Neanderthal

by John Darnton

  Later that evening, as they sat close to the fire, Susan chuckled again when they talked about it. “I wish you could have seen the look on your face,” she said, and then added in a serious tone, “But you know the significance of it, don’t you? It shows they can learn.”

  “No.” Kellicut’s voice came out of the darkness; they had forgotten he was there. “We’re the ones who must learn.” Kellicut was in a febrile state, caused by a breakthrough that afternoon, which he kept to himself. Sitting near the pit, a split second before Blue-Eyes lunged, a vision of Matt’s legs had popped into Kellicut’s head out of nowhere, as clear as the picture-postcard scene of Mount Rushmore on the View-Master that used to fascinate him as a child.

  Two days later, on a warm afternoon, Susan and Matt made love. It had rained that morning and their clothes were drenched.

  They decided to take them off once the rain stopped and spread them on a boulder to dry in the sun. Matt, who undressed first, turned his back. As Susan slipped out of her pants, she looked at the little ripples of muscle on Matt’s lower back and the smoothly sculpted dimples on his buttocks. “I don’t know about you,” she said, “but I’m beginning to feel a little silly wearing clothes when everyone around us is naked.”

  “I can’t say I haven’t had the same thought.”

  “It’s almost antisocial, like dressing up at a nudists’ convention.”

  “I’ll bet they’re all talking about us—rather, thinking about us.” As he turned around, he could see the dark mound of her pubic hair through her wet panties.

  “Well, I for one am ready to take the plunge, at least for this afternoon,” Susan said. She deliberately did not look down at his penis as she took off her panties. As Matt looked at her, she felt an involuntary tightening of her lower abdomen.

  “I have to say,” he said, genuinely admiring, “you look terrific.” She felt proud. Stripping with grace had always been her spe­cialty.

  They walked until they came to a meadow. She had to repress her wryness at the image they conjured up, like an old biblical etching: Adam and Eve strolling through the lush prelapsarian gar­den. Halfway across the meadow they sat down; now its yellow grass walled them in on all sides and made a secure nest. When Susan lay down, he turned and lay down next to her, his hands be­hind his head. She propped herself up on one elbow and danced her fingers across his chest and lower along his stomach. She felt moist between her legs, a tickling of heat, then looked down and saw his erection building. She smiled at him and moved on top of him, spread her legs, and kissed him deeply.

  Later that night, back in their bower, they made love again. Afterward, she lay in Matt’s arms and he traced her chin with his forefinger.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “What a lovely mandible you have. What a fine fossil you’ll make.”

  They were quiet for a while. “You know, Matt, I never let on, and I swore I would never tell you this if we ever met again—why give you the satisfaction?—but it took a long time for me to get over you.”

  He nodded slowly.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I suppose I think you should know it for some reason. After we broke up, I went to Poland for a bit—it was 1981, Solidarity years—and I met all these people trying to fill in the past. They called it the “blank spaces of history” and they had to fill them in before they could move on. The Warsaw uprising, the Katyn massacre, the purge trials, the shooting of workers—it all had to come out. It was an obsession.

  “This afternoon, after we made love, I thought, I feel like that— that’s me. I’ve got these blank spaces in my life and I’ve got to tell you about them so I can go on—so we can go on—and you’ve got to tell me about you and Anne.”

  Anne. Why had he taken up with her? What was his motive? Matt had asked himself that question over and over, reliving the moment with Anne outside the beach house they had all rented the summer he was engaged to Susan. He had walked out with two gin and tonics. He and Anne were alone that warm evening, side by side on a blanket in the sand. When he reached over to kiss her, she had turned away for a moment and then, almost sadly, with a sigh, turned back, and he knew suddenly that she was his—indeed, had been his for some time. But what made him do it? He had some­times dwelt on the question but had never dug into it; he was too frightened about what he might discover about himself.

  “What you are asking is why I did it,” Matt said finally. “I can’t honestly say, though I’ve thought about it more times than I can tell you. I know that afterward I felt like a con artist.”

