“What’s going on, Sundquist?” he asked. “Jack Peters told me how good you were yesterday afternoon, but I’m sure not seeing it this morning. You feel okay?”
Michael hesitated. Should he say anything about the funny feeling he’d had his chest? Or the fire in his legs? But if he did, it was a sure thing the gym teacher would do the same thing the ones back in New York always had: send him to the nurse.
He wasn’t about to start that again. No way!
“I’m okay,” he said. “I just stayed up too late last night, that’s all.”
“Don’t let Peters hear you say that,” the teacher told him. “You want to stay on the team, you keep yourself in shape. Got it?”
“Got it,” Michael agreed, silently suspecting there was a rule somewhere that said gym teachers had to be jerks. He was about to turn away when the teacher spoke again, and Michael wondered if he’d known what he was thinking.
“Then take a few more laps. And while you’re running, you can think about the value of a good night’s sleep.”
While the rest of the class split up into teams for baseball, Michael started around the track.
He steeled himself against the pain as his legs began to burn again, determined that no matter how bad it got, he wouldn’t give in.
He’d built himself up, and he’d made the track team, and whatever was causing the funny feeling in his chest, he’d get through it.
Or die trying.
CHAPTER 11
Katharine gazed in awe at the office Rob Silver had been given on Takeo Yoshihara’s estate. Housed in a large pavilion that blended almost perfectly with the hillside abutting its far end, the two-room suite lay behind a beautifully carved koa-wood door. The smaller of the two spacious, airy rooms was equipped with a desk and filing cabinets, while the larger was filled with tables on which photographs, drawings, and models of native Polynesian buildings were laid out in a manner that was perfectly reflective of the innate tidiness they both shared. Beyond a set of French doors, she could see the gardens that spread across the estate. Aside from the view, Rob’s work space was at least eight times the size of her office at the museum in New York, and apparently whatever equipment Rob might need, Takeo Yoshihara supplied. Against one wall of the larger room was a second desk, supporting Rob’s computer, along with several printers, a scanner, and an array of other equipment Katharine didn’t recognize.
“Can you get me online?” she asked. “I want to start by looking at some files at the museum. I remember something that looks a lot like our skull—”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Rob said. “Let me have those Polaroids.”
Puzzled, Katharine fished the pictures she’d taken of the skull out of her bag, and watched as Rob placed them on the bed of a scanner, brought up a program that allowed him to manipulate images, and began rapidly entering instructions on the keyboard and clicking the mouse. A few minutes later eight views of the skull they’d uncovered in the rain forest appeared on the screen, each depicting it from a different angle.
Six more depicted the mandible.
Rob stood up. “What I want you to do is pick a few things that are unique, that you’d be looking for if you were hunting for similar skulls and mandibles.”
Lowering herself into the chair, Katharine experimented with the mouse and soon got the hang of zooming in on first one image, then another. Five minutes later she’d made her choices, and Rob showed her how to copy the small areas she’d outlined with the cursor so they lay on a blank screen like so many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. “But they’re just fragments,” Katharine objected. “Even if you put them all together, you wouldn’t get a complete skull.”
Rob grinned. “Want to bet?” His tone was enough to warn her it was a bet she’d lose. “We’re going to tell the computer to search for graphic matches to these shapes,” he explained. “It’ll comb every database on the Internet and—”
“Are you crazy?” Katharine objected. “That’ll take months!”
“Maybe it would at your museum,” Rob placidly replied, “but this computer is hooked up to one of the two most powerful computers in the world.”
“You’re kidding.” But one look at his smug expression said he was not.
“It was put in to handle all the data from the telescopes up on top of the mountain,” Rob explained as he typed in a series of instructions to initiate Katharine’s search for a match to the skull they’d unearthed. “The Air Force has a big project up there that tracks spy satellites and space garbage and asteroids, and God knows what all.”
He hit the Enter key to start the search, the screen went blank for a moment, and then lines of type began scrolling down so fast that Katharine couldn’t read them. Reaching out, Rob hit the Pause key. The screen froze.
Katharine found herself gazing at a series of Internet addresses, each of them ending in file names that indicated one or another of half a dozen types of graphic formats. Each was followed by a percentage number.
On the screen Katharine was watching, the percentage numbers ranged from 1 all the way to 100.
Rob hit the Enter and Pause keys again, and more files appeared.
“My God, there’s hundreds of them,” Katharine said.
“Bad search,” Rob told her, hitting the Escape key, then typing in more instructions. “It was matching every image individually. We’ll narrow it down so it doesn’t give us anything that doesn’t have at least four matches for the skull and three for the mandible.” He ran the search again. Within a few seconds a list of 382 files appeared, each with its attached percentage-of-match rating. “Let’s rearrange these according to the match rate,” Rob said, his fingers flying over the keyboard. A moment later the screen blinked, and the list of files reappeared, this time with the closest matches at the top. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got,” Rob said, double-clicking on the file at the top of the list. A graphic image appeared of a large fragment of jawbone very similar to the one they had unearthed. It was in a collection in a university in Sweden, and had been discovered in Africa forty years earlier.
Katharine stared at it in shock. “I’ve never seen that before” She studied the image and its caption, which identified it as a hominid collected in the Olduvai Gorge. Though the fossil was not ascribed to a species, Katharine thought she saw a definite resemblance to Australopithecus afarensis
She clicked on the second file.
This time an image of a skull appeared
A skull that looked to Katharine very much like the one they had unearthed.
The image bore no identification other than that it had been collected on the slopes of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines. Other than the image and the brief notation, all that appeared in the window was a link to another file
Frowning, Katharine double-clicked on the link. A second later a new window opened, and a new picture appeared.
This one, though, wasn’t simply an image.
It was a movie or video, obviously made by someone whose skills with the camera were no further advanced than Katharine’s own. The crudeness of the photography, though, did nothing to lessen the fascination with which Katharine and Rob watched what unfolded on the computer screen.
The camera was trained on something that looked unlike anything either Katharine Sundquist or Rob Silver had ever seen before
It appeared to be some kind of humanoid, and though it was impossible to be certain, it gave the impression of being a young male.