“Hollow?” Malcolm said, frowning.
“Yes. It contains an inner cavity. We didn’t want to open it, so we X-rayed it. Here.” The slide changed. Malcolm saw a jumble of white lines and boxes, inside the tag.
“There appears to be substantial corrosion, again perhaps from acid fumes. But there’s no question what this once was. It’s a radio tag, Ian. Which means that this unusual animal, this warm-blooded lizard or whatever it was, was tagged and raised by somebody from birth. And that’s the part that’s got people around here upset. Somebody’s raising these things. Do you know how that happened?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Malcolm said.
Elizabeth Gelman sighed. “You’re a lying son of a bitch.”
He held out his hand. “May I have my sample back?”
She said, “Ian. After all I’ve done for you.”
“The sample?”
“I think you owe me an explanation.”
“And I promise, you’ll have one. In about two weeks. I’ll buy dinner.”
She tossed a silver-foil package on the table. He picked it up, and slipped it in his pocket. “Thanks, Liz.” He got up to go. “I hate to run, but I’ve got to make a call right away.”
He started for the door, and she said, “By the way, how did it die, Ian? This animal.”
He paused. “Why do you ask?”
“Because, when we teased up the skin cells, we found a few foreign cells under the outer epidermal layer. Cells belonging to another animal.”
“Meaning what?”
“Well, it’s the typical picture you see when two lizards fight. They rub against each other. Cells get pushed under the superficial layer.”
“Yes,” he said. “There were signs of a fight on the carcass. The animal had been wounded.”
“And you should also know there were signs of chronic vasoconstriction in the arterial vessels. This animal was under stress, Ian. And not just from the fight that wounded it. That would have disappeared in early postmortem changes. I’m talking about chronic, continuous stress. Wherever this creature lived, its environment was extremely stressful and dangerous.”
“I see.”
“So. How come a tagged animal has such a stressful life?”
At the entrance to the zoo, he looked around to see if he was being followed, then stopped at a pay phone and dialed Levine. The machine picked up; Levine wasn’t there. Typical, Malcolm thought. Whenever you needed him he wasn’t there. Probably off trying to get his Ferrari out of impound again.
Malcolm hung up, and headed toward his car.
Thorne
“Thorne Mobile Field Systems” was stenciled in black lettering on a large rolling metal garage door, at the far end of the Industrial Park. There was a regular door to the left. Arby pushed the buzzer on a small box with a grille. A gruff voice said, “Go away.”
“It’s us, Dr. Thorne. Arby and Kelly.”
“Oh. Okay.”
There was a click as the door unlocked, and they walked inside. They found themselves in a large open shed. Workmen were making modifications on several vehicles; the air smelled of acetylene, engine oil, and fresh paint. Directly ahead Kelly saw a dark-green Ford Explorer with its roof cut open; two assistants stood on ladders, fitting a large flat panel of black solar cells over the top of the car. The hood of the Explorer was up, and the V-6 engine had been pulled out; workmen were now lowering a small, new engine in its place—it looked like a rounded shoebox, with the dull shine of aluminum alloy. Others were bringing the wide, flat rectangle of the Hughes converter that would be mounted on top of the motor.
Over to the right, she saw the two RV trailers that Thorne’s team had been working on for the last few weeks. They weren’t the usual trailers you saw people driving for the weekends. One was enormous and sleek, almost as big as a bus, and outfitted with living and sleeping quarters for four people, as well as all sorts of special scientific equipment. It was called “Challenger” and it had an unusual feature: once you parked it, the walls could slide outward, expanding the inside dimensions.
The Challenger trailer was made to connect up through a special accordion passageway to the second trailer, which was somewhat smaller, and was pulled by the first. This second RV contained laboratory equipment and some very high-tech refinements, though Kelly wasn’t sure exactly what. Right now, the second trailer was nearly hidden by the huge stream of sparks that spit out from a welder on the roof. Despite all the activity, the trailer looked mostly finished—although she could see people working inside, and all the upholstery, the chairs and seats, were lying around on the ground outside.
