CHAPTER 47


   No matter how long he held his job, David Kent was convinced of one thing. He would never understand government logic. The head of his security detail kept right on with his argument and David finally had to stop the man and say, "we've already canceled the scheduled appointment, am I right?" When the man nodded in the affirmative David then went on and said, "and this little meeting here wasn't even on the schedule, again, am I right?" The Secret Service agent was growing frustrated but, David drove his point home with, "so if some irate camper wants to get even with me because the power was out at his site, he wouldn't know to look for me here, right?"
The agent was not happy about it but he retreated in disgust and David turned back to the plump little black man with the booming voice who was the owner of the office he was currently sitting in. Doctor Hank Ellis was laughing at the conversation he had just heard and he had to ask the secretary of the interior, "are all your days like this?"
"No," David replied in a very serious tone that almost sounded as if he were offended, "some days I have to put on a tuxedo and go to big parties at the White House."
Both men held their serious face for only a moment before they burst out laughing. As Hank recovered he became half way serious as said, "let me apologize for Bigsby and Carver. It's just that I've spent over six months trying to get someone, anyone, from the government down here to take a look at what we have. When those two said they knew you, I had to take the chance."
David merely shrugged and said, "so you told them what this was all about?"
Hank shrugged and replied, "well I told Bigsby. The truth is that Reverend Carver and I don't get along all that well.”
That only made sense to David, after all, Ellis was a paleontologist and Carver was a Baptist minister, "don't tell me, evolution?"
Hank became very serious and then he said, "no, Carver is just an ass hole." They both burst out laughing again but, finally, Hank said, "no matter what the case Mister Secretary, I'm glad you're finally here. Trust me, someone in the government needs to know about this."
Ellis led David further into the big building they were in and now David understood why the place looked like a warehouse. This is because it really was in a manner of speaking, "I was wondering why you didn't want to see me at the University." Paleontology may not have been David's field but he had been around academia out long enough to recognize most of what he was walking past. The fact that they were drawers was easy enough to see but, the sheer number and labeling system told David, "so this is where you keep all the stuff that you dig up?"
"Yep," Hank replied as he stopped and opened a drawer which proved to be very shallow and filled with vacuum sealed bags, "very little of what we recover ever makes it to the Museum floor. Most of what we got look like this stuff here."
David knew better than to reach down and touch the stuff even if it was in protective covering but, he did get closer and study it. When he backed off he realized that he did not know any more than he did to start with. Identifying bones was just not his thing. He gestured to the remains and asked, "so what is it? Some kind of dinosaur?"
That actually drew a laugh from Hank who thought it somewhat ironic, "if you had asked me that last week I would've told you most definitely not. Past that, no one has a clue what those fossil fragments belonged to. Most of what we find out there in the field looks just like that too."
As they began walking again David noticed the sheer volume of shelves and drawers in this warehouse. There was a lot of stuff that was just sitting around and no one had studied. He imagined that just going through this one warehouse could probably consume a lifetime of work, an entire career even. David was a bit amazed as he gestured to everything around him and said, "you mean to tell me, all of this stuff?"
"Yep," Hank replied in a jovial but serious tone. He continued with, "and this is just the stuff from the dig sites here in Nebraska. Oh, it's several decades worth of digging but, still just in this area. I doubt we'll ever have the money to really look at most of it. Sooner or later, someone may get around to it but, most of the time it's only when we have a breakthrough, like recently, that we start combing back through this stuff."
That drew David's curiosity, "what breakthrough? I haven't heard about any...” A thought struck David and his eyes got big, "you mean the elves don't you? This has something to do with them doesn't it?"
"In a manner of speaking," Hank replied. He stopped and squared up with David as he tried to explain, "imagine you were trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle and you didn't even know if it was supposed to be round or square, let alone have an image of what the picture is supposed to be. How hard would that be?" When David only shrugged, Hank continued with, "it wouldn't be impossible to assemble but, it would be a site harder. Now imagine if you are missing some of the pieces. Then throw in some random pieces from an identical puzzle but, not the same one as yours. Then you might wind up with some duplicate pieces and not even realize it. Your little job is starting to sound a lot harder now, isn't it?"
David nodded in agreement and replied, "I get the metaphor. I just don't see what that has to do with me?"
Their next stop was an obvious clean room. They stayed outside and watched some people working from behind a window. David was fairly sure he understood what he was looking at here but, Hank explained anyway, "you could say we've literally pulled out some warehoused samples and are dusting them off here. I might add, this is not the only place this is going on. I've been talking with several people in my field and, as it turns out, we've all had some similar thoughts. That's where all this got started. Right here, we're preparing the samples so that we can make full-scale copies of them. That way we don't have to worry about damaging the real fossils.”
Somehow, David thought that job would've looked a little different from what he was saying here. There was no plaster, there were no buckets, and there were no splatter soaked trays. When he said as much the paleontologist replied, "oh, you're talking ancient history. These days we just laser scan the sample and a 3-D printer re-creates it for us. We've been at this for several months now and we've made some progress. We'll actually be able to begin physical reconstruction of at least two full specimens within the year. Now that we know what the shape of our jigsaw puzzle is, it's made that task a lot easier. Now let me show you what's made it even easier than that."
