Fifty Degrees Below (15 page)

So he did his part, working hard in the building, learning about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its potential detachment from its seabed perch. Learning of plans to run oil tankers and other shipping over the pole from Japan to Scotland and Norway and back, halving the distance and making the Arctic Ocean a trading lake like the Mediterranean—

Then his watch alarm would go off, surprising him again, and it was off into the long green end of the day, livid and perspiring. Happy at the sudden release from the sitting at desk, the abstract thinking, the global anxiety (cave painting, Atlas figure, desperate effort to hold world aloft).

Because all that was only part of the optimodal project! Looking for animals, playing chess with Chessman, reading in the restaurants, sleeping in his tree. . . .

These summer days usually cooled off a little in the last hour before dark. The sun disappeared into the forest, and then in the remaining hour or two of light, if Frank had managed to get over to Rock Creek Park in time, he would join the frisbee golfers, and run through the shadows throwing a disk and chasing it. Chasing the other players. Frank loved the steeplechase aspect of it, and the way it made him feel afterward. The things it taught him about himself: once he was running full tilt and a stride came down on a concealed hole with only his toes catching the far side, but by the time he was aware of that his foot and leg had stiffened enough that he had already pushed off using only the toes. How had he done that? No warning, instant reaction, how had there been time? In thousandths of a second his body had sensed the absence of ground, stiffened the appropriate muscles by the appropriate amount, and launched into an improvised solution, giving him about the same velocity a normal stride would have had.

Another time the reverse happened, and he stepped on a hidden bump under the front of his foot. But he knew that only after he had already given up on the stride and was catching himself on the other foot, thus saving himself a sprained ankle.

Things like this happened all the time. So just how fast
was
the brain? It appeared to be almost inconceivably fast, and in those split seconds, extremely creative and decisive. Indeed, running steeplechase and watching what his body did, especially after unforeseen problems were solved, Frank had to conclude that he was the inadvertent jailer of a mute genius. His running foot would come down on nothing at all, he would fly forward in a tuck and roll, somersault back to his feet and run on as if he had practiced the move for years, only better—how could it be? Who did that?

Eleven million bits of data per second were taken in at the sensory endings of the nervous system, he read. In each second all incoming data were scanned, categorized, judged for danger, prioritized, and reacted to, this going on continuously, second after second; and at the same time his brain was doing all that unconsciously, in his conscious mentation he could be singing with the birds, or focusing on a throw, or thinking about what it meant to be under surveillance. Parallel processing of different activities in the parcellated mind, at different speeds, taking from microseconds to a matter of years, if not decades.

Thus the joy of running in the forest, giving him little glimpses of the great unconscious Mind.

Throwing was just as fun as running, or even more so, being more conscious and easier to notice. He looked, aimed, calculated, tried for a certain result. It had none of running’s effortless adjustment, it was much more erratic and imprecise. Still, when the disk flew through the trees to its target and crashed into the chains and fell in a basket, it shared some of the miraculous quality of his tumbles; it did not seem physically possible. And if he thought about it too much he could not do it, his throws immediately degenerated into waldo approximations. You had to “play unconscious,” letting unfelt parts of the brain do the calculating, while still consciously directing that the throws be attempted.

So he played on, in a kind of ecstatic state. There was some quality to the game that seemed to transcend sports as he had known them; not even climbing resembled it. Surely it was closely analogous to the hominid hunting and gathering experience that was central to the emergence of humanity. As Frank ran the park with the guys he sometimes thought about how it might have gone: I throw. I throw the rock. I throw the rock at the rabbit. I throw the rock at the rabbit in order to kill it. If I kill the rabbit I will eat it. I am hungry. If I throw well I will not be hungry. A rock of fist size was thrown
just so
(the first scientist). Rock of
just this size,
of
just this weight,
was thrown at
just under the full velocity of which one was capable,
at a trajectory
beginning just above horizontal
. It hit the rabbit in the leg but the rabbit ran away. When a rock hits a rabbit in the head it will usually stop. Hypothesis! Test it again!

