Dragon's Hope Read online

  “Mr. Teedle,” Rose said anxiously, “do you mind if I . . .?”

  “Go ahead,” Mr. Teedle said, waving his arm.

  Rose hurried up the stairs after Henry, with some difficulty because of her dress. Henry held the door for her at the top, and she followed him in.

  “Five dollars!” Mr. Teedle expostulated behind them. “That can’t have been more than five miles! You must be joking!”

  They ran down the hallway, Rose’s heels clacking loudly against the floor. Unlike most days, when they had to dodge students, the building was empty.

  It’s rather nice not to receive odd looks for being here, Rose thought briefly. Since the school was for men only, she had had to pretend to be looking for Henry if anyone asked. One of his roommates had stopped her once, to chide her for going into a building where “women had no business being.”

  As if women can’t study sciences, too! Rose thought, remembering the indignation she had felt that day.

  They reached the door to the laboratory that was not currently being used for classes. The window was blocked so that no curious onlookers could peer inside, and Henry patted his pockets for the key. He stared at Rose in distress.

  “I didn’t bring mine, either,” she said. “Knock.”

  Henry knocked on the door. “This is Henry Wainscott,” he called. “Rose Palmer is with me. Would you please let us in?”

  There was rustling, then footsteps, and the door opened. There were six men inside, all scientists that Rose recognized.

  “Are we too late?” she asked breathlessly, rushing inside as the man held the door for her. Henry followed after her. “How is Virgil?”

  “See for yourself,” another of the men said, drawing aside. The egg was on the floor, nestled within a nest of blankets. Off to the side was the teddy bear Henry had bought for their son, a ridiculous gesture that Rose had objected to.

  At first, the egg seemed the same as always. But then she noticed there were tiny cracks at the edges. She walked around, and saw that the cracks were much larger on the side that hadn’t been facing them.

  “Is he all right?” she asked anxiously. “He’s not saying anything.”

  “He has been,” one of the professors said. “It’s just —”

  The egg jostled, a noticeable jump. He was very, very upset that nobody was helping him!

  “That,” the professor said. “That’s what he’s saying.”

  Henry started to move forward. One of the men, a zoologist, put out his hand to block him.

  “No,” the man said. “The dragon’s shared no memories of any ancestors being helped with hatching. I don’t think he’s supposed to be helped.”

  “But —” Henry protested.

  “If you help a chick hatch out of an egg, it’ll die,” the man said firmly. “We don’t know if that’s true for dragons, but it wouldn’t be wise to risk it. He must do this himself.”

  Another crack spread across the egg. It jostled. He was very, very, very upset!

  Henry let out a small moan.

  Rose unwound the train from her arm, anxious to do something. She had been horrified to think of him hatching without her, but now it was unbearable to stand here waiting.

  The egg jostled again. No new cracks spread across it.

  Virgil was miserable. He was very, very miserable. He was stuck and he was miserable and he just wanted to sleep. Nobody was helping. He was very unhappy.

  “How long will it take?” Henry asked pitifully.

  “There were cracks on that side of the egg when I came,” one of the men said. “That was two hours ago.”

  “My wife took more than eight hours to deliver our son,” another man said.

  Rose shuddered. That wasn’t something she wanted to think about.

  There was nothing from the dragon for a long time. Rose wondered whether he really had gone to sleep. Was that normal for a dragon? She didn’t think it was normal for most other creatures. She was just about to ask when the egg wriggled vigorously.

  He was stuck and he was uncomfortable and he was STUCK STUCK STUCK! He wanted to get out, he wanted to get out, he wanted to get OUT! OUT, OUT, OUT!

  One of the cracks spread further as the egg bounced.

  “You can do it,” Henry gasped, clenching his fists. “You can do it. Please!”

  The door rattled behind them, and Rose spun around to glance back. Mr. Teedle shut the door behind himself and put away his key. “Five dollars, indeed,” he was muttering.

