Cretaceous Dawn

by Lisa M. Graziano

Shanker turned in surprise. “No? You want to . . . leave him here?”

  “We’re taking him with us.”

  “What? Whitney, that’s. . . .” He lowered his voice. “Let’s be reasonable, now. We can’t carry him that far. There’s no conceivable purpose—”

  “We’re taking him to his caves. He wanted to be buried there, with the rest of his people.”

  Julian rose and collected the four spears. One was coated in dried blood, Corla’s blood. She had pulled it out of the wound with her teeth. Using the ponchos and several leather strips from Carl’s sack, he fashioned a litter and laid it on the ground beside Carl. His two companions watched him in silence.

  “This is just sentimentalism, dangerously impractical,” Dr. Shanker finally said in his new, slurred voice.

  But Julian was beyond reason. When he didn’t answer Dr. Shanker said angrily, “You know you won’t get far with all that weight.”

  Yariko stepped forward to help. Working gently, they slid Carl onto the litter. Yariko straightened his arms and closed his eyes, and then covered the body with skins. Julian crouched down and took one end of the litter and Yariko took the other. But Dr. Shanker roughly pushed Julian aside, muttering, “You and Yariko share the back end. It’ll take two of you.” Then lifting his end, he said, “If we’re going to do this insane thing, let’s get going.”

  It took all that day and night to reach the caves, following the descriptions that Carl had given. Julian set his mind on the task and let no other thought or feeling intrude; he could not have gone on, otherwise. The litter was heavy, and Yariko and he together could barely manage what Dr. Shanker carried alone on that rough ground. They stopped to rest often, just long enough to catch a breath and mop the sweat out of their eyes. At each stop Dr. Shanker looked more bent and savage. They told him to leave it; they told him to take a rest, and let them do the work; but he ignored it all. And although he was slow, sometimes staggering from the pain, Julian knew they could not make it without him.

  Julian saw nothing of the landscape around him. He felt the sharp ground cutting into his feet through worn-out soles. He felt the heat, and the painful weight of the poles pressing on his aching shoulders; but his mind was numb. The day passed in a blur and ended in blackness. The moon came up, a thin crescent above the western horizon, so dim that it hardly outshone Venus glimmering beneath it. By this faint light, they kept to the path.

  At a steep downward slope Yariko wanted to pause and re-position but Dr. Shanker ignored her. He was breathing in gasps and spitting blood every few steps; they were all exhausted.

  “Stop,” Yariko begged. “Not for me, for you. You need a rest. You won’t make it.”

  “If I stop now I’ll never get up,” Dr. Shanker growled. “Later—not here.” He started down the slope at a stumbling shuffle.

  The ground was rough and Julian staggered as he walked, although he was on the upslope end while Dr. Shanker remained in front taking most of the weight.

  Near the bottom, Shanker stumbled and almost fell. The litter tipped but with a great effort he kept his balance, straightened his end, and made it to the bottom. Once there, he set the litter down and collapsed without a sound, clutching at his chest. Hilda licked at his face and whined.

  Julian gave him the last few mouthfuls of water from the skins. Then they opened one of the sacks and wrapped it tightly around his chest, hoping the pressure would ease the pain in his ribs. He allowed himself only a few minutes to rest, and then insisted on taking up the litter again. Yariko silently moved to his end and took one side from him. Julian staggered on at the other end.

  Just as the sky was brightening, they came to the base of the little mountain. It did not have a gradual slope, but rose suddenly out of the rocky rubble, nearly vertically, cut by fissures and tufted with bushes. In the diffuse predawn light the cliff looked immense, rising into the sky, but it was in reality no more than a hundred feet tall. Here and there a small tree grew sideways out of the rock.

  Coming closer, Julian saw that the wind and rain had eroded the cliff face into shallow caves. Two looked quite large, extending well back into the cliff. A little to one side, eerily sending out long shadows in the dawn light, were the cairns of Carl’s ancestors. There were twelve in all.

