Bones of the Earth Read online

  Still, the corrupting influence of the man was such that it was hard not to think along such lines.

  Again, Griffin clamped his hand over his watch. Glancing down at it, he said, “You’ll take the position anyway.”

  “And the reasoning upon which you base this extraordinary conclusion is—?”

  Griffin put the cooler on Leyster’s desk. “This is a gift. There’s only one string attached—you will not show it to anyone or tell anybody about it. Beyond that—” He twisted his mouth disparagingly. “Do whatever it takes to convince you it’s genuine. Cut it open. Take it apart. There are plenty more where that came from. But no photographs, please. Or you’ll never get another one to play with again.”

  Then he was gone.

  * * *

  Alone, Leyster thought: I won’t open it. The best possible course of action would be ditch this thing in the nearest Dumpster. Whatever Griffin was peddling, it could only mean trouble. FBI probes, internal committees, censorship, death. He didn’t need that kind of grief. Just this once, he was going to curb his curiosity and leave well enough alone.

  He opened the cooler.

  For a long, still moment, he stared at what was contained within, packed in ice. Then, dazedly, he reached inside and removed it. The flesh was cool under his hands. The skin moved slightly; he could feel the bones and muscles underneath.

  It was the head of a Stegosaurus.

  A gust of wind made the window boom gently. A freshet of rain rattled on the glass. Cars hummed quietly by on the street below. Somebody in the hallway laughed.

  Eventually, volition returned. He lifted the thing from the cooler and set it down on the workbench, atop a stack of Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology reprints. It was roughly eighteen inches long, six inches high, and six inches wide. Slowly, he passed his hands over its surface.

  The flesh was cool and yielding. He could feel the give of muscles underneath it, and the hardness of bone beneath them. One thumb slipped inadvertently onto the creature’s gums and felt the smoothness of teeth. The beak was like horn; it had a sharp edge. Almost in passing, he noted that it did have cheeks.

  He peeled back an eyelid. Its eyes were golden.

  Leyster found himself crying.

  Without even bothering to wipe away the tears, not caring if he were crying or not, he flipped open a workbook, and began assembling tools. A number four scalpel with a number twenty blade. A heavy pair of Stille-Horsley bone-cutting forceps. A charriere saw. Some chisels and a heavy mallet. These were left over from last summer when Susan What’s-Her-Name, one of the interns from Johns Hopkins, had sat quietly in the corner week after week, working with a komodo dragon that had recently passed away at the National Zoo to prepare an atlas of its soft tissues. Exactly the kind of painstaking and necessary work one prays somebody else will perform.

  He swept the worktable clear of its contents—books and floppies, a pair of calipers, paper cutter, bags of pretzels, snapshots from the dig—and set the head in its center.

  Carefully he laid out the tools. Scalpel, forceps, saw. What happened to those calipers he’d had out here? He picked them up off the floor. After a moment’s hesitation, he tossed the mallet and chisel aside. They were for speedy work. It would be better to take his time.

  Where to begin?

  He began by making a single long incision along the top of the head, from the edge of the beak all the way back to the foramen magnum—the hole where the spinal cord leaves the braincase. Gently, then, he peeled away the skin, revealing dark red muscles, lightly sheened with silver.

  Craniocaudal musculature, he wrote in the workbook, and swiftly sketched it in.

  When the muscular structure was all recorded, he took up the scalpel again and cut through the muscles to the skull beneath. He picked up the bone saw. Then he put it down, and picked up the forceps. He felt like a vandal doing so—like the guy who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta. But, damn it, he already knew what a stego’s skull looked like.

  He began cutting away the bone. It made a flat, crunching sound, like stiff plastic breaking.

  The brain case opened up before him.

  The stegosaur’s brain was a light orange-brown so delicately pale it was almost ivory, with a bright tracery of blood vessels across its surface. It was a small thing, of course—even for a dinosaur, a stegosaur was an extraordinarily stupid brute—and he was familiar with its shape from the close examination of brain casts taken from the fossil skulls of its kindred.

  But this was scientific Terra Incognita. Nothing was known about the interior of a dinosaur’s brain, or its microstructure. Would he find its brain similar to those of birds and crocodiles or more like those of mammals? There was so much to learn here! He needed to chart and record the pneumatic structures in the skull cavity. And the tongue! How muscular was it? He should dissect an eye to see the number of types of color receptors it had.

  Also whether this thing had nasal turbinates. Was there room enough for them? Their purpose was to trap and recover moisture from each exhaled breath. A warm-blooded animal, with its high rate of respiration, would need complex turbinates to help keep the lungs from drying out. A cold-blooded animal, needing less rehydration, might not have turbinates at all.

  The argument over whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded had been raging for decades before Leyster was even born. It was possible he could settle the whole matter here and now.

  But first there was the brain. He felt like Columbus, staring at the long, dark horizontal line of a new continent. Here Be Dragons. His scalpel hesitated over the ruptured head.

  It descended.

  * * *

  Weariness caused Leyster to stagger and briefly lose consciousness and recover himself all in an instant.

