Lewis takes the prime sample from his last archaeological dig and hands it to Professor Howard. It is the thin black shell of a humanoid skull, half eaten by time.
“Ever seen anything like it?” Lewis asks.
Howard cups his palm and the skull nestles like a trophy while he works it around with the fingers. His index finger has been lost at the first joint; the next stained yellow by a habit too old to break. Still the hand seems skilled.
“Interesting,” he says, gazing into the empty eyesockets.
“The rear lobe,” Lewis protests, “it looks like a balloon out of the back. Like it’s been inflated to get extra brains in, or something.”
Howard looks up with a whiff of disgust. Field archaeologists! They are like farm labourers. They like to believe in myths; they make up legends. It keeps them going. But then, what do expect after years digging in the same hole with nothing more than a teaspoon?
“Taken from a jungle tribe, right?” Howard says, passing the skull close to his face, so its odd shape fills his line of vision. “You know, I’ve seen the samples from some who still bind cords around the heads of babies to distort their growth. They are not unlike this.”
“But not the same,” Lewis whines.
Howard smiles. Far too long digging, he thinks.
“But this is alien, isn’t it?” Lewis persists as if he might will truth into the question.
The professor doesn’t take his eyes from the skull. His rite of inspection is like a religion. “You’ve had this dated?” he asks at last.
“Ten thousand years.”
“Who did it for you?”
“Kepler,” Lewis says, “it was him sent me here. He told me you were the best man to do the DNA.”
Howard lowers the skull.
“I’ll admit it’s not exactly like anything I’ve seen before. I’ll do some tests. Come tomorrow.”
* * *
Lieutenant Wilhemena Jones- Billy to her unsuspecting friends- eased out of her in-flight catsuit, wishing she could step into a real bath. Seven days of space dust and space sweat and all you got was a suction treatment to cleanse out the pores, administered in 3.7 minutes whilst sitting in a contraption like the inside of a vacuum cleaner dustbag. What she wanted was a real bath and maybe to sip a gin and tonic. So what if the water for a real bath would add ten times its weight to the launch vehicle. It would be worth it.
And why had she been sent into the black forest jungle of a foreign planet anyway? To kill someone. To clean out another Government mess, one of a never ending series made on foreign planets. Mining expeditions were a recurring disaster; they always ended up with one or two losers who didn’t want to come home. Of course, in the politically correct modern age, you couldn’t ask the regular mission soldiers to shoot anyone. No, you had to send a trained assassin, someone nobody one knew about; someone whose face didn’t appear on the News.
An electronic bleep called her treatment to a close. She extracted herself from the dustbag and put on her jungle uniform.
Kirst’s camp was four miles to the east of her landing site. She had to hike that distance on foot. She figured two hours, shoot the bastard, and make it back by nightfall, lift off into the sunset if she was lucky.
She’d known Michael Kirst at the Academy. He’d been its brightest star for a while. Now he’d flipped his lid under pressure.
But what pressure, for God’s sake? All he had to do was control a primitive civilisation. No unnecessary fraternisation seemed an easy enough rule. There was none of the rationing here, you didn’t need pills against the UV, you were away from a hundred problems back home. It should’ve been a doddle. Why couldn’t he get that one simple thing right?
She checked her weapon- a handle shaped to her palm, and a barrel the length of her index finger. Feather-light death! She clipped it into the holster dangling from her belt. Time to get moving.
* * *
Howard has a clipboard and a puzzled look on his face, as though he has written himself a riddle he can’t solve.
“Well?” Lewis prompts, “with all this lab equipment you must be getting somewhere.”
Howard is not offended. He’s proud of his lab and takes it as a compliment. “Just how closely did Kepler examine the skull?” he asks.
“He took a bone sample, that’s all. He said it was remarkably well preserved. I told him that’s because I found it in a peat bog.”
Howard smiles, turns around and picks up the skull, now sheathed in a clear plastic bag. “This is very interesting,” he says, “the inflation of the rear of this cranium is perfectly smooth. It does not appear to have been caused by cord binding or any other form of post natal distortion. In fact, you could say that all those other cord bound skulls were a pale imitation of this one.”
He takes the skull from its bag and offers it to Lewis. Then he hands him a magnifying glass.
“Look here,” he says, pointing.
“What am I looking for?”
“A hole.”
Lewis drops the magnifying glass away from his eye. “A hole?”
“Look!” Howard commands again, “1.2 centimetres above the right eyesocket, 3.2 from the geometric centre of the forehead. Not remarkable, except it’s less than 0.4mm in diameter and completely smooth sided.”
Lewis stares through the magnifying glass. “Jesus!” he says.
“There’s more,” says Howard. He leans over and twists the skull half a turn, so Lewis is now looking at the back of the inflated cranium. “Just here, there’s an identical hole, an exit wound I’d say- but on a microscopic scale.”
