Fragment

SEPTEMBER 15
12:06 P.M.

The Muddy Charles Pub, overlooking the river that bore its name, buzzed with MIT professors and students consuming pizza and beer.

Among those gathered to hear the much-anticipated SeaLife announcement was noted zoologist Thatcher Redmond, who nibbled his trademark roasted pumpkin seeds and sipped a plastic cup of Widmer Brothers hefeweizen.

Though he professed to be a strict vegetarian, Thatcher cheated in private. He disguised his paunch under the camouflage of his Banana Republic cargo vest, which he wore over a pale denim shirt with each sleeve folded twice.

Today, as usual, students thronged Thatcher’s table, and this time his colleague Frank Stapleton had decided to join them to watch the breaking news about Henders Island.

Frank Stapleton was an academic bear with black-framed glasses and frazzled gray hair. An old-school man, he made an enjoyably stodgy sparring partner to Thatcher’s crowd-pleasing sensationalism: students loved to hear their public exchanges just for the entertainment value.

This time, however, something else had stolen their attention.

“Wait, wait! Here it is,” shouted the student wielding the remote control.

A mutual shushing quelled the pub chatter as everyone trained eyes and ears on the large television screen mounted over the bar.

The CNN anchorwoman finally reached the story that had been teased all day:

“After the apparently disastrous final episode of the reality show SeaLife, a network spokesman has now admitted that the much-discussed cliffhangers were in fact hoaxes created for no other purpose but to generate ratings.”

Groans and curses filled the pub.

“Issuing an apology and an announcement that the show is going into an indefinite ‘retooling’ break, the show’s producers released the following clip.”

A video clip ran showing the SeaLife cast smiling and waving from the stern of the Trident and sailing off into the sunset.

“That’s the hoax!” someone shouted, triggering another avalanche of shushes. The newscaster continued:

“However, relatives have been unable to contact their loved ones on the show since the last episode aired twenty-three days ago. Two crewmember families will make a public statement on Live Current later tonight. And while official complaints against the United States and Great Britain by other members of the U.N. Security Council were formally filed today, Defense Department officials are continuing to deny a firestorm of Internet rumors of a naval blockade around Henders Island and a media blackout. Our own requests for satellite images of the area, whose coordinates have been closely followed by millions of viewers on the show’s website, have been denied. According to all satellite services, the Pentagon purchased exclusive rights to all satellite photos of Henders Island within hours of the final airing of SeaLife.”

The anchorwoman blithely moved on, over a chorus of angry groans, to a story about a man who murdered his entire family and then committed suicide.

“Why don’t they just kill themselves first?” Stapleton grumbled.

“Courage, I think,” Thatcher replied. “It takes far less courage to commit suicide when you’ve done something so bad everybody will want to kill you anyway.”

“That’s about the sickest goddamned thing I’ve ever heard,” Stapleton snapped, looking at Thatcher. “Thanks for clearing that up.”

Thatcher shrugged.

A student in a black King Kong T-shirt chimed in. “SeaLife beat out sex for the most looked-up word on the Internet last week. How sick is that?”

“That’s it? After three weeks of waiting we’re supposed to believe it was just a huge scam for ratings?” Thatcher Redmond’s attractive blond research assistant, Sharon, glowered at the television screen.

“Face it,” the T-shirted student snorted, “it was a brilliant piece of marketing, Sharon. They sucked you in.”

“It’s not a hoax,” Sharon insisted. “What they just showed was CGI, and not even good CGI.”

“That wasn’t CGI,” someone said.

“It was an old clip!” another shouted from across the pub.

“They doctored an old clip with CGI,” another said.

“What the hell is CGI?” Stapleton grumbled.

“Computer Graphic Imaging!” everyone in earshot shouted.

“We could probably prove that’s CGI in less than an hour,” Sharon insisted. “The other governments of the world can definitely tell. So why are they trying to get away with it?”

“Coca-Cola and Nike sales?” offered the guy in the black T-shirt.

Thatcher Redmond grinned and drummed his fingers on the table. He enjoyed any form of chaos. He was immediately attracted to anything that roiled the thin film of “order” that human beings tried so vainly to impose over reality. “I almost wish it weren’t a hoax.”

Frank Stapleton looked up. “You can’t be serious, Thatcher.”

