Cretaceous Dawn

Before Darwin’s monumental publication, evolution was held to be a rigid sequence of steps preordained by God to produce humans. According to Darwin, there was no preordained endpoint to evolution, and therefore one species was no “higher” or closer to the goal than another. A bee is just as highly specialized and adapted to being a bee as a human is to its specific circumstance. Both are the current endpoints of their evolutionary lines, the current tips of the twigs on the evolutionary tree.

Earles locked her desk, switched off her computer, and put on an old sweater over her uniform. Picking up the small box that Hann had just brought her, she went down the hall to the lobby. “I’m off,” she said to the cop behind the counter. “Time to get a little rest. I’ll be back by five. If any calls come in from those scientists forward ’em to my cell phone.”

But Earles didn’t get her few hours’ rest, as it turned out. Before she reached it the front door opened, and Mark Reng walked into the station. He looked startled to see Earles. “Oh, I was just going to leave you a message,” he said.

“No need.” Earles led the way back to her office with a sigh. She unlocked the door and took off her sweater, placing the small box on her desk again. “Is the rewiring progressing well?”

“Yes, all that’s fine. Maybe a few more hours and I’ll be done.” Mark held a small book in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. “I guess police chiefs keep hours like graduate students,” he said with a nervous laugh.

Earles pushed a chair toward him. “Just say it right out,” she said, leaning back against the desk and folding her arms. “This can’t get much stranger than it already is. I’ll listen to anything.”

“Right here. Brand new, ready to go. I measured it myself to be sure they made it correctly.” Earles opened the box on her desk and tilted it to show Mark the dull gray-white metal inside.

“The thing is,” Mark said, “that bar won’t work. I mean it’ll work as far as getting the vault operating again, but it won’t create the same results.”

Mark looked uncomfortable again. “I know this sounds terrible, but I don’t think they want to find those people. I think they’re intentionally setting things up to work but with slightly different settings. You see,” and he looked up with almost a pleading expression, “they know as well as I do that a different chunk of platinum in the circuit will modify the results in small ways. They can’t replicate the exact conditions without the original bar.”

“Well, if my boss was really working on translocation of objects, that’s a huge finding. She and Dr. Shanker will be famous when they write it all up. They’ll be the first to show such a thing is possible. Science is a very competitive field, you know,” he added, somewhat defensively. “I’ve been to enough conferences to know that physicists can be aggressive about their careers. If my boss never shows up, those two could steal all the results. That woman Ridzgy, has been copying files onto CD’s, and that’s not allowed.”

“I had no idea scientists were so cutthroat,” Earles said. “It sounds as bad as the criminal world. OK for motive, if you’re right. Now tell me about this metal bar.”

“The settings are predetermined in the program,” Mark said. “But then there are the fine adjustments. Someone goes into the vault, just before the run is started, and watches the dials while making delicate adjustments. I’ve done it so I know what to look for; I could do it with a new piece of platinum.”

“Not for those people you’ve brought in—they don’t know the details. They only know what’s recorded, and the dial settings written down are for the original platinum standardizer. This new bar isn’t the same as the original. The differences might be undetectable to us, but the fine adjustments needed are within those differences. They’d need the same bar, exactly as it was, to exactly replicate the experimental run.”

“And they can’t have the same bar,” Earles said thoughtfully. “Yet she seemed confident, giving me these dimensions. She even said straight out that without the correct dimensions they wouldn’t be able to find the missing people.”

Earles didn’t realize she was staring fixedly at Mark until he began to squirm. She was thinking of Bowman’s astonished look when his colleague had handed over the measurements, and Ridzgy’s interruption when Bowman was about to say something.

“Yes. I’ve been listening to them talking, from inside the vault. They ignore me. Kind of convenient, actually. And they’ve started erasing things from the hard drive of the master computer.”

That impressed Earles more than anything else. “Erasing files? That’s a criminal act. That could compromise the investigation. And the material doesn’t belong to them.”

“It will if my boss doesn’t come back to claim it,” Mark said, and his mild voice was surprisingly angry. “They’ll run a perfect experiment when it’s all set up, but they won’t retrieve objects from the correct place—or time. Then they’ll take off with all the records and their own new data, and publish it as their own.”

This investigation was surely the strangest imaginable, Earles thought. If Mark was right. . . . She strode to the door, ready to charge into the physics lab and confront those people. But Mark spoke again.

