Old Earth

by Gary Grossman

  • • •

  McCauley clicked another picture and then asked for a pick. He wedged it between the wall and a section of the rock and pushed hard. It loosened an area, but not enough to dislodge any rock. He struck the pick in hard above the first spot and put his shoulder against the handle. It loosened more dirt, allowing him to wedge the end in further. With the next effort, a three-foot portion of stone fell to the ground.

  “More light!”

  Alpert brought hers closer, as did Jaffe. More nothing. More of the super black wall which absorbed all their light.

  “It’s buried behind this,” McCauley exclaimed.

  He reached further. It was smooth for inches, and then he felt an indentation in the surface. First one, then another, and even more angling downward. They all felt the same, about an inch wide and a quarter-of-an inch deep.

  “Help me clear more rock. Now!”

  Twenty-eight

  That evening

  Rich pulled the flap back on McCauley’s tent.

  “Gotta a minute, doc?”

  “Sure. Hey, how’s Anna doing?”

  “Okay. She’s not a happy camper, but she wants her computer. That’s a good sign. I keep her in the loop, which she loves.”

  “Nice going. I’ll try to stop over tomorrow,” McCauley said.

  “She’d like that.”

  “So, what’s up Rich?”

  “You’ll probably want to toss me out of the tent, but I really think you should call Robert Greene.”

  “Him again. The conspiracy nut.”

  “Yeah. We may have stepped into a secret government project or some hidden black ops facility. You said as much yourself. Or it belongs to a private corp that was testing something. Even scarier, a CDC research lab, which I hope to God it isn’t.”

  Some of the newer possibilities Tamburro raised had also occurred to McCauley. Clearly he needed help, especially if the CDC was involved. He could go to Kappy, but that didn’t seem prudent.

  “What if we do more research first?” McCauley asked.

  “To tell you the truth, I have. Not much comes up except coal mine accidents. Just call.”

  Tamburro handed McCauley a sheet with the phone number. “Mind if I stick around?”

  “I have to call now?”

  “Right now. In front of me.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  At that moment, Alpert walked into McCauley’s tent.

  “Room for another?”

  “Sure. You can witness the beginning of the end of my career.”

  “Oh?” she asked.

  Tamburro explained.

  “Just call,” Alpert implored.

  McCauley punched in the number on his cell.

  “Speaker,” Tamburro insisted.

  The professor activated the speaker function. On the fifth ring the call went to voice mail.

  “Apparently I don’t know you well enough to give you my cell, so leave your name at the beep and if, after investigating you a bit, and I’m so inclined, I’ll call you back. If you don’t hear from me, don’t bother calling again. We’ll never be talking.”

  McCauley shrugged his shoulders and thought, What an asshole!

  “So here comes the beep. Make it quick. I’m busy.”

  Not knowing how much time he had, McCauley jumped right in. “Hello, Mr. Greene. My name is Quinn McCauley. I’m a paleontologist working at a site in Montana. We, ah… .”

  Alpert gave him a speed up sign.

  “We found something…” he took a beat, “…interesting.”

  Interesting took Katrina back to her discussion with McCauley. It was a safety word.

  “And I’d like to talk to you about it confidentially.” He gave his number, said thank you and ended the message.

  “What’s the chance he’ll call back?” Alpert asked.

  “Oh, he’ll call,” Tamburro said. “The operative words were ‘interesting’ and ‘confidentially.’ Too good to ignore. He’ll call back all right.”

  • • •

  McCauley’s phone rang at an ungodly hour. He was in such a deep sleep he almost missed the call.

  “Hello,” McCauley said finally answering.

  “Is this Dr. McCauley?” the male voice replied.

  “Yes.” Quinn struggled to find his watch to check the time. 3 A.M. Jesus. “Who’s this?”

  “Robert Greene. You called me earlier.”

  “A lot earlier, Mr. Greene.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I wasn’t looking at the time.” He laughed. “Guess I’m too much of a night owl. If this isn’t good, we can talk tomorrow. But it’ll probably be way late again.”

  “No, no,” McCauley said as he gathered his thoughts. “Now’s okay.”

  “I’ve looked you up on LinkedIn, on the Yale website, and a few other places I have access to, Dr. McCauley. Read your bios and a paper you wrote on dinosaur communal behavior in the Jurassic period.”

  “Thanks. You’re probably the fifth person to get through it.”

  “Actually, I didn’t finish it. Made some of the government reports look dry. But I have to ask, anything more than theory?”

  “Just theory.”

  “Pictures would have helped.”

  “Academia. They weigh the ink.”

  “Really? Pictures tell so much more.”

  “Look, next time I’m in my time machine I’ll be sure to bring my camera.”

  “Now you’re speaking my language.”

  “I’m not really the science fiction type,” McCauley said.

  “Not even Jurassic Park?”

  “Well, of course. Got my undergraduate degree from Harvard. That’s where Crichton went.”

  “There’s hope for you yet. So what did you find that was interesting and we needed to have a confidential talk?”

  McCauley smiled. Tamburro had been absolutely correct.

