by Mike Ashley
Finally, she delivered herself of a theatrical groan to signal that she was giving up on the notion of falling asleep. She sat up, lighted the lantern, and wiped her face and throat with a damp cloth. She said, “And I thought Texas summers were miserable.”
Through her handkerchief, Gilzow said, “Look at the bright side. No mosquitoes. No fire ants, either.”
“But no shade trees to sit under, and no grass to sit on. And no watermelon to eat out on the grass, out under a tree.”
Gilzow lifted a corner of the handkerchief and peeked out. “You know what’d really be nice right now? Cold beer. Not that awful Navy stuff; I mean, real beer. Fine, manly beer so cold it’s got ice crystals suspended in it. Or rum and Coke, in a big tall glass, with lots of ice cubes. Mm hmm. Cool us off and render us insensible at the same time.” She let the corner of the handkerchief fall back into place. “I cannot believe there isn’t a drop of anything to drink in this whole camp.”
“Well, at least we can get Cokes and ice at the supply tent.”
Gilzow sighed, barely audibly above the lantern’s hiss. Then she plucked the handkerchief off her face and sat up. “I’m willing to forego insensibility,” she said, “if I can only cool off. Just let me find my sandals.”
Leveritt slipped outside and waited, listening. The camp was on a low bluff overlooking the river valley. Behind the bluff was a rocky flatland extending to distant hills. By day it stood revealed in all its stark desolation; nothing moved on the plain that wind or rain did not move, for only down in the valley, along the river’s winding course, was there life. Between sunset and sunrise, the flatland lay vast and black, as mysterious as sea depths, while the night resounded with the cracking of cooling rocks.
Gilzow emerged. Theirs was the one undarkened tent, and the sky was overcast, but the obscured full moon cast enough light for them to see their way through the camp. No one else was about. The tents were open, however, and out of them came snatches of conversation, murmurings about heat and humidity and the day’s work and the next day’s prospects. When they overheard a man say, “Roger, where’s that rain you predicted?” they paused, Gilzow literally in mid-step, balanced on one foot, until Roger answered, “I think the rain clouds must’ve gotten themselves snagged on those jumbly old hills.” Leveritt walked on, Gilzow hopped and skipped to catch up, and her soft laughter hung in the unmoving air.
“Jumbly old hills!” She glanced back over her shoulder at the tent. “I don’t think Roger’s actually supposed to be doing what he does. I think he’s a meteorologist who got lost on his way to becoming a poet.”
“Listen to you!”
“It’s true. He once showed me some poems he’d written, and I memorized one of them.” Gilzow stopped walking, struck a pose, and recited:
“Australopithecus’ sleep
is fitful, for it seems
that Australopithecus
isn’t used to having dreams.”
“That’s not poetry,” Leveritt said, “it’s doggerel. And besides, I’m sure australopithecines could—”
“Oh, get a sense of humor, Bonnie.”
Stung, Leveritt opened her mouth to reply, but no retort occurred to her.
“Sorry, Bonnie.” Gilzow sounded sincerely contrite. “This heat and humidity—”
“It’s okay,” Leveritt said stiffly. “It’s – I’m a born pedant.”
On their way back from the supply tent, carrying a cooler between themselves and each holding an opened soft drink by its throat in her free hand, they came upon two men. Gilzow said, “Mike, Roger.”
Mike Holmes and Roger Ovington turned, and the former said, “Hi, Lou. Bonnie. Hot enough for you?”
“Blah. About that rain, Roge.”
“Paleozoic weather’s as capricious as Cenozoic.” Ovington nodded toward the hills. “But it’s coming. We just saw some lightning flashes way off on the horizon.”
“Bonnie ’n’ I’re going to have to drown our sorrows in straight Coca-Cola – unless somebody around here’s got some rum or something he’d consider swapping for bizarre sexual favors.”
