Neanderthal Page 4

  Eagleton was keenly aware how much this little venture meant. He felt the pressure. But he felt something else, too, that rising bubble of excitement, the sweaty palms. God, how he detested sweat! But how he lived for the excitement. Just like the old days. He knew the nicknames they called him, “Captain Queeg,” “the Metal Cobra.” That was the trouble with internal surveillance; you found out more than you wanted to know. Still, it was impossible to know too much. Information is power, as they say. A healthy dose of paranoia never hurt anyone. He recalled that droll joke about defining the opposite of paranoia: “The outrageous be­lief that one is not being persecuted.”

  For silver-haired Harold Eagleton, now sixty-two and counting, surrounded by enemies and hemmed in by a vindictive bacteria-filled world, this expedition represented his comeback. But everything had to go exactly right. This business with Kellicut was worrisome. He didn’t trust Van. He needed Mattison and Arnot, and he had to make sure they functioned just the way he required them to.

  He lit a cigarette and fiddled with the remote control. Good close-up of her. Him, too. She wasn’t bad-looking, even he had to admit—he who usually thought of a woman in terms of her street value. But he could see the attraction here, something about the turn of the lips, the flowing hair, and the way she brushed it back with one hand when she was nervous—and she was clearly nervous now, taken aback when she saw Mattison. But she recovered quickly, Eagleton was glad to see, and entered the room with poise.

  She made the rounds, shaking hands. The men stood up with an ostentatious show of politeness and the women remained seated and grasped her hand tightly, smiling in that complicity of sisterhood that women scientists affected these days. It was a varied col­lection of talent: a morphologist, a neurologist, a physicist, a mathematician, and an astrophysicist; two geneticists; a geologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a parapsychologist; an ar­chaeologist, an ecologist, an evolutionary sociobiologist, a paleon­tologist, an anatomist, and an archaeohistorian. Susan recognized most of the names and even knew some of them. When she was in­troduced to Dr. Ugo Brizzard, a man who published studies on tele­pathic communication that most scientists regarded as crackpot, she barely registered a flicker of surprise.

  Eagleton watched closely as she approached Mattison. His hand was out and she took it.

  “We already know each other,” she said.

  “That we do,” he replied.

  They smiled at each other and she moved on.

  Very cool, thought Eagleton. He was beginning to allow himself to be optimistic. They can handle this, he thought, as he filed away their dossiers in a drawer marked DIRECTOR ONLY.

  “We are lucky to have both Dr. Arnot and Dr. Mattison together in the same room.” Dr. C. B. Simpson, a white-haired anthropolo­gist, was acting as a moderator. “That way we can get two differ­ent answers to every question.” They laughed. Then, with tea and coffee, the group tossed out questions. Easy ones at first, then more and more specialized. Eventually they got to the topic that the discussion was leading to inexorably: the extinction of the Ne­anderthal.

  “Can you provide us with the current best thinking on when and why this occurred?” inquired a mathematics professor named Eugene Pringle, a benign-looking man with thick glasses that mag­nified his eyes into bulging orbs of blue and white.

  “The when is easier than the why,” said Susan. “Current evidence is that the Neanderthal disappeared about thirty thousand years ago. The richest new finds are in parts of the former Soviet Union. Radiocarbon dating puts them about then.”

  “On the other hand,” said Man, “we also have signs pointing to a transition, not an extinction, within the Upper Paleolithic. There are indications of a regional industry, the Châtelperronian, in southwest France and Spain—”

  “Excuse me,” came an interruption from the back. “What is a regional industry?”

  “Production of tools over a large area. If it is Neanderthal—and the well-struck blades tend to make me think it is—the date could go somewhat later. There are even signs of an association between the Neanderthal and the Aurignacian. On that basis we can’t rule out population-mixing.”

  “Some of us do rule it out,” put in Susan.

  “Because?”

