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TWO

Natural Disaster

I
t was almost ten after eight when Richard Scryman knocked at Nathan’s open door. He looked like an anxious stork – beaky, with long awkward arms and legs.

‘Hey, Richard – you still here?’ asked Nathan, checking his Rolex. ‘Sorry, fella, I lost all track of time. I’ll see you in the morning, OK?’

Richard said, ‘There’s no way I’m about to leave, Professor. It’s the embryo’s heart rate. It’s gone totally berserk.’

‘Shit. How bad is it?’

Richard used his fingertip to draw a wildly zig-zagging graph in the air. ‘One second it’s way over three, the next it’s down to two thirty-five.’

‘
Shit
,’ said Nathan, tossing down his pen.

‘I don’t think we can leave it too much longer,’ Richard told him. ‘If it doesn’t pip in the next couple of hours, I seriously doubt that it ever will.’

Nathan shrugged himself into his long white lab coat and followed Richard out of his office. ‘
Shit
,’ he repeated. His dirty-blond hair was all messed up, and he hadn’t shaved in two days. He was forty-four, but he looked like a puffy-eyed college student who has just woken up on somebody’s couch after an all-night drinking session.

His two young interns, Keira and Tim, were standing in front of the glass-fronted incubating unit looking both anxious and guilty, almost as if it was their fault that the embryo was showing signs of stress.

‘What’s the arterial pulsation as of now?’ he asked them.

Keira frowned at her computer screen. ‘Two ninety-five. Two ninety-six. It’s steadier than it was a few minutes ago.’

‘Two ninety-six? That’s high, but not critical. No sign of pipping?’

‘No major muscle spasms – not yet, anyhow. Very slight shivering, but only in the legs.’

‘Apart from the heart rate, any other signs of distress?’

Tim shook his head. Nathan turned back to Richard Scryman and said, ‘Maybe we should give it another couple of hours. With any luck, the bpm might have settled down by then.’

Richard pulled a face. ‘It’s your call, Professor. But the yolk sac is pretty close to being totally depleted, and I can’t see it surviving very much longer. Like, basically, it’s having a heart seizure.’

‘Two ninety-eight,’ said Keira. Then, ‘Two ninety-nine.’

Nathan stared at the egg for almost half a minute without saying anything. It was huge, at least three-quarters the size of an ostrich egg, and a very dark green, with black freckles, as if somebody had used a toothbrush to spatter Indian ink all over it. It was resting in a specially molded cup of latex foam, and it was clustered with electrodes – constantly measuring its heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen absorption.

For Nathan, this egg was the culmination of five years of intensive laboratory work – quite apart from all the fund-raising dinners and the sponsorship drives and the academic wheeler-dealing. This egg was every theory he had ever dreamed up, and every genetic formula he had ever devised, made reality.

The skepticism of his fellow zoologists had probably exhausted him the most. They had never let up – not at board meetings, not at zoological seminars, not in scientific journals. Nathan Underhill is a New-Age lunatic. Nathan Underhill is a self-publicizing charlatan. Nathan Underhill is a snake-oil salesman, who has diverted much-needed funds away from far more serious research projects, just to develop a zoological freak show. More than one religious leader had accused him of doing the work of the Devil.

Even his students called him ‘Doctor Freakenstein,’ although with considerably more tolerance, especially the girls. They liked an oddball, especially a good-looking oddball, and even though they generally agreed that what he was attempting to do was totally insane, they also thought that it was pretty cool of him to try.

The door at the far side of the laboratory was noisily opened up, and George the janitor stuck his head around it.

‘Finished yet, Professor? I’m locking up now.’

Nathan raised one hand. ‘Sorry, George, we’re right in the middle of something. You’ll have to wait for a while.’

‘Can’t wait till tomorrow morning, then, this something that you’re right in the middle of?’

‘No, George, it can’t. It’s only slightly less important than the birth of Jesus.’

‘Oh, that’s OK, then. I’ll check back later, when I’ve finished my hoagie.’

‘Bet the Three Wise Men never said that,’ Tim remarked, under his breath.

Nathan unhooked his stethoscope and held it against the eggshell. He could hear the heartbeat, soft and frantic, and he checked it against his wristwatch. Over four times faster than a human heartbeat, but only slightly quicker than a chicken’s.

