Fragment

by Warren Fahy

  “Pleasure,” Thatcher said with a curt dip of his head, but he avoided eye contact with Nell and moved on toward a cluster of others gathered farther down the corridor.

  She shook her head. “Another Nobel Prize winner, no doubt.”

  “Tetteridge, as a matter of fact,” Geoffrey said. “Nobel Prize winners are much nicer. You could always just keep your own name, you know.” He winked.

  She reached out to poke him in the ribs but hesitated. Geoffrey sensed that her moment of levity had passed, and her eyes drifted as some sadness caught up to her.

  Geoffrey smiled, curious. “What’s going on, Nell?”

  “I was hoping you were going to tell me.”

  He detected a surprising fear under the irony. “Seriously?”

  She sighed. “A lot of people have died here. And they were my friends.” She looked at him.

  Geoffrey was alarmed, and also intrigued by the intelligence he saw working in her eyes. “I see.”

  Thatcher returned, walking briskly up to them. He gave Nell an up-and-down look and then addressed Geoffrey. “I believe we’re being summoned, Doctor.”

  “Don’t call me Doctor, Thatcher,” Geoffrey sighed, and smiled encouragingly at Nell. “Come on.” He gently jabbed her in the ribs with a finger. “Let’s crash this party.”

  5:21 P.M.

  The conference room, which doubled as an observation bay when the table was pushed against the wall, occupied most of the north side of the Trigon.

  The tilted window of laminated glass overlooked the lime-green slopes that rose to the straight edge of the island’s rim against the blazing blue sky.

  Seated around the conference table were a scattering of military brass and about twenty American and British scientists, some quite well known, some Geoffrey did not recognize. He spotted Sir Nigel Holscombe, a favorite of his, who had hosted many a classic BBC nature documentary series.

  A satellite-uplinked teleconference screen dominated the western end of the room. In the Oval Office, the President sat behind his massive desk with his advisors seated nearby, among them the secretaries of Defense and State.

  “I hope we’re coming through all right,” the President began. “I apologize for the delay.”

  Geoffrey glanced at Nell with wide eyes.

  But Nell’s focus was on the screen, her expression intent.

  Dr. Cato answered, “Yes sir, Mr. President, we hear you fine.”

  “Good. As everyone here knows by now, I trust, the tragic incident on SeaLife was unfortunately not a hoax. The cover story was invented to buy us time to make an important decision. I wanted to share what we have now learned with the most distinguished scientific minds we could assemble before having to make that fateful decision. Dr. Cato, please bring us all up to speed on the situation as it now stands.”

  Thatcher munched on a peanut from a bag he had stashed in pocket number eight. He observed Dr. Cato with contempt. Suffering from an apparent bout of professional jealousy, Cato had roundly snubbed Thatcher at the Bioethics Convention in Rio last winter, and Thatcher, for one, had not forgotten it.

  “Thank you, Mr. President. I’m Wayne Cato, chairman of Caltech’s Biology Division and project leader of the Enterprise research team. To give us all some crucial background, Doug Livingstone, our on-site geologist, will explain how we think Henders Island got here in the first place. Doug?”

  The tall geologist with a wing of salt-and-pepper hair over his craggy face rose and introduced himself in an upper-class British accent. “This graphic put together by the geologic team on the Enterprise illustrates what we have been able to reconstruct about the origins of Henders Island.”

  An animation of the Earth appeared on a presentation screen behind him.

  “Seven hundred and fifty million years ago, a supercontinent known as Rodinia split into three pieces. One hundred and fifty million years later, these pieces smashed back together. They formed a second supercontinent we call Pannotia.”

  On the screen, the Earth rotated as a sprawling supercontinent cracked into three continents and slammed together.

  “Another hundred and fifty million years passed. Then, just as the Cambrian explosion of life introduced an astonishing variety of multicellular species on Earth, Pannotia tore into four vast segments. These pieces would become Siberia, northern Europe, North America, and the supercontinent geologists call Gondwana, which included Antarctica, South America, Africa, India, and China.”

