At the Midway (15 page)

To the left.  The Orcs closed in.

Another jink to the right.

Then straight to sea.

Nothing.  The killer whales had closed all exits.  More and more, a rainbow mist.  If only they could extend the surface.  If only they could fly.  But they couldn't fly.  They knew they were not gulls.  They were, after all, intelligent.

Intelligent enough to know they were about to die.  Intelligent enough to also know they had a choice as to mode of death.

They turned towards the bay.

The killers closed ranks at the mouth of the bay and there was no escape.

Coming in, the belugas could feel the sharp bottom cut their stomachs, but there was no worse pain than the teeth of the killers, so they kept coming.  They sounded to each other.  They looked at each other for one last time in a place where they could live.

Then they could go no further.

They were beached.

The humans who discovered them stretched and dying on the shore were perplexed by their suicidal behavior.

"I've seen pilot whales do this back east."

The day wore on.  The whales were mammals, but they'd long since lost the ability to survive on land.  Gravity drew their internal organs down upon their lungs.  The fifteen white whales were being crushed to death by their own bodies.  It was a terrible, lingering death.  The sun was harsh and the belugas, through their agony, saw the humans hold their noses.

"Don't they stink, though!"

"They're dying, son.  They're dying."

But the killers offshore did not know this.  They patrolled the entrance to the bay, expecting at any moment the belugas to emerge.

And then they heard their own death knell.

Evolution is the hidden wish list of every species--not a banal series of flukes or chance mutations.  Every wish is a facet of what the species needs to survive in a changing environment. If the wishes are granted, the species endures.  Since 99.99% of all species that have ever lived are extinct, it can be concluded that most wishes are denied.

The most noticeable feature of the Tu-nel, their colossal size, was the result of a specific threat.  Forty-five million years ago the deadliest marine creature of the Eocene Epoch made its debut.  Early paleontologists would dub it 'Basilosaurus'--'King of the Reptiles.'  A few years after discovering its fossils, they realized their mistake.  The Basilosaurus was not a reptile at all, but an archaeocete.

The first great whale.

A recent émigré from the land, the Basilosaurus sported two vestigial rear legs.  Its two front legs were transformed into giant rudders that guided it along as it swept its flukes up and down.  Eighty feet in length, it looked like a huge, obese eel with flippers.  Using its widely separated but formidable teeth, it could tear any animal that got in its way to shreds, including the Tu-nel.

While deadly, the Tu-nel of the Eocene were a mere fifty feet long.  They had an imposing dental armory, but their strong apsid formation (the skull having an 'arched' design, with a temporal opening that allowed the jaw to swing open at a wide angle) had been weakened by the nasal hollows that allowed them to sing.  During the Eocene, the Tu-nel traveled in large herds and it was song that bonded the members of each school.  The availability of so much 'meat-on-the-flipper' made the Tu-nel appealing targets for the Basilosaurus.  Entire herds were wiped out by the voracious giant whales and the Tu-nel were driven from the ocean.  Had it not been for the fact that their ancestors were land-dwellers, they would have been unable to readapt to a semi-aquatic, riparian existence.

But a wish had been granted.

Again compelled to spend much of their time on land, the Tu
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nel relearned some of the old habits they'd lost eighty million years ago.  Their numerous ventral supports fused into a dozen huge ribs between the shoulders and pelvic girdle, and the cervical vertebrae thickened and arched
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thus protecting the internal organs as the Tu
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nel roamed the beaches.  They were already as large as the biggest of the plesiosaurs.  The enhanced skeletal structure was to promote a new spurt of growth when they made their second great entry into the ocean.

Other benefits accrued during their last major sojourn on land.  Along with the vertebrae, the rest of the bones became less flattened.  This caused the Tu
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nel to look less like a giant turtle with a long neck and more like the now
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extinct sauropods, the largest land creatures that had ever lived.  Unlike Brontosaurus and Diplodocus, however, the Tu
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nel were not vegetarians.  To hunt in shallow waters, and on the land itself, their limbs had to become stronger.  Yet they could not forsake the wide paddles that had propelled them at sea--because they could never leave the water entirely.

At the time of their defeat by the dinosaurs, therapsids were divided between those that hatched eggs and those who gave birth to live young.  The proto
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Tu
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nel had become viviparous.  Not only did the young develop inside of the mothers' bodies, but the newborns emerged tail
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first.  This way the birthing was nearly completed before the newborn needed its first breath of air.  And (also like whales) the mother had to push the baby to the surface for that life
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giving breath.  It was an exceptionally clumsy process, because the Tu
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nel never developed raised nostrils, like the old Brachiosaurs, or blow
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holes, like porpoises and whales.  Also, the necks of the newborns were not particularly dexterous, and a mother could not always nudge an infant's head above water.  Next to old age and the casualties caused by the Basilosaurus, the greatest source of mortality among Tu
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nel was drowning at birth. Yet babies remained too fragile to survive the crush of gravity on land.  The Tu
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nel never developed the ability to give birth to live young on land.  As a consequence, they could never completely forswear their pelagic ways. Ever on the search for compromises (even while, for no good reason, denying others), evolution made some odd adaptations.

Among the most important concerned their four paddle
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like limbs.

Carnivorous, the Tu
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nel could never find enough food in the shallows to satisfy their enormous appetites.  They dared not venture after larger sea game because of the toothed whales patrolling offshore.  At first, they compensated by moving into the fresh water of the rivers and catching the animals that came down to drink.  But the mammals had keen instincts and excellent olfactory abilities, and they soon learned which water holes to avoid.

