TEN
The Amazon Jungle is not well understood. Many of the species are either so rare or so remote that they are completely unknown to us. The small plants and insects, the foundation of that immense and complex system, are so numerous and diverse that scientists cannot hope to catalogue the half of them; certainly not before the jungle is destroyed by agriculture and everything in it becomes extinct. How, then, can we understand the ecosystem of the Late Cretaceous jungle, extinct for 65 million years? One thing we know: large animals would have been rare. You might have walked for days without seeing a single large, photogenic, scary carnivore.
—Julian Whitney, Lectures on Cretaceous Ecology
1 September
5:23 PM Local Time
Earles closed her door for a moment’s quiet time. But she’d hardly reached her desk again when Hann entered without knocking, the two physicists on his heels. All three were bursting with news.
Earles was amused in spite of herself. “Who’s first?”
The woman—Ridzgy?—spoke first, as Earles had known she would. “Preliminary assessment,” she said, flipping open a tiny laptop and seating herself, uninvited, on Earles’ desk. “Here’s the sequence we’re proposing. One, the initial explosion that you say was reported by the guard. Then, within sixty seconds of that, a large vacuum was set up inside the vault.”
“A vacuum?”
“A sudden drop in air pressure, so that the door was pulled shut and sealed itself; an implosion, if you like.”
Earles nodded. “The door was quite difficult to open when we first got there.”
“Yes. It would be. Of course we weren’t there to measure the vacuum, but the readings in the vault were recorded in the master computer. We’re studying them now.”
Earles sat down behind her desk, forgetting in her interest to tell Ridzgy to get off. “OK. What caused the first explosion?”
“Unknown, so far,” Bowman said. “Such things can happen if there’s noise in the vault; for example, if the door wasn’t sealed and a loud noise occurred—”
“Especially if a certain small but integral part is used in the alignment,” Ridzgy interrupted.
“What part? Alignment of what?” Earles asked.
“Well, we can’t be sure yet. The initial explosion shattered the dials and indicators, and as you know it’s a bit of a mess. However, there’s every indication that they were using a magneto-electric buffer to allow for micro-fine adjustments of the field.”
“In English, please,” Earles said, looking at Hann. “And without the caveats and hesitations: just give me your line of thought, substantiated or not.”
Ridzgy nodded. “OK. This may be a long step, but here it is. There’s a small platinum bar in the loop from the fine adjusters to the wiring. A piece of metal say as long as my palm. It’s a kind of standardizer, or constant, that subtly modifies the electrical field. Kind of like the iron balls on each side of a ship’s compass allowing fine adjustments to the magnetic field, only not so crude. It allows some very delicate control over settings; but it also makes the equipment supersensitive to noise and vibrations. I’ve never actually seen a setup that made use of it, until now.”
Earles was thinking hard. “Is there more significance to this thing than just making an explosion more likely? Could it be related to the implosion, this drop in air pressure? And where did the air go?”
“Don’t know yet,” Bowman said. “It’s not as if you can grab a parcel of air and just . . . vanish it, leaving a temporary vacuum. We’re studying the results now to see if they recorded the volume of air that was, well, moved.”
He seemed to be looking at Ridzgy for approval as he spoke. For that matter, he seemed to be looking at her most of the time. Earles was mildly annoyed; she wanted two independent opinions, not two people voicing the same thoughts because one needed the approval of the other. Or maybe there was something else at work?
She shook her head and went back to relevant thoughts. “There was a graduate student involved with their work. I’ll send him to you tonight. He seems to know what they were up to. But he didn’t mention a platinum bar, so maybe it’s not important.”
“The platinum bar may have been significant,” Ridzgy said. “It could have amplified their settings in unexpected ways. In any case, a lot of power shot through that system: not only are circuits burnt, but that bar is partially melted. And platinum has a very high melting point.”
“How high?”
“Almost eighteen-hundred degrees Celsius.”
“Which is. . . .” Earles tried to do the calculation in her head, but Ridzgy was quicker.
“Over three thousand degrees Fahrenheit.”
Earles sat very still. So that’s it, she thought. That’s the answer. Those people were vaporized, carbonized, whatever it was called, in a three-thousand-degree crematorium. She turned to look at Hann.
“Charlie,” she said, and paused. Years of practice giving empty words of sympathy didn’t make this moment any easier. “I’m so sorry.”
Hann looked startled. “What?” He held yet another Styrofoam cup in his hand, probably loaded with the false sweetness of powdered coffee creamer.
Earles took a breath, and then closed her mouth. Not only did she have to express awkward sympathy, genuine though it was, but she had to give it to a man who was oblivious. “The vault was heated to three thousand degrees, Charlie,” she said as gently as she could. “The people inside . . . I’m sure they felt nothing. It would have been instantaneous.”
Hann’s cup hit the floor with a soft splat. The sticky liquid sprayed his crisp trousers and shoes. He stared at Earles as if he thought she had killed his brother herself. Then he stood up and walked unsteadily to the door, crushing the Styrofoam cup underfoot and leaving the wet outline of his boot heel with every step on the dirty linoleum.
