Natural Selection

by Dave Freedman

  “Are all the juveniles are learning to fly, then?”

  Monique paused. “I don’t know if it’s supposed to work that way.”

  “If what’s supposed to work that way?”

  “Adaptation. I don’t think they all adapt at the same rate. When species change environments, they say it’s very gradual. And individual. When ancestral penguins deserted the air for the sea, it didn’t happen en masse. Two hundred thousand penguins didn’t just wake up one day and decide to jump into the water. But one penguin probably did. It went in before all the others. Then, whether it took days, months, or millions of years, at some point, another one followed. Then forty more followed, then a thousand, until eventually, the entire penguin species was swimming. According to the science books, the same phenomenon played out repeatedly over geological time. There was one Archaeopteryx that flew before all the others, one amphibian that crawled, one whale that swam. Maybe there will be one ray that flies. Every species has its pioneers.”

  “And its martyrs,” Jason said gravely.

  Monique stared down at the cut-open ray, a strange look in her eyes. “So what? If there are martyrs, Jason, so be it. They died for a worthy cause. Everyone’s always said mantas were an evolutionary mistake, that they swim just like birds fly and never should have evolved in the water in the first place. Maybe this creature is nature’s first shot at correcting that. I mean, do you realize what we have here? This animal, this species, is literally evolutionary history in the making.” She touched the dead ray, newly amazed.

  “Charles Darwin himself dreamed of seeing something like this. When we talk about all the species that evolved in this planet’s history—the amphibians, birds, mammals, man himself—they were all just tiny pieces of evolution, incremental improvements along the way. But this ray—this ray is evolution. It’s not just a new species, a new genus, even a new family. There has never been anything like this animal ever. It’s a new order.” She looked at all of them, her eyes blazing. “We just discovered a new order.”

  “So how are we going to find them again?” Phil said.

  Monique shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  The room was silent. Neither did anyone else.

  “I know.”

  They all turned. It was Lisa. She was staring at a fistful of fax pages.

  CHAPTER 37

  “WHAT IS that?”

  Holding the papers, Lisa reentered the lab. “A report from the Audubon Society. A report about seagulls going missing up and down the California coast. I called the Audubon people a while ago, when I thought GDV-4 might have gone airborne, but clearly something else is happening to the gulls. . . .” She eyed the papers. “It’s like a plague moving up the coast, and it’s followed the rays’ migration exactly, from Clarita Island right up to here in Point Reyes. They’re feeding on the seagulls en masse.”

  Jason drummed his fingers. “The Audubon people don’t think it’s anything else?”

  “They have no idea what it is.”

  “It’s the rays.” Darryl eyed the crushed birds. “I’m telling you, they’ve got to be flying.”

  Jason could almost dream it. “Maybe they really are.”

  “You don’t actually believe that, do you?” This was from a calm, rational voice behind them.

  They all turned. It was Harry Ackerman, near the entrance, in a surprisingly cheap-looking gray suit, with a laptop slung over his shoulder.

  “Harry, what a surprise.” Jason walked over to him.

  “Nice to see you, Jason. My assistant mentioned you were up here.” They shook hands.

  “What brings you to the neighborhood?”

  “Actually, I’ve had more . . . challenges with my businesses. So I scheduled meetings in San Francisco and the Valley to raise capital.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s nothing dire—I assure you.” The voice was as cool as ever. “I thought I’d stop by. Oh, excuse me. . . .” He grabbed his laptop just before it fell from his shoulder.

  “You should be careful with that, Mr. Ackerman,” Phil warned.

  “Is that new, Harry?” Jason tried to see the machine. “I’m tired of borrowing Phil’s all the time, so I’ve been thinking about buying one myself. What kind is that?”

  “Toshiba. I don’t know computers at all, but I was told this is a good one.”

  Phil nodded. “Are you backing it up, Mr. Ackerman?”

