Thorne watched, holding his breath. And then he realized that the leafy light-and-dark pattern went only partway up their bodies, to mid-thorax. Above that, the animals had a kind of diamond-shaped crisscross pattern that matched the fence.
And as Thorne stared, the complex patterns on their bodies faded, the animals turned a chalky white, and then a series of vertical striped shadows began to appear, which exactly matched the shadows cast by the windows.
And before his eyes, the two dinosaurs disappeared from view again. Squinting, with concentrated effort, he could just barely distinguish the outlines of their bodies. He would never have been able to see them at all, had he not already known they were there.
They were chameleons. But with a power of mimicry unlike any chameleon Thorne had ever seen.
Slowly, he backed away into the shed, moving deeper into darkness.
“My God!” Levine exclaimed, staring out the window.
“Sorry,” Harding said “But I had to turn on the lights. That boy needs help. I can’t do it in the dark.”
Levine did not answer her. He was staring out the window, trying to comprehend what he had just seen. He now realized what he had glimpsed the day Diego was killed. That brief momentary sense that something was wrong. Levine now knew what it was. But it was quite beyond anything that was known among terrestrial animals and –
“What is it?” she said, standing alongside him at the window. “Is it Thorne?”
“Look,” Levine said.
She stared out through the bars. “At the bushes? What7 What am I supposed to – ”
Look,” he said.
She watched for a moment longer, then shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
“Start at the bottom of the bushes,” Levine told her. “Then let your eyes move up very slowly….Just look…and you’ll see the outline.”
He heard her sigh. “I’m sorry.”
“Then turn out the lights again,” he said. “And you’ll see,”
She turned the lights out, and for a moment Levine saw the two animals in sharp relief, their bodies pale white with vertical stripes in the moonlight. Almost immediately, the pattern started to fade.
Harding came back, pushed in alongside him, and this time she saw the animals instantly. Just as Levine knew she would.
“No shit,” she said. “There are two of them?”
“Yes. Side by side.”
“And…is the pattern fading?”
“Yes. It’s fading.” As they watched, the striped pattern on their skins was replaced by the leafy pattern of the rhododendrons behind them. Once again, the two dinosaurs blended into invisibility. But such complex patterning implied that their epidermal layers were arranged in a manner similar to the chromatophores of marine invertebrates. The subtlety of shading, the rapidity of the changes all suggested –
Harding frowned. “What are they?” she asked.
“Chameleons of unparalleled skill, obviously. Although I’m not sure one is entirely justified in referring to them as chameleons, since technically chameleons have only the ability – ”
“What are they?” Sarah said impatiently.
“Actually, I’d say they’re Carnotaurus sastrei. Type specimen’s from Patagonia. Two meters in height, with distinctive heads – you notice the short, bulldog snouts, and the pair of large horns above the eyes? Almost like wings – ”
“They’re carnivores?”
“Yes, of course, they have the – ”
“Where’s Thorne?”
“He went into that clump of bushes to the right, some time ago. I haven’t seen him, but – ”
“What do we do?” she said.
“Do?” Levine said. “I’m not sure I follow you.”
“We have to do something,” she said, speaking slowly, as if he were a child. “We have to help Thorne get back.”
“I don’t know how,” Levine said. “Those animals must weigh five hundred pounds each. And there are two of them. I told him not to go out in the first place. But now…”
Harding frowned. Staring out, she said, “Go turn the lights back on.”
“I’d prefer to – ”
“Go turn the lights back on!”
Levine got up irritably. He had been relishing his remarkable discovery, a truly unanticipated feature of dinosaurs – although not, of course, entirely without precedent among related vertebrates – and now this little muscle-bound female was barking orders at him. Levine was offended. After all, she was riot much of a scientist. She was a naturalist. A field devoid of theory. One of those people who poked around in animal crap and imagined they were doing original research. A nice outdoor life, is all it amounted to. It wasn’t science by any stretch –