Genus: Unknown Adaptation Read Online Free PDF Page B

her hands together to rest her chin, examining the collection of images that she'd selected from the thousands they'd taken over the past year documenting the growth and behavior of the 'Sirian Sasquatch'.
    They hadn't been able to come up with a name for the beasts because it was just about impossible to pin down a genus they seemed to match-they had class characteristics of so many!-but as they'd grown to maturity, someone in the lab had called them Sasquatch and it had stuck not only because, outwardly, they seemed closer to that beast than anything else but also because they'd gotten really big, really fast.
    That wasn't the source of her uneasiness, though. It was actually a relief that they seemed to follow the typical maturing process of medium sized earth mammals when they didn't 'fit' anything else. They seemed to be, at least primarily, mammals, so the similarity of their maturing process to earth primates was almost hailed as a break-through discovery.
    Shaking her head after a moment, she got up from her chair, stretched the kinks out and moved to the door of the habitat that they'd designed for their aliens. She'd already disengaged the lock and grasped the handle when a sudden thought struck her.
    Frowning, she released the handle and moved back to the console, searching the data bank again for the image that had popped into her mind. She found nearly a dozen similar images, taken at different times before she found the one she'd been looking for. The uneasiness deepened as she studied it and the other images. After a few moments, she was on the search again. An hour later she had pulled up enough images to completely fill her holographic monitor and spread them out in the sequence they'd been taken.
    A chill began to seep into her as she carefully studied each image and verified the camera that had taken it.
    She was actually surprised to see that they'd managed to catch so many-considering their 'beasts'
    obviously knew exactly where the cameras were and what they were for.
    It occurred to her directly behind that realization that she'd unlocked the door leading to the habit. She'd designed and built it in the hope that they'd be able to observe the Sirian beasts under more natural conditions and thus get a better understanding of their behavior in their natural habitat.
    She wondered if they'd found that amusing or insulting, but the certainty had settled in her that they weren't dealing with beasts at all. The Sirian Sasquatch was no animal-it was an intelligent species. She was certain of it.
    Whether she could convince anyone else was a matter of debate, but she was a believer.
    Even as she surged up from her seat and headed to the entrance to the habitat, however, Sissy flew the door of her lab and skidded to a breathless halt. Kate, already unnerved by the direction of her thoughts, whipped around instinctively at the sudden intrusion. Sissy's hair was askew from her rush, her eyes as wide as saucers and her face pale. "They're going to terminate the project! They're on their way down here now!"
    "What?" Kate exclaimed in disbelief.
    Sissy gulped. "Warner said he had the order from headquarters and it was out of his hands. I tried everything I could think of to convince him we hadn't studied the Sirian Sasquatch nearly enough, but he wouldn't listen. What are we going to do?"
    Kate was so blank with absolute shock for several moments that she could only stare at Sissy. "They can't do that!"
    Sissy was ringing her hands. "They can! We can't stop them! He called security-they're on their way down here now!"
    Fear swept through Kate, completing her descent into complete disorder. "You mean terminate as in …
    kill? They're going to destroy them?" she gasped in disbelief.
    "That's what I've been trying to tell you!"

    "Like hell!" Kate snapped, surging toward the door. "I'll talk to him, make him see reason! They're an important species! They can't do this!"
    Sissy followed her as she surged out of her