Fragment

August 24

12:43 P.M.

The surgical mask muffled Geoffrey Binswanger’s amazed laughter. His eyes twinkled with childlike delight.

A lab technician bent the tail of a large horseshoe crab and stuck a needle through an exposed fold directly into the cardiac chamber of the living fossil. The clear liquid that squirted through the needle blushed pale blue as it filled a beaker. The color reminded Geoffrey of ‘Frost’-flavored Gatorade.

The director of the Associates of Cape Cod Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, had invited Geoffrey to see how horseshoe crab blood was extracted each spring and summer. Since the blood was copper-based instead of iron-based, it turned blue instead of red when exposed to oxygen.

Geoffrey had spent several summers as a visiting researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, or the ‘WHOI’ (pronounced ‘hooey’ by the locals), but he had never visited the Cape Cod Associates facility. So today he had taken his metallic-lime Q-Pro road bike up Route 28 a couple miles to the lab, which lay tucked inside a forest of white pine, white oak, and beech, to take a look.

Geoffrey wore maroon surgical scrubs over his biking clothes, a sterile hair cap over his dreadlocks, plastic booties over his shoes, and latex gloves. Similarly clad lab technicians removed the writhing arthropods from blue plastic drums, folded their tails forward, and placed them upright in crab-holders on four double-sided lab counters.

‘This procedure doesn’t hurt, I hope?’ Geoffrey said.

‘No,’ said the technician who had been assigned to show him around. ‘We only draw one-third of their blood, then we drop them back in the ocean. They regenerate it in a few days. Some are destined to be fish bait on the trawlers, though, so it only makes sense that they be routed through us for extraction first. We can tell from scars that a lot of the crabs have donated blood once or twice before.’

Geoffrey knew these primitive creatures were not, technically, crabs. They resembled giant Cambrian trilobites lined up in rows over the stainless steel shelves, a bizarre marriage of the primordial and the high tech. But, Geoffrey mused, which was which? This lowly life form was still more sophisticated than the most advanced technology known to man. Indeed, all the equipment and expertise gathered here was devoted to unlocking the secrets and utilizing the capabilities of this one seemingly primitive organism.

‘What’s the scientific name of this thing?’ he asked.

‘Limulus polyphemus. Which means “slanting one-eyed giant,” I think.’

‘Sure, Polyphemus, the monster Odysseus fought on the island of Cyclopes.’

‘Oh, cool!’

‘What’s their life span?’

‘About twenty years.’

‘Really? When do they reach sexual maturity?’

‘At about age eight or nine, we think.’

Geoffrey nodded, making a mental note.

‘This whole lab,’ the technician continued, ‘was built to extract crab blood and refine it into Limulus amebocyte lysate, or LAL–a specialized protein that clots on contact with dangerous endotoxins, like E. coli.’

Geoffrey looked in a barrel where the crabs were clambering methodically over one another. He already knew most of what he was hearing, but he wanted to give the young lab tech an audience. ‘Endotoxins are common in the environment, aren’t they?’

‘Yes,’ answered the youngster. ‘They mostly consist of the fragments of certain bacteria floating in the air, and they’re only harmful if they enter animal bloodstreams. Tap water, for instance, while safe to drink, would kill most people if they injected it. Even distilled water left in a glass overnight would already be too lethal to inject.’

‘How do you extract the LAL?’

‘We centrifuge the blood to separate out the cells. We burst them open osmotically. Then we extract the protein that contains the clotting agent. It takes about four hundred pounds of cells to get a half ounce of the protein.’

‘So why do these guys have such a sophisticated defense against bacteria, I wonder?’

‘Well, they swim in muck,’ the technician said.

Geoffrey nodded. ‘Good point.’

‘Yeah, they never evolved an immune system, so if they get injured, they’d die pretty fast from infection without a pretty badass chemical defense of some sort.’ The technician removed the needle from one specimen and lifted it from its cradle, straightening its tail. He placed the living Roomba in a barrel. ‘Before we had horseshoe crabs we had to use the “rabbit test” to see if drugs and vaccines contained bacterial impurities.’ The technician grabbed a fresh donor and handed it to a colleague. ‘If the rabbit got a fever or died, we knew there were endotoxins present in the sample being tested. But since 1977, LAL from these guys has been used to test medical equipment, syringes, IV solutions, anything that comes in contact with human or animal bloodstreams. If the protein clots, we know there’s a problem. This stuff has saved millions of lives.’

