Cretaceous Dawn

by Lisa M. Graziano

  FOURTEEN

  Carnivores have evolved several predatory repertoires. “Grapple and slash” predators, typified by modern felines, are ambushers using short bursts of speed to bring down prey. Curved, flattened claws are the main weapons, including large hind claws used for disemboweling. The Cretaceous dromaeosaurids, including Troodon and Velociraptor , were probably such hunters. “Pursuit and bite” predators, like the modern canids, are chasers who use their strong jaws and teeth to dispatch prey. The fearsome tyrannosaurids were likely classic “pursuit and bite” predators. They had tremendously powerful jaws and necks, short but strong forelimbs, and killed by tearing out huge chunks of flesh.

  —Julian Whitney, Lectures on Cretaceous Ecology

  1 September

  8:10 PM Local Time

  “Now that was one weird conversation,” Hann commented as he walked back to the station with Earles. “Are you heading home?”

  “No. I’m staying until I get more information. That pack of government regulators, that OSHA, might shut the whole thing down tomorrow, and then we’ll never know what happened.” Earles had been moving at her usual long stride, but now she stopped and turned to face Hann, so that he nearly bumped into her. It was getting dark and a few fireflies blinked near the hedges. A peaceful September evening . . . except that it wasn’t. “I’d like to talk to you about Frank,” she said.

  Hann looked down at his feet while he took in her words. “OK. Shoot,” he said after a moment. He took out a cigarette and his lighter.

  “Was—is there anything about him that could explain his disappearance? Could he reasonably have walked off and gone somewhere else, without telling family or friends?”

  Hann snapped the lighter shut and put it back in his pocket. The cigarette didn’t help after all but he drew in the smoke anyway. “No. Not reasonably. I don’t know him as well as I could of course, since mostly we didn’t grow up together. But when he decided to move here last year, so we could get to know each other, he didn’t ask for my help. He was independent, and responsible.”

  Earles nodded. “That was my impression too. Former marine, wasn’t he? Used to discipline. No,” she went on, starting to walk again, “I agree. If he went somewhere, it was involuntarily.”

  “What do you mean involuntary? They took him somewhere by force?” Hann’s face took on an angry flush, and for the first time Earles saw a physical resemblance to the guard Frank.

  “Perhaps I do mean that,” she said thoughtfully, more to herself than to Hann. “So they weren’t vaporized, because there are no . . . residuals. And that wouldn’t create a vacuum anyway.” Somehow, Earles couldn’t get her mind off the conviction that those people were inside the vault . . . and then they weren’t.

  She stopped walking again, abruptly, and this time Hann did collide with her. “Uh, sorry,” he mumbled, looking embarrassed and rubbing his shoulder where it had struck hers. “Are you. . . ?”

  “Beetles,” Earles said. “Beetles and stones. Twigs and beetles. From where, Charlie? From where, and how?”

  Hann looked blank; it was a look that Earles was used to by now. He generally trusted her, but clearly he didn’t share her fascination with oddball things like twigs and beetles, things that could be picked up outside of any campus door. She wasn’t sure if her own interest was worth anything, for that matter, but it was growing stronger each minute.

  If such things, living things too, could come from somewhere and appear inside a sealed vault, wouldn’t that increase the air pressure in a sealed chamber? Even if they were very small things?

  Without warning, Earles turned and strode back toward campus. “You go take a break,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll let you know when I need you.”

  “But where are you going?” he cried after her, feeling a little bereft just when he was opening up about Frank.

  “To the lab. To find that mop-headed graduate student. He knows more than he’s saying.”

  It was late afternoon. Yariko’s chill had long since been replaced by sweat in the full heat of the open plain. They had followed the river for hours, moving in a pattern from the shore up to the plain and back, trying to cover all possible ground. They had found nothing.

  “He must have gotten out before here,” Yariko said, as they stood on the bank once more looking at a log jam in the water. “There’s no way he’d be washed over this.”

