Warren Fahy - Fragment

As the aircraft pulled up, the bomb’s hardened nose penetrated forty feet into the rocky core of the island. The reverberating clap of the missile’s impact with the stone heart of Henders Island drew rats, spigers, and swarms, which converged around the neat hole punched into the island’s bull’s eye. A 120-second delay began ticking down inside the bomb so that the pilots could achieve safe distance before its one-megaton nuclear warhead detonated.

“That’s gotta be the most expensive can of Raid in history,” the pilot remarked as they left the island at twenty miles a minute, covering nine miles in about thirty seconds. The boomerang-shaped B-2 banked in a wide circle as they gained altitude.

“Check it out, Zack,” the copilot said.

The two men looked over the expanse of the carbon-graphite composite wing as a brilliant light popped like a giant flashbulb in the bowl of the island.

A 250-foot deep crater a thousand feet wide was instantaneously excavated at the island’s center from the initial blast.

Within four seconds every living thing on the surface of the island was vaporized and the ashes blasted over the rim in a cone of smoke. Sand turned to glass. Rock flowed red-hot as a sun-like inferno filled the bowl.

The bomber pilots watched the eruption of light bloom on the island like a yellow rose.

“Don’t look at it too long,” the pilot warned. “Burns the retinas.”

“We’re past the nine-mile range…” the copilot said. “God, you can feel the heat of that thing from here!”

The intense light faded as a giant funnel of dense smoke rose out of the bowl three miles into the sky.

“We better stay ahead of the shockwave,” the pilot said, and he throttled up to just under the speed of sound.

“Target confirmed killed, Base. Copy?”

“Copy that. Mission accomplished. Come on home, boys.”

Nell and Geoffrey gazed from the prow of the Trident at the crimson dawn.

Geoffrey cocked his head and studied her wryly for a moment.

“So, I’ve been meaning to ask: What’s sexier than a man who knows the right thing to say?”

“A man who knows when not to say anything.” Geoffrey lifted her chin to meet her smiling lips with his.

Hiding inside a hatchway Zero videoed them kissing, and Cynthea whispered restlessly in his ear: “Are you getting that?”

Zero popped his left eye open at Cynthea. Yup , his eye said.

Hender’s grin and eyes appeared first as he seemed to materialize behind the two young scientists on the prow. They laughed to see him.

“Oh wow…” Cynthea whispered. “Get that, get that, get that, baby! ”

Hender moved between them and hugged Geoffrey and Nell with four arms, and together they faced the uncertain dawn.

Page 27 of A Field Guide to Henders Island by Geoffrey Binswanger-Duckworth, Nell Duckworth-Binswanger, and Andrew Beasley, 1 stedition.

Page 39 of A Field Guide to Henders Island by Geoffrey Binswanger-Duckworth, Nell Duckworth-Binswanger, and Andrew Beasley, 1 stedition.

Map of Henders Island

Preliminary sketches of a spiger by Nell Duckworth on board Trident , August 26-“motion studies.”

Preliminary sketches of a spiger by Nell Duckworth on board Trident , August 27-“speculations on internal structures.”

Thanks to Dr. Donald Lovett, one of the foremost authorities on osmo-regulation in crustaceans, for his enthusiasm, patience, and courage, no matter how frightening the ride became.

Jennifer Limber, Mike Fahy, Daren Bader, Phil Steele, Kate Jones, and so many others were the autotrophs of the Henders ecosystem. And especially Michael Limber.

Stephen Jay Gould for his fantastic journey through evolution, Wonderful Life.

Dr. Michael E. Dawson of the Associates of Cape Cod lab for giving me the same tour Geoffrey took. Dr. Mark McMenamin, years ago, for letting me know that the fossil I found at the Marble Mountain in California was just a ball of algae and a trilobite leg that washed ashore on an ancient beach. Good enough for me-wow.

My beautiful editors, Kate Miciak and Sarah Hodgson, who felt it, too; Loren Noveck and Glen Edelstein, for helping to make this dream a reality; Peter McGuigan, Stephanie Abou, Hannah Gordon, and the rest at Foundry, the best.

Verne, Wells, Conan Doyle, Boulez- and Crichton. And a happy 200th to you, Charles Darwin.