Fragment

by Warren Fahy

  Geoffrey knew this species of scientist well: Thatcher’s battleground was the court of public opinion; Geoffrey’s was the laboratory. Either could be fatal to the other, and the scientific arena did not always favor the fittest. When battle lines were drawn between the establishment and the truth, even in the halls of science, the truth did not always win, at least in the short term. And that short term could last generations. Raymond Dart’s revolutionary discovery of the missing link in human evolution had languished in a box in South Africa for forty years while the entire scientific establishment dismissed him and worshipped at the altar of Piltdown Man, a phony fossil made of spare ape parts and an Englishwoman’s skull stained with furniture polish. At that time, it had been politically correct to believe that the missing link would be found in Europe, and that bias had been sufficient to override other evidence to the contrary for four decades. It was scientists just like Thatcher who caused this sort of mischief, Geoffrey knew—and he was smart enough to give them a wide berth.

  Geoffrey leaned back and continued to look out the window, which did not stop Thatcher from continuing to restate his case for a good hour more. Geoffrey could not decide whether he was amused or alarmed by the man’s mind-numbing persistence.

  Geoffrey had concluded months ago that the MIT star’s “Redmond Principle” was quackery of the first order. After the most cursory perusal of Thatcher’s best-selling book, it was apparent to Geoffrey that it was the kind of parlor trick that scientists employed to exploit popular opinion and gain attention: make a wild claim that capitalized on current fears, ascribe it a “conservatively low probability” in order to make it appear plausible, and then ram it home! Whether Redmond really took seriously the slipshod science in his book, or its melodramatic clichés, Geoffrey was not sure—but Geoffrey was impressed by the shrewd social science the older man had displayed. While Thatcher’s hysterical predictions of impending doom could not possibly be proven or disproven in even a decade’s time, if ever, they could not fail to cash in on the present zeitgeist—something Geoffrey’s work had rarely ever accomplished.

  Thatcher, for his part, certainly recalled Geoffrey from the conference in Stuttgart the previous year. He had marked the young man immediately as one of those self-styled “maverick” scientists Thatcher despised—those who traded on good looks and an affected iconoclasm to dazzle their pretty female students into the sack. Youth had a certain automatic fashionability that Thatcher deeply resented, and the fact that Geoffrey was African-American made the younger man strategically difficult to attack—which Thatcher also resented. Above all, he despised the air of integrity that charming rogues like Geoffrey exuded. They were so proud of their uncompromised vision when, in all probability, their vision had never been exposed to any challenge in the first place. Things had not been so easy for Thatcher.

  While he supposed there were some scientists from the younger generation who were passionate and sincere crusaders, Redmond had bought a ticket on the gravy train strictly to pig out. Idealism was a business to him. Science was nothing more than a means to an end. He had never been a political animal, cleaving neither left nor right on the political spectrum. But he was capable of going in either direction if it gave him an advantage. Ironically, he had gone left in order to become a capitalist; he had become an environmentalist for his own personal enrichment. He planned on strip-mining the environmental cause purely for his own profit. And he was honest about it, at least to himself—which was more than he could say for most of his colleagues.

  Geoffrey’s silence was making him uncomfortable. “So what do you say, Dr. Binswanger? You haven’t stated your position.”

  “Um, sorry, Thatcher.” Geoffrey excused himself with a dip of his head as he unlatched his shoulder harness and went forward to talk to the crew.

  SEPTEMBER 16

  4:14 P.M.

  Geoffrey and Thatcher skipped like a stone across the globe, landing twice before taking a Lear jet to Pearl Harbor, where they boarded a different C-2A Greyhound and found themselves in the same place they had started, sitting in the window seats behind the plane’s wings.

  “Imagine a world where there is no intelligent life—where there is no mankind,” Thatcher droned on to a numb Geoffrey. “Imagine, Doctor, how nature would advance only in exact proportion to the resources available and retreat with perfect modesty as those resources became scarce. There was a stretch of time that lasted for millions of years before the arrival of so-called ‘rational’ apes, when the rain forest covered continents, and countless species of more humble apes flourished. Life in telligent enough to enjoy interacting with nature, but not intelligent enough to challenge it, to harness it, or to attempt to control it: the golden age of primates. Surely this step, just before Reason, was the most sublime reached by life on Earth, wouldn’t you agree, Doctor? The ‘rational animal’ is the most grandiose oxymoron in existence: a ventriloquist’s dummy that mimics and mocks nature with its mysticism and science.”

