No, said Reuben. I was, but
Louise nodded. Youve got good taste, she said, looking at the furnishings, a mixture of Caribbean and Canadian, with lots of dark stained wood.
My wife did, said Reuben. I havent changed it much since we split.
Ah, said Louise. Can I help you with dinner?
No, I thought Id just put on some steaks. Ive got a barbecue out back.
Im a vegetarian, said Louise.
Oh. Um, I could grill you some vegetablesand, um, a potato?
That would be great, said Louise.
Okay, said Reuben. You keep Ponter company. He headed off to the bathroom to wash his hands.
Working on the deck behind the house, Reuben could see Louise and Ponter having an increasingly animated conversation. Presumably, Hak was picking up more words as they went along. Finally, when the steaks were done, Reuben tapped on the glass to get Louises and Ponters attention, and waved for them to come on out.
A moment later, they did so. Dr. Montego, said Louise, excitedly, Ponter is a physicist!
He is? said Reuben.
Yes. Yes, indeed. I havent got all the details yet, but hes definitely a physicistand, I think, actually a quantum physicist.
How did you determine that? asked Reuben.
He said he thinks about the way things work, and I saidguessing he might be an engineerdid he mean big things, and he said, no, no, little things, things too small to be seen. And I drew some diagramsbasic physics stuffand he recognized them, and said thats what he did.
Reuben looked at Ponter with renewed admiration. The low forehead and the prominent browridge made him look, well, a little dim, buta physicist! A scientist! Well, well, well, said Reuben. He motioned for them to sit at a circular deck table with an umbrella, and he transferred steaks and grilled veggies hed wrapped in aluminum foil to plates and set them on the table.
Ponter smiled his wide smile. This, clearly, was real food to him! But then he looked around again, just as Reuben had seen him do this morning, as if something were missing.
Reuben used his knife to slice a piece off his steak, and brought it to his mouth.
Ponter, awkwardly, mimicked what Reuben had done, although he sliced off a much bigger piece.
After Ponter had finished chewing, he made some sounds that must have been words in his language. They were immediately followed by a male voice Reuben hadnt heard before. Good, it said. Good food. The voice seemed to have come from Ponters implant.
Reuben raised his eyebrows in surprise, and Louise explained. I was getting confused talking to them, trying to keep straight what was the implant speaking on its own, and what was the implant translating for Ponter. Its now using a male voice for Ponters translated words, and a female voice for its own words.
Simpler this way, said Haks familiar female voice.
Yes, said Reuben, it certainly is.
Louise gingerly used her long fingers to unwrap the foil around her grilled veggies. Well, she said, lets see what else we can find out.
And for the next hour Reuben and Louise talked with Ponter and Hak. But by then, the mosquitoes were out in abundance. Reuben lit a citronella candle to drive them away, but the smell made Ponter gag. Reuben extinguished the candle, and they went back into his living room, Ponter sitting in a big easy chair, Louise at one end of the couch with her long legs tucked underneath her body, and Reuben at the other end.
They continued talking for another three hours, slowly piecing together what had happened. And, once the full story had emerged, Reuben sank back into the couch, absolutely amazed.
Chapter 20
Keyword(s): Neanderthal
Word this morning from Sudbury, Canada, is that marriage proposals are outnumbering death threats two-to-one for the Neanderthal visitor. Twenty-eight women have sent letters or e-mails c/o this newspaper proposing to him, while Sudbury police and the RCMP have recorded only thirteen threats against his life
USA TODAY POLL:
Percentage who believe the so-called Neanderthal is a fake: 54.
Who believe hes really a Neanderthal, but came from somewhere on this Earth: 26.
Who believe he came from outer space: 11.
Who believe he came from a parallel world: 9.
Police today defused a bomb left at the entrance to the mineshaft elevator leading down to the cavern containing the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, where the so-called Neanderthal first appeared
A religious sect in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is hailing the arrival of the Neanderthal in Canada as the Second Coming of Christ. Of course he looks like an ancient human, said the Rev. Hooley Gordwell. The world is 6,000 years old, and Christ first came among us fully a third of that span ago. Weve changed a bit, perhaps due to better nutrition, but he hasnt. The group is planning a pilgrimage to the mining town of Sudbury, Ontario, where the Neanderthal is currently living.
Early the next morning, after taking care not to be seen en route, Ponter and Dr. Montego rendezvoused with Mary in the lab at Laurentian. It was time to analyze Ponters DNA, to answer the big question.
Sequencing 379 nucleotides took meticulous work. Mary sat hunched over a milky white plastic desktop, the surface illuminated by fluorescent tubes beneath it. Shed placed the autorad film on the desktop and, with a felt-tip marker, wrote out the letters of the genetic alphabet for the string in question: G-G-Cone of the triplets that coded for the amino acid glycine; T-A-T, the code for tyrosine; A-T-A, which in mitochondrial DNA, as opposed to nuclear DNA, specified methionine; A-A-A, the recipe for lysine
At last she was done: all 379 bases from a specific part of Ponters control region were identified. Marys notebook computer had a little DNA-analysis program on it. She started by typing in the 379 letters shed just written on the film, and then she asked Reuben to type them in again, just to make sure theyd been entered correctly.
The computer immediately reported three differences between what Mary had entered and what Reuben had, notingit was an intelligent little programa frameshift caused by Mary accidentally leaving off a T at one point; the other two errors were typos by Reuben. When she was sure they had all 379 letters entered correctly, she had the program compare Ponters sequence to the one shed extracted from the Neanderthal type specimen at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum.
Well? said Reuben. Whats the verdict?
Mary leaned back in her chair, astonished. The DNA I took from Ponter, she said, differs in seven places from the DNA recovered from the Neanderthal fossil. She raised a hand. Now, some individual variation was to be expected, and naturally thered be some genetic drift over time, but
Yes? said Reuben.
Mary lifted her shoulders. Hes a Neanderthal, all right.
Wow, said Reuben, looking at Ponter as if seeing him for the first time. Wow. A living Neanderthal.
Ponter spoke a bit in his own language, and his implant interpreted: My kind gone? said the male voice.