“If you say so.” James Wollaston was humoring her, knowing she had been under terrible stress for months. It was close to midnight, and they had spent the last hour collecting Colin Trantham’s pictures, pulling them from medical records and apartment and studio. Julia would not tell him what game she was playing, but he could see that to her it was far more than a game. He started carefully through the heap; pen and ink drawings, charcoal sketches, oils and acrylics and pencils.
“Well?” Julia was too impatient to wait for him to finish. She was staring at him expectantly although he was on only the tenth picture.
“Did he always draw nothing but nature scenes?” said Wollaston. “Just plants and animals?” He was staring at sheet after sheet.
“Mostly. Colin is a top biological illustrator. Why?”
“You insist he drew from life, from what he had seen. But in these pictures that doesn’t seem to be true.”
“Why not?” Julia pounced on him with the question.
“Well, I recognize the first drawings, and they’re terrific. But this—” he held out the board he was examining “—it looks wrong.”
“It’s not wrong. That’s a member of Castoroidinae—a rodent, a sort of beaver. Keep going. What’s that one?”
“Damned if I know. Like a cross between a horse and a dog—as though Colin started by drawing a horse’s head, then when he got to the body and legs he changed his mind.”
“You were right about the horse. That’s Hyracotherium. To the life. Keep going.”
But Wollaston had paused. “Are you sure? It looks strange to me, and I have a pretty good grounding in comparative anatomy.”
“I’m sure you do.” Julia took a painting from the stack. They were less than halfway through the heap. Her hands were trembling. “Current anatomy, Jim. But I specialize in paleoanatomy. Colin has been drawing real plants and animals. The only thing is, some of them are extinct. The Castoroidinae were giant beavers, big as a bear. They were around during the Pleistocene. Hyracotherium’s a forerunner of the horse;, it flourished during the Lower Eocene, forty or fifty million years ago. These pictures are consistent with our best understanding of their anatomy based on the fossil record.”
She was shaking, but Wollaston did not share her excitement. “I’ll take your word for it, Julia. But I want to point out that none of this is too surprising, given your own interests and the work you do.”
“That’s not true!” Julia fumbled out a cigarette, lit it, and inhaled hard enough to shrivel the bottom of her lungs. “It’s more than surprising, it’s astonishing. I told you the first time we had a drink together, what I do bores Colin stiff. He doesn’t know beans about it and he doesn’t care. There’s no way he got these drawings from me. And do you realize that these pictures are in reverse chronological order? Fossil dating is a tricky business, I’m the first to admit that; but in this set, the more recently Colin did them, the older the forms represented.”
“What are you saying, Julia?” The concern in Wollaston’s voice was for sister more than brother. “If you’re suggesting…what it sounds like you’re suggesting, then it’s nonsense. And there’s a perfectly rational explanation.”
“Like what?”
He reached forward, removed the cigarette from her fingers, and stubbed it out. “Julia, the longer you study the human brain, the more astonishing it seems. You say that what you do bores Colin. Probably true. But do you think that means he didn’t even hear you, when you talked and talked paleontology all these years? Do you think he never picked up one of your books? They’re scattered all over the apartment, I’ve seen them there myself. It’s no wonder you recognize what Colin has been painting—because you put all those ideas into his head yourself.”
“I didn’t, Jim. I know I didn’t. And here’s why.” She was turning the stack, moving down toward the bottom. “Now we’re beyond the K-T barrier—the time of the late Cretaceous extinction. See this?”
The painting was in subdued oils, browns and ochers and dark greens, crowded with detail. The viewpoint was low to the ground, peering up through a screen of ferns. In the clearing beyond the leafy cover crouched three scaly animals, staring at a group of four others advancing from the left. The sun was low, casting long shadows to the right, and there was a hint of morning ground mist still present to soften outlines.
“Saurischians. Coelurosaurs, I’d say, and not very big ones.” Julia pointed to the three animals in the foreground. “The pictures we were looking at before were all Tertiary or later. But everything beyond that is Cretaceous or earlier. I’d place this one as middle Jurassic, a hundred and sixty million years ago. No birds, no flowering plants. I know those three animals—but the four behind them are completely new to me. I’ve never seen anything like them. If I had to guess I’d say they’re a form of small hadrosaur, some unknown midget relative of Orthomerus. That flat hulk, way over in the background, is probably a crocodile. But look at the detail on the coelurosaurs, Jim. I couldn’t have told Colin all that—I couldn’t even have imagined it. Look at the scales and wrinkles and pleats in the mouth pouch, look at the eyes and the saw-toothed brow ridges—I’ve never seen those on any illustration, anywhere. The vegetation fits, too, all gymnosperms, cycads, ginkgoes, and conifers.”
James Wollaston laughed, but there was no suggestion from his face that he found anything funny. He was sure that Julia Trantham was practicing her own form of denial, of reality avoidance. “Julia, if you came in to see me as a patient and said all that, I’d refer you for immediate testing. Listen to yourself!”
But she had moved to the final drawing, smeared where Colin Trantham had fallen on top of it before it was dry. “And this is earlier yet.” She was talking quietly, and not to Wollaston. He stared at her hopelessly.
