CRO-MAGNON (31 page)

Calder looked at Blaine. “It’s either Fitrat or Teague.”

“
Was not Gulnaz,” Zinchenko said.

“
How do you know?”

He touched his barrel chest. “Ask. She say no.”

“
Can you trust her answer?”

“
Da.”

Calder glanced at Blaine again. “Teague’s recorded everything, at least when the generator was switched on, which was most of the time.”

Her oval face, already pale from the frigid air off the glacier, turned a shade lighter. “Yesterday, when we talked about the hybrid boy apparently being ambidextrous, I said I expected gene-sniffing results by last night.”

“
So, when Teague tells Salomon you’re already working with the DNA, he’ll realize we have good samples.”

“
Yes. And that will make it harder to stall him while we see what’s what and decide on a course.”

“
And during our midday session we voiced our suspicions about Teague, including that we know he’s armed. If Teague radioed him, Salomon knows we’re suspicious of his motives and intentions.”

“
Last night, Teague order me make contact,” Zinchenko said. “Then send me out of room.”

“
So, he already knows.” Blaine’s blue eyes narrowed. “What else have we said, Ian?”

Calder thought back. “Nothing incriminating, so far as I remember. I think that’s it.”

“
That’s enough, though. Now Salomon will be doubly suspicious. Knowing his penchant for staying on top of things, I’m not surprised he decided to visit.”

“
We’ll have to hurry to complete our work.” Calder glanced toward the bow. They were approaching the icy shoreline, where the mountain rose steeply above the submerged tunnel. Swiveling on the seat, he crawled forward and began to sort his and Blaine’s scuba gear.

#

The tunnel, illuminated by Calder’s beam, appeared to have remained stable overnight. Having grown accustomed to the two strictures exacerbated by the original diver’s explosives, he performed the necessary underwater gymnastics without succumbing to claustrophobia, though he could sense the irrational fear lurking in his subconscious. He was concerned that Salomon must suspect him and Blaine of developing their own agenda. He was more worried about Caitlin than himself, since she was central to the man’s plans. She seemed so focused on her own goals that she failed to perceive the situation objectively.

If something happened to her because he failed to take the threat seriously enough . . .

But this was not the time to be worrying about external threats, he thought, as he swam to within a few yards of the cave, the silty glow from Blaine’s headlamp blooming around him. Emerging from the water, he remounted his air tank and fastened the harness. Behind him he heard Blaine break the surface. Diffusing his flashlight, he unfolded the frame and set the contraption on the icy floor.

After the particle-laden water of the tunnel, the air of the cave was gratifyingly clear, but he reminded himself that it was bathed in radon gas and that at least some carbon monoxide must have accumulated from the catalytic heater.

“
Remember not to breathe the air,” he said through his mask.

“
Speak for yourself,” she said, her voice echoing hollowly.

Discarding his fins, he hunched his tank higher and shuffled to the frost-covered wall. The heat rays had exposed a panoply of colors, still vivid after thirty thousand years. Feeling like an interloper, he peered around the cave at the five bodies—three humans and two animals—frozen in a tableau of death, and wondered if the discoverers of Egyptian tombs experienced the same morbid guilt.

Blaine’s amplified shadow fell around him and he stepped aside. Crouched on either side of the heater, they gazed at the newly uncovered panel of paintings. Calder marveled again at the degree of detail the long-dead woman had managed to invoke with her primitive materials. If she was an indication, these people were fully as talented as any moderns.

The first of the four paintings depicted the scraggly-haired crone from the previous panel waving to the tilt-nosed Cro-Magnon woman. The young woman, clutching a baby, was walking away from the windbreak. She was accompanied by the broken-nosed Neanderthal, the pony-tailed man who seemed to be his
brator,
and the wolf who now looked about two-thirds grown. The two men carried leather bags over their shoulders and heavy spears in their hands. The ground was covered with snow. Bending closer, Calder decided the artist had used a wash of quicklime, probably prepared at the hearth, to render the white of the background.

“
She doesn’t look happy,” Blaine said.

“
None of them do. Notice how the artist used posture to convey state of mind. Prehistoric painters were good at that. In Chauvet Cave—”

“
Later.” Blaine glanced at her watch. “Soon, you’ll be calling time.”

“
You’re right. We need to work fast.” Calder took out his camera. Waiting for the flash to charge, he surveyed the other three pictures: The man with the ponytail, looking back, waving to the other two. The broken-nosed man and the wolf facing a charging dirk-toothed tiger, the woman huddling in the foreground with her baby. The woman and man atop a low pass, looking down at two lengthy cylindrical structures.

“
Those are Cro-Magnon longhouses,” Calder said. “We’ve found evidence of stake holes north of the Alps.”

“
Looks like the Cro-Magnon woman’s presence caused dissention in the Neanderthal camp,” Blaine said. “Her Neanderthal protector escorted her back to her people.”

“
Yes. After his brother left, they ran into a dirk-tooth. Lucky to survive.” He shook his head. “That Neanderthal must have been some hunter.”

Blaine had moved on and was crouched over the prehistoric man’s body. “Did you see that he was wounded at some time in his side?” She bent for a closer look. “Judging from marks on the ribs, probably from a spear.”

“
Yes. He also broke his left femur and his right radius, with trauma to the ulna. The femur was a stress fracture but the forearm felt splintered, as from a bad fall.” Calder snapped a close-up and moved to the next painting. “If this guy’s a typical Neanderthal, they led a hard life.”

#

Blaine and Calder sat on their air tanks on the precipitous snow bank above the dive site. A few yards away Zinchenko hunkered in the stern of the skiff, fiddling with the outboard engine.

