"What happened?" he asked John the Gypsy, "Did that crazy Brandon come snoopin' around?"

"It was the cave man," said John the Gypsy. "He's gone away!"

"What?" McAfee stared in disbelief. Then he raised his voice and shouted, "Thalia! Get my keys!"

Thalia McAfee came running with the keys, and McAfee opened the museum door and snapped on the lights. He strode through the doorway and past the display cases and the models and photo blowups. Lights went on in the underground chamber, and McAfee looked in at his treasure. The boys peered past McAfee. They saw empty eye sockets looking back at them, and the remains of a grinning mouth.

They saw ribs jutting from the smoothbrushed earth, and a hand reaching. McAfee turned on John the Gypsy.

"You're crazy!" he said. "The bones are right here. What's the matter with you?"

"He walked away!" insisted the other. "I seen him go. He was wearing a fur thing like one of them shawls that the Mexican people wear, only fur! And he had hair! He was alive!"

"You shut up!" snapped McAfee. "You want to get the whole town up here?"

He put out the lights in the cave and marched out of the museum. The others followed him.

"Got up and walked, huh?" he said. He made a mocking noise, locked the museum door, and went back to his house. Eleanor was waiting there at the bottom of the porch steps.

"Get inside, Eleanor," commanded McAfee. "It wasn't anything. Crazy John's been seeing things."

He looked back. "John, you keep awake! I ain't payin' you to nap, you know!"

He and Eleanor vanished into the house. John the Gypsy mumbled something under his breath and took a folding chair out of the van. He placed it halfway between the van and the museum. He then took a shotgun from the van and sat down.

The Three Investigators went back to the loft.

"Must have been a dream," said Pete softly.

"The old guy doesn't seem too bright," said Bob.

"No," Jupe agreed, "but does that mean he sees things that aren't there?"

"Well, no. But anyone can have a dream and not be sure what really happened and what didn't," said Bob.

"He seemed very positive," said Jupe.

"What about the door? It was locked," said Pete.

"Someone could have had a key," said Jupe. He sat up in his sleeping bag and stared out through the window and across the meadow. The trees onthe far side of the field were deep black against the night sky, but the gra.s.s on the meadow was silver with dew. A series of darker patches crossed that silvery field - a trail that ended in the shadows under the trees.

Had someone walked that way, crushing the gra.s.s underfoot and disturbing the droplets of dew?

Jupe started to get up. Then he saw John the Gypsy rise from his chair and look out across the meadow. John held his shotgun in the crook of his arm, and his head was to one side as if he were listening.

He went to his van after a minute or two and took a blanket from his bed. He wrapped it around himself and sat down again in the chair.

"Perhaps it was a dream," said Jupe softly. "But John the Gypsy believes it was the cave man, and I think he's afraid."

Pete looked nervously out of the window at the moonlit meadow. "I don't blame him," he said. "If I saw a cave man wandering around, I'd be terrified!"

Chapter 7.

A Busy Morning JUPE WAS THE FIRST one up and out of the barn on Sat.u.r.day morning. In the bright sunlight the woods did not look particularly dark and mysterious. Jupe began to walk through the meadow towards them. He went slowly, keeping his eyes on the ground, but he didn't see a single footprint. The dark patches that he'd seen in the gra.s.s the night before had disappeared with the morning dew.

He had gone perhaps thirty metres when he spotted a place where the gra.s.s was quite thin and the dark earth showed through the green. He knelt, feeling a shiver of excitement.

He was still there, staring at the ground, when Pete came to his side.

"What is it?" said Pete. "You find something?"

"A footprint," said Jupe. "Someone walked across this field very recently - someone with bare feet!"

Pete crouched to look at the print. Then he stood up and stared at the woods. His face was pale.

"Barefoot?" he said. "On . . . on this rough ground? Does that mean John the Gypsy really saw something?" He looked around.

Jupe said nothing and went on towards the woods. Gulping, Pete followed him.

They were alert for further signs of the person who had pa.s.sed this way, but the gra.s.s was long and thick and they reached the edge of the woods without seeing another print.

There was a path under the trees, but the ground there was strewn with pine needles.

