Cretaceous Dawn

Tyrannosaurus rex, the monarch of carnivores, cavorting at the apex of the food pyramid, was probably the least abundant of dinosaurs. No ecosystem could have maintained a large number of them. Consequently, few have fossilized. Only twenty more-or-less complete skeletons have been discovered, mainly in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana. Everything we know about T. rex is based on this shocking paucity of data. One thing is certain: with a small statistical sample, we have not found anything near the biggest or oldest T. rex. With our small sample of twenty, we are unlikely to have found the rare statistical outliers, the huge ones, the true monarchs.

The physics lab was eerily quiet as the two scientists ran their calculations. Small objects, from insects to three-inch rocks; yet the equipment was sensitive enough to detect the minute changes in air pressure within the sealed chamber. And minute they were, so that Bowman shook his head and declared they were wasting time on a layman’s crazy hunch.

Ridzgy persisted. The idea was farfetched, but how could she dispute its possibility when she herself had first announced the mysterious “creation” of beetles?

The answer, when it came, was frightening. A volume equivalent to at least four adults had to have been removed to create the measured drop in air pressure. It was an instantaneous change that caused air from the outer room to rush in, slamming the door with it; once sealed, the vault had maintained its vacuum. But instantaneous though it was, the change had been recorded.

Ridzgy looked at him thoughtfully. “It seems impossible. Four people and a dog, or rather four and a half people and a dog, to become non-matter, and perhaps be reassembled somewhere else? True, that dead man didn’t sound cut in half so much as . . . vanished in half. . . .” She shook her head and settled once more in front of the control computer.

“But the principle, Marla. The principle may have been shown by the small objects, the twigs and such, that appeared. So it should hold for objects of any size.”

On the computer screen page after page of commands scrolled by. Marla Ridzgy watched closely. “A molecule leaves a molecular-sized vacuum. When the air rushes in to fill it the change in pressure in the vault is imperceptible. But if that much matter disappeared. . . . Why, it was probably 30 percent of the vault’s volume. Can you imagine the effect of such a vacuum? Even if it is transient?”

“The vault wasn’t sealed,” Bowman reminded her. “Which is why the damage wasn’t worse. And then there was the dead guard. The blood is sprayed all over the outside of the door, but there’s none inside the vault, except those few smears from the other people. That guard wasn’t cut in half by the door, and his upper half never bled inside the vault.”

“Then,” Ridzgy said, pausing the computer’s scrolling, “if we buy this as a working hypothesis—just for the moment—this vault, because of the exact settings, became a translocation machine. It brought beetles in from somewhere else, alive, and it sent a group of people to that somewhere. . . .” She left the last word hanging. “Do you realize how big this is, if they’ve really shown it? If they publish this, and convince the world of physics that it’s been done? Only,” she added after a short pause, “they’re not here to tell anyone what they’ve done. Right now, we’re the only ones who know.”

Bowman watched his colleague’s face carefully. “If they were sent to where their beetles came from, perhaps that cop is right. Perhaps they could be brought back again, if they’re alive, if the vault was working and the settings were exact.”

After sundown, in the moonlight, Julian climbed out of the enclosure, following Carl in search of ferns. It was not necessary to clamber up the wall the dangerous way he had done before; instead, Carl propped a wooden ladder against it, near the water trough. Looking up, Julian could see the tips of great hollow bones jutting from the top of the wall. They were femurs of some huge beast, serving as water pipes.

As they climbed to the top he rapped his knuckles against one of the shafts, and a watery sound echoed up. How had Carl managed to drag such monstrous bones there and mount them upright? Julian had a ludicrous mental image of Carl striding over the rocky hills, an eight-foot, three-hundred-pound femur balanced on his shoulder.

At the base of the slope they headed north toward wooded ground, following a well-worn trail through the brush. Carl moved with a long swinging stride and was soon several yards ahead. The moon was full and lit up the open landscape.

The afternoon spent in safety had confused Julian and dulled his sense of watchfulness. He could almost have been back in Pennsylvania, fossil hunting with his father, if it weren’t for the renewed sense of urgency to go west after his companions. He tried to calculate how far they might have gone since their separation. But that only made his chest feel tight, so that he had to think about breathing. Much as he wanted to think they were still searching for him, he decided they would have gone on, impelled by the short time window, knowing it was their only chance.

The bracken rustled nearby and Julian paused. Then, from the ground at his feet, a horrible sound broke out: a piercing, rapid, “Kah kah kah kah kah!” that seemed to echo all around. He stumbled backward, clamping his mouth shut over a yelp of fear. Twigs snapped, something scurried through the undergrowth, and there was silence again.

