by Anthology
“Bottom-line kind of questions,” said De La Cerda. “Is there you-name-the-mineral here? Is there a lot of it? Things like that. And you can bet somebody’s spent a lot of time calculating which natural resources might be safe to grab here and not have them missed for a hundred million years from now.”
Hendryx’s wedge-like jaw jutted belligerently forward. “Nothing ever was missed, was it? So they can’t have taken anything out. Or maybe they did, maybe you can take out whatever you want, because the past takes care of itself. It has so far.”
Westerman folded her thin arms across her chest and gave him an angry look. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you.”
“You should get used to the idea that not everybody thinks exactly the way you do. From time to time, you might even try rethinking a position.”
“Tim, you know if Northemico gets loose here, it’ll make the Antarctic feeding frenzy look like a model of responsible conservation.”
“That was different.”
Several people demanded in chorus, “How?”
The beleaguered geologist glowered. “What have we missed from the Paleozoic? Maybe the stripmine scars are buried deep inside the earth. Maybe they’ve eroded completely away. Maybe they’ve been deformed beyond recognition and understanding.”
“Lots of maybe,” muttered Rubenstein.
“We know the landmasses are drawing together, and that the collision’ll fold this whole region over on itself.”
Everyone at the table was regarding Hendryx very seriously. Westerman said, “Are you saying anything people do here’s okay as long as they hide the evidence under a mountain range?”
“Listen, the bills have to be paid, or we have to go home.”
“This is home,” De La Cerda said, “for some of us.”
“You think so.” Hendryx patted his lips with a napkin. “But you can’t live here without supplies from the future, and the pipeline stays open only so long as someone foots the bill to keep it open. If the government stops, then Northemico or somebody has to start, or that’s all she wrote.” He pushed his chair back, surveyed the semicircle of mostly hostile faces before him. Vick hung back, and because she did, I hung back, too. “I want this expedition to continue as much as you do.”
Westerman’s mouth was set in a thin, straight line as she glared at his retreating back. An almost identical line creased her forehead. “I sometimes wonder,” she said, “if good sex is worth all the aggravation.”
After breakfast, Vick said she had to go with Cardwell to splash around in tide pools and collect specimens. I passed what passed for the cool part of the morning bringing whoever didn’t have work to do up to date with the latest shipboard gossip and scurrilous rumor. It got definitely hottish toward midday, but then clouds scudded in at noon, dumped enough rain to cool things off reasonably, and, mission accomplished, scudded away. I took a long nap and was greatly improved for it. Rick King was up and around by late afternoon—days were shorter in the Silurian, and years consequently longer, by three dozen days—and looked rested, fit, and out of place in what I took to be the latest thing in twenty-first-century beachwear for men.
I had hoped simply to prowl on the beach, poke at the occasional lump of cast-up sea life, and just enjoy being on land for a change. King, however, prevailed on me to steer him around and make such introductions as I didn’t have to disturb anyone’s work to make. Nearly everyone was polite, and De La Cerda, of all people, actually seemed charmed. Westerman couldn’t keep suspicion out of her face, and King, to give him what was due, received her chilly how-do-you-do and perfunctory handshake with admirable grace.
While we had run through the possible introductions, King studied the cliffs behind the camp. “What’s up there?”
“More sand and rock.”
“There a way up?”
I should have lied to him, but I didn’t, so next I had to take him up the path to the top. He looked like Tarzan going up; I felt like Sisyphus. When we got up, he stood with his arms akimbo and gazed off at the low mountains in the distance while I sat on a rock and pretended that I wasn’t panting for breath, that my heart wasn’t rattling loosely in its mountings. It was getting into evening, and all of that bare jagged rock had begun to burn prettily.
