Raghubir paused. “I think you’ll want to come and see for yourself, Dr. Jericho.”

Well, the Troodon skull that Phil Currie had sent over from the Tyrrell had waited patiently for seventy million years; it could wait a little longer. “I’ll be right there.” I left my office and made my way down the elevator, past the Inco Gallery — God, how I hate that thing, with its insulting cartoon murals, giant fake volcano, and trembling floors — through the Currelly Gallery, out into the Rotunda, and —

And—

Jesus.

Jesus Christ.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

Raghubir might not know the difference between real flesh and blood and a rubber suit, but I do. The thing now standing patiently next to the admissions desk was, without doubt, an authentic biological entity. There was no question in my mind whatsoever. It was a lifeform —

And—

And I had studied life on Earth since its beginnings, deep in the Precambrian. I’d often seen fossils that represented new species or new genera, but I’d never seen any large-scale animal that represented a whole new phylum.

Until now.

The creature was absolutely a lifeform, and, just as absolutely, it had not evolved on Earth.

I said earlier that it looked like a big spider; that was the way the people on the sidewalk had first described it. But it was more complex than that. Despite the superficial resemblance to an arachnid, the alien apparently had an internal skeleton. Its limbs were covered with bubbly skin over bulging muscle; these weren’t the spindly exoskeletal legs of an arthropod.

But every modern Earthly vertebrate has four limbs (or, as with snakes and whales, had evolved from a creature that did), and each limb terminates in no more than five digits. This being’s ancestors had clearly arisen in another ocean, on another world: it had eight limbs, arranged radially around a central body, and two of the eight had specialized to serve as hands, ending in six triple-joined fingers.