Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

“Ask away.”

“You said it was black on its top and white on the bottom?”

“That’s right.”

“Pure jet-black and pure milky white—you’re sure?”

Theresa thought for a moment. “Yes.”

“No shades of brown or gray?”

“No, none.”

“No stripes or dots or other discolorations?”

“No, nothing like that.”

She didn’t change her story, Ackerman thought. He’d asked her the same questions several times, and she’d come back with identical answers. She had a good memory and wasn’t making this up. Exaggeration perhaps, but not outright fantasy. What had she seen out there? The coloring she’d described was classic manta ray—numerous physical traits were also—but several details didn’t fit. She’d said the animal didn’t have a tail, and mantas almost always had tails. Many other physical characteristics didn’t jibe either.

Harry Ackerman stroked his cleanly shaven chin. He didn’t like mysteries. He preferred things to fit into neat, clearly defined packages. Frustrated, he glanced down at something.

What’s he looking at? Theresa wondered. She could see it was something beneath the desk; it looked like—

“Are you a marine biologist, Mr. Ackerman?”

He glanced up, and the eyes seemed to chill further. “I’m a lawyer by training actually. Now—”

“A lawyer? How did you get into this?”

“I’m on the board.” This was sort of true.

Theresa nodded and looked around. They were seated in Manta World’s massive east wing. She couldn’t believe the size of the place, with towering ceilings and wide spaces that made a shopping mall look small. Except for the two of them and the bored college girl gabbing on the phone at another small desk, the place was empty. There wasn’t even a sign out front anymore. There certainly weren’t any manta rays. Theresa stared at the biggest fish tank she’d ever seen in her life. It was literally the length of a football field and the height of a three-story building, filled with turquoise water and nothing else.

“They all died.”

She turned. “Excuse me?”

“The mantas. They all died. We don’t know why, we just couldn’t keep them alive.”

“Oh.” Theresa stared at the tank anew. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s still very sad.”

And Harry Ackerman meant that. He wasn’t on Manta World’s board; he was the board. Ackerman was a patent lawyer by training, but at the height of the late-nineties dot-com boom, he’d done what others had. He wrote a business plan on a cocktail napkin, created an Internet company, and took it public. The goal had been to create a legal marketplace, an online subscription service that lawyers across the country could use to share information on cases. The company IPO’d for $1.8 billion, and while it went bankrupt just nine months later, the investment bankers had their fees, and Ackerman had obscene amounts of money, $500 million after taxes. Rather than buy a pro basketball team or sailing crew, he invested his money, and not necessarily wisely. He put massive chunks into a handful of the era’s other hopeful high-tech ventures, including a fiber-optic company, as well as Manta World. None had done well.

But besides money, what Ackerman also craved was respect from a group of people who didn’t dole it out easily. Despite his success, none of the real players at the dozen charitable foundations and golf clubs that he and his wife had joined would give him the time of day. This elite group of entrepreneurs, real-estate moguls, entertainment CEOs, and hedge-fund managers hardly spoke to him. In their eyes, Harry Ackerman was nothing more than another dot-com idiot who’d gotten lucky. They were always polite but brief in that typical CEO style Ackerman despised. The message was clear: he could join all the charities and golf clubs he wanted, but he wasn’t in their club.

Ackerman longed for the day when he would be, when he and his wife would casually stroll into a thousand-dollar-a-plate black-tie charity ball, and heads would quietly turn. Isn’t that Harry Ackerman? Then all the fancy types would jockey to meet him for a change—to ask him to dinner or discuss investments and his favorite flavor of ice cream.

The Manta World project had been a disaster from the get-go. Five years old and counting, it was almost dead, even though Ackerman still had a handful of marine biologists under contract. They were on the ocean in tropical Mexico now, still with the nominal goal of trying to make it all work. Ackerman had been in salvage mode for months, but maybe, just maybe, this woman could help take things in another direction. But he had to be sure. “You said it didn’t have a tail.”

“Correct.”

“No tail of any kind, not even a little stump?”

“No, nothing.”

Ackerman nodded. Still sticking to her story.

“And it wasn’t more than a foot across the wings?”

She nodded.

“You’re sure? It wasn’t, say, three or four feet?”

“No. I remember it distinctly—it was as wide as a phone book is long.”

Again, exactly what she’d said before. “And you said it was… stocky?”

“Very—muscular, too.”

“Hmm.”

Something else that didn’t fit. Mantas could be called stocky, but only when they’d grown into adults. When they were immature, they were extremely thin, almost wispy, certainly not stocky and muscular. It didn’t fit.

Theresa watched Ackerman closely. For the first time, he looked downright puzzled. Without a trace of embarrassment, he removed what he’d been surreptitiously studying earlier: a large coffee-table book, Circumtropical Rays of the World. He opened it on the table, and Theresa watched as he flipped colorful, glossy pages, settling on a spread about mantas. Theresa noticed a photo of a manta with a scuba diver, and her eyes bulged slightly. That thing’s enormous! The size of an airplane! Boy, did they get big!

Ackerman turned to her. “You said its eyes were large?”

“Very.”

“How big were they?”

“The size of golf balls.”

“Golf balls?” He stared at the pictures again. “And it had horns sticking out of its head?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.” Ackerman didn’t know rays like the biologists who worked for him, but he’d still learned a great deal about them in the past years. The horned head was a very distinctive feature; very few ray species had it, only two that Ackerman knew of. They were the two he’d kept going back to, the manta and the mobula ray. But the large eyes were something else that indicated that the ray had been neither of those. Ackerman shook his head. What had she seen? He flipped another page, focusing on a marble ray. Marbles were round, unmistakably so, but she’d said this animal was shaped like a stealth bomber, the classic manta shape. He flipped again. Not a stingray either. All stingers had clearly defined spines with tails that were impossible to miss.

He shook his head. That left only one other possibility. A new species. What if she’d actually seen a new species out there?

“Thank you for coming in, Theresa.”

“Oh.” Theresa hesitated then uncrossed her legs. She’d been dismissed. She stood.

Embarrassed by his bad manners, Ackerman stood as well. “Sorry. What I meant is I really appreciate this. It could be useful. We’ll see.” He smiled warmly and shook her hand.

“My pleasure.”

Ackerman picked up the phone. He wanted an expert opinion. Now. As he dialed, Theresa pretended to look for something in her pocketbook. She watched as he tapped out a very long series of digits. She heard a jolt of static and guessed it was an overseas connection. “Hi, Monique? It’s Harry Ackerman calling for Jason…. Oh, someone just came in who may have seen a new species. Can I speak with him, please?”