  “Ooh!” one of the men shouted. “That’s another crack!”

  Furious with herself for getting distracted, Rose spun back. The crack was stretching further . . . further . . . further . . .

  “He’s going to do it,” Henry gasped. “He’s going to do it!”

  “Let me see!” Mr. Teedle said, elbowing one of the other men off to the side so that he could get through them.

  Virgil was scrunched and stuck and miserable and he was VERY, VERY, VERY UPSET!

  There was a cracking sound, and something tiny and sharp poked through the center of the fractured web.

  “It’s an egg tooth!” the man standing next to Rose shouted.

  Everyone rushed to their side of the egg. Rose was so crowded in among them that she could scarcely breathe, but she didn’t care. Almost as one, they all held their breath.

  The tiny egg tooth chipped away, and small glimpses of green began to come into view.

  “Is he green?” Henry murmured.

  “Were Deinonychus antirrhopus dragons green?” another man wondered.

  “We have no way of knowing,” Mr. Teedle said reverently. “This is our first time finding out.”

  It’s not true that we have no way of knowing, Rose thought. He’s shared some of his parents’ memories, including how they saw each other. His father was blue, and his mother was green . . .

  A whole snout burst through, and there were shouts and cheers around them.

  Virgil was angry! Why were they making noise instead of helping him? They were right there!

  “You’re almost out,” Henry said eagerly. “You’re almost out, Virgil. Come on! You can finish! I know you can!”

  A huge section of egg broke free and shattered across the floor. Behind it they could see a glimpse of a tiny face, and a tiny claw gripped the edge of the opening.

  The dragon’s head shot out, dripping and shiny, with tiny nubs where horns would soon be. The egg toppled forward, and his head smacked the floor. Virgil struggled further, and another claw emerged from the egg. Then another. Then a whole arm. Then a leg.

  At last, only the tail was still left within the egg. It tapered down into a wet and sticky mess behind him.

  Virgil was sad. Virgil was very tired.

  Virgil was hungry.

  Chapter 4: Hungry

  “Food,” one of the professors said out loud. “We have to feed him. What are we going to start with?”

  “I want to be the first to feed him,” Henry said immediately. “Unless . . .” He looked over at Rose, his expression guilty. “Do you want to be first?”

  “No,” Rose said. Quite honestly, she didn’t even want to be the second. “You can be first.”

  “Do we have anything prepared?” Mr. Teedle demanded, looking around at one of the other men.

  One of the other professors cursed, with rather shocking language. “I’m sorry. I meant to get something started, once the egg was hatching . . . but in all the excitement . . .”

  “Do we have anything even thawed?” Mr. Teedle demanded.

  “Rheinhold was going to do that, and he’s not here,” a professor said uncomfortably.

  Are they really going to waste time assigning blame? Rose thought incredulously. “Then start with insects,” she said briskly to the biology professor who stood near her. “Pull them out and cook them over a Bunsen burner until they’re thawed. Then cool them down however necessary, so they won’t burn his mouth. And you,” she added, turning to the man next n
earest her, “you do the same with the meats.”

  The men nodded and hurried to the icebox. Two other men started to set up Bunsen burners.

  “What else do we need?” Henry asked. “Do we have a . . . prepared recipe?”

  “We’ll have to develop that as we see what he accepts and rejects,” Mr. Teedle said.

  Rose said nothing. She knew what they were all thinking. If he rejects everything, if the only things he could eat went extinct millions of years ago, he’ll starve to death. We’ll have no way to save him.

  Surely that wasn’t going to happen, though. Surely their son would be all right. Surely the baby would eat.

  Please eat, Rose thought. Please don’t put us through what Mama went through with her daughters. We can’t hire a wet nurse, like she had to. Please eat.

  Virgil was sleeping on the floor. Rose crept closer to watch him. His chest moved in and out as he breathed, and his tail twitched in the slime of the egg. She wanted to move forward, to clean him off, but she wasn’t sure if that would wake him. She didn’t want to wake him, not before they had food ready.

