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.
His prognathic ridge jutted forward while his brow sloped sharply back. His features were large and coarse, his eyes peering fearfully from deep sockets. His jaw looked underslung, and his body, clad only in a loincloth, appeared to be almost covered with a light coat of hair.
Formed in a loose circle around the boy — if they could really call him a boy — was a group of perhaps fifteen tribesmen. The men seemed to be warily watching the boy they had encircled, as if they weren’t certain what to expect of him.
As Katharine watched, the circle tightened, and she could see the boy in the center tense, his eyes darting from one person to another. Then, in a movement that came so quickly it was little more than a blur, the boy darted out of the circle and disappeared into the jungle. Stunned into momentary inaction by the sudden movement, the tribesmen appeared to talk animatedly among themselves for a few seconds, and finally vanished into the jungle themselves, obviously intent on tracking the fleeing boy.
The screen went black, and for a moment Katharine and Rob thought the video had come to an end.
They were wrong.
After several seconds the computer screen filled with a jungle scene. The village was gone, and for a moment, as the image on the screen hovered in stasis, Katharine wondered if perhaps whoever had made the video was merely checking his camera. But then the lens zoomed in, and finally Katharine saw it:
The face — the hominid face of the boy, if that was truly what he was — gazed out from a thicket of vines in a way that made Katharine shiver as a wave of deja vu passed over her. Then she realized what it was: not deja vu at all. The image on the screen was triggering a genuine memory, a memory of a museum exhibit she’d seen years ago, depicting a family of Homo habilis, perhaps the earliest of the hominids to make tools.
The being on the screen, but for the color of its skin and the pattern of hair on its face, might have stepped out of that diorama and into the jungle scene she and Rob Silver were watching.
But of course it was impossible; Homo habilis had been extinct for two million years.
Therefore, what they were watching was a hoax.
“Can you pause it?” Katharine asked as the camera lingered on the face.
Rob reached out and clicked the mouse on a button on the screen. The image froze. Katharine leaned forward, examining the face. This had to be an actor expertly made up, a work of cosmetic wizardry worthy of a Hollywood special effects team. But how had they managed to slope his forehead so perfectly? It would have been a simple thing, of course, to add anything necessary to give the actor’s features the proper look, but enough prostheses to lend the boy such authentic features should have enlarged his head.
Yet it seemed to be in perfect proportion to the body.
Reaching out to manipulate the mouse herself, Katharine restored the picture to its former size and set it running again.
A split second later the first spear struck.
The lens of the camera was still in close-up, and the look of shock that came into the boy’s eyes was perfect. They widened, then moved, as if searching for the source of the stick that protruded from his chest.
A second and third spear struck, and the boy’s expression of shock twisted into an agonized grimace of pain so genuine that Katharine was glad the video had no sound track — even in the silence of the room she could almost hear the howl that must have torn from his throat.
His mouth gaped open, and then he pitched forward onto the ground, twitched spasmodically for a few seconds, and lay still.
Rob reached over and took Katharine’s hand as they watched the rest of the video unfold:
The men and boys of the tribe gathered around the body, poking at it until they were certain it was dead.
They tied it to a pole, securing it by its hands and feet, letting it hang as they carried it back to their village.
In the village, the men dressed the corpse, slitting open its belly and throwing the entrails to a pack of dogs who snatched them up, fought over them, then settled down to gobble their feast in an atmosphere of uneasy suspicion.
The men roasted the body over a fire as the tribe gathered around to share in the unexpected delicacy.
For a moment the camera settled on the face of a woman who stood apart from the rest, her eyes glistening as she watched.
