Relic (Pendergast, #1)

by Douglas Preston

They believed instead that headaches were caused by sorcery.” He shifted in his wheelchair. “The accepted remedy was now for the kinfolk of the headache victim to identify the sorcerer and, naturally, go off and murder him.

But you’ve displayed three gifts that are indispensable to a first-class researcher: a sense of what to look for, a sense of where to look for it, and the zeal to see your theories through.”

Every sixty to seventy million years or so, life starts getting very well adapted to its environment. Too well adapted, perhaps. There is a population explosion of the successful life forms. Then, suddenly, a new species appears out of the blue. It is almost always a predatory creature, a killing machine. It tears through the host population, killing, feeding, multiplying. Slowly at first, then ever faster.”

“Don’t you see? Something came back in that crate from South America. Unleashed in the Museum. A highly successful predator. That figurine of Mbwun is the proof. The indigenous tribes were aware of this creature, and built a religion around it. Whittlesey inadvertently sent it into civilization.”

“Welcome!” he cried out. “Welcome my friends, fellow New Yorkers, citizens of the world! Welcome to the unveiling of the greatest museum show ever mounted!”

“When the human mind evolved to understand the workings of the universe, the first question it asked was: What is life? Next, it asked: What is death? We’ve learned a lot about life. But, despite all our technology, we’ve learned very little about death and what lies beyond…”