Cretaceous Dawn

by Lisa M. Graziano

  Nearly in front of him, not forty feet away, the animals came together. Julian expected to hear the crack of a bone-shattering collision, but at the last instant they swerved in perfect tandem, and shoulder to shoulder, like a pair of well-trained horses, they headed for the water.

  The splash of their combined tonnage hid everything for moment. When the crocodiles could be seen again, the larger one was on top of the smaller one, whose tail was curling up into the air; an instant later, they sank together. A cloud of bubbles rose to the surface, and then the water was still.

  The beach was absolutely silent.

  A long, long moment went by, that seemed like forever. Julian took his hands off his ears and cautiously lifted his head.

  “Oh, my. . . .” Yariko was standing at his shoulder. She had a look of shock on her face that made Julian’s heart race even faster, if that were possible. She grabbed his arm; her fingers dug painfully into the muscle. “Were they as big as I thought?” she whispered. “How do they—I mean, I thought that they—do they lay eggs?”

  “My God! The place will be crawling with them,” Dr. Shanker said. “What a nightmare.” His voice was shaking.

  Frank said nothing. He stared at the water with a grim expression as he clung unsteadily to his branch.

  Julian stood, trembling, not even feeling Yariko’s grip. He took one fearful look at the water, but there was nothing to see. Then it dawned on him. He had just seen the mating of Deinosuchus.

  They moved farther into the trees.

  “Deinosuchus—does everyone believe me now? We’re in the Cretaceous, all right,” Julian said, tripping on a fallen branch as he looked back over his shoulder at the beach.

  Yariko and Shanker eased the gasping Frank back onto the ground. “If those monsters try to come in here, they’ll find a bullet,” he said, clutching at his gun.

  Dr. Shanker snorted. “They won’t even feel your bullets,” he said.

  Crocodiles could be fast on a smooth, sloping beach, but they could not easily clamber through terrestrial undergrowth, whatever their size, as Julian explained. Still, it was hard to feel safe, and they were all tensed, waiting for another deafening bellow.

  “I’ve seen them in zoos, but. . . .” Frank looked white around the eyes. “It can’t be possible. Nothing can be that big.” He laughed shakily. “Well. One more thing to consider.”

  “The fossil skull found in Montana was six feet long,” Julian said. “That corresponds to a fifty-foot animal.” He was as frightened as any of them; perhaps more, since he had actually been standing on the beach, near where the crocodiles met each other, seconds before their appearance. But at the same time he felt the numbness lift. He felt alive, alert, with his observational skills honed and ready. This was like one of those dangerous dig sites where everything, even the safety of the team, depended on his skills. He was ready, now, to be a member of this team, to contribute to their survival, to lend his expertise however he could. He was excited.

  Dr. Shanker cleared his throat. “Somehow, a monstrous version of something we’ve all seen, something modern, seems worse than the unknown. They must grow fast so they can keep up with the big dinosaurs.” He added that lightly, as if dinosaurs were a joke.

  “Dinosaurs do grow quickly, like mammals,” Julian responded, taking him quite seriously. “They probably reach full size early in their lives, maybe in the first ten years. Crocodiles are reptiles—they grow throughout their lives, at the same rate each year. To reach forty or fifty feet, they have to be decades old; fifty or sixty years, I’d say.”

  “But these are much bigger than anything I’ve heard of,” Yariko said. “How do you know they grow at the same rate?”

  “They lay down annual layers of calcification in their bones, and these can be counted, much like tree rings,” Julian explained. “Based on fossil bones, Deinosuchus, and Sarcosuchus, its cousin from Africa, grew less than one foot per year. Deinosuchus lived in western North America.”

  “Um, I hate to ask,” Yariko said in a small voice, “but what other huge creatures might be roaming around?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Julian said.

  Suddenly Frank sat straight, staring into the bushes. He reached for the gun in his holster, which was lying beside him.

  “What is it?” Yariko asked, staring all around her with nervous eyes.

  “Something’s moving in there. Not a person.” Frank cautiously slid the gun out and lifted it. At the same time they heard the sound of crashing underbrush.

