Orphan of Creation (13 page)

He always dressed that way, in fragmented outfits—and always seemed to
talk
that way, in partial sentences and telegraphed syntax. He was the sort of person who unfairly made other people hate Californians. His years at UCLA may have rubbed off, but Rupert was from Nebraska.

Rupert Maxwell got away with a lot because of his reputation. Still in his early thirties, he was the author of a number of flawlessly scholarly papers whose learned prose seemed to have nothing to do with the language their author spoke. All those around him, from Grossington on down, agreed he was apparently good at his work— “apparently” because it was very rare to catch him actually doing any. The studies, the reports, the data, seemed to appear magically, effortlessly. It was as if he had a secret supplier who hid by the coffee maker he seemed always to be at, or perhaps the waiters where he took his long lunches delivered information with the check. “Anyway, a fun weekend. Played some touch, went canoeing on the C. & O. Canal, caught the ball games. Nothing too special.” He flashed his grin again and started to shrug off his coat. “But never mind that stuff. What’s the news from the Gowrie excavation?”

All at once it was no effort for Barbara to smile. “I made a new friend. Rupert Maxwell, say hello to Ambrose.” She stepped off the stool and let her office mate see the cranium.

But he was looking at her instead. His eyebrows shot up from behind the mirrored shades and he cocked his head to one side. “Who . . . ?” he began to ask, as if he thought she was trying to introduce him to some imaginary friend hovering over her shoulder. Then his eye caught the skull.

His mouth knotted into a frown, he pulled off his shades, whistled low, and leaned in close to the unbelievable sight. There was a long silence, a longer silence than Barbara had ever heard from Rupert. At last he spoke. “Hello, Ambrose,” he said, addressing the half-cleaned cranium. “Nice to meet you. Where’ve you been all my life?”

<>

Jeffery Grossington was a wanderer, a fidgeter. It was as if his brain were attached to his feet and his fingers. He had to be fiddling with something, or walking, or neatening his desk, or doing
something
, anything, while his brain worked. He had to get rid of the nervous energy churned up by the adrenaline of thinking about a grand idea.

He was rarely aware of events outside the limits of his own skull at such times. He would often come to himself with a start and find himself with his fingers tangled up changing a typewriter ribbon that did not need changing, or down in the public cafeteria sitting over a cup of tea that had been empty for an hour. Mostly, however, he walked.

The worst of it was that his secretary Harriet likewise had a tendency to concentrate too much. She would sit in his outer office, absorbed in whatever report she was coaxing out of the computer, or preparing a summary of events paleontologic around the world, and she would not notice the stocky figure quietly easing out of the inner door and into the corridor. A call would come, or a visitor, or Harriet herself would have a question—and Dr. Grossington would have vanished altogether, perhaps not to reappear for hours.

At least this time Grossington told Harriet he was going for a walk, so even if she didn’t know where he was, she at least
knew
she didn’t know. Grossington made his way downstairs to the public areas of the museum, into the grand, musty, sweeping vault of the rotunda, with the bull elephant in its center, his trunk raised forever, trumpeting a silent salute to the massed herds of a long-passed era.

The crowds and the hordes of schoolchildren surged about, talking, laughing, rushing to see the dinosaurs, calling to one another. Grossington navigated his way through them, through the main entrance of the museum, down the wide granite stairs, and onto the wide expanses of the National Mall. The red brick of the original Smithsonian Castle stood directly across the Mall, flags waving jauntily from its cheerful parapet.

Grossington crossed to the middle of the Mall, out from under the line of massive trees that bordered it. He breathed in the crisp late-November air and looked about him. The Capitol Building sat in majesty, a lord of creation, at the east end of the great space, and the Washington Monument speared skyward in the west, pointing upward toward all aspiration. Lining both sides of the wide tract of greensward between the two were the buildings of the Smithsonian Institution, proud monuments to learning and knowledge. It was an inspiring place to be on a perfect fall day, a place of great ambition and beauty built by generations of men and women who were not afraid to dare or dream.

The trouble was, at the moment, Grossington
was
afraid to dare. If that excitable Dr. Barbara Marchando had burst into his office with, say, a Mayan headdress pulled from the Mississippi ooze, or a stone tablet covered with Viking runes she had excavated in California, he could have accepted it. It would have been incredible, startling, but not something that threatened to turn the world upside down. Certainly Barbara did not, could not, realize how much turmoil her discovery would create—how much turmoil the possibility of finding that mankind had “company,” as she put it, could raise.

