A Bone From a Dry Sea

NOW: SUNDAY EVENING

DR JOE HAMISKA was tall and scrawny, with a dark red-brown beard flecked with grey. He dressed a bit like someone in an old film about African explorers, with leather walking boots and baggy shorts and a white cotton shirt open at the neck to show a few grey hairs on his tanned chest.

He said, ‘Hi, there,’ to Vinny and smiled, but before Dad could introduce her to anyone else he said, ‘We’ve got problems, Sam. The Craig people have switched their dates. They’re coming Thursday.’

‘I don’t see it makes much difference,’ said Dad.

‘Oh but it does, Sam, it does. Come and look at this.’

He took Dad over to a trestle table under an awning and gave him a sheet of paper but kept on talking so that he couldn’t read it. From what Dad had said in the truck, Vinny guessed that this was to show her and everyone else that working for Dr Hamiska was much more important than having your daughter visit you.

She didn’t mind. She was floating in a pool of happiness because she was here at last. She’d made it, against all the odds, since that Christmas twenty months ago. Tom had just learnt to read so Mum had sent him to get the presents from the Christmas tree and sort them into piles in the living-room while the rest of them cleared up breakfast. They’d come in and found that he’d put four piles together by the sofa and one, Vinny’s, separately by the armchair. Of course he hadn’t meant anything, not consciously, but there’d been a meaning all the same, obvious as a jeer. Colin had laughed and muddled the piles up and told everyone to find their own and made a fuss of Vinny, but while she was picking the Sellotape off her first present and folding the paper away before looking to see what Gran had sent her, she was thinking I want my own dad. After lunch she’d written a long thank-you letter for his cheque, not asking for anything, not complaining, but with questions in it which he’d have to answer. So her campaign had started, and now here she was.

She looked around. Only twenty minutes before it had been daylight and they’d been driving through barren, hummocky ground which Dad had called badlands. Then they’d climbed to the camp among a few sparse trees on the first slope of hills, and already it was almost dark. The plain below had changed colour as she’d watched, from brown and grey and orange to nearly black. She felt she was seeing the shadow of the world rise up as the sun set behind her and the eastern stars emerged. The air was still, and thick, and hot.

The camp was huts, tents and larger awnings. Butane lamps had been lit. Close by Vinny a woman working at a trestle table pushed her spectacles on to her forehead with a weary gesture and looked up.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘You’re Vinny. I’m May Anna. I guess you’re tired after the trip.’

‘Dad made me a nest in the back of the truck after lunch and I slept till we were almost here. Can I see what you’re doing?’

May Anna was about thirty-five, Vinny guessed, obviously American, thin, with lanky pale hair in a pony-tail. She wore a T-shirt and denim shorts. The lenses of her spectacles were the size of saucers.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘You like jigsaws?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Have a go at this one.’

On the table were what looked like flakes of stone arranged in rows on two trays. Most of them were smaller than a penny. Between the trays was a rounded blob of Plasticine, on to which a few flakes had been fitted together to form two irregular patches, each about half the size of Vinny’s palm.

‘Is it someone’s skull?’ she said.

‘Correct. A fellow called Homo habilis, maybe. Maybe not. Looks like we’ve got about half a cranium, if we can fit it together. This bit here.’

May Anna ran her fingers spider-like over the back of her head.

‘How old is it?’ said Vinny.

‘If he’s habilis, could be two million, two-and-a-half million years.’

‘Wow!’

From the books Dad had told her to read, Vinny knew that habilis meant something that had been about half-way human, a bit like an upright-walking baboon with a much bigger brain. There’d been other somethings with other names, and no-one agreed which of them had really been the ancestor of modern humans. No-one seemed to agree about anything, much. They’d find a bit of jaw or a kneebone and say it was really important and different from what anyone else had found and proved all the others were wrong and there’d be a colossal row until someone found something else. Then they’d all gang up against the newcomer.

‘I’m used to it,’ said May Anna. ‘But I still wake up nights and think about all those years and my skin crawls. Know what I mean?’

Vinny peered at the flakes of fossil each in its numbered square. The empty squares showed where the ones which May Anna had fitted into place came from.

‘It’s worse than a jigsaw,’ she said. ‘You haven’t got a picture.’

‘We have, though,’ said May Anna. ‘Look.’

She held one of the larger chips slantwise to the lamplight.

‘See those wrinkles?’ she said. ‘Know what they are? They’re the pattern on the surface of the brain beneath.’

‘I can’t see anything . . . Oh, yes . . . No . . .’

May Anna picked up another flake and held it against the first, edge on.

‘Your eyes have to learn to see, know what I mean?’ she said. ‘But look here – they just don’t belong. They don’t . . . Hey! Look at this! They do!’

Laughing, she turned one chip through ninety degrees and put the two edges together. They fitted as if they’d only just been snapped apart. They overlapped, leaving a triangular space each side of the join. May Anna, still crowing, turned them over and pressed them on to the Plasticine mould, tilting her head this way and that to study them.

‘Some days you don’t get a single darned fit,’ she said. ‘Now a pointy bit – I’ve seen it, I know I’ve seen it. There . . . And look! Hey! Sam! Come see what we’ve got here!’

She’d called to Dad but it was Dr Hamiska who’d reached the table first. Then everyone was crowding round to watch her fit the three new pieces against one of the existing patches, and then chip by chip ease the other patch loose and join it on with the new pieces bridging the gap. Everyone started talking together.

‘I guess I’ve got it wrongly oriented,’ said May Anna, twisting her hand above the surface to show which way she thought the skull now went.

‘It’s too small,’ said someone. ‘It can’t be habilis.’

‘Who said it was?’ said someone else.

