Bones of the Earth Read online

  The seats filled up. Somebody dimmed the lights.

  Griffin took the podium. He looked much older than Leyster recalled him being.

  “First slide, please.”

  The slide showed the cartoon caveman Alley Oop, caressing the head of his faithful dinosaur mount, Dinny. There was light laughter.

  “In just a moment we’ll get to what I believe is technically known as ‘the good stuff.’ And what we have is spectacular. In addition to the papers, there will be a film program tonight—actual footage of live dinosaurs from the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. The film has been chosen by your fellow vertebrate paleontologists from generation two, and they’ve taken care that all your favorites will be there. I can guarantee you—there will be surprises.”

  Several in the audience applauded.

  “However, before we can proceed, I am required to share with you a few of the rules of the road. Everyone here has already been told the penalties for violating secrecy. Today I’m going to explain why those penalties are so Draconian. Now, our physicists have requested that I share with you as little of the mechanics of time travel as possible. Slide?”

  The new slide showed a dense throng of mathematical notations. Leyster assumed they were not taken from the actual equations of time travel, but they could have been no more incomprehensible if they had been.

  “No problem.”

  Laughter.

  “In order to hold such conferences as this one, we will be shuttling researchers back and forth across a period of the next century or so. It’s bound to occur to a few of you that there’s a wealth of information to be gleaned from a copy of next year’s newspaper. Lottery numbers. World Cup winners. Stock prices. What’s to keep you from jotting down a few numbers and taking advantage of them? Only one thing:

  “Paradox.

  “A paradox is anything self-contradictory and yet irreconcilable. For example, the barber of Seville, who shaves everyone in town who doesn’t shave himself. Does he shave himself or not? The statement, ‘This sentence is a lie.’ True or false? A little closer to the bone, a man goes into the past and kills his grandfather as a child, thus preventing his own birth. How can he exist, then, to commit the murder in the first place?

  “Without time travel, paradoxes are pleasant logical puzzles which can be neatly dispatched with a tweak in the rules of logic dealing with self-reference. However, once it’s possible to physically invade the childhood of one’s grandparents, the resolution of paradoxes becomes vitally important. So we’ve given this some serious thought.”

  Griffin paused, frowning down at his notes for a beat. Nobody made a sound. Leyster did not feel any particular warmth or charisma from the man, but he was clearly alone in this. The entire room was with Griffin.

  “It turns out that paradox is deeply embedded in the nature of existence. The two are profoundly interrelated.

  “Third slide.” Another cartoon, this one of an athletic man in Greek skirt and lace-up sandals running furiously toward a turtle crawling away from him on the road ahead.

  “Consider Zeno’s first paradox. Achilles, the fastest man in the world, wishes to overtake a tortoise on the road ahead of him. He races toward it as swiftly as he can. However, by the time he reaches where the tortoise was, the tortoise is no longer there. It has moved a little further down the road. No problem. He simply races to that new spot. However, when he arrives there, he finds again that the tortoise has moved away. No matter how many times he tries, he can never catch up with the tortoise.”

  Griffin produced a tennis ball from the pocket of his jacket. He tossed it lightly into the air, caught it on the way down. “Consider also, Zeno’s third paradox. Achilles draws his bow and shoots an arrow at a tree. The tree is not far distant. But in order for the arrow to reach the tree, it must first travel half the distance from the bow to the tree. In order to reach that midway point, it must travel half of that distance. And so on. In order to arrive anywhere, the arrow must perform an infinite number of operations. Which will take it an infinite amount of time. Obviously, it can never move.”

  Suddenly he threw the ball as hard as he could. With a soft boom, it hit the closed ballroom doors and bounced away, up the aisle.

  “Nevertheless—it moves. Paradox can and does happen. This is the riddle of Achilles. How can the seemingly self-contradictory exist so easily in this world?

  “And to this riddle we have no answer.

