Fragment. Warren Fahy
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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