The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  Mac held out a hand that said, No need. “I’m sorry to hear about your friends,” he added. “And we can talk about that later, if you like.”

  “Merci,” Cousteau said, with a nod.

  “Jacques, this is my friend Yanni Thorne.”

  Cousteau, ever the gentleman, reached across his friend to shake her hand. “Special Agent?”

  “Yeah,” Yanni replied, looking past him in the direction of the lagoon. “Just got promoted about ten minutes ago.”

  “Physiquement, I think I am feeling better than I should,” Cousteau said, once they’d arrived at the hotel, and after Mac and Yanni had checked in to their rooms.

  “How’s that?” Mac asked.

  “After all of that happened . . . down there. After all I saw, I came to the surface trop vite.” He turned to Yanni. “Too fast.”

  She nodded.

  Cousteau continued. “And yet I feel perfectly fine—I have no, and this absolutely should not be, no aftereffects? And the strangest thing—though there is plenty of strange about this—is how my arms feel better also.”

  “Jacques was in a car accident sometime back,” Mac explained, heading off Yanni’s question.

  Wearing an expression of disbelief, the Frenchman shook his arms, then reached upward and wiggled his fingers. “But now there is no pain.”

  Mac and Yanni exchanged looks and shared the same thought. The red stuff.

  Cousteau did not seem to notice.

  Mac could see easily that his friend appeared to be drifting off into a nightmare. “Mentalement, c’est une autre histoire,” Cousteau muttered.

  Mac nodded sympathetically. “Another story” indeed.

  June 29, 1948

  Not very long after sunrise, while Cousteau lay low at the hotel, Mac and Yanni accompanied Tse-lin to the excavation site where he had been at work, above the western shores of Santorini.

  They made their way down the steep, rocky trail until Tse-lin came to a halt at around the midway point. From here the feeling that they were standing on the rim of an enormous caldera was all too clear. Mac thought it was a perfect spot to take in a spectacular view of the lagoon and the smaller islands. But it was also clear to him that Tse-lin had not stopped to admire the view.

  “I have something important to tell you both,” he said.

  Given recent events, Mac and Yanni expected the worst: the full spectrum from being blackmailed into service by Mao’s communists to joining a cargo cult came to mind.

  “What is it, Tse-lin?” Mac asked.

  “I . . . I am so uncertain,” he said.

  “We’re your friends,” Yanni said. “Tell us what’s eatin’ you.”

  Tse-lin paused a moment, seemingly to summon his courage. “I am now American,” he said proudly, before pausing. “And now . . . I need an American name.”

  Mac and Yanni released the collective breaths they had been holding but managed to maintain their solemn expressions.

  “That is serious,” Mac said.

  “Very serious,” Tse-lin said, with a nod.

  “You got any ideas yet?” Yanni asked.

  “I was thinking . . . maybe Seymour.”

  Mac, who’d been prepared to offer whatever support he could, started to bite on his lower lip. “Um, anything else make the short list?”

  “Maybe Poindexter too.”

  Now Mac turned away, feigning a coughing fit, and Yanni threw him a dirty look.

  “Those are . . . swell names, Tse-lin,” she said. “But what about Alan?”

  “Ah-lan?” Tse-lin repeated.

  “It was my husband Bob’s middle name. And I’ve always loved it.”

  Mac, who had gone pensive at the mention of his late best friend, managed a smile. “I think it’s a lulu,” he said at last.

  Now Tse-lin smiled too. “Alan. From now on I would like to be called Alan.”

  “It’ll be my pleasure,” Yanni responded, trying unsuccessfully not to tear up.

  “Me too . . . Alan,” Mac said.

  They found Pierre Boulle working in the shade of a blanket-sized canopy that had been rigged to allow the fossil diggers to remain out of the direct sunlight. The men who quarried volcanic ash for the Suez Canal’s concrete had taken a giant chunk out of the island, like a slice out of a layer cake. From the bottom of the quarry, one could either look out across the lagoon or straight up into the layers of alternating volcanic and sedimentary deposits. The youngest layers, near the top, enclosed part of a Crusades-era church. Twenty feet below the church floor lay graves of the first humans to reach Santorini. The farther down one walked toward the bottom of the mine’s geologic layer cake, the deeper one descended into time.

