Ark (9 page)

As the sun rose, the chow and I walked together to the big yurt. I was finishing my coffee when Henry appeared. He had a carefree air. He was smiling, relaxed, practically jovial. He wished me good morning and suggested an outing. He raised his eyebrows slightly when I didn’t leap at the chance. I had come here to work with Henry, to learn new things, to behold new wonders, not to go sightseeing. Besides, Hsi-tau did not leap to mind when you heard the words tourist destination. I had already flown or driven over hundreds of miles of its tawny surface. Everything looked the same even when the wind blew, which was all the time.

“Sounds great,” I said weakly, anticipating yet another gourmet picnic lunch and hoping against hope that the natives I kept expecting to see, but never did, had invited us to share Mongolian hot pot in an authentic yurt.

Reading my face—and for all I knew, my mind—Henry gave me a quizzical look. He led me to a Humvee that stood with engine idling outside the door of the yurt. Two chows—mine and Henry’s—sat in the backseat with black tongues lolling. A couple of Kalashnikov assault rifles and two large holstered pistols were clipped to a rack behind our heads. A canvas bag, perhaps containing spare ammo or even hand grenades, and a pair of army-green, state-of-the-art binoculars dangled beside them.

At breakneck speed we raced down the arrow-straight road to nowhere for a few miles, then Henry turned off the pavement and we proceeded much, much more slowly across a trackless wilderness, Humvee lurching over the rough surface. The bag of grenades, if that’s what it was, swung wildly, banging itself against the window posts, and I kept twisting my head to make sure it hadn’t yet exploded.

“Do the guns bother you?” Henry asked.

“Only if they go off.”

“They’re not loaded.”

“Then what’s the point of bringing them along?”

“The Boy Scout motto,” Henry said.

The country was more rugged here, and as we traveled the dunes got progressively larger. The Humvee’s big knobby tires spun, gripped, spun some more, and gouged deep tracks in the sand. Despite the fact that we were equipped with a two-way radio and a couple of satellite phones interfered in no way with my fear that the Humvee might get stuck and we might die of thirst and exposure. Consider the consequences: If Henry died, so did humanity’s last chance to take command of its fate, unless he could get the president of the United States on the phone before we perished and tell him what was coming.

The Humvee crested a hill. In the distance I saw some tents clustered in the shadow of a mesa. I got out the binoculars and focused on the campsite. People were scurrying around the tents or working on the wall of the mesa, which was pockmarked with excavations of various sizes. As we drew closer, I kept on sweeping the site with the binoculars. The lenses were powerful and self-focusing. Details emerged in great clarity. People were climbing down from the mesa. Most of them were local, but a few who were larger and clumsier than the others were Caucasian. One of them was a brawny fellow with a red handlebar mustache who wore a cowboy hat and, sure enough, when I panned down with the glasses, cowboy boots.

I stifled a gasp. I knew this man. And as soon as I got out of the Humvee, he recognized me. Apart from a look filled with hatred and loathing, which I returned, he gave no sign that he had ever seen me before. He was grotesquely huge, a slab of muscle and bone nearly seven feet high. In a windchill factor of about thirty degrees Fahrenheit, he wore shorts and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. His biceps were the size of a normal man’s thighs. Even his teeth, when he grinned at Henry, were half again as large as standard human teeth.

In a booming bass voice he shouted, “Hot damn, Henry! I thought you’d never get here.”

He enveloped Henry in a bear hug, lifting him off his feet and pounding him on the back. After giving him a final shake that dislodged his Yankees cap, Bear put him down. The cap, snatched by the wind, skittered away. The giant chased it as nimbly as a kid, recovered it, and screwed it back on Henry’s head.

Henry introduced us. We stared at each other, neither of us offering a hand or a smile or uttering a sound. I wouldn’t have touched this creature or spoken to it if someone had put a gun to my head. The giant’s name, as I already knew, was Bear Mulligan. As a young man he had been an All-American left tackle who got his nickname in college from the ferocious way he tackled opponents. It was written in the newspapers that he didn’t just bear-hug running backs, he ate ‘em alive. Stadiums boomed with his name, shouted in unison by fifty thousand Texans in a state of bloodlust. Bear had a knack for fame. He grew up to be a paleontologist who was invariably described by the many reporters who traveled far to interview him as “legendary.”

Henry, glancing first at Bear and then at me, immediately picked up on the revulsion between us.

“Come on, Henry,” Bear cried. “I want to show you what your money has bought.”

The two of them rushed away, Bear’s tree-trunk arm around Henry’s shoulders. I followed, uninvited and ignored. Pretty soon we reached the mesa and with Bear in the lead, clambered up a network of aluminum ladders that had been bolted to its face. In minutes we reached the top, which was perfectly flat, and there, in an enormous ditch, lay an enormous skeleton.

“Biggest dad-gum land animal ever seen by human eyes!” Bear shouted. “We’re gonna name it for you, Henry.”

“Oh, no, you’re not,” Henry said.

“It’s a girl,” Bear said. “Looks like a
Sauroposeidon,
but she ain’t. She’s bigger—about forty meters long. She stood about twenty meters high. Humongous long neck, like a giraffe, but a lot bigger. Weighed maybe forty-five tons. Older than
Sauroposeidon,
too.”

