We were riding in some sort of smallish military cargo plane, empty inside except for a few odd-sized crates and the antislide webbing that hung from the walls. We had the belly of the plane to ourselves and spread out as far as possible from one another in order to engage in solitary work. I pushed one of the larger crates against the back wall and began setting up my field microscope. Elsie turned a crate on its side and used it as a table for the impressive library of reference books she’d carted along with her. She obviously knew the books well. She riffled through them expertly, checking facts against a long sheet of data on a computer printout. Dr. Craven, meanwhile, paced the length of the floor dramatically, lost in an unending brainstorm, which he snapped out of now and again to record an idea into his handheld tape recorder. I think he was dictating notes for the book he was planning to write. For all his show of intense concentration, I could see he was, in fact, keeping one adoring eye on the boss, Dr. Chapman. She was in the habit of mumbling to her books, and nearly every time she did so, Mendel looked up, thinking she might be talking to him.
Colonel Hicks walked back from the cockpit holding a computer printout of some kind. He didn’t say a word, but sat down on a supply crate and began to review the pages. Soon he was lost in thought and staring out the window. I couldn’t blame him for having a lot on his mind.
I hand-sliced a razor-thin, fairly uniform section of reptile flesh off the sample I’d collected and treated it with a wash of iodine. Within twenty minutes I had prepared a decent slide and put it under the microscope. Although the lens vibrated and jumped with the plane, I quickly noted the sample’s most remarkable quality.
It was perfectly normal!
This was odd. Typically, creatures presenting even the slightest of outwardly visible mutations show a whole host of concomitant abnormalities at the cell and tissue levels. I should have found irregularities of cell composition, chemical balance, and muscle construction. The two-headed lambs I’ve examined around the Chernobyl area, for example, look just as strange under the microscope as they do with the naked eye.
At lower levels of magnification, I saw that I was looking at superficial epidermis with a layer of subcutaneous fat and a very small section of muscle. A certain amount of decay had already begun to corrupt the sample. I noticed a high density of chromatophores, or pigment-bearing cells. The ratio of melanophores to allophores was typically reptilian and suggested the creature might be able to change color, chameleonlike. A large, flat oval with a hollow at the center was a femoral scent-gland pore. Only males have these pores.
At a higher level of magnification, the arrangement of blood vessels and striations of the muscles told me Elsie’s dino theory was probably wrong—although this animal was definitely reptilian, it was also cold-blooded, something dinosaurs were not.
I was on the verge of announcing these discoveries when one of the soldiers walked back from the cockpit holding another sheaf of printouts for Hicks’s inspection. The way the soldier moved told us something new had happened. He stepped up to the colonel and yelled over the noise of the engines, “Sir, we just got a report of three fishing trawlers going down.”
Hicks yelled back at him, “So what? What makes you think it’s related?”
“The trawlers were pulled under, sir.”
Pulled under? That got everyone’s attention. Hicks snatched the report out of the soldier’s hand and scanned it. It was bad news, and as he read down the page his shoulders fell forward under the mounting weight of the situation.
According to the Coast Guard’s report, a trio of fishing boats—the Harpo, the Chico, and the Groucho—had been trawling the waters a few miles off the New England coast. It was raining steadily, but the sea was relatively calm. As the first light of day began to leak through the clouds, the skippers of the three boats had reported to each other that their engines were beginning to drag. At first they’d thought they were “heavy in the bunt” (the bagging portion of a fishing net). But that theory was abandoned when the ships lurched to a sudden halt. Something had them by the nets they were trailing behind them. It was at this point the first call went out to the Coast Guard.
Orders were given to haul in the nets, but the lines wouldn’t budge. Then the three trawlers found themselves moving backward through the water, slowly at first but then faster and faster. The crew must have been terrified, wondering, What in the hell did we catch? Deckhands used axes to try to cut themselves free of the nets, but the steel cables were too strong and the sterns of the vessels were dipping low to the waterline, being pulled not only backward but down. A moment after everyone bailed out over the sides, the three ships disappeared completely under the surface.
