The Lost World Page 10

  He went into his office and slammed the door.

  Arby stuck his hands in his pockets. “They couldn’t have figured it out without our help.”

  “I know, Arb,” she said. “But we can’t make him take us.”

  They turned to Malcolm. “Dr. Malcolm, can you please—”

  “Sorry,” Malcolm said. “I can’t.”

  “But—”

  “The answer is no, kids. It’s just too dangerous.”

  Dejected, they drifted over to the vehicles, gleaming beneath the ceiling lights. The Explorer with the black photovoltaic panels on the roof and hood, the inside crammed with glowing electronic equipment. Just looking at the Explorer gave them a sense of adventure—an adventure they would not be part of.

  Arby peered into the larger trailer, cupping his eyes over the window. “Wow, look at this!”

  “I’m going in,” Kelly said, and she opened the door. She was momentarily surprised at how solid and heavy it was. Then she climbed up the steps into the trailer.

  Inside, the trailer was fitted out with gray upholstery and much more electronic equipment. It was divided into sections, for different laboratory functions. The main area was a biological lab, with specimen trays, dissecting pans, and microscopes that connected to video monitors. The lab also included biochemistry equipment, spectrometers, and a series of automated sample-analyzers. Next to it there was an extensive computer section, a bank of processors, and a communications section. All the lab equipment was miniaturized, and built into small tables that slid into the walls, and then bolted down.

  “This is cool,” Arby said.

  Kelly didn’t answer. She was looking closely at the lab. Dr. Levine had designed this trailer, apparently with a very specific purpose. There was no provision for geology, or botany, or chemistry, or lots of other things that a field team might be expected to study. It wasn’t a general scientific lab at all. There really seemed to be just a biology unit, and a large computer unit.

  Biology, and computers.

  Period.

  What had this trailer been built to study?

  Set in the wall was a small bookshelf, the books held in place with a Velcro strap. She scanned the titles: Modeling Adaptive Biological Systems, Vertebrate Behavioral Dynamics, Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems, Dinosaurs of North America, Preadaptation and Evolution. . . . It seemed like a strange set of books to take on a wilderness expedition; if there was a logic behind it, she didn’t see it.

  She moved on. At intervals along the walls, she could see where the trailer had been strengthened; dark carbon-honeycomb strips ran up the walls. She had overheard Thorne saying it was the same material used in supersonic jet fighters. Very light and very strong. And she noticed that all the windows had been replaced with that special glass with fine wire mesh inside it.

  Why was the trailer so strong?

  It made her a little uneasy, when she thought about it. She remembered the telephone call with Dr. Levine, earlier in the day. He had said he was surrounded.

  Surrounded by what?

  He had said: I can smell them, especially at night.

  What was he referring to?

  Who was them?

  Still uneasy, Kelly moved toward the back of the trailer, where there was a homey little living area, complete with gingham curtains on the windows. Compact kitchen, a toilet, and four beds. Storage compartments above and below the beds. There was even a little walk-in shower. It was nice.

  From there, she went through the accordion pleating that connected the two trailers. It was a little bit like the connection between two railway cars, a short transitional passage. She emerged inside the second trailer, which seemed to be mostly utility storage: extra tires, spare parts, more lab equipment, shelves and cabinets. All the extra supplies that meant an expedition to some far-off place. There was even a motorcycle hanging off the back of the trailer. She tried some of the cabinets, but they were locked.

  But even here there were extra reinforcing strips as well. This section had also been built especially strong.

  Why? she wondered. Why so strong?

  “Look at this,” Arby said, standing before a wall unit. It was a complex of glowing LED displays and lots of buttons, and looked to Kelly like a complicated thermostat.

  “What does it do?” Kelly said.

  “Monitors the whole trailer,” he said. “You can do everything from here. All the systems, all the equipment. And look, there’s TV. . . .” He pushed a button, and a monitor glowed to life. It showed Eddie walking toward them, across the floor.

