Project J

by Sean Brandywine

  Chapter 58: Murder!

  It was impossible. It could not have happened. Yet there it was. In the large pen they had built to hold the juvenile T-Rex taken from the upper Cretaceous Period, the vicious predator lay dead. And not just dead, but viciously murdered.

  Dr. Brown stared down at the carcass sprawled on the sand and shook his head. One of his assistants was already in the pit, photographing the body from all angles. From his higher elevation, Brown could easily see what had killed the mighty beast. Slashes along the exposed flank were deep. But the worst was a large chunk of the neck directly behind the head. It was missing. Something had taken a big bite out of a T-Rex.

  Stryker came up to stand next to Brown. “What the hell did that?” he asked.

  Brown could only shake his head. “Damned if I know. He was fine last night when we fed him. No one could have gotten in here and done that. You know the security we have in place since that attempt on Jesus’ life. And even if someone did sneak in, how the hell did they kill him? He may only be a juvenile but he was still more than a match for a man. Crap, he could swallow a man whole!”

  “Do you have surveillance cameras set up here?” Stryker asked.

  “Yes. They were mostly to make sure no one snuck in, but there are two overlooking his pen. I’ll go over the recordings.”

  “Do that.” Stryker noted the dark pools of dried blood half under the large body. “I’d like to know what could rip up a T-Rex.”

  Half an hour later, in a lab nearby, Brown was sitting with an assistant while the video recordings were being reviewed. They began with the feeding, a gruesome but interesting show in which they tossed a live sheep into the pen and allowed the beast, which some of them had nicknamed “King,” go after it. It was an unfair contest; the sheep always lost. After gobbling the sheep whole, he roared his defiance at the humans who had fed him, then settled down for a nap. They had found that he tended to take a nap after a meal, not an uncommon trait among predators.

  The two monitors before them continued on showing his pen from two angles. Nothing much happened. The lights were lowered and the researcher who had been taking close up photos of his eyes (with a telephoto lens) left. In the lower right of each display small numbers recorded the time.

  “Let’s speed it up,” Brown told the tech. “But stop and back up if you catch any motion.”

  Obediently the tech keyed in instructions and the displays flickered a little. For minutes nothing changed beyond the jerking motion that was his breathing. Then, extremely suddenly, there was motion on both displays. The tech stopped the recordings and backed up both to a point before the motion, then continued forward in real time.

  King lay there, sleeping peacefully, but suddenly jerked his head up. He roared and twisted his body sideways. Then he was on his feet, tail lashing out, jaws snapping. But there was nothing there. He danced in a circle, snapping to his left as if something were there. But his jaws closed on only empty air.

  “Freeze that!” Brown suddenly cried out. The scene on both monitors froze. Brown leaned forward to stare at the scene. “Can you magnify this?”

  “Sure.”

  The dinosaur’s side filled the screen. Red marks appeared against his brown-gray flank, lines that opened up into gashes with blood spurting out. Two then three lines formed along the side of his leg.

  “Is he biting himself?” the tech asked.

  “No. But something is cutting him.”

  They backed out again and resumed the motion. A roar of anguish and pain filled the room as King twisted his head around. Suddenly his head snapped back and he did a little dance as he twisted around to the other side. That jaw filled with teeth snapped shut on nothing. As his body turned, they could see two more slashes appear on this right side, at the base of his neck. He continued to turn in a circle, trying to get at whatever was attacking him. Then, as they watched in disbelief, his head twisted backwards and up. Holes appeared in his neck, blood spurted out, and his whole body trembled. The holes widened and suddenly a chunk of his flesh was ripped out. It fell to the ground, where it lay bleeding.

  King roared again, but there was no defiance or triumph, only pain. His head twisted around in a circle then lowered. His body collapsed to the sand. For a minute muscles twitched then were still.

  Blood continued to flow out of the gash but slowed and finally ceased. The King was dead.

  “There wasn’t anything there!” the tech said disbelievingly.

  Brown said nothing for a long time. Then he rose and silently walked out of the room.

  Chapter 59: In Theory...

  “What the hell happened?” Stryker asked later that morning. Assembled in a conference room were all the project heads. “You’ve all seen the video. Something attacked and killed our pet T-Rex. But nothing was there. Any suggestions?”

  His question was met with silence. It was Fielding who finally broke that silence.

  “Dr. Brown,” he said to the still-stunned scientist, “Is there any natural predator who might attack a T-Rex?”

  “Well, normally I’d say no. But... Ours was a juvenile. There were other dinosaurs contemporary with him who might have attacked a juvenile. The Gorgosaurus was from the same time period. A full grown one would run thirty feet long and weight about three tons. But more likely would be an Albertosaurus. They were about the same size as the Gorgosaurus but much more common during that period.”

  “Would one attack a T-Rex the size of ours?”