Leaving the Tu
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nel no choice but invasion.

Their first attempts at hunting on land were stupendously clumsy and usually futile.  Their population dwindled and extinction lurked close for a million years.

The chief modification which allowed them to survive was a strengthening of their limbs. Tens of millions of years earlier the brontosaurs had maneuvered their tremendous ninety
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ton bodies on stout, columnar legs.  They had short, hooved feet, with stubs for distal bones and claws on their inner toes.  They complied with the typical digital sequence of the terrestrial dinosaurs, the formula usually being either 2,3,4,5,3 or 2,3,4,5,4
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the numbers indicating the segments in each digit.

The pelagic dinosaurs made nonsense of this arrangement.  The ichthyosaur could have as many as a hundred segments in its transmogrified leg.  In decay, its leg
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fins looked like broken necklaces.  On the other hand, the mesosaurus, the first land reptile to run back to a life in the sea, had a standard arrangement of fingers and toes, except they were webbed.

Life in the ocean shortened the limbs of the plesiosaurs.  It also lengthened their fingers to an exceptional degree, making an excellent framework for its webbed skin.  Like the ichthyosaur, it developed extra segments
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in the longest fingers there could be as many as nine divisions.  Yet the bones were not flattened like the ichthyosaur's.

  The Tu
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nel were not descended from the plesiosaurs, which had been cold
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blooded reptiles.  They had come from warm
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blooded therapsid stock.  The ancient phalangeal formula of cynognathus
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2,3,4,4,3
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could still be discerned.  But they had made oceanic adaptations virtually identical to those of the plesiosaurs.  Their bones, too, had remained somewhat rounded.  Had this not been so, their skeletons would have been too weak for a return to land.

The middle of the Oligocene showed the Tu
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nel with appendages nearly as effective on land as at sea.  Its limbs were only a little longer, but stronger; and while half of the supernumerary bones had fused, its front digits were flexible.  It could even, to a certain degree, grasp.  And the Tu
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nel happened upon an evolutionary discovery that gave it some speed on land. In the early stages it had flopped around like a seal.  But as its muscles developed, so too did a certain sleekness.  Eventually, they began to combine limb propulsion with a mild form of  slithering.  It was this mobile combination that allowed the young Tu
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nel to overtake and crush the men in Lieutenant Hart's camp.

Most important of all
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during their frightening trips to deeper waters to give birth, the larger and stronger Tu
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nel were left alone, while the smaller ones were attacked and eaten by the Basilosaurs.  As a result of this evolutionary attrition, in a relatively short time the Tu
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nel not only doubled in length, but in strength as well.

The
Basilosaurnae
branch of the early great whales left no decedents.  Modern whales had to take a different direction.  Because, when they returned, the Tu-nel simply ripped the Basilosaurs out of the oceans.

One consequence of the increase in strength and size was a concomitant development in the Tu
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nel singing organs.  The oceans vibrated with new songs.  This was just as well, for the Basilosaurus had scattered the larger permanent herds forever.  Now, for the better part of the year, the males traveled alone. Mother and offspring had to survive on their own.  As a result, even after the great whale enemy was driven to extinction, the Tu
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nel continued to increase in size.

What was about to hit the killer whales was the longest wish list of all time.  And nearly every important item was checked off.

The Tu-nel bore in.  The mother and the two young ones had heard the killers' hunt song forty miles away (the limit of their hearing with so much noise about), as well as the threatening thud of their flukes on top of the waves.  They adjusted course. The stranded belugas had barely begun to understand the true meaning of sunlight when the Tu-nel tore into the Orc pack.

When going all-out, the mother could hit twenty-eight knots.  It was a speed the torpedo-shaped spearfish and sail fish could more than double.  On occasion, a marlin could top seventy miles per hour.  For its size, though, nothing could match a Tu-nel.

They rarely hunted in packs.  The mating season was the annual exception.  But they had developed a concise and clever hunting code.  Using a series of glottal clicks condensed into brief bursts, they signaled the location of their prey and the formation of their attack.  On this occasion, the young ones produced a few clicks and grunts instinctively, but they soon dropped back.  The killer whales made their own peculiar sounds.  The Tu
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nel recognized them and understood the nature of their target.

An adult female Tu-nel had eighty-four vertebrae in its neck, which thickened and became less flexible as the years passed.  The mother could not have scythed her neck across Lieutenant Hart's campground the way the young ones had.  On the other hand, the young ones would not be able to do what the mother was about to do for a dozen years to come.

The killer whales knew there was a threat in the immediate area, but they were accustomed to attack, not defense, and they were unsure of what to do.  The Tu-nel hunt song seemed to come from a half dozen different directions at once.  When the mother struck the pack, they were still shifting frantically back and forth just as the belugas had done before getting trapped in the bay.

The mother's neck was thirty-nine feet long.  The cervical vertebrae articulated on surfaces that were nearly flat; when contracted they had a tensile strength comparable to steel.  Her head was four feet long, but narrow, hardly wider than her neck.  Only by staring hard could a scientist have discerned the dog
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like visage of cynognathus.  Following an homogalous pattern, her teeth were much like those of the carnivorous tyrannosaurus, allosaurus and ceratosaurus.  Her sharp, six
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inch frontals curved backwards, as did the progressively shorter teeth running to the rear of her jaw.  They were made for slashing, tearing, and holding.  The "chewing" was done in the gizzard.  This mode of digestion would have convinced a paleontologist of dinosaur origins.  In fact, it was an evolutionary development of the riverine proto
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Tu
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nel and was never discarded.