Книга - Fragment

Fragment
Warren Fahy


Jurassic Park meets Lost in this electrifying new adventure thriller.When the cast and crew of reality TV show ‘SeaLife’ land on picturesque, unexplored Henders Island it’s a ratings bonanza. But they’re blissfully unaware that the decisions they make there will shape the fate of mankind … if they can only survive.For they quickly discover that the island is seething with danger. Having evolved in total isolation from the rest of the planet for millennia, Henders is home to host of vicious and exotic predators, terrifying creatures who live in a lightning fast blur of kill or be killed.A team of crack scientists is sent in to assess the situation and they are astounded by what they find. It soon becomes clear that if even the smallest bug ever made it off Henders island, life on earth as we know it would change very quickly indeed.The President is faced with the toughest decision of his career: take the risk of letting one of these creatures escape so that further research can be done, or nuke the island to protect the rest of planet Earth? Just when it seems the stakes couldn't get any higher, the scientists make a surprise discovery that changes everything…






Warren Fahy

Fragment








‘Anihinihi ke ola.

(Life is in a precarious position.)

—Ancient Hawaiian saying




Contents


Epigraph

Prologue



1791

August 21

Present Day

August 22

August 23

August 24

September 3

September 4

September 5

September 7

September 10

September 15

September 16

September 17

September 18



Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher




Prologue


When the American Association for the Advancement of Science met in Anaheim, California in 1999 to discuss an urgent report on the impact of alien species, the scientists gathered weren’t discussing species from another planet–their report referred to species imported to the United States from other parts of this planet.

Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel and graduate students Lori Lach, Doug Morrison, and Rodolfo Zuniga estimated the cost to the United States economy from alien species at approximately $123 billion annually–roughly the gross national product of Thailand.

By 2005, a report called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment revealed that biological invasions had reached epidemic proportions. At least 170 alien species inhabited the Great Lakes, a single species of American jellyfish had wiped out twenty-six species of commercial fish in the Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea now hosted over a hundred alien invaders.

It is on islands, in particular, that these battles of attrition, which usually take place outside the human timescale, come into sharpest focus. On islands, the battles are swift, and the annihilations total and dominant species with no competition often proliferate to create multiple new species. Of the two thousand species of fruit fly around the world, about a quarter of them are found on the Hawaiian Islands.

In 1826, the H.M.S. Wellington accidentally introduced mosquitoes to the island of Maui. The mosquitoes carried avian malaria. Entire populations of native birds, which had no immunity to the disease, were wiped out or driven to higher altitudes. Feral pigs exacerbated the problem by rooting around the forest undergrowth and creating breeding pools of standing water for the mosquitoes. As a result, twenty-nine of the island’s sixty-eight native bird species have vanished forever.

As David Pimentel told the scientists attending the AAAS convention after presenting his findings, ‘it doesn’t take many trouble-makers to cause tremendous damage’.

No one could have imagined that island species could turn the tables on mainland ecologies. No one had even heard of Henders Island.

Elinor Duckworth Ph.D., Foreword,

Almost Destiny (excerpted with permission)



1791




August 21


5:27 P.M.

‘Captain, Mister Grafton is attempting to put a man ashore, sir.’

‘Which man, Mister Eaton?’

Three hundred yards off the island’s sheer wall, H.M.S. Retribution rolled on a ten-foot swell setting away from the shore. The corvette was hove to, her gray sails billowing in opposite directions to hold her position on the sea as the sailing master kept an eye on a growing bank of cloud to the north.

Watching from the decks in silence, some of the men were praying as a boat approached the cliff. Lit pale orange by the setting sun, the palisade was bisected by a blue-shadowed crevasse that streaked seven hundred feet up its face.

The Retribution was a captured French ship previously called the Atrios. For the past ten months, her crew had been relentlessly hunting H.M.S. Bounty. While the British admiralty did not object to stealing ships from other navies, they had a long memory for any ship that had been stolen from theirs. It had been five years since the mutineers had absconded with the Bounty, and still the hunt continued.

Lieutenant Eaton steadied the captain’s telescope and twisted the brass drawtube to focus the image: nine men were positioning the rowboat under the crack in the cliff. Eaton noticed that the seaman reaching up toward the fissure wore a scarlet cap. ‘It looks like Frears, Captain,’ he reported.

The dark crack started about fifteen feet above the bottom of the swell and zigzagged hundreds of feet across the face of jagged rock like a bolt of lightning. The British sailors had nearly circled the two-mile-wide island before finding this one chink in its armor.

Though the captain insisted that they thoroughly investigate all islands for signs of the Bounty’s crew, a more pressing matter concerned the men of the Retribution now. After five weeks with no rain, they were praying for fresh water, not signs of mutineers. As they pretended to attend their duties, 317 men stole furtive, hopeful looks at the landing party.

The boat rose and fell in the spray as the nine men staved off the cliff with oars. At the top of one swell the man wearing the red cap grabbed the bottom edge of the fissure: he dangled there as the boat receded.

‘He’s got a purchase, Captain!’

A tentative cheer went up from the crew.

Eaton saw the men in the boat hurling small barrels up to Frears. ‘Sir, the men are throwing him some barrecoes to fill!’

‘Providence has smiled on us, Captain,’ said Mr Dunn, the ruddy chaplain, who had taken passage aboard Retribution on his way to Australia. ‘We were surely meant to find this island! Else, why would the Lord have put it here, so far away from everything?’

‘Aye, Mister Dunn. Keep a close counsel with the Lord,’ replied the captain as he slitted his eyes and watched the boat. ‘How’s our man, Mister Eaton?’

‘He’s gone in.’ After an agonizing length of time, Eaton saw the scarlet-capped man finally emerge from the shadow. ‘Frears’s signaling…He’s found fresh water, Captain! He’s throwing down the barrecoe!’

Eaton looked at the captain wearily, then smiled as a cheer broke over the decks.

The captain cracked a smile. ‘Ready four landing boats for provisioning, Mister Eaton. Let’s rig a ladder and fill our barrels.’

‘It’s Providence, Captain,’ cried the chaplain over the answering cheer of the men. ‘’Tis the good Lord who led us here!’

Eaton put the spyglass to his eye and saw Frears toss another small barrel from the fissure into the sea. The men in the longboat hauled it alongside.

‘He’s thrown down another!’ Eaton shouted.

The men cheered again. They were now moving about and laughing as barrels were hauled up from the hold.

‘The Lord keeps us.’ The chaplain nodded on the ample cushion of fat under his chin.

The captain smiled in the chaplain’s direction, knowing that he’d had the shock of his life these past months observing life aboard a working ship in the King’s navy.

With a face as freckled as the Milky Way, Captain Ambrose Spencer Henders resembled a redheaded Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar, to his crew. ‘An island this size without breakers, birds, or seals,’ he grumbled. He stared at the faint colors swirled in the island’s cliff. Some bands of color seemed to glitter as if with gold in the last light of the setting sun. After sounding all around the island they had found no place to anchor, and that fact alone baffled him. ‘What do you make of this island, Mr Eaton?’

‘Aye, it’s strange,’ Eaton said, lowering the glass–but a glimpse of Frears falling to his knees at the edge of the crevasse made him raise it hastily to his eye. Through the spyglass he found Frears kneeling in the crack and saw him drop what appeared to be the copper funnel he was using to fill the small kegs. The funnel skittered down the rock face into the water.

A red flash appeared at the sailor’s back. Red jaws seemed to lunge from the twilight and close over Frears’s chest and head from each side, jerking him backwards.

Faint shouts drifted over the waves, echoing off the cliff.

‘Captain!’

‘Eh, what is it?’

‘I’m not sure, sir!’

Eaton tried to steady the scope as the deck rolled. Between waves he saw another man in the longboat catch hold of the lip of the fissure and scramble up into the shadow of the crack.

‘They’ve sent another man up!’

Another swell blocked his view. A moment later, another rolled under the ship. As the deck rose, Eaton barely caught the image of the second man leaping out of the crevasse into the sea.

‘He’s jumped out, sir, next to the boat!’

‘What in blazes is going on, Mr Eaton?’ Captain Henders lifted a midshipman’s scope to his eye.

‘The men are hauling him into the boat. They’re coming back, sir, with some haste!’ Eaton lowered the glass, still staring at the fissure, now doubting what he had seen.

‘Is Frears safe, then?’

‘I don’t believe so, Captain,’ Eaton replied.

‘What’s the matter?’

The lieutenant shook his head.

Captain Henders watched the men in the boat row in great lunges back to the ship. The man who had jumped into the water was propped up against the transom, seemingly stricken by some fit as his mates struggled to subdue him. ‘Tell me what you saw, Mr Eaton,’ he ordered.

‘I don’t know, sir.’

The captain lowered the scope and gave his first officer a hard look.

The men in the boat shouted as they drew near the Retribution.

The captain turned to the chaplain. ‘What say you, Mr Dunn?’

From the crack in the cliff face came a rising and falling howl like a wolf or a whale, and Mr Dunn’s ruddy jowls paled as the ungodly voice devolved into what sounded like the gooing and spluttering of some giant baby. Then it shrieked a riot of piercing notes like a broken calliope.

The men stared at the cliff in stunned silence.

Mister Grafton shouted from the approaching boat: ‘Captain Henders!’

‘What is it, man?’

‘The Devil Hisself!’

The captain looked at his first officer, who was not a man given to superstition.

Eaton nodded grimly. ‘Aye, Captain.’

The voice from the crack splintered as more unearthly voices joined it in a chorus of insanity.

‘We should leave this place, Captain,’ urged Mister Dunn. ‘’Tis clear no one was meant to find it–else, why would the Lord have put it here, so far away from everything?’

Captain Henders stared distractedly at his chaplain, then said, ‘Mr Graves, hoist the boat and make sail, due east!’ Then he turned to all his officers. ‘Chart the island. But make no mention of water or what we have found here today. God forbid we give a soul any reason to seek this place.’

The hideous gibberish shrieking from the crack in the island continued.

‘Aye, Captain!’ his officers answered, ashen-faced.

As the men scrambled from the boat, the Captain asked, ‘Mr Grafton, what has become of Mr Frears?’

‘He’s been et by monsters, sor!’

Captain Henders paled under his freckles. ‘Master gunner, place a full broadside on that crevice, double shot, round and grape, if you please! As you’re ready, sir!’

The master gunner acknowledged him from the waist of the ship. ‘Aye, sir!’

Retribution fired a parting round into the crevasse on lances of fire and smoke as she came about, blasting the cliffs, which crumbled like a castle’s ramparts.

9:02 P.M.

Captain Ambrose Spencer Henders dipped a kite-feather quill into the porcelain inkwell on his desk and stared down at the blank page of his logbook. The oil lamp swung like a pendulum, moving the shadow of the quill across the paper as he paused, weighing what to write.



PRESENT DAY




August 22


2:10 P.M.

The Trident cut the deep water with her single-hulled bow and turned three wakes with her trimaran stern. She resembled a sleek spacecraft leaving three white rocket trails across a blue universe. The storm clouds that had driven her south for three weeks had vanished overnight. The sea reflected a spotless dome of scorching blue sky.

The 182-foot exploration vessel was approaching the center of 36 million square miles of empty ocean that stretched from the equator to Antarctica–a void that globes and maps usually took advantage of to stack the words ‘South Pacific Ocean.’

Chartered for the cable reality show SeaLife, the Trident comfortably quartered forty passengers. Now an ‘on-camera’ crew of ten who pretended to run the ship, fourteen professionals who really ran the ship, six scientists, and eight production staffers, along with a handsome bull terrier named Copepod, rounded out her manifest.

SeaLife was chronicling the Trident’s yearlong around-the-world odyssey, which promised to encounter the most exotic and remote places on Earth. In its first four weekly episodes the cast of fresh young scientists and hip young crew had explored the Galapagos Islands and Easter Island, launching SeaLife to number two in the cable ratings. After the last three weeks at sea, however, enduring back-to-back storms, the show was foundering.

The ship’s botanist, Nell Duckworth, glared at her reflection in the port window of the Trident’s bridge, repositioning her Mets cap. Like all the other scientists chosen for the show, Nell was in her late twenties. She had just turned twenty-nine seven days ago, and had celebrated over the chemical-and-mint-scented bowl of a marine toilet. She had lost weight, since she hadn’t been able to keep food down for the last ten days. Her motion sickness had subsided only when the last of the massive storms had passed last night, leaving a cleansed blue sea and sky this morning. So far, bad weather, sunblock, and her trusty Mets cap had protected her fair complexion from any radical new pigmentation events. But she was not checking her reflection for wrinkles, weight loss, or freckles. Instead, all she noticed was the look of despair glaring back at her from the glass.

Nell wore taupe knee-length cargo jeans, a gray T-shirt, and plenty of SPF24 sunblock slathered on her bare arms and face. Her beat-up white Adidas sneakers annoyed the producers since Adidas was not one of the show’s sponsors, but she had stubbornly refused to trade them in.

She gazed south through the window, and the crushing disappointment she was trying not to think about descended over her again. Due to weather delays and low ratings, they were bypassing the island that lay just beyond that horizon–bypassing the only reason Nell had tried out for this show in the first place.

For the past few hours, she had been trying not to remind the men on the bridge of the fact that they were closer than all but a handful of people had ever come to the place she had studied and theorized about for over nine years.

Instead of heading one day south and landing, they were heading west to Pitcairn Island, where the descendants of the Bounty’s mutineers had apparently been planning a party for them.

Nell gritted her teeth and caught her reflection scowling back at her. She turned and looked out the stern window.

She saw the mini-sub resting under a crane on the ship’s center pontoon. Underwater viewing ports were built into the port and starboard pontoons–Nell’s favorite lunch spots, where she had seen occasional blue-water fish like tuna, marlin, and sunfish drafting the ship’s wake.

The Trident boasted a state-of-the-art television production studio and satellite communication station; its own desalinization plant, which produced three thousand gallons of fresh water daily; a working oceanographic lab with research-grade microscopes and a wide spectrum of laboratory instruments; even a movie theater. But it was much ado about nothing, she thought. The show’s scientific premise had been nothing but window dressing, as the cynic in her had chided her from the start.

On the poop deck below, she watched the ship’s marine biologist, Andy Beasley, trying to teach the weather-beaten crew a lesson in sea life.

2:11 P.M.

Andrew Beasley was a gangly, narrow-shouldered scientist with a mop of blond hair and thick-framed tortoise-shell glasses. His long, birdlike face often displayed an optimistic smile.

Raised by his beloved but alcoholic Aunt Althea in New Orleans, the gentle young scientist had grown up surrounded by aquariums, for he lived over his aunt’s seafood restaurant. Any specimens that came under his study were automatically spared the kettle.

He had gone on to live out Althea’s dream of becoming a marine biologist, e-mailing her every day from the moment he left home for college to the day he accepted his first research position.

Aunt Althea had passed away three months ago. After surviving Hurricane Katrina, she had succumbed to pancreatic cancer, leaving Andy more alone than he had thought possible after feeling so terribly alone all his life.

One month after her funeral, he had received a letter inviting him to audition for SeaLife. Without telling him, Althea had sent his curriculum vitae and a photo to the show’s producers after reading an article about the casting call for marine biologists. Andy had visited his aunt’s grave to put flowers on it, flown to New York, and auditioned. As if it were Aunt Althea’s last wish being granted, he had won one of the highly contested berths aboard the Trident.

Andy usually wore bright clashing colors that gave him a slightly clownish appearance. It also made him a natural target for sarcasm. He was as blindly optimistic and as easily crushed as a puppy–a combination that drew out a maternal impulse in Nell that was surprising to her.

