffrey nodded. He gestured to himself, then pointed at the door. “When others come, emergency exit. OK? Yes?”
Hender smiled, revealing the three wide teeth that wrapped around his upper and lower jaws. He nodded vigorously. “Yes, hazardous! Emergency exit! Thank you, OK, Geoffrey!”
Hender translated for the four other hendropods, whose eyes flicked back and forth between him and the humans.
Under her breath, Nell told Geoffrey, “You speak pretty good Hender.”
“Hender uses only imperative verbs and simple nouns—probably from associating the words with pictures on directions and warning labels. They’re designed so no one has to be able to read to get the point, but often have a variety of verbal translations.”
“I’ll be damned,” Zero muttered. “And I always hated those things.”
Nell smiled, delighted. “Who would have thought warning labels would be the Rosetta Stone?”
Thatcher had been staring off into space, but he abruptly broke his silence. “I still don’t see how they could evolve here.”
“That’s easy,” Andy piped up. “They disappear.”
Nell looked at Andy, puzzled.
“I think their fur can sense light and somehow reflect it on the opposite side of their bodies. Hey, Hender. Disappear! Don’t worry—he likes doing it. He knows it freaks me out!”
Hender nodded at Andy and smiled as his thick fur fluffed out.
Although they were looking right at him, Hender…vanished. The background seemed to emanate through him, leaving only his grin and two eyes visible.
“Dear God,” Thatcher murmured.
“It’s the freakin’ Cheshire Cat, man!”
All of the hendropods followed suit, blending into the background except for their colorful eyes and smiling teeth.
“Holy shit.” Zero videoed as he laughed.
“That must be how their ancestors managed to slow down long enough to think in this environment,” Nell said, thoughtfully.
“And make tools,” Geoffrey added.
“They can step outside this crazy food chain.”
Geoffrey’s eyes lit up as a piece fell into place. “That’s it! Death by predation is so common here that none of these species needed a biological clock to enforce a life span. When these guys developed invisibility…” He turned toward Nell, excited. “They may have become virtually immortal. Which allowed them to preserve the integrity of their gene pool by minimizing procreation! Intelligent creatures could not reproduce very frequently on such a small island,” he murmured. “In a group this small, the risk of compromising the gene pool would be too great. So the longer each generation lasts the less opportunity for genetic corruption. It’s a scenario that I never imagined before!”
“So Hender’s kind might actually be immortal?” Nell whispered. “My God…”
“There are monkey versions of Hender in the jungle that disappear, too,” Andy said. “Quentin and I called them shrimpanzees. Hender doesn’t like them very much because they steal from his traps.”
“Sounds like a much safer species to rescue, if you ask me,” remarked Thatcher.
“Hey Hender saved all of our lives today, asshole!” Andy retorted. “Shrimpanzees would have had you for lunch. And dinner, maybe.”
“Dozens of people have died on this island in only a few weeks, Dr. Redmond,” Nell said. “We may seem safe right here for the time being, but we wouldn’t last more than a few minutes outside this tree.”
“By the way!” Andy rose and slid his glasses up his nose, raising his eyebrows at the ruddy zoologist. “Just out of curiosity, Thatcher, where the FUCK is our driver?”
“He should have been back by now,” Thatcher snapped back, hotly.
“What have you done with him, Thatcher?”
“What in God’s name are you suggesting?” the older man spluttered.
“I’m starting to wonder about you. I mean, just how far would you go to protect the biosphere from intelligent life, anyway? After all, people are the biggest danger on the planet, right?”
“I resent whatever you are trying to imply,” Thatcher shot back.
“If he doesn’t come back soon, Thatcher, we won’t stand a chance trying to cross this island!” Zero said.
“And even if we stay here, we’ll go out with a big bang.” Geoffrey studied Thatcher thoughtfully.
“Are you absolutely dead nuts positive you got the message across to that kid?” Zero said.
“Or should we start panicking now?” Nell asked.
“What exactly are you accusing me—”
Another quake wrenched the ground, twisting the fuselage around them.
The hendropods reappeared and moved closer to the humans.
“With this kind of seismic activity the military could already be evacuating the island for all we know,” Geoffrey said.
“Maybe the Army doesn’t want the hendropods to get off the island, and they’re just going to leave us behind!”