  Pierre Boulle and Alan Tse-lin had set up camp at the very bottom.

  “So this is where that chimp skull came from?” Mac asked.

  “The skull, the spear points, the hand axes,” Pierre replied, not bothering to look up.

  “Couldn’t they have been made by early humans and then gotten mixed up with your primate bones? Maybe by a stream eroding through and washing them down to this level?”

  Now Pierre turned, appearing to size up the American zoologist. “That idea is merde. Do you know what is merde?”

  “I’m familiar with it.”

  “Then you know there were no tool-making humans here five million years ago, or any humans. But these tools were here.”

  “Can you tell us what else was here five million years ago?” Yanni asked.

  “A very different world,” the newly minted Alan replied. “These fossils, these artifacts, and even the rock that surrounds them, they are beginning to tell us a story—of our past and perhaps of our future. It is our job to decipher that story.”

  With that, Alan Tse-lin picked up a stainless steel dental pick and knelt beside his colleague, who was scraping and brushing earth away from a newly exposed skull.

  “She is a beautiful lady, no?” said Pierre.

  “It’s a beautiful specimen,” Yanni replied, “but how do you know it’s a female?”

  In response, Boulle drew an index finger along a ridge that ran along the top of the cranium. “This we call a sagittal crest,” he said.

  “In this species, females were larger,” Alan chimed in. “Bigger crest. Bigger jaw muscles.”

  Boulle turned to Mac. “And monsieur, these tools we collected are related to funerary rites. Je suis absolument certain!”

  Mac nodded, “Whose funerals?”

  “Well, the tools are not from people across the water. And they were not mixed in with stone artifacts from humans who lived here in more recent time.”

  “So who—”

  “As I say, they were buried here, monsieur. Délibérément!”

  Yanni moved in for a closer look. “Meaning these creatures had some belief that tools might be needed after death?”

  “Who knows? Perhaps they are just for decorative purposes,” said Alan. “But what a possibility to raise!”

  “And I have not seen such quality stonework since the American Clovis points they recovered in ’29,” Boulle said, then pointed toward higher strata. “The first humans are way up there—one hundred, maybe two hundred thousand years before today.”

  “And crude, crude tools are what you find there,” Alan Tse-lin added. “But here is a most amazing thing—”

  “The more ancient culture is the more advanced culture,” Boulle interjected, stealing his colleague’s punch line.

  Alan nodded in affirmation, before continuing, very gingerly, to expose the bones of a hand, placed evidently with loving care, over the “beautiful lady’s” chest.

  Boulle turned back to the skull, brushing soil away from a blackened layer beneath it. “This dark here is plant material,” he said, reverently. “Someone made a soft bed of olive leaves before laying her body to rest.”

  Mac and Yanni watched them for a few moments more before turning their attention to the red stains in the lagoon, the phenomenon plainly vi
sible even at this distance.

  Yanni took a step toward MacCready. “So you think there’s a connection, going all the way back, between these fossils and the red stuff?”

  Before Mac could answer, there was a rumble in the sky and four heads turned to the north.

  Flying in tandem, two silver jet fighters streaked across the lagoon. As if intentionally overflying the excavation, they dropped altitude and let out a unified roar. The drawn-out, artificial thunder rattled the eyeless sockets of a skull that had never lived to see (or even to imagine) a plane. Before the jets circled back over the island fragment called Therasia and disappeared again into the north, Mac identified their origin by the large red star adorning a vertical stabilizer. Russians.

  “I don’t know, Yanni,” Mac said, answering her question, “but we need to get to work—and fast.”

  Chapter 4

  Dead of Night

  Call it mother, if you will—but Earth is not a doting parent.

