Paradeisia: Origin of Paradise (10 page)

Karen gave him such a severe look that he stopped chewing his gum.  “I don't know who you are.”

He volunteered, “Guy Giordano.”

She rolled her eyes, “And I didn't want to know.  But my name is Karen Harigold, I'm Secretary Health, and it's a national health crisis because I said it's a national health crisis.  Got it?”

“Yeah,” the guy murmured.

“And, Doctor Compton?”

“Yes?”

“Call Fox News.  Tell them about the St. Joe's quarantine.  Anonymously.”

“Just as long as I don't end up with an espionage charge like James Rosen.”

“Very funny,” she said.  “I hardly think you're on the top of the President's hit list...”  Then she struck out for the door.  “I'll be back ASAP.”

Doctor Compton asked, “Where are you going?”

She spun around and swore: “I'm going to the White House to get my quarantine order.”

St. Joseph's Medical Center

Sarah Rodriguez and Doctor Burwell sat across from one another at a desk in the quarantine area.  They were talking over a meal of hospital food somebody had brought for them.  Their first date, really, Doctor Burwell thought to himself.  And they were both having a good time, until Sarah suddenly grimaced.

“What's wrong?” Doctor Burwell asked.

“My stomach.  I don't think it likes these noodles.”

“You want some Pepto?  I'll call for them to bring some over.”

“Thanks,” she managed to smile appreciatively.

Doctor Burwell picked up the phone and dialed four digits.  “Hey, yeah.  Can somebody send some—” Doctor Burwell stopped. 

Sarah cried out, reaching for his arm, “John!”

She had never used his first name before.  But now, she was squeezing him with a surprisingly warm hand and gasping in what appeared to be terrible pain.

Doctor Burwell yelled into the phone, “Send some people in here now!”

Sarah's
swallowed eyes were rolling as her head dropped to her chest.  Doctor Burwell rushed around the table to hold her up, but she slipped into unconsciousness.   He wrapped both arms under her and lifted her up to carry her to a nearby bed.

Doctor Kingsley entered the area wearing a mask and gown, followed by a team of doctors.  Doctor Burwell knew enough to stay out of their way as they flew into a blur of activity.  Just as they were attaching the patches from the respiratory monitor, Sarah opened her eyes and cried out in agony, vomit gushing from her mouth and nose.

China Academy of Sciences

Doctor Ming-Zhen said, “Oh, they call them 'primitive' primates.  But there's nothing primitive about them.  They were primates in the strictest possible sense.  They only call them primitive because they came before now.  Just the same way we call society before ours 'primitive.'”

“Why haven't I ever heard about these primates of the cretaceous before?” Zhang asked, clearly bedeviled.

Doctor Ming-Zhen shrugged, “Everybody wants to hear about the dinosaurs, so we paleontologists don't talk about the other animals we dig up.”

“So you think this lends credence to your discovery of the man in the dinosaur stomach?  I really don't think that's enough to—”

Doctor Ming-Zhen interrupted him, “There's more to it than that...  Because the Hell Creek formation was originally dated to the Cretaceous, in the early 1900's, as more and more fossils of more and more different species were unearthed, it sent the evolutionary timeline back to the drawing board continuously.

“As species were added to the Cretaceous epoch, science was forced to depart from what I was taught in my early days in the field: the old textbooks explained matter-of-factly that the amphibians led to the reptiles (which then included dinosaurs) which led to the mammals and the birds.

“Now, the textbooks have a more convoluted version of history that varies from textbook to textbook but seems to usually claim a giant burst of life in the Cretaceous followed quickly by a mass extinction (somehow survived by many mammals).”  Doctor Ming-Zhen leaned forward, “My question is now: was it possible that the variety of animals at Hell Creek represents not the population of an era, but rather the same type of species localization one would find in any modern environment?”

“I'm not sure I understand,” Zhang replied, shifting uncomfortably.

Doctor Ming-Zhen explained, “For example, a child can name the animals typically found in the savannah, and the same child can also tick off many of the animals usually found in the Congo.  But the lists would always be
different
.  Giraffes in the savannah, gorillas in the Congo.  Different areas host different species.”    He waited, allowing his superior to digest his statement.

“So you are saying that the Hell Creek formation could possibly be a representation of a specific environment hospitable to specific animals rather than an era, or a layer, of geologic time?”

“Yes,” he confirmed.  “To the east, in the Chicago area, mastodons, woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, and other large mammalian bones are found, but no dinosaurs.  Not one.  Not even a fragment of a dinosaur is found in that area.  Why?  Was it species localization?  In California and in Florida the same list of mammalian bones have been dug up, but not a single dinosaur in Florida and very, very few in California.  In Missouri and down to Texas, both dinosaurs and large mammals are found in abundance.

