Old Earth

by Gary Grossman

  It was a percentages game. For most people in the field, it was completely and utterly a game of failure. You were simply a few feet off. You stopped too soon. The weather was too hot or too cold to go on. Your support staff gave up. You lost your funding. Your bones ached. You grew too old to continue…or to care. However, there were still extraordinary things to uncover.

  “The earth has all the time in the world,” McCauley explained. “We don’t have such luxury. So gang, get your backs into it more.”

  It was hot, and work was tedious, exactly what Dr. Quinn McCauley had promised. He’d chosen a spot nearly two miles off the beaten path, far from the park entrance where the tourists stopped to gaze at the famed dinosaur cemetery and well beyond the main road that led up to Makoshika State Park. With the exception of jet contrails during the day and satellites sweeping past in the night sky, contemporary time hardly existed. It was the perfect environment to explore the past.

  • • •

  Well into their first week, the students were enthusiastic and already an effective team. McCauley’s prompting helped shape their camaraderie, but each wanted to be the first to find something really noteworthy.

  The closest layers bore sloths and horses. The mammoths were deeper. Then the dinosaurs. There was evidence of the ancient ocean with shells literally photographed in time by sediment and silt.

  “Fossilization is Mother Earth’s three-dimensional photographic record,” he casually noted around one of the evening campfires. “You surely have the picture. Some animals sank into mud and sand after their death. If scavengers didn’t immediately raid the carcasses, layers of sediment eventually covered the remains. Under the right combination of heat, pressure, chemical reactions and time, the harder parts of the creatures—bones and teeth—could become fossils. But it was far from automatic.”

  His students knew this to a great extent, but the rest was a powerful lesson.

  “Most animals never fossilized. They just decayed; disappeared from earth’s record and, the missing fossil record, forever lost, is far, far larger than the remaining, existing fossil record waiting to be found. That in itself is staggering. What we will never know is greater than what we will ever find.”

  “Be patient gang,” McCauley implored through the second and third weeks. “You’re in one of the richest dinosaur graveyards in the world, but only a small percentage of the genera that ever lived makes it to the scrapbook. For paleontologists, it’s like randomly spinning the tumblers of a giant safe. Most of the time they don’t click. But, when all the numbers fall into place, the door can open to untold treasures…or another vault.”

  Not that McCauley had ever found the combination to anything really remarkable himself.

  • • •

  “Hey, Dr. McCauley, your TA, Pete, is on your phone,” yelled Rich Tamburro from the base camp tent.

  McCauley had left his cell there while barbequing the team’s chicken dinner. By the time Tamburro brought him the cell, the line was dead. Service in the park was spotty. Not surprisingly McCauley couldn’t get DeMeo back.

  “No go?” Tamburro asked.

  “Nope. Probably checking to see if there’s anything to report.” Nothing major so far, he thought.

  The students might disagree. Tamburro and his digging partner Anna Chohany uncovered Triceratops fossils. Lobel and Cohen worked a nearby gully and came up with evidence of an Edmontosaurus. Rodriguez, Trent and Jaffe working together found dinosaur gizzard stones. These were smooth, egg-sized rocks which looked like they had been polished by a tumbler. But the process that resulted in the glass-like quality was actually something quite natural and amazing: the dinosaurs’ own digestive system. They’d used stones to grind up food in their gizzards. Of course, the finds would have to be confirmed. However, each discovery prompted McCauley to push his students further.

  Over dinner he did just that

  “You want to make history, you have to beat history,” he said. “It’s full of tricks. Keep reading the rocks; the slope of the strata. Feel the winds and the directions they blow. Look for signs of streams and where they could have made twists and turns through the ages. Follow the leads. And work harder.”

  These were important lessons. Wind and water erosion constantly changed the landscape, reshaping the cap rocks, sandstone knobs and freshwater shale. Scrubs, grasses and more than one hundred forty species of wildflowers conspired with the land to mask clues. Pine and juniper roots dug into the earth and spread in all directions creating more barriers to exploration.

  • • •

  The next day

  “Finally,” McCauley proclaimed when he reconnected with his teaching assistant.

  “Hi, boss. How’s it going?”

  “Pretty well. They’re all engaged. How are your travels?”

  “Good. Taking trains some of the time. Renting motorcycles occasionally. Meeting cool people.”

  “Cool or hot?”

  He laughed. “So far they’re cool and, well, some of them cold. But I’m having a great time anyway,” DeMeo said honestly. “Think you’ll come up with anything?”

  McCauley turned his back on his students. “I can only hope. But I’m already thinking about moving to a new area. We could use some bigger challenges.”

  “Like what?”

  “Still looking around. There are some formations down the valley that might be interesting. Remember last year in South Dakota?”

  “Oh yeah,” Pete DeMeo recalled. Careful excavation of sandstone revealed some interesting finds for the students. They weren’t worthy of a scholastic journal account, but it led to a rewarding summer program.

  “Well, that’s what I’m hoping for.”

  “Good luck, boss.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You still have my itinerary?”

  “Yup, somewhere.”

  “Well if you find it, don’t call. Oh, and did you get a text about your visitor?”

  “No, who?” McCauley asked.

