The Extinction Code

by Dean Crawford

  ‘The lines are sedimentary strata,’ Channing explained patiently. ‘Here in Hell Creek, erosion of softer rock by rivers and wind exposes hillsides formed from other, harder rocks and the strata they contain, laid down over millions of years.’

  Weisler considered this for a few moments as they walked. ‘So it’s a record.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a record of geological time, of what happened here over huge periods, like the growth rings in a tree. Different weather, different events, all of them leave a record in the rocks for us to study.’

  ‘And you’re the guy that studies the rocks, right?’ Weisler said, apparently pleased with himself.

  ‘No,’ Channing replied with a quiet joy at the media man’s error. ‘I’m the guy that studies what we find buried in those rocks.’

  Channing reached a section of the hillside slope that he recognized and he slowed and crouched alongside a steep cliff face, strips of color clearly visible even to the layman’s eyes. Although not a geologist by training, Channing’s work involved understanding precisely what he was looking at in order to locate what he was seeking.

  ‘We need to go a little deeper,’ he said.

  Weisler wiped sweat from his brow and squinted down into the valley. ‘Damn me, it’s like an oven here. How do you know you need to go deeper?’

  Channing pointed at a thin layer in the rocks. ‘Because of this.’

  The layer was an inch or so thick, light pink or white, and lay beneath another one about a half inch thick and dark gray in color.

  ‘What is it?’ Weisler asked as he crouched alongside Channing.

  ‘The K–T Boundary,’ Channing replied, ‘the division between the Cretaceous and Paleogene period. This boundary bed marks a bolide impactor’s arrival on Earth.’

  ‘A what now?’

  ‘A massive asteroid impact,’ Channing went on. ‘See the dark layer above it? That’s shocked quartz and iridium, caused by rock being super–heated and compressed. That fell after the layer below it, which was formed by acid rain falling on the earth after the impact as the chemicals churned up from inside the earth hit the atmosphere and poisoned it.’

  Weisler stared at the rocks in amazement. ‘You can tell all of that from an inch and a half of rocks?’

  ‘It’s been studied for decades,’ Channing replied. ‘See the few inches of banding above the K–T boundary? That’s where we find what we call the “fern spike”, huge numbers of fossilized ferns. Such plants are usually the ones to grow first in the wake of forest fires, when the rest of the landscape has been decimated.’

  Channing could almost hear the media man’s mind turning over as he looked at the barren landscape around them.

  ‘And this happened here, turned this land to stone like this?’

  ‘No,’ Channing replied. ‘It happened on the Mexican peninsular, at a place called Chicxulub, sixty five million years ago. This boundary of rock, the evidence of the impact, is found at the same level in the rocks all around the world.’

  Channing stood up and prepared to move out again.

  ‘An Extinction Level Event,’ Weisler said, surprising Channing.

  ‘Yeah,’ he agreed, ‘an ELE. Ninety per cent of all living species went extinct directly after that impact.’

  As they moved down the hillside, Weisler hurried to keep up. ‘What did you say you studied again?

  ‘I’m a paleontologist,’ Channing replied, his voice echoing away across the lonely canyons. ‘I specialize in looking for Tyrannosaurs.’

  The descent continued for another few minutes as Channing sought the location specified in the letter. The author’s references to opposing lignite layers and tonsteins, a name for a certain kind of acid leached kaolinitic clay, guided Channing as he searched the rock faces. The sun blazed down upon them and seemed to beat back off the rock faces as Channing hunted for his quarry, but after an hour of crawling across hard rocks on his knees and chipping off samples from the rock face itself he was no closer to locating whatever the letter was referring to.

  Channing sat back in his haunches and pulled his hat down further over his eyes to shield them from the infernal sun. Weisler stood over him and looked impatiently at the rocks.

  ‘You found anything yet?’

  Channing fought to keep his temper in check as he replied.

  ‘A lot of old rocks and nothing much else. Are you sure you don’t know who sent you that letter?’

  Weisler shook his head. ‘I told you, I have no idea. It showed up, post–marked NYC, no name or identifying marks, with a covering note asking me to contact you and pass it on. I would have binned the damned thing if it hadn’t said that what was out here could change the world forever.’

  Channing wiped sweat from his brow onto the back of his forearm and shook his head. ‘There’s nothing here.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Channing repeated, already suspecting that the letter was a hoax, the party trick of some sad loser with nothing better to do than waste other people’s time with their fantasies.

  ‘But then why bring me to you? Why go through this whole charade?’

  Channing got slowly to his feet and dusted his jeans off as he replied.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea, but who knows? There are more than enough weirdos and conspiracy theorists in this world. I’ve lost count of the number of letters I’ve received from people claiming that the world is in fact flat, or that people walked alongside the dinosaurs, or that the world is only six thousand years old.’

  Weisler looked up at the hard, uncaring face of the cliff and sighed, and Channing realized that the media man had been as deceived as he had and was as likely just as disappointed.

  ‘Don’t let it get to you,’ Channing suggested. ‘I’m surprised that you don’t get these kinds of pranks all the time too.’

