Cretaceous Dawn

by Lisa M. Graziano

  The half-skinned animal fell to the ground. “Today . . . we don’t know what time!”

  “I think I can find out.” Julian grabbed her arm, roughly, and pushed her away. “Go. Run. Get over there where we made the line of stones. Yell for Shanker.”

  “What about you?”

  Julian took a deep breath to calm himself. “I’ll be there soon. I think I understand that drawing. . . . SHANKER!” he yelled. “DR. SHANKER!” He ducked into the cave.

  The light was poor, and he cursed himself for not remembering that. But his eyes adjusted quickly, and now that he understood it the diagram made sense, dimly seen though it was. He heard breathing behind him and turned to see Yariko’s silhouette as she entered.

  “I’m not going anywhere without you,” she said. “Now explain this drawing.”

  “This is the horizon,” Julian traced the wobbly curved line with his finger. “A small part of the global circumference. These lines are sun angles over the course of a day. Remember when I showed you how to stack your fists to see how high the sun was? This shows the progression of the sun in the sky, as height above the horizon. Local noon is when the sun is highest; after that, the angle decreases again. This time of year, of course, it doesn’t get very high at this latitude.”

  “But how does it tell us the time?” Yariko squatted beside him on the dusty floor, trying to make out the vague details. One triangular wedge, bracketed by two sun angles, seemed to stand out.

  “This part of the diagram is colored in,” Julian went on in a rapid voice, putting his hand over the triangle Yariko had noticed. “And the little suns here, up in the sky, are much bigger. When we were here with the torch I noticed the coloring. It marks this range as our time window.” He paused, frowning. “The question is, which way is east? Which is the morning sun and which the afternoon? It could make all the difference.”

  “East is usually on the right,” Yariko said. “Isn’t that the convention with maps?”

  Julian put his face nearly against the rough wall as he felt around with his fingers. “There must be a note of the cardinal directions,” he said. “If only I could see—”

  “There! It’s underneath the horizon. It’s hard to see.”

  Julian couldn’t quite make it out. “Which way is east?” he asked, almost dreading the answer.

  “That way . . . right.”

  “Then our time window is midmorning to local noon. It’s almost over.”

  2 September

  5:50 AM Local Time

  Earles was the only one who didn’t jump when the door of the outer room slammed open, sounding like a gunshot in the predawn quiet. Two police officers rushed in.

  Ridzgy’s mouth fell open. “You’re going to arrest those people if they reappear?” she asked, staring at Earles.

  For once Bowman was quicker than his colleague. He looked from Earles to the grim-looking officers, both large men, and walked over to Ridzgy. “It’s time to go, Marla,” he said gently, putting a hand under her elbow.

  Ridzgy looked around and saw that everyone was watching her: Earles, Mark, the two policemen; one of them was the idiot with the cigarette breath, but he didn’t look like an idiot now. He looked grim, decisive. She stood. “What are you talking about?”

  Earles stood also. Her casual pose was gone. “Marla Ridzgy and Claude Bowman, you are charged with conspiracy, theft, and sabotage—for a start. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to counsel. Anything that you say. . . .”

  Hann stepped forward with the handcuffs.

  For one moment of frozen disbelief Yariko and Julian simply stared at one another. Then the adrenalin took over.

  They scrambled for the cave entrance.

  There was a ludicrous instant when each tried to make the other leave the cave first, but Julian won: he shoved Yariko bodily through the narrow opening. Screaming for Dr. Shanker and Hilda, they pelted over the uneven ground, past Julian’s abandoned pile of brush, past the cairns, on across an open space to the line of rocks marking the boundary.

  Yariko’s shouts changed as she ran: her voice went up an octave and the name she yelled over and over was “Clifford!”

  When he realized what it meant, Julian had to suppress a wildly irrelevant, not to mention irreverent, impulse to laugh. “Dr. Shanker!” he yelled again, forcing down the hysterical giggles. In his momentary distraction he lost his stride.

  Yariko was ahead, her hair bouncing behind her; now she was over the stone line and still running, as if unable to stop.

  A shout from behind made Julian turn. “Whitney! Yorko! What’s going on? Have you gone crazy?”

