CRO-MAGNON (47 page)

He negotiated the second offset by convincing himself the tunnel was a tourist attraction made of chicken wire and stucco. Once through, the illusion dissolved and he thought how the passage was relentlessly narrowing under the daily assault of minor tremors. It couldn’t last much longer. He could only hope the two of them would be clear of the cave when one of the strictures suffered its ultimate stenosis.

Inside the frozen cave, he suppressed a surge of nausea as he saw the decapitated boy’s sandy-haired head lying to one side, deep-set green eyes staring at the blackened hearth.

Moving to the rear of the elongated chamber, he checked the motion gauge the diver had planted. No new tremor had been recorded, though he supposed that even ones too small to register could still be dangerous at what was probably the mountain’s weakest point. Hunching under the weight of his air tank, he trudged toward the catalytic heater now focused on the right-hand wall.

Caitlin’s single-mindedness nagged at him. After he had returned from checking Ayni’s hut for signs of Fitrat, he had recommended to his partner that they give up the idea of two more dives and take the trail south from Ayni’s hut over the first pass and then west in hopes of meeting the ranger on his rounds.

But she would have none of it.

He was worried about her safety—more so, he realized, than if she been just a colleague. At no point during the series of dangerous dives and the tense intervals in camp had she shown the slightest reciprocation of the feelings he had involuntarily developed. Obviously, he thought, a desirable woman and world-class scientist would not be attracted to a lowly college professor who couldn’t even secure tenure in a partially soft science.

Who perhaps no longer truly desired . . .

But that did not discharge his responsibility toward her.

You need to get her out of this!

But how? The two of them on foot would never find their way through the glacier-choked mountains to the southern border.

He heard Caitlin surface. She’d been adamant about completing this dive, ostensibly to get the samples Salomon had specified through Teague, but actually in preparation for the secret dive tonight. He knew that if he’d backed out, she would have gone on alone.

Now, as she sidled up behind him dripping lake water, he moved the BlackCat aside and inspected the penultimate panel of paintings the radiant heat had de-iced.

The first depicted the scar-faced Cro-Magnon man spearing a wolf that looked nearly full-grown, the woman with the tip-tilted nose sprawling against the tent with her singlet askew, while the javelin’s tip pierced the snarling animal’s ribcage.

“
Oh,” Blaine said in a hushed voice. “He killed the woman’s wolf.”

“
I dunno,” Calder said. “Look at the yellowish ruff.” He directed his beam to the back of the cave, where the wolf lay across the lion. “Just like that one.”

The second frame showed a boy, obviously a Neanderthal by the shape of his head, bending over the wolf, which had collapsed in the snow beside a mountain stream. The animal’s ruff showed a hint of yellow against the lime-wash of snow.

“
You may be right,” Blaine said. “This could be the same wolf.”

In the third picture, the Cro-Magnon woman crouched in front of her now larger baby who was sprawled on a fur, stubby arms and legs waving in obvious distress. Her “suitor” faced the two of them, a scowl twisting his scarred face, one open palm extended toward the baby, while the woman struck with a stone knife at his face.

The final painting depicted the broken-nosed Neanderthal being swept off a precipitous trail by an avalanche of ice and rocks, the yellow-ruffed wolf scrambling back along the trail. Far above, another Neanderthal gazed down from a field of rocks. Despite the man’s foreshortened size, Calder could make out a suggestion of black in place of an incisor.

“
That’s the man who forced the Cro-Magnon woman to mate with him,” Blaine said. “Looks like an ambush.”

“
Right.” Calder pointed to the gap-toothed man’s club, which he was holding like a pry bar. “He brought down the mountainside.”

Blaine nodded. “Life wasn’t so different thirty thousand years ago. You had to watch your associates as well as your enemies.”

“
Must be a continuation of the action in the first three pictures. But the chronology of the four pictures seems out of whack. We know the wolf was wounded.”

“
No. the sequence spans a stretch of time.” Blaine pointed to the third painting. “See the ochre wash? The baby has more hair.”

“
Marvelous, the way the artist is able to invoke detail with her primitive materials.” Calder stepped to the body of the Neanderthal and resumed taking measurements where he had left off yesterday.

Blaine said, “We need to get busy on the two remaining heads.”

“
I don’t think I can do the woman,” he said.

“
Fine.” Blaine knelt by the female Cro-Magnon, set her flashlight on the icy floor, and drew her rubber-handled dive knife.

“
Don’t you have to take core samples for Teague?” Calder said.

“
Before we leave.” She looped the woman’s shell necklace higher and positioned the serrated blade. “That won’t take long. I’ll just grab any old samples, something I can show him.”

Calder waddled toward the rear of the cave, knelt by the body of the Neanderthal, and took out his own knife. “Are you sure you’ll be able to scan these people’s brains?” he said. “I’d hate to think we’re risking our lives for nothing.”

“
You know there are no guarantees in science, Ian. Often, Mother Nature hands us results contrary to our expectations.” She started to saw, the rasp of the blade stark in the ancient stillness. “But I’m confident this can work.”

Calder, looking for a place to begin cutting, poised his own blade. The Neanderthal’s blue eyes glared at him beneath shelving brows as though he knew what the man from the future was about to do. Calder felt guilty. Reluctant to begin, he glanced at Blaine.

“
Doesn’t freezing the brain cells rupture them?”

“
The wall, yes.” The words rode atop the scrape of her serrated blade against frozen flesh. “But as long as the nuclei and the glutamate receptors don’t thaw, we can still scan the synapses.”

“
How do you know?”

“
When we scan mouse brains, we first freeze them in order to immobilize the tissue.”

Blaine was already an inch into the Cro-Magnon woman’s swarthy throat, Calder saw. There was no going back. He knew he needed to get started on the Neanderthal’s massive neck.

