Jane by Robin Maxwell Read Free Book Online Page A

the Dutch East Indies.”
    The lights in the lecture hall dimmed, and with the episcope whirring, a schematic section of the geologic formations at Trinel was projected on the screen behind and above the podium, highlighting the all-important layers in which the P.e. fossils had been found. Almost immediately there were loud, skeptical mutterings from the audience.
    Someone just behind Father and me wasted no time in calling out loudly, “Our esteemed colleague, Rudolph Virchow, is no longer with us…”
    “I’m glad that old fossil is dead,” Father whispered a bit too loudly, referring to the recently deceased pasha of German science.
    “… but if he were here, I’m sure he would strenuously object, as he had many times before, to your contention that the three bone fragments in question were part of the same individual. The skull is most certainly that of a giant gibbon of some kind, and the femur is clearly human. You yourself have pointed out the grievous injury to the thighbone. That injured man—”
    “Pardon,” Dubois interrupted, “ P.e. was a female.”
    “The injured female,” the skeptic continued, sounding quite annoyed, “lived long enough for the bone to ossify. Apes do not perform those kinds of caretaking of their own species, as humans do.”
    Dubois moved to the table and, picking up the skull in one hand, the femur in the other, demonstrated that they were extremely weighty. “These are thoroughly fossilized—stone—and the color of the two specimens is identical. Numerous geologists have confirmed the level at which they were found—and they were found at the same level, Dr. Ellenbogen.”
    Near the front at the side aisle of the hall, a strapping fellow in a tan linen shooting jacket with padded shoulders that looked to be quite unnecessary stood up and called out, “Correct me if I’m wrong, Professor Dubois, but wasn’t a great deal of flora and fauna extracted from this same level at Trinel, fossils that confirm that their geologic histories are identical with P.e. ’s?”
    I noted that the outspoken man was clean-shaven except for a small pale mustache and looked altogether out of place in the room full of black-clad academics.
    Indeed, every eye in the room fell on the man—clearly an American—defending the beleaguered speaker. He seemed to my eye “rakish,” if I’d had to describe him, and he’d made his declarations in bold, deliberate tones, evincing admiration from a few, irritation from the greatest majority of others.
    “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” Dubois inquired.
    “The name is Conrath. Ral Conrath. I’m an expedition leader and engineer by trade, and I’ve worked on every continent in the world. I had the great fortune to visit the Trinel site, though sadly after you’d left. Your team’s efforts there were unimpeachable.”
    “Thank you.” Dubois, while certainly pleased at the kind words, was eager to get on with it and turned back to the subject at hand. “So I stand on my assertion that the skull, the femur, and the tooth, as well as the entire collection met their end in either the late Pliocene or early Pleistocene epoch.”
    “Here the fantasy passes beyond all experience!” called out another heckler in the first row.
    Father could no longer contain himself. He stood and faced the rotund and bespectacled clergyman who, from the fine cut of his robes and scarlet sash, could be identified as a cardinal. “Can’t you even devise your own ignorant insult? That was Rudolph Virchow’s boneheaded rejection of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, for crying out loud! How can you take seriously anything that idiot said?”
    Arguments broke out all over the chamber now, and Dubois allowed them to swirl around him with admirable equanimity. But out the corner of my eye I caught a small, swift movement. Father’s hand had darted quickly to his chest. I glanced at his face and saw pain there, brief though it was, before he let