London, England
51.5N 0.1W
Altitude: 50ft
Geology: River valley, clay and fluvial deposits
‘Do you have consent to take Mo out of school?’
Alim politely explained the urgency of the situation, only to be told that an ongoing astronomical event did not fit any of the Department for Education’s criteria for school absences.
He countered, ‘What about “act of God”, you know, force majeure?’
The receptionist was now very confused. Force Majeure was her favourite indie band. ‘I’m afraid we don’t recognise God at this school – it’s multifaith!’ she finally replied with a bureaucratic air.
Alim demanded to see the headteacher. While he waited, a couple of children cheerfully scuttled past on an errand. He met their curious looks with a half-smile, then turned to see the office door reopen and both the receptionist and the headteacher appear.
Gayle Windlass was a no-nonsense teacher with a passion for the arts and history. She knew Alim of old, as she had once collared him to assist at ‘a night with the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum’ for Mo’s year.
Gayle grasped his hand. ‘Mr Azim! How delightful to see you. We’ve missed your fascinating talks. Did you see the news? The children watched it in the hall. We are lucky not to be fried chicken, to be sure!’
Alim gestured to the office window. ‘Drowned ducks more like. Haven’t they warned you? The Thames Barrier is only designed for tidal surges, not full-blown tsunamis! I need to take Mo away now!’
As he explained his fears, Gayle Windlass assessed the situation, looking Alim up and down. He was normally a dapper man, but seeing his sweaty shirt, soggy trousers and agitated air, she realised the veteran scientist had to be serious.
‘You can’t just take Mo. What about the other children? We have to evacuate them as well. How long have we got and where can we go?’
Alim had heard that a tsunami could travel up to 500mph over open ocean. He looked at his watch.
‘No more than an hour and anywhere that’s a few storeys high or can float!’
One of Gayle’s gifts was delegation and the ability to co-opt help. Alim was now very much on board.
Mo was sitting in the main hall with his classmates, all assembled to watch the big event on the widescreen TV. The teaching staff were now calming the children, still stunned from the shockwave.
The screen was showing large waves hitting the north coast of Scotland and warnings to evacuate low-lying areas. Then Gayle Windlass swept in with Alim shuffling behind her, as if on an invisible lead. Taking up the rear were the receptionist and several teachers.
Gayle had decided on a plan of action. She knew they had to move fast, but without panicking the children. Her receptionist hyperventilated, as school protocol was about to be broken on numerous fronts.
Miss Windlass spoke with calm authority. Even Alim kept quiet and still, although his eyes were searching for his boy in the mass of children.
‘We are all going on a school trip, to celebrate the joys of our own neighbourhood. It can sometimes take something big to make us appreciate what we have at our own feet.
‘Years 1 and 6 will go to the Tower of London, years 2 and 5 will visit Tower Bridge, and years 3 and 4, HMS Belfast.’
Alim worried as the children prepared to file out of the hall in pairs. ‘This is taking too long!’
Behind them, the TV screened pictures of high tides of increasing ferocity hitting the east coast of Northumberland, and the shallower waters of the North Sea.
He wished he had hightailed it with Mo back to the Shard, but at least these destinations were high enough and would ride out the flood.
The receptionist was in a complete tizz. What would Ofsted say? The children leaving school without parental permission forms?
At last Alim and the remaining staff were able to leave the hall. Mo was proud yet embarrassed to see his father in the role of Pied Piper, leading a crocodile of children through the back streets towards St Katharine Docks.
He had felt the reassurance of his father’s hand briefly on his shoulder as Alim passed along the children. ‘That’s my dad!’ he whispered to his friend.
‘He looks like a clown!’ was the unkind reply.
On they went, Alim following the news on his smartphone to track the course of the wave. The lines of children passed through the cobbled streets. Unaware of the danger, the kids chattered happily; this was one exciting day! A morning in the hall watching TV, followed by a trip!
Alim was really worried now. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief, anxious about the time that they had left and the height they had to reach to get to safety.
