Cretaceous Dawn

Deinosuchus rugosas, the giant prehistoric marine crocodile, had the strongest jaws of any animal known, at any time period. Crocodilians are often thought of as slow on land, crawling on their bellies with bent legs and feet sticking out to the side. But even modern animals have preserved the unique crocodilian ankle joint that allows the foot to rotate. A foot that can point forward allows the legs to come under the body, and the animal to lift its body off the ground. Thus crocodiles have several gaits including the gallop, which is much like a rabbit’s run with hind feet and then forefeet moving in tandem. Bony scales along the back make erect walking possible even in fifty-foot animals—and Deinosuchus, which could outcompete even the largest of dinosaur carnivores, is known to have reached such massive size.

Sharon Earles sat in the headquarters “conference room,” really a former storage room off the entranceway, with Hann and the forensics expert from Roscoe. The man looked seasoned, she noted with approval: gray-haired, solid, calm. One didn’t usually see big city experts in South Dakota towns; they stayed where the action was. Well, she thought grimly, here was some action.

The man, who had introduced himself only as Agent Kayn, gave a summary. “Three separate blood samples were collected in and near the vault. Your call to the lab this morning was very helpful—my samples were top priority. I’ve got blood type right now, but more details will be coming later. Based just on type, one sample matches the dead security guard, as expected. The second sample does not match the other security guard, based on the medical records you gave me. I can’t tell yet if it matches either of the two researchers presumed to have been present.”

Hann shifted in his chair. “They obviously weren’t present,” he said. “I don’t think the other guard was either.” He hesitated, and then added quietly, “Frank, the other guard, is my half-brother, you know.”

Earles looked up in surprise. It was news to her that Hann had such a stake in the case. So that was why he’d left the lab so quickly. And now he wanted to convince himself that Frank hadn’t even been there. Why, even after seeing which guard the body belonged to, he must have been terribly upset. And Frank had yet to be located.

Agent Kayn ignored Hann. “The third sample did not come from either of the scientists or the other guard; somebody else, somebody unauthorized and not logged in, seems to have been present at the—”

“Hilda Shanker,” Earles said, “apparently had complete blood work done only last month, prior to a minor surgery. The appointment was recorded in Shanker’s pocket calendar, found in his jacket. I called the local doctor’s office, and the regional hospital, without result. There was no such patient admitted on or within a month of that date. Furthermore, there are no records anywhere of a Hilda Shanker. As for Shanker and Miyakara, they seem to have disappeared. Not in the building, not at their homes, missed some big departmental meeting at twelve-thirty, last seen early this morning going into the lab.” Earles looked at Agent Kayn.

“There’s no surveillance system, and the alarm was off,” he said, “though I don’t suppose there’s usually such security on a research lab. But there were clearly two people working in the room earlier today, and according to the computer activity, at least one was there until about twenty seconds before the explosion.”

“The guard—the dead one—called that in, so he wasn’t killed immediately.” Hann got up and dumped half a cup of Cremora into his instant coffee. “The real explosion was about one minute later. Shook the whole building, and presumably that’s when he was caught.”

The forensics man nodded. “Cause of death is obvious, although I’ve never seen such clean fragmentation of a body. Skin, organs, spine, everything is neatly severed. No crushing or tearing, no evidence of trauma at all in fact—except that he was cut in half. Another thing: there should have been a great deal more blood.”

“Well, what was there came from what we saw: the lower half of a body. The blood associated with the torso and head would have been an even greater volume—and it isn’t there. Not in the lab, not in the vault. No blood, no torso. It’s almost as if his upper half, blood and all, simply . . . vanished.”

“I’m calling in some physicists,” she said. “I talked with that graduate student who was at the scene first. His name’s Mark Reng. He’s pretty shaken, but he did put me onto the top physicists in the country doing the same kind of work this lab was doing. Two of them are on their way now; colleagues of Miyakara and Shanker. Something happened in there, something that wasn’t just equipment exploding. In the meantime—” Her cell phone rang. “Excuse me,” she said. “This may be relevant.”

