Cretaceous Dawn

by Lisa M. Graziano

  The last object was a tiny leather sack tied closed. Julian turned it in his hand, puzzled, and then began to work on the knot. The leather string fell apart in his fingers. He turned the sack upside down and shook it. A small object fell out into his palm.

  There is a fear that comes when one sees something familiar in a place where it is not expected, where, in fact, it cannot exist. This fear came to Julian. His free hand went up against the rough wall for balance. The cave seemed to close in around him.

  A shadow fell across the entrance. “What did you find?” It was Yariko’s voice.

  Julian could not speak. He looked up and held out his open palm.

  “What is it?” Dr. Shanker asked, coming up beside Yariko.

  “My pocket compass.”

  “A compass? Whitney, are you telling me you’ve had a compass on you all this time? Do you realize. . . ?”

  Julian shook his head. “I didn’t bring it. It was broken, on Cypress Island. Remember? We couldn’t find the magnet. Without the magnet it was useless. . . .”

  They all stared at the compass, Julian stooping against the rough stone, the other two standing over him. The letters “JW” were scratched into the tiny glass face.

  “Must be yours, all right,” Dr. Shanker said.

  “But how did my compass get here? I didn’t bring it. It’s still on Cypress Island, somewhere in the trees near the beach, in a million pieces.” He thought back to that first night in their new world and the fear they’d all felt; and his own hopelessness, when the compass was broken. Now both he and it were here, a thousand miles from where they’d started; but he hadn’t brought it with him.

  “You did bring it,” Dr. Shanker said. Julian shook his head again, but Shanker continued. “In another time, it didn’t break. And you brought it here.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Dr. Shanker looked at Yariko, and she nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I had already come to that conclusion.”

  Julian stared from one to the other of them, waiting for an explanation.

  “Hold on a minute,” Dr. Shanker said. “I want to take a close look at this cave.” He squeezed himself out through the entrance.

  Julian looked at Yariko. “What do you see?” he asked.

  Yariko was staring at the opposite wall. It was quite dim, but now Julian could make out faint tracings on the wall. He walked over and touched them with his fingers. The lines seemed to be painted on rather than chiseled, and they were regular, in even rows extending from waist to shoulder height. He put his face close to the rock but still couldn’t see anything clearly.

  Then the cave seemed to light up and the lines leapt out at him, startlingly clear and close. He jumped back.

  Dr. Shanker had entered with a makeshift torch; he was now standing beside Yariko. “Would you look at that,” he said, and there was awe in his voice.

  The lines were curved designs separating rows of writing. Whatever the paint material was it reflected the firelight very well; the letters seemed almost to glow themselves. In places the writing was streaked with moisture and with a black mold, but much of it was clear.

  They began to read.

  The laconic record of a tiny community slowly revealed itself. There were no sentences as such, only phrases and numbers, and some didn’t make sense to Julian. The top line he thought he understood.

  “Arrival at second new moon since entry. Reversion point unknown. Day 1 after new moon. Day 2. Day 3 after new moon reversion point and time established as W. vanished when in plain sight. Correct place set down although too late. Future retrieval possible? Day 4 will wait here some time in case of retrieval attempt.”

  The line ended there; below a set of designs, very beautiful designs, the writing looked quite different. It seemed to record three generations of births and deaths, and although Julian could not immediately make out dates or spacing of these events, he thought there were more than a dozen people, perhaps as many as twenty, alive at one time. Apparently not all were buried outside the caves, as there were only twelve cairns. Thirteen now, he corrected himself. Some must have died while journeying, or out hunting, and never been found.

  The third line down seemed to record a migration to the east. The fourth and last line, which he had to stoop to read, looked like a record of journeys back to the caves for burials and other reasons that were not clear.

  Julian stood, feeling the ache in his legs and back. The words glowing in the light of Dr. Shanker’s torch did not solve the mystery. He wondered who “W” was; the lucky one who was in the right place to revert when the time came, apparently; but who? And who were the people left behind?

