“Oh, no. I’m a programmer. Spend most of my time cutting C Sharp code. We don’t really have any tour guides. Top secret place and all that.”
The woman seemed to be honestly friendly and not at all put off by Tamara’s strict and aloof attitude. That made Tamara soften a bit. “My dad used to be programmer,” she told the young woman. It was always good to make friends. Might learn something from them. “He even goes back to the days of COBOL.”
“Gosh, he must be old!”
“As the mountains,” Tamara said with a smile. “He used to tell me stories about the early days of computing. He even knew how to use a keypunch. Nowadays no one even knows what a punched card looks like. Used to be called IBM cards.”
“I think I heard of them. From one of the older scientists.”
“Well, you picked up that phrase from someone. Only the old programmers like my dad used the term ‘cutting code’. Everyone else would say ‘writing’ code, or programming.”
“Yes, we had an old guy in our department. Died two years ago. Very nice guy. Used to complain about programmers being called software engineers instead of programmers. Maybe your dad knew him, both being programmers.”
“I doubt it. Well, let’s begin that tour. Got a map?”
By the time she had been given a tour of the place it was lunchtime, so they adjourned to the cafeteria. The tour had been superficial; they entered few of the buildings, but it did give her a sense of the layout. The cafeteria itself was small but the food was very good, and they had outside tables so Tamara could enjoy the fresh mountain air and view.
“Have you worked here for a long time?” she asked of Carla.
“Since the project moved here from California. ’Bout five years now.”
“You like the work?”
“Yes. I like working for Chronodyne and I like this area. Big change from smoggy LA. Only thing bad is that it’s such a long ways from Disneyland. I used to drive down there a couple times a month. I like the place.”
“Happiest place on Earth, Walt used to say.”
“Yeah. I think so. I love watching the children looking around with wide eyes and not believing what they’re seeing. You ever see a little girl run up to Mickey Mouse and give him a big hug? Priceless!”
“Is the staff here good?” Tamara was just making talk, but she was also paying attention. You never knew when casual chats would reveal hidden secrets.
“Yeah. I like most of the people. ’Course, some of the scientists look down on those of us with only a B.S. You know, PhD snobbery. But others are fine.”
Finishing the chicken cordon bleu, Tamara began attacking the apple pie. “I find Project Dry Wells pretty amazing. What do you think of it?” She was probing to see if this low level programmer knew about the time machine.
“Amazing isn’t the word for it. Incredible! Impossible! To actually recreate a...” Suddenly she cut off. “Well, you know,” she finished lamely.
Tamara laughed. “Don’t worry! I have the highest security clearance, and a definite need to know.” She pointed to her badge, which gave her clearance for the whole project. “I’ve already been given a briefing by doctors Stryker and Crane. I know what kind of time machine you have here.”
Carla looked a little embarrassed but relieved. “I think it’s fantastic for research. We only have a small team of scientists other than the physicists, but they’re finding out the most interesting things about the past. Dr. Brown has found four new species of dinosaurs! And Dr. Borodin thinks he has located a partial play by Shakespeare that was never published. Isn’t that wild?”
“That would be interesting,” Tamara agreed, even though it was a lie. She had read one of his plays and thought it the most boring thing ever. “Anything really spooky going on here?” she asked.
“Spooky? Well, there are the spooks! You know, the CIA guys. At least, I think they are from the CIA. They won’t talk about what they’re doing, but every once in a while they come in and take over the Machine. Lot of guessing going on about that they’re using the Machine for but I doubt anyone knows for sure. Maybe not even Dr. Stryker.
“And then there’s the secret projects.”
“Secret Projects? You mean there are parts of this project you don’t know about?”
“Sure. There’s five of them. They don’t have any names, but are called Project A, B, C, D, and J. Real mysterious like. But everyone pretty much knows that Projects A and B are bringing back extinct animals.”
“What?” Tamara’s ears picked up. “You mean they can create living animals from the past?”
“Sure. About a year ago they began experimenting. Apparently they had troubles at first and had to redesign parts of the Machine and reprogram a lot also. A lot of animals didn’t make it or died almost immediately. But they got it down. The first really successful test was a cat. Fluffy it was named. It was picked up from 1966. It’s not official, but most people think that it was Dr. Grossman’s pet a number of years ago and he wanted it again. Well, anyway, he kept the cat and it’s still living with him. Pretty wild, huh?”
“Yes, pretty wild.” Her mind was racing with the possibilities that would open, the least of which was resurrecting extinct species. But why hadn’t they told her about that capability of the Machine? Were they keeping it secret? Or did it just not come up?
“Come on, I’ll show you something,” Carla said.
