“The size has also come into question, with reports ranging from 50 to 150 feet in length. This is most likely because Kronos keeps a large portion of his body submerged while moving across the surface. In fact, given the way he swims, it’s impossible to see him all at once from the surface. At first I thought it was a new species-”
“There’s no way Kronos is the first of his kind, and I doubt he’s the last,” Atticus said. “The Gulf of Maine is probably the species’ spawning ground. That would account for the high frequency of sightings, especially if the species reproduces on a multiple-year cycle, rather than yearly.”
“That’s what I thought at first, too,” O’Shea said. “But if there were a population of these things, let’s say one thousand of them-enough to keep the species alive-we’d be seeing them all the time. Creatures as big as Kronos, especially those that breathe air, are impossible to hide.”
Atticus was about to ask O’Shea how he knew Kronos breathed air, but stopped when he realized that the con man was right. Kronos didn’t have gills. Unless the creature had some other way of extracting oxygen from the water, it breathed air like a whale. He kicked himself for not thinking of that before. There he was, an oceanographer, yet distracted enough to miss the obvious.
“But I have a new theory,” O’Shea said. “What if Kronos were one of a kind?”
“Impossible,” Atticus said. “Complex creatures don’t simply form out of nothing, and Kronos is more complex than most.”
“I’ll grant you that,” O’Shea said, “but I’d have to disagree on the point of forming something out of nothing. The whole universe, whether you believe in God or the Big Bang, is something from nothing. At one point before there was time, there was nothing-then poof, there was everything.”
“And then, poof, there was a 150-foot sea serpent,” Andrea said with a laugh. “I’m no oceanographer or quantum physicist, but I know that’s not possible. Didn’t it take millions of years for the first single-celled organisms to appear on earth?”
“Hundreds of millions,” Atticus added.
“I’m not suggesting that Kronos emerged out of some primordial ooze at the bottom of the ocean. But I think nature can play the genetic scientist when it wants to…when a niche needs to be filled.”
Atticus raised a single disbelieving eyebrow.
O’Shea held up his hands. “I know. I know. This is your area of expertise. Just hear me out.” O’Shea pulled up a picture of a platypus on one of the laptops. “Take the platypus. It’s a mammal that lays eggs. It has an elongated snout that looks like a duck’s bill. It uses electroreception to track its prey. It’s venomous like a snake, though it uses a spur to deliver its venom, not fangs. And you don’t even want to hear what the thing has for sex chromosomes. It’s related to only one other creature on earth, the echidna, but only the platypus feeds underwater, has webbed feet and a bill. The point is, the platypus is one of a kind in the animal kingdom. Even its closest relative looks, feeds, and behaves nothing like it. While it has a population that sustains it from generation to generation, it is certainly a genetic aberration.”
Atticus crossed his arms. “And this unique species, this one-of-a-kind mutation of something previous, say an actual Kronosaurus, has lived for how long?”
Though O’Shea could clearly see Atticus wasn’t buying a word of it, he took the question seriously and ran with it. “Let’s assume you’re right, that Kronos started as a Kronosaurus…but lived long enough to adapt and mutate to a new world. Kronosaurus was supposed to have gone extinct during the Cretaceous period, which ended 65 million years ago. But we already know that several species thought to have gone extinct, like the coelacanth, which we believed went extinct 60 million years ago, still thrive today. I’m not saying Kronos is 65 million years old, but it’s not unreasonable to say the Kronosaurus went extinct as little as, say, four thousand years ago.
“Before you state the obvious-that no creature could live the four thousand years between then and now, let’s first keep in mind that we’re talking about a total genetic aberration. I won’t pretend to be a geneticist, so forgive the simple explanation. All living things have these things called telomeres. Their length determines the length of a life, barring any kind of accident or terminal disease. It’s been shown that lengthening telomeres can prolong life. The pharmaceutical company Gernetrix is developing two drugs that trigger telomere lengthening even now.”
“Where have I heard of that company before?” Andrea asked.
“It’s one of Trevor’s. And let me tell you, he puts a lot of stock in the technology. The man plans on becoming as immortal as the ancient gods he admires so much. My point is, if something radical happened to Kronos’s genes, right down to the DNA, there is no reason he couldn’t have either extremely long telomeres…or they simply aren’t shortening with age as they do with every other living creature on the planet. It’s not completely impossible that Kronos is a one-of-a-kind creature with an incredibly long life span. In fact, I’m positive he’s at least thirty-five-hundred years old.”
Atticus squinted. “What are you getting at?”
O’Shea sighed. He was just a con man after all. Though Atticus had to admit, he was the smartest con man he’d ever met-not that he’d met many- but he imagined most didn’t have minds like O’Shea’s. “Sightings of Kronos were passed down in oral tradition through generations. The first recorded sighting was put to page in 1400 B.C.”
O’Shea turned to his desk and reached beyond one of the laptops. He picked up an old leather Bible.
“You think Kronos is in the Bible?” Atticus asked.
O’Shea nodded and flipped through the pages. “At first I thought Kronos might be the creature, Leviathan, which in Hebrew means, ‘twisted’ or ‘coiled.’” O’Shea stopped turning pages, worked the laptop’s touch pad for a moment, and brought up an image of Leviathan.
A dark, brooding engraving filled the screen. Atop peaks of black waves sat a twisting serpentine creature that looked to be a cross between a snake and a dragon. In the sky above the creature flew a sword-wielding angel. Atticus read the title: Destruction of Leviathan by Gustave Dore. The similarities between the creature in the engraving and Kronos were striking, but not quite right.
O’Shea resumed turning pages. “If Kronos had been Leviathan, we’d all be in a heap of trouble. Some rabbinical writings say that God destroyed the female Leviathan shortly after creating it, so that the species could not multiply. If the Leviathans had been allowed to procreate the world could not have stood before them. And the Bible is very detailed about how impervious to attack Leviathan is. It all lines up with my theories on Kronos.”
“But, Kronos isn’t Leviathan?” Atticus asked.
O’Shea stopped turning pages. “I didn’t start figuring things out until the moment you, and the rest of us, saw your daughter alive in the belly of that thing.” O’Shea placed his finger on a verse in the bible. “Listen…‘Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.’”
Atticus’s eyes grew wide. “Jonah? You think that thing out there was created by God, somehow survived all this time, and swallowed my daughter?”
“I’m not saying I believe any of this. I’m just asking, ‘What if?’ and keeping an open mind. If I’m going to consider that Kronos is a genetic aberration in the extreme, it seems only fair to consider the idea that God created Kronos. The majority of people on this planet believe that God created everything there is. What’s one more creature?”
“But wasn’t Jonah swallowed by a whale or a fish or something?” Andrea asked. Her demeanor didn’t strike him as being incredulous, but more interested. Atticus realized he still knew so little about who she had become. He had no idea what her religious beliefs were and decided to tone his reactions down…just in case.