Bones of the Earth (10 page)

There was a sudden flash of blue on the far side of the browse plain. “Whoops, there she goes!” Salley waited until the fisher had disappeared into the forest, and grabbed the carrier. “Come on!”

They ran across the browse plain.

The nest was a shallow depression scratched in the dirt and ringed with the dead leaves and forest litter with which the fisher had covered the eggs while they were hatching. A flattened area beside it was where she had rested while shading her children from the sun and protecting them from predators.

In the center was the allosaur.

The hatchling was appalling and adorable all at once. Looking at it, one saw first the downy white fluffy that covered its body and then those large and liquid eyes. Then, with a
shreep
like a giant's fingernails scraping slate, that horror of a mouth opened to reveal its needle-sharp teeth. It was an ugly little brute, and at the same time as cuddly as a children's toy.

She leaned over the nest to admire the appalling creature. “Watch this,” she said to Monk. “Here's how you handle an allosaur hatchling.”

She fluttered one hand in front of the creature, and when it lunged forward, snapping, whipped it away. Her other hand swooped down to nab it behind the neck.

Deftly, she popped it into the carrier, and snapped shut the door.

“You're just going to take it? I thought—”

She turned on him, sternly. “Okay, Kavanagh. I've shown you my dirty laundry, I've answered every question you could think of, down to the color of my pubic hair. I haven't held back a thing. Now it's payback time. How are we going to do this?”

He took a deep breath. “I'll bring the carrier with me—I'm rated to bring back living specimens to any time period after 2034. In transit, we swap ID cards—they don't check them as closely when you're returning from deep time—and I'll hand off the specimen to you. You get off at 2034. I'll go on to your originally planned time.”

Doubt touched Salley then, and she said, “It sounds pretty touch-and-go to me. You're sure this will work?”

“In my time-frame—it already has.”

Fierce elation filled her, like liquid fire, and she blurted out, “You know! You
know
what I'm going to do, don't you?”

That irritating little smirk again. “My dear young lady. Why do you think I'm here in the first place?”

5

Island Hopping

College Park, Maryland: Cenozoic era. Quaternary period. Holocene epoch. Modern age. 2034 C.E.

Richard Leyster returned from the Triassic sunburned, windswept, and in a foul mood. All the way to the University of Maryland, he stared sullenly at the passing traffic. It was only as the driver pulled into the ring campus that he roused himself to ask, “Have you ever noticed how many limos there are in the D.C. area with tinted windows?”

“Ambassadors from central Africa. Assistant Deputy Secretaries of HUD. Lobbyists with delusions of importance,” Molly Gerhard said casually. She had observed the same thing herself, and didn't want Leyster to move on to the next questions: How many time travelers
were
there loose in the world? From when? For what purposes? It didn't do to ask because Griffin wouldn't tell, and once you became sensitized to the possibilities, paranoia invariably followed. Molly had a mild case of it herself.

To distract him, she said, “You've been staring out the window as if you found the modern world horrifying. Having trouble readjusting?”

“I'd forgotten how muggy the summers here could be. And the puddles. They're everywhere. Water that sits on the ground and doesn't evaporate. It feels unnatural.”

“Well, we just had a rainstorm.”

“The midcontinental deserts of Pangaea are the bleakest, emptiest, driest land anybody's ever seen. There are cycads adapted for the conditions, and they're these leafless, leathery-black stumps sticking up out of nothing but rocks and red sand. That's all.

“But every so often, a storm cloud manages to penetrate to the supercontinental interior. Rain pours down on the sand and washes through the gullies, and the instant it stops, the desert comes to life. I almost said ‘blooms,' but of course it doesn't bloom. Flowering plants don't appear until the late Cretaceous. But that doesn't matter. The cycads put out leaves. Desert ferns appear—ephemeral things, like nothing living today. The air is suddenly full of coelurosauravids.”

“What are those?”

“Primitive diapsids with ribs that stick way out to either side, supporting a flap of skin. They scuttle up the cycads and launch themselves from the tops, little stiff-winged gliders. I've seen them as thick as mayflies.

