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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.

Ever since he was a child, and as long as he could remember, Geoffrey was a scientist. Whenever adults had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he literally did not understand the question. He was conducting formal experiments at the age of four. Instead of asking his parents why some things bounced and some things shattered, he tested them himself, marking his picture books with a single heavy dot next to illustrations of things that survived the test of gravity and a swirly squiggle next to things that did not, which his mother had discovered to her mixed horror and delight.

His parents, who raised him in the upper-class Los Angeles suburb of La Cañada Flintridge, finally conceded that they had a very special child on their hands when they had come home from work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab one night to find the babysitter curled up on the couch asleep in front of the television and their six-year-old son sitting on the back patio holding a running garden hose. ‘Welcome to Triphibian City,’ he’d said as he presented his engineering feat with an imperious wave of his hand.

Geoffrey had flooded the entire backyard just as millions of toads from the wash of Devil’s Gate Dam had spawned. Thousands of the tiny gray amphibians had stormed under the fence through Geoffrey’s little tunnel and now inhabited a metropolis of canals and islands presided over by ceramic garden gnomes.

From that point forward, Geoffrey’s parents did all they could to occupy their son’s curiosity in more constructive ways. They sent him to a camp on Catalina Island, where he was nearly arrested for dissecting a Garibaldi, the pugnacious State Fish of California, although his campmates had already speared as many of the fish as possible, because it was illegal, and had flung them on the rocks.

When they enrolled him in a neurobiology class for gifted children at nearby Caltech, he had never felt more at home. He explored the campus with his genius friends and snuck into the labyrinth of steam tunnels beneath the campus, for which he almost got arrested, yet again.

Geoffrey graduated from Flintridge Prep at the age of fifteen and immediately qualified for Oxford, much to his parents’ horror. His mother finally acquiesced, and Geoffrey stayed at Oxford for seven years, earning degrees in biology, biochemistry, and anthropology.

Geoffrey had won a variety of awards through the years since university but he never displayed them in his office, the way so many of his colleagues did. Looking at them made him queasy. He was deeply suspicious of any strings that might be attached to such honors. He accepted them out of politeness, but even then at arm’s length.

His latest book had become something of a bestseller for a scientific tome, though to his literary agent’s chagrin he resisted opportunities to become what he called a ‘sound-bite scientist,’ pontificating on TV about the latest scientific fad and mouthing the majority position with no personal expertise in the plethora of matters journalists asked scientists to expound upon. He cringed when he saw colleagues placed in that position, even though they usually seemed pleased to have appeared on television.

For his part, Geoffrey preferred a forum like this one tonight. The storied Lillie Auditorium at Woods Hole was one of the true churches of science. Through the last century this humble hall had hosted more than forty Nobel Laureates.

When the small auditorium was built around the turn of the 19th century, Woods Hole was already a thriving community of loosely affiliated laboratories with a progressive campuslike culture. Here, men and women had found remarkable equality from the start, the men in their boater hats and white suits and the women in their bodices, bustled cotton dresses, and parasols, hunkering down in the mud together and digging for specimens.

Lillie Auditorium cozily held an audience of about two hundred people, its high ceiling supported by wide Victorian pillars painted a yellowing white like fat tallow candles. Under its wood-slatted chairs one could still find the wire fixtures where men used to store their boaters.

The Friday Night Lectures were the most anticipated of the summer lectures at Woods Hole. They regularly drew top scientists from around the world as featured speakers. The Fire-Breathing Chats, however, traditionally took place on Thursday nights.

Geoffrey’s first presentation eight years ago had caused a near-riot–so naturally the directors had reserved some prime Thursday night slots for his visit this year in hopes of a repeat.

Geoffrey had invented the Fire-Breathing Chats so that he and some other young turks at Oxford, after persuading the proprietor of the King’s Head Pub to set a room aside every Thursday night, could commit scientific sacrilege on a regular basis. Their enthusiastic audience had soon swollen to standing room only and had proved a thumping good time regardless, in retrospect, of how risible most of the theories advanced had been. But the object was not so much to be right as to challenge conventional wisdom and to engage in scientific reasoning, even if it led to the demolition of the theory being proposed. They had a special prize for that, in fact–the Icarus Award, for the theory that was shot down the fastest.

It was rapid-fire science, theory in action, method in motion, and often in the flaming death of a hypothesis could be seen the embers of a brilliant solution. Pitching a bold idea to the wolves had a thrilling appeal to Geoffrey. When it didn’t destroy his theories it improved them, so he had carried the tradition with him wherever he went as a test for his most unscrupulous ideas. He thought of these lectures as ‘peer preview.’

