Deep Past

by Eugene Linden

  Claire shook her head. “Worst-case scenario.” She took them through events since she left with the bones, ending with a simple, “I blew it.”

  She let Rob and Sergei absorb what had happened. “OK,” Rob said, “so your team’s falling apart, the array is broken, your reputation has been ruined, and your funding has been cut off.”

  Claire nodded. “Yup, that sums it up nicely!”

  Rob paused. “So what’s the bad news?”

  Sergei snorted, and even Claire gave a wan smile.

  Sergei held up a finger. “I’m thinking.” He nodded to himself in some internal dialogue. “There’s really only one solution, and it’s obvious. We—Transteppe—take the bones back.”

  A brief flash of paranoia swept over Claire. Then she realized what Sergei was saying. Her eyes widened.

  Sergei nodded. “You understand? We sent the bones to you for analysis. It’s only natural that we take them back …” Sergei paused, just enough to convince Claire that there was a little bit of a sadist in this otherwise nice man, before continuing, “and that we hire you as a consultant to analyze the bones at our laboratory.”

  It made sense. Now that word of the bones was getting out, their existence couldn’t be buried and she could still pursue her work. On the other hand, Sergei was Russian. She looked at Sergei. “Can you do that?”

  Sergei looked at Rob. “Can we do that?”

  Rob looked at both of them. “I don’t know. Lemme think …” He wandered off.

  Sergei and Claire stood there in silence. After a couple of minutes, Claire asked, “What team does Capablanca play for?”

  Sergei smiled. “Cuba, but he died over one hundred years ago.”

  Claire looked more confused.

  “And he played chess, not football.”

  Claire laughed. “Of course!”

  Rob came back. He looked at Claire. He did not look comfortable. “As for taking the bones back—yes. It makes sense, particularly since a lot of people now know they exist.” He paused. “As for the consultancy, I’m not sure … we’re getting close to things that might impact Transteppe’s relationship with the host country.” He looked at Sergei. “Do you have discretion to spend money on something like this without approval?”

  Sergei, a veteran of negotiating bureaucracies, albeit not a particularly successful one, nodded confidently. “Absolutely!” And then he added, trailing off, “On an interim basis …”

  Both Claire and Rob noticed the hedge.

  “Also”—Sergei looked at Claire—“remember that you were going to come over today to look at the rest of the lip.”

  Rob was confused, “What?”

  Claire got it instantly. “We haven’t investigated the rest of the lip. He’s saying that there might be other stuff in the piece you cut off from the escarpment, right?”

  Sergei nodded. “Exactly!” Then, almost mumbling, he added, “Longer term, I probably should notify senior management and probably should get something worked out on paper.”

  Claire liked to think of herself as willing to push the envelope, but she was still a scientist, and scientists were used to working in controlled situations where they could focus on minutiae without distractions. While she understood the logic of shifting her work to Transteppe, she wished that she had more time to think through the implications such a radical move would entail. One occurred to her immediately.

  “What about those minders who caused you to come to me in the first place?” she asked, directing her question to both Rob and Sergei.

  “Good question,” said Rob. “Sergei?”

  “I agree,” said Sergei. “Good question!” He thought a second. “Now that the bones are public, it will be far harder to make the whole thing disappear … but if they think this is a big deal, they can still cause quite a bit of trouble … it would help if you had already established communication with some official …” Sergei trailed off.

  This was one place where Claire had a ready answer. “I was thinking about how best to bring in the Kazakhstan antiquity authorities—the right antiquity authorities—you know, in a way that would make sure that the project got the proper attention from the right people.” Rob and Sergei were both listening—life would be much easier if Kazakh experts were involved. “And so I thought about getting Dr. Timor Tabiliev out to see the bones—fast, before all our minders gum up the works …”

  “Who’s this Tabiliev?” Rob and Sergei spoke in unison.

  “A supposedly incorruptible academic at the National Museum. I’m hoping to give him the two bones that are still connected so that Kazakhstan shares in the discovery and analysis.”

  “An incorruptible bureaucrat? Really? In Kazakhstan? I’d like to meet this man,” Sergei said slowly with the tone he might have used if Claire had said she was going to introduce him to a tap-dancing unicorn.

  Rob brought the conversation back to the questions at hand. “OK, interim’ll work, but I think I’m going to send a note to one of our board members.”

  Claire looked apprehensive, but she was in no position to argue. “OK, but is that wise?”

  Sergei looked uncomfortable. “I agree with Claire, it might slow things down.”

  Rob gave Sergei a hard look but addressed his answer to Claire. “Part of my job is to anticipate trouble, and this is beginning to look like it could really blow up.”

  Claire could not argue with that. Sergei said nothing but looked uncomfortable, even sad.

  “What are you thinking, Sergei?” she asked.

  Sergei had been thinking about the vise he was in, but he wasn’t going to talk about that. “Nothing, except that an intelligent Russian’s instinctive reaction on hearing that the top guys are involved is to head for the hills.”

