Cretaceous Dawn
Page 7
“The landscape will be dangerous wherever we are,” Frank said. “On the other hand, I’m not sure we need to move from here. Camping is safer than traveling, especially into the unknown. We could be anywhere. We don’t know what it’s like further inland.”
Julian thought hard. “I know something of the terrain,” he said, “and that will help us find the right spot. I think Yariko’s right, and we’re actually still in Creekbend. Does that make sense? Creekbend is—will be, I should say—in the northern part of the state. What are we, twenty miles north of Roscoe?”
He began to place small stones in the soil as landmarks. “West from here will take us into Montana, through swamps and rivers and streams; wetlands, I should think. Nothing like the Montana we’re used to. The elevation, for one thing, is much lower. I would expect to get into more dry terrain after about six hundred miles, and finally rocky hills in the western part of Montana. Young versions of the Rockies, that is.”
Julian looked up from his map, flushed and excited. His eyes fell on Frank’s crudely splinted leg and he fell silent. There was an awkward pause.
“How big are these structures, these batholiths?” Dr. Shanker asked after a moment.
Julian looked away from Frank. “Massive, usually. They form the cores of many mountain ranges. But this one is relatively small, only about five hundred square kilometers.”
“Small! That’s a sizable target. It almost makes the journey seem possible. You’ve half convinced me. Will we recognize it when we get there? Will it give us fireworks? Eruptions? Smoke and lava?”
Julian shook his head. He thought he felt Frank’s eyes on him, and he didn’t dare look at the man. “Not necessarily. Most of the activity should be below the surface. We’ll see low hills and exposed, rocky terrain. We’ll have to keep a sharp lookout for volcanic debris . . . and we’ll need to keep in a straight line.” Then another thought came to him, and a sense of hopelessness with it. “Two months . . . how can the vault stay set up and running for two months? They’ll do something with it. They’ll never leave it untouched.” He tossed away the last stone and folded his arms.
“Oh, but it won’t be two months in real time,” Yariko countered. “I mean, in our time. I mean, in their time.”
“What do you mean? Time is time,” Julian said, not ready to hope yet.
“Like . . . a different dimension?” Frank asked, trying hard to follow.
“Well, sort of.” Yariko thought for a moment. “This is somewhat unconnected to what I was studying, but it comes in handy. I used to work on time travel. Models, I mean. Theoretically, if you could go into another time—gravity has a complicated relationship with time, you know, so it may be possible with a graviton vault—you could calculate the parallel movement of days in the two different time periods.”
Julian’s head began to feel too full. “You’re losing me,” he said. “Give us the equations some other time. Just tell us what it all means.”
“How about I give you the simplified version,” Yariko said. “I want you to believe me because you understand it, not because I say so.” She picked up another twig and smoothed the dry soil, scattering Julian’s pebbles. “Think logarithmically,” she said, and wrote a series of numbers: 1, 10, 100, 1000. . . . “Each is ten times the other, right? Those are years. We’re at negative sixty-five million years, or 0.65 of one hundred million years. That means our time will move much, much faster than time at year zero—modern time, that is—when they’re running in parallel. And we can calculate that difference.”
“Wait. That isn’t right.” Now Julian’s head was beginning to spin. “A year is a year, at any point in Earth’s history. The planet didn’t orbit the sun a million times faster in the past, and life wasn’t speeded up. Time has always been the same.”
“Of course it has,” Yariko said. Frank shook his head and bent over his tools again, striking them together with a grating sound that hurt Julian’s teeth. Yariko continued. “Time is time. But time travel is another thing entirely.” She looked around at the others. “Think of it as a long straight rope that can be folded,” she said.
“Time travel requires folds so that linear time differences meet ever so briefly, allowing mass to be transferred. The time of your origin folds differently from positive or negative times around your origin—the future or the past, that is. The differences depend not on absolute dates but on the length of time you’ve traveled, and how long you stay there. The greater the time jump, the greater the difference in ‘folding.’”
