Pandemonium (8 page)

The room’s parquet floor was scattered with silk Persian rugs, and in the center of the room, directly in front of them, was a long banquet table pointing toward them, where four seated dinner guests now rose to greet them.

“Hey, man!” said a moonfaced man with a ponytail. “Oh, my God! Is that you, Nell?”

“Otto?” Nell asked, amazed.

The man ran and hugged her.

“Geoffrey, let me introduce you to Otto Inman,” she said. “He was on Henders Island in the NASA lab before you got there.”

“Yeah, before it was totally destroyed,” Otto said, reaching out to shake Geoffrey’s hand. “I didn’t figure on Henders Island when I designed it.”

“Nice to meet you.” Geoffrey shook his hand.

A stocky Asian man with graying hair approached them, and Otto introduced him. “This is Katsuyuki Fujima,” he said, uncertain whether he had gotten the name right.

“Yes, perfect.” The man nodded at Otto. “Very nice to meet you. I am a biologist from Nagoya University, Japan.” He reached out to shake Nell’s hand.

“He was on Henders Island, too, briefly,” Otto said. “He helped collect specimens on the last day we were there.”

“One big happy reunion,” Geoffrey said with a puzzled glance at Nell.

Nell arched her eyebrows. “Interesting.”

“Yes,” Katsuyuki agreed.

A thin, pale, black-haired man with coal black eyes approached them. “Hello! I am Dimitri Lagunov.” The slender Russian wore a thin black goatee and glasses. “I am the only biologist here who was not on Henders Island, it seems. It is very good to meet you both. This is Klaus Reiner.”

A tall, blond German man wearing spectacles and a business suit without a tie greeted them. “Hello. I’m just an electrical engineer,” he said. “Working on the power plant.” He shrugged.

Geoffrey and Nell shook his hand.

Maxim strode to a leather armchair at the head of the table, its back to the red velvet curtain. “Please, everyone, sit down!” His basso profundo voice compelled them like a force of nature, and everyone took a seat at his end of the table to either side.

“So are you now going to say, ‘I’m sure you are all wondering why I brought you here’?” Nell asked, giggling. “Because that would really be funny right now, Maxim.”

The anxiety of the others at the table crumbled into nervous laughter.

Maxim smiled. “Something like that. You seem to have made introductions already.” He nodded at the train of waiters who entered the hatch door bearing trays of food and champagne. “Let me welcome you all as guests. I thank each of you for answering my invitation.”

With fresh flutes of champagne, his guests obliged him in a toast.

“I wonder if any of you can identify what you are now being served,” Maxim said as the waiters placed a dish before them.

Quite obviously, it was a serving of seared mushrooms—so the stakes increased as each scrutinized the variety presented on the plates. All sampled the fungi, which had a meaty flavor drizzled with a tart pomegranate sauce.

“Armillaria,”
Nell volunteered. “Honey mushrooms?”

“Ah! Our botanist, the newlywed Nell Binswanger, is correct! Very good!” Maxim raised his large hand to signal one of his men, who dimmed the chandeliers in the room.

As the room darkened, everyone gasped to see the mushrooms on their plates, on their forks and in their mouths glowing green, blue, orange, and purple. Maxim’s chest quaked as he laughed. “Explain to them, please, Nell.”

She recovered from the surprise. “
Armillaria
is a bioluminescent mushroom,” she said. “The mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of one of the longest-living fungi. One single organism can spread over three square miles and live for thousands of years. They produce fox fire, which is bioluminescent and grows on rotting logs. In olden days, Scandinavians used them to mark paths through the forest during the long northern nights.”

“Very good,” Maxim purred like a panther. “She is very good, Geoffrey.”

“But this isn’t foxfire,” Nell protested. “Foxfire is blue or green. This is more like …
rainbowfire
.”

“That is an excellent name for it, Nell!” Maxim approved.

“Is it edible?” Otto asked, triggering laughs around the table.

“Oh, yes!” Maxim relished a bite of the lightly seared mushrooms, which glowed orange and pink on his fork; then he sipped some champagne. “And quite delicious.” Maxim raised his left arm.

Some of his men now carried forward three tall boxlike objects covered in black cloth and set them in a row on the far side of the banquet table. “I would like you all to tell me everything you know about what I show you next.”