Now he strode across the stage in a Black Watch tartan kilt and held out a hand to calm the applause as he reached the lectern and tapped the microphone. Whoops and wolf whistles rose from his audience, and Geoffrey stepped out from behind the lectern for a bow.

With the kilt, he wore a T-shirt dyed rust-red by the mud of the island of Kaua’i. Green block letters across his chest read, ‘Conserve Island Habitats.’ Geoffrey had spent half a dozen summers on the small Hawaiian island, vacationing at his uncle’s stilted house tucked in the narrow strip of rain forest between a vine-strangled cliff and Tunnels Beach. He had found no better way to escape civilization than to don a mask, snorkel, and fins. He’d shoot through the ancient lava vents, chasing Moorish Idols, following nonchalant sea turtles, and feeding urchins to the brash Humuhumunukanukaapuaha’a fish that took them right out of his hands. He had worn this T-shirt on dozens of his swims through those tunnels, and it was the only common denominator for every Fire-Breathing Chat: he wore it for every talk.

He raised a hand to the easel beside him that announced tonight’s topic:

Predator and Prey:

The Origin of Sex?

Another round of whistles, applause, and jeers rose.

Geoffrey took refuge behind the lectern and began.

‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. First–a brief history of the world.’

A ripple of amusement crossed the audience as they settled in and the lights dimmed.

Geoffrey clicked a remote, and an artist’s rendering of two worlds colliding appeared on the screen behind him.

‘After a Mars-sized planet collided with ours and penetrated her surface, spewing a molten plume of ejecta that would congeal into the Moon, Mother Earth remained a cooling ball of lava for 100 million years.’

Geoffrey clicked to a close-up of the full Moon over the ocean.

‘It was this fantastic violence that ironically created the hand that rocked the cradle of life. Four billion years ago, as Earth’s lunar child circled in low orbit, the first oceans were churned by its wrenching tides. Four hundred million years later, the Earth and Moon would be bombarded by another wave of massive impacts as our fledgling solar system continued to work out the kinks in the clockwork we observe today.’

He clicked to a scene of what looked like outer space scattered with clusters of colored spheres.

‘During this inconceivably violent age, known as the Archean Eon, the first self-copying molecules coalesced in Earth’s oceans. Such molecules are easily re-created in our laboratories using the same inorganic ingredients and forces that bombarded our planet’s primordial seas. During the next billion years, the accumulation of replication errors in these molecules created RNA, which not only replicated itself but catalyzed chemical reactions like a primitive metabolism! RNA’s replication errors led to the evolution of DNA–a molecule more stable than RNA that could copy itself more accurately and manufacture RNA.’

Geoffrey clicked to a computer-generated image of a DNA molecule.

‘From this self-copying molecular machine, the earliest life emerged as a simple organization of chemical reactions. The first crude bacteria harnessed methane, sulfur, copper, sunlight, and possibly even thermal energy venting in the dark depths of the ocean to fuel these metabolic processes.’

The next slide showed a variety of simple forms that looked like primitive prokaryotic cells.

‘The first crude organisms collided and sometimes consumed one another, blending their genetic material. A minute percentage of these blendings bestowed advantages on the resulting hybrids.’

Geoffrey clicked through images of waves crashing on shores.

‘If you combine extreme tides caused by the nearby Moon, which is still drifting about two inches farther away from the Earth each year, with the constant bombardment of ultraviolet radiation from the sun, then stir and cook the primordial soup for one and a half billion years, you get the most significant innovation in the story of life.’

Geoffrey clicked the remote, and the next slide sent giggles through his audience.

‘Yes, my friends, it looks like a sperm cell, but it’s actually a tailed protozoan called Euglena viridis. It is an individual animal, a unique species, a single-celled organism remarkably similar to sperm. The primordial sea had produced the first creatures with the ability to hunt, using thrashing tails to chase down other single-celled organisms and consume them. Sometimes these first predators actually exploited the reproductive systems of their prey to facilitate their own reproduction–and sometimes their prey perpetuated itself by hijacking the genes of its attacker.

‘In either case, the proposition of tonight’s Chat is that these very first hunters and their prey created a new and mutually beneficial relationship that we call sex. When certain cells began to specialize in consuming or penetrating other cells for reproduction, others cells specialized in hosting reproduction itself, thus deflecting death and perpetuating both lines of DNA. Sex is the peace treaty between predator and prey. The offspring of their union not only combined the properties of both but carried forward each original single-celled organism, now modified as sperm and egg. So there you have the kindling for tonight’s Fire-Breathing Chat, ladies and germs. I submit that sex began at the very beginning with single-celled organisms. I propose that the answer to the age-old question, which came first, the chicken or the egg, is the egg…and the sperm.’ Geoffrey stepped aside from the podium and bowed.

