Fragment

12:06 P.M.

“Watch this, Mr. Pound,” insisted Dr. Cato.

“Otto is going to send in one of our last remote-operated vehicles,” Nell explained.

Dr. Cato tapped Otto’s shoulder and startled him as he sat at one of the workstations in Section Four. “Where are we going now, young man?”

Otto pulled up his VR goggles and grinned up at Pound. The biologist’s left thumb was encased in an aluminum splint. It had not stopped him from operating the ROVs he’d helped design.

He was feeling no pain, thanks to the kick-ass Novocain pads the Navy doctor had given him for his thumb. “Welcome to the jungle, guys.” Otto put the VR goggles back on. “We’re about to penetrate the outer edge with a small robotic vehicle and take a little peek inside. This usually only lasts a few seconds, so don’t blink!”

“All right.” Pound glanced reprovingly at Cato and Nell. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”

“We’ve already deployed about eighty ROVs,” Nell said, patiently. “We only have about a dozen left. We’ve made it pretty far across the fields, all the way to the rim of the island. But we’re using all the rest now to try to get into the jungle, where most of the action seems to be.”

The ROV was the coolest Christmas present a seven-year-old kid could ever imagine finding under the tree. Several outboard cameras captured images as it emerged from a rack under Section One. The remote-controlled vehicle turned left on the slope toward the jungle.

With the soft zither of servomotors the robotic vehicle rolled over purple patches of Henders “clover” and left brown tracks behind it in a rearview cam that showed in the bottom half of the screen.

Otto steered it toward the edge of the jungle and slowed down.

“Hang on,” he said, and throttled the ROV into an opening between the trees. On the monitor above, the ROVs camera weaved swiftly around the trunks of trees that looked like palms crossed with cactus. Some were covered with reptilian scales, thorns, what might have been eyes-even snapping mouths.

Slaloming around the tree trunks, the ROV came to a tunnellike corridor lined by dense trees whose trunks were curved like ribs or giant tusks and whose interlacing canopies of mistletoelike clover were pierced by sunbeams. The ROV raced under the dangling clusters, chains, and spirals of colored berries on translucent tendrils that rose and fell like jellyfish tentacles along the corridor.

A streaming horde of insects and animals buzzed and roared past the speeding ROV, rushing toward it in the lower screen from the rear-cam. Otto zigzagged down the curving tunnel as a rush of creatures seemed to miss it at every turn. He hung a right turn at breakneck speed as the corridor forked. They could make out nothing but a whirl of blurring shapes hurtling around the ROV as it raced down the jungle tunnel.

Something large darted out from the side.

The rover’s camera dove into the dirt. A bird feather was all they could identify, pressed against the lens.

“Yee-haw!” Otto pulled off his VR goggles. “We see lots of bird feathers,” he explained to Pound, who stared at the screen with a blank expression.

“I want you to give me some of your best ROV footage inside the jungle, Dr. Cato, to show to the President,” he said.

“Well, that was it, right there!” Otto announced triumphantly.

“That’s as far as you’ve gotten?” Pound asked.

“That’s the record, man!” Otto gave Nell a low-five. “You can see why those bastards have eyes in the back of their heads, Nell! We rigged a rearview cam that I could see in the bottom half of the goggles that time. There is no way I’d have gotten that far without it. But man, that is a LOT of stuff to process-they need two brains!”

Dr. Cato pointed at another monitor, noticing Pound’s eyes glazing. “Look at this remote we were able to set up next to a disk-ant trail, Mr. Pound. This one’s lasted three days. Right, Otto?”

“Ri-”

The camera went dead.

“-ght.” Otto looked at Pound and shrugged.

“I still don’t understand why we can’t just go down to Section One and take a look inside the jungle there!” Pound complained. “What’s the point of having all this million-dollar equipment if we can’t even use it when we need to?”