“Tux, eh?” said Margo. “I brought my dress with me this morning. It’s nice, but it’s not a Nipon original or anything.”
Kawakita leaned toward her. “Dress for success, Margo. The powers that be take a look at some guy wearing a T-shirt, and even though he’s a genius they can’t visualize him as Director of the Museum.”
“And you want to be Director?”
“Of course,” said Kawakita, surprised. “Don’t you?”
“What about just doing good science?”
“Anybody can do good science. But someday I’d like a larger role. As Director, you can do a lot more for science than some researcher fiddling in a dingy lab like this. Today it’s just not enough to do outstanding [267] research.” He patted her on the back. “Have fun. And don’t break anything.”
He left, and the lab settled into silence.
Margo sat for a moment, motionless. Then she opened up the folder with the Kiribitu plant specimens. But she couldn’t help thinking there were more important things to be done. When she’d finally reached Frock on the phone, and told him about what little she’d found in the crate, he had grown very quiet. It was as if, suddenly, all the fight had gone out of him. He’d sounded so depressed, she hadn’t bothered to tell him about the journal and its lack of new information.
She looked at her watch: after one o’clock. The DNA sequencing of each Kiribitu plant specimen was going to be time-consuming, and she had to complete the sequencing before she could use Kawakita’s Extrapolator. But as Frock had reminded her, this was the first attempt to do a systematic study of a primitive plant classification system. With this program, she could confirm that the Kiribitu, with their extraordinary knowledge of plants, had actually classified them biologically. The program would allow her to come up with intermediate plants, hypothetical species whose real counterparts might still be found in the Kiribitu rain forest. At least, that was Frock’s intention.
To sequence DNA from a plant, Margo had to remove part of each specimen. After a lengthy exchange of electronic mail that morning, she had finally been given permission to take 0.1 gram from each specimen. It was just barely enough.
She stared at the delicate specimens, smelling faintly of spice and grass. Some of them were powerful hallucinogens, used by the Kiribitu for sacred ceremonies; others were medicinal and quite possibly of great value to modern science.
She picked up the first plant with tweezers, slicing off the top portion of the leaf with an X-Acto knife. In a mortar and pestle, she ground it up with a mild enzyme [268] that would dissolve the cellulose and lyse the cells’ nuclei, releasing the DNA. She worked swiftly but meticulously, adding the appropriate enzymes, centrifuging the result and performing a titration, then repeating the process with other plants.
The final centrifuging took ten minutes, and while the centrifuge vibrated in its gray metal case, Margo sat back, her mind wandering. She wondered what Smithback was doing in his new role as Museum pariah. She wondered, with a small thrill of fear, whether Mrs. Rickman had discovered the missing journal. She thought about what Jörgensen had said, and about Whittlesey’s own description of his last days on earth. She imagined the old woman pointing a withered finger at the figurine in the box, warning Whittlesey about the curse. She imagined the setting: the ruined but overgrown by vines, the flies droning in the sunlight. Where had the woman come from? Why had she run off? Then she imagined Whittlesey taking a deep breath, entering that dark hut of mystery for the first time ...
Wait a minute, she thought. The journal had said they encountered the old woman before entering the deserted hut. And yet, the letter she found wedged in the lid of the crate clearly stated that Whittlesey discovered the figurine inside the hut. He didn’t enter the but until after the old woman ran away.
The old woman was not looking at the figurine when she cried out that Mbwun was in the crate! She must have been looking at something else in the crate and calling it Mbwun! But nobody had realized that, because they hadn’t found Whittlesey’s letter. They’d only had the journal for evidence, so they’d assumed Mbwun was the figurine.
But they were wrong.
Mbwun, the real Mbwun, wasn’t the figurine at all. What had the woman said? Now white man come and take Mbwun away. Beware, Mbwun curse will destroy you! You bring death to your people!
[269] And that’s just what had happened. Death had come to the Museum. But what inside the crate could she have been referring to?
