Neanderthal

by John Darnton

  A figure approached out of the semidarkness on the other side of the fire, and at first Matt’s heart leaped, but then he saw that it was Kellicut, whom he had not seen since before the attack by the renegades. Kellicut sat down wearily, not even acknowledging the presence of Sergei, whom he had never met; the Russian was too astounded to speak and only stared at him. Kellicut barely glanced at Matt; as he picked up a stick and poked it into the fire, bringing down a burning pile of embers in a splutter of sparks, he seemed weighted down. Matt was abruptly certain: He knows something.

  “I heard you calling her,” Kellicut began, clearing his throat. “I think you’re looking in the wrong place.”

  Matt held his breath, too nervous to speak. Kellicut was talking in a cold, wooden way, and Matt didn’t want to break whatever spell had taken hold of him. But then the man fell silent again. It was maddening.

  “Tell me,” said Matt, the tension strangling his voice so that it came out almost in a whisper.

  “The shaman knows where she is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw them go up the mountain together this morning.”

  “She hasn’t come back. Why didn’t Dark-Eye come to let me know?”

  “He’s praying. He’s trying a higher power.”

  Matt jumped up, dashed across the village to the shaman’s hut, burst through the closed door, and almost tripped over him. The holy one was on his hands and knees, praying. Matt lifted him up as if he were a bag of twigs and leaves and carried him to the door. Then he saw Susan’s sketch of the Enigma on the ground and stooped to pick it up.

  He carried the old shaman in his outstretched arms like a bundle, all the way to the fire, and set him down there. Dark-Eye peered around uncertainly, his eyes reflecting back the fire glow like a cat’s.

  “How do we ask him?” said Matt, trying to calm himself.

  “Well, there are ways to communicate, as you know,” replied Kellicut, “but they take time. It means going up the mountain with him to his sacred temple.”

  “We don’t have time for that,” protested Matt.

  Sergei got up abruptly and came running back a few minutes later, carrying Susan’s beige cotton work shirt. “Show this to him,” he said.

  Matt held the shirt out to the shaman, who took a long look. Slowly he gathered up his bony limbs, walked over to the fire, pulled out a burning stick, and blew out the flame on the end of it. Then he walked over to a flat rock and sat on his haunches before it. Holding the stick in his fingers, he moved it in a graceful arc, bearing down upon the rock. As Matt came and stood behind him, a black line appeared. Gradually the figure took shape, the outline of a hominid.

  Dark-Eye went back to the fire for another stick, and with it he filled in the details. There was the hair and the protruding brow. Then with a flourish came the ghastly telltale touch; he drew animal skins across the chest and around the trunk and added a fur collar around the sloping crown. All in all, it was an excellent picture of Kee-wak.

  26

  Susan dug her heel into the earth to see if it was soft. It was igneous rock and dirt compressed by millennia of volcanic action, so tunneling was clearly impossible. Not to mention that there was no place to tunnel to, and also the fact that her jailers would per­ceive in an instant what she was doing.

  As irony would have it, she was in Van’s pit. She examined it. The pit had been dug deeper since then so that now anyone would be hard pressed to get out. Nor could she see over the edge into the main cavern, even by standing on tiptoe at the far end. She tried such little experiments to keep her mind off the danger.

  After she had fallen into the trap, her hands were fastened be­hind her in the snare so tightly that she almost screamed in pain. She felt that her shoulder sockets were being pulled apart. She was carried roughly, hung upside down with her face to the ground. All she could see was the legs of her captors, squat ankles and splayed toes caked in mud. By twisting her head to the side, she could make out the lower portion of the rock face, and she could tell by the jolting movements that they were hurrying downhill.

  She knew by the darkness when they entered the cave. The rock walls at her eye level were occasionally washed with the yellowish glare of unseen torches above. Three times her shoulders and knees scraped against the rock as they veered sharply around cor­ners. With all the twists and turns of the route, she could not mem­orize it. The blood rushed to her head but she did not black out.

