Cretaceous Dawn

Mark Reng’s eyes were red and swollen, his face gray and bristly. He looked less like a skinny kid now and more like a contemporary. Earles didn’t think about what she must look like by now; it wasn’t a concern.

Bowman was sound asleep, drooling onto the page of an open notebook that served as a pillow. Ridzgy turned from the computer screen with a triumphant look.

“I’m ready to set up the experimental run, if Mark is,” she said. “The program’s up and working, the parameters are set, and the other machines are standing by to record.” She indicated the four slave machines ranged along the bench, each monitor showing scrolling sequences of numbers and symbols, never ending, endlessly repeating.

Please God I never have to watch a program sequence again, Earles thought to herself. “Very well,” she said. “You square things with Mark. I’m going to step out for a few moments while you set up.”

Earles went out into the dim hallway. Throughout the night she’d encountered several overworked, chronically sleep-deprived graduate students near the coke machine in the lobby; but at five-thirty in the morning the place seemed to be empty. A time of truce, Mark had called it, when graduate students could leave without fear of notice: the hour before dawn, after the equally overworked junior faculty had left and before one’s advisor arrived again for the day.

By seven o’clock the junior faculty would be back, the red-eyed graduate students would be back, and the building would come alive again. By nine o’clock, if not before, government regulators from OSHA, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, would be descending on the place to permanently shut it down, having heard through mysterious channels about the “accident” in a lab run under government funding. They would confiscate the evidence and the equipment, take away the funding, and probably end the police investigation.

Looking at her watch, Earles saw that it would be a close thing. She paced the lobby on the first floor, knowing that patience was still needed: Ridzgy must be given time to finalize her own plans.

Bowman was awake, wrinkled and grumbling; there were lines on his cheek where it had lain against the notebook. The notebook itself was no longer there. None of them were there. The counter was remarkably neat.

“I just straightened up a little,” Ridzgy said with a mirthless smile, following Earles’ gaze. “Stacked ’em all in a safe corner. No sense risking all those valuable records, if this thing blows up again.”

Earles glanced toward Mark, who stood outside the vault yawning. Their eyes met. Reaching her hand around to the radio on her belt, she pushed the emergency signal button.

Julian woke to find the others still asleep, except for Hilda who was nosing around and pawing at the rocks. She may have been chasing lizards; but if so, they were too quick for her in the heat. Now and then she sat down and scratched at an itch with her hind foot. Watching her eased some of Julian’s heartache, because she was so busy and so innocent at the same time. For her, life went on.

After a while he got up quietly, trying not to wake the others, and began to explore the caves. The one at his back was empty, except for a stack of wood and a few bits of leather, tattered and decayed. It was very small. There were, of course, no bats; they had not yet evolved.

The second cave opened on the cliff face only a few yards away. The entrance was no more than a crack in the rock, wide enough to fit one person. Dr. Shanker might have to turn sideways and squeeze, but Julian slipped in easily. The narrow mouth opened up to a large room, fairly dry and quite safe from big animals.

Whatever Carl may have thought, Julian did not believe that the cave was dug by humans. It had the irregular shape and uneven roof of a natural formation. Somebody had smoothed the floor, however, and carved rough shelves along one wall. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness he saw that there were objects on the shelves.

There was a large knife that was carved from a sliver of bone. A smaller version lay near it. They were not particularly sharp, and were crudely made. Beside the knives lay two clay bowls. There was no clay in these hills. The bowls had come from near the river, maybe brought here by Carl. Beside the bowls was a flat clay pan with a stick for a handle, but it was cracked in half, and useless.

The last object was a tiny leather sack tied closed. Julian turned it in his hand, puzzled, and then began to work on the knot. The leather string fell apart in his fingers. He turned the sack upside down and shook it. A small object fell out into his palm.

There is a fear that comes when one sees something familiar in a place where it is not expected, where, in fact, it cannot exist. This fear came to Julian. His free hand went up against the rough wall for balance. The cave seemed to close in around him.

Julian shook his head. “I didn’t bring it. It was broken, on Cypress Island. Remember? We couldn’t find the magnet. Without the magnet it was useless. . . .”

