|
THE DISCOVERY
From above, the day was perfect.
A sky of sapphire blue, a sea of sparkling turquoise. A scattering of marshmallow clouds
drifted across a vast expanse of azure.
The wind had died, and the ocean rose and fell gently against the shattered end of a lava
flow that extended from the sea to a vent nearly halfway up Kilauea on the island of
Hawaii.
The Big Island. Bigger by far than all the rest of the Hawaiian islands put together.
And growing bigger every year.
Today, though, even the earth seemed to have fallen in with the torpor of the air and
water. The fires burning deep within the island's core seemed to have settled to a slight
simmering, as if waiting for another time to push up through the rocky crust above and
send trails of glowing magma snaking down the mountain's flank to push farther into the
sea.
The kind of day for which the diving team had been waiting.
An hour after dawn, they were aboard the tug and barge that carried them out of Hilo Bay.
Now the barge was anchored two hundred yards off the end of the lava flow, held in place
by three anchors chained to heavy hawsers. The tug itself needed nothing more than a lunch
hook to hold its position, and the surface crew--with little to do until the divers in the
water signaled them--relaxed on deck, drinking beer and playing cards, as somnolent as the
weather itself.
Perhaps if the wind and the sea hadn't conspired against them, someone would have felt the
seismic blip and realized that the idyllic day's serenity was an illusion.
Beneath the thick tongue of lava that wound down from the distant vent, the pressure from
the hot core far below the crust of the earth had built, cracking apart a great slab of
rock.
It wasn't an explosive crack--nothing like the displacement that occurs when the locked
edges of continental plates suddenly break free and hundreds of miles of solid-seeming
earth jerk abruptly in opposite directions.
Nor was it the kind of crack in which, without warning, the floor of the sea heaves
upward, sending a great tidal wave thousands of miles in every direction, towering over
land, to drown whatever stands in its way.
This crack, occurring just below the surface, caused only the smallest of blips on the
seismographs that monitored the mountain's movements. If anyone on the island felt it at
all, it was to wonder a moment later if perhaps he had merely imagined it.
Beneath the lava flow, the fissure in the rock provided just enough room for a glowing
column of molten rock to begin its rise to the surface, heat and pressure widening its
path as it went, until at last the white-hot magma broke into the empty tunnel under the
broad strip of lava on the top, where years ago the still-molten interior of the flow had
simply drained out of the tube formed by its own fast-cooling surface.
Now, as the tug bobbed peacefully at the end of the flow, and the divers below worked in
blissful innocence, the liquid fire streamed downhill, both hidden and insulated by the
black rock above it.
Coming to the end of the tube, to the closed chamber where the last flow had finally been
frozen by the sea, the lava pooled, more and more of it pouring in every minute, its
weight building against the interior of the cliff's face, its heat relentlessly burning
away the wall of stone that kept the boiling magma from the sea.
One hundred feet below the surface, the two divers, a man and a woman, worked with intense
concentration to retrieve the object they had discovered a week ago.
Embedded in the layer of lava that covered the ocean floor, it was almost perfectly
spherical, its color so close to that of the lava itself that the divers, coming upon it
for the first time, almost missed it completely. Its shape was what had caught the woman's
eye--a curve caught in her peripheral vision.
She had paused to take a closer look, because it struck her as an interesting formation of
lava. Seconds after she bent to investigate it, her partner, sensing that she
was no longer in her customary position to his right, turned back to make certain she was
all right. Within less than a minute, he had become as interested in the sphere as she.
For nearly ten minutes they'd examined it. Though it was firmly anchored in the lava, they
could see that it was not quite part of it. A geode of some sort. After photographing it
and recording its exact position, they finished their dive, and later on that day reported
the find to their employer.
Now, they had returned to the site of their discovery. They had been underwater for nearly
an hour, carefully working a custom-made net around the sphere and fastening the net
itself to a hook suspended from the end of a large crane mounted in the center of the
barge's deck. The basket net, designed specifically for this purpose, resembled the
macrame seines that generations of Japanese fishermen had once secured around glass
floats, but it was woven from a plastic fiber stronger even than steel.
Having secured their net, and satisfied that the heavy mesh would not slip, the woman
activated a signaling device fastened to her weight belt.