“OK, we’ve tracked down Hilda Shanker’s records.” Earles looked amused. She glanced at Hann. “That student you met, the one who was ‘going for a walk’ with Hilda, has just been interviewed by Campus security. Don’t bother,” she went on, turning to Agent Kayn, whose pen was poised over his notebook. “Hilda’s appointment was at the Creekbend Veterinary Hospital, which has all her medical records. I’m told she’s a healthy three-year-old German shepherd.”

Earles shrugged. “A lab is like any workplace. Look at this place.” The station was in fact grimy, shoddy, and smoky; stray dogs and even cats were common visitors. “There’s one more thing,” she went on, as Hann rose and turned to leave. “Campus security also reported another missing faculty member. Guy named Whitney, over in the geology building. Seems he never showed up for lecture, nobody could find him. Last seen leaving his office at about eleven, carrying a paper bag.”

Julian stood at the edge of the forest, where the palm trees and laurel-like bushes grew sparsely in the rocks and sand, letting in splashes of sunlight between them. The beach was quiet except for the occasional crying of the strange gull-like birds, and there was hardly any sound from deeper in the forest; only now and then the rustling of a beetle in the dead leaves, or the cawing of a bird in the canopy. The sun was high over the trees, past its zenith, and by the direction of its motion he knew they were on an eastern shore.

Looking down at his feet he saw countless shells in the sand, much as he would have seen on any beach. He felt dizzy, and he couldn’t suppress the images of cool streams winding through hemlock and hardwoods, streams strewn with rocks, black rocks indented with immeasurable imprints of fossil shells. Sometimes he and his father had lost themselves in those woods. They would wander for an hour or more in search of descending ground and hemlock, indicating a stream. Sometimes, Julian imagined bears and once he was quite sure they saw a black panther, loping through the trees, eerie and agile.

But never had he been truly scared. And if he was nervous, the wonder of the streams always saved him: the streams meant rocks, and rocks meant fossils: mollusk-like shells from 400 million years ago, long before the earliest dinosaurs reared their heads in the mist. He shuddered and turned away.

Yariko and Dr. Shanker were whispering together a few feet away, stooping over a patch of sand; Yariko had a twig in her hand and seemed to be drawing lines on the ground. No doubt she’s trying to figure out how we got here, Julian thought. Trying to come up with just the right equation to explain it. But what did it matter? They were here.

Frank leaned back against a palm trunk with his splinted leg jutting out straight along the ground. He must have been in great pain still; his face went pale and flushed by turns. He had unbuttoned the front of his vest in the heat and set his gun and VHF radio on the ground beside him. Somehow, he still retained the imposing authority of a policeman; he looked alert, if immobile. He was perhaps twenty-five, large and broad-shouldered. His blonde crew cut was frosted with sand stuck in the sweat. He turned to look at Yariko and Dr. Shanker. “What are you doing?” he asked, his voice sounding strained.

“All right, no need to get angry,” Dr. Shanker interrupted. “If you’re correct, Whitney, then we’ve been moving objects through time as well as space. Rather large amounts of time, too.”

Frank hitched himself up straighter, wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve, and reached for the VHF. He fiddled with the knobs and startled the others with a loud sound of static. “I don’t know how we got here or what you people were up to,” he said, and the others all looked over at him. “But one man is dead, one injured, and I can’t raise anyone on the VHF.”

Frank closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them and went on, in a slightly stronger voice. “I’ll keep trying. We’ll contact a passing ship, if necessary, to get a message out. But the immediate thing is survival. We need to find water, and think about the possibility of being here over night.”

Frank reached over and abruptly pulled the twig out of Yariko’s hand, to her obvious amazement. “If you keep drawing lines in the sand, we’ll have a real magnitude problem,” he said. “The time to start looking for water is before you’re good and thirsty.”

