Fragment

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 Hermes 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 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.