Bones of the Earth (14 page)

Salley watched how the girl put her arms around Leyster's neck, how she stared deeply into his eyes. Leyster looked spooked. He was definitely out of his depth. “She's just a headhunter.”

“She doesn't get to be what she wanted. Why not let her have her consolation prize?”

“So she gets her trophy fuck?” Salley said scornfully. “Much good it will do either of them. He looks ashamed of himself already.”

“Well, things don't always work out the way we'd like them to.”

They danced for a time. Salley put her head on Griffin's shoulder, and said, “How'd she get back here in the first place?”

“We don't publicize it, but occasionally, we'll make that kind of arrangement. For a considerable fee. Under carefully controlled circumstances.”

“Tell me something, Griffin. How did I get that
Allosaurus
hatchling past all your security people?”

“You were lucky. It won't happen again.”

She drew back and looked at him coldly. “Don't give me that. I waltzed right through. People turned their backs. Halls were empty. Everything fell into place. How?”

He smiled. “Well … thwarted, as I so often am, by bureaucracy, I came to feel that all this secrecy was … an unnecessary burden. So I may have given Monk a few hints and pointed him in your direction.”

“You shithead.” She pressed her body against his. They couldn't have been any closer if they tried. “Why make me jump through hoops? Why make everything so convoluted and baroque?”

He shrugged. “Welcome to my world.”

“They say that once in her life, every woman should fall in love with a
real bastard
.” She looked deeply in his eyes. “I wonder if you're mine.”

He drew back from her a little. “You're drunk.”

“Lucky you,” she murmured. “Lucky, lucky you.”

Hours later, personal time, Griffin returned to his office. The lights were on. Other than himself, there was only one person he trusted with the key. “Jimmy,” he said as he opened the door, “I swear my body aches in places I never—”

His chair swivelled around.

“We need to talk,” the Old Man said.

Griffin stopped. Then he shut the door behind him. He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a shot of 90-proof Bulleit. The Old Man, he noted, had been there before him. “So talk.”

The Old Man lifted the top report from the stack and read: “‘Defector said priority was given to opportunities to assassinate high-profile individuals, to which end a short list had been made of opportunities. Primary among these were fundraisers.'”

He dropped the report on the desk. “Had you bothered to read this, you'd know that Holy Redeemer's hit list of people they particularly want to take out has our two favorite media hounds, Salley and Leyster, in positions one and two. You should not have been taken by surprise today. You should have known to keep those two apart.”

“So? Jimmy caught the terrorists. You notified him to do so. The system worked as well as it ever does. Meanwhile, I get to keep my options open.”

The Old Man stood, steadying himself with one hand on the desktop. Griffin had to wonder how much he'd had to drink already. “We caught two fucking outside operatives, and we've still got a mole in our operation. How did they know about the Ball? Who told them which caterer would be handling it?” He slammed the pile of reports with his fist. “You have no options. Read these. All. Now.”

Griffin took his seat.

Griffin was a fast reader. Still, it took him over an hour to absorb everything. When he was done, he covered his eyes with his hands. “You want me to use Leyster and Salley as bait.”

“Yes.”

“Knowing what will happen to them.”

“Yes.”

“You're prepared to let people die.”

“Yes.”

“It's a god-damned filthy thing to do.”

“From my perspective, it
was
a god-damned filthy thing to do. You'll do it, though. I'm sure of that much.”

Griffin stared long and hard into the Old Man's eyes.

Those eyes fascinated and repulsed Griffin. They were deepest brown, and nested in a lifetime's accumulation of wrinkles. He'd been working with the Old Man since he was first recruited for the project, and they were still a mystery to him, absolutely opaque. They made him feel like a mouse being stared down by a snake.

He hadn't touched his bourbon yet. But when he reached for it, the Old Man took the glass and poured it back into the decanter. He capped it and put it back in the cabinet. “You don't need that stuff.”

“
You've
been drinking it.”

“Yeah, well, I'm a lot older than you are.”

