Bones of the Earth (19 page)

While Molly tidied her papers into a pile, Jimmy Boyle placed one black binder before everybody's place. Then, almost ritually, he helped Amy Cho back into her seat.

They all opened their binders.

Griffin took Molly's pointer and erased everything from the whiteboard. He pulled up a new time line. “This is two years and three months of Robo Boy's life, from his own perspective. During this time, he bounces all over the Mesozoic, but we're ignoring that. Here to the left, it begins with his being recruited to join our merry little band of pranksters. To the right, at the end of our examined period, while he was working at Hilltop Station, is the date the opal man, Tubal-Cain or whoever it was supposed to be, was shipped. Okay? Robo Boy never picked it up. We had people watching, but he never came close to it. Something scared him off.

“Here, just before his transfer to Hilltop, is where our second sting is being placed. We've baited a trap with Salley and Leyster. He's going to strand them in the Maastrichtian. We're going to investigate. Again, there won't be the physical evidence to prove he was at fault. But three months later, when we yank the expedition back, we can use their testimony to convict him.”

“Wait,” Tom said. “Why would you place a second sting just before the first? No wonder Robo Boy was spooked.”

“We already knew the first sting didn't work,” Griffin said testily. “So we're placing the second sting as early as possible in order to minimize the time available to him. We want to get him out of our hair as quickly as possible, remember?”

Molly flipped through the material in the binder, scanning the headings and subheadings, reading the captions. The final page was a casualty list.

She looked up. “Five deaths?”

“A terrible thing,” Griffin said. “But unavoidable.”

“
Five deaths?
Unavoidable?”

“They all knew the risks.” Griffin turned a page in his binder. “Tom, Molly, your part in this operation will be to—”

She stood so fast the chair toppled over behind her. “This isn't what I took this job to accomplish. I refuse to be a part of it.”

“According to our files, you play your part as directed.” He tapped his binder impatiently. “So, please, spare us this display of histrionics.”

Jimmy Boyle's face was like stone. Amy Cho looked alarmed. Tom Navarro had raised his hands and was shaking his head. Calm down, he meant. Choose your fights carefully. Never do anything irrevocable when you're angry.

She ignored them all.

“You don't intimidate me, and you can't con me either. All this I-have-the-files-and-I-know-the-future bullshit doesn't cut it. I'm not going to go along with your filthy little plan. I'm going over your head. And if
that
doesn't work, I'll quit. So your files are wrong. One way or the other, they're wrong.”

Griffin made an elaborately bored grimace and flicked his fingers toward the door. “Go. See how much good it does you.”

In a rage, she left the room.

She stormed down the hall to the Old Man's office. Normally, the door was closed and the office was dark. But on her first day here, the Old Man had promised that the door would be open, “anytime you need to see me.”

The door was open for her.

She went in.

The Old Man looked up from his work. It was uncanny how much he looked like Griffin while somehow feeling like a completely different person. More solitary, in a wolfish sort of way. More deeply scarred.

The fingertips of one hand lightly stroked the skull he kept on his desk. Involuntarily, she remembered the half-facetious rumor that it was a trophy from a hated enemy he had somehow defeated. “Come in,” he said. “Close the door, have a seat. I've been expecting you.”

She obeyed.

It was like entering an ogre's den. Thick curtains kept out the sunlight. Heavy wooden furniture held a clutter of mementos and framed photographs. He even had an
Quetzalcoatlus
skull propped up in the corner. It was as if he dwelt within his own hindbrain.

“Sir, I—”

He held up a hand. “I know why you're here. Give me credit for—” He stifled a yawn. “Give me that much credit, anyway. You're hoping that age has mellowed me. But if it hasn't, you think you're prepared to quit.

“Alas, it simply isn't that easy. Your Griffin made the decisions he did because
I
told him to. He didn't like it any more than you do. But he understood the necessity.”

Molly's heart sank. She prided herself on being able to see deeper into a face than most, but the man was unreadable. He might be a saint or a devil. She honestly couldn't tell which. Looking into his eyes was like staring down a lightless road at midnight. There was no telling what might be down there. Those eyes had seen things she could not imagine.

She took a deep breath. “Then I'm afraid I must tender my resignation. Effective immediately.”

“Let me show you something.”

The Old Man removed a sheet of paper from a drawer. “This is a copy, of course. I just returned from a ceremony where you were presented the original.” He slid it across the table to her.

It was a citation. The date had been blacked out, as had most of the text. But her name, in black Gothic letters was at the top, and several phrases remained. “For Exceptional Valor” was one.

“I can't tell you what you did—what you're going to do—and I can't tell you when you'll do it. But twenty people are alive because of your future actions. You got into security because you wanted to make a difference, right? Well, I just saw an old woman kiss your hand and thank you for saving the life of her son. You were embarrassed, but you were also pleased. You told me that that one instant justified your entire life.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Of course you do.” He took the paper from her hands and returned it to his drawer. “You simply can't imagine what I could possibly say to keep you on board.”

“No. I can't.”

He looked at her with a strange glitter in his eye. He likes this, Molly thought. Corruption was the final pleasure of men such as he. Her original mission was lost. Now she wanted only to escape his presence before he managed to drag her down into the mire of complicity and guilt with him. She simply wanted to get out of this room unsoiled.

“Have you ever wondered,” the Old Man asked, “where time travel came from?”

Carefully, she said, “Of course I have.”

“Richard Leyster told me once that the technology couldn't possibly be of human origin. Nobody could build a time machine with today's physics, he said, or with any imaginable extension of it. It won't be feasible for at least a million years.

“As usual, his estimate was correct but conservative. In point of fact, time travel won't be invented for another forty-nine-point-six million years.”

“Sir?” His words didn't make sense to her. She couldn't parse them out.