They all stared at the compass, Julian stooping against the rough stone, the other two standing over him. The letters “JW” were scratched into the tiny glass face.

“But how did my compass get here? I didn’t bring it. It’s still on Cypress Island, somewhere in the trees near the beach, in a million pieces.” He thought back to that first night in their new world and the fear they’d all felt; and his own hopelessness, when the compass was broken. Now both he and it were here, a thousand miles from where they’d started; but he hadn’t brought it with him.

“You did bring it,” Dr. Shanker said. Julian shook his head again, but Shanker continued. “In another time, it didn’t break. And you brought it here.”

Yariko was staring at the opposite wall. It was quite dim, but now Julian could make out faint tracings on the wall. He walked over and touched them with his fingers. The lines seemed to be painted on rather than chiseled, and they were regular, in even rows extending from waist to shoulder height. He put his face close to the rock but still couldn’t see anything clearly.

Dr. Shanker had entered with a makeshift torch; he was now standing beside Yariko. “Would you look at that,” he said, and there was awe in his voice.

The lines were curved designs separating rows of writing. Whatever the paint material was it reflected the firelight very well; the letters seemed almost to glow themselves. In places the writing was streaked with moisture and with a black mold, but much of it was clear.

The laconic record of a tiny community slowly revealed itself. There were no sentences as such, only phrases and numbers, and some didn’t make sense to Julian. The top line he thought he understood.

“Arrival at second new moon since entry. Reversion point unknown. Day 1 after new moon. Day 2. Day 3 after new moon reversion point and time established as W. vanished when in plain sight. Correct place set down although too late. Future retrieval possible? Day 4 will wait here some time in case of retrieval attempt.”

The line ended there; below a set of designs, very beautiful designs, the writing looked quite different. It seemed to record three generations of births and deaths, and although Julian could not immediately make out dates or spacing of these events, he thought there were more than a dozen people, perhaps as many as twenty, alive at one time. Apparently not all were buried outside the caves, as there were only twelve cairns. Thirteen now, he corrected himself. Some must have died while journeying, or out hunting, and never been found.

The third line down seemed to record a migration to the east. The fourth and last line, which he had to stoop to read, looked like a record of journeys back to the caves for burials and other reasons that were not clear.

Julian stood, feeling the ache in his legs and back. The words glowing in the light of Dr. Shanker’s torch did not solve the mystery. He wondered who “W” was; the lucky one who was in the right place to revert when the time came, apparently; but who? And who were the people left behind?

“It’s the caves,” Dr. Shanker said, pointing to one part of the picture. “See, here’s this one, and here’s the little one. And here are the cairns.”

“What’s that triangle?” Julian asked, touching the clean shape that seemed to tower over the crudely drawn cairns. “There’s nothing like that here. Look, there’s a little moon over it.”

“It’s the reversion point,” Yariko said. “See how it’s in the center of a circle? I bet that’s a roman numeral III next to the moon: the third day after the new moon. And here,” she dropped to her knees and bent forward excitedly to look, “here are the measurements to find the circle. It’s quite large, actually.” She looked up at the others. “We could mark the nearest edge, and this corner, and make sure to be inside the line.”

“Yes, but when? Is there a time, or do we sit on the ground all day, waiting?” Dr. Shanker frowned at the rest of the picture. “This one makes no sense.”

There was something naggingly familiar about that second picture that Julian couldn’t quite place. There was a half circle with lines coming out of its center, an overlapping ellipse, and a few other strange symbols.

“Somehow it’s familiar,” he said. “But I can’t make it out. Maybe later when I’m less tired.” He turned back to the wall of writing. Some of it might be a century old; yet the paint was unfaded.

He let himself be led into the late afternoon sunlight. The shadow of the cliff stretched out toward the cairns. They sat down against the cliff face.

“But the compass . . . and the writing. . . .” Julian felt as one does after a night of heavy dreams, trying to shake off their influence in the gray of morning.

“It took me several hours of hard thought to see the possibilities in the third and fourth terms of the Taylor expansion. Beyond the fourth term, I thought the numbers were negligible.”

“But even with the equations straight in my head,” Yariko went on, “I still didn’t believe it. Quite impossible. And not exactly consistent with the facts.

