by Warren Fahy
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.
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 sugar, a pile of salt, a bowl of freshwater, 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, staring openmouthed beside him.
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, and others in its vicinity scattered.
“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 sprang 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. “… three twenty-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 stri
pes 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.
Henders Rat
Rodentocaris hendersi (after Echevarria et al, Proceedings of the Woods Hole Scientific Meetings, vol. 92: 87-93)
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.