Griffin wasn't sure how old the Old Man was. There were longevity treatments available for those who played the game, and the Old Man had been playing this lousy game so long he practically ran it. All Griffin knew for sure was that he and the Old Man were one and the same person.

Overcome with loathing, Griffin said, “You know, I could slit my wrists tonight, and then where would you be?”

That hit home. For a long moment the Old Man did not speak. Possibly he was thinking of the consequences of such a major paradox. It would bring their sponsors down on them like so many angry hornets. The Unchanging would yank time travel out of human hands—retroactively. Everything connected with it would be looped out of reality and into the disintegrative medium of quantum uncertainty. Xanadu and a score of other research stations up and down the Mesozoic would dissolve into the realm of might-have-been. The research and findings of hundreds of scientists would vanish from human knowing. Everything Griffin had spent his life working to accomplish would be undone.

He didn't know that he'd regret that.

“Listen,” the Old Man said at last. “You remember that day in the Peabody?”

“You know I do.”

“I stood there in front of that mural wishing with all my heart—all
your
heart—that I could see a real, living dinosaur. But even then, even as an eight-year-old, I knew it wasn't going to happen. That some things could never be.”

Griffin said nothing.

“God hands you a miracle,” the Old Man said, “you don't throw it back in his face.”

Then he left.

Griffin remained.

Thinking of the Old Man's eyes. Eyes so deep you could drown in them. Eyes so dark you couldn't tell how many corpses already lay submerged within them. After all these years working with him, Griffin still couldn't tell if those were the eyes of a saint or those of the most evil man in the world.

Griffin thought of those eyes.

His own eyes.

Loathing himself, he set to work.

7

Protective Coloration

Survival Station: Mesozoic era. Triassic period Tr3 epoch. Carnian age. 225 My B.C.E.

The important thing was to maintain a scientific frame of mind. He was being tested. When Griffin popped out of the time funnel early, with his Irish shadow in tow, Robo Boy knew exactly how to act and what to say.

“They trapped a dwarf coelophysid in the highlands the other day.” He accepted their credentials through the slot in the cage door and carefully compared the photos against their faces. “Everybody was all excited.” He checked their names against the schedule on his clipboard. “It was less than two feet long.” He ran the papers through a text verifier, waited for the light to flash green. “They're calling it
Nanogojirasaurus
.” The light flashed. “But Maria thinks it's just a juvenile.”

He unlocked the heavy, iron-barred door and they stepped out of the cage. A monotonous rain was drumming on the supply room's roof. The shelves were thronged with boxes and bundles. A single lightbulb overhead filled the empty spaces between them with shadows and mystery.

“Why aren't the chairs set up yet?” Griffin asked. He clamped a hand over his wrist, glared down at it, and said, “I can't spare much time. I'm only stopping over on my way to the Induan.”

“You weren't supposed to arrive for another two hours,” Robo Boy pointed out.

The Irishman took the clipboard from his hands, scribbled out what Robo Boy had written, and wrote a later time above it. “Sometimes things don't happen exactly when it says they did in the record. It's a security measure.”

The buzzer sounded, announcing another arrival.

With a heavy iron
clank
, a new car filled the cage. Robo Boy snatched back his clipboard.

Salley stepped out of the cage.

“They trapped a dwarf coelophysid in the highlands the other day,” he said, holding out his hand for the woman's credentials. “Everybody was all excited.”

“It was a juvenile,” Salley said. “I read Maria Caporelli's paper about it. I'm gen-two, remember?” To Griffin, she said, “Can't you cut through all of this bureaucratic rigamarole for me?”

“Of course.” Griffin nodded to the Irishman, who leaned forward and threw the latch. Salley stepped out into the room.

“Hey!”
Robo Boy objected. But the Irishman clapped a hand on his shoulder and quietly said, “Let me give you a wee bit of advice, son. Don't try so hard. You'll get a lot further in life if you cut people a little slack.”

Robo Boy flushed and retreated, as he always did, into his work. First he set up four chairs. Then the folding table. Finally, glasses and a pitcher of water that had been chilled by keeping the jerrycan right next to the cage.

