CRO-MAGNON (64 page)

“
Then stop wasting time,” Calder said.

“
All right.” She glanced at the Neanderthal’s head. “I’ll make better time without—”

She stopped and they both listened to the faint buzz coming from the gorge.

Calder tried to stand but fell back, fumbling with the Glock’s fire selector. “I thought you said we were one up.”

“
We are. But Delyanov could have fielded more than one helicopter.” The sound was louder now, and she turned toward the gorge. “Maybe there’s a whole fleet of Nighthawks after us.”

“
That was a good trick,” he said. “But it would only work with Salomon, himself.”

“
I know.” She hesitated. “If this is it for us, Ian, I want you to know . . .”

But the scruffy helicopter that rose above the lip of the gorge was a civilian model. And the bearded face that peered from the bubble was Rolf Mathiessen’s.

Chapter 28

Murzo Ayni stood inside the doorway, watching the bearded man with the silver mane wend past the limestone pits and pinnacles of the abandoned phosphate mine. Murzo had never acclimated to the equatorial heat and humidity of this sun-blasted island in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, and rarely ventured outside during the day. Still, he had to admit that his eighteen months as administrator of Caitlin Blaine’s project for the Institute of Human Evolution had been pleasant. Particularly after Farrin had flown from Tajikistan to marry him.

When Mathiessen, as IHE director, took Blaine and her crew under his wing, they based the operation in this rusting metal building in the gutted interior of the maverick republic of Nauru. Mathiessen had christened the operation the Resurrection Project for publicity purposes, over the objections of Blaine and Calder, who both thought the name too God-like. Even so, the funding he was able to raise was, at best, marginal. He knew that worry over future funding had caused Caitlin to accelerate the program.

As the one who administered the project, Ayni well knew that they needed this island haven in order to sidestep the nearly worldwide ban on human cloning and also to evade charges of industrial piracy by the late Laszlo Salomon’s still-thriving corporation. He would be glad when the project culminated, a deal was struck with Salomon Industries, and he could move his family to a promised job at IHE’s headquarters in the cool Pacific Northwest of America. But right now he wished Caitlin had not charged him with explaining her actions to the director.

Mathiessen looked relieved to gain the air-conditioned comfort of the facility. He clasped Ayni’s hand, swiped at his craggy brow, and exchanged greetings. Ayni, still limping from the chunk the 50-caliber machinegun bullet had taken out of his right thigh that fateful day in the Hindu Kush, began the walk through the derelict structure to the converted crushing facility they called the “lab.”

Mathiessen kept pace on his long legs.
“Caitlin’s e-mail said Ian would be here.” His voice held an undertone of anxiety.

As well it might.

“
He flew in from Kenya yesterday.”

Blaine, as project director, worked here full-time with her staff of Henrik Volker, Peter Golub, and several support personnel, while Calder, now the Institute’s chief paleoanthropologist, supervised divers digs in remote locales around the world, often accompanied by Fedor Zinchenko as supervising camp master, and spent only a portion of his time on Nauru as the project’s anthropology consultant.

They entered an abandoned warehouse filled with hulks of rusting machinery, their footsteps echoing in the dusty silence. Ayni, wanting to soften what was coming, shook his head and grinned.

“
What?” Mathiessen said.

“
Even though they are man and wife now, they still squabble about human evolution whenever Ian visits the island.”

“
Out-of-Africa versus Multiregional Evolution?”

Ayni nodded. “They went at it today at lunch. Of course, it is all on the surface.”

But Mathiessen was not to be put off. “Caitlin refused to tell me over the Net what this ‘demonstration’ is except that it’s a ‘break point.’” His brow wrinkled. “Surely her team can’t have finished cloning and growing the prehistorics, since she’s only been at it two years.”

Now it starts.

“
That is not completely correct.” Ayni, with his facility for languages, was rapidly picking up American syntax but was not yet comfortable with contractions.

“
What d’you mean?” The director’s voice held an edge of tension.

“
Remember, they are force-growing the subjects to their ages at time of death. And as you saw with the wolf, the period varies.”

“
I concurred in cloning the wolf as a test subject, but I thought they were staggering the boy’s and adults’ cloning so they would come to term simultaneously and provide emotional support for each other.”

Go easy.

“
Caitlin says children are more resilient than adults, and Ian feels this would be even truer of prehistoric people. So, she started the boy right after they succeeded brain-loading the wolf.”

They skirted a huge machine of scabrous steel and cast iron, motes of dust dancing in errant rays of sunshine. Mathiessen remained silent, apparently struggling with the implications.

Trying not to be obvious, Ayni kept an eye on the IHE director, gauging his temper. “If the boy is not ‘normal,’ Caitlin says she can abort or suspend the cloning more easily than with the adults, while they investigate the problem.”

“
Why rush things with the boy?” The IHE director looked confounded. “If I understand, that would bring him to his age-at-death right about now, years ahead of his parents.”

Oh, yes.

“
That is correct.”

“
But his memories won’t be loaded, and you’ll have to hold him in a vegetative state.” Mathiessen shot the administrator an exasperated look. “That’ll cost money. And the boy might deteriorate.”

Drop a bigger hint.

“
Again, that is not quite the case. Dr. Volker wanted to see if the memory transfer works as well with humans as animals, and still have time to start over if there is some ‘glitch,’ as Mr. Golub terms it.”

Now the IHE director looked truly alarmed. “You don’t mean they already scanned the boy’s brain and—”

Now.

Ayni wished Caitlin had not stuck him with this chore. He kept his eyes straight ahead.

“
Uploaded the memories.”

Mathiessen pulled up, forcing Ayni to halt.

