Meridian - A Novel In Time (The Meridian Series) Page 17

  Paul was pulled with a strange conflict of emotions. On the one hand he was still in the throes of the elation he felt in making the time shift alive. The danger inherent in the operation was obvious. Even the visitor from the future had hinted that they had suffered many deaths in the Arch. His gratitude at being alive was fed by a surge of pride and satisfaction in the accomplishment. They were through; they had shifted in time! But to where? If Nordhausen was correct then the temporal coordinates were well off the mark. It was not merely an error of hours, minutes or even days. Nordhausen seem to believe they were many centuries off—even millennia.

  “You sure about this, Robert?” He didn’t want to believe that they could miss their target date so badly.

  “Look around, Paul. Kelly screwed the whole thing up, can’t you see that?”

  The more he stared at the ominous sky, the more Paul came to realize the truth. They were lost—buried in time. They had gone so far back that humans had not even evolved. The thought staggered him for a moment, and his face betrayed a curious mixture of awe and fear.

  “Now, how the hell will we get back, would you please tell me that?” Nordhausen had already transitioned from denial to anger, and he voiced the one obvious concern that he hoped Paul could quickly amend.

  “Don’t worry,” Paul was wide eyed as he looked at the terrain with new apprehension. “We won’t be here long.”

  “What do you mean?” Nordhausen latched on to the statement.

  “The machine is set to pull us out,” Paul explained. “Besides, Kelly is standing the watch on the shift. He’ll see what’s happened.”

  “Kelly? He’s the one that got us into this fix!” Nordhausen took no solace from Paul’s argument. “It’s a miracle he didn’t have us materialize inside solid rock, or somewhere up in that, so we could just plunge to our doom.” He gestured at the smoldering sky.

  “That can’t happen, “ Paul explained. “The pattern buffers prevent that sort of thing. The shift accounts for differences in the landforms over time, and moves us appropriately based on the reference point of the mass and gravity—” He stopped his explanation, seeing how Nordhausen’s face dropped as he started in on the physics. “Humans are never found alive while embedded in solid rock, or hovering a thousand feet above the atmosphere. The machine accounts for these things. Just take my word for it, OK?”

  “Well this wasn’t supposed to happen either, was it?” Nordhausen would not be put off so easily.”

  “Look, we missed our breaching point, that’s all.”

  “Missed it? You make it sound as if we just missed a damn BART train! We landed in the middle of the fucking Cretaceous, Paul—Do you realize that?”

  “Well what do you expect me to do about it?” Paul warmed to the argument a bit.

  “Get us out of here, that’s what!”

  “Calm down, Robert. Kelly’s will take care of us. He must have entered a bad variable.”

  “No shit!”

  “And he’ll find out what’s happened and take the appropriate action. Besides, the fail-safe will pull us out in time. Remember? We don’t belong here, and Time will see us safely home again.”

  “Well I wish I could be so certain.” Nordhausen was still frustrated, but he slowly composed himself, accepting his fate.

  Paul fingered the thin film of reddish-white substance on the rocks. “I’ll bet there’s iridium in this stuff.”

  “Iridium?”

  “Yes, it’s a common byproduct that fits with the major impact theory.”

  “There you go with that asteroid business again. You’re not going to just sit here and talk disaster theory, are you?”

  “Well why not? You put the clues together a moment ago. If we are where you think we are, then we’ve got a unique look at what may have happened during the last extinction event. No sense moping about it. Let’s do some science while we’re waiting for the retraction. All those clues were consistent with a major impact, right?”

  “I suppose your going to feed me that nonsense about some mysterious dark star.”

  “It’s not my theory,” Paul protested. “Alvarez and a few of his colleagues came up with the idea at U.C. Berkeley. They found all this stuff was prevalent on the K-T boundary: iridium, shocked quartz, tektites, little glass beads, and it was followed by a fern spike when most of the other pollen breeding plants died out. It’s happened before, you know.”