Shanker was on his hands and knees. He looked back over his shoulder when he heard Julian crashing through the twigs; by the expression on his face, he obviously thought he was done for. When he saw Julian and then Carl behind him, the look changed from terror to amazement.

They helped him to his feet. He was so weak that they had to support him, one at each arm. He raised his head with an effort to gape at Carl, and then turned to Julian. But he said nothing.

In a more concealed spot near the cliff wall Julian eased him down gently onto the ground. He could not see any obvious injuries. Dr. Shanker sat with his head lolling back against the stone but his eyes were open and he seemed to be alert. “Well, Whitney,” he whispered. “Did you come back for me?”

“What happened to you? Where’s Yariko?” Julian felt like shouting and shaking him. If Dr. Shanker was in this state, alone. . . . All his fears for Yariko came rushing back.

Shanker stared at him a moment with a confused expression. Then he shook his head. “Not here. I don’t know.” His voice was so low that it was difficult to understand.

“You left her?” Julian said, tightening his grip on Shanker’s arm. He felt no sympathy at that moment; only anger that he had left Yariko alone.

“You’re a fierce young fellow,” Shanker said, summoning up the energy to speak again. “I don’t know where Hilda is either. I hope they stayed together.” He closed his eyes to rest, but a moment later he looked up again and said, in a weak voice, “Who’s your friend? Doesn’t he speak?”

Julian glanced around but Carl had disappeared. By now he was used to these sudden absences. Carl often scouted ahead, or climbed an escarpment to spy out the land. This time their guide came back within a few minutes, carrying a skinful of cold water from a nearby stream. The water helped to revive Dr. Shanker and he looked up at them with a more focused attention, droplets sparkling in his beard.

“Can’t you think of anything else?” Shanker said. He looked haggard but his voice was stronger, already taking on its usual egotistical tone. He stared at Carl again, then closed his eyes and rested a moment. “Been having funny deliriums for days . . . but this one beats all.”

“I’ll tell you,” Shanker said at last, “just so you don’t pester me about it. The river . . . you fell in the river. I thought you were done for. We couldn’t do much for you, being occupied by our horned friend. Standing right next to one of them for the first time—a live one—is something I won’t forget.”

“Of course we didn’t know what was happening to you, except that you didn’t join us in facing the thing. I don’t think the animal was trying to kill us, or it would have. We couldn’t have fought it. There was a young one behind it; maybe it was a straggler and the parent had come back for it.”

Dr. Shanker took another sip of water and continued. “Anyhow, Mamma was warning us off in no uncertain terms. She came out to the river bank. That’s about when we realized you’d gone for a swim. Not bright, if you ask me; that water was cold. Yorko was frantic. She lost it, for moment: she actually charged the thing. Straight along the bank, screaming bloody murder. She practically impaled herself on its horns. That almost ended things: Mrs. Triceratops decided to charge us. Chased us quite a way upstream, in fact, snorting and squealing like a monstrous pig. She seemed unimpressed by our spears. I wonder if even a T. rex can bring down one of those. Quite terrifying.”

“We searched all afternoon, Whitney. Finally picked up your trail where you left the river. But . . . maybe it wasn’t even your trail,” he said thoughtfully, looking at Carl.

“You were right behind me, then,” Julian said. “I thought I was following you, but you were following me. No wonder I couldn’t catch up to you.”

“Comic,” Dr. Shanker said. “Typical. I knew we should have gone sooner, but Yorko wouldn’t listen.” He shrugged. “We finally moved on, but we didn’t get very far. I can’t say I like this rocky ground any better than the swamp. Cluttered up with too many of those damn Triceratops.”

“That’s his hypothesis?” Dr. Shanker said, peering at Carl with his bushy eyebrows drawn together in a scowl. Carl said nothing, but Dr. Shanker continued to stare. He was obviously as amazed as Julian had been at the first sight of another human.

“All right, all right. Where was I? That second night, in the middle of that God-awful tempest, I stepped on a diabolical little reptile. It bit me on the ankle. I killed it with the back end of my spear, broke its spine, which is some consolation, but the rotten thing caused my ankle to swell up. I ate it the next day.”

“A little thing,” Dr. Shanker said. “A foot long at most. It was ringed with red, I think, but it was hard to tell in the moonlight. Red and yellow. What’s the verdict?”

