Cretaceous Dawn

by Lisa M. Graziano

  Crazy as this conclusion was, any other explanation seemed wildly impossible.

  But Carl seemed to accept the Cretaceous as his proper home. It sounded as though a previous generation had originally been brought here. In that event, the timing was not exact: Carl’s ancestors had been placed into the Cretaceous of perhaps a century ago. Still, in the span of Earth’s time, a hundred years was essentially nothing. A minor change of setting in the vault? Natural variability of result when dealing with huge time scales?

  Julian shook his head. He could not solve the puzzle without help, and his host was not forthcoming.

  Carl rose and gathered the bowls, put them in a leather pail, and walked across the enclosure to the water source. He’d had enough of talking, and had returned to his chores.

  Julian stood in the doorway and watched the pink and orange streaks spreading in the western sky. The air was warm and still. The sounds that came to him were quiet and unthreatening. Carl washed the crockery with a soft abrasive sound, scrubbing at the clay with a handful of tough plant fibers. A ceratopsian snorted, shaking its head; another rubbed against the dead tree. Nothing could be heard from outside the stone wall; only a vast, blanketing silence.

  Suddenly Julian envied his host this peaceful home, this private castle in a world without noise, without city lights to take away the night and the stars—without six billion human beings.

  At that moment the yard within the ring of stones felt more like home to Julian than his apartment back in South Dakota ever had. Certainly it was a haven in the carnivore-infested wilderness. But even if T. rex himself were to appear over the wall, he had the feeling, ludicrous though it was, that Carl would deal with him in his unhurried, practical way.

  Suddenly a conversation with Yariko, one night in their tree loft, came back to him. We could populate a village, you and I. She had been right after all. Here were the remnants of her village of anomalous Cretaceous human beings. But who had started it? Misguided rescuers, not realizing they too could be trapped here, not getting the time exact enough? If so, did that mean that the lab and the vault were in working order, and might allow reversion?

  When the vault came to mind Julian had to take a mental step back. His previous life was too remote, especially in his current exhausted state, to seem real any more; the ambition of reverting to the lab seemed an academic one rather than a personal one. For the moment, he wanted nothing more than to find Yariko and bring her here to share this peaceful life with him.

  Carl stood before him with a quizzical look on his face, holding the pail with the crockery piled inside it. Julian realized he was blocking the doorway and stepped aside.

  When Carl came out again he sat down on the rock and said, “The storm is coming up fast. Your friends will not go far tonight.”

  “I need to find them, as quickly as possible,” Julian said, waking with a start from his idyllic thoughts as the urgency of their time window rushed in again. “They’re headed west, and I’ll have to catch up before. . . .” He stopped. Carl could never understand the details about their time window, now only two weeks away. “I need to reach the hills,” he ended.

  Carl nodded as if this information did not surprise him.

  Looking at the man’s impassive face, Julian had the absurd notion that Carl already understood. He wanted to tell this strange being everything and ask for advice. He wanted Carl to tell him what to do next.

  But Carl only said, “The higher ground is hard to travel over. Your friends will not find a way there quickly.”

  “Do you ever go back to your caves?” Julian asked, wondering how far west they were.

  Carl nodded.

  “Then it’s not impossible.” Julian spoke to convince himself more than anything. He didn’t want to think about the dangers, the small chance of finding each other in the vastness; the fact that his companions did not know, as he did from the fossil record, that they had entered the territory of Tyrannosaurus rex. “I’d better start tonight,” he added. “The moonlight should be bright enough.”

  “Nothing will move in this storm,” Carl said quietly. “You would do better to wait for morning.”

  Julian looked out at the dark sky, over the walls of the enclosure. No signs of a storm were apparent, but then he’d never been a good weather watcher. A few hours ago he’d been afraid of this man. Now he was hoping that Carl might point out the easiest way and give him some advice on the terrain. “How long does it take, to the caves?” he asked.