  “Now, in just a minute, I’m going to leave the room, and take a limo back to the Pentagon. The trip takes roughly half an hour. I’ll travel an hour into the past—so that I’ll emerge from the Pentagon exactly one half hour ago. A car will be waiting for me. I’ll ride it back here to the Marriott. The driver will let me off at the front door. I’ll walk through the lobby, down the hall, and to the closed doors of the Grand Ballroom.”

  Heads were already beginning to swivel.

  “And I’ll enter the room… now.”

  The doors opened and Griffin strode in, smiling jauntily and waving as he made his way to the stage.

  The two identical men shook hands.

  “Griffin, good to see you.”

  “Good to see you, Griffin.” The earlier Griffin addressed the audience: “As you can see, it is indeed possible for the same object to be in two places at the same time.” He handed the later Griffin the microphone. “And now I must leave to take that limo I told you about earlier, because—well, I’ll let my one-hour-older self tell you why. With age comes wisdom, you know.”

  Down the aisle Griffin went. He stooped to pick up the tennis ball along the way, and then disappeared through the double doors.

  His other self reached into a pocket and set that same tennis ball atop the podium. “There goes the pragmatic resolution of our dilemma. By making a simple loop in time, I was able to witness the same moment from two different perspectives. Causality was not violated. There was no paradox involved.

  “Similarly, all your actions in the past—all your future actions, everything you will do—have already existed for millions of years, and are a part of what led inevitably to this present moment. Don’t obsess about the repercussions of simple actions. Step on as many butterflies as you wish—the present is safe.

  “However, suppose when I entered the room just now, I decided to behave differently than I had witnessed myself behaving the first time. Suppose that rather than shake hands, I’d decided to punch myself out. Suppose then my earlier self had become so irate that he refused to travel into the past. What then?”

  “It couldn’t have happened!” somebody called from the audience. “It didn’t—so it couldn’t.”

  “So common sense would tell you. However—slide!” The incomprehensible physical equations again filled the screen. “Common sense has very little to do with physics. Unhappily, paradox is only too possible.

  “Let’s imagine that when I came into this room, with this tennis ball in my pocket, I kicked the original of it out of my way in the aisle, sending it skittering in among this amiable sea of friendly faces. This would have prevented my earlier self from picking it up in the first place. Where, then, would this tennis ball have come from? Suppose also that I subsequently took this ball and gave it to my earlier self to take back in time so I could bring it here to pass back into time.” He tossed the ball back and forth between his hands. “Where did it come from? Where does it go? If it came spontaneously into being, as a miracle of quantum physics, then why does it have the Spalding logo stamped into its side?”

  Nobody laughed. A few in the audience cleared their throats uncomfortably.

  “Either of those instances—the refusal to perform a previously witnessed act, or the tennis ball from nowhere—would have been a massive violation of cause and effect. There are extremely good reasons why this cannot be allowed to occur. I am not permitted even to hint at these reasons, but I can assure you that we take them very seriously indeed.

  “The bottom line is simply this: Could yo
u go back in time and kill your own grandfather? Yes and no. Yes, it could happen. There’s nothing in the physical nature of reality to prevent it. No, we won’t permit it to happen.

  “We have means of detecting a paradox before it actually happens—and, again, I won’t tell you what they are. But any threat to this precious and fragile enterprise will be nipped in the bud, I can assure you that. And those responsible will be punished. No exceptions. And no clemency, either.”

  He slipped the tennis ball back in his pocket. “Any questions?”

  A spry old gent who might have been the father of someone Leyster once worked with, stood. “What if, in spite of your best efforts, a paradox slips by you?”

  “The entire project would be canceled. Retroactively. By which I mean that this wonderful opportunity will then have never been placed before you. It’s harsh, but—I have been assured by those who know—absolutely necessary.”

  A woman stood. “What would become of us, then?”

  “Cut free from causality, our entire history from that moment onward would become a timelike loop and dissolve.”

  “Excuse me. What does that mean?”