On the tug, the crew set to work to lift the geode from the ocean floor.
One of the men, catching a whiff of sulfur in the air, wrinkled his nose, then decided it
was nothing more than the noxious odor the tug's bank of batteries sometimes threw off.
As they concentrated on operating the crane, none of the crew noticed the smoke that was
starting to drift through the first tiny rifts in the face of the cliff two hundred yards
away.
A hundred feet down, the two divers backed thirty feet away from the geode, then turned to
watch as the cable from the crane tightened. For a breath-held moment nothing moved. Then
the geode--nearly three feet across--abruptly came free from the lava, shooting upward a
few yards before dropping instantly back almost to the bottom, like a yo-yo on a
string. A momentary pause. Then it began a slow, steady vertical journey
toward the surface, while the two divers made their way back to the place where
it had lain.
The crane was just swinging the geode onto the deck of the barge when the face of the
cliff gave way. As a gout of brilliant yellow lava spewed out, exploding into millions of
fragments when it hit the surface of the sea a split second later, the crane operator
screamed a warning. Within seconds the hawsers had been cut, the anchors and their chains
abandoned, and the tug was running directly out to sea.
The water, dead calm only a few seconds before, churned around the tug, reacting to the
explosive force of the fast-growing gush of lava now pouring forth from the crumbling face
of the cliff.
"What about the divers?" someone yelled.
But even as he spoke, the terrified crewman knew the answer to his question.
The divers were just peering into the depression in which the geode had rested when they
felt the first subsonic vibration. In the instant that surprise became panic and they
reached for their belts to release their weights and make an emergency ascent, it was
already far too late.
A rift suddenly opened in the ocean floor, and as the boiling magma burst into the sea,
the water itself seemed to explode into a hellfire cauldron of sulfuric acid, boiling
water, and steam. A fusillade of shrapnel-size fragments of volcanic glass shot in every
direction. An instant after the divers had been killed by the steam, acid, and boiling
seawater, their bodies were shredded by the silicate fragments, which tore through them
like millions of white-hot scalpels.
Within seconds, nothing was left of them.
A mile out to sea, the crew of the tug gazed in awe at the spectacle behind them.
The shoreline had disappeared, lost in a dense fog of steam mixed with poisonous gases and
volcanic ash that hung like a curtain where only a few minutes ago the face of the cliff
had been. The sea, whipped by a building wind, was heaving, and overhead dark clouds
gathered as if the forces that had unleashed the fury of the mountain now had
summoned a storm.
Using binoculars, the crew scanned the water for any sign of the two divers, but even as
they searched, they knew they were bound to fail. They had barely escaped with their own
lives. As the storm built and the seas became great, heaving swells, the captain of the
tug turned back toward Hilo and the safety of the harbor.
On the barge, three men secured the geode to the deck, silently wondering if it had been
worth the lives it had cost to collect it.
PROLOGUE: LOS ANGELES
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
Everything was supposed to be getting better, not worse.
They'd promised him--everyone had promised him.
First the doctor: "If you take the pills, you'll feel better."
Then his coach: "Just try a little harder. No pain, no gain."
Even his mom: "Just take it one day at a time, and don't try to do everything at
once."
So he'd taken the pills, and tried harder, but also tried not to do too much. And for a
while last week things actually seemed to improve. Although smog had settled over the city
so heavily that most of his friends had cut out of school early and headed for the beach,
where an offshore wind might bring fresh air in from the ocean, he'd gone to all his
classes. After the last bell he'd stripped out of his clothes in the locker room and
donned his gym shorts before jogging out to the track to do the four warm-up laps that
always preceded the more serious work of the high hurdles.
The event that just might, with a little more work, make him a State Champion on his
eighteenth birthday.