  Please eat, Rose prayed. Please . . . be able to eat what we have prepared.

  Three men were clustered around each of the Bunsen burners.

  “Don’t cook the crickets too much,” one of the men opined. “They must have eaten raw food.”

  “How do you know?” another man challenged. “They breathed fire. One of the prevailing theories is that dragons cooked their food.”

  “Cook some of the crickets and leave the rest as raw as you can,” Mr. Teedle said, moving over to them. “It’s very likely that adult dragons preferred roasted food, or at least didn’t mind it. They presumably used their fire for hunting. But we don’t know about infants.”

  “Cooking meat makes it more digestible,” another man said. He was holding a frozen chicken while another man set up a tripod to put it on. “That’s why we do it.”

  “So cook most of the chicken,” Mr. Teedle said. “We’ll try it with various pieces at varying levels and see what he’ll accept. What about the rats? Who’s thawing a rat?”

  “I’m going to do it just as soon as I’m done with these insects,” one of the men over a Bunsen burner grunted, stirring something in a small bowl that was set over the tripod. “Yes, I think these are close to thawed. Here, you,” he said, turning off the Bunsen burner and picking up the bowl gingerly in his gloved hands. He set it on the table on a mat that had been laid out for it. “Crush these into a paste. We can be reasonably certain that the babies didn’t eat their food whole.”

  Henry nodded and picked up a pestle.

  The door rattled, and two men rushed in. They were both paleontologists who worked with Mr. Teedle.

  “Did we miss it?” one of them asked.

  “Traffic was horrible on Broadway,” the other one added.

  “He’s over there,” Mr. Teedle said in a low voice. “He’s sleeping.”

  The two men looked crushed, but then they crept over to that part of the room, and one of their faces lit up. The other just looked fascinated.

  I know, Rose thought, smiling slightly. I know.

  “Can we touch him?” one of them asked.

  Henry’s head shot up.

  “We don’t know yet,” Rose said. “Better not to risk it. We’ll wait until Henry feeds him.”

  “Do you think he might catch a chill?” one of the men asked. “Maybe we should put a blanket on him.”

  “He might be temperature insensitive,” the other one said. “Dragons breathed fire, after all.”

  “It’s doubtful that the infants did,” the first one objected. “We don’t want him to get ill.”

  “The egg didn’t need incubation,” Rose spoke up. “Not in the past few weeks, and not in his parents’ memories. The mechanism that produced fire must at least be sufficiently active to keep him warm.”

  The men fell silent, and all three of them watched the dragon.

  The mechanism that produced fire, Rose thought. Her veins tingled in excitement. Dragon fire was one of the great mysteries in paleontology. Where it had come from, what had produced it, what the many dragon species had used it for . . . those were all subjects of intense debate.

  One of her goals had long been to be the paleontologist who discovered the answers to those mysteries. And now, perhaps, the answer to all of those questions was lying in front of them, sleeping.

  It was both exciting and frustrating. Exciting, because she could hardly wait to find out all the things Virgil would teach them about his species. Frustrating, because she had promised herself not to think of him as a subject of research. How would she do that? How could she possibly reconcile her curiosity with the fact that he needed a mother who looked at him lovingly, not clinically?

  Rose glanced over at Henry, who was grinding crickets without complaint.

  If I fail, at least he’ll have Henry to be affectionate, she thought. The man was almost built to be a parent.

  But with that thought came some jealousy. Why did it come so easily to him? What did he have that she was lacking?

  “Should I pour some water in this?” Henry asked. “Presumably he’ll have to get water from someplace.”

  “Yes, tentatively, but let’s try it without first,” the man next to him said. “I really should have thought to remove the hair from this rat before we froze it,” he added.

  Henry wrinkled his nose. “I hope rats aren’t the thing he likes best. I don’t favor the idea of capturing them.”

