Cretaceous Dawn

The history of mammals is primarily about teeth. Reptiles, excepting a few snakes, have simple teeth designed for slashing and tearing. Mammals, however, have extraordinarily complex and specialized dentition. Many different kinds of teeth exist in the same mouth: incisors, canines, premolars, and molars. They are capable of precision cutting, stabbing, grinding, and even snipping by means of a shearing action, exactly like scissors. If you have ever seen a cat chew a tough piece of meat on the side of its mouth, then you have seen the marvel of carnassial teeth. The mammalian capacity to process food quickly probably underlies our high metabolic rate; that is, we may well have achieved our present ecological importance by means of superior dentition.

The Creekbend police station was bustling. Early evening was always a busy time, and today even more so. The forensic man, Agent Kayn, had just left his final report; that OSHA man had been in again with his little twitching mustache, telling Earles things she’d found out hours ago; Mark Reng had been located and sent to the lab; and Hann had been hanging around off and on, red-eyed and fiercely fending off any expression of sympathy, trying to pick up bits of information.

At least she was able to give him some positive news when he came in next. “There was no ash or any other . . . remains in the vault,” she explained as he paced her office, smoking a cigarette down to a nonexistent stub. “Nothing. Only those few drops of blood, a lot of fingerprints, and some dog hairs. They weren’t burned to nothing, or vaporized.” When Hann’s expression didn’t change she went on, “Frank may still be OK. There’s no indication that he was killed in the lab.”

“But you said that room got up to three thousand degrees,” Hann argued, as if he was afraid to begin hoping again. “That would have . . . they would be dead. All of them.”

“Yes, but they don’t seem to be. The forensic man says there would be some remains, you know; if nothing else, bits of metal from their clothing, and. . . ,” she meant to say ‘teeth,’ but changed her mind. At the moment Hann was a bereaved relative, not an investigator. “It’s difficult and frustrating not having any clues when people have disappeared,” she said. “And you’ve gone through a lot in the past few hours, thinking about your brother.”

“But still your brother. Charlie, why don’t you take the night off, and tomorrow too? Take as long as you need. Just keep remembering we haven’t seen any evidence that Frank isn’t alive.”

“What am I supposed to do, sit in front of the TV all night with a pack of cigarettes?” Hann’s belligerent tone was an indication of his worry. He never spoke to his chief that way. “I want to stay here and work with you. I have to know what happened.”

“All right. It was just a thought, in case you needed time to yourself,” Earles said, wondering what she would do with him. “For now, you could take all these reports and go over them somewhere quiet, and see what you can come up with.” It was busywork; Hann was unlikely to come up with any new ideas. But he needed something to do and she needed her own time to think.

“Not really. Whatever they were up to, they kept it secret even from him. But we’ve found some puzzling things. Perhaps there’s another physicist we can discuss this with? The details are technical.”

“I’ll come over,” Earles said, and hung up. She grabbed her belt and opened the door, calling “Hann!” into the corridor. “We’re going to the lab,” she said when they met in the entranceway. Earles was a little annoyed at the physicist’s tone. So the woman didn’t think the police chief would understand “the details.” Well maybe I won’t, she thought, and Hann certainly won’t. But we’ll get the gist all right, and contribute some ideas of our own.

Bowman and Ridzgy were seated side by side in front of the master computer, intently watching lines of code scroll by. Earles waited politely for the sequence to end before speaking.

“No, that’s still unknown. Readings show that the air pressure in the vault dropped suddenly, after the sequence had been run. Don’t touch that,” Bowman added, taking a laboratory notebook away from Hann. “We’ve got them all in order.”

Ridzgy gave him a sharp look. “It means just what it says: an apparent change in location of an object. This notebook is filled with calculations and measurements for some very strange objects.” She opened the notebook again and pointed out a particular page. “See here? Pebbles, beetles—why beetles, of all things? Twigs . . . weighed, then placed in different parts of the lab and observed.”

It was difficult to pinpoint the direction, especially since the slight breeze distorted the sound. But it seemed to come roughly from the south, straight back from the river. Then the breeze died, and it was silent except for the buzzing of flies.

Julian agreed with her. “We have to stay together—always.” He went to the raft, half hauled out on the bank, and began tossing their possessions onto the shore. “Spears, bows, and arrows,” he said. “Enough for all of us. What about this?” He held up the turtle shell.

Julian didn’t answer. He glanced once more at the raft: it looked like a child’s creation, rough and crooked, uncomfortable in the extreme, almost laughable; but it had been their home for nearly a month, and he felt strange leaving it for a walk in the forest.

“No, but we could loop it around trees as we went, so we wouldn’t get lost,” Julian explained. “It’s what I used to do as a kid. However, this might do just as well.” He hefted the makeshift stone-headed axe. “We’ll mark the trees as we go.”

They set off into the forest, walking south. Every minute or so Dr. Shanker called out Hilda’s name, but his voice seemed to fall on the dead needles underfoot, unable to penetrate the vast stillness of the forest.

Julian wasn’t the only one feeling nervous about the forest. They’d spent the past few weeks traveling at night, seeing only the moonlit shores of the river, silvered leaves of trees, and a few mysterious black openings into the forest. Now they peered through the trees in uneasy curiosity at this new land. Julian was surprised at how much the terrain had changed. This was clearly a totally different ecosystem, far removed from the sea. Indeed, they must have been five hundred miles from the Inland Sea by now.

All around the huge trunks of sequoia rose like pillars. When Julian stood still for a moment and gazed up, the trunks seemed to converge at the top because of their enormous height. Shafts of sunlight fell through, touching the pillars and bringing out the red tint of their bark, or by luck piercing all the way down to the floor of the forest and lighting up a patch of ferns. At the base, the trees were so large around that one could have hollowed them out and made a house inside.

