Robert Sawyer: Gator

Something scampered by in the dark, its footfalls making tiny splashing sounds. Ludlam didn’t even bother to look. It was a rat, no doubt—the sewers were crawling with them—and, well, if Ludlam could get used to the incredible stench, he could certainly get used to the filthy rodents, too.

This was his seventy-fourth night skulking about the sewers beneath New York. He was dressed in a yellow raincoat and rubber boots, and he carried a powerful flashlight—the kind with a giant brick battery hanging from the handle.

In most places, the ceiling was only inches above his head; at many points, he had to stoop to get by. Liquid dripped continuously on the raincoat’s hood. The walls, sporadically illuminated by his flashlight beam, were slick with condensation or slime. He could hear the rumble of traffic up above—even late at night it never abated. Sometimes he could hear the metal-on-metal squeal of subway trains banking into a turn on the other side of the sewer wall. There was also the constant background sound of running water; here, the water was only a few inches deep, but elsewhere it ran in a torrent, especially after it had rained.

Ludlam continued to walk along. Progress was always slow: the stone floor was slippery, and Ludlam didn’t want to end up yet again falling face forward into the filth.

He paused after a time, and strained to listen. Rats continued to chatter nearby, and there was the sound of a siren, audible through a grate in the sewer roof. But, as always, he failed to hear what he wanted to hear.

It seemed as though the beast would never return.

The double doors to Emergency Admitting swung inward, and ambulance attendants hustled the gurney inside. A blast of ice-cold air, like the ghostly exhaling of a long-dead dragon, followed them into the room from the November night.

Dennis Jacobs, the surgeon on duty, hurried over to the gurney. The injured man’s face was bone-white—he had suffered severe blood loss and was deep in shock. One of the attendants pulled back the sheet, exposing the man’s left leg. Jacobs carefully removed the mounds of gauze covering the injury site.

A great tract of flesh—perhaps five pounds of meat—had been scooped out of his thigh. If the injury had been another inch or two to the right, the femoral artery would have been clipped, and the man would have bled to death before help could have arrived.

“Who is he?” asked Jacobs.

“Paul Kowalski,” said the same attendant who had exposed the leg. “A sewer worker. He’d just gone down a manhole. Something came at him, and got hold of his leg. He high-tailed it up the ladder, back onto the street. A passerby found him bleeding all over the sidewalk, and called 9-1-1.”

Jacobs snapped his fingers at a nurse. “O.R. 3,” he said.

On the gurney, Kowalski’s eyes fluttered open. His hand reached up and grabbed Jacobs’s forearm. “Always heard the stories,” said Kowalski, his voice weak. “But never believed they were really there.”

“What?” said Jacobs. “What’s really there?”

Kowalski’s grip tightened. He must have been in excruciating pain. “Gators,” he said at last through clenched teeth. “Gators in the sewers.”

Around 2:00 a.m., Ludlam decided to call it a night. He began retracing his steps, heading back to where he’d come down. The sewer was cold, and mist swirled in the beam from his flashlight. Something brushed against his foot, swimming through the fetid water. So far, he’d been lucky—nothing had bit him yet.

It was crazy to be down here—Ludlam knew that. But he couldn’t give up. Hell, he’d patiently sifted through sand and gravel for years. Was this really that different?

The smell hit him again. Funny how he could ignore it for hours at a time, then suddenly be overpowered by it. He reached up with his left hand, pinched his nostrils shut, and began breathing through his mouth.

Ludlam walked on, keeping his flashlight trained on the ground just a few feet in front of him. As he got closer to his starting point, he tilted the beam up and scanned the area ahead.

His heart skipped a beat.

A dark figure was blocking his way.

Paul Kowalski was in surgery for six hours. Dr. Jacobs and his team repaired tendons, sealed off blood vessels, and more. But the most interesting discovery was made almost at once, as one of Jacobs’s assistants was prepping the wound for surgery.

A white, fluted, gently curving cone about four inches long was partially embedded in Kowalski’s femur.

A tooth.

“What the hell are you doing down here?” said the man blocking Ludlam’s way. He was wearing a stained Sanitation Department jacket.

“I’m Dr. David Ludlam,” said Ludlam. “I’ve got permission.”

He reached into his raincoat’s pocket and pulled out the letter he always carried with him.

The sanitation worker took it and used his own flashlight to read it over. “Garbologist,’“ he said with a snort. “Never heard of it.”

“They give a course in it at Columbia,” said Ludlam. That much was true, but Ludlam wasn’t a garbologist. When he’d first approached the City government, he’d used a fake business card—amazing what you could do these days with a laser printer.

“Well, be careful,” said the man. “The sewers are dangerous. A guy I know got a hunk taken out of him by an alligator.”

“Oh, come on,” said Ludlam, perfectly serious. “There aren’t any gators down here.”

“Thank you for agreeing to see me, Professor Chong,” said Jacobs. Chong’s tiny office at the American Museum of Natural History was packed floor to ceiling with papers, computer printouts, and books in metal shelving units. Hanging from staggered coat hooks on the wall behind Chong was a stuffed anaconda some ten feet long.

“I treated a man two days ago who said he was bit by an alligator,” said Jacobs.

“Had he been down south?” asked Chong.

“No, no. He said it happened here, in New York. He’s a sewer worker, an—”

Chong laughed. “And he said he was bitten by an alligator down in the sewers, right?”

Jacobs felt his eyebrows lifting. “Exactly.”

Chong shook his head. “Guy’s trying to file a false insurance claim, betcha anything. There aren’t any alligators in our sewers.”

“I saw the wound,” said Jacobs. “Something took a massive bite out of him.”

“This alligators-in-the-sewers nonsense has been floating around for years,” said Chong. “The story is that kids bring home baby gators as pets from vacations in Florida, but when they grow tired of them, they flush ‘em down the toilet, and the things end up living in the sewers.”

“Well,” said Jacobs, “that sounds reasonable.”

“It’s crap,” said Chong. “We get calls here at the Herpetology Department about that myth from time to time—but that’s all it is: a myth. You know how cold it is out there today?”

“A little below freezing.”

“Exactly. Oh, I don’t doubt that some alligators have been flushed over the years—people flush all kinds of stuff. But even assuming gators could survive swimming in sewage, the winter temperatures here would kill them. Alligators are cold-blooded, Dr. Jacobs.”

Jacobs reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the tooth. “We extracted this from the man’s thigh,” he said, placing it on Chong’s cluttered desk.

Chong picked it up. “Seriously?”

“Yes.”

The herpetologist shook his head. “Well, it’s not a gator tooth—the root is completely wrong. But reptiles do shed their teeth throughout their lives—it’s not unusual for one or more to pop loose during a meal.” He ran his thumb lightly over the edge of the tooth. “The margin is serrated,” he said. “Fascinating. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”