  It was a thorough jam, with a drop to a calm pool on the other side. There was no body circling in the eddy, no Whitney on this or the far shore, no footprints or any other sign he’d been there. “OK, you may be right,” Dr. Shanker conceded. “But then we should be ahead of him, which means we’d have seen where he got out.”

  “Not if it was rocky. Not if he got there hours ago. He was probably in the river only a few minutes.” She was silent a moment, pondering. “I think he got out and made for the Triceratops trail. That’s where we were headed, after all. I think we should go back, to where that dead one was in the river.”

  Dr. Shanker acquiesced, with some misgivings, and they turned and made their way back along the shore. They’d passed the dead animal in the river about a quarter mile upstream. It was clearly the crossing point of the herd. He’d gone out to look at the animal and had seen the sliced-up thigh, the pecked-out eyes, the open belly with pale intestines trailing in the water. He hadn’t said anything to Yariko, and he didn’t tell her now either. He realized that something as small as a human body could be scavenged to nothing in a matter of hours.

  But another search of the area revealed something new: the remains of a small fire.

  Yariko was ecstatic. “I knew he was here,” she said. “How did we miss this before? And look—he went through the bushes here. See where they’ve been trampled? It looks like a path.”

  “Anything could have done that,” Dr. Shanker grumbled. “But all right, maybe it was him. Certainly he made the fire.” He was relieved, yes, but he didn’t entirely share Yariko’s elation. “You realize,” he went on, “we’ve seen this now only by chance. Any signs of him will be tiny; and we’re searching a huge area. We’ve probably missed all kinds of signs. And he may be doing the same. We could be here for days.”

  Yariko nodded. “We’ve got to think hard about where he is and what he’s doing. I say we follow this path.”

  They emerged from the tunnel-like opening in the brown-leafed shrubs and looked once again on the open plain. The Triceratops trail followed the direction of the river and was plain to see for some distance. Nothing moved on it.

  Julian’s path, if that’s what it was, seemed to continue straight toward the west. It wound among patches of low bushes and the occasional gray boulder, a narrow, six-inch ribbon of hard-beaten earth. The lack of twigs, leaves, or even small stones indicated a frequency of use.

  “Whitney didn’t make this trail,” Dr. Shanker said. “In our own time I’d say it was a deer path. Must be some Cretaceous equivalent of deer.”

  “He didn’t make it, but he followed it,” Yariko said. She stooped and lifted a stick, broken off at one end and whittled to a point at the other. “This was done with a knife. He was making a spear.”

  Further on they came across unequivocal evidence: the outline of a human shoe neatly centered within the massive footprint of Triceratops.

  “I believe we may actually find him,” Dr. Shanker said. “It almost seems possible.” Then he pointed over the bushes. “Look,” he said. “Another dead one.”

  Away to their right lay the body of a Triceratops, an adult. They didn’t get too close. The carcass was torn in half and huge chunks were missing from its back end. Looking at the torn-up earth and a trail through the dust and twigs, they decided the animal had broken away from the herd and been chased down. Its side was scored by a series of long, bloody grooves. The whole thing reeked of almost-fresh blood and Triceratops stench, and was surrounded by a cloud of flies. It was not that old.

  They silently moved back to the “deer path�
� and hurried away. After a moment Yariko said, “It must have been attacked by several things. All those claw marks on its side. . . .”

  “Claw marks, or teeth marks?” Dr. Shanker walked ahead now, clutching his spear again. “Of course, it’d have to be something with an enormous mouth. I wonder what could bring down a Triceratops. There doesn’t seem to be anything big enough, from what we’ve seen.”

  Had Julian been there, he could have told them what might run down and kill an adult Triceratops, what had a big enough mouth to cause such grooves. On the dry plains where Triceratops horridus lived there also lived its hunter, Tyrannosaurus rex.

  Julian breakfasted on smoked Triceratops. It was excellent, and not as leathery as he’d feared. After a long drink from the river he wrapped up the rest of the meat in the skin, slung it over his shoulder, and continued west, upriver.