He checked the latest acoustic scans on his computer screen. The embryo
looked
OK. He could clearly see its head, its body and its wings. He could see the egg tooth, too: the sharp projection on its beak with which it was supposed to pierce the air sac inside its shell. This would start it breathing, and then it would break open the shell itself, and hatch out into the open air.

But to start hatching, it needed to give one convulsive jerk with its neck muscle, and so far it had shown no signs that it was strong enough. Based on its size and weight, Nathan had calculated that it would start to pip after thirty-five days, compared with twenty-one days for a chicken, but after thirty-eight days it was still folded up inside its shell, and it hardly ever stirred.

‘Blood pressure’s dropping,’ said Tim. ‘Oxygen saturation – that’s going down, too.’

‘It’s dying,’ said Richard.

Nathan knew that he was right. He had hoped so much for a natural hatching, but it was obvious now that the embryo was far too weak.

Tim said, ‘Blood pressure’s down to twelve.’

‘Heart rate’s dropping, too,’ said Keira. ‘Two sixty-five. Two sixty-three. Two fifty-one.’

Richard looked at Nathan and even though Nathan didn’t want to admit it, he knew that he had no choice. He opened the deep drawer under the laboratory bench, and took out the picture-framing hammer that he had bought especially for this moment – this moment that he had not believed would ever come.

He tied a surgical mask over his face, and snapped on a pair of purple latex gloves.

‘Two twenty-one,’ Keira intoned. ‘Two-one-seven. Two-one-two.’

‘Video cameras running?’ asked Nathan.

Tim gave him the thumbs-up. Quickly but very carefully, Nathan peeled the electrodes off the speckled green shell. He listened again with his stethoscope, to satisfy himself that the embryo’s heart was still beating. Then he carefully tapped the top of the egg with his hammer.

He tapped it once – twice – three times – but it didn’t crack. It was obviously much thicker and stronger than he had calculated.

He looked at Richard but all Richard could do was shrug. Keira and Tim looked equally helpless.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Here goes nothing.’

He struck the egg as hard as he could, and it broke into three large pieces, although they didn’t fall apart. He put down his hammer, and gently lifted the uppermost piece. Inside, there was a thin translucent membrane which stretched and then tore. A gray feathered head appeared, glistening with mucus, and a single orange eye which stared at him, unblinking.

‘Holy
Ker-
ist!’ said Tim.

An appalling stench poured out of the egg, so foul that Keira made a retching noise and clamped her hand over her nose and her mouth, and even Richard coughed and took two steps back. The smell was sulfurous, like a rotten chicken’s egg, but it also had a strong undertone of chicken meat that was turning green, and a sinus-burning corrosiveness. It reminded Nathan of a blocked kitchen sink filled with Drano – hair and fat dissolving in sodium hydroxide.

‘Oh God,’ said Richard. ‘Look at it! It’s still alive, but it’s half decomposed.’

Nathan turned his head away, took a deep breath, and held it. He turned back and tugged away the second piece of shell, and then the third. The embryo’s wing feathers were slimy, and its body was like a soft, half-collapsed sack. It had all the component parts that he had expected – the head, the beak, the legs and the claws – and there was no doubt that its heart was still beating.

But it took one sticky breath, and then another, and then it choked, and stopped breathing altogether. Nathan carefully scooped both hands underneath it, trying to lift it up.

‘Tim – bring me the nest! Like,
now
! Keira – get ready with the oxygen!’

Tim carried over a red plastic bowl filled with fine sand and feathers and shreds of soft purple wool. Nathan had designed it himself, based on the scrapes that were hollowed out on cliffsides by peregrine falcons, to rear their young.

With trembling hands, Tim held the bowl close to the incubator unit.

‘OK, now, easy,’ said Nathan. ‘We’ve put too much love and effort into this little guy to see him die now.’

‘He’s eighty per cent necrotic already,’ said Richard. ‘He.
It
. Maybe it’s a she.’

Nathan raised his hands, and as he did so, the embryo fell apart. The wings dropped off, on to the floor, and the head rolled into the nest. The rest of the body collapsed into a mush of skin and bones and putrescent slime.

