Joe was first from the copter, giving Mina a hand, followed by Kylie, looking around her rather nervously, with Larry, who had piloted them, last. Bernard Clift was standing there, waiting to greet them.
‘There’s an atmosphere of something here,’ Kylie told him, as they were introduced. ‘You must feel it, Bernie. I can’t explain it. I don’t like it. Oppressive.’
Clift laughed shortly. ‘That’s the Bodenland family, Kylie. You have to get accustomed to them. Now listen, Joe, I’m grateful for your prompt arrival, although frankly I didn’t expect you all to show up. We can find a place for you to sleep.’ He ran a hand through his hair in a self-conscious gesture. ‘This discovery is so important – and top secret. I have shut down our one phone line to Enterprise. The students are forbidden to leave the site, at least without my express permission. No radioing or any form of communication with the outside world. I’ve made them all swear to keep secrecy on this one, until I’m ready.’
‘As a matter of interest, Bernie,’ Bodenland said, ‘how did you get them to swear?’
He laughed. ‘On their mother’s virginity. On whatever they took seriously. Even the Bible.’
‘I’d have thought that custom had worn thin by now,’ Joe said.
‘Not with all of us, Joe,’ said Kylie, laughing.
Clift looked at her approvingly, then said, ‘Well, come and see before the light fades. That’s what you’re here for.’
He spoke jerkily, full of nervous energy.
As they followed him along a narrow track among low sage winding up the mountain, he said, ‘Joe, you’re a rational man and a knowledgeable one, I figured you’d know what to make of this find. If it’s what I think it is, our whole world view is overturned. Humans on the planet sixty million years earlier than any possible previous evidence suggested. A species of man here in North America, long before anything started crawling round Olduvai Gorge …’
‘Couldn’t be a visitor from somewhere else in the universe? There’s just the one grave?’
‘That’s why I’m insisting on secrecy. My findings are bound to be challenged. I’m in for the Spanish Inquisition and I know it. But if we could find a second grave … So I don’t want anyone interfering – at least for a few days.’
Bodenland grunted. ‘Our organization has its own security unit in Dallas … I could get guards out here tomorrow prompt, if you need them. But you must be wrong, Bernie. This can’t be.’
‘No, it’s like the comic strips always said,’ Larry remarked, with a laugh. ‘Cavemen contemporary with the brontosaurus and tyrannosaurus. Must have been some kind of a race memory.’
Ignoring her son’s facetiousness, Mina said, ‘Bernard, hold it. I’m not prepared for this ancient grave of yours. I’m no dimmer than the next guy, but I can’t attach any meaning to sixty-five million years. It’s just a phrase.’
Clift halted their ascent abruptly. ‘Then I’ll show you,’ he said.
Bodenland glanced quickly at his friend’s face. He saw no impatience there, only the love a man might have for the subject that possessed him and gave his life meaning.
Before them, streaked now by the shades of advancing evening, was a broken hillside, eroded so that strata of rock projected like the ruins of some unimaginable building. Sage grew here and there, while the crest was crowned by pine and low-growing cottonwoods.
‘For those who can read, this slope contains the history of the world,’ Clift told Mina. ‘What interests us is this broken line of deposit under the sandstones. That’s what’s called the K/T boundary.’
He pointed to a clayey line that ran under all the shattered sandstone strata like a damp-proof course round a house.
‘That layer of deposit marks a division between the Cretaceous rocks below and the Tertiary rocks above. It represents one of the most mysterious events in all Earth history – the extinction of the dinosaurs. It’s only centimetres thick. Below it lie kilometres of rock which is – as you might say – solidified time, the long millennia of the ages of reptiles. It has been verified beyond doubt that the K/T deposit line was laid down sixty-five million years BP, before present. Our grave lies just below that line.’
‘But there were no humans living then,’ Mina said, as they started walking again, taking a trail to the left.
‘The K/T layer preserves evidence of a worldwide ecological catastrophe. It contains particles of shocked minerals, clues to massive inundations, soot which bears witness to continental-scale firestorms, and so on. Some gigantic impact occurred at that time – scientists guess at a meteorite capable of creating a vast crater, but we don’t really know.
‘What we do know is that some large-scale event ended a majestic era of brilliant and strange living things.
‘Our grave suggests that what perished at the end of the Cretaceous Period – or the Mesozoic Era, which contains all reptilian periods – was not only the dinosaurs but also a human-like race perhaps so thinly distributed that no remains have turned up – till now.’
‘Homo Cliftensis,’ said Kylie.
They halted where the sandstones had been excavated and there were tokens of human activity, with planks, brushes, jackhammers, and a wheelbarrow incongruous nearby. They stood on a bluff overlooking the desert, across which mesas were sending long fingers of shadow. A well of shadow filled the excavation they now contemplated, as it lay like a pool below the ancient crusts of the K/T boundary.
Kylie shivered. But the air was cooling, the sky overhead deepening its blue.
Two students, a man and a woman, were standing guard by the dig. They moved back as the new arrivals appeared. Clift jumped down into the hole and removed a tarpaulin, revealing the ancient grave. The skeleton remained lying on its side, cramped within the coffin for an unimaginable age. The Bodenland family looked down at it without speaking.
‘What’s all the red stuff?’ Kylie asked, in a small voice. ‘Is it bloodstains?’
‘Red ochre,’ Clift said. ‘To bury with red ochre was an old custom. The Neanderthals used it – not that I’m suggesting this is a Neanderthal. There were also flowers in the grave, which we’ve taken for analysis. Of course, there’s more work to be done here. I’m half afraid to touch anything …’
They looked down in silence, prey to formless thought. The light died. The skeleton lay half-buried in ochre, fading into obscurity.
Kylie clung to Larry. ‘Disturbing an ancient grave … I know it’s part of an archaeologist’s job, but … There are superstitions about these things. Don’t you think there’s something – well, evil here?’
He hugged her affectionately. ‘Not evil. Pathetic, maybe. Sure, there’s something disconcerting when the past or the future arrives to disrupt the present. Like the way this chunk of the past has come up to disrupt our wedding day.’ Seeing Kylie’s expression cloud over, he said, ‘Let the dead get on with their thing. I’m taking you to have a drink.’
‘You’ll find a canteen at the bottom of the hill,’ said Clift, but he spoke without looking away from his discovery, crouching there, almost as motionless as the skeleton he had disinterred.
The sun plunged down into the desert, a chill came over the world. Kylie Bodenland stood at the door of the trailer they had been loaned, gazing up at the stars. Something in this remote place had woken unsuspected sensibilities in her, and she was trying to puzzle out what it was.
Some way off, students were sitting round a campfire, resurrecting old songs and pretending they were cowboys,