  Geoffrey had been enduring Thatcher’s droning Jeremiad for the better part of six hours now on this last, unbearably long leg of their trip. He had been spared only by a fitful nap two hours earlier, and even then he had dreamed an infinite loop of the scientist’s dreary doomsaying.

  It was bad enough having the Redmond Principle wielded at him, but if Geoffrey had to suffer one more oblique reference to Thatcher’s Tetteridge Award, or the big fat check that would accompany the Genius Grant he was suspiciously so certain of receiving, or the Pulitzer Prize he was laying odds on winning, or another celebrity he’d had lunch with, Geoffrey would probably need to use the barf bag affixed to the back of the seat in front of him.

  Geoffrey heard something clunk loudly on the roof of the plane. “Excuse me, Thatcher.” Grateful for the distraction, he climbed out of his seat and walked forward.

  When he got to the cockpit he saw a gleaming KC-135 Stratotanker detach its fuel probe and pull away from the Greyhound in a graceful display of aerial acrobatics.

  The Greyhound pilot gave a thumbs-up to the Stratotanker. “Muchas gracias, muchacho!” The pilot glanced back at Geoffrey. “Sky bridge!” he explained. “This is one of two C-2As the Navy fitted for aerial refueling. They’re the only aircraft that can reach this place and land on an aircraft carrier.”

  “So that’s how this thing can fly so far in one leg?” Geoffrey asked.

  “Correct. We had to set up the sky bridge as soon as the carrier group was in place.”

  Geoffrey grinned, marveling at the circuit that had been put into place to reach the incredibly remote location.

  “Speaking of, I think that’s your island right there!” The copilot pointed.

  Far below, Geoffrey saw dozens of huge naval vessels ringing a brown-cliffed island on the distant horizon. As they drew nearer, Geoffrey thought the island resembled a wide Bundt cake, slightly glazed with white guano around its rim.

  The pilot hailed the Enterprise’s control tower.

  “You better get back to your seat and strap in, Dr. Binswanger. If you’ve never landed on a carrier deck, when the tailhook catches us you’ll be glad you’re facing backwards.”

  “OK.” Geoffrey hurried back to his seat. “We’re about to land,” he told Thatcher.

  Thatcher was irritated at the interruption. He tossed a few sunflower seeds into his mouth from a vest pocket. “As I was saying, if this isn’t a hoax, perhaps it’s Mother Earth’s perverse way of eradicating us—a little curiosity out here waiting to kill the cat.” Thatcher chuckled.

  “Mm-hmm,” Geoffrey said.

  “Intelligence, wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Binswanger, is the snake in the Garden of Eden? The fatal virus planet Earth was unlucky enough to contract? Or is that too heavy for you?”

  Geoffrey shook his head and looked out the window. Seeing a few of the gray leviathans of the Enterprise Joint Task Group, the seriousness of the situation they were about to enter finally struck him.

  Thatcher continued, seem
ingly intoxicated by his own baritone voice. “Unfortunately, I doubt Henders Island will live up to the hype. Island ecologies are wimpy. No offense, Doctor.”

  Geoffrey wondered what Thatcher was driving at now, but then he remembered he was wearing his T-shirt from Kaua’i that said “CONSERVE ISLAND HABITATS” in faded green letters on the mud-red fabric. He shook his head. “None taken, Thatcher. Island ecologies are wimpy. That’s why we can learn so much from them. They’re the canaries in the coal mine. Which is why I doubt we’ll see anything to write home about here. Canaries rarely eat cats.”

  Thatcher raised his bushy eyebrows. “Ah, but don’t you admit a certain morbid hope? I mean, what if this were some thing world-changing? After all, giant dodder from the island of Japan is spreading across North America. You know, the stuff that looks like yellow Silly String? If you’re not aware of the study a three-inch cutting produced a growth the length of three football fields in just two months during an experiment conducted in Texas in 2002. When you attack it, it germinates. If you chop it up, every part grows into a complete plant. And the most amusing thing about giant dodder,” Thatcher leaned toward Geoffrey confidentially, “is that it kills any plant it infects, whether it be the lowly weed or the mighty oak.” Thatcher giggled with genuine joy.