“Queer fellow,” Dr. Shanker said. “Anyhow, that’s when we got separated. Yariko disappeared in the rain—it was pitch black by then and I couldn’t find her. Then the dry stream we were in flooded. There’d been water on the ground all night but suddenly it started moving. It knocked me down. I don’t know about your river experience, Whitney, but mine wasn’t exactly fun.” Shanker scratched at his hairy face and coughed.

“I don’t know, but I don’t think so. The water wasn’t that deep. I’m sure we would have ended up in the same place, or close enough. I lost Hilda, too. When I managed to crawl out I couldn’t walk very well though I tried. I circled the area calling. No sign of her in the morning, or Hilda either. Fantastic place for lightning, by the way, this prehistoric period of yours. You never warned us. And then the fog came, so it was all hopeless. I’ve been staggering along ever since, trying to catch up. You see, I’ve found bits of Hilda’s fur and a few dog prints here and there. I’m sure they’ve come this way.”

“I doubt that,” Dr. Shanker said dryly. “She was so anxious to catch up with you that she must be miles ahead by now. I haven’t exactly been traveling at my peak speed.” He grinned, but the grin quickly turned to a grimace. “This damn foot of mine.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back to rest.

Julian looked at him as he sat back against the stone. He did not look wasted; his frame was still burly. But even through the hair and the filth on his face the unhealthy glow of a fever could be seen. The wet and exposure, lack of good food, and constant physical strain must have weakened him. No wonder he was in such bad shape. Worried as he was about Yariko, Julian felt ashamed of his impatience toward a man who was so sick.

Dr. Shanker opened his eyes and looked up. “Whitney. Leave me some food and water, and I’ll be fine here. I know you want to hurry after her. I’ll catch up in a few days.”

Julian glanced at Carl, who gave a slight shake of his head. He had lit a fire and was warming some meat and roots on the stones. He sprinkled the meat with a crumbling of dried leaves, and the spice improved immensely on the flavor. Even Dr. Shanker mumbled something about it as he gnawed on a piece.

After eating they took off Dr. Shanker’s shoe and carefully washed his ankle with relatively clean water. It was badly swollen and streaks of red and black extended up his leg, under the skin. The cold water seemed to lessen the pain. His pant leg was cut off a few inches short; obviously the scrap of cloth Carl had found was an attempt at a bandage.

Carl rummaged in his sack and pulled out some dried stems, twisted and hard. Julian could tell nothing about the plant except that it was a monocot. It had a pungent smell, something like pepper or cinnamon, too strong to be pleasant.

“You don’t need to interpret,” Dr. Shanker muttered. “I can understand him well enough now.” He took the twig and sniffed at it, grimacing. “Pleasant stuff, your voodoo medicine.” But he chewed it nonetheless. “Salicylic acid. Aspirin. In Boy Scouts we knew a dozen plants that contained the stuff.”

Julian sat beside Carl and looked out at the bushy canyon. The sunlight glared and sparkled from the stones and the pools of water. A cloud passed overhead, dimming the light. Then the cloud moved on and the light glared in his eyes again, as fiercely as ever.

For a long time they said nothing. Julian was learning his guide’s habit of silence, of conserving words as if they were a finite resource. Finally he said, “Will he get better, do you think?”

Julian guessed that Dr. Shanker was suffering from a blood-born infection. The modern Komodo dragon used the technique of infecting its prey with bacteria harbored in the serrations of its teeth, and it seemed plausible that some of the Cretaceous carnivores might follow the same strategy. Ironically, the reptile had not only lost its meal, but gotten itself eaten for its pains.

After a while Carl reached into the stiffened sack and took out a strangely shaped piece of wood, flattened on one side and glossy as though it had been polished with oil. It was about the width of his spread hand and maybe four times the length, and pegged to the flat top were five white strings of decreasing length, gut perhaps, thin as thread and pulled tightly over the wood. Beneath the strings, at one end, a hollow had been carved into the wood, about twice the size of a fist.

Carl set the contraption upright against his chest, the hollowed end resting on his crossed legs, and plucked at it with his fingers. His movements were graceful, despite the missing fingers on his left hand. Because the strings were so short and the sound cavity so small, the instrument had a pingy sound with little resonance. The music was strange and quiet; it reminded Julian of Yariko’s Japanese instrument that he’d once heard her play, so long ago. He leaned his head against the rock and listened to the soft wandering sounds that brought Yariko so clearly to mind.

Julian looked carefully at Dr. Shanker. The man seemed to be sleeping peacefully, probably for the first time in days. Rolling up his poncho, he took Shanker’s swollen foot and propped it up. Then he put the water skin near the sick man, and stretched out on the ground beside him. “And you?” he asked, looking at Carl.