Earles let him go. “I’ll get that coroner in again, to look for remains . . . ash, I suppose,” she said, and she wondered irrelevantly if human ash could be distinguished from canine ash.
As the Cretaceous autumn advanced, the weather often turned to drizzle. Fortunately the seasonality of North America was subtle in that time, so it was still fairly warm. At first the rain was welcome; drinking water didn’t have to be boiled if they could catch it in the turtle shell as it fell, and staying just short of filthy without having to try river bathing was a plus.
The travelers fell into an easy routine, sleeping during the gradually cooling days and continuing up the river at night. The champosaurs were left behind, or became shy; no large terrestrial carnivore disturbed them. In fact, no large animals at all appeared for many days. They began to relax from the constant edge of desperate fear. Julian’s interest in spotting new dinosaurs revived, and they made good progress on the river; they estimated close to thirty miles a night against the slow current. At that speed, and even with the windings of the river, they might make a thousand miles well before the time ran out. But they hurried all the same. Delays would be inevitable, and it was too much to expect that the river would cooperate the entire distance. They did not often talk about the subject; it was more than enough keeping up with the moment-by-moment demands of each day and night.
Food seemed more abundant, too, or maybe they were becoming more adept hunters. Yariko was the first to bring down a small mammal with a bow and arrow. Julian was impressed; he hadn’t really taken her bows seriously before. After that, they shot one nearly every evening before setting out on the river again. Dr. Shanker and even Julian became reasonable shots as long as the target was perfectly still and no more than twenty feet away—not an impossible happenstance, as it turned out, the animals not knowing enough to be frightened of humans. Not only did they eat well, but Julian was able to study many kinds of mammals and began to note subtle differences between them.
Placental mammals from that period were all very much alike, and especially among insectivores the fossils were so similar that even defining genera was difficult, much less species. Julian was fascinated by the thought that from such conservative creatures, small brown eaters of whatever they could find, came the whole panoply of Tertiary mammals: the great cats, mastodons, ruminants, sloths, pangolins, cetaceans, bats, rodents, primates. It made him wonder: of all the inconspicuous animals known to twentieth-century zoologists, which ones would diversify into new species, while the others disappeared? What would life be like, sixty-five million years after the time of Homo sapiens?
Once they woke up in the middle of the day in a pouring rain. Julian sat up, his hair streaming and the drops drumming on the platform. The light was so gray that he could not even tell what time of day it was. The rain had knocked down leaves, which stuck to his skin uncomfortably, and the water felt cold.
Yariko was already awake. She was sitting on the edge of the platform, water dripping from her hair, and dripping off her feet that dangled over the edge. She gave him a small smile and said, “You look like a drowned rat.”
“You look like a drowned primate,” Julian countered. He felt awkward; once again they had fallen asleep with his arm over her, as had become habit, but it didn’t seem to mean very much. Yariko needed his companionship as he needed hers, certainly, but he felt no greater emotion coming from her. And until he did, he was not going to push his own feelings on her—not when they were all so vulnerable. Yariko sitting up in the rain looking cold and unhappy, rather than choosing to curl up against him for warmth, made him doubly unhappy.
They agreed that it was impossible to sleep, and climbed down to see how Dr. Shanker was taking the rain. They found him squatting in the boat with Hilda; several of the palm-leaf mats were propped up on sticks and tented over his head. He wasn’t much drier than they were. The boat was in a deep puddle, and the air inside his tent was heavy with the smell of wet dog.
Together they dragged the boat through the mud to the river. When they climbed aboard and took up positions, they were covered in mud as well as being wet and cold.
The opposite bank was almost unseen in the gray rain although the river had been steadily narrowing as it went west. Seen from out in the middle of the stream the banks took on a ghostly quality, appearing and disappearing in the grayness. The water seethed and hissed in the heavy rain. It was difficult to tell if they were making progress, because they couldn’t see any landmarks to judge by. The makeshift floorboards were black from the wet, rubbing against the bottoms of their legs and causing rashes. Hilda curled up in the bow in a profound depression and refused to raise her head all day. Eventually Yariko propped up some of the frond mats over their heads, but the whole wobbly structure fell overboard and floated away.
For several hours they paddled miserably, not talking, hardly even looking up. Finally Julian raised his head to shake the sopping hair from his eyes and caught a glimpse of something moving on the shore.
“Stop,” he hissed, suddenly attentive.
“Is this your Ornithomimus that you keep talking about?” Dr. Shanker said irritably. “Fine time he picked to show up.”
“Quiet.” Julian stopped paddling and the boat swung around. “I don’t think it knows we’re here.” Ornithomimus was a peculiar and rare theropod about which very little was known. He longed to see one.