  Livingstone waited as the animation caught up.

  “Tens of millions of years passed as the new continents converged to form Laurasia, which slammed into Gondwana two hundred seventy-five million years ago and formed the super-continent known as Pangaea, where dinosaurs emerged. Pangaea started breaking apart a hundred and eighty million years ago into the seven continents familiar to us today, which is why dinosaur fossils can now be found on every modern continent.”

  The geologist flicked through some stock images of the violent coasts of Cornwall and Alaska.

  “Over the eons, landmasses continued to split and collide, dragging mountain ranges under the sea and shoving ocean beds up to create the Andes, Rockies, and Himalayas. Fragments of land continued to break off continents. Some drifted thousands of miles. We know that Alaska, for example, is a train wreck of giant chunks cast off from China and other parts of the world.”

  Livingstone clicked to the next animation, which appeared to be a tighter detail of the previous globe.

  “We now believe that there was a fifth fragment of Pannotia. Probably about the size of New Zealand, this fragment somehow managed to dodge the geological pie-fight for half a billion years, riding up and down the Pacific rim while being relentlessly ground down between tectonic plates. All that remains above water of this fragment today is Henders Island, which seems to have been upthrusting just faster than erosion can melt it under the sea.”

  Livingstone clicked to an image of a geological cross-section of the island. It looked like a jagged pillar or a tapering candle rising from the sea floor.

  “We put together this profile from sonar mapping data collected by Navy subs during the past few weeks. Rock samples from the cliffs indicate that this island is a continental microplate with a craton or basement core composed of prelife Archean-aged rock. Excavations for this command center and rock samples collected during a mountaineering expedition indicate the overlying younger rocks to be freshwater stream and lake deposits that contain fossils of completely unknown organisms with no parallel in the rest of the world’s fossil record.

  “So, Mr. President, this small island’s humble appearance disguises an epic legacy. The fluke of its natural history has helped hide it from the eyes of science. Its remoteness has kept it out of the path of human beings. From the air, it looks like the typical caldera of a volcanic island. Its imposing cliffs have fended off tsunamis from meteor impacts, as well as the few travelers who may have come across it, for millions of years. Recent seismic activity, however, indicates that the island’s substrate is weakening. This accounts for giant fissures in the island’s escarpments that have allowed access to the island’s interior for the first time.”

  The lanky scientist pointed toward the window.

  “The vegetation covering the majority of the island seems to be a bacterial symbiont that absorbs a variety of minerals and photosynthesizes. Combined with other organisms that use acid to scour the vegetation off the rock, this is probably what carved out the island’s bowl-shaped topography, disguising it as a volcanic island in satellite images.”

  Livingstone glanced at Geoffrey and the other scientists seated around the table. “When the supercontinent Pannotia existed, the ocean was nearly fresh. Many believe this played a role in the rise of complex life during the Cambrian explosion. Complex life might also have evolved in the vast freshwater inland seas of Pannotia before migrating down rivers into the open seas. This island seems to have carried life on a separate journey from that evolutionary exp
losion all the way to the present day.”

  “Don’t give me the labor pains, just show me the baby, Dr. Livingstone,” the President said, to some laughter around the table. The President’s advisors did not laugh.

  Livingstone cleared his throat. “To put it in perspective, Mr. President, Australia was isolated seventy million years ago, and look how weird kangaroos and platypuses are. Life on Henders Island has been isolated almost ten times that long. For all practical purposes, it might as well be an alien planet.”

  Geoffrey felt almost physically dizzy. Thatcher, he saw, was looking at Dr. Livingstone with an expression of awe that bordered on delight.

  The Secretary of Defense spoke for the first time. “So I guess that means we can rule out biowarfare programs—this isn’t the Island of Doctor Moreau?”

  There was a general release of laughter.

