Bones of the Earth

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.”

“Holy shit. But wait. I can’t get away from this until it’s over—it would draw too much attention to me. Can you stall him for half an hour or so?”

“No problem, we’ll just let him stew. The flesh comes off the bone so much easier that way.”

She slipped back into the lounge to find that the press conference was over. The students were Monday-morning quarterbacking Salley’s performance.

“Very shrewd indeed,” the weedy one said. Nils, loosely aligned with Manuel and Katie, though there seemed to be something going on between him and Caligula’s Tamara.

“If she’s so shrewd, why doesn’t she copyright the hatchling? All those plush allosaurs with felt teeth and fake feathers. It makes my teeth ache to think how much she’s missing out on.” Jamal, self-centered and opportunistic, though everybody seemed to like him—Gillian in particular. “I had a doll like that when I was little.”

“She’s not a natural blond, is she?”

“According to Kavanaugh’s book, she is.” Tamara dangled another rat over her archaeopteryx.

Caligula snatched the rat and flung it down to the floor. Then he stood on the creature’s head with one foot, and tore messily at its stomach with his beak.

Jamal grimaced down at it. “Oh God. Oh, gross. Rat innards all over the carpet again.”

The teleconference room was a good sixty years old and timelessly bland, though the equipment itself was contemporary. Molly double-checked that the camera was off-line, and then turned on the video wall.

The defector was sitting bitterly in a chair behind a conference table, staring straight ahead of himself at nothing. He rarely blinked.

“When will Griffin be here?” he asked peevishly. He was dressed entirely in black, and had cultivated a small, devilish goatee. All in all, he was the single most Satanic-looking individual Molly Gerhard had ever seen. She was surprised he wasn’t wearing an inverted crucifix on a chain around his neck.

Tom Navarro, sitting to the man’s left, put down some papers and pushed his glasses up on his forehead. “Just be patient.”

On the defector’s right, Amy Cho sat smiling down at the top of her cane, tightly clutched by those pale, blue-veined hands. Without looking up, she made a comforting, clucking noise.

The defector scowled.

Okay, kiddies, Molly thought. It’s show time!

She dimmed the lights to give her an indistinct background, put her administrative assistant on the table before her, and switched it to steno mode. Then she snapped on the camera. “All right,” she said. “What do you have for me?”

“Who’s this?” the defector demanded. “I was supposed to talk to Griffin. Why isn’t he here?”

She’d wondered that herself. “I am Mr. Griffin’s associate,” she said emotionlessly. “Unfortunately, he can’t be here at this time. But anything you can tell him, you can tell me.”

“This is bullshit! I came here in good faith and you—”

“We have yet to establish that you have anything worth hearing,” Tom Navarro said. “The burden of proof is on you.”

“That’s bullshit too! How could I even know about your operation if it weren’t riddled with double agents? Your press conference announcing time travel is going on right now! I didn’t come here to be treated like a child!”

“You’re absolutely right, dear,” Amy Cho said. “But you’re here now, and you have a message that needs to be heard. So why don’t you just tell us it? We’d all be delighted to listen.”

“All right,” he said. “All right! But no more of this good-cop bad-cop routine, okay? I expect you to keep this guy muzzled.” This last was directed at Molly.

Bingo! she thought. He’d accepted her authority. Their little psychodrama was now firmly on course. But she was careful not to let her elation show. Outwardly, she allowed herself only the smallest of nods. “Go on.”

“Okay, I stared work at the Ranch four years ago—”

“From the beginning, please,” Molly Gerhard said. “So we have a more complete picture.”

The defector grimaced and began again.

He was a film maker. After graduating from London University in 2023, he’d returned to the States and the usual round of rejection and menial industry jobs an aspirant director could expect, before drifting into Christian video. He’d had some success with Sunday school tapes and inspirational packages for aspirant missionaries. He specialized in morality tales of people rescued from drugs, alcohol, and situation ethics by a strict literal reading of the Bible. He was always careful to have those transforming passages read aloud by a stern father-figure, who could then explain what they meant. He was particularly proud of that touch.

He’d had success, but no money. Religious producers were notoriously miserly, slow to pay off a contract and quick to point out the spiritual benefits of poverty and hard work.

Nor was there recognition to be had. The Jew-dominated secular film industry, of course, paid no attention to fundamentalist films. None of his work was reviewed, listed, or even noted in their cinematography journals. Awards? Forget it.

So when he was approached by one of the Ranch’s recruiters, he listened. The money wasn’t great, they told him, but it was reliable. He’d be doing important work. He’d have his own studio.

The Ranch started him out with a documentary of an expedition to Mount Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark. Six weeks in Armenia, sleeping in tents and coddling the inflated egos of self-styled archaeologists who didn’t even know that the mountain’s name dated back not to the Flood but to a prestige-seeking Christian monarch in the fourth century A.D. After that, he made a series of training films showing how to forge fossils. Then revisionist biographies of Darwin and Huxley identifying them as Freemasons and hinting at incest and murder. He admitted that these were speculations.