  They jumped to their feet, except Frank who calmly leveled his gun at the noise. The animal was very close. Then the bushes parted.

  “Wait!” Dr. Shanker shouted. “Don’t shoot! It’s Hilda!”

  Hilda scampered out of the dimness of the forest, her tail between her legs and her fur clotted with mud. She was too frightened even to bark. She ran to Dr. Shanker and buried her head against him, shivering and whimpering as if she had done something punishable. Dr. Shanker crooned over her, smoothing her fur and working out the clots of mud. “Thought you were dead, you dumb old mutt.”

  “Look! She’s been wading through mud,” Frank said.

  They looked at him without understanding.

  “Streams,” he said. “Fresh water. Come on, people. Enough talk, more doing. We should take a look around. We need water badly.”

  Julian looked at Yariko; her face was sweaty and sandy, and her lips looked painfully dry. About as dry as his felt. It seemed like days since his last cup of coffee early that morning; he’d had nothing to drink since. Making a sudden decision, he stood up.

  “Don’t go alone,” Dr. Shanker said. “Yorko, go with him. Take the gun.”

  “Do you know how to use it?” Frank asked. He made no move to hand it to them.

  “No.” Julian looked at Yariko, who shrugged.

  “Then you’ll be better off without it.” Frank leaned back and closed his eyes; but he opened them again immediately. “What are you planning to carry water in?”

  Dr. Shanker cleared his throat. “Ideas, anyone?”

  Julian looked down and pushed some dirt around with his foot. He was suddenly very, very thirsty. He didn’t want to have to think of how or where to find water. He just wanted some.

  “Shoes,” he said, suddenly. Yariko made a face. “Unless someone comes up with a better idea. . . .”

  Dr. Shanker pulled off his loafers. “I’ll drink out of my own, thank you,” he said, handing them to Yariko. Julian took Frank’s, feeling slightly foolish at his own idea, and he and Yariko set out.

  “Frank was right, wasn’t he,” Julian commented in a low voice. “We waited until we really needed it to begin searching for water.”

  “He’s very tough,” Yariko said. “Knows more than you’d think for his age; I’ve talked with him in the lab a few times. Good thing he’s with us. Good for us, I mean,” she added hastily.

  The light was dulled by the crowded trees and shrubs. It didn’t feel like a bright afternoon in the forest.

  “I don’t like the gloom,” Yariko said, her eyes darting from side to side in the low woods. “I feel like something’s about to jump out at me.”

  “Spoken like a primate,” Julian said. “A creature of the daylight. But we’re much safer in the dark, out of harm’s way. Witness the crocodiles; they’re active in the heat of the day.”

  But he had to agree with her that the woods looked frightening. The trees were stunted and bent, almost bushes, the trunks branching close to the ground and lifting up a crown of leaves just above their heads. An intense gloom gathered beneath the thickest parts of the canopy. Here and there nettles or bushy scrub scratched at their faces, or forced them to turn aside altogether to find an opening. They passed a few large conifers, junipers maybe, twisted into bizarre shapes, like gnarled old people. The ground was sprinkled with dead leaves that made it impossible to walk quietly. The cheerful patches of buttercups, growing near the edge of the forest, were absent in the gl
oom. It was no comfort that the smells were those of any ordinary forest, perhaps with a stronger overtone of decay; in fact, that made the whole situation seem more bizarre.

  Julian’s foot came down with a splash, and he jumped back. “Water.” It was a brown puddle. He stooped and skimmed a little from the surface with his hand, and then sipped it.

  Yariko hung back. “How is it?”

  “Muddy,” Julian said, making a face. “But it’s not salty. Let’s go a little farther and look for a clear pool.”

  The ground became soggy, squelching at each step. Their sneakers and socks were quickly waterlogged. Ferns grew thick everywhere, giving off a pungent odor when crushed. After a few hundred yards a low mud bank appeared: the edge of a pool. The trees hung out over the water, and on the farther side, about twenty feet away, the ground rose up again and the forest continued. The dim greenish light softened the far edges and blended the ferns and leaves on the opposite bank, giving a kind of opalescent sheen to the water. Tiny ripples and rings spread out on the surface where insects skittered about.