“What I'm telling you now is a government secret: Time travel is not a human invention. It is a gift from the Unchanging. And the Unchanging are not human.”

“Then … what are they?”

“If you ever need to know, you'll be told. The operant fact is that the technology is on loan. As is ever the case with such gifts, there are a few strings. One of which is that we're not allowed to meddle with causality.”

“Why?” Molly asked.

“I don't know. The physicists—some of them—tell me that if even one observed event were undone, all of time and existence would start to unravel. Not just the future, but the past as well, so that we'd be destabilizing all of existence, from alpha to omega, the Big Bang to the Cold Dark. Other physicists tell me no such thing, of course. The truth? The truth is that the Unchanging don't want us to do it.

“They've told us that if we ever violate their directives, they'll go back to the instant before giving us time travel, and withhold the offer. Think about that! Everything we've done and labored for these many years will come to nothing. Our lives, our experiences will dissolve into timelike loops and futility. The project will have never been.

“
Now
. You've met these people—the paleontologists. If you told them that the price of time travel was five deaths, what would they say? Would
they
think the price was too high?”

His face grew uncertain in her eyes. She squeezed them tight shut for the briefest instant. When she opened them again, she felt compelled to stand and turn away from him. On the wall was a photograph. It had been taken at the opening of the dinosaur compound in the National Zoo, and showed Griffin and the then-Speaker of the House stagily pulling opposite ends of a
T. rex
wishbone. She stared at their stiff poses, their insincere grins.

“I won't be a part of it. You cannot make me responsible for those deaths.”

“You already are.”

She shook her head. “What?”

“You remember that week you spent at Survival Station? Tom told you to make sure that Robo Boy heard that Leyster and Salley would be leading the first Baseline expedition. Tom got his directions from Jimmy, who was acting in response to a memo that Griffin should be writing up right now. You've already played your part.”

The Old Man spread his hands. “Can you go back and undo everything you did and said back then? Well, no more can I undo these five deaths.”

“I'll quit anyway! I won't be used like this!”

“Then twenty people die.” Griffin smiled sadly and spread his hands. “This is not a threat. Later in life, you'll happen to be the right person in the right place at the right time. Resign now, and you won't be there. Twenty people will die. Because you quit.”

Molly squeezed her eyes tight, against her tears. “You are an evil, evil man,” she said.

He made a warm, ambiguous sound that might have been a chuckle. “I know, dear. Believe me, I know.”

10

Sexual Display

Lost Expedition Foothills: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period.Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 65 My B.C.E.

They buried Lydia Pell on a fern-covered knoll above Hell Creek. There was some argument over what religion she was, because she had once jokingly referred to herself as a “heretic Taoist.” But then Katie went through her effects and found a pocket New Testament and a pendant cross made from three square-cut carpenter's nails, and that pretty well settled it that she was a Christian.

While those who had kept the night watch over her corpse slept, Leyster spent the morning searching Gillian's Bible for an appropriate passage. He'd considered “There were giants in the Earth,” or the verse about Leviathan. But such attempts to fit in a reference to dinosaurs made him feel as if he were cheapening the grandeur and meaning of Lydia Pell's life by reducing it to the circumstances of her death. So in the end he settled for the Twenty-Third Psalm.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” he began. “I shall not want.” There were no sheep anywhere in the world, nor would there be for many tens of millions of years. Yet still, the words seemed appropriate. There was comfort in them.

The day was wet and miserable, but the rain was light and did not interfere with the ceremony. For most of the afternoon, everybody glumly carried stones from the creek to raise a small cairn over her grave, in order to keep scavengers away from her body. Just as they finished, the sun came out again.

Lai-tsz raised her head. “Listen,” she said. “Do you hear that?”

A distant murmurous sound rose up from the far side of the river. It sounded a little like geese honking.

All in a group they hurried up to the top of the hollow, where a gap in the trees afforded a partial view of the valley. There they saw that the land beyond the River Styx was in motion. Tamara scrambled up a tree and shouted down, “The herds are
flooding
in! They're coming from all directions. More from the west than the east, though. I see hadrosaurs of some sort, and triceratopses too.”

“I didn't bring my cameras!” wailed Patrick.

Tamara called down from the top of the tree, “Now they're crossing the river! Holy cow. It's incredible. They're putting up so much mist you can't see the half of them.”

Several others went swarming up the trees to see for themselves.

“Can you give us an estimate of their numbers?” Leyster shouted up.

“No way! I keep losing sight of them among the trees. Or in the water. But there must be hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.”

“Hundreds of hadrosaurs, or hundreds of triceratopses?”

“Both!”

“What are they doing on this side?”

“It's hard to tell. Milling about, mostly. Some of the hadrosaurs appear to be breaking into smaller groups. The triceratopses are clustering.”

“So what do you think—are these guys migrating?”

“Actually, it looks like they're moving in to stay.”

“They couldn't have chosen a better time for it,” Katie commented. “All this young growth, freshly fertilized with titanosaur dung—it's herbivore heaven here.”

“Damn.” Leyster thought for a moment, then said, “I want to go down by the river and get a closer look at them.” He was understating the case drastically. He
had
to go take a closer look. “Who here wants to go with me?”

Tamara swung down out of her tree so fast Leyster worried she would fall, singing, “Me! Me! Me!”

“Some of us should stay here,” Jamal said dubiously. “To look after the camp. Also we've still got the walls to put up.”

“Come with us,” Leyster said quietly. “Nobody can say you haven't done your share of the work.”

Jamal hesitated, then shook his head. “No, really. How can I expect anybody else to work, if I'm not willing to work myself?”

The party he put together was, to Leyster's profound disappointment, made up mostly of the food-gatherers and Daljit. Of the house-builders, only Patrick, loaded down with his cameras, broke ranks.