by John Darnton
Which was why his office had been transformed by artifacts and totems in the last two weeks. Along one wall were portraits of the great men in paleoanthropology and related fields, ranging from geology to cognitive psychology. There were even practitioners of the new school of experimental archaeology, strange souls who disappeared naked in the rough for months on end, trying to re-create the lifestyles of their primitive ancestors. Even those who had strayed from what came to be the path of accepted wisdom, the maverick conservatives and fighters of lost causes, were represented.
To the right, staring skeptically into space through tiny circular glasses, was a photograph of Rudolf Virchow, the German founder of modern pathology who had sabotaged his reputation by fighting the preposterous theory of evolution. There was a painting of Alfred Russel Wallace, the soft-spoken, lower-class autodidact with watery brown eyes, the man whose theories anticipated Darwin’s. There was Thomas Huxley, long-haired and handsome, sneering confidently at the camera; and Paul Broca, the cornerstone of French physical anthropology; and even Edward Simpson, the notable English forger, sitting on a wooden chair surrounded by the tools of his trade, a hammer in one hand and at his feet some fraudulent stones, destined no doubt for gullible Victorian buyers. Towering over them all, both physically on the wall and mentally in Eagleton’s hierarchical pantheon, was Ernst Haeckel, the German naturalist, soulful-looking with long blond tresses and an air of tragic destiny like General George Custer. He had embraced evolution with a dangerous passion, converting the survival of the fittest into a tenet for Naturphilosophie, the mystical romantic philosophy that led to the eugenic theories and racial doctrines of Nazism. Eagleton was irresistibly drawn to the man, pictured here in boots and broad-brimmed hat, a stein of beer at his elbow.
On a table by Eagleton’s desk lay an odd assortment of molds, mandibles, bits of skull with numbers scrawled on them in dark ink, and a variety of prehistoric tools: hammer stones, unifacial and bifacial choppers, polyhedrons, core scrapers, discoids, flakes, and fragments. When lost in thought, he picked the pieces up, turned them over and over like worry beads, and replaced them in new patterns.
On the opposite wall, stretched tight and held in place against a cork backing, was a reproduction of the Khodzant Enigma with its missing panels, the favorite unsolved riddle of all graduate students. No one but Eagleton knew that it was somehow connected to the Neanderthal—at least no one still living. Eagleton had made the connection thanks to Zhamtsarano, the Mongol who inspired in him the respect and affinity an explorer feels for a colleague who walked the same uncharted path decades earlier and disappeared. The pictograph had been uncovered in Zhamtsarano’s files in the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Academy of Sciences. There was a sketch of it, with the final quadrant missing, of course, and a scrawled notation in Cyrillic. Again, Eagleton read the translation on a sheet of paper on his desk:
Every tribe has its own central myth. It is the origin or survival myth that delineates the tribe and creates its separateness. To penetrate to the heart of the myth is to understand the tribe’s moment of creation and the dawn of its history.
Mount Olympus, Gaea and Uranus, the Titans, Cain and Abel, the flood and Noah’s Ark, Muhammad on the mountain, Krishna, the lost tribe of Israel—all incorporated this basic truth, Eagleton had realized. He believed that Zhamtsarano had solved the riddle of the pictograph but had left the answer unrecorded, typical for someone who believed that the voyage was as important as the destination. Eagleton stared at it for hours, trying to decipher its message, and sometimes while engaged in another task he would turn his wheelchair suddenly to look at it, as if the secret could be seized in an ambush.
Time was running out for Eagleton. He had decisions to make but no solid information on which to base them. Van’s transponder was still dead. There was a good chance that he and the others were in trouble. Should he send in Kane and the SWAT team? If the paratroopers arrived too early, storming over everything and kicking ass the way they always did, it could abort the whole mission. But if they came too late? The only problem then would be containment: how to stop the word of what they had found from getting out—if indeed there was anything left for them to find.
And what about the Russians? He had been distressed to learn from Van’s last transmission that they were already on the spot. In his snide way Van had implied that Eagleton knew about their expedition. Which was true, of course, in a general sense and he had seen no reason to put Van in the loop. But he had not thought Moscow would move so quickly and had no idea what the Russian scientists were up to. They’d had second thoughts about handing over all that research and conceding the field to the Americans, glasnost or no. After all, why give away an advantage in a breakthrough field? Cold War habits died hard.
Eagleton lit another cigarette, and opened the Operation Achilles folder with the updates on top. No good news there. The subject had lost twenty pounds over three weeks, had stopped cooperating with the experimenters, had to be chained with hand and leg irons, and was making strange noises.
He flipped through the pages of experimental data on Achilles: summaries of the raw sheets that were recorded over months and shipped in bulk to Maryland to be checked and rechecked, ever since they had discovered the remarkable powers of the creature. Not telepathy, which was mind reading, but definitely a step toward it—Remote Viewing, or RV, is what the scientists called it, and they were absolutely certain that the creature, whatever other lesser traits it might display, possessed it.
Eagleton came upon a transcript of his first interview with the scientist who explained it to him. He read it.