One day last week, when he was alone on the field, the pills had at last seemed to kick
in. He'd been expecting to lose his wind halfway around the first lap, but even as he
rounded the final turn, he felt his body surging with energy, his lungs pumping air
easily, his heartbeat barely above normal. On the second and third laps he'd kicked his
pace up a notch, but still felt good--really good. So on the fourth lap he'd gone all out,
and it was like a few months ago, when he'd still felt great all the time. That day last
week, he felt greater than ever: his lungs had been sucking huge volumes of air, and his
whole body had responded. Instead of the slow burn of pain he usually felt toward the end
of the warm-up mile, his muscles had merely tingled pleasurably, his chest expanding and
contracting in an easy rhythm that synched perfectly with his steady heartbeat. His whole
body had been functioning in harmony. He'd even taken a couple of extra laps that day,
exulting in the strength of his body, euphoric that fi nally the pills and the exercise
were working. He'd set up the hurdles then, spacing them precisely, but setting them a
little higher than usual.
He'd soared over them one after the other, clearing the crossbars easily, feeling utterly
weightless as his body floated over one barricade after another.
When he'd started back to the locker room two hours after he began, he was barely out of
breath, his heart beating easily and his legs feeling as if he'd only been strolling for
half an hour instead of running and jumping full-out for two.
The next day it had all crashed in on him.
A quarter of the way around the first lap, he'd felt the familiar constrictions around his
lungs, and his heart began pounding as if he were in the last stretch of a 10K run. He
kept going, telling himself it was nothing more than a reaction from the day before, when
he'd worked far harder than he should have. But by the time he finished the first lap, he
knew it wasn't going to work. Swerving off the hard-packed earth of the track, he flopped
down onto the grass, rolling over to stare up into the blue of the sky, squinting against
the glare of the afternoon sun. What the hell was wrong? Yesterday he'd felt great! Today
he felt like an old man.
He'd refused to give in to the pain in his lungs, the pounding of his heart, the agony in
his legs. When his coach had come over to find ou t if he was all right, he'd tossed it
off, claiming he'd just gotten a cramp, then rubbing the muscles of his right calf as if
to prove the lie. The coach had bought it--or at least pretended to, which was just as
good--and he'd gotten up and gone back to the track.
He made it through the four laps, but by the last one he'd only been able to maintain a
pace that was little more than a fast walk.
The coach had told him to try harder or go home.
He'd tried harder, but in the end he'd gone home.
And each day since then it had grown worse.
Each day he'd struggled a little harder against the pain.
The day before yesterday, he'd gone to the doctor for the fourth time since New Year's,
and once again the doctor hadn't been able to find anything wrong. Once again he'd
answered all the questions: Yes, he was fine when he came back from Maui with his mom
after New Year's. No, his father hadn't been there; he'd gone to Grand Cayman with his new
wife and their baby. No, it didn't bother him that his dad hadn't gone to Maui with
them--in fact, he was glad his mom had dumped his dad, since his dad seemed to like
hitting both of them when he got drunk, which had been practically every night the last
couple of years before he finally left. No, he didn't hate his dad. He didn't like him
much, and was glad he was gone, but he didn't hate him.
What he hated was the way he felt.
The doctor had said maybe he should see a shrink, but he wasn't about to do that. Only
geeks and losers went to shrinks. Whatever was wrong, he'd get over it by himself. But
over the last two days the pain had become almost unbearable. He was having nightmares,
and waking up unable to breathe, and his whole body had started hurting all the time.
This afternoon, when he started feeling like maybe it might be better just to die if he
couldn't get away from the pain, he'd cut out after school and driven around for a while,
until a cop stopped him and gave him a ticket for having a broken muffler. So now what the
hell was he going to do? He couldn't afford to pay for the ticket, let alone get the damn
muffler on the car fixed. Besides, what was the big deal? It didn't make that much noise,
and hardly stank up the inside of the car at all. But his mom was going to give him hell
for the ticket anyway, and his dad would only launch into an endless lecture about how
much it costs to raise two families if he asked to borrow the money to fix the muffler.
What a mess!
Turning into the tree-lined block on which he'd lived all his life, he pressed the button
on the sun visor that would activate the garage door opener while he was still two houses
away, and turned into the driveway just as the door opened fully. Automatically starting
the game he played against himself every afternoon, he pressed the button again, trying to
gauge it so the descending garage door would just clear the back end of his car as he
pulled it inside.
Today he missed, and the car jolted sharply as the garage door glanced off the rear
bumper. So now there would be scrapes on the car and the garage door, as well as the
ticket and the bad muffler.
