Chapter 1: There were Giants...

Mark stared hard at the monitor in front of him. "Yes!" he exclaimed. "I told you this could be translated." He grinned at the text on the screen.

Melissa smiled at his excitement. To Melissa, whether a language was written a thousand years ago or fifty thousand years ago meant little except it made Mark happy. "That's nice, Mark." She bent over and licked his earlobe.

"Don't," he told her in a growly voice, "or I'll hurt you."

"As if," she whispered and ruffled his hair.

Mark stared hard at his monitor and exclaimed, "Uh oh!"

"What?" she stared at her childhood sweetheart and asked again, "What?" Sensitive to Mark's every mood, she sensed a feeling of dismay come over him."

"I believe the French cave drawings are even older than estimated," He paused and took a deep breath before he continued, "Or they are fakes, a damned hoax."

Melissa's patience acceptance of Mark's single mindedness came to an abrupt end. "Oh for god's sake Mark, get real. Who cares if some geeky old professor cheated to get his name up there in lights? You better worry more about whether your Standard Oil stocks are going to tank or not. And speaking of tank, you forgot to gas up your mom's van again, didn't you?"

"I already told Mom to divest our portfolio of all petroleum stocks and invest in wind, hybrid autos and a new bicycle company that has developed a light weight motor driven trike that gets a hundred fifty miles to the gallon. I guarantee there'll be a thirty percent return minimum on the investment."

He looked up from his computer long enough to ask her, "Honey, would you please go talk to Mom? I need to concentrate here." He turned back to his computer. Melissa Puffin tensed, stared at the back of Mark's head, opened her mouth and closed it again.

She stormed into the kitchen and began to vent her anger, "I give up. Your son is the most aggravating person in the whole universe." Melissa dropped her body into a kitchen chair and watched Mark's mother prepare a small pork roast for dinner.

Rachel Stone laughed at the young woman. "I remember you said almost the same thing about ten years ago. You told me a week after your family moved next door, 'He is the most exasperating man I have ever met.' You were both seven years old and you were so indignant that Mark refused to go bicycling with you." They both laughed at the memory.

Melissa frowned. "It's worse than ever, now that he's found what he calls an anomaly in a series of hieroglyphics, early Indian texts and the cave drawings in France and Spain. He says that Modern man either originated in the Swiss Alps or somewhere in the Mediterranean area. He's about to drive me..." She shook her head and sighed.

"I was incorrect," Mark's voice came from the open door to his bedroom. "There were three simultaneous places where supposedly non-evolved Man began to evolve independent of the others, the hominids currently accepted as the proto men."

"Damn it, Mark!" Melissa jumped up and knocked her chair back away from her. "I don't care about any of that stuff. When are you going to come back down to Earth and pay some attention to your mother and me?"

"Oh man, how I hate these senseless confrontations," Mark told the ceiling and went back inside his room. He closed the door behind him. Rachel stared at the closed door and felt a new level of frustration. Why couldn't Mark understand he was about to lose Melissa?

Mark closed the door and sat back down at his computer. In moments he was focused on the array of data that danced across the screen of his left hand monitor. The middle monitor showed the Spanish cave drawings and the right monitor displayed a drawing that was hopefully a rendition of "Lucy," the supposed oldest proto human, believed to be three and a half million years old.

"Lucy was an accident," Mark told the screen.

Mark was unaware of the conversation in the kitchen. "Tell your son I have decided to go to the wrestling meet at the U. I intend to get laid and party. I'm not waiting any longer for him to realize what he's losing. He just lost it." Melissa walked out the back door, through the gate that led to her house and into her back door.

"Oh dear, Mark's finally done it for certain this time." In Rachel's mind, Melissa was the perfect daughter in law and the ideal mate for Mark. Rachel wanted grandchildren. To be specific, she wanted grandchildren created by Mark and Melissa. Almost from the day the Puffins moved in next door, she became obsessed with the idea that Melissa was destined to have Mark's babies.

Angela Puffin met her daughter as she came into the living room. "Sweetheart, your father is upset. Please don't do or say anything to arouse him further."

"Huh," Melissa grunted, "The only thing that would arouse that pervert would be a naked ten year old girl child."

"I heard that." Carl Puffin came into the living room and grabbed Melissa's arm.

