Timeline

by Michael Crichton

  “Well,” Stern was saying, “you’ll have to scan your document at a fairly high resolution, and send it to us. Do you have a scanner there?”

  Hastily, Chris rummaged through the equipment on the field table, looking for a spare radio. He didn’t see one; all the charger boxes were empty.

  “The police department doesn’t have a scanner?” Stern was saying, surprised. “Oh, you’re not at the—well, why don’t you go there and use the police scanner?”

  Chris tapped Stern on the shoulder. He mouthed, Radio.

  Stern nodded and unclipped his own radio from his belt. “Well yes, the hospital scanner would be fine. Maybe they will have someone who can help you. We need twelve-eighty by ten-twenty-four, saved as a JPEG file. Then you transmit that to us. . ..”

  Chris ran outside, flicking through the channels on the radio as he went.

  From the storehouse door, he could look down over the entire site. He saw Johnston and Kramer walking along the edge of the plateau overlooking the monastery. She had a notebook open and was showing him something on paper.

  And then he found them on channel eight.

  “—ignificant acceleration in the pace of research,” she was saying.

  And the Professor said, “What?”

  :

  Professor Johnston looked over his wire-frame spectacles at the woman standing before him. “That’s impossible,” he said.

  She took a deep breath. “Perhaps I haven’t explained it very well. You are already doing some reconstruction. What Bob would like to do,” she said, “is to enlarge that to be a full program of reconstruction.”

  “Yes. And that’s impossible.”

  “Tell me why.”

  “Because we don’t know enough, that’s why,” Johnston said angrily. “Look: the only reconstruction we’ve done so far has been for safety. We’ve rebuilt walls so they don’t fall on our researchers. But we’re not ready to actually begin rebuilding the site itself.”

  “But surely a part,” she said. “I mean, look at the monastery over there. You could certainly rebuild the church, and the cloister beside it, and the refectory, and—”

  “What?” Johnston said. “The refectory?” The refectory was the dining room where the monks took their meals. Johnston pointed down at the site, where low walls and crisscrossing trenches made a confusing pattern. “Who said the refectory was next to the cloister?”

  “Well, I—”

  “You see? This is exactly my point,” Johnston said. “We still aren’t sure where the refectory is yet. It’s only just recently that we’ve started to think it might be next to the cloister, but we aren’t sure.”

  She said irritably, “Professor, academic study can go on indefinitely, but in the real world of results—”

  “I’m all for results,” Johnston said. “But the whole point of a dig like this is that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. A hundred years ago, an architect named Viollet-le-Duc rebuilt monuments all over France. Some he did well. But when he didn’t have enough information, he just made it up. The buildings were just his fantasy.”

  “I understand you want to be accurate—”

  “If I knew ITC wanted Disneyland, I’d never have agreed.”

  “We don’t want Disneyland.”

  “If you rebuild now, that’s what you’ll get, Ms. Kramer. You’ll get a fantasy. Medieval Land.”

  “No,” she said. “I can assure you in the strongest possible terms. We do not want a fantasy. We want an historically accurate reconstruction of the site.”

  “But it can’t be done.”

  “We believe it can.”

  “How?”

  “With all due respect, Professor, you’re being overcautious. You know more than you think you do. For example, the town of Castelgard, beneath the castle itself. That could certainly be rebuilt.”

  “I suppose . . . Part of it could, yes.”

  “And that’s all we’re asking. Just to rebuild a part.”

  :

  David Stern wandered out of the storehouse, to find Chris listening with the radio pressed to his ear. “Eavesdropping, Chris?”

  “Shhh,” Chris said. “This is important.”

  Stern shrugged his shoulders. He always felt a little detached from the enthusiasms of the graduate students around him. The others were historians, but Stern was trained as a physicist, and he tended to see things differently. He just couldn’t get very excited about finding another medieval hearth, or a few bones from a burial site. In any case, Stern had only taken this job—which required him to run the electronic equipment, do various chemical analyses, carbon dating, and so on—to be near his girlfriend, who was attending summer school in Toulouse. He had been intrigued by the idea of quantum dating, but so far the equipment had failed to work.