And he still hurt.
Maybe, instead of going into the house, he'd just sit here awhile.
Sit here and see what happened.
A feeling of warmth began to spread through him, washing away the pain he'd been enduring,
and suddenly everything began to seem better.
Maybe he'd finally found the answer to his problems.
Without his mother.
Without his coach.
Even without his doctor.
The boy closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and for the first time in weeks felt no pain.
For the woman, the day had been no better than it had been for her son, starting with an
early call from her ex-husband suggesting that they renegotiate his child support
payments. Translation: the bimbo he'd run off with wanted more money to spend on herself.
Well, she'd disabused him of that idea pretty quickly. At noon she'd discovered that an
associate who was a full year junior to her was going to get the part nership slot that
should have been hers. So now she was faced with a decision: Sit it out for another year,
or start job hunting? But she knew the answer to that one: she wasn't going to be made a
partner, ever, so she might as well start checking with the headhunters.
Then, when she'd decided things couldn't get any worse, the doctor called to recommend a
good psychiatrist for her son. Well, before she sent him off to a shrink, she'd have him
checked out by someone else. Except the HMO probably wouldn't pay for it, and the trip to
Maui at New Year's had strained the budget as far as it would go.
Still, she'd figure out something.
Turning into the driveway, she jabbed the remote on the visor, bringing the car to a
complete stop as she waited for the garage door to open.
It was the noise of the engine more than the fumes that poured out of the garage that told
her something was wrong. Slamming the gear lever into Park with one hand as she opened the
door with the other, she slid out of her car and ran into the garage.
She could see her son slumped inside his car, his legs up on the front passenger seat, his
back resting against the driver's door. His head was lolling on his chest.
Stifling a scream, she grabbed the driver's door handle.
Locked!
She ran around the car and tried the other door, then called her son's name.
Nothing!
Wait!
Had something moved inside the car?
She cupped her hands over her eyes and peered into its shadowy interior.
His chest was moving! He was still breathing!
Coughing as the fumes in the garage filled her lungs, she fumbled for the extra key that
hung from a nail under the workbench, shoved open the door to the kitchen and grabbed the
phone. "My son!" she cried as soon as the 911 operator answered. "Oh, God,
I need an ambulance!"
A carefully measured voice calmly asked for her address.
Her address!
Her mind was suddenly blank. "I can't--oh, God! It's--" Then it came back to her
and she blurted out a number. "On North Maple, between Dayton and Clifton. Oh, God,
hurry! He locked himself in the car in the garage and--"
"It's all right, ma'am," the calm voice broke in. "An aid car is already on
its way."
Dropping the phone on the counter, she raced back to the garage. She had to get the car
open--she had to! A hammer! There used to be a sledgehammer at the end of the workbench!
Squeezing between the front of her son's car and the wooden bench, she uttered a silent
prayer that her ex-husband hadn't simply helped himself to the big maul. He hadn't--it was
right where she remembered it. Grasping its handle with both hands, she hoisted it up,
then slammed its huge metal head into the passenger window of her son's car. The safety
glass shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, and the woman dropped the hammer to the
floor, snaked a hand through the broken window, and pulled the door open. Reaching across
her son's body, she switched the ignition off, and the loud rumble of the motor died away,
only to be instantly replaced by the wail of a fast-approaching siren. She grasped her
son's ankles and tried to pull him out of the car, but before she'd managed to haul him
even halfway through the door, two white-clad medic s were taking over, gently easing her
aside, pulling the boy out of the car and clamping an oxygen mask over his face. As he
stirred, her panic at last began to ease its grip.
"He's coming around," one of medics assured her as they carried him out of the
garage and put him on a stretcher. "Looks like he's going to make it okay."
Her son began struggling as the medics put him into the ambulance and started to close its
rear door.
"I want to come," the woman begged. "For God's sake! He's my son!"
The door to the ambulance reopened, and the woman scrambled inside. With the siren
wailing, the ambulance raced toward Cedars-Sinai Hospital, nearly twenty blocks away.
