Bones of the Earth Read online

  Leyster was riveted.

  Too soon, she finished, saying, “But if I can tell you nothing else, I can tell you how valuable your work is—or rather, will be. Sir Isaac Newton said, If I have been able to see farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants. Well, today I have the rare opportunity of standing in the presence of giants. And the even rarer opportunity of being able to thank them. Thank you. Thank you for all you will do.”

  She stood down to tumultuous applause, and did not stay for questions.

  Cedella leaned over and said in Leyster’s ear, “I just discovered who I want to be when I grow up.”

  The afternoon passed in the usual happy blur, moved along by the surge and flow of attendees hurrying from room to room between sessions. There were three tracks running simultaneously and not a single paper that didn’t conflict with at least one more that Leyster needed to hear. When the last one ended shortly before five, he wandered out to the lobby, head abuzz with all he had learned, looking for someone to form a dinner party with. The Metzgers, or possibly old Tom Holtz. But when he got there, the lobby was crowded with police and security personnel.

  The Metzgers were being arrested.

  Cedella held her chin high, eyes ablaze with scornful defiance. Bill simply looked deflated, a little man in a suit suddenly too large for him. Knots of shocked scientists stood in the entryways and watched as the two were led away by state troopers.

  “I’m sorry, sir, you can’t come in here,” said a young officer when he automatically moved toward his friends. An admonishing hand closed about his upper arm. Turning, he saw Monk.

  “What happened?”

  “It’s called note-passing,” Monk said. “They caught the woman red-handed. Leaned up against the mail slot and slipped the letter in behind her back while her husband pretended to have a heart attack. Sad thing, isn’t it?”

  There was a brass mailbox built into the reception counter. The manager was unlocking it under the supervision of two FBI agents and a representative of the postal service.

  “I was talking to one of Griffin’s people. He told me they got the memo a week ago detailing how to set up the sting. What happens is, Griffin will gather everybody’s reports, write up a memo summarizing them, and post it back to his people seven days in the past. Pretty slick, actually.”

  “I don’t understand. They seemed like good people. I just can’t picture them doing something like this.”

  “Well, that’s what makes it so sad. The wife’s mother has schizophrenia. Painful case, apparently. Committed suicide eight, maybe nine years from now, just weeks before the new neural mediators came on the market. Ironic, hey? So when they learned they were coming back, the husband got hold of a few pills and the wife popped them into an envelope along with a letter to her younger self, and… well, what you saw.”

  Leyster stared hard at Monk. “When did you have the time to learn all this?”

  “This isn’t my first trip. People gossip. I told you that before.”

  “You son of a bitch. You knew. You knew this would happen, and you did nothing to prevent it.”

  “Hey. I couldn’t, remember? That would have created a paradox.”

  “You could have told Bill. Just a word in his ear: ‘Griffin knows what you’re planning.’ ”

  “Yeah, that would’ve worked just fine. It would’ve stopped them and the whole goddamned project as well! Do you want that? I sure as hell don’t.”

  Leyster spun on his heel, and went into the bar.

  * * *

  The bartender poured him a single malt, and he carried it into a dim booth in the back. He thought about the Metzgers, and he thought about Monk. He thought about his own culpability. Finally, to keep himself from thinking about those things any more, he got out a pen and started to write words on the napkin. Burning Woman. Predators. Cretaceous. Death.

  A woman slid into the booth opposite him.

  It was Gertrude Salley. She was more than two decades older than he, but he couldn’t help thinking what a good-looking woman she was. The gloom was kind to her.

  “You’re trying to think of a title for your book.”

  “How did you know that?”

  Her eyes were piercing, flatly lustrous, like a hawk’s. Amazing eyes that told him nothing about that hard intelligence burning within her skull. “I know quite a lot about you. I’m not permitted to tell you how.” She put an ironic spin on the word permitted, to let him know how little hold such rules had on her. “Nor who we were—or will be—to each other.”

  “Who are we, then?”

