by Warren Fahy
Zero’s grin widened. “OK, baby.”
Cynthea avoided Captain Sol’s scrutinizing eye as she raced past him to give Zero a huge hug.
11:46 A.M.
The mongoose sat so still it might have been a stuffed specimen in a diorama. Only its nostrils moved as it sniffed the air.
It found no familiar scents, but caught nauseating whiffs of sulfur in the air. Strange stimuli baffled its instincts, and its ringed tail, whiskers, and ears twitched in unison.
The animal was fitted with a black nylon harness. Mounted on top was a Crittercam, a device invented by Greg Marshall for the National Geographic Society. At the end of a curving black tube, a pencil-wide camera lens peered over the mammal’s supple shoulders.
The tiny camera beamed a real-time image from a Starburst candy-sized titanium-cased transmitter on the animal’s back. Its signal was good for a maximum range of about five hundred meters.
The grizzled and faintly striped fur of the mammal shimmered in the diffused light as it crept up over a tree branch that seemed to be coated in scales like a reptile.
The mongoose kept lifting its head on its long, flexible neck, temporarily blocking the tiny camera’s view. Flinching at every unfamiliar noise, it surveyed its surroundings.
The mongoose’s reputation for astonishing athletic ability is well earned, though the popular belief that it is immune to the poison of the cobra—its archenemy as depicted in Kipling’s famous children’s story—shortchanges its prowess. In fact, the mongoose relies solely on its lightning-fast reflexes to prevail over the world’s deadliest snake. Likewise, the supposed close contest between the mongoose and the cobra, perpetuated by Kipling’s tale, was a myth. It wasn’t really a contest at all.
The average mongoose approaches a cobra with almost playful zeal. Their confrontation is a pitiful thing to behold. The mammal toys with the venerated reptile, easily dodging its strikes with eye-blurring leaps, taunting it with its jerking ringed tail as it times its fatal assault. So precise is its coordination on that final strike that the mongoose counts on biting the cobra’s head behind the hood to deliver the coup de grâce. Mongooses have even been known to pin their victims down, rip out their fangs, and taunt their toothless quarry, like a cat would a mouse, before condescending to feed on their still-coiling prey.
Deadly snakes, of course, are not the only victims of the fearless mammal. Birds, rodents, reptiles, and fruit all find their way to its stomach. Its keen sense of smell can even locate scorpions underground, a mongoose delicacy.
It froze now. Its senses were on fire with foreign cues, its instincts confused by conflicting danger signs. Spooked by the motion of the unfamiliar foliage, the mongoose leaped from the branch to land on the feather-strewn ground.
A buzzing rushed toward it. The mammal sniffed the air, switching its tail, eyes darting from side to side as it attempted to locate the source. It jumped, spinning onto its back in the air like a high-diver performing a double twist.
A whining bug zipped toward its head; the mongoose caught it with both front paws as it landed on its hind feet.
The feisty bug bit the mongoose’s nose with surprising violence, and the mongoose hissed, wrestling it ferociously and kicking up feathers on the forest floor.
The insect’s power baffled the mongoose. Its pinching knife-edged legs managed to cut off two of the mongoose’s toes as the mammal bit the bug nearly in half through a crunchy exoskeleton.
Even as the mongoose chewed its carapace, the bug fought, leaking blue blood over the mammal’s chin. The strange, tangy taste reminded the mongoose of pill bugs, and it spat the bug out as it scanned the trees.
A flying swarm swooped down through the branches. The mongoose leaped, barely avoiding an animal its own size that had narrowly misjudged its trajectory.
When the mongoose hit the ground, it ran.
It slalomed around tree trunks and under logs to lose its pursuers.
In the parting mist of a ravine, a cobralike shape reared up, and the mongoose sprang sideways.
It switched its tail, going into attack mode as a familiar sight finally engaged its scrambled instincts.
When the mongoose lunged at the snake-shape, something streaked in from its right.
It tried a midair twist, but a pulse of agony jackknifed it forward as something snipped off its tail.
The snarling mammal hit the ground and spun to face its attacker, its back raised and the bleeding stub of its tail twitching. It faced its opponent—a Henders rat.