"Footprints won't show here," said Jupe, "but maybe farther on ..."

"Hey, wait a second!" cried Pete. "You don't want to go in there now! I mean, somebody might still be there and ... and ... and if we're going to get anything to eat, we'd better get going. There'll be a mob at that cafe! Come on, or we could wind up starving."

"Pete, this could be important!" said Jupe.

"To who?" retorted Pete, "Hey, come on, Jupe. We can search the woods later."

Reluctantly, Jupe let himself be coaxed away. He and Pete went back to the barn.

Bob came out as they arrived. Just then Newt McAfee appeared on his back porch.

"Mornin'," Newt called to the boys. "Beautiful day, ain't it? Ought to get a big turnout for the opening of my museum." He smiled with satisfaction.

"Hey, John!" yelled Newt. John the Gypsy came out of his van holding a bowl of cereal. "Didja see any more cave men last night?" Newt chuckled, but the watchman scowled.

"I seen one, and that's enough," said John, and he disappeared back into his van.

Unperturbed, Newt yelled after him, "Don't you go running off now, John. After breakfast I need your help to fix up a few things in the museum. And then you got to stay here and keep an eye on the place while we have the opening ceremonies in the park."

Newt went back inside the house, and the three boys headed down Main Street for breakfast. Again there was a crowd waiting at the Lazy Daze Cafe and by the time they were seated, the boys were famished.

As the waitress took their order, the boys heard the bra.s.sy sound of a Sousa march. They looked out past the crowds of pedestrians and lines of cars that inched up the street. A group of very young musicians were rehearsing in the park.

"The band from the local high school," Bob guessed.

The crowd on the pavement thinned for a minute, and Jupe and his friends could see the full splendour of red, white and gold band uniforms.

Trucks from several television stations were pulled up on the far side of the park, and a man in a short-sleeved shirt fiddled with the microphone on the bandstand.

The boys were just starting their breakfast when Dr. Terreano came into the cafe.

The immunologist, Hoffer, was with him, sneezing into a handkerchief.

The two men glanced down the aisle, and Terreano spotted Jupe and smiled.

"How about making room for them?" said Jupe to his friends.

"Sure," said Pete. "Let's ask them if they want to sit with us."

Jupe went to the front of the cafe and issued the invitation, and the two scientists accepted gratefully. They followed Jupe to the table.

"Very kind of you boys," said Terreano as he sat down. His long, almost mournful face was resigned. "This town is a madhouse. I suppose it will be a madhouse until the summer is over and all the tourists go home."

Terreano put a pat of b.u.t.ter on his plate. "We usually have breakfast at the foundation, but Jim Brandon is not very good company today. I understand how he feels, of course. This whole thing has been hard on him."

Elwood Hoffer sneezed and smiled a tight smile. "Hay fever," he explained to the boys. Turning to Dr. Terreano, he said, "It's nice that you're so understanding, Phil, but I personally feel there was no need for Brandon to call you a petrified reactionary."

"Brandon is very highly-strung," said Terreano mildly. "Right now he's frustrated.

Imagine finding an almost complete fossil skeleton and then not being able to examine it properly. And he wants to see if the find might alter the way we think about the origins of mankind. Not that I think it will - I think the little hominid in the cave is just another evolutionary dead end - but Brandon found it and he should have his chance to evaluate it. I'd be angry, too, if I'd made a major find and things had turned out this way."

"What did Dr. Brandon want to do to the bones?" said Bob. "I've heard about carbon-14 dating."

"That probably wouldn't be useful in this case," said Terreano. "When you use carbon-14 dating, you measure the amount of carbon-14 in your sample. Carbon-14 is a radioactive element, and fifty-seven hundred years after a plant or animal has died, it has just half as many carbon-14 atoms as it did when it was alive. Then, fifty-seven hundred years after that, it has only a quarter as many carbon-14 atoms, and so on and so forth. And after forty thousand years there wouldn't be enough carbon-14 to tell anything."

Bob looked startled. "You think the cave man is older than forty thousand years?"

