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The creature in the front seat nodded at Cane and made a kind of thumbs-up sign to Andy using both thumbs on four hands. It
turned its head on its twisting upper body and widened its mouth at Cane, nodding rapidly. Its bristling, translucent fur flashed with stripes and dots of colored light.

“Blue One? Are you there? Copy?”

“Answer them, Cane!” Geoffrey said.

Cane picked up the radio mike. “Um… we might… uh … uh …collect some specimens, too. Blue One out.”

“Go where he’s pointing!” Andy yelled.

“What in the FUCK is going on!” the soldier hollered.

The creature hummed as its six-fingered hands traced the contours of the dashboard, stroking the words on the controls and gauges.

“I do
not
like this!” Cane continued.

The creature recoiled a little from the sergeant. Then it grasped his wrist with two hands and plucked the gun from his fingers with two other hands with such speed and strength that Cane was disarmed before he could even think of squeezing the trigger. With one protruding eye, the creature peered curiously down the weapon’s barrel.

“No, Hender! Here, give me that, OK?” Andy said. “Very bad!”

The creature turned its head to Andy. Then it tossed him the gun, which Andy caught nervously.

“Oh my god,” Nell murmured. “He
understands
us?”

“Give me my weapon!” Cane screamed as anger ignited the adrenaline in his bloodstream.

“Don’t worry!” Andy assured him, handing him back his gun.

The creature made a zither sound from the small sagittal crest on its head as it stroked the brown, tan, and green pixels of camouflage on Cane’s uniform. For an instant the pattern seemed to be projected over the creature’s plush coat.

“Come on, you guys, you’ve got to see where he lives!” Andy told them.

“Does that thing…speak
English?”
Thatcher asked in a hoarse whisper. He sat frozen and staring with wide eyes at the beast in the front seat.

“No, he doesn’t speak
English
!
”
Andy rolled his eyes, and
smirked at the ruddy scientist. “This isn’t a
Star Trek
episode, dude! He saved my life, that’s all I know. And he saved Copey. He makes great chili, too.”

“No way.” Zero laughed, a wide grin fixed on his face as he videoed feverishly from the backseat. “Sir Nigel Holscombe, eat your
heart
out, baby!”

Cane kept his gun on the creature, which made musical noises as it investigated everything around it while continuing to look at Cane with one motionless three-striped eye.

“This animal,” Thatcher spoke with slow, quiet urgency, “is more dangerous than anything on this island.”

Geoffrey, who was only now shaking off the shock of their close call on the ledge, watched in astonishment as the creature patted the panting bull terrier on the head. “You were just saying what an atrocity it would be to destroy life on this island, Thatcher. Change your mind?”

“This is different.”

The Hummer rocked gently as a powerful earthquake rumbled through the ground.

“Come on, let’s go,” Zero said. “We shouldn’t stay in one place too long!”

The creature put all four hands on its head and its eyes retracted under furry lids.

“You guys feel that?”
The voice of Blue Three’s driver crackled over the radio.

“Yeah, that was a bad one,”
the driver of Blue Two answered.
“Whoa, check it out!”

A piece of the unbroken rock wall on the south side of the island crumbled and crashed down, leaving a fang of blue sky in the island’s rim.

“We might have less time than we thought, guys,”
Blue Two’s driver said.

“Keep on task till they call us back to base,”
Blue Three crackled.

“Roger that,” Cane replied. “Out.” He turned to the others. “I’m not sure what we’re doing driving around with one of the things we’re supposed to be nuking, God damn it!”

“What?” Andy looked at Nell, bewildered.

“The President gave the order to sterilize this island, Andy,” she explained.

“Great,” he said. “But what about the people?”

Sergeant Cane was sweating visibly. “You call
that…
a
person?”
He stared warily at the creature that was examining him. “Are you sure it doesn’t speak English? I mean I swear we heard it speakin’ English back there, God damn it!”

Andy looked at Cane’s uniform suspiciously. “So is
he
in charge now? Are you the guy with the nukes, Commander G.I. Joe with the karate grip? How much have I missed here, anyway?”

“It’s OK, Andy,” Nell soothed. “The President also asked us to see if any life on this island could be saved.”

Geoffrey stared at her in surprise. “Change of heart, Nell?”