  Dr. Shanker was back near the cave, Hilda barking at his heels as she sensed the humans’ excitement.

  “The time window!” Julian yelled. “It’s now! Run!” He started to run faster; now the line of stones was only fifty feet away. Yariko skidded to a sudden halt and ran back toward him. She paused at the stones, urging him on with her arms and eyes.

  Hearing a heavy sound and curses from behind him Julian looked over his shoulder. Dr. Shanker had fallen on his knees. But even as Julian turned, Shanker was up and running again; running slowly, limpingly, on an obviously weak ankle.

  “Julian!” Yariko shrieked.

  Julian stood now halfway between his two companions. He took one step, one slow step, toward Dr. Shanker.

  “No! Go on! Don’t help me,” Shanker cried fiercely. “Get in there with Yorko! Move!”

  Julian sprinted the last forty feet right into Yariko’s outstretched arms. She steadied him, panting.

  They watched Dr. Shanker coming closer with agonizing slowness. Hilda kept pace with him; she obviously thought this was a game. “Stay there! I’m coming too,” Shanker called.

  “He’s going to make it,” Yariko said, and then the world dissolved into roaring noise and confusion.

  2 September

  6:30 AM Local Time

  “I think it’s ready now.” The young man, eager and excited although tired, climbed out of the vault. “I’ve made the fine adjustments. We can power up now.” He went to the computer.

  Earles took a deep breath and let it out. She’d first seen this lab less than twenty-four hours ago, yet it felt like she’d been in and out of it all her life. She heartily hoped never to see it again after this morning.

  Mark halted the string of commands on the IBM. “Switched on,” he said. “I’ll do the final settings now.”

  Earles followed him to the vault and watched as he crouched over the dials with his delicate tools. A few minutes went by, and she restrained the urge to ask questions; he’d warned her about vibrations, including sounds. She returned to her seat near the computer.

  Then Mark emerged, triumphant, with an excited grin on his face. He left the door open behind him and went back to the computer.

  “Perturbation level six,” he said, finger poised over the enter key. “Here we go.”

  Julian lay as he was, eyes closed, surrounded by the harsh stench of a synthetic world. He did not dare to move. Please, he thought, please let me not be alone.

  Finally he opened his eyes and looked into the dim, flickering light of a tiny room. Bits of twisted wire and shards of glass lay scattered about. There was the sharp smell of blood. He sat up with an effort, feeling the blood run down his face, and looked around, dreading what might, or rather might not, be with him. With a sigh, he reached his hand out to Yariko, and held tight.

  When it was all over, the invasion by more people than he could comprehend, OSHA officials bursting into the middle of it all and sealing off the vault, packing up the computers, shouting orders in the confusion; the questions, the phone calls, the discussions, and more questions; Yariko quietly, succinctly, steadfastly repeating the partial truth of spatial translocation, without giving anything else away; the questions about Dr. Shanker and Frank, and the sad admission of loss; the ambulance, the police, the doctor, the local paper; when he could not remember his phone n
umber, or even what that meant; when someone had covered the new bloodstain on the floor with a white cloth, and Julian with a white lab coat to hide the tattered clothes, as if his Cretaceous self were another body to be discretely hidden; when it was all over, he found himself alone, walking down the corridor, climbing the stairs and then standing on the concrete steps of the building, looking out at the world.

  Maybe he expected to find the forests and intense blue sky of the Cretaceous. All he saw was the bleak gray light of a September day, the brick of the campus buildings, and the grainy black of asphalt. The noises confused him and each one seemed overly loud. Cars passed on the street, people talked, doors banged, bicycle chains clattered; all this fused together into a nightmare jumble, numbing his senses.

  The vast forests that he had become accustomed to, the great inland sea, the herds of ten thousand T. horridus were long since gone. Dr. Shanker and Hilda had already lived out their lives and died. An entire world had passed away. Somewhere under Julian’s feet, a few mineralized bones remained.

