It regarded him with polite, bland patience. Molly Gerhard recalled that Griffin had once told her that one of his chief tools was boredom. Sitzflesk, he said, was even more important to a bureaucrat than it was to a chess player. Many a concession had been made by a negotiator who simply couldn’t face running through the same excruciating drivel for the seventeenth time. Yet he had never been able to out-sit an Unchanging. He could not match their perfect lack of expectation. He could not rattle them, nor insult them. They never displayed emotion.
“We’ve been discussing you,” Griffin said. “It has been suggested that this is not your proper time.”
“I am here. Time is always proper.”
Griffin grinned. He was a warrior, Molly Gerhard realized, and this was his field of combat. However discouraged he might have been mere minutes ago, the possibility of victory exalted him. “It has been suggested that you are an artificial construct. Is this true?”
“Yes.”
“How were you made?” Molly Gerhard asked.
“I was grown from human genetic material, suitably altered for the purposes to which I am put.”
“Who made you?”
“I am not authorized to tell you that.”
“Then we must talk to those who made you.”
“I cannot authorize that.”
“Who can?”
“I am not authorized to tell you that.”
Tick-tock, she thought again, her suspicions confirmed. The Unchanging was just another machine. Nothing more. Nothing less. They could stay here forever arguing with the thing, and not make a single inch’s headway.
Griffin, unfortunately, was a battler. It took three hours’ repetitive argument for him to give in.
“Can anything at all be resolved through you?” he finally asked. “Have you the authority to make decisions without precedent? Can you, under any conditions, send us forward on your own cognizance?”
“No.”
Griffin looked disgusted. “Then leave.”
It turned to go. Suddenly, Molly remembered another of Salley’s hints. “Tell me something,” she said. “Exactly how many of you are there?”
It paused. “One.”
“No, not you personally. I mean of the Unchanging. How many Unchanging are there in Terminal City? How many are there in the world at any given time? How many exist if you add up every one of the Unchanging no matter what era in time it inhabits?”
“One,” it said. “I am all there is. I perform all tasks, fulfill all functions, suffice for all that must be done. Only me. One.”
* * *
When the Unchanging was gone, Molly Gerhard said, “Yikes.”
“What annoys me,” Griffin said, “is the very real possibility that the Pentagon has had this information all along, but didn’t deem it important that we share in it.”
Jimmy scratched his head. “Let me get this straight. There’s only one of them.”
“Yes. One single individual, looped through time a thousand, a million, however many times it takes to do all the tasks that need doing.”
“Like that old notion that there was only one single subatomic particle running from one end of time to the other and back, over and over, until it’s woven an entire universe out of itself?”
“Yes.”
Jimmy stood, scraping his chair back on the floor. “Then I know what to do. Gather up everything you want to take with you. We’re leaving.”
* * *
When they came to the center of Terminal City and saw the guard waiting for them, Griffin said mildly, “I hope that whatever you plan doesn’t require our getting past the Unchanging. Without my pass, we won’t be allowed anywhere near the funnel.”
Molly Gerhard felt a sudden chill. Without access to the funnel, they had no way go get home. “Ever?” she asked.
“Now don’t you worry one least bit,” Jimmy said. “Let me show you how we handle problems like this back in Belfast.”
Unhurriedly, but not slowly either, he walked up to the Unchanging on duty before the cavern’s entrance. “Excuse me just a sec,” he said. “I have something here that—”
He was alongside the Unchanging now. His hand came out of his pocket and moved with uncanny speed toward the being’s back. Then he stepped away.
There was surprisingly little blood. Just a spreading crimson stain on the robe where the knife hilt stuck out of the Unchanging’s back.
Quietly, without protest, it fell.
It was quite dead.
“If there’s only one of him, then he has to end somewhere,” Jimmy commented. “And if he ends here, then he couldn’t see it coming.”
He started toward the funnel. “Come on.”
16. Buddy System
Lost Expedition Foothills: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 65 My B.C.E.
When sunset came, they set up the poptent in a sheltered spot in a grove of sycamores and fell asleep almost immediately.
In the morning, Chuck was the first out, whistling cheerily. The instant he left the tent, however, the whistling cut off.
He stuck his head back in and, with quiet urgency, said, “Don’t make any fast movements or loud noises. Grab your things and get out of the tent. Now.”
“I hope this isn’t another one of your—” Tamara began, crawling out, spear in hand and blouse only half buttoned. “Oh, shit.”
A herd of geistosaurs had moved into the grove. It was hard to count their numbers in the dawn light, but there were at least forty of them. They were unhurriedly stripping the leaves from the lower branches of the sycamores.
The geistosaurs were almost dead white, with blotchy black markings scattered across their bodies and thick black rings around their eyes. Those rings should have made them look comic, but did not. Their markings, combined with their absolute silence (Geistosaurus was the only mute hadrosaurine Leyster knew of) gave them a spooky solemnity, as if they were spirit animals that had wandered into reality from the totemic lands of the dead.