The men pulled off the shroud from the first box and revealed an acrylic aquarium half-filled with water. Maxim’s guests rose and gathered around as they noticed living things inside the aquarium.

“Whoa!” Otto said, laughing. A fluorescent sea spider hunted what looked like swimming snails swishing above it. “No freaking way!” Otto exclaimed.

“Ammonites?” Geoffrey gasped.

The scientists peered with open mouths at the miniature ram’s horn coils that jetted through the water like tiny nautiluses.

“They have been extinct for sixty-five million years!” Katsuyuki cried.

“No, Dr. Fujima,” said Maxim.

Geoffrey broke into a wide grin. “You found them here?”

“Yes!” said Dimitri.

“Please, tell me about them, Geoffrey,” Maxim said.

Waiters served them another round of hors d’oeuvres: ammonite escargot.

“There was a time when they ruled the seas, reaching ten feet across,” Geoffrey said. “The Roman historian, Pliny the Elder, named them after examining their fossils near Pompeii and noted their resemblance to the ram horns worn by the Egyptian god Amon. You know, the one King Tut was named after? But this is impossible.…”

“Amen,” said Otto.

“Don’t laugh,” Nell said. “But we probably adopted that word from the tradition of invoking Amon in prayers.”

Maxim laughed. “Go on.”

“Some think these creatures may have plowed across the sea’s surface like Jet Skis, hunting with heads and arms like armored squid,” Geoffrey said.

“Well, they were right, Geoffrey,” Maxim said. “I’ve seen them do it.”

“Do you know how huge a discovery this is?” Katsuyuki said, his hands shaking. “It’s a miracle!” Otto gave him a high five.

“How do they taste?” Maxim asked.

“We’re
eating
them?” Nell asked.

“Oishii!”
Katsuyuki nodded, elated. “Delicious.”

“Chewy,” Otto said, laughing.

“And that’s a sea spider,” Geoffrey said, pointing at the multicolored eight-legged creature that reached its impossibly long, folding arms out to the racing ammonites. “One of the strangest crustaceans. This one’s really colorful! They seem to be a branch that split off from all other arthropods about half a billion years ago…”

“Some think they actually
are
arachnids—before they evolved for land,” Otto said.

“That’s debatable, Doctor,” said Katsuyuki, admiring the specimen.

“It’s still a cool theory,” Otto said. “What’s in this one?”

An attendant pulled the shroud from the next tank, which was dry. Inside, yellow and orange animals that glowed circled round and round on the bottom.

“Gammarids?” Geoffrey suggested, looking into the dry aquarium.

“Yes,” agreed Dimitri. “Some kind of amphipod, like gammarids, we think. We call them gammies.”

“But adapted for land?” Geoffrey said. “With only eight legs?”

“Look at the spikes on their backs,” Nell said. “They look like aetosaurs!”

“What are aetosaurs, Nell?” Maxim asked, leaning back in his chair and watching the scientists as waiters served another round of appetizers and replenished their champagne.

“One of my favorite dinosaurs, with spikes on its back pointing to each side.”

“It’s thought that gammarids may have evolved in Lake Baikal or the Caspian Sea, which isn’t so far from here, I think,” Otto said.

Dimitri smiled. “Lake Baikal is rather far from here, Dr. Inman. But you are right, the gammarids there have similar spikes on their armor.”

“They’re also known as
killer shrimp,
” said Otto. “They’re a big concern at Berlin University. They’ve been migrating from the Caspian Sea across Europe through the Danube and wreaking havoc. They’ve even been turning up in England and Scotland recently. But no one has ever recorded a land-based species! And with only four pairs of legs?”

“They must have undergone an independent Hox gene mutation, like early arthropods, when they crawled on land four hundred million years ago and became hexapods,” Geoffrey said.

“Hexapods?” Maxim asked.

“Bugs,” Geoffrey clarified. “With only six legs.”

“But why are they glowing?” Nell wondered. “They seem to be blind. No eyes, at all! See?”

“They move like tiger beetles!” Katsuyuki exclaimed with an eight-year-old’s delight. “So fast! But why in a circle, around and around?”

“We’ve noticed they move like that sometimes,” Dimitri acknowledged, shrugging.

“Wait a minute … army ants,” Nell murmured.

“Huh?” the others asked.