“For several days I thought a good deal more about survival than about physics, I can tell you. Then one night while Hilda and I were curled up together in a bush, I lay there thinking about you and remembering all our little conversations together—I missed you, you know—and suddenly, like a rock falling on my head, or like that apple of Newton’s, I understood. I saw the answer.”

Yariko paused and looked up. “Julian, do you remember our first or second night on Hell Creek, lying on the platform in the tree? We made up such ridiculous stories. Do you remember what we talked about?”

“Yes. Of course I do. I thought of the same thing when I met Carl. There was a population of people who survived, at least for a time. Now we know they came to these caves. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about it, in fact, even if I don’t know any Taylor equations. Obviously, someone tried to rescue us, but didn’t hit the exact time.”

“And they found the bits of your compass in the woods, repaired the thing, and brought it here?” Dr. Shanker snorted derisively. “Come on, Whitney. You’re not as slow as that.”

“There was no rescue party, Julian,” Yariko said. “That was never a possibility, and the idea of “future retrieval” by someone else is hardly possible either. The finest of calibrations can pinpoint a location, or a time, with only so much precision.”

“Precision meaning how close each result is to the others,” Dr. Shanker explained in a condescending voice, as if talking to a child. “A very different thing from accuracy, which is—”

“I know what accuracy is!” Julian snapped. He didn’t need a lecture on scientific terms. He was trying hard to follow what Yariko was saying. “Go on.”

With a warning look at Dr. Shanker, Yariko continued. “Like he said, each run, even identical runs with identical settings, will give a slightly different result. Another group getting in the vault and arriving within fifty or a hundred years of us, and in the exact same location, would be, well, beyond probability.”

“But you were getting samples from the same place, over and over. Those beetles and stones and such. Are you saying they were from all different times in Earth’s history?”

“They were all from roughly the same time and place. A few centuries here or there, a few hundred kilometers here or there; that’s as precise as we could be. Plenty good enough for translocating similar samples, but not good enough for a rescue team to get anywhere near us.”

Julian didn’t like the direction his thoughts were going. “Does that mean we can’t revert? That the instruments won’t be set to exactly the right place?”

“Not at all,” Dr. Shanker said. “If we were true Cretaceous objects, we couldn’t count on being brought into the vault on a given run, because of the variability. But reversion is different from retrieval, or simple translocation. We originated in the vault, and we’ll revert to the vault, as long as the settings are correct.”

“So what does any of that have to do with Carl?” Julian asked, bringing the conversation back to where it had started, and where his mind was still focused.

Julian sat very still as he took in her words. Nobody but themselves . . . nobody but myself, and Yariko, and. . . . When he realized what that actually meant, the sense of awe kept him silent for a long moment.

“The wonder of it,” Dr. Shanker broke in. He’d obviously been waiting impatiently for understanding to dawn on Julian, and was too eager to allow time for sentimental feelings. “The initial reaction in the vault sprayed material through the space-time manifold. We were not sent back to a single point in time. We now know that there were at least two Julian Whitneys, two of each of us, that appeared at distinct and separate points in time. We, the three of us sitting here now, have just lived through one set of events; our counterparts, waking up in a slightly more distant past, must have faced a different sequence of events. In one life, one time, your compass breaks; in another, it survives and helps us find our way.

“We’ll never know how many other versions of us might have appeared at different times. Probably no more than four, if Yorko is right about the equations. But then what happened to the other two? Mauled and eaten by dinosaurs? The probabilities would tend in that direction. Another version of Frank might have lived; another version of me might have died. Perhaps I did see a Cairn that day on Cypress Island.

“The whole thing is fantastic, isn’t it? And yet, never forget the underlying philosophy of science. Observe, observe, observe; then draw your inferences. Science, after all, is nothing more than a rigorous application of common sense.”

Dr. Shanker grinned and stuck out his beard in the way he had when making a speech. “Thus. Observation: another human being lives in the Cretaceous. He suggests he was born here and came from these caves. Observation: your compass is here, in the cave, in perfect working condition. Observation: sixty days ago, you left your compass on the sand, a thousand miles away, broken beyond repair. Inference: we have been here before, duplicates of us if you will; or maybe an original set, and we are the duplicates. And Carl is descended from us. Of course there are many more observations to support that inference, but you get the idea.”