“Didn’t that bother you?” Tom Navarro asked abruptly.

“Didn’t what bother me?”

“Slandering Darwin and Huxley. They, neither of them, did any of the terrible things you claim.”

“They could have. Without God, all things are possible. They were both atheists. Why shouldn’t they do whatever evil things entered into their heads?”

“But they didn’t.”

“But they could have.”

“If we can keep to the topic—” Molly said crisply. Amy Cho, sputtering with indignation, looked like she was about to take her cane to Tom. To the defector, Molly said, “Please continue.”

“Yes.” The defector placed his hands together, as if in prayer, bowed his head over them, and then looked up through his dark eyebrows at her. He looked like a second-rate stage magician building up suspense for his next illusion. “As you say.”

Finally, they trusted him enough to let him film a demolitions expert assembling a bomb.

“Who was he?” Tom wanted to know.

“I have no idea. They brought him in. I filmed him. End of story.”

The video had been made under almost comically excessive secrecy. He was taken blindfolded at night to a cabin in the mountains to film a man wearing thin gloves and a ski mask while he slowly and lovingly assembled a bomb to the accompaniment of a synthetic-voice narrative. He hired actors to play the parts of Ranch strategists in what they thought were scripted fictions, then muffled their voices and electronically altered their faces, to protect those strategists even further.

“How many videos did you make?” Tom Navarro asked. “When did you start?”

“We made a lot. How to build a bomb. How to plant it. How to infiltrate a hostile organization. Hiding your faith. Passing yourself off as a godless humanist. I lost count. Maybe one a month for the past year?”

“That’s a lot of work for so little time,” Amy Cho observed.

“No third takes, no re-shoots, no catering,” the defector said with a touch of pride. “It may not be pretty, but it’s efficient. I gave them good value, and I brought their films in under budget.”

“And they dumped you.”

“We had a falling-out, yes.”

Molly checked the transcript on her administrative assistant. “We seem to have skipped over the cause of your dismissal.”

“He was running a porn site,” Tom said. “Anonymously, it goes without saying. The Ranch probably would’ve never found out if he hadn’t gotten the fifteen-year-old daughter of one of their administrators involved.”

The defector glanced at him scornfully. “It was her own idea, made freely and without coercion. It wasn’t exploitative at all.”

“It was a so-called ‘Christian porn site,’ ” Tom explained. “That had to be what made them angriest. They hate those things. They think the very name is rank hypocrisy. Know what? I think they have a point.”

“I’m having trouble picturing such a thing,” Molly said.

“Biblical scenes. Girls in short skirts kneeling in church. The joys of wedded bliss. Saints being flogged and tortured.”

“Those were faked. Do I really have to put up with this?”

“We’re only establishing why they let you go,” Tom said. “I hear the folks at the Ranch are saying some pretty harsh things about you.”

“They should talk. They’re not Christians! Christians are supposed to forgive. I made a mistake and I admitted it. Did they forgive me? After all my work? Like hell they did.”

“Of course, dear,” Amy Cho said. “Tom, you’re not to behave like this.”

Tom turned away from the defector, as if in anger, but really, Molly knew from long experience with him, to hide his smile.

Hours later, the preliminary interview was finally done.

“What a piece of work,” Molly said to her partner afterward, when only the two of them were left in their respective conference rooms. “How much do you think we can get out of him?”

“Well, he doesn’t know a third as much as he thinks he does, and he’ll have to be coddled in order to tell us half of that. The Ranch has been careful to keep him away from their mole, and the only times he’s actually met any of their operatives, they made sure he didn’t learn their identities. On the other hand, he knows exactly what kind of explosives they’ll be using, the type of incident they hope to create, and which scientists are their most likely targets.”

“So he really can be as useful as I think?”

“Oh, yes.”

By the time Molly Gerhard joined the afternoon session, it was almost over. She didn’t mind. She’d heard Leyster—an older Leyster, admittedly—present it several times before. He invariably began by observing that his lecture before this later, better-informed generation should have been titled “A Fossil Speaks.”

Then, after polite laughter, he’d say, “I admit to feeling a little uncomfortable speaking to you. I’ve only been in the field—exposed to the living reality of the Dinosauria—for a little over a year, and everyone here is a full lifetime ahead of me. So much of what I think I know is surely outdated by now! What could I possibly have to contribute to your understanding?”

He’d look down briefly, then, as if in thought. “A few years ago, my time—a few decades in yours—I was involved with what seemed to me the most wonderfully informative fossil anybody had ever found. I’m speaking of the Burning Woman predation site, which I wrote about in a book called The Claws That Grab. Some of you may have read it.” He always looked surprised when they applauded the book. “Uh… Thank you. It seemed to me to provide a perfect test case for calibrating our earlier observations. How close did we come? How short did we fall? We could not, for obvious reasons, hope to locate the original site, but predation was not uncommon in the Mesozoic…”

From which point, he’d get down to specifics about the Burning Woman tracks, what aspects he’d read correctly and which had turned out to be wrong in surprising ways. He was not a brilliant speaker. He fumbled words and dropped sentences and went back and started to re-read them and stopped midway through to apologize. But the students never minded. He knew what they needed to hear. He showed them what it was like to think brilliantly about their discipline.