“So what if the cretaceous, and all the other epochs with it, did not exist at all?  When you're looking at Hell Creek sediments, you don't say, 'Here are the mastodons on top (because there are no mastodons in Hell Creek formations) and here are the dinosaurs on the bottom.'  If Hell Creek represents a swampy environment, which I suspect it does, then the mammals you find there are suitable to just such a place.  Perhaps the simplest way to look at this is the right way to look at it: mastodons are not found in the Hell Creek areas because mastodons didn't like those environments.”

“But what if that area was covered in ice, during the ice age, so that's why the mastodons are not found there?”

“Visible Hell Creek is not a huge vast area: rather it appears bordering a vast area where very few fossils from anything except plants are found, the Fort Union Formation, supposedly formed during the Pleistocene, right after the Cretaceous.  So let's assume that, during an ice age, ice was covering this huge Fort Union area as well as the surrounding Hell Creek areas, preventing mammoths from living there.  How is it that the ice was there, but it wasn't covering Hot Springs, South Dakota, right nearby; Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan to the
north
; or New York to the west, all places where mammoths are found?  That makes very little sense to me.

“And why are dinosaurs so scarce in California?  Because it was covered in ocean back then and they were all washed away, as they say?  How about because it wasn't swampy, the way dinosaurs like it?”

Zhang thought for a moment.  Then he said, “But don't you usually dig very deeply for the dinosaur fossils, because they are from far back in history and therefore in a deep layer?”

“Another myth.  That's how they draw things in fantastical school textbooks.  But the truth is, when dinosaur fossils are discovered, it is most often because they are exposed on the surface of the ground, not because they are dug up from deeply within it.  In Hell Creek areas, the common method for finding fossils is by
walking around
looking for them, not by digging up vast mines.  The same is true in the Gobi Desert here, the Sahara in Africa, and Patagonia in South America.”

Zhang said, “What about flowering plants, though?  I thought pollen from flowering plants was only found in certain layers, so that proves that the layers were from certain periods of time.  When it is present, pollen spreads everywhere on the wind.  In other words, if flowering plants existed through all that time, then pollen would be found in all fossil formations?”

“Ah,” Doctor Ming-Zhen nodded knowingly.  “The angiosperm argument.  First of all, angiosperms are extremely fragile.  Just pick one from the ground, you can see how fragile it is.  And even though it's covered in a protective layer, pollen is still far more fragile than, well, bones.  Studies have shown that it decomposes in soil within a matter of months.  In water, it would be much faster.  So when pollen
is
discovered within a formation, it is an extraordinary event.  For example, even though scientists have deduced that angiosperms would have had to originate before the Triassic, only
one
sample of angiosperm pollen has ever been found in sediment from that layer (or so-called sediment from that layer). 
Only
o
ne
.”

Zhang scratched his nose.  Then he said, “All right, so your major proposal is that mastodons lived at the same time as dinosaurs, but that they lived in separate areas because of the environments in those places.  What does that have to do with Antarctica?”

“If we accept that the mastodons lived with the dinosaurs, then this brings into question the existence of the 'ice ages;' the times in which the world was supposedly much colder and dominated by them and wooly mammoths.  If mammoths were indeed contemporary with dinosaurs, could there be somewhere in the world where dinos have been quick-frozen in time, just as the notorious iced mammoths have been—the ones with fresh grass still in their mouths?”

“And you think Antarctica could be the place?”  Zhang eyed Doctor Ming-Zhen skeptically, “Zhou, this seems somewhat fanciful...”

Doctor Ming-Zhen nodded, “I grant you, it's not a place famous for paleontology, but it has provided a wealth of fossils for those who have the resources to look.  They have discovered ancient vegetation so fresh that petrification has not even begun.  This vegetation was quick-frozen, just the same way that the frozen mammoths in the north were.  They have also found plenty of dinosaur fossils, but only bones so far.  So there is proof that dinosaurs lived in Antarctica before it froze.”

“So, you really think there could be dinosaurs stopped dead in their tracks with their mouths full of food?”

“Well, no.  I'm not thinking of anything remotely so dramatic.”  Doctor Ming-Zhen explained that, contrary to popular opinion, most of the frozen mammoths or mastodons had not been entombed in ice, but, rather, within the icy soil, with most of them standing upright, as if they had just been pressed down into the earth where they stood.  He asked “Now how could that possibly have happened?”

“Am I the paleontologist?”