At last they reached Tower Bridge. As the 60 or so children started to ascend the stone steps, a siren went off in the distance and the air was suddenly full of the wailing of police cars.
It felt like an age before the last children reached the higher ground of the bridge itself.
The teaching staff were arguing about admission prices at the exhibition’s entrance. Rushing forward, he almost screamed at the person behind the desk, ‘Can’t you hear those damned sirens? This is an emergency! Just get the kids upstairs.’
As he got to the back of the column, he was able to talk to Mo. ‘Don’t worry, my boy, we’ll soon be out of danger.’
Mo looked confused. Danger? This was supposed to be a trip. There was something strange going on: all around them flocks of seagulls and pigeons were wheeling around, as if sensing the force of nature that was about to arrive.
By now most of the children were in the foyer and climbing the internal stairs. Suddenly a distant rumble grew, and as Alim strained to look east up the river, he saw a high line of water bearing down and realised to his horror that it looked taller than the bridge roadway. The queue of children was still moving too slowly. He was frozen with fear and indecision.
Staring at the foaming wall of water, he decided they would be safer out in the open. Quickly gathering the last dozen children, he yelled frantically, ‘Into the centre and hold hands!’
The children ran. Seeing the oncoming wave, they needed no urging to flee. As they reached the centre of the bridge, Alim ordered them to grasp the railings and brace themselves. The wave, which bounced off each row of warehouses, was now one great roller, green at the bottom and foaming at the top.
Mo could see objects in the depth of the wave – branches, plastic chairs, traffic cones and a swirl of all the rubbish discarded along the Thames margins. The little height they had gained by reaching the centre of the bridge was of no use. Alim picked up Mo and held him tight as two other children clung onto his trouser legs. Selfishly he regretted helping the school. Looking into Mo’s eyes, he wished they had sped off together to safety an hour ago. Mo’s look of trust was heartbreaking. ‘At least we’re together,’ Alim thought, as the wave bore down on them.
Tower Bridge
They crouched and averted their eyes from the inevitable. In the darkness of their terror and as the spray and mayhem hit them, they suddenly felt lifted. It was as if a mysterious force were buoying them up, above the boiling waters. Their fingers gripped harder as their feet started slipping. The roadway appeared to be moving beneath their feet. Sirens were ringing in their ears and a recorded voice warned pedestrians to stay behind the barriers.
Daring to open his eyes, Alim could see from the angled roadway that the bridge was opening! The little gap in the middle of the bridge had now become a chasm – the wonders of Victorian technology had come to their rescue. The great bascules were lifting as if to salute the oncoming tsunami. The children clung for their lives to the mesh on the cast-iron balustrades, as the maelstrom rushed beneath, drenching them with foaming spray.
The wave passed them in seconds and then there they were, hanging onto the sloping roadway like a string of drowned rats. Each of the children’s faces turned to Alim with unexpected grins. Alim, who had started the day inconvenienced by a
mild shower, was now soaked to the skin. He wiped the water from his eyes as he turned and watched the crest of the wave flow upstream and lift HMS Belfast off its moorings, pitching its stern up. As it dropped, he heard the crowd of whooping children on its upper deck. For them, the thrills and scares of previous trips to Thorpe Park now paled into insignificance.
Ed Goodheart, bridge master, waved at the sodden survivors through his window. Gone were the times when the bridge would open up to 130 times per day. However, today he had his one opportunity to open it on demand. Seeing the plight of the stranded children, he had taken the only action he could and pulled the levers, setting the great bascules into action. Alim looked up to heaven and thanked his god.
Far beyond the spot where Alim fixed his gaze was another world.
Fifty million miles away on Mars lies the dry bed of a far more ancient river than the Thames and there, with its wheels firmly planted in those dry gravels, the rover worked a marvel of 21st-century engineering.
The sparse clouds above it were wispy and white, set against the orange glow of a tenuous atmosphere. Around it were the shapes of rounded hills and shallow valleys. Within this landscape of shifting sands and static boulders were outcrops of stratified rocks and sedimentary beds. A dull twilight lit the iron-red and mineral-green hues of this alien terrain, and all was silent.