  She stood up in the pit and took stock. Her feet were free but her hands were still imprisoned behind her in that damnable snare. Her shoulders ached; when she flexed them the pain shot through her joints, but she was relieved to realize that they were not dislocated. Her blouse had come undone in the ambush, and there was a cut across the top of her chest. She also had a bruise on her fore­head from when they had tossed her into the pit. She looked around. There were bones scattered about, and she bent down to examine them with her expert’s eye. They were animal bones, and the thin cut marks on the side were from human canines, so they were refuse from meals, not the bones of victims themselves. That was some consolation.

  She wondered if Matt had any idea what had happened to her. What if no one saw her ambushed? What if Dark-Eye was too far ahead on the path? Matt and she had talked about the renegades kidnapping members of the tribe, so eventually when she didn’t turn up, he would reach the right conclusion. But how long would that take and, once he did, what could he do? She knew he would try to rescue her because he would never abandon her, but what plan would stand even the remotest chance of success?

  She took a mental survey of what was at hand. Not much, but there was the mirror in her front pocket. She bent at the waist to see if she could determine whether or not it was still whole. She did not feel the crunch of broken glass. She pivoted her upper torso to one side and twisted her bound hands to reach the front of her pants, like a contortionist, straining at the snare and swiveling her pelvis, but was unable to hook a finger into the nearest crease of the pocket.

  She heard a sound above. Looking up, she saw a creature leering down at her, leaning casually on a spear. An overwhelming sense of revulsion seized her. The brute was so hideous that its presence could be detected by smell alone. There was a spark of cleverness in its eyes but it was the glint of low cunning, not the re­fined brilliance of an august being.

  Who do you think you are, she wanted to say, to be looking down on me like some animal in the zoo? She stopped wiggling and stood up straight; she wanted to lift her chin and proclaim, How dare you treat me like this—I, Homo sapiens sapiens? Then she felt the filling up of her mind, as the sense of an alien presence moved like a huge clot of black blood into her cortex.

  The sensation lasted for some minutes; then the creature picked up its spear and turned away without a backward look. She shuddered. The sensation she had just experienced was not at all warm and intimate, as it had been with Leviticus. It felt hard, cold, threatening. She realized there was something she feared more than anything else: the moment when Kee-wak stood there focus­ing his sinister energy on her psyche.

  Matt sat in the bower, his head in his hands, thinking deeply. He took from his rucksack the fragment of Neanderthal skull that Kellicut had given him, letting the silver chain run through his fin­gers like sand. That was another lifetime ago, that dig in southern France—several lifetimes ago.

  Matt completed an inventory of the goods they had brought with them from the outside world. There was his knife, his tape recorder, the flares they had taken from Van, the medical kit, two sleeping bags, ten feet of fishing wire, a few tins of food, a metal plate that doubled as a frying pan, and other odds and ends. In Susan’s ruck­sack was more food, bits of chocolate, notebooks, Kellicut’s diary, her tape player and tapes, vitamins, some archaeology tools, mask­ing tape, and a small inflatable pillow. He smiled at the pillow, her one concession to luxury, which she had not yet used.

  It was the image of Susan alone and frightened th
at drove him crazy. He had no idea even where she was being held, and he imagined the worst. Perhaps he should try to arrange for his own kid­napping; then at least they would be reunited. But what if they weren’t? Perhaps he should send Sergei to look for the outside reinforcements who must be on their way. But what if that expedi­tion was only a fiction? Maybe he and Sergei could make some bows and arrows and try to shoot their way in. No, they wouldn’t get very far.

  He had to come up with a strategy. He and Susan had managed to extract Van, but that time they had luck and surprise on their side. Now surprise was out of the question, for certainly the renegades would be expecting a counterattack. And who was there to help him launch it, aside from Sergei and one or two hominids? The tribe had been decimated by the raid, and some of the best fighter-hunters, like Leviticus and Lancelot, were dead. This time it would be impossible to steal quietly through the back tunnels. The renegades were sure to post sentries; they were not naive and incapable of formulating plans like the valley hominids, and as hunters they were accomplished in offense and defense. Further­more, if they did station sentries, the power they possessed would make them virtually infallible.