The something was a small pen behind a building not far from the cafeteria. In it Tamara saw what she first took to be a turkey, but as she got closer it took on a strange look. It was fatter than most turkeys she had seen in the wild, had large yellow feet, but most strange was the large, hooked beak in green, black and yellow. The plumage was a brownish-gray. It stood just over three feet tall and was busy munching on an apple.
“Hi there!” said a voice from the side. Tamara turned to see a man walking up. He was late forties, somewhat on the heavy side and sported a bushy gray beard along with overly thick eyebrows. “I’m Dr. Brown,” he continued as he came up and offered his hand. “I’d guess that you’re the auditor from DOD.”
“Word certainly gets around fast,” Tamara commented dryly.
“Small place here. How do you like Arnold?”
“Is that what I think it is?” she asked him.
“Well, if you’re thinking Raphus Cucullatus, then you’re right. Also known as the Dodo.”
“They’re all extinct,” she said. “He doesn’t seem very dead.”
“In the wild, sure. The last one died in 1662, only a hundred years after their discovery on the island of Mauritius. This was our first success at reviving an extinct species.”
“And what is that... that thing over there?”
The thing she was pointing to looked like a small horse or mule, but the front half of the body had white strips like a zebra’s over its brown coat while the back half had none. It was munching on some hay.
“That is Herman. He’s a Quagga. An extinct form of zebra. Last one died in an Amsterdam zoo in 1883.”
“Quagga and dodos! Please don’t tell me that you’ve got a yard filled with T-Rexes on the other side of the building,” she said.
“No, all the T-Rexes we had escaped last week. They’re up in the forest now, hunting anything they can find and terrorizing the natives.”
She looked to him sharply, only to see a wide grin and knew he was kidding her.
“Well, it would be possible, wouldn’t it?” she asked.
“Well, sure, but we’re more interested in perfecting the Machine than creating a Jurassic Park. Besides, the Machine is limited in the size of the object it can bring back. Dr. Carlyn has some very small dinosaurs, but a T-Rex would never fit in the chamber.”
“You have any more animals around?” she asked carefully.
“Well, just one right now, he said with a smile. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
Inside the building there was a laboratory, including a lot of testing equipment and cage
s.
“This here is Smiley. Of course, he’s just a juvenile now.”
Inside a wire cage was a large cat with light brown coat. When it looked up at her, she saw a blunt forehead and small, rounded ears. But what immediately caught her eye were the teeth protruding from the upper jaw. It looked like a cross between a cougar and a vampire.
Before she could ask, he told her, “This is a Smilodon, also known as the Saber-Toothed Cat.” He opened the cage and reached in. When he turned around, the cat was in his arms and licking his face. It was big enough that he could barely hold it.
“Smiley here is quite affectionate, but that maybe partly because he was raised here, not in the wild. Human company is all he knows. We picked him up right after he was born. He was bottle fed by humans and has become rather domesticated. Of course, now we feed him nice, juicy chunks of raw meat. Even so, he still plays rather roughly at times. Tries to bite the hand that feeds him and such.”
“A Saber-Toothed Tiger,” Tamara said in wonderment.
“Cat actually. Calling it a tiger is wrong. Would you like to pet Smiley?”
“I’ll pass. My aunt had a cat once, and every time I tried to pet it, it bit me.”
He scratched Smiley’s head, which the cat seemed to like very much, then put it back in the cage.
“Smiley’s in here for some tests. Later I’ll take him for a walk and put him in the larger cage. It’s big enough for him to roam around in.”
“How big will Smiley get?” Tamara wondered aloud.
“Oh, that depends. My field is not paleontology, so I’m not totally sure which species of Smilodon this is. If he’s a Smilodon Gracilis, then he’ll max out at about 220 pounds. If he’s a Smilodon fatalis, then about 600 pounds. But if he’s a Smilodon Populator, then he’ll get up to 800 pounds. That’s about the size of the largest Siberian Tigers.” He sighed. “I’m afraid we’ll have to get rid of him before then.”
“What will you do with him?”
“That hasn’t been decided yet. I’m hoping that we can announce our project before then so we can openly give him to a zoo. But our little time machine is top secret right now and is likely to stay that way for a long time to come. I’m pushing to announce him as a cloning project using DNA from a Smilodon crossed with a modern day tiger. Smilodons, you may know, became extinct only a few thousand years ago. They were contemporaries with man. Cloning them without the Machine would be completely possible with modern techniques. There’s been talk about cloning a mammoth. Why not a Smilodon?”
Tamara thanked him, and left shaking her head.
“See, I told you we had some fantastic results from the Machine,” Carla said. “Come on, now, I’ll take you over to Personnel and they’ll get you assigned an apartment in Mountain View. That’s what the apartment building is called.”
