The errands he sent them on were mysterious, too. Once they went to Stanford and picked up five small squares of plastic from a professor there. The plastic was light, and sort of foamy. Another time they went downtown to an electronics store and picked up a triangular device that the man behind the counter gave them very nervously, as if it might be illegal or something. Another time they picked up a metal tube that looked like it contained cigars. They couldn’t help opening it, but they were uneasy to find four sealed plastic ampoules of straw-colored liquid. The ampoules were marked EXTREME DANGER! LETHAL TOXICITY! and had the three-bladed international symbol for biohazard.
But mostly, their assignments were mundane. He often sent them to libraries at Stanford to Xerox papers on all sorts of subjects: Japanese sword-making, X-ray crystallography, Mexican vampire bats, Central American volcanoes, oceanic currents of El Niño, the mating behavior of mountain sheep, sea-cucumber toxicity, flying buttresses of Gothic cathedrals . . .
Dr. Levine never explained why he was interested in these subjects. Often he would send them back day after day, to search for more material. And then, suddenly, he would drop the subject, and never refer to it again. And they would be on to something else.
Of course, they could figure some of it out. A lot of the questions had to do with the vehicles that Dr. Thorne was building for Dr. Levine’s expedition. But most of the time, the subjects were completely mysterious.
Occasionally, Kelly wondered what the bearded man would make of all this. She wondered whether he knew something they did not. But actually, the bearded man seemed kind of lazy. He never seemed to figure out that Kelly and Arby were doing errands for Dr. Levine.
Right now, the bearded man glanced over at the entrance to the school, ignoring them. They walked to the end of the street, and sat on the bench to wait for the bus.
Tag
The baby snow leopard spit the bottle out, and rolled over onto its back, paws in the air. It made a soft mewing sound.
“She wants to be petted,” Elizabeth Gelman said.
Malcolm reached out his hand, to stroke the belly. The cub spun around, and sunk its tiny teeth into his fingers. Malcolm yelled.
“She does that, sometimes,” Gelman said. “Dorje! Bad girl! Is that any way to treat our distinguished visitor?” She reached out, took Malcolm’s hand. “It didn’t break the skin, but we should clean it anyway.”
They were in the white research laboratory of the San Francisco Zoo, at three o’clock in the afternoon. Elizabeth Gelman, the youthful head of research, was supposed to report on her findings, but they had to delay for the afternoon feeding in the nursery. Malcolm had watched them feed a baby gorilla, which spit up like a human baby, and a koala, and then the very cute snow-leopard cub.
“Sorry about that,” Gelman said. She took him to a side basin, and soaped his hand. “But I thought it was better that you come here now, when the regular staff is all at the weekly conference.”
“Why is that?”
“Because there’s a lot of interest in the material you gave us, Ian. A lot.” She dried his hand with a towel, inspected it again. “I think you’ll survive.”
“What have you found?” Malcolm said to her.
“You have to admit, it is very provocative. By the way, is it from Costa Rica?”
Keeping his voice neutral, Malcolm said, “Why do you say that?”
“Because there are all these rumors about unknown animals showing up in Costa Rica. And this is definitely an unknown animal, Ian.”
She led him out of the nursery, and into a small conference room. He dropped into a chair, resting his cane on the table. She lowered the lights, and clicked on a slide projector. “Okay. Here’s a close-up of your original material, before we began our examination. As you see, it consists of a fragment of animal tissue in a state of very advanced necrosis. The tissue measures four centimeters by six centimeters. Attached to it is a green plastic tag, measuring two centimeters square. Tissue cut by a knife, but not a very sharp one.”
Malcolm nodded.
“What’d you use, Ian, your pocketknife?”
“Something like that.”
“All right. Let’s deal with the tissue sample first.” The slide changed; Malcolm saw a microscopic view. “This is a gross histologic section through the superficial epidermis. Those patchy, ragged gaps are where the postmortem necrotic change has eroded the skin surface. But what is interesting is the arrangement of epidermal cells. You’ll notice the density of chromatophores, or pigment-bearing cells. In the cut section you see the difference between melanophores here, and allophores, here. The overall pattern is suggestive of a lacerta or amblyrhynchus.”
“You mean a lizard?” Malcolm said.
“Yes,” she said. “It looks like a lizard—though the picture is not entirely consistent.” She tapped the left side of the screen. “You see this one cell here, which has this slight rim, in section? We believe that’s muscle. The chromatophore could open and close. Meaning that this animal could change color, like a chameleon. And over here you see this large oval shape, with a pale center? That’s the pore of a femoral scent gland. There is a waxy substance in the center which we are still analyzing. But our presumption is that this animal was male, since only male lizards have femoral glands.”
“I see,” Malcolm said.
She changed the slide. Malcolm saw what looked like a close-up of a sponge. “Going deeper. Here we see the structure of the subcutaneous layers. Highly distorted, because of gas bubbles from the clostridia infection that bloated the animal. But you can get a sense of the vessels—see, one here—and another here—which are surrounded by smooth muscle fibers. This is not characteristic of lizards. In fact, the whole appearance of this slide is wrong for lizards, or reptiles of any sort.”
“You mean it looks warm-blooded.”
“Right,” Gelman said. “Not really mammalian, but perhaps avian. This could be, oh, I don’t know, a dead pelican. Something like that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Except no pelican has a skin like that.”
“I see,” Malcolm said.
“And there’s no feathers.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Now,” Gelman said, “we were able to extract a minute quantity of blood from the intra-arterial spaces. Not much, but enough to conduct a microscopic examination. Here it is.”
The slide changed again. He saw a jumble of cells, mostly red cells, and an occasional misshapen white cell. It was confusing to look at.
“This isn’t my area, Elizabeth,” he said.
“Well, I’ll just give you the highlights,” she said. “First of all, nucleated red cells. That’s characteristic of birds, not mammals. Seco
nd, rather atypical hemoglobin, differing in several base pairs from other lizards. Third, aberrant white-cell structure. We don’t have enough material to make a determination, but we suspect this animal has a highly unusual immune system.”
“Whatever that means,” Malcolm said, with a shrug.
“We don’t know, and the sample doesn’t give us enough to find out. By the way, can you get more?”
“I might be able to,” he said.
“Where, from Site B?”
Malcolm looked puzzled. “Site B?”
“Well, that’s what’s embossed on the tag.” She changed the slide. “I must say, Ian, this tag is very interesting. Here at the zoo, we tag animals all the time, and we’re familiar with all the ordinary commercial brands sold around the world. Nobody’s seen this tag before. Here it is, magnified ten times. The actual object is roughly the size of your thumbnail. Uniform plastic outer surface, attaches to the animal by a Teflon-coated, stainless-steel clip on the other side. It’s a rather small clip, of the kind used to tag infants. The animal you saw was adult?”
“Presumably.”
“So the tag was probably in place for a while, ever since the animal was young,” Gelman said. “Which makes sense, considering the degree of weathering. You’ll notice the pitting on the surface. That’s very unusual. This plastic is Duralon, the stuff they use to make football helmets. It’s extremely tough, and this pitting can’t have occurred through simple wear.”
“Then what?”
“It’s almost certainly a chemical reaction, such as exposure to acid, perhaps in aerosol form.”
“Like volcanic fumes?” Malcolm said.
“That could do it, particularly in view of what else we’ve learned. You’ll notice that the tag is rather thick—actually, it’s nine millimeters across. And it’s hollow.”