Huddling close to the warm coals, he used a handful of the water to scrub at his face and bristly chin. It would soon be time to attempt another painful shave with the pocketknife. He remembered Dr. Shanker laughing at him the first time he’d shaved—“I’m just waiting for you to hit that jugular,” Shanker had said—and felt another surge of impatience to be up and searching.
Carl walked in, water streaming from his head and chest, his feet encased in mud. He shook the wet hair out of his eyes, blew his nose violently into his hand, and wiped the palm on his leather leggings.
Julian looked at him with concern. “Is the flooding bad?”
“The river has spread over the banks,” Carl said. “My path is covered two miles to the east.” At Julian’s dismayed look he added, “We will still travel. The land is higher to the west.” He stooped beside the fire and dished out the hot yellow mash.
“We should head out soon,” Julian said. “How much time before the animals are ready?”
Carl smiled. “Not much time. Old men do not sleep as much as young men.” He pointed to the ceiling of the middle room, where the carcass had hung the day before. “That was the last task.”
“Will we take the meat with us?” Julian wondered how the man had handled the carcass by himself, but he didn’t ask.
Carl shook his head. “It was a yearling. One of the adults kicked it and crushed its skull. The meat was already bad when I found it, but the skin was good.”
“And the carcass?”
“For Corla. The Big Ones can eat anything.”
Julian wondered what Corla would do without the handouts for a few weeks, and if she would hunt on her own. Old as she was, he could still imagine her bringing down a Triceratops.
After they ate Carl doused the coals with water, rather than covering them with ashes to keep them warm. The action seemed significant to Julian. Perhaps Carl planned to be away for some time. “Won’t the enclosure flood?” he asked, picturing the result of a few days of heavy rain: a lake of muddy water, and the bloated bodies of the ceratopsians bobbing around in the center of it. But Carl said there were drains around the edge.
The rain was no more than a drizzle by the time they sloshed out into the brown pool. The water had already dropped considerably; the drains seemed to work. Carl had gathered supplies for the journey: sacks of smoked meat, two small skins (varanid lizards, Julian thought) for carrying water, and two light spears with fire-hardened points. They each took a food sack, a water skin, and a spear, and Carl carried a bundle of hides and an additional small sack that seemed to be elaborately stiffened with curved bones or sticks. He handled this one carefully, as if it was delicate.
They climbed the ladder to the top of the wall. It was well into morning already, but there was little light. Still, Julian was surprised at what he saw from the top of the wall. The river valley had vanished under a gray-white fog. The tip of Carl’s hill rose above it, the only visible bit of terrain other than the tops of a few tall trees some distance away.
He turned for a last look at Carl’s home. The pool of water had subsided and exposed the stony ground, choked with mud. He looked at the placid beasts, pulling mouthfuls from the bales of ferns that Carl had placed on the dry ground. He wondered if they would miss their caretaker. With a last look at the hut with its dinosaur-skin curtain, he turned and followed Carl down the hill.
They headed for the river. Water streamed along the ground and pooled in the cupped and curled leaves of the bushes. There seemed to be an unusual amount of animal activity; Julian heard rustlings and cracklings and the occasional eerie cry. He had the sense of an invisible world waking up. Holding tight to his spear, he followed Carl through the dense fog, keeping close so as not to lose him. Before long the river could be heard, loud in the dense air and sounding much closer than it turned out to be.
They came to it suddenly in the fog, and Julian hardly recognized it as the same river. It had turned into a muddy brown torrent, foaming and roaring, barely contained by its banks. Large branches, in some cases whole trees with tangles of roots still attached, swept past, crashing against unseen rocks. The rain had changed the landscape and must have washed away any traces that Yariko and Dr. Shanker had left behind. Julian leaned on his spear. He was disenheartened and a little dazed by the thundering noise that seemed to come from all directions in the fog.
“We will find them,” Carl said. He, too, leaned on his spear and looked at the river; but his expression was keen and attentive.