  They were quiet for a long time.

  “Matt, there’s something I never told you.”

  Matt sucked his breath in. Susan continued. “It’s hard to say, so I’ll just say it. All that time, or most of it, I was with someone too, a guy I took up with while you were away the summer before. He was important to me and I couldn’t give him up. I tried to, when you and I were talking about getting married, but I couldn’t.”

  She paused, then said, “There, that wasn’t so hard.” Once started, she couldn’t stop. “So all that time you were with Anne, all that time you were sneaking around, I was seeing him. And all that time when we had those scenes about you being pathologically unfaithful and such a shit, I couldn’t bear to tell you. I told myself I didn’t want to hurt you. But it was more than that; I was a coward. I would have lost my ... my right to anger. But after we split up, that’s what made the pain so much worse—the knowl­edge that I was at fault too and you would never know. I’ve re­gretted it a lot since, and I’m still sorry for it now.”

  She squeezed him tighter. “Matt, whatever happens, we need to be able to trust each other. Nothing is as bad as deceit and betrayal.”

  Matt didn’t know what to say. He held her gently for a long time. In the rush of emotions, he wasn’t even sure what he was feeling. He wanted to ask who the man had been, but then he realized he didn’t need to; he already knew. It could only have been one person: Kellicut.

  Eagleton toyed with the stone ax, a light-salmon-colored piece of rock shaped like a half-moon. It had been sculpted 1.2 million years ago; some unknown hand, already more human than not, had rounded the edge with a necklace series of nicks, each as perfect as a fingerprint. It was a thing of beauty. He had borrowed it through a trustee at the Smithsonian who didn’t press too hard into his vague explanation as to what he needed it for. In truth, he wanted it as a medium’s divining rod. Like any good detective, Eagleton knew that in solving a mystery you couldn’t go back too far.

  He was waiting for Dan Wilkinson, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s neuroscientist who specialized in parapsychological phe­nomena. In 1985, Wilkinson had run a series of experiments on re­mote viewing that were famous within the tightly controlled circle of initiates who followed such things. In the lead-lined conference hall on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building in Wash­ington, he set up a psychic as a viewer before a team of scientists. Among other experiments, he gave the man specific degrees of lon­gitude and latitude and asked him to draw what he saw there. On the sketch pad a mansion with pillars gradually took shape—al­most identical to the one in a black-and-white photograph locked inside a leather briefcase. It was Mikhail Gorbachev’s dacha.

  Skepticism persisted over the next decade, though the DIA kept three RV psychics on the payroll. They lay in trances in darkened rooms at Fort Meade, Maryland, trying to locate American hostages in Lebanon, track down Saddam Hussein, and ferret out Soviet submarines. In 1994, Congress handed the program to the CIA, which recommended a cutoff in funding, and in November 1995 an article in The Washington Post blew it out of the water. Now Wilkinson was unemployed.

  Eagleton kept Wilkinson waiting outside his office. He was wary of him, and not simply because the man had risen through the ranks of a competing intelligence agency. Like Eagleton, he was a bureaucratic empire builder, and his goal was the same: to head the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Tech
nology. A rival was one thing, an intelligent rival something else. But Eagleton needed his neurological expertise and his laboratory, so he had brought him into the loop—halfway.

  He punched the button and ordered the receptionist to send his rival in. Wilkinson carried what looked like two hatboxes, set them on Eagleton’s desk, and motioned toward the disinfectant switch. “I wouldn’t set off the bug juice, Eagleton. No telling what it would do to this.” Eagleton was beginning to regret that he had sent Wilkinson the Neanderthal skull and allowed him to read some of the reports from Operation Achilles. Thank God the loca­tion was still a secret.

  “The endocast, I presume,” Eagleton said. “How did it come out?”

