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“How long have you been here,” Griffin asked, “with her?”
“One month.”
“It must have been difficult.”
Salley moved a little closer to him. “You have no idea,” she said angrily. “That has to be the single most arrogant and self-centered and… and manipulative creature in existence.”
Griffin smiled sadly. “You haven’t met the Old Man yet.”
“Oh God,” Salley said. “I am so ashamed.”
“You shouldn’t be ashamed of something you did not do,” Griffin said.
“But I am! I am! How could I not be, knowing that she’s me?”
Suddenly Salley was crying. Griffin placed his arms around her, comfortingly, and she let him.
“It’s fu
“Yeah,” Griffin said. “Fu
“I can’t keep a single god-damned resolution I make,” she said bitterly. “Not to save my life.”
Jimmy moved away. There was nothing more to be learned here.
Gertrude was still talking, of course.
“Did you ever notice,” she said, “how all the stations are set at the end of an age? Just before a major extinction event? Did you ever wonder why the station in Washington should be different?”
“Biologically speaking,” Jimmy said, “our home age is in the middle of one of the greatest extinction events in the history of the planet. Even if not a single species more died off after our time, it would still be one of the Big Six.” He’d been around scientists long enough to have picked up that much, anyway.
“Perhaps,” Gertrude said. “Yet look around you. We’re extinct, humanity, I mean, and have been so for a long, long time.”
“How?” Molly Gerhard whispered. “How did we die off?”
“That,” Gertrude said firmly, “I’ll leave as an exercise for the student.”
There was an odd look on her face, triumphant and yet yearning. She was lonely, Jimmy realized. The old thing had been living here in splendid isolation so long she’d almost forgotten how to get along with other human beings. But she still felt the lack of their company.
He felt terribly sorry for her. But at the same time, he didn’t feel called upon to do anything about it. That wasn’t part of his job.
A chime sounded.
“What was that?” Molly Gerhard asked.
“It’s time,” Gertrude said, “to meet our sponsors.”
The gate was located in a small room at the center of Gertrude’s tower. Now a door opened, and one of the Unchanging emerged. “We have come,” it said, “to take you to the meeting.” To Gertrude: “Not you.” To the others: “Now.”
18. Peer Review
Lost Expedition Foothills: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 65 My B.C.E.
The raft trip down the Eden was slow and languid. They were not disturbed once by crocodilians, though they saw many. And because the migrations were not entirely over yet and the river meandered through more varied terrain than existed back in Happy Valley, Leyster was able to add several rare dinosaurs to his life list. He got clear sightings of betrachovenators, cryptoceratops, fubarodons, and jabberwockies. Once he even saw a Cthuluraptor imperator in all its terrifying splendor. They were species he had never seriously hoped to see, and it put him in a good mood.
Jamal was still a little weak from the aftereffects of his fever. But his broken leg had begun to knit over the weeks that it had taken to build the raft. He was looking forward to the day when the splint came off. There were times, in fact, when he insisted that his leg was already healed, and the thing could be removed immediately. But Daljit refused to allow it. “After everything I put up with, watching over you,” she said, “I am not taking any chances of a repeat performance. I am not going to be Florence fucking Nightingale ever again. Got that?”
They had considered other means of returning home, but settled on the raft as being the safest method of transporting Jamal. It broke Leyster’s heart to cut up an entire coil of rope to lash the logs together, but there was no helping it. Tamara christened it the John Ostrom, after the man who had established dinosaurs as active creatures and the ancestors of birds, and she stuck an upright stick with a handful of bright dinosaur feathers tied to its tip between the logs at the bow for luck.
Their trip began early in the morning, when they loaded all their possessions onto the raft, loosed the moorings, and used long poles to push it out into the river. Water birds were diving for fish in the smooth brown water. They exploded into the air at the raft’s approach.
Tamara stood at the stern ma
Leyster was thinking about the infrasound paper and idly admiring the sculptural beauty of their bodies, when a pterosaur’s shadow touched the raft, then soared toward shore.
He turned quickly, and caught the briefest flash of the animal disappearing behind a massive bank of willows, into a rookery that he could hear but not see. In that lucid instant, everything came together for him.
Interspecific infrasound communication in a late Maastrichtian community of predator and prey species
“Okay, I’m ready to start composing the paper,” Leyster a
Composition was, of necessity, a mental exercise. Of all their dwindling resources, the rarest and most valued was paper. They had communalized all notebooks and passed an iron law that nothing could be written in any of them without the consent of all.
As a result, Leyster had had to train his memory so he could compose their scientific papers in his head, recite them to the tribe to get their feedback, and then, only when all objections had been dealt with, transcribe the words in his tiniest, neatest hand.
“What’s the title?” Tamara asked. Daljit and Jamal sat up to hear.
He told them.
“Not very catchy, is it?” Jamal said.
“It’s not supposed to be catchy. It’s supposed to convey information in as clear and specific a fashion as possible.”
“Yeah, but…”
“Oh, Jamal just wants it to be commercial,” Daljit said. “So he can license the gaming rights and market a set of plastic action figures to Burger King.”
Jamal flushed. “I withdraw my objection.”
She gave him a squeeze. “I’m just teasing you, sweetie-pie. I know you’re not like that anymore.” Then, as an afterthought, she said to Leyster, “You’re not going to include Chuck’s goofball notion, are you?”
“I might.”
“Refresh my memory,” Jamal said. “Exactly what was his theory again?”
“To begin with, he posited that since the major dinosaurs are capable of hearing infrasound, they would also be able to hear the mountains shifting and the continents moving underfoot. That movement is so slight and regular that they could then orient themselves by it. It would provide a sonic compass for their migrations—they’d simply head toward where the world sounded right to them.
“Now, when the Chicxulub impactor struck the Earth, it would have set up reverberations that lasted for years. That’s elementary. Major earthquakes do that all the time.
“But Chuck speculated that, since the impact was so much greater than any earthquake, dinosaurs would then be deafened to the steady noises that tell them where they are. They wouldn’t know where to go for the migrations. He further speculated that the noise might be great enough that they would no longer be able to communicate. Thus rendering their feeding strategies useless.