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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. Camianage. 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 fu
“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, a
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 fu
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 fu
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 co
“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 ru
“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 du
“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.