And yet, how could he blame her for her excitement, when he shared it himself? He thought again of that impossible skull, and it was as if a light had gone on inside him. He grinned, his pace increased, and he rubbed his hands together in pleasure. It was gold—a gleaming fragment of scientific gold chipped out of the wall of the past, pointing the way to a rich vein of discoveries.

But—his pace slowed, and he looked up to realize that he was nearly at the Capitol. On impulse, he turned toward the greenhouses of the Botanical Gardens, tucked incongruously into a corner of the Mall. He always enjoyed a stroll through the hothouse plants, always delighted in the eccentricity of the place. He found the entrance and went inside, the humid, peaty warmth of the hothouse air wrapping itself around him.

But—was this a Piltdown or a Coelacanth? There. That was what it came down to. That was the focus of his uncertainty. He grunted to himself, pleased that he had spotted the trouble.

Was this skull Barbara had dug up a second Piltdown, a brilliantly manufactured fake, a hoax? He liked and trusted the impetuous Barbara, but he had to consider the possibility that either she was duping him, or someone was duping her. Suppose the skull and the allegedly related remains had been “salted”—craftily buried by a hoaxer in anticipation of their later discovery?

The original Piltdown Man had survived undiscovered as a fraud for forty years, and the perpetrator had never been identified with any certainty. All that was really known for sure was that a few bits of human and ape bones had been doctored and presented as parts of the same individual. The resultant forgery had made fools out of the greatest names in paleontology—Keith, Woodward, Smith and—wrecked reputations. Far more seriously, it had skewed, warped every study of the human past for two generations.

Or was Barbara’s skull a Coelacanth? That strange, bone-headed genus of fishes had been confidently marked down as extinct for millions of years—until a specimen of a Coelacanth was pulled up, spluttering, flopping, and very much alive, from the waters off Africa.

Whether or not Barbara’s skull was authentic, it was certain to set off a tidal wave of controversy. It upset too many theories, rocked too many boats for too many people. Real or fake, it would inevitably be challenged. Grossington knew he had to expect that, be prepared for it from square one. Barbara had done a good job of preparing for challenge already, if her careful site notes and photocopies of the journal that had offered the first clues were any indication. The film she had shot would be back from the lab in a day or so, delayed a bit by the holiday rush, more than likely, and it should provide more convincing documentation. It would back up a superb paper trail.

Of course, a good hoaxer would
have
to leave just as superb a paper trail.

Grossington found a bench and thought for a moment, and decided that Barbara had not perpetrated a hoax. It was not in her character. Yet he knew perfectly well that if she had salted that skull, a key part of the plan would be to convince him that she was not capable of any such thing. But be that as it may—he could not and would not operate on the assumption that his people were lying to him. If they called you a fool for trusting people, he preferred to be a fool.

That didn’t solve his problem, however, for it made no less likely the chance that
Barbara
was being hoaxed. Still,
she
was no fool. It would be hard to trick her, and the trap that had been laid here would have required some enormous efforts.

How could it possibly be a fraud? He had
seen
that skull, had touched it, smelled it, seen on it the endless minute details that shouted out its authenticity, its unhuman-ness.

Grossington knew he was an expert, that he could not be fooled in such things. Which was no doubt exactly the same sort of thing Keith, Woodward, Smith, et. al., had said about Piltdown.

Even so, he simply could not believe that skull was a fake. He would
know
if it were. Just as he was forced to have faith in his people, he was forced to have faith in himself.

In a scientist, faith was supposed to be a rare commodity. Ideally, it did not exist. All opinion, all thought, all judgment and theory, were supposed to rest on the evidence. Did he have enough faith in Barbara’s skill and skepticism tucked away to commit his department to an enterprise that would certainly expose it to controversy, and quite possibly (if his faith was indeed misplaced) destroy it in scandal and fraud?

Well, the only concrete evidence was what his senses told him about the skull—and his senses said it was real.

Was that enough to commit on? Or should he tell Barbara to forget it, go back to her current research, and risk losing history’s greatest discovery in the hunt for the human past?

He knew, deep inside, that he could safely say no without stifling the discovery, especially with Barbara Marchando involved. She would go across the figurative street to the competition—the American Museum of History in New York, or that team in Cleveland. Word would get out, the site would be excavated, the lead followed up without Grossington putting himself at any risk. It was too big to squelch forever.

