Sasquatch
by Mike Nassau
Dr. Malcolm X Goins was more than a little surprised at being summoned (well, it was worded as an invitation) to see the Director of National Security. He was the chairman of the Genetics Department at Walter Reed Hospital, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Fisk University with his M.D. from Meharry Medical College and Ph.D. in genetics from Howard University, and he was highly respected in medical genetics and well known for his research on different forms of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus). While defending the people of America from AIDS could be seen as a form of national security, it had never brought him into contact with the cloak and dagger crowd watching for assassins, saboteurs and other terrorists. So it was with much curiosity and a little anxiety he went to see the formidable Dr. Wheat, an attractive woman known for her ability to think on her feet and to defend the defective policies and asinine comments of the president.
He was shown into her office very nearly at the appointed time and was introduced to two scientists who were with her. She wasted no time on social niceties, and did not give him any more information than necessary. She explained they needed to have a tissue sample analyzed to determine what it was, whether it was human or some other animal, and, if human, what race, but that the work must be absolutely secret and that the results could never be released. Could he do a DNA study on it by himself, letting no one else know what he was doing? He said that he could do so, but it would take more time than if he could get his technicians to help. She replied that time was not so critical as was absolute secrecy, so he agreed to do it by himself. He was presented with a small vial with a sample of liver tissue and he went back to Walter Reed.
As he ground up a small amount of the liver and extracted the DNA from it, he wondered what the sample could be from. How could it be that they didn't know even if it was human or not and yet need to know as a matter of national security? He didn't come up with an answer until he started to get results from selected polynucleotide sequences. They showed great similarity to known human sequences, but were not the same. Comparing them with chimpanzee sequences, they showed about half as much divergence from human nucleotide order as from the chimpanzee. This told him the sample was hominid, but not modern human, that it was from a hominid which had been separated from the ancestral line leading to modern humans for some three million years. If he was working on a hair embedded in amber, like the mosquitoes in Jurassic Park with dinosaur DNA in them, he would understand better, but this was a fresh liver sample. Of course, fresh liver samples had been obtained from long extinct Mammoths found frozen in Siberia, but that was from some 10,000 years ago, not three million.
Then he realized that the amount of divergence would mean six million years if the sample were from an ancestor, that the three million years represented three million years of change by both modern humans and the unknown hominid since they were separated, just as the six million years separation from chimpanzees meant that much change by both humans and chimpanzees. Since the sample had the same degree of divergence from the chimpanzee as modern humans do, it obviously was not the common ancestor from six million years ago. So he realized that the sample was from a hominid which had survived to the present but which had diverged from modern humans about three million years ago, probably either the Sasquatch of North America or the Yeti of Asia. While sighted many times, both creatures were doubted to really exist by most of the scientific community. They were regarded as myths or fables, not real flesh and blood animals, but he had a sample of liver from some hominid which was not known to exist. This was when the secrecy requirement to which he had been sworn really began to grate on him.
He made his report to Dr. Wheat just one week after he was given the sample. He explained that the degree to which two samples of DNA diverged constituted a biological clock showing how long the lines leading to the animals had been separated. Mutations, changes in the nucleotides present, occurred at a fairly constant but very low rate over time, the more mutations, the longer the separation. The five genetic races of modern humans had only been separated from each other for 200,000 years or less. The original split at that time had the ancestors of two races moving south and the other three going north from somewhere not too far from northwestern Kenya. The two southern races, the Khoisan (Khoikhoi or 'Hottentots' and San or 'Bushmen') and the Twa ('Pygmies', Mbuti) had separated from each other about 150,000 years ago. To the North, the two races of western Africa and the Trans-Saharan race had separated about the same time. In West Africa, the Sahelian race of the grasslands and the Guinean race of the rain forests had separated some 100,000 years ago. The Trans-Saharan race, which included everyone else, northern Africa, the Horn of Africa, Eurasia, the Americas, Australia and Oceania, had diverged greatly in appearance but not in DNA sequences. The separation between Australian natives and Icelanders, between Quechua Indians of the Andes and Ethiopians, or Chinese and the Dravidians of southern India, was less than 60,000 years, too little to be considered more than sub-races. Since this sample showed a divergence of some three million years, it was from a different species, not just a different race. The separation would be at the time of the australopithecines. This meant it was from a hominid unknown to science but which had survived to the present.
Then he begged her to tell him if it was the Sasquatch or the Yeti. She looked at him in a startled, puzzled manner. Then she said she would have to consult others before deciding if he could be told anything more, and had him go to her waiting room while she made some phone calls. When she called him back in a few minutes, she informed him that she was authorized to tell him that the sample was collected in mountains in western United States. He returned to Walter Reed excited to know that he was the first person to ever examine the DNA of a Sasquatch, the elusive hairy wild man of the western forests.
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Dr. Wheat met with the rest of the Council to discuss this finding. That it was a hominid of terrestrial origin was actually what she and the others had expected from the autopsy results fifty years earlier. The beings were too similar to modern humans to have originated anywhere but the Earth. They had become known as "grays" to flying saucer enthusiasts and drawings of them were everywhere with their thin bodies and huge, dark eyes. This was because their gray uniforms and large dark monocles had been perceived as their skin and eyes by observers. When these were removed from their dead bodies, they were amazingly like humans to be from a "flying saucer" which had crashed in New Mexico. The autopsies had shown the similarity was internal as well as external. The lack of speech centers in their brains and the shape of their throat and mouth indicated that they vocalized like bonobos and chimpanzees, and did not have spoken language. Their brains were somewhat larger than modern humans in proportion to their small bodies, so they were obviously intelligent, even without the evidence of the technology they had used. But was it their technology?