  “Endocranial cast, if you don’t mind,” said Wilkinson. “See for yourself,” he added, raising the lid of one box high in the air like a waiter presenting the chef’s specialty. Before Eagleton sat a perfect model of a brain, like a Jell-O concoction but made of silicone rubber. It looked like a human brain, but on closer inspection dif­ferences emerged; it was elongated and larger at the back, along the occipital lobes, while the frontal lobes seemed smaller.

  “Incredible, isn’t it?” said Wilkinson. “We’ve never made such an ideal replica. The grooves along the inner surface were strong, so we got good reproduction. You can spot the specific neural regions easily.”

  “I can see that,” said Eagleton testily. “But what does it tell us?”

  “For openers, it’s huge. A little over sixteen hundred fifty milliliters in volume. Modern brains average about twelve to fif­teen hundred. There is cerebral dominance—in other words, he’s right-handed. By the way, he is a he, isn’t he?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Wilkinson picked up a pencil and poked the brain. “Notice of course the size of the occipital lobes. You’d expect this from the bulging of the occipital bone, sometimes called a chignon or bun.” He opened the other box, which contained the skull Kellicut had sent. “See this crest near the occipital bone? That’s the juxtamas­toid eminence. It’s to anchor the muscles running to the lower jaw. That’s what gives him his powerful viselike bite. We think he used his teeth almost like a third hand. That’s borne out by the cut marks on the incisors, which are extremely large.”

  “You’re skipping the main part, aren’t you?”

  “I’m getting there,” replied Wilkinson impatiently. He tapped the pencil on the sides of the brain. “Okay, here it is. Take a gander at these regions. Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, the angular gyrus. See anything strange?”

  Eagleton waited silently.

  “They’re the centers for speech—in humans. And they’re not there. Virtually nonexistent.

  “Now look at all this.” The pencil caressed the brain’s surface. “The cortex. In humans much of it—more than half—receives visual input. Here it’s exaggerated. Almost ninety percent. That’s the area for Remote Viewing.”

  “How does it work?”

  “We can’t know that until we get an actual brain. But I would venture a guess that somehow this creature is able to enter into the receptor field of another. It can read the neural impulses, probably on both the parvicellular and magnicellular pathways. I think the only way it could do that is to go right to the main source for the cortex—the thalamus itself.”

  The thalamus, thought Eagleton. From the Greek meaning anteroom or bridal chamber, the innermost secretive center, a tiny foot­ball set right above the brain stem.

  “If I’m right, then of course there are repercussions.”

  “Such as?”

  “For one thing, the faculty may involve more than viewing. In Operation Achilles we’ve seen it work, more or less, across species. It may well be more efficient within a single species. On some level it may even be closer to telepathy—actual thought transference. Since humans formulate much of thought through language, you wouldn’t expect a Neanderthal to pick it up. But it might be dif­ferent with each other.”

  “Can the system be foiled? What if you keep your eyes closed?”

  “In theory that should make a difference. If your receptor field isn’t working or sees nothing but darkness, how can someone else enter it? But in practice, how much of a difference would it make? We just can’t say.”

  “If a human comes near a Neanderthal, would the Neanderthal automatically know he’s there?”

  “Again, impossible to say. If I had to conjecture, I’d say probably not. Probably the faculty is not passive, like hearing—that is, always operative, even during sleep. I think that would lead to stimulus overload; it would drive you batty just trying to sort out all the messages you’re receiving. More likely, the inner eye has to be consciously directed, the way our external eyes are. It’s not an alarm system unless you turn it on.”

  “If you’re right about the thalamus, what are the repercussions?”

  Wilkinson shrugged. Now he had entered the realm of pure speculation. “We don’t know much about the thalamus. But its position suggests two things: It’s delicate and it’s extremely impor­tant. People who believe in ESP like to look here; it’s possible hu­mans have a vestigial or as-yet-undeveloped capacity. So do those who search for some physiological template for the ego, the sense of self. And of course there’s a third thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is, it is inextricably bound up with all sensation—including most notably pain. Haven’t you ever gotten a headache from eyestrain?”

