by Ted Kosmatka
Paul got to know some of the other techs. He learned their stories.
Each tech’s area of expertise was compartmentalized; each understood his or her given data sets. There was little cross-training. The different labs required different badges, and the person who prepped was never the person who tested.
The samples all came to Westing through the third floor—carried in the bones themselves, or in lozenges sampled from the dig sites. After that, the samples were typed and turned into data—and then relabeled, repackaged, and sent to the assayers, whose job it was to interpret the data and send the information upstairs.
Paul’s own badge got him through the door of the testing lab, but the deeper assaying labs were still off-limits.
The way the system was designed, the typers knew the sample origin but couldn’t translate the raw code into meaningful information. The assayers divined meaning from the nucleotide base-pair sequences but knew nothing of the origin of the samples, or from which bones they’d derived.
Of all the recent techs, only Charles had access to the master bank of data sets. He alone could cross-reference. But it turned out that even his access wasn’t complete.
Only the fifth floor knew all the secrets.
Fifth-floor heaven, looking down.
The first time Paul had encountered Charles, he’d been confused by the man. It was Paul’s first week at Westing, and a stranger walked into the break room. The man tried to strike up a conversation about bird-watching. Paul told him politely that he wasn’t really into birds, but the man was undeterred. So began a half-hour soliloquy on the avian visual system.
Paul would learn over the course of the next few days that Charles could talk endlessly about two subjects: birds and quantitative reverse polymerase chain reaction assays.
Charles had worked in the gene frequency lab. He was tall and thin and pale. It was difficult to guess his age. He was balding, with wisps of curly, sandy-colored hair going gray at the top, but his face was smooth and young. He might have been thirty or forty-five. He tended to bounce when he walked—and he was always walking. Even when he spoke to you, he was walking, pacing back and forth, continually on the move.
Charles could do the autism trick; he’d show you if you asked.
It was almost diagnostic.
If you told him the date of your birth, he could tell you what day of the week you were born. He could do it instantly. When Paul learned this, his surprise shifted. He’d heard of people like this, of course. Many of them were in institutions.
Paul went from being surprised that Charles was so strange to being surprised that he was so normal. There were terms for what he was, after all. The fact that Charles could drive and hold a job meant that most of those terms would have the qualifier “high-functioning” in front of them.
Hongbin had his own term for him, though: “association savant.” Charles worked in multiple variant analysis.
Among the gene freaks of the fourth floor, he was the chosen one.
* * *
“Can I help you?”
The secretary’s name was Bratton. She was a formidable middle-aged woman partial to sweaters, black-rimmed glasses, and small mouse figurines. The figurines were glass mostly, of a cute anthropomorphic variety that seemed more than a little out of place in a research lab. She positioned them conspicuously around her workstation, as if to counteract the no-nonsense matter-of-factness that she exuded from every pore of her body. When Paul met her, she did not strike him as the kind of woman who would have a deep and abiding love for small glass mouse figurines. She was one of the two secretaries on the fourth floor and handled the various secretarial needs of the gene freaks. She did not get coffee.
“I’m running behind,” Paul said. “I was hoping you could help me with something.”
“If I can.”
“I sent Charles some rush samples a few months back, and I need the results yesterday.”
She stared at him over the tops of her glasses as if swatting away requests like this was a part of her job description that she particularly enjoyed. “You’re the new tech transferred from the third floor, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’m sorry to be the one who has to inform you of this, but Charles is on leave.”
“Leave?” Paul said, hoping his surprise sounded genuine.
“Yes.”
“I had no idea.”
“Yes.”
“Nothing serious, I hope.”
“Let’s hope not.”
“Any idea when he’ll return?”
“I haven’t been informed of a return date.”
“Well, these samples were a rush, and I still really need the results.”
“Other teams are taking over Charles’s workload. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard. There shouldn’t be much of a delay.”
Paul did his best to scowl. “I’m already past deadline on these samples.”
“What is the project number, and I’ll get—”
He cut her off: “It’s okay. I’m sure they’ll get done. You wouldn’t know what project Charles was working on just before he left?”
“I really wouldn’t have any idea.”
“Okay, thanks.” He turned to leave, then stopped. “I don’t mean to pry, but you wouldn’t happen to know the circumstances of his departure?”
“I’m really not privy to that kind of information.”
“I understand. But what I’m really asking is, do you think he’s coming back?”
The secretary shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”
Which, of course, could be interpreted in one of two ways.
Paul studied her closely, pushing one last time. “I mean, he’s not gone for good, is he?”
Ms. Bratton gave him a quizzical look, as if she were trying to decide how to answer—or perhaps how to tell him to mind his own business. “He’s still technically an employee, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s just on indefinite leave.”
“Thank you.”
* * *
Paul waited until after five o’clock, when the halls started to empty, and then slipped down the hall to Charles’s office. After glancing around to make sure he wasn’t being observed, he opened the door and stepped inside. The door closed silently behind him.