Andy fidgeted with the wireless mike pinned to his skinny yellow leather tie. He wore a Lacoste blue-white-orange-yellow-purple-and-green-striped shirt, which resembled Fruit Stripe gum. Paired with the vertically striped shirt, he wore Tommy Hilfiger boardshorts with horizontal blue, green, pink, red, orange, and yellow stripes. To set it all off, he wore green size-11 high-top sneakers.

Andy’s teaching props, a number of latex hand puppets of various sea creatures, lay scattered on the white deck before him. Beside him sat a panting, broad-nosed bull terrier with a miniature life vest strapped on his square chest.

Zero Monroe, the lead cameraman, changed the memory stick in his digital video camera. The previous one had blinked FULL in the middle of Andy’s lesson, something that had been planned, much to Zero’s chagrin, in order to start rattling Andy and get him primed for an eruption.

‘Are we ready yet?’ Andy asked, flustered but still trying to smile.

Zero raised the camera to his right eye and opened the other eye at Andy. ‘Yup,’ he replied. The rangy cameraman used words sparingly, especially when he was unhappy. This job was making him unhappy.

His lean physique, wide aquamarine eyes, and deadpan humor lent Zero a vaguely Buster Keaton-like quality, though he was six-two and broad at the shoulders. He wore a gray Boston Marathon T-shirt that he had earned three times over, and battered blue New Balance RXTerrain running shoes with orange laces and gel-injected soles. His faded brown Orvis cargo pants had fourteen pockets stuffed with memory sticks, lenses, lens filters, lens cleaners, mike filters, and a lot of batteries.

Zero had made his living and reputation photographing wildlife. He had mastered his trade in some of the most inhospitable environments in the world, taking assignments from the infested mangrove swamps of Panama (filming fiddler crabs) to the corrosive alkaline lakes in the Rift Valley of East Africa (filming flamingos). After the last three weeks, Zero was wondering which assignment was worse–this one, or standing in mud that ate through his wading boots while his blood was drained by swarming black flies.

‘Let’s go, Gus,’ Zero growled.

A grip clacked a plastic clapper in front of Andy’s face, startling him. ‘SeaLife, day fifty-two, camera three, stick two!’

‘And…ACTION!’ Jesse Jones shouted.

Jesse was the obligatory obnoxious member of the on-camera ‘crew.’ The real crew wore uniforms and tried to stay off-camera as much as possible. Universally hated by both his shipmates and the viewers at home, Jesse Jones was delighted to play a starring role. Reality shows needed at least one cast member everyone could loathe with full enjoyment, one who caused crisis and conflict, one whom sailors in olden days would have called a ‘Jonah’ and heaved overboard at the first opportunity.

Tanned and muscular, with heavily tattooed upper arms, Jesse wore his hair short, spiked, and bleached white. No one had taken advantage of the show’s legion of sponsors quite so much as he had. He was decked out in black thigh-low, ribs-high Bodyform wetsuit trunks, complete with a stitched-in blue codpiece, and over them a muscle Y-shirt printed with palms and flowers. On his feet were silver Nikes and on his nose rested five-hundred dollar silver-framed Matsuda sunglasses with pale turquoise lenses.

‘Where were we, Zero?’ Andy said.

‘Copepods,’ Zero prompted.

‘Oh yes.’ Andy smiled. ‘That’s right–Jesse?’

Jesse threw a rubber hand-puppet at Andy, who ducked too late. It bounced off his face.

Everyone laughed as Andy replaced his imitation tortoise-shell glasses and gave a crooked smile to the camera. He slipped his hand into the puppet and wiggled its single google-eye and two long antennae with his fingers. ‘So Copepod, here, gets his name from this microscopic sea creature.’

The banana-snouted dog barked once and resumed panting next to Andy’s leg.

‘Poor Copey!’ Dawn Kipke, the crew’s surf-punk siren, crooned. ‘Why would anyone name a dog after that ugly freaking thing?’

‘Yeah, that’s uncool, dude,’ Jesse shouted.

Andy lowered the puppet and frowned at Zero, who zoomed in on his face.

Andy’s face turned red and his eyes bulged as he threw the puppet down. ‘How can I teach anything if nobody ever LISTENS TO ME?’ he raged.

He stormed off the deck and down the hatchway.

The crew turned to Zero.

‘Hey, I’m not in charge, man,’ Zero said, walking backwards as he shot. ‘Ask the guys upstairs!’ He panned up to the bridge, where Nell stood looking down at them. She made hand-antlers at them in the window and stuck out her tongue.

2:14 P.M.

‘Looks like mutiny, Captain. I think we’re going to have to land at the first opportunity.’

Captain Sol gave Nell a sly look over his shoulder. A trim white beard framed his tanned face and sea-blue eyes. ‘Nice try, Nell.’

‘I’m serious!’

Glyn Fields, the show’s biologist, stepped next to Nell to look through the window. ‘She’s right, Captain. I really think the crew’s getting ready to storm the Bastille.’

Nell had met Glyn during her second year as an assistant professor teaching first-year botany at NYU. Glyn was teaching first-year biology, and his looks had caused quite a stir among the faculty when he arrived. It was Glyn who had persuaded her to try out for SeaLife.

Tall, pale, thin, and very British, Glyn had sharp, handsome features, nearly black eyes, and his mother’s thick Welsh crown of black hair. The biologist was a tad too vain for Nell’s taste, but she may have felt that way simply because he never seemed to notice her (like that, anyway). He wore the stereotypical clothing of an English academic: Oxford shirts, corduroys, plain leather shoes, and even blue blazers on occasion. He now wore a blue Oxford shirt, khaki slacks, and topsiders without socks–about as casual as he was capable of dressing, even in the tropics. Nell suspected the Englishman would never be caught dead wearing shorts, a T-shirt, or, heaven forbid, sneakers.

She remembered how she had protested to Glyn a year ago that SeaLife would create a yearlong detour in her studies. When Glyn had mentioned that the expedition might come across the obscure little island she was always talking about, Nell knew instantly she might never get this chance again. Surprising herself, she tried out for the show and was actually chosen, along with Glyn.

Now, as he saw Nell’s hopes dashed, Glyn obviously felt a twinge of guilt. ‘Maybe a quick landing would be good for morale, Captain.’

Second Mate Samir El-Ashwah entered through the starboard hatchway, dressed in the full Love Boat-style white uniform inflicted on the Trident’s professional staff. A wiry man of Egyptian extraction, Samir’s Australian accent surprised at first. ‘Holy Dooley, the Turbosails are in the groove, eh, Captain? What are we making, just outta curiosity?’

‘Fourteen knots, Sam,’ Captain Sol said.

‘That’s getting it done, I reckon!’

‘I’d say.’ Captain Sol laughed, scratching the coral atoll of white hair around his bald head.

Nell peered up toward the skylight at the ninety-three foot Turbosail, one of two that towered over the bridge like cruise-ship’s smokestacks grafted onto the research vessel. The massive cylindrical shaft passed through the center of the bridge, housed inside a wide column that was smothered in notices and photos. Nell heard motors whirring inside the column as the sail turned above.

Turbosails were pioneered by Jacques Cousteau in the eighties for scientific exploration vessels, including his own Calypso II. Ideal for long-range research vessels, the tubular sail used small fans to draw air inside a vertical seam, as wind passing around it produced a much higher leeward surface speed than any traditional sail. Now that the storm had passed, the crew had raised both of the Trident’s Turbosails and rotated the seams to catch the nor’easter.

The ship cruised due west at a nice clip, ten degrees south of the Tropic of Capricorn.

‘Captain Sol, we’ll never get this close again!’ Nell said.

‘The storm did blow us pretty far south,’ Glyn said. ‘And while as a biologist, I have to say Nell’s little island is pretty intriguing, the thought of solid ground is even more appealing right now, Captain. It sure would feel good to stretch our legs.’

‘Why can’t we go?’ Nell whined.

Sol Meyers frowned. He looked like Santa Claus on vacation in his extra-large orange T-shirt with a white SeaLife logo silk-screened on the breast pocket.

‘I’m sorry, Nell. We have two days to make up if we’re going to make Pitcairn in time for the celebration they’re planning for us. We just can’t do it.’

‘A scientific expedition to explore the most remote places on Earth!’ Nell quoted the show’s opening tagline with naked scorn.

‘More like a floating soap opera that ran out of bubbles,’ Glyn muttered.

‘I’m sorry, Nelly,’ Captain Sol repeated. ‘But this is Cynthea’s charter. She’s the producer. I have to go where she wants, barring some emergency.’

‘I think Cynthea’s trying to pair us off now,’ Glyn mused. ‘Apparently the entire crew has already boffed each other.’

Nell laughed and squeezed Glyn’s shoulder.

The biologist flinched and rubbed his triceps as if she had bruised him. ‘You’re the most touchy-feely woman I’ve ever met, Nell,’ he snipped, fussing with his shirt where she had touched him.

Nell realized they were all getting irritable. ‘Sorry, Glyn. Maybe I’m part Bonobo chimp–they use physical contact to give members of their group a sense of security.’

‘Well, we British have the opposite reaction.’ Glyn pouted.

‘Hey, I don’t mind, Nell,’ said Carl Warburton. The ship’s first mate had a TV actor’s tanned handsomeness, black wavy hair frosted gray at the temples, and a late-night deejay’s voice to go along with his droll sense of humor–all of which made him irresistible. ‘Consider me a Bonobo,’ Warburton said, and he scratched his ribs and stuck out his tongue at Nell charmingly.

Captain Sol glanced up at the bridge camera mounted over the forward window. Cynthea Leeds, the show’s producer, watched everyone through cameras like this one, which were positioned throughout the ship. Each week’s show was cut from footage collected by these cameras, as well as what was captured by the ship’s three roving cameramen.

Captain Sol hid his lips with his hand and whispered, ‘I think Cynthea’s trying to set me up with ship’s surgeon Jennings.’

‘She’s trying to set me up with ship’s surgeon Jennings,’ Warburton said.

Nell did her best Cynthea impression: ‘Drama!’

A loud tone blared suddenly on the bridge, and everyone jumped.

‘Captain,’ Samir said. He checked the instrumentation. ‘We’re picking up an EPIRB, sir!’

‘Christ, I thought it was Cynthea,’ Captain Sol sighed.

‘An EPIRB?’ Warburton asked. ‘Out here?’

‘Double-check it, Sam,’ Captain Sol instructed.

‘What’s an EPIRB?’ Nell asked.

‘An Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon.’ Warburton was moving quickly to Samir’s side.

‘Got a position?’ Captain Sol asked.

‘We should after the next satellite sweep…’ said Samir.

‘Here it comes.’ Warburton glanced over his shoulder at Nell.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘You’ll never believe it.’

Samir turned to her. Surprise lit his round face and a smile revealed his beautiful teeth. ‘According to these coordinates, it’s coming from your island, mate.’

Nell felt her heart pound as they confirmed the signal.

‘Hold on–wait–we’re losing it,’ Warburton warned.

Captain Sol stepped around Samir and squinted at the navigation screen. ‘That’s strange…’

Warburton nodded.

Nell moved a little closer. ‘What’s strange?’

‘You don’t fire off an EPIRB unless you mean business,’ the captain answered. ‘And if you do, the lithium battery should last forty-eight hours, minimum. This signal’s fading.’

‘There it goes,’ Samir reported as the next data update wiped it off the screen.

‘Sam, you better hail the nearest LUT station. And check the beacon’s NOAA registration, Carl.’

Warburton was already scanning the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration database. ‘The beacon’s registered. Oh man…it’s a thirty-foot sailboat!’

‘What the hell is it doing out here?’ Captain Sol scowled.

Warburton scanned the information on file. ‘The vessel’s name is Balboa Bilbo. The owner’s name is Thad Pinkowski of Long Beach, California. OK, this is interesting: the registration on the beacon expired three years ago.’

‘Ha!’ Captain Sol grunted. ‘It’s a derelict.’

‘Maybe the NOAA records are out of date?’ Glyn suggested.

‘Not likely.’

Samir held the Satphone to his ear. ‘LUT reports that we’re the nearest vessel, Captain. Since it’s too far from an airstrip to get a search plane out here, they’re asking us to respond, if able.’

‘How soon can we reach it, Carl?’

‘Around fourteen hundred hours, tomorrow.’

‘Bring her about, due south. Sam, let the LUT station know we’re responding.’

‘Aye, sir!’

‘And try hailing her on VHF.’

‘On it!’

Captain Sol pushed a button and spoke into the ship’s intercom. ‘All hands, as you can see, we are now making a course adjustment. We will be landing sooner than planned, tomorrow afternoon, on an unexplored island. There will be a more detailed announcement at dinner. As you were!’

Faint cheers rose from the deck outside.

Captain Sol turned to Glyn. ‘Mutiny averted. That should hold them for a while. Well, Nell. It looks like the wind keeps blowing your way.’

The southern horizon swung into view in the wide windows as the Trident came about. Captain Sol pointed to the left edge of the navigation monitor, where a small white circle rose on an arc toward the top of the screen.

Warburton smiled. ‘There it is, Nell.’

Nell ran to see the plotting monitor as the men stepped to each side.

‘If you want to find an untouched ecosystem, you certainly came to the right place,’ Glyn conceded.

‘It must be twelve hundred miles from the nearest speck of land, I reckon,’ Samir said.

‘Fourteen hundred.’ Nell’s heart pounded so loudly she feared the others could hear it. ‘Every plant pollinated by insects on this island should be a new species,’ she explained.

Glyn nodded. ‘If your theory holds up.’

The motors revved as the Turbosail rotated over the bridge.

As Nell’s eyes brimmed, the others wondered whether she was looking for more than a new flower on Henders Island.

They all cringed as a voice blasted from a speaker by the camera over the forward window: ‘Tell me this is not a joke, please!’

‘This is not a joke, Cynthea,’ Captain Sol answered.

‘You mean we actually got a distress signal?’

‘Yes.’

‘Captain Sol, you’re my hero! How bad is it?’

Captain Sol looked wearily at Warburton. ‘It’s probably just a derelict sailboat. But the beacon was activated, so we have to check it out.’

‘God, that’s gold! Nell–tell me you’re excited!’

Nell looked up at the speaker over the window, surprised. ‘Yes, it’ll be nice to do a little actual scientific research.’

‘Tell me more about the island, Glyn!’ screeched the electronic voice.

‘Well, according to Nell, it was discovered by a British sea captain in 1791. He landed but couldn’t find a way to the island’s interior. There’s no other record of anyone landing, and there are only three recorded sightings of it in the last 220—’

The starboard hatch slammed open and Cynthea Leeds power-walked onto the bridge wearing a fitted black Newport jumpsuit with white racing stripes.

Everyone froze.

‘I like that. I like that a lot,’ Cynthea announced. ‘Peach, did you get that? Great! Gentlemen–and lady–congratulations!’

Cynthea smiled wide, flashing her expensive teeth as she tossed back her bangs in girlish joy. A thin black wireless headset arched over her black hair, which was cut in a razor-sharp pageboy.

Cynthea was a dauntingly well-preserved woman, sexy at fifty. Her mother had insisted on strict ballet training from the age of five–the only thing she considered a kindness on her mother’s part. At five feet eleven inches without heels she still had the posture of a ballerina, though her imposing stature was better suited to the high-testosterone arena she had chosen to enter than to ballet.

Like a hermit crab out of its shell, Cynthea looked laughably out of place at sea, or even outside a city. But she couldn’t help noticing lately that she was being herded out to pasture in the youth-centric jungle she inhabited.

Cynthea had produced two number-one reality shows for MTV. But the cutthroat environment she lived in would not tolerate a single misstep. After her last network reality show, the misbegotten Butcher Shop, had cratered, her only offer was the job every other producer in town had passed on: a round-the-world sea voyage with none of the comforts of home.

Sensing that she had to adapt or go extinct, and in the midst of an acute panic attack, she told her manager to take the offer.

