Warren Fahy - Fragment

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.

Returning from a quick swim at Stony Beach, Geoffrey pedaled his bike down Bigelow Street. When he turned onto Spencer Baird Road, he glanced over his shoulder. A man with a crewcut, a white polo shirt, and navy blue shorts was following him. The big man sat awkwardly on his bike, but he pedaled hard, gaining on Geoffrey.

He looked like the guy in the suit who had stood up and left at the end of his last Chat. Instinctively, Geoffrey pedaled faster.

The big man seemed to match Geoffrey’s speed, pedal for pedal, as both headed down Spencer Baird Road. Geoffrey took a hard turn down Albatross Street and swerved to avoid an SUV coming off the boat ramp. He flew past the Aquarium of the National Marine Fisheries and took a fast turn onto Water Street.

As he blew past Crane Monument the road narrowed and cars lined the curbs. He risked going down the center of the street, weaving around the clogged traffic and earning some honks. He heard more horns behind him and realized that his pursuer was heading down the middle of the street, too!

As he looked up the road, the light for the drawbridge turned red. It would be raised at any moment. Pedestrians and cyclists gathered as the harbormaster walked the yellow swinging gate closed on the Sound side of the street at the far end of the bridge.

He threaded his bike through the crowd and reached the bridge as the harbormaster began to swing the gate closed on the Eel Pond side. Geoffrey decided to go for it. He tore over the bridge and slipped around the shouting harbormaster as his bike shot through the narrow gap between the two gates-only to hear the big man, huffing and puffing, only a few feet behind him! Jeeze lou-fuckin’-weeze , Geoffrey thought, standing up on his pedals to pump them as hard as he could.

When he reached the WHOI building that contained his lab, he rode straight up to the entrance and jumped off his bike, letting it skid to rest at the foot of the steps.

He unsnapped the strap of his helmet and yanked it off, ready to swing it at his pursuer, who hit the hand brakes of his bike and stuck out a pale leg to stop his bike in a fishtailing slide.

“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.