That lecture always lit a fire in them.

She entered the lecture hall just as the question-and-answer session ended. There was a tremendous roar of applause, and while the front rows converged upon the speaker, the back rows emptied quickly into the hallway outside. There the students clustered into knots, excitedly discussing what they’d just heard.

Molly Gerhard experienced a kind of culture shock, encountering these sober gen-twos after the more freewheeling gen-threes. It was like traveling back to the Victorian era. Port and cigars in the library, and scientists who wore formal clothes to autopsies.

Leyster moved slowly up the aisle, chatting with anyone who approached him. He was back among his own.

Molly’s primary mission today was to make an impression on as many grad students as possible, so that when she popped up in the Mesozoic, it wouldn’t seem suspicious. Somebody would remember meeting her and she wouldn’t be an inexplicably unqualified stranger but, rather, Dick Leyster’s unqualified niece. A clear-cut case of nepotism and not a mystery at all.

She closed her eyes, listening for the loudest voice of the many in the hall. Then she headed straight for the clique of students from which it originated, and waltzed right in.

“—body talks about land bridges,” the speaker was saying. She almost didn’t recognize Salley, who was apparently trying out a new and transient look involving red dye and a razor cut. “That’s because their teachers made such a big deal about the Bering Strait land bridge in grammar school. But land bridges between continents are rare. The more common way of getting around is island hopping.”

“You mean, swimming from island to island?” somebody asked.

“The islands would have to be damned close together for that. No, I’m talking plate tectonics. There are a couple of ways it could happen. You could have a microplate raft off across the ocean. The Baha Southern California microplate is moving up the coast, but if it were heading westward, it would fetch up against Siberia in a few tens of millions of years—these things happen. Or you could have a new island chain formed by a plate margin coming up. The dinos could cross the ocean without even being aware of it.”

“Is this commonly accepted,” Molly asked, “or is it your own theory?”

Salley stopped. “Excuse me. Who did you say you were?”

“Molly Gerhard. I’m Dick Leyster’s niece.”

“Wait. You know Leyster? Personally.”

“Well, I should, he’s—”

Taking Molly’s elbow, Salley steered herself away from the others, leaving the conversation unfinished. “What’s he like?”

“Um… stern, a little shy, kind of internal, you know?”

“I’m not interested in that kind of cult-of-personality crap,” Salley said impatiently. “Tell me what he’s like as a researcher.”

“Well, I’m not a paleontologist myself—”

“I can tell.” Salley dropped her arm as Leyster’s group moved past them. Abandoning Molly, she went hurrying after.

In Just a Dino Girl, Monk Kavanaugh had written of this very lecture that “Salley sat in the back row, enraptured. There was so much going on in Leyster’s brain! She knew there were things he suspected, or speculated, or intuited, that he was not about to say aloud because he could not prove them. She wanted to pry these secret possibilities out of him. She wanted to see him fly.”

By sheer luck, Molly had chanced upon a moment that was famous in paleontological gossip. She decided to tag along. She had never seen anything happen that would later wind up in a book.

She caught up just as Salley held up a battered, much-read copy of Leyster’s book and asked for his autograph. She saw Leyster’s modest smile, the way his hand dipped automatically into a pocket for his pen. “It’s not really very good,” he said. “It was the best I could do, given what we knew then, but so much of what we knew then was wrong.”

Then, overriding her polite protests, he asked, “Do you want it inscribed? Yes? How should I make it out?”

“To G. S. Salley. I don’t use my—”

“You!” He slammed the book shut and shoved it back into her hands. “Can’t I get rid of you?”

He turned his back on her, and strode away. Molly, watching, saw Salley’s look of bewilderment harden into anger. Then she too spun around, and stormed off in the opposite direction.

Just a Dino Girl also told how Salley, returning to her own time, would condense Leyster’s talk into a tightly-argued critique of his original work and submit it for publication to a geosciences journal. By luck, nobody involved in the peer review was in on the secret of time travel or, if they were, had heard Leyster’s lecture. She was careful not to use any information that wasn’t available in her own time, and so avoided the wrath of Griffin’s people. The paper, when it came out, did much to augment her professional luster and to diminish Leyster’s as well.

Molly had less than an hour before she had to escort Leyster back to D.C. She filled it as well as she could.

On the way to the limo, they turned a corner and almost walked into Salley. Leyster turned his head away. Salley’s face went white.

You’ve given her a knife, Molly thought. Then you spat in her face, and dared her to use it. That would be bad enough. But now you’ve turned your back on her. As if she were harmless.

Leyster really was a royal screw-up. But Molly didn’t say that. Nor did she tell him that he was a primary target of the Ranch’s terrorists. Molly never said anything without a definite end in mind.