Yariko wiped out all the zeros and ones in the dirt and began to draw equations. “So, using months, and sixty-five million years, two months spent in this time would put us back . . . in about twenty hours modern time. That’s rough of course; it could be eighteen hours, or twenty-two. I do need IBMs for this sort of calculation,” she finished.
Julian tried to make his mind work again. “So . . . we might show up in the vault twenty hours after we disappeared? Approximately?”
“Approximately,” Yariko agreed. “Certainly within twenty-four hours. The lab just might be the same after twenty hours.”
There was a silence.
Frank finally succeeded in striking sparks, startling them all with the new crackling sound, and began patiently nursing a tiny fire. “The bottom line is this,” he said, looking up from his carefully cupped hands. “Travel or stay, we have work to do right now. We can’t count on being rescued immediately; and if you’re serious about this thousand-mile walk, there’s a lot you’ll need to learn first.”
Only Yariko was able to meet Frank’s eye. “But, Frank, your leg. . . .” She trailed off into silence.
“It’ll heal,” Frank said. “I’ve had broken legs before. Anyway, I don’t intend to slow you down. Nobody has to take care of me.”
Julian fidgeted with his hand in his pocket. Would they have to leave Frank behind? No, that was unthinkable. But so was waiting around a month for his bones to knit. And if he tried to keep up with them, he’d only prevent the leg from healing.
His fingers in a front pocket came into contact with something smooth and round. “My compass!” he said. “My pocket compass. Look.” He pulled it out. The glass face was cracked, but still intact.
Dr. Shanker jumped up and took it from him. The low sun, filtering through the foliage, reflected off the glass. “A compass. That’s wonderful. Whitney, you may be of use yet.”
“Let’s not get too excited,” Yariko said. “Remember, the whole thing is quite untested. It’s not remotely theoretical; it’s barely hypothetical. And the lab may have been totally destroyed—in which case it couldn’t be repaired in twenty hours, even if someone tried.”
Dr. Shanker interrupted. “Whitney. If that’s east,” and he pointed toward the water, “which it seems to be by the sun, then this compass is pointing south. It must be broken.” He handed the compass back, looking disgusted.
Julian stared at it a minute and then grinned. “Magnetic reversal,” he said.
“What?”
“The earth’s magnetic field flips every so often, so the poles switch. This compass was designed for magnetic north being in the Arctic, and magnetic south being at Antarctica. In this time, the poles are reversed.”
“Then. . . .” Yariko sat back down to think. “Then we really are in a different time.”
“Will it still work?” Dr. Shanker asked.
“Certainly. Only south means north.” Julian looked at the compass and then pointed dramatically behind them, into the undergrowth. “Two degrees north of west: that way lies our road.”
There was a rustle in the bushes and Hilda’s head appeared.
“Hilda! Where have you been?” Dr. Shanker jumped to his feet.
Julian hadn’t noticed the dog leaving, but in any case she was back, carrying a small bundle of bloody fur in her mouth. She stopped abruptly as they all stared at her; then she backed away several feet, fortunately outside of their makeshift wall, and lay down with o
ne paw over her kill. Julian itched to take it from her and see what it was; but the dog began gnawing on it, slobbering and crunching in the most sickening way. Julian looked the other way; Yariko’s face was scrunched up in disgust.
Dr. Shanker cleared his throat. “Speaking of food. . . ,” he said, and stopped.
“I’m getting quite hungry, now you mention it,” Yariko said. “Not that I want something dead to chew on. What are we going to do?”
Julian suddenly felt weak and empty. He hadn’t eaten since early morning.
“OK Frank, you and your gun are on,” Dr. Shanker said; but Frank shook his head.
“There are only four bullets,” he said. “We might use them all trying to bring down one animal. Better think of another way to hunt.”
They looked at each other helplessly. “Spears?” Dr. Shanker said. “Knives, anyone?”
