The expedition had been on its feet for over four weeks, and Shoat and Walker granted the scientists' request for an extra two days here. The scientists got hardly any sleep during their stay at the coral site. They would never pass this way again. Perhaps no human ever would. Frantically they harvested these traces of an alternate evolution. In lieu of carrying it with them, they arranged the material for digital storage on their hard disks, and the video cameras whirred night and day.
Walker brought in two winged animals. Still alive.
'Fallen angels,' he announced.
They were upside down, strung with parachute cord, still half-poisoned from sedative. A soldier had been bitten by one, and lay sick with dry heaves. You could tell which animal had delivered the bite; its left wing had been crushed by a boot.
They weren't really fallen angels, of course. They were demons. Gargoyles.
The scientists clustered around, goggling at the feeble beasts. The animals twitched. One shot a cherubic arc of urine.
'How did you manage this, Walker? Where did you get them?'
'I had my troops dope their kill. They were eating a third one of these things. All we had to do was wait for them to return and eat some more, and then go collect them.'
'Are there more?'
'Two or three dozen. Maybe hundreds. A flock. Or a hatch. Like bats. Or monkeys.'
'A rookery,' said one of the biologists.
'I've ordered my men to keep their distance. We've set a kill zone at the mouth of the subtunnel. We're in no danger.'
Shoat had apparently been in on it. 'You should smell their dung,' he said.
Several of the porters, on seeing the animals, murmured and crossed themselves. Walker's soldiers brusquely directed them away.
Live specimens of an unknown species, especially warm-blooded higher vertebrates, were not something that came walking into a naturalist's camp. The scientists moved in with tape measures and Bic pens and flashlights.
The longest one measured twenty-two rapturously colored inches. The rich orchid hues – purple mottling into turquoise and beige – was one more of those paradoxes of nature: what use was such coloration in the darkness?
The big one had lactating teats – someone squeezed out a trickle of milk – and engorged crimson labia. At first glance, the other seemed to have similar genitalia, but a Bic tip opened the folds to expose a surprise.
'What am I seeing here?'
'It's a penis, all right.'
'Not much of one.'
'Reminds me of a guy I used to date,' said one of the women.
But even as they bantered and joked, they were intently gleaning data from these bodies. The tall one was a nursing female, in heat. The other was a male with eroded three-cusp molars, callused foot pads and chipped claws, and ulcerated patches where his elbows and knees and shoulder bones had abraded against rock. That and other evidence of aging eliminated him as the female's 'son.' Perhaps they were mates. The female, at any rate, probably had one or more infants waiting for her to come home. The two animals revived from Walker's sedative in trembling bursts. They surfaced into full consciousness only to hit the shock of the humans' lights and sink into stupor again.
'Keep those ropes tight, they bite,' Walker said as the creatures shivered and struggled and lapsed back into semiconsciousness. They were diminutive. It didn't seem possible these could be the hadals who had slaughtered armies and left cave art and cowed eons of humans.
'They're not King Kong,' Ali said. 'Look at them, barely thirty pounds apiece. You'll kill them with those ropes.'
'I can't believe you destroyed her wing,' a biologist said to Walker. 'She was probably just defending her nest.'
'What's this,' Shoat retorted, 'Animal Rights Week?'
'I have a question,' Ali said. 'We're supposed to leave in the morning. What then? They're not house pets. Do we take them with us? Should we even have them here?' Walker's expression, pleased to begin with, drew in on itself. Clearly he thought her ungrateful. Shoat saw the change, and nodded at Ali as if to say Good work .
'Well, we've got them here now,' a geologist said with a shrug. 'We can't pass up an opportunity like this.'
They had no nets, cages, or restraining devices. While the animals were still relatively immobile, the biologists muzzled them with string and tied each to a pack frame with wings and arms outstretched, and feet wired together at the bottom. Their wingspread was modest, less than their height.
'Do they possess true flight?' someone asked. 'Or are they just aerial opportunists, drafting down from high perches?'
Over the next hour, such details were debated with great passion. One way or another, everyone agreed they were prosimians that had somehow tumbled from the family tree of primates.
'Look at that face, almost human, like one of those shrunken heads you see in the anthro exhibits. What's the cranial measurement on this guy?'
'Relative to body size, Miocene ape, at best.'
'Nocturnal extremists, just as I thought,' said Spurrier. 'And look at the rhinarium, this wet patch of skin. Like the tip of a dog's nose. I'm thinking lemuriforms here. An accidental colonizer. The subterranean eco-niche must have been wide open to them. They proliferated. Their adaptation radiated wildly. Species diversified. It only takes one pregnant female, you know, wandering off.'
'But frigging wings, for Pete's sake.'
The gargoyles had begun struggling again. It was a slow, blind writhing. One made a noise midway between a bark and a peep.
'What do you suppose they eat?'
'Insects,' one hazarded.
'Could be carnivorous – look at those incisors.'
'Are you going to talk all day? Or find out?' It was Shoat.
Before anyone could stop him, he pulled his combat knife, with its blood gutter and double-edged tip, and in one motion cut the male's head off.
They were stunned.
Ali reacted first. She pushed Shoat. He didn't have the size of Walker's athlete-warriors, but he was solid enough. She put more weight into her second shove, and this time got him backed off a step. He returned the push, open-handed against her shoulder. Ali staggered. Quickly, Shoat made a show of holding the knife out and away, like she might hurt herself on the blade. They faced each other. 'Calm yourself,' he said.
Later Ali would say her contrition. For the moment she was too full of fury at him and just wanted to knock him over. It took an effort to turn away from him. She went over to the beheaded animal. Surprisingly little blood came out of the neck stem. Next to it, the other one was bucking wildly, curved claws grabbing at the air.