Hominids (5 page)

“Ponter!” he called again once the wind had died down, but although the room was large, the register tanks, arrayed in a vast grid, were all narrow columns; there was no way Ponter could be concealed behind one of them.

What could have happened? If a rock wall elsewhere in the mine had collapsed, and behind it had been an area of low pressure, maybe …

But there were seismic sensors throughout the mining complex, and they’d have triggered the release of warning smells here in the computing lab if there had been any such disturbance.

Adikor hurried across the granite floor. “Ponter!” he called again. “Ponter?”

There was no fissure in the flooring; he couldn’t have been swallowed up by the ground. Adikor could see register tank 69, the one Ponter had been working on, at the far end of the room. Ponter obviously wasn’t there, but Adikor ran over to the register, anyway, looking for any clue, and—

Adikor found his feet going out from under him, and he came slamming down on his back on the granite floor. The surface was covered with water—lots of water. Where had it come from? Ponter had been drinking from a tube earlier, but Adikor was sure he’d finished it upstairs. And besides, there was much more here than could have fit in a tube; there were buckets of it, spreading out in a wide puddle.

The water—if that’s what it was—looked clean, clear. Adikor brought his wet palm up to his face, sniffed. No odor.

A tentative lick.

No taste at all.

It
was
pure, apparently. Pure, clean water.

Heart pounding, head racing, Adikor went to get some containers to collect it in; it was the only clue he had.

Where had the water possibly come from?

And where on Earth had Ponter gone?

Absolute blackness.

And—water! Ponter Boddit’s legs were wet, and—

And he was sinking, water up to his waist, his chest, the bottom of his jaw.

Ponter kicked violently.

His eyes were indeed wide open, but there was nothing—absolutely nothing—to be seen.

He flailed with his arms while treading water. He gulped in air.

What had happened? Where could he be?

One moment he’d been standing in the quantum-computing facility, and the next—

Darkness—so unrelentingly dark, Ponter thought perhaps he was blind. An explosion could have done that; rock bursts were always a danger this far underground, and—

And an influx of subterranean water
was
possible. He swung his arms some more, then stretched out his toes, trying to feel for the bottom, but—

But there was nothing, nothing at all. Just more water. He could be a handspan from the bottom, or a thousand times that much. He thought about diving down to find out, but in the dark, floating freely, with no light at all, he might lose track of which way was up and not make it back to the surface in time.

He’d taken in a mouthful of water as he’d felt for the bottom. It was utterly free of taste; he’d have expected a subterranean river to be brackish, but this seemed as pure as meltwater.

He continued to gulp air. His heart was racing, and—

And he wanted to swim toward the edge, wherever that—

A groaning sound, low, deep, from all around him.

Again, like an animal awakening, like …

Like something under great stress?

He finally had enough air in his lungs to manage a shout. “Help!” Ponter called. “Help!”

The sound echoed weirdly, as if he were in an enclosed space. Could he still be in the computing room? But, if he were, why wasn’t Adikor responding to his calls?

He couldn’t just stay there. Although he wasn’t exhausted yet, he soon would be. He needed to find a surface to clamber onto, or something in the water with him that he could use as a flotation aid, and—

The groaning again, louder, more insistent.

Ponter started to dog paddle. If only there were some light—any light. He swam for what seemed a short distance, and—

Agony!
Ponter banged his head into something hard. He switched back to treading water, his limbs beginning to ache, and he reached out with one hand, fingers splayed, palm forward. Whatever he had hit was hard and warm—not metal or glass, then. And it was absolutely smooth, maybe slightly concave, and—

Another groan, coming from—

His heart fluttered; he felt his eyes go wide, but they saw nothing at all in the blackness.

—coming from the hard wall in front of him.

He began to swim in the opposite direction, the noise now growing to earsplitting proportions.

Where was he? Where was he?

The volume continued to increase. He swam farther and—

He’d slammed into another hard, smooth wall. These certainly weren’t the walls in the quantum-computing chamber; those were covered with soft sound-deadening fabric.

Suddenly, the water around Ponter was moving, rushing, roaring, and he was caught up in it, as if he were in a raging river. Ponter took a huge breath, drawing some water in with the air, and then—

And then he felt something hard smash into the side of his head, and, for the first time since this madness began, he saw light: stars before his eyes.

And then, the blackness again, and silence, and—

Nothing more.

Adikor Huld walked back up to the control room, shaking his head in astonishment, in disbelief.

Ponter and he had been friends for ages; they were both 145s, and had first met as students at the Science Academy. But in all that time, he’d never known Ponter to be given to practical jokes. And, besides, there was no place he could be hiding. Fire safety required multiple exits from a room on the surface, but down here practicality made that impossible. The only way out was by walking through the control room. Some computing facilities had false floors to conceal cabling, but here the cabling was out in the open, and the floor was ancient granite, polished smooth.

Adikor had been watching the controls; he hadn’t been looking out the window at the computing chamber. Still, there had been no flash of light to catch his eye. If Ponter had been—well, what? Vaporized? If he’d been vaporized, surely there should have been a smell of smoke or a tinge of ozone in the air. But there was nothing. He was simply
gone
.

Adikor collapsed into a chair—Ponter’s chair—stunned.

He didn’t know what to do next; he literally had no idea. It took several beats for him to focus his thoughts. He should notify the town’s administrative office that Ponter was missing; get them to organize a search. It was conceivable—barely—that the ground had opened up, and Ponter had fallen through, maybe into another drift, another level of the mine. In which case he might be injured.

Adikor got to his feet.

Dr. Reuben Montego, the two ambulance attendants, and the injured man entered through the sliding glass doors to Emergency Admitting at St. Joseph’s Health Centre, part of the Sudbury Regional Hospital.

