CRO-MAGNON (33 page)

Why am I not surprised?
Blaine wondered what the enforcer’s new orders would be.

Nothing good for her and Ian, she was sure.

#

Blaine, filing out of Zinchenko’s trailer behind Mathiessen, Calder, and Fitrat, tapped the IHE director’s shoulder. “Dr. Calder and I want to show you some results of our regression analyses, in the work trailer. I think you’ll find them interesting in comparison with the norms from Klasies and Skhul.”

Mathiessen nodded as if she was making sense. The three scientists trooped to the trailer and closed the door.

Blaine put a finger to her lips, and whispered: “The place may still be bugged.” She turned to the nearest corner, picked a stuffed woolen sock from a cardboard box of snow, and handed it to Mathiessen. “DNA from all three humans and both animals.”

“
Why are you giving it to me?” he whispered. “you’re the geneticist; I’m just an old bone guy.”

“
Just in case. It’s frozen solid and packed in ice. It’ll last for a few hours if you keep it away from your body. After that, you’ll have to find some Dry Ice.”

“‘
Just in case’ of what?”

Calder whispered, “Caitlin thinks Teague is some kind of hatchet man, maybe even a hit man. We don’t know his real orders, but we don’t think Salomon will want to publicize Neanderthal DNA that’s clonable. If anything should happen to us—”

Mathiessen’s craggy face looked startled. “Do you think anything might? Because I can insist on taking you back to Dushanbe right now—”

“
I’m not finished here,” Blaine said, motioning him to keep his voice down. “It’s important that I run more tests.”

Mathiessen raised an eyebrow. “More important than your lives?”

Calder had been standing with one hand in his coat pocket. Now he took out his hand and slipped something into Mathiessen’s pocket.

Mathiessen fingered it through the cloth, and Blaine watched him register surprise, then shock.

“
You know what it is,” Calder whispered.

“
A Venus of Willendorf.” Mathiessen frowned. “ I don’t believe I can accept—”

“
But accept it you will,” Calder said, eying the older man. “Just in case.”

Mathiessen hesitated, then nodded. “I’ll see that it reaches a proper museum.”

“
When we get back to the States, we may want to do extensive work with the DNA,” Blaine whispered. “We believe this discovery should be used to benefit mankind, not to pump up the value of Salomon’s stock.”

“
I agree, in principal.” Mathiessen stroked his beard. “I know about your work with mice. I also heard you’re a workaholic.”

“
If you’re asking if I’m committed to the regeneration project, I’m proud to say I am.”

He gave her a searching look. “Are you quite sure your present departure from your instructions is to ‘benefit mankind,’ and not because you’ve turned your original obsession into an even larger one?”

Not true!
She started to protest, but Calder murmured, “I was skeptical. I still am. But I’m also convinced that Caitlin is onto something.”

The IHE director’s smile was grim.
“‘
Onto something,’ or ‘on
something’
? If you’re risking your lives . . .”

“
Please give us some slack,” Blaine said. “We may need you to take us under the Institute’s wing and drum up financial support.”

Mathiessen looked sober, as if weighing his options. Finally, he nodded.

“
I’ll put out feelers. Of course, I can’t use government grants for this. And if I approached the consortium of universities and museums, it would let the cat out. Plus, the Institute’s discretionary funds are already allocated for this fiscal year.”

“
So where does that leave us?” Blaine whispered.

“
Pretty much dependent on private donations.” Mathiessen blew out his cheeks, and Blaine knew he was wondering if he’d lost his senses. “I’ll do my best, but I can’t promise anything.”

“
Just don’t let Salomon know,” Calder added.

Laszlo Salomon’s voice came through the door: “Dr. Mathiessen, we need to leave soon, before the wind picks up.”

Mathiessen whispered hurriedly: “If you believe you’re in physical danger, we should have a
private means of communication.”

“
We can’t use the radio here,” Calder said. He handed Mathiessen a slip of paper. “The frequency for the forest ranger, Murzo Ayni. I’ll ask him to monitor his radio every night at six, local time.”

Salomon’s voice sounded again, this time with a firm edge.

Mathiessen turned to the door. “I’ll lay over in Dushanbe till you’re out.” He hesitated, peering at the two of them. “But . . .”

Calder gripped his arm. “And Rolf, be careful.”

“
Me?”

“
Salomon needed your prestige to field this expedition,” Calder whispered. “He doesn’t anymore, and he may suspect that Caitlin and I have our own agenda.”

“
Dr. Blaine!” Salomon’s voice had grown commanding. “I believe you have something of mine.”

Mathiessen opened the door. “The man is a world-class industrialist. Surely he wouldn’t—”

“
Just don’t turn your back.”

In the doorway, Blaine tugged Mathiessen’s sleeve. “Rolf, we might need you to pull us out of here.”

He nodded. “I’ll stay ready.” He stepped outside.

Blaine took a second package from the box in the corner, this one wrapped in two sheets of computer paper. She followed Mathiessen outside, where Salomon waited impatiently. Fitrat had disappeared, probably to the warmth of Zinchenko’s trailer.

Salomon turned his back on Mathiessen and stepped close to Blaine and Calder. The IHE director took the hint and proceeded toward the helicopter, where the pilot was making his visual check. Salomon took the package and slipped it into his briefcase.

“
Dr. Blaine, I didn’t want to bring this up with Ms. Fitrat present, but what is this business of the Neanderthal being left-handed and the boy ambidextrous? I believe you said it could affect how you ‘handled’ this ‘situation.
’
”

Blaine realized that Teague had relayed yesterday afternoon’s conversation in the work trailer. Her mind raced, trying to think what she and Ian had said, and how it could be rationalized.