She knew she had won the SeaLife gig because of her talent for spicing up a show’s content, which the show’s producers were painfully aware could be a problem if the science stuff got dull. Over the last three weeks, however, her efforts to get seasick scientists to mate had been a gruesome debacle.

If this show was killed, she was convinced it would be the end of her career. No husband, no kids, and no career: all of her mother’s prophecies checked off. Which would be much easier to bear if Cynthea’s mother were dead, but she wasn’t–not by a long shot.

Cynthea pressed her hands together in a gesture of thanks to the powers-that-be. ‘This could not have come at a better time, people! I think we would have killed and eaten each other before we ever got to Pitcairn. Tell me more about this island, Glyn!’

‘Well, it’s never actually been explored, is the neat thing. According to Nell—’

‘When can we land?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon,’ Glyn answered. ‘If we can find a place to put ashore. And if the captain grants permission to go ashore, of course…’

‘You mean we can shoot our landing on an unexplored island for the anything-can-happen segment of tomorrow’s broadcast at five-fifty? Glyn, you will be my superhero if you say yes!’

‘It’s possible, I should think, providing the captain agrees.’ The Englishman shrugged. ‘Yes—’

‘Glyn, Glyn, Glyn!’ Cynthea actually jumped for joy. ‘What was it you were saying about a British sea captain?’

‘The island was discovered in 1791 by Captain Ambrose Spencer Henders…’

Nell was amused to see Glyn’s vanity flattered by Cynthea’s spotlight.

Glyn looked at Nell. ‘However, Nell is the one who—’

‘That’s just gold, Glyn! Do me a favor and make the announcement to the crew?’ Cynthea interrupted. ‘At sunset–right after dinner–and really build it up? Oh, pretty, pretty please?’

Glyn looked apologetically at Nell. She nodded, relieved to have him do the honors. ‘Well, all right.’

‘You know Dawn? The tan, leggy brunette with the tattoo?’ Cynthea gestured in the vicinity of her tailbone. ‘Yes? She was just remarking to me how she thought British scientists were the sexiest men alive.’ Cynthea leaned forward and crooned in Glyn’s ear: ‘I think she was talking about YOU!’

Glyn’s eyes widened as Cynthea turned to Captain Sol. ‘Captain Sol, can we land?’ She jumped up and down like a little girl pleading with her grandfather. ‘Can we, can we, can we?’

‘Yes, we can land, Cynthea. After we check out the beacon.’

‘Thank you, Captain Sol! You know ship’s surgeon Jennings is just crazy about you?’

Warburton shook his head.

‘Now if we could only find someone for Nell,’ the producer persisted. ‘What about it, sweetie? What is your type, anyway?’

Nell saw Glyn looking out the window at Dawn, who was performing yoga stretches on the mezzanine deck below. Hard-bodied and sporting buzzed black hair, Dawn wore a midriff-baring mustard mini-T over her imposingly toned core. A purple and yellow sun tattoo peeked over the rear of her black bikini bottoms. ‘I don’t have a “type,” Cynthea,’ she said. ‘And I wouldn’t want to be anyone’s “type,” either.’

‘Always the loner, eh, Nell?’ Cynthea said. ‘You have to know what you’re looking for to find him, darling.’

Nell looked Cynthea in the eyes. ‘I’ll know him when I see him.’

‘Well, maybe you’ll find a new rosebud or something to name tomorrow, eh? Give us some drama, if you do, Nell! Pretty please?’

Cynthea turned and loped out the hatch.

Nell looked back down at the plotting monitor, watching the island as it moved down in tiny steps from the top of the screen. As the sight overwhelmed her, she almost forgot to breathe.

Captain Sol looked at Nell with fatherly affection. He placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’d say it was destiny, Nell, if I believed in that sort of thing.’

She looked at him with bright eyes and impulsively squeezed his big, tanned hand.

‘Still no response on the emergency frequencies, Captain,’ Warburton said.

Nell traced a fingertip from their position over the blue plasma screen to the white circle above tiny white letters:

Henders Is.

7:05 P.M.

Huddled inside the cramped, equipment-filled brain center of SeaLife, tucked within the Trident’s starboard pontoon, Cynthea watched three camera feeds of Captain Sol and Glyn making the announcement to the crew after dinner.

‘Peach’ McCloud sat by Cynthea, manning the editing/uplinking bay. Whatever original audiovisual equipment Peach was born with was buried under his hair and beard and replaced with man-made microphones, headphones, and VR goggles.

Cynthea had worked with Peach on live MTV shows in Fort Lauderdale and on the island of Santorini. Her one stipulation when she accepted the job as SeaLife’s producer had been that Peach come along as her engineer. Without Peach, the job would have been unthinkable.

Peach had agreed. He always agreed. Anywhere was his living room if he had a wireless connection. It really didn’t matter to Peach if he was on a boat weathering fifty-foot swells or in his Soho apartment. So long as his digital habitat came with him, Peach was happy.

Cynthea spoke urgently through her headset, on a conference call to the SeaLife producers in New York. Peach equalized sound levels and switched shots according to the jabbing eraser-end of her pencil as she talked.

‘We need the segue, Jack. We’re getting it right now and can zap it to you in ten minutes. We’re landing on an unexplored island in the Anything-Can-Happen feed tomorrow, Fred–come on, that’s the hook! And it’s a rescue mission–we’re responding to a distress signal!’

Cynthea gestured at Peach for confirmation, and Peach flashed ten fingers twice.

‘Peach can send it in fifteen minutes,’ Cynthea lied. ‘Give us the satellite feed, Fred. Yes, Jack, as you’ve mentioned several times already, there’s no sex. The whole crew screwed each other in the first four weeks. All I’ve got to work with now are scientists, Jack, so come on–cut me some slack! How could I know the crew smuggled Ecstasy on board? Anyway, that’s a done deal, Fred, and we’re lucky we kept it off the Drudge Report, OK? Are you kidding me? You must be kidding me now. Then Barry should do a show with scientists and try to have sex in it. I fucking dare him to do it, that flaming asshole, especially while they’re puking on each other! If there were any Ecstasy left I would have slipped it into their green tea by now, Jack! I’m suggesting that we go back to the original angle, the science thing. Right, adventure, Fred, EXACTLY! Thank you! And what comes from adventure but romance, Jack–I swear, if this isn’t the play that saves this show, you can broadcast my execution. Didn’t have to think about that too long, eh, Fred? Well, boys, I’m glad to know the way to your heart. Don’t worry–tomorrow we’re making television history sweetie!’

Cynthea squeezed Peach’s shoulder painfully. ‘We got it!’

Peach grinned and nodded, dialing in sound levels as Captain Sol addressed the crew. ‘This is good stuff, boss.’

7:05 P.M.

Shooting from port to starboard across the mezzanine deck, Zero framed a pointillist sunset of orange, lavender, and vermilion cirrus clouds.

Candlelit dining tables set for dinner dotted the foredeck as the Trident cruised due south. A warm wind played over the tables. The scientists and crew were finishing their dinner of orange roughy, rice pilaf, and green beans almondine. All three cameramen circled the tables as the crew buzzed with curiosity about the upcoming announcement.

Captain Sol finally clanged a glass and, with the South Pacific sunset at their backs, he and Glyn addressed the crew.

‘As I’m sure you’ve all noticed, we are now heading south,’ the captain began, and he pointed his right arm dramatically over the prow.

Cynthea directed Peach to cut to the bridge-mounted camera that showed the Trident heading toward the southern horizon, then to another that showed the prow slicing through the sea, then back to the captain.

‘A few hours ago we picked up an emergency beacon from a sailboat in distress.’

The crew chattered excitedly.

‘We know that the vessel’s owner was rescued by the United States Coast Guard off Kaua’i during a storm five years ago. So either this boat has been adrift for five years, or it came aground on the island south of us even before then, or someone else is on board it now. We tried hailing the vessel on emergency frequencies but got no response. Since search-and-rescue aircraft don’t carry enough fuel to reach this location from the nearest airfield, we have been asked to respond.’

A chorus of ‘Wow’s rose from the tables.

Glyn cleared his throat. The biologist was visibly nervous now that the cameras and lights turned to him. ‘The good news,’ the Englishman announced, ‘is that the signal seems to have come from one of the world’s last unexplored islands.’

After twenty-one miserable days at sea, the distress signal itself was cause for celebration. But the opportunity to land on an unexplored island inspired thunderous applause from all.

‘The island is only about two miles wide,’ Glyn said, encouraged. He read from cue cards Nell had prepared for him. ‘Since it is located below the fortieth parallel, a treacherous zone mariners call the “Roaring Forties,” shipping lanes have bypassed it for the last two centuries. We are now headed for what could well be the most geographically remote piece of land on the Planet Earth. This empty patch of ocean is the size of the continental United States, and what we know about it is about equivalent to what can be seen of the United States from its interstate highway system. That’s how sparsely traversed this part of the world remains to this day. And the seafloor here is less mapped than the surface of Mars!’

Glyn got an appreciative murmur out of the crowd and he charged on.

‘There are only a few reports of anyone sighting this island, and only one report of anyone actually landing on it, recorded in 1791 by Ambrose Spencer Henders, Captain of the H.M.S. Retribution.’

Glyn unfolded a transcript of Captain Henders’s log entry. This had been the remarkable glimpse into the unknown that fired Nell’s undergraduate imagination nine years earlier. Without stumbling too badly over the archaicisms and nautical abbreviations, he read:

‘Wind at WSW at 5 oClock in the AM, with which we hauld due West, and at 7 oClock spotted an Isle 2 miles wide that we could not find on the Chart, which lies at Latitude 46° S., Long 135° W. There is no bottom to catch anchor around this island. We rainged along its shore in search of a suitable landing but high cliffs gird the island completely. Our hopes frustrated and not wanting to spend more time than we had, I had every body to stations to put about, when at half past 4 oClock in the PM a man spotted a Fissure from which water streams down the cliff, staining it dark. Mr Grafton believed it could be reached by Longboat, and so I emmidiately put down one boat, and the men took some Barrecoes to fill.

‘We collected Three Barrecoes of freshwater from a trickling waterfall inside the Fissure. However, we lost one man dear to us in the effort, Stephen Frears–a true man, and strong made, whom we shall all terribly miss, and judged the risk of another man too great.

‘Upon the urgings of our Chaplain, and having determined that the island was neither habitable nor accessible by the blackhearts of HMS Bounty, we departed with haste and heavy hearts, our heading due West to Wellington, where we all are looking forward to a friendly harbour.

–Captain Ambrose Spencer Henders,

21st August, 1791’

Glyn folded the worn printout Nell had given him. ‘That’s it–the only reported landing. If we can find a way inland, we will be the first to explore Captain Henders’s forgotten isle.’ Glyn nodded and smiled at Nell.

There was a rowdy round of applause, and Copepod barked.

‘So the storms served a good purpose, after all,’ Captain Sol told them. ‘Poseidon has put us on a course to help a fellow mariner in distress. And we’ll have a chance to visit one of the final frontiers on Earth, where no man has gone before!’ Captain Sol raised his fist skyward, a ham at heart.

7:07 P.M.

‘God bless Captain Sol,’ Cynthea muttered in the control room, jabbing her pencil eraser at different screens as everyone cheered and toasted. ‘We’ll have to lay in some music behind Glyn’s speech and edit it way down.’

‘Yeah, that nearly killed us,’ Peach agreed.

‘Find some sea shanty thing, like something from Jaws when Robert Shaw is talking about sharks and battleships. Lay it in behind that speech and it’ll be a thing of beauty. Then can it and zap it, Peach. Get it to those bastards in L.A. before the assholes in New York can say no.’ Cynthea spoke through her headset to her camera crew. ‘OK, boys, we’re done. Eat some dinner. Nice work, darlings!’

7:08 P.M.

Spirits soared following the announcement, and when the annoying lights and cameras finally shut down everyone cheered again, sarcastically.

Nell glanced over at the next table.

Still puffed up from his starring debut, Glyn had seated himself across from Dawn. He seemed terribly interested in what she was saying.

Nell stifled a giggle at the almost inconceivable coupling. Dawn looked like she would eat Glyn alive.

Zero sat down across from Nell at her table and commandeered an unclaimed plate of food. Gouging a bite out of a filet of orange roughy, the lead cameraman looked at her. ‘So what made a gal like you want to be a botanist?’ He broke off a chunk of fish and fed it to Copepod.

Nell sipped her ice water as she mulled over his question. ‘Well, when my mom was killed by a jellyfish in Indonesia, I decided to study plants.’

Zero lifted a forkful of fish to his mouth, surprised. ‘For real?’

‘Of course, for real!’ said Andy, who was sitting next to Nell protectively, as always, though it was usually she who protected him.

Nell had persuaded Andy to leave his cabin after his earlier tantrum, and he had changed into a more subdued blue plaid flannel shirt open over a yellow T-shirt with a smiley face on the chest. The vintage shirt said, ‘Have a Nice Day!’ with no ironic bullethole in its head or anything out of the ordinary–just a smiley face waiting for the world to deface it.

Nell squeezed Andy’s wrist and patted Zero’s hand, instantly charming both men with her brief touch.

‘My mother was an oceanographer,’ she explained to Zero. ‘She died when I was a kid. I never saw her much, except on television. She was abroad most of the time, making nature documentaries in places that were way too dangerous for children.’

‘You’re not the daughter of Janet Planet, are you?’

‘Um, yeah.’

‘“Doctor Janet explores the wild planet!”’ he said, mimicking the show’s intro perfectly. ‘Right?’ A wide grin spread on the cameraman’s face as he remembered the early color TV series, to which he had been addicted as a boy.

Nell nodded. ‘Yeah. You remember the show?’

‘Hell yeah! It brought full-color underwater photography to TV for the first time! It’s pretty legendary among my kind. So, why isn’t your name Nell Planet?’

Nell laughed. ‘Our last name didn’t play well on television.’

‘So you’re following in your mom’s footsteps.’

‘Except that I chose botany,’ Nell protested, parrying with her fork. ‘Plants never eat people.’

‘Right on.’ Zero snagged a glass of iced tea from the tray of a passing server and raised a toast to her. ‘Conquer your fears, right?’

Nell toasted him with her water and frowned at the dark horizon. ‘Something like that.’




August 23


6:29 A.M.

She sat in the blue glow of the TV screen, holding a strange flower in her hand.

An image of her mother coalesced on the swollen fish-eye lens of the television, dressed in khaki and a pith helmet–Saturday morning cartoon clichés in degraded 1970s color stock, a sick subconscious rerun remarkable for its budgetless detail.

Behind her mother swayed a cartoon jungle of leaves, thorns, fur, eyes, pulsing, breathing, all of them melting together in a running liquid of anatomy. The jungle congealed into a giant face, and the face seemed like it had always been there. Her mother kept waving while the mouth in the jungle face opened behind her like a midnight sky. Just as it always did.

Nell screamed, soundlessly–the whole dream was profoundly silent, except for the clicking sound of her nails on the glass. Her mother always reached out to her, but she could never touch her through the screen. Suddenly, Nell knew she could break it…

Nell swung the flower in her hand at the screen like an ax, and the Monster howled in rage as its voice shrank into the clock radio alarm, beeping beside her.

Nell jerked awake and bashed the beeper off, irritated at its complicity.

She rose on an elbow and squinted at the dim rays streaming through the portholes of her cabin. Her neck and chest felt cool with sweat.

So, she thought, recalling the dream, she’d had a visit from the Monster.

Nell hadn’t had this dream for many years. Yet it still crushed her under the same debilitating fear she had felt when she was ten and dreamed it nightly.

Today, on Henders Island, she would find a new flower–and she would name it after her mom. And she would finally lay her to rest, in a private ceremony so appropriately far from home.