Julian woke to find the sun past its height and Carl gone. He stood up to stretch and saw Dr. Shanker walking about in the sunlight, limping heavily and leaning on his spear. He looked pale but his face was set in determination, and the fact that he was standing at all was a big improvement.

He nodded to Julian. “Fantastic day,” he said, and it was. The sun gleamed on the rocks and a few birds fluttered in the bushes on the other side of the stream bed, calling to each other in short, raucous notes. The signs of life were heartening after the silence of the past few days.

“I’ve been up for at least an hour.” Dr. Shanker gestured at a small pile of twigs and twisted wood that he’d gathered. “Your friend’s disappeared, anyway,” he added.

“I wish I knew.” Julian sat down and removed his shoes, or what was left of them, and picked the grit out from between his toes. “As far as I can understand, a group of people got here before us and survived for a couple of generations. Carl’s the last one. One of the grandchildren or even great-grandchildren, I gather; he never talks about coming from the future. Actually, he doesn’t really talk at all. I think he’s been alone for a long time, maybe decades. I wish I could have a bath,” he added, plucking at his sticky shirt.

“You think it was a separate translocation event? An independent group of people? Not possible.” Dr. Shanker lowered himself carefully onto a boulder. “Damn this foot,” he grumbled. “Think about it, Whitney. The history of the earth, as a distinct gravitational entity, is about six billion years. We go back in time and hit the Late Cretaceous. Somebody else goes back in time, and what’s the chance that they’ll hit within a hundred years of us? One in six hundred million. Negligible. It can’t happen. On the other hand, here we have your stalwart friend. Maybe we’re both crazy and imagining him together. Are you sure falling in that freezing water didn’t addle your brains? Maybe you banged your head on a rock.”

Julian grinned at that. “And you—brains addled by a lizard? Anyway, I’d already figured all that. Obviously they got here the same way, with the same equipment. Remember we used to joke about the rescue party? Maybe there really was one, or an attempt at one.”

Dr. Shanker grunted. “Who would know enough to set everything up again and get in the vault during a run? And if they did know that much, why would they risk themselves? No, this translocation through time isn’t something anyone’s going to figure out, unless we get back and tell them.” He pondered for a moment. “Didn’t you ask him about his origins? He must know something.”

“Of course I asked him,” Julian said, realizing as he spoke that he hadn’t asked all that much after that first day with Carl. Perhaps his amazement had been blunted by Carl’s familiarity and the natural way he seemed to fit into the landscape; and his curiosity had been buried under his desire to find Yariko and Dr. Shanker.

“He talked about people coming from the east, from the edge of the sea. They traveled west: so maybe they did know what they were doing, if they were trying to revert.” Julian eased his shoes back on over the blisters. “He’s referred to maybe several generations, but I can’t be sure. I told you, he isn’t much of a talker. In his own good time, I suppose.”

“Your lack of curiosity astounds me, Whitney. And here you are a scientist, a Cretaceous expert at that. You’d never let a new dinosaur off that easily. I intend to get answers from the guy. His horrible voodoo medicine was just what I needed, anyway. I’ll never underestimate aspirin again.”

“Corla?” Dr. Shanker peered at Julian from under his bushy brows. “You’ve led a whole life, I see, since the last time I saw you. You’ll have to tell me about it.”

Carl was approaching with a bulging sack slung over one shoulder. He stopped in front of the others and put down the sack without a word. Dr. Shanker winked at Julian and said in a low voice, “You’re right. Not a talker.”

Thanks to Dr. Shanker’s kindling, they ate a warm meal of fresh tangy roots and stems, a nice change from the dried meat, and drank from a stream that trickled down the wall of the gully. Then they set out. Carl took the lead; Dr. Shanker came next, crutching along at a surprising pace with his spear, trying to gain the lead but not succeeding. Julian came last of all, trying to contain his impatience. He was eager to find Yariko again, although he supposed Dr. Shanker was just as eager to find Hilda.

As Carl had warned them, the terrain was rough and cut by gullies and sudden clefts. Shrubs and gnarled pines dotted the area, but did not give much shade. The sun burned down on them. Julian’s hair was noticeably hot to the touch and his back, underneath the water sack, was soon drenched in sweat and chafed by the leather. They stopped now and then to drink from a brook or a trickling waterfall; Dr. Shanker bathed his foot each time, sighing as the cool water ran over it. The swelling, to Julian’s relief, was going down.

