Fragment (11 page)

Several scientists sprang their traps at her urging and isolated a few dozen specimens. Reaching their hands into the extendable gloves, they placed the sprung traps into airlocks spaced inside the trough. In the close-up view from the cameras above, they could see the tiny creatures leaping onto their gloves.

“They seem to attack anything that moves,” Nell observed.

“Yeah, no matter how big it is,” Andy said.

“Don’t worry, there’s no way they can get through butyl rubber,” Quentin said.

“Ever seen
The Andromeda Strain?”

“Or
Alien?”
Andy said.

“Come on, guys.”

The scientists placed their traps in the airlocks, where the outside of the traps were sterilized with a chlorine dioxide bath. They opened the hatches and transferred the traps to individual observation chambers, where the live specimens inside could be released.

The other specimens from the original trap seemed dead, victims of a frenzied carnage. The original hot dog was nowhere to be found.

The two largest animals they had captured were about the size of tailless muskrats or squirrels. Both had eight legs. Though its side was ravaged by its rival, one specimen was clearly more complete. It had bitten off its rival’s head and seemed to have died choking on it.

“What… is that?” stuttered Quentin.

“Jesus, I’ve never seen anything like that,” one scientist whispered.

“God,” Andy giggled.

“OK, let’s settle down.” Otto was clearly rattled himself. “I’ll dissect. Quentin, you operate the camera.”

“Gladly.” Quentin quickly relinquished the glove box to Otto.

Otto reached in and cleared away the other animal parts, which included a few half-bitten disk-ants; a half-eaten two-legged thing that looked like a grasshopper fused with a toad; a headless island “rat,” as Andy had called it; and, surprisingly, a few chunks of a mouse-sized species.

Each partial specimen was passed down the trough to be rinsed and prepared for preservation. The strangeness of the body parts sent a chill down the assembly line of scientists.

“What are we looking at here?” one said.

“I don’t fucking believe this,” another muttered, uneasily.

“Let’s take this one step at a time,” Otto told them. “All right, people, we’re about to conduct the first dissection of a Henders specimen.”

Otto spread the largest intact animal out on its belly. He washed the blue gore from its velvetlike fur, which turned out to be coffee-ground brown with black and white stripes on its haunches. Strips of iridescent fur radiated over its softball-sized head. The head of the second rat made a bulge in its throat the size of a baseball.

As the last blue liquid was rinsed off, everyone gasped at the impossible specimen.

“OK, let’s see what we’re dealing with here.” Otto’s voice cracked. His hands were shaking.

“Steady now,” Nell said.

Quentin moved the video camera across the top of the chamber until it was directly over the subject, and then zoomed in, providing an enlarged view on the plasma screens above the trough.

Otto placed his gloved left hand over the specimen’s head and blocked throat.

Nell perched on one of the high stools next to Otto and opened her sketchpad. “Just take it easy now,” she said calmly. She started to sketch a diagram. “The fur coloration on its haunches looks like an okapi.”

“Yeah.” Andy nodded, frowning at the captured specimen. “People thought okapis were a hoax when they were first discovered. They thought they were giraffes, zebras, and buffalo stitched together…”

“They’d never believe this freaking thing.” Quentin gawped at the red-furred chimera.

“The stripes must confuse predators,” Nell theorized.

“Come on, this thing
is
a predator,” Otto said.

“I think it’s probably both—predator and prey,” she said. “The front looks fierce and the back says ‘I better hide my ass with camouflage while I run the hell out of here.’”

“Hunters that are hunted?”

“That hunt each other,” said Andy.

“Check out that tail.”

“Are we sure it’s dead?”

“Let’s find out,” Otto said. “Beginning narration of dissection at…” He consulted his watch. “… three twenty-two p.m. This is the first dissection of a Henders specimen. It is a fur-bearing, eight-legged animal, about thirty-five centimeters long, with okapi-like zebra stripes on its haunches, reddish-brown fur of the texture of really plush velvet or velour on its back, and bright stripes of fur around its face that change color at different angles.”