  There was a small silver scar, shaped like a crescent moon, by the corner of her mouth. It rose and fell with her predatory smile. “A week from now you’ll go back for the first time. I envy you that. The excitement of starting from scratch, of knowing that everything you see, everything you discover, is new and important.”

  “Is it…” He couldn’t quite put his question into words. It wouldn’t come out right. “…as good as I want it to be?”

  “Oh, yes.” She closed her eyes briefly, and when they opened they were amazing all over again. “The air is richer and the greens are greener and at night there are so many stars in the sky that it’s terrifying. The Mesozoic swarms with life. You can’t appreciate how thinned-out and impoverished our time is until you go back. Rain forests are nothing. They’re not even in the running. Stretch out your arm.”

  He obeyed.

  “With my own eyes, I have seen a plesiosaur give birth. This hand”—she held it up to show him, and then reached out to slowly stroke the length of his arm—“stroked her living neck as she lay quivering in the shallows afterward.” She offered her hand to him, palm upward. “You may touch it, if you wish.”

  Almost jokingly, he touched her palm with his fingertips. She closed her hand around them. Her knee brushed against his, and for a second he thought it was an accident.

  “Touch my face,” she said.

  He touched her face. Her flesh was softer than a young woman’s, not near so taut. She raised her chin and moved her head against his palm, like a cat, and he felt himself harden. He wanted her.

  Salley smiled. Those wide lips moving up in slow synchronicity with the lidding of her eyes. He felt the passion radiating from her like heat from a flame. He wanted to look away. He could not look away.

  “Who are we to each other? Are we—?”

  “Shhh.” The sound was so soft and low as to be a caress. “You always ask too many questions, Richard.”

  “I need to know.”

  “Then find out,” she said. “Come to my room. I know what you like. I know where to touch you. I know I can make you happy.”

  * * *

  As if in a dream, he left the bar with her. They went up the elevator together, fingers intertwined, bodies not quite touching. They drifted hand in hand down the hall to her room. The difference in their ages added a touch of perversity to the whole thing which, strangely enough, he found himself liking. Leyster was not a sexual adventurer. He had summer affairs when he was in the field, and videotapes to get him through the winters. This was utterly unlike anything he’d ever done before.

  How serious was their relationship, he wondered, in the shared time that lay in his future and her past? It was serious enough for her to go into her own pre-history in search of him. Maybe they were married. Maybe she was his widow. He wanted it to be real. He wanted everything from her.

  At the door Salley released his hand to get out her key. He seized her and spun her around. They kissed, his tongue in her, and then hers inside him. Her body was soft and matronly; she ground it hard against his. He touched her face, that magical silvery moon of a scar. She did not close her eyes, not even for an instant.

  He saw how she looked at him. It took his breath away.

  At last, with a contented sigh, she pulled away. “I have a gift for you.”

  “Mmmm?”

  “The title for your book. I brought alo
ng a copy of it.”

  She opened the door.

  A small table had been set up so that it would be the first thing he saw on entering the room. A light shone down upon the book set on end upon it.

  First he saw his name, and then he saw the strip of black electrician’s tape covering the title. Then he saw the man in the chair behind it.

  It was Griffin. He looked considerably younger than he had that morning.

  Three security men materialized in the hall behind them. Two took Salley by the arms. The third pushed Leyster into the room and pulled the door shut behind them both.

  “Once again, Mr. Leyster, you’ve made a terrible mess of things.” Griffin tipped the book over, and stood. “Leaving it for others to clean up after you.”

  Muffled by the door, Salley’s angry voice dwindled down the hall. “What are they going to do with her?” Leyster demanded. He made a move toward the door. But the security man stood between him and it, sad-eyed and competent. Leyster had never been much of a brawler. He turned back to Griffin.

  “Nothing bad. A limousine has been called to take her back to the Pentagon. They’ll return her to her proper time, and that’s it. Oh, a reprimand will be placed in her file for trying to leak information back in time. But Ms. Salley doesn’t much care about that.”