That was the thing about having badged checkpoints for each department. Once you were on the other side of security, it meant the offices didn’t need locks.
Charles’s office was the same size and shape as his own, a rectangular cell half as wide as it was deep. However, it had a window that received the afternoon sunlight, which now poured in through half-lidded blinds to bake a corrugated pattern across the white tile floor. Although nearly an architectural clone of Paul’s own office, it was as different from his as two rooms could be.
A large steel desk faced the door. Behind it was a row of short, gray filing cabinets. Bookshelves lined the opposite wall, and in them were not books but endless rows of binders. There were no posters on the walls. No paperweights on the desk. The little pieces of personality that tended to salt people’s work spaces were missing here. The computer, too, was different—a different creature entirely from the one that sat on Paul’s desk. This was a machine meant for serious code crunching. Three flat-screen computer monitors of various sizes were arrayed around the broad desktop.
One whole wall of Charles’s office was whiteboard. Nearly floor to ceiling. A small stool sat beneath it to allow Charles to reach any unscribbled corner of the white expanse. Currently the whiteboard was thoroughly graphitized with a massive accumulation of arcane chemical formulas and long strings of nucleotide base-pair sequences; lines connected different sequences. Paul realized why there were no bits of personality in the office. This, the whiteboard, was where Charles lived. It was the ultimate expression of his personality.
Paul opened the desk and sorted through the contents.
He had a plan in mind, if he was caught. He’d say he was looking for an old
folder he’d given Charles. An old data set that he’d lost copies of. It wasn’t a ridiculous possibility on its surface, but he doubted the excuse would hold.
Paul yanked open another drawer. Inside were pens and papers and paper clips. A lower drawer held stationery and user’s manuals. Below that, a box of throat lozenges and ten issues of Microscopy Monthly. Deeper strata held papers and receipts, and even an old credit card bill in Charles’s name.
Paul checked the filing cabinets next, leafing through the carefully ordered manila folders. He found template documents and data request forms dating back seven years—all neatly filed. He found copies of reports that went back even further: purchase orders, submission results, the entire record of everything Charles had ever done here. Or almost everything. He double-checked. The most recent file, the one dating to Charles’s last month, was absent. There was no record of what Charles had been working on just before he’d left.
Paul closed the cabinet and looked around the room. He must be missing something. He tried to put himself in Charles’s shoes but found he couldn’t. Asking yourself, “What would I do if I were Charles?” was an exercise in futility.
No one was Charles.
Paul had never known him well, but there were stories you heard.
Probably half the guys in the lab were geniuses. You had to have an IQ above 136 to be a genius. Charles was the kind of genius that other geniuses called a genius when they weren’t talking about something as definable as a score on a standardized test. His head didn’t work the same. Charles was different.
Paul knew he had to hurry. The longer he was in the room, the greater his chances of being caught. He stared at the whiteboard again, looking closer this time. In one corner he noticed a cladogram—a broad tree of life with various branches spreading outward and upward. The tips of the branches each had a different label: crow, owl, finch, penguin, ostrich, and on and on. Dozens more. These names were attached to lines that swept down toward the trunk of the tree before converging just beneath a horizontal dotted line. Everything below that dotted line was labeled God’s imagination. It was there that all the lines connected.
Paul stared at the whiteboard.
There were so many Charles stories.
They circulated around the lab.
Charles taking nine minutes to park his car, sliding into his spot again and again until he got it just right, each tire equidistant from the yellow lines.
Charles who always knew what time it was and never needed a watch.
Charles who startled.
Paul noticed the wastebasket then, overturned, wedged under the desk. He crossed the room, pulled it free, and looked down inside the small metal cylinder.
Inside the wastebasket was a jumble of tissues and wadded-up papers, but beneath the refuse, near the bottom, he saw the corner of a manila envelope peeking out. He bent and picked the envelope out of the trash. It was heavy. He opened the top and upended the contents onto Charles’s desk.
Several sheets of eight-by-ten photographs spilled out in a long line, facedown, like the pile in a game of rummy. Along with the heavy photos was a single piece of white printer paper, folded neatly in half.
Paul unfolded the paper. On it was a list of words:
Grayson Group
The Smith Museum
Carner Laboratories
The Gernert Institute
The Field Museum of Natural History
Johnston Laboratories
Paul folded the paper in quarters and shoved it into his pocket for later consideration. The Field Museum. Some memory tickled. What was it about the Field Museum? Why did that ring a bell?
Paul looked down at the backs of the photos on the desk. He flipped them over.
They were photographs of bones.
Grayish white. In situ.
The Flores bones. Or something like them. These were different shots than the ones he’d seen before. The angle was different; they’d been taken from a few feet up, but there was no doubt what the pictures showed. Paul looked through the photos one by one. The last photograph stopped him. It was a skull. A different specimen than the one he’d seen. More complete. A full upper mandible, two eye sockets, a right temporal bone.
Paul slid the photos back into the manila folder and turned toward the whiteboard again.
God’s imagination.