  They had found Carl’s caves; they had brought him home. But it was not time to rest. As the sun rose they worked slowly, tiredly, to scrape at the hard earth and collect loose rocks. Carl was wrapped in his poncho and laid in a shallow depression under a high cairn, in the midst of the others.

  Yariko had tears on her cheeks as she placed the stones, little by little covering the body, until only glimpses of leather showed, and then nothing. Julian wondered at this, since she had not known Carl, but he didn’t question it. He felt as if the whole Cretaceous world was grieving for their fellow being. For himself, it was too hard a task. He could not lay the weight of stones one by one on his friend, his mysterious teacher and guide in the Cretaceous wilderness. Even when the covering was complete he could only bring new rocks over and place them on the ground for Yariko and Dr. Shanker to lift onto the growing cairn.

  A few times over the past week Julian had been sure they would all be killed, bungling people from a future age, and Carl would be left to return to his gentle animals and his solitary life. It had never entered his imagination that Carl would be the one to die. Even after the attack, although he knew no human body could survive that much trauma, Julian still half believed that Carl would get up, say they must go now, and stride ahead with his spear. Anyone who could stand and face Tyrannosaurus rex with so much inner strength must surely be able to face off death itself.

  But in the end Carl was as fragile as any of them. His enclosure, his hill, his ingenious water system, the fire pit and the marvelous spices hanging from the ceiling, were all without their master now. The animals would die of starvation, milling about the enclosure, waiting for their caretaker to return. At that thought the tears began to trickle down Julian’s face, dropping on the ground, evaporating quickly on the warm rock. He turned away.

  With the last stone in place the energy that had kept them all going for the past day and night was gone. Dr. Shanker could barely stand. They sat down just outside the entrance of the nearest cave, shaded from the intense morning light, and leaned back against the stone cliff. Hilda lay down and put her head in Dr. Shanker’s lap. For a long time they sat without speaking, too numb even to doze.

  “Now that we’re here,” Dr. Shanker said at last, “where are we?”

  His question was to the point; and two days ago, it would have mattered to Julian. They could be miles from the calculated spatial window. Their path could have been thrown off considerably by the gullies and other obstacles that had been circumvented. “Here,” however, was as good to Julian now as anywhere else.

  He thought back to their second day on Cypress Island and remembered seeing a new crescent moon through the trees. Again, on the river journey, he had seen a new moon. And in the predawn twilight, as Carl slipped away, a thin moon was rising again. It was exactly two months since their entry into the Cretaceous world. Carl had been right.

  And the four of them were relatively unscathed after their thousand-mile trek. Dr. Shanker was still in pain, but his breathing seemed easier and he had stopped coughing up blood. His ankle was nearly healed although, as he said, the toe of his dilapidated sneaker would bear teeth marks to the end of its days. Yariko had a long scrape on one arm and a gash on her cheek, and the palm that had been bitten by the dromaeosaur, so long ago, had a wide pink scar that didn’t like to be stretched. Hilda’s face where she’d been kicked would always have a little bald spot, and she didn’t seem to see as well through that eye. As for Julian, he had some minor cuts and an aching head from hitting a rock when he’d fallen down the gravelly slope. But they had gotten off lightly, all four of them, considering their adversary. Now there was nothing to do but wait.

  “Yariko,” Julian said, turning his he
ad to look at her, and taking her hand. “Tell me. Tell me what happened when you were alone.”

  Yariko looked far from ready to begin her story. “There’s not much to tell,” she said in a tired voice. “And some of it I still haven’t figured out completely . . . well, never mind. I don’t want to think about being alone.”

  “Tell me some of it,” Julian urged. “You can finish later. I want to know.”

  “OK. But you’ve probably heard half of it already, from Dr. Shanker. How we lost you in the river.”

  Julian nodded.

  “And then that Triceratops chased us up stream, and we couldn’t come back to you for a long while. By the time we did, it was too late. You were gone. We searched everywhere. It was very strange. When we finally left the river we thought we were following your trail, and we were happy enough to find the pile of wood you left behind in a little woods. We used it that night. We were impressed, you know. Not only did you remember to leave us a sign, but you were thoughtful enough to leave something useful.”