He twisted its round head. They could see iridescent stripes radiating around its toothy mouth.

“Good God,” Andy said. “It has crab claws on
its face!”

“The specimen appears to have four front legs that may function more like arms,” Otto continued. “The first pair is connected to its lower jaw and is furless. These seem to be chelate appendages with slender pincers that are white in color…very strange. They emerge from a wide lower jaw of an almost frog-or birdlike hinged mouth with long teeth that are packed close together and seem to be rather sharp. The teeth are extremely hard and dark gray. The mouth has dark blue lips drawn back that can apparently close over the teeth.”

“What is that, a skullcap?” Nell’s pencil flew as she sketched the outlines of the animal. “On top of its head?”

“The subject appears to have a light brown, furless cranial cap of some sort,” Otto said.

“Jesus,” Quentin said. “Either I’m dreaming or we are making history here, folks.”

“You aren’t dreaming,” Nell told him.

The scientists clapped and whooped, finally releasing their anxiety and exhilaration.

Nell quickly penciled in the snaggle-toothed mouth in the creature’s round head, her face frozen with grim concentration.

Henders Rat
Rodentocaris hendersi
(
after
Echevarria et al,
Proceedings of the Woods Hole Scientific Meetings
, vol. 92: 87-93)

This animal looked like a miniature version of the deadly lunging animals she had seen on the beach, except that its jaws were horizontal instead of vertical like the ones that came from the crevasse.

“It looks like a deep-sea angler,” Andy said.

“Like a cat crossed with a spider.” Nell carved its outline deep into the sheet of paper with her pencil.

“Right, like the spigers you mentioned,” Quentin said.

“Right.” Nell nodded.

“The specimen has a pair of large green-red-and-blue eyes with three optical hemispheres,” Otto narrated, and he tested the flexibility of the creature’s eyes with a poking index finger. “The eyes are mounted on short stalks that pivot or swivel inside a socket in its head. They also toggle in a socket at the end of the stalks, apparently, having a very ingenious mechanism.”

“I sure hope that thing’s dead,” Andy said.

Otto ignored him and wiggled the forelegs behind the head to see how they bent. “The large legs behind the head are very muscular and have spines at the end. They are fur-bearing, but the heavy spikelike spines are hairless, hard black exoskeleton or horn, and they seem to have a very sharp edge.”

“They look like praying mantis arms.”

“Yeah, that’s how they fold,” Otto agreed. “They may be able to act as shears or vises, too.”

“Or spears,” Nell suggested, shivering as she thought of what the others must have faced inside the crevasse. “The spigers speared the sand in front of them to back away from the water.”

Otto continued. “These mantislike subchelate arms are articulated to a bony ring under the skin, from which the neck musculature also extends. The next pair of limbs appears to be true legs. They resemble a quadruped’s forelegs…with one extra joint… and they seem to be attached to a broad central ring of bone that can be felt under the dermis and which forms a medial hump on the dorsal surface of the animal.”

“Those are eyes!” Nell exclaimed.

“Huh? Where?” Andy said.

“See, on top of that hump on its back, Otto?”

“Oh,” Andy said.

“There are eyes on the medial hump,” Otto confirmed, rinsing off more blue blood. “Which are similar to the eyes on the head.”

“Do you think it has a second set of optic lobes in its back?” Nell asked. “I mean, look, they’re image-forming eyes, not just light-intensity receptors.”

“Either there’s a brain under there or they have ridiculously long optic nerves,” Andy continued.

Otto continued his description. “There are three eyes on the central hump, reminiscent of the eyes on a jumping spider. One eye looks directly behind and one to each side. They each toggle inside a socket. I think you’re right, Nell. There could be some kind of ganglion structure under this hump. There’s a cranial cap on top of it similar to the one on the head of the animal.” As Andy winced, Otto tapped the brown chitinous cap on the hump between the eyes, testing to see if there was any reflex action left in the animal. There wasn’t.

Otto picked up a pair of dissection scissors and cut carefully along the mid-line of the cranial cap. He pulled each half apart with forceps. “Yep, it’s got a second brain.” He looked up at Nell. “This isn’t just some enlarged ganglion.”