“Something like Rutiodon, one of the phytosaurs. But a different jaw. And there on the left is Desmatosuchus, one of the aëtosaurs. I don’t recognize that other one, but it has mammalian characteristics.” She looked up. “My God, we must be back near the beginning of the Triassic. Over two hundred million years. These are thecodonts, the original dinosaur root stock. He’s jumping farther and farther! Jim, I’m scared.”
He reached out for her, and she clung to him and buried her face in his jacket. But her words were perfectly clear: “First thing in the morning, I’ve got to see Colin.”
***
What James Wollaston had heard with incredulity, Colin Trantham listened to with a remote and dreamy interest. Julia had taken one look at him, and known that no matter what the neurologist might say, Colin would never be leaving the hospital. It was not the IVs, or the bluish pallor of his face. It was something else, an impalpable smell in the air of the room that made her look at her brother and see the skull beneath the skin.
Whatever it was, he seemed oblivious to it. He was grinning, staring at her and beyond her, his face filled with the same ecstasy that she had seen in the studio. His conversation faded in and out, at one moment perfectly rational, the next jumping off in some wild direction.
“Very interesting. The implant and the drugs, of course, that’s what’s doing it. Has to be.” From his tone he might have been talking of a treatment applied to some casual acquaintance. “Did you know, Julia, if I were a bird I’d be in much better shape than I am now? Good old Hemsley operated on me, and he got most of it. But he must have missed a little bit—a bit too much for the implant to handle. Poor little scarab, can’t beat the crab. But if I’d been a bird, they could have cut away the whole of both cerebral hemispheres, and I’d be as good as ever. Or nearly as good. Wouldn’t know how to build a nest, of course, but who needs that?”
And then suddenly he was laughing, a gasping laugh that racked his chest and shook the tubes leading into his fleshless arms.
“Colin!” The fear that curiosity had held at bay came flooding back, and Julia was terrified. “I’ll get the nurse.”
“I’m fine.” He stopped the strained laughter as quickly as he had
started it and his face went calm. “Better than fine. But I’m a robot now. I, Robot.”
She stared at him in horror, convinced that the final disintegration of mind was at hand.
“You know what I mean, Julie.” Now he sounded rational but impatient. “Don’t go stupid on me. Remember what Feynman said, in physics you can look on any positron as an electron that’s traveling backward in time. You tell me I’ve been jumping backward—”
“Jim says that’s nonsense. He says I’m talking through my hat.”
“Jim?”
“Dr. Wollaston.”
“So it’s Jim, is it. And how long has that been going on?” He narrowed his eyes and peered up at her slyly. “Well, you tell Jim that I agree with you. I’m going backward, and I can prove it. And according to Feynman that means the electrons in my brain are positrons. I’ve got a positronic brain. Get it?” He laughed again, slapping his skinny hands on the bedsheets. “Positronic brain. I’m a robot!”
“Colin, I’m getting the nurse. Right now.” Julia had already pressed the button, but no one had appeared.
“In a minute. And you know how I can prove it? I can prove it because I feel absolutely wonderful.”
His face had filled again with that strange bliss. He reached out and held her hand. “Remember how it felt when you were four years old, and you woke up in the morning, and you knew it was your birthday? That’s how it used to be, all the time for all of us. But ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: immature forms pass through the evolutionary stages of their ancestors. And that applies to feelings as well as bodies. Little kids feel the way all the animals used to feel, a long time ago. That’s the way I am when I’m there. Fantastic, marvelous. And the farther I go, the better it gets. You looked at my pictures. If I’ve been going back, how far did I get?”
Julia hesitated. She was torn. Half of her wanted to believe her brother, to see more of those marvelously detailed drawings and to analyze them. The other half told her she was dealing with a mind already hopelessly twisted by disease.
“Your last picture shows the period of the earliest dinosaurs. They’re all thecodonts, nothing that most people would recognize. The fossil record is very spotty there. We don’t know nearly as much about them as we’d like to.”
“And what would be next—going backward, I mean?”
“The Permian. No dinosaurs. And at this end of the Permian, over ninety percent of all the lifeforms on earth died off. We don’t know why.”
He was nodding. “The barrier. I can feel it, you know, when I’m trying to jump. I went through one, when all the dinosaurs died off. This one is bigger. I’ve been trying to fight my way through. I’m nearly there, but it’s taking every bit of energy I have.”
“Col, anything that tires you or upsets you is bad. You need rest. Why are you climbing imaginary walls?”
“You don’t know the feeling. If I could jump all the way back, right to the first spark of life, I bet the intensity of life force and joy would be just about too much to stand. I’m going there, Julie. Across the barrier, into the Permian, all the way to the beginning. And I’m never coming back. Never.”
As though on cue, the thin body arched up from the bed, arms flailing. The mouth widened to a rictus of infernal torment and breath came hoarse and loud. Julia cried out, just as the nurse appeared. Wollaston was right behind her.
“Grand mal.” He was bending over Colin, grabbing at a rubber spatula and pushing it into the mouth just as the teeth clenched down. “Hold this, nurse, we don’t want him swallowing his tongue.”