The players collapsed at the end, sat around the final hole puffing and sweating.

“Forty-two minutes ten seconds,” Robert read from his watch. “Pretty good.”

“We were made to do this,” Frank said. “We evolved to do this.”

The others merely nodded.

“
We
don’t do it,” Robin said. “The gods do it through us.”

“Robin is pre-breakdown of the bicameral mind.”

“Frisbee is Robin’s religion.”

“Well of course,” Robin said.

“Oh come on,” Spencer scolded, untying his fiery dreads from their topknot. “It’s bigger than that.”

Frank laughed with the others.

“It is,” Spencer insisted. “Bigger and older.”

“Older than religion?”

“Older than
humanity
. Older than
Homo sapiens
.”

Frank stared at Spencer, surprised by this chiming with his evolutionary musings. “How do you mean?”

Spencer grabbed his gold disk by its edge. “There’s a prehistoric tool called the Acheulian hand axe. They were made for hundreds of thousands of years without any changes in design. Half a million years! That makes it a lot older than
Homo sapiens
. It was a
Homo erectus
tool. And the thing is, the archeologists named them hand axes without really knowing what they were. They don’t actually look like they would make good hand axes.”

“How so?” Frank said.

“They’re sharpened all the way around, so where are you going to hold the thing? There isn’t a good place to hold it if you hit things with it. So it couldn’t have been a hand axe. And yet there are millions of them in Africa and Europe. There are dry lakebeds in Africa where the shorelines are coated with these things.”

“Bifaces,” Frank said, looking at his golf disk and remembering illustrations in articles he had read. “But they weren’t round.”

“No, but almost. And they’re flat, that’s the main thing. If you were to throw one it would fly like a frisbee.”

“You couldn’t kill anything very big.”

“You could kill small things. And this guy Calvin says you could spook bigger animals.”

“Hobbes doesn’t agree,” Robert put in.

“No
really
!” Spencer cried, grinning. “This is a
real theory,
this is what archeologists are saying now about these bifaces. They even call it the killer frisbee theory.”

The others laughed.

“But it’s
true,
” Spencer insisted, whipping his dreads side-to-side. “It’s
obviously
true. You can
feel
it when you throw.”

“You can, Rasta man.”

“
Everyone
can!” He appealed to Frank: “Am I right?”

“You are right,” Frank said, still laughing at the idea. “I sort of remember that killer frisbee theory. I’m not sure it ever got very far.”

“So? Scientists are not good at accepting new theories.”

“Well, they like evidence before they do that.”

“Sometimes things are just too obvious! You can’t be throwing out a theory just because people think frisbees are some kind of hippie thing.”

“Which they are,” Robert pointed out.

Frank said, “No. You’re right.” Still, he had to laugh; listening to Spencer was like seeing himself in a funhouse mirror, hearing one of his theories being parodied by an expert mimic. The wild glee in Spencer’s blue eyes suggested there was some truth to this interpretation. He would have to be more careful in what he said.

But the facts of the situation remained, and could not be ignored. His unconscious mind, his deep mind, was at that very moment humming happily through all its parcellations. It was a total response. Deep inside lay an ancient ability to throw things at things, waiting patiently for its moment of redeployment.

“That was good,” he said as he got up to leave.

“Google Acheulian hand axes,” Spencer said. “You’ll see.”

The next day Frank did that, and found it was pretty much as Spencer had said. Certain anthropologists had proposed that the rapid evolutionary growth of the human brain was caused by the mentation necessary for throwing things at a target; and a subset of these considered the bifaced hand axes to be their projectiles of choice, “killer frisbees,” as one William Calvin indeed called them. Used to stampede animals at waterholes, he claimed, after which the hominids pounced on animals knocked over by the rush. The increase in predictive power needed to throw the flattened rocks accurately had led to the brain’s frontal lobe growth.

