Out back, his shed did indeed look like the shed from A Beautiful Mind, complete with maps, pins, and pieces of string. In the middle of the floor was a contraption that looked like a cluster of wires all welded to the outside of a metal box, roughly the size of a microwave. The place smelled musty, like the door hadn’t been opened in days.
The ground near the house and shed was hard packed, not amenable to taking footprints, and the farm, it was now apparent, was big. Natural woodland covered a decent portion of it—plenty of space for a person to get lost.
All this cut Jennie up pretty bad. “Where do you think he went? You sure those two wouldn’t have hurt him?”
I was pretty sure, but in her state, she didn’t want to hear “pretty sure.” She wanted definite answers, and she wanted to blame herself for waiting on me before entering the property.
But she hadn’t wanted to face her brother alone. I got that, sort of.
“Do you not have any other family at all?” I asked. “Friends? Anyone to help you out here?”
“I didn’t want anyone to see him like this.”
Ah… So she was turning to a complete stranger from the cryptozoology community. Poor kid. “We’re calling the police again,” I said.
She didn’t argue.
I had to step outside to get reception. I explained the situation to the dispatcher, that there was a young man missing, then I headed for the barn. It was time to see what was in that freezer.
* * *
Jennie beat me to it. She was staring down into the chest with a frown pasted on her face when I found her. The light from inside the freezer and the little flashlight in my hand were the only illumination.
“What’s it look like?” I asked.
“A shaved pelican that’s been hit in the face with a shovel,” she said. “And it has teeth.”
That turned out to be a pretty accurate description. The thing’s tail had been wrapped around it to make it fit in the box, and its wings were leathery and devoid of feathers. Its teeth jutted out from the beak like a kid in desperate need of an orthodontist.
Despite how absurd it looked, the sight of it stopped my heart for a moment. I’d seen a lot of fakes in my line of work, and this one was good, very good. The skin was semi-translucent and looked like it would give slightly if I touched it.
A good Hollywood props artist might have been able to fake it, but I knew which of those dabbled in hoaxing. This was well beyond their abilities. The person who’d made this deserved an Academy Award.
The claws on its one visible foot had uneven wear that would have taken hours with files and other abrasives to create.
Any second, that thing was going to open its eyes and look right at me.
“So what is that?” Jennie asked.
I shook myself out of my reverie. “No idea.”
“Call me crazy… but I think it might actually be a dinosaur.”
“How did your brother say he was getting dinosaurs?”
“With that machine thing in the shed. He said he could pull them through time. Except there’s not even a power source for it.”
“How’d the Littles find him?”
“Probably online,” said Jennie. “I don’t know for sure, but he was posting stuff on a cryptozoology forum and I assumed they found him there and got him to tell them where he was.”
I stared at the strange creature a moment longer. “This is almost definitely a fake,” I said, pouring as much conviction as I could into my voice. “Joe Little has a lot of experience finding good fakes. And your brother had everything else he needed, the story and a place for them to hole up until they found a buyer.”
“How would you fake something like this?”
“Costume material, maybe a dead animal for part of it. You put it in a freezer and typically you embed it in ice, but that’s an old trick that’s gone out of style nowadays.” Could she hear how my voice wavered? This wasn’t costume material. It looked like all of it was made from dead animal.
Jennie began to reach down into the freezer and I stopped her. “Best not to touch it,” I said. “Whenever you see something that weird, don’t touch it.”
“But you’re sure it’s fake?”
I backed away and shut the freezer door. “I’m gonna do a little research online.” As I headed for the door of the barn, I almost stepped on a dead pigeon. It lay on the floor, its little mouth open, its eyes staring off into space.
That bird had been alive just a few hours ago.
* * *
I had my field kit in my truck and therefore was able to package up the bird in short order. I put it down next to the door of the barn. “I’m going to call my contact at the CDC and I need your permission to talk to them,” I told Jennie, who’d followed me out.
“They said their investigation would take months.”
“I’d still like to talk to them.” I dialed on my phone, let it ring through to voicemail, then dialed again.
“Daryl?” answered a tired voice. “I told you not to call my direct line.”
“You’re working late, Connie.”
“What do you want?”
“Well, you know me. I have a question about a case, but there’s someone you should talk to first.”
“I can’t just go digging up whatever case file…”
I didn’t hear the rest because I beckoned Jennie over. “Tell them who you are and about your case, and give me permission to talk to them about it.”
Jennie did all that, but when I got back on the line, Connie wasn’t any happier with me. “I don’t care if she’s okay with you talking to us. It doesn’t mean that I can just root around in other people’s files and tell you their results. And some of what we deal with is a matter of national security.”
“I’m gonna tell you a theory and you tell me I’m crazy, and we’ll be done,” I said.
“Why don’t I tell you you’re crazy right now and be done?”
“These birds died of a big virus. I mean the virus itself, the string of RNA, is huge. Like something from prehistory. A primitive, dinosaur-age forerunner of viruses today.”
