Cretaceous Dawn

by Lisa M. Graziano

  Earles ignored him. “If a beetle appeared inside the sealed vault, the air pressure would change. It would increase, by a tiny amount. Was that change measured?” She looked from Bowman to Ridzgy, but neither answered. “You said the twigs and such were all weighed after they appeared.”

  “Yes.” Bowman sounded cautious.

  “Let’s say a pebble weighs one gram. It appears in the sealed vault, and causes a change in air pressure that the instruments can detect. From that, you could calculate how much mass had to disappear to cause the vacuum that pulled the door shut.”

  Ridzgy was looking at Earles with a new respect; but her first words were a correction. “It isn’t mass that’s important, it’s volume. What matters is the volume of air something displaces.”

  “Volume, then,” Earles said.

  “Well, there are measurements for about twenty samples, including some small rocks. Size, from which we can calculate volume, and change in pressure in the vault . . . yes, there should of course be a predictable relationship.”

  “But what would that tell us?” Bowman sat down again, somewhat unnecessarily close to his colleague, Earles thought. “And the door wasn’t sealed when the vacuum was created. Some air from the room must have rushed in before the door closed.”

  “We’d know if the volume could equal four-and-a-half people and a dog. Even if it was a rough number, we’d know if it was possible.” Earles got up and walked over to the vault, where she looked in at the smashed dials and open, dangling wires. “Maybe they can be brought back from wherever they are. Maybe they can be retrieved, if they’re still alive, just like they retrieved their beetles.”

  She turned back to the scientists. “I’ll call the department’s electrical engineer to help you with the wiring. Better yet, I’ll get that student, Mark Reng. He said he knew all about the electronics of this thing. I want this place back up and running before morning.”

  Julian struggled to the top of the wall and sat, staring, legs dangling over the edge. After a moment the sun on his neck and the painful heat of the stones reminded him that he had to act. He threw the bundle and spear to the ground and scrambled down after them. Then he gripped the spear in his right hand and stared around at the corral.

  Something about it seemed well-ordered, lived in, although it was hard to choose any detail that gave the impression. Perhaps it was the animals standing like cattle chewing their cud; or maybe it was the dry, well-beaten earth of the ground, and the neat stacks of wood here and there.

  Making a sudden decision, Julian set out across the corral to the building at the far side. He passed within a few yards of the ceratopsians. They gazed at him out of wide brown eyes. None of them got up. They did not seem concerned.

  The doorway was merely a gap between two stones. Julian looked cautiously inside and saw that the interior extended backward for several tiny rooms. The first room contained an ash-filled pit and a mound of hay built up against one of the walls; ferns, that is, and shrubs that had been cut down at the base. Some part of Julian’s mind was satisfied, since grass per se had not yet evolved.

  On the far side of the room another doorway led into darkness. He stepped over and looked inside. The roof of this inner room must have been made of stone or more neatly thatched, because it let in no light and his eyes were half a minute adjusting. The light that filtered in from behind showed a large chamber with a soil floor. A few large rocks lay about, possibly meant to be seats. In the center, hanging by a rope strung through its jaw, was the carcass of a small ceratopsian. It was half skinned, and the leather hung down over its back legs and dragged stiffly on the floor. The blood was already partially dried, and the carcass had begun to stink in the heat.

  Stepping around it, Julian found another doorway on the opposite side. The third room was better lighted. It had a window, again only a gap between the stones, through which a shaft of light stabbed onto the floor. Beside the window stood a wooden barricade made of thick logs. Julian guessed that an opening led to the opposite slope of the hill.

  In the corner, so wrapped up in shadow that it might have been missed, was a wooden couch, a length of tree trunk that had been split to form a smooth, flat surface. Stretched out on the couch, his back propped up against the stone wall, was a man. He was breathing quietly, asleep it seemed, his eyes only pits of shadow. He was wearing a tunic of cured leather and tight pants down to his knees, and his feet were bare. His hair was yellowish gray, long and tangled, falling about a gaunt, brown face that looked like chiseled wood.