  Matt was concerned that Susan and he were getting too thin. He knew that a diet of nuts, berries, and vegetables would stabilize their weight eventually, but he worried that in the meantime their constitutions would weaken. There did not seem to be much sickness among the hominids, but who knew what antibodies they had built up in their separate existence?

  Early one morning he rummaged in his backpack while Susan slept. He came across a variety of odds and ends that might come in handy someday—a Swiss army knife, the medical kit, Van’s flares—and at last found what he was looking for, a roll of thin wire. He broke a metal clasp off the backpack and held it up to examine it. Perfect. He pulled open a file from the knife, placed the clasp against a rock, and filed it down to make a hook. On the other end he punched a tiny hole, then cut some black bristles off a brush, added a fragment of yellow cloth, tied the minute bundle securely just above the hook, and attached the wire to the hole. He cut down a sapling, trimmed the branches off, and set out.

  He followed the stream upriver until he came to a pool where the water ran deep and dark. A hesitant breeze set ripples skidding across the water. Another perfect day in paradise, Matt thought, as he stood on an outcropping along the bank. Now let’s see how gullible the fish are in paradise. He flicked the line out to the center of the pool and trolled it back slowly, jerking the lure slowly from time to time in an easy motion, perfected in countless sum­mer mornings on New England lakes.

  He did not have long to wait. On the third pass there was a quick splash, a glint of silver, and the lure dived. The tug was strong and insistent. Matt gave the fish some play, then yanked hard and pulled it in. Its tail smacked the water as he hoisted it in the air: a trout—about seven pounds, he figured. It thrashed on the grass until he struck the head with a rock. A bit of blood appeared in the down-gaping mouth and its tail flapped, so Matt struck it once more.

  Walking back, Matt felt pleased by his ingenuity. How should he present it to Susan, wrapped in leaves? Ceremoniously, with an unctuous bow, like the maître d’ at the Four Seasons? No one was in the village when he returned, not even the children. That was strange. He walked to the fire, set the fish on a boulder nearby, and carried his gear to the bower. Susan was not there. He was return­ing to the village when he heard her calling his name. He yelled back, realizing as he did so how unusual it was to hear shouts in the valley.

  She looked upset. “Matt, my God, what have you done?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The place is in an uproar. Kellicut is on the warpa
th.”

  “What in God’s name for?”

  When they reached the village where a few moments before there had been no one, Matt saw that a crowd had gathered. They must have hidden when I came through before, he thought. The hominids looked stunned. The center of attention, Matt realized with a sinking sensation, was the boulder where he had left his fish. As he approached with Susan at his side, the group parted to give him a wide berth, and the children stared at him with eyes swollen wide with apprehension.

  Kellicut was at the center surrounded by elders, uttering all kinds of sounds and waving his arms. When he saw Matt his face darkened. “Get over here,” he commanded.

  Matt walked over to him. By now he knew his transgression had been monumental.

  “Don’t say anything,” said Kellicut. “Not that they would understand you if you did. The same way they don’t understand me. But some of it gets across, somehow. Look contrite even if you don’t feel it.”

  Matt did feel it and didn’t have to masquerade the emotion. He looked down but out of the corner of one eye caught a glimpse of Susan; she seemed ashamed.

  “You’re unbelievable,” continued Kellicut. “You come in here and upset everything. These are people who can’t understand killing. The idea of willfully taking life! As a concept it simply doesn’t exist. But eating it! I can’t imagine how they’d react if they knew that’s what you had in mind.”

  “Christ, I’m sorry,” said Matt. “I had no idea.”

  “Clearly.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Well, for openers, get down on the ground on your knees and look down.”

  Matt did so.

  “Now look up at me.” Kellicut placed his palm on Matt’s head and looked up into the sky silently for a long time.

  “Now get up,” he said.

  “What was that all about?”

  “I’ve seen them do that sometimes—when they have something very important to communicate, I believe. So perhaps they’ll think we’re doing the same thing. I’m showing my displeasure with you.”