Frank still had to laugh, despite his will to believe. As one of the editors of the
Journal of Sociobiology
he had seen a lot of crazy theories explaining hominid evolution, and he recognized immediately that this was another specimen to add to the list. But so what? It was as plausible as most of the others, and given his recent experiences in the park, more convincing than many.

He stared at a website photo of a hand axe as he thought about his life in the park. He had written commentaries for the
Journal
suggesting that people would be healthier if they lived more like their paleolithic ancestors had. Not that they should starve themselves from time to time, or needed to kill all the meat they ate—just that incorporating more paleolithic behaviors might increase health and well-being. After all, a fairly well-identified set of behaviors, repeated for many generations, had changed their ancestors a great deal; had created the species
Homo sapiens
; had blown their brains up like balloons. Surely these were behaviors most likely to lead to well-being now. And to the extent they neglected these behaviors, and sat around inside boxes as if they were nothing but brains and fingertips, the unhealthier and unhappier they would be.

Frank clicked to this commentary and its list of all the paleolithic behaviors anthropologists had ever proposed as a stimulant to the great brain expansion. How many of these behaviors was he performing now?

• talking (he talked much of the day)

• walking upright (he hiked a lot in the park)

• running (he ran with Edgardo’s group and the frisbee guys)

• dancing (he seldom danced, but he did sometimes skip along the park trails while vocalizing)

• singing (“Home-less, home-less, oooooooooop!”)

• stalking animals (he tracked the ferals in the park for FOG)

• throwing things at things (he threw his frisbees at the baskets)

• looking at fire (he looked at the bros’ awful fire)

• having sex (well, he was trying. And Caroline had kissed him)

• dealing with the opposite sex more generally (Caroline, Diane, Marta, Anna, Laveta, etc.)

• cooking and eating the paleolithic diet (research this; hard to cook in his current circumstances, but not impossible)

• gathering plants to eat (he did not do that; must consider)

• killing animals for food (he did not want to do that, but frisbee golf was the surrogate)

• experiencing terror (he did not want to do that either)

It appeared by these criteria that he was living a pretty healthy life. The paleolithic pleasures, plus modern dental care; what could be nicer? Optimodal in the best possible sense.

He went back to the Acheulian hand axe link list, and checked out a commercial site called Montana Artifacts. It turned out that this site offered for sale an Acheulian axe found near Madrid, dated at between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand years old. “Classic teardrop shaped of a fine textured gray quartzite. The surface has taken a smooth lustrous polish on the exposed faces. Superb specimen.” One hundred and ninety-five dollars. With a few taps on his keyboard Frank bought it.

PRIMATES IN AIRPLANES. AACK!

Flying now made Frank a little nervous. He gripped his seat arms, reminded himself of the realities of risk assessment, fell asleep. He woke when they started descending toward Logan. Landing on water, whoah—but no. The runway showed up in the nick of time, as always.

Then into Boston, a city Frank liked. The conference was at MIT, with some meetings across the river at Boston University.

Quickly Frank saw that getting an opportunity to talk in private with Dr. Taolini would be hard. She was involved with the organization of the event, and much in demand. The one time Frank saw her alone, in the hall before her own presentation, she was talking on her cell phone.

But she saw him and waved him over, quickly ending her call. “Hello, Frank. I didn’t know you were going to be here.”

“I decided to come at the last minute.”

“Good, good. You’re going to tell us about these new institutes?”

“That’s right. But I’d like to talk to you one-on-one about them, if you have the time. I know you’re busy.”

“Yes, but let’s see . . .” checking her cell phone’s calendar. “Can you meet me at the end of my talk?”

“Sure, I’m going to be there anyway.”

“That’s very nice.”

Her talk was on algorithms for reading the genomes of methanogens. She spoke rapidly and emphatically, very used to the limelight: a star, even at MIT, which tended to be an all-star team. Stylish in a gray silk dress, black hair cut at shoulder length, framing a narrow face with distinct, even chiseled features. Big brown eyes under thick black eyebrows, roving the audience between slides, conveying a powerful impression of intelligence and vivacity, of pleasure in the moment.