“Wouldn’t it be delightfully ironic, Professor Stapleton, if in our rush to shine light in every corner to dispel our primal fear of the dark, we opened up a Pandora’s box that finally wiped us off the planet?”

“Yes, it would be ironic, but I don’t see what would be so damned delightful about it.”

“At least something might have a chance to survive on this planet, Professor Stapleton, if humans were eradicated. I realize, of course, that this whole thing is almost assuredly a fraud of some sort. The chances that anything remotely as dangerous as our species could be found on so small and isolated an island are slim to none. But if such a thing actually did happen, I believe it might be cause for celebration.”

Sharon stared at her mentor with the mixture of angst and awe characteristic of all his research assistants. “Why, Dr. Redmond?”

Stapleton shuddered. “Please, for the love of God, don’t encourage him.”

“Intelligent life is an environmental cancer, Sharon,” Thatcher replied. “By rearranging nature, the human race has created new viruses, diseases, drug-resistant bacteria. We are alone responsible for all manner of mayhem that could never have occurred in nature. After centuries of domesticating plants and animals, genetic engineering is now directly corrupting the code of life. We’re crossing wires of evolutionary circuitry billions of years in the making and precipitating a genetic breakdown that could soon rage through our environment like a molecular plague.”

“Very dramatic, Thatcher.” Stapleton regarded him with curiosity. “But if you believe that, how do you get up in the morning? For that matter, how do your students?”

“We have spliced the genes of jellyfish into mice to make them glow green in the dark,” Thatcher replied dryly. “We have manipulated Hox genes to give houseflies a hundred legs and millipedes six. We have inserted the genes of insects into plants and the genes of plants into animals. There is practically nothing on Earth that mankind does not use and nothing that he will not ‘improve’ if given the chance. And whatever is left, we carelessly discard. Pollution and global warming are merely precursors to the environmental apocalypse to come. Before the century is out, if we have not destroyed ourselves first, or even if we have, we humans will probably have pounded the final nail into Mother Earth’s coffin. If we were just wiping ourselves out it would be of little concern: we merely got what we deserved, like many other obnoxious species before us. But at the hands of the rational ape, life on Earth and in her seas is likely to suffer a mass extinction as nano-engineered genetic viruses cascade through keystone species and collapse whole ecosystems, one after another. All multicellular organisms will disappear as single-celled organisms are forced back to the drawing board to reinvent what mankind has fatally sabotaged. If that’s what you call dramatic, Professor Stapleton, I agree. And if that’s what you call me for pointing it out, then so be it. Intelligent life is the ultimate bio-hazard. Any worthy opponent would be a welcome discovery, for the planet.”

A smattering of grim applause broke out at Thatcher’s oration.

“Look, I’m as much an environmentalist as the next guy,” Stapleton argued, “unless the next guy’s you, I guess, but don’t you think that’s a smidgen on the absolutely hopeless side?”

Thatcher eyed the green plastic container from which Stapleton spooned his lunch. “What in heaven’s name are you eating, Professor?”

Stapleton swallowed a mouthful and dabbed his lips with a napkin. “Calves’ brains and scrambled eggs. I tried it on leave in Paris when I was in the Army. My wife makes it for me sometimes.” He scooped up another bite.

“I see.”

“I’m on the Prisby Diet.”

Thatcher shook his head. “A quack diet.”

“Hey, I’ve lost twelve pounds. You should try it.” Stapleton took a sporkful and chewed it defiantly.

“And so now you are eating cow brains.”

“Actually, baby cow brains. With mango chutney,” Stapleton corrected, his mouth full.

“Surely you’ve heard of mad cow disease, Doctor?”

Stapleton swallowed. “OK, let’s say you’re right, Thatcher. In twenty years, the average gestation time of CJD, you and I will both be in an old folks’ home anyway. At least I’ll be the one laughing.” He winked and dug for another bite.

There were gasps of disgust and snickers around the table.

“Professor Stapleton,” Thatcher sighed, “you are a living object lesson of my book’s thesis. In what natural scenario would the brains of a domesticated, hormone-injected, Franken-fed, genetically engineered calf become a part of the diet that your Homo sapiens body evolved over the last five million years to consume?”

“Thatcher,” Stapleton shook his head, “the great thing about human intelligence is that we don’t have to do things in one way or another. Human beings might not do these things that you predict. Don’t you account for that possibility?”