For the next few minutes the petrified sailors were left to bob in the frigid water. They had seen nothing and didn’t have the faintest idea what was happening to them. Then, with a great hiss of air pressure, the surface of the water erupted and the Groucho burst up out of the water and flew into the air. The other two vessels shot up seconds later. All three ships keeled over or capsized. Miraculously, no one drowned. A Coast Guard helicopter found the men clinging to the sides of the boats and airlifted them safely back to shore.
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Mendel informed Elsie, tapping the ashes from an imaginary cigar and wiggling his eyebrows like Groucho Marx. She turned away from him with a sharp, withering glance.
“Sixty-seven degrees longitude, forty-seventh parallel,” Hicks read from the report. He moved to the low table Elsie had been using as a desk and pushed her books aside. Unfolding a large map of the world and smoothing it out, he used his index finger to find the coordinates. “Oh, for crying out loud!” he cried out loud when he saw where the pulling-under incident had taken place. “This damn thing is only two hundred miles off the eastern seaboard, and we still don’t even know what it is!”
The colonel looked for a moment as though he would slam his fist through the tabletop. Instead he reached up and massaged his temples. The orders he had been given from his commanding officer, General Anderson, sounded simple enough: Find the thing causing all the property damage in the ocean and destroy it. As he would explain to me later, several maritime merchants had suspended operations in the wake of the Kobayashi incident, preferring to wait until the danger had passed—a move that was costing the United States $450 million per day in lost revenue. After a moment of internal agonizing, he snapped out of it and got back to work.
“All right,” he yelled, in a dangerous mood, “I want to know what you brainiacs have come up with so far.”
Elsie, unaffected by the colonel’s apoplexy, pursed her lips and clucked her tongue. “Alex, Alex, Alex. Is that the only thing you men want from a woman—brains? I’m tired of being treated like a slab of gray matter. There’s more to me than just a cerebellum, you know.”
Hicks smiled tightly, tolerating her shtick, waiting for her to get down to business, which she quickly did. She and Mendel took places at the low makeshift table in the center of the space. She reached into the pile of books she had scattered around and thumbed through a large text until she found the page she wanted. She spun it around to face Hicks and shoved it across the table. As she did so she pronounced the very same name that had come to my mind back in Panama, when I had been standing in that swimming-pool-sized footprint.
“Theropoda Allosaurus.”
Hicks looked down at the page, then up at Elsie. “It’s a goddamn dinosaur?”
“Allosaurus?” Mendel rolled his eyes. “You have got to be kidding.”
“No, Dr. Craven, I’m afraid I’m perfectly serious,” she announced, reaching across the table and squeezing her colleague’s chin. “It all fits,” she continued. “Bipedal locomotion exclusively on the hind legs, the vertebrae horizontally balanced over the pelvis, the recurving razor claw on the flanged fingers … and when you add that to the evidence of the serrated tooth marks left in the side of that boat, it all points in the same direction—Theropod
a Allosaurus.”
“Perhaps,” Craven shouted with the exuberance of a sword fighter, “but there are at least three problems with your theory! Number one: The only known remains of Theropoda Allosaurus were found in Utah and Wyoming—meaning, I suppose, that the creature we are pursuing is just now returning to his home on the range after a vacation in the South Pacific. Number two: While members of Theropoda can certainly run and fly with great dexterity, I’ve never heard of one swimming. And number three: If this is supposed to be a dinosaur, where do you propose it’s been hiding for the last, oh, sixty million years or so?” He smiled smugly, savagely, confident in his debunking prowess.
Hicks blinked at both of them, on the verge of losing his patience. “What in the hell are you two talking about?” he demanded.
