by Jack Dann
"Some people are better antennas than others, Steve."
Steve fell silent.
"There is a theory," said Paul, "that molecular structures, no matter how altered by process, still retain some sort of 'memory' of their original form."
"Ghosts."
"If you like." He stared ahead at the highway and said, as if musing, "When an ancient organism becomes fossilized, even the DNA patterns that determine its structure are preserved in the stone."
GALLATIN FORMATION
CAMBRIAN
500-600 MILLION YEARS
Paul shifted into a lower gear as the half-ton began to climb one of the long, gradual grades. Streaming black smoke and bellowing like a great saurian lumbering into extinction, an eighteen-wheel semi with oil-field gear on its back passed them, forcing Paul part of the way onto the right shoulder. Trailing a dopplered call from its airhorn, the rig disappeared into the first of three short highway tunnels quarried out of the rock.
"One of yours?" said Ginger.
"Nope."
"Maybe he'll crash and burn."
"I'm sure he's just trying to make a living," said Paul mildly.
"Raping the land's a living?" said Ginger. "Cannibalizing the past is a living?"
"Shut up, Gin." Quietly, Carroll said, "Wyoming didn't do anything to your family, Paul. Whatever was done, people did it."
"The land gets into the people," said Paul.
"That isn't the only thing that defines them."
"This always has been a fruitless argument," said Paul. "It's a dead past."
"If the past is dead," Steve said, "then why are we driving up this cockamamie canyon?"
AMSDEN FORMATION
PENNSYLVANIAN
270-310 MILLION YEARS
Boysen Reservoir spread to their left, rippled surface glittering in the moonlight. The road hugged the eastern edge. Once the crimson taillights of the oil-field truck had disappeared in the distance, they encountered no other vehicle.
"Are we just going to drive up and down Twenty all night?" said Steve. "Who brought the plan?" He did not feel flippant, but he had to say something. He felt the burden of time.
"We'll go where the survey crew saw the presence," Paul said. "It's just a few more miles."
"And then?"
"Then we walk. It should be at least as interesting as our hike prom night."
Steve sensed that a lot of things were almost said by each of them at that point.
I didn't know then . . .
Nor do I know for sure yet.
I'm seeking . . .
What?
Time's flowed. I want to know where now, finally, to direct it.
"Who would have thought . . ." said Ginger.
Whatever was thought, nothing more was said.
The headlights picked out the reflective green-and-white Highway Department sign. "We're there," said Paul. "Somewhere on the right there ought to be a dirt access road."
SHARKTOOTH FORMATION
CRETACEOUS
100 MILLION YEARS
"Are we going to use a net?" said Steve. "Tranquilizer darts? What?"
"I don't think we can catch a ghost in a net," said Carroll. "You catch a ghost in your soul."
A small smile curved Paul's lips. "Think of this as the Old West. We're only a scouting party. Once we observe whatever's up here, we'll figure out how to get rid of it."
"That won't be possible," said Carroll.
"Why do you say that?"
"I don't know," she said. "I just feel it."
"Women's intuition?" He said it lightly.
"My intuition."
"Anything's possible," said Paul.
"If we really thought you could destroy it," said Ginger, "I doubt either of us would be up here with you."
Paul had stopped the truck to lock the front hubs into four-wheel drive. Now the vehicle clanked and lurched over rocks and across potholes eroded by the spring rain. The road twisted tortuously around series of barely graded switchbacks. Already they had climbed hundreds of feet above the canyon floor. They could see no lights anywhere below.
"Very scenic," said Steve. If he had wanted to, he could have reached out the right passenger's side window and touched the porous rock. Pine branches whispered along the paint on the left side.
"Thanks to Native American Resources," said Ginger, "this is the sort of country that'll go."
"For Christ's sake," said Paul, finally sounding angry. "I'm not the Antichrist."
"I know that." Ginger's voice softened. "I've loved you, remember? Probably I still do. Is there no way?"