  “You had no right!” Leyster found he was quivering, with shock, with fear, with anger. “No right at all.”

  “You, sir, are a fucking idiot.” Griffin reached into his jacket and took out a folded sheet of paper. “A woman twice your age tells you a couple of lies and you waltz right up to her bedroom. You think Dr. Salley is your friend? Well, think again.” He unfolded the paper and thrust it at Leyster. “Read it and weep.”

  It was a photocopy of a page from Science, dated April 2032. At the top of the page was the title, “A Re-Evaluation of the Burning Woman Predation Site.” The paper was authored by G. C. Salley.

  Leyster read the abstract, disbelieving, and as he read, the room grew unsteady around him. There was a roaring noise in his ears, as if all the universe were laughing at him.

  “That paper is the single most virulent refutation of your book ever printed. And the woman who wrote it almost got to screw you twice. You can open the door now, Jimmy.”

  Leyster made no move toward the doorway. “You’re letting me off with a warning. Why didn’t you do that with the Metzgers?”

  “The—?”

  “Husband-wife team, attempted causal violation,” the security man said quickly. “Captured 2012, convicted in 2022, released in 2030.”

  Griffin seized his wrist and stared down at it, hard. “The world is not a fair place, Mr. Leyster.” He looked up again. “We did it the way we did because according to the records, that’s the way we did it. The rules against paradox bind us as tightly as they do you.”

  3. Lagerstatten

  Hilltop Station: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 67 My B.C.E.

  Griffin went straight from the orientation lecture to the Mesozoic. The phoniness of the thing, the charade of shaking hands with himself in particular, had depressed him. He needed to refuel. So, opting to avoid the snares and responsibilities of booking travel through his office, he took a local forward thirty years, and used his clout to slip into a VIP tour group headed for the deep past.

  They emerged from the funnel and out into the rich air and hot sun of the late Cretaceous. Dinosaurs still walked the Earth, though they wouldn’t for long, and shallow seas so moderated the climate that even the poles were free of ice. Not counting Tent City, where the researchers slept, there were only thirty-seven structures in all the world where one could honestly claim to be indoors.

  He was home.

  His fellow excursionists were the usual mix of predator capitalists, over-affluent politicians, and decorated heroes of genocidal wars, with a North American admiral and her loud wife thrown in for good measure. Griffin disappeared into the group and let it carry him along. He had the gift for being unobtrusive, when he wanted.

  Their guide was what the loud American had, in a sarcastic aside, called “your basic science babe,” blond and fetching in khaki shorts, linen blouse, and white cowboy hat. One had to look hard to see that she was actually rather plain. A couple of the gents, smiling secret fantasies at her backside, preferred not to look that hard. Griffin emerged from private thoughts to discover that she was talking.

  “…first thing that people ask is ‘Where are the dinosaurs?’ ” She smiled dazzlingly and swept out an arm. “Well, they’re all around you… the birds!”

  In his weary state, the group seemed to Griffin like a cheap jack tourist construction made of bamboo, bright paper, and string, with a crank to turn that would jolt the two-dimensional cutout people into a crude semblance of human life. The guide gave the crank a turn and it chuckled, peered about hopefully, lifted a camera and then decided not to shoot.

  “Yes, birds are indeed dinosaurs. Technically speaking, they’re derived theropods, and thus they are distantly related to Tyrannosaurus rex, and kissing cousins to the dromaeosaurids. Even the birds back home in the twenty-first century are dinosaurs. But the behavior of Mesozoic birds is strikingly different from that of modern birds, and many have toothed beaks. Oh, look! There’s a Quetzalcoatlus!”

  Crank.

  Hands lifted to shade eyes, mouths gaped to let oohs and ohs escape, the camera swung up and went whirr. The girl stood smiling and silent until their reactions had played out, then said, “Now, please follow me up to the top of the observation platform.”