Blaine decided it was time to explain her new idea
. Or at least as much as Ian needs to know right now.

“
Like I told you, I ran the sniffer program overnight. Scrubbed the locus of the boy’s handedness haplotype for gene markers.”

“
And?”

“
He has both RGHT from his mother and the same gene as the Neanderthal, which I assume induces left-handedness. I’ve named it L-E-F-T.”

“
Clever. So, what’s the bottom line?”

“
By possessing both genes, the boy may have been benefited from both brain orientations—the right-handers’ reasoning ability and the left-handers’ creativity.” She twirled her hands. “And the two feed off each other.”

“
What’s that mean?”

“
Intuition drives intellect. Intellect directs intuition.”

“
You’re talking about a potential for creative genius again.”

Blaine, detecting a tinge of doubt, hurried on. “Yes. Where the brain has greater flexibility and balance, neither side being dominated by the other, the result could be an increased incidence of genius.”

“
I believe what we call genius is not just . . .” Calder stared over the lake, his graying brown hair blowing in the cold wind.

“
Yes, genius is a catch phrase for at least seven or eight kinds of advanced ability. It’s too varied and specialized to measure meaningfully.”

“
How about IQ?”

She snorted. “The so-called intelligence quotient measures only verbal-linguistic and mathematical-reasoning aptitudes, and not very accurately. Genius expresses itself mainly in accomplishments.”

He peered at her. “If there were hybrid geniuses among the prehistoric population, why don’t we see archaeological and genetic evidence?”

She ticked off on her fingers: “People resist change. There probably weren’t many hybrids. Some may have been outcasts. And their freakish physical appearance may have hindered them in finding mates.”

“
And these factors operated strongly enough that genius had no impact?”

“
I didn’t say that. Don’t some anthropologists believe that mankind—the purported ‘great race’—reached a peak of intelligence during the period from forty thousand to ten thousand years ago?”

“
Based on their bigger brains before the advent of herding and farming, yes. But that’s speculative.” He frowned. “Again, if there were hybrid geniuses, why didn’t they invent writing, civilization, and science forty thousand years ago?”

“
Because people lived in small groups. The societal conditions for synergistic innovation didn’t yet exist.”

A few yards away, the outboard sputtered and died and Zinchenko cursed in Russian.

“
So, what does this new gene mean to us?” Calder said.

“
For one thing, suppose we could help people with inadequate brain function?”

Calder looked quizzical. “You mean through some modern version of eugenics? Didn’t Charles Davenport and Josef Mengele—”

“
Don’t compare me with monsters, well-meaning or not. Especially the well-meaning ones. We could begin with patients whose brains are so unbalanced that they’re unable to function normally.”

“
Yeah, but then you’d expand to the general population.”

“
Only on a voluntary basis.”

Calder put his fingers on his forehead and closed his eyes. “I see villagers carrying torches . . .”

Blaine knew she was losing him.
He’s thinks I’m obsessed. He’s afraid I’ve lost sight of the mission.

And for what she was about to suggest, she needed his cooperation. She wracked her brain for a suitable argument.

“
For mankind, physical evolution seems to have been halted or at least redirected by our culture. If we want to evolve further in beneficial ways, like eliminating disease, extending longevity, and fostering genius, we have to do it ourselves.”

Calder shook his head. “I’ve got to tell you, Caitlin, it sounds like ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau.
’
”

“
The good doctor—sorry, bad doctor—was experimenting on fictional human-animal hybrids. My idea would involve entirely human Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal haplotypes. We’d only reinstate the Neanderthal lateralization gene if we had a solid handle on the outcome.”

“
And how would you assure that?”

She smiled. “Very carefully. The human race has incurred much change in the last thirty thousand years, both from natural selection and from genetic drift. So we’d need physical proof that the setup would work.”

Calder sighed. “I’m not sure I like the idea of tinkering with mankind’s makeup.”

“
God’s province and so forth?”

“
I’m not religious, but you get the idea.”

“
I assure you, we wouldn’t ‘tinker.
’
”

Blaine’s eyes ranged over the ruffled surface of the lake. How to convince him she wasn’t a mad scientist?

“
For example, we wouldn’t just cut into a chromosome and insert a gene, because there’s probably an extended haplotype at work.”

“
There’s that word again.”

“
A group of genes working together, encompassing millions of base-pair letters and hundreds of thousands of three-letter words. To make sense of it all, we’d need to study the brain of an individual who has both RGHT and LEFT and then compare his genome with the current human genome.”

“
And how would you study a brain like that, since you won’t actually have one?”

“
The same way I’d study any brain. I want to scan the boy’s, once we get back Stateside.”

“
Scan his brain? You make it sound like baking a cake. I heard you were doing that to mice at Salomon Industries.”

“
That’s supposed to be a secret.”

“
Mathiessen told me.”

“
How’d he find out? If Salomon—”

“
He has contacts throughout the scientific world.” Calder’s eyes glinted hazel in the midday light. “Have you had any success?”

All right!
she thought.
He’s showing interest.

“
Yes. We scan the synaptic signals and download them onto optical storage disks.”

“
Mouse synapses, you mean.”

“
Mice are mammals. Humans are mammals.”

On the water, the outboard fired, caught, then fell into a sputtering limbo. Zinchenko hunched over it, grumbling.

Calder said, “And how would you scan the boy’s brain, when it’s halfway around the world in a frozen cave.”

She stared at him, waiting for the shoe to drop.

He stared back, open-mouthed. “No.”