Not even the rover, working steadily at a task it was not designed for, could be heard, because the air was too thin and there was no one and nothing to hear it. Nothing moved here apart from the odd dust devil and the rover itself, gamely trying to split apart layers of shale with its arm. It was like making a cake wearing boxing gloves. Two taps of a geologist’s hammer would have made short work of it, but no one had expected the rover’s discovery and it was now following improvised orders from its programmers on Earth. These masters were desperately trying to reset the rover’s software to allow it to act more autonomously, because the 20-minute delay in communication made direct operation impossible, and Oddity Rover, for all its sophisticated equipment, couldn’t work ‘outside of the box’.
Rover
Despite its perky animalistic demeanour (spidery legs, twin camera eyes and robot arms), the rover was no closer to an animal than a vacuum cleaner that had sucked up a laptop. It could compute, but it couldn’t think; it could capture images, but it couldn’t see. It could measure the temperature, but it couldn’t feel the cold and it was oblivious to its own successes and failures. Back on Earth, Patrick Marshall and Dolores Tallon were slowly going crazy with the frustration of it all.
‘The problem is, Dr Tallon, it’s just not designed to do this!’
‘Patrick, this is incredibly important. There must be a way.’
But, for all his skills at programming, not even Patrick could instil a positive mental attitude in a machine!
Two days later Alim’s feet were wet again, only this time it was voluntary – fetching a cricket ball from the cold English Channel. The first five balls of the over had left him sprawling and chasing balls or just watching their slow, graceful arch into the welcoming waves. His fatherly admiration of Mo’s batting skills had now given way to an overwhelming desire to mend his dented pride.
A flat stretch of hard, wet sand made a perfect strip. Since they had last played cricket on the beach, Mo had gained a hand-eye co-ordination that had surprised and almost pleased his father. Alim trudged back to the spot where the neat lines in the sand marked the bowler’s crease. Turning round, he viewed the spot approximately 3 feet and marginally to the leg side of the expectant Mo. His fingers felt for the seam and he carefully tossed the ball with a flick of the wrist. He imagined himself as a young man again, white-clad with green turf between his feet, imaginary fielders waiting, spectators expectant. With deep concentration he began his short run. His leading arm traced the flight and his right followed with hand twisted to unleash the wrist spin on the ball at the apex of its arc. He knew he still had it! The ball left the hand perfectly, flighted and dipped. Mo needed just the one to win. Mesmerised by the trajectory, he decided to push a single to clinch the game.
The bouncing ball gripped on the crust of the drying sand, and turned and looped over the shoulder of the proffered bat and took the imaginary off-bail from the slab of mudstone wicket. Arms aloft, Alim cried, ‘Ball of the century! Game tied!’
Mo stared in disbelief. Then, as his eyes drifted past his exuberant father to the far crease, he broke out in the widest of smiles. ‘No ball, game won!’
‘What! How can you tell that?’ exclaimed Alim.
Pointing his bat at a fresh impression of the last run-up, where the heel was obviously outside the crease, Mo explained, ‘Footprints in the sand, Daddy!’
They had not come to the red cliffs and sweeping beaches of the Jurassic Coast to play cricket. Whenever he could, Alim took Mo with him on his fossil expeditions. The wash of the tidal wave that had nearly drowned them in London had exposed more fresh rock than usual, and today there were rich pickings. Fossil-hunting helped them bond and Alim proudly observed that Mo had a natural gift for it. He studied and soaked in every word and image he could on the subject. Mo had three languages – Bengali, English and Latin. Two he could speak fluently, and one he used to name ancient animals.
Alim had his fossil-hunter’s tool kit with him today. With his bag on his shoulder and the cricket bat over Mo’s, looking like the Walrus and the Carpenter, they marched down the sandy beach, its drifts of pebbles leading towards a long line of dark cliffs.