  “I’m not really sure,” McCauley admitted. “Some of my colleagues recommended I get in touch with you, but quite honestly…”

  “Here I go again,” Greene interrupted. “You don’t believe I’m for real.”

  “I was trying to put it more delicately.”

  “You don’t have to. The only thing I’ll say in my own defense is I’m a researcher not a rumor monger. Like you, I look for things no one else has found. Most days there’s nothing. And then there are the times when it’s all worthwhile. I think it’s safe to say you recently had a good day, but you don’t know how to explain it.”

  Greene waited for an answer.

  “Dr. McCauley?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Am I correct?”

  There was another long pause.

  “Okay. I take it I am. That means you might want my help,” Greene said breaking the silence again.

  Quinn McCauley thought hard.

  “When?”

  Twenty-nine

  The cave

  They returned again with better tools. The more rock they cut away, the greater the mystery.

  Soon they had a fifteen foot wide portion of the smooth, sleek wall. Yet, no matter how much light they aimed, they still couldn’t see it. The smooth surface simply absorbed all the light, reflecting none back.

  “Blacker than black,” Jaffe said.

  McCauley was more interested in what he was feeling than what they couldn’t see: the indentations. The wall was riddled with them.

  He felt with his fingertips, then with the palm of his hands. “I can’t quite get it, but it feels like there’s a design to them.”

  “A design?” Alpert responded.

  “Here. Feel.” He took Dr. Alpert’s hand and blindly moved it across the wall.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just random depressions.”

  “Slide your hand down. There’s more.”

  She closed her eyes to focus her concentration.

  “Wait, Yes. They begin to spread out,” she noted.

  “Okay, let’s switch.” McCauley now
reached in and tried to get a picture in his mind’s eye. It was hard. “Damn,” he complained. “Wish I could do a rubbing. No chalk or pencil.”

  “We have dirt,” Alpert said. She scooped some and let it flow through her fingers. “And I have a few sheets paper.”

  “You’re better than a Boy Scout,” he joked.

  “I should hope so.”

  McCauley pressed the paper against the surface and rubbed dirt in, making a virtual negative of a portion of the pattern. He felt one small dimple at the top of the design. Below it, more, in a still indeterminate pattern. Soon he began counting the indentations aloud as he felt groups of the dents and visualized where they were.

  One by one, he handed the 8.5 x 11 inch papers back to Alpert. It took five pages in all.

  It didn’t look like much. Putting the rubbings in her backpack she said, “We’ll have to see this in better light.” McCauley stepped away. He was onto something.

  “Okay. Your turn again. Come back in here and close your eyes. Get a sense of the larger picture as you feel the wall. Tell me what you see,” he said to Alpert.

  Katrina started again. It took her a few tries to come to a blind observation. “A pattern, but I don’t get exactly what it is.” She began to count just as McCauley had.

  “Aloud.”

  As she counted out, McCauley wrote the numbers down.

  “I still don’t see anything,” she said.

  “Come on, Dr. Alpert. Think.”

  She started all over again. The other students watched in wonder. McCauley was seeing it come together on paper as she called out the seemingly random numbers.

  Suddenly she stopped. “A…a…pyramid.”

  • • •

  Later that afternoon, Quinn was on Expedia looking into airfares. At first, he thought he’d go it alone, but he realized he needed a counter balance. Tamburro? No. He should stay with Chohany. Jaffe? Maybe. Then he considered another possibility. He’d put Jaffe in charge of the site and ask Katrina Alpert to join him. If nothing else, in the short time that he’d known her, McCauley was impressed that she didn’t hold anything back. Worth a try.

  McCauley found her in the mess tent pouring a cup of coffee.

  “I’ve decided to take Tamburro’s recommendation.”

  She wasn’t sure what that was.

  “To go meet the conspiracy nut we heard on the radio. What do you think?”

  “Conspiracy nut?”

  “Well, it’s a label. I suppose he does some credible research. I just thought that under the circumstances…”

  “Unusual circumstances,” she replied.

  “Completely unusual.”

  “Given that, what the hell. I say go.”

  McCauley was actually surprised.

  “You do?”

  “Sure. Go. I can help here.”

  “Thank you, but I thought,” he began to fumble, “I thought that maybe I needed someone to tag along to keep me sane. You’ve been doing a good job of that since you joined up. So, I figured you should be the voice of reason. What do you say?”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Now she was surprised.

  “Where?” Alpert asked.

  “Bakersfield, California.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Well, apparently it just hasn’t made your bucket list yet. It’s north of Los Angeles by an hour or so. Pack for a few nights.”

  “Promise me no underwear on doorknobs?”

  “I’ll do better than that. Separate rooms.”

  “Oh, you got that right, mister.”

  “Then you’re up for it?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “Great, because we’ve got a plane out of Glendive at four fifty-two. First, I’m going to run into town to see if I can get the pictures printed up. We might need them.”

  Thirty

  Glendive, MT

  The teenage boy working the cash register at the CVS put the film through the processor and the finished prints into the sleeves without comment. McCauley thanked him. He didn’t look at the pictures until he returned to his SUV. There, he open up the sleeves. The electronic part of the camera, the flash, hadn’t worked. But his decision to buy the disposable cameras was still rewarded.

