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Lyle walked me to the door and opened it, but then said good-bye. The door closed behind me, and I saw Malik the Zoologist leaning over a microscope. He seemed not to have heard me walk in. The room was enormous, with a long black table in the center, like the ones from chemistry class. There were cabinets beneath it, and all kinds of equipment on top of the table, including some stuff I recognized--glass test tubes, bottles of liquids--and a lot of stuff I didn't. I walked over toward the table and looked at a circular machine with test tubes inside of it.
"Sorry about that," Malik said at last, "but these cells don't live very long outside the body, and Tua only weighs a pound and a half, so I try not to take more blood from her than necessary. That's a centrifuge." He walked over and held up a test tube that contained what looked like blood, then placed it carefully in a rack of tubes.
"So you're interested in biology?"
"I guess," I said.
He looked at the little pool of blood in the bottom of the test tube and said, "Did you know that tuatara can carry parasites--Tua carries salmonella, for instance--but they never get sick from them?"
"I don't know much about tuatara."
"Few people do, which is a real shame, because they're by far the most interesting reptile species. Truly a glimpse into the distant past." I kept looking at the tuatara blood.
"It's hard for us to even imagine how successful they've been--tuatara have been around a thousand times longer than humans. Just think about that. To survive as long as the tuatara, humans would have to be in the first one-tenth of one percent of our history."
"Seems unlikely," I said.
"Very. Mr. Pickett loves that about Tua--how successful she is. He loves that at forty, she's probably still in the first quarter of her life."
"So he leaves his whole estate to her?"
"I can think of worse uses for a fortune," Malik said.
I wasn't sure that I could.
"But what fascinates me most, and is the focus of my research, is their molecular evolution rate. I apologize if this is boring." In fact, I liked listening to him. He was so excited, his eyes wide, like he genuinely loved his work. You don't meet a lot of grown-ups like that.
"No, it's interesting," I said.
"Have you taken bio?"
"Taking it now," I said.
"Okay, so you know what DNA is." I nodded. "And you know that DNA mutates? That's what has driven the diversity of life."
"Yeah," I said.
"So, look." He walked over to a microscope connected to a computer and brought an image of a vaguely circular blob up on the screen. "This is a tuatara cell. As far as we can tell, tuatara haven't changed much in the last two hundred million years, okay? They look the same as their fossils. And tuatara do everything slowly. They mature slowly--they don't stop growing until they're thirty. They reproduce slowly--they lay eggs only once every four years. They have a very slow metabolism. But despite doing everything slowly and having not changed much in two hundred million years, tuatara have a faster rate of molecular mutation than any other known animal."
"Like, they're evolving faster?"
"At a molecular level, yes. They change more rapidly than humans or lions or fruit flies. Which raises all kinds of questions: Did all animals once mutate at this rate? What happened to slow down molecular mutation? How does the animal itself change so little when its DNA is mutating so rapidly?"
"And do you know the answers?"
He laughed. "Oh no no no. Far from it. What I love about science is that as you learn, you don't really get answers. You just get better questions."
I heard a door open behind me. Davis. "Movie?" he asked.
I told Malik thanks for the tour, and he said, "Anytime. Perhaps next time you'll be ready to pet her."
I smiled. "I doubt it."
Davis and I didn't hug or kiss or anything; we just walked next to each other on the dirt path for a while until he said, "Noah got in trouble in school today."
"What happened?"
"I guess he got caught with some pot."
