Darryl Hollis didn’t think any of the equipment would help with their task. In a sweat-soaked red polo at the stern, he shook his head at the closest buoy. “Four miles down and surrounded by mountains? Sonar’s not gonna pick up a damn thing down there, Craig.”
Summers eyed the dotless crisscrossing gray formations on the sonar monitor. “We still gotta try. We might get something.”
Jason was suddenly depressed. “Why would we? If those rays actually make it into these waters, why would they ever come up again?”
“Because this island might not stay an island for long, Jason. Don’t you understand. GDV-4 isn’t in these waters right now, but that could change.”
“When?”
“Who knows. A day, a week, a year.”
“Where does that leave us, then? We can’t go down there after them, not at these depths. So what do we do here?”
Summers eyed the monitors patiently. “We wait.”
THREE DAYS later, the equipment turned up the reading everyone expected. The rays swam right into the virus-free island. But then some of them apparently left it. Over the next weeks, sporadic sonar and radar signals painted an unambiguous case. For reasons unknown, a small number of rays were repeatedly venturing to the surface. They nevertheless remained elusive. Given their extraordinary sensory abilities, their potential to hide in the canyons, and the island’s fifty-square-mile size, they were impossible to pin down. They successfully evaded Jason’s team for months.
It was near sunset in late April. In the waters offshore of Eureka, with a stunning line of ruby red on the horizon, Darryl shook his head. “I don’t get why these things are still coming to the surface at all. They’ve got all the food they need down there, they’re not feeding on gulls anymore”—Audubon reports indicated the birds had returned to the coastline en masse—“so why are they still coming up? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Yes it does,” Monique said. “They’re not coming up for food, Darryl. At this stage, I think it’s much more complicated than that.”
“How so?”
“I think some of these rays spent so much time at the surface they might be . . . linked to it in a way.”
“Linked to it?” Darryl knew that Monique had been spending a great deal of time with her old evolution texts lately. Apparently, she’d learned some things. “How do you mean?”
“Maybe accustomed is a better way to put it. Their muscles, their brains—everything about them is accustomed to the surface now. So they can’t just desert it. At least not entirely. Despite the food below, I think certain physical and even physiological changes might have occurred that will make disappearing down there an impossibility.”
“You almost make it sound like an addiction.”
“In a lot of ways, I think it is. For some of them anyway. They may have spent so much time up here that they can’t just quit it cold turkey.”
“How big do you figure these things are now?” Summers asked.
“Full-size adults. Fourteen feet across the wings, twelve feet long, four thousand pounds. Hang-glider size.”
“You been keeping Mr. Ackerman up on all of this, Jason?” Phil asked.
“I’ve left messages, Phil. I think he’s got other things on his mind right now.”
“Like what?”
“His businesses. They’re doing worse, and I don’t know how his capital raising’s been going.”
Phil nodded and went below deck. Darryl turned back to Jason. “Four thousand pounds?”
“If not more.”
“My God. Can you imagine seeing one of those things actually flying on land?”
“It could happen, Darryl.” Monique cleared her throat. “It really could. And much sooner than twenty million years. Maybe sooner than any of us could fathom.”
“Let’s say it did.” Jason noticed a glowing full moon was overhead now. “Where would they go, Monique?”
“Around here . . .” In the pale white light Monique looked around, noticing the trees onshore. These particular trees weren’t ordinary trees but coastal redwoods, towering evergreens the height of office buildings that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction. Monique knew that in their current location they were very close to several redwood parks: Redwood National Park, other private parks, and the biggest park of them all, Leonard State Park, a truly gargantuan forest that stretched right up to the Oregon border, nearly a hundred miles away. “I don’t know where they’d go, Jason. All I know is this area makes me nervous.”
“Why?”
“Because there aren’t any beaches here.”
“So . . . ?”
“So if another one of those things really did come to the land . . .” She looked around some more. “We’d have a hell of a time finding it.”
“Monique.” Phil Martino peered up the stairs from below deck. “FYI, I’m printing a really big e-mail that just came in for you.”
“Who’s it from?”
“A . . . professor, uh . . .”
She looked stunned. “Professor Benton Davis?”
“Yeah.”
“Son of a bitch, he got back to me.”
Jason turned. “Who’s Professor Benton Davis?”
She went to the stairs. “An evolutionary historian, the author of one of my textbooks . . .”
“Why’d you contact him?”
“If one of these things really does try going to the land, he can help us determine exactly where. . . .” She rushed below deck. “Where’s that e-mail, Phil?”
CHAPTER 40
THEY’D LEARNED to hover.
With the full moon lighting up the ocean plain, the four dozen most talented fliers continued to practice. Visible in silhouette, they were hang-glider size indeed, with mouths the size of a sports car’s front end and eyes as big as baseballs. A recent growth spurt of a thousand pounds had added powerful lean muscle to their wings and undersides, their rippling muscles now vastly faster and stronger.
