As he watched them go, Michael wondered how much more of a punch this guy packed than Slotzky had back in New York.
Probably a lot.
The slight shift in the crust of the earth beneath the island of Hawaii was so small, and occurred so slowly, that for several hours it went unnoticed by anything except the machines.
The machines, of course, noticed everything, for that’s what they had been designed to do. Sensitive instruments perceived the small tremors that resulted as a new fissure opened deep in the bowels of the great volcano Mauna Loa, recording those tremors and reporting them to other machines.
No alarms sounded, no sirens wailed warnings of the tidal waves that can be generated by the sudden major shifts that sometimes occur on the ocean floor.
Instead, the machines whispered among themselves, passing the news of the activity beneath Mauna Loa from one information nexus to another, until, long before any man was aware of the movement, the computers of the world were already building models to project what the slight shifts might mean for the future of the planet.
Deep beneath the mountain, the magma, molten and seething, made its way toward the surface, oozing through the cracks and crevices the pressure from below had caused, widening them and filling them, gathering force from below to propel the climb upward to the surface.
And as the magma moved, the mountain gave way to it, and the tremors increased.
Men, as well as machines, began to notice.
Among the first on Maui to note the trembling in the earth beneath their feet were the technicians tending the array of telescopes at the top of Haleakala. Their computers were programmed specifically to alert them to volcanic activity. Despite the massive concrete blocks on which the telescopes sit and the shock absorbers that are designed to protect them from the smallest vibrations, tremors in the earth wreak havoc with observation of the universe beyond the planet’s bounds.
When the earth moves, nothing stops it.
And astronomical observation stops instantly.
Phil Howell was annoyed. Experience told him that these tremors almost certainly would continue, at least for the next few days. It meant there would be no more observation of a star he’d been watching deep in the Whirlpool Galaxy, fifteen million light-years away.
Howell was fascinated with the star for two reasons. The first was that it seemed to be the source of a signal that various radio-telescopic antenna arrays had begun picking up a few years ago. So far the signal existed only in fragmented bits and pieces that he was only now beginning to assemble into a whole.
The other reason for Phil Howell’s fascination with the star was that it was going nova. The radio signal, he was almost certain, would eventually prove to have been a precursor to the star’s impending destruction.
But now the computer had alerted him that the unrest in the earth was going to postpone his observations of the sky indefinitely. Leaving the computers to continue their work on the fragments of radio signal, he decided to take the rest of the day off and drive out to see the site Rob Silver had been talking about for the last month. Rob’s discovery was intriguing; even more intriguing was the opportunity to meet Katharine Sundquist, the woman who seemed to fascinate Rob Silver every bit as much as the distant star fascinated Phil. Leaving the computers to tend to the universe, he locked his office and headed out toward Hana.
Click!
The shutter snapped, the automatic film advance hummed, and Katharine adjusted her position slightly, as oblivious to the flies that were hovering around her as she was to the sweat that was running down her face in muddy rivulets. Every bone in her body ached from the hours she’d spent crouched over the skull — now nearly fully exposed — but she was no more aware of the pain in her joints than of the heat and the insects.
The important thing was to get the pictures, to have the visual proof of the position in which the skull, and the rest of the skeleton, had been found.
She pressed the shutter release again.
Click!
Another whir, another painful adjustment in her position.
Another photograph.
Another document to prove eventually that despite the fact that what she was uncovering made no sense, it had, in fact, been found in exactly this position, at exactly this location.
She’d been laboring on the excavation for two days now, carefully scraping away the deposits to expose the remains, with no sense yet of when the body had been buried. From what she’d seen so far, it could have been a year or a decade or a century.
A thousand years? Four thousand years? Certainly no more than that, for man hadn’t been on Maui — or anywhere else in Hawaii — any longer than that, and no animal except man built fire pits.
Undoubtedly the site was much younger than a thousand years — probably only a few hundred, given how shallow it was.
She’d refused to let Rob’s crew help with the excavation of the skeleton, assigning them to the area around the rudimentary fire circle. The contents of the circle itself were still undisturbed. Having decided to work on the skeleton first, Katharine immediately ordered the fire pit covered and declared it off limits. Once she’d exposed every one of the bones, photographing them at every stage of their excavation until she was satisfied that she had a complete record of their recovery and would feel comfortable about moving them to a lab, she’d turn her attention to the fire pit.
“I want every layer kept separate,” she’d explained to Rob. “Even if I have to peel it down a millimeter at a time.”
“What is it you think you’ve got here?” Rob asked, realizing she was dead serious about doing all the excavation herself.
When he first asked the question, she had no answer for him. She’d been acting purely on instinct — that intuition born of experience that told her that she’d never seen a site quite like this one.
As she began exposing the skull, though, her motives for not telling Rob what she was thinking had changed.
The fact was, what she was thinking made no sense.
As she’d first begun uncovering the skull, it had been clear that it was some sort of primate. That alone was strange enough, because she was well aware that there were no primates native to Hawaii.
In addition, the positioning was problematic: you wouldn’t find a chimpanzee or gorilla — or any species of primate, for that matter — next to a fire circle. Not unless someone had killed the animal and left it there.
A scenario, she knew, that was possible, but unlikely, given the location.
But as she kept digging, patiently cleaning the skull with dental tools and brushes, she began to realize that it didn’t look like a primate at all.
What it most closely resembled, in fact, was some of the early hominids.
That, of course, was impossible.
First, early man hadn’t existed in Hawaii.
Second, this particular site hadn’t existed at the time of early man.
Therefore, the skull had to be something else. Whatever it turned out to be, she was determined to have a perfect scientific record to back up the assertions she would eventually make.
She took one more photograph, and as the camera began rewinding, she stood, stretched, and took a deep breath, wincing as her nostrils filled with the sulfurous odor that seemed to be hanging over the site more strongly than usual today. She was reloading the camera when she heard Rob’s voice.
“Kath? Got a visitor who wants to meet you!” Looking up, Katharine saw Rob step into the clearing. Behind him was a second man the same age as Rob. “This is Phil Howell. He’s the head stargazer up at the top of the mountain. Phil, this is Katharine Sundquist.”
Phil Howell stepped forward, extended his hand, then lifted his brows as he got a whiff of the scent of rotting eggs. “My God! What are you excavating with, sulfuric acid?”