  “Well... Maybe. T-Rex stayed small until about ten years of age. Then they went through a growth spurt and at about eighteen years reached mature size. I don’t think there is anything that would attack a full grown T-Rex. It would be forty feet long, and weigh around eight tons.”

  “But a juvenile?”

  “Maybe.” Brown paused. “But there has been some speculation that Albertosaurus hunted in packs in order to bring down larger dinosaurs. Like Velociraptors did. A pack of Albertosauruses could well attack a T-Rex. Our King was by no means fully grown.

  “But what does that mean? There’s no other dinosaurs here.”

  “No, but there were back where King came from.”

  “What...?”

  Fielding turned to Stryker with a frightened look on his face. “You remember the speculation early in the project about the nature of entangled matter? Our Machine creates a link between matter that existed in the past and matter that we have here and now. It uses that entanglement to force the matter here to become exactly as the matter in the past. Remember how Dr. Spencer suggested that the entanglement would work both ways? His theory was that once we created the object here, it would be permanently entangled with the object in the past.”

  “Yes, I remember. He suggested that anything that happened to the object in the past would also happen to the object in the present. But we tested that, and came to the conclusion that the entanglement was one way in the time stream. The object in the past could not affect the object in the present.”

  “Yes,” Fielding agreed. “But we tested it with inanimate objects only. That was before we expanded to try it with live animals.”

  Everyone in the room was silent as the impact sank in.

  “Maybe with a live object, the entanglement continues. Why I’m not sure, but wouldn’t that explain what killed King? Let’s say that we created him here exactly ten days ago. And let’s further say that exactly ten days afterwards, back in 65 million BC, a pack of Albertosauruses attacked the original King. And killed him. Or it might have been a pack of some other large raptors. Those slashes on his side could have been made by Velociraptors.

  “At the same time, relatively speaking, our copy became slashed and killed.”

  “Oh, my God...” muttered Stryker.

  Fielding, however, was the first to realize what that meant to Project J.

  “And entanglement works both ways. What if something had happened and we had to kill King here? If someone blew his head off here, I’ll bet th
at the original would also lose its head.”

  Stryker looked sick. “Then our current theory of entanglement time displacement is flawed,” he said softly.

  Suddenly Tamara jerked her head up. “Do you mean...”

  “Yes,” Fielding said. “Our Jesus is entangled with the original.”

  “But the original died. Right? We saw that on the Machine.”

  “We saw that they failed to revive his body. We saw them prepare it for burial. Then we saw it being taken out of the tomb and to someplace else. But we didn’t follow that. We just assumed that he was taken to some other tomb as part of a plan to make it appear he had risen.”

  Fielding looked around at the intent faces. “We healed Jesus of his wounds and pulled him back from near death here. He was in a coma for almost two days while we worked to save him. When he awoke here, in our infirmary...”

  Each person there was filling in the startling results in their minds.

  “He would have arisen there,” Tamara whispered.

  Chapter 60: Confirmation

  The control room of the Machine was crowded. Stryker and Fielding, Tamara and Jesus, were the only ones with seats, the dozen or so who had followed them were standing behind them.

  “He would have awoken about two and a half days after pick up,” Fielding was saying, “based on what happened in our time. That gives us a time to look, but where? Where did they take his body?”

  Tamara turned to Jesus to ask, “Do you know where they planned to take your body?”

  He shook his head. “It was not planned to have to take me anywhere. They hoped to revive me where I was, in Joseph’s tomb.”

  “Maybe, when they came back to remove the body, they realized that he was still alive even after their attempts to revive him failed,” suggested Juliette. “So they took him somewhere else, not to another tomb, but someplace where they could try again to revive him.”

  “That might be reasonable. But where? Dr. Myers, does the Bible help in this regard?”

  “All four of the Gospels tell of Jesus appearing after the resurrection. Matthew says he appeared to Mary Magdalene and ‘the other Mary’ and informed them to tell the disciples to go ahead to Galilee and he would meet them there. Then, in Galilee, he gives them the commission to ‘baptize all nations in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’.

  “Then, in Luke, he appears to two disciples on a road but they do not recognize him. He breaks bread with them, they recognize him, and he disappears. Then he says that Jesus appeared to the eleven left and they thought he was a spirit. They gave him ‘broiled fish, and of a honeycomb’ and he ate them to prove he was real. Later, he blessed them and was lifted up into heaven.

  “According to John, Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene, although she did not recognize him at first. He then appeared to most of the disciples, and a week later to them again, including the doubting Thomas.

  “Mark has him appearing to Mary Magdalene, then the eleven where he tells them to go out to all the world and preach the gospel.

  “That’s about it. But I’m not sure how this helps.”

  “It doesn’t really,” Fielding agreed. “But it does tell us in general that he appeared on the third day to at least Mary Magdalene. Then, the following week to the disciples. But where? And exactly when?”

