Julian felt a shocking surge of desire as images came into his mind. For a moment he couldn’t stop them; he wondered if Yariko was having similar thoughts. Then he came back to reality. If she was picturing anything, it wasn’t his face that was close to hers, or his body. She’d be thinking of that mysterious fiancé, who Julian pictured something like Frank; and at that thought, his desire slipped away.
Yariko could be heard getting into her clothes; but Julian stayed as he was for a while longer.
After some time the rain stopped and the clouds opened up. The moon went down. It rested a moment on the treetops like the huge face of a celestial dinosaur, and then disappeared. The stars that showed as the clouds retreated were more brilliant without any competition from the moon; they were so bright that the outline of the river could be seen again, where the faint speckled reflection of the sky ended and the black mass of the jungle began. The air felt warmer, and less close.
“Do you know,” Yariko said suddenly, “they aren’t the same stars. I wish I had studied my astronomy. The Crab Nebula, for instance; a huge glowing cloud of gas blown off by a supernova. But it hasn’t happened yet. That gets to me, somehow.” After a few moments of silence she added, “But then, is North America even in the same place on the globe? Could that explain why the stars are different, and why it’s so warm?”
“No . . . we’re in the same latitude now as in our own time,” Julian said. “About forty-five degrees north, though not as far west; the Atlantic Ocean is young yet, and only just beginning to open. As for the climate, it’s significantly warmer now all over the globe. a Atmospheric CO2 is incredibly high—we’re in a real hothouse, with lmost no polar ice caps. That’s why sea level is so much higher.”
When the sun rose, mist began to curl from the water. A few birds fluttered in the leaves along the river, some of them dropping plummet-like from a branch and disappearing with a splash, after the fashion of a kingfisher. There were no song birds and the silence of the sunrise was uncanny for those used to the morning din of calls and trills.
All around in the quiet water and the slow current, fish began to rise for insects. They’d hear a plop of water and then see the rings spreading out. They tried to shoot toward the center of the rings, taking turns with the best working bow, but they were hardly quick enough. Each time the arrow would plunge in and then bob back up again and float on the surface, clean. They stopped after every few shots and paddled quietly about to collect the arrows. Julian was ready to groan with hunger.
Suddenly there was a disturbance in the river about thirty feet ahead. “Look!” Yariko cried, pointing. “Something’s going after the fish.”
The something was hard to identify, until it finally caught a fish in its jaws. Then Julian saw the narrow snout with protruding nostrils on the very end, and the exceptionally long thin teeth as they impaled the struggling fish. “Champosaur,” he said.
“Looks like a crocodile to me,” Dr. Shanker said, backpaddling. “How big is it? Will it attack us?”
“They’re small,” Julian said. “Four to eight feet at most. I don’t see why it should attack us when there’re so many fish. Look,” he went on. “It’s leaving a trail of pieces. Maybe we can scoop some up as bait.”
The water was now calm; they slowly paddled closer and Yariko reached over with the turtle shell and scooped up the floating debris.
“Don’t get your hand near the water,” Julian cautioned. “The champosaur might still be there.”
They managed to pick up three shreds of what looked like internal organs. Yariko took apart one of the bows and Dr. Shanker turned it into a very crude fishing pole and line.
The first piece of bait was pulled right out of the loop they’d tied around it, and they never even saw what got it. Then Dr. Shanker took off his watch, tore off the thin metal tongue and clasp, and with some effort bent it into a tiny hook.
Almost instantly something bit. Shanker yanked it in so hard that he went over backward on the boat, and the foot-long fish never had a chance to let go; in fact, it was all they could do to keep Hilda from grabbing it as it flopped around on the raft.
“Try again,” Julian urged, greedy in his hunger. “Let’s get two.”
They did. The second one took longer, but it was almost twice as big. It got a bit mangled being dragged onto the raft; Yariko was worried a champosaur would detect the blood and come after them, so they hastily paddled for shore.
