Fragment (28 page)

“What the hell is your problem!” Geoffrey yelled, just as Angel Echevarria came out the door.

“Geoffrey, yo, what’s going on, man?” Angel asked, looking at the stranger, whose polo shirt was drenched with sweat. The man clutched his diaphragm as he struggled for breath.

“Ask this turkey. He’s been following me all the way from Stony Beach!”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Binswanger,” the man wheezed. “The President has requested…” He took a couple breaths. “Your presence…on a matter of…national security. May I…have a moment, sir?”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Geoffrey said, laughing.

“No shit?” Angel said, ready to believe it.

Geoffrey had been driven home in a blue SUV with tinted windows to pick up a hastily packed duffel bag. Then he was taken straight to Hanscom Air Force Base. There, a C-2A Greyhound stood waiting on the tarmac.

As he climbed aboard the cargo delivery plane, four crewmen motioned him to the back.

He set his bag on some crates as he made his way to the passenger section. There were only two window seats, which faced the tail next to small portholes behind the wings. The only other passenger occupied the portside seat to his right, a bearded man digging a hand into one of the seventeen pockets on his Banana Republic cargo vest. Geoffrey instantly recognized the man, who looked up and studied Geoffrey with expressionless eyes.

Geoffrey extended his hand. “Thatcher Redmond, right?”

“Yes…” Thatcher squinted in the shadowy cabin. “Dr. Binswanger, I believe?”

Geoffrey shook the older scientist’s hand and took his seat. “Call me Geoffrey.”

“They told me you were the other passenger we were waiting for. I’m afraid I haven’t heard of you before.”

Geoffrey knew Thatcher was lying. They had met at a conference six months ago, even shared a table at the banquet. They had both immediately caught the scent of their natural enemy in the scientific jungle, however, and marked it for future reference. This was going to be a long plane ride, Geoffrey thought. He forced a smile. “Pretty crazy, isn’t it?”

“I have to say I always believed it was a hoax.” Thatcher tossed a few peanuts in his mouth.

Geoffrey looked out the small window as the plane taxied down the airstrip. “I did, too.”

Almost as soon as they were airborne, Thatcher launched his first volley.

“So here we sit in a military plane speeding toward a newly discovered pocket of untouched life, like antibodies rushing to destroy an infection. It’s obvious, wouldn’t you say, Doctor, that humans are the real threat to this planet, not some precarious ecosystem on some island in the middle of nowhere. We may have stumbled across the last place on Earth that was actually safe from our meddling…”

“Surely we can preserve as well as destroy, Thatcher,” Geoffrey said.

Thatcher shook his head. “The curse of intelligent life is that it must destroy, eventually, Doctor.”

“Oh yes, you believe free will is equivalent to determinism. Isn’t that right, Thatcher? And don’t call me
Doctor.”

“Oh dear, you’re not so religious as to believe in free will, I hope! Or to confuse such a belief with science!”

“Depending on the definition, free will need not be a religious notion.”

“Free will is madness, nothing more. Reason and religion make it dangerous.”

“Not necessarily. Reason can make free will sane, though sanity is not automatic, I will agree.”

“You seem to put a lot of stock in human nobility, Doctor. Considering what we have done to this planet, I find that to be a rather surprising attitude for a man of science.”

Geoffrey knew that no matter what position he took, Thatcher was going to take a more fashionably radical position just to stay out in front. He sensed that Thatcher was now trying to place him in some undesirable political camp, so Geoffrey stopped responding altogether.

Geoffrey knew this species of scientist well: Thatcher’s battleground was the court of public opinion; Geoffrey’s was the laboratory. Either could be fatal to the other, and the scientific arena did not always favor the fittest. When battle lines were drawn between the establishment and the truth, even in the halls of science, the truth did not always win, at least in the short term. And that short term could last generations. Raymond Dart’s revolutionary discovery of the missing link in human evolution had languished in a box in South Africa for forty years while the entire scientific establishment dismissed him and worshipped at the altar of Piltdown Man, a phony fossil made of spare ape parts and an Englishwoman’s skull stained with furniture polish. At that time, it had been politically correct to believe that the missing link would be found in Europe, and that bias had been sufficient to override other evidence to the contrary for four decades. It was scientists just like Thatcher who caused this sort of mischief, Geoffrey knew—and he was smart enough to give them a wide berth.

