Rogue Powers (57 page)

So let me break that tradition here and now: This book, I am proud to say, was edited by Elizabeth Mitchell.

Thanks, Betsy.

RMA

August, 1985 Washington, D.C.

Here is an excerpt from Roger MacBride Allen's next novel,
THURSDAY'S CHILD,
coming in 1987 from Baen Books:

Dr. Jeffery Grossington, Associate Secretary for Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History and Man, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., was a man well suited to a position with such a long and ponderous title. He had the character traits a man engaged in the study of the long-dead past needed: slow, deliberate, careful thought processes; the patient willingness to sift through minute bits of evidence and fragile shards of bone for one tiny fragment of meaning; the capacity to build knowledge out of mystery; the imagination and vision to understand what the rare, tiny clues scrabbled out of the earth could tell of human ancestry. But of all his skills, virtues, and talents, Jeffery Grossington was certain that the greatest of them all was patience.

Students of other scientific disciplines might feel compelled to compete in a race against time, against constrained budgets, against colleagues who might be hot on the trail of the same discovery, but not Grossington. That sort of nonsense (he believed) didn't have any place in paleoanthropology (though many of his fellows would have disagreed). After all, the persons of interest to Grossington's studies had all died thousands or millions of years ago; their bones could wait a day or a year or a decade more before revealing their secrets. Rush made for errors; cautious deliberation and painstaking care were the hallmarks of his work. There was simply no
need
for a good paleoanthropologist to scurry manually toward conclusions.

Indeed, he strongly disapproved of rush, or commotion, or
any
sort of urgency—and suspected that most hurry was not only unneeded, but quite often detrimental. Outright frantic activity infuriated him.

Fortunately, he was also slow to anger, or else when Barbara burst that morning into his office there would have been hell to pay.

She all but bounded into the room, grinning ear to ear, and charged straight toward his desk. He should have immediately given her a good tongue-lashing, but she had the element of surprise working for her. No one in the history of Grossington's tenure had ever dreamed of barging into his office like that. Dr. Grossington opened his mouth to offer an infuriated rebuke, out he never got the chance. Before he could react to the intrusion, Barbara compounded her offense by scooping up his coffee tray and placed it none too carefully on a sidetable, sweeping all the papers from the center of his desk, and vanishing back out into the hall, only to return a moment later carrying, of all things, an old-fashioned wooden hatbox.

Suddenly moving with great care and deliberation, she set the box down most gently on the exact center of his desk blotter, and stepped back to stand in front of his desk, like a student waiting for the teacher to examine her science project.

"Dr. Marchando, what the devil is the—" But Dr. Jeffery Grossington stopped himself in mid-outburst and took a good hard look at Barbara. She was flushed, excited, and her dark brown face was alight, exhilarated. Her eyes gleamed, her hair was dishevelled, her makeup was blurred and smeared, her clothes, which she normally kept up so carefully, were wrinkled, mussed-up, and looked as if they had been slept in for a day or two. All of which was totally out of character for thee prim, careful Dr. Marchando.

"Well, open it, Dr. Grossington," she said. "Aren't you going to open it?
"
she asked breathlessly. "I've been travelling all last night and the whole day before— bus, train, plane, taxi—to get it to you.
Open
it!"

He looked at her curiously, and his big, callused, well-manicured hands moved involuntarily toward the cord that held the lid of the box. He hesitated, much unnerved, and looked hard at the hatbox, as if he feared it might contain a bomb. Then he looked to Barbara. He had a nasty feeling things in his world were about to turn upside down. "Barbara, what's
in
here?"

She grinned, almost wild-eyed, and leaned over the
desk, her whole face shining with enthusiasm. "The end, Jeffery. The end of so many searches.
That's
what in there. Maybe even the collapse of every existing theory of human evolution.
Open
it."

Grossington swallowed hard and undid the cord. He lifted the worn black-lacquer top off the octagonal box and set it aside. There was a layer of shredded bits of foam rubber hiding the contents proper, and Grossington removed the bits of padding carefully, one by one. Years of field work had made slow and careful work a matter of reflex action for him. He wanted to make sure there was no danger of his damaging whatever-it-was by moving too fast.

Gradually, as he dug it out from under the bits of padding, he could
see
what it was: a skull, a human skull, a fully intact cranium and mandible, all the
teeth
intact, every detail fully present and preserved.

And then he looked again, and saw more, and his eyes widened in shock: hominid, yes—but it was not human.

Grossington could feel his heart starting to pound, the sweat coming out on his forehead as he carefully, oh so carefully, removed the prize from the hatbox.

The prominent sagittal crest, the huge, fiat molars, the human-like canine teeth, the box-shaped dental arcade, the obvious positioning of the skull's balance point to allow for an erect, bipedal gait The prominent, exaggerated brow ridges—a dozen, a hundred things that spoke, even shouted, the impossible. This was an
Australopithecine,
a member of a hominid species that had died out a million years ago.

But this was no fossil!
This was
bone,
not the mineralized shadow of bone; none of the once-living material of this skull had leached away to be replaced by other matter. What he held in his hands was the actual, true, once-living matter, browned and leached and stained and weakened by time, but still formerly living bone—and of recent vintage. Not so long ago, these bones had been as alive as Grossington himself.

Grossington stared at the grinning skull, mesmerized, for a long time. Finally he spoke. “When and where?”
Dr. Marchando," he managed to say at last, very quietly. "How old is this, and where in heaven's name does it come from?"

"Sir, that skull—and the well-preserved
complete
skeleton found with it—were buried—deliberately, ritualistically buried—140 years ago. In Alabama, U.S.A."

Grossington sat there, stunned. "How? How could that possibly
be?”

"I don't know, sir, I honestly don't know. But I have a very strong hunch—and some evidence—that our friend here has some living relatives still around, if we knew where to look." For the first time, the excitement went out of Barbara's voice, to be replaced by something else, something mixed of awe, and fear, and wonder. She reached out and touched the face of the musty skull. "After finding this, I no longer think we're the only hominid species currently living on this planet."

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