Timeline

by Michael Crichton

  He was standing in sunlight. The air was cool and damp. Birds chirruped in the huge trees rising above him. Shafts of sunlight came down through the thick foliage, dappling the ground. He was standing in one beam. The machine stood beside a narrow muddy path that wound through a forest. Directly ahead, through a gap in the trees, he saw a medieval village.

  First, a cluster of farm plots and huts, plumes of gray smoke rising from thatched roofs. Then a stone wall and the dark stone roofs of the town itself inside, and finally, in the distance, the castle with circular turrets.

  He recognized it at once: the town and the fortress of Castelgard. And it was no longer a ruin. Its walls were complete.

  He was here.

  CASTELGARD

  “Nothing in the world is as certain as death.”

  JEAN FROISSART, 1359

  37:00:00

  Gomez hopped lightly out of the machine. Marek and Kate stepped slowly out of their cages, seemingly dazed as they looked around. Chris climbed out, too. His feet touched the mossy ground. It was springy underfoot.

  Marek said, “Fantastic!” and immediately moved away from the machine, crossing the muddy path for a better look at the town. Kate followed behind him. She still seemed to be in shock.

  But Chris wanted to stay close to the machine. He turned slowly, looking at the forest. It struck him as dark, dense, primeval. The trees, he noticed, were huge. Some of them had trunks so thick, you could hide three or four people behind them. They rose high into the sky, spreading a leafy canopy above them that darkened most of the ground below.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Gomez said. She seemed to sense that he was uneasy.

  “Yes, beautiful,” he answered. But he didn’t feel that way at all; something about this forest struck him as sinister. He turned round and round, trying to understand why he had the distinct feeling that something was wrong with what he was seeing—something was missing, or out of place. Finally, he said, “What’s wrong?”

  She laughed. “Oh, that,” she said. “Listen.”

  Chris stood silently for a moment, listening. There was the chirp of birds, the soft rustle of a faint breeze in the trees. But other than that . . .

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “That’s right,” Gomez said. “It upsets some people when they first arrive. There’s no ambient noise here: no radio or TV, no airplanes, no machinery, no passing cars. In the twentieth century, we’re so accustomed to hearing sound all the time, the silence feels creepy.”

  “I guess that’s right.” At least, that was exactly how he was feeling. He turned away from the trees and looked at the muddy path, a sunlit track through the forest. In many places, the mud was two feet deep, churned by many hooves.

  This was a world of horses, he thought.

  No machine sounds. Lots of hoofprints.

  He took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Even the air seemed different. Heady, bright-feeling, as if it had more oxygen in it.

  He turned, and saw that the machine was gone. Gomez appeared unconcerned. “Where’s the machine?” he said, trying not to sound worried.

  “It drifted.”

  “It drifted?”

  “When the machines are fully charged, they’re a little unstable. They tend to slide off the present moment. So we can’t see them.”

  “Where are they?” Chris said.

  She shrugged. “We don’t know, exactly. They must be in another universe. Wherever they are, they’re fine. They always come back.”

  To demonstrate, she held up her ceramic marker and pressed the button with her thumbnail. In increasingly bright flashes of light, the machine returned: all four cages, standing exactly where they had been a few minutes before.

  “Now, it’ll stay here like this for maybe a minute, maybe two,” Gomez said. “But eventually it will drift again. I just let them go. Gets ‘em out of the way.”

  Chris nodded; she seemed to know what she was talking about. But the thought that the machines drifted made Chris vaguely uneasy; those machines were his ticket back home, and he didn’t like to think that they behaved according to their own rules and could disappear at random. He thought, Would anybody fly on an airplane if the pilot said that it was “unstable”? He felt a coolness on his forehead, and he knew in a moment he would break out in a cold sweat.

  To distract himself, Chris picked his way across the path, following the others, trying not to sink into the mud. On solid ground again, he pushed through thick ground cover, some kind of dense waist-high plant, like rhododendron. He glanced back at Gomez: “Anything to worry about in these woods?”

  “Just vipers,” she said. “They’re usually in the lower branches of the trees. They fall down on your shoulders and bite you.”

  “Great,” he said. “Are they poisonous?”

  “Very.”

  “Fatal?”

  “Don’t worry, they’re very rare,” she said.

  Chris decided not to ask any more questions. Anyway, by now he had reached a sunlit opening in the foliage. He looked down and saw the Dordogne River two hundred feet below him, twisting through farmland, and looking, he thought, not very different from the way he was used to seeing it.

  But if the river was the same, everything else in this landscape was different. Castelgard was entirely intact, and so was its town. Beyond the walls were farming plots; some of the fields were being plowed now.

  But his attention was drawn to the right, where he looked down on the great rectangular complex of the monastery—and the fortified mill bridge. His fortified bridge, he thought. The bridge he had been studying all summer—

  And unfortunately, looking very different from the way he had reconstructed it in the computer.

