Bones of the Earth (15 page)

“The Carnian is a lousy place to look for dinosaurs,” he explained over a cup of tea. “That's one reason everyone is so worked up over the gojirasaur—they're rare. All the action here is in synapsids and non-dinosaurian archosaurs. They're the ones who are busily speciating and competing for dominance of the community. The early dinosaurs are just bit players. But a funny thing is about to happen. The synapsids are going to take a major hit in the evolutionary sweepstakes. Most lines will die out completely. The only ones that'll survive into the Jurassic are mammals, and then only because they colonized the small-animal niche. Which is where they'll be stuck until the end of the Mesozoic and the onset of the Cenozoic. Following this so far?”

Molly nodded.

“Okay, now the non-dino archosaurs also suffer a reduction in diversity. But among the archosaurs is a group called the pseudosuchians, and their descendants include all the crocodilians. So they do pretty well. And dinosaurs come up winners. From the Triassic on, the Mesozoic belongs to them.

“But it's important to understand that whatever favored dinos was opportunistic, not competitive.”

“Which means?”

“It means they didn't supplant their rivals because they were inherently superior. Some of those archosaur groups are as hot-blooded as any dino. But the volcanic event that opened up the Atlantic Ocean changed the environment in ways that favored dinosaurs over their rivals. They just got lucky.”

He folded his arms smugly.

It was a good performance. He'd rattled off the lies as if he meant them, pedantically and with just the right touch of condescension. It astonished him how carefully Molly listened.

But then she said, “So do you think I could get a job in supplies, like you? I mean, it looks pretty simple. You just move things around with a fork lift, right?”

“No, I do not.” He didn't have to fake his irritation. “They use fork lifts at the far end, where there's plenty of electrical energy.
I
use a hand truck.” Supplies were shipped down the funnel in bundles lashed to pallets, and thus he measured the work in pallets. Three pallets was a light day, and ten was more work than he could do without help. “Everything gets loaded and unloaded by hand.”

“Cool. So how did you get your position in the first place?”

“I was transferred.”

It was easy to get transfers if you were a hard worker and willing to take on the grunt jobs nobody else wanted. Robo Boy was careful to make himself unpopular so that when he applied for a transfer, nobody ever made a strong effort to keep him. He had wandered from job to job, seemingly aimlessly, until he ended up deep in the Triassic, with complete control over the supplies and shipping, and, not coincidentally, one nexus of the time funnel.

“Well, how did you get your first gig?”

“I started out with a masters in geology. I got really good grades. I wrote my thesis on some stratigraphic problems that the people here were interested in.”

“That doesn't sound like a terribly viable option for me,” Molly said.

“No, it doesn't. Now what's all this about Leyster and Salley?” He crossed his arms and leaned back, masking his interest with a skeptical expression.

Molly flashed that brainless smile of hers. “They're going to be working on the Baseline Project. Together. If you can imagine that.”

“I find that hard to—wait a minute. That's supposed to be a gen-three project.”

“Griffin's promoting them both. At least that's the offer he's putting on the table. But can you picture either of them turning him down? Leyster's pre-2034, so he'll have to be shifted forward in time. But that's not much of a sacrifice for him. Most of his friends are in paleontology, and I'm the only one in the family he's actually close to.”

“I can't picture those two working together. Who gets to be the boss?”

“Neither. Both. One's in charge of the camp, and the other's in charge of specimen collection. Lucky for them, they'll be bossing around a batch of grad students so green they won't have any idea what a fucked-up arrangement that is.”

“Huh,” Robo Boy said.

Briefly, he wondered how Molly had come into possession of such juicy inside dirt. Surely not from the notoriously close-mouthed Leyster. Did she have contacts in Administration?

He would have liked to ask her. But that wouldn't be in character.

That was on Tuesday. Three days later a big rhynchosaur roast was held to celebrate the end of survival training. Everybody had too much beer, and then they built a campfire to sit around, though the nights never really got cold enough to need it. Leyster got up and made a little speech, and then introduced their guest-lecturer.

