They spent a few minutes poking around in the directory named Serinus, but quickly discovered that without the password, only a single file was open to them.
A file that confirmed that Takeo Yoshihara and Mishimoto Corporation were indeed embarked on a major research project aimed at tackling the problem of global pollution head-on. “And making a fortune with whatever they discover, no doubt,” Rob remarked as they finished reading the file.
They’d abandoned the computer then, but for the rest of the afternoon, as Katharine concentrated on reconstructing the skeleton that had been exhumed from the ravine, the first faint tendrils of an idea kept reaching out to her. When Rob finally interrupted her to suggest they have dinner together, she realized that the afternoon had slipped away.
Though she was no closer to gaining access to the files containing the image of the skull and the video, the skeleton was almost complete. And the idea, though not yet fully formed, was starting to come together in her mind. “I think I’m going to finish this,” she said. “You go on, and I’ll see you in the morning.”
After Rob left, she called Michael and told him she’d be late.
“How late?” he asked.
“Only a couple of hours,” she promised. “And then we’ll go out for pizza, okay?”
“I guess,” Michael replied, and she heard the anxiety in his voice.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”
There was a long silence, then: “I’ll be okay. See you when you get home.”
She hung up the phone and hesitated, wondering if she shouldn’t call it a day and go home now. But even as that thought came to her, the idea that had been poking at the edges of her consciousness all afternoon suddenly came together.
Once again she replayed the video in her mind, but this time, instead of trying to decide what kind of creature it was that she’d seen, she concentrated on how old it might have been.
If it was some kind of small primate, it would have been full-grown.
But if it wasn’t a primate?
More images flashed though her memory.
The way the tribesmen had stared at it.
The way its fear seemed to grow, and the look almost of surprise when the tribesmen had begun chasing it.
It had been so much smaller than the men.
And the woman had acted like …
The woman had acted like a distraught mother who had just lost a child.
A mutant?
Could what she’d seen on the video have been a mutated human child?
Mutated by what? Pollution?
Even as the question formed in her mind, so did a possible answer. Mount Pinatubo.
The volcano that had erupted in the Philippines less than ten years ago, spewing enough ash and poisonous gas into the atmosphere to make dozens of villages uninhabitable.
If alcohol and tobacco could harm a fetus, what might the gases disgorged from an active volcano do? Katharine’s eyes fixed once more on the skeleton on the table, but now her mind’s eye no longer saw the fire pit next to which the body had been buried, but the sulfurous vent a little farther up the ravine. What if the remains she’d unearthed were of someone who’d been born only months after an eruption of Haleakala?
Suddenly it became imperative to determine the age of the bones as exactly as possible, and try to correlate them to one of the last eruptions on Maui.
Or on the Big Island, where even now new vents were opening, releasing gases from the bowels of the planet?
She worked for three more hours, preparing bone samples and searching the Internet for the labs that could do the work most quickly and efficiently.
And now her mind was starting to fog with exhaustion and her whole body ached.
And she was already hours later than she’d promised Michael.
Leaving everything as it was, Katharine began closing up the workroom. She’d just turned the lights off and was about to lock the door when a sweep of headlights across the window caught her eye.
Leaving the lights off, she went to the window and looked out.
Michael sat staring at the television, trying to concentrate on the characters on the screen but unable to keep his attention on the movie for more than a few seconds at a time.
He kept thinking about Josh, clutching the bottle of ammonia in the rest room, sucking the fumes deep into his lungs, struggling to hang on to it when he’d taken it away from him.
And he remembered the look in Josh’s eyes just before he’d fled from the locker room. For