Carl did not show any fatigue but as the day went on Dr. Shanker lagged and his limping grew worse. He never complained, but kept pegging away with the butt end of his spear. For all his arrogance, Julian had to allow him a certain tenacity and consistency of character. The man seemed completely unfeeling about his own condition. Julian wondered when he would begin questioning Carl.

After several hours of hard traveling they began to climb steeply uphill. At the top of a ridge, panting and leaning on their spears, they looked to the west and saw the whole immense landscape spread out like a map. The broken ground continued, stained brown and green and laced with canyons and gullies. In the distance the ground rose again, easing up toward a group of isolated hills.

To the best that Julian could calculate, those hills marked the place they had been trying to find, the end of their thousand-mile journey. He hoped that Yariko at least would reach them in safety. The region, open and burning in the sun, seemed to hold fewer carnivores and might be less dangerous. But the hunters were scarce precisely because their prey was scarce. There was obviously little food to be had, and Yariko probably did not have a supply slung on her back, as Julian and his companions did. And Dr. Shanker’s injury was a reminder that large carnivores were not the only things to fear.

At some point the old river bed they’d been following fanned out and disappeared in the rocky landscape. Julian never expected to find a trail nicely laid out all the way to their destination; still, he was disturbed to see it disappearing, because their path would probably begin to diverge from Yariko’s.

They rested while the sun went down and then continued in the dark under the moon, now nearing the third quarter. More gullies, ridges, broken ground; a bleak and barren landscape. Julian saw no animals, and no signs of Yariko either. Another cliff face loomed ahead, and they stopped in its shadow to give Dr. Shanker a rest. Progress had been good; but reaching their goal within the limited time window would be meaningless to Julian if they did not find Yariko.

“Escape from what?” Dr. Shanker asked, looking at Julian. “I thought you said there’d be fewer of those pesky large animals out of the swamp, Whitney.” He pulled himself to his feet with the help of his spear. “What do you see, you two?”

Julian wondered if T. rex had that kind of memory. Tyrannosaurids had immense heads, but they were mostly bone and muscle. The braincase was relatively tiny. Still, she might have learned to associate humans with a steady supply of food; and she could certainly trail them by scent.

Carl led them toward a thicket of pine trees that crowded the base of the cliff. He said the strong scent of the needles would help to hide them. They settled in the darkness under the trees, backs up against the shaggy trunks, and ate a little dried food.

“Our wise old guide refuses to speak,” Dr. Shanker said, irritably. “What does he know about Cretaceous animals anyway? How can he be sure this thing won’t crash over here and attack us? Whitney, maybe he’ll answer you. He seems to like you.”

Carl looked at him for a moment, his eyes narrowed. But there was no anger in his expression; instead he seemed to be weighing his opinion of Dr. Shanker. Finally he thrust a plug of meat into his cheek and said, “I am sure of nothing.”

With his mouth still full of chewed food, Dr. Shanker laughed, a little uncertainly. “Is that plausible? Do they even have such a well-developed sense of smell?”

“They’re known to have enormous turbinal bones, the spiral bones in the nose,” Julian explained. “Her sense of smell, I’d guess, is probably uncanny with a surface area like that.” He didn’t mention the other thing he was thinking: Corla was used to being fed by this man; she had followed him into the barren hills, far from the river valley, where there was no prey to be caught. Carl had nothing to give her. Dr. Shanker interrupted his thoughts.

“And you imagine that this animal is specifically tracking us? Up hill and down? Brainy, for a dinosaur. Ph.D., perhaps?” He snorted. “I think you’re giving it too much credit. It isn’t like Hilda, you know. We seem to have thrown it off our trail, anyway. I don’t hear anyone stomping around out there.”

Carl seemed impervious to the sarcasm; he may not have understood it. He chewed, spat out the end of the meat that had become too dry to swallow, and said, “Would you like to see her?”

Dr. Shanker carefully set down his piece of meat on a rock. “Then what are we doing, sitting here waiting to be killed?” For the first time he spoke directly to Carl.

Dr. Shanker scratched his beard and continued to stare at Carl. Julian could not tell through all the hair on the man’s face whether he was angry, or frightened. After a moment Shanker said, as if to himself, “I’d hate to leave here without ever having seen one . . . that is, if it doesn’t involve getting killed.”