“Burrowers emerge from the sand—horn-beaked eosuchians the size of your hand. They frolic and mate in lakes a mile wide and an inch deep, so many that they lash the water to a froth. There's something with a head like a block of wood that's not quite a proper turtle yet, with the plates of its shell still unfused, and yet with its own clunky kind of charm. It's a day of carnival, all bright colors and music, flight and feeding and dropping seeds and depositing eggs. And then, just as suddenly as it began, it's all over, and you'd swear there was no life anywhere this side of the horizon.

“It's a beauty like nobody has ever seen.”

“Wow.”

“You bet wow. And I got dragged away from
there
to—” Leyster caught himself. “Well, it's not your fault, I suppose. You're just one of Griffin's creatures. What's my schedule?”

The driver parked the limo in one of the student lots and hurried around to open Leyster's door. An undistinguished brick building squatted behind some low bushes nearby. Save for the remnants of the old Agricultural College, the campus dated back to the 1960s and it looked it. As they walked across the lot, Molly flicked open her administrative assistant and began to read.

Leyster was first scheduled to meet informally with an honors colloquium of generation-three grad students. Then there was tea with the head of the Department of Geology. After which he'd give a formal talk to a gathering of generation-two recruits. “Both groups are still time virgins,” Molly said. “The gen-two kids have been brought forward from the recent past, and the gen-three guys were shipped back from the near future. But none of them have been to the Mesozoic yet. So they're all pretty excited. Oh, and neither batch is supposed to know about the other.”

“Why on earth would you schedule two separate groups for the same time?”

Molly Gerhard shrugged. “Probably because this is when the university let us have the buildings. But it could just as well be simply because that's what we did. A lot of the system runs on predestination.”

Leyster grunted.

“For the colloquium, all that's expected of you is to mingle with the kids. Larry”—that was the driver—“will be on hand to make sure nobody tells you anything you shouldn't know. I expect you'll find the gen-three group pretty interesting. They're the first to be recruited knowing that time travel exists. They grew up with titanosaurs on TV and ceratopsians in the zoos.”

“Well, let's get it over with.”

The generation-three recruits had taken over a student lounge, and were sprawled over the couches or sitting cross-legged on the floor with the television at their center of focus. In one corner, a live archaeopteryx was shackled to a segment of log by a short length of chain.

Leyster paused in the doorway. “
Those
are going to be vertebrate paleontologists?”

“What did you expect? They're most of them from the 2040s, after all.”

“What's that they're watching?”

“Nobody told you? Today's July 17, 2034.”

If there was an Independence Day for paleontologists, it was today. This was when Salley held her famous press conference, announcing—as if it were her right—the existence of time travel. After today, paleontologists could publish their work, talk about it in public, show footage of a juvenile triceratops being mobbed by dromaeosaurs, sign movie contracts, make public appeals for funding, become media stars. Today was when a quiet and rather dry science, whose practitioners had once been slandered by a physicist as “less scientists than stamp collectors,” went Hollywood.

Before Leyster could react to the news, two of the group's lecturers saw him and hurried forward with outstretched arms. He faded into their handshakes. Molly turned her back on him, hit her mark, and begin working the room.

“Hi. I'm Dick Leyster's niece, Molly Gerhard.”

“I'm Tamara. He's Caligula.” The girl pulled a dead rat out of a paper bag and dangled it over the archie. With a shriek, the little horror leaped for it. “You one of our merry little crew?”

“No, I don't have the educational background, I'm afraid. Though sometimes I think maybe I'd like to get a job with you guys. If something turns up.”

“If you're Leyster's niece, I guess it will. Hey, Jamal! Say hello to Leyster's niece.”

Jamal sat precariously balanced in a stuffed chair with one broken leg. “Hello to Leyster's niece.” He leaned forward, hand extended, and the chair overtoppled forward, to be stopped by an agile little hop of his foot and a grin that was equal parts cocky and shy. “So the prim in the ugly clothes is Leyster? Go figure.”