Julian was silent for a while, trying to take in these fantastic ideas. The sun was low and the shadow of the cliff now stretched over the cairns. His head was whirling.

Yariko touched his knee. “It gives you a strange feeling, doesn’t it?” she said. “Jules, what generation do you think he is? He couldn’t be. . . .”

My son? Julian thought. My grandson? His chest began to ache. Carl was dead now. And yet, what was time? He himself, Julian Whitney, was dead, and had not yet been born; his birth was still sixty-five million years in the future, and yet he might be lying under a cairn on Cypress Island.

He had a sudden sharp image of Carl leaning back against the stone wall of his hut, a twig in his mouth, talking in his short phrases about the land to the west. Carl had shown them the way.

“He must have been the last of the generations,” Julian said, finally. “It would have taken a lifetime to build his hill, and more than a few people. I think he was third or even fourth generation. The writing didn’t show years, only generations.” He looked at Yariko. “I find it amazing that against all the odds we brought a child, or more than one, into the world.”

“A little community, surviving in all of this wasteland,” Dr. Shanker said, waving his hand, vaguely taking in the entire Cretaceous world. “Passing on stories from one generation to the next. The seaway to the east. Reaching the caves on a certain moon in this season. But why did they all die out?”

Julian played with a pebble by his foot, not wanting to look up at the cairns now under the afternoon shadow of the cliff. “I think I can guess,” he said. “It’s unlikely enough that one child survived. A whole group? Think of the mortality rate. Predation. Malnutrition. Not to mention how inbred they would be—”

“He did know where we had to be, didn’t he?” Dr. Shanker said, obviously following his own train of thought. “But I’m still not clear on how he—or we—picked this spot. Obviously it’s the right place, because someone reverted . . . someone named W,” he ended, turning to Julian. “You reverted.”

Julian’s emotions, so keyed up as he tried to believe that Carl was his great-great-grandson, did a backflip. And if he reverted without Yariko, then—

“That’s right!” Julian hadn’t actually known Frank’s last name, but that didn’t matter. “Frank reverted, and I stayed with Yariko. I couldn’t have reverted or I wouldn’t have been able to teach paleontology to the next generation. Carl knew some paleontology. I’m serious.”

“OK, you win,” Dr. Shanker said. “Frank would never pass down paleontological knowledge to his offspring. But I still have to be in the gene pool somewhere.”

“I may be a physicist, but I remember my basic genetics. Carl had blue eyes. Yours are black, Whitney’s and mine are brown. But there are blue eyes in my family. It seems to me that you two together could hardly bring a blue-eyed descendant into the world.”

“What about Frank?” Yariko put in quietly. “He had blue eyes, and he was young, too. Maybe he . . . maybe before he reverted. . . .” She stopped and looked quickly at Julian. “No, never mind that. He reverted the third day after they got here, according to that writing.”

“What if, what if a lot of things,” Yariko interrupted, feeling Julian stiffen. “This is useless speculation, and has nothing to do with us now.” She paused. “The question is how long will it be before our window of reversion opens, and where do we need to be when it does?”

“All right, all right,” Dr. Shanker said with sudden loudness. Hilda looked up at him questioningly. “We clearly need to hold another council of war. Dr. Miyakara. Dr. Whitney. At our last council, as you recall, under the palm trees of Cypress Island, we decided to try the chance at reversion; and to make our way a thousand miles to the west. How long has it been? Sixty . . . no, sixty-one days? The river was lucky for us. But have we made it in time? Whitney. What’s your expert opinion?”

“I don’t know.” Julian felt suddenly weary at the thought of all those miles, through swamp, river, and forest, over stony hills and across gullies. He didn’t want to struggle onward anymore. He wanted to stop and rest, here at the caves, reversion or not. “I guess this would be day one of the second new moon. That would make the reversion time two days from now.”

“Very good. Yorko has already told us her opinion. Let me tell you mine.” Dr. Shanker stopped to think, scratching at his beard. “A thousand miles is a long way to travel with any kind of accuracy. But we’ve made the journey before; sixty years ago, maybe? A hundred years? And at that time, apparently, we did have a compass. We came here. We came to these caves and we stopped, and one of us reverted. I put my trust in my previous self: I vote we stay here. We’ll either revert within the next few days, or we’ll live here forever.”