  Griffin smiled. “No comment.”

  Leyster thrust up his hand.

  “Mr. Leyster. Somehow I knew that you would be one of those asking questions.”

  “This technology—whatever it is—must be expensive.”

  “Extremely so.”

  “So why us?

  “Is that a complaint?” Griffin asked. Amid laughter, he clamped a hand over his watch, glanced down, and then up again. “Any further questions?”

  Leyster remained standing. “I just don’t understand why this technology is being made available for our use. Why paleontologists? Why not the military, the CIA…” He fumbled for another plausible alternative, “…politicians? We all know how little money was spent last year on fieldwork, worldwide. Why are we suddenly important enough to rate the big bucks?”

  There were annoyed sounds from the audience.

  Griffin frowned. “I fail to see why you’re opposed to this project.”

  “I’m not—”

  “No, listen to me! I’ve come here bearing the greatest gift that anyone has ever received, and it’s being presented to you at no cost whatsoever. Yes, there are a few strings attached. But, my God, they’re extremely light, and what you get—the opportunity to study real, living dinosaurs—is so extraordinary, that I’d think you’d be grateful!”

  “I only—”

  People were actually shouting at him now. The crowd belonged to Griffin. It was more than the fact that he controlled access to the one thing they all wanted more than anything else. He knew how to manipulate them. A salesman had once told Leyster that the first thing he did was to find out a prospect’s name. Once the name was dropped into the spiel, he said, the prospect was halfway to being sold. What Griffin was doing was more complex than that. But no more sincere.

  They don’t want to know, he thought. They’ve received something they know they don’t deserve, and they’re not willing to ask the price. They’re afraid it might be too high. “I really feel that we—”

  “Sit down!” somebody shouted.

  Blushing with confusion, he sat.

  Griffin held up both hands for calm. “Please. Please. Let’s remember that in science, no questions are forbidden. Our Mr. Leyster had a perfect right to ask. Unfortunately, reasons of security prevent me from answering. Now, as I mentioned before, there will be films tonight, and if you’ll look at your schedules, you’ll see that you have three hours for dinner. I must ask you not to leave the hotel.

  “In the meantime—a lot of you have been working with materials provided from the Mesozoic past. Let’s hear those papers.”

  The applause was enthusiastic. Griffin leaned forward into it, almost bowing.

  * * *

  After lunch, Leyster returned to the Grand Ballroom for the afternoon keynote. He looked around for the Metzgers. Only a few of the seats were filled, but there were plenty of people in the back of the room, networking and politicking, leaning against walls and looking skeptical, speaking earnestly up at those leaners, and reaching into paper bags to bring forth the polished skull of a troodontid or the brightly feathered wing and toothed beak of an Archaeopteryx.

  There was no use trying to be a part of the influence-swapping until he sorted out who was who, the major players from the bright young grad students who would hang in for a season or three before realizing that the money was elsewhere, the influential patriarchs of major institutions who spent so much time in administration they never published anything from the shy nondescripts who averted their heads to hide the eyes that burned with passionate insight.

  A husky man with white hair cropped short over his pink scalp to disguise his incipient baldness came up behind Leyster and pounded him on the back. “You bastard! You look so young! I don’t know how you do it.”

  “I think I am young. This is my home year, so—Monk? Is that you?”

  James Montgomery Kavanagh—Monk to his friends—had studied with Leyster at Cornell. At one point they’d even been roommates, though neither of them recalled that year with much fondness. But he looked so haggard! So tired. He must have been recruited a full twenty years in the future.

  Monk squeezed his shoulder, released him. “Quite an exciting morning, hey? I enjoyed your paper, by the way. Couldn’t stay for the questions, unfortunately. Too bad more people didn’t turn out for it.”

  “I’ve had fewer.”

  “You were up against a Tyrannosaurus hatchling. Nobody thinks all that highly of Hitchcock’s work, but she had slides everybody wanted to see. Hell, I only came because it was you. Which papers are you planning to take in this afternoon?”