Grabbing the notebook from her carryall, she quickly reconstructed a list of what she had found in Whittlesey’s crate the day before:
Plant press with plants
Blow darts with tube Incised disk (found in the hut)
Lip plugs
Five or six jars with preserved frogs and salamanders (I think?)
Bird skins
Flint arrowheads and spear points
Shaman’s rattle
Manta
What else? She rummaged in her handbag. The plant press, disc, and shaman’s rattle were still there. She laid them on the table.
The damaged shaman’s rattle was interesting, but far from unusual. She’d seen several more exotic specimens in the Superstition exhibition.
The disk was obscure. It showed some kind of ceremony, people standing in a shallow lake, bending over, some with plants in their hands, baskets on their backs. Very odd. But it certainly didn’t seem to be an object of veneration.
The list wasn’t helpful. Nothing inside the crate had looked remotely like a devil, or whatever else could inspire such terror in an old woman.
Margo carefully unscrewed the small, rusty plant press, its screws and plywood holding the blotter paper in place. She eased it open and lifted off the first sheet.
It held a plant stem and several small flowers. Nothing she had ever seen before, but not particularly interesting at first glance.
[270] The next sheets in the press contained flowers and leaves. It was not, Margo thought, a collection made by a professional botanist. Whittlesey was an anthropologist, and he had probably just picked these specimens because they looked showy and unusual. But why would he collect them at all? She went through all the specimens, and in the back found the note she was looking for.
“Selection of plants found in overgrown abandoned garden near hut (Kothoga?) on September 16, 1987. May be cultivated species, some may also be invasive after abandonment.” There was a little drawing of the overgrown plot, showing the location of the various plants. Anthropology, thought Margo, not botany. Still, she respected Whittlesey’s interest in the relationship the Kothoga had to their plants.
She continued her inspection. One plant caught her eye: it had a long fibrous stem, with a single round leaf at the top. Margo realized it was some kind of aquatic plant, similar to a lily pad. Probably lived in an area of floods, she thought.
Then she realized that the incised disk found in the but showed the very same plant. She looked at the disk more closely: it depicted people harvesting these very plants from the swamp in a ceremony of sorts. The faces on the figures were twisted, full of sorrow. Very strange. But she felt satisfied to have made the connection; it might make a nice little paper for the Journal of Ethnobotany.
Putting the disk aside, she reassembled the press and screwed it down tight. A loud beeping sounded: the centrifuge was finished, the material prepared.
She opened the centrifuge and slid a glass rod into the thin layer of material at the bottom of the test tube. She carefully applied it to the waiting gel, then eased the gel tray into the electrophoresis machine. Her finger moved to the power switch. Now for another half-hour wait, she thought.
[271] She paused, her finger still on the switch. Her thoughts kept returning to the old woman and the mystery of Mbwun. Could she have been referring to the seed pods—the ones that resembled eggs? No, Maxwell had taken those back himself. They weren’t in Whittlesey’s crate. Was it one of the frogs or salamanders in jars, or one of the bird skins? That se
emed an unlikely locus for the son of the devil himself. And it couldn’t have been the garden plants, because they were hidden in the plant press.
So what was it? Was the crazy old woman ranting about nothing?
With a sigh, Margo switched on the machine and sat back. She replaced the plant press and the incised disk in her carryall, brushing away a few packing fibers clinging to the press, packing fibers from the crate. There were additional traces inside her handbag. Yet another reason to clean the damn thing out.
The packing fibers.
Curious, she picked one up with the tweezers, laid it on a slide, and placed it under the stereo-zoom. It was long and irregular, like the fibrous vein of a tough-stemmed plant. Perhaps it had been pounded flat by Kothoga women for household uses. Through the microscope, she could see the individual cells gleaming dully, their nuclei brighter than the surrounding ectoplasm.
She thought back to Whittlesey’s journal. Hadn’t Whittlesey mentioned specimen jars being broken, and his need to repack the crate? So, in the area of the deserted hut, they must have thrown out the old packing material, which had become soaked in formaldehyde, and repacked the crate with material found lying near the abandoned hut. Fibers prepared by the Kothoga, perhaps; probably for weaving into coarse cloth or for the production of rope.