  • • •

  During the first leg, McCauley removed a sheet of paper from his Johnson & Murphy shoulder bag.

  “What’s this?” Dr. Alpert asked, scanning the sheet.

  “A sketch of what you felt in the cave.”

  Now, with McCauley’s handwritten scribbling, the pyramid had indeed taken shape, but with far greater impact. Not just a pyramid, but a pyramid of numbers. Very familiar numbers.

  • • •

  Bakersfield, CA

  The next day

  The introduction at the door had been cordial and quick. Greene, actually awake at mid-day, invited the two paleontologists into his home. He was in his early thirties, about two hundred pounds, five-eight, with short military length black hair, and an open moon face. This was not the look of a conspiracy theorist or whatever McCauley had imagined a conspiracy theorist to be.

  His mid-century house was another thing. It was lacking in all amenities. If there was furniture to be found, it was under boxes that lined every hallway, the living and dining rooms, and, McCauley presumed, the bedrooms and bathrooms.

  “So nice of you to come all this way,” Greene said as he led them through his maze. “You have to understand I get the weirdest calls from people all over the world. That’s why my phone message sounds the way it does.” Greene was positively apologetic. “It’s designed to discourage people. Most I don’t even answer. I mean, who would want to talk to them?”

  Greene’s stock went up in McCauley’s estimation. “I understand. We have some of the same in our world.”

  “The Lost World,” Greene declared.

  “Excuse me?” Katrina was confused.

  “The Lost World. One of the classic dinosaur movies.”

  She still didn’t get the reference.

  “Michael Rennie, you know, he played Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Claude Rains, Fernando Lamas. David Hedison. And,” he turned to McCauley, “my heart be still, a very hot and young Jill St. John.”

  McCauley nodded yes, though Greene wasn’t sure if it was because of the reference to Jill St. John or the movie. So he went on…and on.

  “1960, based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel. He also wrote Sherlock Holmes.”

  Katrina was trying to keep up, but it was difficult.

  “Explorers investigate a mysterious mountain in Venezuela. They get past the cannibals, only to have to contend with man-eating plants and then giant spiders. But it’s the dinosaurs that make it so cool. Well, not dinosaurs in any sense you know. The budget was so low that the director, Irwin Allen, used lizards instead of models or stop motion. The Lost World—you should see if sometime.”

  “Matter of fact, I have,” McCauley volunteered. “And the 1920s original. The effects are actually better. And there’s Lost Continent from the ’50s, but that’s not even worth talking about.”

  “Well, I guess I’ve met my match. Sorry. Sometimes I get wound up pretty tightly.”

  Quinn McCauley smiled. He just bonded with Robert Greene and they hadn’t even gotten to the reason for the visit. “Not a problem.”

  “How about coffee?”

  “Sure,” McCauley replied.

  “Tea?” Alpert asked.

  “Got both.” He led them through the obstacle course he called home on the way to the kitchen. While the water was heating, they chatted about more dinosaur films. With their drinks in hand, Greene took them into his office which contained three computers and blacked out windows.

  “Welcome to World Headquarters. Doesn’t look like much.”

  Alpert agreed. “Definitely not.”

  Greene laughed. “Doesn’t need to. The picture I use on my website is a fake created i
n photoshop. It’s my dream office.”

  “I thought you’re all about the truth?”

  “Oh, I am, Dr. McCauley. Read the small print. It’s just below the photo. A disclaimer with the warning, even pictures lie.”

  “Very cool,” McCauley said.

  Katrina kicked him.

  “What’s that for?”

  “I thought you wanted me to be your reality check.”

  “Ah, good cop, bad cop?” Greene said picking up on the exchange.

  “Simply trying to keep skepticism in tow,” she added.

  “Well, if it’s any consolation,” Greene continued, “that’s what I’m all about. Information is king. That’s what I request from the government. That’s what I deliver online. No speculation. Documents, records, transcripts. All facts, or at the very least, what isn’t blacked out on the way for public consumption. Once in hand, I give it the contextual wrapping. Then, I plug it into appropriate webisodes, video links, podcasts I’ve appeared on, and my Internet radio show. Impressive, huh?”

  McCauley had to agree. “Before I talked with you I thought it was primarily going to be paranormal stuff. But hell, when I looked at your site, you’ve got more on Iraq, Vietnam, and Voting Rights issues than UFOs and ghosts.”

  “Thank you, Dr. McCauley. I take that as high praise. You’re not quite accurate on the balance, but I’ll accept the compliment. Now to your questions. I need a little more than what you gave me on the phone. Bullet points will do for a start. Actually, depending upon whether the government is involved, less is even best. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  McCauley looked for a place where they could settle. Greene removed two storage boxes from a couch opposite his desk. He stacked them higher atop others. “Sit, sit. What can you tell me?”

  “In general terms, we’re camped at one of Montana’s richest dinosaur locations. But after nearly halfway through our time, our work wasn’t leading to anything out of the ordinary. Not that it necessarily ever does. But I don’t want my students to get too bored, especially early on. So I checked out a valley with a deeper geological footprint by a few million years. Before moving everyone down, I spotted something up a cliff.”