  “I thought—”

  “Skip the Baryonyx thing. Total nonsense. And Tom Holtz’s chat on taxonomy. Cladistics is like New York City. It’ll be something impressive, once they’re done building it. Good to see Tom still producing useful work after all these years, though. You’d think he’d be retired by now.”

  “What do you know about the afternoon speaker?”

  “Gertrude Salley? Oh, she’ll put on a show. What a character. Brilliant in some ways, but… well, she likes to take chances. Willing to publish her findings before they’ve been entirely found. She’s a splitter—never met a taxon she didn’t like. If she could, she’d assign her right and left hands to different species. And not too careful about where she gets her data, if you catch my meaning. You have to keep a sharp eye on your specimens when Rude Salley’s around.”

  “I never heard of her. Where’s she from?”

  “About thirty-forty years forward. I don’t know the exact date. She must be in grammar school or maybe junior high right now. She works a generation or two ahead of us.”

  “Um. Then we’re not supposed to be talking about her in this kind of detail, are we? Griffin said…”

  “They can’t stop gossip! They make a token attempt, but let’s get real. It’s tolerated. So long as no hard data get passed along with it. The impulse is too deeply embedded in human nature, hey?” Without pausing, he said, “Well, I could listen to you forever, Dick, but I’ve got a career to think about. People to suck up to and serious ass to kiss. Take care, okay? All right.”

  And he was gone.

  The Metzgers had come up to Leyster sometime during the encounter, and stood listening in silence. Bill stared wonderingly after him. Cedella shook her head. “Wow.”

  “He’s mellowed,” Leyster said. “You should have seen him back in college.”

  * * *

  Gertrude Salley was a strikingly handsome woman. She wore a Nile green silk outfit with mid-length skirt and buttons up the side. Leyster had never seen clothes of quite that cut. But he didn’t need the string of pearls about her neck to tell him that they were, for her time, impeccably conservative. They just had that look.

  Her address was entitled “The Traffic Moves th
e Policeman,” and according to the Proceedings it was about the co-evolution of the supersauropods—the seismosaurs and titanosaurs of such tremendous size that they made a camarasaur look dainty—and the Mesozoic forests. Leyster didn’t think much of the topic.

  But then she began to speak.

  “I know so much you need to know,” she said. “So very much! I’ve read all your books, and thousands of your papers, and in the forty-five minutes allotted to me, I have no doubt whatsoever that I could drop enough information to save you all decades of effort.

  “But I am not allowed to do so, and even if I were, I wouldn’t. Why? Because so much of what I know is based on basic research that you yourselves will do. Good science is hard work, and everything we in generations two and three have achieved is built upon your efforts. If I told you your discoveries, would you be willing to sink half your life into verifying them? Or would you simply initial the data and pass ‘em forward? We’d end up with one of Griffin’s paradoxes… information that comes out of nowhere. And information that comes out of nowhere is not reliable, for it doesn’t connect anywhere with the facts.

  “What can I offer you, then? Not facts, but modes of thinking. I can lay out for you a few theories I have which are, alas, unprovable, and through them, perhaps, indicate a few fruitful ways of looking at things.

  “Consider the Titanosauridae. They were by far the predominant sauropods of the Late Cretaceous, and so ecologically pivotal that in their time a forest could be defined as a body of trees surrounded by herbivores…”

  And she was off, leaping like a salmon from idea to idea. Hers was the kind of fast and playful intellect that enjoyed tossing a stone into the pond of received wisdom, just to see the frogs jump. And speaking, as she did, from a vantage of fifty years, it was impossible to tell which of her notions were crazy, and which were the result of radical new discoveries. When she spoke of mountains dancing to the music of sauropods, Leyster was positive that was metaphor at best; when she claimed that ceratopsians were farmed by their predators, he was not so sure. That guff about birds he didn’t buy at all.