Neanderthal

by John Darnton

  He opened the rear door and walked down a hallway toward a faint luminous glow. He found Grady in a side room, his feet up, a paperback propped on his lap. On the wall in front of him, shining down, was a bank of screens. Two were blank but three were functioning. One screen was aimed at a blank wall with a sink; otherwise it was empty. On the other two screens, seen from dif­ferent angles, was a huddled dark shape lying on a cot. It was hard to make out, and in any case it was immobile, undoubtedly asleep.

  “That him?” asked Kane.

  “Yep. Sleeping beauty.”

  Kane looked at digital figures on the lower corner of the screen. “You recording?”

  “Yep. Those are the orders. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

  “Sound too?”

  “We record it, but we keep it low. Drives you nuts otherwise.”

  Grady leaned over and turned a dial. Out of a loudspeaker in the ceiling came a strange, slow rasping sound. It took a moment for Kane to realize that it was breathing. He looked at his watch and timed it with the second hand. Grady watched him, then turned the dial down.

  Later, lying in a bottom bunk, Kane pulled out his watch and tried to imitate the breathing. He found it difficult to do, since the pauses between exhalations were abnormally long. He had trouble falling asleep because of the snoring at the other end of the room.

  In the morning, over a breakfast of powdered scrambled eggs, Kane met the six other men in the dormitory, all American, taciturn, and buttoned-up military types like himself. They were like jailers anywhere.

  He had been well briefed before he left Turkey, but still he didn’t feel prepared for what he was about to witness. He had been hear­ing about Operation Achilles for some time—you didn’t get to his level without having developed a scuttlebutt network that might have future strategic value—and he had weaseled and cajoled enough from Eagleton and others to have a pretty good sense of what was going on. But he had still had difficulty actually believ­ing it until a few minutes ago, when he had been given the file.

  He had been ushered into a small windowless office and it lay before him in the center of a desk, the only paperwork there. The door closed and he was alone. A large bottle of aspirin was on the windowsill, the third one he had seen. Slowly, as if he were opening a potential letter bomb, he lifted the flap of the thick envelope plastered with labels reading CLASSIFIED LEVEL S (the highest) and U.S. MILINTEL. He pulled out an inch-thick raft of papers and plowed through preliminaries written in uncharacteristically non­military prose, probably by a scientist. Then he reached the perti­nent summary passages.

  Subject was found beside a path in a mountainous zone, exact location unknown. It was lying face down, apparently ill or stricken, when it was discovered by two shepherds. They were immediately struck by subject’s appearance and at first left it alone but then returned, placed it in a cart, and brought it to the village of Djibaillot, Tajikistan, where subject was put in an outbuilding for animals. When its condition worsened it was taken to a local clinic, where the doctor refused to provide treatment. It was allowed to remain in the clinic, however, and its existence became known to the American consul, who followed prescribed notification procedures pursuant to DATCOM 3824. Subject was relocated to new quarters in Murgab under strict security and put in segregated confinement.

  Over time subject’s condition gradually improved so that it regained consciousness and began eating, although dietary provisions continue to be a problem. Its mental state is at times agitated, and it gives the appearance of objecting to confinement. It has had to be restrained. Experimentation is difficult though not impossible, and becoming harder over time. But already substantial variants have been established in the experimental zone. In fact, nothing like the sub­ject’s responses have ever been encountered anywhere before with humans.

  “With humans,” noted Kane, the first indication that “the subject” represented something so totally out of the realm of the or­dinary that what was being recorded with such pedestrian nonchalance was nothing less than the world’s most startling scien­tific discovery. He flipped through the rest of the documents. There were medical reports, recorded in a slanted hand with a fountain pen. Blood pressure, EEG, sonographs, DNA testing. There were exclamation points after some of the physical measurements. It ap­peared that the exam had been done while “the subject” was not conscious. An asterisk explained: It would not “cooperate” and at the sight of a stethoscope or other instrument it flew into a fit of rage or fear or some combination of the two. There followed pages of notes, apparently on perceptual studies: photographs of black-and-white and multicolored blocks, triangles, circles, squares, play­ing cards, picture postcards, references to frames from videos.