At first he thought it might be Ornithomimus, but as the boat drew closer he glimpsed its face for an instant. It was chewing on wet leaves. It must have been a hadrosaur, because of the wide duck-bill shape of the mouth, but there might have been a crest rising up from the back of the head; it was hard to tell. Then the rain closed in again and the bank disappeared.
“Did you see the crest?” Julian whispered in excitement.
“What crest?” Dr. Shanker said. “What animal? I can’t see a Goddamn thing.”
“I saw the animal, but I didn’t see a crest,” Yariko said. “What did it look like?”
“A long, tubular crest, curving backward, on the head. You didn’t see it?”
“No,” she said, but she admitted the view wasn’t very clear.
“Parasaurolophus,” Julian said, picking up his paddle. “For goodness sake, let’s paddle to the shore and get a better view of it.”
“What’s the significance of it?” Yariko turned the steering oar toward the bank.
“Whether it’s still extant. It was once very common, but the crested hadrosaurs by and large died out by the late Maastrichtian.”
The river was shallow near the bank and the bow of the boat stuck in the ooze on the bottom. The leaves stirred; the creature must have snuck away into the forest at their approach. Julian was disappointed, but he stared intently into the dripping foliage, hoping to catch a glimpse of it running away. He saw nothing except the wet jungle and the rain.
Yariko crawled over to him. “Are you sure it wasn’t just a branch, sticking up behind its head?” she asked.
“No,” Julian said sadly. “I’m not sure. I’ll never know now, will I.”
“Julian,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder, “there’re too many mysteries for you to solve them all.”
He leaned over the edge of the raft to inspect the ground where the animal had been standing; but if it had left any footprints, they were already turned to mud and puddles in the rain.
Dr. Shanker’s voice startled him. “Whitney! We’re not pulling to the bank every time you want to look for a dinosaur. We’ll be eaten alive. Start paddling!”
Julian never again saw anything resembling Parasaurolophus. If it lived at that time, in the higher floodplains of the river, it must have been either very rare or exceedingly shy.
Dr. Shanker picked up a stone and threw it at the underside of the loft in the tree. He had settled on this method of waking up the others, although Julian could never tell if he was being discrete or was too lazy to climb the tree. If discrete, it was not necessary: he and Yariko had still done nothing more than sleep and talk together on their private loft.
Julian sat up, swung his legs over the edge, and peered down bleary-eyed at the ground. The sun was high and the forest was suffused with the greenish light of midday. “What’s up? It’s still broad day.” He wasn’t happy about being woken.
“Julian,” Dr. Shanker said, peering up anxiously, and Julian knew instantly that something was wrong by the use of his first name. “Hilda’s gone. She doesn’t answer, she’s not anywhere nearby. I think something’s happened to her.”
Julian ran his fingers through his damp hair. “What do you mean, gone? When did she go?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I woke up and she was missing.”
“She’s exploring,” Julian said, still grumpy from the early wake-up. “Leave her alone.”
“She should have been back by now,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for a long time. I’m telling you, something happened.”
Julian sighed and began to pick his way down the tree. He’d expected something like this to happen eventually. For weeks now Hilda had stayed quietly beside them, only wandering short distances, and it was too much to expect of a curious dog in a fabulous new place.
As they’d progressed inland the ground had become more dry under foot. Now they were surrounded by climax forest with a firm ground, carpeted with dead leaves and shot here and there with ferns and mushrooms. It was ideal ground for an active dog to explore. She had probably followed a scent trail into the forest and was beyond earshot. Julian had little hope of finding her, unless she returned on her own—if she could.
They inspected the ground everywhere around the tree, and saw nothing to show which way she had gone.
“I used to think she could always take care of herself,” Dr. Shanker said, “but with some of the animals here, I’m not so sure. She’s very fast, though. I can’t believe a two legged animal could possibly outrun her.”
Yariko poked her head over the edge of the platform. “What’s happening?” she said. Then glancing around, “Where’s Hilda? Did she run off?” Julian nodded, and she climbed over the edge of the platform and down to the ground.
“I should have kept her on the rope,” Dr. Shanker said. “Talk about delays. We’ll never reach the mountains in time.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Yariko. “Dogs don’t get lost that easily. When did she go?”
He explained again.
It seemed a poor idea to wander through the forest searching for her, since she could have gone in any direction. Neither did it seem wise to split up and call for her, but that’s what they did: Yariko remaining by the tree at Julian’s insistence while he and Dr. Shanker went in opposite directions along the bank for a short way, calling for Hilda.
Julian realized how little he’d been using his voice lately when he became hoarse by the tenth yell of “Hiiiildaaaa!” Nervous of leaving Yariko alone, he soon turned and made his way back downstream to their tree. Yariko wasn’t there; she was twenty feet away bogged down in a tangle of undergrowth, calling for Hilda.
Dr. Shanker soon joined them; he had seen and heard nothing.
The sun turned toward afternoon as they looked at each other.
Yariko lifted her head suddenly. “What was that?”
Julian strained to hear something; then the wind changed and he caught the sound of barking, very faintly. It was coming from deep in the forest.