‘Especially rabbits, I guess.’

The technician laughed. ‘Yeah. Especially rabbits.’

Geoffrey touched the hard reddish-green carapace of a crab. The shell had the smoothness and density of Tupperware. He laughed nervously as the technician handed him an upside-down crab.

Gingerly, he took the large specimen. Five pincered legs made piano-scale motions on each side of a central mouth on the creature’s underside. Geoffrey cupped its back carefully so as not to get nipped.

‘Don’t worry, these guys are actually pretty harmless. And they’re hardy as hell, too. I know a scientist here who says that back in the day he stored some in his refrigerator and forgot about them for two weeks. They were still kicking when he finally remembered to get them out.’

Geoffrey watched with childlike delight as the arthropod bent its spiked tail up and revealed the ‘book’ gills layered in sheaves near its tail spine. ‘Gads, what a beast!’

‘When I started working here I thought only aliens from space movies had ten eyes and blue blood.’ The technician laughed. ‘This guy’s even got a light-sensing eye on his tail.’

‘Nature’s produced a lot of different blood pigments.’ Geoffrey peered at the maw at the center of the crab, which reminded him of the mouth of an ancient Anomalocaris, the arthropod that ruled the seas during the first ‘Cambrian’ explosion of complex life half a billion years ago. He was struck by the color of this creature, which closely resembled the color of the reddish-green trilobite fossils he had collected at Marble Mountain in California as a boy: this crab was a living fossil–literally. ‘I’ve seen violet blood and green blood in polychaete worms,’ he said. ‘I’ve even seen yellow-green blood in sea cucumbers. Crabs, lobsters, octopus, squid, even pill-bugs, a relative of these guys here, all have blue copper-based pigment that serves the same function as the red iron-based pigment in our blood.’

The technician arched his eyebrows. ‘You’ve been humoring me a bit by letting me make my spiel, haven’t you, Dr Binswanger?’

‘Oh, call me Geoffrey. No, I’ve learned a lot I didn’t know, actually,’ Geoffrey assured him. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this beastie. Thanks for letting me check it out.’

The technician gave him a thumbs-up. ‘No problem. Did you see SeaLife last night?’

Geoffrey squirmed. This was the fourth time someone had asked him this today. First, his attractive neighbor, as he left his cottage. Then Sy Greenberg, an Oxford buddy researching the giant axons of squids at the Marine Biological Laboratory, had asked the same thing as they passed on the bike path near the Steamboat Authority. Then the dock manager at WHOI, while he was locking his bike outside the Water Street building where his office was located.

‘Um, no,’ Geoffrey answered. ‘Why?’

The technician shook his head. ‘Just wondering if you thought it was for real.’

That’s what the other three had said. Exactly.

Someone rapped on the window in the hall outside the clean room. On the other side of the glass stood Dr Lastikka, the lab director who had arranged his tour. Dr Lastikka made a telephone gesture with his hand to his ear.

‘Jeez, it’s my lunch hour. Oh well, OK, I’m done.’ Geoffrey handed the horseshoe crab carefully back to the technician and pantomimed to Dr Lastikka, Tell them to hold!

Dr Lastikka signaled OK.

‘Thanks, that was really cool,’ Geoffrey told the technician.

‘Doing your lecture tonight, Dr Binswanger? Er–Geoffrey?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘I’ll be there!’

‘I won’t be able to recognize you.’

‘I’ll wear the mask.’

Geoffrey nodded. ‘OK!’

This was why Geoffrey loved Woods Hole: everyone was fascinated by science, everyone was smart–and not just his fellow researchers. The general public, in fact, was usually smarter. Woods Hole, he confidently believed, was the most scientifically curious and informed population of any town on Earth. And it was one of the rare places, outside a few college campuses, where scientists were considered cool. Everyone showed up for the nighttime lectures. And then everyone adjourned to various taverns to talk about them.

Geoffrey exited the clean room through two sealed doors. As he tugged off his cap and mask, a lab assistant pointed him to a phone. The front desk patched him through. ‘This is Geoffrey.’

