The Dig (44 page)

The helicopter banked left and descended onto a white landing pad with a red circle, some distance from the field.

As they got out of the chopper, Matt saw Peter and Hank and several others running toward them from the lone baobab in the clearing. They all shook hands and hugged, then carried their bags from the helicopter.

“Look at this place!” Matt exclaimed. “How many RV’s do you have here?”

“These eight and then three more at B site,” Peter replied with a grin. “I tried to get a brand-new one for the two of you but couldn’t get it approved for just a two-day stay—sorry. I think you’ll find your accommodations acceptable, though.”

Peter gestured at a pile consisting of a huge, brand-new tent, sleeping bags, plastic-sealed pillows, sheets and blankets, and a king-size air mattress.

“Where are the rest of the tents?” Matt asked.

“Oh, no one sleeps in tents here now—the RVs sleep eight each.” He winked at Matt.

“Okay, so, Peter,” Tuni began, “before you say anything, I haven’t told Matt what you’ve got.”

Matt rolled his eyes and sighed. “Yeah, she prefers to torture me and remind me every day. What is it?”

Peter and Hank merely smiled.

“Well, then, let’s go to the office,” Peter said with an air of mystery. “Could you all excuse us?” This to the rest of the group besides Hank.

As they walked, Matt surveyed the area around him, envisioning what it might have looked like with the tree cover it would have boasted in the recent past. Near the helicopter landing pad stood an area full of denuded tree trunks.

After meeting dozens of people, all of whom shook Matt’s gloved hand, they finally reached the area with the motor homes, all parked in a row with little canopied spaces in between. Peter’s, the closest to the tree in the middle, served as the office.

Matt looked around as he entered. The RV was a lot more spacious than Rheese’s, but more cluttered as well. Stacks of plastic storage boxes rose to the ceiling, and various precision instruments and electronics were strewn on most of the available surfaces. What looked like a large laptop computer lay split in two pieces on the main table, with screws and other small parts scattered all about.

“Excuse the mess,” Peter said. “As you know, we’ve got a hundred things going on at once. And I apologize in advance if I have to step away for an interview.” He smiled and did his best conceited-celebrity pose. “Have you had to do any?”

Matt frowned, “Heck, no. Hopefully, my name’s not being thrown around, so how would anyone track me down? Nah, all my information is from the TV news and my conference calls with you guys. Some of their mistakes are annoying; others are hilarious—it’s really just crazy how big it’s all gotten. Have you heard about the religious stuff?”

“Heard about it!” Peter exclaimed. “I’m talking to different groups every single day! And it’s funny how quickly the believers’ sentiments turned from ‘It’s blasphemy!’ to ‘It confirms everything we always believed!’ They say it proves creationism, man’s destiny to inherit the earth, and all the rest. Then there’s the extraterrestrial-colonization ideas, the Maya calendar system experts who refer to the ages that existed before this one… It’s actually all very interesting. I’ve had representatives from every major religion except the Vatican—who have requested that
I
go to
them
—all asking me these questions and telling me their thoughts. In the end, it’s always the same. I’m telling you, one day there are death threats on my voice mail, and the next, I’m receiving flowers and notes of blessing.”

“So… ,” Matt began, “anything new happen with Rheese or Enzi? Has anyone checked it out?”

“Well,” Hank began, “Enzi has a free pass out of jail if they ever catch Dr. Rheese. He’s agreed to testify about everything, but without someone to testify against, he’s stuck there for a while.”

“And what about the whole diamond thing?” Matt asked as Peter put glasses of iced soda in front of him and Tuni.

“Yeah,” Peter replied. “Hank put that whole thing together with the detective in charge of the case.”

Hank leaned forward. “I’d already noticed that Rheese had identified impact signatures on all his maps—and that he was only excavating at those spots. I realized it after the detective told me who the kidnapper guys worked for—some mob-type guy who deals in blood diamonds from war-torn countries. See, when asteroids hit in certain areas where the right minerals are beneath the surface, bam!—instant diamond mine. It’s not that common, though. The major operations look along tectonic and volcanic areas. With impacts, you’d have to spend a lot of time digging for nothing, and that gets pretty expensive.”

“Unless you have a museum paying for it all,” Peter added.

“So you actually found the Pwin-T impact site, right?”

They nodded.

“So has anyone checked it out to see if there’s anything there?”

Peter laughed. “Yeah, you kidding? The Kenyan government owns the land where the impact took place. They didn’t waste a second getting some contractors over there to survey the site. Sure enough, there’s about two tons of diamonds beneath the surface. They’ve given us a lot of help”—he rubbed his fingers together to signify money
—
“and a lot of leeway after we showed them what was out there. Aside from the donations from all the religious organizations—which we’re more than happy to accept in the interest of our research—the Kenyans are promising us a tiny chunk of the proceeds from mining it.”

Matt smiled with them but started to feel a little sick. That same cache of diamonds that was making everyone so happy was created when thousands of people were vaporized and a city destroyed. People he had more or less met. He had to remind himself that it happened 150 million years ago, but it still seemed like yesterday.

“Did you find anything else there?” Matt asked. “On our last conference call, Collette said something about taking your ground-penetrating radar things over there.”

“Like what?” Peter replied. “Signs of a city? Nope. But we did detect a significant level of aluminum-magnesium alloy below the surface and all around the area. Basically, the same alloy as the k’yots. Which leads me to…”

Peter opened a cabinet and then another door inside it. He pulled out his hands, and down dropped the two legs and two sleeves of a full k’yot. He reached behind the back and pulled up the top, which had been hanging back like a hooded sweatshirt. He walked it over to Matt and laid it on the table in front of him.