Thousands of other animals hung just beneath the ocean’s surface. They were resting. They’d practiced flying for hours, but fatigue had set in and forced them to stop. They simply watched as the others darted in and out of the moonlight above.
The experts consistently moved with grace now. No frantic flapping, no violent splashes. Body movements were controlled, precise. Discontinuities in the airflow still occurred, but they were far less common, and even when they did happen; the resulting turbulence no longer sent them crashing into the ocean. The four dozen creatures had learned to regain continuity, to fly through turbulence just like an airplane or a bird. Wind wasn’t a problem either. By manipulating their flying muscles in literally thousands of subtle yet significant ways, they’d learned to use the wind to their advantage, to manage it, to massage it.
After months of practice, hovering, too, had become more than doable. Like the rest of the movements, it was almost natural now.
Almost. With the full moon shining down, the four dozen predators continued to practice. There were different types of hovering, and several focused on the most basic, hovering in the stationary position, beating their wings in rapid smooth movements and holding steady. Others hovered while simultaneously moving forward. Others still hovered straight up, rising like helicopters, then descended the same way. Half a dozen worked on arcing motions, rising up, moving forward, then descending again. A few dive-bombed, then came to gentle hovering stops just above the water. They all practiced something, over and over again.
All of them wanted to stop, however, to submerge and join their brethren in the water. None dared. Earlier, one had tried, and the one that had become their leader savagely killed it. They continued to practice.
As they did, those beneath the waves just watched them soaring like great, watery seagulls beneath the rippling moon. Then a mass of clouds drifted in front of the orb and threw the submerged creatures into darkness. Still none moved. They simply continued to watch. Even as everything faded to black.
“IS MONIQUE still reading that e-mail?”
It was night on the Expedition’s stern. Craig, Darryl, and Phil were crouched at the back wall, eyeing the monitors. Lisa was jotting something in her notebook. So no one answered Jason as he looked up from the laptop. “Darryl? Is Monique still reading that e-mail?”
“Oh.” Darryl thought about it. “She must be.” When he’d gone down earlier, she hadn’t even looked at him, just read page after page of information. “Hey, turn that up a little, will ya, Sloppy Joe?”
“You like this, Big Dog?” Craig increased the volume on his enormous boom box, playing a soulful female singer.
“Love it.”
Jason put the laptop down. “I like it, too.”
Craig was surprised. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.” Jason had just finished typing his notes for the Species Council report and, despite his curiosity about what Monique had found, actually felt like relaxing a little. He looked up at the sky. It was gorgeous, no clouds and a trillion stars.
“Jason.”
“Yeah.”
It was Darryl, at the stairs with Craig and Phil. “Phil’s gonna show us a new video game. Wanna come?”
“Oh, thanks, but I’m not really into video games, guys.”
They disappeared, and Jason looked back up at the sky. It was just stunning. He exhaled and tapped his feet to the music, wondering who the singer was. Then he noticed Lisa, still jotting in her notebook, and saw her feet were also tapping. He realized the two of them were alone.
“Nice night, huh?” She was looking up now too.
“Beautiful.”
She turned back to her notebook. And right there, Jason summoned up the courage to do something he’d been thinking about for quite a while. “Lisa.”
“Yeah.”
“Would you like to dance?”
She paused when Darryl and the guys started coming back up, but Darryl overhead and turned them around.
“I’d love to dance.”
They went to the middle of the deck.
Lisa raised an eyebrow when he put an arm around her waist.
“You probably had no idea I was such a smooth lothario,” he joked.
She laughed, maybe too hard, and he immediately felt self-conscious. “Or maybe you just thought I was some controlling, insecure marine biologist.”
She smiled. “You guessed it.”
“So the music’s pretty good, huh?”
“Changing the subject?”
“Not at all. What do you want to talk about?”
“Why you’re so controlling, of course.” She was still smiling. “Seriously, why do you micromanage everything, Jason? Why can’t you trust anybody?”
“Maybe I’m just wired that way.”
“I don’t buy that. It’s more than that.”
He looked around, at the gorgeous sky, the moon. “Come on, I thought we could try to relax here.”
“I didn’t think you could ever relax.”
“This isn’t helping.”
“Why can’t you trust anyone?”
He turned to the glistening ocean. “I’ve honestly never thought about it.”
“Tell me.” She gently turned his chin. “Please.”
He looked at her. “Maybe it started with all the Manta World problems.”
“OK.”
He looked at the stars. “You’ve got to understand, Lisa, people I’d known for years, people I’d trusted . . . They all suddenly stopped calling. Meetings got canceled, my tables at conferences ended up empty. . . .” He looked her in the eye. “They abandoned me and they never came back.” He shrugged. “After a while, you start to lose trust in people.”
“I see.” This was a real answer, and she almost hadn’t been expecting it. “I’m very sorry.”
“To be honest, for a long time, I felt you were letting me down too. You were so totally focused on your own research. Often at the expense of what the rest of us were trying to accomplish. I think I really resented that. It might be why we fought so much.”
