by C T Cassana
CHAPTER IX: Welcome to Jurassic Park!
On Saturday morning, the kids held a meeting in their headquarters. After a few stern reprimands from Lisa and a few brief apologies from Charlie, they turned their attention to what they had found the night before. They were both anxious to know what the second annulus they had found was for.
“There’s another annulus, the instructions for it and another poem in Latin to find the next one,” announced Lisa upon opening the envelope.
“And what’s this one for?”
“‘Tempus anulus’, the time annulus,” said Lisa solemnly, riffling through the instructions and then filing them away in the Book of Time.
“We hit the jackpot!” cheered Charlie. “Now we can travel to the past!”
“Hey! Not so fast! Remember that Professor Conwell said that we shouldn’t travel in time until we had all the annuli.”
“So?” replied Charlie, as if he were the only one capable of working things out. “He also said that there were more annuli and that he only had a few of them. So obviously, he traveled to the past without waiting to find them all. He’s good at giving advice that he didn’t even follow himself.”
Lisa listened to her brother in silence, not knowing how to respond.
“Besides, the poem with the clues for finding the next one are in Latin again,” the boy went on. “It would be better if we try this annulus now, you know, to leave a little time before we go asking Mum or Dad for help to translate them. Or would you rather that we ask Miss Rotherwick?”
Lisa said nothing while she weighed up their options. The little runt was right, at least, about the need to leave a little time before asking for help again with the Latin. She still didn’t know what to make of their last visit to Miss Rotherwick, and that made her uneasy.
Charlie studied his sister’s expression; he almost had it in the bag, he thought.
“Our last trip came off perfectly,” he added.
“I wouldn’t go that far...”
“Well, anyone can make a little mistake. But everything was planned perfectly, and it worked. That’s the real key, planning things properly.”
“And not forgetting to hold onto me,” added Lisa. “Alright then. We’ll read the explanations in the notebook, and if everything is clear, we’ll make our first journey in time. Do you know where you want to go?”
“Of course! To see dinosaurs.”
“Are you mad? What if we meet a Tyrannosaurus Rex?”
“We come straight back, obviously. The only danger would be if it hugs me and comes back home with us, although if it did I’m sure it would decide to eat Mrs. Davis before it ate us.”
Lisa smiled at her brother’s wisecrack.
“But dinosaurs lived millions of years ago,” she said. “And the annulus doesn’t even have room for that many numbers.”
Charlie took the annulus from his sister. She was right. It seemed unbelievable to him: who would think of inventing a contraption to travel back in time without being able to visit the age of the dinosaurs? Annoyed, he took the bracelet out of the compartment in the desk and fitted the annulus onto it. In silence he began turning the numbers around and around, trying to find the earliest date possible, until a triumphant smile broke out on his face.
“Look at this,” he said, showing the bracelet to Lisa.
She looked at it in astonishment. The annulus was a wide cylinder containing eight small dials with numbers. Lisa deduced that the first two were for the day, the second two for the month and the last four for the year. To the left of these eight was one more dial with two single marks: “B.C.” and “A.D.”. Charlie turned the dials back as far as they would go, back to the 1st of January 9,999 B.C., and when he did so another dial with a number appeared, so that 9,999 could be changed to 10,000, and so on.
“I think we really can go see dinosaurs,” he concluded.
“It’s incredible,” said Lisa, who watched how the little dials appeared and disappeared.
“It’s magic,” replied her brother, with an air of self-importance. “If the cape and the ring can get bigger and smaller, why wouldn’t it happen to everything else?”
Lisa nodded while she continued to study the bracelet. The time annulus appeared to operate in a very similar way to the place annulus; it even had the stars as the means of returning home.
“When do we go?” asked Charlie.
“I don’t know. I’ll read the notebook, and when I’ve got it all clear I’ll tell you.”
Charlie responded with an annoyed frown. His sister was too meticulous, he thought, especially since she had unilaterally declared herself the chief strategist of their team.
. . .
That morning Dr. Oswald Butler woke up with a feeling that things were about to change. Some weeks earlier he had decided to move the work site half a mile to the west, to a small plain as barren as the one they had been digging at for months.
The paleontologist felt like a gambler who had just begun betting on red after a hopeless losing streak on the black. Waiting to see whether the elusive Lady Luck might finally smile on him, he spent the whole afternoon pacing nervously from one end of the site to the other, watching over every movement made by his workers.
The hours went by with no results and the sun began to set over the Black Hills. Dr. Butler looked at his watch and calculated that they had at most half an hour of daylight left. He felt a wave of rage and frustration wash over him, and he cleared his throat in an effort to dissipate it. Just when he was about to give the order for everyone to begin packing up, he heard a phrase that he had been dreaming of hearing for months.
“Doctor, there’s something here!”
Everybody crowded around Alice Powell, and Dr. Butler pushed his way through to her. She was the most competent person on the whole team; if she had raised the alarm it was because she had found something truly important.
“What is it, Alice?” asked Butler, unable to conceal his anxiousness.
“I don’t know, Oswald, but it’s clearly a skeleton.”