She looked at him as tears welled in her eyes. “This is different …”

“Come on,” Zero yelled. “We gotta check this out! This is fricking amazing! Go where he says, man! Go! Go!”

“We need to find out what we have here and then report to the President as soon as possible, Sergeant,” Nell said. “Everything depends on it. OK?”

Cane gritted his teeth. The creature’s hands ceaselessly tested everything around it, including Cane’s helmet. He closed his eyes, breathing hard. “All right. But I’m under strict orders about not allowing anything unauthorized off this island alive!”

“Does that include us?” Andy wanted to know, seething. “Are you going to nuke us, too, Commander BUTTHOLE?”

“Don’t push me, sir.”

“Yes, don’t push him, Andy,” Nell agreed.

Geoffrey nodded. “Let’s all just get along, now.”

Cane backed the Hummer out slowly and then he gunned it up the slope.

“Wheeeeeee!” the creature fluted.

The Hummer’s Mattracks rolled to a stop beside a towering baobab-like tree at the north rim of the island. About a dozen of these gargantuan trees clung to the edge of the island. From a distance they’d looked like toadstools, with vast umbrellas of dense green foliage.

“It lives here?” Cane was staring.

“Wait till you see his hobbit hole,” Andy said. “Oh, hey, if we’re going to transport them off the island before all the nukes go off we better take something to pack their things in!”

“Them?
Pack
their
things?” the soldier said.

Andy nodded.

“We can use the specimen cases in the back here.” Nell glanced at Geoffrey; he nodded and reached for them.

Copey barked enthusiastically and jumped out first. Up here, near the island’s rim, the air was considerably fresher. The sound of the jungle below was a buzzing high-pitched white-noise.

The scientists each carried one of the aluminum specimen cases from the back of the Hummer.

Now that he was outside the vehicle, Cane carried his M-1 assault rifle, glancing warily at the branches overhead. They were far away from the teeming jungle at the island’s heart—but what lurked in the giant tree above them was anyone’s guess.

“Are you sure we’re all right, Andy, next to this thing?” Zero pointed his video camera up into the tangled canopy.

“Yeah, we’re fine if we stay close to the tree.”

A perimeter of salt seemed to have been excreted into the soil around the tree’s trunk. This seemed to hold back the Henders clover from attacking the creamy gray surface of its trunk, which was as wide as a house. Stepping stones led over the salt perimeter like a Japanese rock garden.

Though it had originally appeared to them like a spider with six legs radiating four meters, the creature now seemed compact. Two legs folded up in back like a spider’s. Its middle arms apparently acted as forelegs, and its upper arms tucked up against its
long neck so that the first joints or “elbows” resembled pointy shoulders from which surprisingly human arms hung down. The hands on all six of its limbs had three fingers and two opposable thumbs. The scientists and the cameraman drank in the details of its anatomy and its elaborate and effortless motion with speechless wonder.

The long elastic tail from which the creature had dangled over the cave was now coiled inside a potbelly. A sheen of color played over its thick fur like the Aurora Borealis. Its head was onion-shaped, with an understated sagittal horn on top. It had a high-browed forehead over a wide and graceful mouth, and no sign of a nose. As it looked at them, its large oval eyes had a sly, feline look, moving independently in different directions. The eyes blinked with furry eyelids whenever their stalks retracted. Slanted triangular lobes projected to either side of the creature’s sagittal horn like brow-ridges over its eyes.

The shape of its wide mouth and lips had a duck-like friendliness, with smiling corners and an eager peak on its wide upper lip. Its expression had an elegant confidence that the humans found disconcerting. Reaching out one of its upper hands, the creature touched the barrel of Cane’s assault rifle with delicate curiosity.

Cane jerked the barrel back and aimed the weapon at its head.

“No!” Nell shouted.

Copepod barked frantically.

“Chill, dude!” Zero said, lowering his camera.

“You can trust him, Hender,” Andy told the creature.

“It has a
name?”
Thatcher sounded bemused.

“It’s cool, Cane.” Geoffrey spoke with more confidence than he felt. “This thing just saved our lives, remember?”