She twisted away from his grip, spun once and kicked him in the forehead. "Don't you ever touch me again, you filthy slime. Next time I'll put you in the hospital."

Then they heard two shotgun blasts and a yell from next door...

After Melissa stormed out of the Stone house, Rachel stared at the back door when Melissa closed it behind her. She thought a moment, got a determined look on her face and walked into the living room. She opened the gun cabinet that had remained unopened for the past seven years, removed an antique twelve gage double barreled shotgun and opened the breech to load it with double ought shells. She slipped on a pair of shooters' mouse ears.

"This is for your own good, Mark," she whispered. Rachel snapped the gun closed and walked toward Mark's bedroom door.

She slammed his door open, grabbed the back of his office chair and rolled him to one side. "Look out!" she yelled, brought the shotgun to bear on the computer tower, and let fly with the left barrel. She turned just a little and blew her son's three-screen sixty-six inch monitor away.

"What's the matter, have you gone crazy?" Mark yelled. His ears rang. He was partly deafened from the concussion created by the two blasts.

Rachel slipped the mouse ears off, gave her horrified son an angry grin and told him, "No, I am not, definitely not crazy. You're crazy, if you think I'm going to let you shut the most wonderful girl in the world out of your life while you explore outer space or wherever your mind goes when you zone out.

Melissa ran into the smoke filled room. "What happened?"

Mark shoved his way past and answered her, "Ask my crazy mother." He stormed out of the house.

"I killed his computer," Angela told Melissa. I refused to stand by and watch that idiot son of mine ruin what you two have just so he could chase some crazy theory of his about the origins of the species. I want the two of you to have babies and to hell with all that other foolishness."

Three days later Mark returned home. "Oh my god honey, where have you been?" Rachel stared hard at her somehow changed son. She could not define what had changed in him, only that he had changed.

"Thinking," he replied. "I intend to move out and find a place of my own. I need space to do my research. What you can't seem to appreciate is that what I discovered in Dad's stuff when I was twelve has grown to something I can't yet understand. I intend to move up to Coalville." He walked past her to his room. He noted the damaged computer and monitors had been replaced. He saw both of the old hard drives in front of the monitor.

Mark took a suitcase from his closet and began to place pants, shirts and underwear inside. He sandwiched the two hard drives between the pants and shirts, added his collection of flash disks and closed the suitcase. He lifted it off the bed and started to leave.

"Please honey," Rachel pled with fear in her eyes. "Please don't go. You're all I have left in the world."

Mark sat the suitcase down and stood straight. "I need my time to further research my discovery. I can't do that in a house where two needy females constantly hound me and give me no peace. Why can't anyone understand the simple fact that I need my space to do my research?"

Rachel stared hard at her son. "Mark, please tell me what you have found that is so earth shattering that you have completely alienated Melissa and kept me at arm's length for weeks on end?"

She looked up into his eyes and added, "Honey, you are seventeen years old. You are a teenager, not a department head at the U. What can a teenager discover on a home computer that the universities had overlooked?"

"Actually Dad discovered the first artifact on one of our treks up in the Uintas. Remember that small metal globe with the scratchings on it?" Rachel nodded slowly.

"That was our last camping trip before he was killed. I was ten and I still remember it like it happened just hours ago."

Rachel nodded, "Yes, I remember. Your father joked that it was impossible that a stainless steel ball could have gotten stuck in the strata where he found it. He labeled it one of life's anomalies and brought it home with us.

"You have used it as a decoration for years."

"Not so," he told her. "I have studied it all these years. When I was twelve I deciphered the scratchings after I used Dad's notes as a starting point. They're not scratches but etched markings that show the Earth as it was at a time before the continental drift. When properly interpreted the scratches become a map and show a table of mathematics based on prime thirteen. It also expresses pi as a complete coefficient instead of a long string of numbers to the right of the decimal point."

Mark returned to his room and came back with a twenty gig flash drive. "Here, take this to work and try to get a better understanding of what you've tried to belittle. Also consider the fact that I did this work before I was fourteen."

All at once Rachel did not feel so certain of herself. "What is it Mark?"

"This disk holds a whole new system of mathematics far beyond anything you have ever seen or imagined." He smiled and added, "There is also included a spectrographic analysis of the minute sample I was able to gouge off the surface of the globe at the cost of a half dozen carbide mill bits. Pay attention to the copy of the attached letter from the testing lab."