  He had walked for about an hour and was considering stopping to rest when something made him pause. It was a muddy footprint, clearly outlined on one of the wide, flat stones along the riverbank. As a paleontologist, Julian had good training in the study of footprints. But no expertise was needed here. It was the outline of a human foot. He knew immediately from the size that it was Dr. Shanker’s, not Yariko’s.

  The feeling of relief was so intense that he sat down on the ground, right where he was. A human footprint meant that he was not the last man on earth. He was not alone; they were searching for him.

  A second look at the print brought up the obvious question. Why was Dr. Shanker walking barefoot?

  The mud was dry, turning to dust as Julian touched it. They were clearly hours ahead of him. They: but was Yariko there too?

  Horrid possibilities came into his mind. Maybe Yariko had drowned trying to save him, and Dr. Shanker finally gave up and walked away. Maybe she had been killed by the Triceratops, maybe . . . Julian’s heart was almost racing and he felt an irrational fury at Dr. Shanker for being alone, for being barefoot, for not taking care of Yariko.

  But Dr. Shanker might not be alone. Surely Hilda was still with him, yet there was no dog print. Julian began to calm down again, and even feel excited. He was on the right trail. Now he only had to catch up with them.

  The footprint pointed away from the river, toward the bushes. Looking closer, he saw that a path had been beaten through the bracken, and he followed it to the more open ground beyond. The trail continued through the low scrubby bushes and ferns, past a clump of trees, finally reaching a pile of rocks in the distance. Shanker must have climbed to the top of the rocks to get a better view of the land. Julian strode along the path, his excitement mounting in the hope that his friends might still be there.

  The sun was high and he was soon drenched in sweat. There was hardly any shade in the field of scrub. The light glared down on his already aching head; bits of dirt and leaves stuck to his legs, and the heavy smell of crushed fern and herbs made him dizzy. After twenty minutes Julian was desperate for a rest.

  He walked toward a stand of old bent-over juniper. A few logs lay on the ground in the shade. It was too tempting to pass up, and his friends may well have stopped there too.

  He took a step closer, and one of the logs moved. The animal, whatever it was, seemed enormous, camouflaged in the dappled light. Julian gaped at it in disbelief. He couldn’t see the shape well, with the intervening trees and the distance; but it was not Triceratops . The open terrain seemed ideal for a large predator such as T. rex. At that thought Julian turned and hurried away, heart pounding, using the spear to beat through the thick tangles of bushes. In his battered state he could not have run from anything. Even walking took more effort than he thought possible. Now and then he glanced over his shoulder, but nothing came out from the trees. If T. rex it was, it either did not see him or did not care to dine on him just then.

  Finally he reached the pile of rocks, some forty feet tall. He could not imagine what had made such a stack. In the Quaternary, it might have been a glacial deposit. In the Late Cretaceous, nothing came to mind. It was composed of boulders tumbled together, each one as high as his knee. The ascent was steep, but shrubs and creepers had grown out between the cracks and made convenient handholds.

  Julian began to climb. Halfway up he stopped to rest, sitting on a projecting rock, his shoulders drooping and hair sticking to the sweat on his forehead. His legs ached and throbbed. The clump of juniper was still visible; but he felt safer now, the sides of the hill being too steep for a large dinosaur to climb.

  When he’d caught his breath and wiped some of the stinging sweat out of his eyes, Julian picked up the sack of dried meat and the spear and continued the grueling climb. The last ten feet nearly stopped him; it was a vertical wall of boulders. Several were loose, and when he clutched at them they turned with a scraping sound. He hesitated before going on. Then he thought of Yariko and Dr. Shanker climbing up to have a look around, maybe even camping for the night. He stabbed the four corners of his hide bundle so it was securely fastened around the meat, dangling on the end of the spear, and reached up to the wall of rocks.

  The first boulder he put his weight on instantly came free, throwing him off as it crashed down the slope, knocking several more rocks loose on its way. Julian lay sprawled where he’d fallen, clinging and shaking, while the splintering crashes went on, forever it seemed. At last he looked up. The cavity left by the boulder looked ominous.