The ride seemed to take forever, and the woman watched helplessly as her son struggled
against the two medics, one of whom was trying to hold the boy still while the
other kept the oxygen mask pressed firmly over his nose and mouth. Clutching her son's
hand, the woman tried to soothe him, and finally his struggles eased. But just as the
ambulance pulled to a stop at the hospital's emergency entrance, she felt his hand
suddenly relax in hers. His whole body went limp on the stretcher.
She heard one of the medics curse softly.
Her body went numb, and when the doors were yanked open from the outside, she climbed out
of the ambulance slowly, as if she'd fallen into a trance.
The crew rushed her son into the emergency room, where a team of doctors waited to take
over for the medics.
She followed the stretcher into the hospital.
Silently, she watched the doctors work, but already knew what was coming.
And in the end, she heard the same words she'd heard first from her son's doctor, then
from the ambulance crew: "I don't understand--he should be doing fine!"
But her son--her sweet, handsome only son--wasn't doing fine.
Her son was dead.
NEW YORK CITY
"Whatcha tryin' ta do, Sundquist? Kill ya'self?"
A harsh laugh followed the mocking words, ricocheting off the bare concrete walls of the
high school gymnasium, echoing louder in Michael Sundquist's ears as it resonated. What
should he do? Abandon the bench presses he was doing and confront the jerk?
Not a good idea. The jerk, whose name was Slotzky--first name unknown, at least to
Michael--was about a foot taller than he, and outweighed him by maybe fifty pounds, all of
it solid muscle. Confronting Slotzky would be a good way to get his ass whipped, and
getting his ass whipped was definitely not high on Michael Sundquist's priority list this
morning.
Finishing the bench presses, however, was very high on the list, as were doing fifty
push-ups and fifty chin-ups, followed by as many laps around the track on the gym's
mezzanine as he could manage before the ten-minute bell sent him to the showers. If he
ignored Slotzky, avoided a fight, and kept his mind firmly on his work, he could easily
achieve his goal.
A varsity letter.
That was all he really wanted.
He would never be tall enough for basketball, or heavy enough for football. He suspected
it was way too late for him to take up baseball. That left track. And the thing he'd
always been best at was running. Even when his asthma had been so bad he could barely
breathe, he'd still been able to beat the rest of the kids in his class in short sprints.
In fact, it had been kind of a joke: don't bother trying to beat Sundquist off the block,
just keep trotting along behind him and sooner or later he'll run down like a broken
watch.
The joke had been all too true. Only a year ago he'd often found it impossible to run more
than a quarter of a mile. Though he invariably led at the beginning of races, he never
quite managed to win a fifty-yard dash, and in the hundred he always came in dead last.
But even when the asthma was at its worst, he never ever gave up. When his mother claimed
it was no big deal--that no one on either side of his family had ever been an athlete--it
only made Michael more determined. What did she know, anyway? It was a guy thing. The kind
of thing his father would have understood if his father were still alive.
Whenever Michael ran, battling for breath, forcing his body beyond its capacity,
determined to conquer the frightening condition that had held him in its power ever since
he'd been a little boy, he imagined his dad cheering him on. Though his father's face was
becoming cloudy, and sometimes he could barely remember that deep, booming voice, Michael
clung to his vision of his dad. And kept at it until finally, last year, he'd begun to
outgrow the asthma.
Finishing the bench presses, he dropped to the floor to do fifty quick push-ups--still
barely breathing hard--then started toward the high bar to begin his chin-ups, glancing as
he passed at his reflection in the wire-mesh window that separated the gym from the
coaching room. Yes, his chest was dee pening--he could see it.
Every day, bench press by bench press, push-up by push-up, lap by lap, his work was paying
off.
The other guys weren't laughing at him anymore, except for Slotzky. And even Slotzky would
stop tormenting him if he could actually make the varsity track team.
And not as a sprinter, either.
No, Michael had set his sights on a higher goal--long-distance running, where endurance
counted every bit as much as speed, if not more.
He finished the last of the chin-ups and checked his respiration again. He was breathing a
little harder than at the start of the hour, but he wasn't anywhere near panting, no sign
of the onset of those terrible attacks that used to grip him in clammy, gasping terror. He
loped over to the metal stairs leading up to the track that was suspended from the walls
twelve feet up, just below the rafters and well above the basketball hoops. Taking the
stairs two at a time, he glanced at the clock on the far wall.
