Origin (J. T. Brannan) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги

PART FIVE

1

Lynn awoke, her hands instantly going to her belly. She had no way of knowing but it felt OK, and that would have to do for now.

But where was she? It was dark, and the ground was rough beneath her.

Was she still in the cavern? She looked up, and was greeted by the sight of stars. No, she was outside somewhere.

So what had happened? Her presence in the chamber had obviously altered the mechanics of the wormhole in some way, causing it to act in an unplanned manner.

She suddenly had the unpleasant thought that she might be anywhere in the universe, anywhere at all.

Her head snapped up to look at the stars again, and she was instantly reassured. She was still on earth, no question about it. In the northern hemisphere in fact, and she could make out the familiar sights of the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, and Venus, all in their familiar places in the sky. And behind her, when she turned, she saw the moon in all its glory, casting its light down upon her. Besides which, she realized that if she was indeed on another planet, it would be highly unlikely that she would be able to breathe the atmosphere.

She still didn’t know where she was, though, and so she started to walk, examining the landscape around her.

But soon she was tired, so very, very tired, and she felt the need to lie down. She found what she considered a safe place, in the lee of a large rock, put her jacket down as a makeshift pillow, and within seconds was asleep.

She awoke the next morning with the rays of the sun upon her.

She shook the cobwebs from her head, and then the sound hit her. It was strange, like nothing she had ever heard before; a curious rasping sound, like a lizard growling.

She looked around, and her eyes went wide as she saw the animals over the crest of the small hill in front of her. They were enormous furred creatures, and as she watched them stalk across the barren landscape, she was sure she had never seen anything like it. Or had she?

Lynn looked up at the sun, as if to reassure herself that she was still on earth.

She got to her feet and started to walk again. She walked and walked, and it seemed she was in a desert wilderness. She walked for hours, until she was exhausted, and still she had found no sign of life except for those first strange creatures. There was also no sign of human habitation.

She sat down and examined the desert landscape. The shrubs she could see looked like the familiar varieties but what did she know about desert shrubs? Not a lot. But those creatures bothered her, reminding her of something she had seen once before, in a textbook at school, or perhaps university. But a textbook on what?

When the answer finally hit her, it was with the force of a sledgehammer.

2

She continued to move across the landscape over the next few days and eventually came to a river, flowing powerfully through the otherwise arid terrain. It was a true lifesaver, and she decided to stay close to it, scavenging what she could from the desert around her to eat, and drinking the wonderful, clean water from the river.

And then one day she saw them, at first in the distance — a group of half a dozen, making their way to the water. She hid behind a rock pile as she watched them, creatures of a type she recognized with horrifying certainty.

They walked erect on two legs, were about five and a half feet tall, with hair covering much of their muscular bodies. Their features were not dissimilar to her own and the people she knew but they were not Homo sapiens.

She watched them as they drank water and bathed for a leisurely hour, communicating in a mixture of grunts and whistles. And then, finally, they left the river and lumbered off back to wherever they had come from.

The recognition she experienced upon seeing them made her start to understand what had happened. To test her hypothesis, she spent the next few nights staring up at the stars, measuring the movements as best she could.

After several nights, she was sure; horrified, but sure.

The creatures she had seen by the river were featured heavily in many books she had read at Harvard on human evolution, and several that she had studied during her recent research.

They were members of the extinct hominid subspecies Homo neanderthalensis.

This realization confirmed her recognition of the massive furred creatures she had seen that first day as ground sloths, animals that were also long since extinct.

Her astronomy was better than her paleontology, and yet it had only served to confirm her fears.

The night sky was very similar through time, but over very large timeframes, there were subtle differences that could be observed, even with the naked eye. She knew that Neanderthal man had died out tens of thousands of years ago but this did not help to prepare her for the conclusions she drew from her astral observations, for the position of the stars in the sky were as they would have been about two hundred thousand years ago.

She had indeed been caught in the wormhole, but instead of bending the fabric of the cosmos in order to send the Anunnaki through space, it had instead sent her through time.

And as she considered what had happened, she couldn’t help but remember the words of Professor Travers.

‘Yes,’ he had said when asked about the Anunnaki, ‘and don’t ask me how they evolved, as they don’t even know themselves. One moment the earth had other Homo species, including ergastor, heidelbergensis, rudolfensis, habilis, neanderthalensis, among others, and the next we had Homo sapiens sapiens, fully formed not only physically but also mentally.’

And as she sat by the banks of the river, and once more touched Matthew Adams’ baby that grew inside her, Evelyn Edwards finally understood everything.