  “Someone from Cambridge. The department wrote me maybe thinking I was with you.”

  “Cambridge, Massachusetts—Harvard?” McCauley asked.

  “The other Cambridge. The original one. Cambridge University. University of Cambridge. However they say it.”

  “Fuck.” McCauley knew what that meant.

  “The department invited someone on your behalf…”

  “To spy.”

  “They call it an evaluation,” DeMeo offered.

  “Same difference. Bureaucratic shit.”

  “I’m sorry. I wish I could have…”

  “It’s not you, Pete. I wish they’d just leave me alone.” McCauley swore to himself. “Well, who do I have the pleasure of babysitting and for how long?”

  “Just have a last name. Alpert. Some Brit. And at least five days.”

  “Five days too many. Starting when?”

  “What’s today?” DeMeo asked.

  “Tuesday.”

  “Tomorrow. Maybe sooner.”

  “Oh shit! I’m going to call the chair and make his vacation miserable!”

  “Wouldn’t do that. I think they held off sending word until the last minute.”

  “Intentionally.”

  “You think?” It was a sarcastic comment for certain. “Suck it up. Before you know it, it’ll be over. You’ll be fine.”

  “I won’t be fine. I’m taking off for golf this afternoon at Cottonwood with the park director. After that I promised myself a nice hot bath in town, not a soaking from the department.” McCauley was truly frustrated.

  “Like I said, suck it up and play nice.”

  “Easy for you to say. While you’re exposing yourself to every beauty in Europe, I’ll be under some bloody academic’s microscope.”

  “Be a good boy. And like I said, do me a favor, don’t call. I might get lucky yet with some French or Italian babe who wants to try on an American for size. Consider me out of cellphone range for the next month.”


  “Okay, have a good time and for God’s sake, be careful tooling around.”

  “I will. Take care, boss.”

  McCauley hung up, cursed his department and wondered whether he’d even be able to keep his mind on his golf game now.

  • • •

  London

  The same time

  Martin Gruber’s thoughts were focused on taking it slow as he walked with Colin Kavanaugh to Kensington Gardens, one of the seven Royal Parks of London.

  “Beautiful isn’t it, young man? It makes you pause and want to take in your surroundings.”

  Kavanaugh didn’t see it. Nor did he really care.

  Two different men; two different approaches to life. The old man wanting to hold onto the moment; his successor ready to race through it.

  “I know you’re wondering where we’re going,” Gruber said. “It’s up ahead.”

  He transferred a folded newspaper from his right hand to under his left arm making it easier to point to a specific park bench with his umbrella. The umbrella was a needless accessory in the cloudless sky. Nevertheless, it completed Gruber’s presentation.

  Of course, everything Gruber said or did had purpose. Kavanaugh was about to find out what today’s walk was about.

  They ended up at a park bench under a maple shade tree. Another bench backed up to theirs. Gruber rested his umbrella against the seat and marveled at the park. They had a clear view of the greenery and the Long Water that separated Kensington from Hyde Park

  “I’ve always enjoyed coming here. Do you know why?”

  “No, sir.”

  Gruber tapped Kavanaugh’s thigh in a fatherly manner. “Why this is the park where J.M. Barrie conceived Peter Pan. It was the setting of his first novel, a prelude to his Neverland stories. There’s a statue of Peter Pan over near the water. Erected in 1912. You’ve never noticed it?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “A shame. We did a story about it a few years ago. Remember?”

  “I think it was before my time, Mr. Gruber.”

  “Oh, perhaps memories are failing me,” Gruber sighed. “Do have archives pull it for you. It’s a truly wonderful article. After all, Peter Pan holds such charm. I suppose if I had had children, I would have read it to them.”

  “I’m sure you would have.”

  Gruber drifted into what seemed like another reflection. “So much to see. So very much.”

  Suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, his voice changed. It became deeper, stronger, and direct. No longer living in the past, he commanded Kavanaugh’s attention.

  “There is so much to see, and yet you must learn how to see, but not be seen yourself. How to hide in plain sight.”

  “Sir?”

  “How many people took notice of an old man walking at half speed accompanied by a younger business associate? Who noticed us?”

  “Well, nobody I think.”

  “Not completely accurate. People saw us, but took little notice. They were watching the children with the balloons. They turned to the bobby’s whistle as we crossed the street. The car horn that followed. The birds in flight. That’s what caught everyone’s attention. Not us. Not today. In fact, I’ve hardly ever been seen, though this is part of my regular routine, as it will be yours.”

  Gruber continued, “Who cares about you if you show no interest in return? You insert yourself into a habitual schedule and blend in. You become the person no one really sees. You become invisible.”

  Gruber was getting to his real point.

  “You just sit and settle in. Spread out so no one joins you. Discourage any eye contact by not having any, yet see everything.”

  Kavanaugh tried. He stayed too long on a woman pushing a stroller and a young boy watching a squirrel climb a tree.

  “Ah, it’s not so easy, is it? You’re lingering. You have to appear like you’re taking in a wide view. However, you’re actually recording every detail. It takes practice. Soon it will become natural and when that happens you are ready to do your work.”