"I would be astonished if he weren't," said Terreano. "However, carbon-14 dating isn't the only way to find out how old an individual might be. There are other methods of dating, and there are various methods of judging how human a creature might be. We always have trouble with this one, because no one can say with real certainty what makes a human. Is it a matter of a creature walking upright, or is it the size of the brain in relation to the rest of the body, or the teeth ..."

"Teeth?" echoed Bob. "What about teeth?"

"Human teeth are arranged in the jaw in a sort of arc," said Terreano. "The teeth of other primates, like apes and monkeys, are in a U, with the two sides parallel.

There are differences in the size of the molars, too, and ..."

"And here comes the waitress with our breakfast," said Hoffer. "Thank heavens."

"Sorry," said Terreano. "I didn't mean to bore you, Elwood."

"It was really interesting," Bob declared quickly. "I can see why Dr. Brandon is so mad. If Newt McAfee is tampering with the fossil man ..."

"And he is," said Terreano. "Not that we're sure it really is a man."

"Don't labour the point, Phil," said Hoffer. "I can't see where a conclusion about it matters to more than a handful of scientists."

Terreano grinned. "Dr. Hoffer's research may be more immediately applied," he told the boys. "If he can prove that heartburn is caused by the body's effort to fight off the common cold, we will all be grateful."

"It's not impossible that heartburn is caused by an immune reaction," Hoffer remarked stiffly. "I'm convinced that breakdowns in our immune system cause many of our troubles, and our genes - what we've inherited - are responsible for very few problems, no matter what Karl Birkensteen might say."

Terreano looked downcast at the mention of the dead geneticist. "A brilliant man," he said seriously. "It was a great loss."

"Perhaps," said Hoffer. "But genetic engineering is at least as risky as splitting atoms. Once you start, where do you stop?"

"Was Dr. Birkensteen actually hoping to improve humans?" said Jupiter. "Eleanor told us yesterday that he had bred smarter chimpanzees. Did he believe he could make smarter men?"

Terreano looked troubled. "I don't think he envisioned anything as radical as a race of super beings, but he did think that too many people are born to live at a very basic level. He felt that man, who has a wonderful brain, should not have to spend twelve to sixteen years in school simply getting the skills to enable him to earn a living."

"Impudence!" said Elwood Hoffer. "Meddling with nature that way can have terrible consequences. Birkensteen's animals are proof of that. He bombarded their sires and dams with various rays, and he saturated them with chemicals. He has been able to train the horses to an extent, and the chimps do have large and nimble brains.

However, their life expectancy is only a fraction of what it would be for normal animals in captivity."

"It was as if the animals lived too fast," said Terreano. "At the end Birkensteen was trying to slow down the ageing process. He had formulated various mixtures that he gave to the chimps in different ways. He worked with the kinds of chemicals that the brain secretes to prompt sleep or waking.

"His work was very daring and very original. He was in line to get the Spicer Grant, which is money that the board of the Spicer Foundation awards every other year to the scientist in residence whose work may be of greatest benefit to humanity. If Birkensteen had succeeded even partially, he could have had more than a million dollars to use any way he chose."

"What happens now?" asked Pete. "Who'll get the money?"

Terreano shrugged. "Who knows? Dr. Hoffer here might cure all of our stomach ulcers, or Jim Brandon might give us new insights into our origins, or ..."

"Speaking of Brandon," Hoffer interrupted, "look out there."

They turned towards the windows. They saw Brandon striding along the pavement, side-stepping other pedestrians. He was making straight for the cafe.

Terreano waved when he came in. Brandon took an empty chair from another table and sat down next to Jupe.

"I've got it!" he announced briskly. "I called Sacramento. I'm going to call back after lunch, at which time the governor will be free to talk."

"The governor will get your hominid out of that cave?" said Terreano.

Hoffer looked at Terreano in surprise. "I thought you two weren't talking."

"That was earlier," said Terreano. "Jim, really, do you think the governor will help?"

"Why not?" said Brandon. "If the state can take property to build roads and schools, why can't it take property in order to save that fossil? I'm going to ask the governor to have the whole area declared a state historical monument. There could easily be more fossils in the hills, and it would be criminal to lose them because McAfee wants to let the public in at five bucks a head!"

Brandon stopped.

From the park across the way came the renewed blare of the band.