Twenty minutes left. He could run a couple of miles before heading for the showers.
He broke into an easy jog, pacing himself carefully so he wouldn't have to break his
stride as he approached the sharp turns at each of the gym's four corners. There was no
one else on the track; the rest of the class was on the floor below, some of them playing
a game of basketball, a few lifting weights, but most of them just sprawled out on the
floor, waiting for the hour to end.
"Hey, Sundquist," Slotzky yelled, an ugly grin splitting his lips. "Ain't
ya afraid ya might pass out up there?" As Slotzky's friends laughed obediently,
Michael, stopped by Slotzky's shout, spontaneously raised the middle finger of his left
hand.
Big mistake.
Slotzky's grin disappeared. He rose from the floor and started up the stairs, three of his
friends following him. As he searched for an escape route, Michael wondered what misguided
impulse had led him to do something so stupid.
He also wondered if there were any truth to the rumor that Slotzky had once thrown someone
off the roof of a building.
As Slotzky and one of his friends approached him from one direction, the others circled
around the opposite way, catching him in a heavy-duty pincers.
"Whatcha gonna do, chickenshit?" Slotzky taunted as he advanced on Michael,
closing the distance between them.
Michael glanced at Slotzky, then at the bully's friend. There was only one way out.
Dropping down onto his stomach, he swung his legs out over the edge of the track, then
lowered himself until he was hanging by his fingers. Slotzky was running toward him now,
and though the bigger boy was still thirty feet away, Michael could already feel the soles
of Slotsky's Nikes grinding down on his fingertips. Without so much as glancing down at
the floor below, he released his grip and let himself drop, falling into a rolling tumble
the moment his feet touched the hardwood planks.
A twinge of pain shot through his shoulder, but he ignored it, scrambling to his feet and
looking up to see what his pursuers would do.
Slotzky leaned over the rail, glowering at him. Then, with a skill perfected by years of
practice, he spat on Michael. "See ya after school," he said.
Wiping Slotzky's slimy glob from his face, Michael backed away a few paces, then turned
and trotted off toward the showers.
He wondered if Slotzky would be carrying a knife or a gun after school today.
Or both.
Katharine Sundquist knew she should be concentrating on the work at hand. Before her, on
the desk in her office in the Natural History Museum, was a fragment of a hominid jaw that
had arrived from a dig in Africa a week ago. Not that there was much work to be done: she
had tentatively identified the specimen as Australopithecus afarensis the moment she'd
seen it, and her subsequent examination failed to suggest that it might be anything else.
It had been discovered in an area where Australopithecus afarensis was, if not common,
certainly not unheard of, and excavated at a depth that, barring something unusual turning
up in the carbon dating of the site, generally corresponded to the level where
that particular precursor of Homo sapiens might be found. The problem was, she kept
getting distracted by a series of photographs that had arrived the day after the
australopithecine jaw.
There were half a dozen pictures, along with a letter describing the site more fully. The
name on the letterhead--Rob Silver--had caught Katharine's attention immediately, for
though she'd seen Silver only a few times in the twenty-odd years since they'd been in
graduate school together, she still had a clear mental image of him: tall, muscular, with
an unruly mop of light brown hair and blue eyes that had--at least for a while--never
failed to set her heart beating faster every time she saw him. The romance, though, had
quickly faded when his interest in Polynesian culture and hers in early man had sent them
in opposite directions, putting not only a scientific gulf between them, but an entire
planet as well. Within four years she'd met and married Tom Sundquist and given birth to
Michael.
When Michael was six, Tom Sundquist had died.
Died in Africa, on a perfect summer morning, a decade ago. But the image of it was as
clear in her mind now as if it had happened only yesterday. Tom was leaving for Nairobi to
catch a flight to Amsterdam, where he was scheduled to read a paper on the dig they'd been
developing together for the past five years. She and Michael were staying on at the dig,
where Katharine would supervise the work in Tom's absence while Michael happily played
with the African children with whom he'd made fast friends. She and Michael had stood
together, hand in hand, as Tom's single-engine Cessna accelerated down the dirt landing
strip and rose into the morning sky. As always, the pilot swung around to pass over them
one final time, but that morning he'd decided to show off.