“Sorry,” said Holmes, “sorrier than I know how to tell you,” and he gave a little laugh obviously intended to show that he might not be kidding. Gilzow laughed, too, to show that she definitely was. Leveritt could only marvel at her tentmate’s self-possession. She herself could think of nothing to say, could think nothing, in fact, except, We’re all four of us standing here in our underwear.
“Well,” Gilzow said, “come sit on the cliff with us anyway. We also grabbed some crackers and a can of chicken salad.”
“Then stand back, girls,” Holmes said, “because we take big bites.”
They sat among the rocks at the edge of the bluff and dangled their feet over an inky void – by night, the valley was abyssal. They ate and spoke of nothing in particular. All four of them started at a very loud pop of fracturing rock, and Ovington said, “It doesn’t take much imagination to populate the darkness here with giant crustacean monsters clacking their claws.”
Gilzow leaned close to Leveritt and said in a low voice, “I rest my case.”
Holmes said to Ovington, “Sometimes you are a weird person.”
Ovington laughed. “To me, prehistoric still means big ugly monsters. Hey, I’m just a weatherman, okay? I can’t tell a psychophyte – what is it?”
“Psilophyte,” said Gilzow.
“I can’t tell a psilophyte from creamed spinach. To me, a trilobite’s just a waterlogged pillbug. And it doesn’t matter what time period I’m in, meteorology’s the same here as it is back home. Trade winds blow from the east, a high-pressure system’s still – everything’s different for the rest of you.”
“Not for me and Bonnie,” said Holmes. “Rocks is rocks.”
“Still.” Ovington gestured at the overcast sky. “The Milky Way’s different, yet it looks the same to me here as it does back home. One of the astronomers told me once that in the time between now and the twenty-first century, our little solar system is going to travel all the way around the rim of the galaxy. A complete orbit and then some, as a matter of fact.”
“You try to imagine that,” Leveritt said quietly, “but you just can’t.”
“When I was a kid,” said Gilzow, “I drove myself just about nuts trying to deal with geologic time and cosmic immensity. I started collecting models of geologic time, copying them out of science books and science-fiction novels, into a notebook. I must’ve ended up with a couple or three dozen. Like, if the Earth’s age were compressed into twelve months, or twenty-four hours, or sixty minutes. Or how, if you put a dime on top of the world’s tallest building, the height of the building would represent the entire age of the Earth, and the thickness of the dime would represent how long humans’ve been around.”
“I like that one,” Ovington said, and laughed. “I like it a lot!”
“My favorite,” said Holmes, extending both arms out from his sides, “has always been the one my dad taught me when I was ten. The span of my arms, he said, was how long life had existed on Earth. And all of human history and prehistory fit on the edge of my fingernail.”
“Dang,” said Gilzow, “where’s my notebook?”
They fell silent. Minutes passed, irregularly punctuated by the sounds of splintering rock and faint, unmistakable thunder.
“Do you suppose,” Leveritt said suddenly, and tried to keep herself from asking the question that had been forming in her for weeks, since the night before the boat had brought her from the camp on the estuary, tried to make herself stop, but it had to come out now, had to, now, “do you suppose that if somebody came from the twenty-first century and died here in the Silurian, he’d cease to exist back in the future?”
The others’ faces turned toward her. She could not see their expressions clearly but did not think she needed to see them to imagine their collective thought: What a truly stupid question!
Holmes said, “Whoa,” but not sarcastically, and then,
“Run that by me again.”
Encouraged, she said, “I mean, would that person still be born and grow up to come back through time and die four hundred million years before he’s born? Or would he be erased from existence? Would he have never been?”
“Actually,” said Ovington – it was, Leveritt realized with gratitude, his kind of question – “there’s a story about someone who decided to tackle that very matter. This was back in the early days of the expedition, when everybody was jittery about creating paradoxes. All this person did was bring back some lab animals and kill them.”
“What happened?” Leveritt said.
“Nothing happened. You could say the experiment annihilated the animals but didn’t annihilate them from having been. Or so the story goes. It may not be a true story.”