Shouts came from the back of the auditorium. Uncomfortable groans rose from the scientists in the front rows, especially from the gray hairs.

Geoffrey clicked to the next slide–a human egg wreathed by wriggling sperm–and he paused to enjoy the slightly nervous titter of recognition that the image always evoked from an audience.

‘Egg and sperm may actually be the living echo of a revolutionary moment that transpired a billion and a half years ago in the ancient seas of Earth. Indeed, I propose that this original love story has repeated itself in an unbroken chain since reproduction began in eukaryotic cells–that is, cells that have membrane-enclosed nuclei inside them. When the first hunter cells grew tails in order to chase down their prey, the hunted cells made peace, if you will, by absorbing the hunter’s DNA and facilitating its reproduction, thus ensuring both cells’ survival and turning a war into a partnership.

‘And since the sharing of genetic material led to a convergent variation in the morphology of their offspring, this innovation accelerated the evolution of superior forms in tandem, continuing to ensure the survival of both kinds of original cell in male and female carriers. And the elaboration of multicellular life issuing from that ever-accelerating partnership would launch both of the original organisms into wildly diverse environments.’

The grumblings grew louder in the audience. Geoffrey raised his voice mildly.

‘I suggest that this proposition is validated each time sperm penetrates an egg and results in an offspring. All complex life may have developed simply to stage this age-old dance of two single-celled species. From octopi to humans to whales to ferns, countless expressions of life on Earth stage this original single-celled rendezvous, just as it occurred in ancient seas, in order to reproduce.’

The audience muttered and shuffled as Geoffrey reached his peroration.

‘So why are such complex animals beneficial for continuing the partnership of sperm and egg? Because, ladies and gentlemen, unlike sperm and egg, animals can exploit an amazing variety of changing conditions and environments through evolution. We sexually reproducing animals are an astonishingly diversified fleet of sperm-and-egg-carriers that bring the ancient seas with us into ever-new environmental frontiers.

‘Of course, such elaborate vehicles were also beneficial to the replication of the original single-celled organisms because they have more fun replicating than single-celled organisms. There’s nothing like improved incentives to increase output. But I think we’ll leave that topic for another chat.’

Geoffrey bowed once again, this time to an enthusiastic ovation, unfazed by the jeers and scowls from the front row.

Now the real fun began. He took the first torpedo from a particularly vexed colleague right in front of him. ‘Yes, Dr Stoever?’

‘Well, I don’t know where to begin, Geoffrey,’ the baldheaded scientist drawled forlornly. ‘Sex began with isogamous gametes: two sex cells of the same size fusing together and joining their DNA, which then divided into more cells with a recombination of the two cells’ genes. It did not begin with ancestors of sperm and egg! I’ve never heard of such a preposterous theory!’

‘That is the general assumption,’ Geoffrey replied cheerfully. ‘But everyone concedes that very little is known about the details. I’m sure you’re aware of Haeckel’s theory, Dr Stoever?’

‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, of course–everyone is aware of Haeckel’s theory, Geoffrey.’

There was a smattering of laughter at this and Geoffrey raised his hand to the audience. ‘Well, just to remind everyone, for a long time scientists observed that during certain phases of development the human embryo looks remarkably like a tadpole, with a tail and gills, and continues to go through other stages that appear to be entirely different animals. What Haeckel proposed is that embryonic development is actually a recapitulation of an animal’s evolutionary past.’

‘Haeckel’s theory has been discredited,’ yelled one scientist from the back row.

‘It only applies to the development of embryos, anyway,’ protested another. ‘Not to sperm and ova!’

‘Ah.’ Geoffrey nodded. ‘Why not? Think outside the box, Dr Mosashvili. And Haeckel is far from being discredited, Dr Newsom. In fact, this proposition, if it proves correct, might well be his final vindication.’

‘You can’t claim sperm and egg are merely echoes of the first eukaryotic cells,’ shouted another irate scientist.

‘Why not?’ Geoffrey volleyed.

‘Because sperm and egg are unlike any other organism. They carry only half the chromosomes!’

‘Which they combine to produce the next stage of their development,’ Geoffrey returned, ‘which, I propose, may be the carrier stage, if you will–which naturally became more and more specialized to reach new environments. The fact that sperm and egg carry only half the chromosomes of their offspring could be a further effect of specialization to symbiotic reproduction, or it could be proof that sex began with separate organisms that combined and doubled the amount of their chromosomes to make sexually differentiated carriers of each original cell. I submit that Haeckel’s principle is not only right, but may not have been taken far enough.’

