“But can you do it?”
“Possibly, but why?”
“How long would it take?”
“With my current facilities? And if I did nothing else? A few months, perhaps.”
“What if we gave you all the equipment and all the support staff you could possibly need? What then? Money is no object, Professor Vaughan.”
Mary felt her heart pounding. As a Canadian academic, she had never heard those words before. She’d had friends at university who had gone on to do postgraduate work in the States; they’d often reported back about big five-and six-figure research grants and state-of-the-art equipment. Mary’s own first research grant had been for a paltry $3,200—and Canadian dollars, at that.
“Well, with, ah, with unlimited resources, I suppose I could do it fairly quickly. A matter of weeks, if we’re lucky.”
“Good. Good. Do so.”
“Umm, with all due respect, Dr. Krieger, I’m a Canadian citizen; you can’t tell me what to do.”
Krieger was immediately contrite. “Of course not, Professor Vaughan. My apologies. My enthusiasm for the project got the better of me. What I meant to say was, would you please undertake this project? As I said, we will provide whatever equipment and staff you need, and a sizable consultancy fee.”
Mary’s head was swimming. “But why? Why is this so important?”
“If the gateway between the two worlds ever opens again,” Krieger said, “we may have many Neanderthals coming into our world.”
Mary narrowed her eyes. “And you want to be able to discriminate against them?”
Krieger shook his head. “Nothing like that, I assure you. But we’ll need to know for immigration reasons, for providing appropriate health care, and so on. You don’t want an unconscious person being given the wrong medicine because doctors couldn’t tell if he was Neanderthal or Gliksin.”
“Surely you can simply look to see if he has a Companion implant. Ponter says all his people have them.”
“Without disparaging your friend in the least, Professor Vaughan, we have only his word for that. For all we know, he was in fact a parolee in his universe, and that thingamajig was some sort of tracking device worn only by him and other criminals.”
“Ponter is not a criminal,” said Mary.
“Nonetheless, you can surely appreciate that we prefer to have our own methods for determining which species a person belongs to, rather than having to rely on something we’ve heard anecdotally.”
Mary nodded slowly. It did, sort of, make sense. And, after all, there was benign precedent: the Canadian government already put a lot of work into defining who is and who isn’t a Status Indian, so that social programs and entitlements could properly be administered. Still…“There’s no reason to think the portal might open again, is there? I mean, there haven’t been any signs, have there?” She’d love to see Ponter again, but…
Krieger shook his head. “No. But we believe in being prepared. And I’ll be honest: I grant that your Mr. Boddit looked, shall we say, distinctive. But it’s possible that another Neanderthal might have less pronounced features, and be able to slip into a population of our kind of humans.”
Mary smiled. “You’ve been talking to Milford Wolpoff.”
“Indeed. As well as Ian Tattersall and just about every other Neanderthal expert you can name. There seems to be no consensus among them about how much Neanderthals differed from us.”
Mary nodded; that much was certainly true. Some, like Wolpoff, held that Neanderthals were just another variety of Homo sapiens—at best a race, if that term had any validity, and certainly members of the same species as modern humans. Others, including Tattersall, felt the opposite: that Neanderthals were a species in their own right, Homo neanderthalensis. To date, all DNA studies seemed to support the latter view—but Wolpoff and company felt the few Neanderthal DNA samples available, including the 379 nucleotides of mitochondrial DNA that Mary herself had extracted from the Neanderthal type specimen at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, were either aberrant or misinterpreted. It wasn’t too much to say that this was the most hotly contested issue in all of paleoanthropology.
“We still only have complete genetic material from one Neanderthal,” said Mary, “namely Ponter Boddit. It might be impossible to find anything diagnostic in that one sample.”
“I understand that. But we won’t know for sure until you try.”
Mary looked around the lab. “I have duties here, at York. Classes to teach. Grad students.”
“I understand that, too,” said Krieger. “But I’m sure arrangements can be made to cover your responsibilities. I’ve already had a word with the university’s president.”
“You’re talking about a full-time research project?”
“We’ll certainly compensate you for the entire academic year, yes.”
“Where would I work? Here?”
Krieger shook his head. “No, we’d want you to come to our secure facility.”
“In Rochester, right?”
“Rochester, New York, yes.”
“That’s not that far from here, is it?”
“I flew in today,” said Krieger, “and that takes no time at all. I understand it’s about three and a half hours by car.”
Mary considered. She would still be able to come up and see her mother and friends. And she had to admit that nothing interested her more right now than studying Ponter’s DNA; her class load would just be an inconvenience.
“What, ah, terms did you have in mind?”
“I can offer you a one-year consulting contract at $150,000 U.S., starting immediately, with full medical benefits.” He smiled. “I know that’s a key point with you Canadians.”
Mary frowned. She’d more or less prepared herself for returning to York University, to the site of the rape, but…
But no. No, that wasn’t true. She’d hoped she could stand being here, but, if this morning had been any indication, she was still jumpy as hell.
“I have an apartment here,” said Mary. “Acondo.”
“We’ll take care of the mortgage payments, taxes, and maintenance fees for you while you’re away; your home will be waiting for you when this job is done.”
“Really?”
Krieger nodded. “Yes. This is the biggest thing that’s happened to this planet since—well, ever. What we’re looking at here, Professor Vaughan, is the end of the Cenozoic, and the beginning of the next era. There haven’t been two versions of humanity on this planet for thirty-five thousand years or so—but, if that portal reopens, there are going to be two versions again, and we want to make sure it goes right this time.”
“You make it sound very tempting, Dr. Krieger.”
“Jock. Call me Jock.” A pause. “Look, I used to be with the RAND Corporation. I’m a mathematician; back when I graduated from Princeton, seventy percent of all math grads from major universities applied for jobs at RAND. That was where you got the money and resources to do pure research. In fact, the joke was that RAND actually stood for ‘Research And No Development’—it’s a think tank in the purest sense.”
“What does it stand for?”
“Just ‘Research and Development,’ supposedly. But the fact is its funding came from the U.S. Air Force, and it existed for a fundamentally unpleasant reason: to study nuclear conflict. I’m a game theorist; that’s my specialty, and that’s why I was there—doing simulations of nuclear brinksmanship.” He paused. “You ever see Dr. Strangelove?”
Mary nodded. “Years ago.”
“Old George C. Scott, he’s clutching a ‘BLAND’ corporation study there in the War Room. Freeze-frame it next time you’re watching the DVD. The study is labeled World Targets in Megadeaths. That’s about right for what we had to do. But the Cold War is over, Professor Vaughan, and now we’re looking at something incredibly positive.” He paused. “You know, despite its military roots, RAND did lots of far-out thinking. One of our studies was called Habitable Planets for Man, and it was all about the likelihood of finding earthlike planets elsewhere in the galaxy. Stephen Dole put that one together in 1964, just when I started at RAND. But, even then, back in the glory days of the space program, very few of us seriously thought we’d have access to another earthlike world in our lifetime. But if that portal reopens, we will. And we want contact to go as positively as possible. When the first Neanderthal embassy opens up—”