“My father was a master bowmaker,” Yariko said. “I could try, but they’d be crude—”
“And dinner wouldn’t be until next month,” Dr. Shanker broke in. “Whitney, you know about these animals. This thing Hilda’s caught—could we catch one of those? It doesn’t seem to be making her sick . . . yet.”
Julian shrugged. “Mammals in this time are mostly nocturnal. I’m not sure we’ll even see them before full dark. Hilda probably sniffed it out of some lair.” As with the water earlier, he realized they should have brainstormed before they actually needed the food. “I saw vines,” he said at last. “We could try making traps . . . fishing nets. . . .”
“What I wouldn’t give for a good hunting rifle,” Dr. Shanker began, when a strange sound, an angry squawk followed by a thud, made them start.
Frank had lobbed a stone at a large bird that was perched on a rock just outside the trees, on the edge of the sand. As they watched, the bird tumbled off the rock and flapped madly in the sand. Then it stopped moving.
“Well, somebody get it before a croc does,” Frank said, taking out his pocketknife. “It’s big enough for the four of us.”
They dined on Ichthyornis, as Julian described it, grilled over their little fire of dead leaves and sticks. It was a fierce-looking bird, with a long jaw and jagged teeth like a crocodile’s; but it was only a fisher bird, and couldn’t have harmed them. It did not look appetizing when plucked and gutted; but Julian said he’d once eaten roasted shearwater in New Zealand, where it was a delicacy, and found it quite tasty despite it’s being a fish eater. Ichthyornis however did not live up to its distant descendent: it was an oily and fishy meat, not very pleasant even to very hungry people.
The light was nearly gone by the time they finished the bird and cleaned their hands as best they could. All too soon the sun was disappearing behind the forest, and the darkness began to come around them.
“I can’t decide if I’d feel safer on the open beach or under the trees,” Yariko said as they looked around in the gloom. “But I suppose a huge animal would give us plenty of warning with all this undergrowth to crash through.”
“It’s not the big animals that we need to worry about at night,” Julian said grimly. “But this spot is probably as safe as anywhere, unless we want to sleep in the trees.”
“Tomorrow we’ll need to be more prepared before dark,” Frank said, looking up from feeding the fire. “We may be spending several nights out here.”
“If you count sixty as several,” Dr. Shanker muttered, but Frank didn’t seem to hear him.
Julian looked at their two-foot-high wall of sticks and stones and shook his head; but when even Dr. Shanker admitted to the added psychological security, he realized it was better than nothing. “The only nocturnal hunters will be small mammals, so the wall might help,” he assured the others, wondering silently if this were actually true. “The Deinos certainly won’t be active at night; they’re reptiles. The predators that could hurt the mammals—and us—are daytime hunters.”
“I sure hope you’re right,” Dr. Shanker said. “Good thing we have an expert along on this expedition.”
They decided on an order for keeping watch, and began their first night in the Cretaceous.
Despite his paleontological knowledge, Julian spent his two-hour watch huddled in fear, surrounded by an eerie cacophony of night sounds. Leaves rustled, branches snapped, trees creaked; and every few minutes, it seemed, a chorus of yips or hoots swelled all around him. He wondered if they were close to another water source, and if the mammals, and perhaps other things, things he shuddered to think about, were collecting there.
Frank’s small fire was only bits of black sticks with an occasional red gleam, giving off no real light. Dr. Shanker gave a loud snore at irregular intervals, making Julian jump. The air was almost too warm but he shivered. He resisted the urge to wake Yariko, or even Hilda, just for the company. When he lay down after Frank took over he was more exhausted than he’d ever felt in his life. His brain was screaming for rest and every muscle ached. He curled up in the patch of earth they’d cleared of debris, and was instantly asleep.
From across the quad in Creekbend he saw Deinosuchus coming for him. It came out of the biology building and walked, elbows bent, along the sidewalk, students scattering in every direction. But no, it wasn’t coming for him. It only wanted to get to the particle physics lab, so it could revert and go home. . . . But, he thought, how can it fit in the vault?
The crack of a gunshot brought Julian back to the Cretaceous.
