Hender waved good-bye to the gathering at the entrance of the museum, his coat turning magenta, and the crowds gave him a deafening send-off after an evening that was already being breathlessly reported as a triumph around the world.

On the ride back to the hotel in the motorcade, Hender opened some of the small gifts he had been given, which had been cleared through the security people who intercepted them. He now had a handsome gold magnifying glass, a fantastic pen encrusted with jewels that dazzled his eyes, and a beautiful lighter for creating fire with a click of the finger, an invention Hender regarded as miraculous. On Henders Island, he had collected some disposable plastic lighters on the beach below his house, and Kuzu had figured out how to strike sparks with them; but none of these devices had ever made a flame by themselves.

It started to rain. Hender rolled down the window and smelled the scents that were as varied, noxious, sweet, and pungent as the scents of his native island. Their Phantom rushed through the night as the rain made the endless streets and cars and buildings glisten. The enormous car deposited Hender and his entourage in front of the hotel, where shoulder-to-shoulder police held back the bursting crowd.

Andy noticed that the packed onlookers seemed unruly. As Hender stood waving among the sea of people, they converged on him with dangerous pressure. Despite Andy's apprehension, Hender was at ease now, waving four hands and rising on two legs over the police line, which incited an eruption of applause and cheers. To the horror of those guarding him, Hender contracted and disappeared, rising on the other side of the barrier. Amid an explosion of flashing cameras, he reappeared in vivid color and shook the people's hands four at a time, deciding that he liked humans very much.

A tall man with a shaved, tattooed head shoved his way through the others in front of Hender. Hender noticed that three of the bald man's upper teeth were made of gold. Rushing behind, his bodyguards saw the man raise one muscular arm. A butcher knife flashed in his pale fist. "Piss off, ya grotty devil!" he screamed, and he leaped at the sel, the blade flashing as he plunged it down at Hender's chest.

Before any of the bodyguards could intervene, Hender moved four hands in a blur of motions, removing the knife from the yob's hand with two hands and slamming him on his back on the sidewalk with two more, pinning him with five hands. Red waves of light rippled across Hender's fur as blood pooled under the groaning man's head on the pavement.

The crowd clapped but then backed away, stunned at the lethal display Hender had unleashed on his attacker. Dozens of phones and cameras had recorded the assault from every angle.

Immediately, Hender was surrounded by uniformed humans, who shouted as they gently put themselves between him and his assailant and quickly extricated him from the crowd. Hender gave the police the man's knife as they cuffed and carried the man away on a stretcher.

Hender's security detail rushed him into the hotel, and Andy trotted along with him. "Awesome kung fu, Hender," Zero said.

"Yeah, good work, man!" Andy said.

"Thank you, Andy. I'm sorry I hurt the man."

"It's OK, Hender," Cynthea said.

"He was trying to kill you!" Andy said angrily.

"I hope nobody's mad."

"He was an asshole," Zero growled.

As they entered a private elevator, Andy gave Cynthea and Zero a worried look.

"I want to sleep now, guys," Hender said. "For four hours. OK?"

"OK," Andy said.

"See you in a while, Hender. You were great tonight!" Cynthea said. "Don't worry!"

"Thank you, Cynthea." As he stood inside his door, his fur washed out and grayed suddenly. "Good night." Hender closed the door to his room softly.

Andy's cell phone rang. "Yes? Oh. Really. That's a shame. I see. No, thanks, I think it sucks, but, yeah ... because it sucks! It wasn't his fault! Right, bye." He looked devastated.

"What?" Zero asked.

"They canceled the audience with the Queen tomorrow."

"Why?" Zero asked.

"Security reasons."

"Oh, shit!" Cynthea said.

"What did they say?" asked Zero.

"They said it would be better to postpone the Royal visit until further review."

"Give me that schmuck's phone number, Andy," Cynthea said.

Andy shook his head. "It's no use, Cynthea. They've made up their minds."

11:59 P.M.

Nestled in the blue whirlpool of blankets on his giant bed, Hender worked quietly on the next bit of his book, working off his nervousness so he could go to sleep:

The 2nd Darkness

According to the Books, 64,985,121 years ago. There were only eight petals on Henderica, and eight tribes, which kept to themselves when they weren't fighting before the second darkness came.

There were over a million sels then, and they built great things like humans do today. Some dreamed of things that could carry them across the poison sea. But when the waves came they carried two petals and two tribes away as the sky turned black.

Sels found the tunnels made by treno trees, whose roots had lived and died and melted away. The tunnels twisted hundreds of miles under the ground. While all other plants died above, the warring tribes came together to save the trenos. For four years, the six tribes fed the trees underground. And they wrote the first Books, to remember.

All of your "dinosaurs" died then. I'm glad. I don't think I would have met humans if they had lived. But maybe I would have met something else, instead.

MARCH 20.

11:31 A.M. MAXIM TIME.

Geoffrey came out of their dorm after a fitful sleep. He saw that the others were peering through the window of the maternity ward excitedly.

"Trees," Dimitri said. "They must be trees! But they're moving...."

"They're Henders trees," Otto said.

"They're animals," Katsuyuki explained.

"They only look like trees," Geoffrey said as he approached them and looked through the glass. A miniature jungle had sprung up over the last week and formed tunnels five feet tall through which ravenous jet streams of Henders bugs and even rats now circulated. A variety of the pseudo-palms retracted lines of glistening bait-eggs that dangled from their fronds.

Geoffrey looked at Katsuyuki wearily. "How did these species get to an island off Japan, Katsuyuki?" he asked. "Did you ever figure that out?"

"We think they came from a jar in a raft that washed ashore."

