Shorty's Story

Doug DonnanExecutive Editor OMNI-GENRE+MAGAZINE!donnan.doug@yahoo.com

 

                        

by

                  

Doug Donnan


  "Well, you're the high falutin' paleo-anthropologist Vandergriff," he spouted

with dramatic exasperation. "Please just tell me what you think you have here."

Professor Haelstrom dropped his hands along side the creases of his white lab-

oratory smock and pushed out his bank of chins in challenge. The two of them

had been meticulously going over the shockingly well preserved pieces of the

ancient, anatomical puzzle (now dubbed Mini-Man) for many hours and had

reached a dead end. Neither one of them had a Sherlock Holmes clue as to just

what these fragile little bones might add up to.

     "Now see here professor," Vandergriff responded as he slipped a delicate

set of calipers into the pocket of his lab coat. "I thought we both had decided to

compare notes on this find. My associates who accompanied me on this dig in

Indonesia had directed me to you and your facility here. I was told that you

could help us solve this puzzle. Are you now just going to throw in the towel?

Let's just try and side up on this and leave our egos and notions out of it"

     Professor Haelstrom shrugged slightly and exhaled in mock surrender. He

began to flip back pages on his metallic clipboard and then raked a set of sausage

fingers through his wil-o'-the-wisp iron gray hair. He blew out another exagera-

ted sigh. "Okay, let's just try and start back at square one then shall we--hmm?

You and your team are scraping around with your instruments on some remote

little island in Indonesia--Calamari. One tenacious digger in your little dirt band

detects a rather sizeable curving protrusion in the cracked soil. He begins picking 

and brushing around and, eventually, uncovers this little fellow's softball-sized 

cranium. He pauses and stands up to try and make heads or tails--sorry about the

pun--out of what he has unearthed there in the parched clay of the mysterious atoll.

He decides, and rightfully so, to call his discovery to your attention. Before long

everyone is on their hands and knees scraping away. After a considerable amount

of painstaking work the entirety of his skeletal structure is revealed and then carefully

exhumed, bone by tiny bone, from his shallow mud grave. Tagged and labeled, he is

soon flown away from his tropical island home and brought here to our crack re-

search facility for analysis and scientific categorization," he paused squinting over the

dipping rim of his half-lens reading glasses. "How'm I doing so far?"

     "Yes--Yes, that's the scenario mostly, but--" Vandergriff sighed as he tossed

out his arms like some great white bird.

     "Now," Haelstrom broke in, "after taking multiple CAT scans of this Homo's

brain case, performing voodoo like stereo-lithography imagery and God only knows

what all else the lab boys have cooked up, we are no closer to identifying this tiny

bag of bones than we were when you first dropped this bomb on us two days ago,

and, to top it all off, you want to classify it as a new species--Homo Calamarsis?!"

     Vandergriff hung his head in disgust and then rotated some to look back on

the examining table where Shorty's (their pet name for this miniature H.Erectus)

skeleton was reconstructed. "He's probably only about 13,000 years old. For

Christ's sake Haelstrom that's unbelievable! My set-in-their-ways archeological

and anthropological colleagues will be throwing some heavy stones at me on

this if I can't back it all up with some hard facts. What are we gonna do?"

     "We?" Haelstrom whipped off his glasses and pointed them at Vandergriff, "To

quote Tonto to the Lone Ranger when the two were hopelessly surrounded by a

band of pissed-off Indians…'What you mean we?'" At that Haelstrom turned and

made for the stainless steel swinging doors of the lab. He hesitated, then turned

and dipped into his shirt pocket. "Oh, by the way, speaking of stones--one of our

morphological staff found this little tidbit mixed in with the Ziploc bags containing

Shorty's spinal column," he held out a dime-sized black flint triangle and presented it

to Vandergriff. "You had better have a talk with your worker bees on their tagging

and bagging procedures. I don't know exactly what it is, but it doesn't belong to

our mini-man here."

     Vandergriff reached for the shard and held it up to the fluorescent light, "Where

are you going? We need to--"

     "I need to go see a man about a dog, and then I am going to lunch. If you would

care to join me you can meet me down in the cafeteria in fifteen minutes. I've got

a pocket full of change for the canteen machines so lunch is on me." Haelstrom

continued across the black and white tiled floor and splashed out the doors leaving

Vandergriff in his wake.

     "But--?"

     Standing there feeling not so alone in the stillness of the laboratory, Vandergriff

continued to study the little razor-sharp black piece of flint. He was fascinated by it.

In fact, so fascinated, that he decided to make an in-house call to the Morphology 

Department to ask if the individual who had found the misplaced stone sliver might

possibly join him for a few moments there at Shorty's side.

