Origin (37 page)

L
YNN ENTERED THE
chamber in a flying leap, just as the lightning strikes solidified into one solid mass, enveloping the whole chamber in a ball of pure energy.

As the only living thing in the chamber, the energy converged on her falling body, pulsating around her like another living entity. And she found herself suspended in the air, the ball of intense lightning energy coagulating around her with the feeling of warm liquid. The light became even more intense, and she lost all sense of who and where she was, all sense of existence.

And then everything went black, and she felt nothing at all.

T
HE STRANGE GREEN
fire died away almost as soon as it had appeared, leaving Adams clinging to the handrail of the elevator, staring down at the charred, burned elevator shaft and the lumpen mass of Eldridge’s ravaged body below.

He gingerly touched the wall exposed below the elevator, and was surprised to find it cool. He felt around, and found everything was cool, as if it had never been burnt.

He slowly lowered himself through the elevator floor, using handholds on the shaft to climb down it.

At the bottom, he stared at Eldridge’s body. The flesh looked as if it had been steamed clean off the bones. He almost gagged at the smell.

With energy like that having burst through the entire level, what would have happened to Lynn? He almost didn’t want to go back but knew he had to.

Would the Anunnaki be there?

Adams swallowed hard, and pressed on. There was only one way to find out.

He reached the conference room to find the wall separating it from the control room and viewing gallery now just a shattered shell, and no sign of any activity in the chamber beyond. There were bodies everywhere, and most of the flesh had been seared from the bones. He pressed on to the huge windows. He stood at the ledge and peered into the cavern beyond, and it was immediately obvious that there was no ‘mother ship’, no Atlantis spacecraft carrying the genocidal Anunnaki.

But where was Lynn? He turned away from the cavern and looked at the dozens of ruined bodies.

He gritted his teeth and began to search.

A
N HOUR LATER,
he finished examining the bodies, convinced that Lynn was not among them. Where was she? Had she managed to escape somehow? He hoped so, with all his heart.

But what had happened here? The energy had obviously centred on the cavern – the walls bore the same burn markings as the rest of the ravaged underground level – and yet the wormhole had not opened.

Or had it?

He considered Lynn’s disappearance again, and looked back at the cavern with new eyes.

Lynn was alive, he knew it. He didn’t know where, but somewhere in the universe, she was alive.

And he would never rest until he found her.

L
YNN AWOKE, HER
hands instantly going to her belly. She had no way of knowing but it felt OK, and that would have to do for now.

But where was she? It was dark, and the ground was rough beneath her.

Was she still in the cavern? She looked up, and was greeted by the sight of stars. No, she was outside somewhere.

So what had happened? Her presence in the chamber had obviously altered the mechanics of the wormhole in some way, causing it to act in an unplanned manner.

She suddenly had the unpleasant thought that she might be anywhere in the universe, anywhere at all.

Her head snapped up to look at the stars again, and she was instantly reassured. She was still on earth, no question about it. In the northern hemisphere in fact, and she could make out the familiar sights of the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, and Venus, all in their familiar places in the sky. And behind her, when she turned, she saw the moon in all its glory, casting its light down upon her. Besides which, she realized that if she was indeed on another planet, it would be highly unlikely that she would be able to breathe the atmosphere.

She still didn’t know where she was, though, and so she started to walk, examining the landscape around her.

But soon she was tired, so very, very tired, and she felt the need to lie down. She found what she considered a safe place, in the lee of a large rock, put her jacket down as a makeshift pillow, and within seconds was asleep.

She awoke the next morning with the rays of the sun upon her.

She shook the cobwebs from her head, and then the sound hit her. It was strange, like nothing she had ever heard before; a curious rasping sound, like a lizard growling.

She looked around, and her eyes went wide as she saw the animals over the crest of the small hill in front of her. They were enormous furred creatures, and as she watched them stalk across the barren landscape, she was sure she had never seen anything like it. Or had she?

Lynn looked up at the sun, as if to reassure herself that she was still on earth.

She got to her feet and started to walk again. She walked and walked, and it seemed she was in a desert wilderness. She walked for hours, until she was exhausted, and still she had found no sign of life except for those first strange creatures. There was also no sign of human habitation.

She sat down and examined the desert landscape. The shrubs she could see looked like the familiar varieties but what did she know about desert shrubs? Not a lot. But those creatures bothered her, reminding her of something she had seen once before, in a textbook at school, or perhaps university. But a textbook on what?

When the answer finally hit her, it was with the force of a sledgehammer.

S
HE CONTINUED TO
move across the landscape over the next few days and eventually came to a river, flowing powerfully through the otherwise arid terrain. It was a true lifesaver, and she decided to stay close to it, scavenging what she could from the desert around her to eat, and drinking the wonderful, clean water from the river.

And then one day she saw them, at first in the distance – a group of half a dozen, making their way to the water. She hid behind a rock pile as she watched them, creatures of a type she recognized with horrifying certainty.

They walked erect on two legs, were about five and a half feet tall, with hair covering much of their muscular bodies. Their features were not dissimilar to her own and the people she knew but they were not
Homo sapiens
.

She watched them as they drank water and bathed for a leisurely hour, communicating in a mixture of grunts and whistles. And then, finally, they left the river and lumbered off back to wherever they had come from.

The recognition she experienced upon seeing them made her start to understand what had happened. To test her hypothesis, she spent the next few nights staring up at the stars, measuring the movements as best she could.

After several nights, she was sure; horrified, but sure.

The creatures she had seen by the river were featured heavily in many books she had read at Harvard on human evolution, and several that she had studied during her recent research.

They were members of the extinct hominid subspecies
Homo neanderthalensis
.

This realization confirmed her recognition of the massive furred creatures she had seen that first day as ground sloths, animals that were also long since extinct.

Her astronomy was better than her paleontology, and yet it had only served to confirm her fears.

The night sky was very similar through time, but over very large timeframes, there were subtle differences that could be observed, even with the naked eye. She knew that Neanderthal man had died out tens of thousands of years ago but this did not help to prepare her for the conclusions she drew from her astral observations, for the position of the stars in the sky were as they would have been about two
hundred
thousand years ago.

She had indeed been caught in the wormhole, but instead of bending the fabric of the cosmos in order to send the Anunnaki through space, it had instead sent her through time.

And as she considered what had happened, she couldn’t help but remember the words of Professor Travers.

‘Yes,’ he had said when asked about the Anunnaki, ‘and don’t ask me how they evolved, as they don’t even know themselves. One moment the earth had other
Homo
species, including
ergastor, heidelbergensis, rudolfensis, habilis, neanderthalensis
, among others, and the next we had
Homo sapiens sapiens
, fully formed not only physically but also mentally.’

And as she sat by the banks of the river, and once more touched Matthew Adams’ baby that grew inside her, Evelyn Edwards finally understood everything.