"A raft?" Geoffrey wondered suddenly. "Thatcher?"

"Yes, actually!" Katsuyuki exclaimed. "We found Thatcher Redmond in the raft."

"Alive?"

"No! Very dead."

"A bug jar from Hender's house must have been in the Zodiac," Geoffrey muttered. "Oh, Christ! We used jars of glowing animals to signal the boat that rescued us. We must have left one in the raft! But Hender's jars didn't have rats in them.... Where did they come from?"

"You call those rats?" Dimitri said. "They have eight legs and-and two sets of eyes-"

"Yes, and they have two brains," Geoffrey conceded. "They're mammal-like arthropods that evolved in isolation on Henders Island. We just called them rats. What I don't understand is how they got off the island."

"All of this came from one suitcase of specimens," insisted Dimitri.

"Do you have any photographic record of what was in that suitcase?"

"Yes, of course." Dimitri called up a gallery of images on a laptop.

Geoffrey took over from him and scrolled through the images. One photo showed two brown lumps that looked like dates. He paused on them and zoomed in.

"What?" Katsuyuki said.

"Resting eggs?" Geoffrey muttered. He looked up at Katsuyuki. "Like the kind copepods and daphnia lay during periods of stress to make clones?"

"Yes." Katsuyuki nodded. "A very effective survival mechanism. You think Henders rats might use resting eggs, too?"

"I wouldn't be surprised. Maybe Hender put them in his light jars as a food supply for the bugs. I wish he were here so I could ask him. If those things are resting eggs and they hatched into clones and mated, they would have exchanged millions of sex cells by now. Both would be assembly lines of baby rats, as would all of their offspring."

"But how could those 'trees' get here?" Dimitri asked.

"They're related to disk-ants." Geoffrey peered through the clear spots as he moved along the window. "A certain percentage of disk-ants latch on to the ground and metamorphose into about six or seven varieties of animal that superficially resemble palm trees."

"How long was this island isolated?" Dimitri muttered in amazement.

"More than half a billion years, three supercontinents ago," Otto said.

"Hey!" Geoffrey spotted something as he reached the center of the window and looked down. The others gathered round and looked where he pointed.

Hundreds of eight-legged Henders "rats" were speeding through tunnels between the trees. They seemed to be converging on a spot four feet from the window, where they delivered regurgitated food to a single rat that had grown to the size of a German shepherd.

"Oh, no," Otto whispered.

"Does that camera work?" Geoffrey pointed at the camera mounted on a track inside the chamber above the window.

"Yes." Dimitri pointed out the control toggle at the end of a conduit hanging down from a hole drilled above the window.

"You drilled through the wall there?" Geoffrey asked as he reached up to toggle the camera down.

"Yes. But we filled the holes with cement," said Dimitri.

Geoffrey shook his head grimly as he rotated the camera down.

Dimitri grabbed his wrist and stopped him. "Careful, my friend! We don't want to break the window."

Geoffrey agreed. "You do it, then."

Geoffrey observed as the Russian used the controls to toggle the heavy camera housing that was mounted on a thick steel arm. The camera slid along the track at the top of the window inside the chamber. When the camera reached them, Geoffrey said, "Point it down at that thing and let's get a look at it."

The image of a large squirming animal surrounded by the rats became visible on a screen mounted over the window and on various laptops on the lab counters. Unmistakable stripes of iridescent colors radiated over its bony frill. Sizzling stripes of pink and orange zigzagged on its furry back. It drummed its limbs in spasms, staying in place. "That," Geoffrey sighed, "is a spiger."

Katsuyuki frowned. "How?"

"We never figured out where spigers come from. But that's one right there. The rats must be able to develop into them. But, why?" Geoffrey pressed his mind for some evolutionary pressure that could explain it. "Why would rats turn into spigers?"

"Maybe they're breeding their own food," Otto said.

"Like we breed pigs and cows!" Katsuyuki agreed.

Geoffrey nodded. "Perhaps. Spigers had scarcely any big game to hunt except for other spigers. So maybe the rats made enough spigers to ensure spiger-on-spiger kills, which would provide the rats with a feast, as well."

"Why wouldn't both spigers be eaten in the feeding frenzy?" Otto wondered.

"Yes, how could they survive?" Katsuyuki asked.

"The larger animals on Henders Island were protected by armies of symbiants," Geoffrey said. "We've been learning about them from the hendros. We call them 'symbiants' since they seem to have been related to disk-ants. They fed on anything that attacked their host, even knitting together to protect wounds. But if a wound was too severe, the symbiants seemed to sense it and abandoned the sinking ship, sometimes even turning on their host. When symbiants turn and are ready to migrate to viable new hosts, other animals can sense it and attack their dying host. As a consequence, only the losers in a spiger fight would have been attacked, unless both spigers were mortally wounded. Healthy spigers could gorge themselves to their heart's content right alongside the rats and not be touched, and inherit a lot of their prey's symbiants simultaneously."

"So rats grow their own beef," Katsuyuki said.

"And butchers, too," Geoffrey said. "These cows are both."

"It's like vultures breeding wildebeest," Otto wondered, his mouth opening in shock. "But how do the rats make them?"

"Like bees, maybe," Dimitri said.

"Of course," Katsuyuki said. "Bees feed royal jelly to larvae to turn them into queens."

Geoffrey nodded. "Right. They could be regurgitating food with some enzyme or hormone. Or they could be like locusts. Environmental pressures trigger a dormant genetic expression that changes grasshoppers into locusts. We used to think they were different species."

"Christ, can you imagine?" Otto said. "If these things got loose above, they'd be creating locusts the size of SUVs."