“It’s got eyes in the back of its head,” Quentin said.

“And a head in the back of its eyes,” added Andy.

“See that pair of nerve cords running forward to the head?” Nell pointed at the close-up on the drop-down screen.

“Yeah, and here’s another pair that run toward the posterior of the animal. See there?” Quentin pointed. Two white twines of fine string stretched from the brain to the posterior of the animal like jumper cables.

“It may control the locomotion of its hind legs remotely with the second brain,” Nell theorized.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Otto disagreed. “Not fucking possible!”

“Maybe it has specialized ganglia for speeding up its attack or
evasive reflexes, or to help with digestion like some arthropods do,” Andy offered.

“Well, we won’t be able to determine that from a dissection.” Otto frowned. “We would have to do a detailed neurological study of live specimens. But we’ll see if we can follow the nerves later. Moving toward the posterior of the animal we see very powerful, kangaroo-like hind legs, with an extra joint where the tibia would be. These limbs are connected to a wide subcutaneous pelvic girdle that is ring-or tube-shaped like the other rings. The tail—”

“I don’t think that’s a tail,” Quentin said.

“It’s a leg,” Nell said.

Otto scowled.

“Pull it out from under the body,” Nell suggested.

“OK. The tail has a wide base. It is very stiff. It is long and broad, folding more than halfway under the animal to the chest area between the forelegs. The dorsal surface of the tail, which is the bottom when under the animal, is covered with ridged plates and spines in a geometric pattern.”

“Traction pads.” Nell indicated the bottom of the “tail.” “And cleats—like the bottom of a running shoe!”

“Whoa,” Quentin exclaimed. “It must rip that tail backwards under it to get air!”

“The taillike appendage appears to be a sort of ninth leg.” Otto shook his head in amazement. “This leg might be used to propel the animal higher or faster during leaps.”

“It kind of seems like an arthropod that turned into a mammal. Doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Andy said. “I was just thinking that. Spiders are furry crabs, or at least chelicerates.”

“This is no arthropod,” Otto scoffed. “With a mouth and jaws like that? And this is fur, not tarantula hair!”

“It’s bleeding again.” Nell pointed.

“The subject is leaking some light blue fluid that may be blood.”

“They must have hemocyanin. Copper-based blood, like marine arthropods. See? You can see it turning bluer as the liquid hits the air.”

“I’m extracting a blood specimen for analysis.” Otto took a hypodermic needle from a dissection kit affixed to the inside wall of the trough.

“Copper-based blood?” Nell looked at Andy.

“Maybe hemoglobin, too,” he said. “Some iron-based blood pigments are purple.”

“That’s
blue,”
Quentin said. “Are you color-blind?”

“No, I’m not color-blind!” Andy glared at Quentin.

“Could have fooled me.” Quentin was looking at Andy’s pink, yellow, and blue Hawaiian shirt.

Nell patted Quentin on the shoulder. “Let’s get a look inside this thing.”

“I’m now sealing the blood sample,” Otto narrated.

“Cut a little tissue sample, too, Otto,” Quentin told him. “That’ll make it easier to get a nucleic acid sample in case the blood doesn’t have any circulating cells.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Otto expelled the hypo full of blue liquid into a tube and capped it. Then he placed the sample into the specimen cradle, along with a small slice of tissue that he placed in a quarter-sized petri dish. After covering the petri dish, he pushed the cradle into the airlock. “OK, Quentin, let’s get a genetic analysis on this thing.”

Quentin sprayed the outside of the containers with isopropyl alcohol and then flooded the mini-airlock with yellow-green chlorine dioxide gas. When the gas was vacuumed out he retrieved the specimens through the airlock and handed them to the lab technicians, who immediately prepared blood agar cultures. One started grinding tissue samples in what resembled a test tube-sized blender. Attached to a high-speed tissue homogenizer, this glass chamber prevented the dispersal of any potentially harmful aerosol from the specimen into the air of the lab.