Project J (32 page)

He put down the Bible.
 
“Please,” he asked, “would you talk with Seymour about Mariam?”

“I will.”

Chapter 57:
 
Mary Magdalene

“Okay, now we follow her.”

In the Machine room, Jesus, Myers, Tamara and Fielding were watching as the operator, Jacques, had set in once again the coordinates for that fateful afternoon two thousands year prior, and was now displaying the spectators at the crucifixion.

The Machine operator was resting his wrists on the console while his fingers delicately adjusted two dials.
 
Then his hand went to the screen and touched the nose of Mary Magdalene gently.
 
A red glow spread out from that point, covering the selected figure of the dark haired woman in the group of mourners.
 
When it reached the edges of her robe all the red condensed into an outline of her.
 
That flashed twice and then faded to a dim outline.

“That is Mariam,” confirmed Jesus.
 
He was leaning forward in the chair, eyes fixed upon the main screen of the Machine’s console.
 
The operator keyed in a command and the figures on the screen came to life again.
 
One older woman was weeping and had to be supported by a man standing beside her.
 
Mary Magdalene appeared to be trying to comfort her.
 
Another woman stood a couple feet from that group, crying to herself.

Words were exchanged, and the man led Jesus’ mother away from the scene on Golgotha.
 
Mary Magdalene stayed, moved over to the other woman and put her arm around her.
 
The two of them looked straight ahead, almost looking directly at the viewers in the future.

“That new tracking software seems to be working.
 
I’m going to increase the time passage speed now,” Jacques said.
 
On the screen the two women seemed to be moving in tiny, rapid jerks.
 
Eventually they turned and left.
 
The Machine’s point of view followed them down the hill side, along a well-traveled path, past many people hurrying about, and eventually to a house that looked like all the other ones but was one they had seen before; one belonging to
Mary, the mother of James
.

The Virgin Mary, to use the name most knew her as in the Twenty-First Century, was already there, sitting silently on a stool in a corner.
 
The Beloved Disciple, John, was also there, talking to three other men.

“Please slow it down,” Jesus asked.
 
The operator complied.
 
“That is Peter and Andrew.
 
When the third man’s face became visible, he added, “And that is Simon!
 
It is not surprising that they would come to her house.
 
I wonder where the others are?”

For a while, little happened.
 
Everyone looked sad.
 
The disciples who had gathered there also looked fearful.
 
Simon kept glancing towards the door as if he expected to see Roman soldiers charging in at any second.
 
Perhaps he did.

When the door did open, it was not a soldier but a young man, a teen, who Jesus said he did not know.
 
The boy said something to John then left.
 
John talked to the two Marys and they left the house.
 
The Machine continued to track Mary Magdalene.

Not unexpectedly, the two women made their way to the tomb where Jesus’ body lay.
 
They brought with them linens and bottles of lotion and a large jug of water, items they would need to cleanse Jesus’ body and prepare it for burial.

“Let’s cut to a day or so later,” Myers suggested.
 
“Jesus has already seen enough of his own body.”

Several keyed commands later the scene switched totally to black then to the inside of that house again.
 
Mary Magdalene was there, along with others.
 
She was just carrying a cloth bag out of a side room and setting it down next to the door.
 
The disciples were not present.

“She is leaving,” Jesus said.
 
“Going back to Galilee and the children.”
 
He turned to the others.
 
“Judas and Deborah were left with Mariam’s parents when we came to Jerusalem.
 
They were too young to know of what I had to do.”

“Who will go with her?” Myers asked.
 
Women did not travel alone in those times.

“John probably.
 
Maybe others.
 
My mother will go with her.
 
I asked John to take care of her after I was gone.”

“Then you weren’t absolutely sure that you would arise from the dead?” asked Tamara.

Jesus glared at her and did not answer.
 
Finally, his features softened and he said, “Whatever is God’s will.”

Not much was happening on the screen.
 
People moved about, packed for a journey and looked gloomy.

“We won’t see much for now,” Myers said.
 
“Jacques, would you please run the scan forward until they are in Nazareth.
 
Then lock in that setting.
 
We’ll pick it up from there another time.”
 
He turned to Jesus to ask, “This where her parents are, Nazareth, right?”

“Yes.”
 
