The Link (57 page)

“Come on Leicester Legacy,” says Ann after nothing happens for a while.

In a few moments, as though she understands the need for it, she links her fingers with Robert as they stare at the crystal.

It begins to move. Starts swaying back and forth.

They adjust their arms. The crystal jerks. They re-adjust. Inch by inch, they move their arms until the crystal begins to turn in circles. They make more adjusting movements and the circle gets smaller and smaller. The crystal finally stops above a spot on the map.

“That has to be it,” says Robert. He marks the point with a pencil. “It has to be.”

He looks at it. “Here’s a road going in,” he says. He winces. “Doesn’t go in all the way though.”

“What’s going on now?” says Norman’s voice.

They turn toward where he stands in his pajamas, eying them apprehensively.

Robert tries not to smile but can’t help it. The expression on Norman’s face—“say it isn’t so”—tickles him.

“Norman—” he beings.

“Don’t tell me,” Norman cuts him off.

Robert and Ann splutter, trying to control their reaction to Norman’s lugubrious expression.

“I’m sorry, Norman,” Robert says. He holds up the map. “We’re about twenty-seven miles off course.”

“Oh, God,” moans Norman softly. “How did I get into this?”

CUT TO speeding motor home, Robert driving. John wakes up in back. “Hey, what the hell is going on?” he calls.

“We’re moving,” Norman tells him gloomily.

“Hell, you don’t have to tell me we’re moving,” John says. “I can see we’re moving. What I want to know is why?”

“Don’t ask,” says Norman.

It is close to dawn when Robert turns the motor home into the desert and drives as far as he can before the road ends. From there, he hikes in, Ann beside him. The elevation has been rising as he drove. They are in higher country now.

Finally, they cross a ridge and see, in front of them, a rocky terrain and, in the distance, hills with pine tree stands, sandstone cliffs ranging in color from yellow to almost red.

“I think we’re almost there,” he tells them.

They hurry on. Then Robert sees the boulder and rushes forward to jump on it as he did in his OOBE. He has the good sense to stop at the last instant, realizing that he’ll break his neck if he doesn’t. Grinning to himself, he clambers onto the boulder, then reaches down to pull up Ann beside him, points.

“Down there,” he says. “On the—”

He breaks off, both of them gasping.

As he has spoken, a shaft of light has shot down as though to point out the very spot where he must dig.

Ann turns first. “Dad,” she says.

He turns to experience the most thrilling moment of his life.

On a distant hilltop are the ruins of a temple. The sun, just appearing above a far-off ridge, is shining through an aperture in the temple wall, the narrow beam of light pointed down at the creek bed.

“This is it,” he murmurs, in a shaky voice, putting an arm around Ann. She is shivering. “Are you cold?” he asks.

“No, I’m excited,” she tells him faintly.

“Me too, darling, me too,” Robert says.

Jumping off the boulder, they run down to the creek bed and make a pyramid of rocks to mark the place.

Then they climb up to the hilltop and look at the temple ruins.

“I’ve been here,” he tells her. “This is it. I’m sure.”

Ann whirls suddenly, her fingers digging into his arm. Robert twists around to see a tall figure standing in the shadows.

Neither of them speaks. Ann clutches at his arm as the figure steps out from the shadows.

“Good morning,” he says.

It is the Indian we have seen from the start of our story.

His wait is over.

Over coffee at their campsite, they learn that the Indian’s name is JOSEPH LOMAH (short for Lamahquahu). He has a permit to dig this area which he will share with them. There is a road coming in from the east which will permit them to park the motor home within a few hundred yards of the site.

“How deep have you gone?” asks Robert uneasily because he knows where he must dig.

“I haven’t begun yet,” says Joseph. “I didn’t know where to start.”

Robert doesn’t say anything but his expression asks the question: And now you do?

Norman, despite his relatively good-natured acceptance of Robert’s (to him) weird behavior, puts his back up now. Is there any indication whatsoever that this area has archeological promise?

“We’ll find cutting tools below ten feet,” says Joseph. “Choppers. Scrapers. Hammerstones.”

“How do you know that?” Norman demands.

“Wait,” says Joseph. “See. There were people living here.”

“How long ago?” asks Norman with a bored tone. He doesn’t believe a word the Indian is telling him.

“Half a million years,” says Joseph.

Norman explodes. “That is utterly absurd!” he cries, letting it all out at once.

Later, he takes Robert aside and tells him that he’s making a terrible mistake to leave the promising site his father had in order to come here. “You don’t really believe this man, do you?” he asks incredulously.

“I believe this is the place to dig,” Robert answers.

Norman blows out heavy, probably disgusted breath. “Well, I can’t promise that I’ll stay with you to the bitter end,” he says.

Joseph magically shows up with a four-man crew and the dig begins, shovels and picks biting into the creek bed where the pyramid of rocks had been built. As they dig, the soil is placed on screen tables to be sifted.