* * *
The day was hot and humid as hell, as if it was going to rain sometime soon. She found the village in a clearing between trees and undergrowth. She clocked the metal huts and the discarded mining equipment beyond the indigenous dwellings. The primitives gazed at her with suspicion, but none approached, maybe because she had the look of the visitors; she had their power.
She couldn’t find Kirst in the camp. His pre-fab hut contained two of the indigenous women and a small child. She waved at them, trying to communicate, but they just showed their teeth in what she supposed were smiles and pointed. She didn’t know if they were answering the right question, or even answering truthfully, but she figured they had no reason to lie; after all they couldn’t know why she was here.
There was a waterhole not far down the track and she found Kirst bathing in the water.
“Kirst,” she called out.
He looked up from his ablutions, standing naked to his belly in the water.
“Billy,” he shouted in surprise. He stopped himself. “I didn’t know it would be you. I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry for what?” She had her weapon pointed now, wanting to get it over while she was still calm.
“I knew they’d send someone. Did you draw the short straw?” He smiled.
She was thrown. Did he want to die?
“Why the hell don’t you protect yourself?” she shouted.
“You’d like me to run, perhaps? They’ll send an army if they have to, Billy. You know that. No one is allowed to break the contact rules.”
Her hands shook as she tried to hold the aim.
“Remember how we were at the Academy?” he said. “Weren’t you the one who thought the home world was doomed? It was the reason you joined the Space Force… to get away. Shitty air, too much politics. The water’s so full of hormones, you can’t raise a family except out of a test-tube, you said. Look around.”
“Do you wanna die?” she asked, her thoughts repeating aloud.
“No, I don’t want to die,” he said, “but there are places I don’t want to live…”
She pressed the trigger then. It wasn’t well aimed, but good enough. He fell back, painlessly and efficiently dead. She watched his body sink in the water, ripples chasing out to the edge and the trapped air bubbling to the surface.
She thought about going back for the child.
* * *
On the back wall of Howard’s office is a light box, the kind hospitals use for inspecting the flimsy films of x-rays. Howard hangs up two such films, showing his bar graphs of DNA analysis.
“You know what these are?” he says. Then he shakes a cigarette out of a battered packet, offers one to Lewis.
Lewis shakes his head.
Howard points at the first bar-graph. “This is old news. The Holman-Graves expedition of ‘49 brought back this sample.” He moves to the second. “This one was brought in from China by Qwan and his students last year. You notice anything?”
Lewis shrugs.
“See this area,” says Howard, circling a section at the end of the horizontal axis which is similar on both samples, “this is present in modern man, but it’s much smaller. See, it’s huge in these. These are dated six to eight thousand years ago.”
He lights his cigarette with a desk lighter and drags on it. He hangs up a third graph on the light box.
“Now,” he continues, “if I look back to the Barozzi skull. This was dug out of ice in the Sixties by Hugo Barozzi and dated as 12-14,000 years old. You see, in this, the area in question is entirely absent.”
Lewis shrugs again. The professor looks at his student, recognising the poor listener- he’d rather be digging with his teaspoons.
“So we have a mystery,” Howard tells him, “this unexplained DNA characteristic that appeared first in early homo-sapiens, but is now on the wane, almost as if it is being diluted out by time.” Howard looks up at the three graphs. He drags on the cigarette and gazes enraptured as if he sees art in the bars. “Of course, the samples are old. They could be contaminated… some other effect- that’s what many of my colleagues would say.”
“Did you test my sample yet?” Lewis asks impatiently.
Howard smiles. He takes down the Barozzi chart and clips in a new film. The bars on the far end of the horizontal axis are off the scale, just vertical lines going up till they run out of film.
“Shit!” exclaims Lewis.
Howard waits for it to sink in. “It’s difficult to believe this is not the source. I would say you have found the great grand-daddy of whatever is being diluted out.”
“But that means… that means.” Lewis stammers to a halt.
Howard finishes his cigarette in one last gasp and stubs it into the ashtray on the desk. “They can say that this is a flip-flop in nature, something that rose very quickly out of nowhere for no reason and is now falling away very slowly over the centuries. I prefer to think it is alien.”
* * *
Lieutenant Wilhemena Jones ran the water for a hot bath. It was always nice after a long mission, after the gruelling debriefs were over.
“One shot through the head,” she had told the debrief officer, “standard, no problems.”
She poured out a gin and tonic with extra gin and dropped in a slice of synthetic citrus fruit. The first heat of the bath as she stepped in was heaven, worth everything water cost in a time of rationing. She was going to savour it.
But as she lay back and the wet heat ran up over her aching muscles, she couldn’t help thinking about Kirst. She thought about his child. She wondered whether it was a boy or a girl. She was glad she had let it live.