As Katharine and Michael watched--she with growing apprehension, he with growing
excitement--the pilot put the little plane through a series of twists and loops, then sent
it straight up until it went into a stall, flipped over, and plunged toward the earth in
an accelerating nose dive.
Katharine had seen it before--it was one of the pilot's favorite stunts--and it always
terrified her. At the last second the pilot would pull out of the dive, waggle his wings,
and head off toward Nairobi, flying low enough to send the herds of animals below him into
panicked stampedes.
But that morning, as she and Michael watched, the plane smashed nose first into the
ground, instantly exploding into a ball of fire.
She and Michael had left the dig that day and never returned.
Within a year Michael's asthma attacks began, triggered, Katharine was convinced, by what
he'd seen on the morning his father died. In the years since Tom's death, Katharine had
concentrated on only two things: her son's health and her work. For most of that time, it
had been enough. But lately, especially the past few months, when Michael seemed finally
to have freed himself from the crippling attacks, she'd been wondering if she wasn't
turning into just another of the fossils she spent so much of her time studying.
And then, last week, the letter from Rob Silver arrived, along with the photographs. The
site, he explained, was on the flank of Haleakala, on Maui. For the last five years he'd
been working in Hawaii, studying the evolution of Polynesian architecture as it moved from
the South Pacific into the Hawaiian Islands. But the site in the photographs, he wrote,
bore no resemblance to anything he'd ever seen in Hawaii. He had money in his budget for a
consultant, and wanted to know if Katharine would be interested.
She kept returning to the pictures, peering at the images of the site that had been
discovered beneath a thick layer of vegetation.
She'd gone through the museum's library, comparing the photographs to every other image
she could find of early Hawaiian ruins.
There was no comparison.
Yet the only way she could truly analyze the site would be to see it.
Now, once again putting aside the drab grayish fossil, and the photos of the equally drab
grayish site from which it had been excavated, she again picked up the pictures of the
site on Maui.
Though the site itself appeared to be little more than a collection of rough stones, it
was surrounded by a lush forest of towering trees and flowering shrubs and vines, and
while in some of the pictures the turquoise-blue of the Pacific Ocean could be seen in the
distance, in others there were glimpses of a waterfall tumbling into a crystal-clear pool,
a setting so beautiful it could have come straight from a Hollywood set designer's vision
of Eden.
Had Rob deliberately given her those seductive glimpses of the paradise surrounding his
site?
And why was she even daydreaming about tropical flowers and trade winds? It was the site
that counted!
But as she glanced around the windowless cubicle in the dismal cave that was her office,
and remembered just how miserable the weather outside was, she knew exactly why she was as
tantalized by the lush surroundings of Rob Silver's site as she was by the discovery he
had made.
She picked up the letter once more.
Thirty thousand dollars.
Rob Silver was offering her thirty thousand dollars to spend three months working with him
on Maui.
Plus expenses.
She remembered the tense meeting she'd had with the museum's director last week. Her
budget alone was about to be slashed by thirty percent.
The grant from the National Science Foundation--the grant she'd been counting on to fund
fieldwork this summer--was "approved but not funded."
So there, but for the offer on her desk, was the future: no fieldwork and a budget that
was all but nonexistent.
The major problem was that Rob Silver needed her by the first of the month, which was as
long as he could hold up his dig. That would meantaking Michael out of school--and away
from the track team he'd becomeso enamored of lately--which she suspected he wouldn't like
at all. Well, maybe when she told him where they were going, his objections might
evaporate.
She picked up the phone and called the director. "I may want to take a leave of
absence," she said. "Three months." She hesitated, then spoke again.
"Without pay, of course." As she hung up the phone five minutes later, she
wondered if Michael would be as easily convinced as the director had been.
When she got home that afternoon, though, and saw the cut on his arm and the ugly
yellowish purple bruise that surrounded her son's painfully swollen left eye, Katharine
knew that the decision was made. Three months away from New York was just what both of
them needed.
Excerpted from THE PRESENCE © Copyright 2002 by John Saul. Reprinted with permission by Fawcett Books. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
|
