Neanderthal
Page 38
On the other side, the three humans waved. Hurt-Knee stared back but did not try to imitate the gesture. So they turned and left and started down the mountain. They had walked only about twenty paces when they heard a rumble behind them, a consuming rumble that sounded a bit like the avalanche, only sharper. They turned around to see the bridge collapsing in on itself, crunching up like a straw and then plunging into the ravine. Hurt-Knee had tripped the destruct mechanism. They could see only his back, already disappearing up the slope.
They rested near a cold mountain stream, in the same spot where they had stopped on the way up.
“Sergei,” said Matt, “something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Did your people ever figure out why Kee-wak’s guys were trading? Whatever possessed them to come down off the mountain and exchange goods?”
“It wasn’t because they wanted goods. They had everything they needed—at least at this stage of development.”
“Then what was it?”
“What they wanted was humans,” explained Sergei. “The skins they left were bait. They wanted to lure people up onto the mountain.”
“But why?”
“For sacrifice. To appease the demons causing the earthquakes. That’s what Shakanov said. We’ve been tracking disappearances in this area since the early 1900s, and they always correspond to a resurgence of volcanic activity.”
“And the godhead?”
“I’m not convinced it’s a god of hunt. I think it’s a god of terror, the god that makes the ground tremble. They believe that god is the cave bear The cave bear is the one animal whose hide we’ve never found below. It’s sacred. At least, that’s the theory of our scientists. Up to now our scientists have only been guessing; they’ve never actually seen a Yeti.”
“So your guys don’t have any absolute proof?” asked Matt.
“That’s true.”
They were silent for a bit, listening to the water. Then Sergei spoke up. “I was thinking about what you said earlier about deception. Isn’t it ironic that our worst characteristic is the one to determine survival?”
“I’m not sure it’s our worst characteristic,” said Susan. “In some ways it’s inseparable from intelligence. Metaphorically speaking, it’s our opposable thumb. It allows you to manipulate the world. If you have brains, you’re smart. If you have guile, you’re clever.”
“Think of it as the ability to create illusion and surprise,” said Matt. “And then you’re in the realm of art and magic and music and storytelling. Think of it as our own inner eye, our own ability to project ourselves outward by our imagination.”
Sergei was indeed thinking. Susan looked at him closely and posed the question the conversation had been inexorably moving toward. “So now that you know, are you going to go back and tell the government they’re right?”
Sergei leaned over to take a sip of cold water, and when he finished, sitting up and wiping his chin, he was smiling. “When have you ever known a government to be right?”
“Son of a bitch!” shouted Matt at full voice. Susan leaned over and touched Sergei’s arm. Matt fished in his rucksack and came up with his tape recorder and two tapes and Kellicut’s diary. He flung them far away, into a ravine where they disappeared noiselessly. “Here’s to deception!” he said.
“Long live deception!” countered Sergei.
Eagleton was waiting for them, rocking his chair back and forth nervously inside the Quonset hut, the cage he had come to hate. He had been rocking and chain smoking from the moment he had received Sodder’s call from the chopper, not long after the new team commander found the three of them walking down the path several miles above Kellicut’s camp.
“Three of them? You mean doctors Arnot, Mattison, and Van?”
“Not Van. Someone else. A Russian.”
A Russian? Impossible.”
Eagleton couldn’t interrogate him further without the others overhearing his answers. Nothing to do but wait. He felt like a drink. Damn, he hadn’t had a drink in ages.
The whirring of the helicopter came a good three minutes before the sudden earth-sucking roar as it swooped to set down on a rock ledge in the compound. He peered out the window, pulling back and leaning over to look through one eye so that they wouldn’t see him. There was a stranger: long dark hair, easy stride, Slavic features. Eagleton moved over to his desk and feigned composure.
They didn’t even knock. First came Sodder, then the woman, then Mattison, finally the stranger. They looked thin, exhausted. Nobody shook hands, and Eagleton struggled to find the right voice—concerned, not commanding.
“We were so worried. You were up there so long, totally out of contact. Tell me everything. What happened?”
Matt drew a long breath. “It was a disaster. We got stuck in a blizzard. There was an avalanche. We found Kellicut’s body. Van died too; he was crushed by a falling boulder. There was nothing we could do to help him. We’re lucky we got out alive.”
Eagleton wanted to ask about the Neanderthal, but instead he gestured at Sergei. “And who is this?”
“Sergei Ilyich Konyanov.” Sergei stepped forward and offered a hand.
Eagleton reluctantly took it, recoiling. “Russian.”
“You bet.”
Eagleton turned to Matt. “I don’t understand.”
“We found him wandering around up there. Apparently the Russians sent an expedition of their own. They lost everyone but him.”