They dared not try to slip away. Any large animal was potentially dangerous. And though a geistosaur was no more aggressive than a Brahma bull or a water buffalo, it was considerably larger. If they startled one, it could easily trample them all.
Nor would climbing a tree be of any use. It might save them from a ceratopsian, but not a hadrosaur. When they reared up onto their hind legs, the geistosaurs could reach all but the highest branches. Those, they could shake savagely enough to dislodge anything clinging there.
So they sat scrunched up against the trunks of the sycamores for several hours, hoping to escape notice, while the ghostly white-and-black giants browsed their way through the grove, pale animals among the pale trees. “Under other circumstances,” Chuck muttered underneath his breath, “I’d be enjoying this. We’ve got front row seats here.”
“I can’t get a handle on their social interplay,” Leyster whispered back. “As a rule, the smaller adults seem to be subordinate to the larger. But—”
“Would you two kindly shut the fuck up?” Tamara whispered. “We don’t want to stampede them.”
At that instant, the phone rang.
As one, every geistosaur in the grove lifted its head in alarm. For a long, frozen instant, nothing moved. The phone continued ringing, an alien noise completely unlike anything these animals could ever have heard before.
Then they fled.
They scattered like pigeons. Briefly, they were everywhere, enormous, terrified. The juveniles dropped to all fours first, and trotted briskly off to the east and north. Then the adults, herding their young before them.
In its haste, a geistosaur brushed against the poptent, sending it leaping up a good six feet into the air. By the time it bounced back to earth, the grove was empty.
The phone was still ringing.
Shakily, Leyster stood. He stretched his aching muscles, then retrieved his pack, so he could answer the phone. It took a minute to unwrap the thing. “Yes?�
��
“This is Daljit. Lai-tsz called and told us she’s built a device for detecting infrasound and… Hey, how far have you guys gotten?”
“Not as far as we were hoping. But we’ll make up for lost time this afternoon. How’s Jamal?”
“It’s just a broken leg,” Jamal said in the background.
“I think it’s infected,” Daljit said. “Did you remember to bring antibiotics?”
“Of course we did.” Their last, though Leyster didn’t mention that. “Oh, and you’d better watch out for Chuck. He’s got hold of a theory.”
“Uh-oh. What is it?”
“I’ll let him bend your ear when we get there. Right now, tell us about the infrasound.”
While he listened, Chuck and Tamara repacked their gear. When he finally hung up, Tamara said, “We were lucky. The only thing that was broken was one of the tent’s support struts. We can make a replacement from a sapling.”
“Thank God,” Leyster said.
They were midway through the slow process of losing everything they had brought with them. The solar shower device went first, followed quickly by (of course) their consumer electronics—game players and music systems—and the batteries they required to function. Then a knife went missing, and a comb, and the next thing they knew, they were suffering serious inconvenience, and facing the possibility of genuine hardship. When one of his cameras died, Patrick went into mourning for a week.
Bit by bit, they were losing their grip on the machine age and sliding back into the stone age. It was a terrifying prospect not only because it was irreversible, but because they lacked the complex mastery of paleolithic technology that a stone age hunter had. Nils had spent most of the rainy season trying to make a bow before giving it up as a bad job. He hadn’t even been able to manufacture shafts straight enough for the arrows.
“Let’s go,” Leyster said, shouldering his pack. “I can tell you about the infrasound on the way.”
* * *
Lai-tsz had jury-rigged two recorders to detect infrasound. On their very first day using them, the crew back home had been able to establish that the valley was full of sub-audible communications. More, according to Daljit, the messages were profoundly moving.
“They sing!” she’d told Leyster. “No, not like whales. Much lower, much more vibrant. Oh, it’s exquisite stuff. They played some for us over the phone. Jamal says we should be sure to hang onto the copyright. He says he’s sure a music company would be interested.”
“I was joking,” Jamal said weakly in the background.
“Oh, hush. You were not. Fortunately, our original equipment included directional microphones. Since Lai-tsz rigged up two recorders, it’s possible to point one at a tyrannosaur and another at a herbivore, record both simultaneously, and then play them back to see if you’ve got anything that looks like interspecific communication.”
“So, do they?”
“Well, it’s a little early to say…”
“Don’t be a tease, Daljit,” Jamal said.
“But yes, yes it really does look like there is.”
* * *
When Leyster finished relating the conversation, Tamara said, “That is so neat!”
“Aw, c’mon,” Chuck said in a mock-hurt voice. “How can you be so impressed by something we already suspected, and not by my theory? I mean, let’s face it, it’s got the K-T extinction, continental drift, the Chicxulub impactor, and mass dinosaur madness all in one sexy package.”
“Yes, but those are just ideas. Forgive me, Chuck, but anybody can come up with ideas. What the guys back home have done goes way beyond ideas. They’ve established a new fact! It’s like the universe had this secret it’s been keeping since forever, and now it’s been found out. It’s like reading the mind of God.”
“Now who’s being grandiose?”
“Louis Agassiz once wrote that a physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle,” Leyster said. “I’m siding with Tamara on this one.”
Chuck shrugged. “Anyway, they’ve established that different species talk to one another infrasonically. I consider that step one toward proving my theory.”