  On the radio, Kramer was saying, “And if you rebuild part of the town, then you could also rebuild part of the outer castle wall, where it is adjacent to the town. That section there.” She was pointing to a low, ragged wall running north–south across the site.

  The Professor said, “Well, I suppose we could. . ..”

  “And,” Kramer continued, “you could extend the wall to the south, where it goes into the woods over there. You could clear the woods, and rebuild the tower.”

  Stern and Chris looked at each other.

  “What’s she talking about?” Stern said. “What tower?”

  “Nobody’s even surveyed the woods yet,” Chris said. “We were going to clear it at the end of the summer, and then have it surveyed in the fall.”

  Over the radio, they heard the Professor say, “Your proposal is very interesting, Ms. Kramer. Let me discuss it with the others, and we’ll meet again at lunch.”

  And then in the field below, Chris saw the Professor turn, look directly at them, and point a stabbing finger toward the woods.

  :

  Leaving the open field of ruins behind, they climbed a green embankment, and entered the woods. The trees were slender, but they grew close together, and beneath their canopy it was dark and cool. Chris Hughes followed the old outer castle wall as it diminished progressively from a waist-high wall to a low outcrop of stones, and then finally to nothing, disappearing beneath the underbrush.

  From then on, he had to bend over, pushing aside the ferns and small plants with his hands in order to see the path of the wall.

  The woods grew thicker around them. He felt a sense of peace here. He remembered that when he had first seen Castelgard, nearly the entire site had been within forest like this. The few standing walls were covered in moss and lichen, and seemed to emerge from the earth like organic forms. There had been a mystery to the site back then. But that had been lost once they cleared the land and began excavations.

  Stern trailed along behind him. Stern didn’t get out of the lab much, and he seemed to be enjoying it. “Why are all the trees so small?” he said.

  “Because it’s a new forest,” Chris said. “Nearly all the forests in the Périgord are less than a hundred years old. All this land used to be cleared, for vineyards.”

  “And?”

  Chris shrugged. “Disease. That blight, phylloxera, killed all the vines around the turn of the century. And the forest grew back.” And he added, “The French wine industry almost vanished. They were saved by importing vines that were phylloxera-resistant, from California. Something they’d rather forget.”

  As he talked, he continued looking at the ground, finding a piece of stone here and there, just enough to enable him to follow the line of the old wall.

  But suddenly, the wall was gone. He’d lost it entirely. Now he would have to double back, pick it up again.

  “Damn.”

  “What?” Stern said.

  “I can’t find the wall. It was running right this way”—he pointed with the flat of his hand—”and now it’s gone.”

  They were standing in an area of particularly thick undergrowth, high ferns intermixed with some kind of thorny vi
ne that scratched at his bare legs. Stern was wearing trousers, and he walked forward, saying, “I don’t know, Chris, it’s got to be around here. . ..”

  Chris knew he had to double back. He had just turned to retrace his steps when he heard Stern yell.

  Chris looked back.

  Stern was gone. Vanished.

  Chris was standing alone in the woods.

  :

  “David?”

  A groan. “Ah . . . damn.”

  “What happened?”

  “I banged my knee. It hurts like a mother.”

  Chris couldn’t see him anywhere. “Where are you?”

  “In a hole,” Stern said. “I fell. Be careful, if you come this way. In fact . . .” A grunt. Swearing. “Don’t bother. I can stand. I’m okay. In fact—hey.”

  “What?”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just wait, okay?”

  Chris saw the underbrush move, the ferns shifting back and forth, as Stern headed to the left. Then Stern spoke. His voice sounded odd. “Uh, Chris?”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a section of wall. Curved.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I think I’m standing at the bottom of what was once a round tower, Chris.”