Geoffrey leaned back and continued to look out the window,
which did not stop Thatcher from continuing to restate his case for a good hour more. Geoffrey could not decide whether he was amused or alarmed by the man’s mind-numbing persistence.

Geoffrey had concluded months ago that the MIT star’s “Redmond Principle” was quackery of the first order. After the most cursory perusal of Thatcher’s best-selling book, it was apparent to Geoffrey that it was the kind of parlor trick that scientists employed to exploit popular opinion and gain attention: make a wild claim that capitalized on current fears, ascribe it a “conservatively low probability” in order to make it appear plausible, and then
ram it home!
Whether Redmond really took seriously the slipshod science in his book, or its melodramatic clichés, Geoffrey was not sure—but Geoffrey was impressed by the shrewd social science the older man had displayed. While Thatcher’s hysterical predictions of impending doom could not possibly be proven or disproven in even a decade’s time, if ever, they could not fail to cash in on the present zeitgeist—something Geoffrey’s work had rarely ever accomplished.

Thatcher, for his part, certainly recalled Geoffrey from the conference in Stuttgart the previous year. He had marked the young man immediately as one of those self-styled “maverick” scientists Thatcher despised—those who traded on good looks and an affected iconoclasm to dazzle their pretty female students into the sack. Youth had a certain automatic fashionability that Thatcher deeply resented, and the fact that Geoffrey was African-American made the younger man strategically difficult to attack—which Thatcher also resented. Above all, he despised the air of integrity that charming rogues like Geoffrey exuded. They were so proud of their uncompromised vision when, in all probability, their vision had never been exposed to any challenge in the first place. Things had not been so easy for Thatcher.

While he supposed there were some scientists from the younger generation who were passionate and sincere crusaders, Redmond had bought a ticket on the gravy train strictly to pig out. Idealism was a business to him. Science was nothing more than a means to an end. He had never been a political animal,
cleaving neither left nor right on the political spectrum. But he was capable of going in either direction if it gave him an advantage. Ironically, he had gone left in order to become a capitalist; he had become an environmentalist for his own personal enrichment. He planned on strip-mining the environmental cause purely for his own profit. And he was honest about it, at least to himself—which was more than he could say for most of his colleagues.

Geoffrey’s silence was making him uncomfortable. “So what do you say, Dr. Binswanger? You haven’t stated your position.”

“Um, sorry, Thatcher.” Geoffrey excused himself with a dip of his head as he unlatched his shoulder harness and went forward to talk to the crew.

Geoffrey and Thatcher skipped
like a stone across the globe, landing twice before taking a Lear jet to Pearl Harbor, where they boarded a different C-2A Greyhound and found themselves in the same place they had started, sitting in the window seats behind the plane’s wings.

“Imagine a world where there is no intelligent life—where there is no mankind,” Thatcher droned on to a numb Geoffrey. “Imagine, Doctor, how nature would advance only in exact proportion to the resources available and retreat with perfect modesty as those resources became scarce. There was a stretch of time that lasted for millions of years before the arrival of so-called ‘rational’ apes, when the rain forest covered continents, and countless species of more humble apes flourished. Life in telligent enough to enjoy interacting with nature, but not intelligent enough to challenge it, to harness it, or to attempt to control it: the golden age of primates. Surely this step, just before Reason, was the most sublime reached by life on Earth, wouldn’t you agree, Doctor? The ‘rational animal’ is the most grandiose
oxymoron in existence: a ventriloquist’s dummy that mimics and mocks nature with its mysticism and science.”

Geoffrey had been enduring Thatcher’s droning Jeremiad for the better part of six hours now on this last, unbearably long leg of their trip. He had been spared only by a fitful nap two hours earlier, and even then he had dreamed an infinite loop of the scientist’s dreary doomsaying.

It was bad enough having the Redmond Principle wielded at him, but if Geoffrey had to suffer one more oblique reference to Thatcher’s Tetteridge Award, or the big fat check that would accompany the Genius Grant he was suspiciously so certain of receiving, or the Pulitzer Prize he was laying odds on winning, or another celebrity he’d had lunch with, Geoffrey would probably need to use the barf bag affixed to the back of the seat in front of him.