  “On rewritable CDs.” Ackerman said the words almost officially, as if it was his first time using them in a sentence. Then he noticed the cut-up ray and forgot about the computer. “This is nothing short of a miracle, a true evolutionary miracle.” He thought of how much it would impress the bigwigs on the black-tie charity circuit—a prize so vastly superior to the traditional trophies of success that it would smack the smug looks off their faces faster than they could cash out a stock option. But only if they actually knew about it. Ackerman was tired of the project being sidetracked by what he regarded as unrealistic scientific speculation. “Tell me, Jason, do you think this animal actually flying is realistic?”

  “We don’t know, Harry. There’s evidence it might have flown, so—”

  “Evidence? You consider crawling a few feet from shore and eating some birds as they float on the ocean evidence of flying?”

  Exactly what I said, Summers thought.

  Jason gave Ackerman a look. “It’s just a possibility at this stage.”

  Ackerman chuckled. “Who knows? Maybe they really will fly. In twenty million years. Right, Phil?”

  Phil Martino suddenly laughed so hard he could barely speak. Watching him, Lisa and the triumvirate were genuinely amused. But Jason looked like he was going to blow a gasket. Phil was laughing in his face, and in front of the boss.

  Ackerman discreetly leaned into Phil’s ear. “OK, calm down.”

  “Oh.” Suddenly aware of Jason’s anger, Phil shut up. “Sorry, Jason. I don’t know why I found that so funny.”

  Jason relaxed. “Yeah, sure, Phil. No problem.” It was forgotten.

  “Either way,” Ackerman continued, “your progress has been spectacular. All of you. I just wanted to see this specimen in person and say good luck.” He quickly shook everyone’s hand, checked to make sure his laptop was still slung over his shoulder, then went outside to a waiting limo.

  Through a filthy window, Monique watched as the car pulled away. “So what’s next?”

  Whether it was the result of being the butt of Ackerman’s joke or not, Jason suddenly looked extra motivated. “What’s next is we’re going to find another one of these things. . . .” He started pacing. “We’ll set up more sonar. And radar, too. We have the equipment, so we’ll put it onshore in case another tries flying to land. And we’ll track the seagulls. These rays will have massive appetites, could put on two hundred pounds a week, so we’ll follow the birds.” He continued to pace. “Lisa, you said some gulls went missing right here in Point Reyes?”

  “Yes, but there’s another data point here I didn’t see before. . . .” She was looking at the report’s last page, at something handwritten and initialed on the very bottom. “Apparently some more birds went missing just”—she checked her watch—“two hours ago.”

  Jason halted. “Two hours? Where?”

  “Bodega Bay.” It was the sight of a well-known Hitchcock movie, thirty-odd miles north of their current position.

  “Let’s get up there.” Jason glared at all of them. “We’re gonna find another one of these things. Whether it flies in twenty million years or tomorrow.”

  “NOTHING HERE.”

  They were a mile offshore of an ugly Bodega Bay beach of mud and rock. They’d set up sonar buoys at sea, tripod-mounted radar guns on land, and kept their eyes open.

  Two monitors were set up on the Expedition’s back wall, and Craig shook his head at them. “What do you want to do, Jason?”

  Jason scanned the ugly terrain, the pathetic little trees behind the beach, th
e tiny breaking waves. “The rays were just here . . . they couldn’t have gone far.” He looked around some more. “We’ll wait.”

  THEY DID wait. One week, then five. There was no sign of the rays.

  It was a cold, drizzling December night, and they were half a mile off a desolate Schooner Gulch state beach. In gray gym shorts and grungy flip-flops, Craig was crouched beneath a blue tarp covering the monitors. There were still no readings of any kind. “They’ve gotta still be swimming the canyons.”

  Behind him in a hooded yellow slicker, Lisa looked around. “How big do you think they are now, Jason?”

  “Big. Fifteen hundred pounds, maybe eight feet across the wings.”