  “No kidding,” Chris said. He thought, How did Kramer know about that?

  :

  “Check the computer,” the Professor said. “See if we have any helicopter survey scans—infrared or radar—that show a tower. It may already be recorded, and we just never paid attention to it.”

  “Late-afternoon infrared is your best bet,” Stern said. He was sitting in a chair with an ice pack on his knee.

  “Why late afternoon?”

  “Because this limestone holds heat. That’s why the cavemen liked it so much here. Even in winter, a cave in Périgord limestone was ten degrees warmer than the outside temperature.”

  “So in the afternoon . . .”

  “The wall holds heat as the forest cools. And it’ll show up on infrared.”

  “Even buried?”

  Stern shrugged.

  Chris sat at the computer console, started hitting keys. The computer made a soft beep. The image switched abruptly.

  “Oops. We’re in e-mail.”

  Chris clicked on the mailbox. There was just one message, and it took a long time to download. “What’s this?”

  “I bet it’s that guy Wauneka,” Stern said. “I told him to send a pretty big graphic. He probably didn’t compress it.”

  Then the image popped up on the screen: a series of dots arranged in a geometric pattern. They all recognized it at once. It was unquestionably the Monastery of Sainte-Mère. Their own site.

  In greater detail than their own survey.

  Johnston peered at the image. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “It’s odd,” he said finally, “that Bellin and Kramer would both just happen to show up here on the same day.”

  The graduate students looked at each other. “What’s odd about it?” Chris said.

  “Bellin didn’t ask to meet her. And he always wants to meet sources of funding.”

  Chris shrugged. “He seemed very busy.”

  “Yes. That’s the way he seemed.” He turned to Stern. “Anyway, print that out,” he said. “We’ll see what our architect has to say.”

  :

  Katherine Erickson—ash-blond, blue-eyed, and darkly tanned—hung fifty feet in the air, her face just inches below the broken Gothic ceiling of the Castelgard chapel. She lay on her back in a harness and calmly jotted down notes about the construction above her.

  Erickson was the newest graduate student on the site, having joined the project just a few months before. Originally, she had gone to Yale to study architecture, but found she disliked her chosen field, and transferred to the history department. There, Johnston had sought her out, convincing her to join him the way he had convinced all the others: “Why don’t you put aside these old books and do some real history? Some hands-on history?”

  So, hands-on it was—hanging way up here. Not that she minded: Kate had grown up in Colorado and was an avid climber. She spent every Sunday climbing the rock cliffs all around the Dordogne. There was rarely anyone else around, which was great: at home, you had to wait in line for the good pitches.

  Using her pick, she chipped off a few flakes of mortar from different areas to take back for spectroscopic analysis. She dropped each into one of the rows of plastic containers, like film containers, that she wore over her shoulders and across her chest like a bandolier.

  She was labeling the containers when she heard a voice say, “How do you get down from there? I want to show you something.”

  She glanced over her shoulder, saw Johnston on the floor below. “Easy,” she said. Kate released her lines and slid smoothly to the ground, landing lightly. She brushed strands of blond hair back from her face. Kate Erickson was not a pretty girl—as her mother, a homecoming queen at UC, had so often told her—but she had a fresh, all-American quality that men found attractive.

  “I think you’d climb anything,” Johnston said.

  She unclipped from the harness. “It’s the only way to get this data.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Seriously,” she said. “If you want an architectural history of this chapel, then I have to get up there and take mortar samples. Because that ceiling’s been rebuilt many times—either because it was badly made and kept falling in, or because it was broken in warfare, from siege engines.”

  “Surely sieges,” Johnston said.

  “Well, I’m not so sure,” Kate said. “The main castle structures—the great hall, the inner apartments—are solid, but several of the walls aren’t well constructed. In some cases, it looks like walls were added to make secret passages. This castle’s got several. There’s even one that goes to the kitchen! Whoever made those changes must have been pretty paranoid. And maybe they did it too quickly.” She wiped her hands on her shorts. “So. What’ve you got to show me?”

