by Warren Fahy
Hender looked out. “OK,” Hender said. “Hi Andy!”
Copepod barked in response.
7:23 A.M.
Cynthea saw Andy run out on the foredeck. The five hendropods glided behind him.
The nearest Navy ship was now on top of them, slicing past their port side, its loudspeakers blaring out over the decks.
“YOU ARE ORDERED BY THE UNITED STATES NAVY TO ABANDON SHIP NOW. CARRY NOTHING WITH YOU OR YOU WILL BE FIRED ON.”
When the hendropods saw an arcing waterspout fired from a water canon on the deck of the destroyer, they whirled and ran in the other direction.
Andy caught Hender. “No, it’s OK, Hender! Come on!”
The hendropods turned around slowly at Hender’s humming and clicking calls. Then, reluctantly, they continued behind him and Andy toward the bow.
Behind them, one last Henders rat crouched in the hatchway through which they had come, rubbing its spikes together as it chose a target.
It bolted across the deck toward the hendropods just as they entered the frame of the videophone.
As the rat launched itself through the air, Copepod growled inches from Hender’s ankle.
Hender glanced at the ocean with one eye before casually batting the rat overboard with a deft block by its rear foot.
The rat thrashed in the water before sinking into the sea.
Nell, Geoffrey, Andy, Captain Sol, Warburton, Cynthea, Samir, Marcello, and the rest of the Trident’s crew gathered the hendro pods between them on the foredeck, creating a human shield as Cynthea had commanded.
With the combined stress of the moment and the sight of the gigantic ships moving through the sea around them, all of the hendros vanished.
11:24 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time
All the major networks and cable news channels displayed on plasma screens in the White House Situation Room were muted.
The President and his advisors stared in astonishment at only one screen—the one that carried the live feed from the guided missile destroyer, U.S.S. Stout.
“Captain Bobrow, can you hear me?” the President asked the captain of the Stout.
“Yes, sir.”
“Get me a closer view of the folks on deck, if you can, Captain.”
“Yes, sir. We’re getting you a closer view now.”
The image zoomed in as a camera on the decks of the Stout showed the Trident’s crew clustered at the bow.
“Isn’t that Nell?” the President said. “That’s Nell Duckworth, I believe, isn’t it, Trudy? I was told she died in an accident on the island. And there’s Dr. Binswanger.”
The others were impressed once more by the President’s Rolodex memory for names and faces.
“What’s going on here, Wallace? Lay off the shells, Captain Bobrow, damn it. I want you to stop firing, is that understood?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President, those are from the other guys.”
“Well, hey, you other guys, stop firing,” said the President.
“Yes, sir!”
“What is that…some kind of distortion?” the Defense Secretary asked.
“We need a closer look there, Captain Bobrow.”
“Yes, sir. We’re coming around.”
The Press Secretary suddenly cracked the door of the Situation Room and stuck his head in. “Mr. President! Turn to the Discovery Channel, sir!”
“What?”
7:25 A.M.
The bullhorns sounded again from the nearest ship:
“ABANDON SHIP TRIDENT! CARRY NOTHING WITH YOU OR YOU WILL BE FIRED ON!”
“These are the amazing people of Henders Island,” Cynthea declaimed triumphantly into Peach’s microphone.
Marcello kissed his St. Christopher’s medal.
Cynthea gestured at the hendropods, but stopped, bewildered. They were gone. “What happened? Where are they?”
4:25 P.M. Greenwich Mean Time
Sixty million people worldwide were watching TV when the live-feed from the Trident cut into their regularly scheduled programming.
Within two minutes, that number had leaped to over 200 million. The number continued to rise as the media feeding-frenzy accelerated through the swarm of satellites encircling the Earth in real-time.
11:26 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time
The President listened to Cynthea Leeds speaking from the bow of the ship on the television. Whatever species of Henders organism the TV producer was referring to was nowhere to be seen.
“The President of the United States and the Navy are about to destroy not only us, but a new and intelligent species of people who have as much right to exist on this planet as we do! More, even!”
The loudspeakers of the Stout echoed over the deck in the background, “TRIDENT, YOU ARE IN DIRECT VIOLATION OF UNITED STATES NAVY DIRECTIVES. BEGIN ABANDONING SHIP IN THIRTY SECONDS, OR YOU WILL BE FIRED ON.”
“I don’t like it, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Defense insisted. “Why are they not complying? Are they crazy?”
7:27 A.M.
The Navy ship’s bullhorn rang out in the background.
“ABANDON SHIP NOW! COMPLY NOW!”