“What era?”

“Late Jurassic, prob’ly, but don’t hold me to that till we’ve worked on her a little more.”

“Did you find her intact, as we see her here?” Henry asked.

“Intact, more or less,” Bear replied. “We did a little retrofitting, mostly small bones that got scattered by the earthquake that done her in, but the big parts you see lie pretty much the same as they laid for all them millions of years. Found us some eggs, too. Huge— bigger ‘n medicine balls. She must’ve been settin’ on the nest when the world turned upside down on her.”

The way Bear talked like an old cowhand grated. Whatever else he might have been—and we’ll get to that presently—he was one of the most famous scholars in his field. He was also well-off. In the 1920s, his grandfather, an authentic redneck, had struck oil in Wink, Texas, and later on, all over the world. The family owned a private bank in New York, among other things. Bear had gone to a well-known New England school, the same one his father had attended, and after his football days, earned a doctorate at Harvard. I knew a lot about Bear. He didn’t grow up talking like he had a mouthful of barbecue.

He showed us some fragments of fossilized dinosaur eggs.

“Imagine being the size of this here lady and all of a sudden finding yourself flyin’ through the air doin’ somersaults,” he said. “Must have been pretty disorienting.”

“I don’t see any broken bones,” Henry said. “The ground must have opened where she was standing. She probably was buried instantaneously, to have stayed together, like she’s done for a hundred and fifty million years.”

“Could be, old buddy. But we’re talkin’ about one hell of an earthquake.”

Henry and I exchanged glances. Yes, he was talking about one hell of an earthquake.

Henry had brought treats for the workers—vacuum chests of hot Chinese and American food, coolers filled with beer, ice cream and apple pie for the Americans, Chinese sweets for the locals, huge boxes of Godiva chocolates for everybody. In the mess tent, speeches were made. Henry—meaning Henry’s money—was cheered. By the end of lunch everybody was drunk except Henry, who didn’t drink in any meaningful sense of the word, and myself, who hated beer and would not drink with Bear Mulligan, who was too large to be affected by alcohol. Afterward, we toured the bone collection. This included a nearly intact
Tarbosaurus,
a carnivore slightly smaller than T.
rex,
and many other creatures, all of which had been alive one moment and entombed the next on a day more than a hundred million years before.

Through it all, Bear had neither looked at me nor spoken a word to me—nor I to him, because the sight and sound of him made my skin crawl. The time to depart finally arrived. We walked over to the Humvee. Henry visited the latrine, leaving the two of us alone. Bear looked down on me with raw hatred in his eyes.

“Be warned, bitch,” he said in the Chip-and-Buffie English he spoke when I knew him.

“Of what?”

“If you repeat one word of your rotten dirty lies about me to Henry,” he said, “I’ll hunt you down and tear your head off.”

“Better do it now, then,” I said.

“You’re going to tell him, aren’t you?”

“You’ve made it pretty obvious that you and I have a problem. If he asks what it is, I’m not going to lie to him.”

Henry emerged from the latrine tent. Still glaring, Bear muttered, “Here he comes. One lie and you’re dead. That’s a promise.”

He reached out for Henry and gave him a gentle hug. So tender was the look on Bear’s face that for a moment I thought kisses might come next. Bear stood waving good-bye to Henry until we couldn’t see him anymore.

Henry checked the Humvee’s navigation screen and told me we had just time enough to get to the road to nowhere before dark.

I said, “Good,” but dreaded the bumpy ride ahead. Already the Humvee was pitching and yawing. I wished I had worn a sports bra. The windows were closed because of the dust. The chows, carsick already, whimpered.

After a silence, Henry said, “What was
that
all about?”

I didn’t pretend that I didn’t understand the question. I replied, “Bear was surprised to see me, I think.”

“You know him?”

“We knew each other in the past. It didn’t end well.”

“Why not?”

“He’s the rapist.”

Henry stopped the Humvee. “Go on,” he said.

“His family bought the judge and Bear walked on a legal technicality. The cops were so busy trying to subdue him—he broke some bones—when he resisted arrest they forgot to read him his rights.”

Henry took my hand. I was astonished. He had a nice hand, dry and sinewy.

“I had no idea,” he said.

“How could you have?”

“It should have turned up when he was vetted for the grant.”

“That was long before you knew me. Wouldn’t you have given him the grant anyway? It would have been the broad-minded thing to do. He wasn’t convicted of anything.”

“Probably,” Henry replied. “Are you afraid of him now?”

“Terrified. I know him. When you were in the latrine he warned me that he’d rip my head off if I told you who and what he is.”

“He meant it?”

“Of course he meant it.”

Henry was still holding my hand. His face was grim.

“You’re going to tell Bear about this conversation?”

“No,” Henry said. “But he’ll know. The money will stop.”

“Then what?”

“Then we contain him. You’re safer than you think.”

~ * ~

2

DARKNESS FELL BEFORE WE REACHED
the yurts. We saw their lights, a white blotch in the anthracite sky, from a long way off. Their brightness puzzled, even startled Henry. He floored the gas pedal and the ungainly, rattling Humvee sped onward, headlights poking into the darkness.