  “Only too well,” there was a complaint in Nordhausen’s tone. “Mass extinctions seem to occur on earth every 26 million years, so they came up with the idea that a small dark star called Nemesis was disturbing debris in the Oort cloud outside the solar system, and sending a rain of asteroids and comets down on us. Yes, Paul, I’ve heard that rubbish.”

  “Hell, Robert, look around! I’ll bet we’ve landed smack dab in the middle of the last major extinction event! We’re probably right on the K-T boundary, perhaps only a few years after the asteroid hit.”

  The Alvarez theory had been debated for some time in the scientific community after the discovery of a thin layer of sediments in old rock formations dating back to the Cretaceous period. Iridium had been found there in concentrations well above the norm. It was a relatively rare element on earth, usually deep under the surface, but was thought to be present in asteroids that would strike the planet at regular intervals. The other clues all supported this possibility as well. Tektites and shocked quartz were also byproducts of a massive collision where the ejecta would have been thrown up into the atmosphere, falling hundreds, even thousands of miles away. The resulting obscuration was made worse as raging fires added smoke and cinder to the mix. Sunlight struggled to reach the surface, and temperatures dropped very suddenly—not a good thing for cold blooded creatures like the Dinosaurs. Mass extinction followed as hundreds of thousands of species were wiped out. It had happened before, five times, throughout the earth’s long history. The K-T event, as it was called, ushered in the new era of the Tertiary period, where humans arrived very late in the process of evolution.

  “The K-T boundary. Yes, that makes good sense.” Nordhausen was finally starting to get his mind around the situation. “Looks like we’ve jumped out of the frying pan and landed in the fire. We were happily watching the sixth major extinction event, and now we get to take a peek at the fifth.”

  “Sixth extinction?”

  “Of course! We’re losing some 30,000 species or more per year in our time. That’s equivalent to the same die-off rate of this time period, the last great extinction that wiped out the dinos. Everyone focuses on them, God rest their souls, though the extinction in the marine life was much more severe. Maybe it was a comet or asteroid, though I’m inclined to side with the gradualists. Probably a combination of many things: climate change, competition from egg-eating mammals, volcanic activity, disease. They all played a part in the K-T event, and the asteroid was probably just the icing on the cake. It was one of your imperatives, Paul. They used to call them ‘Acts of God’ before you dreamt up your time theory, and what God wants, God gets. No more dinos.”

  “Strange,” said Paul. “Is it really that bad—back home I mean?”

  “What, the extinction? Certainly! Normal background loss for species is only about four or five per year. But we’ve been hard at work, day in and day out, doing the job of the next asteroid. Human civilization has had such a terrible impact on the planet that, by the time the next big hunk of rock arrives, the sixth extinction will probably have run its course. The asteroid will just be the icing on our cake, and the end of everything.”

  “You mean we’re causing the sixth extinction?”

  “Who else? We’ve been at it for thousands of years: invading and destroying habitats, cultivating one species in favor of another, introducing alien germs and creatures in unfamiliar environments, not to mention the pollution we cause. Hell, we’ve bred all the diversity out of wheat so we can have our toast in the morning. Now that plant is totally dependent on human cultivation to
survive. That’s just one tiny example—I could go on for hours. If you ask me, we’ve been up to a great deal of mischief, just futzing about trying to amuse ourselves. Unfortunately the planet has been paying the price. The dinos are long gone and perhaps we’re next in line if things keep on. These Holy Fighters who blew up Palma are hastening the process, but the rest of us are just as guilty. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns! We spend all our energy selling trinkets and trifles to keep the masses fat and happy, while the planet is dying right beneath our feet.”

  “Join the Green Party, Robert.”

  “You know I’m not political. I just do my bit in the classroom when I can. I figure if we can raise a few heads at a time something might be done about it. We treat this planet like it was our own private amusement park. We’ll just amuse ourselves to death, I suppose.”