Sylvia Davenport was a generation-three researcher from Ring Station, located a hundred years into the aftermath. She stood by the campfire and talked to the new recruits about the K-T extinctions. Robo Boy listened scornfully from the shadows.

The upper Triassic was buggy and humid. The survival camp was, anyway, and he didn't really care what it was like elsewhere. He never left the camp on expeditions or field trips, but stayed at home always, operating the commissary.

“We've looked,” Davenport said. “Enough dinosaurs survived the Event to repopulate the Earth with their kind within the millennium. Yet ten years later, there were only a fraction of the number of those that survived, and in a century, they were extinct. Why? Other animals adapted. Hell, there were
dinosaurs
that adapted—the birds. Why didn't the rest? Non-avian dinosaurs had already survived the worst of it. Why couldn't they adapt?”

Robo Boy leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. This was a trick he had learned in school. It made him look engrossed in the subject and allowed his mind the freedom to wander.

He shut out the speaker's voice. Directly behind him, Leyster was murmuring something to the woman beside him, a gloss on what Davenport had just said. Robo Boy shut him out too.

He sank into the blissful silence of his own thoughts.

He despised the scientists for their constant inquisitive chatter, the way they leapt freely from possibility to possibility, postulating, positing, and speculating, with never an assurance that truth lay truly underfoot, unchanging, solid, inviolate. He could not live that way. If he were to admit, however briefly, that their tentative and provisional way might be valid, all certainty would dissolve within him, leaving nothing but chaos and the Pit. Stranding him in that emotional anomie he had inhabited before his Third Birth as a Midnight Christian. So he held them at an ironic distance. He spoke to them as from behind a mask—the mask of the worthless man he had been. In this way his old life had some value. It moved his new life closer to its validation.

Briefly, he thought about the time he had caught a glimpse of an angel. Then he wondered exactly when and where they might be—where they
really
were, as opposed to the party line of their atheistic humanist leaders. By his best guess, Robo Boy figured they were roughly six thousand years in the past, sometime between the Fall and the Flood. Physically, the camp lay somewhere east of Eden, in a land without flowers.

How astonishing to be alive in the time of the Patriarchs!

Sodom and Gomorrah were still thriving cities. Giants walked the Earth. Somewhere, Methuselah was living out his thousand years. Tubal-Cain was inventing metallurgy. The young Noah, perhaps, was seeking out a virtuous woman to be his wife. He felt blessed to be alive at such a time, and he thanked God for this blessing, and for the events that had brought him here.

It was a book that had changed his life, and a single sentence within that book which had done the work. The book was
Darwin Antichrist
, which he had bought to laugh at, and the sentence was, “If time travel is real, then why haven't we found human footprints among the fossil dinosaur tracks?”

If time travel is real
—

It had never occurred to him to doubt the consensus version of reality before that very instant. And once he began to doubt it, layer upon layer of the humanist fallacy started to peel away, until all the world was dark and empty and held together only by an incomprehensible network of conspiracies.

—
then why haven't we found human footprints among the fossil dinosaur tracks?

Of course! He closed his eyes, blind as Paul on the road to Damascus, his mind racing ahead of the page, anticipating the arguments that would lead him through the labyrinth of his meaningless existence and out into the light.

Toward God.

He had never thought much of God before. A white-haired old man on a throne in the clouds, hung up on the Sunday school blackboard, that was it. Now he realized God as something more subtle than that, an all-justifying power that entered into his heart and mind and skin like liquid lightning and made him impervious to scorn and error alike.

He did not ask why an all-loving God would create a false fossil record in order to deceive men and lead them away from the revealed truth. Robo Boy simply accepted it.

After his conversion, he had moved from organization to organization, always finding them lacking in commitment and zeal. At last, though, he had discovered deep creationism and the Thrice-Born Brotherhood: born once in the flesh, again in Christ, and a third time as warriors. They understood that defending God sometimes required extreme methods. They had opened his eyes. Under their tutelage, he'd proudly abandoned the conventional prayer-at-bedtime and church-on-Sunday beliefs he had been brought up in for a life of urgent commitment.