Could the fibers have been what the woman was referring to? It seemed impossible. And yet, Margo [272] couldn’t help a little professional curiosity about it. Had the Kothoga actually cultivated the plant?
She plucked out a few fibers and dropped them in another mortar, added a few drops of enzyme, and ground them up. If she sequenced the DNA, she could use Kawakita’s program to at least identify the plant’s genus or family.
Soon, the centrifuged DNA from the fibers was ready for the electrophoresis machine. She followed her usual procedure, then switched on the current. Slowly, the dark bands began forming along the electrified gel.
A half hour later, the red light on the electrophoresis machine winked out. Margo removed the gel tray and began recording the position of the dots and bands of migrated nucleotides, typing her results into the computer.
She punched in the last position, instructed Kawakita’s program to search for matches with known organisms, directed the output to the printer, and waited. Finally, the pages began scrolling out.
At the top of the first sheet, the computer had printed:
Species: Unknown. 10% randomized genetic matches with known species.
Genus: Unknown
Family: Unknown
Order: Unknown
Class: Unknown
Phylum: Unknown
Kingdom: Unknown
Cripes, Margo! What did you put in here? I don’t even know if this is an animal or plant. And you won’t believe how much CPU time it took to figure that out!
Margo had to smile. So this was how Kawakita’s sophisticated experiment in artificial intelligence communicated with the outside world. And the results were ridiculous. Kingdom unknown? The damn program couldn’t even tell if it were a plant or an animal. Margo suddenly felt she knew why Kawakita had been reluctant to show her the program in the first place, why it took a call from Frock to get things in motion. Once you strayed out of its known provinces, the program grew flaky.
She scanned the printout. The computer had identified very few genes from the specimen. There were the usual ones common to almost all life: a few respiration cycle proteins, cytochrome Z, various other universal genes. And there were also some genes linked to cellulose, chlorophylls, and sugars, which Margo knew were specific plant genes.
At the waiting prompt, she typed:
How come you don’t even know if it is an animal or plant? I see lots of plant genes in here.
There was a pause.
Didn’t you notice the animal genes in there, too? Run the data through GenLab.
Good point, thought Margo. She dialed up GenLab on the modem and soon the familiar blue logo popped up on the screen. She uploaded the DNA data from the fibers and ran it against their botanical sub-bank. Same results: almost nothing. A few matches with common sugars and chlorophylls.
On an impulse she ran the DNA data through the entire databank.
There was a long pause, and then a flood of information filled the screen. Margo quickly hit a series of [274] keys, instructing the terminal to capture the data. There were numerous matches with a variety of genes she had never heard of.
Logging off GenLab, she fed the data she’d captured into Kawakita’s program, instructing it to tell her what proteins the genes coded for.
A complicated list of the specific proteins created by each gene started to scroll down the screen.
Glycotetraglycine collagenoid
Suckno’s thyrotropic hormone, 2,6 adenosine [gram positive]
1,2,3, oxytocin 4-monoxytocin supressin hormone
2,4 diglyceride diethylglobulin ring-alanine
Gammaglobulin A, x-y, left positive
Hypothalamic corticotropic hormone, left negative
1-1-1 sulphagen (2,3 murine) connective keratinoid, III-IV involution
Hexagonal ambyloid reovirus protein coat
Reverse transcriptase enzyme
The list went on and on. A lot of these seem to be hormones, she thought. But what kind of hormones?
She located a copy of Encyclopedia of Biochemistry that was busily gathering dust on a shelf, dragged it down and looked up glycotetraglycine collagenoid:
A protein common to most vertebrate life. It is the protein that bonds muscle tissue to cartilage.
She flipped through to Suckno’s thyrotropic hormone.
A hypothalamic hormone present in mammals which acts on the pituitary gland.