‘But originating as a predator/prey relationship…I don’t buy it.’ Dr Stoever was scowling.

‘Look at bees and flowers,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘When insects invaded the land, they devoured plant life. But plants adapted to the invasion. They turned insects into agents of their own reproduction by offering nectar in flowers and seeds in fruit. Examples abound of predator/prey relationships becoming symbiotic relationships, even reproductive relationships. Every one of us is a colony of cooperative organisms, millions of which inhabit our intestinal tract, graze on our epidermises, and devour bacteria scraped by our eyelids off our eyeballs, between the columns of our eyelashes. All of these creatures had to have begun as predators but then adapted in cooperation with our bodies so as not to destroy their own homes, and in fact to help their hosts survive and flourish. Without the vast horde of creatures that inhabit us, we would die. We could not have evolved without them, nor they without us. Instead of a perpetual war, I believe this treaty of cooperation is the true theme of life, the very essence of a viable ecosystem. Instead of the stalemate of a war, which many believe the natural world reflects, perhaps evolution is always working toward stability, peace treaties, the mutual benefit of alliances. And its central building block is the treaty between the first single-celled predator and its prey: sex. That peace treaty had to be struck before the relentless violence of predator and prey inevitably selected both for extinction, which probably happened many times.’

‘The development of sex in eukaryotic cells is still a mystery,’ grunted another grizzled scientist. He shook his white-haired head emphatically.

‘Maybe the answer to the mystery has been too obvious for us to see, Dr Kuroshima,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘Maybe the explanation has been right under our noses all along, or, at least, under our kilts. Perhaps we’ve just been too shy to look?’

A wave of grumbles, hoots, and whistles greeted this flourish, and the eighty-year-old Japanese scientist scoffed benignly, holding a hearing aid to his head with one hand and waving the other at Geoffrey, for whom he had great affection, despite and probably because of the younger man’s tendency to stir things up.

One pretty student intern in the audience raised her hand.

‘Yes?’

‘Dr Binswanger, can I ask a question on a different topic?’

‘Of course. There are no rules except that there are no rules at Fire-Breathing Chats.’

The audience seconded this with some enthusiastic applause.

‘Your expertise lies in the geo-evolutionary study of island ecosystems,’ the young woman recited. She’d clearly memorized her program of summer speakers. ‘Did I get that right?’ She laughed nervously, inspiring some sympathetic laughter in the feisty crowd.

‘Well, I’ve touched on pattern analysis in nature, and in biological communication systems in particular,’ Geoffrey agreed, ‘but genetic drift and island formation is my current project here at Woods Hole, where I’m overseeing a study of insular endemic life on Madagascar and the Seychelles in a geo-evolutionary context. So, I guess you could say yes!’

There was a scattering of academic chuckles, and Angel Echevarria rolled his eyes; the girl was quite good-looking and Geoffrey had totally blown it, again.

‘So…Did you see SeaLife?’ she asked.

This released a unanimous eruption of laughter.

‘By the way, you’ve got great legs,’ she added.

Geoffrey nodded at the ensuing howls and gave a Rockette kick.

Geoffrey thought about Angel’s video of the reality show. The blue blood had continued to bother him. The blurred images of the plants looked strange but not ridiculous–in fact, rather more subtle than he imagined a TV show could manage. But it wasn’t enough for him.

He shook his head, stalemated. ‘Given what is known about isolation events and the duration of micro-ecologies–and given what they can do in Hollywood movies these days–I’m going to have to assume that island’s a hoax, like Nessie and Bigfoot.’

Boos and cheers divided the room.

‘Sorry, folks!’

‘But wouldn’t you have to see it firsthand to be sure, Dr Binswanger?’ the attractive intern called.

Geoffrey smiled. ‘Sure. That’s the only way I’d feel comfortable commenting on it definitively. But I don’t think they’ll be asking any experts to take a closer look. It’s a perfect place to pull off a scam, if you think about it. It’s about as remote a location as you could possibly find. It’s not like anyone can just go there and check it out for themselves. That makes me suspicious, and since I’m already skeptical, the combination is deadly, I’m afraid. Yes, uh, you there, with the beard, in the back…’

Angel winced, closing his eyes sadly. Geoffrey had no idea that his own dismal ineptitude in pursuing sexual opportunities was the best evidence against his theory that sex cells created more complex animals to perpetuate themselves: if the end product was Geoffrey, Angel thought, total extinction was inevitable.