  Gruber casually removed his pocket watch. It was 16:52 hours.

  “Like now.”

  At precisely that moment a man sat down on the bench behind them.

  “And then you wait for the proper things to be said.”

  “Peanuts?” the man said.

  Still talking only to Kavanaugh, Gruber said, “He’ll always start with a food reference. Alphabetical. A-Z. Then you start all over again. We’re up to ‘P’. Thankfully peanuts are easy. By agreement, we skip Q, X, Y and Z.

  “Your reply is always the same. ‘No thank you.’”

  The man continued. “Are you sure? They come from a great place.”

  “Now,” Gruber continued, “the second level of a security check. The correct response always is a reference to a location in the most recent issue of Voyages.”

  Gruber leaned back and said to the stranger, “Oh? Pray tell, where?”

  “A little stand in Boston’s Quincy Market.”

  “This is how we make contact. And this is where. No other acknowledgement is needed. No other confirmation. No glances. No pleasantries. You spend two more minutes. Maybe three. No more. It is the same whomever you meet. And whomever you meet will always act in the same manner. I invented a name for our contacts. My personal homage. Perhaps you’ll figure it out one day.

  “Mr. Marvin.” The man pushed back in his bench. “Meet Mr. Kavanaugh. Soon he will be your contact.”

  “I wish you an easy passing,” the man said. “Should it not be so and you require my assistance, I will take care of your needs.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Marvin. I’m prepared to let nature take its course.”

  Gruber checked his watch again. 16:54. “Two minutes. Time to go, my boy.”

  The young man rose first. He helped Gruber to his feet. Gruber recovered his umbrella and used it to point the way out, a different direction. “This is the way you will always return. Routine.”

  It wasn’t until they were out of the park that Kavanaugh realized that Gruber had left his newspaper on the park bench. When he brought it up, he learned why. It contained information from the field.

  • • •

  Glendive, MT

  Later that night

  “Dr. McCauley. Dr. McCauley.”

  He thought he heard his name in a dream. It had to be a dream because McCauley had treated himself to a night in the lap of luxury—by Glendive standards. After a few hours of friendly, but exhausting golf with Jim Kaplan, he checked into the GuestHouse Inn and Suites on North Merrill Avenue, soaked in a bathtub for the first time in months, and fell asleep on the bed only half dry. It was just as he wanted. Seclusion. No calls, no conversations. Restful sleep.

  Restful until…

  He heard a knock in his dream. Then scenes later, which amounted to barely seconds, another knock accompanied by, “Dr. Quinn McCauley?”

  He stirred, but remained asleep until a louder knock.

  “Dr. McCauley, I’m sorry to bother you, but please let me in.”

  It was a woman’s voice. He rubbed his eyes and checked the clock display on the nightstand. 11:30 P.M. “Go away. I don’t need housekeeping.”

  “It’s not housekeeping, Dr. McCauley. Open the door.”

  “I’m sleeping.”

  “No you’re not. You’re talking to me.”

  McCauley detected an accent. British and distinctly out of place in Glendive.

  “Really, go away. Whoever you are, we can talk in the morning.”

  “I think not,” came the reply.

  McCauley sat up. “And why’s that?” he asked without an ounce of courtesy.

  “Because I’m here.”

  “And I’m supposed to care?” He was now sitting upright on his bed.

  “Yes you are. We have an appointment. Dr. Alpert. Do you recall?”

  McCauley’s mind raced. “Appointment?”

  “Yes, your university cleared it. You did get word. Right?”


  Oh shit, he said to himself.

  McCauley turned on the light. “Give me a second.” He reached for his jeans and shirt, which he’d thrown over the back of a chair. “You sure this can’t wait until tomorrow. I did want to get a good night’s sleep.”

  “So I heard when I went to your base camp where I thought you’d be.”

  “Aren’t you a day early?”

  “Yes, but if you don’t open the door soon, I’ll be on time,” she said with all proper authority.

  McCauley stumbled over his golf clubs which were leaning against the foot of the bed. “Shit!” he yelled.

  “Excuse me?” the woman said.

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  He picked up the clubs, set them aside, unlatched the lock and opened the door to reveal a beautiful brunette with hazel eyes, striking dark eyebrows and a beguiling smile.

  “There, that wasn’t so difficult, was it?” she said.

  He stood quite awkwardly, three inches taller than her.

  “Two things. First, aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  “Ah, well…” He looked around at the mess in his room he’d managed to create in a short time. “Yes. And second?”

  “You might want to button your shirt and zip up.”

  In his haste, he was two buttons off and just a little bit exposed.

  “Sorry.”

  The tenured Cambridge professor breezed into the room. He caught a whiff of her perfume; a smoky fragrance that brought him fully to his senses.

  “And about the room. This is as good as it gets on my salary.” He was referring to the décor. The mess was something else entirely: computer printouts in piles, maps on the floor, and dirty shoes on the corner of the bed.

  She glanced at the only chair available and moaned. “Mind if I…?”

  “Here, I can do that.”

  It was too late. With two fingers, she gingerly removed his underpants from the only chair in the room and put them over the door knob. Next, the uninvited guest sat down as if she owned the room.