“We’re exhausted,” said Susan. “Do you mind if we sit down?”
“We could use some food, too,” Matt said.
Eagleton, flustered, told Sodder to order up some food and bring in chairs, but Sodder, his curiosity piqued, was reluctant to leave, and in the end Matt and Susan and Sergei said they were too tired for more questioning right now and needed to recuperate. Eagleton’s counterfeit politeness forced him to give way, and he hid his anger.
He tried one last time, rolling his chair around the desk and grabbing Matt by the arm. “Do you really mean to say you wandered around in subzero weather in a blizzard for weeks on end, and you managed to survive without any help?”
“We were lucky. We found a cave where we waited out the storm. Then we found a more temperate valley. But it was rough.”
“And you didn’t see any sign of the Neanderthal?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Eagleton straightened in his chair.
“We brought you this,” Matt said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small sliver of mandible. One edge was smooth where he had broken off the piece that had a drill hole for a necklace. “You might want to have it dated.”
On the plane Matt ordered champagne right away. The steward, who seemed taken with Susan, gave them each an extra bottle, so that by the time they were at thirty thousand feet, they were already feeling giddy.
“Incidentally,” said Susan, “I wasn’t going to say this, but you seem to be driving me to it. I was right, you know.”
“About what?” Matt knew about what.
“It was war, not sex, that did them in.”
“Who?”
“Don’t play dumb.”
“Oh, those guys. I’ve already forgotten about them.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it.”
“Okay. Let’s say for a minute—just a minute—that perhaps just conceivably you are not totally incorrect. What are you going to do about it? Who are you going to tell?”
Susan frowned. “It’s a problem, I know. I’ve been thinking about it too. Of all the people in the world, there’s only one who knows just how right I am, and that’s you. I can’t stand that thought.”
“And I can’t say anything either. So you’re stuck. Either you keep me around and you’re constantly validated, or you make long-distance calls whenever you get depressed.”
“That could mean a lot of calls.”
“My point exactly.” He took another sip. “Seriously, what are you going to do?”
“I’m not sure. I w
as thinking of going to East Africa, the Olduvai Gorge.”
“You’re kidding! That’s where I was going to go. Maybe Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. I’m excited by the recent finds there. The bipedalism they reveal pushes our human ancestry back even further. But why you? What bones would you look for?”
“Actually, I was thinking of something more along the line of molecular biology.”
Matt’s face dropped. “Susan, no. Not DNA. You’re not going to turn into one of these people who go around collecting placentas to prove we all came from a common ancestor named Eve?”
“It’s the wave of the future, Matt. It’s real science, quantifiable, verifiable. Not all that guesswork about how old the bone is, what geostratum it was found in, and the rest of it.”
“You’re nuts. You can’t possibly believe that you and I and everyone else came from an African bushwoman only two hundred thousand years ago?”
“The rate calculations may be off. It could be a little longer than that.”
“Susan.” Matt’s voice rose. “Genetic dating challenges my whole theory that we all left Africa more than a million years ago. You’re going to attack everything I stand for.”
“Now, Matt, take it easy. I didn’t say that. I might not attack it directly. I just think you may be a little off—say, six hundred thousand years.”
“Six hundred thousand years! That kills the whole thing!”
“Matt, pipe down. People are beginning to stare.”
“How could you?”
“Well, I may give you a chance to talk me out of it.”
“When have I ever talked you out of anything?” He sighed as he put his arm around her.
“There’s always a first time,” she said, snuggling in and taking another sip.
Outside through the plastic window, they saw the roof of the world receding, black-and-white jagged peaks that looked purple in the sunlight and were softened by distance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Darwin, Charles. Struggle for Existence and Natural Selection,
Origin of Species (London: Orion Books, 1996). Gould, Stephen Jay. Adam’s Nave! (London: Penguin Books, 1995). Leakey, Richard. The Origin of Humankind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994).
Schick, Kathy D. and Toth, Nicholas. Making Silent Stones Speak (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
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Shreeve, James. The Neandertal Enigma (New York: William Morrow and Company Inc., 1995).
Slessei,, Malcolm. Red Peak (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964). Stringer, Christopher and Gamble, Clive. In Search of the Neanderthals (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN DARNTON was born in New York City in 1941. He has worked thirty years as a reporter editor, and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, based in New York, Nigeria, Kenya, Spain, Poland, and the United Kingdom. He won the George Polk Award twice for his coverage of Africa and Eastern Europe, and in 1982 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for stories smuggled out of Poland during Martial law.
He is married to Nina Darnton, also a journalist. They have two daughters, Kyra and Liza, and a son, Jamie. They live in London, where he is bureau chief for The New York Times.