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“We could be getting parasite DNA in the sample,” Nell told them. “Can you tell the difference?”

“Yep, we can distinguish samples,” one of the technicians answered.

Working in biological safety hoods along the other side of Section One, the technicians processed the samples, pipetting the blood and tissue and homogenizing them, adding reagents, mixing, centrifuging, decanting, heating, cooling, and finally pipetting the processed material onto other plates or into specimen tubes.

“My God, this is heaven, Otto,” Nell said, admiring the array of machines on the other side of the lab. “Do you know how many weeks it would have taken me to do this work as an undergrad at Caltech?”

“Yeah, this baby’s got more toys than a lab geek’s wet dream.” Quentin smiled proudly.

“I can still remember when I had to pour my own electrophoretic gels for molecular samples. Now it’s as easy as putting a piece of bread in a toaster.”

“Well, more like making cinnamon toast,” a technician remarked drily.

Nell laughed. “We even had to generate our own taq polymerase.”

“Give me a break,” Andy pleaded.

“I’m with you, Nell,” Quentin said. “You youngsters don’t appreciate how amazing these instruments are. God, Andy, when are you going to learn some molecular biology, dude? You’re more of a dinosaur than I am. PCR didn’t even exist when I was in college, but I saw where things were heading, and learned this stuff before I got left behind.”

“Well,
somebody
has to keep their feet in the
mud,”
Andy snapped, defensively.

“Bravo,” Nell said. “We need both right now, Andy—field naturalists and gene jocks. That machine Steve is using—hi, Steve!— is a Bioanalyzer. It will tell us in a few seconds how pure our RNA extractions are and how much RNA we got in each sample. It’s a microscopic electrophoresis unit and gel scanner that examines all the samples on those little chips that look like dominoes.

Each one of those dots is equivalent to a whole electrophoretic gel from the old days, when I was in my teens.” She pointed. “And when an RNA sample is put into the thermocycler right there, it gets reverse transcribed, making our cDNA library, and in the same tube it does the PCR. That amplifies the cDNA into thousands of copies so we can sequence the genes in this auto-sequencer right there, or test it in that micro-array machine over there.”

“You lost me at Parcheesi,” Andy grumbled.

“Dominoes,” Quentin teased.

“It’s actually pretty simple, Andy,” Nell told him. Her eyes glowed with excitement. “All living cells have RNA, which is a message transcribed from the genes in the DNA. So when we run the reactions backwards with an enzyme called reverse transcriptase, we make clones of the DNA—the cDNA—from the RNA! Then, to tell what these critters are related to, we can either run the cDNA on micro-array chips, which is really fast, sequence the DNA, or else isolate, clone, and sequence the actual genes from the cell’s DNA, which takes a little longer. You could do any of this yourself after a couple hours of training, Andy.”

“I learned the theory in my Bio courses,” he said. “I never used all these machines. I didn’t think normal people could work these things.”

“Who said you’re normal?” Quentin taunted.

“Andy,” Nell said, preempting his umbrage, “these guys in the lab coats wouldn’t know an arthropod from an anthropoid unless you handed them a gene sequence. No offense, guys.”

Otto cleared his throat. “Can we get back to the dissection while the gene jocks do their thing?”

“Carve that turkey!” Quentin commanded in agreement.

Nell swiveled on her stool and put her pencil to a fresh page on her sketchpad as Otto turned the animal onto its back and rinsed it again.

“The fur on the ventral surface of the specimen is light tan in color. The specimen appears to have an orifice on the central underbelly, probably for waste excretion, between the central legs.

Between the hind legs there appear to be sexual organs…both a penislike structure and what may be a vaginal opening.”

“Hermaphrodites?” Nell said.

“If so, there goes the arthropod theory,” Otto said. “No arthropods are hermaphroditic—”

“Right,” Quentin interrupted. “But many phyla of animals have at least a few groups that are hermaphrodites. Worms and snails, for example.”

“Barnacles are hermaphrodites,” Andy said. “They’re arthropods.”

“Barnacles are arthropods?” Otto asked.

“Yep.”

“Damn. That’s weird.”

“How do we know how long this ecosystem’s been isolated?” Nell intervened. “It’s at least theoretically possible that it’s had a very long time to evolve. I would say it’s probable, given what we are looking at, guys. I mean, come on.”