  Obediently, they shuffled after her, so many celebredons following in the wake of a lithe young nobodysaurus that the least of them could buy and sell by the job lot. Yet such was the power of organizational structure that they meekly did as she directed.

  “But when can we see real dinosaurs?” somebody asked.

  “We’ll be able to see non-avian dinosaurs through field glasses from the top of the tower,” the guide said pleasantly. “There’s also a photo safari arranged for those of you who want to get up close and personal with the animals.”

  Hilltop Station was situated atop a volcanic plug, steep enough on three sides to keep off everything but the swarms of midges and mosquitoes that rose from the southwestern swamps every evening at sundown. The fourth side sloped gently downward to the flood plain, where most of their research took place. From the top of the observation platform, it was possible to see over the rooftops to the horizon in every direction.

  “…and if any of you have questions, I’d be only too happy to answer them.”

  “What about the theory of evolution?”

  Griffin leaned against the rail, savoring the light breeze that pushed back against him. The sky was thronged with birds, semibirds, and pterosaurs: The Mesozoic truly was the first great age of flight. He stared out over the flood plain, with its scattered stands of ancestral sycamore and gum, metasequoia and cypress. Winding rivers shone like silver, dwindling to threads as they reached for the thin blue line along the horizon that was the Western Interior Seaway.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Have they proved the theory of evolution yet?” It was the American wife, of course. “Or is it still just a theory?”

  Someone poked Griffin with a pair of binoculars, but he waved them away. He didn’t need optics to know the dinosaurs were there. There would be ankylosaurs browsing on the berry bushes along the river banks, and herds of triceratopses speckling the flowered plains. Anatotitans ambled between copses of dromaeosaur-haunted poplar or stripped the leaves from cycads and dawn beeches. Lambeosaurs foraged in the swamps. There were mangroves along the seashore, where troodons hunted small arboreal mammals, and—invisible from here—deltas at the mouths of the rivers, where edmontosaurs built their communal nests, safe from the land-bound tyrannosaurs.

  “A theory,” said the guide, “is the best available explanation, satisfying all known facts, of a phenomenon. Evolution h
as held up to two hundred years of rigorous questioning, in which scientists have come up with enormous amounts of information supporting it, and not one shred of disproof. In the paleontological community, it is universally accepted as true.”

  “But you don’t have a complete record of one of these creatures changing from one thing into another! Why is that?”

  “That’s a very good question,” the guide said, though Griffin knew that it was anything but. “And to answer it, I’ll have to teach you a German word, lagerstatten. That’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it? It means ‘mother lode.’ ” She had modulated her chirpy delivery into a practiced sincerity that Griffin found almost equally grating.

  “Before time travel, we had to rely on the fossil record, which is extraordinarily patchy. So few fossils are formed, and of these so few survive erosion, and of those, so very few are found! But occasionally, paleontologists stumbled upon lagerstatten, fossil deposits of extraordinary richness and completeness. These deposits were like snapshots, giving us a very good idea of what life was like for an extremely brief period of time. But a find like the Solnhofen limestone or the Burgess shale was incredibly rare, and great periods of time were hidden from us.”

  “But not now,” the American said.

  “So you would think. But there are only a dozen or so stations like this one scattered through the 175 million years of the Mesozoic. So that the stations themselves are essentially lagerstatten—fabulously rich sources of knowledge, separated by gulfs of time so vast that we’ll never fill in all the blank spots, try though we might.”

  The American nodded to herself. “So it will never be proved.”

  “Anybody can deny anything. But there’s good news! One of our long-term projects is to make a series of brief forays into the time between stations, sampling twenty to thirty species once every hundred thousand years. The genetic baselines we establish will be the equivalent of taking a photograph of a rosebud once a minute in order to create a film of it blossoming. Which should be enough, I would think, to convince even the most hard-headed skeptic. That’s a lot of work, though, and the results won’t be in for quite a while. So we’ll just have to wait.” Her smile bloomed again, like a time-lapsed flower. “Are there any further questions? No? Well, then, next on our…”