He looked at the screen and the figures currently frozen in position.
 
“I wish I could hear,” he said softly.

Chapter 58:
 
Murder!

It was impossible.
 
It could not have happened.
 
Yet there it was.
 
In the large pen they had built to hold the
juvenile
T-Rex taken from the upper Cretaceous Period, the vicious predator lay dead.
 
And not just dead, but viciously murdered.

Dr. Brown stared down at the carcass sprawled on the sand and shook his head.
 
One of his assistants was already in the pit, photographing the body from all angles.
 
From his higher elevation, Brown could easily see what had killed the mighty beast.
 
Slashes along the exposed flank were deep.
 
But the worst was a large chunk of the neck directly behind the head.
 
It was missing.
 
Something had taken a big bite out of a T-Rex.

Stryker came up to stand next to Brown.
 
“What the hell did that?” he asked.

Brown could only shake his head.
 
“Damned if I know.
 
He was fine last night when we fed him.
 
No one could have gotten in here and done that.
 
You know the security we have in place since that attempt on Jesus’ life.
 
And even if someone did sneak in, how the hell did they kill him?
 
He may only be a juvenile but he was still more than a match for a man.
 
Crap, he could swallow a man whole!”

“Do you have surveillance cameras set up here?” Stryker asked.

“Yes.
 
They were mostly to make sure no one snuck in, but there are two overlooking his pen.
 
I’ll go over the recordings.”

“Do that.”
 
Stryker noted the dark pools of dried blood half under the large body.
 
“I’d like to know what could rip up a T-Rex.”

Half an hour later, in a lab nearby, Brown was sitting with an assistant while the video recordings were being reviewed.
 
They began with the feeding, a gruesome but interesting show in which they tossed a live sheep into the pen and allowed the beast, which some of them had nicknamed “King,” go after it.
 
It was an unfair contest; the sheep always lost.
 
After gobbling the sheep whole, he roared his defiance at the humans who had fed him, then settled down for a nap.
 
They had found that he tended to take a nap after a meal, not an uncommon trait among predators.

The two monitors before them continued on showing his pen from two angles.
 
Nothing much happened.
 
The lights were lowered and the researcher who had been taking close up photos of his eyes (with a telephoto lens) left.
 
In the lower right of each display small numbers recorded the time.

“Let’s speed it up,” Brown told the tech.
 
“But stop and back up if you catch any motion.”

Obediently the tech keyed in instructions and the displays flickered a little.
 
For minutes nothing changed beyond the jerking motion that was his breathing.
 
Then, extremely suddenly, there was motion on both displays.
 
The tech stopped the recordings and backed up both to a point before the motion, then continued forward in real time.

King lay there, sleeping peacefully, but suddenly jerked his head up.
 
He roared and twisted his body sideways.
 
Then he was on his feet, tail lashing out, jaws snapping.
 
But there was nothing there.
 
He danced in a circle, snapping to his left as if something were there.
 
But his jaws closed on only empty air.

“Freeze that!” Brown suddenly cried out.
 
The scene on both monitors froze.
 
Brown leaned forward to stare at the scene.
 
“Can you magnify this?”

“Sure.”

The dinosaur’s side filled the screen.
 
Red marks appeared against his brown-gray flank, lines that opened up into gashes with blood spurting out.
 
Two then three lines formed along the side of his leg.

“Is he biting himself?” the tech asked.

“No.
 
But something is cutting him.”

They backed out again and resumed the motion.
 
A roar of anguish and pain filled the room as King twisted his head around.
 
Suddenly his head snapped back and he did a little dance as he twisted around to the other side.
 
That jaw filled with teeth snapped shut on nothing.
 
As his body turned, they could see two more slashes appear on this right side, at the base of his neck.
 
He continued to turn in a circle, trying to get at whatever was attacking him.
 
Then, as they watched in disbelief, his head twisted backwards and up.
 
Holes appeared in his neck, blood spurted out, and his whole body trembled.
 
The holes widened and suddenly a chunk of his flesh was ripped out.
 
It fell to the ground, where it lay bleeding.

King roared again, but there was no defiance or triumph, only pain.
 
His head twisted around in a circle then lowered.
 
His body collapsed to the sand.
 
For a minute muscles twitched then were still.