SIX
Somehow, it has gotten into the popular culture that life was more abundant in the Cretaceous, back near the primal beginning of the world. This view is a holdover from the eighteenth century, before anyone knew how old the earth really was. The Cretaceous was actually a very recent period, and despite the hothouse climate and high sea level, was in many ways not that different from the Quaternary, the proper time of Homo sapiens.
—Julian Whitney, Lectures on Cretaceous Ecology
Julian tried to jump up but something was holding him down. Something heavy. He grabbed at it in fear and tried to shove it away.
He heard a gasp as of pain, right in his ear; then a hand pushed at his face. “Stop,” he sputtered, trying to turn his head. “It’s me. Get off me.” Frank, maybe? He couldn’t tell.
But it was Yariko’s voice that came next. “I fell on you. Let me go.”
Julian realized he was gripping her shoulders. He let go and sat up. “Are you all right? What just happened? Where are the others?” Even in his fear he felt embarrassment; Yariko had been lying right on top of him, and he’d grabbed at her . . . what would she think?
“All right, everyone calm down,” came Dr. Shanker’s voice from off to the right. “Hilda! Come back here and stay.” He could be heard coming toward them. “Put that gun away,” he went on. “What happened to the fire? Let’s get some light.”
“Frank!” Yariko called.
“I’m still here,” Frank said. “Never far, you know. See if you can find any twigs and I’ll make some light.”
They scraped enough together for Frank to get a tiny blaze going. “It’s best to collect wood in the daylight,” Frank commented dryly as he carefully added small branches to the fire.
“Never mind that, what just happened?” Dr. Shanker came into the little circle of light. He sounded irate. “You nearly blew my head off with that thing.”
“Actually, you were behind me,” Frank said calmly. “Something attacked us, and I shot it.”
Dr. Shanker snorted. “What’s the point of shooting off a gun when you can’t see a damn thing? I thought there were no predators at night anyway.”
“There was something,” Frank said. “It came out of the bushes at me, and it bit me. It wasn’t Hilda,” he added.
Hilda could be heard crunching on something off to the side. She’s tough enough on sticks, Julian thought. Why didn’t she give us any warning? “You got bitten? How bad is it?” he asked.
“Just a scratch. The thing jumped on me. It had claws, too. It was going for my face. You k
icked out the fire right after I shot the thing,” he added to Dr. Shanker.
It took some time to calm Shanker’s annoyance and Frank’s sense of mistreatment. He insisted he had shot the animal despite its invisibility; Dr. Shanker insisted that a small animal shot at such close range would have blown apart rather than run away.
“I hit something,” Frank said. “I know the sound of a bullet hitting a body close by. Down one bullet, three left,” he added.
Yariko took the next watch. There wasn’t anything they could do about Frank’s injuries until daylight, and he said they weren’t bad. Julian settled down again, curled on his side, and lay a long time awake.
In the dim early morning the mystery was cleared up. The remains of Hilda’s midnight snack, the front end of a vaguely raccoon-shaped mammal, had a neat bullet hole from one side to the other.
“That was some shot, by firelight,” Dr. Shanker admitted. “You’re either a crack shot or very lucky.”
Frank didn’t comment; he was polishing the gun.
He had a small but painful bite on his shoulder, a long gash on one cheek, and several more on his forearms. He sat very still as Yariko looked him over but he looked relieved, Julian thought, to be proved right.
“That raccoon thing was probably even more scared than we were,” Yariko commented. “Imagine wandering around in familiar Cretaceous territory and suddenly bumping into us.” Even Frank had to chuckle at that.
He looked much better already, despite the night’s adventure; but he could not walk. On his watch he had fashioned a very clever crutch for himself out of a forked branch with an added crosspiece, but he could hardly even hobble into the bushes to empty his bladder. Julian suspected the leg bone wasn’t set properly.
“What’s this?” Dr. Shanker said suddenly, stooping to lift something shiny from the dirt. “It looks like metal.” He held it out.