“Whoah, whoah, whoah! That’s not the way science works. First you gather the data, then you analyze it, and then you come up with a hypothesis and a plan for testing it. In that order.”
“And yet scientists come up with idiot notions and set out to prove them all the time,” Tamara said. “I could name names, if you want. Your system works fine in theory. But things are different in the real world.”
“I’m going to move to Theory someday,” Chuck said. “Everything works there.”
“Sometimes you guys make me question my ability to teach. You can’t prove a hypothesis in paleontology—you can only test it to see if it can be destroyed. If, over time, a hypothesis resists every attempt made to falsify it, then you can say that it’s extremely robust and would require an extraordinary mass of data to unseat it. The germ theory of disease is a good example of that. The evidence for it is compelling. People bet their lives every day that it’s true. But it’s not proven. It’s simply the best available interpretation of what we know.”
“Well, given what we know, I think my hypothesis is the best available interpretation of the facts.”
“It’s not parsimonious, though. It’s not the simplest possible explanation.”
Arguing and keeping a wary eye out for predators, they made another few miles’ progress through the forest.
* * *
They were following an old hadrosaur trail when the woods opened out into a bright clearing. It had recently been browsed almost to the ground, and was covered with new growth, fresh green shoots shot through with white silkpod blossoms and red-tipped Darwin’s broomsticks. A stream ran through it. On the far side of the stream, the woods resumed with a stand of protomagnolia trees in full bloom. Their scent filled the clearing.
Birds scattered as they stepped out of the darkness. They waited cautiously for a moment, then took a step forward. Then another.
Nothing attacked them.
Gratefully, Leyster let his knapsack slip to the ground. “Let’s take a break,” he said.
“Second the motion,” Tamara said.
“Moved and carried.” Chuck plopped to the ground.
They put their packs together, and sat leaning against them with their legs stretched out. Leyster rolled up his pants legs and checked for ticks. Chuck took off a shoe and rubbed his foot.
“Let’s take a look at that,” Tamara said. Then, “The sole is practically falling off! Why didn’t you say something?”
“I knew you’d want to tape it up, and we’ve got so little left.”
Leyster already had the duct tape out of his pack. “What do you think it’s for?” The shoe had been repaired before, but the tape had abraded where the sole met the upper. He rewrapped it with generous swaths of new tape overtop the old. “There. That should hold for a while.”
Chuck shook his head ruefully. “We have got to start making new shoes.”
“Easier said than done,” Leyster said. “We can’t do oak tanning because we haven’t found anything that looks to be ancestral to the oak. And the problem with brain tanning is that dinosaurs have such tiny little brains. We’ll have to harvest a lot of them.”
“Sounds like the pioneer method for making a toothpick,” Chuck observed: “First, you chop down a redwood…”
Everybody chuckled. They were silent for a while. Then Tamara lazily said, “Hey, Chuck.”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t really believe that stuff about the Chicxulub impactor making the Earth ring, do you?”
“What’s so difficult about that? The Earth rings for two to three weeks after a major earthquake, and the force of the collision was six times ten to the eighth power stronger than any earthquake. Now, most of that force went into heat and other forms of energy. If less than one tenth of one percent of that went into elastic energy, as seems entirely plau
sible, then the elastic wave propagation would be enough to make the Earth ring for a hundred years.”
“Oh.”
“The only question is how much the heat energy changed the properties of the crust. If it became more viscous and less solid, then the more viscous crust would damp out the elastic waves. However, I do not think that happened. Extremely unlikely, in my humble opinion. Though I am open to new interpretations, if the data are there to support them.”
Leyster smiled to himself. Chuck had a good mind. He’d make a fine scientist as soon as he learned to stop jumping to conclusions. He sighed, stretched, and stood.
“Time to go, kids.” Leyster took a reading, pointed toward the protomagnolias. Tamara came after him, and then Chuck.
They splashed through the stream and back into gentle shadow.
“Keep alert,” Chuck said. “Don’t be distracted by how peaceful it all looks.”
He had barely finished speaking when the dromies attacked.
Dromaeosaurs were not particularly large as dinosaurs went. They were the size of dogs, somewhere between knee– and hip-high to a human, but, like dogs, they were nothing you wanted to have attack you. This particular pack was covered in tawny green feathers, all short save for the wrist-fans on the females, which were used to shade their eggs when brooding. The feathers, the savage little teeth in their whippet-narrow heads, and the oversized claws on their hind feet combined to make them look like Hell’s own budgerigars.
They were ambush hunters.
As one, they burst out of the bushes and leapt down from the trees. The air was filled with flying bodies and protomagnolia petals.
Chuck screamed once.
Leyster spun and saw Chuck go down, covered with dromaeosaurs.
Instinctively, he dropped his compass and snatched out the axe. Hollering and swinging, he ran toward the swarming knot of dromies.
Tamara ran past him, yelling at the top of her lungs. She’d thought to drop her knapsack, where Leyster hadn’t. Her spear arm was cocked back, and there was murder in her face.
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