Blood continued to flow out of the gash but slowed and finally ceased.
 
The King was dead.

“There wasn’t anything there!” the tech said disbelievingly.

Brown said nothing for a long time.
 
Then he rose and silently walked out of the room.

Chapter 59:
 
In Theory...

“What the hell happened?” Stryker asked later that morning.
 
Assembled in a conference room were all the project heads.
 
“You’ve all seen the video.
 
Something attacked and killed our pet T-Rex.
 
But nothing was there.
 
Any suggestions?”

His question was met with silence.
 
It was Fielding who finally broke that silence.

“Dr. Brown,” he said to the still-stunned scientist, “Is there any natural predator who might attack a T-Rex?”

“Well, normally I’d say no.
 
But...
 
Ours was a juvenile.
 
There were other dinosaurs contemporary with him who might have attacked a juvenile.
 
The Gorgosaurus was from the same time period.
 
A full grown one would run thirty feet long and weight about three tons.
 
But more likely would be an Albertosaurus.
 
They were about the same size as the Gorgosaurus but much more common during that period.”

“Would one attack a T-Rex the size of ours?”

“Well...
 
Maybe.
 
T-Rex stayed small until about ten years of age.
 
Then they went through a growth spurt and at about eighteen years reached mature size.
 
I don’t think there is anything that would attack a full grown T-Rex.
 
It would be forty feet long, and weigh around eight tons.”

“But a juvenile?”

“Maybe.”
 
Brown paused.
 
“But there has been some speculation that Albertosaurus hunted in packs in order to bring down larger dinosaurs.
 
Like Velociraptors did.
 
A pack of Albertosauruses could well attack a T-Rex.
 
Our King was by no means fully grown.

“But what does that mean?
 
There’s no other dinosaurs here.”

“No, but there were back where King came from.”

“What...?”

Fielding turned to Stryker with a frightened look on his face.
 
“You remember the speculation early in the project about the nature of entangled matter?
 
Our Machine creates a link between matter that existed in the past and matter that we have here and now.
 
It uses that entanglement to force the matter here to become exactly as the matter in the past.
 
Remember how Dr. Spencer suggested that the entanglement would work both ways?
 
His theory was that once we created the object here, it would be permanently entangled with the object in the past.”

“Yes, I remember.
 
He suggested that anything that happened to the object in the past would also happen to the object in the present.
 
But we tested that, and came to the conclusion that the entanglement was one way in the time stream.
 
The object in the past could not affect the object in the present.”

“Yes,” Fielding agreed.
 
“But we tested it with inanimate objects only.
 
That was before we expanded to try it with live animals.”

Everyone in the room was silent as the impact sank in.

“Maybe with a live object, the entanglement continues.
 
Why I’m not sure, but wouldn’t that explain what killed King?
 
Let’s say that we created him here exactly ten days ago.
 
And let’s further say that exactly ten days afterwards, back in 65 million BC, a pack of Albertosauruses attacked the original King.
 
And killed him.
 
Or it might have been a pack of some other large raptors.
 
Those slashes on his side could have been made by Velociraptors.

“At the same time, relatively speaking, our copy became slashed and killed.”

“Oh, my God...” muttered Stryker.

Fielding, however, was the first to realize what that meant to Project J.

“And entanglement works both ways.
 
What if something had happened and we had to kill King here?
 
If someone blew his head off here, I’ll bet that the original would also lose its head.”

Stryker looked sick.
 
“Then our current theory of entanglement time displacement is flawed,” he said softly.

Suddenly Tamara jerked her head up.
 
“Do you mean...”

“Yes,” Fielding said.
 
“Our Jesus is entangled with the original.”

“But the original died.
 
Right?
 
We saw that on the Machine.”

“We saw that they failed to revive his body.
 
We saw them prepare it for burial.
 
Then we saw it being taken out of the tomb and to someplace else.
 
But we didn’t follow that.
 
We just assumed that he was taken to some other tomb as part of a plan to make it appear he had risen.”

Fielding looked around at the intent faces.
 
“We healed Jesus of his wounds and pulled him back from near death here.
 
He was in a coma for almost two days while we worked to save him.
 
When he awoke here, in our infirmary...”

Each person there was filling in the startling results in their minds.

“He would have arisen there,” Tamara whispered.