‘I guess so,’ he admitted. ‘But always let the fossil speak for itself. For the purposes of isotopic dating, what we’re really concerned with is this piece of jawbone. The rock sample is probably more or less irrelevant.’
‘That’s right.’
‘It could be that there are some unusual atmospheric conditions that have prevented any petrification.’
Swift described how Furness had found the specimen in a limestone cave high in the Himalayas.
‘In which case,’ said Sacher, ‘it’s quite possible that for many thousands of years your find was encased in ice.’
‘You mean Like a glacier corpse?’
‘Exactly. We now know that a body is not always crushed by the shearing force of a glacier. Do you remember that glacier corpse they picked out of the ice in the Austrian Alps a few years ago? I believe it was in 1991.’
‘Yes. The Iceman. I remember.’
‘Turned out he was a Neolithic hunter who had died over five thousand years ago. His body tissues, his skin tattoos, even his Reeboks were all perfectly preserved.’
Sacher turned away from Swift to blow out a cloud of smoke.
‘Now as I recall, the Iceman was found at a height of around three thousand metres. Your specimen was found at what kind of height?’
‘Six thousand metres.’
‘Okay, that’s twice as high. So here’s a very early hypothesis. And that’s all it is. Like I say, we’ll let the fossil speak for itself. But suppose the Iceman could have remained preserved for another five thousand years. Suppose also that at twice the height, your specimen could have stayed preserved two or three times as long. Maybe thirty thousand years. Suppose he could have stayed in the ice all that time. Only when the ice melted and the body was finally released did it start to decay, but very slowly. It seems to me that it’s quite possible that your specimen could be at least fifty thousand years old.’
‘That still leaves us about nine hundred fifty thousand years short,’ she objected.
Sacher shrugged.
‘You know my methods, Watson. Data first. Attain the knowledge required and the precision necessary with the least number of analyses. Then we’ll reexamine the theories in the light of what the fossil tells us. That’s the proper scientific method.’
He extinguished his cigarette in an iron pyrite rock sample that served as his ashtray.
‘And what particular method will you choose?’ she asked.
‘Ordinarily I might suggest a cosmogenic method. With the accelerator mass spectrometer we can get a precise age on as little as one milligram of carbon. However, the tooth enamel on this piece of mandible is so good that I think I’ll try ESR.’
‘Electron spin resonance,’ Swift nodded. ‘Where you measure the energy of the electrons trapped in the dental enamel.’
‘Yeah. You obtain a date for the material from the ratio between that and the trapping rate.’
Sacher thought for a moment and then turned off the CD player as he began to wrestle with the choice of dating techniques available to him.
‘On the other hand, in this lab we now have uranium series, or thorium series. I used thorium to date some new Neanderthal specimens they found in Israel last year. Did you know that there were Neanderthals living in Israel as recently as fifty thousand years ago?’
‘And if this does turn out to be older than that?’
‘Anything over one thousand years and we’re stuck with using the rock. But from what you’ve told me I think that it’s going to be of limited use. I’ve never really subscribed to using pieces of rock to date pieces of bone unless they’re actually discovered within a geological stratum.’
‘Whatever you think is best, Ray.’
‘Of course, this is going to take a while.’
‘How long?’
‘I’ll call you when I have something.’
‘As soon as, okay?’
Sacher lit another cigarette.
‘God knows how long we’ve already had to wait. A little longer shouldn’t make a hell of a difference.’
Swift raised an eyebrow.
‘Ray, that’s the third time you’ve mentioned God. What does God have to do with it?’
He shrugged and looked vaguely sheepish.
‘I used to think, nothing at all.’
‘Ray.’ For a moment Swift was too surprised to do anything but open and close her mouth. ‘You’re an atheist.’
Sacher ran a pudgy hand through his thick hair. There was more grey than she remembered. He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively.
‘You’re not going soft on this, are you?’ She frowned.
‘You know, it’s said that amputees commonly experience a phenomenon called phantasmagoria, in which they encounter the feeling that an arm or a leg, even a female breast, is still present following its severing. The presence of this phantom limb, especially the hand or the foot at its periphery, may be most strongly felt for several years after an amputation. It may even itch.
‘Swift? It’s like this. I guess that after a long period of atheism, I’m beginning to find that I have much the same feeling about God. And I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that this is the best evidence of His existence that I’m ever likely to find. Religious experience may indeed represent the only way of verifying this itch, although I rather doubt that there exists any one religion that could accommodate my kind of heterodoxy. You know what I’m saying?’
Swift stood up, kissed him on the cheek once again, and then headed toward the laboratory door.
‘Hey, Swift?’ he said, laughing uncomfortably. ‘Have you got a problem with that?’
She turned on her heel.
‘Only this, Ray. Atheism is like standing up to the Mafia. There’s safety in numbers.’
He made a gun with his forefinger and pointed it at her.
‘Wiseguy,’ he laughed.
‘Call me when you’ve got something.’
‘I’ll call you anyway.’
Five
‘O the mind, the mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.’
From his home outside Danville, Jack Furness tried calling Swift a few times at her home, and then at her laboratory on campus, but all he ever heard was the sound of her voice-mail service. Over the course of two or three days he left several messages, and when still she did not return his calls. Jack put her out of his mind and set about preparing for meetings he had arranged with the National Geographic Society and the White Fang Sports Equipment Company, who had jointly sponsored his expedition to the Himalayas.
He was not much bothered by her neglect. He knew Swift too well to take it personally. In a way, he was even glad that she had not called. Not seeing her meant that he was able to devote all of his energies to writing up reports, preparing the expedition accounts, and best of all, developing and printing the many rolls of film he had taken during his six months in Nepal.
Her silence pleased him in another way too. It seemed to suggest that she herself was busy and that the fossil might indeed turn out to have been an important find.
And if it did turn out to be important? What then?
As time passed he began to think that perhaps he had acted a little impulsively in giving the fossil away. It wasn’t that he wanted the thing back. Far from it. Rather, he began to worry about the legalities of what he had done. Having no wish to become embroiled in any legal arguments with his sponsors as to whether the fossil had been his to give away in the first place, he called his lawyer and was reassured to learn that while the Nepalese government might take a dim view of the removal of the artifact without proper permissions, there was nothing in Jack’s sponsorship contract that interfered with his ownership rights in any scientific or archaeological discoveries made during the expedition.