The Presence (14 page)

“I didn’t say I believed it,” Katharine said. “And I can add half a dozen other reasons why it’s impossible, starting with the fact that every early man specimen I’ve ever seen—and I mean
every
one—is a fossil. And these bones, in case you haven’t noticed, aren’t fossils. They don’t look more than a few hundred years old, if that.”

“So what do we have?” Rob asked.

“I wish I knew,” Katharine sighed. “What I’d really like to get my hands on is a computer, so I could check some things out on the Net.”

“Well, at least that part’s easy,” Rob told her. “Come on.”

The funny feeling started almost the minute Michael emerged from the locker room and trotted out to the field for his fourth-period gym class. At first he hardly noticed it, but as he jogged across the grass toward the spot near the far end zone of the football field where his class was falling in for the morning’s round of calisthenics, he felt it again. It was like last night, when he’d awakened from the nightmare and felt as if there was something in his lungs that wasn’t quite letting him catch his breath, or fill his lungs with air.

Asthma.

But even as the word popped into his consciousness, he rejected it.

It didn’t feel like asthma, and besides, he was over that—he hadn’t had an attack in months!

Ignore it, he told himself. It’ll go away.

He fell into place in the loose formation just in time to yell out a loud “Yo!” when the teacher called his name, then dropped down to the ground for the set of ten quick
push-ups that opened the gym class. The class was quiet this morning, and everyone knew why.

Kioki Santoya.

All morning, people Michael didn’t even know had come up to him, asking if there had been anything strange about Kioki last night. What was he supposed to say? He’d hardly even known Kioki—even this morning he had still been having trouble remembering his last name. Now, as he did his push-ups, he could sense the other guys watching him, wondering if there was something he wasn’t talking about. He made it through the push-ups, and though the odd sensation in his chest was still there, it didn’t seem to be any worse. Along with the rest of the class, he scrambled to his feet and starting doing jumping jacks. By the time they’d finished a set of twenty-five, Michael was starting to sweat and he could feel his muscles warming up.

“O-kay!” the teacher said. “Run in place!”

Michael’s arms dropped to his sides as he began running, lifting his knees high with each step, working his legs like two pistons. This was one of his favorite exercises, for in the long months it had taken to build his lungs, his legs had developed, too, and he’d almost come to think of their strength as a kind of barometer, proof positive that his entire body was growing stronger every week, forever throwing off the terrible grip in which his disease had held him.

This morning, though, after only a few steps, the muscles in his legs started to burn. But that was crazy—he was barely getting warmed up! At this rate, a single lap around the track would wear him out.

“Okay, let’s do it!” the teacher yelled. “One lap, and the first two around choose up sides for baseball!”

The class broke ranks and headed out onto the quarter-mile track that circled the football field. Two of the guys—Zack Cater, who was in Michael’s English class, and someone whose name Michael thought was Sky, and who lived down the road from him—took off in the lead. Instantly, Michael knew he had no chance of beating them. He might be able to put on enough speed in the first hundred yards to pull ahead of them, but by the second hundred he’d have fallen behind. Then, most of his energy having been spent on the first sprint, he’d wind up straggling in at the very back of the class.

Not good for someone who had made the track team just yesterday.

Worse would be the humiliation that followed when Zack and Sky left him until dead last to be chosen for the baseball teams.

Better to pace himself and finish somewhere in the middle of the pack.

Glancing around, he saw that there were only two other boys behind him, so he increased his pace slightly, quickly passing three runners, then closing on two more. Once he’d left all five of them behind, he steadied his pace, falling into an easy gait that should have carried him comfortably through the turn at the end zone, then back along the opposite side of the field.

Except that the strange feeling in his chest was getting worse and the muscles of both his legs were burning like crazy, and threatening to cramp up any second.

But he’d done a full lap yesterday, then whipped Jeff Kina in a sprint! What the hell was wrong?

Once again, as it had every few minutes this morning, his mind went back to the dive last night.

But it wasn’t just the dive he was thinking about. It was also the long hike across the rough lava, stumbling with every step.

And the fight with his mother, and the hours of sleep he’d missed. So what did he expect? All his body was doing was punishing him for last night.

A strange thought flickered through Michael’s mind: Was that what had happened to Kioki Santoya, too? If they hadn’t gone on the dive at all—if they’d just gone to a movie, and then come home early, as they’d first planned—would Kioki still be alive?

But that didn’t make any sense. It wouldn’t have made any difference what they’d done last night—what had happened to Kioki … had just happened.

For himself, though, the hike and the dive and the loss of sleep were costing him. Well, fine. If he had to pay for what he’d done, so be it. But he still wasn’t going to let himself finish last.

Determined to ignore the discomfort in his chest and the pain in his legs no matter what, Michael held his pace through the curve around the end zone, and started down the long straightaway. One of the boys he’d passed on the first stretch came up on his right and fell in beside him.

“Thought you were supposed to be real hot shit,” the boy said. Laughing loudly, he pulled away from Michael, deliberately twisting his feet to kick up a cloud of dust from the cinders that paved the track.

Michael tried to turn his head away, but couldn’t avoid sucking in some of the dust, and braced himself against the fit of coughing he was sure would seize him. But then he was through the gray cloud and suddenly felt himself building up speed.

He’d been right! Whatever it was, all he’d had to do was work his way through it! His legs were starting to feel a little better, and his chest was getting back to normal, so he notched up his stride and started to close on the boy ahead of him for the second time. They pounded down the track with Michael just a pace behind, and though the dust behind the other boy was starting to make Michael’s eyes sting, he could feel his strength surging back. As they headed into the last curve, Michael pulled ahead.

Now the finish line was just yards away. Michael poured all the energy he could muster into the final sprint. He passed one more boy, then crossed the line, his chest heaving and his legs burning again. It wasn’t until he dropped his pace back to a walk and turned to join the rest of the class that he realized the gym teacher had been watching him.

“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.

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.