“Um… listen, I can’t talk to you. I’m sorry. I could get fired just for taking this call.”
“Because I’m crazy, right?”
“Good night, Daryl.” She hung up.
“You don’t look happy,” said Jennie.
I didn’t answer her, just got out my laptop and booted it up. It took a few searches, but I eventually found a picture on The Daily Dot of a Rhamphorhynchus.
“That looks like the thing in the freezer,” remarked Jennie.
“Seems like a weird dinosaur to pick for a hoax,” I said. “It’s harder than most to fake up, and it’s not the kind of thing people will recognize. Most fakes are of the obvious ones, like stegosauruses and T-rexes.”
“So why do you think they chose this thing?”
“Your brother’s graduate work was in what?” I asked.
“Theoretical physics. He was studying particles that scientists think move backwards through time. He said it gave him the power to time travel.”
I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. “Okay,” I said, “I want you to listen to me.”
Her pale face, illuminated with a mixture of the flashlight beam, the light off my laptop, and moonlight, was dead serious, those hazel eyes fixed on mine.
“I was six years old and on a camping trip with my family,” I began. “I woke up in the middle of the night and, hand on my heart, I saw a Sasquatch. It was standing over me, taller than my dad, broader than a door, covered with thick hair, and we looked at each other for what felt like a lifetime. When I woke up in the morning, there weren’t any tracks, but the ground was hard enough that it didn’t disprove anything.”
“So that’s why you’re a cryptozoologist?”
“I could’ve decided it was a dream. There’s a good chance it was just a dream, but I asked what if. Forty years later, here I am, still asking what if.”
>
“So what’s your point?”
“There’s never any end to the what ifs. You can waste your entire life chasing them down. Even with an actual… whatever that is in the freezer, there are more questions than answers here.”
“Isn’t that the point of life? To ask the hard questions?”
“There are hard questions and there are hopeless questions,” I said. “I suggest worrying about the former. I am sorry about your brother, though. I hope they find him.”
“You sound like you’re leaving.”
I realized she was right. I was. “I’ve got to. Sorry.”
She watched me as I climbed into my truck, started the engine, and drove off. My guilt was assuaged about half a mile later when I passed two police cruisers going the other way. At least I wasn’t leaving her alone.
* * *
I drove through the night, like I had a pack of Sasquatches on my tail, like distance would separate me from my mistakes and the life I regretted more and more by the day. Sometimes the road back is too far to travel in one lifetime, but then again, it was past time I got going in the direction I wanted to go.
Perhaps I’d never shake my reputation for being a whackjob hung up on fringes of science that were so far out they didn’t really qualify as science. Perhaps I’d never be able to do more with my biology degree than manage a pet store, but I was tired of chasing ghosts. All my life I thought finding the real deal would make the long years worthwhile.
That thing in the freezer looked like the real deal, and now I knew the truth. That thing guaranteed me another forty years of dead ends, crooked hoaxers, and mockery from the scientific establishment. I hated myself right then, hated having to admit that I’d wasted my life. Nothing would justify those forty years.
Jennie’s call came hours later. I’d made it home and it knocked me out of a deep sleep.
“So,” she said, “I turned everything over to the police and the state university. My guess is that they’ll just file it all away under unexplained phenomena.”
“Probably,” I said. “What about your brother?”
“We found him in the shed. He’s having a rough time. He just appeared there. No one saw him enter.”
“And?”
“He’s incoherent. We’re taking him to the hospital.”
“As long as he’s safe.”
“Physically, he is.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m sorry about all that.”
“Just know that if we get invaded by time traveling dinosaurs tomorrow, I’m blaming you.” She laughed.
The sound was like music to my ears.
“But thanks,” she said, “for the advice. I think you’re right about all this, even if you’re wrong. If that makes sense.”
“It does,” I said. “I’m glad you understood.”
A Word from Emily Mah
We all know what it’s like to regret choices, but when I wrote this story I tried to imagine regretting a whole lifetime. What would it be like to take a good long look at the days I’d lived and feel they’d all been a waste? It wasn’t a happy concept, obviously, so I had to find a way to give Daryl some measure of redemption.
I also wanted to explore the idea of lying to oneself. It’s not an attractive quality, and that made this project more challenging. Could I create a protagonist who made this final decision without sacrificing the reader’s sympathy? I’m not sure I have, so I leave that up to the reader to decide.
Writing for Jurassic Chronicles was a wonderful opportunity to return to my roots, writing speculative fiction. These days I mostly write chick-lit, which I love, but I’ll never love anything as much as the science fiction and fantasy I grew up reading. (If only I could write it half so well!)
To me, speculative fiction isn’t just about stretching what’s possible. It’s about analyzing who we become in these altered worlds and new situations, unlike anything we’re likely to face in our day to day lives.
I am the type of person who loves a good “documentary” on cryptoscience or UFOs. If I can watch it without getting nightmares (not a given for me), I’ll eat it up. At science fiction conventions, I run into people who live lives that are… shall we say… outside of consensus reality? Humans are a fascinatingly diverse group, and the extent to which we create the world we inhabit fascinates me.