‘There you are, El Geoffe!’

It was Angel Echevarria, his office mate at WHOI. Angel was studying stomatopods, following in the footsteps of his hero, Ray Manning, the pioneering stomatopod expert. Angel had been out of the office that morning and had left a message saying he was going to be late. Now the researcher was practically jumping out of the phone.

‘Geoffrey! Geoffrey! Did you see it?’

‘See what? Take it easy, Angel.’

‘You saw SeaLife, right?’

Geoffrey groaned. ‘I don’t watch reality TV shows.’

‘Yeah, but they’re scientists.’

‘Who go to all the tourist spots, like Easter Island and the Galapagos? Come on, it’s lame.’

‘Oh my God! But you heard about it, right?’

‘Yeah…’

‘So you know half of them got slaughtered?’

‘What? It’s a TV show, Angel. I wouldn’t be too sure about that if I were you.’ Geoffrey stepped out of the cleansuit as he spoke. He nodded as a technician took it from him.

‘It’s a reality show,’ Angel insisted.

Geoffrey laughed.

‘I recorded it. You’ve got to see it.’

‘Oh brother.’

‘Get back here! Bring sandwiches!’

‘All right, I’ll see you in half an hour.’ Geoffrey hung up the phone, and looked at the technician.

‘Did you see SeaLife last night, Dr Binswanger?’ she asked.

1:37 P.M.

Geoffrey entered the office he shared with Angel carrying a few bags of sandwiches from Jimmy’s sandwich shop. ‘Lunch is ser—’

He was shushed by a cluster of colleagues from down the hall who had gathered to watch Angel feed his mantis shrimp.

Watching a stomatopod, or ‘mantis shrimp,’ hunt was truly a spectacle not to be missed.

Geoffrey aborted his greeting immediately and set down his helmet and the sandwich bags. In the large saltwater tank, Angel had placed a thick layer of coral gravel and a ceramic vase decorated with an Asian-style depiction of a tiger. The vase rested on its side, its mouth pointed toward the back of the aquarium.

Angel pinched a live blue crab in forceps. ‘Don gave me one of his blue crabs. Thanks, Don.’

‘I think I’m already regretting it,’ moaned Don as he nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

‘Whoa!’ several exclaimed as Angel’s pet emerged.

‘Banzai!’ Angel dropped the unfortunate crustacean into the tank. Morbid fascination compelled everyone to watch.

The ten-inch-long segmented creature moved like some ancient dragon. Its elegant overlapping plates rippled like jade louvers as it curled through the water. A Swiss Army knife’s worth of limbs and legs churned underneath. Its stalked eyes twitched in different directions. The colors on its body were dazzlingly vivid, nearly iridescent.

‘Here it comes,’ Don groaned.

The blue crab sculled its legs as it sank through the water, and halfway down it saw the mantis shrimp. It immediately swam for the far side of the vase but the mantis lunged up and its powerful forearms struck, too fast for the human eye. With a startling pop, the crab tumbled backwards. The carapace between the crab’s eyes was shattered and the crab hung limp in the water.

The mantis shrimp moved in and dragged its quarry back into its vase.

The audience ‘wowed.’

‘And that, my friends, is the awesome power of the stomatopod.’ Angel sounded more like a circus barker than a stomatopod expert. ‘Its strike has the force of a .22 caliber bullet. It sees millions more colors than human beings with eyes that have independent depth perception, and its reflexes are faster than any creature on Earth. This mysterious miracle of Mother Nature is so different from other arthropods it might as well have come from an alien planet. It may even replace us someday…Bon appetit, Freddie!’

‘Speaking of which, Jimmy’s has arrived,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Yay, Jimmy’s,’ said a female lab mate.

‘Glad you’re here,’ Angel told Geoffrey. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

Everyone took sandwiches. A computer monitor on the lab counter showed a cable newscast with the volume turned down. The SeaLife logo flashed behind the newscaster.

‘Hey, turn it up!’ someone called, as Angel simultaneously cranked up the volume.