The consensus of the scientists was that it was not their technology. They were probably the servants or slaves of some more advanced species, used to man space exploration because the master species did not want to be confined in space craft for the many years it took to reach other stars and their planets. They had been taken from Earth some three million years ago, presumably some sort of australopithecines, and kept as slaves, pets or domestic animals by the master species. They had to have been taken from the Earth by some more advanced species since australopithecines could not have traveled to a planet of another star on their own. The information that the grays had been taken from Earth about three million years ago was unexpected. The Scientists in the project had speculated that the grays were humans from Earth who had been modified by selection or genetic engineering by their masters after being captured fairly recently. Their Earth origin had not been doubted by many, however, since the probability of nearly identical forms of life on another planet was virtually zero.
Are they a threat to humans? Is the master species a threat to humans? If the master species decides to use the grays to conquer the Earth and enslave humans, is there any possibility of getting the grays to ally with their human relatives against their masters? The first two questions were pretty impossible to answer, but the third seemed more amenable to analysis. The difference between grays and humans was great. Communication was difficult. They presumably were treated quite well by their masters or they couldn't be trusted to explore at great distances from their home world. For humans to try to recruit grays as allies would be comparable to wolves trying to recruit domestic dogs as allies against humans. Except they had been domesticated for 300 times as long as the dog. It would be very difficult if not impossible, especially in view of the three million year separation.
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At a meeting of scientists on a spaceship, 4785 (short for 1053 9224 5802 4785) was trying to get agreement on the report of their findings to be sent to the Masters. Theirs was the third shift, each ship had observed Earth for nearly eighteen years. The report would be received in only about twelve Earth years, but the ship would not get home for some forty years. Many of them would be dead before then, the rest would be old. 4785 asked 9272, the chief biologist, what his conclusions were. 9272 signed that the Earth was indeed the planet from which the Masters had obtained their ancestors, that the humans were very close relatives of the People. There were many similarities that had implications for health maintenance, many medicines both natural and synthetic which would be useful both for People and for the other animals the Masters had imported from Earth. There were some traits which might be introduced into the People by genetic engineering if authorized by the Masters. The human capacity for speech was the most obvious trait, it permitted communication while leaving the hands free for other tasks. The prehensile tail of the spider monkey was another trait he would like to see introduced, it could be used for many things. He had collected frozen embryos of many types of humans as well as spider monkeys, gibbons, bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, cattle, dogs, horses, sea lions and dolphins.
3387 reported that the social scientists had finally understood some human languages after finding a deaf woman who taught them a sign language which had some similarities to their own. There were machines which could convert some spoken language into writing, which was much easier to learn than speech. Some hybrid children, half human, half our People, had been produced and they could easily learn both human speech and the sign language of the People. An impressive collection of human knowledge and writings had been amassed. The profusion of human languages was amazing and bewildering, the People must be grateful that the educational system provided by the Masters kept everyone using the same sign language. Information including teaching videos had been collected on the eight languages which were believed to be the languages important enough to survive the consolidation which was resulting from the internet and other electronic communication (Arabic, Chinese, English, Hindustani, Japanese, Malay, Russian and Spanish), but the principal effort was on English, which seemed to be dominating international communication. If the People were to be modified genetically so that in the future they could communicate by speech like humans, it would be suggested they learn English.
The most serious part of the report was on the destructive tendencies of humans. They reproduced without planning, producing more children than they could feed, educate or find jobs for. There were only about half as many humans as there were People on the home world, but Earth was smaller and the humans were much more crowded. Humans were destroying their environment and using up their natural resources. Worst of all, they killed and maimed each other intentionally. It was the consensus of the social scientists that they must ask the Masters to take the Earth into protective custody as soon as possible and institute a program of benevolent control.
The group agreed to a report along these lines and sent it to the home world. Then they began the lengthy transmission of all the information they had collected, while their ship was progressing on the long journey home.
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Malcolm Goins had managed to obtain a tranquilizer gun which shot darts which would anesthetize animals. When his vacation time came, he headed for the Cascade Mountains of Washington state. He rented a Landrover which was supposed to be able to go nearly anywhere on land. He bought a lot of camping gear. He even got a liquid nitrogen tank used by dairy farmers to store semen for artificial insemination to keep his tissue sample in. He was determined to find a Sasquatch and get a tissue sample of his own that he could report on.
Unfortunately, he was not only in the wrong state for where the liver tissue sample had been taken, he was on the wrong planet going around the wrong star to find the People he was looking for.
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This story was originally written in 1997 for the fiftieth anniversary of the famous crash at Roswell, New Mexico. This is a later version, recreated from memory in 2004 after the original was lost. It is intended as a tribute to Robert Sheckley and the ironic tradition of Saki and O. Henry which he has so ably continued in science fiction. It is available on the internet at:
www.nassausasquatch.webs.com
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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 01.07.2010
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