  Rob laughed. “This guy is different,” he said. “The board came through here last year for a visit. One member—guy named Fletcher Hayden, Canadian—used to run a gold-mining company. Turns out he’s an amateur archaeologist. I took him out on horseback through the concession last year—right to the spot where we found the bones, come to think of it—and he told me that he spends most of his vacations volunteering on digs. I think he’s a widower. Anyway, I’ll send him a friendly note, using his interest in archaeology as an excuse, and let him know that something turned up on the concession that might be a big deal, but stressing that it won’t interfere with development. That way, when it comes time that we have to inform senior management why Claire’s in the lab, we might have a friend in our court. It’ll also help big-time if the minders see that Transteppe is totally behind us.”

  For Rob that was a long speech. She knew he was going out on a limb for her, and she felt bad about what was going to come next.

  “Actually, there are a couple more things …”

  Rob gave her a look. “Yes?”

  “First is that I would like to bring along some of my team …” Both Sergei and Rob gave her doubtful looks … “OK, OK, here’s a thought … you pay me whatever you think fair as a consultant, and I’ll split it with whoever I bring along—doesn’t cost you anything extra.”

  Sergei opened his hands in surrender and nodded. “That works.”

  “You said there were a couple more things?” Rob said warily.

  “Yup,” Claire said enthusiastically. “When I came to collect the bones, I couldn’t help noticing a helicopter sitting on a pad,” she said as cheerfully as she could. “Just sitting there …” Rob looked wary. “It looked lonely and underused?”

  Rob wasn’t giving her any help. “And …?”

  “OK,” she sighed and then went on quickly, “think about it. Best-case scenario: legitimate involvement from distinguished Kazakh authority, yes? That’s Tabiliev. Best case for the best case: get him here as quickly as possible so that there is a relationship established before various interests start trying to take control. Therefore … helicopter!” She brought an imaginary drumstick down on an imaginary snare drum in a pantomime of a rimshot.

&n
bsp; Sergei smiled.

  “I’ll think about that helicopter,” said Rob, interrupting before she could go on. “In the meantime, we’ll get a truck out to pick up the bones. This afternoon good?”

  Claire thought about her scheduled meetings with the staff. She gave Rob a thumbs-up. “Any time after four o’clock is perfect.” As she turned toward her truck, she felt a wave of gratitude. She kissed them both on their cheeks. “You two are my heroes!”

  Rob, embarrassed, made a Gary Cooper anyone-would-have-done-the-same-thing-ma’am wave of his hand. Sergei blushed despite himself and then recovered and bowed, “At your service … besides, if things go wrong, where could they exile me?” He furrowed his brow. “Wait a minute, I’ve got it! Kazakhstan!”

  As Claire drove back to the camp, she smiled again at the memory of Sergei wearing a soccer jersey with a famous chess champion’s name on the back. He came across as extremely intelligent, funny, and straightforward, but he was also Russian, had come to Kazakhstan with baggage, and played chess. There was no way he was as straightforward as he seemed. Then she remembered how Rob had vouched for him. The one thing she was certain of was that Rob carried no hidden agenda.

  19

  Claire was almost feeling good when she arrived back at her Quonset. Lawrence was waiting outside her door. She scratched behind his ears, and then he jumped ahead of her when she opened the door and immediately began looking around for his food bowl. She assumed he’d already been fed (she knew the desert cat scored about five meals a day, and besides, he was supposed to be in training to get back to the desert, not to become a house cat) so she went directly to her computer to check the emails she’d put off reading earlier. The first she opened was from Adam Constantine of the New York Times.

  She had met Constantine at a scientific conference—he had seemed interested in her and chatted her up—and he had been one of the people she had emailed when she received the photo of the bone from Sergei. In that email, she had mentioned a potentially momentous find in the steppes of Kazakhstan. Getting no reply, she had again emailed him the previous night saying that events had taken an unexpected turn and urged him to contact her in the event that he wanted to know more about the find. Constantine was the Times’s go-to reporter on all things paleontological, and her logic had been that the best protection against any attacks would be early disclosure in a credible and widely read publication.

  Constantine’s email started off breezily. Sorry for not responding sooner. As you can imagine, I get deluged with solicitations, and with deadlines, etc.,—you get the picture. That said, I remember meeting you very well and you certainly got my attention with the stuff about five-million-year-old bones that seemed to be arrayed. On the other hand I was troubled by some of the uncertainties surrounding this situation. I did my due diligence, and when I contacted Delamain, they said that you were no longer affiliated with this dig and suggested that I speak with them again when your replacement was on-site? What’s up with that?

  Constantine then went on to say that before he asked the Times to commit to funding a trip to Kazakhstan, he needed to know a lot more about the circumstances that led to her replacement. He ended by saying that he would be back in touch at some point, and in the meantime, whom would she suggest that he contact in the Kazakh officialdom?

  Claire could have dealt with a smug dismissal, or pretentious put-down, but this was far more devastating because it was entirely reasonable. Hell, it was what she would have written had she been in Constantine’s position and received Claire’s email.