“And so the United States Navy continues its countdown to its sentence of execution,” Cynthea narrated.
There was an unbearable silence. The Trident crew looked at their watches and winced as the seconds ticked down. The Navy had stopped firing warning shots, but no one was sure if this was a good or bad thing.
Andy whispered in what he hoped was Hender’s ear. “Go on, Hender.”
Hender suddenly appeared in brilliant, rippling colors. “Hello, people!” he said in a fluting voice. “Thank you for saving us!”
All the hendropods blushed into vivid color beside him then and waved at the camera in Peach’s hand as they fluted together, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”
11:27 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time
“Well…what the…?” The President’s mouth hung open.
The astonished Commander-in-Chief glanced at his defense secretary and then back to the frightened people who stood defiantly on the bow of the Trident.
Half a billion people were watching the hendropods as the omnivorous eyes of humanity opened across the face of the Earth.
Some laughed at what they saw and thought it was a joke. Others scoffed and thought it was a fraud. Some recoiled and thought it was a horror, and others wept in awe and called it a miracle. Still others trembled with rage and believed it was the Apocalypse.
People watched in real time as their world was instantly turned upside-down. All who watched knew the human race had arrived at a moment of judgment that would mark its destiny and its character, and its world, forever, and the war over the meaning of that moment had already begun in living rooms, cafes, bars, and dormitories across five continents.
“Sweet Jesus H. fucking Christ,” the President said.
7:28 A.M.
Behind the backs of the Trident’s crew, the camera showed the Navy bearing down as the second ship circled across their starboard bow, and a third ship appeared on the horizon.
Nell grabbed the mike from Cynthea. “Mr. President, if you are watching, you must spare these special beings!”
Admiring Nell’s chutzpah, Cynthea reclaimed the mike from her, whispering “Finally, a little drama, Nell. Good work, girl.” Then she shouted into the microphone, “So now we wait with the rest of the world to see what their fate and ours will be!”
Marcello watched the second hand of his watch as it crossed the 30-second mark, and he placed his hand on Hender’s arm as he closed his eyes.
Hender patted Marcello’s hand and Andy’s shoulder reassuringly as his eyes moved in separate directions.
Nell squeezed Geoffrey’s hand hard.
The destroyer’s bullhorns crackled, and a voice boomed over the decks: “THE PRESIDENT HAS ORDERED US TO STAND DOWN. WE ASK PERMISSION TO COME ABOARD.”
“Drama!” Cynthea exalted.
Then they all cheered, hugging each other a
cross species as the U.S. Navy stood down.
7:29 A.M.
Thatcher recognized the blue lid of a glass jar wedged between the bottom and the pontoon of the Zodiac. Another nut jar. Thank God, he was starving.
He tugged it, planted his feet on the pontoon. He pulled it out and twisted it open as he brought it close to peer inside.
Henders wasps and drill-worms spilled out of the jar onto his face and eyes. It was seconds before he realized it was one of Hender’s bug-jars that they had waved hours earlier to get the Trident’s attention.
Thatcher screamed and knocked the satphone overboard as the drill-worms punctured his eyelids and one of the raft’s air chambers simultaneously.
He writhed, tangled in lines and scuba gear, shrieking as the Zodiac partially deflated and one side folded around him. His panic slowly turned to shocked disbelief. Thatcher saw a burst of light as the worms corkscrewed into his optic nerves, and then there was darkness, and a while later there was no more.
8:12 A.M.
All the way from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, the dull black B-2 stealth bomber cruised at Mach 2 at an altitude of twelve hundred feet over the South Pacific ocean.
“Look at that, Zack! The thing’s already breaking apart,” said the copilot.
As they approached the island they could see one of its walls collapsing into the ocean as they approached.
“Damn! OK, let’s lay this egg,” said the pilot.
Before the aircraft cleared the cliffs of Henders Island, the bomb bay doors opened and a B83 gravity bomb fell forward. A parachute deployed and like a two thousand pound lawn dart, the warhead plunged five thousand feet.
As the aircraft pulled up, the bomb’s hardened nose penetrated forty feet into the rocky core of the island. The reverberating clap of the missile’s impact with the stone heart of Henders Island drew rats, spigers, and swarms, which converged around the neat hole punched into the island’s bull’s eye. A 120-second delay began ticking down inside the bomb so that the pilots could achieve safe distance before its one-megaton nuclear warhead detonated.
“That’s gotta be the most expensive can of Raid in history,” the pilot remarked as they left the island at twenty miles a minute, covering nine miles in about thirty seconds. The boomerang-shaped B-2 banked in a wide circle as they gained altitude.