  Julian stared at him for a long time while his brain told him, idiotically, “Homo sapiens.”

  As Julian’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he realized that he was being quietly watched. The man was awake.

  After a moment he spoke. “I saw you come up from the river,” he said. The voice was deep, measured, and quiet. The accent was strange and it took Julian a moment to decipher the words. “I have watched you.” He nodded toward a chunk of wood in the opposite corner of the little, skewed room, as if inviting his guest to sit down.

  Julian realized that he was leaning heavily on his spear; his head was spinning, and in another moment he would have keeled over in a dead faint. He sank down onto the seat, still tightly clutching the spear, as if the wooden solidity of it held a part of his sanity.

  For a few minutes neither moved or spoke. Julian couldn’t make his voice work, and the strange man seemed content to observe in silence. Finally he rose and stood looking down at Julian, the dim shadow of his broad shoulders falling across the room. Then he strode through the doorway.

  When Julian felt he could stand up without his legs trembling he followed the man back through the series of rooms and into the dusty corral. The ceratopsians stood placidly around the tree, chewing wisps of fern. Their master had grasped a crude wooden pitchfork and was tossing clumps of hay—dried ferns of various species—in their direction. He threw a few more forkfuls and then turned to face his visitor.

  The man’s face, in the sunlight, was the color of old leather, smooth except for the corners of the eyes, and his chin was sprinkled with a thin, sparse beard. Something about the face struck Julian with a sense of familiarity, of comfort almost. Surely, he knew that face. . . . He shook off the odd feeling. Of course the man looked “familiar”; he was another human being, and Julian hadn’t seen more than two of his own species in over a month.

  “The others are gone,” the man said, softly and with finality.

  “You saw them?” Julian cried, excitement surging through him, once he understood the words.

  The face took on a puzzled expression, the creases bunching around the eyes.

  “Who are you?” Julian said.

  The man gave him a searching look, and then, apparently deciding his visitor was harmless, wiped a hand on his thigh and held it out. “Carl,” he said; or so Julian heard it. The accent was odd and the name could have been different. It sounded more like “Corl.”

  Julian took his hand automatically. The palm was rough, crossed with scars and calluses, and the finger nails were filthy. His grip was surprisingly strong.

  “Julian Whitney. But. . . .”

  It occurred to Julian that he might be suffering a heat-induced hallucination. Maybe the strain of climbing the hill had finally done him in, after the river and hiking in the heat. How else could he account for this Maastrichtian anomaly, this man who strode up and shook visitors by the hand? He felt like laughing. Here was the welcoming committee of the Late Cretaceous. But where had he gotten his twentieth-century manners and learned his English?

  Julian looked his host over closely and decided that he was too dirty and wiry to be a mirage. He hoped he would dream up a more angelic hallucination.

  Carl was silent.

  “How did you get here?” Julian finally stammered.

  “Walked.”

  “Walked . . . impossible. Don’t you understand? Humans don’t exist here!” In his state of shock, the irony
of this statement was completely lost on him.

  The man gave him a level stare without expression. Julian stared back, but he could not hold that gaze for long and soon dropped his eyes. It was then that he noticed Carl’s left hand. It had only three fingers, the third cut off at the top knuckle. Twisted pink scars had grown over a good portion of the palm and filled in the space where the last two fingers should have been.

  Carl walked calmly back to the hut and disappeared into the shadows. Nothing about the man had seemed threatening so far, but he was hardly friendly either. His expression was unreadable. Julian wondered if he were fetching a weapon.

  Carl came out with a sort of shovel, roughly carved from a single piece of wood. He handed it to Julian without a word and then grasped his pitchfork again.

  He began tossing hay toward his dinosaurian livestock. After a few heaves he glanced back at Julian and said, “We will talk after the work.”

  He seemed to be saying, stop gawking and start shoveling. Julian shrugged and fell to.

