The lack of caves on the broad steppes was a problem for the Neaderthalers; they had to follow the herds, yet without shelter they would perish, and did perish. The Cro-Magnon solved the problem by building their own caves. They set up tepee-like circles of mammoth tusks and covered them with hide, often sinking the structure quite deep into the ground and covering it with earth as protection against the glacial-chilled blasts of the long winters which they spent, snug and secure, making new weapons, clothes and babies. Their deep freezer for storing winter supplies was the outdoors with their food caches protected against scavengers under huge rock cairns. The remains of one such cache had been discovered in deep mud at Ellen's dig and was now at Manchester University for preservation and analysis.
The volunteers helping with the excavation had also uncovered one of the greatest inventions of the Cro-Magnons: the forced draught hearth. It was little more than a trench in the floor of their hide tents that was bridged with flat stones and sealed with packed earth. The duct led from the central hearth to the outside with its opening facing the freezing prevailing wind and so provided a constant supply of air for the high temperatures needed to use bone as a fuel in regions where wood was scarce. It was a huge leap which laid the foundations of ceramics and metallurgy, and gave Europe its early technological lead.
But for Ellen it was not their greatest achievement.
She was more fortunate than many in her passionate interest in palaeontology because she had actually dug artifacts out of the ground with her bare hands and held them. On one occasion last summer her careful brushing had exposed the halves of a flint knife: long and delicate and so thin that, when cleaned, light shone through its razor-sharp edge. But the flint-knapper had made a mistake with his bone hammer and broken the virtually finished blade. An archaeologist from the Weald and Downland Museum had even been able to point out the incorrect spawling blow that had led to the breakage. It was sobering to think that she was the first to hold the two halves of the broken tool since the flint knapper had thrown them down in disgust all those centuries ago. She had repaired it with Super Glue and used it as a letter knife.
But flint tools were common. What Ellen craved was the one discovery that had eluded British palaeontologists: a significant art find. There had been no discoveries in the British Isles to equal the magnificent cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet in France. She and David Weir had visited them the previous year and had been enthralled by the vivid, beautifully-painted scenes of bison, horses, antelope and all the other great herds that had roamed the fertile plains of prehistoric Europe.
Ellen had been more captivated than David. Looking at the paintings at first hand, and not reproductions in books, had turned her interest into a burning passion. Her aching desire to know more about these strange people who were her ancestors gnawed at her reason. She wanted to see them at work; at play; above all she wanted to see them working on their marvellous paintings and try to quantify the mighty intellectual leap involved in their realisation that what they saw before them in bright sunlight could be carried in their remarkable minds and reproduced on cave walls deep in the earth where the sun never shone.
But a time machine wasn't possible so Ellen assuaged her craving for information by collecting books on the subject. Over two hundred now filled the pine bookcases in her living room. Apart from the large books containing reproductions of palaeolithic art discoveries around the world, on balance they were a disappointment -- long on conjecture and short on facts. She suspected that many of the authors knew less about the subject than she did.
Running her eye over the collection reminded her that before going to bed she had heeded David's reminder and set her video recorder to tape a BBC Learning Zone programme about the discoveries at Byno in the Czech Republic. She wasn't going to get any sleep now so she might as well settle in her rocking chair and watch it.
The tape was unwatchable. The picture had horizontal tears across the middle, and the sound wow and fluttered badly. A couple of commercially-recorded tapes bunged in the machine produced the same result.
Damn and blast! That meant that the video recorder was loused up. Hopefully David would have a decent copy of the programme.
She flicked to Channel 4. The elderly television's picture had shrunk; there was a black band around the edges. The other channels and test cards were the same.
A wonky video recorder and TV! Double damn and blast.
The television was old -- well past its watch by date -- but she could ill-afford a new one. Well -- maybe if she played up to Bob Harding's cheerful flirting he would put both appliances at the top of his repair pile. He had supplied the video recorder in the first place and had repaired it several times.
`Pussy hairs,' he had lectured her the last time, `belong on pussies -- not in VCRs. Don't let that cat sleep on it any more. That'll be twenty quid with a fifty percent discount if I get one of your lovely, dazzling smiles.' Hard to believe that two days a week the outrageous yet likeable old flirt was a highly-regarded government scientific consultant.
A flare of headlights across the fields caught her attention. About a mile distant were the lights of the police vehicle guarding the scene where the two men had disappeared. Before nightfall all the available fishing punts had been pressed into service. Local volunteer searchers had probed the depths with long rods in a futile attempt to find the swamp's latest victims. A new search with scuba divers was due to start work at first light. Ellen knew that they stood little chance of finding the two men but she had readily agreed to help. No one had such a detailed knowledge of the area as her.
She decided that she ought to cadge some bed space off Thomas and try to snatch a couple more hours sleep. Today was Saturday. Always a busy day...
Really must get some sleep...
And so she did -- right there in the rocking chair.
Chapter 9.