  ‘We do,’ Weisler admitted, ‘but this one seemed so real, so genuine. He knew stuff, right?’

  Channing hesitated. Weisler was right, the author of the letter had known what he was talking about. He wondered whether the prank had been played by one of his colleagues, or perhaps worse one of his competitors.

  ‘Do you have the rest of the letter with you?’ Channing asked, wondering if he could identify the prankster by his hand writing on the covering letter that Weisler had mentioned.

  Weisler retrieved his covering letter and handed it to Channing, who read it for a moment and then gasped out loud as his hand flew to his mouth.

  ‘What is it?’ Weisler asked.

  Channing re–read the covering letter and realized that the note contained further concealed information.

  Please forward this information to Professor Aubrey Channing, Montana State University, whose knowledge of fossilized remains embedded in Paleogene kaolinitic layering is far and above that of his contemporaries, none of whom would think to seek higher knowledge.

  Channing lowered the letter and stared at it in silence for several long seconds.

  ‘Will you tell me what the hell’s going on?’ Weisler demanded.

  ‘Why not?’ Channing whispered vacantly and then stared up at the rock face before him. ‘We’re in the right place and the wrong place.’

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘This can’t be possible,’ Channing murmured again.

  ‘Damn it man, what does the letter say?’

  ‘That we’re in the right place, but the wrong time.’

  ***

  III

  Channing broke free from his catatonic shock and hurried up the hillside, scrambling for purchase amid the rocks. Weisler leaped up in pursuit, struggling to keep up as Channing climbed up toward a narrow ledge a few yards further up the hill.

  The sun was now beating down with almost unbearable strength as they ascended the hill, Channing’s shirt soaked with sweat and his breath coming in short, sharp gasps as he climbed and finally reached the ledge. He clambered up onto it, and immediately he saw what he was looking
for as Weisler dragged himself onto the ledge and knelt alongside him, gasping for breath.

  ‘Jesus, where’s the fire?’

  Channing did not respond as he looked at the rock formation before him.

  The face showed obvious signs of disturbance by human hands and tools, and although Channing was no tracker he could see a few scattered boot prints in the dust where somebody had been working the site, maybe for a couple of days or so. But it was what was protruding from the rock face itself that stunned him into a sort of reverential silence.

  ‘That’s a bone!’ Weisler said, and whipped out a camera from his satchel.

  Channing knew that it was a bone, or to be more accurate the fossilized remains of a bone, buried deep in the strata for sixty five million years. His career experience was such that he did not need to study it for more than a few moments to know what he was looking at.

  ‘Tyrannosaur,’ he whispered.

  The bone that Weisler was now photographing avidly was almost a yard long and lined with razor sharp teeth several inches in length, the whole bone and likely the skull with it still mostly concealed inside the rock from which patient hands had begun to liberate it. The classic lines of a theropod carnivore were obvious, perhaps even to the layman, but as Weisler was clearly beginning to realize, that was not what was odd about the remains.

  ‘Wait one,’ he said. ‘Scientists have been digging these things up out here for years, so what’s the big deal?

  Channing didn’t know quite where to begin, and suddenly he found himself beginning to understand why whoever had written the letter had no desire to be associated with the spectacular remains they had located out here in the barren Montana wilderness.

  ‘It shouldn’t be here,’ Channing replied finally.

  ‘Sure it should,’ Weisler insisted. ‘It’s a dinosaur, right? They’re buried all over the place out here.’

  ‘But not here,’ Channing insisted.

  Weisler sighed and lowered his camera. ‘I don’t get it.’

  Channing pointed down the hillside, and across it at the thin line of the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary running through the rock strata.

  ‘The K–T Event, the asteroid impact that struck the Chicxulub peninsular and caused a devastating extinction level event, occurred down there.’

  Weisler looked down at the line, and then turned to the remains in the cliff face.

  ‘The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs,’ he said quietly.

  ‘It ended their reign sixty five million years ago,’ Channing confirmed. ‘Virtually every scientific discipline accepts that the event was the end of the dinosaur line, and no scientist has ever discovered the remains of a dinosaur after that event.’ He turned to stare at the jaw bone lodged in the solid Montana rock face. ‘Nobody has ever discovered dinosaur remains above that line.’

  Weisler got it quickly enough and began enthusiastically snapping more shots of the remains, this time ensuring that the nearby line of the K–T boundary was in–shot.

  ‘So, the asteroid didn’t kill all of the dinosaurs. I can see why this guy didn’t want to go public right away. I guess he’d face a real storm of protest.’

  There was a famous saying in science that Channing had first heard at college, from the words of a man named Arthur Schopenhauer: “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self–evident.”

  Often academic careers were ended by such dramatic discoveries, the truth of those discoveries only coming to light long after the unfortunate scientist’s death. Established science would often cut funding to research deemed unscientific, scientific journals would refuse to publish papers on radical hypothesis, and both governments and big business would seek to undermine any research that threatened profits or political stability: researchers into the links between cigarettes and lung cancer had even been issued death threats as a result of their work. To buck the trend, to rock the boat or otherwise oppose the establishment early in one’s life was reckoned to be career suicide for any academic, which was why professional opposition to supposedly “consensus” science like climate change was vocalized only by those scientists who had already retired and thus had no career and income to lose.