Doctor Ming-Zhen grinned enthusiastically, “Actually, the answer came from a seismologist”

Unamused, Zhang asked, “And what was the answer?”

United Nations Security Council

Doctor Martin continued, “A neighbor of mine, originally from Russia, told me about something very strange that had happened.  Her son was deployed in the navy to the North Sea.  He had left his childhood dog at home in her care.

“One day, the dog began to whimper and run back and forth, very agitated.  She didn't know what the matter
was, so she took it outdoors.  That did not help.  It continued in this fashion until she became convinced that it was ill, so she took it to a veterinarian.  There was nothing physically wrong with the animal, but upon their return, it simply lay down on the floor and wouldn't move.  It stayed like this for days, not eating, just lying and letting out an occasional whimper.

“At the end of a week, she was contacted by the navy.  There had been a horrific accident on her son's submarine.  The vessel had sunk and the entire crew was lost.

“She told me that the moment the accident happened is the moment the dog became agitated.

“Effectually, the dog
knew
, without a doubt, that its best friend had died, and, by all appearances, furthermore knew the exact moment when the danger first struck.

“As a biologist who has held senior academic posts most of my adult life, I was dumfounded by the refusal of my colleagues in the scientific community to take this seriously.  What are we afraid of?  Are the implications too terrifying for scrutiny?

“Whatever the case, I proceeded with research.  First, I looked into all the information I could on the subject, all the examples of animal intuition.

“It turns out, they are everywhere, right before our eyes.  You don't have to look at all.  Someone simply must give you a tap on your shoulder.”

The White House

“Where is the President?” Karen asked, her hands on her hips.

“He's in his private study, if you must know,” Abael replied, calm as always.  She strode right past him, but he maneuvered his electric wheelchair around to block her.  “I must ask you to stop.”

“Get out of my way, you freak,” Karen said, stomping past.  She opened the door off the oval office and walked down the corridor to the private study.  She didn't bother to knock, but swung the door open and stomped in.

What she saw stopped her dead.

The President was sitting at his desk against the wall to the left.  He was staring at a monitor displaying a group of uniformed officers with a Chinese flag in the background and the characters
PLA
in front.  The President was obviously having a dialogue with them. 

Foreign policy wasn't her area of expertise, but she wasn't an idiot, either.  The President was talking with the People's Liberation Army of China, a country with which military cooperation would have been unthinkable due to less than amicable relations of late due to friction in the South China Sea.

She said, “Baraq?” 

The President, looking a bewildered, immediately switched off the monitor.  “What is it, Karen?”

“There's something...  I need to show you something.”  Eying him uneasily, she strode to a screen in the corner and turned it on to Fox News.

On the monitor, the anchor was saying, “--Medical Center in Towson, Maryland, where a quarantine is underway.  You can see the police have arrived and, we are told, also the Centers for Disease Control.  On the scene now is Fox's Lisa Hamilton.  Lisa, what's the situation in Towson?”

“While officials here will not speak to anyone, we have received information from an anonymous source saying that the hospital is under quarantine due to a virus of some sort.  The source stressed that the public should not be alarmed, but that a mysterious virus reminiscent of Swine Flu has turned up there and the hospital has been quarantined.  And, while no one will speak to us here, it is quite clear that the hospital will not be accepting any new patients.  Police have been cordoning off the area, and it is surrounded—”

Karen muted the television station.  “Mr. President, this is an illegal quarantine, but I ordered it.  I ordered it because I gave Abael an executive order for you to sign that would have authorized it two days ago.  Even though he said he'd
send it back to me yesterday, I never got it.”

The President looked apologetic, “I'm sorry, Karen.  I'v
e been a little….”

“With all due respect Mr. President, what could possibly deserve your attention more than this?” she motioned to the screen.

The President took a heavy breath and looked off to the side, appearing solemn.  “Preparations.”

“For what?” Karen asked almost breathlessly.  She was suddenly not feeling nearly
as important as she had before.   In fact, although she would never admit it, she now felt a little unnerved.  Especially when she felt Abael's presence behind her and turned to see him warning the President of the United States with a dark, icy gaze.

The President raised his eyes and gazed directly at her, “You will know...  When the time is right.  You will all know.”

Karen raised her hand to her hairline, gripped by a sudden headache.  She lowered her hand and said, “If it's something more important than a national health crisis, don't you think you should have a meeting with your cabinet?  Don't you think we should be prepared, too?”

The President nodded slowly.  “I have given that a lot of consideration.  I certainly would not leave you in the dark unless it was absolutely necessary.”

Although feeling less secure, Karen braced herself and demanded, “Why are you talking with the freaking People's Liberation Army?  What is going on, Baraq?”