“You always seem to get there ahead of me,” Mitch said.
Merton shaded his eyes against the sun. “They’re having a kind of mid-afternoon powwow, if that’s the right word, back in the tents. Bit of a knockdown, really. Eileen, I think they’re going to decide to uncover one of the girls and take a direct look. You have perfect timing, Mitch. I’ve had to wait days to see anything but videos.”
“It’s a committee decision?” Mitch asked, turning to Eileen.
“I couldn’t stand having all of this on my shoulders,” Eileen confessed. “We have a fine team. Very argumentative. And Daney’s money works wonders. Good beer at night.”
“Is Daney here?” Mitch asked Merton.
“Not yet,” Merton said. “He’s shy and he hates discomfort.” They hunkered their shoulders against a gritty swirl blowing up the gully. Merton wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “Not his kind of place at all.”
The wide, bush-studded net flapped in the afternoon breeze, dropping bits of dry branch and leaf on them as they stooped to enter the pit. The excavation stretched about forty feet north, then branched east to form an L. Mottled sunlight filtered through the net. They descended four meters on a metal ladder to the floor of the pit.
Aluminum beams crossed the pit at two-meter intervals. Rises in the pit, like little mesas, were topped with wire grids. Over the mesas, some of the beams supported white boxes with lenses and other apparatus jutting from the bottoms. As Mitch watched, the closest box slowly railed right a few centimeters and resumed humming.
“Side scanner?” he asked.
Eileen nodded. “We’ve scraped off most of the mud and we’re peeking through the final layer of tephra. We can see about sixty centimeters into the hard pack.” She walked ahead.
The Quonset structure—arched wooden beams covered by sheets of stamped, ribbed steel and a few milky sheets of fiberglass—sheltered the long stroke of the L. Sunlight poured through the fiberglass sheeting. They walked over flat, hard dirt and haphazard cobbles of river rock between the high, irregular walls. Eileen let Mitch go first, ascending a dirt staircase to the left of a flat-topped rise being surveyed by two more white boxes.
“I don’t dare walk under these damned things,” Eileen said. “I have enough skin blotches as is.”
Mitch knelt beside the mesa to look at alternating layers of mud and tephra, capped by sand and silt. He saw an ash fall—tephra—followed by a lahar, a fast-moving slurry of hot mud made of ash, dirt, and glacier melt. The sand and silt had arrived over time. At the bottom of the mesa, he saw more alternating layers of ash, mud, and river deposits: A deep book going back far longer than recorded history.
“Computers do some really big math and show us a picture of what’s down there,” Eileen said. “We actually debated whether to dig any deeper or just cover it over again and submit the videos and sensor readings. But I guess the committee is going for a traditional invasion.”
Mitch moved his hand in a sweeping motion. “Ash came down for several days,” he said. “Then a lahar swept down the river basin. Up here, it slopped over but didn’t carry off the bodies.”
“Very good,” Merton said, genuinely impressed.
“Want to see our etchings?” Eileen asked.
Eileen unrolled a display sheet in the conference tent and tuned it to her wrist computer. “Still getting used to all this tech,” she murmured. “It’s wonderful, when it works.”
Merton watched over Mitch’s shoulder. Two women in their thirties, dressed in jeans and short-sleeved khaki shirts, stood at the rear of the long, narrow tent, debating in soft but angry voices. Eileen did not see fit to introduce them, which clued Mitch that she was not the only high-powered anthropologist working the dig.
The screen glowed faintly in the tent’s half-light. Eileen told the computer to run a slide show.
“These are from yesterday,” she said. “We’ve done around twenty-seven complete scans. Redundancy upon redundancy, just to be sure we’re not making it up. Oliver says he’s never seen a more frightened bunch of scientists.”
“I haven’t,” Merton affirmed.
The first image showed the pale ghost of a skeleton curled in fetal position, surrounded by what looked like sheets of grass matting, a few stones, and a cloud of pebbles. “Our first. We’re calling her Charlene. As you can see, she’s fairly modern Homo sap. Prominent chin, relatively high forehead. But here’s the tomographic reconstruction from our multiple sweeps.” A second image came up and showed a dolichocephalic, or long-headed, skull. Eileen told the computer to rotate this image.
Mitch scowled. “Looks Australian,” he said.
“She probably is,” Eileen said. “About twenty years of age. Trapped and asphyxiated by hot mud. There are five other skeletons, one close to Charlene, the others clustered about four meters away. All are female. No infants. And no sign of males. The grass matting has decayed, of course. Just molds remain. We have a shadow mold around Charlene, a cast of fine silt from seepage through the mud and ash showing the outlines of her body. Here’s a tomographic image of what that cast would look like, if we could manage to pry it loose from the tephra and the rest of the overburden.”
A distorted ghost of a head, neck, and shoulders appeared and rotated smoothly on the display sheet. Mitch felt odd, standing in a tent that would have been familiar to Roy Chapman Andrews or even to Darwin himself, while staring down at the rolled-out sheet of the computer display.
He asked Eileen to rotate the image of Charlene again.
As the image swung around and around, he began to discern facial features, a closed eye, a blob of ear, hair matted and curled, a hint of cooked and distorted flesh slumped from the back of the skull.
“Pretty awful,” Merton said.
“They suffocated before the heat got to them,” Eileen said. “I hope they did, anyway.”
“Early-stage Tierra del Fuegan?” Mitch asked.
“That’s what most of us think. From the Australian migration out of South and Central America.”
Such migrations had been charted more and more often in the last fifteen years; Australian skeletons and associated artifacts found near the tip of South America had been dated to older than thirty thousand years BP, before the present.
The two other women walked around them to reach the exit, as serious and unsocial as porcupines. A plump, red-faced woman a few years younger than Eileen held the flap open for them then stepped in and stood before Mitch. “Is this the famous Mitch Rafelson?” she asked Eileen.
“Mitch, meet Connie Fitz. I told her I’d bring you here.”
“Delighted to meet you, after all these years.” Fitz wiped her hands on a dusty towel hanging from her belt before shaking hands. “Have you showed him the good stuff?”
“We’re getting there.”
“Best picture of Gertie is on sweep 21,” Fitz advised.
“I know,” Eileen said testily. “It’s my show.”
“Sorry. I’m the mother hen,” Fitz said. “The others are still arguing.”
“Spare me,” Eileen said. Another image cast their faces in a pale greenish light.
“Say hello to Gertie,” Merton said. He glanced up at Mitch, waiting to see his reaction.
Mitch poked the surface of the screen, making the light pool under his finger. He looked up, on the edge of anger. “You’re kidding me. This is a joke.”
“No joke,” Merton said.
Eileen magnified the image. Then, clearing his throat, Mitch asked, “Fraud?”
“What do you think?” Eileen asked.
“They’re in close association? Not in different layers?”
Eileen nodded. “They were buddies, probably traveling together. No infants, but as you can see, Gertie was maybe fifteen or sixteen, and she was probably gravid when the ash covered her.”