And with that flower she would finally slay the Monster, too–by giving it a new, and beautiful, face.

12:01 P.M.

A sliver of shimmering light appeared on the horizon, and then the guano-crowned cliff began to rise from the ocean like a snow-capped ridge.

Nell and the others gathered on the mezzanine deck to watch the island as it was raised.

‘What a wall!’ exclaimed Dante De Santos. The muscular twenty-three-year-old cook’s assistant had Maori-style tattoos on his tanned arms, and jet-black hair combed back from a pugnacious face and tiger-opal eyes.

Nell remembered that he was an amateur rock climber who had been itching to pull out his gear and give it some use.

‘I could make that ascent, no problem, if we can’t find a way to land, man!’ he bragged. ‘Remember to tell the captain for me if we can’t get ashore, OK, Nell?’

She smiled. ‘OK, Dante.’

Nell watched the wide wall of Henders Island rise more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty from the horizon. It seemed so lonely out here in the middle of nowhere. She was reminded, with a pang of uneasiness, how very far away they were from everything.

5:48 P.M.

Revving boat engines echoed off the rock face of a cove as four Zodiacs raced toward a crescent beach.

Two 150-horsepower Evinrude outboards powered the large Zodiac that took the lead with Jesse at the rudder. Jesse’s passengers feared for their lives: Nell and Glyn clung to the edge rail as the inflatable jumped the breakers, its dual engines whining as they launched from each crest.

The cliff around the cove rose seven hundred feet straight up, swirled with faded bands of color like pigments in an overturned bucket of paint. Centered in the cliff, a dark crack had spewed broken rock over the beach down to the water. Judging from the fresh red and green color of the rubble, the crevasse had opened fairly recently.

Washed aground on this outpouring of jagged rock, the hull of a thirty-foot sailboat lay on her side like a swollen whale carcass.

‘That crack looks new,’ Glyn shouted.

Nell nodded, grinning. ‘It may give us a way inland.’

The Trident rolled on swells in the cove, anchored to one of the few submarine ledges their sonar had picked up around the island. They had nearly circumnavigated the entire island before locating this inlet, which they could have found in a few minutes had they circled in the other direction.

Now they had no time for setup. They had to dive into the boats and go live.

Peach got the camera feeds up as he counted down to the satellite uplink in the control room.

The three cameramen marked Peach’s countdown in their headsets aboard the speeding rafts. They carried waterproof videocams and backpack transmitters with a thousand-meter range.

Cynthea looked from the stern of the Trident and fired off orders to her camera crew. ‘OK, this goddamn island has a beach after all, and we’re in at 5:49, Fred! We’re going hot right now! Peach, tell me you’re on top of the uplink!’

‘TWO–ONE–ZERO. I’m there, we’re live,’ Peach said, cuing Zero’s feed first.

Cynthea ran down a passageway belowdeck, toward the control room in the starboard pontoon. ‘Glyn! Glyn? Can you hear me, Glyn?’

5:49 P.M.

Glyn wore a wireless earmuff transmitter on his right ear and carried the SeaLife flag at the prow of the Zodiac. The British biologist sported an orange SeaLife T-shirt, shorts, and Nikes, the last thing Nell thought she’d ever see on him. ‘Yes, Cynthea,’ Glyn said. ‘I hear you!’

Nell could hear Cynthea shouting through Glyn’s earphone: ‘Plant the flag on the beach!’

Nell grinned with excitement as she gripped the edge rail of the speeding boat and scanned the beach. The adrenaline pumping through her veins made her want to leap out of the boat and fly to the shore.

5:50 P.M.

Cynthea crashed through the door into the control room, where three camera shots zoomed toward the shore in the bank of monitors above Peach’s head.

The small Zodiac landed first. Zero and Copepod jumped out into the surf. Copepod barked excitedly and darted up the beach. Zero sidestepped out of the water to cover the other Zodiacs landing.

The rest of the crew watched intently from the decks of the Trident.

Andy ran to the ship’s rail in striped pajamas. ‘I can’t believe they didn’t WAKE ME UP!’ he yelled. ‘They give me the night watch and then they don’t wake me up? God damn it, I’m tired of getting SCREWED all the time!’

Andy turned to see a camera recording the moment and noticed some of the uniformed crew laughing nearby. ‘Screw you!’ he screamed.

Cynthea cut back to Glyn planting the SeaLife flag in the sand.

‘I claim this island for SeaLife!’ Glyn cried.

Fans cheered in their living rooms and dorm rooms across the globe; Glyn had just become an instant star.

The network chiefs smiled, and for the first time in a month leaned back in relief as they watched their screens.

Millions went ‘Ooo!’ as Cynthea caught Dawn flashing a look at Glyn and Nell squinting at Dawn.

Cynthea winked at Peach.

He nodded. ‘Drama.’

5:51 P.M.

‘Right! Let’s have a look at the boat!’ Glyn said.

The landing party scrambled over the avalanche of rock.

Zero and the other cameramen were shooting through Voyager Lite wireless television cameras with transmission backpacks feeding signals to the Trident. Peach switched the shots and beamed the signal to satellites that bounced it to relay stations that fed hundreds of cable networks and millions of television screens downstream.

They neared the boat’s battered hull that was encrusted with a thick layer of barnacles. As they drew closer they saw its name painted on the transom in faded green letters:



Balboa Bilbo



‘That’s our girl!’ Jesse shouted, banging his hand on the stern.

They circled the boat and saw the upper deck, which was tilted toward them at a thirty-degree angle. The boat had been de-masted and her rig wrenched overboard. She had obviously been at sea a long time before coming aground.

‘OK, let’s check it out,’ Glyn said, doing a little impromptu narrating and looking at Zero, who waved him off.

Jesse climbed onto the deck.

Glyn climbed aboard behind Jesse, and Zero followed.

Jesse crawled into the cabin. The glass was missing from its hatches and windows. Much of the cabin’s interior seemed to have been stripped: cabinet doors were gone, hinges and all; the glass from the windows seemed to have been pried out. Jesse spotted the beacon in the pilot’s seat and picked it up.

‘Yep, here’s the EPIRB all right. It’s still in the “on” position.’

He aimed the antenna of the cylindrical yellow device at Glyn like a gun, laughing.

‘What does that mean?’ Glyn said, looking at the camera. Zero quickly cut him out of the shot.

Jesse looked around the wreckage-strewn cabin. ‘Well, something had to turn this EPIRB on, Professor.’

Copepod barked frantically in the distance.

‘Maybe a bird flew through the window and pecked on it or something.’ Glyn pointed out the window. ‘The glass is missing, see?’

Jesse looked right at the camera and shook his head. ‘It’d take three birds working as a team to turn on an EPIRB, dude.’ He made the cuckoo sign against his head.

‘Oh.’ Glyn nodded. ‘Right!’

Nell stood on the rocks above the prone body of the sailboat.

Holding the bill of her baseball cap, she searched the base of the cliff. A purple patch of vegetation caught her eye some distance to the left of the crevasse. Everything else around her seemed to disappear as she focused on the vividly colored growth.

‘Hey, where’s Copepod?’ Dawn shouted.

The cameramen panned. The frantic barking had stopped abruptly. The bull terrier was nowhere to be seen.

Nell jumped across the rocks until she reached the coarse reddish sand of the beach. She jogged up toward the cliff. The afternoon sun lit up the wall of rock and the bright purple plants at its base. Nell saw flecks of gold in the sand. Fool’s gold, she thought–there must be a lot of iron sulfide in the cliffs.

She was relieved that no cameraman had followed her. The commotion of the landing party receded behind her as adrenaline quickened her steps.

Nell dug her knees into the sand before the patch of purple spears at the base of the cliff, catching her breath.

The stalks looked like a jade plant’s, she thought, except the straight shafts had no branches like jade plants, and the color was a vivid lavender. She noticed that the core of each stalk was purplish-blue, while its artichoke-like leaves were tinged green at their fuzzy points. They resembled fat asparagus spears, but she couldn’t identify the family they belonged to–let alone their genus or species, as there was no recognizable growth pattern.

She tried to calm her heartbeat as she rifled through the botanical taxonomy in her mind, telling herself that she must be overexcited and overlooking something obvious.

She reached out to the largest of the specimens and pulled a spiked leaf from the plant. It ripped like old felt and melted into juice that stung her fingertips.

She flicked her fingers, startled, and wiped away the blue juice on her white shirt. Opening her Evian bottle she splashed water over her left hand and shirt.

To her astonishment, the plant reacted like an air fern to her touch, folding all its leaflike appendages against its stalk. Then it retracted underground, an action that required internal muscles–mechanisms that plants did not have.

Surprised, she was about to call the others when she saw what looked like a trail of white ants moving along the base of the cliff.

She leaned forward and watched the large, evenly spaced creatures hurl down a groove in the sand, toward a crab carcass. They moved faster than any bug she had ever seen.

5:52 P.M.

‘Copey must have gone up into the canyon,’ Jesse yelled.

‘Copey!’ Dawn called.

‘Maybe that’s where the survivors went,’ Glyn suggested. ‘I mean, if there are any.’

‘Someone stripped this vessel, dude,’ Jesse shouted, shaking his head and banging his fist against the hull. ‘And somebody turned that beacon on.’

Cynthea seized the moment, switching to Glyn’s channel. ‘Go, Glyn, go! We have seven minutes left on the satellite feed!’

‘Let’s go!’ Glyn said.

Cynthea tapped camera two’s screen with her pencil.

‘Yeah!’ Jesse howled, and he raised his fist to lead the charge.

The three cameramen covered the four scientists and five crew members as they climbed the natural ramp of broken rock up into the crevasse.

5:53 P.M.

Nell picked up a sun-bleached Budweiser can that had somehow made it to the shore, and she used it to block the path of the speeding bugs.

One of the creatures fell on its side.

An inch-wide waxy white disk lay motionless on the sand.

She threw the Bud can aside and looked closer. Centipede-like legs emerged from the edge of the white disk. The legs flailed and the bug spun like a Frisbee over the sand in an evasive maneuver.

More of the white bugs arrived, massing in front of her. They were rolling on their edges, like unicycle motocrossers, down the groove. Within seconds, dozens had gathered. Suddenly, they tilted in different directions–preparing to attack?

Astonished, Nell stood up and took a few quick steps back. Such animals could not exist, she thought.

She looked around for the others in the landing party; they were gone.

She ran toward the crevasse, yelling, ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’

5:54 P.M.

From the control room Cynthea watched the search party as they entered the canyon, whose curving walls were obscured by mists above. The late-afternoon sun etched beams and shadows through the heights of the crack as water streamed and dripped over them.

Struggling over large boulders and climbing natural stairways of smaller rocks, Glyn boosted Dawn over a ledge, admiring the tattoo peeking from the back of her low-slung jeans.

‘Hey, look, everybody!’ shouted Jesse. ‘The crack of Dawn!’

Peach switched cameras at Cynthea’s pointing pencil. ‘This is great stuff, boss!’

‘We just saved SeaLife, Peach,’ she told him.

8:55 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time

On his wafer-thin wall-mounted 55-inch Hitachi screen in his Midtown Manhattan office, Jack Nevins watched Glyn give Dawn a two-handed tush-push over a boulder.

‘This is great, Fred,’ Jack said into his cell phone.

Fred Huxley watched his own drop-down TV in the adjacent office, his own cell phone to his ear as he lit up a Cohiba: ‘This is GOLD, Jack!’

‘I think that magnificent bitch just saved our asses, pal.’

‘I could kiss her!’

‘I could fuck her.’

‘The old gal’s got a hell of a survival instinct.’

‘Next week’s numbers are gonna rocket, Baby Fred!’

‘Next week’s numbers are going to KILL, Brother Jack.’

5:57 P.M.

The search party fanned out on a ledge where the crevasse widened. Lush vegetation clung to the walls: a strange mat of purple growth squished underfoot.

The vegetation along the walls arched and wove together to form a cornucopia-like tunnel that stretched up into the twilit distance, speared with beams from the setting sun.

‘Nell, you hit the mother lode!’ Glyn muttered.

Some of the tall, glistening plants resembled cacti; others, coral. The canopy trembled with fluttering, brightly colored foliage above them. The air smelled sweet and pungent–like flowers and mildew, with a sulfurous hint of cesspool.

Glyn squinted skeptically at the canopy. Sweat trickled into his eyes and the salt burned as he rubbed them. He was still breathing hard from the climb. What should have been leaves, the biologist thought, looked more like ears of multicolored fungus sprouting from the branches overhead. ‘Wait a minute,’ he cautioned, winking his left eye repeatedly to clear it.

‘Yeah, hold on,’ Zero said.

The ‘plants’ and ‘trees’ grew in radial shapes like century plants, yuccas, and palms, but with multiple branches. They swayed as if there were a breeze. But the thick air was utterly still.

A buzzing, chittering sound rose like a chorus of baritones humming through police whistles. The green tunnel turned slightly purple. It rippled as if a strong wind was passing over it.

‘Hey!’ Jesse yelled, making everyone jump. ‘This plant’s MOVING, man!’

Jesse’s shout echoed through the stony heights, and the insect noise stopped abruptly. Except for the distant hiss of the surf below, the canyon was silent.

Zero’s camera barely caught a blurry shape streaking through the branches overhead.

The insect noise resumed, louder now.

Dawn screamed. Dartlike thorns, attached to a tree by thin cables, had impaled her bare midriff. As the party watched, the tree fired two more thorns like blow darts into her neck.

The translucent cables turned red, siphoning Dawn’s blood. With a desperate lunge she broke the cables and shrieked, bleeding from the siphoning tubes as she ran frantically toward the others.

Glyn noticed the branches above reaching down–then something caught the corner of his eye: a wave of dark shapes rushing toward them down the tunnel.

He felt a sharp bite on his calf and yelped. ‘Crikey!’ Glyn looked down at his bone-white legs, exposed for the first time on this trip by the damned L.L. Bean chino shorts he agreed to wear for the landing. He almost couldn’t spot the offender against his pale skin. Then he located it by a second sharp pain: a white disk-shaped spider clung to his left calf.

He raised his hand to swat it and hundreds of miniatures rolled off the spider’s back. A red gash melted open on his calf as, in the space of two seconds, the yellow edge of his tibia was exposed and more white disks fired into the gaping gash.

Before Glyn could scream, a whistling shriek flew straight at him.

He looked up as an animal the size of a water buffalo hurtled through the opening of the tunnel.

Zero turned the camera as Glyn yelled and caught the beast closing its hippo-sized vertical jaws over the biologist’s head and chest. With a sharp crunch, the attacker sank translucent teeth into Glyn’s ribs and bit off the top of the Englishman’s body at the solar plexus. Bright arterial blood from Glyn’s beating heart shot thirty feet between the beast’s teeth, dousing Zero’s shirt and camera lens.

Zero lowered the camera and saw a cyclone of animals shrieking and clicking as they swirled around the rest of Glyn’s body.

The others screamed as they were bombarded by flying bugs and more shadows pouring out of the tunnel.

Zero threw the camera toward the onslaught, and a few animals streaking toward him pivoted and chased it instead.

As fast as he could, he slipped from the ledge and zigzagged down the rocks in the crevasse.

5:58 P.M.

Cynthea, Peach, and the world watched in astonishment as all three camera shots panned wildly.

‘Crikey!’ someone shouted–and there was an awful cracking sound.

A chaos of shrieks overloaded the microphones, and the cameras jerked and spun.

One camera tumbled onto its side. Red and blue liquid spattered its lens.

Another camera fell, and blood-drenched clothing blocked its view.

The audience across the nation heard screams from their suddenly blackened TV screens.

Cynthea cut to the remaining camera just in time to see something fly toward the lens. Then the camera fell and was instantly blackened by swarming silhouettes.