  “Because the remains in question, the Vindija remains, are too inconclusive. They were found on a level with only a single Aurig­nacian bone point. That’s not enough to hang an entire theoretical framework on, especially one with such a significant claim. There are just too many questions.”

  Matt grimaced. She had always been meticulous when it came to science, he thought. He gave her a long look for the first time. She still could knock his wind out. The years haven’t been bad to her, he thought, though her skin now was lined by scores of little wrinkles, the result of all that tanning. Her body had thickened a bit but it was not unbecoming. It filled out her face and rounded the curves of her hips. As always, her black hair was her most striking feature, though now it was not long and straight but rose up in all directions like a thundercloud. Something had deepened her looks. Was it the markings of a lonely life or new mystery endowed by their separation? How long had it been, fifteen years? In all that time they had never spoken. They attacked each other obliquely, through gossip and in footnotes. He had caught sight of her several times, once at the far end of a conference room, but when he made his way there, pushing and shoving through the crowd, she had gone.

  “Face it,” said Matt. “There’s a lot we don’t know. We don’t even know when most of them lived. The spread of fossils is simply too thin. Maybe they were dying like flies eighty or ninety years ago and we just blundered across more recent skeletons.”

  “Eighty or ninety years ago!” interjected the mathematician, Pringle.

  “Sorry, I slipped into shorthand. I mean of course eighty or ninety thousand years.”

  “So much for the when,” said Pringle. “How about the why?”

  “Well,” said Susan. “That’s even more debatable. As you’d expect, theories abound. They all have one obvious fault in common—they come from the survivors. As the saying goes, history is written by the victors.”

  “No one else is around to do it,” said Pringle.

  “Right. Anyway, in general terms everyone agrees that the Neanderthal’s physiognomy made him able to endure a cold climate, much colder than anything we could survive. During the last glaciation, Würm One, he would have felt pretty much at home once he had a cave to crawl into and a fire to toast his feet. Then something happened.”

  “Surely it was something traumatic,” put in a short squat man whose name Susan had missed. “The Neanderthal would have stopped at nothing to pass on his genes.”

  Oh no, thought Susan, I hope he’s not one of those creepy ultra­-Darwinist sociobiologists, one of those guys who likes to monop­olize cocktail parties by hurling out factoids—such as, rabies lives in spit, so mad dogs bite and can’t swallow.

  Matt interjected. “There are those who hold with a theory of catastrophe, some Big Bang that caused a mass extinction. An upheaval in the environment, a volcanic eruption. Some change in the ecosystem that he was particularly ill-equipped to surmount. The problem is that the catastrophists can’t come up with the catastrophe. It would have to be something powerful enough to wipe out the Neanderthal but localized enough to spare Homo sapiens. That’s a hard line to walk. And ice bores in Greenland and ash dusting in the Sahara don’t indicate any singular event thirty thousand years ago.”

  “Maybe the earth’s warming gradually shrank his zone of habi­tation,” put in Pringle. “Maybe it forced him into a smaller and smaller area—say, high up into the mountains until eventually his food supply gave out.”

  “Unlikely,” said Susan. “The time scale is off. And he would have adjusted.”

  “Maybe he tried and failed.”

  “Maybe. But bear in mind that everything we know about Neanderthal paints a portrait of a creative, adaptable being. He uses fi
re. He lives in caves. He wears animal skins. He’s someone who manipulates his environment rather than becoming a victim of it.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that for hundreds of thousands of years prehistoric man is stuck in this swamp of immutable brutal subsistence. Then along comes a variant that claws its way out of the muck. He applies his intellect. He lives in a social grouping. He’s a problem-­solver. And this is the creature that nature selects for her cruel joke? It doesn’t make sense—scientifically, that is. If science teaches us anything, it is that nature is consistent and logical.”

  “That’s true,” said the squat man. “It’s like cholera.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Susan.

  “Cholera spreads through excreting, so cholera makes us excrete,” he said.

  I knew he was an ultra-Darwinist, thought Susan.

  “So what’s the answer?” asked the eminent paleontologist, Dr. Victor Schwartzbaum.