THE SPYDER KEPT its flight as short as possible. It landed in a field and folded its rotors. It was as well for Malone that he had failed to catch it. The machine had learned enough that day about the human metabolism from Vikki Taylor to have manufactured in a matter of milliseconds an effective nerve gas that would have knocked Malone unconscious and left him with a granddaddy of a headache for several hours thereafter.
It was to Vikki Taylor that the spyder now turned its attention. It set off across the grass in the direction of the Taylors' house, the curious articulation of its legs converting to a smooth forward momentum.
The spyder's controllers had an abiding curiosity about all humans, but of all the pupils that had streamed out of St Catherine's the previous afternoon, Vikki Taylor had caught their special interest because the rhythms emanating from her brain were of a particular richness, strength and texture. There was another reason: in the visible light part of the spectrum her body was externally symmetrical like all the others, but not in the infra-red part of the spectrum.
The need for good balance and coordination on high gravity planets capable of retaining an atmosphere dictates the symmetrical structure of higher lifeforms. Symmetry, in which each half of the body is a mirror image of the other half, is a universal characteristic. The blind watchmaker of evolution had determined that larger creatures that needed to move efficiently -- to run, change direction, jump and climb -- in order to survive, needed the equilibrium of a degree of symmetry although this requirement did not have to extend to the arrangement of internal organs.
So the spyder had followed Vikki from school, keeping close so that it could read the infinitesimally weak emanations of her brain rhythms which, compared with the others, were remarkably strong. Being able to get close enough at one point earlier to amplify the girl's idle daydream into a vivid reality thus distracting her long enough to remove a tiny blood and tissue sample from her leg had proved an unexpected bonus.
Now, an hour before dawn, it had returned to fill gaps in the knowledge it had acquired, and was under her bedroom window, monitoring those rhythms to be c
ertain that its quarry was in deep sleep.
A whiplike rod extended quickly upwards from its body case and a series of tiny barbs on the end of the rod got a good purchase on a first floor window sill. The spyder climbed up the side of house by the simple expedient of winding in the whip. It repeated the process with the next floor, and three minutes after leaving the ground it was moving silently across the slate roof to the dormer window of Vikki's bedroom.
Its study of the structure of the glass in the sash window lasted no more than a few nanoseconds.
Chemically glass is a liquid, albeit a high-viscosity liquid; over the years it flows downward so that window panes gradually thicken at the bottom. The spyder selected an area of glass large enough for it to pass through and accelerated the ageing process so that the designated section of glass flowed like hot wax leaving a hole large enough for it to climb through and lower itself to the floor.
It moved to the bed where Vikki was asleep, curled into a foetal position with her duvet pulled snugly around her neck. It determined that the bedcovers would be transparent to its probes and extended a sensor which it held above the sleeping girl and moved the length of her body. It repeated the operation with different heads on the sensor, at one point even unleashing a burst of low-level X-ray radiation.
The body scan was quick and thorough. Together with the information garnered that day from Vikki's blood and tissue samples, the spyder's makers now had more information on the human race than humans themselves.
The mapping of the human genome -- the unravelling of the billions of bonds in the DNA molecule's double helix -- is mankind's most ambitious co-ordinated biological research programme involving many thousands of research workers in universities scattered across the globe. Conservative estimates put completion of the mighty task, if it ever could be called completed, around the mid-21st Century.
The unravelling the human genetic code was a 70 year project for Mankind that the spyder's makers accomplished in as many seconds.
Vikki stirred and turned onto her back, her handless left arm now draped over the side of the bed above the spyder.
The spyder had already noted the wrist's damaged bone and tissue which answered the question about the girl's asymmetric form in the infra-red, but it was required to provide more detailed information. That the wrist's carpal bones and tendons in the carpal tunnel had been terminated and fused into a single mass with no attempt at repair or regeneration answered several more questions as did the examination of Vikki's artificial hand in its box on her dressing table. Without opening the box, the spyder probed the hand's structure, internal mechanism, and materials. There was yet one more question to be answered. It returned to Vikki, positioned a sensor above her head, and started searching.
Chapter 10.
JACK AND ANNE TAYLOR'S first overseas holiday in the four years since Vikki's birth turned into a disaster hardly before it had began. Their flight from Gatwick to Alicante was delayed eight hours and it was after midnight when their coach finally pulled up outside the ageing El Alamo apartment block near Calpe's Fossa-Levante Beach on the Costa Blanca. It was all Jack and Anne could afford in those days.
`These are your apartment's keys,' said the embarrassed courier as the sullen coach driver yanked their cases out of the bay and dumped them on the forecourt. `Apartment 4B. That's apartment B on the fourth floor.'
`But you're coming up to make sure everything's okay?' Jack Taylor protested.
`I'm awfully sorry, but the driver might leave without me,' said the courier apologetically. `We've got six couples to drop off at Javia. The main electric power switch is on the wall by the door as you go in. The water and gas should be on -- you should be fine.'