  He shook his head, blankly wondering where he was and why he felt so tired. Then the room swam into focus and he felt the silence of the building around him. The Elvis clock an old girlfriend had given him, with its pink jacket and swiveling hips, said that it was 3:12 A.M. He’d been working on the brain without food or rest for over twelve hours.

  There were several collection jars before him, each with a section of the brain preserved in formaldehyde. His workbook was almost filled with notes and drawings. He picked it up and glanced down at a page near the beginning:

  Opening the cranial cavity reveals that the brain is short and deep with strong cerebral and pontine flexures and a steep caudodorsal edge. The small cerebral hemispheres have a transverse diameter slightly in excess of the medulla oblongata. Though the optic lobes and the olfactory lobe are quite large, the cerebellum is strikingly small.

  He recognized the tidy, economical lettering as his own, but had no memory whatsoever of writing those words, or any of those on the dozens of pages that followed.

  “I’ve got to stop,” he said aloud. “The condition I’m in, I can’t be trusted not to screw things up.”

  He listened to the words carefully, and decided that they made sense. Wearily, he wrapped up the head in aluminum foil and placed it in the refrigerator, ejecting a month-old carton of grapefruit juice and a six-pack of Diet Pepsis to make room for it. He didn’t have a padlock, but a little rummaging came up with a long orange extension cord, which he wrapped around the refrigerator several times. With a Magic Marker he wrote, Danger!!! Botulism experiment in progress—DO NOT OPEN!!! on a sheet of paper, and taped it to the door.

  Now he could go home.

  But now that the head—the impossible, glorious head—was no longer in front of him soaking up his every thought, he was faced with the problem of its existence.

  Where had it come from? What could possibly explain such a miracle? How could such a thing exist?

  Time travel? No.

  He’d read a physics paper once, purporting to demonstrate the theoretical possibility of time travel. It required the construction of an extremely long, large, and dense cylinder massing as much as the Milky Way Galaxy, and rotating at half the spee
d of light. But even if such a monster could be built—and it couldn’t—it would still be of dubious utility. An object shot past its surface at exactly the right angle would indeed travel into either the past or the future, depending on whether it was traveling with the cylinder’s rotation or against it. But how far it would go, there was no predicting. And a quick jaunt to the Mesozoic was out of the question—nothing could travel to a time before the cylinder was created or after its destruction.

  In any event, current physics wasn’t up to building a time machine, and wouldn’t be for at least another millennium. If ever.

  Could someone have employed recombinant engineering to reassemble fragments of dinosaur DNA like in that movie he used to love back when he was a kid? Again, no. It was a pleasant fantasy. But DNA was fragile. It broke down too quickly. The most that had ever been recovered inside fossil amber had been tiny fragments of insect genes. That business of patching together the fragments? Ridiculous. It would be like trying to reconstruct Shakespeare’s plays from the ashes of a burnt folio, one that yielded only the words never and foul and the. Except that the ashes came not from a single folio, but from a hundred-thousand volume library that would have included Mickey Spillane and Dorothy Sayers, Horace Walpole and Jeane Dixon, the Congressional Record and the complete works of Stephen King.

  It wasn’t going to happen.

  One’s time could be better spent, alas, trying to restore the Venus de Milo by searching the beaches of the Mediterranean for the marble grains that had once been its arms.

  Could it be a fake?

  This was the least likely possibility of all. He had cut the animal apart himself, gotten its blood on his hands, felt the grain and give of its muscles. It had recently been a living creature.

  In his work, Leyster followed the biological journals closely. He knew exactly what was possible and what was not. Build a pseudodinosaur? From scratch? Scientists were lucky if they could put together a virus. The simplest amoeba was worlds beyond them.

  So that was that. There were only three possible explanations, and each one was more impossible than the next.

  Griffin knew the answer, though! Griffin knew, and could tell, and had left behind his card. Where was it? It was somewhere on his desk.

  He snatched up the card. It read:

  H. JAMISON GRIFFIN

  ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER

  Nothing more. There was no address. No phone number. No fax. No e-mail. It didn’t even list his organization.

  Griffin had left no way to get in touch with him.

  Leyster grabbed the phone, punched up an outside line, and dialed directory assistance. Simultaneously, he booted up his Internet account. There were millions of records out there. The days when a man could accomplish anything at all without leaving any trace of himself behind were long gone. He’d find Griffin for sure.

  But after an hour, he had to admit defeat. Griffin’s name was listed in no directory Leyster could locate. He worked for no known government agency. So far as Leyster could tell, he had never posted a comment of any kind on any subject whatsoever, or been referred to, however fleetingly, by anyone.

  The man did not seem to exist.

  In the end, Leyster could only wait. Wait, and hope that the bastard would return.

  And what if he didn’t? What if he never came back?

  These were the questions that Leyster was to ask himself a hundred times a day, every day for a year and a half. The time it took Griffin to get around to ending his silence with a phone call.

  2. The Riddle of Achilles

  Crystal City, Virginia: Cenozoic era. Quaternary period. Holocene epoch. Modern age. 2012 C.E.