Elsie came around the table and draped herself over the soldier’s shoulder, a move she knew would cause Mendel to seethe with jealousy. She called Hicks’s attention to the textbook and the artist’s sketch of her prime suspect. The drawing showed a lateral view of the skull and skeleton of a forty-foot-long dinosaur. She explained: “Theropoda is a suborder of enormous reptiles, the same group that gives us the tyrannosaurus and the velociraptor. It is probably the ancestor of many modern-day species, such as the fighting gamecock. All of these creatures are extremely powerful, agile, and fast. The fellow you see pictured here, Allosaurus, has been thought to be extinct since the late Cretaceous period.”
“Did I forget to mention problem number four,” Mendel interjected, “that Allosaurus would fit inside any one of those footprints we found in Panama?” As enamored as he was with our redheaded coworker, Mendel Craven relished a sharp debate, a trait that made him an excellent guest on the talk shows he visited while promoting his books.
Hicks stared at the picture, shaking his head. He almost looked as if he was going to be airsick. Obviously, the idea that we were poised for an encounter with a powerful, overlarge dinosaur didn’t agree with him. He blinked down at the page and seemed startled each time he reopened his eyes.
I stepped away from my microscope and gave him even worse news.
“I think we’re missing something here,” I said, joining them around the table. “What about the radiation? I don’t think the radiation is an anomaly. I think it’s the clue. Elsie, you’re right: Those prints are very similar to Allosaurus, but they’re far too large. And Mendel, you’re right: A land creature like Allosaurus wouldn’t have been able to tear up those boats so far out to sea.”
“Don’t tell me what it isn’t,” Hicks snapped. “Tell me what the hell it is!”
I would have liked to give him an answer. But the trouble was, I still wasn’t sure exactly what this thing was. I sat down at the table and looked at the map. “Okay, let’s look at what we know so far. The first sighting was made in French Polynesia, an area that has been exposed to over a hundred nuclear tests over the last thirty years.”
“That would explain the traces of radiation we’ve been finding. The thing must be contaminated.”
“I think it’s more than contamination. I believe that what we’re dealing with here is a mutated aberration, the result of a severe disruption in genetic coding material. It’s the only way to explain the remarkable size.”
“I see.” Mendel stroked his goatee in amused contemplation. “It’s sort of similar to your earthworms: Radiation makes them large.”
“Exactly. Only the worms I’ve been studying at Chernobyl are recognizable as the offspring of their parents. But this thing, this reptile, this whatever-it-is, seems to be different from any creature we’ve seen before. It’s possible that the instructions encoded in the DNA structure have been so radically altered that we might never be able to identify this animal’s parents.”
“Strange.”
“But possible,” Craven the debunker allowed.
I went on. “With DNA samples and a year or two of research, we might be able to determine its genetic heritage. But based on the evidence we’ve gathered so far, I think it’s safe to say we’re looking at a brand-new life form. I believe we’re witnessing the dawn of a new species. The very first of its kind.”
I would have gone on, but the look on Hicks’s face told me he’d had enough paleontology and mutation biology for the moment. He took a long, deep breath, then exhaled even more slowly.
“In other words, it’s impossible to say for sure what this thing is.”
I nodded. He nodded. Elsie and Mendel nodded. We were in agreement.
I remember feeling a twinge of pity for the bulldoggish army colonel. After all, the three of us were only scientists, people who labored in relative safety far from the front lines. But Hicks, I sensed, would have to face this thing sooner or later while the rest of us watched from a distance. I could see he was anticipating such a showdown, and I tried to imagine what it would be like having a responsibility such as that weighing on my shoulders.
“My life sucks.”
Animal and Lucy looked up from their sandwich plates with sympathetic smiles. Their friend and coworker, Audrey, was standing in the aisle dripping water on the restaurant floor. The diner across the street from WIDF was as busy as they’d ever seen it, packed with office workers and businesspeople escaping the deluge. When neither of them said anything, she felt compelled to reiterate and elaborate. “My life sucks rotten donkey eggs.”
“Oh, sweetie, please,” Lucy consoled her, “your life doesn’t suck. Him”—she pointed across the table at Animal—“now, his life sucks.”