“Do you see something?” Julian asked.
But he said, “Only the river,” and turned away.
They walked along the bank for nearly an hour, sometimes scrambling over stones, sometimes slogging through pools where the river had overspread its course. Then they plunged into a dense wood, and the fog thickened so that the great shaggy trunks of the pines loomed up, huge and solitary, then disappeared again behind them. Gnarled juniper trees looked like weird old men appearing suddenly and several times gave Julian a fright. If Carl noticed any of his jumps and starts, he did not show it.
Finally Carl slowed and then stopped near the river again.
“Here is where you crossed,” he said.
Julian saw nothing. “How can you tell?”
“There is nowhere else to cross.”
Fortunately, they were already on the correct side of the river; but it was no easy task following Hell Creek. They had to wade or scramble across each brook that emptied into it. The largest of the streams was a regular little river of its own, swollen with rainwater, and looked daunting to cross. Carl led Julian over a series of boulders, some of them partly submerged, the water foaming against them. Their placement was too regular, too convenient for chance.
Near the center of the stream both banks were invisible in the fog, and Julian could see only the patch of water directly beneath his feet, tumbling past. The motion of it threw him off balance suddenly, as if the ground were slipping away underneath him. He tottered, but Carl gripped his arm firmly and shouted over the roar of the water, “Better not to look down.”
When they reached the opposite bank of the tributary they continued west, while Hell Creek veered away to the south. The sound of it sank into a vague hissing and rumbling. They were in an open area of stones and low scrubby bushes looming out of the fog. Julian began to shiver in the dank cold. Carl must have felt the cold also; he stopped and unrolled the bundle of skins. They turned out to be ponchos, one for each of them. Julian slid the skin over his head and found that it made a warm, if heavy, covering.
“The others can’t be too far ahead,” he said as Carl tied up the sack again.
“How long would they stay to look for you?”
Julian paused, thinking. He was still disturbed at the thought that they’d continued on without him, and wondered for about the hundredth time how they had missed him on the river bank. “I’m sure they would have searched that day, and maybe all night too,” he said at last. “At most, I think they could be two nights and a day ahead of us.”
Carl nodded; but Julian could not read his expression. His face was neither optimistic nor entirely grim. To Julian there seemed little point in searching for the others in the vast, soupy sea of fog. For the moment he forgot his own foolish desire to search at night in the midst of a tempest, and wondered what Carl thought they could possibly find before the fog lifted, if it ever did.
When Carl realized he was being watched, his expression softened. “They went this way yesterday morning,” he said.
“They did? How do you know?” Julian tried to squelch the excitement he felt. Carl couldn’t have seen any signs; but then he sounded so certain, as he did about everything.
“I tracked them before you found me.” Carl pointed into the wall of fog. “The one you called Shanker. There may have been one other with him. He was making for a pine woods that I know.”
Julian let the excitement take over. “Then they can’t be too far ahead. Why didn’t you fi
nd him yesterday?”
“I saw you. You were looking at my hill, and then you found my path. I turned back and waited for you.”
Julian wasn’t surprised that Carl had reached his hill first, but he did wonder how the man had seen him while tracking the others. Apparently, Yariko and Shanker had been very close by at some point, and none of them had known it.
They continued on their way.
Despite his new hope, the heavy silence of the fog began to weigh on Julian. After some time he thought there was a noise to the left, a scraping sound like rocks grinding together. He immediately thought of Yariko and Dr. Shanker walking; but he also thought of Corla, or some other terrible Cretaceous carnivore, stepping over the loose stony rubble.
Calling out loud was out of the question. He turned to ask Carl if they should creep up to the source of the sound and investigate; but Carl was gone. In those few seconds of hesitation Carl had continued ahead and been swallowed up by the fog. Julian hurried to catch up, but his foot snagged on a root and he fell hard on the rocky ground.