In the bright dawn with the mists still dissipating, they cleaned the fish and made a stew that seemed a feast. The last of their shriveled roots rehydrated as the water came out of the fish and a lovely smell went up. Nothing had ever tasted so good. Julian didn’t care that his fingers and face were sticky with fish.
“Good thing we didn’t decide to bathe in the river,” Yariko said thoughtfully, licking her fingers. “That champy-thing had pretty long teeth.” She kept a number of bones for fishhooks. Dr. Shanker saved selected fish parts as bait, carefully wrapped in large leaves and set in the crook of a tree.
They were able to construct a wider and more comfortable platform than last time, and Yariko even pulled some leafy fronds and sent them up, to cover the worst of the bumps. However, Dr. Shanker still insisted on sleeping below with Hilda. They curled up side by side in the boat, which had been dragged almost completely ashore. A hoary, homespun string was tied loosely around Hilda’s neck, and the other end to Dr. Shanker’s wrist, to wake him if she moved.
As the sun climbed up above the trees, the jungle grew lighter, and the loft was flecked with little bits and chinks of light falling through the leaves. The air smelled clean although the morning breeze felt chilly. Julian and Yariko lay side by side, not quite touching. After a while Yariko turned away from him, settling on her side to sleep as she usually did. Her shoulder touched Julian’s and he pressed in closer rather than moving away.
When she didn’t react, he lifted his head and gazed at her. Her hair, still slightly damp, was in a tight shiny braid. Her T-shirt was cleaner but the jeans were still mud-spattered, torn and already bleaching in the subtropical sun; one hand was bandaged and puffy, and there were several scratches on her arms and face: she looked nothing like the Yariko of the physics lab. Yet, he still saw her the same way: decisive, competent, and calm. Dr. Shanker might see himself as the leader; but Julian felt that if anyone’s characteristics were to bring them to their goal, it would be Yariko’s.
“It’s starting to sink in,” he said, lying back again but still with his shoulder against hers, “that we’re the only people in existence. Us three. That’s the whole of the human population. Before. . . .” He hesitated, worried about upsetting Yariko, but decided to go on. “Before, I was thinking we had to get back home. I mean, I thought of the world as full of humans and our creations and society, and us just temporarily isolated from the world. But now. . . .” He couldn’t tell if she was even listening.
“What?” Yariko asked, without turning over. “What do you feel now?”
“Well, now I understand that this is the world; that there are no people. They don’t exist. There is no world of humanity to go ‘back’ to. There’s only this world—our world.” Julian stopped. He wasn’t making much sense, but the feeling was strong, and sudden. It was an entire change of outlook, of philosophy even. But it was not a sad feeling. It was just different.
Yariko turned her head to him and laughed at a sudden, ridiculous thought. “We could populate a village, you and I.”
Julian felt himself turning red. “Maybe a little one,” he said. They seemed to be thinking in parallel, but she was ahead of him; too fast for him, even as a joke. “It would be a very inbred village,” he said at last, reverting to science.
“Of course,” Yariko said. “Isn’t that common in small biological systems? You of all people; you shouldn’t be squeamish. All of our children would sleep with each other perfectly wantonly, and produce more children.”
“For Godsake.”
; She was thoroughly enjoying his discomfort. “But how can you be shocked? We’re Cretaceous animals now, aren’t we? Part of the wilderness.”
“Maybe Dr. Shanker could contribute to the gene pool,” Julian suggested.
Yariko made a face. “Who’s being disgusting now?”
“I don’t mean with you,” Julian quickly amended. “Our daughters.”
“Will he still be virile in fifteen years?”
“Knowing him, yes.”
Yariko looked thoughtful. “Maybe we’ll produce a whole race of people. Do you know, I’m not joking. Maybe we’ll spawn an entire civilization.”
Julian thought about it a moment, while brushing away a fly that landed on his arm to drink from the sweat. “No,” he said, “it wouldn’t be possible. There needs to be a critical mass to spawn a population.”
