What if no one is lying? said Louise.
Thats just not possible, Miss Benoit, said Shawwanossoway. No one could get down to SNO without it being recorded.
No one could if he came down by the elevator, said Louise. But what if he didnt come that way?
You think maybe he climbed down two kilometers of vertical air shafts? said Shawwanossoway, scowling. Even if he could do thatand it would take nerves of steel-security cameras still would have recorded him.
Thats my point, said Louise. He obviously didnt go down into the mine. As Professor Mah said, theyre calling him a Neanderthalbut hes a Neanderthal with some sort of high-tech implant on his wrist; I saw that with my own eyes.
So? said Bonnie Jean.
Please! exclaimed Louise. You all must be thinking the same things Im thinking. He didnt take the elevator. He didnt go down the ventilation shafts. He materialized inside the spherehim, and a roomful of air.
Naylor whistled the opening notes of the original Star Trek theme.
Everyone laughed.
Come on, said Bonnie Jean. Yes, this is a crazy situation, and it might be tempting to jump to crazy conclusions, but lets stay down to earth.
Shawwanossoway could whistle, too. He did the theme to The Twilight Zone.
Stop that! snapped Bonnie Jean.
Chapter 15
Mary Vaughan was the only passenger on the Inco Learjet flying from Toronto to Sudbury; shed noted on boarding that the plane, painted with dark green sides, was labeled The Nickel Pickle on its bow.
Mary used the brief flight time to review research notes on her notebook computer; it had been years since shed published her study of Neanderthal DNA in Science. As she read through her notes, she twirled the gold chain that held the small, plain cross she always wore around her neck.
In 1994, Mary had made a name for herself recovering genetic material from a 30,000-year-old bear found frozen in Yukon permafrost. And so, two years later, when the Rheinisches Amt fur Bodendenkmalpflegethe agency responsible for archeology in the Rhinelanddecided it was time to see whether any DNA could be extracted from the most famous fossil of all, the original Neanderthal man, they called on Mary. Shed been dubious: that specimen was desiccated, having never been frozen, andopinions variedit might be as old as 100,000 years, three times the age of the bear. Still, the challenge was irresistible. In June 1996, shed flown to Bonn, then headed to the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, where the specimen was housed.
The best-known partthe browridged skullcapwas on public display, but the rest of the bones were kept in a steel box, within a steel cabinet, inside a room-sized steel vault. Mary was led into the safe by a German bone preparator named Hans. They wore protective plastic suits and surgeons masks; every precaution had to be taken against contaminating the bones with their own modern DNA. Yes, the original discoverers had doubtless contaminated the bonesbut after a century and a half, their unprotected DNA on the surface should have degraded completely.
Mary could only take a very small piece of bone; the priests at Turin guarded their shroud with equal jealousy. Still, it was extraordinarily difficult for both her and Hanslike desecrating a great work of art. Mary found herself wiping away tears as Hans used a goldsmiths saw to cut a semicircular chunk, just a centimeter wide and weighing only three grams, from the right humerus, the best preserved of all the bones.
Fortunately, the hard calcium carbonate in the outer layers of the bone should have afforded some protection for any of the original DNA within. Mary took the specimen back to her lab in Toronto and drilled tiny pieces out of it.
It took five months of painstaking work to extract a 379-nucleotide snippet from the control region of the Neanderthals mitochondrial DNA. Mary used the polymerase chain reaction to reproduce millions of copies of the recovered DNA, and she carefully sequenced it. She then checked the corresponding bit of mitochondrial DNA in 1,600 modern humans: Native Canadians, Polynesians, Australians, Africans, Asians, and Europeans. Every one of those 1,600 people had at least 371 nucleotides out of those 379 the same; the maximum deviation was just eight nucleotides.
But the Neanderthal DNA had an average of only 352 nucleotides in common with the modern specimens; it deviated by a whopping twenty-seven bases. Mary concluded that her kind of human and Neanderthals must have diverged from each other between 550,000 and 690,000 years ago for their DNA to be so different. In contrast, all modern humans probably shared a common ancestor 150,000 or 200,000 years in the past. Although the half-million-year-plus date for the Neanderthal/modern divergence was much more recent than the split between genus Homo and its closest relatives, the chimps and bonobos, which occurred five to eight million years ago, it was still far enough back that Mary felt Neanderthals were probably a fully separate species from modern humans, not just a subspecies: Homo neanderthalensis, not Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.
Others disagreed. Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan was sure that Neanderthal genes had been fully co-opted into modern Europeans; he felt any test strand that showed something different was, therefore, an aberrant sequence or a misinterpretation.
But many paleoanthropologists agreed with Marys analysis, although everyoneMary includedsaid that further studies needed to be done to be sure if only more Neanderthal DNA could be found.
And now, maybe, just maybe, more had been found. There was no way this Neanderthal man could be real, thought Mary, but if it were
Mary closed her laptop and looked out the window. Northern Ontario spread out below her, with Canadian Shield rocks exposed in many places and aspen and birch dotting the landscape. The plane was beginning its descent.
Reuben Montego had no idea what Mary Vaughan looked like, but since there were no other passengers aboard the Inco jet, he didnt have any trouble spotting her. She turned out to be white, in her late thirties, with honey-blond hair showing darker roots. She was perhaps ten pounds overweight, and, as she came closer, Reuben could see that she clearly hadnt gotten much sleep the night before.
Professor Vaughan, Reuben said, offering his hand. Im Reuben Montego, the M.D. at the Creighton Mine. Thank you so very much for coming up. He indicated the young woman hed picked up on the way to the Sudbury airport. This is Gillian Ricci, the press officer for Inco; shes going to look after you.
Reuben thought Mary looked inordinately pleased to see the attractive young woman who was accompanying him; maybe the professor was a lesbian. He reached out to take the suitcase Mary was holding. Here, let me help you.
Mary relinquished the bag, but she fell in beside Gillian, rather than Reuben, as they walked across the tarmac, the summer sun beating down. Reuben and Gillian were both wearing sunglasses; Mary was squinting against the brightness, evidently having forgotten to bring a pair.
When they arrived at Reubens wine-colored Ford Explorer, Gillian politely began to get in the backseat, but Mary spoke up. No, Ill sit there, she said. IahI want to stretch out.
Her odd statement hung between them for a second, and then Reuben saw Gillian shrug a little and move up to the front passengers seat.
They drove directly to St. Josephs Health Centre, on Paris Street, just past the snowflake-shaped museum Science North. Along the way, Reuben briefed Mary about the accident at SNO and the strange man who had been found.
As they pulled into the hospital parking lot, Reuben saw three vans from local TV stations. Surely hospital security was keeping reporters away from Ponter, but, just as surely, the journalists would be following this story closely.