“Is this island radioactive?” Andy asked.

“Nope.” Quentin shook his head. “These aren’t just mutants.”

“Something like this must have diverged a long time ago, then,” Otto agreed. “Hell, that’s a given. But not from arthropods.”

“Well, how the hell else do you explain it, then, Otto?” Quentin was scowling again. “You think this thing came from Mars?”

“I don’t know where this thing came from, Quentin!” Otto retorted sharply. “And neither do
you
right now, OK?”

“Let’s take a look at the internal organs,” Nell interposed gently.

“OK.” Otto looked back up at the screen and lowered his shaking scalpel. “I’m starting the incision from the central orifice and cutting back toward the specimen’s tail.”

“God, I hope it’s dead,” Andy said.

“Stop saying that!” Otto snapped as he sliced through the thin but tough skin and laid open the animal’s belly.

“Hey!” someone shouted.

Everyone jumped and glared at the technician, who was pointing to the bubble window at the end of the lab.

But all they could see was the edge of the forest.

“Sorry! I could swear I just saw something looking at us out there. Big as a man, hanging right on that tree there. Fuck, it must have been a reflection or something. It had lots of arms and it looked like it was spying on us. Sorry. But I
swear!
It was there. Really.”

“Christ, Todd!” Quentin groaned. “Lay off the caffeine, OK?”

“I said I was sorry! But, Jesus, I saw it plain as day and never took my eyes off it and then it was just
gone
, man.”

Otto sighed and turned back to his work. “OK. Continuing the incision, there is an outer sheath or integument that is translucent grayish white, tinged blue. Making an incision through this sheath…it seems to be made of micro-hydrostatic tubes that release clear liquid when severed. Under this are distinct muscle bands running to various points throughout the body… they are especially dense at the bases of the appendages. And look at this here…we’ve got branching tracheal tubes extending into all the muscles.” He cleared his throat. “And each of them does connect with the integument.”

“It’s just like the gas exchange system of insects and spiders,” Andy intoned.

Otto nodded. “And, yes… there is a spiracle on the outer body surface for each trachea. The fur must have covered them.”

“Wow, so those trachea deliver the oxygen directly to the muscles from the outside,” Andy said. “If they’re that extensive it may be what allows such big animals to be so active.”

“Look how the spiracles line the sides of the body in neat rows.” Quentin pointed at the close-up on the screen over the specimen chamber. “And those rows extend right up along the legs…”

“Providing oxygen directly to the muscles.” Andy finished his sentence.

Otto cleared his throat again. “And, OK—immediately underneath the layers of muscles and tracheae are two green glands, each with a bladder that is light gray in color—”

“Looks like it has a urethra,” Andy said, thankful to see something familiar.

“Yes. These glands appear to empty at the joint at the base of the legs.” Otto attached retractors to hold open the incision. He suctioned some pooling, syrupy blood.

“Coxal glands, just like king crabs,” Andy sang.

“Spiders have coxal glands, too,” Quentin chimed.

“OK,” Otto said, irritated. “I’m now cutting anteriad from the central orifice. I’m exposing the rest of a wide, thin bone ring or cylinder that has an aperture in the ventral side. The spiked foreleglike appendages are attached to socketlike shoulders in each side of this bony structure.”

“Looks like a segment of a lobster tail.”

“But internal?” Otto scoffed. “An
internal
exoskeleton? It doesn’t make sense…”

“Does anything here make sense?” Nell said. “We’re segmented creatures, too, Otto, just a few steps removed from arthropods. Do
we
make sense?”

“It’s a lot of steps.” Otto shook his head stubbornly. “How could it molt?”

“Maybe the old shell dissolves or is absorbed internally as the new one hardens,” Nell suggested. “Surgeons use dissolving sutures that melt internally. Maybe they have a similar solution.”

“A lot of marine crustaceans eat their own shed shells to reuse the minerals,” Andy concurred.

“All right, noted,” Otto said. But he still didn’t sound as if he agreed with them. “Continuing the incision down the belly from the mantislike arms and the forelegs. OK, there’s a lot of fluid here! Suctioning that away…we see a series of six branching stomachs filled with what appear to be freshly eaten pieces of prey. Each stomach is segmented by a kind of bony grinding mechanism, like a bird’s gizzard—”

“Or a crustacean’s gastric mill,” Andy said.