The geologist didn't answer.
"Paul?"
"We're just about there," he said. The grade moderated and he shifted to a higher gear.
"Paul—" Steve wasn't sure whether he actually said the word or not. He closed his eyes and saw glowing fires, opened them again and wasn't sure what he saw. He felt the past, vast and primeval, rush over him like a tide. It filled his nose and mouth, his lungs, his brain. It—
"Oh, my God!"
Someone screamed.
"Let go!"
The headlight beams twitched crazily as the truck skidded toward the edge of a sheer dark drop. Both Paul and Carroll wrestled for the wheel. For an instant, Steve wondered whether both of them or, indeed, either of them was trying to turn the truck back from the dark.
Then he saw the great, bulky, streamlined form coasting over the slope toward them. He had the impression of smooth power, immense and inexorable. The dead stare from flat black eyes, each one inches across, fixed them like insects in amber.
"Paul!" Steve heard his own voice. He heard the word echo and then it was swallowed up by the crashing waves. He felt unreasoning terror, but more than that, he felt—awe. What he beheld was juxtaposed on this western canyon, but yet it was not out of place. Genius loci, guardian, the words hissed like the surf.
It swam toward them, impossibly gliding on powerful gray-black fins.
Brakes screamed. A tire blew out like a gunshot.
Steve watched its jaws open in front of the windshield; the snout pulling up and back, the lower jaw thrusting forward. The maw could have taken in a heifer. The teeth glared white in reflected light, white with serrated razor edges. Its teeth were as large as shovel blades.
"Paul!"
The Enerco truck fishtailed a final time, then toppled sideways into the dark. It fell, caromed off something massive and unseen, and began to roll.
Steve had time for one thought. Is it going to hurt?
When the truck came to rest, it was upright. Steve groped toward the window and felt rough bark rather than glass. They were wedged against a pine.
The silence astonished him. That there was no fire astonished him. That he was alive— "Carroll?" he said. "Ginger? Paul?" For a moment, no one spoke.
"I'm here," said Carroll, muffled, from the front of the truck. "Paul's on top of me. Or somebody is. I can't tell."
"Oh, God, I hurt," said Ginger from beside Steve. "My shoulder hurts."
"Can you move your arm?" said Steve.
"A little, but it hurts."
"Okay." Steve leaned forward across the front seat. He didn't feel anything like grating, broken bone ends in himself. His fingers touched flesh. Some of it was sticky with fluid. Gently he pulled someone he assumed was Paul away from Carroll. She moaned and struggled upright.
"There should be a flashlight in the glove box," he said.
The darkness was almost complete. Steve could see only vague shapes inside the truck. When Carroll switched on the flashlight, they realized the truck was buried in thick, resilient brush. Carroll and Ginger stared back at him. Ginger looked as if she might be in shock. Paul slumped on the front seat. The angle of his neck was all wrong.
His eyes opened and he tried to focus. Then he said something. They couldn't understand him. Paul tried again. They made out "Good night, Irene." Then he said, "Do what you have . . ." His eyes remained open, but all
the life went out of them.
Steve and the women stared at one another as though they were accomplices. The moment crystallized and shattered. He braced himself as best he could and kicked with both feet at the rear door. The brush allowed the door to swing open one foot, then another. Carroll had her door open at almost the same time. It took another few minutes to get Ginger out. They left Paul in the truck.
They huddled on a naturally terraced ledge about halfway between the summit and the canyon floor. There was a roar and bright lights for a few minutes when a Burlington Northern freight came down the tracks on the other side of the river. It would have done no good to shout and wave their arms, so they didn't.
No one seemed to have broken any bones. Ginger's shoulder was apparently separated. Carroll had a nosebleed. Steve's head felt as though he'd been walloped with a two-by-four.
"It's not cold," he said. "If we have to, we can stay in the truck. No way we're going to get down at night. In the morning we can signal people on the road."