  EPILOGUE

  The shy-looking man stood for a moment just inside the door at the back of the lecture hall. The seats were full. It was a popular course, and seventy students had registered. They were talking in loud voices, laughing, comparing schedules. Some of them were glancing at their watches. He was only a minute late, but on the first day of class the teacher should try to make a good impression—especially if that first day had already been postponed a week because of a shotgun wedding.

  A touch on his arm made Julian start. A woman stood beside him; he didn’t know her. She had gray-blonde hair, muscular arms in short sleeves, and a tough look about her. Stuck in her wide belt were a VHF radio and a large bundle of keys.

  “Sharon Earles, Creekbend police chief,” she said, holding out a very calloused hand. “You obviously don’t remember me, Mr. Whitney. We met when you reappeared in the vault.”

  Julian did remember her now. Of all the staring, demanding faces that surrounded him that strange morning, hers was the one he finally saw clearly. She had silenced the crowds, banished the reporters and the regulators, and let him go, alone, to recover.

  “I didn’t say thank you,” Julian said, realizing immediately how foolish he sounded. “You . . . understood.”

  “Perhaps,” Earles said. She was as tall as he was, he saw; he didn’t have to look down into her face. “But there’s a great deal I still don’t understand. I want to talk to you about . . . beetles.”

  Julian gaped at her. “My class has already started. It’s Yariko who knows the physics, anyway.” His hand went involuntarily to his jeans pocket.

  “Dr. Miyakara is said to be on leave of absence from the University. No one seems to know where she is.” She pulled a well-handled piece of paper from her pocket and unfolded it to show a close-up photo of a brightly colored beetle. “Tell me,” she said. “Where were you really, for those two months?”

  Julian’s fingers closed around his own precious scrap of paper, the telegram he’d received that morning from the Baja Peninsula of Mexico. He had it memorized:

  “Mark arrived with copies of all files stop Lab all ours stop Vault under construction stop Shanker will be proud stop Can’t wait your arrival Thanksgiving stop Love Y.”

  He gave Earles a sweet, boyish smile, turned, and walked down the slope of the central aisle. The noise in the room died out, and before he reached the front every eye was fixed on him.

  He turned around and leaned on the podium. At the back of the room, under the recessed dimmer lights, Earles could just be seen standing where he’d left her. He gave her another smile.

  Then he nodded to the class, and began to talk to them. The students were so attentive that he was able to speak in a quiet voice and still be heard.

  “This course is about the ecology of the Cretaceous, the end of the Age of the Dinosaurs. The entire course will focus on one example, about which scientists know a great deal: the western part of North America, during the Maastrichtian age of the Late Cretaceous. The goal of the course is to teach you what the world might have been like at that time and place.

  “What was the climate like? What were the geological features of the terrain? What kind of trees grew in the forests? What kind of plants floated in the water? If you could pick up a walking stick and hike through the jungle, what animals would you see? Opossums? Insectivores? Birds? What kind of dinosaur life? Would the jungle really be teeming with monsters ready to kill you, as you might have seen in the movies? Or would the large animals be more rare, shy of your strange scent?

  “I intend to tell you a story. For anyone without a syllabus, the premise of the course is that I have just come back from a two-month safari in the Maastrichtian. I am going to describe to you, over twenty-five lectures, what I saw, what I ate, how I lived, and what the world was once like. I’d like to start, however, by asking you a question. The question is a test, in a way, of your ecological wisdom. What do you suppose was the single most common type of animal, in the North American Late Cretaceous?”

  The students seemed to be paying close attention, but they were all shy of answering.

  “We can take a vote,” he said. “How many think it was some species of dinosaur?”

  More than half the class raised a hand.

  “Maybe Tyrannosaurus rex?”

  Most of the hands went down, but a few stayed up.

  Julian smiled. “I’m glad you’ll have something to learn from this course. The most common type of animal by far, in that age and in this, was coleoptera—the humble beetle.”

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  Alphadon: (mammal) “First tooth.” A small, omnivorous marsupial, about 1 foot long. Diet: fruit, insects, and small animals. Alphadon was a tree dweller with a prehensile tail. Range: North America, Late Cretaceous.