  Kane was trying to decode the terms when the door opened and a small balding man walked in, his hand already extended, a bundle of nervous energy in a white coat with the tip of a fountain pen protruding from a pocket.

  “I’m Resnick. Welcome to our little hideaway.” Kane grunted. He did not feel like being polite. Resnick turned to the matter at hand. He was concerned, he said, because there had been a rapid deterioration in the subject’s health. It had stopped eating. This was worrisome and vexing, Resnick said, especially since they had spared no effort to find food that might be appealing. It was not easy to obtain fresh vegetables in this part of the world. They had even taken to flying in shipments of fresh vegetables from the provincial capital, but it was still losing weight precipitously.

  Resnick sighed. “It’s almost as if it has made a decision to just pack it in. We cannot allow that, of course. We may be compelled to use force feeding. I’d hate to do it, but there may be no other way.”

  “Tell me about its special ability,” said Kane.

  “Ah, the gift.” Resnick gave a half smile and looked away.

  “Does it really exist?”

  “I’d have liked for you to witness it yourself, but I’m afraid that’s impossible now. It hasn’t been cooperating for some time.”

  “But you saw it? You recorded it?”

  “Unclear. At one point, yes, no question. But then replication became difficult. The data are not scientifically—how shall I put it?—unchallengeable. They can’t be, without the necessary rigors. No control group, that sort of thing. How can there be a control group with a subject of one?”

  “But did you ascertain that it exists to your satisfaction?”

  Resnick gave his crooked little smile again. “You must understand, I’m a scientist first and foremost. I demand facts where others are willing to proceed on faith. Suppositions, theories— none of that interests me.”

  Kane remembered what he had extracted from Resnick’s dossier: a Martinet who worked under Van Steeds, that latter-day disciple of B. F. Skinner who did his dissertation on the thalamus and psycholingualism. A note had been scribbled in the margin by Eagleton: This man Resnick will perform any experiment, no questions asked. In short, he was the perfect choice to supervise an experiment bound to call up skepticism from the few scientists permitted to learn about it. Hence, true to form, he probably refused to accept the conclusions of his own work even when they stared him in the face. Kane grunted again. “Let me see him.”

  As they went down a basement staircase, part of Kane balked at going on. He knew why: the power of memory. Almost twenty years ago he had gone down a similar staircase in Uganda. Idi Amin had fled Kampala, and as a young military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kane had hurried to the destroyed capital. He had been among the first to search Amin’s deserted house, and in its basement he had followed an underground tunnel to the notorious State Research Bureau. There he had gone down a stair­case like this one, with only his flashlight for light, leading to an underground dungeon where a massacre of seventy people had taken place hours before. Some were still alive, cut into pieces, when he walked over the concrete floor, literally wading through blood. It was a memory that came to him in nightmares from time to time.
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  He followed Resnick. When they came to a thick steel door, Resnick jangled a ring of metal and held up a jagged-edged master key. When the door swung open, what struck Kane was the stench, an odor with the tang of urine, shit, and stale sweat but something even stronger, a pungent smell that overwhelmed all the others. Despite himself and his training, he felt fear closing in on him.

  “Mornings are usually better, but you never know,” said Resnick. “And that begs the question of how it knows it’s morning. There are no windows, no distractions of any sort.” He was speaking over his shoulder, as officious as a doctor making the rounds with a new intern. They passed half a dozen empty cells and he stopped before another door.

  “Now it’s best for you to go on alone. We don’t want to upset it. When you come into its field of vision, keep your head down, sort of bowed. We’ve found that works best. And move extremely slowly. No sudden movements—that’s the worst. Keep away from the bars. You may feel strange sensations inside your head. And don’t talk. Above all, don’t talk. Even if it makes a sound, don’t re­ciprocate.” He unlocked the door and stepped aside, and Kane walked through. He steeled himself and took a step forward silently, then another.