The bulbous eyes of the rat swept back and forth on diagonal stalks. Long, crowded crystalline fangs filled its wide mouth and colors pulsed in stripes around its jaws. White crab claws on its lower jaw fed the still-curling tail of the mongoose into its mouth, bite by bite as though into a sink disposal. It trained both eyes on the trembling mongoose and spat out the tip of its tail. Then it closed its lips over its mouthful of fangs and blew a piercing whistle from two nostrils on top of its round head.
The mongoose hissed, stepping back as the high-frequency noise pierced its eardrums. In shock from pain, the mongoose froze, its senses overloaded. It tried to focus on its opponent, whose face rippled with dazzling stripes of color.
The velvet-furred rat held its thick tail curled under its body, tucked between its four legs. A sharp cleat hooked down on the tip of its tail like a scorpion’s stinger, gripping the ground.
The rat’s second brain toggled the eyes on its back, ready to direct the creature’s leaps with the hind legs and the “tail,” which could launch the animal twenty feet. It rose up on its four legs and extended long knife-edged arms at the mongoose, as though sensing it with antennae, the claws on its lower jaw extending in anticipation.
The mongoose preempted its strike and lunged at it, catching the back of the rat’s neck in its teeth.
The mongoose bit down and gave a vicious jerk of its head to snap the rat’s neck—but there were no bones in its neck to snap. It gave a few more furious shakes as the rat blew another whistling screech. The mongoose bit down again and again before it released the mortally wounded rat and sensed the wave of animals approaching. Panicked, it spun and leaped away, tipped off balance without its tail.
Another Henders rat sailed through the air, tackling the mammal with its knife-edged arms.
It clamped the mongoose’s hind legs with its own and twisted it to the ground. The mongoose’s supple back rippled and curled like a whip as it writhed in a death grip with its attacker, kicking up more dust and feathers.
But the invertebrate was more flexible. The claws on either side of the rat’s wide jaws grabbed the mongoose’s belly and its teeth bit deep.
Attracted by the snarling fracas, a riot of other creatures arrived. They plunged into the shrieking ball of carnage on the forest floor.
The Crittercam’s lens was suddenly sprayed blue and red.
The transmission went dead.
The mongoose had survived two minutes and nineteen seconds.
11:49 A.M.
Moans of disappointment filled all three still-operating sections of StatLab as the monitors went dark.
Presidential envoy Hamilton Pound stared in frustration out the windows of Section Four, which was farthest from the jungle and highest up the slope of green fields that rose to the island’s high rim.
Pound thought the inside of StatLab resembled the interior of a large Gulfstream jet jammed with workstations, monitors, and specimen-viewing chambers, each attended by grim-faced scientists and technicians. All seemed very depressed by what they had just witnessed.
“Damn,” Dr. Cato said. The slender scientist had neatly trimmed white hair and wore a peach-colored Caltech polo shirt. The usually keen, youthful sparkle in his gray eyes was absent now. The fate of the mongoose had filled him with dread. “OK—scratch mongoose off the list, Nell.”
Nell nodded and shot him an ominous look.
For his part, Hamilton Pound was confused by what he had just seen. And a
little dizzy, too. He wore a rumpled, sweat-stained Brooks Brothers shirt with rolled-up sleeves and a loosened blue-and-red Hermès tie around his unbuttoned collar. His receding hair was slicked back with sweat. He was suffering from a bout of dysentery as his system battled a microbial invasion, and he swigged thirstily from a bottle of Mylanta.
As Special Assistant to the President, Ham Pound had been dispatched on this fact-finding mission by POTUS himself. It was his first opportunity for a solo performance, and at thirty-two he knew it was an impressive milestone in what had already been referred to in the Washington Post as a “meteoric diplomatic career.” Unfortunately, his own illness, the weather, and canceled flights due to equipment failures had cost him three days en route.
And it was just his luck that yesterday two Sea Wolf attack subs had detected and confronted a Chinese sub only fifty nautical miles north of Henders Island. The incident had precipitated a dangerous diplomatic standoff, and the President wasn’t happy about it. The Chinese had backed down, for now. But the ball was firmly in Pound’s hands, and he had to score.