“
I thought the two big bills from Mass. General and Louisiana Southern were for the wolf.” He glared at the administrator.

Ayni felt a quiver of apprehension. True, Caitlin was his direct boss, but this man held the wallet strings. Of course, Ayni thought, he already had his Nauruan citizenship and could not be sent back to Tajikistan. But he knew that the island nation had ninety percent unemployment since the phosphate mines ran out. If Mathiessen fired him, what would he do? Raise goats? What would he feed them?

Mathiessen’s voice was insistent. “They already scanned a frozen human brain and digitalized the signals?”

This should be Caitlin’s job.
There was no way to soften the truth.

“
Yes.”

The director’s scraggly brows shot up, and his face flushed. “That’s Caitlin’s ‘break point’? They’ve loaded the boy and they’re going to wake him?”

“
Yes.”

“
When?”

“
Now.”

Mathiessen let out a hiss. “What if the scan didn’t work properly?”

“
It worked with the wolf.”

“
How do you know? Just because he’s all right physically . . .”

“
You will see.”

“
But what if the boy’s more complex memories didn’t scan correctly? Isn’t the process destructive?”

“
Yes. But Dr. Volker and Mr. Golub assured Caitlin that they were as ready as they ever—”

“
She was supposed to bring me in on any substantial decisions.” Dismay had turned to indignation. “I call scanning the boy’s brain early and force-growing his clone ahead of the adults ‘substantial.
’
”

Ayni did not think he should reply. After all, it was not his decision, though he was complicit. He resumed walking, leading the older man. They left the cavernous warehouse and entered what Caitlin had dubbed the “works.” A hum became audible and grew louder, and they passed a nearly new compressor.

“
Did Caitlin consult you on this?”

Ayni’s head moved, somewhere between a shake and a nod.

“
You pay the bills, Murzo.” Mathiessen sounded increasingly vexed. “You must have known.”

Play dumb.

“
Caitlin is the boss. She makes the decisions and I keep things running.”

“
The institute is already stretched thin. If this goes wrong . . .”

“
I believe that is why Caitlin declined to tell you. She was afraid that you might disagree.”

Or forbid her.

The IHE director scowled. “Who’s in charge here, anyway?”

Again, Ayni did not think a reply was warranted. He could tell that the IHE director had accepted the inevitable.

Turning a corner, he pushed through an air lock into the lab.

#

Inside the insulated room, the temperature bordered on cold. Mathiessen could hear the hum of a generator. The central space housed two glass-topped metal tanks resembling horizontal supermarket freezers except for wires and tubes leading to an overhead console. Items of equipment both familiar and exotic rested on counters or stood against the walls—computer workstations, monocular and stereo microscopes, Petri dishes and bottles of chemicals, a cryogenic refrigerator, C-stands with coils of plastic tubing, a bank of optical storage disks, and specialized electronic instruments including a bulky tunneling electron microscope that had cost the Institute a small fortune. The corners were occupied by two backup generators, a portable X-ray machine, and a
ConGen
automatic DNA sequencer, which Mathiessen recalled had also put a dent in the budget.

Peter Golub sat at a desktop computer, his doughy face set in concentration as he masticated. Henrik Volker, club foot propped at a comfortable angle, perused a printout. They both glanced up as the IHE director entered, but neither man paused in his work.

Beyond the two cabinets, Caitlin Blaine and Ian Calder huddled over a gurney, where previously had stood a third tank. They glanced at Mathiessen rather guardedly but kept murmuring. He paused beside the nearest case and tried to peer inside, but frost rendered the thick glass opaque.

The geneticist and the paleoanthropologist looked up again and greeted him diffidently, as if nothing unusual were afoot. They stepped forward, revealing a white-shrouded figure on a gurney. Two wires and an air hose hung from the overhead console. The leads snaked under the cotton sheet, while the hose terminated at a face mask beneath a shock of sandy hair.

Mathiessen noted that the face beneath the mask was large and prognathous. Forgetting that he had resigned himself to Ayni’s news, he peered at Caitlin in alarm. Even after begging funds from universities, corporations, and foundations, plus misrepresenting the work to obtain a government grant, he had been forced to allocate an excessive portion of the Institute’s budget to her project’s needs.

He ticked off the most outrageous expenses. Leasing the derelict mining facility, without restrictions, from the government of Nauru. Renovating the crushing room. Equipping the lab. Paying Golub’s and Volker’s salaries, which were now considerably higher than Blaine’s. Reserving outrageously expensive time on a magnetic imaging machine at Massachusetts General Hospital and a first-class supercomputer at Louisiana State University.

Mathiessen was shaken by Caitlin accelerating the boy’s scanning based only on purported success with the wolf. That Ian and Murzo had obviously gone along was at least as bad.

But that was scientists for you. They got caught up in their work and plunged ahead.

He perused the long bank of optical storage disks. “When you insisted I fly out and wouldn’t say exactly why, I thought you might have found proof that the wolf’s brain scanned correctly. I didn’t dream you’d started scanning the boy’s brain.”

Caitlin just looked at him. A bit smugly, he thought.

Finally Ian said, “We can try to get additional funding before scanning the adult brains. The team can’t upload their memories until the bodies are fully grown. And even with force-growing and electrical muscle stimulation, Catlin says that will take three more years.”

Mathiessen still felt sorely put upon. Both the Institute’s reputation and his own credibility were on the line. Although no one in the outside world knew they were trying to clone human beings and upload memories extracted from frozen brains, the tabloids had been sniffing and there had been speculative “articles” about the creation of a “Mathenstein monster.” If news got out that the Institute had backed such an attempt in contravention of the laws of the United States and other developed nations, and the project failed, the scandal and ensuing ridicule would cripple the Institute.