The Clouds Beneath the Sun Read Free Page A

he had, Richard Sutton Senior had done everything he could to ensure Richard Junior was the best paleontologist in the business, providing his son with the finest education money could buy, and then supporting important excavations financially so long as his son was part of the team. This did not make the Suttons friends with everyone, but most digs were so inadequately funded that many directors were only too happy to have Richard Junior along, if that meant the books would be balanced. And in any case, he did not really need his father’s support anymore; Richard Junior was an excellent excavator, with a good mind. As Eleanor knew, he already had several discoveries under his belt, including a hominid skull dating to 150,000 years ago, and a species of extinct hippopotamus.
    “The way that tibia and femur fit together strongly suggests an upright gait—we are agreed?” Eleanor set about her own dinner.
    “That’s the point,” said Russell North, worrying at his watch strap with his fingers. “It’s a knee joint like that which makes shopping and bowling possible.”
    Eleanor grinned. She liked North. Whereas Sutton, though ferociously efficient, was a shade on the automatic side, North was a warm human soul, with a sharp sense of humor. His size was daunting and he had a temper, she knew; he could be awkward, direct in the Australian way, but mostly he was fun on a dig, also with a number of discoveries to his name, and no one was perfect. Though he was from down under, he was an associate professor at Berkeley, California, and destined, she felt sure, for greater things. He was a year or two younger than Sutton. Having been brought up in the Australian outback, he was very practical minded and helped out Daniel in looking after the vehicles.
    “The way the two bones fit together,” North went on, “implies that some form of hominid was walking upright two million years ago. That is much earlier than we thought, much earlier than anyone thought, much earlier than the textbooks say. Richard and I have discussed it and we think we should write a paper on this and rush it to Nature.”
    Nature was the weekly science magazine, published in London, where most major scientific discoveries were announced.
    Eleanor nodded. She reached for the water jug and filled her own glass. Then she fixed her gaze on Natalie Nelson. “Natalie, let’s hear from you. You’ve just arrived, you have a fresh mind, how does the discovery strike you?”
    Since the Nelson woman had arrived only that day, Eleanor had yet to form an opinion of her. The newly minted Dr. Nelson came highly recommended. Her specialism was a very useful expertise to have on a dig like the one Eleanor ran, but the director had not anticipated Dr. Nelson being so attractive. She was tall, almost as tall as Eleanor herself, and had close-cropped dark hair, which curled forward under her ears, a longish face with cheekbones that stood out and cast their own shadows down her cheeks, long tapered fingers, and what the women’s magazines, the last time she had looked, called a full figure. Eleanor Deacon had already taken on board that both Russell North and her son Christopher had been immediately drawn to the newcomer and she hated that sort of emotion in the confined quarters of an excavation. Romance on a dig was not unknown—her own late husband had made a speciality of it—so she knew at firsthand that it could make life very difficult.
    Natalie swallowed some water. After a few hours’ sleep she had unpacked, showered, and changed into a blue shirt with khaki trousers. She wore no ring or necklace but had on a man’s watch. Her eyes were as dark as the night outside the tent.
    “I’m sorry to be a wet blanket,” she said, setting down her glass. “But I think you would be unwise to publish until you can check the tibia and femur you have found against a set of modern bones. If your dating is right, they’re two million years old, but you can’t be