  As Matt pondered, he let his eyes roam through the shadows of the forest, the treetops, the gathering darkness of the late afternoon. Off to the west he spotted the moon, a pale cream-colored disk, almost perfectly round. With a start, he remembered Van’s theory about the full moon.

  Susan thrust her pelvis against the protrusion of rock and hooked the rim of her pocket on it. She spun quickly along the wall, hear­ing a rip as the pocket opened and the mirror spilled out. Quickly she lifted her right foot to break its fall. She squatted and picked it up behind her back, then found an indentation in the rock at waist level and propped it up. Only when she was sure that the mirror was secure did she turn around. It was positioned just right.

  Then she paced a bit—like Van, she realized with a shudder— and let her mind sort through her predicament. If only she had seen Matt when she had come down from the mount, if only she had been able to tell him what she had learned up there in Dark-Eye’s cave. Surely the lesson enshrined in the tableau was the key to everything; it was the Rosetta Stone, providing a sudden illumination to the most critical event of prehistory. She thought of the battles between the species, Homo sapiens sapiens against Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, and she thought of the pathetic Nean­derthal in the final panel, and his sense of rage that seemed to shimmer forth from the rock itself. Matt had seen her sketch but did he understand its message? If only there was a way to get through to him. She sat down, leaned her back against the wall, closed her eyes, and concentrated.

  It seemed impossible. Perhaps she was too terrified to concentrate. She breathed deeply five times and told herself to relax. She tried to wipe her mind clean, like a sponge across a blackboard. First she made herself imagine Matt, summoning up an image of him from their younger days. Then she thought of him now, as he had appeared when she saw him at the Institute: the gray hair around his temples, the lines around his eyes, the new becoming familiar again. She thought of their lovemaking. Then she tried to summon him, trying to tap into portions of her brain never before used. She repeated his name over and over while she pictured his face. When she felt she had a firm hold on both, square in the cen­ter of her mind, like a diamond in its case, she talked to him silently. Over and over she repeated the same thought, trying to project it as if she were a transmitting tower sending a radio signal. Keep it simple, she told herself. One word, that’s all, repeated again and again like a mantra: Deceive, deceive, deceive. She called him by name silently, and when she felt she must have reached him, she did it again: Deceive, deceive, deceive. And again and again, for hours on end.

  Matt picked up Susan’s sketch of the Enigma and stared at it. He let it fall from his hands, put his arms behind his head, and looked straight up at the sky. Then he had an inspiration. He had let his mind wander free, which was when it did its best work. It mean­dered back through the whole adventure, reliving it, except this time he rearranged the pieces of the puzzle in chronological order, not the order turned up by chance. It was a bit like rearranging the panels in the Khodzant Enigma for them to make sense, he re­flected.

  First, people start disappearing in the Pamirs. Somehow the U.S. government hears about it. A hominid is captured. The Institute is set up, fronting as a legitimate research center. It runs experiments on the hominid, highly classified, and calls it Operation Achilles. It discovers that the creature possesses special powers. The Insti­tute sends Kellicut over to locate the tribe. He sends back proof they once existed, then disappears. They send over Matt and Susan to pick up where Kellicut left off. Van is sent along as a minder and a plant to call in back-up force when contact is made. So far every­thing fits.

  Achilles was a strange name to choose, Matt thought. The great Greek warrior. He searched his memory. Achilles’ mother, Thetis, was a sea nymph. She had been told by the Fates that he would die young and he was marked by destiny to disappear—like the Ne­anderthal. When he was a baby, Thetis dipped him in the River Styx, hoping its magical waters would protect him from all wounds. But she held him by the heel, which the water did not touch. Was that a clue? Was the government searching for a weak spot in order to control the Neanderthal? Or was the heel the hidden weakness that doomed them to extinction? When the Trojan war broke out, Achilles was a great fighter, until he argued with King Agamemnon and refused to go into battle. He lent his armor to his friend Patroclus, who was killed by Hector. Achilles slew Hector, but then the poisoned arrow, guided by Paris, found its mark, his heel.