Meetings were held in the storage room because it was so much cooler than outside. The time funnel acted as a heat sink, sucking warmth from the ambient air and re-radiating it out into the darkness between stations. Nobody knew exactly where the heat went. The funnel itself had been mathematically modeled as a multidimensional crack in time, and no one had yet figured out a way to probe beyond its walls.

While Griffin neatly positioned papers across the tabletop and Salley poured herself a glass of water, Robo Boy returned the jerrycan to its place beside the time beacon. The beacon was an integral part of the funnel mechanism, anchoring the funnel to this particular instant. Without it, they would be unfindable, an infinitesimally small instant of duration in the shoreless ocean of time. Occasionally he thought how easy it would be to smash the beacon and maroon them all. Always he was stopped by the thought of spending the rest of his life with Darwinian atheists.

The door outside slammed open.

“Hello?” Somebody stood blinking in the steaming wash of hot and humid air. “Anybody here?”

Leyster stepped into the room.

He closed the door behind him, and hung up his slicker on a peg alongside it. Then he turned and saw Salley.

“Hello, Leyster.” A tentative smile, there and gone. She looked quickly away. Leyster, in his turn, muttered something polite and scraped up a chair.

Was it as obvious to everyone else, Robo Boy wondered? The way the two of them were so painfully conscious of each other? How their gazes danced about the room, toward and away from each other, without ever actually connecting? Surely they were all aware of it, whether they acknowledged it or not.

“You two know each other,” Griffin said. “There's no reason to pretend otherwise. However, I'm sure you'll agree that the Baseline Project is important enough to set aside whatever personal—” He stopped, and said to Robo Boy, “Why are you still here?”

“I was running inventory.” He waved his clipboard at the shelves.

“Can it be done another time?”

“Yes.”

“Then leave.”

Robo Boy put the flimsies of his time transit report form into an envelope pre-stamped TTR(TR3/Carnian) and stuck it into the outgoing mailbox. He took his slicker off its hook.

The Irishman leaned back against the shelves, arms folded, and stared at Robo Boy speculatively.

A stab of fear shot through him. He'd been found out! But no, if he had, they'd have arrested him long ago. He assumed the stubborn look his mother had always called his “pig face” and went out into the rain, letting the door slam behind him.

He didn't look back, but he knew from experience that the Irishman's attention had already shifted away from him. He had that effect on people. They thought he was a jerk.

He knew how to act like a jerk because he used to be one.

“Hey, Robo Boy,” somebody said in a friendly way. A girl matched strides with him. It was Leyster's cousin, Molly. She wore a transparent hooded slicker over basic paleo-drag: khaki shorts, blouse, and a battered hat.

“My name is Raymond,” he said stiffly. “I don't know why everybody persists in calling me by that ridiculous nickname.”

“I dunno. It suits you. Listen, I wanted to ask your advice about getting a job.”

“My advice? Nobody asks for my advice.”

“Well, everybody says you've had more transfers than anyone, so I figured you'd know the ropes. Hey, have you heard the rumors?”

“What rumors?”

“About Leyster and Salley and the Baseline Project.”

Molly was, in Robo Boy's estimation, as harmless as anyone could be, a chatterbox and a bit of an airhead and not much else. Still, he didn't want her to know how interested he might be in the Baseline Project. So he sighed in a way that he knew from experience girls didn't like, and waved a hand at the mud and tents and spare utilitarian structures of the camp, and said, “Tell me something. Why would you
want
a job in a place like this?”

“I just love dinosaurs, I guess.”

“Then you're in the wrong place. The Carnian is—” They'd come to the cook tent. It was where he'd been headed all along. “Look, why don't we go inside and discuss it there?”

Molly smiled brightly. “Okay!” She led the way in.

Robo Boy followed, scowling down at her ass. Molly had curly red hair. He thought she wasn't wearing a bra, but she wore her blouse so loosely he couldn't be sure.