Cretaceous Dawn Read online

  “Office of Naval Research,” she said. “They want to keep our work safe and secret. The security guards are at lunch right now, or they probably wouldn’t have let you in.”

  “Security guards?” Julian was shocked.

  Yariko laughed her wonderful rich laugh. “Don’t worry. They won’t break your knees.”

  “Then tell me about these secret experiments,” he said, hitching his chair a little closer and lowering his voice.

  “I’ll give you the short version, and skip the incriminating details. What do you know about quantum gravity?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t grimace,” Yariko said. “It’s not that bad. The general ideas are simple enough. Two planets attract each other because they exchange gravitons, quantum particles. In theory. But the theory’s a mess, and the correct mathematical form of it has never been worked out. A great sticking point is that nobody has detected gravitons. Naturally, people would like to measure these particles before believing in them; or, better yet, we’d like to produce them in the lab.”

  “Is that what you’re working on here? Gravitons?”

  “Never mind that. I didn’t call you to look at gravitons. I called you because for a few weeks now we’ve been producing some, ah, unexpected particles.” She scratched her nose with the end of a pen.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. Particles like pebbles. Twigs. And beetles.”

  Julian laughed. “You’ve got beetles in the lab? Are you sure they aren’t cockroaches?”

  “I didn’t call you here to insult us,” Yariko said, and they both grinned. “The graviton vault is sealed—airtight, in fact, during the runs. Nothing gets in or out.”

  “But you can’t create beetles out of thin air,” Julian said. “There must be a nest—”

  “Of course we can’t just create them,” Yariko interrupted. “They already exist; somehow, we’re pulling them into our vault when we do these runs. What we’ve stumbled on,” and she sat up straight and looked right at Julian, “is spatial translocation of mass.”

  “Spatial . . . you mean you’re transporting things from somewhere else? But that’s incredible!” Julian didn’t know whether to laugh again or not.

  Yariko nodded. “An apt word. What we’d like to know is where the things are coming from. Right under the building? Or several miles away? Or even more? We have one indication so far; but I’m hoping you can tell us more.”

  She turned back to the computer and opened an image file. A beetle appeared on the screen, digitally photographed in several orientations. It was garishly colored, red and gold with a hint of green in the carapace, and it had extremely long antennae.

  Julian’s mouth fell open. “Where did you get these pictures?” he said, leaning closer to the screen to study them better.

  “I took them,” Yariko said. “It was only just alive, so I was able to lay it on its back here, and get the details of the underside. Here’s a close-up of its leg, and here’s its little face,” she added, tapping the screen with her pen.

  “You took. . . .” Julian sat back and stared at her. “But, but that’s impossible. This beetle doesn’t exist any more.”

  “What do you mean it doesn’t exist?”

  “I mean it doesn’t exist. It’s extinct.”

  “It died out?”

  “It disappeared about—”

  Yariko interrupted. “But it’s not. We’ve found several of this kind, in fact. Some arrive quite alive, I promise you.”

  “I tell you, this is an extinct insect,” Julian insisted. “One of the archostemata, probably the Parasabatinca genus. The details on the antennae, the unique joints on the legs, the shape of the carapace . . . but how could anyone know the color? Color isn’t fossilized.” He looked up again from the images in the screen. “Show me this beetle.”

  “I can’t,” Yariko said. “It’s gone. Disappeared. I told you, they don’t persist.”

  Julian stood up and began to pace, suppressing a rising impatience. “Are you telling me you actually discovered a living representative of a beetle thought to be long extinct, and you let it go?”

  “I didn’t know it was ‘long extinct,’” Yariko said, and she sounded exasperated. “I only know that it came from somewhere and was translocated through space into our vault during an experimental run to measure gravitons. I thought you might be able to tell us where it came from, and where some of the other samples came from. I want to know how far these objects are being moved.”

  Julian sat down again. “I’m finding this very hard to believe,” he said. “And what does it have to do with your gravitons?” Somehow it was easier to believe in the spontaneous creation of gravitons, which were effectually meaningless to him, than the spontaneous creation of beetles.