  “Alone, eight days. With you. . . .” Carl spat again. “First we will collect feed to keep the animals.”

  Julian turned and looked at him. “You’re—coming with me?”

  But Carl said nothing.

  SIXTEEN

  Tyrannosaurus rex, the monarch of carnivores, cavorting at the apex of the food pyramid, was probably the least abundant of dinosaurs. No ecosystem could have maintained a large number of them. Consequently, few have fossilized. Only twenty more-or-less complete skeletons have been discovered, mainly in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana. Everything we know about T. rex is based on this shocking paucity of data. One thing is certain: with a small statistical sample, we have not found anything near the biggest or oldest T. rex. With our small sample of twenty, we are unlikely to have found the rare statistical outliers, the huge ones, the true monarchs.

  -Julian Whitney, Lectures on Cretaceous Ecology

  1 September

  9:15 PM Local Time

  The physics lab was eerily quiet as the two scientists ran their calculations. Small objects, from insects to three-inch rocks; yet the equipment was sensitive enough to detect the minute changes in air pressure within the sealed chamber. And minute they were, so that Bowman shook his head and declared they were wasting time on a layman’s crazy hunch.

  Ridzgy persisted. The idea was farfetched, but how could she dispute its possibility when she herself had first announced the mysterious “creation” of beetles?

  The answer, when it came, was frightening. A volume equivalent to at least four adults had to have been removed to create the measured drop in air pressure. It was an instantaneous change that caused air from the outer room to rush in, slamming the door with it; once sealed, the vault had maintained its vacuum. But instantaneous though it was, the change had been recorded.

  Bowman spoke first. “Could it be possible?”

  Ridzgy looked at him thoughtfully. “It seems impossible. Four people and a dog, or rather four and a half people and a dog, to become non-matter, and perhaps be reassembled somewhere else? True, that dead man didn’t sound cut in half so much as . . . vanished in half. . . .” She shook her head and settled once more in front of the control computer.

  “But the principle, Marla. The principle may have been shown by the small objects, the twigs and such, that appeared. So it should hold for objects of any size.”

  On the computer screen page after page of commands scrolled by. Marla Ridzgy watched closely. “A molecule leaves a molecular-sized vacuum. When the air rushes in to fill it the change in pressure in the vault is imperceptible. But if that much matter disappeared. . . . Why, it was probably 30 percent of the vault’s volume. Can you imagine the effect of such a vacuum? Even if it is transient?”

  “The vault wasn’t sealed,” Bowman reminded her. “Which is why the damage wasn’t worse. And then there was the dead guard. The blood is sprayed all over the outside of the door, but there’s none inside the vault, except those few smears from the other people. That guard wasn’t cut in half by the door, and his upper half never bled inside the vault.”

  “Then,” Ridzgy said, pausing the computer’s scrolling, “if we buy this as a working hypothesis—just for the moment—this vault, because of the exact settings, became a translocation machine. It brought beetles in from somewhere else, alive, and it sent a group of people to that somewhere. . . .” She left the last word hanging. “Do you realize how big this is, if they’ve really shown it? If they publish this, and
convince the world of physics that it’s been done? Only,” she added after a short pause, “they’re not here to tell anyone what they’ve done. Right now, we’re the only ones who know.”

  Bowman watched his colleague’s face carefully. “If they were sent to where their beetles came from, perhaps that cop is right. Perhaps they could be brought back again, if they’re alive, if the vault was working and the settings were exact.”

  Ridzgy’s eyes were alight. “Do we want them back?” she asked.

  After sundown, in the moonlight, Julian climbed out of the enclosure, following Carl in search of ferns. It was not necessary to clamber up the wall the dangerous way he had done before; instead, Carl propped a wooden ladder against it, near the water trough. Looking up, Julian could see the tips of great hollow bones jutting from the top of the wall. They were femurs of some huge beast, serving as water pipes.