Before his conversion, the temptation to sin was omnipresent. He was weak. He lusted after women in his heart. Now, believing in prophecy and the inherent rightness of his vow of chastity, he was born again and yet again.

The strictness of his conviction and righteousness made it his duty to convict those non-believers still mired in disbelief, in skepticism, in the Darwinian heresy. Few of them realized how badly they needed saving. But he was on a rescue mission, and where the fate of the world was at stake, it hardly mattered what became of a few souls. Or their bodies.

Davenport stopped speaking. Somebody began to clap, and then the others joined in.

Nobody applauded as loudly as he did.

The next day's schedule had him working the time funnel in heavy rotation. First the juvenile gojirasaur was shipped forward as a present to the People's Paleozoological Garden in Beijing. The famous Dr. Wu himself brought a crew of wranglers, lean young grad students who squatted on their heels when they ate their lunches out of cardboard containers with chopsticks, and joked casually among themselves as they worked under his stern eye.

Leyster emerged from his obsessive checking and re-checking of the Baseline Project's provisions to shake the great man's hand, and receive a few words of recognition in exchange. Then the camp director showed up, and the three of them solemnly examined the caged gojirasaur while the wranglers stood back in silent witness to this moment of shared celebrity.

The theropod itself was a beautiful creature. Its skin was leaf-green, mottled with splotches of yellow. Even its eyes—alert and quietly watchful—were yellow. There was little room for it to move within the cage, and so it stood still. There was a tense menace to its calm, though. Once, a wrangler placed a hand carelessly upon the cage, and the gojirasaur almost bit off her fingers. She danced backwards from its snapping teeth while her peers laughed.

Then they slid iron bars through the underside of the cage and hoisted it inside the time funnel. The Chinese delegation placed themselves carefully within as well, and Robo Boy checked off their names and threw the switch.

They were gone.

Ten minutes later the buzzer sounded, and he had to muscle out two pallets of supplies: toilet paper, restaurant-size tins of food, brush hooks, shotgun shells, a remote-operated hovercam, canvas shower-bags, powdered soap, fungicide cream, tampons, a banjo, and a bundle of scientific journals. Nothing either interesting or unusual. But everything had to be accounted for, recorded, and stowed away.

At last Leyster's people began to arrive for the Baseline Project expedition. They trickled in by twos and threes, laughing and chatting, and they all got in the way of Robo Boy's re-packing of the pallets that Leyster had torn apart to make sure nothing had been left out. Several greeted him by name.

He spoke curtly when he could not avoid speaking at all. Only rarely did he look up from his clipboard. Robo Boy had a reputation for surliness, and it helped keep people at a distance.

Which was useful. Nobody was looking at him when he placed the time beacon carefully atop the third pallet, and lashed it tight with nylon cord. Nobody saw how nervous he was.

Ready hands helped him slide the pallet into the cage. He backed out, mumbling, “Okay, it's all yours.”

“All right, gang, let's
move 'em out!
” Leyster shouted, and bounded inside. “Richard Leyster, present and accounted for,” he told Robo Boy.

Robo Boy checked off their names, one by one, as they crowded into the cage. Somebody made a joke about stuffing college students into a telephone booth, and somebody else said, “Better than stuffing them into a tyrannosaur!” and they all laughed. He was careful not to make eye contact with anybody. He was afraid of what they might see in him if he did.

“That's everyone. You may fire when ready, Gridley,” Leyster said.

“Wait a minute,” Robo Boy said. “Where's Salley?”

“She's not on this expedition.”

“Of course she is,” Robo Boy said irritably. “I saw her name on the roster yesterday.”

“Change of plans. Lydia Pell's taking her place.”

Robo Boy stared dumbstruck at the roster, and for the first time looked at the dozen names as a whole. Salley's was not among them. Lydia Pell's was. It was a perverse miracle, a Satanic impossibility.