“—which must masticate the food into finer consistency as it is passed along. Each of these stomachs is connected to a glandular mass—”

“That looks like a crustacean hepatopancreas,” said Andy.

“—and each also is connected to its own short intestine,” finished Otto.

“If any one of its digestive tracts is damaged it could shut it down and use the other five.” Nell had stopped sketching and was staring in fascination at the creature.

“Yeah, it would seem so.” Otto nodded, skeptically.

“All of the intestines empty into what appears to be a cloaca,” Quentin murmured.

“Crustaceans don’t have cloacae,” Otto said.

“Yeah,” Andy agreed. “Technically.”

“And look, the urethra from each kidney empties into the cloaca, too. And what’s that mass that looks like angel hair pasta there?” Quentin said.

“It looks like Malpighian tubules like insects and spiders have. Look how they all connect to the same region of the cloaca,” said Andy.

“That’s impossible, crustaceans don’t have Malpighian tubules,” said Quentin.

“Exactly,” Otto said.

“Both of you have to start thinking outside your comfort zone,” Nell said as she filled in a sketch. “These creatures would have had to have diverged from other crustaceans hundreds of millions of years ago, remember.”

Otto shook his head and continued. “OK, the cloaca appears to extend through a hole in the bony ring and discharge waste through the anus in the middle of the ventral side of the body. Upon cutting open the cloaca, it appears to contain solid white waste, which we will collect momentarily for analysis.”

“It must crap in mid-leap when the tail is extended back, or else things would get pretty messy.” Andy grinned.

“Maybe it uses the muscular contraction of leaping to expel the waste,” Quentin said. “Projectile crap.”

“Looks like uric acid crystals.” Otto probed the material with his scalpel. “Bird poop.”

“You mean bird pee,” Quentin said.

“Yuck,” Andy said.

“Hey, guys! We got our first RNA results,” one of the technicians called out.

All turned to the technician. He pointed to a series of peaks in what looked like an EKG readout on a monitor over the molecular toasters.

“Oh shit,” Steve muttered as he scanned the graph. “Uh, sorry, folks. Looks like we’ll have to run it again. False alarm.”

“Why?” Otto asked.

“These results don’t make any sense.”

“There must be some sort of contamination in the system,” the lead technician confirmed.

“Why don’t they make sense?” Nell wanted to know.

Steve shrugged apologetically. “Because it’s showing three ri-bosomal RNA peaks.”

“What makes you think it’s contaminated?” Andy asked the technician.

“Nothing on Earth has three ribosomal peaks, my friend.”

“Except for crustaceans,” Andy said.

“Whoa—really?”

Andy rolled his eyes. He looked at Nell. “I guess you gene jocks do need a few folks who still know their animals.”

“I’ll be damned. I didn’t know that.” Steve looked back at the graph. “Guess we’re reading crustaceans, then, guys.”

“Bravo, Andy.” Nell winked at Andy, and he smiled.

“Looks like we’re back to arthropods, Otto,” Quentin said.

Otto shook his head, resigned now. “Unless it
is
from Mars.”

Quentin shrugged. “Hell, maybe
crustaceans
are from Mars, with three ribosomal peaks and all.”

Andy said, “Cut the other direction again, Otto.”

“All right. Continuing the incision down the abdomen from the original point of entry now—what seems like more lobes of the hepatopancreas, with multiple blind-ending tubules—”

“Wow, this thing is set up to digest massive amounts of food
very
rapidly,” Quentin said.

“This sure looks like a crustacean gut.”

“Yes, Andy,” Otto said,
“it does.
Continuing toward the hind quarters. Uh—OK…”

There was a spasm in the animal’s lower belly as Otto drew the scalpel near the rear pelvic ring.

“Back out, Otto,” Nell whispered.

Small legs tore at the edges of Otto’s incision.

“Something it ate didn’t agree with it,” Quentin said.

“No,” Nell breathed. “It’s a mommy!”

“Yeah, and she’s live-bearing,” Andy warned.

“Back out now,” Nell said again, her voice suddenly urgent.

Otto pulled his hands back as a mouse-sized miniature crawled out and snipped a chunk of its mother’s flesh with its foreclaws. It fed the bite into its serrated grin. Then it shook its head and shivered off blue blood.

“Don’t reach for it, Otto,” Nell warned in a whisper. “Just pull out of the gloves.”