  “I’m familiar with dodder, Thatcher, but I’m not sure we’ll find anything quite so dramatic here.” Geoffrey pointed out the window. “Especially if that’s the island we’re talking about.”

  The airplane had rapidly lost altitude. Now, it made a low pass around the island’s cliff as they approached the carrier. Geoffrey noticed the trimaran yacht anchored in a cove cut into the western wall of the island.

  “Hey, that’s the ship from the show! I guess that much wasn’t faked. They really did come all the way out here.”

  “We’ll be landing on Enterprise and a Sea Dragon will Charlie you to Henders Army Base,” the pilot called back to them. “There’s a top-level meeting at seventeen hundred hours.”

  Geoffrey adjusted his watch to the time-zone uncertainly. “That’s less than an hour from now. Right?”

  “Right,” the copilot said.

  “Can’t we stretch and get something to eat first?” Thatcher wadded up the plastic wrapper of his sunflower seeds and stuffed it in pocket number twelve.

  “Attendance mandatory, sir,” the pilot replied. “The President called the meeting!”

  After a sharp involuntary intake of breath, Thatcher smiled. “I never imagined I would be summoned by the President. Did you, Dr. Binswanger?”

  Geoffrey looked out the window as the carrier deck rose beneath them. He braced for impact. “No.”

  “Hold on, guys!” the pilot shouted.

  Thatcher gasped. “Dear Lord!”

  4:49 P.M.

  Still buzzing from the adrenaline high of the tailhook landing on the nearly five-acre flight deck of the Enterprise, Geoffrey clung to a handle inside the cockpit of the thundering helicopter as it made a dizzying ascent over the island’s sheer putty-brown palisade. Both Geoffrey and Thatcher wore blue hazmat suits, their helmets in their laps.

  Scanning the cliff’s overhanging face, Geoffrey noted the metamorphic banding and buckled red layers of rock, deeply corrugated by eons of erosion. They appeared even more weathered than the ancient shores of the Seychelles that had been isolated 65 million years ago at the edge of the age of dinosaurs. As the helicopter cleared the rim, a green bowl opened under them. At its bottom, a broken ring of jungle spread outward like a dark wave from a bald central mesa of weathered rock.

  “Looks like a creosote plant,” Geoffrey observed.

  Thatcher nodded.

  “How so, Doctor?” asked one of the helicopter crewmen.

  “Some individual creosote plants are probably the oldest multi-cellular living things on Earth,” Geoffrey answered. “From the air you can see large rings of vegetation across the floor of the Mojave Desert in California. Fossilized root systems show that the rings are from a single plant growing outward for ten thousand years.”

  “No kidding!” the young pilot exclaimed, impressed.

  Whether it was the geology, the deeply sculpted weathering of the topography, or the strange growth pattern of the vegetation— or all of these cues taken together—Geoffrey’s instincts and training told him that this remote island was considerably older than he had first assumed.

  Below, they glimpsed the four sections of StatLab at the outer edge of the jungle. The NASA lab’s first two sections appeared to be dissolving under a wave of multicolored growth, and the other two sections were strangled and encrusted with vegetation. The jungle seemed to be literally consuming the lab and a plume of swarming bugs poured out of the end of the last section.

  “That’s the old lab,” the crewman told them. “We had to abandon it last week.”

  “Last week?” Geoffrey asked. The ruin looked like it must have been there for decades.

  Farther up the slope they saw the Army’s base of operations on the island, a mobile theater command center. NASA had clearly had its chance and failed.

  “That’s the Trigon,” said the pilot. “That’s where we’re going.”

  The new facility was made up of three olive drab sections joined together in a triangle.

  “That baby’s blast-resistant, has virus-proof windows and magnetic-pulse-protected power and communications systems,” bragged the pilot. “It’s a mobile theater base designed to survive germ warfare as well as high velocity direct fire, direct hits by mortar bombs, and a near-miss from a twenty-five-hundred-pound bomb. You’ll be safe as a baby in a cradle there, guys!”