Frank chuckled, but to Julian it sounded more derisive than humorous. “I rather think it’ll be the other way around, from what I’ve seen so far. One dead, one injured, and you people drawing pictures while time goes by. Now look.” He pushed himself up more with his hands. His voice took on a new sharpness. “I’m no physicist but I do know about wilderness survival and setting up camp. Ex-marine, you know, special forces unit. You,” and he jabbed a finger at Julian and Yariko, “you can go find some water, and something to carry it in. Use your imagination. You,” and he turned to Shanker, “might start exploring. Stay within easy hail. Look for any signs of people.”

“Look here yourself,” Dr. Shanker broke in, in an equally sharp voice. “Who put you in charge? And as for your radio, it may be a useless piece of plastic at this point. That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Don’t you understand what just happened?”

Frank’s face went bright red. “I understand your lab exploded and killed Ron, and sent us somewhere else. You probably didn’t care who got hurt. Now you’re more interested in those equations than in your own survival.”

“Frank’s right,” Yariko said, quietly. She stood, brushing the sand from her hands. “It’s our fault. But it wasn’t intentional.” She looked directly at Frank as she spoke. “I think there was a precise moment in time when this—result was possible, and we unknowingly hit it. Of course I want to figure it all out. But Frank’s hurt and we’re in some unknown place—”

“Or time,” Julian finished for her. He sat down on a rock, pushing aside some branches. His head was pounding; perhaps from the explosion, or the brilliant sun and heat, or maybe from the overpowering scents around him: a low-tide sulfur smell from the beach, rotting vegetation from the woods behind him, and the sharp smell of the laurels and some unknown creeper that had been crushed underfoot. Feeling a tickling sensation on the back of his hand, he looked down to see a beetle crawling across it: a large, red and gold beetle with exceptionally long antennae.

Julian continued his thought. “We’ve moved back in time. Way back, to when those ammonite species lived, and this beetle.” He took a deep breath and looked at Yariko. “Tell me I’m crazy,” he said, and it was almost a plea.

“You’re crazy,” Frank said. “But that’s not my problem right now. We need to make a camp so we can get through the night.” He reached up to a low branch of laurel and pulled himself to his feet, swaying. He gingerly tested his weight on the injured leg, grimaced, and lifted it again. “I need a crutch,” he said. “Get me a good stick, will you? If you three won’t get moving, I will.”

A few birds skimmed across the brilliant water, too far off to see clearly. The mysterious crocodile, if that’s what it was, had not reappeared. Julian both dreaded and anticipated his first sight of the inhabitants. Half of his mind was still looking out for a rescue party, listening for static on Frank’s VHF, wanting to just sit in the shade and wait for it all to go away again. But another part of him knew what he had seen in the sand and knew there was only one possibility. He thought of the fossils—not the tiny innocent shells, but the monsters of the Late Cretaceous—and tried to reject the idea that they were about to come to life. “Translocation,” Dr. Shanker said. But how did time travel come in?

He stopped halfway down the beach and stood gazing at the water, his hands in his pockets, momentarily forgetting about his mission. Gravitons, temporal translocation, beetles; he knew these were important things to discuss. Humans have a need to know why things happen. After that, one can start asking what should be done about it; because humans also like to dictate their own futures.

Frank was ready to simply live, survive, regardless of where or why. Julian however was an observer. He had always followed his future rather than dictating it. Now, he needed to know where they were before he could be concerned with why, or what anyone expected him to do about it. He needed more proof.

“Whitney!” Dr. Shanker’s voice boomed across the beach. Julian turned back toward the trees, annoyed. But Dr. Shanker wasn’t just calling him back to talk. “Whitney! Get back here! Run!”

Along the beach from both directions, parallel to the water, came the crocodiles. The one on the left appeared first. It was at least forty feet long; later Julian guessed its weight to be about ten tons, which explained the vibrating sand under his feet.

