Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

“Of course. I should have something very quickly. In the interim, I won’t breathe a word of this to anyone.” He eyed Jason anew, his dark eyes dancing slightly. “I must say, I’m glad you had the balls to bust into my office! You’re an impressive, focused young man. It was a pleasure meeting you.”

Jason literally turned red at the compliment. He thought it ridiculously flattering, especially considering the source. But Bandar Vishakeratne prided himself on character analysis. He had already decided that Jason Aldridge was a lot like he had been many years ago—dedicated, smart, and hungry. The Princeton man knew well what it was to sacrifice, to work long, hard, lonely hours, to toil away in utter obscurity, to be nearly destitute but still focused. Indeed, Vishakeratne thought he might be seeing a humbler, younger version of himself. And like all great men, by making such a comparison, he was paying Jason Aldridge the greatest compliment of all.

Jason almost bowed. “It was an honor meeting you. Thank you very much, Dr. Vishakeratne.”

“Of course. By the way, from now on, I’d prefer it if you’d address me as Veesh.”

It was an honor bestowed upon few people.

“Thank you very much again, Veesh.” They shook firmly and Jason walked out the door.

Rushing around the exterior office, Andrea looked up immediately. “Jason, a Lisa Barton called for you.” She quickly grabbed some papers off her desk and went to the door as Veesh followed. “You can use my phone. Have a good trip back to California.” They were gone.

Jason dialed, and there was an immediate pickup.

“Jason?”

“Hi, Lisa. What’s up?”

“Jesus, it took you long enough to call back. I’ve been trying to reach you for half a day.”

“Give me a break. I’ve been busy here.” He paused. “Is something wrong?”

“Another juvenile turned up.”

“Really? That’s fantastic. I still have to finish the autopsy on the first one, but we’ll have two now.”

Lisa didn’t bother mentioning that the first one was still inaccessible in a freezer. Perhaps it didn’t matter now. “This one’s not ready for an autopsy yet.”

“What?” He suddenly felt light-headed. “Are you saying you found a live one ?”

“We found a live one.”

“You’re being extremely careful with it, right?”

“Very, but we don’t need to be. It’s in pretty bad shape.”

He looked at the phone. “Lisa, please be very, very careful with it.”

“You don’t understand; it’s not doing well. I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”

“Please be careful. Tell everyone to be careful.”

An annoyed exhale. They had been careful—extremely. At all times, the triumvirate had had at least two rifles pointed at the animal’s head. “OK.”

“I just don’t want you to get hurt, all right?”

“All right,” she said more softly.

“Where are you keeping it?”

“In a cage.”

Jason gave the phone a look. In a cage? “You mean in a tank.”

“No, I mean in a cage. We didn’t find this animal in the water, Jason. We found it on a beach north of San Francisco. By the time we got to it, it had been there for more than thirty-seven minutes.”

“Lisa, you’re not making sense. If it was on the sand for that long, then how could it still be alive?”

“Because it’s breathing air.”

“What?”

“I can’t explain it and I’m not attempting to. But the live ray. That we have here. Right now. Is breathing. I’m looking right at it, and it’s breathing air .”

Literally speechless, he didn’t respond.

Lisa continued. “Whatever we might have thought earlier, that woman off Clarita didn’t imagine or exaggerate anything. What she said she saw that day actually happened. This animal is as real as the nose on my face, and it’s breathing air.”

Jason suddenly felt as if he were out of his body. “You said it’s in bad shape?”

“Worse than bad. I think it’s dying. If you want to see it alive, you’d better get back here fast.”

He didn’t say another word. He simply hung up the phone. As he rushed out of the office, he tried to understand. How on earth could it possibly be breathing air?

THE CREATURE was looking right at him. The moment Jason walked into the room, its eyes were watching him. It couldn’t see him—the room was pitch-black—but a host of other sensory organs told it he was there.

“Here, let me get the lights.”

Lisa squeezed past him in the dark. Perhaps it was inadvertent, but they rubbed against each other. She flipped a switch, and five banks of fluorescents flickered, then illuminated. Jason abruptly forgot why he was here, noticing what she was wearing: a low-cut white top with preppy but tight checked lime-green pants. His brain shifted back to business when Darryl and the others entered. USC’s Northern California research facility was in Point Reyes, forty miles north of San Francisco. Harry Klepper and Ross Drummond had a relationship with the staffers who ran it and before going out of town had arranged for Jason’s team to have access. The lab was the size of a middle-school lunchroom, completely unfurnished except for granite counters, glass cabinets, and wood stools. Jason didn’t notice the periphery. The cage, plopped in the middle of the vast room, was as tall as he was and as wide as a station wagon. Darryl Hollis had borrowed it from a local zoo.

Walking quickly toward it, Jason realized the animal lying behind the bars was staring at him. Immediately—and quite unconsciously—he froze. He was afraid of it. After everything Vishakeratne had told him, how could he not be? It wasn’t the creature’s brain that made him nervous, however. It was its eyes. They were slightly bigger than golf balls, cold and black, and staring right at him. They were terrifying eyes. He’d never felt an animal look at him like that before.

He averted his gaze and walked closer, taking in the rest of it. It was a very thick ray, much thicker than a manta, three feet at its center. Five feet across the wings and four feet long, it was very muscular, very solidly built, a dangerous, dangerous-looking creature. He guessed its weight at 250 pounds.

He scanned the head area. The closed mouth was the size of a snow shovel, with horns like stumpy soda cans sticking out on either side.

He heard something. A wheezing sound. The animal was actually breathing air, its body gently rising and falling.

He inched closer, the eyes following him through the bars. The sound was coming from underneath it. But then he heard a second wheezing sound, from a small hole the size of a quarter on the top of the horned head. “It’s breathing through its spiracle?”

Summers nodded. “We think so.”

Normally, a manta used its spiracle to take in water, from which it then removed oxygen.

Jason crouched. “And it evolved lungs?”

“More likely lung singular.” Monique knelt next to him. “We think it’s a modern version of the lungfish.”

“So… it adapted an air bladder?”

“It must have.”

Most fish possess air bladders. Similar to a scuba diver’s inflatable vest, an air bladder controls buoyancy by varying the amount of air in the fish’s body, causing it to sink or float. But some species—the African lungfish, the walking catfish, the snakehead fish, among others—have adapted their air bladders into lungs that allow them to breathe air on land.

Jason shook his head, mystified. “When did this species ever have access to land?”

Every known water-based species that has evolved lungs has done so only after extensive time away from the water. The lungfish, for example, adapted a lung after the lakes where it normally lived dried up and it was forced to live on mud. But these rays were from the depths and had never been anywhere near land. Until the past months, their entire known evolutionary history had been on the ocean floor. How could they possibly have evolved a lung down there?