The E.R.’s casualty officer turned out to be a Sikh in his midfifties with a jade green turban. “What is it that is wrong?” he asked.

Reuben glanced down at the man’s nametag, which read N. SINGH, M.D. “Dr. Singh,” he said, “I’m Reuben Montego, the site doctor at the Creighton Mine. This man here almost drowned in a tank of heavy water, and, as you can see, he’s suffered a cranial trauma.”

“Heavy water?” said Singh. “Where would you—”

“At the neutrino observatory,” said Reuben.

“Ah, yes,” replied Singh. He turned and called for a wheelchair, then looked back at the man and started making notes on a clipboard. “Unusual body form,” he said. “Pronounced supraorbital ridge. Very muscular, very broad shouldered. Short limbs. And—hello!—what is this, then?”

Reuben shook his head. “I don’t know. It seems to be implanted in his skin.”

“Very strange,” said Singh. He looked at the man’s face. “How do you feel?”

“He doesn’t speak English,” said Reuben.

“Ah,” said the Sikh. “Well, his bones will talk for him. Let’s get him into Radiology.”

Reuben Montego paced back and forth in the emergency department, occasionally speaking to a passing doctor he happened to know. At last, Singh got word that the x-rays were ready. Reuben was hoping to be invited along, out of professional courtesy, and Singh did indeed beckon for him to follow.

The injured man was still in the x-ray room, presumably in case Singh decided to order more pictures. He was seated now in his wheelchair, looking more frightened, Reuben thought, than even a small child usually did in a hospital. The radiology technician had clipped the man’s x-rays—a front view and a lateral shot—to a lighted wall panel, and Singh and Reuben moved over to examine them.

“Will you look at that?” said Reuben softly.

“Remarkable,” said Singh. “Remarkable.”

The skull was long—much longer than a normal skull, with a rounded protrusion at the back, almost like a hair bun. The doubly arched browridge was prominent and the forehead low. The nasal cavity was gigantic, with strange triangular projections pointing into it from either side. The huge mandible, visible at the bottom of the frame, revealed what the beard had hidden: the complete lack of a chin. It also showed a gap between the last molar and the rest of the jaw.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Reuben.

Singh’s brown eyes were wide. “I have,” he said. “I have.” He turned to look at the man, who was still sitting in the wheelchair, babbling gibberish. Then Singh consulted the ghostly gray images again. “It is impossible,” said the Sikh. “Impossible.”

“What?”

“It cannot be …”

“What? Dr. Singh, for God’s sake—”

Singh raised his hand. “I do not know how it can be thus, but …”

“Yes? Yes?”

“This patient of yours,” said Singh, in a voice full of wonder, “appears to be a Neanderthal.”

“Good night, Professor Vaughan.”

“Good night, Daria. See you tomorrow.” Mary Vaughan glanced at the clock; it was now 8:55 P.M. “Be careful.”

The young grad student smiled. “I will.” And she headed out of the lab.

Mary watched her go, remembering wistfully when her own figure had been as slim as Daria’s. Mary was thirty-eight, childless, and long separated from her husband.

She went back to poring over the autoradiograph film, reading off nucleotide after nucleotide. The DNA she was studying had been recovered from a passenger pigeon mounted at the Field Museum of Natural History; it had been sent here, to York University, to
see
whether it could be completely sequenced. Previous attempts had been made, but the DNA had always been too degraded. But Mary’s lab had had unprecedented success reconstructing DNA that other facilities couldn’t read.

Sadly, though, the sequence broke down; there was no way to determine from this sample what string of nucleotides had originally been present. Mary rubbed the bridge of her nose. She would have to extract some more DNA from the pigeon specimen, but she was too tired to do that tonight. She looked at the wall clock; it was now 9:25.

That wasn’t too late; many of the university’s summer evening classes got out at 9:00, so there should still be lots of people milling about. If she worked past 10:00 P.M., she usually called for someone from the campus walking service to escort her to her car. But, well, it didn’t really seem necessary this early in the evening. Mary removed her pale green lab coat and hung it on the rack by the door. It was August; the lab was air conditioned, but it was surely still quite warm out. Another sticky, uncomfortable night lay ahead.

Mary shut off the lights in the lab; one of the fluorescents strobed a bit as it died. She then locked the door and made her way down the second-floor corridor, past the Pepsi machine (Pepsi had paid York University two million dollars to become the exclusive soft-drink vendor on campus).

The corridor was lined with the usual bulletin boards, announcing faculty openings, classroom assignments, club meetings, come-ons for cheap credit cards and magazine subscriptions, and all sorts of items for sale by students and faculty, including one poor clown hoping to get someone to pay him money for an old electric typewriter.

Mary continued down the corridor, her heels clicking against the tiles. No one else was in the hallway. She did hear the sound of the urinals flushing as she passed the men’s room, but that happened automatically, governed by a timer.

The door to the stairwell had safety-glass windows, with wire mesh embedded in them. Mary pushed open the door and headed down the four flights of concrete steps, each flight taking her a half story lower. On the ground floor she left the stairwell and continued a short distance down another corridor, this one also empty except for a janitor working at the far end. She walked into the entryway, passing distribution boxes for the campus paper,
The Excalibur
, and, at last, headed out through the double doors into the warm night air.

The moon wasn’t up yet. Mary headed along the sidewalk, passing a few students as she did so, although none she recognized. She swatted at the occasional insect, and—

A hand clamped down over her mouth, and she felt something cold and sharp against her throat. “Don’t make a sound,” said a deep, raspy voice, pulling her backward.

“Please—” said Mary.

“Be quiet,” the man said. He was continuing to pull her back, the knife pressing sharply into her throat. Mary’s heart pounded violently. The hand over her mouth came off, and she felt it again a moment later on her left breast, squeezing roughly, painfully.