  “You overrated my cleverness,” Julian put in. “It was Carl’s wood.”

  “Of course,” she said. “It never occurred to me how unlikely it was, you taking half a day to chop wood, stacking it up under a tree, blowing the dust off your hands, nodding your head over your handiwork, and then pushing on toward the west and not bothering to wait up for us. But we weren’t thinking clearly. We had other things to worry about. The storm hit us that night, and I thought we were going to be blown and washed into the river and drowned. That’s when Dr. Shanker lost himself.”

  “Quite the contrary,” Shanker said, calmly. “It was you who lost yourself.”

  “No,” she said. “I knew exactly where I was.”

  “As did I,” he said.

  “As I was saying,” she continued, winking at Julian, “I couldn’t find Dr. Shanker anywhere that night, or in the morning. I had no choice, really, but to continue toward the west. I was hoping to catch up to you. Hilda and I found what looked like an old river-bed running in the right direction, and it made for better footing. It was smoother and less overgrown with thorns than the rest of the landscape.

  “I’d only been on it for a short time when I found an old leather sack tangled into some bushes. At first I thought it was a dead animal and I was going to scavenge a meal. To tell the truth, I was pretty upset at you when I saw it was an empty sack. I thought you could have at least put something in it for me.” Yariko laughed weakly.

  “My apologies,” Julian said.

  “Accepted,” she said, squeezing his hand. “After I calmed down and stopped raging at you, I took a good look at that sack and noticed how well it was made. It was carefully stitched together and had a braided leather drawstring. You have marvelous skills, Julian, but I suspect that you’re incapable of stitching one thing onto another thing; and besides, you wouldn’t have had time. It was very confusing. I didn’t know what to think. Later I found another small pile of wood, which I used to keep warm that night. A few days later, I found this.”

  She reached to her belt, hidden under the ragged hem of her T-shirt, and pulled out a short bone knife. It was nicely honed down to a sharp edge.

  “It’s a tooth,” he said, taking it and turning it over in his hand. “Tyrannosaurus, I think.” It was about six inches long, curved and tapered, the edges naturally serrated. A hole had been drilled through the blunt end and a leather thong tied on. “It’s beautifully made.”

  “And very useful,” Yariko said as he handed it back. “Quite sharp. But I was perplexed. Either you had been clever enough to make all these implements, or I had discovered human habitation of the Late Cretaceous. I thought the second option slightly less improbable. I’m a scientist, after all, and I had to accept the least preposterous of the two.”

  “Thank you,” Julian said. “It has nothing to do with cleverness. I already have a knife, and for your information I did make my own sack, out of Triceratops hide.”

  Yariko laughed again. “I’m so proud. Not many people could say that, you know.” Dr. Shanker snorted, and she continued. “You should have seen me, Julian. Tattered, hungry, alone in the Cretaceous wilderness, sitting on a rock pondering physics equations. Hilda thought there was something wrong with me. She kept whining and pawing at my legs.”

  “What equations? Did you figure out how other people had gotten here?”

  “Well, sort of. Not really. But that’s all too complicated for now, and I’m so muddled. Anyhow, I had to stop thinking about physics pretty quickly. I had to find food and dodge that horrible animal that was stalking me. I couldn’t tell if it wanted me for a meal, or was only curious about Hilda.”

  “What animal?” Julian asked, but Yariko was speaking again.

  “Being alone, maybe—maybe the only human being in the world, not knowing if you were even alive, or if we’d find each other—Julian, I can’t describe it. I just can’t describe it.”

  “You don’t have to,” he said, pulling her close and holding her in a tight embrace. “I know what it feels like. We’ll never get separated again. No matter what happens.”

  Dr. Shanker was already snoring, tipped over on one side. They lay down in the shade, on the rough ground near the cave, and slept.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Science, after all, is nothing more than a rigorous application of common sense.

