Deep Past

by Eugene Linden

  Sergei shook his head. “Nothing good will come out of your meeting him. Let’s make sure you never see him again.”

  Sergei’s intensity scared her. Questions swirled, but she was certain that if she pursued them, it would lead to a fight—their first fight. “When you’re ready, I’ll listen.”

  Sergei looked up, grateful. “Thank you.”

  43

  Another two days passed, and the summer heat continued to build. Then, on an intolerably hot day, Claire got a call from Benoit. Usually prone to banter, the scientist seemed subdued. Claire asked how it was going.

  “That’s the thing,” said Benoit. “It’s not.”

  “Not going?”

  “Nope. Not going as in stopped, kaput, ended. Total shit show, to be frank.”

  “Hold on, let me get somewhere where I can talk.” As she moved toward Sergei’s office, Claire waved to the crew. Katie was signaling for her to come over. Claire held up one finger and pointed to her phone. Katie gave a thumbs-up as Claire closed the door and sat down. “OK, continue.”

  “Delamain freaked when they heard an intern had disappeared, and then your pal Tamerlan took possession of that bone you left us. In short, there’s no project. Delamain’s pulled the plug, citing security concerns. Everybody else is gone, and I’m just handing the camp to the Kazakhs—who’ll probably just distribute the spoils.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  There was a long pause. Claire was in no hurry to fill the silence. Finally, Benoit spoke.

  “Claire, I know we got off on the wrong foot, but I actually think you’re on to something big, and I’d like to help. You know I can—that’s why you emailed me in the first place.”

  Claire reviewed the events of the past weeks, which included Benoit using the substance of her email to make his own deal with Delamain, usurping her position, and then undermining the significance of the find, and decided that yes, all that could be described as getting off on the wrong foot, in the same way that mass murder might also be described as youthful hijinks. On the other hand, he was right: there were very good reasons why she had contacted him in the first place.

  Benoit continued, “And I might even be able to bring the remainder of the Delamain grant with me.”

  Claire did a double take; Benoit really had no idea what had transpired at Transteppe since Claire had left the dig. “Let’s be clear,” Claire said crisply, “I’ll think about it. I’ll give you an answer within a day. But in no case is Delamain going to be involved. I don’t need their money; I will not accept their money. They made their decision when they threw me under the bus.”

  “OK, OK, let me know. I just thought, you know, that research always needs more money …” He trailed off.

  Claire was sitting in Sergei’s office in the warehouse. Benoit was an amoral opportunist, but he was smart. She thought about Lyndon Johnson’s remark about it being better to have a potential enemy on the inside of the tent pissing out than one outside pissing in. And she knew from Constantine’s latest email that the immune reaction of the evolutionary biology establishment was already well underway. She also thought about the cranium they were uncovering. She could use Benoit’s help. First she called Sergei, who said he had to check with Ripley on quartering, but the answer was yes.

  Then she called Rob.

  “Hi, quick heads-up: we’re going to have one”—she thought of Constantine—“maybe two more staying with us for a bit. Sergei’s given the OK. Is it OK with you?” She thought she heard a harrumph but took it as a positive that he didn’t hang up immediately.

  She then called Benoit. “OK, we’re on, but there are going to be some house rules …” And she laid out exactly how things were going to go.

  44

  Claire saw Katie waving excitedly from her workstation. Clustered around her was the entire team. She was using a tool that combined high-pressure air and a rapidly moving stylus to remove the final millimeters of sedimentary rock from the object. Up on the screen was the latest, extremely high-resolution image of the round object. Alongside the image was one Katie had found of an elephant yam. They were an exact match.

  Katie had exposed a tiny area of the surface. She was now using the stylus and airbrush to widen the exposed area. It was clear that this was not a petrified yam. Under Katie’s spotlight the lovely, pale-green material appeared translucent.

  Wearing gloves, Sergei picked up a magnifying glass and peered closely at the small patch. “My guess would be jadeite, but this is smooth.” He looked up at the image on the screen. “Looks like the whole surface is smooth.”

  Claire put on a pair of gloves and touched the surface with her finger. Although she already knew the answer, she asked, “What does that mean? Smooth?”

  Sergei looked up. It was the first time Claire had ever seen him awestruck. “Well, we know it’s not a petrified elephant yam. And here’s what a typical jadeite boulder looks like.” Sergei bent over Katie’s keyboard and with a few strokes called up some images on the screen. Some were relatively smooth, many jagged, but all were irregular in shape. “So it’s not an elephant yam, but it looks exactly like an elephant yam except that it’s perfectly shaped and smooth. And jadeite is found in metamorphic, not sedimentary rock. It’s not impossible, but again, very low odds. Multiply the odds to find the compound probability, and it’s about the lowest odds you can get.”

  Claire spoke to Sergei but turned to Katie. “And that’s not the whole story, is it? Tell them, Katie.”

  Katie looked flustered. “No, it’s not. The elephant yam has been used for its medicinal properties, particularly in Ayurvedic medicine. More importantly, yams are famine food—at least for people. When climate cools and dries, yams tend to move deeper into the soil, away from the harsh conditions, and so, when other food disappears, people turn to yams, which may be the only thing that still grows.”