‘Oh God,’ said Keira, and walked off toward the other side of the laboratory, one hand raised in utter revulsion. ‘That is
totally
disgusting.’

Nathan let the embryo’s remains fall back into the incubating unit, scraping the gelatinous green flesh off his fingers. Then he peeled off his latex gloves, and went to the sink to wash his hands with antiseptic gel.

He said nothing. He couldn’t find the words. Tim watched him, still holding the nesting bowl. Keira stayed in the corner, by the door.

With undisguised distaste, Richard picked up the embryo’s wings and restored its head to the top of its body. He coughed again, and said, ‘
Feurrgh
!’ and spat into a tissue. Then, ‘What happened, Professor?’

Nathan finished drying his hands before he answered. ‘Some kind of bacterial infection is my first guess. Group A Streptococcus, most likely.’

‘But how did its heart go on beating for so long? No human could have survived that degree of necrosis.’

‘Of course not. But we’re not dealing with a human here, are we? We’re not even dealing with any recognized species of bird or beast.’

‘So what do we do now?’ asked Tim. His cheeks were even more flushed than they usually were. ‘Jesus . . . I’ve been working on this one cryptozoology project ever since I left the Academy.’

Nathan laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘We refrigerate the remains and first thing tomorrow we start a detailed necropsy. And – listen – we don’t tell anybody what’s happened, not yet. I had a call from the Zoological Society’s funding department yesterday afternoon, and so far we’ve managed to go through two-point-seven.

‘
Million
,’ he added, when he received no immediate reaction. ‘Dollars.’

Richard looked down at the wretched tangle of bones and feathers lying in the incubating unit. ‘Wow,’ he said.

‘You’re damn right,
wow
– when all we have to show for it is one putrefying embryo.’

‘Still,’ said Richard, ‘we might be able to salvage something from it. If we can discover how the embryo managed to live for so long, in such an advanced state of decomposition . . . the zoo might get
some
return for its investment in Cee-Zee research. You know, somebody like Pfizer might be interested.’

Nathan didn’t answer. Richard was probably right, but he felt much too upset. After a while, Richard went over to one of the refrigerators and returned with a stainless-steel tray. He picked up one of the embryo’s wings but Nathan said, ‘No, Richard – it’s OK. It’s my fricking disaster, I’ll clean it up. I’ll see you guys early tomorrow, OK?’

‘You’re sure?’ said Richard.

Nathan nodded. ‘I could do with some thinking time. Right now, I’m feeling kind of bereaved, to say the least.’

At that moment, the laboratory door opened again, and George stuck his head around it. ‘Jesus born yet?’

THREE

Feathers Fly

I
t was nearly midnight before he made it back home. He walked into the bedroom and stood beside the bed, exhausted, saying nothing, as if he had reached the end of a very long journey. Grace was sitting up, reading
Northern Liberties
, a romantic novel about early Philadelphia, when it had been the largest city in America.

‘My God, Nathan,’ she said, putting down her book. ‘You look
pooped
.’

‘Bad day at Black Rock,’ he told her. He pulled off his dark green sweater and started to unbutton his shirt. ‘I think God is giving me a hard time for playing God.’

‘So what went wrong?’

‘What
didn’t
go wrong?’

‘Not the gryphon. You thought it might be hatching today.’

He sat down on the end of the bed. ‘It died. Its heart was still beating, but it obviously didn’t have the strength to break out of its shell. So I cracked it open. And –
yuck
. You should have smelled it. Or rather, you were lucky you didn’t. It was eighty per cent putrefied. Almost liquid, parts of it.’

‘Oh, Nate. After all your work.’

‘I’m going to get myself a beer,’ he told her. ‘You don’t want one, do you?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

‘Well, it’s always been totally out there, this project. But I really thought that this was going to be the one.’

He went downstairs to the kitchen and came back with a can of Dale’s Pale Ale. He sat back down on the bed and popped it open. ‘Somehow, the embryo got infected. I don’t know how, or what with. But it looks like some kind of necrotizing fasciitis.’

Grace pulled aside the bedcovers, climbed out of bed and sat down close to him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. ‘You must be shattered. I don’t know what to say.’