  —C. Shanker

  2 September

  5:30 AM Local Time

  Mark Reng’s eyes were red and swollen, his face gray and bristly. He looked less like a skinny kid now and more like a contemporary. Earles didn’t think about what she must look like by now; it wasn’t a concern.

  She had more important things to focus on. Mark was giving her a nod from the portal.

  Bowman was sound asleep, drooling onto the page of an open notebook that served as a pillow. Ridzgy turned from the computer screen with a triumphant look.

  “I’m ready to set up the experimental run, if Mark is,” she said. “The program’s up and working, the parameters are set, and the other machines are standing by to record.” She indicated the four slave machines ranged along the bench, each monitor showing scrolling sequences of numbers and symbols, never ending, endlessly repeating.

  Please God I never have to watch a program sequence again, Earles thought to herself. “Very well,” she said. “You square things with Mark. I’m going to step out for a few moments while you set up.”

  Ridzgy’s composure was admirable. She didn’t even blink as she turned back to the monitor.

  Earles went out into the dim hallway. Throughout the night she’d encountered several overworked, chronically sleep-deprived graduate students near the coke machine in the lobby; but at five-thirty in the morning the place seemed to be empty. A time of truce, Mark had called it, when graduate students could leave without fear of notice: the hour before dawn, after the equally overworked junior faculty had left and before one’s advisor arrived again for the day.

  By seven o’clock the junior faculty would be back, the red-eyed graduate students would be back, and the building would come alive again. By nine o’clock, if not before, government regulators from OSHA, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, would be descending on the place to permanently shut it down, having heard through mysterious channels about the “accident” in a lab run under government funding. They would confiscate the evidence and the equipment, take away the funding, and probably end the police investigation.

  Looking at her watch, Earles saw that it would be a close thing. She paced the lobby on the first floor, knowing that patience was still needed: Ridzgy must be given time to finalize her own plans.

  After ten very long minutes she descended once again to the basement, and the too-familiar lab.

  Bowman was awake, wrinkled and grumbling; there were lines on his cheek where it had lain against the notebook. The notebook itself was no longer there. None of them were there. The counter was remarkably neat.

 
“I just straightened up a little,” Ridzgy said with a mirthless smile, following Earles’ gaze. “Stacked ’em all in a safe corner. No sense risking all those valuable records, if this thing blows up again.”

  Earles glanced toward Mark, who stood outside the vault yawning. Their eyes met. Reaching her hand around to the radio on her belt, she pushed the emergency signal button.

  “Well then,” she said, taking a chair and casually stretching out her legs. “I think it’s time to show what we know.”

  Julian woke to find the others still asleep, except for Hilda who was nosing around and pawing at the rocks. She may have been chasing lizards; but if so, they were too quick for her in the heat. Now and then she sat down and scratched at an itch with her hind foot. Watching her eased some of Julian’s heartache, because she was so busy and so innocent at the same time. For her, life went on.

  After a while he got up quietly, trying not to wake the others, and began to explore the caves. The one at his back was empty, except for a stack of wood and a few bits of leather, tattered and decayed. It was very small. There were, of course, no bats; they had not yet evolved.

  The second cave opened on the cliff face only a few yards away. The entrance was no more than a crack in the rock, wide enough to fit one person. Dr. Shanker might have to turn sideways and squeeze, but Julian slipped in easily. The narrow mouth opened up to a large room, fairly dry and quite safe from big animals.

  Whatever Carl may have thought, Julian did not believe that the cave was dug by humans. It had the irregular shape and uneven roof of a natural formation. Somebody had smoothed the floor, however, and carved rough shelves along one wall. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness he saw that there were objects on the shelves.

  There was a large knife that was carved from a sliver of bone. A smaller version lay near it. They were not particularly sharp, and were crudely made. Beside the knives lay two clay bowls. There was no clay in these hills. The bowls had come from near the river, maybe brought here by Carl. Beside the bowls was a flat clay pan with a stick for a handle, but it was cracked in half, and useless.