“Check it out, Zack,” the copilot said.
The two men looked over the expanse of the carbon-graphite composite wing as a brilliant light popped like a giant flashbulb in the bowl of the island.
A 250-foot deep crater a thousand feet wide was instantaneously excavated at the island’s center from the initial blast.
Within four seconds every living thing on the surface of the island was vaporized and the ashes blasted over the rim in a cone of smoke. Sand turned to glass. Rock flowed red-hot as a sun-like inferno filled the bowl.
The bomber pilots watched the eruption of light bloom on the island like a yellow rose.
“Don’t look at it too long,” the pilot warned. “Burns the retinas.”
“We’re past the nine-mile range…” the copilot said. “God, you can feel the heat of that thing from here!”
The intense light faded as a giant funnel of dense smoke rose out of the bowl three miles into the sky.
“We better stay ahead of the shockwave,” the pilot said, and he throttled up to just under the speed of sound.
“Target confirmed killed, Base. Copy?”
“Copy that. Mission accomplished. Come on home, boys.”
SEPTEMBER 18
6:34 A.M.
Nell and Geoffrey gazed from the prow of the Trident at the crimson dawn.
Geoffrey cocked his head and studied her wryly for a moment.
“So, I’ve been meaning to ask: What’s sexier than a man who knows the right thing to say?”
“A man who knows when not to say anything.” Geoffrey lifted her chin to meet her smiling lips with his.
6:35 A.M.
Hiding inside a hatchway Zero videoed them kissing, and Cynthea whispered restlessly in his ear: “Are you getting that?”
Zero popped his left eye open at Cynthea. Yup, his eye said.
6:36 A.M.
Hender’s grin and eyes appeared first as he seemed to materialize behind the two young scientists on the prow. They laughed to see him.
6:36 A.M.
“Oh wow…” Cynthea whispered. “Get that, get that, get that, baby!”
6:37 A.M.
Hender moved between them and hugged Geoffrey and Nell with four arms, and together they faced the uncertain dawn.
Page 27 of A Field Guide to Henders Island by Geoffrey Binswanger-Duckworth, Nell Duckworth-Binswanger, and Andrew Beasley, 1st edition.
Page 39 of A Field Guide to Henders Island by Geoffrey Binswanger-Duckworth, Nell Duckworth-Binswanger, and Andrew Beasley, 1st edition.
Map of Henders Island
Preliminary sketches of a spiger by Nell Duckworth on board Trident, August 26—“motion studies.”
Preliminary sketches of a spiger by Nell Duckworth on board Trident, August 27—“speculations on internal structures.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Dr. Donald Lovett, one of the foremost authorities on osmo-regulation in crustaceans, for his enthusiasm, patience, and courage, no matter how frightening the ride became.
Jennifer Limber, Mike Fahy, Daren Bader, Phil Steele, Kate Jones, and so many others were the autotrophs of the Henders ecosystem. And especially Michael Limber.
Stephen Jay Gould for his fantastic journey through evolution, Wonderful Life.
Dr. Michael E. Dawson of the Associates of Cape Cod lab for giving me the same tour Geoffrey took. Dr. Mark McMenamin, years ago, for letting me know that the fossil I found at the Marble Mountain in California was just a ball of algae and a trilobite leg that washed ashore on an ancient beach. Good enough for me—wow.
My beautiful editors, Kate Miciak and Sarah Hodgson, who felt it, too; Loren Noveck and Glen Edelstein, for helping to make this dream a reality; Peter McGuigan, Stephanie Abou, Hannah Gordon, and the rest at Foundry, the best.
Verne, Wells, Conan Doyle, Boulez—and Crichton. And a happy 200th to you, Charles Darwin.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WARREN FAHY was born in Hollywood, California. He’s been a bookseller, a statistical analyst, and managing editor of a video database, where he wrote hundreds of movie reviews for a nationally syndicated column. Formerly the lead writer for WowWee, where he generated creative content for their line of advanced robotic toys, he is now a full-time novelist. He lives in San Diego, California. Delacorte will publish his next novel in 2010.
FRAGMENT
A Delacorte Press Book / June 2009
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2009 by Warren Fahy and Company
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.,
and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Fahy, Warren.
Fragment / Warren Fahy.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33857-4
1. Reality television programs—Fiction. 2. Botanists—Fiction.
3. Biologists—Fiction. 4. Island animals—Fiction.
5. Evolution (Biology)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3606.A275F73 2009
813′.6—dc22
2008046507
www.bantamdell.com
v3.0
