“Oh.” Paul’s face changed. “You’re from—”
“Yes.”
“This is highly unusual for you to contact me here.”
“I can assure you these are very unusual circumstances.”
“Still, I’m not sure I like being solicited for one job while working at another.”
“I can see there’s been a misunderstanding.”
“How’s that?” “You called it a job. Consider it a consulting offer.”
“Mr. McMaster, I’m very busy with my current work. I’m in the middle of several projects, and, to be honest, I’m surprised Westing let you through the door.”
“Westing is already onboard. I took the liberty of speaking to the management before contacting you today.”
“How did you…” Paul looked at him, and Gavin raised an eyebrow. With corporations, any question of “how” was usually rhetorical. The answer was always the same. And it always involved dollar signs.
“Of course, we’ll match that bonus to you, mate.” McMaster slid a check across the counter. Paul barely glanced at it.
“As I said, I’m in the middle of several projects now. One of the other samplers here would probably be interested.”
McMaster smiled. “Normally I’d assume that was a negotiating tactic. But that’s not the case here, is it?”
“No.”
“I was like you once. Hell, maybe I still am.”
“Then you understand.” Paul stood.
“I understand you better than you think. It makes it easier, sometimes, when you come from money. Sometimes I think that only people who come from it realize how worthless it really is.”
“That hasn’t been my experience. If you’ll excuse me.” Politeness like a wall, a thing he’d learned from his mother.
“Please,” Gavin said. “Before you leave, I have something for you.” He opened the snaps on his briefcase and pulled out a stack of glossy eight-by-ten photographs.
For a moment Paul just stood there. Then he took the photos from Gavin’s extended hand. Paul looked at the pictures. Paul looked at them for a long time. Gavin said, “These fossils were found last year on the island of Flores, in Indonesia.”
“Flores,” Paul whispered, still studying the photos. “I heard they found strange bones there. I didn’t know anybody had published.”
“That’s because we haven’t. Not yet, anyway.”
“These dimensions can’t be right. A six-inch ulna.”
“They’re right.”
Paul looked at him. “Why me?” And just like that, the wall was gone. What lived behind it had hunger in its belly.
“Why not?”
It was Paul’s turn to raise an eyebrow.
“Because you’re good,” Gavin said.
“So are others.”
“Because you’re young and don’t have a reputation to risk.”
“Or one to stand on.”
Gavin sighed. “Because I don’t know if archaeology was ever meant to be as important as it has become. Will that do for an answer? We live in a world where zealots become scientists. Tell me, boy, are you a zealot?”
“No.”
“That’s why. Or close enough.”
There were a finite number of unique creations at the beginning of the world—a finite number of species which has, since that time, decreased dramatically through extinction. Speciation is a special event outside the realm of natural processes, a phenomenon relegated to the moment of creation, and to the mysteries of Allah.
The flight to Bali was seventeen hours, and another two to Flores by chartered plane—then four hours by Jeep over the steep mountains and into the heart of the jungle. To Paul, it might have been another world. Rain fell, stopped, then fell again, turning the road into a thing which had to be reasoned with.
“Is it always like this?” Paul asked.
“No,” Gavin said. “In the rainy season, the roads are much worse.”
Flores, isle of flowers. From the air it had looked like a long ribbon of jungle thrust from blue water, part of a rosary of islands between Australia and Java. The Wallace Line—a line more real than any on a map—lay kilometers to the west, toward Asia and the empire of placental mammals. A stranger emperor ruled here.
Paul was exhausted by the time they pulled into Ruteng. He rubbed his eyes. Children ran alongside the Jeep, their faces some combination of Malay and Papuan—brown skin, strong white teeth like a dentist’s dream. The hill town crouched one foot in the jungle, one on the mountain. A valley flung itself from the edge of the settlement, a drop of kilometers.
The men checked into their hotel. Paul’s room was basic, but clean, and Paul slept like the dead. The next morning he woke, showered and shaved. Gavin met him in the lobby.
“It’s a bit rustic, I apologize.” Gavin said.
“No, it’s fine.” Paul said. “There was a bed and a shower. That’s all I needed.”
“We use Ruteng as a kind of base camp for the dig. Our future accommodations won’t be quite so luxurious.”
Back at the Jeep, Paul checked his gear. It wasn’t until he climbed into the passenger seat that he noticed the gun, its black leather holster duct-taped to the driver’s door. It hadn’t been there the day before.
Gavin caught him staring. “These are crazy times we live in, mate. This is a place history has forgotten till now. Recent events have made it remember.” “Which recent events are those?”
“Religious events to some folks’ view. Political to others.” Gavin waved his hand. “More than just scientific egos are at stake with this find.”
They drove north, descending into the valley and sloughing off the last pretense of civilization. “You’re afraid somebody will kidnap the bones?” Paul asked.
“Yeah, that’s one of the things I’m afraid of.”
“One?”
“It’s easy to pretend that it’s just theories we’re playing with—ideas dreamed up in some ivory tower between warring factions of scientists. Like it’s all some intellectual exercise.” Gavin looked at him, his dark eyes grave. “But then you see the actual bones; you feel their weight in your hands, and sometimes theories die between your fingers.”
The track down to the valley floor was all broken zig-zags and occasional, rounding turns. For long stretches, overhanging branches made a tunnel of the roadway—the jungle a damp cloth slapping at the windshield. But here and there that damp cloth was yanked aside, and out over the edge of the drop you could see a valley that Hollywood would love, an archetype to represent all valleys, jungle floor visible through jungle haze. In those stretches of muddy road, a sharp left pull on the steering wheel would have gotten them there quicker, deader.
“Liange Bua,” Gavin called their destination. “The Cold Cave.” And Gavin explained that was how they thought it happened—the scenario. This steamy jungle all around, so two or three of them went inside to get cool, to sleep. Or maybe it was raining, and they went in the cave to get dry—only the rain didn’t stop, and the river flooded, as it sometimes still did, and they were trapped inside the cave by the rising waters, their drowned bodies buried in mud and sediment.
The men rode in silence for a while before Gavin said it, a third option Paul felt coming. “Or they were eaten there.”
“Eaten by what?”
“Homo homini lupus est. ” Gavin said. “Man is wolf to man.”
They crossed a swollen river, water rising to the bottom of the doors. For a moment Paul felt the current grab the Jeep, pull, and it was a close thing, Gavin cursing and white-knuckled on the wheel, trying to keep them to the shallows. When they were past it he said, “You’ve got to keep it to the north; if you slide a few feet off straight, the whole bugger’ll go tumbling downriver.”