  Summers stood. “I wonder if they’re still trying to fly.”

  “According to the Audubon reports, they are.” Lisa had been reading them regularly. Seagulls had continued to disappear in vast quantities right up to their current location.

  “Lisa, those birds could be missing for other reasons entirely.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like . . . maybe GDV-4 really did go airborne. Or maybe some other virus. It just doesn’t make sense that animals that big would still be feeding on seagulls.”

  “It makes perfect sense.” Monique walked forward in her own slicker.

  “How do you figure?”

  “Because adapting to hunt yet another type of prey is hard as hell. Now that these rays have learned to successfully hunt seagulls, they’ll feed on them for as long as they possibly can. If they’re putting on as much weight as Jason thinks, they must have enormous appetites. They can’t afford to experiment right now.”

  Lisa eyed the desolate seascape. “So where are they, then? If they’re still eating seagulls, how are we not picking them up?” She eyed the monitors. “Is this equipment still working, Craig?”

  “It’s working fine. But it’s not infallible. Sonar and radar signals don’t cut through land, so if the rays are only coming up where there’s a bend in the coastline or where we don’t have a buoy or tripod . . . we wouldn’t pick them up and—” His phone started ringing and he checked the ID. “York. Excuse me.”

  As Craig went below deck, Lisa shook her head. “But how are they consistently finding the exact locations where we can’t detect them? Dumb luck?”

  “I don’t think it’s luck at all.” Monique scanned the dark waters suspiciously. “They’ve got to be evading us intentionally.”

  “How the hell are they doing that?”

  “The same way they caught the dolphin, Lisa. Only now they’re using those senses defensively.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You don’t think these things know something’s in the ocean tracking them?”

  The idea took Lisa aback. “I couldn’t say for sure.”

  “They know, and they’re outsmarting us. They’ve been outsmarting us from the get-go.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  “We’ve got to outsmart them for a change. I just don’t know how.”

  Neither did anyone else. They were all silent. Until Summers returned.

  “Any idea how we can find these rays, Craig?” Jason asked.

  Summers looked astounded by his own answer. “Actually . . . yes. I know where they’re going. I know where they’ve been going this entire time. They have a destination; they’ve been migrating to it all along.”

  “What is it?”

  Craig looked up at the rainy sky. “I’ve got a map downstairs. Let me show you.”

  CHAPTER 38

  THEY’D LOST thousands of pounds of weight and become emaciated skeletons on the verge of death. They lay flat on the dark sand four miles below the surface, their thick leathery skins too big for their bodies, excess folds everywhere, the result of having eaten nothing.

  They were the only members of the older generation still alive. Within just the past hour, thousands more had simply closed their eyes and died right here. The move north would continue. It had to. But only when they had the strength to lift themselves up off the seafloor.

  The young adults, they knew, were at the surface again. Their elders tried tuning to them, but they couldn’t. Their sensory organs weren’t functioning properly. For these members of the species, the darkness was dark now. They saw nothing.

  FOUR MILES above, under the drizzling night sky, the rays shot out of the sea, flapping and gliding in every direction.

  They were a hundred yards off of a desolate, evergreen-lined shore. While this part of the coastline looked just like any other, not special in any way, it was very special indeed. The rays knew it was safe here. During their migration, they’d repeatedly detected sonars in the ocean, not from whales, and not from dolphins, either, but from something, and always pointed toward them. As predators, the rays instinctively understood that they were being tracked. Over and over, they had evaded the strange signals with little effort at all: simply by swimming the canyons, then returning to the surface after a bend in the shoreline. They’d just done it again. No sonar, including their own, could pass through land.

  The juveniles were now young adults. Fully exposed in the drizzling night air, they revealed how much they’d grown. They were now enormous 1,500-pound creatures, eight feet across the wings and six feet lengthwise, with deep muscular middles, huge mouths, and pupilless, jet-black eyes the size of squash balls.