Thatcher stared off into space as a memory of his smiling son running to the sliding glass door, toward the pool, flashed in his mind. He remembered the pressure on his foot as he’d nudged the door open… “It will happen because it can happen, Professor. It is merely a matter of time. Probability fulfills itself just as a Japanese pachinko game always fills up with a bell curve of ball bearings. If there were only one or a few of us, human virtue might play a role. But there are billions of us. The cumulative effect of our allegedly ‘free’ will over a period of time is indistinguishable from instinct or predestination. Since sentient beings can do anything, they will do anything, no matter how stupid or destructive, over time. You still haven’t read my book, have you, Professor Stapleton? I’m afraid my optimistic conclusion is that only a preemptive extinction event that eliminates intelligent life can save an environment once it is infected.”

“There are plenty of cultures that have managed to live in harmony with their environment for thousands of years, Thatcher,” Stapleton retorted. “What about North American Indians. Or Polynesians?”

“The Polynesians imported bird viruses that decimated native populations wherever they went, and Native Americans coincidentally arrived just before all the greater fauna of North America vanished. But I must point out that one of the most pristine environments humans inhabit is Papua New Guinea, famous for its head hunters, who may well have contributed directly to the preservation of their environment.”

“Jiminy Cricket, how do you feel about us, then, Thatcher?” Stapleton demanded.

Thatcher smiled. “As Jonathan Swift said, ‘All my love is toward individuals, but principally I hate and detest that animal called man.’”

There was an uneasy ripple of laughter around the table.

“Charming. You give environmentalists a bad name, my friend.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Dr. Stapleton. But environmentalists are people, too.” Thatcher winked at the gallery.

“Oh, I see! No points for effort, eh?”

“It won’t make any difference.”

“Dear Lord, you are such a Cassandra.”

“One thing most people seem to forget about Cassandra is that as unpalatable as her dire predictions were, she was always right.”

“She wasn’t happy about it, though.”

“I’m happy all the way to the bank, my friend.” Thatcher chuckled, and the students in the gallery applauded their rally.

“I don’t think it’s funny!” Sharon protested. “You’re talking about the end of life on Earth as we know it.”

“It’s all right.” Thatcher raised a calming hand. “You’re quite right, Frank. Eat your brains. It is inevitable.”

Thatcher shrugged and smiled, and everyone laughed except for Sharon. She could not understand how her mentor maintained his graceful sense of humor about the bleakest of truths. “Unless, of course, Henders Island is not a hoax,” Thatcher added serenely, winking at Sharon. He rose and raised his plastic cup of wheat beer. “To Henders Island!”

To this, everyone toasted, and the Muddy Charles churned once more with eddying scientific debates.

Thatcher noticed a large man wearing sunglasses and a black suit who had sat alone throughout lunch nursing a single Coke. A thin white cord trailed down from an earpiece and disappeared under his lapel. As he studied the man, the stranger got up from his table. He walked straight toward Thatcher.

Thatcher’s pulse vaulted as the man approached, seemingly in slow motion. Here it is, he realized, remembering the thing he had kept nonverbal in his head until now. Ten days ago, his “son,” as it turned out, had become a statistic, after all-and not even a devastated Sedona had blamed him for it. He knew there was a chance the authorities were investigating him because of the boy’s sudden death-that they suspected him, even-and were keeping it quiet to lull him into a false sense of security. He knew, too, that they had no proof. He had placed a napkin between his shoe and the sliding glass door frame, and he had thrown the napkin away at the airport. The child’s drowning could not be traced back to him.

Nevertheless, as the man took his glasses off and reached a hand out to him, panic seized Thatcher. He found himself rising instinctively and surrendering both of his wrists.

The man smiled and shook his head. “No, Dr. Redmond!” he laughed. “I’m not here to arrest you.”

“Oh? What, then?”

The man leaned near and whispered in his ear.

“Ah!” Thatcher smiled at the others, who watched in curiosity. “I’m being requested by the President, it seems.”

The Secret Service agent gave him a sharp look.

Thatcher put a finger to his lips apologetically. “Sorry, good man. I’m afraid I’ll have to bid you all adieu. Au revoir!”

With a bow and a flourish, Thatcher excused himself from the staring faces around the table.

“Wouldn’t you know it?” Stapleton wagged his head, marveling at Thatcher’s run of luck.