  “I can’t tell you that,” Yariko said. “It’s classified.”

  A deep voice suddenly boomed out of the explosion-proof vault. “Classified, my ass. Tell him about it. Who are you talking to anyway? Is that your paleontologist?”

  The heavy round door of the vault swung wide, and Julian blinked in surprise as a huge German shepherd leaped out of the portal.

  Yariko laughed. “Hilda,” she explained. “She’s part of the staff. Against university policy and illegal of course, but nobody minds.” The dog trotted over to Julian and thrust her nose into his lap.

  Next an enormous man with a grizzled beard climbed out, carefully squeezing himself through the small opening. He came forward with his hand extended.

  “Whitney, is it?” His voice filled the whole room, and his handshake was equally vigorous and overpowering. “I’m Shanker. Yorko’s colleague. We’ve been working on this project together. Pleased to meet you. Yorko’s been telling me about you, and you’re just exactly the man for us. What’s that? Doughnuts?” He was looking at Julian’s grocery-bag briefcase, and his whole face seemed to light up at the prospect of eating something.

  “A book on insects,” Julian said, apologetically.

  “Well, no time for doughnuts anyway. Yorko and I were just setting up for another experimental run.”

  Julian was startled by the name, but Dr. Shanker didn’t seem to realize what he’d said. Yorko was his nickname for Yariko, as Julian soon realized; or maybe he was incapable of pronouncing it correctly.

  Julian had heard the stories about Dr. Shanker, both from Yariko and from his own students who took physics classes. The man was known to teach with great flair and enthusiasm and was beloved by his students. He exercised at the gym every day and had a tremendous physique, even though he was sixty-five. The other faculty thought he was loud and coarse, and he had been married and divorced three times before finally choosing to live alone with his dog. Despite such gossip there was something hearty and straightforward about him that Julian immediately liked.

  He shook Julian’s hand and clapped him on the shoulder, and then he turned to Yariko and said, “What have you told him? Anything?”

  “Only the by-product,” she said. “The beetles and such. He’s not a physicist.”

  “Good. You just missed the morning run, Whitney, but we’re about to start up again right now. It’s hard to predict how long they’ll persist. A few days, some of them. Or a few minutes. Then they fizz out, or ‘revert’ as we hypothesize. The greater the mass, the longer they’ll persist—linear function—but there’s a lot of statistical fluctuation.”

  “He has no idea what you’re talking about,” Yariko said.

  “Good, good,” Dr. Shanker said, unperturbed. “He’ll see.” He turned to Julian again. “It’s the triumph of the little guy,” he said. “Low energy physics, on a shoestring budget. No cyclotron, no particle accelerator, no nothing, no big bucks. What do you think, Whitney, how much is the lab worth? Take a guess—what’s the dollar worth of all our equipment?”

  Julian had no idea. “How much?”

  “Ten million,” he said. “Tops.”

  To Julian it sounded like a staggering amount, but Sha
nker seemed to take it as near poverty.

  “With brains,” Dr. Shanker said, tapping his forehead with no sense of modesty, “with brains, there’s no limit to what you can do.”

  Julian looked at Yariko, ready to raise his eyebrows. But she didn’t return the look, and Dr. Shanker continued.

  “For a while now we’ve been producing these by-products on almost every run of the experiment. That’s where the beetles come in. We’ve been hesitant to make an official report, because that pack of ONR regulators would descend on us and take the experiment out of our hands. We don’t want that to happen. That’s why we’ve snuck you in here in such an unofficial fashion. Yorko says you’re a good ecologist, with a sharp eye for detail, and that’s what we’re looking for right now. What do you think of this?”

  He opened another jar and held out a small black stone.

  Julian turned to the light and studied it. “This was formed at a high temperature,” he said instantly. “You see the crystals? Slow cooling, especially in the middle here. I take it this is a cross section?”

  Yariko nodded. “We split it and sent half to Geology for analysis. It’s the only stone that didn’t revert. But they all looked similar.”