  “It’s beautiful,” Yariko said. “But what about crocodiles? Could those big ones get up here?”

  “No, they’re way too big. There might be smaller ones though; in fact, some crocs stick to fresh or brackish water: the truly marine crocodiles would be dying out by now . . . if it’s when I think it is, that is.”

  But there was nothing moving in the water. Julian knelt at the edge, his knees sinking into the spongy ground, and again scooped up a handful of water. It tasted clean, a little warm but wonderful after a hot day without a drink. He suddenly realized how thirsty he was. Yariko joined him and for a while they scooped water into their mouths, letting it run down their chins and dribble back into the pool, not caring if all the crocodiles in the world were watching. Then they sat back, panting a little.

  Julian felt like a dry sponge that had just come to life in water. Now that his thirst was quenched, he was busy looking at the innumerable footprints in the muddy bank. They were jumbled and confused but dominated by the tiny, four-toed prints of a four-footed animal: clearly a mammal, perhaps the size of a squirrel. Other than that he could see nothing clearly; and nothing at all to indicate the time period. It might have been a twentieth-century stream on a subtropical island.

  Suddenly Yariko started to back away, still crouching. “What’s that?” she hissed

  On the opposite bank, in the shadows of the overhanging branches, a pair of eyes gleamed red, without blinking.

  “It shouldn’t attack if we leave it alone,” Julian whispered back. “It doesn’t look very large.”

  They remained quiet for several minutes, trying not to startle whatever it was. Now and then the eyes shifted sideways a little, as if the animal were moving its head to watch from a slightly different perspective. Then the eyes winked out, and they saw the gray shape of the animal’s body turning and flitting into the forest, making hardly a sound, only a papery stirring of the dead leaves. It was not reptilian. It seemed to be the size of a house cat, and Julian thought he saw a fluffy tail.

  “What was it?” Yariko asked, still whispering.

  “A mammal. But I don’t know what kind.” Julian leaned forward and filled Frank’s rather large shoes with water. “This will be a fantastic place to explore. Tomorrow we should come back here and look for the footprints. If it really is the Cretaceous, think of how much we could learn. Think of the gaps in mammalian evolution that we could fill. And the plants. . . .” he gestured around them, ready to point out key species.

  Yariko looked at him. “If we are in the Cretaceous, Julian,” she said, “the rest of evolution hasn’t happened. And when it does, we probably won’t see it.”

  Julian felt his new excitement slip away, leaving a void as big as his body. Then the dread flowed back in. Something cold touched his fingers, and he started; looking down, he saw the water in the shoe break its surface tension and tilt a drop onto his shaking hand.

  Yariko stood. “It’s okay,” she said. “We can look for footprints. There’s no reason not to.” She held out her hand to help him rise, muttering to herself as she did so, “It’s not like there’ll be anything else to do if we can’t get home.”

  FIVE

  And it came to me that time itself was suspect!

  —Albert Einstein

  1 September

  2:31 PM Local Time

  In one respect, it had been a very productive afternoon at the police station. University officials had cordoned off the basement floor but reopened the remainder of the physics building. They’d stationed a security guard in the lobby but agreed to let the local police team do its work. Since then, interviews with the other physics faculty members and with Miyakara’s graduate student, an underfed-looking kid with wild hair, had clarified the cause of the initial explosion.

  “Vibrations, probably sound, getting into the vault as it was powered down,” Mark Reng had said. “That’s why the door has to be sealed. But if they were inside making adjustments, they may have left the door cracked. . . .” Such explosions were unusual, unlikely, but perfectly possible.

  But Sharon Earles was not reassured. Exploding equipment was one thing; disappearing people was quite another. There was still no word, sight, or evidence of those missing from the lab, and the afternoon was half over.

  “A crime ring?” Hann suggested, jokingly. “They destroyed the lab to hide the theft?”