  “Roger Waters,” said Paul.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. It was a great concert. You should have been there.” Paul’s eyes brightened with a thought. “Think there’s any dinosaurs left around here? We found that Ammonite thing. What if we come across a big dino carcass!”

  “Forget it, Paul. This isn’t a romp through Jurassic Park. Enough of this nonsense. What are we talking about? Kelly botched up the numbers, just like I said he would. How the hell are we going to get back? Would you explain that to me?” Nordhausen returned to the more immediate problem. He would leave the fate of the dinosaurs, and the planet, to another time.

  “We obviously can’t wait around sixty-five million years for the target trigger to pull us out,” said Paul. “But the fail-safe trigger is keyed to the half-life sequence and it should take effect in due time.”

  “You mean we’re stuck here for a while? Why can’t he just pull us out now?”

  “Kelly’s probably working on it,” Paul chided him. “If we went back too far, as we obviously have, the fail-safe would be timed to pull us out in due course. It’s really only a matter of hours in laboratory time. That would give us another shot at things. Kelly may be trying to hasten the process and work another solution right now.”

  “Is that what happened to the visitor?”

  “I think he was pulled out by the target trigger. Remember, he said he landed seven years before the target event, which was the night of our meeting. They knew they only had one shot at getting through the shadow of the Palma Event, so they didn’t program a fail-safe retraction. It was all or nothing. Our visitor just had to live out the seven years until the night of the meeting. It was his only chance of getting home—or of accomplishing his mission.”

  “Must have been hell for the man, sitting there in a monastery all that time.”

  “That was damn clever of him, I thought,” said Paul. “He needed to minimize contact with the outside world to prevent contamination. Find a good Trappist monastery and you can live a nice contemplative life, keeping your mouth shut most of the time so you don’t let anything slip out that could cause mischief. The danger of contamination is very real. I suppose the farther back you go, the more severe the outcome if you tamper with anything important.” He looked at his feet as he finished, almost as if he were afraid he might be squashing some insect out of existence, and all the successive generations of its offspring as well. “We’d better watch what we’re doing here.”

  Nordhausen was inspecting his robes, but soon became frustrated with the situation again. “So you’re telling me you have no idea how long we’ll be here? What are we supposed to do?”

  “Did you bring anything for breakfast?” Paul was very hungry, and amazingly light hearted considering the dilemma they were in. The excitement over the success of his theory was beginning to push away the disastrous implications of their failure on the time coordinates. Nordhausen gave him an infuriated look.

  “Breakfast? We were supposed to be on a quick sabotage mission in the Arabian Desert. Sorry, I forgot to bring a menu.” He stuck his hands inside his robe to warm them up when he remembered the small bundle Maeve had slipped into a pocket there. He fumbled for it, and pulled it out, sniffing at the rich aroma of the coffee beans inside. “I suppose we could brew this up, if you can find a Mr. Coffee machine around here.”

  Paul fished inside his own garments. “Maeve stuck something in my pockets too.” He produced a small mess kit of WWI vintage, along with a flask of water.

  Nordhausen was encouraged and he searched out all his other pockets. “I’ve got a knife,” he exulted, and an old fluid lighter!” He held out the lighter and flipped the cap open to thumb the flint roller. The lighter sparked and a tiny flame leapt up from the wick.

  “Good for Maeve!” Paul smiled. “Let’s look around. You gather up some of those dried out ferns and I’ll look for some rocks. Be sure you only take things that are clearly dead—nothing living, got that?”

  “You honestly think I can change the Time Meridian by simply plucking a live fern out of the ground? It’s got to be more resilient than that.”

  “You never know,” Paul warned him.

  “Well, if you’re going to be a stickler about things, we’ll be depriving the time line of all the fertilizer it might make of the dead leaves if we burn them.” Nordhausen gave him a smug look, pleased to hand him back his own fussiness by way of argument.

  “We’ll just hasten the decomposition process, that’s all. A little more cinder won’t throw this environment out of whack. I think we can safely light a small fire here, Robert.”