“It’s cool, Cane!” the creature sang, freaking the soldier out. Cane felt cornered. He darted a glance at Thatcher, who nodded at him discreetly, signaling patience. Cane backed down, and nodded back at Thatcher.

All watched in astonishment as the shimmering creature stepped delicately onto the stones, then turned toward them and
gestured for them to follow. It opened a round door that was nearly imperceptible in the bulging trunk of the ancient tree.

Inside, engulfed by the flesh of the vast tree, they stepped into another surprise.

“It’s the fuselage of a World War II bomber,” Zero murmured.

Andy nodded. “Yep!”

Only the nose of the plane poked out of the massive trunk, hanging over the cliff at the far end. Through the twisted frame of the cockpit window, which seemed to have been covered by a stitched patchwork of clear plastic, they saw the sun setting over the sea.

“The house that Hender built,” Andy announced.

“‘Hender’?” Nell said.

“That’s what I call him. Or her. Or both.”

“Hender didn’t build this B-29,” Zero said. He canvassed the scene in broad pans.

With four hands, “Hender” pantomimed a plane trying to pull out of a steep nose dive and failing. It made a noise that was an uncanny approximation of an explosion.

“Do you suppose he saw it crash?” Geoffrey asked the others.

“That had to have been at least sixty years ago.”

“I think Hender’s old,” Andy told them.
“Really
old.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Geoffrey agreed. “Is he a solitary animal? Does he live by himself?”

“Yeah,” Andy said.

“What’s that got to do with how old he might be?” asked Nell, intrigued, as she glanced at Geoffrey.

“I’ll explain later,” Geoffrey said.

“Good.”

“It’s a radical theory.”

“Good.”

“Way outside the box.”

She gave him an appreciative glance, then smiled.

None of the humans could take their eyes off the remarkable creature for more than a moment as it moved gracefully toward the nose of the plane in which it had made its home. The fur on
its body emitted soft fireworks of color as it pointed at the control panel in the cockpit. Like a weird recording, it spoke:

“This concludes the Pacific Ocean Network broadcast, May 7, 1945. Once again, it’s VEEE-EEE-DAAAY! Victory in Europe!”

Geoffrey and Nell glanced at each other in speechless astonishment.

“He must have heard that on the plane’s radio,” Zero whispered.

“Yeah,” Andy told them. “And I’ve heard him do Bob Hope, too.”

“I thought you said it didn’t speak English,” Cane snapped.

“He doesn’t. I’ve taught him a few words. And he repeats things he heard on the radio back then, but he doesn’t understand them.”

It was pleasantly cool inside Hender’s lair, and the air had a faintly sweet and spicy smell, somewhat like Japanese incense, Nell thought. She could see that Hender had collected a variety of wine bottles, bell-jars, fishing floats, a peanut butter jar, a mayonnaise jar—precious glass vessels had somehow miraculously survived their journey from civilization to Henders Island in cargo containers, steamer trunks, crates, and wrecks across great gulfs of time and distance.

With his three free arms, Hender shook some jars which held insect-like creatures, and their agitated glow filled the shadowy room with a flickering light.

“He catches fresh drill-worms and wasps by putting a piece of meat in each jar,” Andy explained. “You should see his rat trap.”

The glass vessels glowed green as Hender shook them, casting orbs of light. Nell could see scraps of what looked like trash or beach litter tacked to the walls and ceiling.

Hender’s guests seated themselves on crates inside the B-29 fuselage, some of which were lined up like a bench against one wall with an old rubber raft draped over it. Stenciled on the raft in faded black letters was a name.

“Electra?”
Nell said in excitement. “This couldn’t really be Amelia Earhart’s raft, could it? That was the name of her plane, wasn’t it?”

Geoffrey stroked the cracked rubber, shaking his head as if nothing could surprise him now. “It seems old enough.”

Hender brought out a gourd of some sort.

“Andy, how did you survive six whole fucking days here, man?” Zero asked.

“That first day, Hender came down from the tree next to the lake and grabbed me,” Andy answered. “I thought I was dead. But I woke up here. I wasn’t dead and he had fixed my glasses with something like masking tape. See?” One arm of his glasses was bandaged at the joint.

The creature served them something in cups of cut-off plastic soda bottles and they were stunned by the dexterity of its multiple hands.

“It’s tea-time,” Andy said.