  Chris saw four water wheels, not three, churning in the current that ran beneath a bridge. And the bridge above was not a single unified structure. There seemed to be at least two independent structures, like little houses. The larger was made of stone and the other of wood, suggesting the structures had been built at different times. From the stone building, smoke belched in a continuous gray plume. So maybe they really were making steel there, he thought. If you had water-powered bellows, then you could have an actual blast furnace. That would explain the separate structures, too. Because mills that ground grain or corn never permitted any open fire or flame inside—not even a candle. That was why grinding mills operated only during daylight hours.

  Absorbed in the details, he felt himself relax.

  :

  On the far side of the muddy path, Marek stared at the village of Castelgard with a slow sense of astonishment.

  He was here.

  He felt light-headed, almost giddy with excitement as he took in the details. In the fields below, peasants wore patched leggings and tunics in red and blue, orange and rose. The vivid colors stood out against the dark earth. Most of the fields were already planted, their furrows closed over. This was early April, so the spring planting of barley, peas, oats and beans—the so-called Lenten crops—would be nearly finished.

  He watched a new field being plowed, the black iron blade hauled by two oxen. The plow itself turned the earth of the furrow neatly on both sides. He was pleased to see a low wooden guard mounted above the blade. That was a mold-board, and it was characteristic of this particular time.

  Walking behind the plowman, a peasant sowed seed with rhythmic sweeps of his arm. The sack of seed hung from his shoulder. A short distance behind the sower, birds fluttered down to the furrow, eating the seed. But not for long. In a nearby field, Marek saw the harrower: a man riding a horse that dragged a wooden T-frame weighted down by a large rock. The harrower closed the furrows, protecting the seed.

  Everything appeared to move in the same gentle, steady rhythm: the hand throwing seed, the plow turning the furrow, the harrow scraping the ground. And there was almost no sound in the still morning, just the hum of insects and the twitter of birds.

  Beyond the fields, Marek saw the twenty-foot-high s
tone wall encircling the town of Castelgard. The stone was a dark, weathered gray. In one section, the wall was being repaired; the new stone was lighter in color, yellow-gray. Masons were hunched over, working quickly. Atop the wall itself, guards in chain mail strode back and forth, sometimes pausing to stare nervously into the distance.

  And rising above everything, the castle itself, with its circular towers and black stone roofs. Flags fluttered from the turrets. All the flags showed the same emblem: a maroon-and-gray shield with a silver rose.

  It gave the castle a festive appearance, and indeed, in a field just outside the town walls, a large wooden viewing stand, like bleachers, was being erected for the tournament. A crowd had already begun to gather. A few knights were there, horses tied beside the brightly colored striped tents that were pitched all around the tournament field itself. Pages and grooms threaded their way among the tents, carrying armor, and water for the horses.

  Marek took it all in and gave a long, satisfied sigh.

  Everything he saw was accurate, down to the smallest detail. Everything was real.

  He was here.

  :

  Kate Erickson stared at Castelgard with a sense of puzzlement. Beside her, Marek was sighing like a lover, but she wasn’t sure why. Of course, Castelgard was now a lively village, restored to its former glory, its houses and castle complete. But overall, the scene before her didn’t look that different from any rural French landscape. Perhaps a little more backward than most, with horses and oxen instead of tractors. But otherwise . . . well, it just wasn’t that different.

  Architecturally, the biggest difference she saw in the scene before her and the present was that all the houses had lauzes roofs, made of stacked black stone. These stone roofs were incredibly heavy and required a great deal of internal bracing, which was why houses in the Périgord no longer used them, except in tourist areas. She was accustomed to seeing French houses with ocher roofs of curved Roman tile, or the flat tile of the French style.

  Yet here, lauzes roofs were everywhere. There was no tile at all.

  As she continued to look at the scene, she slowly noticed other details. For example, there were a lot of horses: really a lot, when you considered the horses in the fields, the horses at the tournament, the horses ridden on the dirt roads, and the horses put out to pasture. There must be a hundred horses in her view right now, she thought. She couldn’t remember seeing so many horses at one time, even in her native Colorado. All kinds of horses, from beautiful sleek warhorses at the tournament to barnyard nags in the fields.

  And while many of the people working in the fields were drably dressed, others wore colors so brilliant they almost reminded her of the Caribbean. These clothes were patched and patched again, but always in a contrasting color, so that the patchwork was visible even from a distance. It became a kind of design.

  Then, too, she became aware of a clear demarcation between the relatively small areas of human habitation—towns and fields—and the surrounding forest, a dense, vast green carpet, stretching away in all directions. In this landscape, the forest predominated. She had the sense of encompassing wilderness, in which human beings were interlopers. And minor interlopers at that.

  And as she looked again at the town of Castelgard itself, she sensed there was something odd that she couldn’t put her finger on. Until she finally realized, there were no chimneys!

  No chimneys anywhere.

  The peasant houses simply had holes in the thatched roofs from which smoke issued. Within the town, the houses were similar, even though their roofs were stone: the smoke issued from a hole, or from a vent in a wall. The castle lacked chimneys, too.

  She was looking at a time before chimneys appeared in this part of France. For some reason this trivial architectural detail made her shiver with a kind of horror. A world before chimneys. When had chimneys been invented, anyway? She couldn’t remember exactly. Certainly by 1600, they were common. But that was a long time from now.