“Wow!” he breathed. “You got a
full
one?” He ran his gloved fingers over the rough surface. It was gray and colorless, much like the middle Tuni had shown him months ago. There was no shine to it, and the fibers were crimped all over and frayed at the edges.

“It’s not just
any
full one,” Hank corrected. “Keep looking…”

Matt frowned and looked it up and down. He turned it over and saw the holdstrip hanging from the top two loops but not the bottom ones. And then he saw it: the middle was missing a section—missing
the
section.

“This… ,” Matt gasped. “This was…
Irin
’s. Where did you… how did you… ?”

“B site is a graveyard, all spoking outward from a single, smaller dome in the middle. This was embedded in the rock beneath the house.”

“Yeah, I heard about the graveyard thing on the news specials,” Matt replied. “They said there were no numbers yet, though. How many are there?”

“Well, no actual biological remains would have lasted in this type of matter, of course, and we haven’t announced any figures to the media, but we’ll take you over there later. Around the center dome, we found they had buried who knows how many people, but at some point they started embedding them in metal coffins, apparently pouring their molten alloy directly on the bodies—we’re guessing, to preserve them. Now that type of containment—well, we’re pretty excited to find out what’s inside. At the very least, we’ll have DNA. All in all, bouncing our ground-penetrating radar, we’ve mapped out about fourteen thousand of them so far.”

“Fourteen
thousand
?” Matt swallowed. He felt dizzy. They actually made it—a new city. There had been only three thousand escapees, yet this was almost twice the premigration population of Pwin-T! But what about Irin? Did he really die? Did they do it without him? What about his child? How many generations lived after him? Questions raced through his mind. He looked back down at the k’yot, the one that he felt as though he himself had worn for those two months. He ran his glove over it while the others looked on in silence. Tuni stroked his back and stared at him with wide eyes.

“I’ve been wanting to tell you this
whole
time!” she blurted out. “But I knew you needed to see it in person and be able to read it—if you were comfortable with that, of course.” She turned to the others. “Matt hasn’t read any imprints since coming out of his coma.”

“Yeah, about that,” Hank began. “What did it end up being? They ever find a piece of the k’yot on you?”

Matt reached up and scratched the back of his head. “Yeah. I was half asleep at one point and dropped into an imprint. Figured out I could still access the whole story, so it was obviously still on me somewhere. A little ways into physical therapy, I was scratching my head and I felt something weird in the back. Like a little wormy bump. I had to get some shots—
ugh
—and they pulled out… this.” He pulled out a small transparent capsule, like a perfume sampler vial, and laid it on the table. They all leaned in and saw the tiny thread inside. “I guess, with the laws and everything, I actually
smuggled
this piece out of the country. Well, here it is—if you get the original section out, the whole k’yot will be complete.”

“So,” Peter began again, “you want to… um,
check out
the k’yot?”

Matt looked down at it again and took a deep breath.

“I do, yes,” he finally said. “Just not right at the moment. Can we maybe tour the grounds first?”

“Absolutely, though we only have a couple things excavated in B site, and nothing at all here in A site.”

They all went outside into the damp equatorial heat.

As they passed the huge old baobab, Peter mentioned that the tree was thought to be over four hundred years old and that its preservation had been a condition of the museum’s license to excavate. Matt looked up at the spindly branches sprouting from the impossibly enormous trunk some thirty feet thick. Four hundred years seemed such a short time. Then again, he would turn twenty-six in a couple of months. The thought made him feel suddenly small and brief.

They crossed a line of rope suspended six inches above the ground and extending in both directions to form a circle around the area. Every ten meters, foot-high stakes stuck out of the ground, connected by a grid of twine, just as the team had done at the old site. Each post had a tag hanging from it, bearing a code. They stepped carefully over all the lines until they had gone about four hundred yards.

At the center, they reached a large section that had been excavated. Matt stepped to the edge and looked down in the square-sided hole about five feet deep. A shovel stood stuck in the dirt in the middle, and two ladders leaned against the smooth dirt walls.

“What was in here?” Matt asked. Peter and Hank smiled but didn’t answer.

“How much deeper is it?” Tuni asked.

“Less than a foot,” Hank answered.

“Another secret,” Matt said in a tone of mild annoyance.

“Not secret, dear,” Tuni corrected. “‘
Surprise
’ is the word.”

“We haven’t pulled anything out of here, Matt,” Peter admitted. “We’d like to offer you the honor of exposing the first house. We’ve got radargrams of the whole area, and this one is the closest to the surface. There’ll be press here tomorrow to capture the moment. You game?”

“Sure… I mean, why not?” Matt said. “That’s cool of you guys to wait for me. How long’s it been?”

“Well,” Peter said, “we’ve known everything was out here for a while, but we just removed the overburden a couple of days ago. We’ve only held up the project for two days, really, but we’ve always wanted you to be a part of it. You sort of deserve it, you know?”

“Yeah. I really appreciate it—thanks. So this one is the closest one to the surface?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Hank, “about a good twenty feet above the next highest roofs. We’re estimating this one at about… well, you should just see it.” He turned to Peter. “Can we show him the render?”

“Of course,” Peter said. “Let’s go!”

They followed Hank and Peter across the field to a small, black two-wheeled trailer, its hitch resting on a steel equipment crate. Peter opened a panel on the side and turned a knob. A motor whirred, and the back of the trailer slowly extended downward. After it touched ground, they stepped inside a cramped space lined with racks of computer equipment. Hank sat down in a rolling chair at a station with a keyboard, jiggled the mouse, and brought a large monitor to life. Clicking around, he found the file he needed, and up popped a map showing locations of trees and with silver circles representing the dome houses. Matt and Tuni leaned close and watched as he changed some parameters and the map switched to 3-D, displaying the area at an angle from above. Matt was impressed; it looked like the view from the old tree Peter had pointed out.