‘We just lost the uplink, boss,’ Peach reported.

One hundred and ten million people across the continent had tuned in before the live feed had died.

Cynthea stared at the screens. ‘Oh. My. God!’

8:59 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time

‘We’re fucked,’ Jack Nevins said.

‘It’s been nice, buddy,’ Fred Huxley said, stamping out his Cohiba.

6:01 P.M.

Nell leaped over the rocks toward the crevasse as Zero came running out. His gray T-shirt was drenched with bright red and blue liquid. He didn’t have his camera or his transmission backpack.

Nell called to him but he sprinted past her, lunging down the boulders with a ten-mile stare, heading straight for the water. She followed him instinctively, but halfway down the rocks she swung around and looked back into the mouth of the twilit crack.

What looked like a dog emerged from the shadow of the fissure.

The creature seemed to be sniffing along Zero’s trail. When it leaped onto a rock in the sun she saw that its fur was bright red. It was not a dog. It was at least twice the size of a Bengal tiger.

Its head swung toward her.

Nell backed away, turned, stumbled over the rocks around the derelict sailboat.

She spotted the small Zodiac on the beach and raced for it.

She saw Zero dive into the sea and start swimming for the Trident.

Finally, she hit the hard, wet sand and ran. Without looking back, she reached the Zodiac. She shoved it into the water and flopped in backwards, planting her feet on the transom.

She yanked the pull-start and shot a look up the beach.

Three of the creatures lunged from the rocks to the sand.

Apart from their striped fur, they were nothing like mammals–more like six-legged tigers crossed with jumping spiders. With each kick off their back legs, they leaped fifteen yards over the sand.

Nell yanked the pull-start again, and the motor turned over and coughed to life.

The Zodiac pushed over a breaker, and the three animals recoiled before a crashing wave. Driving spiked arms deep into the wet sand, they pushed themselves backwards in thrusts ten yards long to avoid the hissing water.

Then they reared up and opened their vertical jaws wide, letting out piercing howls like car alarms that bounced and shattered in echoes over the cliffs around them.

Nell stared as the beasts leaped back up the beach and over the rocks toward the crack in the wall.

She stared at the twisted cliff leaning over her in the sky, and froze, breathless. She felt as if she were a child again, paralyzed as her nemesis burst into the light of the day. The face of her monster appeared in the rock, as though it had been waiting in the middle of nowhere for her.

Her head spun and her stomach convulsed. She bent abruptly and vomited overboard, clinging to the tiller with one hand.

Gasping, she splashed her face and rinsed her mouth with saltwater. There was no making peace with it–no way to replace it with a pretty face or flower, she knew. She had to fight it. She had to fight. Angry tears streaked her face as she steered the Zodiac toward Zero.

She called to him. The cameraman reached out and she hooked his arm, pulling him into the safety of the boat.




August 24


12:43 P.M.

The surgical mask muffled Geoffrey Binswanger’s amazed laughter. His eyes twinkled with childlike delight.

A lab technician bent the tail of a large horseshoe crab and stuck a needle through an exposed fold directly into the cardiac chamber of the living fossil. The clear liquid that squirted through the needle blushed pale blue as it filled a beaker. The color reminded Geoffrey of ‘Frost’-flavored Gatorade.

The director of the Associates of Cape Cod Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, had invited Geoffrey to see how horseshoe crab blood was extracted each spring and summer. Since the blood was copper-based instead of iron-based, it turned blue instead of red when exposed to oxygen.

Geoffrey had spent several summers as a visiting researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, or the ‘WHOI’ (pronounced ‘hooey’ by the locals), but he had never visited the Cape Cod Associates facility. So today he had taken his metallic-lime Q-Pro road bike up Route 28 a couple miles to the lab, which lay tucked inside a forest of white pine, white oak, and beech, to take a look.

Geoffrey wore maroon surgical scrubs over his biking clothes, a sterile hair cap over his dreadlocks, plastic booties over his shoes, and latex gloves. Similarly clad lab technicians removed the writhing arthropods from blue plastic drums, folded their tails forward, and placed them upright in crab-holders on four double-sided lab counters.

‘This procedure doesn’t hurt, I hope?’ Geoffrey said.

‘No,’ said the technician who had been assigned to show him around. ‘We only draw one-third of their blood, then we drop them back in the ocean. They regenerate it in a few days. Some are destined to be fish bait on the trawlers, though, so it only makes sense that they be routed through us for extraction first. We can tell from scars that a lot of the crabs have donated blood once or twice before.’

Geoffrey knew these primitive creatures were not, technically, crabs. They resembled giant Cambrian trilobites lined up in rows over the stainless steel shelves, a bizarre marriage of the primordial and the high tech. But, Geoffrey mused, which was which? This lowly life form was still more sophisticated than the most advanced technology known to man. Indeed, all the equipment and expertise gathered here was devoted to unlocking the secrets and utilizing the capabilities of this one seemingly primitive organism.

‘What’s the scientific name of this thing?’ he asked.

‘Limulus polyphemus. Which means “slanting one-eyed giant,” I think.’

‘Sure, Polyphemus, the monster Odysseus fought on the island of Cyclopes.’

‘Oh, cool!’

‘What’s their life span?’

‘About twenty years.’

‘Really? When do they reach sexual maturity?’

‘At about age eight or nine, we think.’

Geoffrey nodded, making a mental note.

‘This whole lab,’ the technician continued, ‘was built to extract crab blood and refine it into Limulus amebocyte lysate, or LAL–a specialized protein that clots on contact with dangerous endotoxins, like E. coli.’

Geoffrey looked in a barrel where the crabs were clambering methodically over one another. He already knew most of what he was hearing, but he wanted to give the young lab tech an audience. ‘Endotoxins are common in the environment, aren’t they?’

‘Yes,’ answered the youngster. ‘They mostly consist of the fragments of certain bacteria floating in the air, and they’re only harmful if they enter animal bloodstreams. Tap water, for instance, while safe to drink, would kill most people if they injected it. Even distilled water left in a glass overnight would already be too lethal to inject.’

‘How do you extract the LAL?’

‘We centrifuge the blood to separate out the cells. We burst them open osmotically. Then we extract the protein that contains the clotting agent. It takes about four hundred pounds of cells to get a half ounce of the protein.’

‘So why do these guys have such a sophisticated defense against bacteria, I wonder?’

‘Well, they swim in muck,’ the technician said.

Geoffrey nodded. ‘Good point.’

‘Yeah, they never evolved an immune system, so if they get injured, they’d die pretty fast from infection without a pretty badass chemical defense of some sort.’ The technician removed the needle from one specimen and lifted it from its cradle, straightening its tail. He placed the living Roomba in a barrel. ‘Before we had horseshoe crabs we had to use the “rabbit test” to see if drugs and vaccines contained bacterial impurities.’ The technician grabbed a fresh donor and handed it to a colleague. ‘If the rabbit got a fever or died, we knew there were endotoxins present in the sample being tested. But since 1977, LAL from these guys has been used to test medical equipment, syringes, IV solutions, anything that comes in contact with human or animal bloodstreams. If the protein clots, we know there’s a problem. This stuff has saved millions of lives.’

‘Especially rabbits, I guess.’

The technician laughed. ‘Yeah. Especially rabbits.’

Geoffrey touched the hard reddish-green carapace of a crab. The shell had the smoothness and density of Tupperware. He laughed nervously as the technician handed him an upside-down crab.

Gingerly, he took the large specimen. Five pincered legs made piano-scale motions on each side of a central mouth on the creature’s underside. Geoffrey cupped its back carefully so as not to get nipped.

‘Don’t worry, these guys are actually pretty harmless. And they’re hardy as hell, too. I know a scientist here who says that back in the day he stored some in his refrigerator and forgot about them for two weeks. They were still kicking when he finally remembered to get them out.’

Geoffrey watched with childlike delight as the arthropod bent its spiked tail up and revealed the ‘book’ gills layered in sheaves near its tail spine. ‘Gads, what a beast!’

‘When I started working here I thought only aliens from space movies had ten eyes and blue blood.’ The technician laughed. ‘This guy’s even got a light-sensing eye on his tail.’

‘Nature’s produced a lot of different blood pigments.’ Geoffrey peered at the maw at the center of the crab, which reminded him of the mouth of an ancient Anomalocaris, the arthropod that ruled the seas during the first ‘Cambrian’ explosion of complex life half a billion years ago. He was struck by the color of this creature, which closely resembled the color of the reddish-green trilobite fossils he had collected at Marble Mountain in California as a boy: this crab was a living fossil–literally. ‘I’ve seen violet blood and green blood in polychaete worms,’ he said. ‘I’ve even seen yellow-green blood in sea cucumbers. Crabs, lobsters, octopus, squid, even pill-bugs, a relative of these guys here, all have blue copper-based pigment that serves the same function as the red iron-based pigment in our blood.’

The technician arched his eyebrows. ‘You’ve been humoring me a bit by letting me make my spiel, haven’t you, Dr Binswanger?’

‘Oh, call me Geoffrey. No, I’ve learned a lot I didn’t know, actually,’ Geoffrey assured him. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this beastie. Thanks for letting me check it out.’

The technician gave him a thumbs-up. ‘No problem. Did you see SeaLife last night?’

Geoffrey squirmed. This was the fourth time someone had asked him this today. First, his attractive neighbor, as he left his cottage. Then Sy Greenberg, an Oxford buddy researching the giant axons of squids at the Marine Biological Laboratory, had asked the same thing as they passed on the bike path near the Steamboat Authority. Then the dock manager at WHOI, while he was locking his bike outside the Water Street building where his office was located.

‘Um, no,’ Geoffrey answered. ‘Why?’

The technician shook his head. ‘Just wondering if you thought it was for real.’

That’s what the other three had said. Exactly.

Someone rapped on the window in the hall outside the clean room. On the other side of the glass stood Dr Lastikka, the lab director who had arranged his tour. Dr Lastikka made a telephone gesture with his hand to his ear.

‘Jeez, it’s my lunch hour. Oh well, OK, I’m done.’ Geoffrey handed the horseshoe crab carefully back to the technician and pantomimed to Dr Lastikka, Tell them to hold!

Dr Lastikka signaled OK.

‘Thanks, that was really cool,’ Geoffrey told the technician.

‘Doing your lecture tonight, Dr Binswanger? Er–Geoffrey?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘I’ll be there!’

‘I won’t be able to recognize you.’

‘I’ll wear the mask.’

Geoffrey nodded. ‘OK!’

This was why Geoffrey loved Woods Hole: everyone was fascinated by science, everyone was smart–and not just his fellow researchers. The general public, in fact, was usually smarter. Woods Hole, he confidently believed, was the most scientifically curious and informed population of any town on Earth. And it was one of the rare places, outside a few college campuses, where scientists were considered cool. Everyone showed up for the nighttime lectures. And then everyone adjourned to various taverns to talk about them.

Geoffrey exited the clean room through two sealed doors. As he tugged off his cap and mask, a lab assistant pointed him to a phone. The front desk patched him through. ‘This is Geoffrey.’

‘There you are, El Geoffe!’

It was Angel Echevarria, his office mate at WHOI. Angel was studying stomatopods, following in the footsteps of his hero, Ray Manning, the pioneering stomatopod expert. Angel had been out of the office that morning and had left a message saying he was going to be late. Now the researcher was practically jumping out of the phone.

‘Geoffrey! Geoffrey! Did you see it?’

‘See what? Take it easy, Angel.’

‘You saw SeaLife, right?’

Geoffrey groaned. ‘I don’t watch reality TV shows.’

‘Yeah, but they’re scientists.’

‘Who go to all the tourist spots, like Easter Island and the Galapagos? Come on, it’s lame.’

‘Oh my God! But you heard about it, right?’

‘Yeah…’

‘So you know half of them got slaughtered?’

‘What? It’s a TV show, Angel. I wouldn’t be too sure about that if I were you.’ Geoffrey stepped out of the cleansuit as he spoke. He nodded as a technician took it from him.

‘It’s a reality show,’ Angel insisted.

Geoffrey laughed.

‘I recorded it. You’ve got to see it.’

‘Oh brother.’

‘Get back here! Bring sandwiches!’

‘All right, I’ll see you in half an hour.’ Geoffrey hung up the phone, and looked at the technician.

‘Did you see SeaLife last night, Dr Binswanger?’ she asked.

1:37 P.M.

Geoffrey entered the office he shared with Angel carrying a few bags of sandwiches from Jimmy’s sandwich shop. ‘Lunch is ser—’

He was shushed by a cluster of colleagues from down the hall who had gathered to watch Angel feed his mantis shrimp.

Watching a stomatopod, or ‘mantis shrimp,’ hunt was truly a spectacle not to be missed.

Geoffrey aborted his greeting immediately and set down his helmet and the sandwich bags. In the large saltwater tank, Angel had placed a thick layer of coral gravel and a ceramic vase decorated with an Asian-style depiction of a tiger. The vase rested on its side, its mouth pointed toward the back of the aquarium.

Angel pinched a live blue crab in forceps. ‘Don gave me one of his blue crabs. Thanks, Don.’

‘I think I’m already regretting it,’ moaned Don as he nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

‘Whoa!’ several exclaimed as Angel’s pet emerged.

‘Banzai!’ Angel dropped the unfortunate crustacean into the tank. Morbid fascination compelled everyone to watch.

The ten-inch-long segmented creature moved like some ancient dragon. Its elegant overlapping plates rippled like jade louvers as it curled through the water. A Swiss Army knife’s worth of limbs and legs churned underneath. Its stalked eyes twitched in different directions. The colors on its body were dazzlingly vivid, nearly iridescent.

‘Here it comes,’ Don groaned.

The blue crab sculled its legs as it sank through the water, and halfway down it saw the mantis shrimp. It immediately swam for the far side of the vase but the mantis lunged up and its powerful forearms struck, too fast for the human eye. With a startling pop, the crab tumbled backwards. The carapace between the crab’s eyes was shattered and the crab hung limp in the water.

The mantis shrimp moved in and dragged its quarry back into its vase.

The audience ‘wowed.’

‘And that, my friends, is the awesome power of the stomatopod.’ Angel sounded more like a circus barker than a stomatopod expert. ‘Its strike has the force of a .22 caliber bullet. It sees millions more colors than human beings with eyes that have independent depth perception, and its reflexes are faster than any creature on Earth. This mysterious miracle of Mother Nature is so different from other arthropods it might as well have come from an alien planet. It may even replace us someday…Bon appetit, Freddie!’

‘Speaking of which, Jimmy’s has arrived,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Yay, Jimmy’s,’ said a female lab mate.

‘Glad you’re here,’ Angel told Geoffrey. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

Everyone took sandwiches. A computer monitor on the lab counter showed a cable newscast with the volume turned down. The SeaLife logo flashed behind the newscaster.

‘Hey, turn it up!’ someone called, as Angel simultaneously cranked up the volume.

‘It’s only two miles wide, but if what the cable show SeaLife aired last night is real, some scientists are saying it might be the most important island discovery since Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos nearly two centuries ago. Others are claiming that SeaLife is engaging in a crass publicity stunt. Last night the show gave a tantalizing live glimpse of what appeared to be an island populated by horrific and alien life that viciously attacked the show’s cast. Network executives have refused to comment. Joining us is eminent scientist Thatcher Redmond for an expert opinion on what really happened.’

Everyone in the room groaned as the camera focused on the guest commentator.

‘Dr Redmond, congratulations on the success of your book, The Human Effect, and your Tetteridge Award which you received just yesterday, and thank you for giving us your insights tonight,’ gushed the newscaster. ‘So, is it for real?’

‘Photosynthesis in action,’ Angel said. ‘The man grows in limelight.’

‘Come on now, Angel,’ Geoffrey said facetiously. ‘Dr Redmond knows all.’