  She looked at the list of other unread emails. There was a new one from Delamain. This could not possibly be good news.

  It was a formal notification that Delamain had named a replacement. Her heart pounded when she saw the name. At least now she knew why he had not answered the email she had sent the day she first received the manila envelope from Sergei containing the photo of one of the ulnae. Even as she fumed, she silently patted herself on the back for the idea of sending a photo of only one of the bones.

  Her Judas was Benoit Richard, a newly minted PhD paleontologist and a bona fide hotshot at the University of Montana. She had met him at a conference on early mammalian evolution. He had done some pioneering work on environmental stress and brain size, confirming a theory that in periods of environmental stress, the more specialized mammals tended to die out, while the generalists survived. She had thought that he would be the perfect credible scientist to recognize the significance of the find. Ruefully she realized that she had been right, but Delamain apparently recognized that, too, and Benoit, obviously, had had better things to do when his peers were learning about ethics.

  While he was too busy to reply to her email notifying him of the find, he’d apparently had the time to make a deal with Delamain to take it over. One of her mother’s favorite phrases drifted through her mind—“The wheels can come off pretty quickly once you’re in the rapids”—and she smiled in spite of herself at the memory of her mother’s bottomless store of mixed metaphors, most of which actually made perfect sense once you got past their literal impossibility.

  Her thoughts returned to the ways in which Benoit’s arrival changed things. She tried to imagine his rage when he discovered that the bones were back at Transteppe. That would be satisfying, but, she thought, it might still be possible to get him on her side. To do that, she realized, she might literally have to toss him a bone.

  She returned to the email, which went on to say that he would be arriving to assume control of the repurposed dig as soon as Delamain could arrange the necessary clearances, which might take a few days. In the interim Benoit hoped that she would behave professionally in reassuring the staff during the transition. Once again Claire’s blood boiled; they were asking her to do the scientific equivalent of tipping her own executioner! She read on. Delamain said that they were holding off notifying the staff to give her time to frame her resignation in a way she preferred. The email ended with a boilerplate statement that Delamain regretted that their relationship had been forced to come to an end, but that they hoped she understood that the foundation had to protect its reputation for straightforward dealings with host governments. There was one more slightly mollifying statement at the end, which said that Delamain would continue to honor its commitments to the project in Florida.

  Claire looked at her watch. It was 2:15. She just had time to check with Sauat to see whether he had contacted Tabiliev before she had the dreaded series of conversations with her staff. As she started to leave her Quonset, another thought came to her. She hadn’t heard from Byron Gwynne. Given what had happened with Benoit, she didn’t have a good feeling about that.

  20

  It was two a.m. in Los Angeles, and Byron Gwynne finally got up from his desk. He walked stiffly toward the door. “OK, Byron,” he said to himself, thinking of the classic divide among taxonomists, “so, after three decades as a splitter, you’re now a lumper.” He shook his head, “God help me if I’m wrong.”

  He’d spent several hours going over the galleys of his book, many of those hours being devoted to his chapter on Primelephas, the ancestor of modern elephants who trudged the African plains just before the great radiation of species 5.5 million years ago that saw the genus splitting into three separate lines. Gwynne looked over the very long endnote that he had added to the chapter. The publisher was not going to be happy because it would necessitate a good deal of resetting and repagination, but, thought Gwynne, it was better than ripping up the script altogether.

  “As this book went to press,” it began, he had received a communication from a field researcher describing the find in Kazakhstan of the petrified ulna of some species of Proboscidea, whose surrounding rock was 5.5 million years old. Gwynne noted that the dimensions were indeed different than any other known relative of Primelephas at the time. Then he explored at length the long history of misidentification of fossil remains as researchers were thrown off by the impacts of disease, dwarfism, or othe
r syndromes that malformed bones and led to the unwarranted identification of new species. He ticked off other warning signals: the bone was found in Kazakhstan, not previously known as the habitat of any proboscides; the area where the bone was found was quite near ancient caravan routes; the discovery came from a researcher with no credentials in proboscid phylogeny; and there were questions about the circumstances of the find and chain of custody. By the end of this recitation, any academic would be ready to convict Claire of a hate crime.

  Gwynne was careful to hedge his endnote seven ways from Sunday, leaving open the possibility that further exploration might indeed reveal more about what creature this bone came from, as well as where and when it lived. At this point, however, Gwynne’s note concluded, there was no reason to tear open the phylogenetic tree of Elephantidae, which was the product of decades of meticulous work by researchers around the world. No one reading this endnote would give Claire’s find a second thought. And, thought Gwynne, as he closed his computer, this was only his first act.

  21

  On her way to the mess, Claire stopped to see Sauat, who said that he had in fact contacted Dr. Tabiliev. “He was surprised to hear from me,” said Sauat, “and I could tell that his email was … carefully written? But he did say that he was always open to meeting a visiting scientist.”

  Claire sighed with relief. “Thanks so much, Sauat! I’ll follow up with my own email and set up a meeting.”