"Mark honey, will you stay over the weekend, please? I have a feeling I may owe you a big apology." Rachel felt ill as she went to her bedroom and closed the door.

"Okay. I'll wait until you get home from work Monday evening," Mark told the closed door. He returned to his room and began to place his clothing back in his dresser drawers.

Mark removed the side panels on the computer his mother had purchased to replace the one she "killed." He nodded his head in approval as he noted the retro installations that brought it up to almost his demanding specifications. He smiled to himself; Leave it to my mother to go top ticket where computers are concerned. He nodded his approval and installed the two hard drives from his old computer.

Melissa entered his room unannounced and shook her head in resignation that nothing had changed. "Well I see you're over your temper tantrum. Where did you go?" She knew this was the wrong approach to take with Mark, but felt driven to push him, to try to make him understand she wanted to be a part of his life and not the casual acquaintance she had become in the past few months.

"To answer your question first, I stayed at the University Library and read. I also sat in the faculty lounge and thought."

Mark drew a breath and continued, "In response to your remark, go home." He turned back to his task at hand and ignored her.

Melissa felt a sick pang deep in her belly. "Oh Mark, I'm so stupid..."

He heard her but didn't respond...

Melissa sat beside Rachel in the back yard. Rachel was stretched out on an air pad. She wore a micro bikini that gave her body the most exposure to the sun's rays. "That pervert is watching you from the upper hall window."

Rachel laughed aloud at the disgust in Melissa's voice. "Maybe he'll choke on his own drool." She rolled over from her back to lay face down.

"How can you be so nonchalant about the way he keeps staring at you with those disgusting beady eyes? God, I want to break his scrawny neck when he stares at me like that." Melissa openly stared hard up at her father with an expression of pure disgust on her face.

"Dear, do you care even a little bit about the thoughts of a cinch bug?" Rachel laughed at Melissa.

Melissa sputtered, "What? What are you talking about?"

"Your father and an errant cinch bug have about the same importance in my life. So long as he doesn't act on his disgusting little fantasies, why should I care what he thinks or wishes? However, if he does try to act out any of his perversions, I would do him grievous harm."

"Good, I hope he gropes you just once so I can watch the action." Melissa stared hard once again up at the fluttering curtains on the second floor window where Carl Puffin peeked down at Rachel and Melissa.

The anger in the younger woman's voice gave Rachel pause. "Has he ever done anything to you?" she asked.

"Yes. Lately he has started to rub against me and has tried to feel me up. I told Mother I'm going to call the police Monday and complain. I think she told him what I said."

"Be careful. He might try to take matters into his own hands. Remember, you're still a minor. In the eyes of the law you won't be legally an adult for almost another six months yet." Rachel looked on Melissa as a daughter than as her son's girlfriend.

"Mom, what can we do about Mark? He's shut us out of his life so completely that I can't even talk to him. If I try to joke with him he shuts me out of his life. All he cares about is that damned computer and his great science fiction fantasy."

Rachel rolled over on her side and sat up. Her face changed and showed her concern. "Dear, I have a hunch that whatever it is Mark is pursuing is not fantasy. You know how he becomes involved in some project or other and seems to withdraw into his own little universe?"

Melissa gave a reluctant nod. "Yes. Even when we were small, he always seemed to think on three levels at once."

"Daniel, Mark's father was even worse." Melissa could hear the sadness in Rachel's voice as she remembered her husband. She continued, "Daniel was almost driven out of the scientific community when he made one of his discoveries public knowledge. The only reason his enemies failed was because he went to the press and showed them not only what he found but also invited reporters along to his dig. He excavated the remains of a small stone building while the cameras recorded every shovel of dirt and debris he removed."

She gave a sad little laugh and continued, "The whole archaeological community was up in arms and tried to debunk his discoveries. A human skull lodged in the earth at a level that corresponded with the late Cetaceous Era was debunked as a hoax. Then as the whole controversy was about to come to a head Dan was killed in a traffic accident and I was left alone with my ten year old son."

"What does all that have to do with the way Mark treats us?" Melissa was impatient for quick answers.

"My son wheedled newer and newer and ever bigger computers out of me. He devoured books on archaeology, anthropology, electronics, cosmology and whatever his little grasshopper mind landed on next. I always knew he was quite intelligent and saw no reason to not give him what he asked for; we could afford it."