“Nothing important in the first ten feet,” Joseph tells them again but Norman, obdurate, refuses to deviate from accepted practice and insists that every shovelful be screened.

When they run across some man-made stone flakes at six feet, he is justified and stunned at the same time. It proves that ancient man made tools here. Norman has to surrender his objection to this site—and on the first day.

“I presume,” he grumbles, “that, at twenty feet, we’ll uncover a wooly mammoth or something.” Like Robert’s father, having a lifetime of carefully assembled facts undercut is not pleasant for him.

The digging is hardly all excitement. Most of it is drudgery. As the excavation deepens, they have to attach a boom arrangement to a nearby tree, the boom lowering a bucket into the hole. The bucket, filled with soil, is winched up and swung over the screen tables. They also begin to shore-in the hole to keep the sides from caving in. Little by little, it takes on the look of a bona-fide shaft.

They keep finding what they take to be man-made objects only to have Norman shoot them down, not without some perverse pleasure. “Genuine artifacts do not appear quite so easily,” he is happy to tell them, tossing aside what is usually no more than a hunk of rock.

By the end of the fourth day, muscles are sore, backs ache, skins are sunburned and bitten by insects. Robert fills a bottle half with milk, half with ice, adds two tablespoons of salt and shakes it up.

He is applying it to Ann’s back as she lies in bed the fourth night when she sighs.

“Having a rough time, babe?” he asks, concerned.

“I’m having a wonderful time,” she tells him, exhausted but happy.

He smiles and kisses her shoulder. “Good,” he says. “I’m glad.”

He cannot sleep, walks to the shaft and finds Joseph there. He sits with the tall Indian and asks him why he said that there were people living in this area half a million years ago.

Joseph tells him of the legends of his people, the Hopis. Legends that civilizations of people occupied this land before the cliff dwellers or the present Indians; that the cliff dwellers and red Indians may actually be descendents of these people.

“You know,” he says, “that it is only within the past fifty years that the true form of the dinosaur known as the Tyrannosaurus became known.”

“Yes?” says Robert, wondering what the Indian is getting at.

CUT TO what Joseph speaks of as he says, “Yet in the Hava Supai Canyon here in Arizona, there is, drawn and carved on a rock, a true depiction of this creature.”

BACK TO Joseph as he finishes. “This picture was made more than twelve thousand years ago,” he said.

Robert waits in silence.

“The legends say that the first people in this area came in small numbers five hundred thousand years ago,” says Joseph. “That they traveled from their primary settlement to live by this creek which, then, flowed like a river.”

“From across the sea?” asks Robert.

Joseph doesn’t answer. In a few moments, he stands. “I’m glad you’re here,” he says.

Robert looks up at the looming man. “Why do I have the impression that you were about to add ‘at last’ to that remark?” he asks.

The Indian grunts. Robert cannot tell if he is smiling in the darkness but it is his impression that the Hopi is.

“Rest,” says Joseph. “Tomorrow will be difficult.”

CUT TO the net day as the difficulty manifests—a six foot boulder in the five-foot-square shaft. “Now what?” John asks.

“Dynamite,” says Joseph.

He returns shortly after with the sticks of dynamite. “I hope you’ve used this stuff before,” Robert says.

“I have,” says Joseph.

Robert restrains him for a moment. “Did you know that boulder was going to be there?” he asks.

“I thought it might be,” Joseph answers.

The charge is set and all of them withdraw.

The rumbling explosion causes Ann to have a spontaneous vision which frightens her. As Robert holds her in his arms, she shakily describes what she saw—a mother cowering in the creek bed with her two children, trying to shield them from an avalanche of ice and water thundering down the slope above.

Joseph, hearing this, nods and pats Ann roughly on the back. “This is good,” he tells her. “To see this is an honor. Don’t be disturbed.”

Robert and Ann look at each other. She rubs away some tears from her cheek. “This
has
been a crazy year,” she says. Robert hugs her, smiling.

The dig continues. Hours. Days. One hundred degrees on the surface. Like digging in a cold storage locker at the bottom of the shaft. Half of them get colds.

Norman is living in a semi-daze, half happy, half dismayed by the artifacts which keep appearing. He gives up trying to resist or understand what’s going on, riding the wave of each new discovery with a shrug and a hapless smile.

The radiocarbon data from the fifteen foot level are gotten back from a lab and turn out to be approximately 25,000 years old.

Next, they run across a paleosol, a fossil soil preserved exactly as it was ages ago. In it, they find crude stone tools and their flake debris.

Norman is delighted but remains confused. “I just don’t understand it,” he keeps muttering to himself.

The work becomes more arduous. They have little maneuverability in the five-foot-square shaft. The original cable becomes too short and they have to use a longer, thinner one. The motor (7/8 horsepower) works with less efficiency and the bucket can only be filled halfway. They know, too, that if the cable shears, the bucket and its contents will crash down on their heads.

One afternoon, Robert stops working abruptly and looks around, then tells them to get out of the shaft; he is working with Norman and John.