  “What’s ‘revert?’” Julian asked.

  “They disappear, after being moved to specific places in the lab. We think they’re going back to their original location.”

  Julian handed the pebble back. “So that’s what happened to the beetles? How come none of them stayed here?”

  “Well, we don’t know yet. . . .” Yariko began, but Julian interrupted.

  “I need you to get another one right away,” he said. “One of those beetles. If you’ve found a living specimen of Parasabatinca, if I can identify the species, why it’ll be the biggest find in. . . .” he stood and began pacing again, rubbing his hands. What a coup it would be! “Can you do another run, or whatever you call it? Can I watch?”

  Yariko and Dr. Shanker looked at each other. Julian stopped and pointed to the pictures still up on the computer screen. “Don’t you see? This is huge. If you’ve actually found living specimens, if these things still exist somewhere, well it’s like discovering a living dinosaur. Can’t you see how exciting that would be?”

  Dr. Shanker grinned and clapped Julian on the back, rather too hard. “So you’re interested in our beetles. Good, good. We’ll try to get one for you. Now: no more talk. You can see for yourself. Yorko, battle stations!”

  Yariko took off the tattered lab coat she wore over her jeans and T-shirt and manned the computer. Dr. Shanker climbed back into the vault. “Just to check the alignment,” he said. Hilda leaped through the portal after him.

  Julian stood outside and peered into the vault. It was a small chamber, perfectly cubical, maybe ten feet to a side, and the walls were entirely metal. Lead lined, he was told later, as well as lined with a faraday cage to keep out radio signals and other static. It was lit by floodlights that were set into circular pits in the ceiling and screened off by the faraday cage.

  There was a low shock-proof table in the center of the vault, and bolted to the table top were various instruments and canisters, a little bit of copper tubing connecting mysterious pressure chambers, a thicket of gauges and dials, and electrical wires, green, red, blue, and white, that had been meticulously soldered in place by hand.

  A great twisting blue and red cable came down from a hole in the ceiling and fed the equipment. Yariko had once told him how she’d set it all up over the past few months: one of the reasons she worked at night as well as by day, since the delicate adjustments necessary were easily disturbed by noise and vibrations. Dr. Shanker was now kneeling beside the table holding a jeweler’s screwdriver in his massive hand, adjusting a calibration screw and watching one of the dials with the intensity of a true and dedicated scientist.

  Julian felt a strange excitement. If true, this would be the oddest discovery he’d ever made. He imagined the headlines: “Paleontologist discovers living fossil of long-extinct coleoptera in a physics lab.” He grinned.

  Finally Dr. Shanker stood up. He turned, with his finger to his lips, and leaned out of the portal. “No talking,” he whispered. “The vibrations will throw it off again. We don’t want to produce the graviton bomb here—although ONR might be intrigued if we were all killed in an explosion.” He leaned farther out and whispered to Yariko, “Have you run the start-up routine?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Get out of there. I’m about to execute.”

  “Try a level six perturbation.”

  “Level six?” Yariko paused, her fingers on the keyboard.

  “Too high, you think? It should increase the probability of a good result. And Whitney’s come all the way over here just to witness the impossible.”

  She grinned. “All right. Get out, close the door.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Shanker said. “Nobody will know. I want to watch and monitor the result.”

  “No,” Yariko said. “Get out of there. Never mind that it’s illegal—it’s dangerous, at such a high energy level.”

  It sounded like a long-standing argument between them. Julian wondered why it was dangerous, but he didn’t dare interrupt to ask.

  “If you insist,” Dr. Shanker said, “I’ll close the door.” He retreated inside the vault, and coolly reached out and pulled the door shut on himself

  Yariko looked up at Julian and shook her head. “He’s going to get hurt someday, but it won’t be my fault. I’ve warned him plenty of times. Do you want to step out?”

  “Step out?”

  “The risk is small, but not zero. Graviton vaults have been known to explode, and this one is wound up tight with these settings.”