  “Which are precisely the conditions that prevailed five point five million years ago,” Claire interrupted, “so you get the picture: a perfect replica of an elephant yam found in substrate that dates back five point five million years—not impossible. But this yam is found next to an array of bones that are exactly the same age. If the yams were a lifesaver for primitive tribes in human prehistory, then they might well have had significance for whatever ate them five million years ago.”

  “Like elephants,” said Katie. “They need phosphorous in their diet, and yams are a good source.”

  “There’s one more thing,” said Claire, completing her train of thought. “There’s a relationship between harsh climates, plants burying carbohydrates in response, and intelligence. Go through any vertebrate order, and the most intelligent species turns out to be the one that has to dig to find food. Pigs are the most intelligent ungulate, bears the most intelligent carnivore, and then there’s us.”

  Francisco was shaking his head. “I want to see the look on the faces of the editors of Nature or Science when we submit a letter introducing the world to five-point-five-million-year-old Ayurvedic yam farmers who happen to be elephants and dabble in the arts.”

  They all laughed. Claire thought about what he’d said. It wasn’t only the editors of Nature and Science she was worried about. William Friedl had specifically warned her off pushing too hard on animal intelligence. And what would Keerbrock think if the minute he signed on he was told that not only were these ancient beings smart, but that they were into stone carving?

  From this perspective, the new find made it more difficult, not less to get a fair hearing in the scientific establishment. “He’s right,” she said. “If these finds were ten thousand years old, there’d be no problem—it would make perfect sense that someone would carve a totem honoring a life-saving food in bad times. Five point five million years old? There weren’t even hominids in Asia that long ago. We’d be pigeonholed with the Piltdown Man.”

  Katie looked up, cool as a cucumber. “I’ve no interest in publishing anything that undermines the credibility of the proje
ct or opens us up to ridicule.”

  This brought Claire up short. It was Katie’s subtle way of reminding Claire that she had given Katie the lead on this object. She was grateful in a way—Samantha probably would have said, “What’s this ‘we,’ white bitch?” Claire was chagrined. She’d participated in all too many research projects where the lead investigator had bigfooted the best work done by the graduate students.

  She put a hand on Katie’s shoulder. “Of course not! And, as the lead on this particular object, you have to figure how best to present the find. You’re going to do more than one paper off this, right?”

  “Sure hope so.”

  “So think about this. First publish a simple description of the object, its dating, its context, its physical orientation relative to the other finds. Then subsequently, there can be more collaborative explorations of what it might mean. Better to be pushed to where you wanted to go in the first place than to try and drag everyone where they’ve never been.”

  Katie thought about that a second. “That could work.”

  She turned to Sergei. “We’re absolutely sure on the dating of the surrounding rock?” Sergei nodded. “And we’ve documented every step of the way?” Sergei gave a thumbs-up.

  Claire was about to let everyone get back to work when something occurred to her. “Francisco, you said elephants. Why are you assuming that whatever did this was an elephant?”

  “Everything about the find says elephant. Our ancestors back then were tiny, and pretty clueless to boot. Oh, and they didn’t make it to Asia for another four point five million years.”

  “Makes sense.”

  Claire turned back to Katie when Francisco said, “And then there’s this.”

  He walked over to his workstation and called up a high-resolution image of the object he’d been working on. “Just got this image this morning,” he said apologetically once Claire and the others had come over.

  He punched another few strokes, and the 3-D image on the screen started rotating slowly.

  “If the editors see this, maybe they’ll be more open-minded about that,” he said, pointing over to Katie’s workstation.

  Claire stared dumbly. “What should I be looking for?”

  On the screen was an image of the eye sockets and forehead of a skull. She could imagine it was some kind of elephant skull, though the forehead was higher and less sloped than she remembered from her work on elephant anatomy.

  Francisco pointed toward the forehead. “Back then, elephants were more primitive in every way than they are today, particularly in brain size. This is the kind of forehead you’d expect to see in a smarter elephant from the future, not a specimen from millions of years ago. Also, look at this in comparison to its contemporaries.” Francisco pulled up some other images of ancient elephant skulls. “They were all more bony and thick. Bart looks more delicate, gracile.”

  “Bart?”

  Francisco laughed. “Sorry, we’ve been calling it Bart—you know Bart Simpson, the cartoon character who’s sorta got a jar head? Well, so does our guy.”

  “Bart it is,” said Claire. “Could it be an adolescent—like the cartoon Bart?”

  “Possible, but doubtful for reasons I can go into later. It could also be paedomorphism—like you see with bonobos today. We’ll know more once it’s uncovered. But then”—Francisco hit a few more keystrokes, pulling up images of the ulnae—“there’s more. If we assume that the skull and the ulnae came from the same species—big assumption, I know—we come to the conclusion that this guy had a very big head relative to his body size—both compared with elephants back then, and even today.”

  Francisco turned away from the screen. “So, if it turns out that something made Katie’s yam, and if I was looking for the maker, my logical suspect would be this guy.” He jerked his thumb toward the screen. “The perfect Ganesh.”

