Ludlam went down into the sewers again the next night. He wasn’t getting enough sleep—it was hard putting in a full day at the museum and then doing this after dark. But if he was right about what was happening…
Homeless people sometimes came into the sewers, too. They mostly left Ludlam alone. Some, of course, were schizophrenics—one of them shouted obscenities at Ludlam as he passed him in the dark tunnel that night.
The water flowing past Ludlam’s feet was clumpy. He tried not to think about it.
If his theory was right, the best place to look would be near the biggest skyscrapers. As he often did, Ludlam was exploring the subterranean world in the area of the World Trade Center. There, the stresses would be the greatest.
Ludlam exhaled noisily. He thumbed off his flashlight, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the near-total darkness.
After about two minutes, he saw a flash of pale green light about ten feet in front of him.
Jacobs left Chong’s office, but decided not to depart the museum just yet. It’d been years since he’d been here—the last time had been when his sister and her kids had come to visit from Iowa. He spent some time looking at various exhibits, and finally made his way into the dinosaur gallery. It had been fully renovated since the last time he’d seen it, and—
Christ.
Jesus Christ.
It wasn’t identical, but it was close. Damn close.
The tooth that had been removed from Kowalski’s leg looked very much like one of those on the museum’s pride and joy—its Tyrannosaurus rex.
Chong had said there couldn’t be alligators in New York’s sewers.
Alligators were cold-blooded.
But dinosaurs—
His nephew had told him that last time they were here—he’d been six back then, and could rattle off endless facts and figures about the great beasts—
Dinosaurs had been warm-blooded.
It was crazy.
Crazy.
And yet—
He had the tooth. He had it right here, in his hand. Serrated, conical, white—
White. Not the brown of a fossilized tooth. White and fresh and modern.
Dinosaurs in the sewers of New York.
It didn’t make any sense. But something had taken a huge bite out of Kowalski, and—
Jacobs ran out of the dinosaur gallery and hurried to the lobby. There were more dinosaurs there: the museum’s rotunda was dominated by a giant Barosaurus, rearing up on its hind legs to defend its baby from two marauding allosaurs. Jacobs rushed to the information desk. “I need to see a paleontologist, ” he panted, gripping the sides of the desk with both arms.
“Sir,” said the young woman sitting behind the desk, “if you’ll just calm down, I’ll—”
Jacobs fumbled for his hospital ID and dropped it on the desktop. “I’m a doctor,” he said. “It’s—it’s a medical emergency. Please hurry. I need to talk to a dinosaur specialist.”
A security guard had moved closer to the desk, but the young woman held him at bay with her eyes. She picked up a black telephone handset and dialed an extension.
Piezoelectricity.
It had to be the answer, thought Ludlam, as he watched the pale green light pulsate in front of him.
Piezoelectricity was the generation of electricity in crystals that have been subjected to stress. He’d read a geological paper about it once—the skyscrapers in New York are the biggest in the world, and there are more of them here than anywhere else. They weigh tens of thousands of tons, and all of that weight is taken by girders sunk into the ground, transferring the stress to the rocks beneath. The piezoelectric discharges caused the flashes of light— —and maybe, just maybe, caused a whole lot more.
“Son of a gun,” said David Ludlam, the paleontologist who agreed to speak to Dr. Jacobs. “Son of a gun. ”
“It’s a dinosaur tooth, isn’t it?” asked the surgeon.
Ludlam was quiet for a moment, turning the tooth over and over while he stared at it. “Definitely a theropod tooth, yes—but it’s not exactly a tyrannosaur, or anything else I’ve ever seen. Where on Earth did you get it?”
“Out of a man’s leg. He’d been bitten.”
Ludlam considered this. “The bite—was it a great scooping out, like this?” He gestured with a cupped hand.
“Yes—yes, that’s it exactly.”
“That’s how a tyrannosaur kills, all right. We figure they just did one massive bite, scooping out a huge hunk of flesh, then waited patiently for the prey animal to bleed to death. But—but—
“Yes?”
“Well, the last tyrannosaur died sixty-five million years ago.”
“The asteroid impact, I know—”
“Oh, the asteroid had nothing to do with it. That’s just a popular myth; you won’t find many paleontologists who endorse it. But all the dinosaurs have been dead since the end of the Cretaceous.”
“But this tooth looks fresh to me,” said Jacobs.
Ludlam nodded slowly. “It does seem to be, yes.” He looked at Jacobs. “I’d like to meet your patient.”
Ludlam ran toward the green light.
His feet went out from under him.
He fell down with a great splash, brown water going everywhere. The terminals on his flashlight’s giant battery hissed as water rained down on them.
Ludlam scrambled to his feet.
The light was still there.
He hurled himself toward it.
The light flickered and disappeared.
And Ludlam slammed hard against the slimy concrete wall of the sewer.
“Hello, Paul,” said Dr. Jacobs. “This is David Ludlam. He’s a paleontologist.”
“A what?”said Paul Kowalski. He was seated in a wheelchair. His leg was still bandaged, and a brace made sure he couldn’t move his knee while the tendons were still healing.
“A dinosaur specialist,” said Ludlam. He was sitting in one of the two chairs in Jacobs’s office. “I’m with the American Museum of Natural History. ”
“Oh, yeah. You got great sewers there.”
“Umm, thanks. Look, I want to ask you about the animal that attacked you.”
“It was a gator, ” said Kowalski.
“Why do you say that?”
Kowalski spread his hands. “ ’Cause it was big and, well, not scaly, exactly, but covered with those little plates you see on gators at the zoo.”
“You could see it clearly?”
“Well, not that clearly. I was underground, after all. But I had my flashlight.”
“Was there anything unusual about the creature?”
“Yeah—it was some sort of cripple. ”
“Cripple?”