Number Four camp was located on a stretch of coastline where erosion had cut away headlands to form slip-faulted cliffs. Detritus littered the narrow scalloped beach below. This was a rough bit of seafront, but wherever you made landfall, you found yourself on an inhospitable shore. The one-day North American west was a volcano range; one-day Appalachia was a chain of islands; between the two stretched an unbroken shallow sea. Just so one’s sense of direction would be utterly skewed, the equator bisected this sea from the future site of San Diego to that of Iceland. Equatorial North America was geologically part of the great northern landmass, Laurasia, whose southern counterpart was Gondwanaland, comprising South America, Africa, India, Australia, Anartica. In all the unsubmerged regions of the world there was very little soil, and what soil there was was thin, poor, and as vulnerable as life on land itself. Actual greenery existed only beside the waterways. It didn’t measure up to the popular idea of a coal-forest, with gern trees, dragonflies big as crows, salamanders as big as sofas. None of the flora was more than waist-high; most were much shorter. Carpeting the lowest and moistest patches of the badlands was Cooksonia, a rootless, leafless plant, no more, really, than a forked stem, towering a mighty five centimeters above the ground. The giant sequoias of the day were comparatively sophisticated—stems with forked branches bearing clusters of small leaflets—but still fell short of what you’d call rank jungle growth. They didn’t soften the land’s serrate outline so much as make it look furry and itchy. Munching happily through all this green salad were millipedes, some of them big enough to provoke a shudder but all of them perfectly harmless. Munching happily through the millipedes were scorpions that looked and carried on as scorpions were always going to act and carry on. There were some book-gilled arthropods that rated the adjective “amphibious.” There were no terrestrial vertebrates, excepting human beings. On the list of things yet to be were lungs, flowers, wings, thumbs, bark, milk, and penes. I was happier here than I’d ever been anywhere else.
King broke a long silence by saying, “This is good stuff.” he patted the pocket containing the recordpack. “Long slow pan from the primordial ocean to the desert of barren rock and drifted sand.” He fiddled with the headheld for another couple of seconds. “This world’s one big still-life, though.”
“Take it up with the folks who punched a hole in time. Maybe they can open up a more action-packed era for you. The Mesozoic, or World War Two.”
“What do they do for excitement around here?”
I took my cue from his choice of pronouns. He excluded me from his subjects, to remind me, I suppose, that we were both media types, cousin—if not brother—professionals. I said, “That depends on who you talk to. For Cardwell, it’s trilobites. For Westerman, it’s club mosses.”
“What is it for you?”
“Being here.”
He brushed that away. “Being here isn’t the be-all, end-all of our existence. You’re a writer, writing a book.”
I had come ostensibly to write a book about life on and around a research vessel embedded in mid-Paleozoic time. The book still wasn’t finished, but, anymore, it was beside the point. I had lost all sense of urgency about finishing it. I didn’t need the money. I didn’t need anything to do with writing a book, except as an excuse to stay.
I said, “I’m here because this is my home.”
“Is it, now?” He shook his head. “One day, this place will be home. People won’t just work and live here, they’ll be born and die here. That’s what makes a place home. Right now, this is summer camp. People come here, do the equivalent of making baskets and looking for arrowheads, and when the time comes, they go home.”
“Hardly anyone goes ho—back. Not if they can he
lp it. They just have to keep passing their extension reviews. It’s less trouble to maintain us here than to replace us.”
“Still—”
I slid off the rock. “It’ll be dark soon. I’m not going to negotiate that path in the dark. Wouldn’t advise you to try it, either.” I started down without waiting to see if he would follow. Later, in the mess tent, I saw him schmoozing with Hendryx and thought, Kindred spirits. Then I took it back. Hendryx was one of us. King, I swore, would never belong.
Everyone scattered into the dusk after supper, most of them claiming to have work that absolutely had to be done before Cardwell’s show started. I changed to my least-ratty attire and went down to the high-tide mark ahead of everyone else to find the best seat. My chip player was in my pocket. I took it out and pressed the go button, and merely ancient music floated out over the prehistoric sea. It was “Stardust,” recorded by Artie Shaw and
His Orchestra in A.D. 1941. I stood wading in time, enthralled as always by Billy Butterfield’s incandescent trumpet, Jack Jenny’s smoky trombone, Shaw’s own soaring clarinet. Then, as I waited for the next track to begin, I heard somebody behind me and put my thumb on the stop button. Vick paused a short distance away. She said, “I heard music.”