  —Isaac Asimov

  5.33 Million b.c.

  On the Bed of the Eastern Mediterranean

  The dust came down like snow—came down with twilight, as gentle and fine as mist. It tasted faintly of salt, and it rode in each afternoon on a wind from the western desert. Proud One had seen the desert once, after the Stone-throwers chased her clan down from the highland savanna and watering holes. The desert was endless. When the sunlight struck it in the morning, it shimmered like a wonderful horizon-spanning lake, but to enter the lake and travel west was slow death.

  Proud One, her surviving child, Seed, and her entire clan were in retreat. The lands above the canyon floor—two miles above—belonged to the Stone-throwers now, belonged to a stockier and much stronger clan that was spreading like a conquering horde from the distant plain of black rock.

  “Stone-throwers,” Seed signed with her fingers, expressing recollection of past horrors, and fear.

  “They will not follow us here,” the mother signed back. She raised two calloused, hair-covered hands above her head, so all could see her assuring reply. They had paused on an outcrop of siltstone, overlooking a vast river. Proud One, the clan of forty’s leading matriarch, flared her huge nostrils wide, breathing deeply of the strange new scents of the forest, of ripening fruits near and far, and of nectars she had not smelled in such abundance since before she was Seed’s age.

  For just a little while, Proud One felt like a child again, at the beginning of a fantastic adventure.

  For only a little while, she felt so.

  Her kind had long ago reached a stage in brain development by which past experiences could be compared, one to another, to anticipate the future in reasonable detail. She also knew that the clan’s retreat into new lands had produced more bad memories than good and so her moment of excitement was all too brief. Proud One looked at her daughter and then to the unknown world ahead with a renewed sense of loss and fear that was the ancestor of worry. And with that emotion the first lies entered the world.

  “We will be safe,” Proud One signed to Seed, and to the rest of the clan.

  She repeated the sign and gestured toward the river’s edge and the northern route that lay beyond.

  Now Proud One’s greatest concern was putting distance between her group and the Stone-throwers. Urgency drove her forward, but an inner, almost equally urgent instinct seemed to be crying out that this new world was far from safe.

  Each day, in this canyon refuge miles below sea level, the planet’s warmest and most complex air currents drew up mountains of moisture from the west, piling trillions of water droplets together above the eastern oases, forming towering anvil clouds. At night the clouds collapsed into torrents. In air two times thicker than on the continents above, raindrops fell with curiously lazy speed, barely faster than leaves falling from trees.

  This particular night, predators arrived with the rain. They came down from the trees, black as the clouds above, revealed against deep shadows only by the suddenly intensifying flicker of lightning. There were only three of them, but they were enough—each so much at the peak of its species’s pack-hunting skills that had Seed not been wide awake and looking in precisely the right direction, the creatures would have fallen upon the encampment without even the faintest scuttle against a tree trunk for warning.

  Proud One was also awake, but her attention had been directed elsewhere. Hearing Seed’s whimper, her head snapped toward the child and followed her gaze upward. She could sense that the rest of her clan was also awake and scanning for movement.

  Proud One expected to see a large, arboreal cat, though there had been no sounds or smells anywhere along the oasis of anything even vaguely reminiscent of a panther. Instead, a particularly long series of lightning flickers seemed to reveal nests of snakes descending from the canopy. Each nest possessed a head, not much larger than her own, and roughly the same shape. But these “heads” were surrounded by groping, wiggling black tendrils—which projected toward her from the shadows.

  One night visitor’s eyes—like none Proud One had ever seen—reflected the shimmering sky fire and held her momentarily transfixed. The child clutched her mother’s waist, while she and the rest of the clan bared their canines, preparing for a fight. Reacting to the threat display, the three intruders froze in place—demonstrating an uncanny ability to blend in with the forest’s dark nooks and crannies.

  But for a shimmer of lightning, Proud One would have seen little or nothing of the actual attack, which began when one of the night stalkers uncoiled two snakelike limbs—and sprang toward her and Seed.

