Natural Selection

by Dave Freedman

  The same basic process had led to the evolution of every organ in every animal ever known. While the variations among ancestral giraffe populations resulted in the selection of long necks, similar variations among other species in other environments led to completely different adaptations: the tiger’s fanged mouth, the elephant’s long trunk, the cougar’s powerful legs. They’d all evolved out of necessity, to help a given species survive in its particular environment, and each variation demonstrated the unambiguous power of natural selection.

  Jason stuck his index finger into the tray and ran it along the brain’s eighteen-inch-long surface.

  “So why did this brain evolve flat?”

  “Good question. The short answer is to make these rays of yours hard to kill.”

  “A flat brain makes them hard to kill?”

  “Yes,” the doctor said matter-of-factly, leaning back on his sofa. “That’s a pro. But there are cons. The major one is that the brain itself is less efficient than it would be if it were rounded. You see, with a flat brain, there are fewer synapses”—connections—“between brain cells, which makes the brain work harder to process the same amount of information.”

  The human brain contained 14 billion cells and trillions of connecting synapses. A spherical shape was the most efficient at supporting such a complex network because it allowed multiple connections.

  “I’m not saying this animal is stupid, mind you. No, far from it. Not with a brain this big. Even flat, this animal is still very smart. It’s just not as smart as it could be.”

  “Thank God for that.” Jason was beginning to wonder if he actually wanted to find one of the rays alive. “And what makes it hard to kill?”

  “Three factors. First, the cerebral cortex is spread over a large surface area and is far less susceptible to damage than normal. Second, like the brains of many predators, the pain center here is tiny; actually this one borders on nonexistent.” The pain center is what informs an animal when it is hurt, and in effect, tells it to slow down and take care of itself. “Humans have very large pain centers. If we get the slightest pinprick, we know something’s wrong. But this animal effectively doesn’t feel pain at all and it won’t slow down for anything. It will literally do whatever comes naturally to it right up until it dies. And in the case of a predator, that means hunting.

  “Third, this brain has what I call spread sensory systems. Spread sensory systems exist to a limited extent in all brains, but they are here in abundance.”

  “Spread sensory systems.” Jason had never heard the term before.

  “Yes. I suppose you could think of them as the neurological equivalent of emergency generators. They provide the brain with a series of ‘support cells’ that effectively act as backups for every function in the body. It is these backups that make this animal hard to kill. All brains, this one included, have specialized cortexes—motor, visual, auditory, et cetera, et cetera. These cortexes act as control centers for particular body functions. So normally, when a given cortex is damaged, the body function it supports ceases operating and the whole body dies.

  “For example, if a person were shot in the head, and the breathing cortex was damaged, all the body’s respiratory functions would immediately stop—even if the respiratory organs themselves were entirely functional. And even if the breathing cortex weren’t damaged, if the bullet entered here”—he pointed at a spot on his own head—“it would rip through the left and right frontal lobes, the parietal, the occipital, the temporal regions; it would rip through bloody everything, and do critical damage to other important cortexes. By the time it was done, the heart, the immune system, and every other function the body needed to live would instantaneously stop and the body would die.”

  Jason nodded. “OK.”

  “But”—Vishakeratne held up a finger—“with a brain that has spread sensory systems and is flat, a single bullet would not irreparably damage any individual control center. The destruction would be far, far less.”

  Jason’s brow crinkled up tensely—he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “How much less? How many ‘backups’ are there?” Two or three, he imagined.

  “Oh, I don’t know exactly.” The neurologist huffed. “I’d imagine . . . thousands.”

  “Thousands? Are you saying it would take thousands of bullets to kill one of these animals?”

  “No, I’m not saying that.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Look.” Veesh shaped his fingers into a gun and aimed the “barrel” at the brain in the tray. “I’m saying if I placed a gun right here and fired, this animal wouldn’t die. A small part of one cortex would be slightly damaged, but the bulk of the brain, and the bulk of the animal’s body functions, would continue to operate normally. I doubt if it would even be seriously wounded.”

  Jason almost laughed. “Are you saying it’s indestructible? That it can take an infinite number of bullets?”

  “No, of course not. I have no idea how many bullets it could take, just that it would be more than a few. Surviving a bullet to the head isn’t nearly as uncommon as you might think. I’ve seen Tanzanian bobcats take four or five and survive.”