They ran straight at each other. This was not the belly crawl of lazy animals sliding into the water. This was the true crocodilian gallop: their whole, monstrous bodies were off the ground, their legs a blur beneath them, their backs bunching and straightening while their thick tails snapped out behind; they were running like lithe cats, with an occasional bounding leap over a rock or a log. And while they ran, they bellowed. Modern crocodiles are among the most vocal of reptiles, and their Cretaceous ancestors were apparently no different: just larger. Julian put his hands over his ears.

Nearly in front of him, not forty feet away, the animals came together. Julian expected to hear the crack of a bone-shattering collision, but at the last instant they swerved in perfect tandem, and shoulder to shoulder, like a pair of well-trained horses, they headed for the water.

The splash of their combined tonnage hid everything for moment. When the crocodiles could be seen again, the larger one was on top of the smaller one, whose tail was curling up into the air; an instant later, they sank together. A cloud of bubbles rose to the surface, and then the water was still.

“Oh, my. . . .” Yariko was standing at his shoulder. She had a look of shock on her face that made Julian’s heart race even faster, if that were possible. She grabbed his arm; her fingers dug painfully into the muscle. “Were they as big as I thought?” she whispered. “How do they—I mean, I thought that they—do they lay eggs?”

Julian stood, trembling, not even feeling Yariko’s grip. He took one fearful look at the water, but there was nothing to see. Then it dawned on him. He had just seen the mating of Deinosuchus.

“Deinosuchus—does everyone believe me now? We’re in the Cretaceous, all right,” Julian said, tripping on a fallen branch as he looked back over his shoulder at the beach.

Crocodiles could be fast on a smooth, sloping beach, but they could not easily clamber through terrestrial undergrowth, whatever their size, as Julian explained. Still, it was hard to feel safe, and they were all tensed, waiting for another deafening bellow.

“I’ve seen them in zoos, but. . . .” Frank looked white around the eyes. “It can’t be possible. Nothing can be that big.” He laughed shakily. “Well. One more thing to consider.”

“The fossil skull found in Montana was six feet long,” Julian said. “That corresponds to a fifty-foot animal.” He was as frightened as any of them; perhaps more, since he had actually been standing on the beach, near where the crocodiles met each other, seconds before their appearance. But at the same time he felt the numbness lift. He felt alive, alert, with his observational skills honed and ready. This was like one of those dangerous dig sites where everything, even the safety of the team, depended on his skills. He was ready, now, to be a member of this team, to contribute to their survival, to lend his expertise however he could. He was excited.

Dr. Shanker cleared his throat. “Somehow, a monstrous version of something we’ve all seen, something modern, seems worse than the unknown. They must grow fast so they can keep up with the big dinosaurs.” He added that lightly, as if dinosaurs were a joke.

“Dinosaurs do grow quickly, like mammals,” Julian responded, taking him quite seriously. “They probably reach full size early in their lives, maybe in the first ten years. Crocodiles are reptiles—they grow throughout their lives, at the same rate each year. To reach forty or fifty feet, they have to be decades old; fifty or sixty years, I’d say.”

“They lay down annual layers of calcification in their bones, and these can be counted, much like tree rings,” Julian explained. “Based on fossil bones, Deinosuchus, and Sarcosuchus, its cousin from Africa, grew less than one foot per year. Deinosuchus lived in western North America.”

Hilda scampered out of the dimness of the forest, her tail between her legs and her fur clotted with mud. She was too frightened even to bark. She ran to Dr. Shanker and buried her head against him, shivering and whimpering as if she had done something punishable. Dr. Shanker crooned over her, smoothing her fur and working out the clots of mud. “Thought you were dead, you dumb old mutt.”

Julian looked at Yariko; her face was sweaty and sandy, and her lips looked painfully dry. About as dry as his felt. It seemed like days since his last cup of coffee early that morning; he’d had nothing to drink since. Making a sudden decision, he stood up.

Julian looked down and pushed some dirt around with his foot. He was suddenly very, very thirsty. He didn’t want to have to think of how or where to find water. He just wanted some.

Dr. Shanker pulled off his loafers. “I’ll drink out of my own, thank you,” he said, handing them to Yariko. Julian took Frank’s, feeling slightly foolish at his own idea, and he and Yariko set out.