“So much for Crittercams,” Nell sighed, patting Dr. Cato’s shoulder.
Dr. Cato looked troubled. This phase of the investigation, wherein common invasive species would be tested against Henders species, had been designated “Operation Mongoose.”
The Navy brass needed to have a name for this task, apparently, even though the whole operation was top secret. Cato was the one who suggested “Operation Mongoose,” since mongooses were notorious island conquerors. Now that an actual mongoose had met such a swift and terrible fate, however, he wasn’t so comfortable with the name.
Nell reached for the newly arrived diplomat’s hand. “Welcome to our home away from home, Mr. Pound. Sorry, but we were a little busy when you came in, as you can see.”
“Nice to be here.” Pound nodded, only half-facetiously, as he replaced the cap on his Mylanta and shook Nell’s hand. “Call me Ham.”
Both Nell and Dr. Cato balked at the suggestion.
“Nell is one of only two survivors of the original landing, Mr. Pound,” Dr. Cato explained, “and a brilliant former student of mine. She’s proven to be one of our most valuable on-site project leaders. I don’t think she’s slept a minute since the first section of the lab touched down nine days ago. Have you, Nell?”
“Nice to meet you,” Pound said, annoyed by the academic niceties.
“Have a look at these,” Nell said.
The woman was all business, Pound decided. Good.
She presented a brightly lit viewing chamber. Inside was what looked like a collection of buttons.
“Those are disk-ants, as Nell here, who discovered them, calls them,” Dr. Cato explained, looking over Pound’s shoulder.
Nell zoomed in with an overhead camera to show a top view of one of the disks on a monitor over the specimen chamber. The one she focused on was waxy-white with a bruisy blue in the center. The “faceup” side of the disk-ant looked like a pie sliced into five pieces. At the center, a shark-toothed mouth grinned across the seams of two slices. On either side of it were dark eyes anyone could take for buttonholes.
Facedown ants were embossed with three spiraling horns radiating from the center on their upper sides.
“You have to give them a real name, Nell,” Dr. Cato said.
“Later. We discovered these ants must not have a queen, Mr. Pound. But like normal ants, they’re pack hunters and scavengers.” Nell looked at the presidential envoy to make sure he was following. “All the creatures on Henders Island have blue copper-based blood, like crabs and squids do. But they also appear to have energy-boosting adaptations. Their mortality rate is extremely high, but their birthrate is so extremely high that it seems to make up for it.”
Nell increased the magnification. She moused an arrow cursor on the screen to indicate the curving edge of a disk-ant. “Those are eyes on the edge, see?”
She looked at Pound, who coughed and nodded.
“Twenty stereoscopic eyes between their twenty arms,” she continued. “The arms retract telescopically. We think their optic nerves have on-and-off switches activated by an inner-ear-like position detector so they can see ahead, behind, or above them as they roll, as if through a zoetrope.”
“A zoetrope?” Pound glanced at his Chronoswiss Pathos wrist-watch, but he couldn’t remember what time zone he was in and all the dials seemed to blur together.
“You know, one of those old rotating novelties,” Dr. Cato said. “If you look at a series of photos through slits as it spins, the photos look like one moving image.”
“Oh right.” Pound removed his glasses and rubbed the steamed-up lenses again. “Keep going.”
“The sophistication of the nervous system is just staggering for an animal of this size,” Dr. Cato explained.
“The size of their ring-shaped brain in proportion to body mass is twice the relative size of a jumping spider’s brain,” Nell added.
“And jumping spiders have the largest brain in proportion to body mass of any known animal,” Dr. Cato said. “When these ants are not rolling, they can walk on either flat side and carry food on top. When rolling, they can carry food on both sides, feeding themselves and their offspring at the same time.”
Pound replaced his glasses. “OK. So?”
Nell panned the camera to a facedown specimen.
