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The hatch at the far end of the lab beeped a loud alarm as it opened, and Chief NASA Technician Jedediah Briggs stepped through and closed the hatch behind him.

“This section of the lab is caked with crap three feet deep on
the outside,” Briggs informed them. He was a tall, athletic man with a Kirk Douglas chin protruding over his helmetless blue cleansuit. Everyone had pretty much grown to dread him. “And we just started to detect a slow drop in pressure. So it’s time to evacuate Section One, boys and girls!”

“Hey, Otto, how many ROVs do we have left?” Nell asked.

“We have sixty-eight left of the ninety-four stored under StatLab-One.”

“Can you control them from any of the lab’s sections?”

Otto thought for a second. “Yes!”

“OK, let’s relocate our base of operations to Section Four,” Nell said, glancing at Briggs. “And, in the meantime, we’ll use sections Two and Three as long as possible. How’s that, Briggs?”

“That works for me.” Briggs nodded. “Now, if you would all get your asses out of here as fast as possible, that would be, well, mandatory!” he shouted.

Everyone scrambled to gather up laptops and as many specimens as possible as they exited the hatch and climbed the stairs to Section Two.

“Sterilize the trough, Otto,” Nell said sternly. “You know we can’t keep a specimen that size safely.”

Otto frowned. “OK, OK.”

On board the
Trident
, dinner was served: canned potatoes, mandarin salad, and a batch of deep-fried mantis shrimp the chef had trapped right off the starboard bow last night.

Zero chewed a succulent morsel of the crustacean as he studied the brilliantly starred sky, lying on a lounge on the mezzanine deck, the empty plate of food resting on his crotch.

“You know you want to,” a voice coaxed.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Cynthea.” He sighed, and stretched back in the lounge chair.

“You can’t pass up an opportunity like this.”

“Maybe,” Zero said.

“I’ve offered you half of the money, damn it. What else could you possibly want?”

Zero grinned. “Keep talking, darlin’.”

Dante smirked at the loafing Zero and stalked off to go below.

The moon floodlit the cove outside the porthole of his room while he organized his gear.

Dante chose to use a minimal rack, rigging his Black Diamond climbing harness and gear slings with nuts, cams, carabiners, and a number of gri-gris. Then he tied together six sixty-meter pitches of Edelweiss dynamic rope for the solo climb.

He checked the Voyager Lite camera and transmission backpack he had stolen from
SeaLife’s
stowage compartment. The battery meters read nearly full, and the Night Vision switch brought up the expected greenish display. He located the transmit button, easily reached on the backpack.

He stowed the backpack, rope, and climbing gear in a five-foot-long waterproof duffel bag. Then he hoisted a body-surfing raft he had brought along so he could sneak the equipment ashore below the Navy’s radar.

The full moon hung directly overhead as he slipped into the sea from the stern, beside the large Zodiac, placing the bag of gear on the raft. Once in the brisk water, he slipped on a pair of swim fins. Then he paddled quietly to shore with the tide, conserving his leg muscles.

Nell gazed out the window of Section Four, studying the glistening nocturnal grazers as they sprouted in the moonlit field. What kind of symbiont could alternate its chemistry to feed on so many different sources of nutrients? she wondered. She rubbed her forehead as she turned the problem over in her mind.

Andy studied Nell. “What are you thinking?”

“It’s not lichen.”

“OK. So what is it, then?”

“I’m not sure…The top growth rate of lichen is about one or two centimeters a year. The stuff on these fields grows faster than bamboo. Its geometric growth pattern reminds me of Ediacara fossils, some really primitive organizations of single-celled life. Whatever it is, it seems to be the base of the food chain here.”

“If it’s not lichen, what is it?”

“Let’s call it clover. The clover photosynthesizes by day and eats rock by night—and these grazers come out at night to eat the clover. Maybe the grazers prefer the minerals the clover consumes at night, or don’t like chlorophyll… We know that some green algae in birdbaths turns red to protect itself from too much light or salinity—but it takes days to make that color change…”

“Hmm…”

“But we know lichen is a symbiont formed from algae and fungus.” She opened her eyes and looked at Andy, but her focus was distant and inward. “In lichen, the algae provides oxygen and organic molecules like sugars and ATP through photosynthesis. The fungus helps dissolve rock and provides nutrients for the algae to synthesize organic molecules.” She focused on Andy. “You with me?”

