Fatalis

Chapter Twenty-Five

The University of California, Santa Barbara, in Isla Vista was founded in 1891 as a trade school. Brought into the University of California system in 1944, the school moved to its present site in 1954. Set on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean and wrapped around its own moody lagoon, the sprawling, spectacular 815-acre campus is the home of Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning professors in engineering and mathematics, humanities and fine arts, and physical and social sciences. The centerpiece of the campus is the 175-foot-tall Storke Tower, which sounds its sixty-one-bell carillon twice every hour.

Grand pulled on his windbreaker and headed over to the physical sciences lab. He was intrigued by Hannah's insistence on coming over and wondered why mentioning the fur samples had gotten such a strong reaction. He had a feeling he'd be finding out. Hannah Hughes did not seem like the kind of woman who held back whatever was on her mind.

Grand walked into the large, bright lab. He didn't come here often but he had fond, very strong memories of the place. He and Tumamait had some of their most impassioned debates here, starting with the day the twenty-four-year-old Grand tested the penetrating power of his first re-created bow and arrow. Could a yew shaft launched from twenty feet away with a granite tip have broken through the skull of a woolly mammoth, and is the skull of a cow really an acceptable substitute? The answers were unequivocally yes to the first and maybe to the second. Years later computer simulations supported Grand's view. But win or lose the debates, Grand had always appreciated Tumamait's questions, which were relentless, unforgiving, and brilliant.

He missed that.

Grand unzipped his jacket but he left it on. Away from the sun at this hour and situated so close to the ocean, the lab vacillated between a stiff late-morning chill and suffocating afternoon heat. With all our science we were still effectively living in solar-heated caves.

Grand wanted to get the hair sample into the DNA soup before class so he'd have the results when he finished up. With luck, DNA fingerprinting would tell him most of what he needed to know. The other morphology tests he wanted to run-carbon-14 dating and gas chromatography to determine the age of the hairs and the ratios of certain key elements of both the hairs and the mineral samples-had to be done elsewhere on campus and would take several hours longer.

Fortunately, the graduate student in charge of the DNA lab during the weekday morning shift was Tami Colgan, a former student of Grand's. A wait of days or even weeks for test results was not uncommon as students, professors, and local attorneys-"the paying customers," as Tami called them-came to the lab for workups. She took his hair sample right away, putting some of it in the soup and having an assistant bring several samples to the Engineering II building around the corner. One of the engineering students had built her own radiocarbon dating unit, so the age of the hair could be determined relatively quickly. Tami also sent the mineral scrapings over to the geology lab for gas chromatography analysis. With Dr. Thorpe off campus, a number of students had declared an unofficial holiday. As a result, the lab was free.

The DNA test facility was located in a windowless, closet-size room off the white-walled main lab. The first part of the analysis consisted of placing a small hair sample into a liquid enzyme that dissolved the DNA from other matter. Once the separation was complete, Colgan would place the DNA on a thin nylon membrane and bombard it with X rays. Since different parts of DNA react differently when exposed to radiation, they form distinctive autoradiographs on the nylon. This pattern resembles a distinctive bar code, the so-called DNA fingerprint The fingerprint can then be scanned into the computer and compared to other patterns on file. Using the high-speed, state-of-the-art equipment, the process of creating a fingerprint would take slightly over three hours. Because radiation was involved, the walls were lead-lined and Tami would only be in there to get things under way.

The young woman promised to get the other tests he requested started, then thanked him for bringing the hairs over. She said she was glad to have had the opportunity to help with real research for a change.

Grand thanked her, then went to teach his once-a-week class on the cave art of the Americas.