  As they climbed to the top he rapped his knuckles against one of the shafts, and a watery sound echoed up. How had Carl managed to drag such monstrous bones there and mount them upright? Julian had a ludicrous mental image of Carl striding over the rocky hills, an eight-foot, three-hundred-pound femur balanced on his shoulder.

  They scrambled down the slope. Carl moved silently, but Julian slipped and stumbled on the half-seen stones.

  At the base of the slope they headed north toward wooded ground, following a well-worn trail through the brush. Carl moved with a long swinging stride and was soon several yards ahead. The moon was full and lit up the open landscape.

  The afternoon spent in safety had confused Julian and dulled his sense of watchfulness. He could almost have been back in Pennsylvania, fossil hunting with his father, if it weren’t for the renewed sense of urgency to go west after his companions. He tried to calculate how far they might have gone since their separation. But that only made his chest feel tight, so that he had to think about breathing. Much as he wanted to think they were still searching for him, he decided they would have gone on, impelled by the short time window, knowing it was their only chance.

  The bracken rustled nearby and Julian paused. Then, from the ground at his feet, a horrible sound broke out: a piercing, rapid, “Kah kah kah kah kah!” that seemed to echo all around. He stumbled backward, clamping his mouth shut over a yelp of fear. Twigs snapped, something scurried through the undergrowth, and there was silence again.

  “It is better to stay watchful,” Carl said, calmly looking back. “Some animals will attack without such warning.”

  “What was it?” Julian asked, curiosity getting the better of his initial terror. He stirred the bracken with his foot, but could see nothing in the moonlight. The branches and leaves threw confusing shadows.

  Carl used his hands to indicate a small animal, about a foot long. “We might have killed it for tomorrow’s dinner. But let it go. We have too little time before the storm.”

  Julian still saw no signs of a storm, but followed his guide closely, chastened and more attentive to his surroundings.

  They skirted the wooded area and stopped in a boggy depression where ferns grew thick and immensely tall. Carl pulled a short curved blade from his belt—it looked like a huge tooth, filed flat—and pushed in among the ferns. Julian could tell where he was only by the tossing of the fronds as he hacked at their stems. A moment later he reemerged with a thick bundle, which he tied with a leather thong and lay on a dry patch of ground. Julian pulled out his own small knife to help.

  By then even he could sense a change in the weather. The wind moved high in the branches and hurrying clouds obscured the stars. The moon took on a sickly glow. Suddenly Carl’s three-fingered hand touched Julian’s shoulder, and with a nod of his head he indicated the ground in front of them.

  The mud was scored by three long depressions, close together at one end and fanning outward at the other. It was the print of a clawed, tridactyl foot. Although Julian had a good eye for tracks, this one took him a moment to understand. It was enormous, and his mental catalogue of animal tracks had to be rescaled entirely before his brain could even see the marks as a footprint.

  “She is nearby,” Carl whispered. He walked ahead into the open, his feet making hardly any sound.

  Julian was a good woodsman; still he made a slight scuffing over the uneven ground. A stick cracked under his foot, and at the sound a dark object reared up over the ferns, about forty feet away. It was an animal’s head. He saw it for an instant in profile, and it was longer than he was tall. Then it turned toward him and he looked into its wide, mottled face and its eyes; or rather its right eye, since his gaze could not take in both at once in that vast head. The eye glittered in the moonlight, peering down from a height of twenty-five feet. The huge jaws were slightly open, showing teeth as long as Julian’s hand. Those jaws could have engulfed him whole, leaving only his feet sticking out.

  Julian knew that he was, quite literally, looking into the face of death; a curiously expressionless face, the color of bark, dented and ridged.

  It could only be Tyrannosaurus rex. He knew this partly because of the distinctive wide cheekbones and the stubby, two-clawed forearm, no bigger than a human’s. But mainly, he knew because of the impossible size of the thing. Nothing had prepared him for the living animal itself: not the skulls he had studied, not museum skeletons, not movies or imagination clothing those museum models with flesh.