  Leyster was the only person in the van who wasn’t peering out the windows, excitedly drawing attention to advertisements and the new Metrobuses, leaning into the glass when they passed a construction site. They’d all been given the day’s Washington Post at the Pentagon, and it was a toss-up whether the comics or the editorial pages amused them more. He could understand their nostalgia, but he couldn’t feel it.

  To him, it was just the present.

  The man beside him turned a cheerful round face his way and stuck out a hand. “Hi! I’m Bill Metzger, and this is my wife, Cedella. We’re from ten years forward.” The woman, smiling, leaned over her husband to shake hands as well. She was noticeably younger than he. It was, if not a May-December marriage, at least a June-October one. “I’m not on the program, but Cedella’s going to be reading a paper on the nasal turbinates of lambeosaurine hadrosaurs.”

  “Really? That’s interesting. My paper deals with the nasal turbinates of stegosaurs. And their throat and tongue structure. And a little bit about their brains.”

  “That sounds familiar.” Cedella flipped rapidly through her abstracts. “Wasn’t that one I wanted to…” She stopped. “Oh! You’re Richard Leyster! Oh, my goodness. I want to tell you that your book was so—”

  Her husband cleared his throat meaningfully.

  “Book?”

  “Oh, right. It wouldn’t be out yet.” She turned to look out the window again. “Can you imagine wearing such hideous clothes? And yet they didn’t seem so bad at the time.”

  Cedella had the most gorgeous Jamaican accent Leyster had ever heard, as rich as caramel pudding, as clear and precise as an algebraic equation. It was a pleasure just to hear her speak.

  “Maybe I should hop out and look you up,” Bill said. The marine in the front seat glanced sharply at him, but said nothing. “You were a hot little number then, funky clothes or no.”

  “What do you mean were?” She swatted him with her newspaper, and he laughed. “I ought to let you try, old man. I wasn’t all tired out looking after you back then—you’d have a heart attack for certain. And it would serve you right.”

  “At least I’d die happy.”

  “But what about me? What would I do with the rest of my evening? After the ambulance had hauled your worthless carcass away?”

  “You could watch TV.”

  “There’s nothing good on that early in the evening.”

  The two of them were so happily, sweetly absorbed in each other that Leyster felt sour and crabbed by contrast. He couldn’t help marveling at how fluidly and naturally the words flowed between them. Conversation was never easy for him. He never knew what to say to people.

  Bill turned back to him. “Forgive my wayward wife. This is our first trip through time, and I think everybody here’s a little giddy.”

  “Not everybody. Some of us live here.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s hard to keep in mind, forgive me.” Bill looked out the window again, marveling at what seemed to Leyster a perfectly ordinary tract of row houses. “I can’t believe how much has changed in only ten years. So very many things are going to happen in the next decade!”

  “Anything important?”

  “Compared to this? Compared to time travel? Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  The marine guard who, they’d been told, had orders to shoot anyone who tried to leave the van before being told to, and to whom they had also been directed to say nothing of their origins or destination, looked uncomfortable.

  * * *

  Orientation was held in the Crystal Gateway Marriott. It was easily the strangest conference Leyster had ever attended.

  In some ways it was the best. One advantage of time travel was that the Proceedings could be made available at the beginning of the conference. It still took a year or more for the papers to be assembled, edited, and printed, but the books themselves could then be shipped back and sold at the registration table, so they could be carried from talk to talk, and annotated as the papers were presented.

  On the negative side, Leyster recognized only a fraction of those present. Paleontology was a small world—there were only two or three thousand professionals in existence at any given moment. Most conferences, he knew everyone of importance, and was at least vaguely familiar with the faces of the rest. Here, though, with professionals re
cruited across the span of twenty-some years, there were many who were strange to him. Even those he thought he knew had aged and changed to the point where he didn’t feel comfortable approaching them. He was no longer certain who anybody was.

  He snagged a bear claw from the buffet, and joined the line for coffee. Bill and Cedella got in line behind him, Bill with a slap on his shoulder, and Cedella with a bright flash of teeth. He was grateful for their company.

  Cedella made a face when she took her first sip of coffee. “This stuff is as bad as ever. If we can put a man on the moon and travel a hundred million years into the past, why can’t we make a decent cup of coffee?”

  “If you think that’s bad, you should try the decaf.”

  “How this man suffers.” She turned to Leyster. “Do you see how he suffers?”

  “I’ve been thinking about my book. It’s almost done, only I’m stuck on a title. I was thinking maybe Tracks of Time—”

  “Oh, but that’s not the—”

  Bill cleared his throat, and Cedella fell silent. “We’re really not supposed to say,” he said gently. “I do apologize, but they were quite firm on that score.”

  “Come! The morning keynote speech starts in a few minutes. I want to get a good seat.”

  Leyster trailed after them into the Grand Ballroom. There was a happy buzz of anticipation in the room. Everyone was anxious to get things started. When the conference was over, they’d begin preparations for their first field trips back into deep time, to encounter in the flesh what they now knew only from impressions in stone. They were like so many fledglings nervously standing on their cliff face ledge, knowing that soon they would step over the edge, spread wings, and fly.