  An enormous fleet of out-of-control airborne bumper cars, they zoomed everywhere. The differences in flying abilities were dramatic now. While no two animals flew exactly the same way—there were literally millions of subtle, often imperceptible differences—four broad skill levels existed.

  The first group comprised those creatures whose increase in body weight had caused great problems. While these animals still thundered out of the ocean successfully, they never climbed higher than fifteen feet. As they’d grown larger, they could no longer properly control their rippling muscles to achieve true lift. Catching unsuspecting gulls bobbing on the seas was easy, but that was all.

  The second group flew considerably better. By mimicking a seagull’s diagonal liftoff exactly, they ascended just like one, picking up speed horizontally and gradually climbing. But unable to manipulate their rippling muscles for the subtle changes in air density, this group tended to experience lift problems above fifty feet. Discontinuities in the airflow resulted and consistently caused crashing falls.

  The third group was more advanced, capable of performing many of the basic flying motions successfully: liftoff, flapping, gliding, turning, and dipping. More sophisticated maneuvers like soaring, diving, and flying across wind currents were beyond their skills, but they continued to practice and improve.

  The fourth group, composed of just four dozen animals, had successfully learned virtually every type of movement there was: flapping, gliding, turning, diving, soaring, angling, flying into currents, with currents, across currents, and skid landing. While not yet graceful, every movement was consistently achievable.

  With one exception. Hovering. Even the most talented of this group couldn’t master it. Every time they attempted to hover, beating their wings superfast above the water’s surface, they lost control and fell in with awkward crashes. The four dozen animals continued to practice, however. They were particularly conservative, even for their species, and knew they weren’t ready for the land.

  Suddenly they detected movement far below the surface. It was the adults, resuming their quest.

  These animals would follow, but not yet. As the drizzle turned into a full rain, they zoomed in every direction. As close as they now were to the looming forest, they were instinctively tuning toward it. Earlier in their development, their sensory organs hadn’t functioned properly in the air, but as they’d grown, their organs had matured and adjusted to the new medium. As a result, the prey from the land was calling them. Softly but very persistent. They’d detected only tiny traces earlier, but now they knew with absolute certainty. Vast amounts of food existed on th
e land.

  Long ago, one of them had attempted to find that food. A single juvenile ray had flown inland but not made it past a hundred and fifty feet. It had long since died.

  The others were more cautious, however. Some were so cautious they’d never be ready for such a journey. But others might. The land possessed a variety of different signals, almost all of them unknown. One signal was familiar, however. From a particular type of prey these rays had tasted once before, a species that had been easy to hunt in the water and perhaps would be easy to hunt on the land as well. They continued to practice.

  CHAPTER 39

  “WHAT THE hell is that?”

  It was still raining and dark, but Darryl had spotted something in the distance. It was silhouetted against the dreary night sky. Something large, dark, and flying. He squinted. “Oh.” An airplane.

  Monique shook her head. “Let’s get downstairs and see what Craig has to say.”

  They joined the others in the galley. Around a little white table next to the fridge, Summers was already speaking. “They’ve been migrating to it from day one. It’s an island in the depths.”

  “An island?” Jason had no idea what this meant.

  “Correct. One spot, one relatively small area. Filled with every type of sea life imaginable and apparently without a trace of GDV-4.” He pointed to an open map on the table. “It’s four miles down and surrounded by mountains that York thinks have effectively blocked out the virus.”

  Jason leaned into the map. “Where is it exactly?”

  “Off the coast of Eureka. About fifty square miles. If the rays actually get there, they’ll find all the food they need.”

  Darryl nodded. “So how far do they have to go?”

  “At the current pace, they’re days away at least. Jason, we can beat them up there and set up the equipment.”

  “Then let’s do that. Right now.”

  BY THE next afternoon they’d finished. Sonar buoys covered the deep-sea island from the water and radar guns, staked into nearby shorelines, covered the land.