  The group digested this for a few moments. Then Claire said, “Hayden’s going to want to see this, so hold off the final uncovering until I see whether he can get back here for it.” She then pointed toward Katie and Francisco. “You two. Let’s leave that new ‘array’”—she made air quotes—“in its block for the time being. I want people to see exactly what these things were like when we found them. We’ve got some bone chips for further chemical analysis, anyway.”

  She handed out a few more assignments and then begged off. She had some thinking to do.

  45

  Claire wandered out to the gardens. She’d worked with elephants for years and she knew all the stories, including studies that showed that elephants used some of the same medicinal plants as did tribes in Africa and for the same purposes—to ease labor pains and reduce inflammation. So why would it open them to ridicule to publish the logical implications of what they had found—if it turned out that this is what they found?

  She thought about Keerbrock. If she was going to get him on board, she was going to have to meet his austere demands. She thought about the array, the cranium, and the “yam.” One: they had no proof that some yet unidentified third party hadn’t arranged the bones, deposited the cranium, and carved the yam. Two: it was not impossible that the yam was just a random piece of jadeite, polished by some long-vanished water source. Three: the cranium might come from an adolescent elephant suffering from some deformity—hydrocephalus?—although Claire had to admit it was doubtful that an elephant with that kind of malady would live long enough to reach adolescence. Four: the two arrays of bones were the result of Benoit’s random deposition, and the jadeite just happened to be in the same place.

  Then she thought about answering these critiques. The first one only worked if the bones and yam had been arranged much more recently. If it was 5.5 million years ago, the third-party explanation was even more sensationalistic than the smart-elephant hypothesis. Dating of the material and the bones could probably settle that one. The second was more difficult because it really was possible that the jadeite was formed by accident rather than design. Nature could produce anything given enough time. The cranium being a deformity was another tough one to reject, but presumably Francisco could settle whether or not it was an adolescent through a more thorough examination. Someone could always throw reason number four at them, but as the number of finds mounted, it became more stretched.

  Paleontologists regularly built whole theories about the size, intelligence, social organization, and diet of human ancestors based on a single tooth or small bone. Why weren’t they held up to ridicule? She knew the answer: because we know how that story continued, the most recent chapter being us.

  What she was dealing with was evidence of an ancient animal intelligence—at a time when intelligence was in short supply in any creature—from a line that either died out or got dumber. Put that way, it was perfectly natural that anything Claire’s team tried to publish would be greeted with skepticism.

  Depressed by this thought, Claire went back to her room to check her email. Her eyes alit on two that had come in, one from Constantine and one from Keerbrock. She took a deep breath and opened Keerbrock’s. It read, “Let’s talk,” and gave a phone number.

  Then she turned to Constantine’s message. He wanted to come out, and soon. This posed a dilemma. He could be valuable. In documenting the find, his story would lend the credibility of the Times to the seriousness of the discovery. But would he and the Times respect an embargo? She was aware of the so-called Ingelfinger rule, which for decades had been the ironclad policy of leading journals and held that a scientific journal would reject any submission that had been previously published in the media. She also knew that some respected journalists would occasionally leak an embargoed story to an online outlet and then publish their own story claiming that the embargo had been broken.

  While trying to decide what to do, she opened an email from her mother. It was the usual mélange of gossip—her sister had been in a screaming fight with her husband that brought a cocktail party to a halt—and mixed metaphors, writing that it was time for Madi
son’s husband to “lay his cards on the table and step up to the plate.” Rarely did global events penetrate her mom’s country club world, so Claire paused when her mom went on to say that a third year of intense drought in Kansas City had led to the closing of the country club’s golf course—can you imagine!—which was causing her to think again about this global warming stuff. She also said that Fran Woodleigh, whose family owned a large farming operation in Missouri, was complaining that fertilizer prices were through the roof. Part of it was the drought, but Fran also said that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had shut down a huge fertilizer factory.

  46

  That same morning Sergei went out to the rail depot. A shipment of building materials and heavy equipment was arriving. Sergei was taking delivery of a new mass spectrometer, and he wanted to ensure that it was handled carefully.

  The unloading was well underway when he arrived, and the landing was a jumble of crates, spanking-new pieces of moving equipment and machinery, and stacks of girders, braces, and other prefabricated building materials, all being checked in by teams of foremen and technicians. Roughly fifty uniformed Transteppe employees were involved in feeding all this into the insatiable maw of the giant concession. One of the foremen saw Sergei and waved to him, pointing to the crate he had separated from the rest of the shipment for special handling as per Sergei’s instructions.

  Sergei started walking over and passed a group of men taking a cigarette break. Most were Transteppe, but a few of the train crew were also smoking and chatting. One of the men looked familiar. He was in a jumpsuit, signaling that he was the lowest-level Transteppe employee, and he was talking with another man who must have been one of the train crew. They were standing in front of a stack of rectangular crates, each about five feet long and two feet high.

  Between the buzz of forklifts and other moving equipment it was hard to hear any voice, but as he passed the two men, he thought he heard one speaking Russian, specifically the word mir, or peace. He turned around, but the group had already broken up, and he couldn’t make out who had spoken.