Hominids Read Online Free

The rough-hewn walls were peppered with steel rods and covered over with wire mesh; this far beneath Earth’s surface, with the weight of two kilometers of crust pressing down on them, unreinforced rock walls would burst into any open space.
    As they walked along the drift, occasionally coming across muddy patches, the man began to take more of his own weight; he was clearly recovering from his ordeal.
    Paul and Dr. Montego were engaged in an animated discussion about how this man could have possibly gotten into the sealed chamber. For her part, Louise was lost in thought about the ruined neutrino detector—and what that was going to do to her research funding. Air blew into their faces all the way along the drift; giant fans constantly pumped atmosphere down from the surface.
    Finally, they reached the elevator station. Reuben had ordered the lift cage locked off here, on the 6,800-foot level—the mine’s signage predated Canada’s switch to the metric system. It was still waiting for them, no doubt to the chagrin of miners who wanted to come down or go up.
    They entered the cage, and Reuben repeatedly activated the buzzer that would let the hoist operator on the surface know it was time to start the winch. The lift shuddered into motion. The cage had no internal lighting, and Reuben, Louise, and Paul had turned off their hardhat lamps rather than blind each other with their glare. The only illumination came in flashes from fixtures in the tunnels they passed every 200 feet, visible through the open front of the cage. In the weird, strobing light, Louise caught repeated glimpses of the strange man’s angular features and his deep-set eyes.
    As they went higher and higher, Louise felt her ears pop several times. They soon passed the 4,600-foot level, Louise’s favorite. Inco grew trees there for reforestation projects around Sudbury. The temperature was a constant twenty degrees; adding artificial light turned it into a fabulous greenhouse.
    Crazy thoughts occurred to Louise, weird X-Files notions about how the man could have gotten inside the sphere with the trapdoor still bolted shut. But she kept them to herself; if Paul and Reuben were having similar flights of fancy, they were also too embarrassed to give them voice. There had to be a rational explanation, Louise told herself. There had to be.
    The cage continued its long ascent, and the man seemed to take stock of himself. His strange clothes were still somewhat wet, although the blowing air in the tunnels had done much to dry them. He tried wringing out his shirt, a few drops falling on the yellow-painted metal floor of the elevator cage. He then used his large hand to brush his wet hair off his forehead revealing, to Louise’s astonishment—she gasped, although the sound surely was inaudible over the clanging of the rising car—a prodigious ridge arching above each eye, like a squashed version of the McDonald’s logo.
    At last the elevator shuddered to a halt. Paul, Louise, Dr. Montego, and the stranger disembarked, passing a small group of perplexed and irritated miners who were waiting to go down. The four of them headed up the ramp into the large room where workers hung their outdoor clothes each day, swapping them for coveralls. Two ambulance attendants were waiting. “I’m Reuben Montego,” said Reuben, “the mine-site doctor. This man nearly drowned, and he’s suffered a cranial trauma …” The two attendants and the doctor continued to discuss the man’s condition as they hustled him out of the building and into the hot summer day.
    Paul and Louise followed, watching as the doctor, the injured man, and the attendants entered the ambulance and sped away on the gravel road.
    “Now what?” said Paul.
    Louise frowned. “I have to call Dr. Mah,” she said. Bonnie Jean Mah was SNO’s director. Her office was at Carle-ton University in Ottawa, almost 500 kilometers away. She was rarely seen at the actual observatory site; the day-to-day