“What was it?” Julian asked, curiosity getting the better of his initial terror. He stirred the bracken with his foot, but could see nothing in the moonlight. The branches and leaves threw confusing shadows.

Carl used his hands to indicate a small animal, about a foot long. “We might have killed it for tomorrow’s dinner. But let it go. We have too little time before the storm.”

They skirted the wooded area and stopped in a boggy depression where ferns grew thick and immensely tall. Carl pulled a short curved blade from his belt—it looked like a huge tooth, filed flat—and pushed in among the ferns. Julian could tell where he was only by the tossing of the fronds as he hacked at their stems. A moment later he reemerged with a thick bundle, which he tied with a leather thong and lay on a dry patch of ground. Julian pulled out his own small knife to help.

By then even he could sense a change in the weather. The wind moved high in the branches and hurrying clouds obscured the stars. The moon took on a sickly glow. Suddenly Carl’s three-fingered hand touched Julian’s shoulder, and with a nod of his head he indicated the ground in front of them.

The mud was scored by three long depressions, close together at one end and fanning outward at the other. It was the print of a clawed, tridactyl foot. Although Julian had a good eye for tracks, this one took him a moment to understand. It was enormous, and his mental catalogue of animal tracks had to be rescaled entirely before his brain could even see the marks as a footprint.

Julian was a good woodsman; still he made a slight scuffing over the uneven ground. A stick cracked under his foot, and at the sound a dark object reared up over the ferns, about forty feet away. It was an animal’s head. He saw it for an instant in profile, and it was longer than he was tall. Then it turned toward him and he looked into its wide, mottled face and its eyes; or rather its right eye, since his gaze could not take in both at once in that vast head. The eye glittered in the moonlight, peering down from a height of twenty-five feet. The huge jaws were slightly open, showing teeth as long as Julian’s hand. Those jaws could have engulfed him whole, leaving only his feet sticking out.

Julian knew that he was, quite literally, looking into the face of death; a curiously expressionless face, the color of bark, dented and ridged.

It could only be Tyrannosaurus rex. He knew this partly because of the distinctive wide cheekbones and the stubby, two-clawed forearm, no bigger than a human’s. But mainly, he knew because of the impossible size of the thing. Nothing had prepared him for the living animal itself: not the skulls he had studied, not museum skeletons, not movies or imagination clothing those museum models with flesh.

He had never before realized how well the name fit the animal. Several times in the past month Julian thought he might have glimpsed a T. rex, but now he knew that all the previous sightings had been of lesser animals. There was no mistaking the monarch of all dinosaurs. He stared up at it in disbelief. Then it lunged toward him. The speed of its leap was terrifying, and all paleontological and rational thought left him as he turned and ran.

He sprinted a few yards and then became mired in a deep mud hole. It would have been better to lie still, but he lost his head and began to thrash and struggle hysterically. He glanced over his shoulder, wondering why he was still alive, and saw a small dark object whiz through the air and smack the animal on the snout. The T. rex stopped, with a look like a dog hit by a rolled-up newspaper. Another rock hit the mud behind it, and then another beyond that.

There was an agonizing moment when they seemed frozen in place, neither man nor dinosaur moving, like actors on a stage waiting for the curtain to fall. Julian thought his heart would explode. In reality it must have been a second in time; but it felt like the longest hour of his life.

The great head swiveled away. It showed a bumpy profile and then the vast bulk of the body as it turned. From nose to tip of tail it must have been fifty feet long, and had Julian stood on Carl’s shoulders, still he could not have reached its hip. As the animal turned he noticed that the left forelimb was mutilated: the claws had been cut off at the second knuckle joint, leaving the limb shorter than the other.

The animal was crouching nearly horizontal, its tail straight and stiff behind. It seemed to be sniffing with its nose to the ground; Julian could no longer see the head over the ferns. He watched the hindquarters move with surprising grace and a rippling of muscles under the brown hide. Then it disappeared into the darkness under the trees. There was a thunk of one more rock, a noise of trampled bracken, then silence.

Halfway up his shins in warm mud, Julian tried to twist his body around to look over his shoulder. The bundle of ferns lay behind him where he had dropped it.

Carl appeared from the shadows nearby, his bundle still balanced on his shoulder. He stooped to pick up Julian’s ferns. “Easy to confuse,” he said, tapping his forehead to indicate the animal’s lack of intellect. Then he reached out with his free hand, clasped Julian’s arm, and pulled him to dry ground.