  “I don’t think you should capture them, even if he does favor them,” the man said. “Rats often carry disease, and they’re often poisoned. You don’t want that being ingested by the dragon.”

  Rose shuddered at the idea.

  “So we’d have to buy them?” Henry asked. “Presumably from the same people who supply them to laboratories?”

  “That would be my recommendation,” the professor said.

  Henry looked less than thrilled.

  “Wouldn’t insects have the same potential problems?” Rose spoke up. “Presumably pigeons, as well?”

  “Oh, yes,” Mr. Teedle said. “Better to only stick with food you can buy.”

  Henry looked even less thrilled.

  Rose sighed. He had refused to show her his finances, but she assumed he was worried about the expense. No wonder, since his budget would now have to stretch to feed three.

  He had insisted that the money wouldn’t be a problem, and that she didn’t have to worry about it. He’d claimed the stipend from his grandfather would be sufficient for whatever they needed. But she wondered. Full-grown Deinonychus antirrhopus dragons were twice the size of humans, and the speed at which they had grown to adulthood was still a mystery.

  Please eat, she thought to Virgil. And please don’t eat so much that we can’t afford it.

  The tiny dragon stirred, and his eyes opened. His tail flicked one of the eggshell fragments, which skittered across the floor. Everyone in the room stopped what they were doing, fixated on the sight of the small dragon.

  Virgil was hungry. He wanted his parents to feed him.

  Chapter 5: Health

  “Crickets first?” Henry asked, looking very nervous.

  “Crickets first,” Mr. Teedle confirmed.

  Henry moved forward, carrying the bowl with him. He held it in his bare hands, which implied that it had cooled enough to be handled comfortably. Hopefully that meant the contents were also sufficiently cooled . . . if that even mattered in the case of dragon infants.

  Henry’s arms shook as he sat down on the floor beside the dragon. “Hello, Virgil,” he said. “I’m your father. Do you remember me?”

  Virgil recognized his father’s mind, but his father looked strange. Where were his horns and claws?

  “I don’t have horns and claws,” Henry said. “I’ve tried to explain this to you before. We’re human. We’re a different species.”

  Virgil didn’t understand. Virgi
l was hungry.

  “Okay,” Henry said. He swallowed several times, visibly. “I have some food for you here. Try this.”

  He reached into the bowl and pulled out a mashed-up bug. He held it out.

  The tiny green-scaled dragon just stared at it. He felt very reproachful. That wasn’t food. His father should know what food was. Why was his father giving him not-food?

  “All right,” Henry said. His voice was steady, but his hands were shaking. “Would you please explain what food is?”

  Food was food! His father was supposed to feed it to him! He should open his mouth, and then Virgil would eat from it!

  “You want me to . . . uh . . .” Henry stared down at the bowl. “No, I’m not going to put crickets in my mouth. Sorry.”

  Virgil didn’t want that not-food! Virgil wanted food! His parents should give him food! Virgil was getting very, very upset!

  “What do I do?” Henry asked the rest of them, looking panicked.

  Let me try, Rose thought, but she didn’t say it. If she failed at this . . . if she failed . . . she wasn’t used to failing, and the thought of failing when a child’s life depended on their success terrified her.

  “Let me try,” one of the men said. “I’ve nursed a baby pigeon back to health once. My wife has a soft spot for them.”

  Looking angry, and embarrassed, and relieved, and unsure of himself, Henry hesitated and then handed the bowl over. The man took them and knelt down by the hatchling.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said coaxingly. “Just try this little bit. If you don’t like it, we can try something else. We just have to see if this will work.”

  Virgil opened his mouth and let out a high-pitched, piercing shriek.

  Rose reflexively covered her ears as the high pitch grew louder and louder. She saw most of the men in the room had done the same thing.

  Virgil was very, very angry and offended! He would tell them that while he was breathing! Now he would scream again!