Jurassic Coast
Alim’s thoughts returned to the events of the past two days. A carpet of foam intermittently lapped over his toes and the rolling pebbles dashed to the beat of the incoming crests. It washed away the angst and adrenaline he had been carrying from the drama on the bridge. He knew now that events were far beyond his control, and some greater purpose had to be behind their extraordinary reprieve.
Mo, able to feel his father’s mind wandering off by the relaxation of his hand, slipped his grip and, grabbing the bag from his father, set across the littoral margin, kicking mermaid’s breath and knotted seaweed. The triumph of the cricket game was already in the past and now his head was brimming with the joy of the beach and the treasure hidden in the rocks ahead. Nothing could compel his attention more than a new sea-cliff scar and the jumbled pile of dislocated strata blocking his path.
Skidding to a halt in mock-dramatic pose, Mo dropped to his knees and allowed the bag to slip off his shoulder and roll out open in front of him. The beach had gone, the waves had gone – all he could think about now were the nuggets trapped in the rocks. The soft-layered, not-quite-hardened grey, green, brown, dirty stone was familiar and he set about picking out the most promising samples. The frantic little boy was transformed into a methodical, meticulous fossil-hunting machine.
Grains of Sand and Stars
It has been estimated that there are ten times as many stars in the universe as grains of sands in all the beaches and deserts on Earth.
He set aside half a dozen likely pieces. From past experience he knew one in six might reveal a prize. Looking for a slightly widened seam, he tapped each rock – just so. On the fourth one, the seam opened to reveal two mirrored plates housing a positive and negative impression of a small pyritised ammonite. He liked these – the iron mineral deposits could be polished to look like gold; it really was like a nugget. Although the next sample was disappointing, he still felt a keen sense of anticipation as he had kept the largest, most promising rock till last. This was bigger than the rest and his intuition told him it would be a good one.
Horned Trilobite
By this time his father had caught up and was now watching him, savouring the joy of youth and sense of freedom to be found where the sea meets the land. It took Mo four taps to find the divide. As the rock split open, he cried, ‘Horned trilobite!’ and the little animal, locked in the rocks for 450 million years, saw the light of day again – if its little stalk-like eyes had been a
ble to see.
With a massive grin Mo studied the segmented body and spiny head. Above the cackle of the passing seagulls he heard his father. ‘Class, genus, period?’
‘Trilobite, Cyphaspis, Devonian,’ responded Mo.
The Devonian
A geologic period and system of the Paleozoic Era spanning from the end of the Silurian Period, about 420 million years ago, to the beginning of the Carboniferous Period, about 359 million years ago. It is named after Devon, England, where rocks from this period were first studied.
‘Very good,’ replied Alim, as he distractedly surveyed the jumble of fresh rocks, recently freed from the cliff face. Mo watched his father mentally gauging the ages of the strata laid out before them.
The older rocks were nearer the cliff and the younger ones towards the sea. Mo’s two finds had immediately calibrated them in Alim’s mind. Leaping forward 200 million years, his father indicated to him where to search next. Major storms, or in this case tidal waves, always brought their rewards to the palaeontologist.
Putting the samples in his bag for later study, Mo moved to pastures new.
Waiting for new instructions, he heard his father muttering a small ditty to himself:
‘She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore.
The shells she sells are sea-shells, I’m sure.
For if she sells sea-shells on the sea-shore,
Then I’m sure she sells sea-shore shells.’
Mo looked quizzical.
‘Oh, it’s a tongue twister from my old school days. We did it in geology,’ Alim explained. ‘It’s about Mary Anning, one of my heroes. She walked these shores 200 years ago, just like we’re doing, and found the most amazing creatures. Shame about her poor dog, though!’
‘What happened?’ asked Mo.
‘A landslip, like this one. It nearly got her as well! But guess what she found?’
Mo paused to think. ‘A dead dog?’
‘Yes, but no. Do you remember the plesiosaur and the ichthyosaur from the Natural History Museum?’
The Other Things Page 3