‘It’s only two miles wide, but if what the cable show SeaLife aired last night is real, some scientists are saying it might be the most important island discovery since Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos nearly two centuries ago. Others are claiming that SeaLife is engaging in a crass publicity stunt. Last night the show gave a tantalizing live glimpse of what appeared to be an island populated by horrific and alien life that viciously attacked the show’s cast. Network executives have refused to comment. Joining us is eminent scientist Thatcher Redmond for an expert opinion on what really happened.’

Everyone in the room groaned as the camera focused on the guest commentator.

‘Dr Redmond, congratulations on the success of your book, The Human Effect, and your Tetteridge Award which you received just yesterday, and thank you for giving us your insights tonight,’ gushed the newscaster. ‘So, is it for real?’

‘Photosynthesis in action,’ Angel said. ‘The man grows in limelight.’

‘Come on now, Angel,’ Geoffrey said facetiously. ‘Dr Redmond knows all.’

Thatcher smiled, showing a row of recently bleached teeth in his ruddy face. He wore his trademark cargo vest and sported his famous red mustache and overgrown sideburns. ‘Thank you! Well, Sandy, I only hope that life on the island can withstand discovery by human beings, to be perfectly frank.’

‘He’s got a point there,’ muttered one of the female researchers, as she bit into her sandwich.

Thatcher continued. ‘So-called intelligent life is the greatest threat to any environment. I don’t envy any ecosystem that comes in contact with it. That’s the thesis of my book, The Human Effect, as a matter of fact, and I’m afraid if this SeaLife show isn’t a hoax of some sort, I’ll soon have to add another tragic chapter to illustrate my point.’

‘Oh brother,’ Geoffrey groaned.

‘Gee, I wonder if he wrote a book or something,’ muttered Angel.

‘But do you think it is a hoax? Or the real thing?’ persisted the newscaster.

‘Well,’ Thatcher said, ‘I wish it were true, of course–as a scientist, that is–but I’m afraid that, as a scientist, I have to say this is probably a hoax, Sandy.’

‘Thank you, Dr Redmond.’ The newscaster turned as the camera cut away from Thatcher. ‘Well, there you have it…’

‘No way,’ Angel insisted. ‘It’s not a hoax!’

The others chattered about the controversy as they carried their lunches back to their offices.

‘OK, Geoffrey, you’ve got to see this. I’ve got the clip right here.’

‘OK, OK.’

Sitting beside Angel in their cramped office overlooking Great Harbor, Geoffrey watched the chaotic images of the last minutes of SeaLife that Angel had recorded.

If someone were trying to stage a schlocky horror film on a very low budget it would probably look something like this, Geoffrey decided. Frankly, it looked like that movie The Blair Witch Project, as though the cameramen were deliberately trying to avoid taking a good look at the cheap special effects.

‘I can’t make out much of anything,’ Geoffrey said.

‘Wait.’ Angel punched the PAUSE button on the remote and then stepped the image forward. ‘There!’

He froze the frame as a group of sweeping shadows nearly blackened the screen. Angel pointed a pencil at a shape that looked like a crab leg.

‘OK,’ Geoffrey said. ‘So?’

‘That’s a toe-splitter! That’s a stomatopod claw.’

Geoffrey laughed and reached for his sandwich. ‘That’s a Rorschach test, Angel. And you’re seeing the species you’ve been studying for the past five years, because you see it in your dreams, your breakfast cereal, and the stains on the ceiling tiles.’

Angel frowned. ‘Maybe. But I don’t think so.’

Then Geoffrey noticed something. He stopped eating. As Angel advanced the frames, red drops splattered the camera lens–then a single light blue drop appeared, seconds before the camera went dark.

Angel opened a mini-fridge that had a sign taped to the door: FOOD ONLY. He took out a carton of milk and sniffed it. ‘So, are you going ahead with the Fire-Breathing Chat tonight?’

Geoffrey turned away from the screen and clicked off the video. ‘Uh, yep. The Fire-Breathing Chat will go on, despite the intense competition from reality TV shows.’

The Fire-Breathing Chat was a tradition Geoffrey had carried on since his Oxford days. It was a forum for heretical ideas, with which he could outrage his colleagues on a semi-regular basis. Afterward they could pummel him with derision to their hearts’ content. The public was invited to enjoy the spectacle and to join in.

‘Everyone’s going to ask you about SeaLife, you know.’

‘Yes, you’re probably right.’

‘You should thank me for preparing you.’

