Deep Past

by Eugene Linden

  The real Benoit, as opposed to the clown in her imagination, was a handsome, trim, dark-haired man in his mid-thirties. He was wearing jeans and a loose-fitting gray shirt that was probably better suited for the streets of Soho than the steppes of central Asia. Claire had to admit, paleontology’s newest superstar wore his confidence well.

  “No hard feelings?” Benoit asked as he took her hand.

  “This find is too important for hard feelings,” said Claire truthfully.

  Benoit breathed a sigh of relief. “Amen to that!”

  The two sat down. Claire let the silence build. Finally Benoit spread his hands. “Now what?”

  “You’ve met the team?”

  “Sure, all good …,” said Benoit, drumming his fingers on the picnic table as though he was playing something on the piano. “All good,” he repeated absently. “We’ve already started on the analysis on that petrified bone you so kindly left for us.” There definitely was something lurking behind that statement.

  “That’s what I was hoping to hear,” she said. “I can’t think of anyone better to help describe this find and place it in an ecological context,” she went on, hoping that he took notice of the word help.

  “Thank you … yeah, once we get a better date, we can focus on what was going on with climate at that time and whether it was a period of rapid speciation for other mammals …” He trailed off. “And what are you going to be doing?”

  Claire could tell that he hated having to ask that question. It was dawning on him that he didn’t hold all the cards.

  “Oh, we’ve just begun looking at the rest of the lip—might be much more in there.”

  Hearing this, Benoit looked down at the table. Clearly, he wanted in on this.

  The remaining team started trickling out of the mess tent. When Tony saw that Benoit was talking with Claire, he started heading over. Claire waved him off.

  “One other thing,” Claire said to Benoit.

  She paused, about to step into a minefield. “I’ve established contact with a distinguished Kazakh archaeologist, Timur Tabiliev, who’s agreed to work with us.” She looked at Benoit to see whether he realized the import of what she was saying. “It would be terrific if you could arrange to work with him as well … it would simplify things …” She trailed off.

  Benoit stared. She realized that he had met Tamerlan. He looked anguished. After a couple of awkward moments, he said, “That sounds logical, and I hope that comes to pass. Delamain was adamant that I work through established channels. I’m sure you understand.”

  What Claire understood was that her troubles were not over—and that Benoit’s had only just begun.

  “OK, that’s that,” she said, starting to get up. “By the way, analyzing the bones is truly important, but I’m going to be focusing on the array and what it means.” She let that sentence hang.

  “Ah yes, the array.” Benoit knew that finding a new species of ancient elephant was a big deal, but that the array was the biggest deal ever. Benoit reached over and grabbed his laptop. “Just a sec before you leave …” Claire sat back down.

  He opened the computer, fired it up, and hit a few rapid keystrokes. He looked intently at something running on the screen and then nodded, satisfied. “I’ve been doing some noodling. Take a look at this.” He slid the computer over so that Claire could see the screen and then hit a button.

  Claire nearly snorted. She had come upon things like this all the time when working on animal intelligence. What Benoit had done was program a series of simulations. Using crude caricatures of elephant skeletons, the simulation showed a series of elephants falling and dying in some elephant graveyard. As the simulation progressed, a timeline at the bottom marked the passage of years. Bones fell and settled in random ways. One ulna settled into the muck, then some years later, another, then another, until there were five ulnae side by side, looking as if they had been purposefully arrayed. When the series finished, she gave Benoit a withering look. “Seriously?”

  Benoit held up his hands. “I’m not saying this is what happened. I’m just showing you what a reductionist might use. You know, Occam’s razor, Morgan’s canon, and all that.”

  She wasn’t sure whether Benoit was trying to give her an honest warning or subtly suggest that he would make a formidable opponent. She chose to look on the bright side. “I agree, Benoit,” she said with a smile, “a reductionist would use that, but do you really think that’s the most likely explanation?” She got up again. “I’ve got a couple of things to do before I head back.”

  Before leaving the Quonset, she turned back to him. “Let’s keep in touch.” Claire took a couple of steps. “Really? Benoit, what are the odds? Even over thousands of years, there wouldn’t be that many elephants, and for the ulnae to fall just so …?” She turned, shaking her head.

  As she walked into the heat, Benoit, who had followed her out of the Quonset, called after her, “I’m just trying to give you a picture of what you’re likely to be up against.”

  She had to admit he was right about that.

  “Thanks, Benoit.” She turned around. “You know, it would actually be good news if we were attacked in the way you modeled”—Claire waved her hand at his computer—“because if I’m attacked in the way you describe, it means I’ve won the battle over whether there were elephants in Kazakhstan five million years ago, and that’s a pretty big deal in itself.”

  Not waiting for a reply, she turned to find Tony and Waylon. She had only taken a few steps when she remembered her last thought from the previous night. Sauat? She stopped by his room and knocked. No answer. Ordinarily this would be no cause for concern, but given the events of the past week, Claire was worried. She did a quick reconnoiter of the camp. He wasn’t there; nobody had seen him. Claire sat down in the picnic area, fished around in her purse and pulled out the scrap of paper Tegev had given to her before departing. She hesitated a minute. What if he was just out jogging? But Sauat didn’t strike her as the jogging type. She dialed the number. The call went to voice mail, and she recognized Tegev’s voice as he said what she assumed was the equivalent of “Please leave a message” in Kazakh. Claire left her number and asked him to call her back.

