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way here to be dated, sampled, sequenced, analyzed, catalogued, studied, or exhibited. The university has priority over the lab’s teaching facilities, but the facility’s main purpose is research. Which is why the lab is infused with millions of dollars annually from corporate endowments. Every multinational from Exxon to Union Carbide has money in this place, and controversies regularly rage on campus among environmental groups fed up with the corporate hijacking of the scientific community. But the lab continues to run smoothly, partly because of the constant influx of dollars, and partly because of the iron-fisted management style of the senior analyst and laboratory director, Dr. Lorraine G. Mathis.
    In fact, only moments after Ulysses Grove was introduced to the prim, fiftyish woman in the white lab coat, he could tell that she was a bundle of paranoia and passive aggression.
    â€œWe’re going to be taking a left at the end of this corridor,” she was saying, leading the group along a narrow, carpeted hallway of glass display cases filled with skeletons of various exotic mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. “Which will bring us to the wet room, where the initial cleaning and sorting of archaeological remains goes on.”
    There were three other people in the group, hurrying to keep up with the bombastic Dr. Mathis as she marched along the corridor with the rigor of an SS officer: Grove, Maura County, and a young researcher named Michael Okuda. Thin as a razor in his lab coat, with delicate Asian features, Okuda was the first scientist to see the mummy on the side of Mount Cairn nearly a year ago. He had been summoned by one of the initial investigators, and had made the hundred-and-fifty-mile trip out to Lake Clark expecting to find nothing more than a frozen hiker from some time around the Carter administration. But the moment he saw that brittle, leathery corpse lying on a parkway near a ranger shack, he knew he had stumbled upon something epochal. He knew it from the desiccated animal skins still clinging to the mummy’s spindly arms, and from the grass-stuffed hides around the perfectly intact feet, and from the primitive axe blade lying near the body.
    Dr. Mathis paused in front of a secure door, fished in her pocket, and pulled out a magnetic card. “The problem with all this media monkey business,” she muttered as she angrily snapped the card through the electronic lock, “is the condition of the mummy. The remains need to be stored at a constant twenty degrees Fahrenheit with ninety-eight percent humidity in order to maintain preservation. Every time he’s thawed out for examination or sample extraction—or this kind of nonsense—the tissues dry and the cells break down further.”
    Standing behind the scientist, waiting to follow her into the lab, Grove noticed a number of things rippling through the group. The young underling, Okuda, glanced away for a moment as though embarrassed by his supervisor’s gall. The journalist from Discover , a nice enough woman in Grove’s estimation, gazed down at the floor and let out an almost imperceptible sigh of exasperation. Grove assumed that the crack about “media monkey business” was aimed directly at her. Grove detested rudeness of any kind, and already felt a vague dislike for this pious administrator. But worse than that, the dizziness was returning. Grove’s gorge was rising, and he felt as though the walls of the man-made subterranean cavern were closing in on him. He needed to get out of there as soon as possible.
    The door hissed open, and Mathis led the group into a narrow room that reeked of disinfectant and something else, something subtle just beneath the surface, something like the sweet stench of rotting meat. The air droned with voices, beeping, and whirring centrifuges.
    â€œWe’re the only facility in North America equipped to house such a find,” Mathis blathered