  Earles checked each one off on her fingers. “Two physicists, a paleontologist, a security guard, and a German Shepherd. That’s some crime ring. Maybe the dog did the actual theft so they wouldn’t leave fingerprints?” She tapped her fingers impatiently on her desk. “And what about the missing half of the dead man? Charlie—” Earles paused, and then went on. “I know you’re thinking about your brother Frank. Just keep in mind that he wasn’t the one killed in the explosion. We’ll figure this out.”

  Hann pulled over the cracked plastic chair and sat down. His face was somber. “It isn’t like Frank to leave when he’s on duty. He wouldn’t. He just. . . . He’ll show up. Tomorrow at the latest.”

  The boy was taking Frank’s mysterious disappearance OK after all, Earles decided. But that was only because he wasn’t the imaginative sort.

  “Excuse me.” The office assistant, Anna, appeared in the doorway. “There’s someone here to see you, Chief. University safety team, or something like that.” Behind her, a dark man craned his neck to see into the office, his eyes darting about in curiosity. Anna stepped out of the way.

  “Yes?” Earles said. “Don’t stand in the doorway. If you have something to say, come in and say it.”

  The man stepped into the room and held out a card. “Miles Gudgeon, University OSHA representative,” he said. “You’re the officer doing this investigation?”

  “University what?” Earles ignored the proffered business card.

  “OSHA. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. We’re run by the Department of Labor.”

  “Ah. I was expecting a visit from you,” Earles said. “Please have a seat, Mr. Gudgeon.” Strange name, she thought. Strange man for Creekbend. No one wore business suits in this town.

  Hann hastily stood and offered up his dilapidated chair. The man declined it. “I don’t want to stay. I just wanted to leave my card, and tell you I’ll be doing a survey of the lab in question. The main office is sending a team out here. They’ll be traveling tonight. You’ll see them first thing in the morning.” He tossed the card on the desk.

  “Not so fast,” Earles said. “I’m conducting an investigation of a death. Possibly of several deaths. Your pack of officials will wait until I’ve finished.”

  Miles Gudgeon sighed. “I’m sure we can work something out. I’ll be in the physics building, doing my own investigation. Tell your chief to call me.”

  That’d be me, pal, Earles thought, but she didn’t say it. The little man wasn’t worth the effort. However, he had the authority to do his own su
rvey, she knew, and OSHA, despite the silly acronym, had the power to take the whole thing out of her hands. Well, she had one day and a night to do her own work. She didn’t trust this Gudgeon with his little mustache and business suit.

  “Sergeant Hann will accompany you,” she said, ignoring Hann’s uneasy look. “He’ll see that you touch nothing. You may take notes but cameras and other recording devices are not permitted at the scene yet.”

  Before the man could object Earles ushered both him and Hann into the hallway. “Keep an eye on him,” she said to Hann.

  The sun was well in the west when Yariko and Julian returned with their dripping shoes. A camp of sorts had been staked out by Dr. Shanker: a half-ring of large stones that Julian knew he himself could never have lifted. Hilda lay in the center chewing on a stick, looking as comfortable as if she were in her own front yard. Shanker and Frank accepted their water-filled shoes and drank gratefully; they didn’t even make faces at the taste. Hilda got a loafer-full of her own, which she lapped noisily without bothering to stand up.

  “We’ve gathered enough brush for a fire,” Dr. Shanker said, indicating a pile of twigs and sticks. “Assuming we can even start a fire, of course. Frank’s been trying to raise civilization again on his radio; needless to say, there’s been no response. And I explored the beach a bit. There are no signs of human life here, not even distant noises. Incidentally, I’ve been unable to find any scraps of metal from the lab, so we may be reverting to the stone age.”

  “Stone age?” Julian laughed, and the sound was slightly hysterical in his own ears. He stopped abruptly. “Assuming we were sent somewhere by your experiment, what might be our chances of getting back?”

  “That depends on where we are,” Yariko said, sitting on the ground beside Frank. “And if we’re really in a different time. Those crocodiles have me nearly convinced, but still. . . .”