  “And, hey, what’s this?” Arby said. At the bottom of the display was a button with a security cover. He flipped the cover open. The button was silver and said DEF.

  “Hey, I bet this is that bear defense he was talking about.”

  A moment later, Eddie opened the trailer door and said, “You better stop that, you’ll drain the batteries. Come on, now. You heard what the doc said. Time for you kids to go home.”

  Kelly and Arby exchanged glances.

  “Okay,” Kelly said. “We’re going.”

  Reluctantly, they left the trailer.

  They walked across the shed to Thorne’s office to say goodbye. Arby said, “I wish he’d let us go.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I don’t want to stay home for break,” he said. “They’re just going to be working all the time.” He meant his parents.

  “I know.”

  Kelly didn’t want to go home, either. This idea of a field test during spring break was perfect for her, because it got her out of the house, and out of a bad situation. Her mother did data entry in an insurance company during the day, and at night she worked as a waitress at Denny’s. So her mom was always busy at her jobs, and her latest boyfriend, Phil, tended to hang around the house a lot at night. It had been okay when Emily was there, too, but now Emily was studying nursing at the community college, so Kelly was alone in the house. And Phil was sort of creepy. But her mother liked Phil, so she never wanted to hear Kelly say anything bad about him. She just told Kelly to grow up.

  So now Kelly went to Thorne’s office, hoping against hope that at the last minute he would relent. He was on the phone, his back to them. On the screen of his computer, they saw one of the satellite images they had taken from Levine’s apartment. Thorne was zooming in on the image, successive magnifications. They knocked on the door, opened it a little.

  “Bye, Dr. Thorne.”

  “See you, Dr. Thorne.”

  Thorne turned, holding the phone to his ear. “Bye, kids.” He gave a brief wave.

  Kelly hesitated. “Listen, could we just talk to you for a minute about—”

  Thorne shook his head. “No.”

  “But—”

  “No, Kelly. I’ve got to place this call now,” he said. “It’s already four a.m. in Africa, and in a little while she’ll go to sleep.”

  “Who?”

  “Sarah Harding.”

  “Sarah Harding is coming, too?” she said, lingering at the door.

  “I don’t know.” Thorne shrugged. “Have a good vacation, kids. See you in a week. Thanks for your help. Now get out of here.” He looked across the shed. “Eddie, the kids are leaving. Show them to the door, and lock them out! Get me those papers! And pack a bag, you’re coming with me!” Then in a different voice he said, “Yes, operator, I’m still waiting.”

  And he turned away.

  Harding

  Through the night-vision goggles, the world appeared in shades of fluorescent green. Sarah Harding stared out at the African savannah. Directly ahead, above the high grass, she saw the rocky outcrop of a kopje. Bright-green pinpoints glowed back from the boulders. Probably rock hyraxes, she thought, or some other small rodent.

  Standing up in her Jeep, wearing a sweatshirt against the cool night air, feeling the weight of the goggles, she turned her head slowly. She could hear the yelping in the night, and she was trying to locate the source.

/>   Even from her high vantage point, standing up in the vehicle, she knew the animals would be hidden from direct view. She turned slowly north, looking for movement in the grass. She saw none. She looked back quickly, the green world swirling momentarily. Now she faced south.

  And she saw them.

  The grass rippled in a complex pattern as the pack raced forward, yelping and barking, prepared to attack. She caught a glimpse of the female she called Face One, or F1. F1 was distinguished by a white streak between her eyes. F1 loped along, in the peculiar sideways gait of hyenas; her teeth were bared; she glanced back at the rest of the pack, noting their position.

  Sarah Harding swung the glasses through the darkness, looking ahead of the pack. She saw the prey: a herd of African buffalo, standing belly-deep in the grass, agitated. They were bellowing and stamping their feet.