  “With apologies to Gertrude Stein, what’s the question?”

  “The question that has brought us all here: What killed off Homo sapiens neanderthalensis?”

  “You’re looking at it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Us. All of us.”

  “How?”

  “Simple,” said Susan. “We wiped them out.”

  “Not so fast,” said Matt.

  “You see,” said Susan. “Those of us who follow in Dr. Kellicut’s footsteps fall into two opposing camps, and we do not take kindly to each other.”

  “That’s an understatement,” said Schwartzbaum.

  “My camp is called ‘Noah’s Ark’ or ‘Out of Africa Two,’ ” con­tinued Susan. “We believe that long after Homo erectus migrated from Africa, a second migration occurred, about one hundred thousand years ago. It was us—anatomically modern humans. We conquered the Neanderthal somehow with a new invention or a new form of social organization. A Darwinian struggle on a mas­sive scale, intraspecies war. It must have been, quite literally, a fight to the very end.

  “Then there is what I call the make-love-not-war school of thinking, which is led by Dr. Mattison here. They believe that there was no second migration out of Africa, and that various forms evolved more or less independently in different regions and then mixed together. Modern man’s gene pool simply swamped that of the Neanderthal.”

  “Swamped is hardly the word I would use,” said Matt. “Assimilated, engulfed. For whatever reason, Homo sapiens is the most sexually minded creature the world has ever produced.”

  “Warlike, too,” added Susan.

  “Yes, and war leads to further interbreeding. The separate subspecies in effect became one. We won by our wiliness in bed, not our wizardry on the battlefield.”

  The alliteration threw Susan off stride and she paused. “Anyone can trivialize another’s theory,” she said.

  “True. But the point is, if you follow your theory you have to be willing to accept the idea of the bloodiest massacre in history—a Pleistocene holocaust, some have called it. Where are the mass graves? Where are all the skulls with smashed braincases? I find it less taxing on the imagination to believe that the Neanderthal con­tinue, inside each of us.”

  “I know it’s hard to believe—when you look at Dr. Mattison’s smooth brow,” Susan said sarcastically.

  “It took forty thousand years to get it that way. Each of us has a trace of that genetic heritage.”

  Their eyes met for a moment, and then Susan cut in. “Lately we’ve come up with some finds that I feel are significant. I’m espe­cially interested in one in Uzbekistan near the Caspian Sea. Two years ago I found a cache of Neanderthal bones. I found them, lit­erally, under my lunch one afternoon; I spilled my coffee on them. I’m still cataloguing them. And although we haven’t yet examined them all, it appears that many Neanderthals died together. It could be the remnants of an ancient killing field.

  “What makes the site so intriguing is that Neanderthal caves are all around and contain thousands of animal bones. Some are un­deniably humanoid. Many of the bones have been split open— painstakingly, as if by a tool. We have reached a conclusion that we feel is inescapable: They were opened for the extraction of the marrow.”

  Susan paused a beat, to let the significance of what she was say­ing sink in.

  “There are also skulls with a telltale mark of Neanderthal handling: a slight but unmistakable mutilation at the base where spinal cord enters, at the foramen magnum. Similar mutilations have been found in skulls in Neanderthal caves since at least 1931. No one knew what to make of them. We think we do.” She looked around at the group. “Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence appears incontestable: Neanderthal man was a brain eater.”

  As Van led them out of the room, Matt turned to Susan and said, “A long time.”

  “Oh, did it seem that long? I thought I was being brief.”

  He shook his head at her misunderstanding—intentional, an old trick. “Where did you drum up that make-love-not-war line?” he asked.

  “I thought you’d like it,” she replied. “Old times and all that.”

  “Do you really believe that stuff about brain eating?”

  “Maybe they got carried away with kinky sex.”

  Matt turned serious. “Susan, what’s going on? Do you have any idea what the hell we’re doing here?”

  Van cut in unceremoniously. “Hold on for another minute and all will become clear.” He rolled ahead down an antiseptic corridor.