“What if—” Leveritt cut herself short. What if what? What if somebody were to be scattered across four hundred million years, what then? “Nothing. Never mind.”
Gilzow turned back to Ovington. “What you’re saying, if that story’s not true, is that the matter hasn’t been settled.”
“Well, by now, it surely has. People’ve been in Paleozoic time long enough.”
“Long enough, anyway,” said Holmes, “so nobody can tell the true stories from the weird rumors. All these myths’re building up. Everybody repeats them; nobody knows if there’s anything to them or not. Like the one about the government’s secret plan to dump reactor waste in the Silurian.”
“Actually,” Ovington said, “the way I heard that story, if it is the same story, is that some generals tried to figure out a military application for a hole into the Silurian. Their plan was to sow Eurasia and Gondwanaland with nukes, so, later on, whenever the infidels and darkies got out of line—”
Holmes guffawed, and Gilzow said, “It’s got to be true!”
“No,” said Holmes, “it can’t be, it’s too stupid.”
“It’s so stupid it has to be true.”
“Maybe it is,” said Ovington, “and maybe it isn’t, but this much is certain – the United States isn’t sharing the hole with anybody!”
Then, Leveritt thought, there’s the story about the man who jumped through – into? across? – time and never came – out? down? Anyway, he vanished as though he’d never been. No one could tell he’d ever been, because nobody was supposed to talk about him.
And there’s a woman in the story who worked hard to get someplace, do something, be somebody. She found true happiness for maybe a whole hour. Afterward, she kept wondering what had happened to it, what had gone wrong. She was no quitter, never had been, but her work somehow wasn’t as fulfilling as she’d expected, and everyone around her thought she was a humorless prig.
But those were just symptoms. The problem—
Thunder rolled across the flatland, louder than before. Leveritt looked and saw a lightning-shot purple sky. The air suddenly moved and grew cool, eliciting a duet of ahs from Gilzow and Holmes and a full-throated cry of “Yes!” from someone in camp. Ovington rose and shouted in that direction, “I told you it was coming!” To the others on the bluff, he said, “Gotta run. Work to do,” and rushed off.
“Guess we’d better go batten down,” said Holmes.
“Just toss everything into the cooler,” Gilzow told him. “Bonnie ’n’ I’ll clean it up later.”
He did as she said, and then they picked up the cooler between themselves and hurried away.
Leveritt did not follow. The problem, she sat thinking, really was that the woman thought she was in a different story, her own, instead of the one about the man who vanished. Every time she turned around, there was his ghost. She couldn’t make him go away. There was no place else for him to go, no one else who would take him in. No one else knew who he was because she wasn’t supposed to talk about him.
Stop haunting me, Ed Morris. Stop.
The first heavy raindrop struck Leveritt on the back of the hand. She got to her feet and found herself leaning into a stiffening wind, squinting against airborne grit, in some danger of being either blown off the bluff or else blinded and simply blundering over the edge. She saw a bobbing point of light that had to be a lantern and concentrated on walking straight at it.
The rain started coming down hard. She found her tent, but as she bent to duck under the flap, she smelled ozone and felt a tingling all over her body, a mass stirring of individual hairs. Everything around her turned white, and she jerked back. For a timeless interval, she saw or imagined that she could see every upturned, startled face and wrinkled square inch of tent fabric in camp, every convolution of the roiling clouds above, everything between herself and the faraway hills, every rock, every fat drop of water hurtling earthward. At an impossible distance from her, yet close enough for her to see his safari garb and the dark flat square object he held, was a slight man whose expression both implored and accused.
The thunderclap smashed her to the ground. She came up on hands and knees, blinded, deafened, screaming, “I remember you, goddammit. What do you want?”
Strong hands closed around her wrist and forearm and dragged her out of the rain. Someone wiped her face with a cloth. At first, she could see nothing and heard only a ringing in her ears. Gradually, she made out Gilzow’s face, saw the look of concern, even alarm, in her wide blue eyes, saw her lips move and heard the sound of her voice though not the words she spoke. Leveritt shook her head. Gilzow stopped trying to talk to her and unselfconsciously helped her remove her wet underclothes. There was a second lightning strike close by the camp, and thunder as loud and sharp as a cannonade. Leveritt toweled herself dry, pulled on khaki pants and a flannel shirt, found her voice at last.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine to me.”