“Sure!”

“OK, so now—what makes this clover turn purple? The only thing I can think of is purple bacteria.” She looked out the window as though she could suddenly see through a fog. “This may be a symbiont of cyanobacteria and proteobacteria, which uses sulfur as an energy source—and turns purple! There’s a lot of iron sulfide, fool’s gold, on the island. I noticed it on the beach…So if this is some kind of cyano-proteobacteria symbiont, then the purple phase of this stuff would produce hydrogen sulfide gas—and stink like rotten eggs, like Zero mentioned! But during the day, when photosynthesizing, it would produce
oxygen…
while the sulfur-reducing bacteria might retreat underground…”

She leaned forward, intently watching one of the nearest fernlike creatures pressing down a translucent frond on the field. White smoke curled around the pads at the end.

“Of course!” She looked at Andy with wide eyes as three thoughts slammed together in her sleep-deprived mind. “If those ‘grazers’ only come out at night, they may be so ancient that they have to avoid oxygen! They may
need
the hydrogen sulfide gas to protect themselves and re-create the primordial atmosphere that they evolved in. See?”

“Go on, go on!”

“And if these grazers eat this stuff when it’s purple, they could be ingesting purple bacteria like
Thiobacillus
to convert the hydrogen sulfide in the plants into
sulfuric acid
—which they may be using to scour the clover off the rocks!”

“Nell,” Andy gasped. “You’re amazing. I don’t have the slightest idea what you just said, but it’s amazing! I told everyone down in Section Two you thought it was lichen, so they’re all calling it lichen now. Sorry.”

She laughed wearily. “That’s OK, Andy. It’s hard to believe this is even our planet. I’m glad we’re here, though. If I couldn’t do something after…I think I might have gone crazy on that ship.”

“Yeah. I think they call it survivor’s guilt.”

“No.” Anger instantly erased the humor from her face. “If survivors do something about it, there’s no reason to feel guilty, Andy. Unless they don’t.”

“It’s up to the living to avenge the dead, eh? Isn’t that how the saying goes?”

She stared at the darkening jungle below, thinking of her eleven shipmates that were now gone. “Something like that,” she answered softly.

“But can you take revenge on animals, Nell? After all, we were the ones who intruded on them. Animals can’t help what they do. They didn’t have a choice. I know what happened to your mom, Nell, but—”

Her eyes scalded him.

“OK.” He nodded, and backed off. “I’m sorry.”

She looked back out the window, focusing on the glistening creatures emerging across the purple slopes of the island.

Glowing swarms of bugs came out of the tangled vegetation now and swirled across the fields in clusters as they grazed.

Dante tugged off the swim fins. He dragged the raft up the beach toward the rocks. Ditching his fins on a high rock and stashing the raft sideways between two boulders, he dragged the duffel bag of climbing gear up the beach and over the rock outpouring to the edge of the crevasse.

He opened the bag, stepped into his harness, attached the pre-strung loops of gear, and slipped on a new pair of his favorite Five Ten climbing shoes. Then he zippered the bag, slung it over his back, and bouldered up into the crack.

About seventy feet in, Dante spotted an ascent route on the left face. He glanced warily into the rock-strewn canyon ahead, weighing his options. He poured some chalk on his hands from a small bag strapped around his waist. Then he felt the cliff-face, carefully examining the surface.

The rock was abundantly pitted with pockets and cracks for nuts and cams. He decided he could climb this face clean, without using the rock hammer or the pitons, and he felt a surge of confidence. It would be a perfect solo climb.

Dante visualized the first line of holds in the moonlight, then he donned his gear and tested his balance. Carrying the heavy gear disturbed his center of gravity—and the camera on his chest would prevent him from hugging the rock. He decided to strap the camera on the backpack instead—it made the center of gravity worse, but at least it was not in his way.

He looked up. A hundred-foot vertical face rose above him to a perfect ramp, a diagonal crack that stretched almost to the top of the 230-meter face. The tricky part would be an overhang on the last thirty feet.

He hoped to climb two-thirds of the way to the summit, find a
ledge, and sleep until dawn. Then he would contact Cynthea and film his remaining ascent, transmitting the first live images of Henders Island to the world.