Animal’s mouth happened to be stuffed full of hamburger at that moment, but it didn’t stop him from firing back, “That’s ’cause I’m married to you.”
“Shut up.”
“You shut up.”
“No, I will not shut up, because I’m talking to my friend Audrey.” And as her husband chomped once more into his sandwich, Lucy’s face quickly registered her disgust at his bad table manners. “How can you eat like that?”
“Iig igh.”
“What? I can’t understand a single word.” As Lucy shook her head, Audrey slid into the booth. Animal chewed through his mouthful well enough to repeat himself.
“Big bites,” he said. Animal and Lucy had spent the last five years bantering insults back and forth, mutual incredulity at the lunacy of the other being the foundation upon which their marriage was built. Despite the nonstop bickering, they remained very much in love. Animal was about to jump back into the fray when he noticed that Audrey was wearing a long face.
“I can’t believe it,” she moped, wringing drops of water from her blond curls into little pools on the tabletop. “For three years I’ve worked like a slave for him and then—tell me it’s just a bad dream—he actually puts the moves on me. After all I’ve done for him!”
“Exactly.” Animal grinned. He was a cameraman at the station, an Italian boy from Bensonhurst, a gonzo hipster who fashioned himself as a young Sinatra. The smirk on his face told his wife that he was about to enlighten their tender-hearted friend on some of the darker, seamier aspects of male psychology. A sharp look from her made him think better of it. Lucy was only a couple of years older than Audrey, and pretty under all her makeup. She had a very highly developed maternal instinct and a pair of shoulders custom-designed to be cried on. She threw a consoling arm around Audrey and squeezed. “I know, I know, I know—that man is scum! You’re a bright, talented girl, but as far as he’s concerned, you’re just a pair of breasts that talk.”
“Oh, there’s an image.” Animal chewed.
“You know how I spent last weekend?” Audrey asked. “Walking his stupid dog!”
“What kind of dog has he got?” Animal asked. “Something huge?”
“A Great Dane. How’d you know?”
“He’s compensating,” was all Animal would say.
“He’s the worst!” Lucy decided. “He’s dirt. He’s nothing but a douche bag, gutter slime, dog crap, puke chunk!”
“Hey, hey! I’m trying to eat here
!”
“Aud, sweetie,” Lucy said sympathetically, “you’re just too damned nice, that’s your problem. I’ve worked at WIDF long enough to see who gets ahead and who gets left behind as roadkill. It’s not just how hard you work, it’s whether you’ve got that me-first attitude. It’s whether you’re willing to step on a few necks on your way up the ladder. It’s rough out there. You gotta be a killer to get ahead, know what I’m saying? And I’m sorry, baby, but you just don’t got what it takes.”
Audrey gasped and pulled away, not quite sure if she ought to be angry. She stared at Lucy, then at Lucy’s husband. “Animal, you don’t think that’s true! Do you?”
The man behind the triple-decker burger shrugged. “Nice guys finish last. First rule of the jungle.”
Once again Audrey gasped. She stared at Animal, then at his wife. She realized the truth of what they were saying: She wasn’t tough enough. Caiman wasn’t the only one at the station who had walked all over her. She’d been working extra hard, coming in early, leaving late, volunteering to do the dirty work whenever something out of the ordinary needed doing. But three years later, she realized, she was spinning her wheels. Instead of making her more respected, her double dutifulness had only turned her into a doormat. After thinking it over for a moment, she crossed her arms and composed herself behind a cruel, chilly smile. “Well, I can be tough if I need to be.”
Lucy and Animal saw what she was doing and couldn’t completely suppress a sudden case of the giggles. “Yeah, we know. No, yeah, no. Sure you can.”
“I can! I can be very, very, very tough.” Audrey skewered them with what she imagined was a piercing, laser-beam stare. That only made things worse. Animal almost had an up-the-nosey, and Lucy slapped her hand over her mouth trying not to burst out laughing.
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