  “Let’s take a look in Mary’s house, the one where we saw them go after the crucifixion. No, wait! Let’s go back to the tomb. The Bible had him appearing there to Mary, at least.”

  “Very well, Jacques, do that.”

  “Joseph of Arimathea was a respected member of the Sanhedrin or council of the Jewish priests in the Temple. He was also a believer in the coming Kingdom of God,” Myers explained to those who might not be familiar with that. “Another member of the Council, Nicodemus, worked with him. It had been their plan to drug Jesus so he appeared dead, and then later revive him. Jesus,” he said, glancing to the man sitting next to him, “says that he did not want them doing that, because he believed God would raise him from the dead.”

  Jesus, who had been following the conversation on his translator, nodded but said nothing. He kept the translator up to his ear like a cell phone.

  The outside of the tomb appeared. It was dark, but a dim gray suggested the coming of dawn soon. Nothing moved. “This is the morning of the third day, Sunday,” Jacques said. “Just before dawn.” He touched the keyboard and the scene lightened quickly. Suddenly there was a blur of motion and he froze the display, backed it up, and then started it forward in real time.

  A woman came into the scene, followed by another, both carrying baskets. They stopped when almost to the tomb’s entrance and stood there, looking at the large rock that had been covering the entrance. It was pushed to one side. The woman, one of whom was now recognizable as Mary Magdalene, looked at each other in puzzlement. When Mary cautiously approached tomb entrance, a figure came out of it. In the faint morning twilight, it was hard to make out who it was. The figure stepped forward until he was standing directly before Mary. It was a young man, dressed in a white robe.

  “Jesus, who is that?” Myers asked.

  “I do not know. I think maybe one of Joseph’s servants. Maybe.”

  The young man said something to the women. The woman behind Mary dropped her basket and covered her mouth with both hands. Mary looked shocked but composed. She said something and the man replied. Then he pointed off in the direction the woman had come from. Both of them turned and walked quickly away.

  “He’s telling them to go and tell the disciples that Jesus has risen,” Myers said with a trace of awe. “Just as the Bible stated.”

  The young man waited, watching the women until they were out of sight, then he took off up the hillside.

  “Well, that really doesn’t prove anything,” Fielding said. “Except that it was not Jesus who appeared to the women. Next we have meetings with a couple of disciples on a road, and the meeting with the whole group during the next week.”

  “Luke states that the after the meeting on the road, those two went back to the others and told them what had happened. Then Jesus appeared among them. I would suggest that you consider looking in the same house and room where the Last Supper was held; Joseph of Arimathea’s house.”

  Jacques began keying in instructions.

  “I would make the time at about one week after the crucifixion. Maybe five days to be on the safe side. That would be the earliest that Jesus could possibly have been strong enough to meet with the eleven. During that time, our efforts to save Jesus here were also saving him there.”

  The screen cleared and a room came into focus. It was large, and the walls were made of stone blocks with curtains. There was a low table but it was pushed to one side and it was empty. A collection of short sofas were also pushed to one side. They were not long enough to lie down in but would allow the person to recline while eating a meal, much in the fashion of formal Roman dinners. Jacques set the display into fast forward. Occasionally a person would dash into the room and leave. When it seemed that a group was forming, he slowed back to real time and they watched. Several times that happened, once a formal meal where the table was brought forward and the sofas arranged around it. But during these meals, Jesus did not make an appearance, and they continued on, speeding through periods of inactivity.

  “It would be my guess that Jesus was in another room of that house,” Myers said. “Assuming, of course, that the entanglement theory is correct and he was alive then. I...”

  He broke off because another group was forming. Half a dozen men were standing around, talking while a couple of servants were arranging the table for a meal. A few more men joined them and the servants were just beginning to set out food when a trio made their appearance from the left. Two of them supported a third between them. Their walk was slow as they made their way towards the table. The men already present stood there, staring at the newcomers in varying degrees of surprise. Or shock.

  Myers heard a gasp f
rom beside him and looked to Jesus to find an equally shocked expression on his face.

  The third man, the one who needed support to walk, was Jesus! But it was a pale, sick looking version of the healthy man seated with the scientists. His wrists were wrapped in cloth and there were two small open wounds on his forehead. In the Machine’s control room, Jesus’ hand went up to the now-faded scars on his forehead.

  When they reached the table, the two eased him down to a couch where he leaned back. The two men then stood behind him. Jesus looked weak but his eyes remained open. He had almost died, indeed would have, had it not been for modern medicine’s effect on his body projected backwards in time through entangled particles, but he was alert. When he spoke apparently all could hear; it was not in a whisper. In a condition that would have had most men flat on their backs in a hospital bed, his iron self-will gave him the strength to do what he felt he had to do.