  “Look there,” Yariko cried, pointing to another spot, very low on the wall at the back of the cave. “It’s a diagram.”

  They moved closer with the torch.

  The diagram was of geometric shapes, and there were symbols, mathematical symbols, around it. There were no words.

  “It’s the caves,” Dr. Shanker said, pointing to one part of the picture. “See, here’s this one, and here’s the little one. And here are the cairns.”

  “What’s that triangle?” Julian asked, touching the clean shape that seemed to tower over the crudely drawn cairns. “There’s nothing like that here. Look, there’s a little moon over it.”

  “It’s the reversion point,” Yariko said. “See how it’s in the center of a circle? I bet that’s a roman numeral III next to the moon: the third day after the new moon. And here,” she dropped to her knees and bent forward excitedly to look, “here are the measurements to find the circle. It’s quite large, actually.” She looked up at the others. “We could mark the nearest edge, and this corner, and make sure to be inside the line.”

  “Yes, but when? Is there a time, or do we sit on the ground all day, waiting?” Dr. Shanker frowned at the rest of the picture. “This one makes no sense.”

  There was something naggingly familiar about that second picture that Julian couldn’t quite place. There was a half circle with lines coming out of its center, an overlapping ellipse, and a few other strange symbols.

  “Somehow it’s familiar,” he said. “But I can’t make it out. Maybe later when I’m less tired.” He turned back to the wall of writing. Some of it might be a century old; yet the paint was unfaded.

  The torch went out and the writing disappeared. Only the designs could be seen, faintly.

  “But who were they?” Julian asked, although he knew his companions couldn’t answer that question any better than he could.

  “Jules, come outside,” Yariko said, holding out her hand.

  He let himself be led into the late afternoon sunlight. The shadow of the cliff stretched out toward the cairns. They sat down against the cliff face.

  “Don’t you want to hear about my mysterious physics equations?” Yariko asked.

  “But the compass . . . and the writing. . . .” Julian felt as one does after a night of heavy dreams, trying to shake off their influence in the gray of morning.

  Yariko laughed and squeezed his hand. “Do you know, you have such a funny expression when you’re confused.”

  He started to mutter, but she cut him off.

  “We left off when I was sitting on a rock, puzzling out equations and the existence of other humans in the Cretaceous.”

  Julian nodded, still skeptical, but willing to hear her out.

  “It took me several hours of hard thought to see the possibilities in the third and fourth terms of the Taylor expansion. Beyond the fourth term, I thought the numbers were negligible.”

  Julian had no idea what she meant but Dr. Shanker seemed to approve. He nodded.

  “But even with the equations straight in my head,” Yariko went on, “I still didn’t believe it. Quite impossible. And not exactly consistent with the facts.

  “For several days I thought a good deal more about survival than about physics, I can tell you. Then one night while Hilda and I were curled up together in a bush, I lay
there thinking about you and remembering all our little conversations together—I missed you, you know—and suddenly, like a rock falling on my head, or like that apple of Newton’s, I understood. I saw the answer.”

  Yariko paused and looked up. “Julian, do you remember our first or second night on Hell Creek, lying on the platform in the tree? We made up such ridiculous stories. Do you remember what we talked about?”

  “Yes. Of course I do. I thought of the same thing when I met Carl. There was a population of people who survived, at least for a time. Now we know they came to these caves. I’ve been thinking quite a lot about it, in fact, even if I don’t know any Taylor equations. Obviously, someone tried to rescue us, but didn’t hit the exact time.”

  “And they found the bits of your compass in the woods, repaired the thing, and brought it here?” Dr. Shanker snorted derisively. “Come on, Whitney. You’re not as slow as that.”

  “That’s true. It doesn’t explain my compass. But the writing—they were obviously here, and they didn’t all revert.”

  “There was no rescue party, Julian,” Yariko said. “That was never a possibility, and the idea of “future retrieval” by someone else is hardly possible either. The finest of calibrations can pinpoint a location, or a time, with only so much precision.”