Trying hard not to look as if his heart were about to burst, Julian forced a painful grin. “Faster than I expected,” he said, the quaver in his voice unmistakable.

Carl nodded. “When I first came here she was the leader. They live many years, longer than our kind. She is the biggest one I know, and the oldest. But the others drove her away when she became too old to hunt well.”

He had studied the largest T. rex skeleton discovered to date, an individual estimated at twelve tons when alive. According to one hypothesis, fifteen-tonners were not uncommon. This matriarch was more than fifteen tons, if he was any judge at all. With the appropriate instruments he could have calculated her weight by the depth of the footprints and the viscosity of the mud; and as his mind turned over these possibilities, Julian realized that the fear was gone. Only the awe remained.

“We know each other.” Carl shifted his bundle to the other shoulder. “She is more of a scavenger now. I set out carcasses for her at times, after I take some of the meat.”

“I hope so,” Carl said. He was silent for a few minutes as they trudged under their bundles, single file now along the narrow path. “She is good to have around,” he continued at last. “The other hunters stay away. They are smaller, but they are more dangerous to animals of our own size. No, I would rather face one of her kind.” After a moment he added, “I feel a bond with her. Both of us are old, both loners. Perhaps she, too, has outlived everyone she ever cared for.”

He said no more until they were nearing the hill of rock, the “sentinel hill” as he had called it. Then he turned to Julian and said, “I call her Corla.”

By then the sky was almost completely overcast and the moon alternately appeared and vanished behind fast-moving clouds. The wind moved in gusts and carried an occasional drop of rain. Every few minutes Julian glanced about nervously, half expecting Corla’s enormous head to emerge over the tree tops. But Carl seemed unconcerned.

The rain came down hard with a sudden blast of wind as they climbed the hill. Within seconds they were drenched, and Julian slipped and barked his shins as he carried the ferns up the rocky side of the hill. Carl moved about the top of the wall uncovering his wells, and Julian went inside to stack the ferns in the middle room of the hut. A few minutes later Carl came in, his bedraggled hair flat against his head and clinging to his shoulders. He added a few pieces of dry wood to the fire and the flames sprang up, sending shadows and lights spinning about the stone walls.

“Won’t you douse the fire?” Julian asked, confused that Carl seemed to be settling in rather than preparing to head back out, and west. “I have some meat that I smoked,” he added, lifting his bundle of Triceratops hide from the corner. “I suppose we won’t have to carry water for a while yet.” Now that the time had come, he was more than ready. Yes, Carl’s home was comfortable after so long living in the wild, sleeping in trees and living from meal to meal; but time was moving, his companions were still lost, and it was past time to find them.

Carl’s look was neutral rather than puzzled as he squatted beside the fire, carefully arranging more wood. “You may go,” he said. “But you will be quickly lost. Weather in this season is a thing to fear.” He raised his head and looked Julian in the eye. “I will find your friends, if they live. I will start when the sun returns.”

Julian was momentarily at a loss. He realized he was counting on Carl’s help; and the thought of venturing out in the stormy darkness, alone again, solitary, leaving behind the only other human being—not to mention the probability of being stalked by a hungry T. rex accustomed to taking handouts—these thoughts shook his resolve more than he cared to admit.

“Half the night has gone,” Carl replied calmly. “Daylight will be soon. Sleep now. I do not wish to search for you tomorrow, and find you drowned in the flood that will come.”

The wind gave a particularly loud howl just then and the sound of the rain changed. Julian shivered. Guilty as he felt being warm and sheltered while his companions endured this night in the open, he suddenly felt extremely weary. His eyes drooped and the bundle of smoked meat fell to the floor. He was half aware of his strange host quietly moving about, stowing things away. Then the scene became unclear, and he thought that Yariko was bending over him, pulling at him. “He’s my father,” she was saying. No, Julian tried to tell her, his hair is blonde. But he couldn’t seem to form the words; and then Yariko was standing, and a cave grew in the darkness behind her.

Julian sat up straight, his eyes wide open in the blackness. The fire was a mound of glowing coals in a ring of ashes. He was sitting on a thick piece of hide with another on top, its musky smell filling his nose.

A dim shape stood in the doorway. The shape moved, and Carl’s voice said, “We will leave early. If your friends stay clear of the river they will be all right. The Big Ones will never hunt in this.” Then he turned and disappeared into the back room.

Julian lay for a time listening to the storm. The wind roared over the thatched roof and the rain splashed and pounded on the stones in the yard. A faint sound drifted in now and then, and his last half-awake thought was, “But how can there be music?”