  The hyenas yelped louder, a pattern of sound that would confuse the prey. They rushed through the herd, trying to break it up, trying to separate the calves from their mothers. African buffalo looked dull and stupid, but in fact they were among the most dangerous large African mammals, heavy powerful creatures with sharp horns and notoriously mean dispositions. The hyenas could not hope to bring down an adult, unless it was injured or sick.

  But they would try to take a calf.

  Sitting behind the wheel of the Jeep, Makena, her assistant, said, “You want to move closer?”

  “No, this is fine.”

  In fact, it was more than fine. Their Jeep was on a slight rise, and they had a better-than-average view. With any luck, she would record the entire attack pattern. She turned on the video camera, mounted on a tripod five feet above her head, and dictated rapidly into the tape recorder.

  “F1 south, F2 and F5 flanking, twenty yards. F3 center. F6 circling wide east. Can’t see F7. F8 circling north. F1 straight through. Disrupting. Herd moving, stamping. There’s F7. Straight through. F8 angling through from the north. Coming out, circling again.”

  This was classic hyena behavior. The lead animals ran through the herd, while others circled it, then came in from the sides. The buffalo couldn’t keep track of their attackers. She listened to the herd bellowing, even as the group panicked, broke its tight clustered formation. The big animals moved apart, turning, looking. Harding couldn’t see the calves; they were below the grass. But she could hear their plaintive cries.

  Now the hyenas came back. The buffalo stamped their feet, lowered their big heads menacingly. The grass rippled as the hyenas circled, yelping and barking, the sounds more staccato. She caught a brief glimpse of female F8, her jaws already red. But Harding hadn’t seen the actual attack.

  The buffalo herd moved a short distance to the east, where it regrouped. One female buffalo now stood apart from the herd. She bellowed continuously at the hyenas. They must have taken her calf.

  Harding felt frustrated. It had happened so swiftly—too swiftly—which could only mean that the hyenas had been lucky, or the calf was injured. Or perhaps very young, even newborn; a few of the buffalo were still calving. She would have to review the videotape, to try and reconstruct what had happened. The perils of studying fast-moving nocturnal animals, she thought.

  But there was no question they had taken an animal. All the hyenas were clustered around a single area of grass; they yelped and jumped. She saw F3, and then F5, their muzzles bloody. Now the pups came up, squealing to get at the kill. The adults immediately made room for them, helped them to eat. Sometimes they pulled away flesh from the carcass, and held it so the young ones could eat.

  Their behavior was familiar to Sarah Harding, who had become in recent years the foremost expert on hyenas in the world. When she first reported her findings, she was greeted with disbelief and even outrage from colleagues, who disputed her results in very personal terms. She was attacked for being a woman, for being attractive, for having “an overbearing feminist perspective.” The university reminded her she was on tenure track. Colleagues shook their heads. But Harding had persisted, and slowly, over time, as more data accumulated, her view of hyenas had come to be accepted.

  Still, hyenas would never be appealing creatures, she thought, watching them feed. They were ungainly, heads too big and bodies sloping, coats ragged and mottled, gait awkward, vocalizations too reminiscent of an unpleasant laugh. In an increasingly urban world of concrete skyscrapers, wild animals were romanticized, classified as noble or ignoble, heroes or villains. And in this media-driven world, hyenas were simply not photogenic enough to be admirable. Long since cast as the laughing villains of the African plain, they were hardly thought worth a systematic study until Harding had begun her own research.

  What she had discovered cast hyenas in a very different light. Brave hunters and attentive parents, they lived in a remarkably complex social structure—and a matriarchy as well. As for their notorious yelping vocalizations, they actually represented an extremely sophisticated form of communication.

  She heard a roar, and through her night-vision goggles saw the first of the lions approaching the kill. It was a large female, circling closer. The hyenas barked and snapped at the lioness, guiding their own pups off into the grass. Within a few moments, other lions appeared, and settled down to feed on the hyenas’ kill.

  Now, lions, she thought. There was a truly nasty animal. Although called the king of beasts, lions in truth were actually vile and—

  The phone rang.