“Well, two men and one woman seem like a critical mass to me.” Abruptly, Yariko’s smile was gone. “Unless two of us get killed, and the other is left all alone. . . . One of us could be the only human in existence. One of us could live a whole lifetime in solitude, if the other two died.” She looked so stricken at the thought that Julian actually reached out an arm and drew her closer.
“We won’t die,” he said, fighting down thoughts of Frank. “We’re all healthy. We’re making good progress. I certainly don’t intend to leave you all alone—or be left without you.” He tried to speak lightly, but his arm tightened around her.
“Besides,” Yariko said, and her voice took on its teasing tone again, “you paleontologists would have found traces of it in the fossil record. Stone buildings, or something.”
Julian shook his head. “Not necessarily. All of our written history, six thousand years, is nothing, a blip, a blink of the eye, geologically speaking. All of those layers of rock could easily have swallowed it up, and we might never have found the slightest hint of it.”
“Then it’s still possible,” Yariko said, with satisfaction, and without pulling away from his encircling arm. “A great civilization: immense dynasties and cataclysmic wars that would put to shame everything we were ever taught in grammar school. Don’t you think?”
He was beginning to catch her enthusiasm. “Yes. And they would live in the higher, stony ground away from the Inland Seaway. They’d build steep hills with hollow insides, stone forts to keep out the carnivores. And they’d round up some of the smaller herbivores for cattle. They would use tyrannosaurids as war steeds. Bring them up from hatchlings, and train them to be loyal. That’s an impressive thought—pounding over the open terrain on a beast like that.”
“How exciting,” she murmured. “Tell me more about it.”
He tried to invent more, about great seagoing ships, imperial hunting expeditions to bring back prize dinosaurs, slave pits with dromaeosaurs instead of lions; but after a while he realized that she had fallen asleep. Her eyes were closed, and her expression was perfectly contented.
TEN
The Amazon Jungle is not well understood. Many of the species are either so rare or so remote that they are completely unknown to us. The small plants and insects, the foundation of that immense and complex system, are so numerous and diverse that scientists cannot hope to catalogue the half of them; certainly not before the jungle is destroyed by agriculture and everything in it becomes extinct. How, then, can we understand the ecosystem of the Late Cretaceous jungle, extinct for 65 million years? One thing we know: large animals would have been rare. You might have walked for days without seeing a single large, photogenic, scary carnivore.
—Julian Whitney, Lectures on Cretaceous Ecology
1 September
5:23 PM Local Time
Earles closed her door for a moment’s quiet time. But she’d hardly reached her desk again when Hann entered without knocking, the two physicists on his heels. All three were bursting with news.
Earles was amused in spite of herself. “Who’s first?”
The woman—Ridzgy?—spoke first, as Earles had known she would. “Preliminary assessment,” she said, flipping open a tiny laptop and seating herself, uninvited, on Earles’ desk. “Here’s the sequence we’re proposing. One, the initial explosion that you say was reported by the guard. Then, within sixty seconds of that, a large vacuum was set up inside the vault.”
“A vacuum?”
“A sudden drop in air pressure, so that the door was pulled shut and sealed itself; an implosion, if you like.”
Earles nodded. “The door was quite difficult to open when we first got there.”
“Yes. It would be. Of course we weren’t there to measure the vacuum, but the readings in the vault were recorded in the master computer. We’re studying them now.”
Earles sat down behind her desk, forgetting in her interest to tell Ridzgy to get off. “OK. What caused the first explosion?”
“Unknown, so far,” Bowman said. “Such things can happen if there’s noise in the vault; for example, if the door wasn’t sealed and a loud noise occurred—”
“Especially if a certain small but integral part is used in the alignment,” Ridzgy interrupted.
“What part? Alignment of what?” Earles asked.
“Well, we can’t be sure yet. The initial explosion shattered the dials and indicators, and as you know it’s a bit of a mess. However, there’s every indication that they were using a magneto-electric buffer to allow for micro-fine adjustments of the field.”
“In English, please,” Earles said, looking at Hann. “And without the caveats and hesitations: just give me your line of thought, substantiated or not.”