Julian was already losing interest in the discussion. He was hungry, tired, and his head ached. It was getting late; there would be time tomorrow to sort out details. Looking around at the other two in the fading light of the evening, he noticed suddenly how scruffy they were. Dr. Shanker was hideous with his swollen face and thick, matted beard. The dinosaur-skin sack was still tightly wrapped about his rib cage. His clothes were barely recognizable as such, and would not last much longer.

Yariko was little better. Her face was dirty and streaked with sweat. Her arms were bruised, scraped, and not very clean. Her jeans were covered with dried mud and her T-shirt was no more than a bleached, gray rag. It did not conceal much, either.

They found running water not far from the caves, behind a stand of low, twisted trees. Yariko called the trees the shower curtain, and the analogy wasn’t bad. The stream tumbled over a mass of rocks just above their heads and fell in a fine spray into a rocky pool. It almost looked as though it had been arranged that way.

Julian would have loved a cold shower then and there but Dr. Shanker was hungry and insisted on dinner first. They managed to kill a dozen small lizards that were warming themselves on the rocks, trying to catch the last of the evening light. The creatures were mostly skin and brittle bones, but all together made a decent meal. Hilda contentedly crunched on the leftovers.

Dr. Shanker carefully banked the fire rather than scattering it. “Might as well keep the heat,” he said, and yawned. “I can hardly keep my eyes open. That bath will have to wait until morning. You two go ahead. Watch out for predators and don’t let the fire get out of hand.” With that advice he staggered into the cave, Hilda right behind him.

Yariko and Julian sat for a while outside the cave, beside the embers of the fire. The red light of sunset faded and stars gradually appeared. After a while Yariko reached for Carl’s sack. They had carried it along, not knowing what useful things might be inside. She pulled out the strange musical instrument and laid it across her lap.

Yariko set it upright in her lap, plucked tentatively, and smiled at the result. Then she tried an experimental chord with her left hand. “Amazing,” she said. “It’s tuned essentially like mine.” She played a melody, a sad wandering tune, leaning forward with her ear close to the instrument, and smiling.

The last time Julian had heard music from that instrument it had brought Yariko to mind with painful longing. Now it evoked images of Carl. He listened, marveling at how they had passed down Yariko’s music to their children, and they to theirs. It was the last thing he would have expected to be treasured in a world where basic survival was of such primary importance. What had it done for them, these people hunting with spears, dodging Tyrannosaurus rex, competing with the fierce raptors for food? But perhaps it was not surprising after all. Music was one of the most basic forms of human communication, developed long before written language existed.

She got up and stepped carefully into the dark cave, one hand outstretched to feel along the wall. When she came out she had several of Carl’s ponchos folded over her arm.

She took Julian’s hand and led him toward the “shower,” the stream that tumbled down over the cliff, where she laid the hides on the stony ground. Then she took something out of her pocket and held it out. It looked like a small stone, a smooth grayish lump. Julian prodded it suspiciously with a finger. It had a waxy feel.

“Trust me,” she laughed. “You need it pretty badly.” Then her voice became serious. “Jules, I missed you. All that time I was alone out there, I couldn’t stop worrying. I didn’t know what had happened to you. I didn’t know if I’d see you again.”

“I was frantic about you,” Julian said, and he put his arms over her shoulders and hugged her fiercely. “Yariko. It’s wonderful to have you back. And you’re never going anywhere without me again.”

In the near-total darkness under the bright stars they helped each other to undress. The night air was warm and still under their private cliff. They felt safe, protected, and very much alone together. Standing under the small cascade they wet each other’s bodies with handfuls of water. The stream was cold and they stood close to keep warm, massaging the soap into each other’s skin and hair.

Yariko gave a little cry as the soap slipped out of her hand and disappeared into the darkness. “No matter,” Julian murmured, pressing his soapy body against hers. When he kissed her he tasted blood and realized that the cut on her cheek had opened. He moved his lips over her face to her mouth, and her chin, and then down her throat. The ground was cold and hard under their bare feet and Julian pushed her back until she was lying on the hides.