Calder said, “That concerned something I asked Dr. Blaine to look into after I determined the subjects’ handedness.”

Salomon focused on him. “And what might that be?”

“
I have a theory that Neanderthals were right-brained, which led indirectly to their eventual demise. Dr. Blaine merely meant that her genetic confirmation would affect how we presented my theory.”

“
And the ‘situation’?”

Blaine said, “The problem of how to publish the results without giving away our discovery. For example, we could claim the DNA came from fossils we’ve already discovered in Skhul Cave and other places, if you’ll agree.”

“
We can decide such matters later.” Salomon stood scowling, his dapper stance oddly intimidating, and Blaine tried to anticipate his next question. At that moment, Fitrat stepped out of Zinchenko’s trailer, and Salomon became all business.

“
Good day, Dr. Blaine.” He said loudly. He taped the briefcase. “This material had better be viable.”

“
It will be, sir.”
Not!
Again noting his peaked visage, she was glad she didn’t believe in the Devil.

The industrialist peered at her. “It would be unwise to betray me.”

She kept her eyes wide. “I wouldn’t, sir.”

“
Others have tried.” She thought he almost glanced at where Teague stood waiting. “They are no longer . . . in the game.” He let the statement dangle, and stepped toward Teague.

What exactly did he mean, Blaine wondered. Was he threatening to turn his “facilitator” on her and Calder? The question was, would he do it anyway? She glanced at Calder. Did she have a right to subject Ian to danger, beyond that of swimming under an unstable mountain and perhaps getting trapped for all eternity?

She eyed Mathiessen, waiting by the chopper as Salomon approached. For a moment, she was tempted to call to the IHE director and accept his offer to chaperone them out of this place. Then she thought of what lay in the cave, and of what she might ultimately do with it—something she had not dared mention even to Calder, never mind Mathiessen.

She recalled Mathiessen’s comment. Had she become obsessed? She realized she was deeply involved in the prehistoric woman’s life. Was that affecting her decisions? It was something she’d have to guard against, because Mathiessen was correct. She had no right to risk Ian’s life over a personal mania.

#

Calder watched the helicopter lift amidst a flurry of snow and accelerate over the lake. He wondered how people had traveled and communicated in this roadless wilderness before modern machines. No doubt they hadn’t done much of either.

He glanced around the bleak encampment. Fitrat had gone back to her quarters in Zinchenko’s trailer and Teague had disappeared.

He turned to Blaine. “You asked Mathiessen to commit to helping with your scheme, physically and financially. And I abetted you.”

“
You’re having second thoughts?”

“
You didn’t tell him you intend to bring out the boy’s frozen head so you can scan his brain.”

“
There wasn’t time,” she said, her voice offhand.

“
That’s not it. You were afraid it would turn him off.”

“
Point taken. I do think we may need his help to get out of here.”

Calder looked grim. “After seeing Salomon up close and personal, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“
And I know we’ll need IHE’s financial support.”

“
Support for exactly what, Caitlin?”

She skirted the question: “I was afraid if I got too detailed, he’d think the idea was a pipe dream and we’d lose on both fronts—money, and help getting out.”

“
Imagine that.” Calder watched the aircraft clear the far shore of the lake. “Even I can see that trying to scan a human brain is out of line with current computer capabilities.”

She turned to him. “Is it, though?”

“
You know it is.”

Her chin came up. “Let’s run the numbers. First, you need to understand that we must record the brain’s synapses in real time, although we can store the result and do the fast Fourier transform at our leisure.”

Calder wondered if she was so wrapped up in her brainchild that she’d lost sight of reality. Her misplaced enthusiasm—obsession?—could wreck their chances of getting out of this remote corner of Tajikistan alive if things went awry.

Which was looking more and more likely.

I need to bring her down to earth.

For every scientific advance that panned out, he knew, many others frittered away time and resources and produced no useful result. They couldn’t afford that here. They needed to get the info they’d come for and get themselves out. And for that, he needed to make Caitlin recognize the absurdity of her position. The problem was, this high-level computer stuff was beyond his ken.

“
Having to process the information moment by moment just makes it worse,” he said, for want of anything better.

“
The human brain, which of course is much more extensive than a mouse brain, contains roughly a hundred billion neurons.” Blaine began to tick off each point. “Each one fires an average of ten times a second, and each of these signals travels along about a thousand axons.”

“
That’s a thousand trillion operations per second—a thousand teraflops! I know from my work in computer-assisted paleoanthropology that current supercomputers get about fifty or sixty teraflops. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a slight discrepancy.”

“
You didn’t let me finish. Real-time recording of each signal at point of destination requires about a hundred floating-point operations per second.”

“
That’s even worse. You’re up to a hundred thousand teraflops.” He scowled. “I can see why you didn’t explain this to Mathiessen. In order to drum up support, he’d have to put his reputation on the line for a project that’s way out of whack with reality.”

Her expression hardened, her eyes turning as frigid as the hard blue sky beyond Salomon’s retreating helicopter.

“
Let me finish. My team and I scan only a thin slice, about one ten-thousandth of the brain, on each pass.”

Calder’s skeptical expression ameliorated as he ran the numbers. “So you’re back to ten teraflops?”

“
Correct. A couple of years ago, that speed would have been out of reach. Now, it’s not.”

“
And how much does that kind of performance cost per hour?”

“
You don’t want to know.”

Calder watched a black dot crest the pass at the top of the glacier and disappear. He looked at Blaine and saw nothing but dogged persistence.

As the beat of the chopper’s blades faded he heard a click, and turned to see Gulnaz Fitrat look out of Zinchenko’s trailer. She had taken off her parka, and her black hair looked mussed. He imagined he could see a hint of satisfaction in her broad face. Or was it satiation?