‘It’s certainly too small,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘A good two hundred cc too small, I think. You’re going to have to take that out of your base-mould, May Anna.’

‘I was just quitting and I picked out a couple of pieces to show Vinny, and what do you know? They fitted. I wasn’t even trying.’

‘Then you’ve brought us luck, Vinny,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘You must keep it up.’

‘If it’s smaller than habilis then it’s older than habilis,’ said someone.

‘Exactly,’ said Dr Hamiska. ‘A million years at least. Two million. And look here . . .’

He ran a stubby forefinger over the surface of the patch, following some kind of line Vinny couldn’t see.

‘We must have something a layman can understand,’ he said. ‘And by Thursday.’

It wasn’t just a wish or a hope, it was an order. An order to the universe. He was peering and poking among the fragments as if he could will them into showing him how they fitted. Dad’s letters had made him sound a tiresome old buffer, but now, meeting him, Vinny found him more alarming than irritating. His personality was like some kind of SF force-field which he could beam out of himself when he wanted, and if you came within range it made you his slave. The fossils, though, were immune to the force-field and gave up none of their secrets, so after a minute he switched it off, straightened and smiled.

‘Well done, Vinny. I can see you’re going to be useful.’

‘I didn’t do anything.’

‘You brought us luck. I take luck very seriously. I’m sorry I couldn’t let Sam go with you on safari, but he’s the best there is and I can’t do without him.’

‘I’d much rather come here. This is really interesting.’

‘We’ll make a palaeontologist of you yet. Well, thanks, Sam. And well done, May Anna – that’s going to be a great help with the Craig people. If only we could get a line on the dating – let’s have another look at your pig-data, Fred . . .’

He rushed off to one of the awnings. A thin man did a Woody Allen shrug and followed him. The others hung around studying the jigsaw and searching the trays for further fits until May Anna shooed them away before they could muddle her arrangements. Dad stayed. He was the only one who hadn’t joined in the chatter round the skull.

‘What do you think, Sam?’ said May Anna.

‘I think maybe. Just don’t let him rush you or you’ll be forcing the evidence. It’s quite unnecessary, this hoo-ha about Thursday.’

‘You don’t have to raise the money, Sam. More important right now, I could do with a drink.’

‘So could I. What about you, Vinny. Coke?’

‘Anything.’

He left and May Anna packed up, covering the trays with weighted plastic sheets and putting an upturned bucket over the precious skull.

‘Who are the Craig people?’ said Vinny.

‘Well now, there was this kid from Colorado called Oscar Craig who used to go wandering up into the hills looking for dinosaur fossils. This would be around eighteen-ninety-something, I guess. Then his dad ran out on the family and his ma moved to Denver where he went to college. He was a bright kid, learned chemistry, was hired by a company, developed a depilatory, from that moved into cosmetics and before he was forty he was running his own business. By the time he died he was one of the richest men in America. He’d married but there were no kids. What he’d done with his money was collect art – Impressionists and older stuff – but I guess that was because it was kind of expected of him, you know? What he really liked was still fossils. He spent a lot of money trying to prove that people came to America long before the textbooks said they did. When he died he set up the Craig Museum back in Denver, mainly for his art-collection, but he put it into his will that it’s got to have a palaeontology department too. When Joe was trying to raise funds to get us out here, the Craig people were the only ones he could get interested. Nobody in the field takes them that seriously, you see, but Joe told them he’d really put them on the map, bring them back fossils of Adam and Eve almost, so that all the other fossil-freaks would have to sit up and take notice. Now the people from Craig are coming out to see what he’s got for their money, and all he’ll have to show them is this little fellow here.’

She tapped the upturned bucket and laughed. Dad came back with the drinks, passed one casually to May Anna and gave Vinny hers a bit more formally. He hadn’t asked May Anna what sort she wanted, either. And earlier he’d twice started to tell Vinny about something or someone special on this expedition, and then stopped himself and said she’d see. She didn’t say anything now, but sipped her Coke. It was just what she wanted.

‘How did you get it cold?’ she said. ‘Have you got a fridge?’

‘Any fool can be uncomfortable in camp,’ said Dad.

‘And any camp with Sam in it is as good as a Hilton,’ said May Anna. ‘It’s a big deal when we run out of canned crabmeat. He’s down in the books as our taphonomist, but that’s just an excuse. We have him to run the camp.’

‘Too true to be funny,’ said Dad. ‘Let’s go and unpack your stuff and I’ll show you the layout. Then it should be supper time.’

Supper was beef curry and rice with fresh vegetables and fruit which Dad had bought at a market near the airport last evening. They ate at trestle tables. Dr Hamiska made a fuss of introducing Vinny all round, too many names to remember. Vinny sat with Dad and May Anna and Fred, Dr Wessler, the one who knew about pigs. The talk was all about the skull, and how much Plasticine May Anna ought to take out to give it the right-sized brain. Vinny couldn’t understand the detail but she could hear their excitement, though Dad was trying to be cautious and Dr Wessler kept telling May Anna – only half as a joke and half, Vinny guessed, because he was the kind of person who actually gets a kick out of things going wrong – that she’d got bits of baboon-skull muddled up with her hominid fragments. Vinny was dropping with sleep by the time the meal ended, but she couldn’t go to bed because Dad had said she mustn’t go to the loos alone in the dark, in case of leopards or something.

At last May Anna said, ‘Looks like you’d better take Vinny to bed, Sam,’ and he remembered he’d got a daughter.

On their way back from the loos he said, ‘I’m sure I needn’t tell you, but just in case. What I was saying about Joe, in the truck after lunch – you won’t say anything about that to anyone, will you?’

‘No, of course not . . . What about May Anna?’

‘Oh, she’s all right.’

‘I think she’s lovely.’

‘I’m glad you like her.’