  “Makena,” she said.

  The phone rang again. Who could be calling her now?

  She frowned. Through the goggles, she saw the lionesses look up, heads turning in the night.

  Makena was fumbling beneath the dashboard, looking for the phone. It rang three more times before he found it.

  She heard him say, “Jambo, mzee. Yes, Dr. Harding is here.” He handed the phone up to her. “It’s Dr. Thorne.”

  Reluctantly, she removed her night goggles, and took the phone. She knew Thorne well; he had designed most of the equipment in her Jeep. “Doc, this better be important.”

  “It is,” Thorne said. “I’m calling about Richard.”

  “What about him?” She caught his concern, but didn’t understand why. Lately, Levine had been a pain in the neck, telephoning her almost daily from California, picking her brains about field work with animals. He had lots of questions about hides, and blinds, data protocols, record-keeping, it went on and on. . . .

  “Did he ever tell you what he intended to study?” Thorne asked.

  “No,” she said. “Why?”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “No,” Harding said. “He was very secretive. But I gathered he’d located an animal population that he could use to make some point about biological systems. You know how obsessive he is. Why?”

  “Well, he’s missing, Sarah. Malcolm and I think he’s in some kind of trouble. We’ve located him on an island in Costa Rica, and we’re going to get him now.”

  “Now?” she said.

  “Tonight. We’re flying to San José in a few hours. Ian’s going with me. We want you to come, too.”

  “Doc,” she said. “Even if I took a flight out of Seronera tomorrow morning to Nairobi, it’d take me almost a day to get there. And that’s if I got lucky. I mean—”

  “You decide,” Thorne said, interrupting. “I’ll give you the details, and you decide what you want to do.”

  He gave her the information, and she wrote it on the notepad strapped to her wrist. Then Thorne rang off.

  She stood staring out at the African night, feeling the cool breeze on her face. Off in the darkness, she heard the growl of the lions at the kill. Her work was here. Her life was here.

  Makena said, “Dr. Harding? What do we do?”

  “Go back,” she said. “I have to pack.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m leaving.”

  Message

  Thorne drove to the airport, the lights of San Francisco disappearing behind them. Malcolm sat in the
passenger seat. He looked back at the Explorer driving behind them and said, “Does Eddie know what this is all about?”

  “Yes,” Thorne said. “But I’m not sure he believes it.”

  “And the kids don’t know?”

  “No,” Thorne said.

  There was a beeping alongside him. Thorne pulled out his little black Envoy, a radio pager. A light was flashing. He flipped up the screen, and handed it to Malcolm. “Read it for me.”

  “It’s from Arby,” Malcolm said. “Says, ‘Have a good trip. If you want us, call. We’ll be standing by if you need our help.’ And he gives his phone number.”

  Thorne laughed. “You got to love those kids. They never give up.” Then he frowned, as a thought occurred to him. “What’s the time on that message?”

  “Four minutes ago,” Malcolm said. “Came in via netcom.”

  “Okay. Just checking.”

  They turned right, toward the airport. They saw the lights in the distance. Malcolm stared forward gloomily. “It’s very unwise for us to be rushing off like this. It’s not the right way to go about it.”

  Thorne said, “We should be all right. As long as we have the right island.”

  “We do,” Malcolm said.

  “How do you know?”

  “The most important clue was something I didn’t want the kids to know about. A few days ago, Levine saw the carcass of one of the animals.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. He had a chance to look at it, before the officials burned it. And he discovered that it was tagged. He cut the tag off and sent it to me.”

  “Tagged? You mean like—”

  “Yes. Like a biological specimen. The tag was old, and it showed pitting from sulfuric acid.”

  “Must be volcanic,” Thorne said.

  “Exactly.”

  “And you say it was an old tag?”

  “Several years,” Malcolm said. “But the most interesting finding was the way the animal died. Levine concluded the animal had been injured while it was still alive—a deep slashing cut in the leg that went right down to the bone.”