They were not modern redwoods; Julian knew this because they had begun to drop their leaves for the winter and the ground was cluttered with wide brown needles rustling underfoot. True redwoods are evergreen trees. These were evidently Dawn Redwoods, Metasequoia, wonderful trees known from the fossil record. They were famous because scientists had assumed they were extinct until an isolated grove of them was found in central China in the 1940s. Saplings were dug up and transplanted all over the world, and they soon became common ornamental trees. However, he had never before seen an entire forest of them. It seemed almost a sacrilege to mark them with the axe, as he did nearly every tree.

One intriguing speculation about why trees evolved such great height was that it protected their leaves from herbivorous dinosaurs. Certainly, Julian thought, the Dawn Redwoods would have been beyond the reach even of the great sauropods such as Apatosaurus and Diplodocus. However, those giant herbivores no longer existed in the north. Somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere the titanisaurids may still have lifted their unbelievable necks to reach the tops of trees; there had even been a Late Cretaceous migration to as far north as Texas, bringing sauropods to North America once again. But in the northern regions the sauropods had long ago disappeared, leaving behind a permanent mark on the floral morphology.

Julian was jolted out of his fear-tinged awe at the forest by the unmistakable sound of barking. It was faint but clear: the kind of bark a dog makes when it has treed something, a sharp, short, endlessly repeated bark.

“That way!” Dr. Shanker said, pointing a little to the left. He began to jog, calling “Hilda! Here girl!” every few steps. Yariko kept just behind him, and Julian brought up the rear with some vague chivalrous notion that a surprise attack from behind would kill him and not her.

Julian was still unsure of this venture away from the river, and how far it might take them. Even putting a dent in every tree they passed, which greatly slowed down their progress, didn’t ensure against losing their direction. And surely Hilda had heard them by now—they’d been able to hear her, after all. She would follow if they headed back.

“What if we stopped and let her come to us?” he suggested. “I don’t think we should go any farther from the river. I’m sure she’ll find us when she’s ready.”

But Dr. Shanker strode on. “Just a little bit further,” he said. “We’ve hardly gone two hundred yards; the river’s only just back there.” Suddenly he stopped and pointed. “We’ve walked up on something,” he said, casually.

About a hundred feet away in the trees, up a rising slope in the forest floor, lay a gigantic gray object that certainly resembled the huge rocks left behind by glaciers. But the region had been free of glaciers for at least a hundred million years; so far they’d seen no such rocks. They watched it in silence for a minute, but it did not move.

Dr. Shanker thought that Hilda might have trotted up to sniff it. They all had the same unpleasant thought: that she had been killed, and the enormous creature was resting after its meal. Flitting from one tree to the next, they climbed the needle-strewn slope, until they were thirty feet away and too nervous to peer around the giant bole of the tree to see what it was.

“Stay here,” Dr. Shanker mouthed; he was afraid even to whisper. He darted from behind the tree to another one nearby, gripping his spear so hard the muscles stood out on his arm and shoulder.

It had been dead a long time, and little was left except a mummified skin pulled tight across the bones. When they walked around to the other side they saw that the skeleton had begun to separate, and the vertebrae of the tail were scattered about on the ground. The feet were still enclosed in leathery skin; the leg bones had fallen under their own weight and lay partly sunk into the soil. It must have lain down on its side to die, and now the ribs arched up above their heads, gray and weathered, black in parts where they had begun to rot.

The size was impossible. To Julian, that was the best word: impossible. People of the twentieth century are used to regarding the elephant as the largest of land creatures, but an elephant could have bivouacked inside the arch of this immense rib cage. The skull was nine feet long, resting on the ground, its vast eye sockets gazing into the forest. It had a narrow, pointed face tipped with a horny beak.

Farther back in the jaw, exposed in death, was a battery of flat teeth like a grinding mill. A bony frill jutted back from the skull and yard-long horns curved out from above the eye sockets. It had a third horn, a smaller one, above the narrow nostrils. It was of course Triceratops horridus. It came over Julian finally how tiny a creature he was. The trees and the dried-up corpse seemed from another world, of vast dimensions perfectly proportioned for each other, and his own presence was ludicrous. He was a product of the diminutive world of the Quaternary, scampering through the haunts of these creatures of more perfect size. He expected to see a moth the size of a crow, or a cockroach as big as a dog, or some other proof that he’d been dropped into a world with a different scale of measurement altogether.

It was time to get back to the river, and they all knew it. They hadn’t heard Hilda’s barking for some time, and without it there was no point in searching for her. If she was alive, she’d have to find her own way back to them. Still, they sat down beneath a great trunk and waited in silence for what seemed a long time, listening.

Dr. Shanker rose and turned back first, to Julian’s surprise. He and Yariko followed, watching Shanker’s slumped shoulders, and tried to cheer him up. Hilda must have come this way, Yariko said; she could never have passed a dead animal without sniffing it and this ultimate of dead animals must surely have attracted her like a magnet; and they all laughed at the thought of her innocent and funny curiosity. But inside they all knew that either she would come back to the river by herself, or they would never see her again.

Now and then they passed a clump of low bushes, bracken, and undergrowth living in the glow of indirect sunlight that filtered down between the giant trees. It was by the merest chance that Julian looked back over his shoulder for a second glance at one of these thickets, and saw a little patch of black fur.

He snuck toward the bush, hoping nothing dangerous was about to come crashing out; but it did not move at all, and he decided it was dead. He pushed aside the twigs and peered down at Hilda, covered with blood and absolutely still.