Ginger started to cry and they both held her. "I saw something," she said. "I couldn't tell—what was it?"
Steve hesitated. He had a hard time separating his dreams from Paul's theories. The two did not now seem mutually exclusive. He still heard the echoing thunder of ancient gulfs. "I'm guessing it's something that lived here a hundred million years ago," he finally said. "It lived in the inland sea and died here. The sea left, but it never did."
"A native . . ." Ginger said and trailed off. Steve touched her forehead; it felt feverish. "I finally saw," she said. "Now I'm a part of it." In a smaller voice, "Paul." Starting awake like a child from a nightmare, "Paul?"
"He's—all right now," said Carroll, her even tone plainly forced.
"No, he's not," said Ginger. "He's not. She was silent for a time. "He's dead." Tears streamed down her face. "It won't really stop the coal leases, will it?"
"Probably not."
"Politics," Ginger said wanly. "Politics and death. What the hell difference does any of it make now?"
No one answered her.
Steve turned toward the truck in the brush. He suddenly remembered from his childhood how he had hoped everyone he knew, everyone he loved, would live forever. He hadn't wanted change. He hadn't wanted to recognize time. He remembered the split-second image of Paul and Carroll struggling to control the wheel. "The land," he said, feeling the sorrow. "It doesn't forgive."
"That's not true." Carroll slowly shook her head. "The land just is. The land doesn't care." "I care," said Steve.
Amazingly, Ginger started to go to sleep. They laid her down gently on the precipice, covered her with Steve's jacket, and cradled her head, stroking her hair. "Look," Carroll said. "Look." As the moon illuminated the glowing sea.
Far below them, a fin broke the dark surface of the forest.
Time's Arrow
by
Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke is perhaps the most famous modern science fiction writer in the world, seriously rivaled for that title only by Isaac Asimov and the late Robert A. Heinlein. Clarke is probably most widely known for his work on Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, but is also renowned as a novelist, short story writer, and as a writer of nonfiction, usually on technological subjects such as spaceflight. He has won three Nebula Awards, and three Hugo Awards, the British Science Fiction Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and a Grandmaster Nebula for Life Achievement. His best-known books include the novels Chilhoood's End, The City and the Stars, The Deep Range, Rendezvous With Rama, A Fall of Moondust, and The Fountains of Paradise, and the collections The Nine Billion Names of God, Tales of Ten Worlds, and The Sentinel. Born in Somerset, England, Clarke now lives in Sri Lanka.
Clarke is best known for looking ahead at the men and women spearheading humanity's challenge to the stars, but here he focuses instead on a group of scientists preoccupied with millenia long past.
* * *
The river was dead and the lake already dying when the monster had come down the dried-up watercourse and turned onto the desolate mud-flats. There were not many places where it was safe to walk, and even where the ground was hardest the great pistons of its feet sank a foot or more beneath the weight they carried. Sometimes it had paused, surveying the landscape with quick, birdlike movements of its head. Then it had sunk even deeper into the yielding soil, so that fifty million years later men could judge with some accuracy the duration of its halts.
For the waters had never returned, and the blazing sun had baked the mud to rock. Later still the desert had poured over all this land, sealing it beneath protecting layers of sand. And later—very much later—had come Man.
"Do you think," shouted Barton above the din, "that Professor Fowler became a palaeontologist because he likes playing with pneumatic drills? Or did he acquire the taste afterward?"
"Can't hear you!" yelled Davis, leaning on his shovel in a most professional manner. He glanced hopefully at his watch.
"Shall I tell him it's dinnertime? He can't wear a watch while he's drilling, so he won't know any better."
"I doubt if it will work," Barton shrieked. "He's got wise to us now and always adds an extra ten minutes. But it will make a change from this infernal digging."
With noticeable enthusiasm the two geologists downed tools and started to walk toward their chief. As they approached, he shut off the drill and relative silence descended, broken only by the throbbing of the compressor in the background.