“He may have had an accident,” Thatcher conceded, realizing it might be true and gambling heavily that it wasn’t.
“Maybe he got ambushed by God-knows-what-out-there,” Geoffrey said.
“OK,” Nell said. “That’s too many maybes, guys. Zero, can your camera zoom in on the base so we can see what’s going on?”
Zero set his camera up on a tripod outside Hender’s door. Switching to night vision, he saw a greenscape with the broken ring of jungle around the bottom of the island lit up like a galaxy. He zoomed in on the Trigon over a mile away and saw helicopters coming and going and Humvees speeding back to the base.
“Hell, it looks like they’re packing it in and getting out of here.”
Zero panned west. He saw that the crack in the far wall of the island had grown. Seawater had swelled the pool that had saved his life to the size of a lake.
“That crack’s opening up. The ocean’s coming in.”
“Shit!” Nell moved aside so Geoffrey could look.
“When water hits old dry fault lines…Bang! Instant earthquake,” Geoffrey peered through the viewfinder. “And every quake will just let more water into the island’s substratum.”
“Terrific,” Zero muttered.
“Do we trust Thatcher?” Geoffrey asked abruptly.
Nell frowned. “The answer lies in the question.”
“I don’t think he has the courage to kill himself along with us,” Geoffrey told her.
“You’re probably right. So he probably told Cane the right thing to say. But Cane might not have done it. And I’m beginning to wonder if, even if he did, we can count on being rescued. I know it’s an awful thing to have to think about, but we have to be realistic. Thatcher might not be the only one who doesn’t like the idea of intelligent life getting off this island. Maybe the news didn’t go down too well with the powers that be. Or maybe Cane just ditched us.”
“I was thinking the same thing. That kid was pretty freaked out,” Zero said.
“And we don’t have any means of communication or transportation,” Geoffrey said.
A swarm of glowing bugs swept over the moonlit purple fields. “Time to go back inside, kids,” Zero warned.
Nell, Geoffrey, and Zero entered the B-29 and closed the door tight behind them.
A tense Thatcher sat surrounded by curious hendropods, who were fondling his red beard and peering into the pockets of his clothing. One discovered a peanut straggler that Thatcher had missed and one of its eyes bent down as it examined it closely— then it grabbed the peanut with its lips and crunched it while registering what seemed to be a smile of pleasure with its wide mouth. Between two arching fingers it offered Thatcher what looked like a miniature dried embryo.
Andy had been keeping watch through the cockpit at the far end of the fuselage.
“Hey, you guys,” he yelled. “They’re leaving without us!”
The humans and the hendropods moved forward and looked out through the patchwork windshield of the B-29.
Thatcher stayed, sitting near the door, and checked his watch.
Two Navy ships were leaving glowing green wakes of bioluminescent phytoplankton churned up by their propellers as they shipped out. Rounding the cliff below, a ship appeared, heading north.
“The Trident !” Nell shouted.
Geoffrey raised an eyebrow. “Eh?”
“It’s the ship from SeaLife,” Zero explained.
“Oh,” Geoffrey said.
“I never thought I’d be so glad to see her!” Nell said.
“Wait a minute!” Zero pulled out a palm-sized short-range video transmitter from one of his pants pockets and unfolded the transmission dish.
He quickly hooked up a jack to the camera and another to a speaker and handed the transmitter to Geoffrey.
“Aim the antenna at the Trident,” he said. “There may be just enough juice left! This thing’s only got a seven-hundred meter range but we might get a bounce off the water. Come on, Peach!”
Peach was playing Halo 5 with earphones on, listening to “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys and crunching spicy cinnamon Red Hots between his molars.
He vaporized a gallery of monstrous aliens with furious efficiency and, suddenly, his Spider Sense detected a status message in the upper right corner of the computer screen:
INCOMING TRANSMISSION.
Peach lifted an earphone. “What the—”
He jockeyed the keyboard and swiftly brought up the feed.
Nell, Andy, and Zero waved frantically in a window on the screen. Behind them stood a cluster of creatures that looked like something from his videogame.
He was stunned for a beat, then fumbled for the volume.
“Peach! Peach! Are you there? Help!”
Peach could not unravel his tongue. He fumbled with a microphone jack. “Zero? Is that you, man?”