  For the next hour they shoveled ceratopsian shit. The scattered clumps had to be gathered into a mound and then shoveled into a depression on one side of the corral that drained to the outside. It was heavy work but Carl seemed tireless for all his age. Julian was soon out of breath.

  At first he was shy of talking to this impossibility, this apparition; and Carl did not break the silence with conversation. Once he glanced at the sky and said, “I eat when the sun sits on the wall. After dark, I go out.” He had a most economical way with words.

  Julian took in the stringy physique, the sharp features and skin that was neither light nor dark. A man perhaps between sixty and sixty-five; not so old, in fact. And in better shape than I am, he thought, or at least more practiced at shoveling shit.

  The sweat ran down his chest and back, and his shoulders began to ache. The sun was a long way from the rim of stones. Finally he screwed up his courage and asked if there were any other people in the area.

  Carl shook his head. “The others are gone, long ago.” Then he added, “Your friend went west.”

  Julian’s shovel stabbed into the ground. “You met them!”

  But Carl shook his head again. He took his time, prying up a clump of dung that had dried into the crack between two boulders. Then he said, “I saw one human print in the mud. There was another?”

  Julian described his companions, but Carl seemed puzzled over the concept of dog. Finally he said, “It was the one you call Shanker. A heavy person with a large foot.”

  Julian gestured with the shovel toward the west wall of the enclosure. “We were heading for the hills. They must think I went on without them.”

  Carl stopped again, leaned on the pitchfork, and stared at Julian in a searching manner, as if a new thought had come into his head. His blue eyes were disconcerting. It was impossible to tell if he was friendly, hostile, or merely indifferent. “West,” he said, as if it had some meaning; but he added only, “they have a hard journey.”

  That seemed to exhaust his vocal capacity on the subject. He nodded toward another depression in the ground and said, “That could be cleaned.”

  After staring for a moment, Julian went to investigate. It was a stone-lined water trough, slightly recessed under the wall. A thick layer of mud and ferns covered the bottom and smeared the sides. It smelled so vile that he hesitated over shoveling into the muck. He stood a moment, frowning at it, until frustration got the better of him. What right did this being have to put him to work? As far as Julian was concerned, Carl didn’t even have the right to exist.

  He turned and blurted out, “You tell me who you are, and if you know where my friends have gone.”

  Carl only said calmly, “The work must be done.” It wasn’t an order; it was merely a statement of fact. Julian began to see that his host did not mean to put him to work. Carl simply did not know what else to do with a stranger. He was as confused about Julian as Julian was about him.

  The very strangeness of Carl had begun to frighten Julian and he seriously considered throwing down the shovel, scrambling over the wall, and disappearing into the scrubby landscape as quickly as possible. Maybe if he ran away, Carl and his animals and enclosure would all disappear, and the world would make sense again.

  But he looked at Carl and watched the broad, tanned back bending and unbending as he worked. His movements were so calm and deliberate that, quite suddenly, Julian trusted him. The man might be the devil who had come back in time to haunt a lonely human; but he was a charismatic devil, who seemed to know exactly what he was doing. As rational thought began to return, Julian felt first a great relief at not being the only human being in existence; and second, creative, if unlikely, reasons for Carl’s existence suggested themselves to his mind.

  As he pondered, he returned to the problem of working the shovel into the recessed trough; the wooden blade was a few inches too wide. When he glanced back at Carl he found that he was being watched.

  “Use your hands,” Carl said, curtly.

  Julian looked down at the mess in the trough and started to laugh. He suddenly felt better about everything. Mucking out cattle stalls had been a childhood job one summer long ago. Now, this simple necessity made him feel as though order had come back to the world. He leaned the shovel against the wall, got down on his knees, wrinkled his nose for all he was worth, and plunged his fingers into the mud.

  As he scooped up the last of the muck, Carl’s shadow fell over him. The sun was a handsbreadth above the rim of stones. He stood, wiping black mud mixed with ceratopsian shit on his jeans.

