Genus: Unknown Adaptation Read Online Free PDF Page A

seem to soothe them. They stopped shaking and after a few moments, the one closest to her lifted his head and began to sniff the air. She smiled wryly. "You won't catch my scent through this suit unless you have an extremely sensitive olfactory system."
    The creature met her gaze when she spoke that time. An eerie sensation fluttered through her. As strange as it sounded, even to her, she almost felt as if something tangible passed through her mind. Dismissing the sensation with an effort, she focused on the eyes. They were very similar to the eyes of Earth creatures, at least from what she could see. The pupils were elongated like cat eyes and quite possibly for the same reason-excellent night vision for nocturnal hunting, but except for the strange color, which she had trouble pinning down, they didn't look alien. She finally decided to categorize the shifting colors of the eyes as hazel even though the predominant colors weren't green and gold but rather purple, blue, and green.
    "Don't look it directly in the eyes," Bill cautioned. "A lot of animals consider that a challenge and will attack."
    Too late, Kate thought wryly, but it didn't seem to antagonize the creature. She discovered when she redirected her focus to the creature again that it seemed to be studying her as intently as she was studying it. It took an effort to break eye contact with it, in point of fact. She discovered when she had that the other two were studying her just as intently.
    "How old do you suppose they are?" Sissy asked.
    Kate frowned and shook her head. "We know they can't possibly be more than a few months. Unless they somehow managed to get onboard when the robot was loading, they would have to be what was in the eggs we brought onboard ourselves. We can't be sure of that since the cams malfunctioned, but I think it's as good a guess as any."
    "The eggs weren't big enough to hold anything that size," Bill put in. "If they came from the eggs, then they've been out a while. They're certainly not newly hatched."
    "That would put them in the bird category, then, wouldn't it?" Sissy said speculatively.
    "It would if this was something from earth since they certainly don't look reptilian or amphibian. We don't know what to expect from Sirius."
    Two techs arrived carrying the cages Bill had called for. Without surprise, Kate saw that the new intrusion alarmed the creatures. Directing the men to set the cages down, Kate, Bill, and Sissy settled to discussing how to capture the creatures with Warner giving directions via the com units. The first thought was to try to coax them into the cages with food. The problem with that was that they didn't have a clue of what would entice them since they didn't have a clue of what the creatures ate.
    Bill finally left with the techs to search the specimen locker to see if they could determine what the creatures had been subsisting on since they'd hatched. His expression was grim when he returned a little later.

    "I'd say they eat pretty much anything," he said dryly. "Most of the specimens we collected are gone. It looks like they got into the food storage lockers, too."
    Guilt flickered through Kate. It didn't take a lot of imagination to know she was going to be in hot water with everybody who was waiting for specimens to study.
    "There was food onboard?" Sissy asked blankly.
    "It's standard procedure to always have emergency rations onboard any outgoing ship," Bill reminded her. "Anyway, they wanted to see what effect, if any, the hyper-drive might have on organic materials."
    Kate shrugged her discomfort off. "Well, if they've already eaten our food and it hasn't had any adverse effects on them, we could bring something from the station to entice them."
    "I sent the techs to get something."
    They want us to get into those strange pods, Rak said uneasily. I don't like the way this seems to be going.
    Me either," Dae agreed.
    Noo was studying the pods they'd called cages. They're made of the same stuff as the