  Even before he crept into full view, Kane was shocked. In one sharp instant, he saw the creature: saw it and smelled it and somehow sensed it with senses he didn’t even know he possessed. His eyes searched it up and down, bore in, changed focus, measuring, assessing, judging. The creature was slumped over on a mattress, turned to the wall, its back humped into a mound. It was hairy but with humanoid skin, darkened to a grayish hue. The hairs were long, thin, and dark like a chimpanzee’s, but sparse and matted to­gether. Its shoulders were rounded and powerful but hunched in an unnatural way. Kane saw that this was from arm irons that bound the creature into a ball. Thick bands circled its wrists and pulled its arms around its stomach and across its lower shoulders like a straitjacket. The chains had opened sores, which festered with pus and dried blood. It was wearing yellowish pants, split along the thighs to accommodate its bulging muscles and with the bottom cut out so that its buttocks, huge and caked with dried feces, stuck out. Its bare feet were large, with the toes splayed. One sole was showing, bright pink.

  The cell was largely bare. There was a sink to one side but Kane saw that the creature, tethered by a chain, could not reach it. There was no toilet or slop bucket. The concrete floor was slanted toward a drain, and a thick hose attached to a faucet hung in one corner.

  Kane felt a strange sensation. Maybe it was the stench or the rush of adrenaline, but his head felt heavy, as if something were growing inside, and he squinted because of an ache deep behind his eyes. He had no time to dwell on it, for at that moment the creature stirred and managed to raise itself to a sitting position. It turned and faced Kane without surprise. They locked eyes. Kane looked deeply into the blue irises and the tiny dark pupils within and knew in an instant that he was peering not into the dull surface reflection of some animal but into the deep pools of an intel­ligent being. Their stares held each other like two aircraft painting each other in radar and then boring in on the targets. Kane did not like what he saw. He felt an instinctual loathing rising up within him. His eyes moved up to the forehead, sloping forward, perfectly formed and symmetrical but grotesquely out of place, like a node. It repelled him. The creature’s eyes looked back, fixing him in a trance, almost challenging. Kane felt not an ounce of compassion. He did not keep his head bowed. Quite the opposite, he tilted it up and stared directly at the helpless creature. He uttered aloud with­out thinking the words that came into his head from somewhere deep inside: “You would do the same to us, wouldn’t you?” In­stantly the figure whipped its head back, tilted it upward, and poured out a high-pitched half-human scream of anguish that re­verberated in its cell and through the narrow corridor.

  Kane found himself being rushed away by Resnick. The man was whining so close to his ear that he could feel his breath.

  “What did you do? What did you do? I told you, I warned you.” As he climbed the stairs toward the light, he could still hear sounds behind him, a moaning now. Then a door slammed and abruptly it was muffled. Upstairs, he sat down, badly shaken, in the tiny of­fice. As he looked at Resnick, fussing around and smoothing his white coat, again Kane’s head was racked with that curious bal­looning ache.

  Matt awakened slowly, rising through levels of consciousness like a diver surfacing. He lay without moving and then opened his eyes and closed them again. Questions took a long time to form in his laggard brain. Where was he? He wanted to retreat into a long sleep. But something was forcing him upward toward the surface and to the light above it. He opened his eyes for good and blinked.

  He moved and instantly felt pain. It shot through his right thigh, moved along his back, and encircled his right shoulder. He raised his left hand into the air and held it before his face. Three fingers, from the middle finger down, had practically no feeling. He clenched his hand. At least the fingers could move. When he hoisted himself up, shifting his weight onto his elbows, the pain cut into his right side again and dug deeply. What had happened? With an effort of will, he forced his mind into reverse. Slowly the memories fell into place. He was fully conscious now and with consciousness came a rush of pure fear that seized his gut: Where was Susan? Was she alive? He shifted his legs and sat upright—the pain striking a minisecond later, as reliable as an aftershock—and looked about.