Thatcher smiled, showing a row of recently bleached teeth in his ruddy face. He wore his trademark cargo vest and sported his famous red mustache and overgrown sideburns. ‘Thank you! Well, Sandy, I only hope that life on the island can withstand discovery by human beings, to be perfectly frank.’

‘He’s got a point there,’ muttered one of the female researchers, as she bit into her sandwich.

Thatcher continued. ‘So-called intelligent life is the greatest threat to any environment. I don’t envy any ecosystem that comes in contact with it. That’s the thesis of my book, The Human Effect, as a matter of fact, and I’m afraid if this SeaLife show isn’t a hoax of some sort, I’ll soon have to add another tragic chapter to illustrate my point.’

‘Oh brother,’ Geoffrey groaned.

‘Gee, I wonder if he wrote a book or something,’ muttered Angel.

‘But do you think it is a hoax? Or the real thing?’ persisted the newscaster.

‘Well,’ Thatcher said, ‘I wish it were true, of course–as a scientist, that is–but I’m afraid that, as a scientist, I have to say this is probably a hoax, Sandy.’

‘Thank you, Dr Redmond.’ The newscaster turned as the camera cut away from Thatcher. ‘Well, there you have it…’

‘No way,’ Angel insisted. ‘It’s not a hoax!’

The others chattered about the controversy as they carried their lunches back to their offices.

‘OK, Geoffrey, you’ve got to see this. I’ve got the clip right here.’

‘OK, OK.’

Sitting beside Angel in their cramped office overlooking Great Harbor, Geoffrey watched the chaotic images of the last minutes of SeaLife that Angel had recorded.

If someone were trying to stage a schlocky horror film on a very low budget it would probably look something like this, Geoffrey decided. Frankly, it looked like that movie The Blair Witch Project, as though the cameramen were deliberately trying to avoid taking a good look at the cheap special effects.

‘I can’t make out much of anything,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Wait.’ Angel punched the PAUSE button on the remote and then stepped the image forward. ‘There!’

He froze the frame as a group of sweeping shadows nearly blackened the screen. Angel pointed a pencil at a shape that looked like a crab leg.

‘OK,’ Geoffrey said. ‘So?’

‘That’s a toe-splitter! That’s a stomatopod claw.’

Geoffrey laughed and reached for his sandwich. ‘That’s a Rorschach test, Angel. And you’re seeing the species you’ve been studying for the past five years, because you see it in your dreams, your breakfast cereal, and the stains on the ceiling tiles.’

Angel frowned. ‘Maybe. But I don’t think so.’

Then Geoffrey noticed something. He stopped eating. As Angel advanced the frames, red drops splattered the camera lens–then a single light blue drop appeared, seconds before the camera went dark.

Angel opened a mini-fridge that had a sign taped to the door: FOOD ONLY. He took out a carton of milk and sniffed it. ‘So, are you going ahead with the Fire-Breathing Chat tonight?’

Geoffrey turned away from the screen and clicked off the video. ‘Uh, yep. The Fire-Breathing Chat will go on, despite the intense competition from reality TV shows.’

The Fire-Breathing Chat was a tradition Geoffrey had carried on since his Oxford days. It was a forum for heretical ideas, with which he could outrage his colleagues on a semi-regular basis. Afterward they could pummel him with derision to their hearts’ content. The public was invited to enjoy the spectacle and to join in.

‘Everyone’s going to ask you about SeaLife, you know.’

‘Yes, you’re probably right.’

‘You should thank me for preparing you.’

‘Duly noted.’

‘Are you really going with the ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny phylogeny thing tonight?’

‘Yep. Fasten your seat belt, Angel, it’s going to be a bumpy night.’

‘When are you going to take home one of your groupies, Geoffrey? Everyone already thinks you’re a Don Juan, so you might as well cash in on your reputation. The girls are right there waiting after every talk, my man, but you always get into a ridiculous scientific argument with a bunch of geezers, instead.’

‘Maybe tonight I’ll get into a ridiculous scientific argument with one of my groupies. That’s the kind of foreplay that would really turn me on.’

Angel frowned. ‘You’ll never get laid, my friend.’

‘You’re a pessimist, Angel. And a chauvinist. Don’t think about it. I don’t.’

‘But I do. And you don’t. Life isn’t fair! You need to get laid even more than I do, my friend. There’s more to life than biology. And there’s more to biology than biology, too.’

‘You’re right, you’re so right.’

Whatever ‘Don Juan’ reputation Geoffrey had was quite unearned. The scientist lacked the patience for friendly, mindless banter. He remained incorrigibly oblivious to traditional romantic signals. Ideas excited him, but he found the rituals of flirtation degrading and inexplicably obtuse.

He’d had nine sexual partners in his thirty-four years. All were short-lived romances, with long gaps in between. Geoffrey attracted would-be rebels, but when the women inevitably tried to force him into some orthodoxy, he had moved on.

While he worried sometimes that he might be lonely at the end of the day, he refused to trade his sanity for companionship. This was not vanity, or some noble sacrifice in the name of principle. It was simply a fact he had come to acknowledge about himself. As a result, he knew he might well end up alone.

So, love was the one mystery he’d had to approach with faith–faith that he would meet someone, faith against evidence, a necessary irrationality that kept him going, kept him looking toward the next horizon with open-ended hope. Because he had to admit to himself he was lonely…and Angel had an irritating way of reminding him of that.

‘So what’s the ceremonial garb for tonight’s riot?’ Angel asked.

The Fire-Breathing Chat tradition required the speaker to wear a random piece of clothing of exotic or historical origin–a Portuguese fisherman’s hat, an Etruscan helmet, a Moroccan burnoose. Last time Geoffrey had worn a fairly pedestrian toga, and the crowd had loudly expressed their disappointment.

‘Tonight…a kilt, I think.’

‘My friend,’ Angel said, ‘you’re crazy.’

‘Either that or everyone else is. I haven’t figured out which yet. Why does everyone wear the same thing at any given place and time? We all have minds of our own, and yet we’re afraid to be unfashionable. It’s an example of complete irrationality and fear, Angel.’

‘Uh, sure. That sounds good.’

‘Thanks. I thought it sounded pretty good, too…’

Geoffrey reversed the video clip. He paused the image as they spoke, pondering the single drop of pale blue liquid at the right edge of the frame.

Someone clever might have added two compelling clues–a stomatopod claw and a splash of blue blood–simply to fool the scientific community and keep a publicity stunt simmering, he mused. But somehow it didn’t seem likely that such sophisticated clues would be known to the producers of a trashy reality TV show. Or that they would count on such subtle evidence being picked up by the handful of experts who would notice.

Geoffrey shrugged and put the puzzle away, unsolved.

7:30 P.M.

Enthusiastic applause greeted Geoffrey as he strode onto the stage of Lillie Auditorium.

The hall was packed with a mixture of young students who had fallen under the spell of the dashing evolutionary scientist and elderly skeptical colleagues who were itching for a scientific rumble.

An ageless thirty-four years old, Geoffrey Binswanger was a physically striking man who remained an enigma to his colleagues. His West Indian and German parentage had produced an unlikely mix of islander’s features, caramel complexion, and sky-blue eyes. His dreadlocked hair and athletic physique undermined his academic seriousness, in the view of some of his fellow academics. Others, intrigued, wanted to count him in their political corners.

His theories, however, showed an utter lack of allegiance to anything but his own judgment–a result, perhaps, of never thinking of himself as part of a group. For whatever reason, Geoffrey had always needed to see things for himself. He wanted to draw his own conclusions without obligation to anything but what could be demonstrated and replicated under laboratory conditions.

Ever since he was a child, and as long as he could remember, Geoffrey was a scientist. Whenever adults had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he literally did not understand the question. He was conducting formal experiments at the age of four. Instead of asking his parents why some things bounced and some things shattered, he tested them himself, marking his picture books with a single heavy dot next to illustrations of things that survived the test of gravity and a swirly squiggle next to things that did not, which his mother had discovered to her mixed horror and delight.

His parents, who raised him in the upper-class Los Angeles suburb of La Cañada Flintridge, finally conceded that they had a very special child on their hands when they had come home from work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab one night to find the babysitter curled up on the couch asleep in front of the television and their six-year-old son sitting on the back patio holding a running garden hose. ‘Welcome to Triphibian City,’ he’d said as he presented his engineering feat with an imperious wave of his hand.

Geoffrey had flooded the entire backyard just as millions of toads from the wash of Devil’s Gate Dam had spawned. Thousands of the tiny gray amphibians had stormed under the fence through Geoffrey’s little tunnel and now inhabited a metropolis of canals and islands presided over by ceramic garden gnomes.

From that point forward, Geoffrey’s parents did all they could to occupy their son’s curiosity in more constructive ways. They sent him to a camp on Catalina Island, where he was nearly arrested for dissecting a Garibaldi, the pugnacious State Fish of California, although his campmates had already speared as many of the fish as possible, because it was illegal, and had flung them on the rocks.

When they enrolled him in a neurobiology class for gifted children at nearby Caltech, he had never felt more at home. He explored the campus with his genius friends and snuck into the labyrinth of steam tunnels beneath the campus, for which he almost got arrested, yet again.

Geoffrey graduated from Flintridge Prep at the age of fifteen and immediately qualified for Oxford, much to his parents’ horror. His mother finally acquiesced, and Geoffrey stayed at Oxford for seven years, earning degrees in biology, biochemistry, and anthropology.

Geoffrey had won a variety of awards through the years since university but he never displayed them in his office, the way so many of his colleagues did. Looking at them made him queasy. He was deeply suspicious of any strings that might be attached to such honors. He accepted them out of politeness, but even then at arm’s length.

His latest book had become something of a bestseller for a scientific tome, though to his literary agent’s chagrin he resisted opportunities to become what he called a ‘sound-bite scientist,’ pontificating on TV about the latest scientific fad and mouthing the majority position with no personal expertise in the plethora of matters journalists asked scientists to expound upon. He cringed when he saw colleagues placed in that position, even though they usually seemed pleased to have appeared on television.

For his part, Geoffrey preferred a forum like this one tonight. The storied Lillie Auditorium at Woods Hole was one of the true churches of science. Through the last century this humble hall had hosted more than forty Nobel Laureates.

When the small auditorium was built around the turn of the 19th century, Woods Hole was already a thriving community of loosely affiliated laboratories with a progressive campuslike culture. Here, men and women had found remarkable equality from the start, the men in their boater hats and white suits and the women in their bodices, bustled cotton dresses, and parasols, hunkering down in the mud together and digging for specimens.

Lillie Auditorium cozily held an audience of about two hundred people, its high ceiling supported by wide Victorian pillars painted a yellowing white like fat tallow candles. Under its wood-slatted chairs one could still find the wire fixtures where men used to store their boaters.

The Friday Night Lectures were the most anticipated of the summer lectures at Woods Hole. They regularly drew top scientists from around the world as featured speakers. The Fire-Breathing Chats, however, traditionally took place on Thursday nights.

Geoffrey’s first presentation eight years ago had caused a near-riot–so naturally the directors had reserved some prime Thursday night slots for his visit this year in hopes of a repeat.

Geoffrey had invented the Fire-Breathing Chats so that he and some other young turks at Oxford, after persuading the proprietor of the King’s Head Pub to set a room aside every Thursday night, could commit scientific sacrilege on a regular basis. Their enthusiastic audience had soon swollen to standing room only and had proved a thumping good time regardless, in retrospect, of how risible most of the theories advanced had been. But the object was not so much to be right as to challenge conventional wisdom and to engage in scientific reasoning, even if it led to the demolition of the theory being proposed. They had a special prize for that, in fact–the Icarus Award, for the theory that was shot down the fastest.

It was rapid-fire science, theory in action, method in motion, and often in the flaming death of a hypothesis could be seen the embers of a brilliant solution. Pitching a bold idea to the wolves had a thrilling appeal to Geoffrey. When it didn’t destroy his theories it improved them, so he had carried the tradition with him wherever he went as a test for his most unscrupulous ideas. He thought of these lectures as ‘peer preview.’

Now he strode across the stage in a Black Watch tartan kilt and held out a hand to calm the applause as he reached the lectern and tapped the microphone. Whoops and wolf whistles rose from his audience, and Geoffrey stepped out from behind the lectern for a bow.

With the kilt, he wore a T-shirt dyed rust-red by the mud of the island of Kaua’i. Green block letters across his chest read, ‘Conserve Island Habitats.’ Geoffrey had spent half a dozen summers on the small Hawaiian island, vacationing at his uncle’s stilted house tucked in the narrow strip of rain forest between a vine-strangled cliff and Tunnels Beach. He had found no better way to escape civilization than to don a mask, snorkel, and fins. He’d shoot through the ancient lava vents, chasing Moorish Idols, following nonchalant sea turtles, and feeding urchins to the brash Humuhumunukanukaapuaha’a fish that took them right out of his hands. He had worn this T-shirt on dozens of his swims through those tunnels, and it was the only common denominator for every Fire-Breathing Chat: he wore it for every talk.

He raised a hand to the easel beside him that announced tonight’s topic:



Predator and Prey:

The Origin of Sex?



Another round of whistles, applause, and jeers rose.

Geoffrey took refuge behind the lectern and began.

‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. First–a brief history of the world.’

A ripple of amusement crossed the audience as they settled in and the lights dimmed.

Geoffrey clicked a remote, and an artist’s rendering of two worlds colliding appeared on the screen behind him.

‘After a Mars-sized planet collided with ours and penetrated her surface, spewing a molten plume of ejecta that would congeal into the Moon, Mother Earth remained a cooling ball of lava for 100 million years.’

Geoffrey clicked to a close-up of the full Moon over the ocean.

‘It was this fantastic violence that ironically created the hand that rocked the cradle of life. Four billion years ago, as Earth’s lunar child circled in low orbit, the first oceans were churned by its wrenching tides. Four hundred million years later, the Earth and Moon would be bombarded by another wave of massive impacts as our fledgling solar system continued to work out the kinks in the clockwork we observe today.’

He clicked to a scene of what looked like outer space scattered with clusters of colored spheres.

‘During this inconceivably violent age, known as the Archean Eon, the first self-copying molecules coalesced in Earth’s oceans. Such molecules are easily re-created in our laboratories using the same inorganic ingredients and forces that bombarded our planet’s primordial seas. During the next billion years, the accumulation of replication errors in these molecules created RNA, which not only replicated itself but catalyzed chemical reactions like a primitive metabolism! RNA’s replication errors led to the evolution of DNA–a molecule more stable than RNA that could copy itself more accurately and manufacture RNA.’

Geoffrey clicked to a computer-generated image of a DNA molecule.

‘From this self-copying molecular machine, the earliest life emerged as a simple organization of chemical reactions. The first crude bacteria harnessed methane, sulfur, copper, sunlight, and possibly even thermal energy venting in the dark depths of the ocean to fuel these metabolic processes.’

The next slide showed a variety of simple forms that looked like primitive prokaryotic cells.

‘The first crude organisms collided and sometimes consumed one another, blending their genetic material. A minute percentage of these blendings bestowed advantages on the resulting hybrids.’

Geoffrey clicked through images of waves crashing on shores.

‘If you combine extreme tides caused by the nearby Moon, which is still drifting about two inches farther away from the Earth each year, with the constant bombardment of ultraviolet radiation from the sun, then stir and cook the primordial soup for one and a half billion years, you get the most significant innovation in the story of life.’

Geoffrey clicked the remote, and the next slide sent giggles through his audience.