He lay still, holding his breath and listening, afraid that the sound of his fall would attract the creature that was moving in the fog. But he heard nothing. Finally he raised himself cautiously, wiped the wet grit from his palms, and looked around. He could not see beyond two yards.
“Carl?” he said, as loudly as he dared. There was no answer; only silence.
EIGHTEEN
The dromaeosaurids, or raptors, were some of the smaller dinosaurs, but their brain size to body ratio was among the highest of all dinosaurs, indicating intelligence. These animals had a keen sense of smell and, like other predators, binocular vision allowed them to see in three dimensions, the better to hunt down their prey. It is thought that the dromaeosauridae hunted in packs, bringing down animals much larger than themselves. Velociraptor, found in Mongolia, is perhaps the best known of the group; but there were equivalent species living in North America. Certainly their prey would not have known or cared about the small differences in morphology.
—Julian Whitney, Lectures on Cretaceous Ecology
1 September
11:05 PM Local Time
Bowman stared at his colleague. He had felt at ease working with her this long day; for that matter, he’d always liked her when they’d met at conferences. She was a no-nonsense scientist and also, he’d often felt, quite attractive in a mature, near-fifty kind of way. Even when he was married, he couldn’t help noticing her; and now that he was single, he’d begun to have ideas. This happenstance that threw them together so intimately was just what he wanted.
But her behavior to Earles was inexplicable.
“Why are you staring at me? You know perfectly well what’s going on,” Ridzgy snapped.
Bowman watched the too-quiet kid, Mark or whatever his name was, slip out of the lab without looking at them. “I do? I only know you sent that woman off to get a useless piece of metal. You know perfectly well that a new piece won’t work. Even with the correct dimensions, there’ll be internal differences in mass and form. It can’t replicate the original bar, and without that we can’t replicate the settings.”
“Of course we can’t.” Ridzgy was clearly impatient. “But we can still do what Miyakara and Shanker were doing—translocate objects and bring them into the vault. Does it matter if our collections don’t come from the exact same place as their rocks and beetles?”
“But . . . but Marla, you told her we could try to bring Miyakara and Shanker back. You told the police. . . .”
Ridzgy made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “She doesn’t know the difference. We’ll get this thing set up and running by morning, do the experiment using the settings they recorded, and see what happens. If we don’t bring the missing people back, who would blame us? It’d be a slim chance anyhow, even if that platinum standardizer hadn’t been melted. Who’s to say they’re even alive?”
Bowman sat down heavily, staring at his partner. “But they’ll come back, if they are alive,” he said, expressing a new thought. “What’s to stop them making it home eventually? Even if they’re in the middle of the Sahara or something—surely they’ll be found. Then they’ll claim their work.”
Ridzgy smiled. She had beautiful teeth; somehow the fluorescent lights brought them out. “They can try. But they’ll have to be fast.” She leaned closer to Bowman and lowered her voice. “What if we went somewhere? We could translocate ourselves, after collecting a few samples to see what kind of place we’ve locked on to. We take all the notebooks,” she swept her arm across the lab bench, “and copies of all their files; and we destroy the original files, except the program that runs the vault. Then we get ourselves back home and start writing. And building; we can duplicate this setup.”
“I admit it’s a clever way of walking out with all the information,” Bowman said. “But if we make a stir with our ‘findings’ it’ll be obvious what we did. Everyone’ll know.”
“Who? The Creekbend South Dakota police force? A small-town woman who thinks she’s Sherlock Holmes, and that idiot sidekick of hers with the cigarette breath?” Ridzgy laughed, and the sound wasn’t pleasant. “Once we disappear too the university and OSHA will descend on this lab and dismantle it. They’ll never let Miyakara and Shanker do this again, even if those two do eventually show up.”
Bowman shook his head. “That graduate student who just left—he’ll know.”
“What ambitious young grad student wants to stay at the University of Creekbend, South Dakota? This place is a dump with no real funding. I’ll give him the fellowship he’s only dreamed about.”