  “Unless we burn up one of your little pushpins in the effort.”

  Paul rolled his eyes. “Just look for some kindling, will you? We can crush a few of the beans inside the bag and use some cloth as a strainer. A cup of Peets would be just the thing I need right now. Sound good to you?”

  Nordhausen was finally persuaded. With nothing else to be done, they set about to find a dry spot for the fire. It took them some time, and several tries on the dampened fern leaves, but they were soon able to get a very small blaze going, sufficient for boiling Paul’s water in the mess kit tin. As Nordhausen labored over the makeshift fire pit a wry grin came to Paul’s face.

  “Do you realize what this is?”

  “It’s a real dilemma, that’s what it is.” The professor was in a sour mood. “It’s a disaster, a catastrophe, and a big joke.”

  “Right,” said Paul. “And we’ve just lit the first campfire made by human hands in the whole history of the earth!”

  Nordhausen gave him an odd look. “Why, I suppose you’re right. Now we’re going to sit here drinking coffee while we watch the dinosaurs die off. If anything else goes wrong on this mission we’ll probably end up getting stuck here.”

  “Maybe we should have waited for Maeve,” Paul exclaimed with a wry edge of humor. “I mean, you and I can’t do much about launching the human race from this point.”

  “Very funny.” Nordhausen was not amused. “What makes you think we would have to populate the earth from this point—to be certain the human race evolves? That’s a bit selfish, Paul. Under your theory the only moral thing we could do here if we don’t get pulled back would be to kill ourselves. I remember the issue being discussed in Maeve’s committee. They even planned a little painless suicide kit for stranded time travelers.”

  Paul sighed heavily, his mood deflating considerably. “I almost forgot about that,” he said looking around.

  “About what?”

  “This suicide business.” They had missed the mark, by the widest possible margin, and the mission was turning into the same disaster that had initiated it. He wondered if Time had not simply played an immensely cruel joke on them, sending them off to the K-T event to watch how the dinosaurs died while preventing them from tampering with the event that would lead to the demise of their own species. Perhaps nothing could alter the accelerating momentum of the sixth extinction that Nordhausen had talked about. Perhaps the Holy Fighters were only feeding a little more fuel into the fire that would soon extinguish the human race on earth forever.<
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  He thought about it all, as he sipped the coffee when it was ready. The steamy vapors and rich, earthy taste made him long for home. He no longer wanted to hunt dinosaurs or postulate on the theory of their demise. The professor was right. If anything else went amiss they might never see their own time again, and they would have to kill themselves. That thought sent him spiraling down to another level.

  “Robert,” he said softly.

  Nordhausen was savoring his coffee, studying the clouds overhead as they were driven by a rising wind. “What now?” He said, his reverie interrupted.

  “You know you were right about that.”

  “Right about what?”

  “We do have to kill ourselves if we get stuck here.”

  “What? God, you really are a piece of work. Things are bad enough and now you’re talking about suicide.”

  “But we’d have to do it, Robert. Don’t you understand? This bit with the fire is the least of our worries. Did you notice that I used up all the water?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything, were you planning on drowning me?”

  “No, you idiot. I used all the water so we could boil it and prevent any organisms from getting into this environment.”

  Nordhausen gave him a dismissive wave. “That’s nonsense. We’re both walking nurseries for a host of parasites, bacteria and possibly even viruses in our own bodies. In fact, if you want to look at things from an evolutionary standpoint, we’re just a convenient way for bacteria to get around on the planet. It once took take decades for bugs to migrate from one habitat to another. Now, when some idiot drinks bad water in Kinshasa and takes a midnight flight to Paris, everything in his gut is along for the ride! Look, don’t worry about this. The environment here is robust enough to deal with anything we’ve brought back with us. I’d be more worried about taking things forward in time, if I were you. Suppose this muck is crawling with some super bacteria that died out millions of years ago. If your fail-safe thing works, then we’d be bringing the damn bug home with a vengeance.”