‘Yes, my friends, it looks like a sperm cell, but it’s actually a tailed protozoan called Euglena viridis. It is an individual animal, a unique species, a single-celled organism remarkably similar to sperm. The primordial sea had produced the first creatures with the ability to hunt, using thrashing tails to chase down other single-celled organisms and consume them. Sometimes these first predators actually exploited the reproductive systems of their prey to facilitate their own reproduction–and sometimes their prey perpetuated itself by hijacking the genes of its attacker.

‘In either case, the proposition of tonight’s Chat is that these very first hunters and their prey created a new and mutually beneficial relationship that we call sex. When certain cells began to specialize in consuming or penetrating other cells for reproduction, others cells specialized in hosting reproduction itself, thus deflecting death and perpetuating both lines of DNA. Sex is the peace treaty between predator and prey. The offspring of their union not only combined the properties of both but carried forward each original single-celled organism, now modified as sperm and egg. So there you have the kindling for tonight’s Fire-Breathing Chat, ladies and germs. I submit that sex began at the very beginning with single-celled organisms. I propose that the answer to the age-old question, which came first, the chicken or the egg, is the egg…and the sperm.’ Geoffrey stepped aside from the podium and bowed.

Shouts came from the back of the auditorium. Uncomfortable groans rose from the scientists in the front rows, especially from the gray hairs.

Geoffrey clicked to the next slide–a human egg wreathed by wriggling sperm–and he paused to enjoy the slightly nervous titter of recognition that the image always evoked from an audience.

‘Egg and sperm may actually be the living echo of a revolutionary moment that transpired a billion and a half years ago in the ancient seas of Earth. Indeed, I propose that this original love story has repeated itself in an unbroken chain since reproduction began in eukaryotic cells–that is, cells that have membrane-enclosed nuclei inside them. When the first hunter cells grew tails in order to chase down their prey, the hunted cells made peace, if you will, by absorbing the hunter’s DNA and facilitating its reproduction, thus ensuring both cells’ survival and turning a war into a partnership.

‘And since the sharing of genetic material led to a convergent variation in the morphology of their offspring, this innovation accelerated the evolution of superior forms in tandem, continuing to ensure the survival of both kinds of original cell in male and female carriers. And the elaboration of multicellular life issuing from that ever-accelerating partnership would launch both of the original organisms into wildly diverse environments.’

The grumblings grew louder in the audience. Geoffrey raised his voice mildly.

‘I suggest that this proposition is validated each time sperm penetrates an egg and results in an offspring. All complex life may have developed simply to stage this age-old dance of two single-celled species. From octopi to humans to whales to ferns, countless expressions of life on Earth stage this original single-celled rendezvous, just as it occurred in ancient seas, in order to reproduce.’

The audience muttered and shuffled as Geoffrey reached his peroration.

‘So why are such complex animals beneficial for continuing the partnership of sperm and egg? Because, ladies and gentlemen, unlike sperm and egg, animals can exploit an amazing variety of changing conditions and environments through evolution. We sexually reproducing animals are an astonishingly diversified fleet of sperm-and-egg-carriers that bring the ancient seas with us into ever-new environmental frontiers.

‘Of course, such elaborate vehicles were also beneficial to the replication of the original single-celled organisms because they have more fun replicating than single-celled organisms. There’s nothing like improved incentives to increase output. But I think we’ll leave that topic for another chat.’

Geoffrey bowed once again, this time to an enthusiastic ovation, unfazed by the jeers and scowls from the front row.

Now the real fun began. He took the first torpedo from a particularly vexed colleague right in front of him. ‘Yes, Dr Stoever?’

‘Well, I don’t know where to begin, Geoffrey,’ the baldheaded scientist drawled forlornly. ‘Sex began with isogamous gametes: two sex cells of the same size fusing together and joining their DNA, which then divided into more cells with a recombination of the two cells’ genes. It did not begin with ancestors of sperm and egg! I’ve never heard of such a preposterous theory!’

‘That is the general assumption,’ Geoffrey replied cheerfully. ‘But everyone concedes that very little is known about the details. I’m sure you’re aware of Haeckel’s theory, Dr Stoever?’

‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, of course–everyone is aware of Haeckel’s theory, Geoffrey.’

There was a smattering of laughter at this and Geoffrey raised his hand to the audience. ‘Well, just to remind everyone, for a long time scientists observed that during certain phases of development the human embryo looks remarkably like a tadpole, with a tail and gills, and continues to go through other stages that appear to be entirely different animals. What Haeckel proposed is that embryonic development is actually a recapitulation of an animal’s evolutionary past.’

‘Haeckel’s theory has been discredited,’ yelled one scientist from the back row.

‘It only applies to the development of embryos, anyway,’ protested another. ‘Not to sperm and ova!’

‘Ah.’ Geoffrey nodded. ‘Why not? Think outside the box, Dr Mosashvili. And Haeckel is far from being discredited, Dr Newsom. In fact, this proposition, if it proves correct, might well be his final vindication.’

‘You can’t claim sperm and egg are merely echoes of the first eukaryotic cells,’ shouted another irate scientist.

‘Why not?’ Geoffrey volleyed.

‘Because sperm and egg are unlike any other organism. They carry only half the chromosomes!’

‘Which they combine to produce the next stage of their development,’ Geoffrey returned, ‘which, I propose, may be the carrier stage, if you will–which naturally became more and more specialized to reach new environments. The fact that sperm and egg carry only half the chromosomes of their offspring could be a further effect of specialization to symbiotic reproduction, or it could be proof that sex began with separate organisms that combined and doubled the amount of their chromosomes to make sexually differentiated carriers of each original cell. I submit that Haeckel’s principle is not only right, but may not have been taken far enough.’

‘But originating as a predator/prey relationship…I don’t buy it.’ Dr Stoever was scowling.

‘Look at bees and flowers,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘When insects invaded the land, they devoured plant life. But plants adapted to the invasion. They turned insects into agents of their own reproduction by offering nectar in flowers and seeds in fruit. Examples abound of predator/prey relationships becoming symbiotic relationships, even reproductive relationships. Every one of us is a colony of cooperative organisms, millions of which inhabit our intestinal tract, graze on our epidermises, and devour bacteria scraped by our eyelids off our eyeballs, between the columns of our eyelashes. All of these creatures had to have begun as predators but then adapted in cooperation with our bodies so as not to destroy their own homes, and in fact to help their hosts survive and flourish. Without the vast horde of creatures that inhabit us, we would die. We could not have evolved without them, nor they without us. Instead of a perpetual war, I believe this treaty of cooperation is the true theme of life, the very essence of a viable ecosystem. Instead of the stalemate of a war, which many believe the natural world reflects, perhaps evolution is always working toward stability, peace treaties, the mutual benefit of alliances. And its central building block is the treaty between the first single-celled predator and its prey: sex. That peace treaty had to be struck before the relentless violence of predator and prey inevitably selected both for extinction, which probably happened many times.’

‘The development of sex in eukaryotic cells is still a mystery,’ grunted another grizzled scientist. He shook his white-haired head emphatically.

‘Maybe the answer to the mystery has been too obvious for us to see, Dr Kuroshima,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘Maybe the explanation has been right under our noses all along, or, at least, under our kilts. Perhaps we’ve just been too shy to look?’

A wave of grumbles, hoots, and whistles greeted this flourish, and the eighty-year-old Japanese scientist scoffed benignly, holding a hearing aid to his head with one hand and waving the other at Geoffrey, for whom he had great affection, despite and probably because of the younger man’s tendency to stir things up.

One pretty student intern in the audience raised her hand.

‘Yes?’

‘Dr Binswanger, can I ask a question on a different topic?’

‘Of course. There are no rules except that there are no rules at Fire-Breathing Chats.’

The audience seconded this with some enthusiastic applause.

‘Your expertise lies in the geo-evolutionary study of island ecosystems,’ the young woman recited. She’d clearly memorized her program of summer speakers. ‘Did I get that right?’ She laughed nervously, inspiring some sympathetic laughter in the feisty crowd.

‘Well, I’ve touched on pattern analysis in nature, and in biological communication systems in particular,’ Geoffrey agreed, ‘but genetic drift and island formation is my current project here at Woods Hole, where I’m overseeing a study of insular endemic life on Madagascar and the Seychelles in a geo-evolutionary context. So, I guess you could say yes!’

There was a scattering of academic chuckles, and Angel Echevarria rolled his eyes; the girl was quite good-looking and Geoffrey had totally blown it, again.

‘So…Did you see SeaLife?’ she asked.

This released a unanimous eruption of laughter.

‘By the way, you’ve got great legs,’ she added.

Geoffrey nodded at the ensuing howls and gave a Rockette kick.

Geoffrey thought about Angel’s video of the reality show. The blue blood had continued to bother him. The blurred images of the plants looked strange but not ridiculous–in fact, rather more subtle than he imagined a TV show could manage. But it wasn’t enough for him.

He shook his head, stalemated. ‘Given what is known about isolation events and the duration of micro-ecologies–and given what they can do in Hollywood movies these days–I’m going to have to assume that island’s a hoax, like Nessie and Bigfoot.’

Boos and cheers divided the room.

‘Sorry, folks!’

‘But wouldn’t you have to see it firsthand to be sure, Dr Binswanger?’ the attractive intern called.

Geoffrey smiled. ‘Sure. That’s the only way I’d feel comfortable commenting on it definitively. But I don’t think they’ll be asking any experts to take a closer look. It’s a perfect place to pull off a scam, if you think about it. It’s about as remote a location as you could possibly find. It’s not like anyone can just go there and check it out for themselves. That makes me suspicious, and since I’m already skeptical, the combination is deadly, I’m afraid. Yes, uh, you there, with the beard, in the back…’

Angel winced, closing his eyes sadly. Geoffrey had no idea that his own dismal ineptitude in pursuing sexual opportunities was the best evidence against his theory that sex cells created more complex animals to perpetuate themselves: if the end product was Geoffrey, Angel thought, total extinction was inevitable.




September 3


2:30 P.M.

About 1,400 miles south-southeast of Pitcairn Island, the two-mile-wide speck of rock was too inconsequential to be marked on most globes, maps, and charts. That speck was surrounded by the U.S.S. Enterprise, the U.S.S. Gettysburg, the U.S.S. Philippine Sea, two destroyers, three guided-missile destroyers, a guided-missile frigate, one logistics ship, two Sea Wolf anti-sub attack subs, two submarine tenders, and three replenishment vessels. The Enterprise Joint Task Group had been en route to the Sea of Japan when the President gave orders to blockade the tiny island. In the middle of the biggest expanse of nowhere on Earth, a floating city of over 13,000 men and women had suddenly materialized three days after the final broadcast of SeaLife.

Eight days had passed since the U.S. Navy had quarantined the area and a stream of helicopters started bringing back strange and secretive rumors from the island to the surrounding ships. All hands were forbidden any communication with the outside world, under order of a total media blackout, but the ships buzzed with rumors from those who had seen the original SeaLife broadcast.

The crew of the Enterprise now watched as the last section of StatLab, a modular lab developed by NASA for dropping into disease hot zones, was hoisted off the deck by an MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopter.

The thundering Sea Dragon’s heavy rotors thwapped as it tilted at the island, dangling the white octagonal tube on a tether as it rose toward its seven hundred foot cliff.

To the men and women on the great carrier deck, the section of the mobile lab looked like a rocket stage or a Space Station module. They had no idea why the lab had been shipped in from Cape Canaveral by three high-speed hydrofoil transports or where it was going on the island. All they knew was that a potential biohazard had been discovered there.

None of the thousands of men and women of the carrier group could imagine what must be on the other side of the cliffs to justify all of this, and some of them preferred not to know.

2:56 P.M.

Nell removed her Mets cap and absently smoothed back her hair as she leaned forward to look with fierce intensity through the observation bubble.

A broken ring of thick jungle wreathed the bottom of Henders Island’s deep, bowl-shaped interior. This section of the experimental lab was designated Section One and had been placed on a scorched patch of earth near the jungle’s edge.

A phalanx of saguaro cactus-like tree trunks rose thirty to forty feet at the edge of the jungle. Nell could see their wide green fronds bristling overhead through the northern hemisphere of the window.

She suspected these ‘trees’ were no more plants than the first lavender spears she had touched on the beach thirteen days ago. Warily, she eyed their movements in the wind. Zero had warned her that in the crevasse he had seen trees moving. Actually, he’d sworn they were attacking.

When Nell learned NASA was to lead the investigation of the island and that Wayne Cato, her old professor from Caltech, was in charge of the ground team, she had begged him to let her participate. Without hesitation, Dr Cato had put her in charge of the on-site observation team aboard the mobile lab.

Hydraulic risers had leveled and aligned two new sections of the lab on the slope behind Section One. Extendable tubes of virus-impervious plastic connected the subway car-sized sections like train vestibules.

Florescent lights lined the quarter-inch-thick steel ceiling. Two-inch-thick polycarbonate windows spanned the upper side of the octagonal hull and reached halfway down its perpendicular sides. To prevent the outside atmosphere from leaking into the lab in the event of a breach, ‘positive’ air pressure, slightly higher than the pressure outside, was maintained inside the lab.

The scientists gathered now before the large viewing bubble at the end of Section One. They were preparing to set out the first specimen trap at the edge of the jungle.

They all knew that Nell had been a member of the first landing party. All of them had seen the amazing final episode of SeaLife by now, if only on YouTube. They looked at her with some awe, and not a little skepticism. She had shown them her sketches of what she called a ‘spiger’–the creature that she claimed had chased her on the beach. But what she had seen on the island had not been photographed, which caused doubt. The scientists knew that eleven human beings were said to have been lost by something that had happened on this island, however, and they could see the evidence of that loss in this young woman’s obsessive focus.

But apart from the extraordinary flora, they had yet to encounter anything remarkable in their two days setting up the lab. They certainly had not encountered anything dangerous. The few small creatures they had spotted emerging from Henders’s jungle had moved too swiftly to be seen clearly or filmed with the limited equipment the half-dozen scientists and dozen technicians had been able to set up at the time.

Six scientists and three lab technicians now watched the lab’s robotic arm lower the first specimen trap–a cylindrical chamber of clear acrylic about the size and shape of a hatbox.

‘Dinner is served,’ Otto announced as he operated the arm and maneuvered the trap closer to the jungle’s edge.

Otto Inman was a moon-faced, ponytailed NASA exobiologist the Navy had flown in from Kennedy. A turbo-nerd since elementary school, he’d found himself in geek heaven after scoring a job on a NASA research team fresh out of grad school. Although he had also been offered a job at Disney Imagineering in Orlando, it was not even a decision for him. After three years at NASA, Otto still could not imagine being blasé about going to work in the morning.

This, however, was the first time any urgency had been attached to the exobiologist’s job. This would be the first field test for many of the toys he’d had a hand in designing, including the lab’s Specimen Retrieval and Remote Operated Vehicle Deployment systems, and Otto was thrilled to see his theoretical systems given a trial by fire.

He maneuvered the robotic arm with a motion-capture glove, skillfully positioning the specimen trap on the scorched earth at the forest’s edge. The trap was baited with one hot dog, courtesy of the U.S. Navy.

‘A hot dog?’ asked Andy Beasley.

‘Hey, we had to improvise, all right?’ Otto replied. ‘Besides, all life forms love hot dogs.’

Nell had made sure to include Andy in the on-site crew. The marine biologist could not have been more delighted, but she worried that he didn’t take the danger seriously enough. When she’d told the NASA staff and Andy about the lunging creature on the beach, they’d mostly responded with polite silence and skeptical looks, which only increased her determination to discover what was really happening on Henders Island.

Otto raised the door on the side of the trap. He disengaged the motion-capture to lock the arm in place.

They waited.

Nell barely breathed.

After three seconds, a disk-ant the size of a half-dollar rolled out between two trees. It proceeded slowly on a straight line directly toward the trap. About eighteen inches from the open door, it stopped.