  Johnston handed her a sheet of paper. It was a computer printout, a series of dots arranged in a regular, geometric pattern. “What’s this?” she said.

  “You tell me.”

  “It looks like Sainte-Mère.”

  “Is it?”

  “I’d say so, yes. But the thing is . . .”

  She walked out of the chapel, and looked down on the monastery excavation, about a mile away in the flats below. It was spread out almost as clearly as the drawing she held in her hand.

  “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “There’s features on this drawing that we haven’t uncovered yet,” she said. “An apsidal chapel appended to the church, a second cloister in the northeast quadrant, and . . . this looks like a garden, inside the walls. . .. Where’d you get this picture, anyway?”

  :

  The restaurant in Marqueyssac stood on the edge of a plateau, with a view over the entire Dordogne valley. Kramer looked up from her table and was surprised to see the Professor arriving with both Marek and Chris. She frowned. She had expected to have a private lunch. She was at a table for two.

  They all sat down together, Marek bringing two chairs from the next table. The Professor leaned forward and looked at her intently.

  “Ms. Kramer,” the Professor said, “how did you know where the refectory is?”

  “The refectory?” She shrugged. “Well, I don’t know. Wasn’t it in the weekly progress report? No? Then maybe Dr. Marek mentioned it to me.” She looked at the solemn faces staring at her. “Gentlemen, monasteries aren’t exactly my specialty. I must have heard it somewhere.”

  “And the tower in the woods?”

  “It must be in one of the surveys. Or the old photographs.”

  “We checked. It’s not.”

  The Professor slid the drawing across the table to her. “And why does an ITC employee named Joseph Traub have a drawing of the monastery that is
more complete than our own?”

  “I don’t know. . .. Where did you get this?”

  “From a policeman in Gallup, New Mexico, who is asking some of the same questions I am.”

  She said nothing. She just stared at him.

  “Ms. Kramer,” he said finally. “I think you’re holding out on us. I think you have been doing your own analysis behind our backs, and not sharing what you’ve found. And I think the reason is that you and Bellin have been negotiating to exploit the site in the event that I’m not cooperative. And the French government would be only too happy to throw Americans off their heritage site.”

  “Professor, that is absolutely not true. I can assure you—”

  “No, Ms. Kramer. You can’t.” He looked at his watch. “What time does your plane go back to ITC?”

  “Three o’clock.”

  “I’m ready to leave now.”

  He pushed his chair away from the table.

  “But I’m going to New York.”

  “Then I think you’d better change your plans and go to New Mexico.”

  “You’ll want to see Bob Doniger, and I don’t know his schedule. . ..”

  “Ms. Kramer.” He leaned across the table. “Fix it.”

  :

  As the Professor left, Marek said, “I pray God look with favor upon your journey and deliver you safe back.” That was what he always said to departing friends. It had been a favorite phrase of the Count Geoffrey de la Tour, six hundred years before.

  Some thought Marek carried his fascination with the past to the point of obsession. But in fact it was natural to him: even as a child, Marek had been strongly drawn to the medieval period, and in many ways he now seemed to inhabit it. In a restaurant, he once told a friend he would not grow a beard because it was not fashionable at the time. Astonished, the friend protested, “Of course it’s fashionable, just look at all the beards around you.” To which Marek replied, “No, no, I mean it is not fashionable in my time.” By which he meant the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

  Many medieval scholars could read old languages, but Marek could speak them: Middle English, Old French, Occitan, and Latin. He was expert in the fine points of period dress and manners. And with his size and athletic prowess, he set out to master the martial skills of the period. After all, he said, it was a time of perpetual war. Already he could ride the huge Percherons that had been used as destriers, or warhorses. And he was reasonably skilled at jousting, having spent hours practicing with the spinning tournament dummy called the quintain. Marek was so good with a longbow that he had begun to teach the skill to the others. And now he was learning to fight with a broadsword.