The Anomaly(9)

“Hell yes,” I said. And to be fair, Feather was quickly adapting to being asked to carry things and/or stay out of the way, doing both with unflappable good cheer. “You’re part of the team already.”

She grinned like a schoolgirl. “Ooh, ooh,” she said, handing her phone to Molly. “Before we get out of signal. Can I get a picture with Nolan?”

We posed while Molly took a shot. I tried, as usual, not to look like a craggy middle-aged man who exercises but not quite enough.

Feather grabbed the camera back and fired the picture off in an email. “To my husband,” she explained. “He’s a huge fan, too.” She flicked through her photos and held the phone out so Molly and I could see. A shot of a hipster-looking guy, standing grinning at the camera with a small boy.

“Cute,” Molly said dutifully. “What’s his name?”

“Perry. He’s five.”

I took a look, too. “So…how old’s the kid, then?”

It took her a moment, but then she laughed her head off. Molly caught my eye and winked.

Good job, Nolan.



As the team unpacked things from the SUV and distributed them for carrying down the trail, I walked a little way off to grab a cigarette. After a few minutes, Gemma wandered over to me. “So, Nolan. Is now good? For that little bit of background?”

I smiled broadly. “Now is great.”

“I must say, you’re a better actor than I realized.”

“How so?”

“Your reaction to seeing the canyon. You made it look like it was genuinely your first time.”

“Well,” I said, “actually, this is my first time.”

She stared at me. “What?”

“I live in LA,” I said defensively. “So if I want a vacation, I tend to go farther away.”

“You’re leading an expedition to look for this alleged cavern, for which no one’s ever found a shred of evidence, and you’ve never even been to the Grand Canyon before?”

“I’ve never been to Egypt, either,” I said. “Does that invalidate my views on the pyramids?”

“Well…maybe, yeah.”

“Scientists say a bunch of things about Mars. None of them have ever been there.”

She was looking at me in a curious, baffled way. “That’s…different. You can see that, right?”

“Being too entrenched in the consensus can stop you from spotting what’s in front of your eyes,” I said, wondering if I might be better off heading back to the SUV to help. “Everybody agreed for years that the out-of-Africa diaspora of Homo sapiens happened sixty thousand years back, for example. But then in 2015, excavators at Daoxian in southern China found teeth in a cave floor, sealed below stalagmites that were uranium-dated to eighty thousand BC. Slam-dunk proof that the teeth have to be older—possibly as old as a hundred and twenty-five thousand years. Did you know that?”

“I did not.”

“And you don’t care. But my point is, sure, it got reported. Eventually. In journals nobody reads. But all the independent researchers who’d been ridiculed for years? It’s ‘Run along—the grown-ups have finally found evidence for what you’ve been saying. So now it’s real. But we’re controlling the story. Oh, and that other stuff you say? That’s still wrong.’”

“But you didn’t know,” she said.

I blinked. “What do you mean, ‘know’?”

“On this and everything else. You were just making shit up, or repackaging other people’s made-up shit. You didn’t actually know this stuff.”

“I’m hazy on your qualifications as an epistemologist.”

“Is that to do with bugs?”

“No. It’s the branch of philosophy that concerns the nature and scope of knowledge. Kant burned his entire life on it. Shoulda waited to talk to you, evidently.”

“Throwing in a long word every now and then doesn’t make you smart.”

I was trying to keep my tone light but finding it a struggle. “Neither does a lot of short ones. And a next page button. And Google ads for diet pills.”

“Cheap shot. And may I also point out that it wasn’t you who found these teeth? This is all secondhand information—like every single thing I’ve heard you say.”

“Discoveries like that don’t come along often.”

“Right. Hence your mantra that ‘it matters not whether we find, only that we continue to seek.’ Very zen. And super convenient, too. Because you’ve made kind of a specialty of not finding shit, right?”

“Were shit easy to find,” I said, “shit would already have been found. It would be part of the consensus, instead of buried and denied.”

“Neat sidestep. But seriously. I think my favorite was that episode where you marched up to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and demanded to see all the skeletons of giants hidden in the vaults. That was priceless. You in pouring rain, in the street, demanding they stop covering up the secret history of America. And that poor guy from the museum repeating again and again that the skeletons didn’t exist.”

“There are,” I said, “many reports from the 1800s mentioning huge skeletons. Even the 1891 Report of the Smithsonian’s own Bureau of Ethnology—at that time directed by John Wesley Powell himself, as conventional a scientist as you’ll find—details skeletons over seven feet tall found in Dunleith, Illinois, and Roane County, Tennessee. I’ve got a PDF of the original right here on my phone if you want to look. There are a ton of similar stories, in some cases found in deposit levels suggesting they predated the Native Americans.”