When Bowman didn’t say anything, Ridzgy leaned closer again. “This is the chance of a lifetime. I’m offering you a full partnership.” She leaned back and crossed her arms. “You aren’t actually going to say no, are you?” Her voice took on the derisive tone that was particularly galling to Bowman.
“No,” he said. “I mean yes. Yes, I’ll do it.”
“Then let’s get to work.” Ridzgy spun her chair around and opened a file. A large beetle, photographed in various poses, appeared on the screen. “The first thing to do is put in a disc and save this image for ourselves. Then, we delete it from the hard drive,” she said, carrying out the actions as she described them. “We do the same to every file. Once we’ve taken all their notebooks with the descriptions and measurements, there’ll be no clues where those people were translocated to. The University won’t be sending out any rescue party to the Sahara.”
The world was gone. There was only thick, gray-white fog pressing in on him in dank silence. For an instant, Julian thought his sight and hearing were gone too.
Then, without the least sound, a wall appeared out of the fog in front of him. It was not the shifting, amorphous gray of fog, but a solid form. It filled his whole range of vision for an instant, and then it was gone. Julian felt a faint stirring of the air around him and smelled a rich, mulchy odor of dung.
He began walking, slowly, trying to make as little sound as possible on the pebbly ground. He felt a kind of shuddering beneath his feet, barely perceptible at first. There was something, a blur, a sense of motion, caught out of the tail of his eye. But by the time he turned to look, there was nothing but empty fog.
Then began an endless nightmare of huge gray shapes appearing and fading away all around him, a trembling of the ground, blindness, and an overwhelming sense of insignificance—his own insignificance. A herd of immense creatures was on the move, and he was in the middle of its path.
Julian knew it must be Triceratops; few other animals moved in such large herds, or were so large themselves. He wondered if he’d be trampled or gored to death, or both; but either he was lucky or the creatures could see well enough in the fog to avoid him. They passed to either side, and he caught glimpses of their great, reddish frills and hooked beaks.
What direction they were traveling he had no idea; but he tried to orient himself with them and keep moving, so as not to stumble into anyo
ne’s direct path. It was the only thing he could do. Sometimes the herd swerved a little one way; other times they and their human flotsam drifted in the other direction. It was not long before Julian lost his bearings completely, and with it the last dregs of confidence. He trailed along, terrified, shivering, arms huddled together under his poncho.
After a while, hours it seemed, but it might have been only ten or twenty minutes, the creatures vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. He was alone again, lost in the fog.
He continued slowly up a gradual rise, to what must have been a ridge or mound, and stopped when he felt the ground level under foot. He wondered if any predators might be trailing the herd; if so, they’d find him an easy target.
At last the fog began to thin. A cold breeze found its way up into the poncho, but he thought it was welcome if it blew the fog away. He stood for a long time, shivering, and finally sat down on the ground. There was nothing to be done but wait for Carl to find him, or for the fog to lift so that he could find his own way.
As the fog thinned to a gray sky a stony, tumbled slope spread out at Julian’s feet. The daylight was almost gone. The sun, pale and smeary, was squeezed into a thin strip of relatively clear sky between the clouds and the western horizon. Soon it would disappear behind the low hills.
Julian turned to look back the way he’d come. The fog still sat in the river valley, although here and there a dark smudge of trees rose up into view. He was surprised at how far and how high he had climbed.
“Now you will see something,” said a voice behind him.
Julian wheeled around and saw Carl, leaning on a spear, gazing out over the plain toward the sunset. He nearly laughed in his relief.
Carl made no comment on his companion’s disappearance; he only nodded toward the west.
Julian looked out over the rocky plain below him, misty but visible. The ground was a patchy greenish brown, the color of earth and bushes, but meandering through it was the wide, black, trampled path of the herd. Here and there great beasts had paused to rest. The bulk of the heard lay far ahead, visible only as a gray smudge. Not for the last time, Julian wished for a good pair of binoculars.
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