She did not sound fine to herself. “I was just dazzled by the lightning.”
“You’re lucky you weren’t fried by it. I don’t guess you’d’ve been yelling bloody murder if it’d hit you, but it must’ve hit right behind you. I’d swear I saw your silhouette right through the tent flap.”
“Really, I’m fine. Really.”
“Well, you lie down.” Gilzow made a shivery sound. “I’m breaking out the blankets. First it’s too hot for sleep, now it’s too chilly.”
Leveritt stretched out on her cot, and Gilzow spread a light blanket over her, tucked it around her almost tenderly, and extinguished the lantern. Leveritt lay listening to the rain’s arrhythmic drumming. It shouldn’t be my job, she thought, to have to remember Ed Morris. The storm passed. She slept.
The following morning was as warm and humid as though there had been no rainstorm. The normally clear and placid river had become a muddy torrent. Erosion was rapid in the Silurian; the steaming flatland, which drained through notches in the bluffs, looked the same and yet subtly changed. The camp’s denizens, ten people in all, stood about in twos and threes, surveyed the valley and the plain, and talked, depending on their specialties, of turbidity or fossiliferous outcrops or possible revisions in topographical maps.
Leveritt and Holmes spent the day in a tent with the sides drawn up, consolidating survey data and incorporating it into a three-dimensional computer model of the region from the valley to the hills. Over tens of millions of years, the land had been repeatedly submerged, then raised, drained, eroded. “Up and down,” Holmes said, “more times than the proverbial whore’s drawers.” Leveritt, her fierce concentration momentarily broken, shot him an oh-please look. They barely noticed a brief mid-morning cloudburst, barely paused for lunch, and might have skipped it but for the noise made by a couple of campmates returning muddy and ravenous from a collecting sortie into the valley. The sun was halfway down the sky when Holmes abruptly switched off his laptop, stretched, and declared that they could continue that evening, but right at that moment he needed some downtime. Leveritt glared at his retreating back until he had disappeared into the next tent; she found herself looking past the tent at the barren plain and the distant hills, and after a minute sh
e resigned herself to thinking about Ed Morris and wondering what had become of him.
Ed Morris. Ed Morris. Maybe you arrived high and dry and unhurt out there on the plain . . .
Her catalog of the possible fates of Ed Morris had grown extensive. It occurred to her now to record them in a notebook, like Gilzow’s models of geologic time. Then she remembered Lieutenant Hales’s injunction against writing anything that had to do with Ed Morris. She still did not feel safe from Hales.
Ed Morris. You arrived and – what? You wasted at least a little time and energy being confused and frightened. But after a while, you gathered your wits and took stock of your predicament. And what a predicament. You’ve got no food, no water, no idea of where you are. You know only where you aren’t. You have only the clothes on your back and the laptop in your hand.
If it’s night, you learn immediately that the stars are no help at all. The constellations you know don’t exist yet. You wander around in the dark, fall into a ravine, break your neck and die instantly . . .
Or break your leg and expire miserably over the course of a couple of days.
Back to the beginning. You find water, a rivulet, and follow it to a stream and follow that to the river and follow the river to the sea and find the main camp . . .
Or find nothing, if you’ve arrived before there is a camp.
Or you don’t find water and don’t fall and break any bones. You just wander around until your strength gives out.
No. You do find water, you reach the river, but you realize your strength will inevitably give out, that you’re lost and doomed to die in the middle of nowhere and no two ways about it, unless you take a chance, eat some of the local flora or fauna, shellfish, millipedes, whatever you can grab, anything you can keep down. You eat it raw, because you don’t have any way to make fire, but don’t get sick and die. You – what do you do if you live?