She swallowed this bitter pill silently. “Do you still feel like that?”
He paused. “I haven’t felt that way for a while. About you, about anyone on the boat. It’s really been a great turnaround.”
“Then how come you still can’t trust us?”
“I can trust you.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Really, I—”
“Good things happen when you trust us, Jason. Look at what happened when you went to Princeton to talk to that Ban . . . Bar . . . Bardan . . .”
“Bandar Vishakeratne.”
“Look at what we did, what we found while you were away with him.”
“That’s because I trusted you. You just proved it.”
“You didn’t trust anybody, Jason You left because you had to. It’s not the same thing.”
He smiled. “It isn’t?”
“Jesus Christ, no, it isn—”
“You’re very pretty, Lisa. I don’t think I’ve ever told you that, but I’ve noticed. I’ve noticed every single day. Wrinkled clothes or not, you are beautiful.”
She hesitated. “Changing the subject again?”
They kept dancing, maybe a little closer.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“Thank you. I’ll think about what you said.”
As they continued he held her tighter . . . and it felt a little strange. On the one hand, physically holding Lisa Barton after all this time was odd, definitely odd, but on the other hand, it was also natural.
It was the same for Lisa, strange but natural, too.
The song ended, and they heard something. . . . It was the guys, starting up the stairs. Darryl poked his head up meekly, as if asking if it was OK to return. Jason waved him forward.
They walked up, and the grin on Phil’s face was bigger than the boat. “So what’s goin’ on, guys?”
Lisa was casual. “Just giving Jason some dance lessons. He only stepped on my feet three times.”
Craig nodded, not missing a beat. “The over-under was four.”
Darryl smiled softly. Before they’d left Baja, he never would have guessed it. Lisa and Jason. Seeing them together made him think of families, kids, and life beyond the Expedition. The Hollises had been discussing those subjects a great deal recently. Issues like which towns had the best public nursery schools and day cares, the possibility of buying a place, which banks offered the cheapest mortgages. It all depended on Monique getting pregnant, of course, but they hoped that would happen in the near future.
Just then Monique appeared on deck. Right away, Darryl saw she wasn’t in a romantic mood. She held a map of Northern California and a printout of the massive e-mail she’d been reading.
Jason couldn’t help but notice how serious she looked. “What’s up, Monique?”
“Every species that ever transitioned from one environment to another did it through a conduit. A specific place where the species was physically comfortable. The very first penguin left the air for the sea via a particular hole in an iceberg. The very first whales entered the ocean by way of a submerged tunnel. Archaeopteryxes, crocodiles, dolphins—every species that’s ever changed environments did it via their own special conduit. These rays are looking for theirs.”
Jason eyed the map. “Can we figure out where that is?”
“I already did.”
CHAPTER 42
“THIS IS where the virus-free island is. . . .”
In the living room below deck, Monique pointed to an open map on the table. “And this . . . is Redwood Inlet.”
On the map, it was a wide spoke of blue, flowing from deep in the green forest right into the ocean.
“It’s nearly a quarter of a mile wide and the perfect conduit to the land. It could give the rays direct access without ever having to leave the water.”
Jason eyed the spoke dubiously. “If they actually use it. No one knows
this ‘conduit’ theory actually played out, right, Monique? And even if it did, who’s to say it will happen here?”
“Agreed, this is guesswork, but it’s extremely educated guesswork. And common sense, too. Jason, if these animals actually want to explore the land, they’ll want to be as physically comfortable as possible. What better place than an inland river?”
“Wouldn’t the freshwater bother them?”
“It might, but nothing’s perfect.”
Jason paused, his eyes drifting farther north on the map. “Are there other ‘conduits’ we should consider? . . . Like these mountains further north.”
“Maybe.” Monique eyed the spoke. “But I think this creek’s a great start.”
“What do you want to do exactly?”
Monique paused, thinking it out. “Wire it. Sonar buoys in the water, radar guns on land. Get prepared in case they actually do go there.”
Jason nodded. “Let’s do it.”
Seconds later, they were on deck, about to head to the creek, when Lisa leaned into Jason and whispered, “See what happens when you trust people.”
Jason just smiled as the boat lurched forward.
“JASON, YOU got a second?!”
The Expedition was really moving now, violent wind rushing past even faster than the redwoods onshore.
Jason turned. “Sure, Phil, what’s up!”
“Can we go below deck?!”
They did, and it was much quieter. “I just wanted to see if the additional work I’ve been doing has been helpful.”
“Oh, very much so, Phil. I really appreciate it and think everyone else does too.”
“Excellent. Because I was wondering if I might become an official researcher like they are. On your reports and all that.”
“Oh.” Coincidentally, Jason had just written a cover page for his Species Council report, listing everyone except Phil as core researchers. “Mind if I ask you something, then?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you actually doing any research?”
Natural Selection Page 18