  “Precision meaning how close each result is to the others,” Dr. Shanker explained in a condescending voice, as if talking to a child. “A very different thing from accuracy, which is—”

  “I know what accuracy is!” Julian snapped. He didn’t need a lecture on scientific terms. He was trying hard to follow what Yariko was saying. “Go on.”

  With a warning look at Dr. Shanker, Yariko continued. “Like he said, each run, even identical runs with identical settings, will give a slightly different result. Another group getting in the vault and arriving within fifty or a hundred years of us, and in the exact same location, would be, well, beyond probability.”

  “But you were getting samples from the same place, over and over. Those beetles and stones and such. Are you saying they were from all different times in Earth’s history?”

  “They were all from roughly the same time and place. A few centuries here or there, a few hundred kilometers here or there; that’s as precise as we could be. Plenty good enough for translocating similar samples, but not good enough for a rescue team to get anywhere near us.”

  Julian didn’t like the direction his thoughts were going. “Does that mean we can’t revert? That the instruments won’t be set to exactly the right place?”

  “Not at all,” Dr. Shanker said. “If we were true Cretaceous objects, we couldn’t count on being brought into the vault on a given run, because of the variability. But reversion is different from retrieval, or simple translocation. We originated in the vault, and we’ll revert to the vault, as long as the settings are correct.”

  “So what does any of that have to do with Carl?” Julian asked, bringing the conversation back to where it had started, and where his mind was still focused.

  “It means,” Yariko said, in a quiet voice, “That nobody but ourselves has come to this place and this time period.”

  Julian sat very still as he took in her words. Nobody but themselves . . . nobody but myself, and Yariko, and. . . . When he realized what that actually meant, the sense of awe kept him silent for a long moment.

  At last he said, “Then Carl would be our descendent.”

  Yariko nodded. She took his hand and held it very tight.

  “The wonder of it,” Dr. Shanker broke in. He’d obviously been waiting impatiently for understanding to dawn on Julian, and was too eager to allow time for sentimental feelings. “The initial reaction in the vault sprayed material through the space-time manifold. We were not sent back to a single point in time. We now know that there were at least two Julian Whitneys, two of each of us, that appeared at distinct and separate points in time. We, the three of us sitting here now, have just lived through one set of events; our counterparts, waking up in a slightly more distant past, must have faced a different sequence of events. In one life, one time, your compass breaks; in another, it survives and helps us find our way.

  “We’ll never know how many other versions of us might have appeared at different times. Probably no more than four, if Yorko is right about the equations. But then what happened to the other two? Mauled and eaten by dinosaurs? The probabilities would tend in that direction. Another version of Frank might have lived; another version of me might have died. Perhaps I did see a Cairn that day on Cypress Island.

  “The whole thing is fantastic, isn’t it? And yet, never forget the underlying philosophy of science. Observe, observe, observe; then draw your inferences. Science, after all, is nothing more than a rigorous application of common sense.”

  Dr. Shanker grinned and stuck out his beard in the way he had when making a speech. “Thus. Observation: another human being lives in the Cretaceous. He suggests he was born here and came from these caves. Observation: your compass is here, in the cave, in perfect working condition. Observation: sixty days ago, you left your compass on the sand, a thousand miles away, broken beyond repair. Inference: we have been here before, duplicates of us if you will; or maybe an original set, and we are the duplicates. And Carl is descended from us. Of course there are many more observations to support that inference, but you get the idea.”

  Julian was silent for a while, trying to take in these fantastic ideas. The sun was low and the shadow of the cliff now stretched over the cairns. His head was whirling.

  Yariko touched his knee. “It gives you a strange feeling, doesn’t it?” she said. “Jules, what generation do you think he is? He couldn’t be. . . .”

  My son? Julian thought. My grandson? His chest began to ache. Carl was dead now. And yet, what was time? He himself, Julian Whitney, was dead, and had not yet been born; his birth was still sixty-five million years in the future, and yet he might be lying under a cairn on Cypress Island.