  Dr. Cato nodded. “Right. And it’s not from outer space, or a so-called lost world frozen in time, or a land of radioactive mutants. Scientists in Romania recently discovered a cave sealed off for five million years. The cave contained an entire ecosystem of thirty-three new species. The base of their food chain is a fungus growing in an underground lake in total darkness. Thermal vents at the bottom of the sea have revealed ecosystems previously unimagined that might reach back to the first single-celled organisms. The ecosystem on this island has been evolving much longer than any other land-based ecosystem on Earth.” He gestured toward Nell. “Dr. Nell Duckworth, one of our project leaders, will now summarize what we know about life on Henders Island. Dr. Duckworth?”

  Nell rose and Geoffrey looked at Nell in surprise, after the humility of her introduction, to discover her authority here.

  Nell’s expression was quite serious, grim, even, to the point of bleakness.

  “Normally, island ecosystems are fragile and vulnerable to ‘weed species’—alien flora and fauna that destroy native species.” She advanced through some images. “Mosquitoes, mongoose, gypsy moths—even house cats have decimated island ecosystems.”

  She clicked the wireless mouse and brought up a blue screen that read PLANT TESTS. She clicked again: six potted plants appeared in split-screen on the large monitor. “Here is some time-lapse footage of some of Earth’s most formidable plants— like kudzu, leafy spurge, giant dodder—after being exposed on Henders Island.”

  In speeded-up motion the specimens on the screen were strangled, dismembered, dissolved, and devoured by Henders vines, clover, clovores, bugs, and animals. The pixilated massacres resembled stop-motion scenes from the original King Kong movie. Specimen after specimen shown in the windows on the screen was raided, razed, and replaced with sprouting Henders varieties.

  Grumbling rose from the audience.

  Nell raised her voice, keeping it authoritative and firm. “None of the over sixty plant species we tested lasted more than twenty-four hours. Most perished in less than two hours.”

  Geoffrey noticed that many of the scientists at the table looked as shocked as he felt, and many of the military officers had clenched their jaws defiantly. The President and his advisors, he noted, seemed to have seen this incredible footage before.

  Nell clicked the mouse. A title appeared: ANIMAL TESTS. A split screen showed a series of animals filmed in slow motion as they battled Henders counterparts.

  “After matching common Earth animals with Henders species in artificial laboratory conditions, we found the same result. Rattlesnakes, pythons, scorpions, jumping spiders, tarantula hawks, cats, army ants, cockroaches…None of these lasted more than a few hours. Most lasted only a few minutes.”

  The officers, civilians, and scientists alike were agitated and indignant to see the familiar monsters hunted down and slaughtered so easily. Even if they were deadly and troublesome species, they were our deadly species, and a certain loyalty was offended by the sight of their swift destruction. The Henders species seemed to move at a different speed, always attacked first, and responded to any resistance or counterattack with a frightening escalation of violence.

  Thatcher glanced at Geoffrey and then looked back at the screen. A smile widened under his red mustache.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” said one of the Navy brass across from Geoffrey. “Sorry, Mr. President. I hadn’t seen this until now.”

  “That’s all right, Admiral Shin.” The President nodded. “That’s why you’re here. I’m seeing some of this for the first time myself. I empathize with your sentiment.”

  “Laboratory conditions are not ideal tests,” Nell continued. “Henders species are even more lethal in the wild. As we found when we released some common specimens equipped with cameras.”

  Footage of the ensuing carnage played behind her.

  “Mr. President,” interposed Brigadier General Travers, who sat across the table from Geoffrey. “This is potentially more deadly than any military threat we have ever encountered, sir.”

  Thatcher forgot to chew his last peanut as he stared at the screen: he swallowed it whole as a Henders rat bit off the head of a pit viper.

  Geoffrey kept looking from the screen to Nell and back. He could not believe what he was seeing—but it seemed impossible to him that this could be faked or that this woman would be participating in some deception.

  He blurted out, “Is this how every species on the island—I mean, there must be something that is nonaggressive in this ecosystem! I’m sorry, Mr. President—Geoffrey Binswanger of Woods Hole.”