  Against this, the matriarch’s keen hearing and sense of touch guided her more deftly than sight. In an instant she had sidestepped the strike and bitten a soft strip of flesh from the very beast that had dropped from the trees in a failed attempt to prey upon her child. The wad of tissue writhed in Proud One’s mouth, tasting simultaneously salty and sweet.

  It seemed impossible that the monster could have survived such a wound—yet, as the mother stood in the rain and blackness, there came to her a slow recognition that the creatures had not failed in their hunt. Through the intermittent lightning Proud One could see that while she momentarily engaged one of the creatures, other predators used the distraction to their benefit. Two clan members, who had been standing nearby, simply vanished—they and their attackers disappearing into the night as if swallowed by it.

  Chapter 5

  Plum Island Rising

  We all agree that your theory is mad. The problem which divides us is this: is it sufficiently crazy to be right?

  —Niels Bohr

  June 30, 1948

  Metropolitan Museum of Natural History

  For Dr. Nora Nesbitt it had been a tremendously busy few days. The lack of sleep was difficult enough, but her training had helped her to adapt. The hardest part of all was the knowledge that she was now a traitor to people she had thought of as friends. Tired and burdened with what she called “a bit of that bad dog feeling,” she bumped into the corner of an awkwardly placed table while retrieving a stack of MacCready’s field notebooks. A framed picture almost fell onto the floor, an amiable-looking guy with a ponytail, but she caught it and repositioned it on the tabletop—or, rather, what had looked like the top of a table.

  Theremin, she thought, with a grimace. That ugly thing, again.

  Fortunately, although Nesbitt had made plenty of noise, no one along the museum’s fifth-floor corridors seemed to have heard anything. In the absolute wakefulness that often crept in behind periods of extended fatigue, she scanned speedily through the first notebook, then a second and a third. It was clear to her by the time she rifled through another desk drawer full of loose notes and correspondence that during all of two years, Mac had written down nothing about the last expedition—nothing about a Himalayan grotto or what he’d referred to as the red stuff—nothing except the most obscure, self-coded references.

  Has he hidden those records? she wondered. Or is he now able to keep it all i
n his head?

  For her own part, Nesbitt reveled in the knowledge that her previous exposure to the red stuff had the side effect of giving her a photographic memory. She could recall and cross-reference hundreds of pages from Mac’s notes in search of anything relevant.

  Does he realize, yet, that he came out of there with something more than a cure for the common cold in his veins?

  Mac and Yanni had suddenly abandoned expedition plans that appeared to be more than two years in the making. And from the moment her colleagues at the (officially nonexistent) Plum Island lab learned this, it was clear their own research was at risk. Nesbitt had assigned code words of her own to the enigmatic red microbe: the Darwin Strain. And to her, those two words spelled Oh, mother. The lock that Nesbitt’s team thought they held over the world’s supply of the substance had seemed absolute. Now that Mac had flown off to the Mediterranean with no warning at all, she was not so sure.

  Nesbitt was scanning through another volume of “notes about irrelevant oddities” when the door to R. J. MacCready’s office opened. She looked up from the papers and screwed on her best I’m-sure-Mac-would-be-delighted-to-see-me-rifling-through-his-notes smile.

  Two familiar figures stepped inside.

  Neither of them was smiling.

  “Patricia. Charles,” Nesbitt said, cheerily.

  “Find everything you need?” Patricia asked.

  “The gold jewelry from Troy is in the east wing and you’ll find the Star of Ceylon in the southeast turret,” Charles Knight said, loudly.

  “We keep the silverware on the ground floor,” Patricia added.

  “You don’t understand,” Nesbitt protested.

  “I’m afraid we do,” Knight said.

  “How long has it been, Nora?” Patricia asked. “Two years?”

  “Yes, well—”

  “Now here you are, back again,” Patricia said, “coming in here really sneaky-like, and going through Mac’s expedition notes.” She gestured toward a stack of suddenly well-organized papers.