“Exactly. Thousands of years underwater takes a toll on everything. Especially in warm water. Cold preserves things better.”
“Like the Titanic.”
“Exactly. And we saw what kind of shape it was in just seventy years later. But this thing, even in warm water, doesn’t look affected at all.”
“Well, it’s clear we have a lot more mapping to do.”
Borger nodded again. “Which brings up another strange thing.”
“No doors.”
“No anything,” Borger quipped. So far, every piece of the hull had been found to be as smooth and unblemished as the next. They hadn’t found any edges anywhere. Even grooves. Nothing to indicate a door or the slightest separation.
Borger turned and looked up at Caesare. “There’s something else. Another thing I’ve been thinking about that doesn’t make any sense.”
Caesare frowned. “You mean other than a glowing alien, magnetic ship… that looks like a giant block?”
He grinned. “Yeah. But this is more of a logical contradiction.”
“Hit me.”
Borger took a breath and tilted his head. “So, we talked before about efficiency and the limitations of making such a long distance trip through space.”
“That’s right. The reason why this was likely a one-way trip.”
“Precisely. The amount of energy needed to travel fast enough becomes prohibitive at a certain speed or vehicle size.”
“And that’s the strange part?”
“More or less. See, if efficiency is everything, which it is in space travel, then why is the ship so big? The embryos we found hidden in Guyana would only have taken up a fraction of the ship’s capacity. Oversizing it makes the whole propulsion issue very impractical.”
Caesare nodded. “A one-way trip lets you get here faster, with less. But instead, they brought a big one.”
“Not just big, a giant one. That’s the contradiction. It just… doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’m inclined to agree.” Caesare glanced away from the screen to his watch. “It’s time for our call.”
Borger nodded absently, eyes still fixed on the monitor’s screen.
Upon seeing DeeAnn Draper’s face appear on Borger’s second monitor, Steve Caesare slid into the seat next to him. His muscular frame made the old chair look even more fragile than it was. With a loud squeak, he promptly leaned forward and smiled at DeeAnn through the computer camera.
“Hello, beautiful,” he grinned with his trademark smile.
DeeAnn narrowed her eyes in response, with a trace of humor. “Hello, Grizzly Adams.”
Caesare rubbed a hand over his long whiskers, some of which were already showing hints of gray.
“I hope you guys are at least taking showers,” she chided.
“Well, some of us are.” Caesare leaned back and motioned sarcastically toward Borger.
Will Borger glowered. “Not funny.”
On the screen, an amused DeeAnn changed the subject. “How are things going with the ship?”
“We have the general dimensions but not much else yet. How about you?”
She sighed. “Well, we talked to Lee. Which turned out to include a big surprise for all us. I presume John has already told you.”
“He has. I’m sorry about that. I think retracting is the last thing anyone wanted, even Admiral Langford.”
DeeAnn nodded with a contemplative expression, and Caesare noted the background of her office behind her. She had decorated. After a moment, DeeAnn changed the subject again. “So, how are things going with Africa?”
Borger brought up a map on his primary screen. It was a richly colored, high-definition image of the entire African continent. “I’ve got everything downloaded, and the servers are ready. But searching an area this big, pixel by pixel, is going to take a while. To save time, we’ve started narrowing things down using some assumptions from Guyana.”
“Such as?”
“High elevation, heavily obscured, and difficult to reach. We might also want to consider a similar latitude.”
Caesare considered Borger’s last point. “Actually, if they were going to store something for thousands of years, why wouldn’t they have done it near one of the poles, like we did with the Seed Vault?”
“I think it’s going to depend on the purpose. Very hot and very cold temperatures both introduce their own challenges. A higher elevation would also provide a cooler environment. But even if it is somewhere along the same latitude, it leaves a heck of a lot of land mass to search.”
“Well, at least it’s a start,” DeeAnn sighed. “Actually, maybe I can help narrow it down a little more. After all, we’re looking for something that could have affected the course of primate evolution, including Homo sapiens. Which means maybe we can find out where by determining when.”
“And when would that be?” asked Caesare.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” she replied. “Nobody really knows… exactly. We only have guesses. The earliest fossils of recognizable Homo sapiens appeared about two hundred thousand years ago around the region known today as Ethiopia. But the event couldn’t have taken place that long ago because our evolutionary paths still weren’t that far away from the other primates. And as similar as primate and human brains are today in complexity, they are still very different in size. So we’re probably looking at an event that happened long after the two species split, but one that still affected them both. So the real question probably isn’t when did our genetic lineage split, but when did we stop being neighbors?”
Caesare and Borger both looked at each other and then back to DeeAnn on the screen. “And that would be…”
“About fifty thousand years ago. Maybe even twenty. Much closer to our present, evolutionarily speaking.”
“And then what?”
DeeAnn shrugged. According to a group called the Genographic Project, our genetic and paleontological records suggest we moved out, beginning with the colonization of modern day Yemen. The migration then rippled out from there. So my guess is that whatever event might have occurred, it probably did so before that.”
“So Ethiopia then.”
“Maybe,” DeeAnn answered hesitantly. “That’s where some of the earliest remains have been found. Other remains have been discovered more recently, like the site near Johannesburg, but they were nonhuman.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
“Not really. But I suggest we start our search in the higher elevations. Those locations will have the most in common with the Guyana site. How fast do you think your computer can sift through the data, Will?”
“Computers,” Will corrected absently. “I’ve got a lot lined up, but when we did this before, the search algorithm was much simpler. We were looking for objects in a large area of ocean so it wasn’t as hard to find things that stood out. It just took time. This time, it’s different. Terrain is much more complicated. At best, I’m guessing we can process maybe a hundred square miles per hour. But we might get lucky. There were stone markers on the mountain in Guyana. If there are similar shapes in Africa, and if part of them are exposed, the servers might be able to pick that up.”
“But if not?”
“Then we could be in for a long wait.”
“Well, let’s hope you two have better luck than I do,” DeeAnn said.
“The problem,” continued Borger, “is the testing.”
“What do you mean?”
He looked to Caesare, then to DeeAnn, both visible on his monitor. “This is going to take a lot of tweaking. It’s not just something that we flip on and wait for coordinates to be spit out. We’re going to need to do some benchmarking, followed by verification on more complicated sections of the map.”