The driver crashed into gear and the coach started moving. The courier gave them a parting wave as he hopped aboard. Vikki started wailing. She was tired, hungry, and wanted the familiar surroundings of her bedroom. Anne scooped her up and carried the lightest case into the block's deserted lobby while Jack struggled with the larger cases. The lift was typical of Spain's 1960s-built apartment blocks: a tiny car barely large enough for four adults, with a hinged outer door that had to be propped open with a bag while it was loaded. Anne entered the lift first and put Vikki down so she could help Jack stack the cases. Once all three and their belongings were crowded in and the outer door closed, Jack pushed the button for the fourth floor.
Time would never blot out the memory of Vikki's terrible scream of agony when the lift started moving. The couple had never encountered a lift without an inner door. Anne's cry of terror when she saw her daughter's hand being dragged into the gap between the lift's floor and the side of the lift shaft as the car started rising was lost in the sheer volume of Vikki's scream. Jack's horrified glance took in everything as Anne fell to her knees beside her stricken daughter. Priceless seconds were lost as he struggled with the unfamiliar control panel to stop the lift. It jerked to a halt and he threw himself dementedly against the door in a futile attempt to spring it open, but the lift had risen two metres; the safety interlocks and the floor above held the outer door closed.
The next two hours passed in a nightmare montage of sounds and images. English voices in the lobby; Jack pleading with them not to try to move the lift, shouting above Vikki's terrible screams; the blood pooling across the floor; the sudden silence when Vikki mercifully fainted; the blood; Anne's handkerchief as a makeshift tourniquet; Spanish voices; arguments; a crash overhead as the roof panel was ripped off and an engineer adding to the crush in the lift; the blood; the suitcases being passed up to make room for a doctor and a nurse; the blood; Anne refusing to leave Vikki; the blue flare and crackle of cutting equipment slicing into the door; Vikki being carried unconscious to an ambulance that disappeared into the night, sirens howling despite the hour, with Jack and Anne following in a Guardia Civil car.
It was exactly four hours after the terrible accident that a surgeon in the general hospital at Denia told Anne and Jack that Vikki was out of danger. He normally spoke good English but exhaustion had him reverting to Spanish as he tried to explain that the damage had been too severe and it had been too late to save their daughter's left hand.
Chapter 11.
THE SPYDER DIDN'T get the full story but the fleeting images it had dredged from the depths of Vikki's subconsciousness were enough.
It would never be known if the feelings of those who controlled the spyder towards this girl who had provided them with so much eagerly-sought information were those of sympathy, but a decision was taken although they could not have foreseen the terrible consequences for Vikki it would have.
The spyder became still as an analysis program was set in motion to isolate and replicate those parts of Vikki's genetic code that determined the configuration of her missing left hand. Building the picture took a little over three seconds. The rest was routine. The operation was completed with the aid of a gas laser beam only a few photons in diameter that performed in much the same manner as a hypodermic syringe. The complex neural and hormone triggers that flowed into Vikki's brain and nervous system included cell division stimulants that had ceased functioning because their job was done when she was in her mother's womb. Aiding them were thousands of nano-machines -- mechanisms so small that they could be seen only under an electron microscope. Not that they ever would be seen; when their task of triggering dormant self-replicating molecules was complete they would be absorbed into Vikki's body.
The spyder's work was done. It left the room, reverse engineered the hole it had made in the bedroom window, and made its way back to Pentworth Lake. Slowly because its energy cells were seriously depleted.
Vikki slept on without stirring.
Chapter 12.
BOB HARDING WAS a Fellow of the Royal Society and therefore the most over-qualified electrical repairman in the country. He was in a sombre mood when he finished repairing the clock-radio. The deaths of the two DTI inspectors had affected him badly. Rigsby had been a radio amateur whom he ha
d "worked" on several occasions, but what made it worse was the thought that he had probably been the last person the two men had spoken to when they had visited him in his shop the previous afternoon to track down the problem of the illegal transmissions.
The two inspectors had declared that Bob's station was clean but they wanted to know if he had sold any electronic or transmitting gear that could be used for the purpose, or whether he knew of anyone in the area who would be likely to set up a pirate beacon.
If only he'd suggested that they see Ellen Duncan before visiting Pentworth Lake. The area had become a swamp after a storm on several occasions. Ellen would've warned them of the dangers.
He tied a customer identification label to the radio, shoved it to one side on his cluttered work bench, and switched on his VHF transceiver, still tuned to the Midhurst VOR beacon, to checked that the transmissions hadn't started again. All was well -- the data from the beacon was loud and clear.
The howl of white noise, which had caused the hand on the signal strength meter to fly across the scale and hit the stop, had been too powerful to be from anything but a large installation; the DTI men must've been mistaken about the source as being the lake. On the other hand, they knew their business and had been equipped with some serious D/F "fox-hunting" gear.
He switched the set off and pulled a window blind aside. A reasonably clear night so he might be able to get that longed for group photograph of Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. It would be another 200-years or so before the three planets were favourably aligned again, so if he didn't get the picture this year, he never would. He pressed the button that opened the roof panels and derived an engineer's sense of satisfaction as the petals that formed the domed roof of his workshop slid smoothly open, powered by a scrap vacuum cleaner motor.
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