Thorne himself was standing in the middle of the room, shouting at the welder on the roof of the camper. “Come on, come on, we’ve got to be finished today! Eddie, let’s go.” He turned, shouted again, “No, no, no. Look at the plans! Henry: you can’t place that strut laterally. It has to be crosswise, for strength. Look at the plans!”
Doc Thorne was a gray-haired, barrel-chested man of fifty-five. Except for his wire-frame glasses, he looked as if he might be a retired prizefighter. It was hard for Kelly to imagine Thorne as a university professor; he was immensely strong, and in continuous movement. “Damn it, Henry! Henry! Henry, are you listening to me?”
Thorne swore again, and shook his fist in the air. He turned to the kids. “These guys,” he said. “They’re supposed to be helping me.” From the Explorer, there was a white-hot crack like lightning. The two men leaning into the hood jumped away, as a cloud of acrid smoke rose above the car. “What’d I tell you?” Thorne shouted. “Ground it! Ground it before you do anything! We’ve got serious voltages here, guys! You’re going to get fried if you’re not careful!”
He looked back at the kids and shook his head. “They just don’t get it,” he said. “That IUD is serious defense.”
“IUD?”
“Internal Ursine Deterrent—that’s what Levine calls it. It’s his idea of a joke,” Thorne said. “Actually, I developed this system a few years back for park rangers in Yellowstone, where bears break into trailers. Flip a switch, and you run ten thousand volts across the outer skin of the trailer. Wham-o! Takes the fight out of the biggest bear. But that kind of voltage’ll blow these guys right off the trailer. And then what? I get a workmen’s-compensation suit. For their stupidity.” He shook his head. “So? Where’s Levine?”
“We don’t know,” Arby said.
“What do you mean? Didn’t he teach your class today?”
“No, he didn’t come.”
Thorne swore again. “Well, I need him today, to go over the final revisions, before we do our field testing. He was supposed to be back today.”
“Back from where?” Kelly said.
“Oh, he went on one of his field trips,” Thorne said. “Very excited about it, before he went. I outfitted him myself—loaned him my latest field pack. Everything he could ever want in just forty-seven pounds. He liked it. Left last Monday, four days ago.”
“For where?”
“How should I know?” Thorne said. “He wouldn’t tell me. And I gave up asking. You know they’re all the same, now. Every scientist I deal with is secretive. But you can’t blame them. They’re all afraid of being ripped off, or sued. The modern world. Last year I built equipment for an expedition to the Amazon, we waterproofed it—which you’d want in the Amazon rain forest—soaking-wet electronics just don’t work—and the principal scientist was charged with misappropriating funds. For waterproofing! Some university bureaucrat said it was an ‘unnecessary expense.’ I’m telling you, it’s insane. Just insane. Henry—did you hear anything I said to you? Put it crosswise!”
Thorne strode across the room, waving his arms. The kids followed behind him.
“But now, look at this,” Thorne said. “For months we’ve been modifying his field vehicles, and finally we’re ready. He wants them light, I build them light. He wants them strong, I build them strong—light and strong both, why not, it’s
just impossible, what he’s asking for, but with enough titanium and honeycarbon composite, we’re doing it anyway. He wants it off petroleum base, and off the grid, and we do that, too. So finally he’s got what he wanted, an immensely strong portable laboratory to go where there’s no gasoline and no electricity. And now that it’s finished . . . I can’t believe it. He really didn’t show up for your class?”
“No,” Kelly said.
“So he’s disappeared,” Thorne said. “Wonderful. Perfect. What about our field test? We were going to take these vehicles out for a week, and put them through their paces.”
“I know,” Kelly said. “We got permission from our parents and everything, so we could go, too.”
“And now he’s not here,” Thorne fumed. “I suppose I should have expected it. These rich kids, they do whatever they want. A guy like Levine gives spoiled a bad name.”