Besides that, I do believe that there is more to the world than meets the eye, that random acts of strangeness happen, and that most of us will at some point in our lives, witness something we can’t explain.
Thanks so much for reading this story. Feel free to contact me at [email protected], and if you want to see more of my writing, the bulk of it is written as E.M. Tippetts (www.emtippetts.com). I will be writing more science fiction in the upcoming months and hope to have some longer works out in the near future.
Victor Mula’s Earth Dream
by M. J. Kelley
One
DEBRIS ORBITED THE PLANET, flashing off the sun like creamy glass shards, stripped and broken around the world in a ring. The Lune approached quickly, the planet growing even larger in all the peepholes and view screens. Ivory clouds wrapped its surface, green and purple-brown continents and navy oceans cut through the land masses. It looked like no world Flint had ever seen before—one with oxygen.
Eno. It’s real.
Flint had awakened from the preservation tank two weeks ago. After he saw the planet for the first time, boredom no longer curdled his everyday experience and excitement took over, excitement wrapped in dreams of confronting Victor Mula.
He gazed out the peephole of the Lune, looking upon the planet, and knew he had found Mula. Didn’t know if he was still alive. But he would find out soon. It had been forty years since Flint had seen him. And in real time, it had been fifty thousand or more.
A thin wire hung from the back of Flint’s skull, and he pulled it, switching on the Ancio inside his head. Then he descended the ladder down to the preservation tanks and passed through the thin curtain at the back that led to the small bunk compartment. He hoped to find most of the crew there, but Reel, a lithe woman, was the only one.
Flint lay on his own bunk.
Reel pulled her pants down and lifted her shirt above her head. Flint quickly climbed off his bunk and approached her. He felt a great pull of sadness. He moved his hand to her waist, but it passed right through and knocked against the bunk’s support on the other side.
“What are you doing?” Reel asked.
“I…”
“Come here.” Her arms entangled him, her hands passing through his body. He strained to feel her touch, strained to feel anything.
“Banola. It’ll be glorious,” she said.
Banola? His face crumpled, his body staggered.
He knew all this, of course. Knew what she was, knew he was alone on the Lune.
Old and alive.
In the hazy disorientation from his preservation sleep, perhaps for a moment, a long moment, he tricked himself, but not any longer.
He backed away from Reel, her arms still wrapped around where he had been, around an invisible torso. The other crew members appeared at the door. Fey, Drake, Hobs, the Simian. They all stared at him.
Rubbing his head, Flint felt the tail end of the Ancio cord peeking out from the back of his skull. And then bringing his hand back around, stared at it.
Old, wrinkled hands.
Flint stuttered, but no words came. He fell to his knees, ignoring the brittle vibration that rang out from the impact within his body. He dug his fingers into his face, ground his teeth. Pain. Sounds left his throat like an injured bird, calling, calling.
He touched the Ancio on the back of his head again. Turn them off. Forget them. He fingered the Ancio’s tail, tears coming to his eyes. Then he pulled his hand away and curled up on the floor. He couldn’t do it. The fierce guilt within him. He wanted it to end. But he wouldn’t let himself forget them.
And so it didn’t end.
He’d left
the Ancio on too long perhaps. Now he couldn’t control himself with it. Couldn’t shut off its projections, like video clips hanging in reality all around him of the crew he loved.
Images flashed before him, visions of the wretched past.
He had searched through the wreckage around the Demore Ring and the double star of Eto. He searched out abandoned civilizations and raided their museums like the glass one on Gole. He bartered with trinkets and artifacts. The genome of salmon, the scapula of a stegosaurus, the marble set of Earth-forged glass, an ancient computer disk, an abacus, a mink coat—all and everything, especially anything derived from Earth animals, DNA sequences, or even the animals themselves. Snakes and pigeons on Andor. Deer and parrots on Pril. All could be sold to collectors for a handsome price. And no one paid more than Victor Mula, the wealthy creator of the Ancio implant.
Flint had heard the rumors. That Mula was collecting any and all Earth DNA, from ancient plants to unique fossils, from bacteria and viruses, to any number of things. And Flint had plenty to sell. So he joined the droves who scurried to work for Mula.
During the human scattering and long expansion into the galaxy, people had brought pieces of Earth life and history with them.
Now these pieces were all that remained of Earth.
Many were devoted to the raking of other civilizations, ones built up, thrived, and now deceased, and so the galaxy was rich with potential pickings. Before his crew died, Flint raked, always an extra eye out for any Earth artifact. He’d compiled a massive collection in the belly of the Lune, his ship.
Earth was mysterious to people—an idea, a concept that connected the desperate scatter of humans across the galaxy. There were no worlds like it with life or life potential, so all humans knew the myths and stories, how life spontaneously erupted there and evolved into so much glory. And, of course, its destruction, a great mystery, since no one witnessed its departure. Only those traveling there found it gone. That happened over a million years ago.
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