Fragment (20 page)

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 Lauderdale 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.”

The other scientists in earshot zinged some dirty looks at Pound.

“I’m afraid that we’re having a few technical difficulties in Section One, Mr. Pound,” Nell told him. “Why don’t you have a look at this instead…”

The visor of NASA technician Jedediah Briggs’s helmet was already fogged up as he entered the vestibule connecting Section Two to Section One.

As he descended the aluminum stairway to inspect the damage to Section One, he heard shrieking whistles around him. A rhythmic pounding reverberated through the lab below. He peered out of his hazy visor at the sensors studding the plastic tube.

About the size of smoke detectors, the sensors lining the vestibule sniffed out any microbial life that might breach the outer lining. They monitored the hermetically sealed space between the outer and inner layers using LAL extracted from the blood of horseshoe crabs, which had been injected into each unit.

A small glass tube in the sensors was supposed to turn yellow in the presence of microbes. NASA had already used similar devices to ensure that interplanetary probes were microbe-free during construction.

As Briggs crept down the aluminum stairway toward the hatch of Section One he noticed that all the green LEDs on the sensors had turned red—and the test tubules had turned bright yellow.

Thankful for the blue cleansuit he had been cursing a moment before, Briggs reached the bottom of the stairs and peered through the hatch window into Section One.

Halos of sunlight streamed into the lab from ring-shaped clusters of holes punched through its roof.

The shafts of light illuminated the creatures crawling, flitting, skittering, and leaping throughout the lab.

The center between one of the rings of holes in the roof fell out and larger animals immediately poured through.

The swarms of creatures gathering below seemed to notice him peering through the window at them and they all moved with unnatural speed straight toward him, creating a cyclone of paper and flying debris.

A rain of wasps and drill-worms splattered like bugs on a windshield as Briggs jerked back from the window. A sudden, piercing alarm sounded.

He turned and ran up the aluminum stairway.

All around him the lining of the vestibule was twinkling now with purple LEDs. He remembered as he ran that the inner layer was laced with fiber optics that detected structural damage to the vestibule. The whole tube turned purple-red as the inner lining was breached around him.

Briggs cursed the baggy cleansuit as he vaulted up the creaking aluminum stairs.

“Technical difficulties?”
Pound snapped. “NASA spent 180 million dollars on this lab, Dr. Cato. I thought it was designed for this!”

“Designed for
this?”
Nell stifled a laugh, looking at Dr. Cato ruefully.

“Some adaptations have been made,” Dr. Cato answered patiently. “Even while the lab was being shipped, and ever since it got here. It’s quite miraculous what they’ve been able to do. But StatLab was primarily designed as a modular mobile lab that could be dropped into remote disease hot-zones, Mr. Pound. It wasn’t designed to be under siege by anything larger than a virus.”

Nell guided Pound along with a firm hand on his waist.

“We should be getting word shortly on the status of Section One. In the meantime, let’s take a look at some things that we’ve already found, OK?”

The afterburners of an F-14 Tomcat roared as it was catapulted from the deck of the U.S.S.
Enterprise.

When the bone-rattling tumult had passed, a Navy officer resumed shouting at Zero over a revving V-22 Sea Osprey, which stood behind her on the gray plane of the flight deck.

“You’re the only one who’s been in there and survived,” the officer yelled.

Zero looked around at the busy men and women on top of the gigantic aircraft carrier. “What makes you think I would go
back
in there?” he shouted back.

“Cynthea said you wanted to get off the
Trident,”
she yelled. “You’ll be quarantined on the island until this is over. The President needs a cameraman there—if you want it, the job is yours!”

Zero looked around wryly in the direction of the
Trident.
“I’ll be damned,” he muttered. He pointed at a monster RV. “In that thing?”

Sitting on the deck with a thick cable attached to its roof was the most macho off-road vehicle Zero had ever seen. Aside from the word “NASA” stenciled in red on its side, impressive by itself, the rover had two monster knobby tires in front and halftracks behind. It had four bubble windows like those on a deep-sea sub, three in front and another at the rear. Protruding from the front of the vehicle was a wedge-shaped grille like the cowcatcher on a 19th-century locomotive. Two heavy robotic arms were folded to either side of the front bubble, like the arms of a praying mantis.

“The XATV-9,” the Navy officer shouted over the Osprey’s engines, pointing behind her. “NASA’s experimental Mars rover! Shipped in by special order of the President himself. You couldn’t be safer in your mother’s arms, sir! What do you say?”

The lensman in Zero answered. “OK,” he shouted, cursing himself at the same time.

“You need to get in
now
, sir!”

Two flight deck crewmen rushed Zero forward. They sealed the
airtight hatch behind him as he climbed into a sunken shotgun seat before the three bubble windows. A control panel out of
Buck Rogers
glittered between Zero and the driver, who was a clean-cut man in a navy blue jumpsuit. He gave Zero a confident thumbs-up and then pointed at a nice Steadicam on a folding robotic arm mounted to the roof above the shotgun seat.

“Strap yourself in quick,” the driver advised. “You ain’t never had a ride like this.”