“Army ants are blind, so they follow scent trails laid down by other ants’ abdominal glands. If an ant travels in a spiral, others following it can get trapped in death circles, with thousands of them turning like hurricanes until they die of starvation.”

“No way,” Otto said. “I’ve never heard of that.”

“But why do the gammies glow if they’re blind? Why do any of these species? I don’t get it.”

“They eat … what did you call it? Rainbowfire,” Maxim said.

“We think the bioluminescence in the fungus either grows on them or continues to glow once ingested,” Dimitri said.

“They must stick out like Christmas lights to predators,” Nell said, puzzling. “Maybe that’s why they’re covered with spikes.…”

“How long would adaptations like these take to evolve?” asked Katsuyuki, shaking his head.

“Well, Lake Baikal is the oldest freshwater lake on Earth.” Dimitri shrugged. “It lies hundreds of kilometers east of the Urals.”

“How old is it?” asked Nell.

“Some say fifty million years.”

“It might be a clue.” Nell looked at Geoffrey.

“The Caspian Sea is a lot closer,” Geoffrey said. “And the Aral Sea. And in any event, I don’t think any of them are old enough. We’re looking at things that must have origins dating back to the great age of marine mollusks, which ended around the time of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. This is a region with major tectonic activity, which made these mountains. What I don’t understand is how could a cave system this size last for so long?”

“The Urals are the oldest mountain range on Earth, Dr. Binswanger. They are two hundred fifty, maybe three hundred million years old,” said Dimitri.

“Ah! Who knows when these specimens were trapped underground and begun diverging, then?” Otto said.

Nell whispered in Geoffrey’s ear: “This is much better than Kauai, sweetheart.”

He nodded and speared a gammarid tail, dipping it in cocktail sauce as she clinked her flute of champagne against his.

The attendant pulled the shroud from the third tank.

The German electrical engineer, Klaus Reiner, who had watched and listened in silent awe as the scientists described the species presented to them at this extraordinary banquet, now spoke up. “What in hell are these?” he said, pointing at glowing bubbles bobbing up and down inside the dry tank.

The others were silent.

Maxim laughed softly.

“We have no idea,” Dimitri confessed, “what these are.”

Small creatures like Christmas tree ornaments glowed pink and orange with four fins that made them spin or glide as they floated up and down.

“How are they doing that?” asked Otto.

“They look like Dumbo octopuses!” Nell said. “Are they filled with gas?”

A light like an ignited match flared inside one of the small bell-like creatures as it rose inside the tank.

“Bombardier beetles!” exclaimed the German.

The scientists turned to him.

“Sorry. I did a paper on them as an undergraduate.…”

“I thought you were an electrical engineer,” Nell said.

“I was studying biochemical energy systems for a while.”

“Explain, please, Dr. Reiner,” Maxim said.

“Bombardier beetles mix hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone generated in separate glands to create an explosive chemical reaction, like a rocket engine. It generates enough heat to boil water. These things might be using a similar process to inflate a bladder with hot gas.”

“Like sky lanterns,” Katsuyuki said.

“Hot air balloons!” Nell said.

Maxim blew a plume of cigar smoke straight up. “Excellent.”

Geoffrey shook his head, staggered by the implications. “We’ve got water, land, and air organisms? How elaborate is this ecosystem?”

“Let me show you.” Maxim nodded at one of his men, and the man pulled a golden sash that parted the red velvet curtains at his back, revealing a great oval window encircled by a wide bronze frame embedded in the solid rock.

Everyone rushed to the window before the curtains had completely opened, and Maxim swiveled in his leather chair to gaze with them through the thick pane of glass that stretched twenty feet high and forty feet wide. The polished window was dark except for glowing colors and shapes that slowly began to emerge. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Maxim said, “May I present Pandemonium.”

9:55 P.M.

Slowly, their eyes made out the outlines of another world on the other side of the window.

A vast lake, splotched with swirling patches of color, channeled into the distance through a corridor angling slightly to the right as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of feet above was a vaulted ceiling with iridescent paisley patterns overlapping over the rock.

The faint light of the chandeliers lit up the area closest to the window. As suspended forms moved closer in the dark, they took on real shape; as they moved away, they dissolved into spectral ciphers. Multitudes of phosphorescent creatures swirled in glowing storms and spiral galaxies receding to the vanishing point in the colossal cavern.