  There was green all around him, leaves and plants and vines. He stared; it seemed so long since he had seen trees. Their miraculous bark was a rich deep brown. There was a light breeze, not cold, that set the branches waving slightly, a rhythmic flow that made him a bit queasy. Overhead the branches met and wove into a canopy. He could see patches of sky. In places the green foliage was so dense that the sunlight came through in slanting shafts, like biblical etch­ings of the forest primeval at the beginning of creation.

  Matt had been resting on woven branches and leaves and grass. It was not uncomfortable, but neither was it natural. Something— someone—had assembled this primitive bed. Who? Again, he tried to push his thoughts backward. He could recall almost nothing after the cave-in. The dust and the rocks and the beam of the flash­light slicing upward: that he remembered. Then pushing the rocks and dirt off, which accounted for the pain along his right side. He saw dried blood on his shirt, and when he tugged at the cloth a pain shot through him. The shirt was stuck to his side. Carefully he peeled it away and looked; a round wound, red with bands of black dried blood, extended from his hip to his lower rib. Ugly-looking but superficial, he decided. He held up his numb fingers and moved them again. They responded slowly and grudgingly. Frostbite. Now he remembered breaking out of the cave, clawing at the rocks with his bare hands, and pulling Susan through the snow. The blinding whiteness and paralyzing fatigue. But how had he gotten here—wherever here was? And where was she?

  A few yards away, at the base of a tree, he saw his coat, crum­pled into a ball. Next to it was his knapsack. The sight filled him with a rush of hope. It was a token that augured well. Clearly something had brought him there, and whatever it was, whatever superior strength had been responsible, it had not killed him—at least not yet. Perhaps Susan was here with him somehow; perhaps she was the one who had put his belongings nearby.

  Matt grunted, summoned up his strength, and stood up. He felt dizzy at first and stretched out his arm to lean against a tree. When he felt level-headed he walked over to the knapsack, knelt down, opened it, and pawed through it. Everything seemed to be there, even the flares he had taken from Van. Near the top he found the blue plastic medical kit, snapped it open, and took out the con­tainer of antiseptic. The top spun off easily; it had already been opened. He held it to the light. A good quarter of it was gone. Pulling up his shirt, he looked again at the wound. There was no sign of infection, and a scab was already forming at the edges. Somebody had been treating it. He poured more antiseptic over it.

  He was in some
sort of bower. The foliage stretched away on all sides and large ferns covered the ground, giving off a rich, dank smell. He found a path and followed it, moving cautiously. Every dozen steps or so, he stopped to look in all directions and held his breath, the better to listen. Nothing moved, nothing was in sight anywhere, and there were few sounds.

  He was puzzled by the lush flora. It reeked of moss, leaves, and ripening fruit, and the trees were festooned with vines. Clearly he had descended thousands of feet from the cave and treeless plateau where the snowstorm had struck. Even so, the vegetation was too luxuriant and fecund to be in the Pamirs unless he had been trans­ported to some hidden valley with a freak meteorological profile, perhaps a place that was sheltered by high peaks, fed by melting snow, and warmed by volcanic vapors.

  The path led through a darkened grove and he walked warily, trying to plant his feet soundlessly. He came to the edge of a tiny meadow and sat down to think of what to do next. Walking into the open didn’t appeal to him. He stared over the grass, which was at eye level. Flies buzzed past. He realized with a sudden pang in his stomach just how hungry he was, but he had little energy, hardly enough to go foraging for food. He sank down, raised his left hand, and looked at his fingers; at least they were feeling a lit­tle less numb. He recalled the Jack London character, surrounded by wolves beside a campfire, whose last waking gesture was to contemplate the sheer beauty of the human hand, all of creation caught in the rolling movement of fingers clenching.

  Then he saw it coming across the meadow with its peculiar loping gait. It moved rapidly. This one was naked and carrying some­thing on one shoulder. Matt slunk lower and stopped breathing. It was coming directly toward him. He had to fight down the instinct to leap up and race away. Instead, he wiggled around and crawled through the grass back to the woods, then crouched low and ran with his head down. When the trees were behind him, he straight­ened and ran flat out, leaping over logs and careening into vines. When he came to an upended tree, he dove under it, hidden by the branches.