  “If you’re staying, I’m staying,” Julian said. “I’m not missing this. I want to see that beetle.” He might have to scramble to prepare for his one o’clock class, but he wasn’t going to miss this for anything.

  “OK then.” Yariko turned back to her console, typed a few commands, and then paused with her finger hovering over the return key. “Here goes,” she said, and pressed it.

  A string of numbers began to scroll up the screen, too fast to read. The other five computers on the counter top were slave machines, running routines, displaying numbers and status messages, none of which Julian understood. There was a clicking sound through the door of the vault, which was still open a crack. Julian looked at his watch and counted off a minute—a tense one.

  The clicking began to speed up, like a mechanical toy running too fast; and then suddenly it stopped.

  There was a moment of silence, and the door of the vault swung open. Hilda poked her head over the lip of the portal, and then Dr. Shanker looked out. He was grinning; he stuck out his big hairy fist with his thumb jutting up.

  “So far so good,” he whispered. “Keep it quiet still. We don’t want anything vibrating while it powers down.” His head disappeared again into the vault.

  “Did it work?” Yariko whispered eagerly, getting out of her chair and stepping forward on tiptoe. “What are the readings?”

  But at that moment a door slammed in the next room, and it sounded like a cannon shot bursting into the silence. The security guards had returned early from lunch, and could be heard talking and laughing in the front room of the lab.

  Yariko’s expression changed to alarm at the noise. The door of the vault should have been closed, sealing out sound and other vibrations; but as in any lab, exact protocols were followed only during inspection visits. With the guards off, and students still in class, safety measures were more relaxed.

  A few seconds passed. Yariko’s scowl relaxed into a wry smile. She shook her head and whispered something before returning to the computer. The guards could be heard leaving the front room again. Julian opened his mouth to ask what exactly the experiment was, and if it had created another beetle.

  But Yariko was staring at the computer screen with a frightened expression on her face. She hit a few keys, appa
rently without effect, and then she got up and ran toward the vault.

  Julian started to ask what was wrong but he never got the words out. Nor did he make it to class that afternoon.

  TWO

  Science is by definition an iterative process, and scientists, those observers of the natural world, are drawn to the philosophy by their innate curiosity. The world view of science is changeable, constantly re-viewable, with never-ending caveats, complexities, and surprises: it is, in fact, a coarse reflection of the natural world. And therein lies the fascination.

  —Julian Whitney, Lectures on Cretaceous Ecology

  The explosion was deafening in the confined, concrete-walled room: a sharp crack like a massive electrical discharge. Julian instinctively pulled into a crouch with his arms over his head. There was a flash of blue light, and the circular door of the vault blew wide open and slammed against the wall. Smoke poured from the aperture, and the room filled up with the acrid smell of burnt electrical circuits.

  Yariko was the first to recover from the shock; she darted to the opening and leaned in, fanning aside the smoke with her hand. “Dr. Shanker,” she hissed. “Are you all right? Can you hear me?” To Julian’s horror, she climbed inside.

  Even in the first instant of fear, Julian noted that Yariko did not yell; if anything she was almost whispering. His ears, recovering from the explosion, barely registered her voice. For several more seconds he didn’t move, not knowing what would happen next. There might be another explosion. The vault might be on fire. He wished Yariko would get out.

  He didn’t want to think about Dr. Shanker, in the center of the explosion. He felt slightly sick.

  “Julian.” It was Yariko’s voice, barely reaching him. She was looking out of the vault, her eyes already red from the smoke. “Come here. I need your help.”

  Realizing he’d been crouching half under the counter while Yariko charged into the smoke, Julian hurried over and peered in after her, dreading to see blood everywhere. The smoke was already dispersing, although the smell was choking and it stung his eyes. The equipment on the center table was partially burnt. Some of the dials had been torn off and lay scattered about the room, their glass faces glittering in shards on the floor. Hilda cringed in the corner with her tail between her legs. Dr. Shanker knelt, clutching one side of his face, blood congealing in his beard. His hands were trembling.