  Susan leaned close to Matt and whispered, “I don’t know any more than you. I simply got a message to come, that it’s something to do with Kellicut, and that he’s in some kind of danger.”

  Van stopped before a heavy oak door, knocked, waited for a reply, and entered. The room was unexpectedly dim; it took a few seconds to focus and find the angular figure seated behind a desk along the wall, away from the window, which was blocked by closed blinds. The man was smoking. A cloud hung over his head.

  “Ah, come in … welcome.” The voice was nasal but seductive, authoritative.

  They stepped closer. The man behind the desk did not rise but offered a bent hand across the spotless blotter.

  “Dr. Arnot, Dr. Mattison. I am Harold Eagleton. Welcome to the Institute for Prehistoric Research.”

  His tone suggested that he was accustomed to having his name recognized. He held his cigarette in the Eastern European manner, between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, the other fingers splayed like a fan.

  As Matt shook his hand, towering over him, Susan studied Eagleton. He was an extraordinary sight, hunched over, all askew: pale skin, cocked head, tilted steel-rimmed glasses. There was a glint of metal under the desk, the rounded steel and black rubber of a wheelchair. So that was why he seemed sprawled out, caved in like a soufflé. She smelled a peculiar odor she couldn’t place. Dis­infectant, perhaps.

  Eagleton turned to face her. “We’re grateful, my dear, that you could come so quickly. Kellicut needs your help, as do we.”

  “There didn’t seem to be a lot of choice,” said Matt. “What’s it all about?”

  Eagleton looked him over. “Well, let’s not stand on ceremony, shall we?” He puffed another cloud. “The Institute … you’ve heard of us, yes? Good.” It was hard to tell if he was genuinely pleased. “We’re involved in many aspects of prehistoric research—many areas. Areas that other institutions might not look into. We have ample funding and we place a strong value on good field­work. We have projects around the world and we want nothing but the best. People like Dr. Kellicut. We need them.”

  Matt was struck by the wording: need? “Why do you need them? What do you need them for?”

  “Whatever,” said Eagleton, waving him off.

  Matt looked at Susan, who was staring at Eagleton, fascinated. Van sat wordlessly on a sofa. The walls were covered with maps and what appeared to be satellite reconnaissance photographs. A small Degas was in one corner. Matt spotted some framed degrees and plotted
the ascent they represented: University of Tennessee, Columbia, Harvard, Edinburgh, St. John’s Oxford.

  Eagleton followed his gaze. He didn’t miss much. “Ah, the old paper trail,” he said. “So meaningless, isn’t it?” He paused reflectively.

  “Where was I?” A cloud of smoke went up. “Well, we’ve sponsored quite a few expeditions recently and some have been more … orthodox than others. Lately, we’ve decided to specialize on the Neanderthal—or rather, we’ve had the decision thrust upon us. We’re very keen on it. Interesting stuff. Not all of us had that kind of background, you understand, though we’ve managed to assemble a neat little stable of experts, as I’m sure you’ll—”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Matt cut in. “Why did you get in­volved in Neanderthal research? What exactly do you hope to gain?”

  Eagleton’s tone changed. Now there was a hard edge to it.

  “Why … why, it could change everything. It could change the whole field, don’t you see? Actually, it was your friend Dr. Kellicut who got us involved. He was quite enthusiastic, so we sponsored him. To the Caucasus. It sounded a bit crackpot, really, but one never knows, does one?” He stubbed out the cigarette, reached under his desk, and flipped a switch. The smoke disappeared through a vent in the ceiling and a slight mist fell. “Antibacterio­logical agent,” he explained. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Go on, please,” said Susan. “Tell us, where is Dr. Kellicut now?”

  “Well, that’s just it. We don’t know. We know generally, of course, but we don’t know specifically. That’s where you come in. That’s why we need you, to help us find him. It takes a paleoan­thropologist to find a paleoanthropologist and all that, you know.”