  This “now,” she reminded herself.

  Behind her, she heard Gomez say, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  :

  Kate looked back and saw that the surly guy, Baretto, had arrived. His single cage was visible on the other side of the path, a few yards back in the woods.

  “I’ll do what I damn well want to do,” he said to Gomez.

  He had pulled up his burlap tunic, revealing a heavy leather belt with a holstered pistol and two black grenades. He was checking the pistol.

  “If we’re going into the world,” Baretto said, “I’m going to be prepared.”

  “You’re not bringing that stuff with you,” Gomez said.

  “The hell I’m not, sister.”

  “You’re not. You know that’s not allowed. Gordon would never permit modern weapons to be taken into the world.”

  “But Gordon’s not here, is he?” Baretto said.

  “Look, goddamn it,” Gomez said, and she pulled out her white ceramic marker, waving it at Baretto.

  It looked as if she was threatening to go back.

  36:50:22

  In the control room, one of the technicians at the monitors said, “We’re getting field bucks.”

  “Oh, really? That’s good news,” Gordon said.

  “Why?” Stern said.

  “It means,” Gordon said, “that someone is headed back in the next two hours. Undoubtedly your friends.”

  “So they will get the Professor and be back here within two hours?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly—” Gordon broke off, staring at the undulating image on the monitor. A little undulating surface, with a spike that stuck up. “Is that it?”

  “Yes,” the technician said.

  “But the amplitude’s much too large,” Gordon said.

  “Yes. And the interval’s getting shorter. Fast.”

  “You mean someone is coming back now?”

  “Yeah. Soon, it looks like.”

  Stern glanced at his watch. The team had been gone only a few minutes. They couldn’t have recovered the Professor so quickly.

  “What does that mean?” Stern asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Gordon said. The truth was, he didn’t like this development at all. “They must be having some sort of trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “This soon, it’s probably mechanical. Maybe a transcription error.”

  Stern said, “What’s a transcription error?”

  The technician said, “I’m calculating an arrival in twenty minutes fifty-seven seconds.” He was measuring the field strengths, and the pulse intervals.

  “How many are coming back?” Gordon said. “All of them?”

  “No,” the technician said. “Just one.”

  36:49:19

  Chris Hughes couldn’t help it; he was anxious again. Despite the cool morning air, he was sweating, his skin cold, his heart pounding. Listening to Baretto and Gomez argue did nothing to increase his confidence.

  He went back to the path, stepping around the pools of thick mud. Marek and Kate were coming back, too. They all stood a little apart from the argument.

  “All right, all right, goddamn it,” Baretto was saying. He took off his weapons and put them carefully on the floor of his cage. “All right. Does that satisfy you?”

  Gomez was still speaking quietly, barely a whisper. Chris couldn’t hear her.

  “It’s fine,” Baretto said, almost snarling.

  Gomez again spoke softly. Baretto was grinding his teeth. It was very uncomfortable to be standing there. Chris moved a few steps farther away, turning his back to the argument, waiting for it to be over.

  He was surprised to see that the path sloped downward rather steeply, and he could see through a break in the trees to the flatland below. The monastery was there—a geometric arrangement of courtyards, covered passageways, and cloisters, all built of beige stone, surrounded by a high stone wall. It looked like a dense, compact little city. It was surprisingly cl
ose, perhaps a quarter of a mile. No more than that.

  “Screw it, I’m walking,” Kate said, and she started down the path. Marek and Chris looked at each other, then followed after her.

  “You people stay in sight, damn it,” Baretto called to them.

  Gomez said, “I think we’d better go.”

  Baretto put a restraining hand on her arm. “Not until we get something cleared up,” he said. “About how things are handled on this expedition.”

  “I think it’s pretty well cleared up,” Gomez said.

  Baretto leaned close and said, “Because I didn’t like the way you . . .” And the rest was too low to hear, just the furious hiss of his voice.

  Chris was grateful to move around the curve in the path and leave them behind.

  :

  Kate started at a brisk walk, feeling the tension leave her body as she moved. The argument left her feeling cramped and edgy. A few paces behind her, she heard Chris and Marek talking. Chris was anxious, and Marek was trying to calm him down. She didn’t want to hear it. She picked up the pace a little. After all, to be here, in these fantastic woods, surrounded by these huge trees . . .

  After a minute or two, she had left Marek and Chris behind, but she knew they were near enough, and it was nice to be alone. The woods around her felt cool and relaxing. She listened to the chitter of birds and the sound of her own feet padding along on the path. Once she thought she heard something else, too. She slowed a bit to listen.

  Yes, there was another sound: running feet. They seemed to be coming from farther down the path. She heard someone panting, gasping for breath.

  And also a fainter sound, like the rumble of distant thunder. She was trying to place that rumble when a teenage boy burst around the corner, racing toward her.

  The boy was wearing black hose, a bright green quilted jacket and a black cap. He was red-faced with exertion; he’d clearly been running for some time. He seemed startled to find her walking on the path. As he came toward her, he cried, “Aydethee amsel! Grassa due! Aydethee!”