“Is it mind reading?”
“Hardly, no. Not the same thing at all. First of all, thinking—at least in humans—is inseparable from language and much of it takes place in the cerebral cortex. This subject does not have a developed cerebral cortex, at least not developed in the same way. No, the gift is ocular.”
“Meaning that it requires eyes to work.”
“Yes, someone else’s eyes.”
“Does it see that person?”
“No, it only sees what that person sees. It looks through that person’s eyes—actually, it occupies the optic centers where the visual information is processed. So it would not see the actual person unless that person happened to be looking into a mirror.”
“Can it go anywhere and see anything?”
“You mean, can it travel through space at will and, say, hang out on a treetop to catch a sunset? Not at all. As I said, it’s a limited form of telepathy, totally dependent on having a channel to work through—another brain that is the primary receiver and data processor.”
“It can really see through another’s eyes?”
They had first spotted it accidentally on the video cameras, back in the days when its appetite was hearty. They noticed that moments before feeding the creature flew into a frenzy of anticipation; somehow it knew that food was on the way. A sharp-witted observer at the monitors pointed out that this happened at the precise moment that the keeper walked by the open door toward the food bin, seven rooms away from the basement cell. They varied the feeding hours but still it knew, to the exact second. They widened the tests to include all kinds of things: baths, recreation, and the presentation of toys. Somehow it could detect things happening in another room. There was one constant: Someone else had to be in that room and using his eyes.
They had constructed iron-clad experiments: A man on a different floor would look at one of three signs—a triangle, circle, or square—and down below the creature would pick out the correct object. They changed all the variables: the objects, the distance, the timing, the lighting. They even turned off the television monitors, and still it chose correctly, with a margin of error so minute, 0.306 percent, as to be statistically insignificant.
The field of observation was expanded. The creature could achieve RV with three different viewers scattered miles away. Given a sketch pad and cha
rcoal, it could even draw in a crude way the outlines of a scene someone else was looking at, provided that the landmarks were distinct enough. But someone else had to be looking for the faculty to work.
Those who spent time with the creature, the handlers and scientists, noted that they experienced a sensation of fuzziness, and sometimes a headache, when the creature invaded their visual receptors. One particular handler, an Irish American called Scanlon, was the creature’s favorite; it seemed to spend a great deal of time “seeing” what Scanlon was observing. At Eagleton’s suggestion, relayed through the scientists, they rigged the creature up to an EGG, galvanic skin response recorder, and other instruments to measure bodily emotions. Then Scanlon, unaware of the test, was taken for a car ride down a mountain road at 70 miles an hour. The needles kicked wildly and the creature’s measurements went off the chart.
Too bad, thought Eagleton, that the creature was otherwise so uncommunicative. The information was all one-way. It was unable to shed any light on its unique ability, like an idiot savant carrying out a multiplication problem to ten decimal points. It was such a crude-looking animal to possess such a sublime gift. Too bad. Perhaps our understanding will come only with an autopsy, and that might not be far off, given the way its health was deteriorating.
This whole operation was too big for any mistakes. God only knew what possessing that faculty could mean. With the advances in genetics these days, a transfer of the gift to humans was more than feasible; it was practically within reach. The applications were awe-inspiring, militarily, if nothing else. An army with such a capability would be invincible. Imagine the possibilities for espionage, information retrieval, command and control. Imagine the advantages during negotiations, economic conferences, setting quotas with the Japanese, bargaining with the European Union. No wonder the Russians were back in the game.
Eagleton closed the folder and pressed the buzzer underneath his desk, and a secretary entered—a new one, the third since Sarah’s quick departure. She was wearing perfume but he couldn’t tell the brand; his olfactory sense was his weakest. When he handed her the file she looked at him and asked, “Anything else, sir?”
His tone came out harsh, the tone of a man who has lots of work ahead and can’t be interrupted by small talk. “No, nothing. Nothing at all.” She left, closing the door softly behind her. He picked up a mandible and bounced it in his hand, then looked over at the Khodzant Enigma. Outside, through the blinds, it was getting dark.
15
“I will not talk about Rousseau. I will not talk about Locke and Schopenhauer. I have purged myself of philosophers. They are all know-nothing philistines. They belong to a part of my brain that I have expunged.”
Kellicut was resting against a tree, a perfect place for a discussion of man as noble savage. He showed a new edginess, which surprised Matt, coming after the strange, almost mystical spaciness that he had been displaying until now. Susan, who sat on the ground looking up at Kellicut, didn’t seem to share Matt’s perception.
Matt leaned against a tree limb. Struck by the sight of some hominids foraging for berries nearby, so peaceful in their natural element, Susan had tried to steer the conversation to the philosophers who used to preoccupy them for hours on end in the bars of Cambridge. It was a way to break the ice, but to Matt it seemed as if she had fallen into the old role of the reverential graduate student.