“He’s very tough,” Yariko said. “Knows more than you’d think for his age; I’ve talked with him in the lab a few times. Good thing he’s with us. Good for us, I mean,” she added hastily.

“Spoken like a primate,” Julian said. “A creature of the daylight. But we’re much safer in the dark, out of harm’s way. Witness the crocodiles; they’re active in the heat of the day.”

But he had to agree with her that the woods looked frightening. The trees were stunted and bent, almost bushes, the trunks branching close to the ground and lifting up a crown of leaves just above their heads. An intense gloom gathered beneath the thickest parts of the canopy. Here and there nettles or bushy scrub scratched at their faces, or forced them to turn aside altogether to find an opening. They passed a few large conifers, junipers maybe, twisted into bizarre shapes, like gnarled old people. The ground was sprinkled with dead leaves that made it impossible to walk quietly. The cheerful patches of buttercups, growing near the edge of the forest, were absent in the gloom. It was no comfort that the smells were those of any ordinary forest, perhaps with a stronger overtone of decay; in fact, that made the whole situation seem more bizarre.

Julian’s foot came down with a splash, and he jumped back. “Water.” It was a brown puddle. He stooped and skimmed a little from the surface with his hand, and then sipped it.

The ground became soggy, squelching at each step. Their sneakers and socks were quickly waterlogged. Ferns grew thick everywhere, giving off a pungent odor when crushed. After a few hundred yards a low mud bank appeared: the edge of a pool. The trees hung out over the water, and on the farther side, about twenty feet away, the ground rose up again and the forest continued. The dim greenish light softened the far edges and blended the ferns and leaves on the opposite bank, giving a kind of opalescent sheen to the water. Tiny ripples and rings spread out on the surface where insects skittered about.

“No, they’re way too big. There might be smaller ones though; in fact, some crocs stick to fresh or brackish water: the truly marine crocodiles would be dying out by now . . . if it’s when I think it is, that is.”

But there was nothing moving in the water. Julian knelt at the edge, his knees sinking into the spongy ground, and again scooped up a handful of water. It tasted clean, a little warm but wonderful after a hot day without a drink. He suddenly realized how thirsty he was. Yariko joined him and for a while they scooped water into their mouths, letting it run down their chins and dribble back into the pool, not caring if all the crocodiles in the world were watching. Then they sat back, panting a little.

Julian felt like a dry sponge that had just come to life in water. Now that his thirst was quenched, he was busy looking at the innumerable footprints in the muddy bank. They were jumbled and confused but dominated by the tiny, four-toed prints of a four-footed animal: clearly a mammal, perhaps the size of a squirrel. Other than that he could see nothing clearly; and nothing at all to indicate the time period. It might have been a twentieth-century stream on a subtropical island.

They remained quiet for several minutes, trying not to startle whatever it was. Now and then the eyes shifted sideways a little, as if the animal were moving its head to watch from a slightly different perspective. Then the eyes winked out, and they saw the gray shape of the animal’s body turning and flitting into the forest, making hardly a sound, only a papery stirring of the dead leaves. It was not reptilian. It seemed to be the size of a house cat, and Julian thought he saw a fluffy tail.

“A mammal. But I don’t know what kind.” Julian leaned forward and filled Frank’s rather large shoes with water. “This will be a fantastic place to explore. Tomorrow we should come back here and look for the footprints. If it really is the Cretaceous, think of how much we could learn. Think of the gaps in mammalian evolution that we could fill. And the plants. . . .” he gestured around them, ready to point out key species.

Julian felt his new excitement slip away, leaving a void as big as his body. Then the dread flowed back in. Something cold touched his fingers, and he started; looking down, he saw the water in the shoe break its surface tension and tilt a drop onto his shaking hand.

Yariko stood. “It’s okay,” she said. “We can look for footprints. There’s no reason not to.” She held out her hand to help him rise, muttering to herself as she did so, “It’s not like there’ll be anything else to do if we can’t get home.”