*   *   *

    "Name's Falaska sir. Rick Falaska. Please just call me Rick won't you? How can

I help you?" he asked politely as he crossed his thick, muscular arms across his bar-

rel chest in readiness.

     "You found this right...Rick?" he asked holding out the pointed black shard.

     He glanced down at Vandergriff's open palm, "Yes sir, I figured, at least at first

glance, that somebody might have misplaced that little obsidian chipped arrow-head

and somehow it wound up in Shorty’s plastic bags of bits and pieces."

     "Arrow-head?" Vandergriff's eyes burst open as if he had just received an electric

shock. "What in fact made you think...first glance? Help me out Rick won't you?

Tell me some things that I don't know about our diminutive friend Shorty here."

     Falaska dropped his arms and stepped closer to the examining table, " Well,

I know this might sound crazy, but I began to go through the skeletal remains as

might a curious detective, using the little arrow-head here," he picked up the shard

from Vandergriff's hand. "I used this as a probe as I inched my way up, down and

around the skeleton. Maybe it wasn't part of the remains, but maybe it was part of

the picture! If that makes any sense," he suggested as he pecked in and out down

the brittle spinal column.

     "I see--and?" Vandergriff' asked as he scanned the table in bewilderment.

     Falaska stopped his little stone pointer midway down the cord and inserted it

into an opening between two of the crusted disks. He gingerly pinched the two

spinal pieces together and then pushed the arrow-head between them. "It fits in   

and through here like a glove," he exclaimed, subtly proud of his discovery.

     Vandergriff stiffened noticeably as he shoved his hands into the starched pockets

of his lab coat. "So just what the hell are you getting at ...Rick?" he thought he

heard this question echo in the stillness of the room.

     "Well sir--I don't know exactly what all happened to our little buddy here

way back when, but it seems to me that he might have run into the wrong crowd

somewhere along the way!"

     "You're saying you think one of his tribe, or whatever, might have shot him?

Why that's preposterous!"

     "Maybe it is, but it looks to me like somebody stopped him dead in his tracks,

cruel and true, I'm guessin'." Falaska rebutted.

     "Murdered?" Vandergriff whispered.

     "I didn't say that doc. I'm just sayin' it looks like an arrow," he held up the

flint, "penetrated the little guys back, broke through his spinal column and got

his immediate attention! That's all I'm sayin'!"

     "But how can you corroborate any of--"

     "We got a brand new 'Omni-Eye' computerized electron microscope downstairs

that might be able to pick up some blood traces." Falaska cut in.

     "Have you brought this up to anyone else--Rick?" Vandergriff probed.

     "Just my wife, and she's about as interested in it all as a monk is in a hockey

game. Why do you ask?"

     "No particular reason," Vandergriff sighed. "What say we keep all this

to ourselves. No sense getting anybody worked up over nothing…hmm?"

     Falaska saw this as a cue to exit, so he turned away for the double doors.

"Yes sir, what ever you say." As he was walking away he turned quickly

and threw over his shoulder, "By the way, you said one of 'his' tribe might have

done him in. I don't think they would have had the will or the wherewithal to use,

much less the brain power to construct, such 'instruments of destruction'." Falaska

then stopped and did a slow one-eighty. "Tell me this, did you all find any oldies of

the Homo Sapiens race on this island of yours?"

     "Our ancestors? Why certainly, in fact there were quite a few specimens found

in his general vicinity. Why do you--" Vandergriff trailed off as he directed a look

at his open palm, then down at the doll-like display of bones on the examining table.

     "Now, I think you're putting the pieces together!" Falaska grinned.

     "You mean you think we-- that is they might have hunted him down. Killed

him?" Vandergriff's eyes moistened.

     "I don't think we need Sherlock Holmes on this professor Vandergriff. I mean,

all things considered, our track record ain't so good when it comes to tolerating

that and them that's different than us--is it now?" Falaska turned for the doors

again and made his way out with a whoosh as he passed through.

     "But, we can't be sure. We shouldn't jump to--" Vandergriff's voice weakened

and did echo there in the clean examining room as though he might be calling out

from some deep cave or bottomless pit.

*     *     *

     "I thought you may have gotten lost trying to find your way down here to the

cafeteria," Haelstrom chuckled as he munched at his salad. "Wouldn't that be a

headline for Nature magazine; 'Noted paleo-anthropologist wanders halls of re-

search center--in search of food'." He playfully cuffed Vandergriff on the back.

"How's your chicken salad sandwich--any bones?"

     Vandergriff barely heard these comments as he stared out from somewhere

deep inside himself, adrift in a darkening sea of human shame and remorse.

                                          

                                _____ The End _____