Ridzgy nodded. “OK. This may be a long step, but here it is. There’s a small platinum bar in the loop from the fine adjusters to the wiring. A piece of metal say as long as my palm. It’s a kind of standardizer, or constant, that subtly modifies the electrical field. Kind of like the iron balls on each side of a ship’s compass allowing fine adjustments to the magnetic field, only not so crude. It allows some very delicate control over settings; but it also makes the equipment supersensitive to noise and vibrations. I’ve never actually seen a setup that made use of it, until now.”
Earles was thinking hard. “Is there more significance to this thing than just making an explosion more likely? Could it be related to the implosion, this drop in air pressure? And where did the air go?”
“Don’t know yet,” Bowman said. “It’s not as if you can grab a parcel of air and just . . . vanish it, leaving a temporary vacuum. We’re studying the results now to see if they recorded the volume of air that was, well, moved.”
He seemed to be looking at Ridzgy for approval as he spoke. For that matter, he seemed to be looking at her most of the time. Earles was mildly annoyed; she wanted two independent opinions, not two people voicing the same thoughts because one needed the approval of the other. Or maybe there was something else at work?
She shook her head and went back to relevant thoughts. “There was a graduate student involved with their work. I’ll send him to you tonight. He seems to know what they were up to. But he didn’t mention a platinum bar, so maybe it’s not important.”
“The platinum bar may have been significant,” Ridzgy said. “It could have amplified their settings in unexpected ways. In any case, a lot of power shot through that system: not only are circuits burnt, but that bar is partially melted. And platinum has a very high melting point.”
“How high?”
“Almost eighteen-hundred degrees Celsius.”
“Which is. . . .” Earles tried to do the calculation in her head, but Ridzgy was quicker.
“Over three thousand degrees Fahrenheit.”
Earles sat very still. So that’s it, she thought. That’s the answer. Those people were vaporized, carbonized, whatever it was called, in a three-thousand-degree crematorium. She turned to look at Hann.
“Charlie,” she said, and paused. Years of practice giving empty words of sympathy didn’t make this moment any easier. “I’m so sorry.”
Hann looked s
tartled. “What?” He held yet another Styrofoam cup in his hand, probably loaded with the false sweetness of powdered coffee creamer.
Earles took a breath, and then closed her mouth. Not only did she have to express awkward sympathy, genuine though it was, but she had to give it to a man who was oblivious. “The vault was heated to three thousand degrees, Charlie,” she said as gently as she could. “The people inside . . . I’m sure they felt nothing. It would have been instantaneous.”
Hann’s cup hit the floor with a soft splat. The sticky liquid sprayed his crisp trousers and shoes. He stared at Earles as if he thought she had killed his brother herself. Then he stood up and walked unsteadily to the door, crushing the Styrofoam cup underfoot and leaving the wet outline of his boot heel with every step on the dirty linoleum.
Earles let him go. “I’ll get that coroner in again, to look for remains . . . ash, I suppose,” she said, and she wondered irrelevantly if human ash could be distinguished from canine ash.
As the Cretaceous autumn advanced, the weather often turned to drizzle. Fortunately the seasonality of North America was subtle in that time, so it was still fairly warm. At first the rain was welcome; drinking water didn’t have to be boiled if they could catch it in the turtle shell as it fell, and staying just short of filthy without having to try river bathing was a plus.
The travelers fell into an easy routine, sleeping during the gradually cooling days and continuing up the river at night. The champosaurs were left behind, or became shy; no large terrestrial carnivore disturbed them. In fact, no large animals at all appeared for many days. They began to relax from the constant edge of desperate fear. Julian’s interest in spotting new dinosaurs revived, and they made good progress on the river; they estimated close to thirty miles a night against the slow current. At that speed, and even with the windings of the river, they might make a thousand miles well before the time ran out. But they hurried all the same. Delays would be inevitable, and it was too much to expect that the river would cooperate the entire distance. They did not often talk about the subject; it was more than enough keeping up with the moment-by-moment demands of each day and night.
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