  Nell answered Geoffrey’s question directly and calmly. “Henders Island’s entire ecology consists of weed species, Dr. Binswanger. Earth’s most lethal flora and fauna are no match for any of the Henders species we have tested. If any of them were to spread to the mainland, they would soon wipe out everything in their biological niche. And each species here can occupy a wide variety of niches throughout its life cycle.”

  High-speed and slow-motion clips on the screen showed a pine tree, a praying mantis, a flat of wheat, Africanized bees, crab grass, and a mongoose—all ravaged and scavenged by Henders opponents.

  “Every insect is outmatched. Every common plant is shredded. Every predator from our world is slaughtered and consumed, bones and all,” Nell told the hushed room. “There are animals that reside in the island’s lake that are bigger than T-Rexes, and there are land predators twice the size of African buffalos. There are mite-sized creatures equally lethal. We haven’t even been able to find nematodes in the soil—in their place we found tiny armored worms that eat detritus and aerate the soil. These armored worms devour nematodes for breakfast. We have found no species from the external biosphere here at all except for a few fungi, molds, and bacteria that appear to have adapted to subsoil environments.” Nell was silent a moment. Then she added: “Nothing from our world can survive here.”

  “Now, come on!” protested Sir Nigel Holscombe. “You’ve got to be joking!”

  “Sadly, no,” replied Dr. Cato. “Extrapolating from the data we’ve collected using the most conservative computer model projections, if this biology mixed with ours, human trade would distribute Henders species to all five continents within a decade. Every living thing the human race takes for granted, from cows to apple trees to dogs and the fleas on their backs, would go extinct within a few decades.”

  “We would be the oddballs, living on islands with kangaroos, kiwis, and giant tortoises, Sir Nigel, praying that species from the mainland never reached us,” said Nell.

  Exclamations of shock, awe, and disbelief exploded around the table.

  Geoffrey leaned forward, fascinated by what he’d seen and heard. “So why hasn’t it happened yet?”

  “Yes, and are we safe on this island?” Sir Nigel chimed in. The old scientist looked deeply rattled and excited, simultaneously.

  “Fourteen hundred miles of ocean surrounds Henders Island in every direction,” Dr. Cato replied. “I’m told that a cameraman is the one who discovered that saltwater is toxic to Henders biochemistry. Like insects and birds, these species invaded the
land by switching from excreting ammonia—which is very soluble in water but toxic if stored in the body—to excreting uric acid. As a result of their terrestrial compromise, Henders creatures lost their ability to hypo-osmoregulate—to keep their blood less salty than seawater. Since they can’t get rid of excess sodium, calcium, or magnesium, exposure to saltwater causes a magnesium buildup in their blood like a fatal dose of anesthesia.”

  “Many Henders species spray pheromones when they sense salt to signal danger,” Nell told them. “This is what is known as a Schreck reaction. It has been observed in rainbow trout that release an olfactory marker when one is attacked, triggering the whole school to scatter.”

  “A pheromone repellent,” Dr. Cato continued, “saved the cameraman when he jumped in a saltwater pool and was coated by it. Saltwater is a reliable secondary repellent to Henders animals, hence the perimeter of fountains we have set up around the base. So, Sir Nigel, to answer your question, we are quite safe here, and our vehicles are now equipped with tanks of seawater as well.” Dr. Cato gave his friend a reassuring nod.

  Geoffrey shook his head, still unable to reconcile this with everything he knew about sustainable ecosystems.

  “Dr. Cato.” The President’s face was grim. “What is your bottom line?”

  Dr. Cato glanced darkly at Nell before answering. “Sir, the bottom line is this: if the oceans had not continued to get saltier since Henders Island was isolated about six hundred million years ago, life on Earth would probably be extremely different today.”

  “So far we’ve been very, very lucky,” Nell said.

  All turned to look at the President.

  “Well, we obviously can’t cover the world in salt,” he said.

  “No, sir,” Nell agreed.

  Thatcher Redmond looked around at his colleagues. “Mr. President, are we actually contemplating the destruction of this ecosystem? If that is what you’ve asked us here to condone, sir, I simply cannot think of a more horrific legacy for America. Or for the human race!”