But the spasm ended as quickly as it had started. Colin Trantham lay totally at ease, his breath slow and easy. His face smoothed, and the fixed grin faded. In its place came a look of infinite calm and blissful peace.
“Dr. Wollaston!” The nurse was watching the monitors, her hand on Colin’s pulse. “Dr. Wollaston, we have arrhythmia. Becoming fainter.”
Wollaston had the hypodermic with its six-inch needle in his hand, the syringe already filled. It was poised above Colin Trantham’s chest when he caught Julia’s eye.
She shook her head. “No, Jim. Please. Not for one month more pain.”
He hesitated, finally nodded, and stepped away from the bed.
“Dr. Wollaston.” The nurse looked up, sensing that she had missed something important but not sure what. She was still holding Colin Trantham’s wrist. “I can’t help him. He’s going, doctor. He’s going.”
Julia Trantham moved to grip her brother’s other hand in both of hers.
“He is,” she said. “He’s going.” She leaned forward, to stare down into open eyes that still sparkled with a surprised joy. “He’s going. And I’d give anything to know where.”
Afterword to “The Feynman Saltation”
Anthony Trollope said, “A genius must wait for inspiration. I am not a genius, so I write every day.”
I am not a genius, and I don’t write every day, either, but there is one guaranteed way to get a story from me. You ask me for one, on some specialized subject, and my brain juices start to flow at once.
This story began with a letter from Robert Silverberg, asking if I had a dinosaur story for a new book he was editing. I didn’t, and at the time I was not writing anything because I was busy reading deeply about parasitic diseases and cancer treatment. I also know nothing about dinosaurs.
Naturally, I wrote back at once and said yes; I gave him my proposed title, “The Feynman Saltation,” and I started to write. But I could not get my mind far away from the morbid fascinations of glioblastomas and chemotherapy and antimetabolite drugs. If this tale seems to be more about cancer than dinosaurs, you now know why.
The above story was taken from Georgia On My Mind and Other Places published by Phoenix Pick
Paperback:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1612420303?tag=arcman-20
Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052GA4H6?tag=arcman-20
Publisher’s Direct
http://www.PPickings.com
Paul Cook is the author of eight books of science fiction, and is currently both a college instructor and the editor of the Phoenix Pick Science Fiction Classics line.
--------------
BOOK REVIEWS
by Paul Cook
The Cassandra Project
by Jack McDevitt & Mike Resnick
Ace Science Fiction 2012
Hardcover, 400 pages
ISBN: 978-1937008710
Two of our most successful writers have joined to produce a taut political and scientific thriller in The Cassandra Project.
The novel opens with the travails of Jerry Culpepper, a seasoned PR expert at NASA who yearns for the good old days when America had a space program. Now, it’s shutting down completely. Culpepper moves on to work for a multi-billionaire (picture a cross between a visionary such as Richard Branson and a good ole boy who understands how the system—and money—actually works: someone such as Lyndon Johnson). But before all this happens, we, the readers, discover that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin might not have been the first humans on the moon in 1969. Instead, Culpepper discovers redacted photos of the far side of the moon as well as other missing data that suggest a cover-up during the presidency of Richard Nixon. (Watergate figures into this novel. Imagine that!) Nevertheless, something was found on the far side of the moon and has been suppressed for more than fifty years by every administration. But what was it? “Bucky” Blackstone wants to fund his own moon mission and find out and Jerry Culpepper is on board. The Cassandra Project never lags and is engaging to the very end. In fact, it practically rushes to its conclusion.
A personal note—What drew me to the novel was its main conceit: that there was “something” on the dark side of the moon and that NASA sent two missions to examine it before Armstrong and Aldrin flew the “official” mission to the moon. When I was eleven, I went on the Rocket to the Moon ride at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. This would have been about 1961. You sat in a
seat that leaned back and felt the theater rumble as the rocket took off, and you saw the voyage through an overhead screen. Disney animation wasn’t all that good, but the thrill for an eleven-year-old was to circle the moon and see the Captain fire a flare on the far side of the moon to show the audience the rectangular remains of “something” built there and abandoned a long time ago. This is what science fiction is about: that sense of wonder.
We’re all grown up now, and that sense of wonder has virtually been hammered out of all of us. But it’s the character of Jerry Culpepper that drives the novel. He’s the one with a real sense of wonder and he still has pride in a space program that used to provide that same thrill to a whole world. Now the space program is gone but McDevitt and Resnick manage to evoke just enough to make The Cassandra Project worth your time…especially if there’s an eleven-year-old trapped inside you or you remember Disneyland of old.
***
Son of Heaven
by David Wingrove
Atlantic Books 2012
Paperback: 442 pages
ISBN: 978-1848875265
Reviewed here is the newly-released trade paperback edition of the original UK hardbound publication of David Wingrove’s Son of Heaven, which originally came out in 2011. Son of Heaven is the first of six projected novels that form a prequel to his extraordinary Chung Kuo series that started in 1989 and concluded in 1999. Those first novels are:
Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2: May 2013 Page 18