One early morning, when Charles had been parking, another researcher had beeped his horn. Charles startled and jammed his foot on the gas, jumping the curb and taking out a huge swath of fencing that bordered the parking lot. He then backed out and pulled away, tires squealing. He drove home and didn’t come back to work for three days.
When he finally did return, he stayed in his office.
The management was aware of the situation and sent a memo to everyone (such memos were often sent to everyone, so that the person it was really intended for wouldn’t feel singled out) that mentioned an accident in the parking lot and suggested that, while no one was in any kind of trouble, the party or parties responsible should come forward so that insurance information could be exchanged.
Charles didn’t come forward. He drove his smashed car to work every day and parked at the far end of the lot. Black paint from the wrought iron had rubbed off on the side of his car. A six-year-old could have looked at the car and the fence and put two and two together. Charles drove his bashed-in car to work every day and stayed in his office.
The managers convened a meeting, and they ultimately decided that the company would simply fix the fence. They never went to Charles. They weren’t sure how he’d handle it.
Charles didn’t care about the money. He didn’t need money or want money or pay attention to money. Paying for the fence would have been easy for him. He was just afraid of being in trouble. That’s why he hid.
Paul glanced over at the filing cabinet, thinking about the empty spot where the last file had been removed. “Why did you leave, Charles?” he said aloud. “What forced you out in such a hurry?”
He stared at the formulas scrawled in Charles’s indecipherable hand. “What was it that you found?”
21
Bone cannot lie.
Bone has no opinion, no cultural bias. It cannot be argued out of existence. If you stop believing in bone, bone does not notice, or care. It will still be there, in the ground or in a museum drawer—an answer to itself.
Paul stood in the doorway of the bone lab, watching Hongbin unpack the latest box of samples. He hadn’t been down here since the transfer. He knocked on the door.
“Ah, so you’re back already?”
“What can I say? I missed you.”
“It was only a matter of time,” Hongbin said. “How’s it going?”
“Slow. It’s a Monday.”
“You’ve got to climb the peak of that activation energy demand, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“How’s the fourth floor treating you? Is it everything we always dreamed it would be?”
“And more.”
“So champagne flows from the water fountains?”
“Of course not. We get our champagne in volumetric flasks, like civilized folk.”
Hongbin shook his head sadly. “You’re just like the rest of them. In it for the glamour.”
Paul moved farther into the lab and laid a manila envelope on the lab bench. “But the osteo lab still gets all the action, I see. What do you have there?”
Hongbin shrugged. “The usual,” he said. “Coded samples. No idea.”
“They asking for the full prep?”
“The works.”
Paul made himself useful, helping Hongbin unwrap the padding. In the end, there were two human femurs, a small part of a pelvis, most of the middle and distal phalanges. It felt good to be back in the bone room. The samples could have been from anywhere. Part of a Roman burial, or perhaps an unexpected find during a construction dig somewhere in the United States—with Westing being the next logical destination after
a coroner deemed the remains of no evidentiary interest, i.e., likely both Native American and old.
“Female?” Hongbin asked.
“Or a gracile male.” In some populations, it was notoriously hard to tell the difference.
Paul studied the femurs.
Bone does not change to fit your theories. If your theory does not fit the bone record, those bones will continue on, defying your theory forever. Like a thorn in your brain.
DNA is like this, too.
“How many cores do you need?” Paul asked.
“Two should do it. Any guesses on type?”
Paul looked carefully at the bones. “Adult. Other than that, I don’t know.”
“Ethnicity?”
“Not a clue,” Paul said.
Paul touched the bone.
Each population is related to every other population. Science tells us we are all descended from a single people—the root of the tree of human diversity to which all populations must trace back.
Carbon dating established the age of the earth and provides a starting date for when this diversity must have begun. Since the age of the earth is known, and the present genetic diversity can be tested, it is a simple thing to calculate what the mutation rate must have been to yield that diversity. Simple, inescapable math. (Number of years since all human populations were one) x (base-pair substitution rate per million nucleotides) = (existing base-pair diversity per million nucleotides). This formula can be flipped to yield the mutation rate: divide the base-pair diversity per million nucleotides by the number of years, and you arrived at the base-pair substitution rate. Once you have the mutation rate nailed down, you can use the genetic differences between two populations to pin down the number of years for which they’ve been diverging.
The deepest clade division exists between the San Bushmen and the rest of the world. Here, humanity split first. West African Bantus are more closely related to Icelandic fishermen than they are to the San. After the San, the next to split were the central African Pygmies—and then after them, humanity floresced into a dozen families, a hundred peoples. Tribes carrying the mutations for M and N mitochondrial haplotypes left Africa shortly after creation, curling along the arc of the Indian Ocean, passing through India, Thailand, Malaysia, and Australia. Another branch spread north and west, into Europe; another went east, into China and Siberia, eventually crossing the Bering Strait into the New World, where they would one day build great cities, and temples to the sun, and there await their destruction by God-fearing men. (And, in the process, leave their bones to be found by strip-mall construction crews across the continent.)