  Apatosaurus: (dinosaur; formerly brontosaurus) “Deceptive lizard.” An herbivore 70 to 90 feet long, 10 to 15 feet high, weighing 30 to 35 tons. Range: North America, late Jurassic.

  Ankylosaurus: (dinosaur) “Fused lizard.” An herbivore 25 to 30 feet long, 4 feet tall at the hips, weighing 3 to 4 tons. Range: western United States, Late Cretaceous.

  Batholith: A mass of intrusive igneous rock formed deep within the earth’s crust that, due to erosion, has an exposed surface of 100 km2 or greater.

  Ceratopsia, ceratopsians: (dinosaur) “Horned dinosaur.” Suborder of herbivorous dinosaurs from the Late Cretaceous. They had beaks and bony head frills along the back of the skull.

  Champosaur: (reptile) A fish eater living from the Late Cretaceous into the Cenozoic. About 5 feet long, living in rivers and swamps. Range: North America and Europe.

  Coleoptera: “Sheathed wing.” Coleoptera, or beetles, make up half the known animal species on Earth. Because their outer pair of wings is a relatively hard structure, beetles fossilize better than do any other insect.

  Cretaceous: The last period of the Mesozoic Era, lasting from 144 to 65 million years ago.

  Deinosuchus: (reptile) “Terrible crocodile.” Up to 50 feet long, and the largest crocodilian known. Range: North America epicontinental sea, Late Cretaceous.

  Dromaeosaur, dromaeosaurus: (dinosaur) “Fast running lizard.” A carnivore about 6 feet long. Range: Alberta, Canada; Montana. Late Cretaceous. A fast-moving predator with large eyes and a sickle-like claw on each foot. Dromaeosauridae were probably the most intelligent of dinosaurs. They include the Velociraptor.

  Edmontosaur: (dinosaur) “Edmonton lizard.” Hadrosaur. An herbivore, 42 feet long and 10 feet tall at the hips. Range: western North America, Late Cretaceous.

  Hadrosaur: (dinosaur) “Bulky lizard.” Duck-billed herbivores, and the most common dinosaurs. 10 to 40 feet long. Range: North America, Europe, and Asia, Late Cretaceous. Hadrosaurs are divided into crested and noncrested types.

  Hell Creek Formation: Upper (late) Cretaceous deposition in North America, to the west of the western Interior Seaway. Named for Hell Creek near Jordan, Montana;
the formation occurs in regions of present-day Montana, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming.

  Ichthyornis: (bird) “Fish-bird.” 8-inch long, tern-like bird with toothed jaws. The first known bird with a sternum (keeled breast-bone), such as modern birds have. Range: western North America, Cretaceous.

  Maastrichtian: 71 million to 65 million years ago. Named for the city Maastricht in the Netherlands, where many fossils (including the first mosasaurs) were found.

  Mosasaur: (reptile) Aquatic reptiles of the Late Cretaceous, very common in the US Inland Sea. Some species reached lengths of 59 feet. The first skeleton was discovered about 1780, in the Netherlands.

  Ornithischian: “Bird-hipped” dinosaurs, one of the two dinosaur orders (the other being saurischian). 2- or 4-footed herbivores, including hadrosaurs, stegasaurs, ankylosaurs, and ceratopsians.

  Ornithomimus: (dinosaur) “Bird-mimic.” A fast-running omnivorous dinosaur from the end of the Cretaceous; 6 to 8 feet tall.

  Pachycephalosaur: (dinosaur) “Thick-headed lizard.” A bipedal, herbivorous dinosaur with a rounded skull, thought to have lived in small herds.

  Paleocene: The Epoch spanning from 64 to 54.8 million years ago.

  Parasaurolophus: (dinosaur) A hadrosaur, bipedal herbivore, duck-billed with a hollow crest 6 feet long.

  Protungulatum: (mammal) “Before Ungulate.” In the order condylarths, and forerunner of the ungulates. A rat-sized placental mammal known best from the Paleocene North America, but possibly originating in the Late Cretaceous, overlapping with dinosaurs.

  Pteranodon: (reptile) “Winged and Toothless.” A winged reptile weighing about 30 pounds, with a 25-foot wingspan.