It came down to whether he, Jeffery Grossington, was willing to take the chance, risk his career and his reputation, on this incredible find. All it took to be safe was to say no, let Barbara go elsewhere and drag the coming storm clouds of controversy off with her and leave his quiet life alone. A very simple, easy thing...

A loud, bright noise made him look up. A child, a little girl in pigtails and pinafore, raced past his bench, down the hallways of the Gardens, laughing and shouting at the joy of being alive. Then Grossington heard a muttering grunt from quite close at hand. He turned and discovered for the first time that he was sharing his bench with a sour-faced old man who was clearly annoyed at the child’s happiness, displeased with the gardens, fed up with the same world that so delighted the child. It was as clear a symbol—and a warning—as Grossington could want. It would be sinfully criminal to throw away the gifts Gowrie and Barbara were offering up.

He got up and walked out of the building back toward the museum, moving with a much faster, brisker gait. Once he had made up his mind, he walked fast, in a straight line, directly toward his goal.

Interlude

<>

Come. Go. Pull weeds. Carry. Bring. Stop. Follow. Out. In.

She knew those hand signs, and all the dozen or so more, the ritualized pantomimes the men used to command her kind. So far as she was concerned, all the words in the world were commands, orders, countermands, and things the commands might be about—the crops, food, water. She signed them to herself, taking an inventory of her tiny collection of words. But now, today, for the first time, she had found a new way of telling, or thought she had: the noises the men made, the shouting, the calling. She had always taken the man-noises as just one more sort of noise, meaning no more or less than her own calls, hoots, cries, and snuffles.

Her own cries could signal distress, or pleasure, or warning, or welcome; they were just one part of the great soundings of the forest, where one animal recognized the calls of its fellows, and could understand and take warning from the meaning of the barks, the yips, the growls of many other animals.

She had always taken the sounds of the men to be such, just noises to urge on and emphasize the hand-commands. The meanings, the commands, were all in the hand signals, not in sound. The man signed them to her kind, and far more rarely, her kind used them among themselves—a skill she was most proficient at.

And yet, she knew another thing. No man ever used hand signals on another man. She had seen human children make the mistake and be severely punished for it. Yet she knew from the endless drudgery of her own life just how needful words were. And she sensed she was close to a great understanding.

For today, she had chanced to see a thing. Huddled together with her kind, locked into their prison-hut, she thought again of what had happened. A man had commanded one of his work-creatures to bring him water, just as another had man called the creature to some other task. She had seen the command gestures—a cupped hand pulled toward the body, and then a hand raised to the mouth and tilted toward the face as if pouring something in.

But the man had seen the second man call the creature, and waved his hand as if to brush something away—the sign to ignore the previous order. The creature had gone away without doing the thing. A minute later, the man saw a passing human child, who had not been there to see the hand signals, tapped him on the arm, and made noises at the child. The boy had run off and brought back water!

It was clear the noises had meant the same thing. Bring-Water. Thinking as hard as she ever had in her life, signing to herself in the darkness and grunting to help make things clear to herself, she puzzled over the facts.

Man Never-Sign—Never Man. Bad Man—Sign No Never. She repeated the signs, emphasizing the point. Man noises Man. She grunted, and tried to make some man-noises. Even to her own ear, they did not sound quite right.

But then she made the connection that had been eluding her in the dim recesses of her mind. Her fur bristled, and she bared her teeth to the darkness in her excitement. Man Do Big Together. Huts. Crops. All-Make Fire. Eat-time. Man Noise-talk. Hand-talk Not...

Frustrated, she growled and grimaced again. She did not have the words to tell herself what she knew inside—which was precisely that hand-talk didn’t have enough words to tell how to do all the men could do.

This was by far the most painfully complex thinking she had ever done. Already, she was struggling to make the symbols she had fit beyond their capacity.

She tried again, unconsciously inventing words as she needed them, adding a growl to the sign for talk to mean noise-talk, an extra wave of the palm to mean hand-talk. Man Noise-talk Do Big, she signed rather tentatively.

That was it. The great revelation. She sat up straighter and snorted with pleasure. Man Noise-talk Do Big, she signed again to the dark. Hand-talk Do Small-Small.

If she listened, she might learn what the noises meant. And then—

Do Big. Big-Big.

She huddled herself up in a ball and went to sleep, dreaming of vague and great powers.