  He had never before realized how well the name fit the animal. Several times in the past month Julian thought he might have glimpsed a T. rex, but now he knew that all the previous sightings had been of lesser animals. There was no mistaking the monarch of all dinosaurs. He stared up at it in disbelief. Then it lunged toward him. The speed of its leap was terrifying, and all paleontological and rational thought left him as he turned and ran.

  He sprinted a few yards and then became mired in a deep mud hole. It would have been better to lie still, but he lost his head and began to thrash and struggle hysterically. He glanced over his shoulder, wondering why he was still alive, and saw a small dark object whiz through the air and smack the animal on the snout. The T. rex stopped, with a look like a dog hit by a rolled-up newspaper. Another rock hit the mud behind it, and then another beyond that.

  There was an agonizing moment when they seemed frozen in place, neither man nor dinosaur moving, like actors on a stage waiting for the curtain to fall. Julian thought his heart would explode. In reality it must have been a second in time; but it felt like the longest hour of his life.

  The great head swiveled away. It showed a bumpy profile and then the vast bulk of the body as it turned. From nose to tip of tail it must have been fifty feet long, and had Julian stood on Carl’s shoulders, still he could not have reached its hip. As the animal turned he noticed that the left forelimb was mutilated: the claws had been cut off at the second knuckle joint, leaving the limb shorter than the other.

  The animal was crouching nearly horizontal, its tail straight and stiff behind. It seemed to be sniffing with its nose to the ground; Julian could no longer see the head over the ferns. He watched the hindquarters move with surprising grace and a rippling of muscles under the brown hide. Then it disappeared into the darkness under the trees. There was a thunk of one more rock, a noise of trampled bracken, then silence.

  Halfway up his shins in warm mud, Julian tried to twist his body around to look over his shoulder. The bundle of ferns lay behind him where he had dropped it.

  Carl appeared from the shadows nearby, his bundle still balanced on his shoulder. He stooped to pick up Julian’s ferns. “Easy to confuse,” he said, tapping his forehead to indicate the animal’s lack of intellect. Then he reached out with his free hand, clasped Julian’s arm, and pulled him to dry ground.

  Trying hard not to look as if his heart were about to burst, Julian forced a painful grin. “Faster than I expected,” he said, the quaver in his voice unmistakable.

  Carl gave him a quizzical look. “They are the fastest of all animals. You cannot out run the Big Ones.”


  “Will it—come back for us?”

  Carl handed over the bundle of ferns and shrugged. “Perhaps. I am surprised she rushed you. She does not see well these days.”

  “She?”

  Carl nodded. “When I first came here she was the leader. They live many years, longer than our kind. She is the biggest one I know, and the oldest. But the others drove her away when she became too old to hunt well.”

  If that charge with gaping five-foot jaws was not hunting well, Julian thought, I don’t know what is.

  He had studied the largest T. rex skeleton discovered to date, an individual estimated at twelve tons when alive. According to one hypothesis, fifteen-tonners were not uncommon. This matriarch was more than fifteen tons, if he was any judge at all. With the appropriate instruments he could have calculated her weight by the depth of the footprints and the viscosity of the mud; and as his mind turned over these possibilities, Julian realized that the fear was gone. Only the awe remained.

  “You seem to know her,” he said as they walked.

  “We know each other.” Carl shifted his bundle to the other shoulder. “She is more of a scavenger now. I set out carcasses for her at times, after I take some of the meat.”

  “You don’t mean that you feed her? That might be what keeps her in the area!” The fear came surging back.

  “I hope so,” Carl said. He was silent for a few minutes as they trudged under their bundles, single file now along the narrow path. “She is good to have around,” he continued at last. “The other hunters stay away. They are smaller, but they are more dangerous to animals of our own size. No, I would rather face one of her kind.” After a moment he added, “I feel a bond with her. Both of us are old, both loners. Perhaps she, too, has outlived everyone she ever cared for.”