  Claire tracked down Tony and Waylon. Her original intent had been to talk to them about the logistics, but her concerns about Sauat caused her to put that aside and urge them to contact her if they heard any news of his whereabouts. She left a note for Sauat in his room. Still worried, she headed back to Transteppe.

  30

  Claire began her new job by getting up at dawn and heading over to the warehouse. She wanted to spend some time alone with the lip. The huge warehouse was still, quiet, and cool when she arrived. The lights had been turned down overnight, and in the pale dawn light, the lip looked like something alien hovering above the floor. Claire walked around it slowly.

  Close inspection of its surfaces revealed nothing that might suggest more bones or other objects. The rough monolith had kept its secrets for five million years, and those to discover its secrets were going to have to work hard. Claire’s reverie was broken as she heard a door open. Sergei arrived with two cups of coffee. He hadn’t seen her, and she was about to walk over when he picked up his phone and made a call. He had a brief conversation in Russian. In stark contrast to his usual animated style, his voice was flat, even harsh. As he hung up, he noticed Claire.

  “What was that about?” She tried to keep her voice as neutral as possible.

  If Sergei was startled, he didn’t show it. “Oh, every now and then, I check in with Primorskichem, a company that is a partner in Transteppe. Mostly, I try to discourage them from visiting.”

  Claire laughed. It sounded plausible. She hadn’t known about the Russian partner, but Sergei had never really said how he got to Transteppe.

  “Did you tell them about the bones?”

  “No, I tell them as little as possible.”

  Sergei looked over at the lip as he handed Claire a cup of coffee.r />
  “I thought you might be here,” said Sergei. “Like a kid getting up early for Christmas, yes?” As she sipped, she looked around the room. Once again, her pulse quickened as she scanned the cornucopia of remote sensing equipment in the warehouse. After some discussion, they decided to first have a go with X-ray computed tomography, familiar to most people from medical CAT scans. For objects as thick as the lip, the machine had to have a very high-energy source to penetrate the rock without signal distortion. Sergei had written the computer algorithms that would differentiate the materials scanned according to density and their atomic properties. A contraption directed beams from both the top and bottom, which sat on a trolley that could be run along a flexible track. By bombarding the lip with X-rays from different angles, the device could create thousands of slices that could be processed into a composite view. It wouldn’t be as precise as a medical CT scan, but it could show them where, if anywhere, something might be located in the rock.

  “Right now, I’m assuming you just want to see whether there’s any more fossilized bone in there. So, we’re not going to do the most precise imaging. OK?”

  Claire nodded, and they got to work. It took the rest of the morning and assistance from a couple of workers Sergei press-ganged into helping to get the equipment set up.

  Sergei looked at his handiwork with approval. “We’ll do some passes, and while you’re interpreting the results, I’ll do some work for my day job.” Sergei compiled the results and then cleared a workspace for Claire.

  As Sergei worked, Claire looked at the Russian scientist with approval, and not just for his facility with the analytical equipment. She was attracted to his mind, and, she had to admit, his body, but there were quintessentially Russian paradoxes about the man. He came with baggage—he’d admitted as much—but she trusted him. There was an endearing quality to his energy and enthusiasm that spoke to simplicity even though she knew he was anything but simple. There was no denying that she was beginning to feel an easy intimacy around Sergei, which was the biggest paradox of all, since that feeling was something she would treasure with a boyfriend, and her relationship with Sergei was purely professional. That’s going to change, she thought, turning her attention back to work.

  Sergei set her up with a computer with her own log-in and strong security. He then transferred his results to a flash drive and handed it to her. Once it was loaded on her computer, he showed her how to massage the data so that different substances would show up as different colors. Among the files he had transferred was one where he had analyzed the fossilized bone from one of the ulnae. He assigned the color red to its mineral profile so that she could easily identify other fossils if more were concealed within the rock. “I’m going to put in a few other tags—there might be interesting minerals in the area.” He looked at Claire with an eyebrow raised.

  She could hardly say no. “Sure.”

  “OK, and I’m going to assign the color purple for anything other than the dominant rock and the tags we’ve specified.” That done, he then set up a secure link to Transteppe’s processors. Compiling the data required massive computing power.

  He walked her through how to use the program. Then he erased the data from his own computer. “That’s it. You can go to village!” Seeing her roll her eyes, he sighed. “OK, no more Russian movie villain bad guy act. Go to town!”

  Claire smiled. “That would be most kind.”

  Claire was itching to go to “village” on the imaging. It seemed like months since she’d last focused on the prehistoric ulnae, but it had really only been a couple of weeks since Rob had showed up at her Quonset. What was the significance of ulnae? She had no idea what to expect, but the prospect of peering inside the lip without blindly digging was thrilling. Claire tried to keep her hopes from skyrocketing. Wind, rain, even the movement of the great tectonic plates had had millions of years to move things around.