It was done as Carla said. After going through the usual red tape and delays, Tamara found herself later that afternoon standing in a second story apartment, looking out over the Dry Wells Project. The apartment reminded her of a small studio apartment she had in West LA once. Small kitchen, small bathroom but a fair sized single room with TV, desk, computer terminal, a picture on the wall of a fiery red sunset at the beach scene, and a sofa that opened out into a bed. Nothing fancy, but good enough for her. It made her nervous when some company tried to put her up in an expensive place, and wine and dine her.
The sun was low in the sky, but it was on the other side of the building so she saw its rays illuminating the low mountains to the east. If the mountains were a higher and had more snow, they would have reminded her more of her home.
A great deal was going through her mind. Usually she absorbed the technical details of a project while maintaining an intellectual attitude and remained impartial towards the possible results of them. But this project was different. It made her feel uneasy. She tried to tell herself it was just because this one was such a giant leap in technology, but a nagging portion of her mind told her it was more than that; more than just high level technology. Illogical as it might seem to an educated person such as herself, but she could not help but wonder if this was a tool that could be terribly misused in the wrong hands.
She had trouble getting to sleep that night, and it was because of more than a strange bed.
Chapter 5: Questions
The man sitting back in the chair, legs outstretched and hands crossed on his lap, looked older than his thirty-six years. His hair was long, a dark brown, as was his full beard, although traces of gray appeared at the temples and some in the beard. His eyes were closed as he sat in the warm sunshine, absorbing its heat as it chased away the last of the night’s coolness. His face was worn, creases radiated out from his eyes, and the skin was tanned as with someone who had spent most of his life out of doors. He wore tan slacks and a blue UCLA sweatshirt. His feet were in sandals. Had he stood up, he would be barely over five feet in height.
The scene was a courtyard, twice the size of a tennis court and adorned with shrubs and several small, incongruous palm trees. It was surrounded by a high wall, broken only by a few windows and two doors.
“Good morning,” said another man, walking slowly up to the seated man. This man was easily least twice as many years, yet they both looked much alike. The newcomer had a beard, neatly trimmed, almost totally gray matching his thinning hair, and more than a few lines creasing a face with pale blue eyes. He walked with a cane and a pronounced limp. He spoke not in English but in the native language of the seated man.
The seated man slowly opened his eyes to look at the newcomer, and then closed them again. “You are come to ask more questions,” he said wearily. It was not a question.
“If you feel like it. There is much I would still like to learn.”
“Why is it you wish to know so much about me?” he asked. “I failed. What was to be, did not happen. I was wrong.”
“You did not fail.” When that did not evoke a response, he continued with, “You did what you could and what you believed in.” Still there was no response. The man eased himself down into the adjoining lawn chair and changed the subject.
“I would like to know about your home. The town in which you were born and lived as a child.”
“I have told you. It was nothing. Just a small village.”
Taking a folded piece of paper out of his pocket, the older man slowly opened it and spread it out on his knees.
“I have a map of your small village here. Would you please show me where your house was?”
For a while it seemed as if the man had no intention of answering. Then, with a sigh, he straightened up and looked down at the paper.
“This is not right,” he said.
“I know it is not accurate, but please try to see it the way you remember it. Can you show me where your house was?”
Looking down at the hand drawn map, he frowned. “This word here... It means water?”
“A well, yes.”
“Then our house was here.”
Chapter 6: Diving into Records
The next morning, Tamara was up early and heading towards the administration building as a few early arriving cars trickled into the parking lot. She found the cafeteria had just opened, and she dined on huevos rancheros, which she found to be quite good. Twenty minutes later she was at her desk, ready to begin her audit.
‘God, I hope they aren’t hiding anything,’ she muttered to herself. ‘I hate when things get nasty and I have to nail people to the wall.’
She chuckled because that was not exactly true. She loved nailing people to the wall – if they tried deliberately to slip something past her. Honest mistakes were another thing and usually dealt with in a kinder manner. Truth was, she enjoyed the hunt when she sensed something was amiss. A challenge, a battle of wits, the bad guys vs. the good auditor – that sort of thing.
And so she plunged into the books, records, computer files, and anything else she could get her hands on that might tell her the story of how this projec
t was spending the money granted to them. And a large amount of money it was, larger than most research projects funded by the OSI, DOD or any other government agency. She was humming to herself as she began tracing fund allocations within the project.
It was not until the afternoon of the second day of the audit that she began to sense something was not quite kosher.
Chapter 7: Late Night Meeting
Three men met in a quiet office long after business hours. It might have been an executive’s office; good quality furniture, soft carpet and a widow looking out over to the scattered lights of the city. In the distance, an airliner was tracing its path over houses and businesses, lowering all the time as it approached the long line of lights marking the airport. Only one lamp was turned on in the office, as if these three wished to meet in darkness in hopes no one would see them.
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