“Well, it would indeed have expanded, just like regular water,” said Naylor. He frowned. “Yes, that would have burst the sphere. But heavy water freezes at 3.82 Celsius. It just couldn’t possibly get that cold that far down.”
Louise Benoit joined the conversation. “What if more than just the man entered the sphere? How much material would have to be added before it would burst?”
Naylor thought for a moment. “I’m not sure; it was never specced for that. We always knew exactly how much heavy water AECL was going to loan us.” He paused. “Maybe … I don’t know, maybe 10 percent. A hundred cubic meters, or so.”
“Which is what?” asked Louise. She looked around the conference room. “This room’s about six meters on a side, isn’t it?”
“Twenty feet?” said Naylor. “Yeah, I guess.”
“And it’s got ten-foot ceilings—that’s three meters,” continued Louise. “So you’re talking about a volume of material as big as the contents of this room.”
“More or less, I suppose.”
“That’s ridiculous, Louise,” said Bonnie Jean. “All you found down there was one man.”
Louise nodded, conceding that, but then she lifted her arched eyebrows. “What about air? What if a hundred cubic meters of air were pumped into the sphere?”
Naylor nodded. “I’d thought about that. I thought maybe a belch of gas had somehow welled up into the sphere, although how it would get inside I have no idea. The water samples we took were somewhat aerated, but …”
“But what?” asked Louise,
“Well, they were indeed aerated, with nitrogen, oxygen, and some CO2, as well as some gabbroic rock dust and pollen. In other words, just regular mine air.”
“Then it couldn’t have come from the SNO facility,” said Bonnie Jean.
“That’s right, ma’am,” said Naylor. “That air is all filtered; it’s free of rock dust and other pollutants.”
“But the only parts of the mine connecting to the detector chamber are in the SNO facility,” said Louise.
Naylor and Shawwanossoway both nodded.
“Okay, okay,” said Bonnie Jean, steepling her fingers in front of her. “What have we got? The volume of material inside the sphere was increased by, at a guess, 10 percent or more. That might have been caused by an infusion of a hundred cubic meters or more of unfiltered air—although unless the air was pumped in very rapidly, it would have been compressed by the weight of the water, no? And, in any event, we don’t know where the air came from—it certainly wasn’t from SNO—or how it was conveyed into the sphere, right?”
“That’s about the size of it, ma’am,” said Shawwanossoway.
“And this man—we don’t know how he got into the sphere, either?” asked Bonnie Jean.
“No,” said Louise. “The access hatch between the inner heavy-water sphere and the outer regular-water containment tank was sealed tight even after the sphere broke apart.”
“All right,” said Bonnie Jean, “do we know how this—this Neanderthal, they’re calling him—even got down into the mine?”
Shawwanossoway was the only one present who actually worked for Inco. He spread his arms. “The mine-security people have reviewed the security-camera tapes and access logs for the forty-eight hours prior to the incident,” he said. “Caprini—that’s our head of security—swears that heads will roll when he finds out who screwed up by letting that guy in, and he says even worse will happen when he finds out who’s been trying to hide it.”
“What if no one is lying?” said Louise.
“That’s just not possible, Miss Benoit,” said Shawwanossoway. “No one could get down to SNO without it being recorded.”
“No one could if he came down by the elevator,” said Louise. “But what if he didn’t come that way?”
“You think maybe he climbed down two kilometers of vertical air shafts?” said Shawwanossoway, scowling. “Even if he could do that—and it would take nerves of steel-security cameras still would have recorded him.”
“That’s my point,” said Louise. “He obviously didn’t go down into the mine. As Professor Mah said, they’re calling him a Neanderthal—but he’s a Neanderthal with some sort of high-tech implant on his wrist; I saw that with my own eyes.”
“So?” said Bonnie Jean.
“Please!” exclaimed Louise. “You all must be thinking the same things I’m thinking. He didn’t take the elevator. He didn’t go down the ventilation shafts. He materialized inside the sphere—him, and a roomful of air.”
Naylor whistled the opening notes of the original Star Trek theme.
Everyone laughed.
“Come on,” said Bonnie Jean. “Yes, this is a crazy situation, and it might be tempting to jump to crazy conclusions, but let’s stay down to earth.”
Shawwanossoway could whistle, too. He did the theme to The Twilight Zone.
“Stop that!” snapped Bonnie Jean.
Chapter 15
Mary Vaughan was the only passenger on the Inco Learjet flying from Toronto to Sudbury; she’d noted on boarding that the plane, painted with dark green sides, was labeled “The Nickel Pickle” on its bow.
Mary used the brief flight time to review research notes on her notebook computer; it had been years since she’d published her study of Neanderthal DNA in Science. As she read through her notes, she twirled the gold chain that held the small, plain cross she always wore around her neck.
In 1994, Mary had made a name for herself recovering genetic material from a 30,000-year-old bear found frozen in Yukon permafrost. And so, two years later, when the Rheinisches Amt fur Bodendenkmalpflege–the agency responsible for archeology in the Rhineland—decided it was time to see whether any DNA could be extracted from the most famous fossil of all, the original Neanderthal man, they called on Mary. She’d been dubious: that specimen was desiccated, having never been frozen, and—opinions varied—it might be as old as 100,000 years, three times the age of the bear. Still, the challenge was irresistible. In June 1996, she’d flown to Bonn, then headed to the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, where the specimen was housed.
The best-known part—the browridged skullcap—was on public display, but the rest of the bones were kept in a steel box, within a steel cabinet, inside a room-sized steel vault. Mary was led into the safe by a German bone preparator named Hans. They wore protective plastic suits and surgeons’ masks; every precaution had to be taken against contaminating the bones with their own modern DNA. Yes, the original discoverers had doubtless contaminated the bones—but after a century and a half, their unprotected DNA on the surface should have degraded completely.
Mary could only take a very small piece of bone; the priests at Turin guarded their shroud with equal jealousy. Still, it was extraordinarily difficult for both her and Hans—like desecrating a great work of art. Mary found herself wiping away tears as Hans used a goldsmith’s saw to cut a semicircular chunk, just a centimeter wide and weighing only three grams, from the right humerus, the best preserved of all the bones.
Fortunately, the hard calcium carbonate in the outer layers of the bone should have afforded some protection for any of the original DNA within. Mary took the specimen back to her lab in Toronto and drilled tiny pieces out of it.
It took five months of painstaking work to extract a 379-nucleotide snippet from the control region of the Neanderthal’s mitochondrial DNA. Mary used the polymerase chain reaction to reproduce millions of copies of the recovered DNA, and she carefully sequenced it. She then checked the corresponding bit of mitochondrial DNA in 1,600 modern humans: Native Canadians, Polynesians, Australians, Africans, Asians, and Europeans. Every one of those 1,600 people had at least 371 nucleotides out of those 379 the same; the maximum deviation was just eight nucleotides.
But the Neanderthal DNA had an average of only 352 nucleotides in common with the modern specimens; it deviated by a whopping twenty-seven bases. Mary concluded that her kind of human and Neanderthals must have diverged from each other between 550,000 and 690,000 years ago for their DNA to be so different. In contrast, all modern humans probably shared a common ancestor 150,000 or 200,000 years in the past. Although the half-million-year-plus date for the Neanderthal/modern divergence was much more recent than the split between genus Homo and its closest relatives, the chimps and bonobos, which occurred five to eight million years ago, it was still far enough back that Mary felt Neanderthals were probably a fully separate species from modern humans, not just a subspecies: Homo neanderthalensis, not Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.