Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

Jason paused. “I said we’re trying, Harry.”

An exhale. “Sorry, Jason. I’m dealing with… some financial issues with some of my companies. It’s been stressful.”

“No problem.” Jason could picture the man rubbing his forehead in the office of his gigantic mansion. “OK, Harry, so I’ll talk to you—”

“I have some other questions, if you don’t mind.”

Jason followed Craig and the officer into another hallway. “Shoot.”

“You said the teeth didn’t come from barracudas, anglers, gars, and—what other fish again?”

A pause. “I honestly don’t remember.” Jason didn’t realize he’d mentioned the fish that the teeth hadn’t come from. “You’d have to ask Lisa for further details on that.” He looked up as the officer reached a door. “Harry, I’m sorry, but we’re kind of in the middle of something here. Can I get back to you?”

“Oh. Not necessary. But anything you need on this, just let me know.”

The line cut out, and Jason hung up. “Sorry about that, Officer Bell.”

In a crisp navy uniform that made Jason feel underdressed, Officer Gavin Bell nodded. “No problem.” The guy had a crew cut and was the size of an NFL linebacker. “Anyway, here it is.”

They entered a windowless white chamber that looked like an examining room in a doctor’s office. But the room wasn’t a doctor’s. It belonged to the Monterey Coast Guard. And the specimen on the silver operating table wasn’t a person. It was a dead dolphin the guard had picked up from three fishermen earlier in the day.

It wasn’t standard practice for the coast guard to alert ichthyologists of such finds. The day before, Jason and his team had bumped into a coast-guard trawler on the ocean, and the two boats had gotten to talking. Monique explained to the “Coasties,” as the officers were known, that they were tracking a new species and Darryl and Craig had invited the men aboard for drinks. As employees of the federal government, the Coasties politely declined this offer, but clearly appreciated the gesture. As it happened, they had a chance to repay it. Earlier in the day, a freshly killed dolphin had turned up in the exact area that Jason and company had tracked their new species to.

“You guys all set in here?”

Jason turned. “We are. Thank you very much, Officer Bell. We owe you one here.”

“You don’t owe us squat.” Bell smiled at Summers, who was wearing khakis four sizes too big for him. “Nobody ever offers us beers.”

As the officer left, Jason started thinking about Lisa and didn’t know why. It wasn’t like him to think about her at all, much less during business. Was their relationship changing? She’d once despised him, but he suddenly couldn’t help but wonder if something more amicable might be brewing.

He turned back to the examining table. He was glad she didn’t have to see this. “Jesus.” What was lying there was truly gruesome: the corpse of a bottlenose dolphin. Jason guessed it had weighed 650 pounds. This was a guess because only the body’s top half was there. The lower half had been bitten off. Bitten off clean. No shark had done it. No shark alive possessed a mouth big enough or jaws strong enough to sever a dolphin in half.

Craig shook his head, eyeing the once-lively eyes, now sealed closed in death. He pivoted, leaned into the bloody red stump, and studied what looked like… vertical lines, from whatever had severed the body. He tried to count them. This wasn’t easy, but there appeared to be a dozen, each as wide as a human hand. They were teeth marks. Made by much larger versions of the fat S-shaped canines they’d found earlier, perhaps the size of champagne bottles. He took a few steps and studied the carcass from another angle. It was covered with smaller bites, gaping red chunks the size of footballs. Craig couldn’t believe what he was seeing. This was proof, and it was unambiguous. “My God, Jason, these rays are predators.”

Jason felt numb. “So… they’ve been feeding on dolphins all this time?”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Why?”

“You haven’t heard what the USDS has been saying?” The USDS is the United States Dolphin Society, a conservation group out of Monterey that monitors the migratory habits of bottlenoses in the Northern Pacific.

“No. What have they been saying?”

“That California’s bottlenose population has been swimming south to Brazil and Chile for two years. York says to escape GDV-4. So these rays can’t be feeding on dolphins, at least not regularly.”

“So what are they eating, then?”

“I have no idea. I’m just wondering why they didn’t eat this.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why didn’t the rays eat this dolphin? They attacked it, they killed it, why didn’t they eat it?”

Jason shook his head.

“Wait a second….” Summers’s eyes sharpened. “I bet this animal has GDV-4.”

“You think?….” Jason picked up a wall phone without a dialing mechanism. “Gavin, did your lab people do any tests on this specimen?” He hung up and Bell instantly brought in a manila file and left.

Summers tore into it and pointed. “Look… ‘tested positive for GDV-4’… ‘only recently entered the bloodstream’… Sounds like a mild case.”

Jason read the words himself. “So they detected a mild case in a living animal. ”

“And they caught a dolphin. They caught and killed a frickin’ dolphin. How is that possible?”

Jason looked at the ceiling, clueless. Slow-swimming rays didn’t possess the physical equipment to catch speedy dolphins. The land equivalent was like a turtle catching a cheetah. It wasn’t possible. And yet it had happened. How? He considered it for several silent moments. And then the answer hit him.

“There’s only one way—there’s only one possible way.”

“What?”

“They must have outsmarted it.”

Craig absorbed this. The rays were more than just predators. Somehow they’d outsmarted what many believed to be the most intelligent wild animal on the planet. “How on God’s earth did they outsmart a dolphin?”

Jason looked up at the ceiling again. “I know. My God, I think I know.”

“ WE NEED to find a brain, a physical brain.”

It was night, and Craig and Jason had just returned to the boat. The Monterey marina was deserted now except for a lone patrolling security guard. Beneath the pale yellow light from the dock’s streetlamps, everyone was on the rear deck, dressed casually, seated on the built-ins or freestanding chairs. The others had just finished a dinner of burgers, grilled chicken, and sides.

As Craig went below deck to change out of his khakis, Lisa shook her head at Jason, not getting the logic. “You’ve seen millions of manta brains, haven’t you?”

“ Manta brains, yes. But these animals are not manta rays, Lisa. They’ve got to be much smarter than that.”

“Meaning they’ll have larger brains?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I want to see one.”

Monique nodded. “That’s a fascinating idea, Jason. But how would we do it? It’s clear now that these rays are hiding, and we haven’t even seen one yet.”

“Not a living one anyway.”

A pause. “Are you saying we can find dead one?”

“Yes.”

Lisa turned to Jason skeptically. “How the hell are we going to do that?”

As Craig emerged from below deck in a white terry robe, Jason smiled at Lisa Barton, for the first time noticing what she was wearing: tight jeans and a yellow shirt with a lower-than-average neckline. Her head was jutted forward, and the chip on her shoulder was almost as big as the quarter moon hanging over the docks.