  When he’d calmed his heart again and regathered his courage, Julian slung the sack and spear over the top and crawled gingerly upward, testing each stone before putting his weight on it. As his head rose up over the top he saw a flat area, a rim, stretching away on either side, but only a few feet thick. Finally, when he was in the most awkward position, raised up to the level of his waist with his stomach pressed painfully against the edge, he saw what lay beyond the wall.

  His mouth dropped open in shock.

  A small field lay ten feet beneath him. It was perhaps twenty-five yards across, encircled entirely by a wall made of haphazardly stacked rocks and the occasional log jammed into a gap. The floor was smooth, covered with dung and dust, bits of stone cropping up here and there, a few bushes straggling in the thin layer of soil.

  Near the center a dead tree stuck up, nearly stripped of its branches, only a twisted trunk with one side branch. Lying in a cluster around this, as if, absurdly, trying to get into its shade, was a group of six animals. They looked like cattle. They seemed tiny—Lilliputian—meek, light brown, perhaps the size of cattle. They were four-footed creatures with no horn, no frill, no weapon, but by the shape of the body and the hooked beak on the tip of the snout Julian could tell they were ceratopsians. Exactly which puny relative they were of the great T. horridus he did not know. The three that were facing toward him looked up with lazy expressions and did nothing. One of them flicked its head, as if it were chasing away an insect.

  On the far side of the enclosure, against the wall, was a shelter made from great slabs of stone. The hut was thatched on top with sticks and dried ferns. It was man-sized and clearly too small to be a stable. It could not have fit even one of the ceratopsians, miniature though they were.

  Julian’s capacity for surprise should have long since been blasted away; but he was shocked by this scene. He had accepted the reality of the strange Cretaceous world, and what he now saw was impossible. Never mind that he himself was an anachronism: Julian’s paleontological sense told him that bipedal, tool-using primates would not evolve for another sixty-five million years.

  FIFTEEN

  Students often ask me what animal is the most fearsome of killers. One serious contender is Deinosuchus, the fifty-foot Cretaceous crocodile. T. rex, though not as long, was probably faster and more terrible. But to me the answer is obvious: H. sapiens must surely be the most fearsome animal yet.

  -Julian Whitney, Lectures on Cretaceous Ecology

  1 September

  8:29 PM Local Time

  When Earles strode into the lab, the two physicists were once again s
ide by side bowed over the computer keyboard. At her entrance they started and turned their heads so perfectly together that Earles had to smile. They looked like children caught in some naughty act.

  “All right,” she said, taking a seat beside them. “I know very little of modern physics, but I understand concepts well—and I have a good imagination.”

  The two scientists looked at her without speaking. They didn’t know quite what to make of this chief of police, and hadn’t from the beginning. Bowman had pictured someone like Hann: big, masculine, unimaginative. He couldn’t decide if Earles should be taken seriously or not.

  She certainly took herself seriously. “So: these people were creating matter—twigs, beetles—inside a sealed vault that not a particle of dust could have entered. I know: I checked it out.”

  “Matter can’t be ‘created.’” Bowman said. “That’s not what they were doing.”

  “Exactly.” Earles went on, undaunted. “Those things already existed. They came from outside, obviously, but they were picked up and moved; I have no idea how, but then you’re the physicists, not me.” She looked at Ridzgy.

  “We’re trying to figure out how.” Ridzgy sounded tired. “We’ve started getting the wiring back together in the vault. The extreme temperature was localized to one small part of the circuit, fortunately.”

  “There’s more,” Earles interrupted. “If stones and insects can be ‘vanished’ from one place to reappear in this vault, then couldn’t the opposite happen? Couldn’t something inside the vault vanish because it had been instantaneously transported somewhere else?”

  Bowman got up and began pacing the room. “I’m a physicist, not a science fiction writer. You asked us to figure all this out for you, but you won’t leave us alone to do it.”