Matt had noticed the changes in Kellicut the moment he saw him. He was taut and brown from his time in the valley. His arms were muscular and his skin was leathered. His age, if anything, gave him more authority, which was emphasized by the fullness of his salt-and-pepper beard. His face was gaunt and his eyes had a fanatic’s gleam, like a biblical avenging angel. He was not wearing a toga, after all, but some kind of loincloth made from what had once been a pair of trousers.
Strangely, Kellicut had registered no surprise at seeing Matt. Undoubtedly he knew of his presence from Susan, of course; still, after so many years and in such peculiar circumstances, Matt had expected more. After all, he had just flown halfway around the world in response to an urgent summons; he had expected to find him grateful, not distant. And there had been that frigid exchange when Matt encountered him a few moments before.
Matt had felt a surge of the old affection, and over the roar of the waterfall, he had yelled: “You sent for us and here we are,” moving toward him to hug him. Kellicut stayed where he was and arched an eyebrow. His answer was just audible above the sound of the crashing water: “Well, in any case, you’re here.” Matt had stifled his hurt, but as he did so, he realized he was replaying an emotion that he had often felt before in this man’s presence.
“We thought you were in danger.”
“That’s what I wanted the Institute to think.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t trust them. I don’t know who to trust. I’m not even sure I trust you. You’ll have to be patient.”
Kellicut then lapsed into a long silence. It did not seem that he was in turmoil; on the contrary, his mind appeared calm and vacant. It was as if something had reached down to his very soul and pulled him inside out.
But now, hours later, under Susan’s prodding, Kellicut began pouring out words that had been bottled up for so long. He spoke without moving his hands, with no gestures whatsoever—only to her. “Philosophy is bunk. It’s a sham. It is not the thoughts or the thinking of the thoughts that is at fault, it’s the words themselves. By their very nature they are confining. Words cannot capture the thought or even come close to capturing it, and so they become liars. Language isn’t a gift, it’s a burden. You realize this once you employ true communication through another channel.”
Kellicut backtracked and told of his search through the mountains, his discovery of the crevice leading to the valley, and his first encounters with the hominids. “I knew from the moment I saw them that they possessed some extraordinary puissance. I had already watched them from a distance, and I knew with a certainty that’s hard to explain that they were aware of me too, that they were observing me as I was observing them. Or, more precisely, that they were observing my observation of them.
“I returned to the camp, left the diary, and came back. This time they were all together in a clearing, as if they were anticipating my arrival. Which of course they were, though I had no way of knowing it at the time. I felt no fear; why should I? I already knew quite a bit about them. They were not hurtful, and my motives were pure. I approached them as kindred beings who exist on a higher plane.
“I stepped out from the bushes and walked among them. They were not in the least surprised. They sniffed me and examined me with curiosity, not at all threateningly. I looked for a leader but there was none—aside from a few elders, I was to discover later, who are respected in a general sort of way. Instead, everyone is truly equal, from the smallest child to the strongest man. They have no gesture of greeting like a handshake, because there is no need to display peaceful intent. Their intent is always peaceful. What reason is there to suspect a hand when one lives in a world without weapons?
“They knew I was hungry and they fed me—literally fed me: gathered around me and put food in my mouth. This was my first experience with the power. I noticed that when I looked at the food, they gave me more. When I looked away, even a little, they held back. Yet they weren’t watching my eyes. How did they know? They just did.”
“How?” asked Matt.
Kellicut turned to him with an edge to his voice. “Don’t you feel it? Haven’t you experienced it?”
“I’m not sure I have.”
“You know when it’s happening. You experience the sensation. It’s as if your mind is filling up in some way; that’s the best way I can describe it—like a vessel filling up with water or a fog that takes hold of your head.
“When it happens with one of them it can be a passing sensation. But when it happens in a group it is intense. The fog thickens and thickens, and when it finally lets loose, a
shower washes through you and cleanses you. It’s not unlike LSD, that same sense of losing oneself totally, of merging with something powerful and infinite. It’s not at all frightening; it’s—what’s the word?—heartening, comforting. It’s like belonging, like breaking through solitude, like not being alone in the profoundest sense.”
The three were silent for a moment, and then Kellicut resumed. “They have achieved a beatific existence. Think of it. They are herbivorous and pacific. They do not kill animals or each other. Their ethos is communal. There is no individuality, no sense of self, no I. Why should there be, how could there be, when the psyche can move out of the body, when the mind literally exists in the collective? All that counts is the tribe.”
“What happens when one dies?” Susan asked.
Kellicut was startled by the question but not because he had not thought about it. He paused. “That’s a whole other matter,” he said gently.
“But how does this psychic power work?” asked Matt.
“A rather pedestrian and utilitarian question.”
“I suppose I’m that kind of guy,” Matt replied.
“It is not used for anything, as such. It just is,” said Kellicut, annoyed.
“What I mean is, are they reading your mind, or are they simply able to see what you’re seeing?”
“Simply?”
“You get my point.”
“I do. And not being able to perform the feat myself, I don’t see how I can answer it. I’ve only been on the receiving end—at least until now.”
“What do you mean, until now?” asked Matt. “Are you trying to learn it?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. But one can always hope.”
