The size of an egg is one of evolution's battlegrounds. The chick wants the biggest possible egg, to aid its development; the mother wants the smallest possible egg, to help her to lay it. Neither party gets its ideal. Daedalus now has a compromise. He wants the egg to expand after being laid.

Sadly, all birds' eggs have a rigid carbonate shell. So DREADCO biologists are breaking fertilized eggs with great care. They are opening them into larger glass or plastic cavities, filled with distilled water or nutritive solution and sealed to the unbroken section of shell with silicone resin. The chick within will find plenty of room to develop further, before having to break its way out. Mother birds may not want to sit on and hatch augmented eggs, although some females appreciate outsize ones. Design problems will loom large. It will probably be easier to hatch augmented eggs in an incubator.

In normal conditions, most birds hatch fairly simple-minded offspring — Daedalus recalls Konrad Lorenz's goslings, which followed him because he pretended to be their mother. But a chick that develops in an expanded egg would take longer in development, and could be far shrewder than average. Even more cunning, imagine two eggs sealed together by a tube the diameter of one of them, the extra space filled with nutrient solution. Would one chick be aware of the other? Would they develop as a clever pair, tackling problems neither could work out alone? Might they even have some subtle avian empathy? A whole new type of bird might result from this research. It could emerge from the augmented egg with much enhanced mental or physical powers.

Daedalus is not sure whether to try the idea on domestic fowl. They are selected for stupid tractability; bright ones could be very troublesome. But ducks seem to have a lot of enterprise already. They could be ideal. The new improved chicks might swim or fly better, or be stronger and more decisive. They could come to dominate their fellows. Even so, an augmented duck that came to dominate a flock of them would be unable to hand on its abilities to the next generation. So Daedalus's egg augmenters are concentrating on birds that have recently lost the power of flight, such as penguins, kakapos and certain rheas. Is the ability to fly still inherent in a chick? If so, could it be recovered by egg augmentation?