  Carl nodded once, which Julian took to mean, “Clean enough.” Then he reached into the trough and pulled a leather plug from the wall. Water gushed in, surprisingly clear. When it had risen to the top of the trough, he replaced the plug. As Julian found out later, the wall was riddled with wooden and bone pipes, reservoirs, filled up with rainwater.

  They washed their hands in the trough until the water was black, and Carl drained and refilled it with fresh water. Then Julian followed his host inside.

  Carl said nothing but simply went about his work. He carefully removed the ashes from a mound of hot coals. Then he lay twigs on the embers and fanned them into a fire. Next he set up a wooden tripod, blackened from use, and hung a clay pot of water over the flames. Julian noticed that his left hand seemed to give him no trouble, and he used it as much as his right; the injury must have occurred many years ago.

  On a flat rock beside the fire pit Carl set a chunk of raw meat and a pile of fiddleheads. Julian smiled when he saw them: fiddleheads are the tops of young fern shoots that, before unfolding into the fern shape, are coiled and resemble the end of a fiddle; certainly an appropriate Cretaceous vegetable.

  Carl handed over a crude bone knife; Julian took it as an invitation to stay to dinner. While the wood burned down they cut the meat into strips. They steamed the fiddleheads, fried the meat with grayish-white roots in a flat clay pan, and finally mixed the whole together. Carl added a wedge of animal fat and a few pungent leaves pulled from a dried bunch hanging from the ceiling.

  It was a fantastic meal, especially after the poor attempts at culinary art that Dr. Shanker, Yariko, and Julian had produced. At home he would have added salt, and used a fork rather than splinters of wood, but the ceratopsian fat and dried herbs could not have been improved on. The room itself was cozy: the fire glowed, rising and falling, intermittently lighting up the bunches of dried plants hanging about, a few clay pans hanging from sticks in the wall, and the tools they’d been using, now standing in one corner. It was a rough but comfortable home; and it gave Julian a sheltered feeling that he hadn’t experienced in a very long time.

  “But where did you come from?”

  “West,” Carl said. “From the hills.”

  They sat on rocks placed just outside the doorway, one to either side, relaxing after the meal. Carl took some time settling himself, chewing on a twig and glancing at the sky. He stretched out his
long, wiry legs, picked at his teeth with his fingernail, belched with a look of profound concentration, and then sighed in relaxation. “From the caves,” he said.

  “The caves?”

  He nodded but did not explain any further; instead he leaned his head back and closed his eyes. After a moment he spoke again. “And you, from the east?”

  Julian wondered how he knew. “From the epicontinental sea—the Niobrara. We started on an island just off the shore.”

  “That is a new name for it,” Carl said. “You have traveled long.” He looked at Julian with a new interest, as if he were reconsidering how much of a hopeless lost fool his guest could possibly be. “I was told about it, but have never seen it.”

  “Who told you? Are there other people?”

  Carl spat out a wad of soggy bark. “There were too few.” He looked at the western sky where the sun was setting, then to the east where the moon would rise, nearly full in a clear sky. The temperature was already dropping and the cooler air was refreshing after the unsheltered heat of the day. “They told me of it, from the telling of those before. A few stayed and so we grew. But that was many years ago. I am the last.” He did not seem at all sad; he merely stated it as a fact.

  Julian watched him eagerly. “Who were they? How many?”

  The question seemed to have little meaning to Carl. “They built the sentinel mound.” He waved his hand to indicate the hut and the enclosure. “I built the walls. But that was a long time ago.”

  They were silent as Julian thought over the strange hints. Carl’s calmness was baffling. How long had he been alone? Ten years? Or forty? Had another group of people traveled back in time? There was no other explanation. Furthermore, Carl clearly originated from relatively modern America; nineteenth or twentieth century, anyway. His speech, his tools, his little oasis of a farm in this vast scrubby landscape, all pointed to an origin similar to Julian’s own. Add to that the coincidence of their being in the exact same location on the globe at the exact same time in prehistory, and it was clear that Carl had been introduced by the same happenstance as Julian: the vault in Yariko’s particle physics lab.