  Matt sat bolt upright. Of Course! There was the stratagem. It was lying there all along in the past, waiting to be plucked: history’s most famous battle, history’s most famous deception.

  The wind died down during the night, and in the morning light it was clear that the blizzard had passed. By dawn the air was so thin and clear that the men could see for miles. When the sun came up it deepened the blue of the sky and gave the snow crust on the win­dow of the chopper, in which Kane had been trapped since the crash, a golden hue.

  He felt relief; they had established radio contact with Sodder, who flew back to camp in the other chopper and now that the storm was over they would be rescued. Only when his sickening fear lifted did he realize how profoundly it had taken hold of him, penetrating his bones like the cold.

  He shifted and felt a searing pain travel up his lower back. He had shared the wrecked cabin with Sheriden, who had cut both his eyes on window glass in the crash and wore a bandage wrapped around his head. The man snored through the night while Kane froze. The rest of the men camped just outside, tunneling through the snow to sleep in a small tent.

  Now he heard the men walking around outside, then a long whistle of astonishment.

  “Hey, you should see this thing. You guys are really close to the edge. You’re damned lucky you didn’t go over.”

  A hand brushed away the snow on a small patch of the window, then scraped at the ice. When Kane raised himself painfully on his elbows and peered through, he saw a head blurred by a thin layer of ice. By craning his neck and looking down he could just make out the top of a snowdrift several feet away, and beyond that nothing but space. If the wind had been stronger, it could have swept the helicopter over the edge, A giddy feeling overtook him, the elation of danger past. Thank God he hadn’t known just how precarious their shelter was.

  On the other side of the helicopter, the men set up a Sterno can and made coffee. They handed a mug in to Kane, and he cupped it in both hands and felt the warmth radiate up to his elbows. He was worried about his feet; he was able to move them but they had no sensation at all. He could only tell he was flexing his toes by looking at his boots. Frostbite, for sure. Well, at least it would be his ticket off this mountain. He was fed up with the mission; he had read Dr. Arnot’s letter left at the campsite for Kellicut, making sure no one else saw it. She referred to some kind of dia
ry; it was obvious that the professor had found the creatures. Maybe they weren’t far away at this very moment.

  They passed in a ready-to-eat meal. It was barely edible, and he used what was left of the coffee to wash it down. One of the men helped Sheriden, cutting large bites and shoveling the food into his mouth as he opened wide, like a baby bird.

  Sodder called on the radio and said they were getting ready to set out and were packing some last-minute supplies into the rescue chopper.

  “Commander.” The pilot poked his head inside the cabin. His tone was perfunctory. “Seeing as how we’ve got some time before they get here, we thought we’d check out where that transponder is. It’s not far away.”

  He’s telling me, not asking me, Kane thought. But why not? “Okay, but be quick about it. We’ve got to get Sheriden to a medic. We can’t wait around.”

  “They’ll have to take us out in shifts anyway. Can’t overload our last bird at this altitude.” Kane grunted. He still bore a grudge for the crash, which was the pilot’s fault. In his mind he’d been composing the complaint he was going to lodge.

  He heard crisp squeaks in the snow as the men walked away. It sounded like all of them were going. He hadn’t realized that. Soon it was quiet except for the sound of a slight breeze.

  “Hello?” he ventured, not too loudly. “Anyone out there?” There was no reply.

  “What’s wrong?” said Sheriden, a trace of panic in his voice. “Nothing.”

  “Why’d you yell?”

  “I didn’t yell. I was just seeing if anyone was there.”

  Kane reached over and fiddled with the radio to make sure it was on. He called Sodder’s helicopter, just to have something to do, but there was no reply. Guess they haven’t started out yet, he thought.