“Yes, you did,” I said, and then, even more inanely, “I don’t have earphones, I hate earphones,” and before I could stop myself, “If God’d intended for us to listen to music on earphones . . .” Babbling.
Fortunately, I relaxed my finger on the button, and Shaw’s rendition of “I Surrender, Dear” throbbed out of the player and enveloped us like a smoky blue cloud. I was gratified to note that she listened almost all the way through the track before she said anything.
“What is this music?”
“Jazz. Swing. Music.”
“It’s,” and she waited two whole seconds before finishing the sentence, “lovely.” She waited again, listened some more. “Lovely and old.”
“Barely pre-World War Two,” I said, trying not to sound defensive.
“God, my grandmother wasn’t even born then.”
“Mine was a teenage girl in Indiana. She used to scrape up thirty-five cents somehow and go see Glenn Miller at the local theater. In those days, thirty-five cents was a lot of money for a teenage girl to scrape up.”
“This is Glenn Miller?”
“A contemporary. Artie Shaw.”
She looked like someone trying to decide if a name she’d never heard before meant anything to her. Then she admitted that it didn’t.
“No need to apologize,” I said. “I’d be fairly astonished if you had heard of him. Pop music before Elvis Presley, before rock and roll, was like the Precambrian to members of my own generation.”
“I have heard of Elvis Presley.”
I decided from the way she said it that she probably didn’t have him confused with some other, subsequent Elvis—Costello, Hitler, Christ, one of those. We listened to “Moonglow,”
“Begin the Beguine,” and “Summit Ridge Drive.” The chip contained dozens of other tracks that I’d personally selected from Shaw’s body of work, but I didn’t want to be a mere tune jockey. I thumbed the stop button twice after “Summit Ridge Drive,” to switch off the player.
“Certainly does grow on you,” she said.
“Uh huh. I have Goodman and Ellington, too. Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, dozens of—I think American pop music peaked sometime between nineteen thirty-five and nineteen fifty.” I looked at her closely. “I wrote a book about it once. Am I getting carried away here?”
She showed me a small gap between her thumb and forefinger. “Only a little. I know people who’d make me listen to the whole Flucks catalogue.” My utter ignorance of even a portion of the Flucks catalogue must have been obvious. “Flucks does a lot of sub—and ultrasonic pieces. Some of them are said to make listeners lose, ah, muscular control.”
“Gosh, why couldn’t Artie Shaw have recorded songs like that?”
She laughed, “I don’t see the fun in it either.”
Other people had been drifting down from the camp all this while. They made themselves comfortable, talked, drank, or simply stared out to sea and waited. Jank showed up with a bottle of brandy, and the three of us passed it around and heckled Cardwell to get the show started. The level of brandy in the bottle got lower and lower. Lulled by a murmur of waves and voices, I nodded off. When I awoke, with a start, the moon was out, the tide was in, and it had become as chilly on the beach as it ever got. Next to me, Jank was gently shaking Vick awake. Everyone else was heading back to camp.
“Rise up, Lazarus,” Jank said, “and walk.”
I said, incredulously, “I missed the show? You let me miss the show?”
“Wasn’t any show.” He nodded seaward, at Cardwell, who stood in the foam at the water’s edge, a master of ceremonies whose star act had let him down. “Tomorrow night, maybe.”
“Doesn’t he know?”
“When they get here, they’ll be here.” Jank drew Vick to her feet, and I made a point of helping. “Tomorrow night, the night after—some night this week, anyway.”
Between us, Vick nodded agreement, sleepily. “Moon’s full. This is the season.”
“How can even the trilobites know when it’s time? There’s only ever the one season.”
“If it’ll ease the pain of disappointment,” Vick said, “why not come snorkeling with us tomorrow?”
“Love to.”