  Suddenly Channing realized why he had been sent the letter, why he had been targeted to travel to this lonely, barren corner of Hell Creek. The scientist who had made this discovery could not afford to promote it, for fear of losing grants and funding for whatever they were researching in their day job. This had been a personal crusade that they could never complete. But Channing was nearing retirement age, had little to lose and himself cared little for the establishment.

  ‘His or her career would be over,’ Channing said finally. ‘They’re handing me the discovery of the century because they know I can afford to take the chance on this.’

  Weisler lowered the camera in his hands as he looked at the professor.

  ‘It’s not that big a deal, surely?’

  Channing stared up at the reporter and shook his head. ‘You don’t get what this means, do you?’

  Weisler shrugged. ‘The stone from space didn’t kill all of the big monsters. What of it?’

  Channing looked down at the rocks before them.

  ‘Tyrannosaurs evolved in the last few million years before the K–T Event,’ he explained. ‘They represented the largest of their species, the theropods, and those were the first to suffer when the asteroid hit.’

  Weisler seemed to forget about his camera as he looked at the huge bones lodged in the rock face.

  ‘How bad was it?’

  Channing chuckled bitterly.

  ‘The asteroid, which was about seven miles across, hit the Yucatan Peninsular at about thirty thousand miles per hour. It passed through our entire atmosphere in a few seconds. Meteor Crater in Arizona is a mile across and was created by an impactor with an energy release of about ten megatons. In contrast, the K–T event impactor struck with a force estimated to be one hundred million megatons.’

  Weisler’s voice became quiet. ‘Pretty bad, then.’

  Channing nodded. ‘The impact would have produced a light so bright that it would have penetrated the bodies of living things, making them briefly translucent and blinding them instantly. The crater it left behind, which is now below the Gulf of Mexico, is two hundred kilometres wide. The impact rained down debris across the entire globe, causing worldwide forest fires and a post–event global winter that lasted a decade. The large herbivores that survived the impact event died out first after all the vegetation was destroyed, followed by the large carnivores like Tyrannosaurs which had nothing left to hunt, followed by marine animals poisoned by the chemical fall out from the blast which would have fallen around the globe. Very little life survived the event and its consequences.’

  Weisler looked at the rocks around them. ‘And all of that’s contained in these rocks?’

  ‘Hard evidence,’ Channing replied, ‘no pun intended. The lowest layers of the K–T boundary are the acid leached rocks, its kaolinitic composition the result of acid rain produced when the asteroid impact blasted anhydrite rock at Chicxulub, which is dehydrated gypsum and forms sulfur dioxide when vaporized. That fell first, followed by the more famous iridium–enriched shocked quartz, the debris from the impact that was hurled into the atmosphere by the blast and then settled on top of the lower layers of the boundary. Finally on top of all that is the lignite, a sort of coal formed in swamps, lagoons and shallow lakes, where peat mires are common, and that lignite contains unusually dense concentrations of fossil fern spores.’

  ‘The growth after the impact,’ Weisler remembered. ‘The fern spike, after the dinosaurs were all gone.’

  Channing nodded, and with one hand he gently brushed the long, hard jaw bone of the Tyrannosaur.

  ‘And yet here it is,’ he said softly, ‘after the impact event.’

  Weisler frowned. ‘Couldn’t it have simply survived?�
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  ‘Not an entire species,’ Channing shook his head. ‘Besides, they would have evolved further, changed, adapted over time to the new environment. This specimen simply shouldn’t be here unless everything we’ve assumed we know about the Chicxulub impact is…’ Channing hesitated as though he were afraid to say the last word.

  ‘Wrong,’ Weisler added. ‘But that doesn’t mean anything that big, right? Only scientists will be in uproar. Most folks won’t give a damn one way or the other.’

  Channing shook his head as he ran his hand down the surface of the Tyrannosaur bone again, this time feeling ripples and holes in the bone beneath his touch.

  ‘That’s not what worries me,’ he said softly. ‘What’s on my mind is: if the asteroid didn’t kill the dinosaurs, then what did?’

  Weisler shrugged. ‘Climate change? Volcanoes? Rising sea levels?’

  Chandler shook his head again and then he stopped moving his hand. He pulled it away abruptly, looked at his palm in shock.

  ‘What, you get bitten by something?’ Weisler asked.

  Channing stood bolt upright as he sucked in a deep breath and seemed to quiver on the spot as though momentarily no longer in his own body. Weisler took a pace toward him, and Channing thrust his hand out to forestall the reporter.

  ‘Stay back,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The letter,’ Channing said, ‘when it was posted to you, when you received it. Was it in a sealed plastic bag?’

  Weisler’s eyes flew wide in amazement. ‘Yeah. Say, how the hell did you know that…?’

  ‘Get out of here, right now,’ Channing snapped. ‘Get back to town and call CDC.’

  Weisler’s face drained of color as he stared at Channing. ‘The CDC? What the hell for?’