  Her computer estimated the amount of time remaining for Transteppe’s processors to finish compiling the three-dimensional profile at one and a half hours. She couldn’t sit still. She decided to use the time to set up a work plan with Katie and Francisco.

  First, she decided to see how Lawrence was doing. She wandered over to the provisions warehouse. There was a Kazakh worker sitting outside smoking. Claire smiled and tried to remember the Kazakh word for cat. The man stood up. First she tried English. “Is there a new cat around here?” The man looked at her blankly. OK, so a game of charades. Claire reached down and pretended to pet an imaginary cat. Now the man got it.

  “Mu-sick,” he said, and then went on in what for Claire was an unintelligible string of phrases. She gathered from his enthusiasm that Lawrence had hit it off with the staff.

  She put her hands up, palms extended out in the universal gesture for “where.”

  He pointed inside the storehouse.

  She found Lawrence snoozing happily beside an empty food bowl. He seemed very pleased to see her and let her pick him up. He might have put on an ounce or two. He purred loudly while she petted him and asked him how his new job as mouser was going. If the empty food bowl could be taken as evidence, she suspected that motivational problems might already have surfaced.

  Claire looked at her watch and realized that there wasn’t much time left before the compilation was finished. Giving Lawrence a final pat on the head, she hustled off in search of Katie and Francisco.

  She found them in the cafeteria. They were both dressed in lightweight cotton outfits. Claire couldn’t help noticing that even the simple outfit looked sexy on Katie. Sergei might have noticed, too. Why am I acting like I’m fourteen? she thought as she grabbed a coffee and the three of them walked back over to the warehouse. She explained how Sergei had set things up. When they got there, Francisco whistled at the technological arsenal. “They must have huge computing power. Wonder what they use it for?”

  Claire shrugged. It was an interesting question.

  While they were going over details, Claire heard a ping and looked over at her computer. The imaging was completed.

  Claire sat down and waved Francisco and Katie over. Sergei’s program allowed the user to move the mouse along the object being imaged. If Claire clicked on any particular location, she could zoom in and study it in more detail. Claire took a deep breath and called up the image. They were looking at the whole lip, which necessitated the lowest possible resolution, but all could see that there were a number of objects that showed up as red. No one said a word.

  Claire moved the mouse over to one splotch. It looked like a rack of jumbo-size baby back ribs. She tried to zoom in on the object, but Sergei had sacrificed resolution for speed in this preliminary run, and they couldn’t quite make out what the object was or indeed whether it was composed of several objects arranged in parallel. She couldn’t say it was another array, but it didn’t matter; it was fossilized bone.

  Claire looked at her hands. They were trembling. Claire turned to Katie. “Let’s write down this precise location, just in case.”

  Katie nodded, wide-eyed. Francisco murmured softly, “Absolution.”

  Claire turned back to the image. “We’ll come back to that.” She moved the mouse to another red splotch. Could it be a very large cranium? They couldn’t be sure.

  Katie was staring at another object on the screen. “Can we take a closer look at that?” she asked, pointing to a round object. It was purple, the catch-all tag assigned to anomalous materials that were different than the surrounding stone.

  Claire tried to zoom in. It was definitely round. “Maybe it’s just a stone.”

  “Sure looks like an elephant foot.” Katie peered at the screen. “But the soft tissue of an elephant foot wouldn’t be fossilized, and this is different than the bones according to your color scheme.” She shrugged. “OK, thanks, just thought it was worth a look.”

  Claire looked at it more closely. “Mark it down anyway—insurance against regrets later.” Her voice had returned to normal.

 
They all stared at the screen a bit more.

  Claire picked up a radio. She decided that this was a good excuse to call Sergei.

  She could hear heavy machinery and wind in the background when he picked up. “Something tells me this is a case where good news travels faster than bad news, yes?”

  “Oh yes! Can you get back here?”

  “On my way.”

  She turned to Katie and Francisco. “I think Hayden would want to see this.” Claire started to walk away. Then she stopped. A wave of pure happiness washed over her.

  31

  She found Hayden in the boardroom. He was talking with Ripley, the site manager. Was she imagining things, or did she hear one of them mention Sergei?

  “I can come back later.” She started to leave.

  “Hold it.” Hayden turned to Ripley and added, “OK if we finish this in a bit?”

  If Ripley was irritated, he didn’t show it. “No worries, I’ve got to deal with a foreman—someone hurt his feelings.” He arched an eyebrow. “Who knew that foremen had feelings?”

  Hayden laughed and got up to greet Claire. “There’s news?”

  Claire simply held up her hands and said, “Eureka!” Then she did a quick vaudevillian two-step, tipping an imaginary hat.

  Hayden was already heading for the door. When they got to the warehouse, Sergei was already there, staring at the screen. He looked up and, seeing Hayden and Claire, stepped back so they could see the image.

  “Sergei used the atomic signal and density of the fossilized bone as a search criterion for the scan. The matching areas are tagged in red.”

  Hayden peered intently. “Is that what I think it is?” he asked, moving the cursor over to the rectangular splotch.