Blaine went on: “Then we apply a weak electromagnetic field to the retrieval area of the right frontal cortex to induce a condition analogous to suspended consciousness.”

Calder was trying to choose an appropriate spot to begin cutting. For some reason, he didn’t want to saw through the already rended flesh. He suspected he was using his indecision as an excuse to delay an unpleasant task. He glanced up at Blaine, who was busily sawing, her masked face grotesque in the wash of light from her flash.

“
How do you know so much diverse stuff?” he said.

“
I don’t. But Peter Golub and Henrik Volker do. Salomon hires only the best in their fields.”

“
I can see that in Teague.”

She glanced up. “We’ve only got a few minutes. Are you going to cut?”

“
I don’t know where to start. I hated dissecting frogs in high school.”

“
For God’s sake, Ian, we’re not doing a tracheotomy. Just cut.”

“
I want the voice box, to study how well Neanderthals might have been able to speak. But I don’t want to disturb the hyoid bone, and I don’t want to have to saw the clavicle. It looks twice as thick as a modern human’s.”

“
You’re going to have a whole cloned Neanderthal. You’ll be able to listen to him talk.”

Calder, still positioning the blade, cocked his head. “You say.”

“
Don’t worry. I’ll make it work.”

“
I am worried,” he said. “Worried about you and I losing our own heads.”

“
Get over it. You’re supposed to be a scientist. And this is cutting-edge stuff, no pun intended.”

Averting his gaze from the Neanderthal’s, Calder placed the blade just above the collarbone. “Like you said, I’m just an old-fashioned bone guy.”

“
Can I count on that?”

He felt a tingle and looked up. Blaine’s gaze was on the woman’s dusky throat.

“
What d’you mean?” he said, and immediately regretted it. To cover his confusion, he said, “So, how come you didn’t bring a Stryker saw?”

She looked up, her oval face obscured by the rubber mask, blue eyes unfathomable behind the tempered glass plate.

“
Shut up and cut. Or I swear I’ll do you myself.”

“
All right.” Having exhausted his excuses, Calder made a tentative slice and found the frozen flesh difficult to penetrate. He leaned on the blade, tried to ignore the Neanderthal’s accusing stare, and began to saw. The sound and feel was like a wet version of scraping a blackboard.

#

Motoring back across the lake, Blaine saw that the cirrus clouds had dispersed, the breeze had died, and the temperature had dropped further. She marveled that the ice around the lake’s edges lake had not advanced.

It would be a crystal-clear night, she thought. At least she and Ian wouldn’t have to flee during a storm. Of course, if Teague should find they were gone and come after them, they might welcome bad weather.

Calder said, “This whole project is getting more and more risky. Have you considered that one more tremor might close the tunnel?”

“
That was always true.”

“
In view of Salomon’s warning, Teague’s outright threat, and Fitrat’s disappearance, I’m really worried about the lives of everyone concerned—yours, mine, and maybe Murzo’s and Fedor’s.”

“
You knew before we started that the expedition was risky.”

“
Not like this. And for what? Even if your team is able to download brain contents after thirty thousand years . . .”

This has gotten bigger than the two of us,
Blaine thought
. We have to carry through.
She sighed. She’d just have keep dispelling his anxieties one at a time, like peeling an artichoke.

“
As long as the brains have remained frozen and protected from cosmic rays,” she said, “time means nothing.”

“
Even if you get data that can be stored,” he said, “you’ll have to do it in the U.S. or some other advanced nation that has a state-of-the-art fMRI machine and a supercomputer. And human cloning is illegal in those places. We could all wind up in prison.”

She noticed he didn’t keep his voice down, even though he was seated on the center thwart beside her. It was almost as if he was inviting Zinchenko to eavesdrop.

She felt a twinge of apprehension. Was he trying to unnerve the camp master in preparation for maybe backing out of tonight’s dive? She glanced at the Russian and saw that, perhaps for the first time, he was paying attention to their conversation.

Great.
Now she’d have to shepherd the two of them.

“
That’s true as far as it goes,” she said. “But legality is not a real problem.”

“
Not a problem?” Calder’s voice rose further. “Laws are not a—”

“
Our main task will be finding money. Even if we work through the NSF, renting sizeable blocks of time on these machines is prohibitively expensive for anyone without major funding. And many venture capitalists have already been burned on genetic engineering schemes that turned into pie in the sky.”

Calder persisted. “Is it even legal to scan a human brain for the purpose of cloning?”

“
Scanning a frozen head would not be unlawful unless the subject’s relatives objected.” She glanced past Zinchenko’s hunched form at the frozen mountain, which had probably looked much the same thirty thousand years ago. “And that will hardly be an issue.”

Zinchenko said, “What this ‘scan human brain’?”

With a surge of relief, Blaine realized that Calder was not trying to frighten the camp master away, but wanted to warn him and at the same time draw him into their plans. A moment’s reflection on the practical and moral aspects convinced her he was right. They would need Zinchenko’s cooperation to screen the surreptitious dive from Teague. And that meant they must tell him what was going on so that he could evaluate the danger to himself.

She glanced at Calder and received a nod.
He’s still with me.

“
Fedor, the remains in the cave are not just bones,” she said. “They’re frozen bodies.”

Zinchenko’s hand left the controls and the outboard began to sputter. He adjusted the choke and peered at her and Calder.

“
You mean like fresh cor . . . cor . . .”

“
Corpses. Yes. Mr. Salomon knew this from the original diver’s report. That’s why he sent Dr. Calder and me.”

Zinchenko kept his eyes on her while he made a further adjustment. “To do what?”

“
He wants samples of the bodies. We think he plans to clone the Neanderthal and—”