. . .
Lisa spent a few days studying the instructions in the notebooks that they had added so far to the Book of Time. Although she didn’t have much information, she developed a clear idea of what they needed to do to be able to travel in time. Her doubts were not related to the operation of the cape, but to whether they themselves were knowledgeable enough to make such a journey. Every time she thought of it she felt overwhelmed by a feeling of vertigo, which might have been due either to the burden of the responsibility or to her irrepressible desire to do it.
Charlie, meanwhile, tried to keep his impatience in check by re-reading all his books on dinosaurs, with special attention to the illustrations of landscapes and terrestrial species. The boy studied the pictures of dense forests of conifers, palms and ferns where huge creatures grazed or were hunted by ferocious predators, and he imagined himself hiding behind a large thicket, watching the whole scene in person.
One of his books detailed the places where the remains of each species had been found, and there was a world map showing the main fossil sites around the globe. Although there was a large number of findings concentrated in southern England, the specimens found there seemed to Charlie to be too harmless and friendly to be worthy of a visit.
The best destination was clear: if they wanted to see real dinosaurs, they had to go the western part of the United States. That was where the most impressive species had been found, including the king of the dinosaurs, the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Fortunately, the map didn’t include pictures of the specimens found in each location, but was marked only with little circles of different colors indicating whether they were marine, terrestrial or airborne species. Lisa had never shown much interest in dinosaurs, so it would be enough simply to show her the map and one of the more harmless species that had been discovered in that region.
Charlie also carefully studied a complete graph showing the different time periods into which the prehistor
ic era was divided, the millions of years spanned by each one and the species that had lived then. The Tyrannosaurus had lived in the Late Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, just before the dinosaurs had suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth under mysterious, cataclysmic circumstances that science had yet to uncover.
. . .
Maggie came running to Miss Rotherwick’s door, knocked on it quickly and opened it before being invited to enter. Helen Rotherwick lifted her gaze from the screen of her computer, surprised by her colleague’s brashness.
“Oh my God, Helen!” said Maggie, gasping for breath. “Come, you have to see this!”
Miss Rotherwick understood at once that it was something important. Without a word, she saved the file she had been working on and rose to accompany Maggie.
The two women walked at a brisk pace down various deserted passageways while Maggie gave her colleague a brief explanation. It was twenty to six in the afternoon and nearly all the museum staff had already gone home.
Maggie unlocked the door to Laboratory 4 and locked it again once they were inside. She went over to the table and turned on the lamp of a large magnifying glass. She gestured to her colleague to take a look. Miss Rotherwick looked through the glass for a few minutes without saying a word.
“What do you think?” asked Maggie at last.
“It looks authentic,” replied Miss Rotherwick.
Maggie nodded.
“Yes, I think so too, but we have to verify it,” she said.
“We mustn’t do anything risky or hasty,” remarked Miss Rotherwick, “especially given how things have been lately.”
“I know, Helen, I know. Let’s not say a word to anybody until we are completely sure.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll help you in any way I can,” said Miss Rotherwick.
“Thank you, Helen. I knew I could count on you.”
. . .
Once the place and time of their destination had been decided, the wait seemed unbearable to Charlie. His sister was taking an incomprehensibly long time studying the only three notebooks they had found so far. Finally, on Tuesday afternoon, the boy called an urgent meeting in their headquarters.
“When are we going?” he asked his sister as soon as the meeting began.
“I don’t know,” she replied.
Charlie took advantage of Lisa’s indecision to take the initiative and be the one to make the plans this time.
“Actually, it doesn’t matter when we go,” he said. “With the bracelet we can come back to the same point we left at. That’s what happened when we went to Merton; we came back to the same spot. Now, with the time annulus we’ll come back to the same spot and at the same moment that we left.”
“Yes, I guess it will work the same way because the mechanism is the same. All we have to do is set the dials to stars and turn the clasp.”
“Which means that we could go tomorrow, or any time. Nobody will miss us because for everyone else no time will have passed.”
Lisa nodded her head in agreement.
“So we’ll go tomorrow,” said Charlie. “If we leave it till Friday, Mrs. Davis might end up spoiling our plans with another game of Monopoly.”
The boy picked up the map with the main fossil sites and showed it to Lisa.
“I think the best place for us to go would be South Dakota or Colorado. That’s where the gigantic sauropods used to live,” he explained, showing his sister an illustration.
The picture showed a placid herd of large dinosaurs grazing and watching over their eggs and young with expressions of idiotic docility. The whole valley was a haven of peace, free of the threatening presence of terrestrial or airborne predators. Lisa contemplated the bucolic landscape and couldn’t take her eyes off a litter of baby dinosaurs breaking out of their eggs under the watchful gaze of their loving mother.
“Alright,” she said. “But we’ll only stay for a few minutes and then we come back. No strolling around. I don’t want to run into any flesh-eating monsters or giant mosquitoes.”
“Okay, Lisa,” replied Charlie begrudgingly, so as not to make his sister suspicious. “And how are we going to find the coordinates?”