‘There’s one of your critters, Nell,’ Otto whispered. ‘You were right!’

Suddenly, a dozen disk-ants rolled out of the forest behind the scout. As they rolled they tilted in different directions and launched themselves like Frisbees at the hot dog inside the trap.

‘Jesus,’ Otto breathed.

‘Close it!’ Nell ordered.

When Otto hesitated for a moment, two reddish-brown animals the size of squirrels rocketed from the jungle into the box. They were followed by two flying bugs that zipped through the air and wriggled under the door before it closed and sealed.

‘Great work, Otto.’ Nell patted his back.

‘Looks like you bagged a couple island rats, too. Look!’ Andy Beasley pointed out the window.

The cylindrical trap was thrashing on the end of the robotic arm.

‘Yikes.’ Otto stopped retracting the arm as the trap shook violently. Its transparent walls were spattered and smeared with swirling blue gore.

‘Oh dear,’ Andy said.

‘Blue Slurpee. My favorite,’ Otto said.

When the trap finally stopped shaking it looked like a blueberry smoothie had been frappéd inside.

‘OK, retrieve that and let’s dissect whatever’s left,’ Nell told them. ‘Then we’ll set another trap. You better shut the door a little sooner next time, Otto.’

‘Yeah, guess so.’ The biologist nodded agreement.

He maneuvered the trap into an airlock, where conveyor belts transported it through a second hatch into the specimen dock, which they had informally dubbed the ‘trough,’ an observation chamber that spanned the length of Section One.

This section of StatLab had been designed as an experimental Mars specimen collection station, but it doubled as a mobile medical lab that could be dropped into disease hot zones. The lab was part of a pilot program that focused NASA’s unique expertise on Earth-bound applications. Additional funding earmarked for ‘Dual-Planet Technologies’ had provided NASA with the resources that had made the program possible. But no one thought StatLab would ever be called into action, and NASA technicians now crawled nervously over every inch of the lab to ensure that it met all system requirements by at least a twofold safety margin. Nothing freaked out NASA technicians more than planning for unknown contingencies.

Six high-resolution screens hung over the long ‘trough.’ Under the top surface of the trough, six video cameras no bigger than breath mints slid along silver threads on X and Y axes, each covering a sixth of the long viewing chamber.

The robotic arm deposited the trap on the conveyor belt, and the airtight hatch closed behind it, sealing with a backwards hiss. The conveyer slid the trap to the center of the trough, where the six scientists had gathered.

‘Let’s hope this soup is chunky,’ murmured Quentin Brancato, another biologist flown in by NASA. He stuck his hands into two butyl rubber gloves that extended on accordioned Kevlar arms into the observation chamber. He opened the door of the trap manually.

‘Careful,’ Nell warned.

‘Don’t worry,’ Quentin replied. ‘These gloves are pretty tough, Nell.’

Several other scientists stood at the controls of a number of smaller traps. Each trap contained a different bait: a piece of hot dog, a spoonful of vegetable succotash, a potted Venus flytrap, a cup of honey, a pile of salt, a bowl of fresh water, all supplied by the galley of the Enterprise. Except for the Venus flytrap, which was a pet Quentin had smuggled onto the flight over. As punishment for breaking the rules, he’d had to sacrifice ‘Audrey’ to science.

Inspired by the idea, Nell had requested that dozens of plant species be shipped in. These included flats of crabgrass, potted pines, wheat, and cactus. All would be exposed to the island around the lab for observation.

Other scientists, spread out along the trough, controlled the cameras, aiming them in the direction of the specimen retrieval trap.

Quentin released the seal mechanism at the top of the cylinder. As he lifted the lid, two flying creatures that looked like whirligigs escaped the hatch.

The pair rose like helicopters, hovering without spinning inside the trough. Their five wings shook off a blue mist. Their abdomens curled beneath them like scorpion tails as they dove straight for the hot-dog-baited trap.

Their heads kept a lookout with a ring of eyes as their legs grabbed the meat and stuffed it into an abdominal maw. Their bodies immediately thickened.

After a stunned moment, the scientist controlling the hot-dog trap remembered to seal the two creatures inside.

‘Got ’em!’

‘Good work!’ Nell breathed.

Quentin inverted the specimen retrieval capsule and dumped the contents onto the illuminated white floor of the trough. Several distinguishable bodies tumbled out in the blue slurry.

He drew a nozzle on a spring-loaded hose from the side of the trough and rinsed the mangled specimens with a jet of water. The blue blood and water sluiced into drains spaced two feet apart in the trough.

Three large disk-ants crawled out of the gore, leaving a trail of blue } } } } } } } behind them as they rolled. Then they flopped on their sides and crawled like pill-bugs, their upper arms flicking off droplets of blood, which spattered around them like ink from a fountain pen. They flipped over and did the same thing on the other side before tipping onto their edges and getting a rolling start, hurling themselves like discuses into the air, at the faces of the mesmerized scientists.

Some caromed off the sides of the trough, their legs retracting into white, diamond-hard tips that visibly gouged and nicked the acrylic. As they banged against the chamber walls they threw off dozens of smaller disk-ants. These rolled down the walls, trailing threads of light blue liquid.

The scientists controlling the cameras zoomed in to watch these juvenile ants wheel toward the baited traps. The rolling bugs hurled themselves onto the sugar and vegetables and even the Venus flytrap. This they devoured from the inside out as its traps triggered one after another.

‘Bye, Audrey,’ Quentin muttered mournfully and Nell patted his shoulder.

One large disk-ant rolled to the trap baited with a pile of salt. It turned on its side to feed, but then, before the trap could be sprung, it reared back abruptly on its edge and rolled away.

‘Trap the juveniles by themselves, if you can,’ Nell instructed. ‘And we need to get tissue samples from the other specimens, Otto, so we can do bacterial cultures and HPLC and Mass Spec GC profiles. We need to dissect these things to see if they have any venom sacs we should know about.’

Several scientists sprung their traps at her urging and isolated a few dozen specimens. Reaching their hands into the extendable gloves, they placed the sprung traps into airlocks spaced inside the trough. In the close-up view from the cameras above, they could see the tiny creatures leaping onto their gloves.

‘They seem to attack anything that moves,’ Nell observed.

‘Yeah, no matter how big it is,’ Andy said.

‘Don’t worry, there’s no way they can get through butyl rubber,’ Quentin said.

‘Ever seen The Andromeda Strain?’

‘Or Alien?’ Andy said.

‘Come on, guys.’

The scientists placed their traps in the airlocks, where the outside of the traps were sterilized with a chlorine dioxide bath. They opened the hatches and transferred the traps to individual observation chambers, where the live specimens inside could be released.

The other specimens from the original trap seemed dead, victims of a frenzied carnage. The original hot dog was nowhere to be found.

The two largest animals they had captured were about the size of tailless muskrats or squirrels. Both had eight legs. Though its side was ravaged by its rival, one specimen was clearly more complete. It had bitten off its rival’s head and seemed to have died choking on it.

‘What…is that?’ stuttered Quentin.

‘Jesus, I’ve never seen anything like that,’ one scientist whispered.

‘God,’ Andy giggled.

‘OK, let’s settle down.’ Otto was clearly rattled himself. ‘I’ll dissect. Quentin, you operate the camera.’

‘Gladly.’ Quentin quickly relinquished the glove box to Otto.

Otto reached in and cleared away the other animal parts, which included a few half-bitten disk-ants; a half-eaten two-legged thing that looked like a grasshopper fused with a toad; a headless island ‘rat,’ as Andy had called it; and, surprisingly, a few chunks of a mouse-sized species.

Each partial specimen was passed down the trough to be rinsed and prepared for preservation. The strangeness of the body parts sent a chill down the assembly line of scientists.

‘What are we looking at here?’ one said.

‘I don’t fucking believe this,’ another muttered, uneasily.

‘Let’s take this one step at a time,’ Otto told them. ‘All right, people, we’re about to conduct the first dissection of a Henders specimen.’

Otto spread the largest intact animal out on its belly. He washed the blue gore from its velvetlike fur, which turned out to be coffee-ground brown with black and white stripes on its haunches. Strips of iridescent fur radiated over its softball-sized head. The head of the second rat made a bulge in its throat the size of a baseball.

As the last blue liquid was rinsed off, everyone gasped at the impossible specimen.

‘OK, let’s see what we’re dealing with here.’ Otto’s voice cracked. His hands were shaking.

‘Steady now,’ Nell said.

Quentin moved the video camera across the top of the chamber until it was directly over the subject, and then zoomed in, providing an enlarged view on the plasma screens above the trough.

Otto placed his gloved left hand over the specimen’s head and blocked throat.

Nell perched on one of the high stools next to Otto and opened her sketchpad. ‘Just take it easy now,’ she said calmly. She started to sketch a diagram. ‘The fur coloration on its haunches looks like an okapi.’

‘Yeah.’ Andy nodded, frowning at the captured specimen. ‘People thought okapis were a hoax when they were first discovered. They thought they were giraffes, zebras, and buffalo stitched together…’

‘They’d never believe this freaking thing.’ Quentin gawped at the red-furred chimera.

‘The stripes must confuse predators,’ Nell theorized.

‘Come on, this thing is a predator,’ Otto said.

‘I think it’s probably both–predator and prey,’ she said. ‘The front looks fierce and the back says “I better hide my ass with camouflage while I run the hell out of here.”’

‘Hunters that are hunted?’

‘That hunt each other,’ said Andy.

‘Check out that tail.’

‘Are we sure it’s dead?’

‘Let’s find out,’ Otto said. ‘Beginning narration of dissection at…’ He consulted his watch. ‘…two forty-two p.m. This is the first dissection of a Henders specimen. It is a fur-bearing, eight-legged animal, about thirty-five centimeters long, with okapi-like zebra stripes on its haunches, reddish-brown fur of the texture of really plush velvet or velour on its back, and bright stripes of fur around its face that change color at different angles.’

He twisted its round head. They could see iridescent stripes radiating around its toothy mouth.

‘Good God,’ Andy said. ‘It has crab claws on its face!’

‘The specimen appears to have four front legs that may function more like arms,’ Otto continued. ‘The first pair is connected to its lower jaw and is furless. These seem to be chelate appendages with slender pincers that are white in color…very strange. They emerge from a wide lower jaw of an almost frog-or birdlike hinged mouth with long teeth that are packed close together and seem to be rather sharp. The teeth are extremely hard and dark gray. The mouth has dark blue lips drawn back that can apparently close over the teeth.’

‘What is that, a skullcap?’ Nell’s pencil flew as she sketched the outlines of the animal. ‘On top of its head?’

‘The subject appears to have a light brown, furless cranial cap of some sort,’ Otto said.

‘Jesus,’ Quentin said. ‘Either I’m dreaming or we are making history here, folks.’

‘You aren’t dreaming,’ Nell told him.

The scientists clapped and whooped, finally releasing their anxiety and exhilaration.

Nell quickly penciled in the snaggle-toothed mouth in the creature’s round head, her face frozen with grim concentration. This animal looked like a miniature version of the deadly lunging animals she had seen on the beach, except that its jaws were horizontal instead of vertical like the ones that came from the crevasse.

‘It looks like a deep-sea angler,’ Andy said.

‘Like a cat crossed with a spider.’ Nell carved its outline deep into the sheet of paper with her pencil.

‘Right, like the spigers you mentioned,’ Quentin said.

‘Right.’ Nell nodded.

‘The specimen has a pair of large green-red-and-blue eyes with three optical hemispheres,’ Otto narrated, and he tested the flexibility of the creature’s eyes with a poking index finger. ‘The eyes are mounted on short stalks that pivot or swivel inside a socket in its head. They also toggle in a socket at the end of the stalks, apparently, having a very ingenious mechanism.’

‘I sure hope that thing’s dead,’ Andy said.

Otto ignored him and wiggled the forelegs behind the head to see how they bent. ‘The large legs behind the head are very muscular and have spines at the end. They are fur-bearing, but the heavy spikelike spines are hairless, hard black exoskeleton or horn, and they seem to have a very sharp edge.’

‘They look like praying mantis arms.’

‘Yeah, that’s how they fold,’ Otto agreed. ‘They may be able to act as shears or vises, too.’

‘Or spears,’ Nell suggested, shivering as she thought of what the others must have faced inside the crevasse. ‘The spigers speared the sand in front of them to back away from the water.’

Otto continued. ‘These mantislike subchelate arms are articulated to a bony ring under the skin, from which the neck musculature also extends. The next pair of limbs appears to be true legs. They resemble a quadruped’s forelegs…with one extra joint…and they seem to be attached to a broad central ring of bone that can be felt under the dermis and which forms a medial hump on the dorsal surface of the animal.’

‘Those are eyes!’ Nell exclaimed.

‘Huh? Where?’ Andy said.

‘See, on top of that hump on its back, Otto?’

‘Oh,’ Andy said.

‘There are eyes on the medial hump,’ Otto confirmed, rinsing off more blue blood. ‘Which are similar to the eyes on the head.’

‘Do you think it has a second set of optic lobes in its back?’ Nell asked. ‘I mean, look, they’re image-forming eyes, not just light-intensity receptors.’

‘Either there’s a brain under there or they have ridiculously long optic nerves,’ Andy concurred.

Otto continued his description. ‘There are three eyes on the central hump, reminiscent of the eyes on a jumping spider. One eye looks directly behind and one to each side. They each toggle inside a socket. I think you’re right, Nell. There could be some kind of ganglion structure under this hump. There’s a cranial cap on top of it similar to the one on the head of the animal.’ As Andy winced, Otto tapped the brown chitinous cap on the hump between the eyes, testing to see if there was any reflex action left in the animal. There wasn’t.

Otto picked up a pair of dissection scissors and cut carefully along the mid-line of the cranial cap. He pulled each half apart with forceps. ‘Yep, it’s got a second brain.’ He looked up at Nell. ‘This isn’t just some enlarged ganglion.’

‘It’s got eyes in the back of its head,’ Quentin said.

‘And a head in the back of its eyes,’ added Andy.

‘See that pair of nerve cords running forward to the head?’ Nell pointed at the close-up on the drop-down screen.

‘Yeah, and here’s another pair that run toward the posterior of the animal. See there?’ Quentin pointed. Two white twines of fine string stretched from the brain to the posterior of the animal like jumper cables.

‘It may control the locomotion of its hind legs remotely with the second brain,’ Nell theorized.

‘I’ve never heard of such a thing,’ Otto disagreed. ‘Not fucking possible!’

‘Maybe it has specialized ganglia for speeding up its attack or evasive reflexes, or to help with digestion like some arthropods do,’ Andy offered.

‘Well, we won’t be able to determine that from a dissection.’ Otto frowned. ‘We would have to do a detailed neurological study of live specimens. But we’ll see if we can follow the nerves later. Moving toward the posterior of the animal we see very powerful, kangaroo-like hind legs, with an extra joint where the tibia would be. These limbs are connected to a wide subcutaneous pelvic girdle that is ring-or tube-shaped like the other rings. The tail—’

‘I don’t think that’s a tail,’ Quentin said.

‘It’s a leg,’ Nell said.

Otto scowled.

‘Pull it out from under the body,’ Nell suggested.

‘OK. The tail has a wide base. It is very stiff. It is long and broad, folding more than halfway under the animal to the chest area between the forelegs. The dorsal surface of the tail, which is the bottom when under the animal, is covered with ridged plates and spines in a geometric pattern.’

‘Traction pads.’ Nell indicated the bottom of the ‘tail.’ ‘And cleats–like the bottom of a running shoe!’

‘Whoa,’ Quentin exclaimed. ‘It must rip that tail backwards under it to get air!’

‘The taillike appendage appears to be a sort of ninth leg.’ Otto shook his head in amazement. ‘This leg might be used to propel the animal higher or faster during leaps.’





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