  He had a sudden sharp image of Carl leaning back against the stone wall of his hut, a twig in his mouth, talking in his short phrases about the land to the west. Carl had shown them the way.

  “He must have been the last of the generations,” Julian said, finally. “It would have taken a lifetime to build his hill, and more than a few people. I think he was third or even fourth generation. The writing didn’t show years, only generations.” He looked at Yariko. “I find it amazing that against all the odds we brought a child, or more than one, into the world.”

  “A little community, surviving in all of this wasteland,” Dr. Shanker said, waving his hand, vaguely taking in the entire Cretaceous world. “Passing on stories from one generation to the next. The seaway to the east. Reaching the caves on a certain moon in this season. But why did they all die out?”

  Julian played with a pebble by his foot, not wanting to look up at the cairns now under the afternoon shadow of the cliff. “I think I can guess,” he said. “It’s unlikely enough that one child survived. A whole group? Think of the mortality rate. Predation. Malnutrition. Not to mention how inbred they would be—”

  “He did know where we had to be, didn’t he?” Dr. Shanker said, obviously following his own train of thought. “But I’m still not clear on how he—or we—picked this spot. Obviously it’s the right place, because someone reverted . . . someone named W,” he ended, turning to Julian. “You reverted.”

  Julian’s emotions, so keyed up as he tried to believe that Carl was his great-great-grandson, did a backflip. And if he reverted without Yariko, then—

  “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t leave without Yariko.” He looked at Dr. Shanker. “And you couldn’t be the father.”

  “Frank!” Yariko cried suddenly. “Frank Walden. Frank was W.”

  “That’s right!” Julian hadn’t actually known Frank’s last name, but that didn’t matter. “Frank reverted, and I stayed with Yariko. I couldn’t have reverted or I wouldn’t have been able to teach paleontology to the next
generation. Carl knew some paleontology. I’m serious.”

  “OK, you win,” Dr. Shanker said. “Frank would never pass down paleontological knowledge to his offspring. But I still have to be in the gene pool somewhere.”

  “How’s that?” Yariko asked, smiling at his smug expression.

  “I may be a physicist, but I remember my basic genetics. Carl had blue eyes. Yours are black, Whitney’s and mine are brown. But there are blue eyes in my family. It seems to me that you two together could hardly bring a blue-eyed descendant into the world.”

  “I could be carrying genes for blue eyes too,” Julian said.

  Yariko shook her head. “I’m not. No Europeans in my stock. I’m as pure as they get.”

  “So you see I would have to be in there,” Dr. Shanker said again.

  “What about Frank?” Yariko put in quietly. “He had blue eyes, and he was young, too. Maybe he . . . maybe before he reverted. . . .” She stopped and looked quickly at Julian. “No, never mind that. He reverted the third day after they got here, according to that writing.”

  “Or Whitney did; we can’t know, can we?” Dr. Shaker said. “What if—”

  “What if, what if a lot of things,” Yariko interrupted, feeling Julian stiffen. “This is useless speculation, and has nothing to do with us now.” She paused. “The question is how long will it be before our window of reversion opens, and where do we need to be when it does?”

  “All right, all right,” Dr. Shanker said with sudden loudness. Hilda looked up at him questioningly. “We clearly need to hold another council of war. Dr. Miyakara. Dr. Whitney. At our last council, as you recall, under the palm trees of Cypress Island, we decided to try the chance at reversion; and to make our way a thousand miles to the west. How long has it been? Sixty . . . no, sixty-one days? The river was lucky for us. But have we made it in time? Whitney. What’s your expert opinion?”

  “I don’t know.” Julian felt suddenly weary at the thought of all those miles, through swamp, river, and forest, over stony hills and across gullies. He didn’t want to struggle onward anymore. He wanted to stop and rest, here at the caves, reversion or not. “I guess this would be day one of the second new moon. That would make the reversion time two days from now.”