“Jamal has an MBA in dinosaur merchandising. We're pretty sure he's the first.”

“Is there money in dino merchandising?”

“You'd be surprised. Let's say you've got a new critter—something glam, a giant European carnivore, let's say. You've got three resources you can sell. First the name.
Euroraptor westinghousei
for a modest sponsorship,
Exxonraptor europensis
for the big bucks. Then there's the copyrightable likeness, including film, photos, and little plastic toys. Finally and most valuable of the lot, there's the public focus on your beastie—all that interest and attention which can be used to subtly rub the sponsor's name in the public's face. But you've got to move fast. You want to have the package on the corporate desk before word hits the street. That rush of media attention is extremely ephemeral.”

“Jamal's going to be a billionaire.”

“You bet I am. You just watch me, girl.”

“Who else is here?” Molly Gerhard asked Tamara. “Introduce me around.”

“Well, I don't know most of them. But, lessee, there's Manuel. Sylvia. The tall, weedy one is Nils. Gillian Harrowsmith. Lai-tsz. Over there in the corner is Robo Boy.”

“Robo Boy?”

“Raymond Bois. If you knew him, you'd understand. Jason, with his back to us. Allis—”

“Shhh!” Jamal said. “It's coming on.”

There was a fast round of shushings, while on the screen a camera focused on the empty lobby of the
Geographic
building. Molly Gerhard recalled hearing that Salley had chosen the site because she knew an administrator there who'd let her have it on short notice. She hadn't told him how big an event it would be, of course. A narrator was saying something, but there was still too much chatter to hear.

“Here she comes!” somebody shouted.

“God, this takes me back.”

“Hush up, I want to listen.”

There were whistles and hoots as Salley hit the screen. To Molly's eye, she was dressed almost self-parodically, safari jacket over white blouse, Aussie hat at a jaunty angle; still, on camera it looked good. She was carrying a wire cage, draped in cloth.

“Look at how much make-up she's wearing!”

“She's cute. In a twenty-years-out-of-date kind of way.”

“Turn it up!” Somebody touched the controls and Salley's voice filled the room:

—
for coming here. It is my extreme pleasure to be able to announce a development of the utmost importance to science.

The moment was coming up fast. Smiling, she bent to remove the cloth from the cage, and one of the girls squealed, “Oh my God, she's wearing a push-up bra!”

“Is she really? She isn't really.”

“Trust me on this one, sweetie.”

But first, I must show you my very special friend. She was born one hundred fifty million years ago, and she's still only a hatchling.

With a flourish, she whipped away the cloth.

As one, the students cheered.

A baby allosaur looked up, blinking and confused, at the camera. Its eyes were large and green. Because it was young, its snout was still short. But when it opened its mouth, it revealed a murderous array of knife-sharp teeth. Except for its face and claws, it was covered with soft, downy white feathers.

It was mesmerizing. It short-circuited every instinctive reaction Molly had.

But she wasn't here to watch TV.

Molly drew back a little, alertly watching the interactions between students, noting who hung together, and which individuals sat adamantly alone. Filing away everything for future reference. Generation three was the single most likely source group for their mole—recruited from a period when the existence of researchers in the Mesozoic was open knowledge but still new enough to be shocking to the radical fundamentalists. Not that she believed her target would be unveiled that easily. She was only establishing a presence today. Still, every little bit helped.

No, just the Mesozoic. Nothing closer. Nothing further away.

She noticed how Leyster leaned forward in his chair and stared at Salley, frowning and unblinking. One of his colleagues touched his sleeve, and he shook it off impatiently. The poor bastard really had it bad.

I don't know why. You'll have to ask the physicists. I'm just a dino girl.

Applause and whoops of laughter.

Something beeped. Her administrative assistant, in phone mode. She stepped out into the hallway to take the call. It was Tom Navarro.

“I'm in California with Amy Cho,” he said. “Grab a conference room—we've hit the jackpot. We've been approached by a defector from Holy Redeemer Ranch.”