‘Duly noted.’

‘Are you really going with the ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny phylogeny thing tonight?’

‘Yep. Fasten your seat belt, Angel, it’s going to be a bumpy night.’

‘When are you going to take home one of your groupies, Geoffrey? Everyone already thinks you’re a Don Juan, so you might as well cash in on your reputation. The girls are right there waiting after every talk, my man, but you always get into a ridiculous scientific argument with a bunch of geezers, instead.’

‘Maybe tonight I’ll get into a ridiculous scientific argument with one of my groupies. That’s the kind of foreplay that would really turn me on.’

Angel frowned. ‘You’ll never get laid, my friend.’

‘You’re a pessimist, Angel. And a chauvinist. Don’t think about it. I don’t.’

‘But I do. And you don’t. Life isn’t fair! You need to get laid even more than I do, my friend. There’s more to life than biology. And there’s more to biology than biology, too.’

‘You’re right, you’re so right.’

Whatever ‘Don Juan’ reputation Geoffrey had was quite unearned. The scientist lacked the patience for friendly, mindless banter. He remained incorrigibly oblivious to traditional romantic signals. Ideas excited him, but he found the rituals of flirtation degrading and inexplicably obtuse.

He’d had nine sexual partners in his thirty-four years. All were short-lived romances, with long gaps in between. Geoffrey attracted would-be rebels, but when the women inevitably tried to force him into some orthodoxy, he had moved on.

While he worried sometimes that he might be lonely at the end of the day, he refused to trade his sanity for companionship. This was not vanity, or some noble sacrifice in the name of principle. It was simply a fact he had come to acknowledge about himself. As a result, he knew he might well end up alone.

So, love was the one mystery he’d had to approach with faith–faith that he would meet someone, faith against evidence, a necessary irrationality that kept him going, kept him looking toward the next horizon with open-ended hope. Because he had to admit to himself he was lonely…and Angel had an irritating way of reminding him of that.

‘So what’s the ceremonial garb for tonight’s riot?’ Angel asked.

The Fire-Breathing Chat tradition required the speaker to wear a random piece of clothing of exotic or historical origin–a Portuguese fisherman’s hat, an Etruscan helmet, a Moroccan burnoose. Last time Geoffrey had worn a fairly pedestrian toga, and the crowd had loudly expressed their disappointment.

‘Tonight…a kilt, I think.’

‘My friend,’ Angel said, ‘you’re crazy.’

‘Either that or everyone else is. I haven’t figured out which yet. Why does everyone wear the same thing at any given place and time? We all have minds of our own, and yet we’re afraid to be unfashionable. It’s an example of complete irrationality and fear, Angel.’

‘Uh, sure. That sounds good.’

‘Thanks. I thought it sounded pretty good, too…’

Geoffrey reversed the video clip. He paused the image as they spoke, pondering the single drop of pale blue liquid at the right edge of the frame.

Someone clever might have added two compelling clues–a stomatopod claw and a splash of blue blood–simply to fool the scientific community and keep a publicity stunt simmering, he mused. But somehow it didn’t seem likely that such sophisticated clues would be known to the producers of a trashy reality TV show. Or that they would count on such subtle evidence being picked up by the handful of experts who would notice.

Geoffrey shrugged and put the puzzle away, unsolved.

7:30 P.M.

Enthusiastic applause greeted Geoffrey as he strode onto the stage of Lillie Auditorium.

The hall was packed with a mixture of young students who had fallen under the spell of the dashing evolutionary scientist and elderly skeptical colleagues who were itching for a scientific rumble.

An ageless thirty-four years old, Geoffrey Binswanger was a physically striking man who remained an enigma to his colleagues. His West Indian and German parentage had produced an unlikely mix of islander’s features, caramel complexion, and sky-blue eyes. His dreadlocked hair and athletic physique undermined his academic seriousness, in the view of some of his fellow academics. Others, intrigued, wanted to count him in their political corners.

His theories, however, showed an utter lack of allegiance to anything but his own judgment–a result, perhaps, of never thinking of himself as part of a group. For whatever reason, Geoffrey had always needed to see things for himself. He wanted to draw his own conclusions without obligation to anything but what could be demonstrated and replicated under laboratory conditions.