  The new base had been established on a level tier carved into the green slope about four hundred yards away from NASA’s crumbling lab. Twelve Humvees and three bulldozers sat in neat rows near the Trigon on the freshly graded terrace.

  The Trigon was encircled by a moat lined with butyl rubber and filled with seawater hauled in by helicopter, the pilot informed them. Every thirty seconds powerful fountains sprayed a white wall into the air around the base.

  Twenty-two 300,000-liter demountable water storage tanks rested on shelves graded higher up the slope, sprouting PVC pipes that fed moats and sprinklers around the base. Geoffrey recognized the tanks from his visit to Haiti after Hurricane Ella—the giant tanks could be transported to disaster areas anywhere in the world within twenty-four hours—by land, sea, or air—to provide safe water supplies.

  As they approached the base, Geoffrey wondered why there were so many tanks. Why did they need so much water? He watched a helicopter filling one from a distended hose, like a robotic Pegasus relieving itself.

  “Time to get those helmets on. We’re about to drop you two off. After you hear the click just twist them clockwise till you hear another click.”

  The Sea Dragon descended over a landing zone, and the rear hatch opened, admitting a gale of hot wind and the urgent pulse of the helicopter rotors.

  Geoffrey and Thatcher braced themselves for the ramp to touch down, but instead it hovered about five feet off the scorched and salted ground.

  “We’re not allowed to land!” the pilot shouted. “Jump! Then run down the path to the building. You’ll be all right.”

  “Er—OK.” Geoffrey poised himself for the jump.

  But Thatcher balked. “You must be joking, young man.”

  “Jump NOW, sir!”

  As the ramp dipped, they both jumped and Thatcher took a tumble. “Fuck!”

  Geoffrey hit the ground on his two feet, his knees flexing with the impact.

  The helicopter rose and the downwash of its rotors pounded their backs.

  Geoffrey helped Thatcher scramble to his feet and they both ran down a wet path of glistening rock salt bordered by fountains that sprayed a tunnel of cold water over them.

  “I’ve had friendlier welcomes,” Thatcher groused, panting.

  The fountains subsided for a moment and for the first time Geoffrey looked out across t
he island they now stood on. “What are they? Triffids?” He remembered the old science fiction movie in which experimental plants invaded the earth. The desperate humans discovered that saltwater killed the vegetation only moments before it had strangled the entire planet.

  “What, pray tell, are ‘triffids,’ Doctor?” Thatcher wheezed as they ran.

  “Never mind,” Geoffrey answered, and a thrill swelled inside him—what on Earth had they found here?

  5:08 P.M.

  Chlorine dioxide gas was replaced with filtered air, and the hexagonal entry hatch inside the Trigon’s germ-warfare-proof air dock swung open.

  Standing before them was a slender redheaded woman in a T-shirt, jeans, and Adidas sneakers. “You can take the helmets and suits off now,” she instructed in a crisp voice.

  Geoffrey pulled off the helmet and his ears popped as they adjusted to the higher air pressure inside the base.

  Geoffrey cocked his head; she was not only attractive, but seemed very familiar. “Do I know you? Oh, SeaLife—of course. You were on the show! Sorry.”

  She forgave him with a nod and a friendly smile. “They wouldn’t let me go home, so I persuaded them to let me hang around and help. In real life I’m a botanist, though not as esteemed as the ones they’ve shipped in.”

  He extended his hand. “Geoffrey.”

  “Geoffrey…?” She took his hand.

  “Binswanger.”

  She frowned. “Hmm.”

  Geoffrey smiled. “Problem?”

  “I could never marry you.” She smiled.

  “Oh really?”

  “My name’s Nell Duckworth. The only reason I ever wanted to get married was to change my last name.”

  “Ah.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You could always hyphenate it,” Thatcher interposed drily, clearly unhappy at having his presence disregarded.

  “That’s funny, Thatcher. You with your great name. By the way, Nell, this is Thatcher Redmond.” Geoffrey presented Thatcher with a regal flourish.