So much for Zero.

Stacking six connected rope coils on a flat rock at the base of the cliff, he tied the end of the rope to a cam, and hooked the cam to his chest harness. He felt the adrenaline pump inside him as he jumped up and grabbed the first hold, pulling the end of the rope with him.

Suddenly, a sound like a Mack truck air horn blasted him from behind, nearly stopping his heart in the deep silence of the night.

He leaped upward instinctively, “smearing” his feet in a mad scramble over the rocky surface.

“What the fuck!” he shouted, clinging to the rock and twisting to look below him. What he saw resembled a giant spider the size of a Chevy Suburban, covered with stripes of glowing fur, crashing into the rock wall below Dante’s feet.

A black spike reached up from the spider. It gouged the cliff beside his right leg, clawing a groove down the hard rock face. Dante sprang six vertical feet in a single terrified lunge, to grab the next set of holds with his chalked hands.

Amped with adrenaline, he chimneyed backwards off a wrinkle and climbed the next fifty feet faster than he’d ever scaled a rock in his life. Pausing for breath at a ledge, he leaned out to look down the face. Three large shapes prowled like phosphorescent tigers below. “Please tell me you can’t climb,” he whispered, panting.

He reached both hands into the chalk bag, dusted them together, and resumed the climb, casting an occasional nervous glance downward at the shrinking forms below. The ramp was another fifty feet above him.

His hand fell on a strange smooth texture, and he momentarily recoiled from what looked like a serving-tray-sized, boomerang-headed cockroach. But it was motionless, and he quickly realized it was just a fossil. He saw others around him, dark and glossy on the moon-washed rock face.

When he reached the ramp he set another cam rigged with a gri-gri, for protection, then he crawled forward to the corner and looked down into the crevasse.

Farther up the crack he saw the cornucopia-like tunnel of jungle growth, its glowing outline etched by the swirling sparks of a million flying bugs. He decided to stay out of its line of sight as much as possible to avoid being detected by anything.

Around the corner, he chimneyed backwards to a bucket of stone that emerged from the cliff like a sharp-edged bowsprit of rock. He set another cam there and marked his elevation— about two hundred feet up. He faced a waving vertical climb of about seventy feet, in the open, until another ramp of rock would take him to the crux.

He chalked his hands again and started up.

The moonlight glint of another fossil caught his eye, so he climbed toward it to have a look.

It leaped off the rock and snapped its jaws at his face— devouring a glowing bug that whizzed past his ear.

Startled, hands slipping and scrabbling, Dante lost his grip.

He fell.

The cam he had set expanded in the crack as his weight tightened the gri-gri. He swung beneath the stone bucket—he had fallen about thirty feet, but the protection held.

Now, shuddering, he got a good look at the creature skittering down the cliff face, moving like a huge beetle welded to a flying fish.

Dante pulled himself up the rope to the hold point and dangled there, watching as more of these living fossils darted around him, snapping up the flying insects that were now buzzing past him.

“Quentin, save the rest of the ROVs for daylight, OK?” Nell said. “Let’s concentrate on lighting and time-lapsing the field specimens till morning.”

Quentin triggered the outboard lights for the cameras that would continue shooting a frame of the plant specimens exposed outside every thirty seconds through the night.

“God!” she said as she ran replays of the time-lapses from the last forty-five minutes. She looked out the window and saw that some of the specimens had already been stripped, uprooted, and replaced with something else.

“Hey, what’s that?” a NASA technician asked.

A strange hum buzzed in the air.

The entire lab seemed to vibrate and then rock gently back and forth.

“Probably a tremor,” Quentin said. “The military said they noticed low-level seismic activity in the island a few days ago.”

“Hang on, folks,” Andy warned.

Nell grabbed the edge of the lab counter and looked out the window, at the trees quivering at the jungle’s edge.

Dante felt the rumble before he heard it. At first he thought the entire cliff was falling, but then he realized it was only the slab he was clinging to—separating from the cliff with a slow crumble. He lunged sideways, finger-locking a crack with his left hand and swinging up to catch a dead-point with his right, simultaneously edging a hold with his left foot. It was the most incredible dyno he had ever made—but he didn’t care, because he was terrified.