Jeremiah Stillman was not the first UFO enthusiast to connect the deformed skulls found at Paracas, which did sort of look like Hollywood’s vision of an extraterrestrial creature, to the nearby Nazca lines, but he had been fortunate enough to live in the Information Age, where cable television and the Internet provided a platform for conspiracy theorists and fringe scientists to publicize their ideas without any meaningful scrutiny. Stillman had been quick to glom onto a persistent, and completely fraudulent, claim that genetic testing conducted on the Paracas skulls had yielded alien DNA. When confronted with the evidence, the “expert” had defended his position by alleging a government conspiracy to suppress the truth, a common and completely unassailable strategy for the true believers.
Yet, despite the fact that Jade found Stillman both professionally and personally distasteful, she could not completely discount the possibility that he and other alien astronaut theorists might be onto something. The Nazca Lines, which incorporated Paracas motifs, were unusual, and while much of what was generally believed about them was exaggerated — you didn’t need to be in orbit to see them — there was no good explanation for why they had been made. Similarly, while artificial cranial deformation was well-understood, it was reasonable to ask why, throughout a thousand years of history and prehistory, people all over the world had made a conscious decision to change the shape of their children’s skulls. Was it possible that they were trying to make themselves look more like their “gods”?
Jade knew from personal experience that almost anything was possible. She had seen too many strange things in her travels to dismiss anything out of hand.
It was unlikely in the extreme that she would find anything remotely resembling proof — one way or the other — in her excavation at the Wari Kayan necropolis, located on the Paracas Peninsula of Peru. It was virtually impossible to prove a negative hypothesis — the non-existence of aliens or absence of alien involvement with the Paracas culture — and even if she found something that refuted the popular theories of men like Stillman, such evidence would do little to shake the faith of the true believers. Such was not her intention however. She wasn’t looking for proof any more than she was looking for fortune and glory. She was a digger, interested only in finding things that had been lost to the ages.
They made the short trek across the virtually barren sand dunes to the foot of the rocky rise known as the Cerro Colorado ridge, where the ancient Paracas had laid their dead to rest in vertical shafts cut into the summit. Several of these had been found, most pillaged by grave robbers, but several more remained unexcavated.
Jade picked her way up the sixty-foot slope, following a well-trod but unmarked route used by both archaeologists and tourists, and made her way to one of the target sites they had identified during the initial survey a week earlier. She shrugged out of her backpack, removing from it the tools of her trade — a small plastic trowel, an icepick, and a stiff bristled brush — and then squatted down beside the sand-filled shaft to commence digging into the past. Professor and Rafi moved to different sites and did the same.
She worked methodically, spooning out sand quickly without screening it. Unlike a habitation site — a former village or city ruin — there was little chance of discovering artifacts in the upper layers of fill, and in the unlikely event that she did, the plastic blade of the trowel would do little if any damage. The work proceeded quickly as she fell into a familiar rhythm, and soon she had cleared a knee-deep pit nearly five feet across. She was just about to lower herself into the hole when Rafi called out to her. She rose slowly to avoid a head-rush, and then hiked over to see what the student had discovered.
Rafi had made faster progress than she, removing several cubic feet of dirt from a shaft. He now stood in the shoulder-deep pit shining a small flashlight down at the sand underfoot. Centered in the cone of illumination was a brown-gray protrusion that she immediately recognized as the top of an elongated skull.
“Good work,” she said, approvingly. “Is it human or…” She arched her eyebrows in an approximation of Stillman’s trademarked enthusiasm. “Alien!”
Rafi laughed with her, then bent down and tried to wiggle the skull loose. “I’ll tell you in a—”
The skull came free easier than expected, and then, as if he had pulled the plug from a drain, the sand beneath Rafi began to move, sliding into the void the removal had created. He let out a yelp of surprise, and then dropped several inches into a swirling vortex of sand.
Jade threw herself flat on the ground at the edge of the pit and thrust a hand down at the imperiled Rafi. She caught hold of his wrist, but in the instant that she did, the ground beneath his feet gave way completely. He only outweighed her by about twenty pounds, but with no time to brace herself, Jade was yanked headfirst into the pit. She scraped past the rocky edge of the excavation so quickly that she did not even have time to think about letting go of Rafi’s arm, and then she was falling headfirst into the yawning blackness.
TWO
The fall lasted only a moment or two and ended with a plunge into chilly brackish water, which was, Jade supposed, preferable to slamming face first into solid rock. An instant after the splashdown, a thrashing Rafi struck her with enough force to knock the wind out of her. For a few seconds thereafter, she struggled to right herself while fighting back the panic of being unable to breathe while enveloped in near-total darkness. She groped for something to hang onto, noticed a spot of light high overhead and oriented toward it like a beacon.
“Dr. Ihara!” Rafi called from somewhere nearby. “Are you all right?”
She tried to answer but no sound came out. Then, with a gasp, she caught her breath. “Okay,” she managed. “I’m okay. What the hell just happened?”
It was a rhetorical question, she knew what had happened, but Rafi answered anyway. “The shaft must have been dug right over a cave or a sinkhole. It collapsed. A cave-in.”
Jade took several breaths to steady herself, and then stared up at the opening overhead. Judging by its size, she estimated it to be a good fifty feet above them. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness, but aside from Rafi treading water nearby, there was nothing to see. The walls and ceiling of the cave remained beyond the limit of her vision.
She tilted her head toward the opening. “Professor!”
Her shout rebounded from the unseen walls with a harshness that set her teeth on edge, but a moment later, the light from the opening dimmed, partially eclipsed by Professor’s silhouette. “Jade! What happened?”
Rafi started to answer but Jade cut him off. “Tell you all about it later.” She grimaced as her voice echoed back, almost painfully loud. “Right now, we could use some rope.”
“On it,” Professor replied. “Don’t run off.”
“Haha. Funny guy.” The light grew noticeably brighter as Professor moved away, and Jade realized that her night-vision was continuing to improve, though that was about the only bright spot, literal or otherwise, about the situation. She faced Rafi again. “I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of swimming. Let’s try to find somewhere high and dry.”