A terrible thought began to form inside her head. She looked up the next, 1,2,3 oxytocin 4-monoxytocin supressin hormone:
A hormone secreted by the human hypothalamus gland. Its function is not clearly understood. Recent studies have shown that it might regulate levels of testosterone in the bloodstream during periods of high stress. (Bouchard, 1992; Dennison, 1991).
Margo sat back with a start, the book dropping to the floor with a hollow thud. As she picked up the phone, she glanced at the clock. It was three-thirty.
= 38 =
When the Buick’s driver had pulled away, Pendergast mounted the steps to a Museum side entrance, juggling two long cardboard tubes beneath one arm as he showed his identification to the waiting security guard.
At the temporary command post, he shut the door to his office and extracted several yellowed blueprints from the tubes, which he spread across his desk.
For the next hour, he remained nearly motionless, head resting on tented hands, studying. Occasionally he jotted a few words in a notebook, or referred to typewritten sheets that lay on one corner of the desk.
Suddenly, he stood up. He took a final look at the curling blueprints, and slowly ran his finger from one point to another, pursing his lips. Then he gathered up most of the sheets, returned them carefully to the cardboard tubes, and stowed them in his coat closet. The rest he folded carefully and placed in a two-handled cloth bag that lay open on his desk. Opening a drawer, he removed a double-action Colt .45 Anaconda, narrow and [277] long and evil-looking. The weapon fit snugly into the holster under his left arm: not exactly standard FBI issue, but a comforting companion nonetheless. A handful of ammunition went into his pocket. From the drawer he also removed a large, bulky yellow object, which he placed in the cloth bag. Then, smoothing his black suit and straightening his tie, he slipped his notebook into the breast pocket of his jacket, picked up the cloth bag, and left his office.
New York City had a short memory for violence, and in the vast public spaces of the Museum streams of visitors could be seen once again. Groups of children crowded around exhibits, pressing noses against the glass, pointing and laughing. Parents hovered nearby, maps and cameras in hand. Tour guides walked along, reciting litanies; guards stood warily in doorways. Through it
all, Pendergast glided unnoticed.
He walked slowly into the Hall of the Heavens. Potted palms lined two sides of the enormous room, and a small army of workers made last-minute preparations. The speaking platform on the podium was being sound-checked by two technicians, and imitation native fetishes were being placed on a hundred white linen tablecloths. A hum of activity floated up past the Corinthian columns into the vast circular dome.
Pendergast checked his watch: four o’clock precisely. All the agents would be at Coffey’s briefing. He walked briskly across the Hall toward the sealed entrance of Superstition. A few brief words were exchanged, and a uniformed officer on duty unlocked the door.
Several minutes later, Pendergast emerged from the exhibition. He stood for a moment, thinking. Then he walked back across the Hall and out into the corridors beyond.
Pendergast moved into the quieter backwaters of the Museum, out of the public spaces. Now he was in the storage areas and laboratories where no tourist was permitted. The high ceilings and vast decorative galleries gave way to drab cinder-block corridors lined with [278] cabinets. Steam pipes rumbled and hissed overhead. Pendergast stopped once at the top of a metal staircase, to look around for a moment, consult his notebook, and load his weapon. Then he moved downward into the narrow labyrinths of the Museum’s dark heart.
= 39 =
The door to the lab banged open, then eased back slowly. Margo looked up to see Frock backing himself inside, his wheelchair creaking. She quickly stood up and helped wheel him over to the computer terminal. She noticed he was already dressed in his tuxedo. Probably put it on before he came to work, she thought. The usual Gucci handkerchief protruded from his breast pocket.
“I can’t understand why they put these labs in such out-of-the-way places,” he grumbled. “Now what’s the great mystery, Margo? And why did I have to come down to hear it? Tonight’s foolishness is getting underway shortly, and my presence will be required on the dais. It’s a hollow honor, of course—it’s only due to my best-selling status. Ian Cuthbert made that abundantly clear in my office this morning.” His voice again sounded bitter, resigned.
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