Free Pandemonium by Warren Fahy Page A

isn’t so far from here, I think,” Otto said.
    Dimitri smiled. “Lake Baikal is rather far from here, Dr. Inman. But you are right, the gammarids there have similar spikes on their armor.”
    “They’re also known as killer shrimp, ” said Otto. “They’re a big concern at Berlin University. They’ve been migrating from the Caspian Sea across Europe through the Danube and wreaking havoc. They’ve even been turning up in England and Scotland recently. But no one has ever recorded a land-based species! And with only four pairs of legs?”
    “They must have undergone an independent Hox gene mutation, like early arthropods, when they crawled on land four hundred million years ago and became hexapods,” Geoffrey said.
    “Hexapods?” Maxim asked.
    “Bugs,” Geoffrey clarified. “With only six legs.”
    “But why are they glowing?” Nell wondered. “They seem to be blind. No eyes, at all! See?”
    “They move like tiger beetles!” Katsuyuki exclaimed with an eight-year-old’s delight. “So fast! But why in a circle, around and around?”
    “We’ve noticed they move like that sometimes,” Dimitri acknowledged, shrugging.
    “Wait a minute … army ants,” Nell murmured.
    “Huh?” the others asked.
    “Army ants are blind, so they follow scent trails laid down by other ants’ abdominal glands. If an ant travels in a spiral, others following it can get trapped in death circles, with thousands of them turning like hurricanes until they die of starvation.”
    “No way,” Otto said. “I’ve never heard of that.”
    “But why do the gammies glow if they’re blind? Why do any of these species? I don’t get it.”
    “They eat … what did you call it? Rainbowfire,” Maxim said.
    “We think the bioluminescence in the fungus either grows on them or continues to glow once ingested,” Dimitri said.
    “They must stick out like Christmas lights to predators,” Nell said, puzzling. “Maybe that’s why they’re covered with spikes.…”
    “How long would adaptations like these take to evolve?” asked Katsuyuki, shaking his head.
    “Well, Lake Baikal is the oldest freshwater lake on Earth.” Dimitri shrugged. “It lies hundreds of kilometers east of the Urals.”
    “How old is it?” asked Nell.
    “Some say fifty million years.”
    “It might be a clue.” Nell looked at Geoffrey.
    “The Caspian Sea is a lot closer,” Geoffrey said. “And the Aral Sea. And in any event, I don’t think any of them are old enough. We’re looking at things that must have origins dating back to the great age of marine mollusks, which ended around the time of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. This is a region with major tectonic activity, which made these mountains. What I don’t understand is how could a cave system this size last for so long?”
    “The Urals are the oldest mountain range on Earth, Dr. Binswanger. They are two hundred fifty, maybe three hundred million years old,” said Dimitri.
    “Ah! Who knows when these specimens were trapped underground and begun diverging, then?” Otto said.
    Nell whispered in Geoffrey’s ear: “This is much better than Kauai, sweetheart.”
    He nodded and speared a gammarid tail, dipping it in cocktail sauce as she clinked her flute of champagne against his.
    The attendant pulled the shroud from the third tank.
    The German electrical engineer, Klaus Reiner, who had watched and listened in silent awe as the scientists described the species presented to them at this extraordinary banquet, now spoke up. “What in hell are these?” he said, pointing at glowing bubbles bobbing up and down inside the dry tank.
    The others were silent.
    Maxim laughed softly.
    “We have no idea,” Dimitri confessed, “what these are.”
    Small creatures like Christmas tree ornaments glowed pink and orange with four fins that made them spin or glide as they floated up and down.
    “How are they doing that?” asked Otto.
    “They look like Dumbo octopuses!” Nell said.