“We’ve got the GPS. I just have to look up South Dakota and we’ll be set.”
“I have to admit, you’re a genius,” said Charlie. “A true genius.”
He closed the book and took it down to his bedroom to put it back in its place, just in case Lisa, for the first time in her life, suddenly felt a desire to look through it.
. . .
Surprisingly, Charlie was late for their meeting. Lisa was double-checking the coordinates for their new destination while she waited for him. Finally, the boy made his dramatic appearance.
“Welcome to Jurassic Park!” he exclaimed as he opened the attic door, holding the flashlight like a microphone.
When she saw him, Lisa couldn’t restrain her laughter. Charlie was wearing his explorer’s outfit and had brought all his gear: butterfly net, canteen, compass, a backpack containing tweezers for taking samples, bags to store them in and, of course, his camera.
“What are you dressed up as?” the girl asked him between laughs.
“You dressed up to go to the library at Merton,” retorted Charlie with an irritated look.
“That was different.”
“It sure was. How many times in your life have you had the chance to see a real live dinosaur?”
“Come on, you’re not taking all that with you. Remember, we’re only going to be there for a few minutes.”
She went over to her brother and took the backpack, net and canteen from him.
“But the bags and the compass I’m taking,” protested Charlie.
“I think it would be better if you changed your clothes. What are we going to tell Dad if he sees you dressed up like that?”
“The truth. That I’m hunting dinosaurs.”
Lisa shrugged her shoulders and picked up the bracelet to check that the dials were all set correctly. Once more she checked the coordinates for South Dakota and the time period they had to travel to. Then she put the bracelet on her brother’s right wrist and wrapped the cape around his shoulders.
“And don’t go forgetting me this time, alright?” she said, putting her arms around him.
“Alright.”
The boy embraced his sister and reached for the clasp on the bracelet. He imagined that this time the whirling sensation would be much more intense and much longer. After all, it was a journey 65 million years into the past.
. . .
Suddenly, he felt extremely cold and had the sensation of floating in a void. He was still dazed by the tremendous jolt he had just felt, as if a hurricane had yanked them right out of their quiet attic.
Lisa no longer had her arms around him; in fact, he couldn’t see her anywhere, although her incessant shouting rang in his ears.
“Wake up, Charlie, wake up!” she was shouting. “Swim towards me, quickly! We have to get back!”
A wave slapped him in the face and filled his mouth with cold, salty water.
“Come on, come on! Swim towards me!” Lisa called out again.
Charlie rubbed his eyes and turned around in a circle, trying to make sense of what was happening. All he could see around him was water. There were no ferns, or palms, or giant trees like redwoods. Only a dark blue sea, churning constantly and tossing him to and fro. The boy saw his sister a few yards away and tried to swim toward her. He was freezing and the waves kept hitting him in the face.
“We have to go back, Charlie!” he heard her scream. “Swim towards me!”
Lisa had worked out before her brother that something had gone wrong. She had no idea what location or time they had ended up in, but she was sure that it was some point in prehistory. And that this was not the peaceful valley she had seen in Charlie’s book.
The girl swam with big strokes trying to reach her brother, but the waves kept pushing her back in the opposite direction. The water was frigid an
d she feared that they wouldn’t be able to survive in it much longer. In the distance she could make out dry land, but it looked too far away for them to reach it by swimming. The best option was to try to get out of there with the help of the cape.
“Where are we?” she heard Charlie say.
“I don’t know.” she replied.
Charlie swam toward her while the waves crashed into him mercilessly. Lisa saw her pale, scrawny brother struggling with all his might and she could tell that he wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer.
“I’ll swim towards you!” she cried, trying to make her voice heard above the roar of the waves. “Just stay where you are and set the bracelet to the stars! We have to get back!”
The boy obeyed, and began turning the dials on the bracelet while he fought to keep afloat.
Lisa started swimming as hard as she could in the direction of her brother. She had just begun wondering how long they would have before some prehistoric creature appeared when something made her look up. A noise resembling the flapping of an enormous sail in the wind was moving toward them. She didn’t know which way to look, and she felt overcome by a sense of terror.
Charlie heard it too, but didn’t dare to shout.
“Hurry, Lisa, for the love of God,” he begged in a whisper, as if his sister could hear him.
The sound grew louder, as if a huge sailboat was on the point of mowing them down. Then they saw the silhouette of an enormous flying dinosaur swooping toward them at full speed. Its wings were extremely long, like the wings of a giant bat, but with a much more tapered shape and with two small claws protruding in the middle. Despite its disproportionately large beak and crest, the beast’s head movements were quite graceful, as if scouring the waves for its next prey was an effortless exercise for it. Charlie recalled having seen specimens like this one in his books: a prehistoric and much less friendly version of the pelican.
Lisa looked back to her brother, trying to control her fear. At that moment, the animal let out a blood-curdling screech and swept past them just a few yards above their heads. Lisa didn’t know whether the creature was merely on a reconnaissance flight, whether it was trying to capture them, or even whether it had noticed their presence. But she had no intention of sticking around to find out, so she kept swimming hard to where Charlie was.