"About time we went back to camp, Professor," said Davis, wristwatch held casually behind his back. "You know what cook says if we're late."
Professor Fowler, M.A., F.R.S., F.G.S., mopped some, but by no means all, of the ocher dust from his forehead. He would have passed anywhere as a typical navvy, and the occasional visitors to the site seldom recognized the Vice-President of the Geological Society in the brawny, half-naked workman crouching over his beloved pneumatic drill.
It had taken nearly a month to clear the sandstone down to the surface of the petrified mud-flats. In that time several hundred square feet had been exposed, revealing a frozen snapshot of the past that was probably the finest yet discovered by palaeontology. Some scores of birds and reptiles had come here in search of the receding water, and left their footsteps as a perpetual monument eons after their bodies had perished. Most of the prints had been identified, but one— the largest of them all—was new to science. It belonged to a beast which must have weighed twenty or thirty tons: and Professor Fowler was following the fifty-million-year-old spoor with all the emotions of a big-game hunter tracking his prey. There was even a hope that he might yet overtake it; for the ground must have been treacherous when the unknown monster went this way and its bones might still be near at hand, marking the place where it had been trapped like so many creatures of its time.
Despite the mechanical aids available, the work was very tedious. Only the upper layers could be removed by the power tools, and the final uncovering had to be done by hand with the utmost care. Professor Fowler had good reason for his insistence that he alone should do the preliminary drilling, for a single slip might cause irreparable harm.
The three men were halfway back to the main camp, jolting over the rough road in the expedition's battered jeep, when Davis raised the question that had been intriguing the younger men ever since the work had begun.
"I'm getting a distinct impression," he said, "that our neighbors down the valley don't like us, though I can't imagine why. We're not interfering with them, and they might at least have the decency to invite us over."
"Unless, of course, it is a war research plant," added Barton, voicing a generally accepted theory.
"I don't think so," said Professor Fowler mildly. "Because it so happens that I've just had an invitation myself. I'm going there tomorrow."
If his bombshell failed to have the expected result, it was thanks to his staff's efficient espionage system. For a moment Davis pondered over this confirmation of h
is suspicions; then he continued with a slight cough:
"No one else has been invited, then?"
The Professor smiled at his pointed hint. "No," he said. "It's a strictly personal invitation. I know you boys are dying of curiosity but, frankly, I don't know any more about the place than you do. If I learn anything tomorrow, I'll tell you all about it. But at least we've found out who's running the establishment."
His assistants pricked up their ears. "Who is it?" asked Barton. "My guess was the Atomic Development Authority."
"You may be right," said the Professor. "At any rate, Henderson and Barnes are in charge."
This time the bomb exploded effectively; so much so that Davis nearly drove the jeep off the road—not that that made much difference, the road being what it was.
"Henderson and Barnes? In this god-forsaken hole?"
"That's right," said the Professor gaily. "The invitation was actually from Barnes. He apologized for not contacting us before, made the usual excuses, and wondered if I could drop in for a chat."
"Did he say what they are doing?"
"No; not a hint."
"Barnes and Henderson?" said Barton thoughtfully. "I don't know much about them except that they're physicists. What's their particular racket?"
"They're the experts on low-temperature physics," answered Davis. "Henderson was Director of the Cavendish for years. He wrote a lot of letters to Nature not so long ago. If I remember rightly, they were all about Helium II."
Barton, who didn't like physicists and said so whenever possible, was not impressed. "I don't even know what Helium II is," he said smugly. "What's more, I'm not at all sure that I want to."
This was intended for Davis, who had once taken a physics degree in, as he explained, a moment of weakness. The "moment" had lasted for several years before he had drifted into geology by rather devious routes, and he was always harking back to his first love.
"It's a form of liquid helium that only exists at a few degrees above absolute zero. It's got the most extraordinary properties—but, as far as I can see, none of them can explain the presence of two leading physicists in this corner of the globe."