Geoffrey heard something clunk loudly on the roof of the plane. “Excuse me, Thatcher.” Grateful for the distraction, he climbed out of his seat and walked forward.

When he got to the cockpit he saw a gleaming KC-135 Stratotanker detach its fuel probe and pull away from the Greyhound in a graceful display of aerial acrobatics.

The Greyhound pilot gave a thumbs-up to the Stratotanker.
“Muchas gracias, muchacho!”
The pilot glanced back at Geoffrey. “Sky bridge!” he explained. “This is one of two C-2As the Navy fitted for aerial refueling. They’re the only aircraft that can reach this place and land on an aircraft carrier.”

“So that’s how this thing can fly so far in one leg?” Geoffrey asked.

“Correct. We had to set up the sky bridge as soon as the carrier group was in place.”

Geoffrey grinned, marveling at the circuit that had been put into place to reach the incredibly remote location.

“Speaking of, I think that’s your island right there!” The copilot pointed.

Far below, Geoffrey saw dozens of huge naval vessels ringing a brown-cliffed island on the distant horizon. As they drew nearer,
Geoffrey thought the island resembled a wide Bundt cake, slightly glazed with white guano around its rim.

The pilot hailed the
Enterprise’s
control tower.

“You better get back to your seat and strap in, Dr. Binswanger. If you’ve never landed on a carrier deck, when the tailhook catches us you’ll be glad you’re facing backwards.”

“OK.” Geoffrey hurried back to his seat. “We’re about to land,” he told Thatcher.

Thatcher was irritated at the interruption. He tossed a few sunflower seeds into his mouth from a vest pocket. “As I was saying, if this isn’t a hoax, perhaps it’s Mother Earth’s perverse way of eradicating us—a little curiosity out here waiting to kill the cat.” Thatcher chuckled.

“Mm-hmm,” Geoffrey said.

“Intelligence, wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Binswanger, is the snake in the Garden of Eden? The fatal virus planet Earth was unlucky enough to contract? Or is that too heavy for you?”

Geoffrey shook his head and looked out the window. Seeing a few of the gray leviathans of the
Enterprise
Joint Task Group, the seriousness of the situation they were about to enter finally struck him.

Thatcher continued, seemingly intoxicated by his own baritone voice. “Unfortunately, I doubt Henders Island will live up to the hype. Island ecologies are wimpy. No offense, Doctor.”

Geoffrey wondered what Thatcher was driving at now, but then he remembered he was wearing his T-shirt from Kaua’i that said “CONSERVE ISLAND HABITATS” in faded green letters on the mud-red fabric. He shook his head. “None taken, Thatcher. Island ecologies
are
wimpy. That’s why we can learn so much from them. They’re the canaries in the coal mine. Which is why I doubt we’ll see anything to write home about here. Canaries rarely eat cats.”

Thatcher raised his bushy eyebrows. “Ah, but don’t you admit a certain morbid hope? I mean, what if this
were
some thing world-changing? After all, giant dodder from the island of Japan is spreading across North America. You know, the stuff that
looks like yellow Silly String? If you’re not aware of the study a three-inch cutting produced a growth the length of three football fields in just two months during an experiment conducted in Texas in 2002. When you attack it, it germinates. If you chop it up, every part grows into a complete plant. And the most amusing thing about giant dodder,” Thatcher leaned toward Geoffrey confidentially, “is that it
kills
any plant it infects, whether it be the lowly weed or the mighty oak.” Thatcher giggled with genuine joy.

“I’m familiar with dodder, Thatcher, but I’m not sure we’ll find anything quite so dramatic here.” Geoffrey pointed out the window. “Especially if
that’s
the island we’re talking about.”

The airplane had rapidly lost altitude. Now, it made a low pass around the island’s cliff as they approached the carrier. Geoffrey noticed the trimaran yacht anchored in a cove cut into the western wall of the island.

“Hey, that’s the ship from the show! I guess that much wasn’t faked. They really did come all the way out here.”

“We’ll be landing on
Enterprise
and a Sea Dragon will Charlie you to Henders Army Base,” the pilot called back to them. “There’s a top-level meeting at seventeen hundred hours.”