  Decades earlier, Vishakeratne had performed an extensive twenty-two-week study on the famously bullet-tolerant predators. In a well-known report, he linked their phenomenal ability to survive “severe head and brain injuries caused by gunshots” to what he dubbed “unusually shaped cerebral cortexes that have a tendency to be flat.”

  “Something else is significant here. This is a mature brain.”

  “As opposed to immature?”

  “Precisely. A brain’s maturity refers to its evolutionary age. And this brain has been around for a very long time. Humans actually have an immature brain, only four million years old, which, compared with the developmental period of other large brains—the dolphin’s, whale’s—is shorter than a twenty-four-hour flu.”

  Vishakeratne carefully lifted the entire brain out of the water with his bare hands, little drops falling onto the glass. “You see, there are no cavity suppressions here.”

  Unlike mature brains, immature brains show evidence of having been compressed, as if they’d been squeezed into a container too small for them. Cavity suppressions, which are small dents in a brain’s surface, appear when a brain literally outgrows the skull it is encased in. The human brain, for example, has evolved so quickly that it often folds on top of itself and actually appears squashed when it is removed from a skull.

  The scientist returned the gray mass to the water. “This is a very mature brain, and that fact is not trivial. It indicates these rays have been fully functional predators for much longer than man has even been alive. I know you must be very anxious to find one of these animals, and I wish you luck in doing that, but I can’t emphasize this point enough. These rays know how to hunt; they know how to kill. Believe me, in any confrontation, they’ll know more about you than you know about them. So if you do find one, you should be very, very careful with it.”

  Andrea’s voice rang out from an intercom. “Dr. Vishakeratne, your staff meeting is in fifteen minutes.”

  “Oh.” The man checked a $6,000 Rolex. Fifteen minutes indeed. Despite his stature, Vishakeratne insisted on attending monthly staff meetings. “You’re going to have to excuse me now.” He stood. “But stay on top of this, and please keep me abreast of what happens.”

  Jason quickly rose from his sofa. “I will. If it’s not too much trouble, would you mind e-mailing me your findings?” He handed him his card.

  “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 c
haracter 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?

  CHAPTER 34

  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?

  Monique stood. “You ever heard of Fritz Bedecker, Jason?”

  “That German ichthyologist with all the crazy theories?”

  “We think one of them might not have been so crazy.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Did you know he had a theory about underwater air geysers in the depths?”

  Jason paused. “No, I didn’t.”

  Monique explained
. Bedecker, a German ichthyologist and oceanographer—as well as a raging alcoholic—had come out with a series of controversial theories during his heyday in 1899. The most inflammatory of these was that prehistoric amphibians had evolved lungs not as a result of spending increasing amounts of time on land but rather in the depths of the ocean. The deep sea, Bedecker had argued, was composed of a worldwide network of what he called “underwater air geysers.” It was these air geysers, not the land, that had led to the evolution of the amphibian’s lung. It was only after the lung had fully evolved in the water that the very first amphibian crawled onto the land.

  In 1899 the notion of deep sea air geysers was considered utterly ridiculous. But late in the twentieth century, that perception changed dramatically with the famous 1977 discovery in the Galápagos islands of a sea vent emitting pure hydrogen-sulfide gas. While hydrogen-sulfide geysers were very different from air geysers, the realization that gas vents of any kind were present in the depths was shocking, and caused many geologists to wonder aloud if somehow air geysers might, in fact, exist as well. To date, an actual deep-sea air geyser still hadn’t been discovered, but in 1992, the theory achieved global credibility when world-renowned Harvard geologist Milton Thornberg said that air geysers not only could exist in the depths, but also that they had to.

  Thornberg’s reasoning could not have been more simple. It is a known fact that 49 percent of the earth’s crust is made of solidified oxygen. With a nine-thousand-degree molten core beneath it, it is perfectly reasonable that the solid oxygen could be superheated, turned into liquid, then gas, and be emitted straight into the depths of the ocean, much like an underwater volcano. Thornberg further explained that the reason these underwater air geysers have never been discovered is that they move around. Created by a volatile molten core that is constantly bubbling and changing, they are never in the same place for more than weeks at a time. And since they are also several miles below the surface, in blackened waters with crushing pressures, they are literally impossible to locate. But air geysers are absolutely real, Thornberg assured the world. And if so, Bedecker was right. The lungfish had evolved naturally as a result—and so could other species.