“On the ‘tails’ side, you see three Fibonacci spirals radiating from the center toward the edge. One of these spiraling tubes is the birth canal. It feeds vitellin, a kind of primitive yolk, to the unborn juveniles. The other tube is a waste canal. And the third spiral,” Nell zoomed in farther, “is actually a row of babies hitching a ride, lined up like puka shells on a necklace. So each ant you can see is really a colony. The babies go into action when their mothers molt, helping to devour and remove the old exo-skeleton. We haven’t figured out their sex organs yet—but they appear to be hermaphrodites that mate once and give birth constantly for the rest of their lives, using a stored packet of sperm from their mate. They can probably self-fertilize, too, like barnacles.” She looked drily at Pound for a reaction, and found none. “They give birth to ready-to-go miniatures that infest them until they’re large enough to leave home or eat their parent—unless Mom or Dad eats them first. As they grow larger they give birth to larger offspring, which tend to graze on the smaller offspring, striking a tenuous balance—until food becomes scarce. Then, in a heartbeat, it becomes every disk-ant for itself.”
She increased the magnification again, to 100X. On one of the “baby” disk-ants was a similar spiral of miniatures hitching a ride on its back.
“The ant’s offspring give birth, too, down to the size of mites.” She looked at Pound. “And they are constantly infiltrated by other passengers from different disk-ants, which line up according to size automatically.”
“Each individual you see,” Dr. Cato added, “is a colony of thousands, which help one another molt and recycle the components of chitin to the next scale down.”
“And help attack prey and the armies of parasites that protect their prey.” Nell knocked on the thick window.
At the sound, the disk-ants lying on their sides snapped up on their edges. Their centipede-like legs telescoped out and rolled them forward toward the noise of Nell’s rapping knuckles. Some of them launched like Chinese throwing disks. Retracting their legs, they banked off the window, leaving pinpoint nicks in the acrylic. Pound could see many other such nicks on the window. One of the ants stuck: a flood of tiny ants flowed down from the doomed ant’s back and spread out on the window as others stayed behind and instantly began devouring their host.
Henders Disk-Ant
Rotaformica hendersi
(after Steele and Benton, Proceedings of the
Zoological Society of Washington, vol. 36: 12-27)
“Jesus,” Pound muttered. They reminded him of the crabs he had acquired while engaging in a particularly ill-advised spring break activity in Fort L
auderdale during his Dartmouth days.
Nell was glad to see him appropriately alarmed. “You should see what they do to army ants. We caught these specimens by extending a hot dog into the jungle on a robotic arm. In ten seconds you couldn’t see the hot dog. Ten seconds later, it was gone. The hot dog practically melted as the nano-ants unloaded from their parents and attacked.”
Nell looked right into Pound’s eyes, touching his arm. “They are omnivorous, Mr. Pound. They graze on the green stuff growing on the island’s slopes and the jungle’s canopy, as well. You came just in time to see another of our tests.”
Pound tried to look impressed, but he just wasn’t. He needed to see the big picture, the full tour. The President had little patience for minutiae, and these creepy disk-ant things were the definition of it. “Don’t give me the labor pains,” POTUS was fond of saying, “just show me the baby!”
“Why can’t we go down to the lower section of the lab and get a look inside the jungle?” Pound said irritably. “I’m here to get a video record of this place to the President three days ago.”
“There’s plenty to see right here, Mr. Pound,” Dr. Cato reminded him.
Pound lowered his voice, glancing at the other scientists working around them. “Doctor, I don’t think you appreciate how much pressure this investigation is under. We need to find out whether this island is a serious biohazard. We can’t maintain a media blackout forever while you’re studying bugs, with all due respect. The rest of the world is getting… antsy.” He glanced at the disk-ants lying dormant again on their sides inside the specimen chamber, and scowled. “And frankly, this is not what the United States needs from a P.R. point of view right now.” He glared at Dr. Cato, whispering, “Nobody’s happy about us monopolizing this situation!”
“I never said we should keep other countries out!” Dr. Cato sputtered indignantly.
Pound spoke with urgent softness to both of them now: “The President has decided that we need to preserve a military option, which quickly becomes impossible with other countries involved. We’ve already included British scientists, since the Brits have a tenuous claim on this island, but any more than that and no matter how dangerous the life forms here turn out to be, the problem will be uncontainable. We need to know what’s going on in there. I don’t understand why we can’t go down to the other end of the lab and get a good look inside that jungle for the President.”