Hank led David into another room that proved to be nothing more than a few computers on some foldout tables. There was a guy sitting on a stool in front of one of the screens but, he was obviously not working on the computer. He seemed to be eating a turkey sandwich and reading a book. His mouth was half-full of food when he tried to explain himself but, Hank merely waved it off and sent the guy on an errand. He then invited the secretary to have a seat in front of the computer screens and gestured to the images.
David had no idea what he was looking at here. Was it some kind of CGI? David asked. The images on two of the screens were obviously some kind of head, with numbers running up the side of the window, and occasionally flying off and joining with the head as a geometrical shape but, beyond that, David was completely lost. Hank explained, "some guys at MIT got this idea a few years back. They took some off the shelf 3-D software and modified the render engine. Now we can plug in the laser scans, from out there in the clean room, and plug them into our models here. The kicker to this software, is that you have to have some kind of idea of the end product and, with what we've got out there, that wasn't possible until a year or so ago."
David became excited and snapped his finger as he pointed at Ellis and exclaimed, "I knew it. You found elves didn't you."
Hank took off his glasses, took a deep breath, and got comfortable on his stool. He chose his words carefully as he said, "before I answer your question. Please bare with me and let me ask you one of my own. I know where you work Doctor Kent. You not only seem less than surprised by that but, it seems as if you already guessed that might happen. You know? That we might find some fossilized elves?"
What could David say to that? He decided to go with the truth and a part of that was, he was not sure how much he knew was classified and how much was not. He told the paleontologist, "that's because I'm not surprised. I've read nearly every report on the elves, that has come through the White House, and it became obvious to me, a while back, that migrations between the two worlds has been very common at points in the past. It's the only thing that explains what we know."
Hank nodded and thoughtfully replied, "I agree. I've also read everything about the elves that I can get my hands on. I know that they claim that their species is a lot older than ours. I know that they say they have been to earth before. I also know that they claim to have controlled their side of the Dell for longer than even they remember.” Hank pointed back to the screens and said, "so if these two skulls turned out to belong to elves it wouldn't be that surprising, would it?"
David merely shrugged and replied, "I suppose not. Of course," David had an afterthought, "it would be hard to tell wouldn't it? I mean without the ears they're not really all that different from us, are they?"
"That I wouldn't know for sure," Hank replied, "they haven't exactly been all that forthcoming about their biology, or at least, not that I've heard. I know the stories bouncing around academia right now and there are more than a few professors who are pissed off about that."
David thought about that for a minute and realized a few things about what Ellis was telling him. Then he pointed to the screens and he said, "wait a minute, are you saying that these fossils might not be elves?"
"Doctor Kent," Hank said in a very serious manner as he put his glasses back on, "my specialty is usually the era that we call the Younger Dryas. In geological terms that was just yesterday. Still, when you work a site you find all sorts of things and a lot of the times it doesn't pertain to your ball of wax. The big thing here in Nebraska are a lot of the large Ice Age mammals that went extinct. A tad over a half a million years ago, as you might be aware, Yosemite popped its cork and buried this entire region in volcanic ash. It was enough to bury everything here, and as a result, a lot of animals died and their remains stayed in pretty good condition until we dug them up.”
David pointed to the computer screens and asked, "so is that the time period we're looking at here?”
Hank pointed to only one monitor and replied, "the one on the right is. Of course, there is every possibility, even a certainty, that the remains that we have are from more than just one animal. In fact, if I had to guess, I'd say that our collection is from dozens of individuals who are close in proportion and definitely of the same species.”
Now David looked to the other screen and asked, "what about that one?"
Hank actually sounded fascinated as he explained, "those are scans being sent to me by a colleague of mine in China. His samples were dug up in the Gobi, over the past decade. They're a bit older than the ones we have here. Say, about a hundred million or so.”
David's eyes got big and he actually caught himself whistling before he stated, "oh my god, they're older than we could have ever imagined. There even older than they think.”
"Not exactly," Hank replied immediately. "Mister Secretary, we've had good pictures of elves for going on four years now. We only got the pictures that we needed here, recently, when a lot of soldiers started coming home from Feyland. Most of them were of no use, you know, soldiers snapping pictures with their cell phones and stuff like that. It seemed like new pictures were being uploaded to the Internet, nearly every day, and my staff kept right on running searches until we found some that we could use. That's when we started work on this right here.”
Now David was confused and kept looking from the computer screens to Ellis and finally he managed to vocalize, "well if these aren't elves then what...”
The obvious answer struck David and a chill ran up his spine as Ellis pushed some printouts in front of him. They were of websites and had picture thumbnails. Some of the printouts were blowups of the pictures and they were all of one thing. David looked Ellis in the eye and was still stunned as he said, "they're orcs."
Hank's eyes narrowed and he leaned forward as he said, "yes they are Mister Secretary. Not only that but, they've been here before. They've been here before and they were on this planet long before primates even existed. They've been to every corner of our world or, at least, that's what our evidence suggests." Ellis gestured to the computer screens and said, "these weren't just some random visitors. It's obvious they were living here and, for a very long time."
David looked off into space and sounded as if he were in denial when he replied, "how is this even possible? Why did they leave? The earth is obviously a lot more habitable than Feyland. Why would they decide to settle there after having been here for so long?”
Hank took another deep breath and after a moment of thought he said, "Mister Secretary, I have no idea. Those are all questions that I have been asking myself for nearly a year now. What's even more important, is that those questions are far from being just academic. Unless I miss my guess, the answers might very well mean our survival or our extinction."




TO BE CONTINUED