Jank and I saw her to her tent flap like gentlemen. I started softly whistling “Embraceable You” as we moved on, and then King bounced up out of the darkness and announced that he had wangled us invitations to a poker game in Rubenstein’s tent. He was disheveled and dirty. His shoes looked to be a total write-off, and his beachwear wasn’t in much better shape. I couldn’t decide whether that ought to raise or lower him in my estimation—the one because he didn’t care that he had ruined his expensive outfit, the other because I imagined he could afford not to care. He was thoroughly pleased with himself. Through the simple expedient of spending a night on a beach, he had begun to prove me wrong and become one of the guys. I had never been so disappointed with the people at Number Four camp.
“In all this time,” Jank said, “I never knew I had to have an invitation to play poker with Rubenstein.” He looked at me. “How about you?”
I was dead tired, but something made me answer, “Oh, why not?”
“Sure,” said Jank, “why not?”
Rubenstein poured each of us a drink and dealt us in. The drink was heavenly, the cards were trash. I looked across the table at him and demanded, “These all you have?” He asked how many I wanted and peeled them off. I looked at them and thought, Worse and worse.
“Yow,” said Jank. “No cards.”
“Yow indeed,” said De La Cerda. “You’re much too happy with your hand.”
“Aah, he’s bluffing,” I said. “Jank always bluffs.”
De La Cerda threw her cards down. “He wants you to think he’s bluffing. I fold.” The rest of us played out the hand, to our regret. De La Cerda looked smug as Jank raked in chips. “Told you so.” The deal passed to Jank. As he shuffled, he said, without quite looking at King, “How’d you get this assignment?”
After a second, King realized that he was the person being addressed. “Applied for it, how else?”
“Applied to Northemico?”
“Yes.” A pause. “Much as you applied to the government.” Jank snapped a card down on the table in front of King. “I applied through the University of Texas.”
“Play cards,” Rubenstein growled.
We played. Jank won the hand again. The deal passed to me. As I shuffled, King said to Jank, “You talk like you think the government’s one thing and Northemico’s another. Like they’re separate, and one’s good and one’s not.” He shrugged. “Or one’s bad and one’s worse.”
Jank stared determinedly at his cards. “Aren’t they? Separate, I mean.”
“Publ
ic government, what you think of as the government—its job is just to keep the citizenry in line, make sure they don’t make trouble for the real government. Real government is private government. Its job is helping rich people to become more so.”
We stared at him, all but gaped, in fact. Jank finally said, “If that’s so, why the whole big show of keeping the corporations out of the Paleozoic all this time?”
“Takes a while to agree on how to cut up a pie so that everybody’s happy.”
De La Cerda nodded slowly, as if agreeing against her will. “Like carving up old gangland cities. It’s just good practice to keep your trouble away from your money.”
Rubenstein said, “Does anybody here want to play poker; for chrissake?”
“Just a sec.” King shut his fan of cards and closed his hands around it. He looked straight at Jank. “You’ve got some grudge against Northemico, so, because I’m here making a documentary for Northemico, you’ve got a grudge against me. Lots of people get mad at the government. I get mad at it. Doesn’t mean I’m mad at you, or anyone at this table, or anyone in this camp. I’m here to do my job, same as you.”
“Remember the ad campaign,” Jank said to nobody particularly, “when Antarctica finally got opened up?” I could tell from King’s expression that he’d never imagined any connection between himself and Antarctica. “Yesterday’s land of perpetual ice and snow, today’s treasure chest of mineral wealth. My favorite was, What good is it to the penguins? Succinct. Punchy.” He looked around at all our faces. “I’m willing to bet there’s this bright entrepreneur somewhere who’s seen pictures of the Silurian sea, how beautiful and serene it looks. He has a brainstorm. A luxury hotel in the prehistoric past. The Silurian Arms! Next thing you know, there’s this whole big ad campaign pitched to assholes with money they don’t know how to spend. The ads say crap like, Come back, come home, to a quiet and unspoiled world. Dine at Chez Paleozoic, gourmet cuisine from then to now.”
King had sat back in his seat and folded his arms while Jank talked. Now he said, “You may have missed your true calling.” He grinned to show that he really was trying to be a sport. “You’d have been an ace adman.”