Peach pulled an extra wireless headset mike out of his hair and positioned it in front of his mouth. “Boss! Boss! You better get in here!”
The door of the bridge banged open and Cynthea ran in, startling Captain Sol and First Mate Warburton.
“Stop the ship, Captain,” she said breathlessly. “Drop the anchor!”
“Are you insane? Not when the U.S. Navy just told us to reach minimum safe distance from a NUCLEAR BLAST.”
“It’s Nell and Zero and Andy. They’re stranded on the island, Captain! They need help!”
Captain Sol cocked his head at her. “Andy? The poor lad is dead.”
“We’ll be out of range of their transmission if you go any farther,” Cynthea pleaded. “Stop the ship!”
Captain Sol frowned but reluctantly nodded at Warburton to cut the engines, testing the sincerity in Cynthea’s eyes with a hard look. “Radio Enterprise and tell her we’ve got a distress call,” he ordered Warburton.
“No!” Cynthea shouted. “You better come see this first.”
Captain Sol’s frown deepened. “Lady, so help me if this is some kind of publicity stunt—”
“What should I tell them, Captain?” Warburton asked.
Captain Sol gritted his teeth. “Tell them…we’ve got engine trouble.”
“You are my god, Captain Sol!” Cynthea kissed both whiskery cheeks. “My sea god!”
“All right, that’s enough of that now!”
Captain Sol shook his head at Warburton, then hurried off the bridge after Cynthea.
The first mate spoke to the Enterprise in the smooth voice of a late-night dee-jay: “Hello there, Enterprise, we’ve got a little engine trouble and we’re working on it right now. We should have the problem fixed momentarily.”
Captain Sol and Cynthea watched the monitor above Peach as he patched in the audio. The picture was frazzled by static.
“Now why the hell shouldn’t I tell the Navy to send a rescue crew, damn it, Zero?” the captain demanded.
“Maybe because they don’t want to rescue what we found,” Zero said.
“They may be deliberately abandoning us, Captain,” Andy said.
“Well, what in God’s name could you possibly have found?” the captain asked. “Everything on the island’s about to be nuked! How much worse can it get, for Chrissakes!”
“Captain Sol, please take a big breath,” Andy said. “Did you take one? OK. Now close your eyes and when I tell you, open them…”
Captain Sol did no such thing.
“Andy,” Nell sighed.
Moving Hender into view, Andy yelled, “OK, open them!”
Hender’s fur flushed with fireworks of green and pink light as his eyes darted in different directions.
Peach whispered, “Have you ever seen anything like that?”
Captain Sol swallowed a curse. “I am not allowed to make a decision like this, people. The Navy’s orders are to shoot first and ask questions later if anything is smuggled off this island!”
“But these beings are intelligent,” Nell insisted.
“Go ahead, Hender,” Andy urged, and whispered to Hender.
“Hello, Captain Sol,” Hender fluted, and he waved two hands human-style. “Please. Help. Us.”
Captain Sol grabbed the back of a chair to keep from keeling over.
Cynthea put an arm around him, looking at the screen. “You’re recording this, right, Peach?” she asked.
“Oh yeah, Boss.”
“These new tri-engines are temperamental as heck, and I guess they’re a bit rusty,” Warburton crooned on the radio to the Enterprise. “One of them gets out of sync, it sets off a chain reaction, and before you know it, they all just… freak out!”
The first mate winced at his own B.S.
“What’s the ETA on engine repairs, Trident?” came the response from the Enterprise. “Over?”
“Uh, not sure, Enterprise.”
“OK. Trident, you are drifting closer to shore, there, copy?”
“Yes, Enterprise, we copy. We’ll drop anchor and continue to effect repairs.”
“Marcello!” Warburton gestured to the seventeen-year-old crewman, who was kissing his St. Christopher’s medal.
Marcello let go of his medal and dropped anchor at the same time.
The steel claw bit into a solid rock holdfast two hundred feet below the surface.
“Copy that, we think that’s a good idea, Trident! Uh, you’re going to need to get moving within one hundred nineteen minutes or abandon ship. Is that well understood?”
The anchor bit rock and the line stretched taut as Warburton started letting it out farther toward the shore.
“Understood, Enterprise,” he answered, gritting his teeth. “It takes a lot less time than that to fix these things, usually!”
“OK, Trident. Keep us informed. Enterprise out.”