Bones of the Earth

9. Trace Fossils

Washington, D.C.: Cenozoicera. Quaternary period. Holocene epoch. Modern age. 2045 C.E.

They held the paper autopsy in a conference room that looked like every other conference room Molly Gerhard had ever seen.

Griffin’s people had been given administrative space in the Herbert Hoover Building on Constitution Avenue. It was an inadequate run of offices squeezed from the Department of Commerce by DOD functionaries anxious to keep Griffin at arm’s length from the Pentagon and the actual workings of time travel. Occasional use of the conference room was only grudgingly permitted by the Bureau of Export. But it had a snazzy new Japanese whiteboard, and a conference table, and that was all she really needed.

“Don’t get your hopes too high,” Tom Navarro said. “We have a very weak case here.”

“I think it’s stronger than you think,” she said. “I’m betting we can sell it.”

She laid the papers out on the table in strict chronological order, with Robo Boy’s birth certificate in the upper left-hand corner, and her summary brief in the lower right.

She was reminded of a fossil slab that Leyster, in one of his mellower moods, had once shown her. It held the traces of pterosaurs dabbling in the mud of a shallow lake. To her uneducated eye, it had looked like nothing but random scratches. Leyster, however, had wanted to show her how paleontology had been done before time travel in order to demonstrate how much could be known from the very smallest of clues. So he had shown her the places where, swimming in shallow water, the pterosaurs had scuffed their feet against the lake bottom, leaving small parallel grooves with the occasional claw-tip shape among them. Here was a full pes print, and over there several manus prints. The pock marks were the imprints of beaks prodding in the mud for invertebrates. He had shown her the pterosaurs, no larger than ducks, dabbling in the water, disappearing suddenly as they dove for food, genially squabbling with each other for space. It had taken him an hour, but in that time he had recreated a world.

This, however, was her field of expertise, and within it she was as skilled as Leyster or any of his compatriots were in theirs. She knew how to trace a life and discern its hidden significance from the papers left behind in its wake. To another, they might be no more than scratches in mud. To her, they were the fossil trace of human emotion.

Griffin entered the conference room with Jimmy Boyle and Amy Cho in tow. Somehow, and despite the fact that he held the door for Amy Cho, he made them seem his entourage. Solicitously, he helped Amy down into a chair. He did not sit down himself, nor did Boyle. “All right,” he said. “Impress me.”

Molly started with the birth certificate. “Raymond Lawrence Bois. Born 9:17 A.M., February 14, 2019, in Akron City Hospital, Akron, Ohio. Father: Charles Raymond Bois. Mother: Lucinda Williams Bois, born Finley.”

She tapped on the whiteboard, drew a time line down one side, and with her pointer squirted the date to one end:

“He grew up in a vintage split-level in Franklin Township. Typical suburban childhood. Riding lawnmowers, memberships at the local pool.”

Next came a series of school records, starting with Turkeyfoot Elementary. As she read through each one, she squirted the dates onto the time line. Hidden in here were the mysterious origins of personality, and if they left no trace, there was nothing to be done about it. She would have to go with externalities. “Look at those grades. This is one bright kid.”

“Any disciplinary problems?” Griffin asked.

“Some. Nothing out of the ordinary. Now right here, sophomore year at Firestone High, he hits adolescence hard, and his grades go into a slump. Drops his AP classes and all extracurriculars. This continues until his senior year, when he finally realizes he needs the numbers to get into college, panics, and brings them back up.

“Fall of 2036, he enters Illinois State University. Normal, Illinois.”

“So he finally got his act together, did he?”

“He was placed on academic pro his first semester, and never got out of it. At the end of his freshman year, he was in danger of flunking out. So he transferred to the University of Akron.”

“Do they normally accept underachieving students?”

“His mother was a chemist at the Polymer Science Institute there. It seems likely she pulled a few strings.”

“Ah.”

“His grades remained lackluster. He was picked up by the campus police a couple of times for drunken behavior, once for public urination, once for grabbing a young lady’s breast in a manner she found offensive.” She put the individual dates up on the time line. A neat, unbroken row of numbers marched across the board. “No charges filed either time.

“I think by now we’ve got a pretty good picture of the sort of guy he was. Weak. Directionless. There was nothing he particularly wanted to do or achieve or become. He had the mental equipment, but lacked any goal that would make him actually exert himself. The only reason he didn’t drop out was that his parents were paying the tab and college provided him with a comfortable existence. Nevertheless, it was as good as written that he was never going to get his degree. He was on a downward spiral.

“Now look here.” She put an enlargement of the transcript up on the whiteboard so they could all see it, and circled the relevant numbers. “Out of nowhere, he pulls himself up out of his tailspin. Look at those grades! He got an A in French! How he managed that after such a sloppy beginning, I’ll never know. He can’t have gotten much sleep. Where did that kind of discipline come from?”

She put the date of his finals up on the board, but left an open space before it, where she inserted a large red question mark. “There aren’t a lot of things that can turn someone’s life around like that. A hitch in the military. Marriage. Or getting religion.”

“He found Jesus,” Amy Cho said warmly. She struggled up out of her seat, and stamped her cane for emphasis. “He discovered the solace and strength of the Lord!”

“He certainly did. We may never know what triggered his conversion. But we know it happened, because during the time he was burning the midnight oil to bring his grades up, he also got involved in Campus Ministries. For about six weeks. Then, abruptly, he quit.”

Amy Cho leaned heavily on the table with both hands and stared down at the transcript, as if it were a holy relic. “They were too mild for him! Liberals and Unitarians, weak tea the lot of them. He’d been touched by holy fire! He needed sacrifice! They offered him prayer meetings and recycling drives. He was looking for a cause that would consume him. One that would accept everything he had and demand more.”

Nobody doubted that she knew what she was talking about.

“He worked in a furniture factory that summer. No absences, no tardiness. In his off hours, he apparently wrote a few papers for creationist on-line journals. Most of them have been erased, but we found one that another creationist group pirated for their own website. In it, he calculated how much water it would’ve taken to cover the Earth during the Flood, and put forward several speculations as to where that excess water might have gone. It differed from most such papers in that it adhered rigorously to known science. In the end, he admitted that none of his speculations could account for the discrepancy in figures, and concluded that God must have worked a miracle.

“Junior year. He changed his major from English Lit to Geology.”

“How deeply involved was he in creationist circles at this time?”

“He was still hoping to discredit science using its own tools. He was an activist, but he hadn’t hooked up with the Ranch yet. We know this because now is when his father died.”

She added the date to the whiteboard:

“He didn’t attend the funeral.”

“There’s no record that he did,” Tom corrected her.

“There’s no record he attended the funeral. If the Ranch had been grooming him at that point, he would have been there. He would have been very careful to sign the register.”

“He was still a pilgrim,” Amy Cho said. She stared down at the papers as if she could read things from them that no one else could. “He moved from creation science to deep creationism. He fell in with the Wrath of Gideon. They talk a good game, but they’re riddled with informers, and everybody knows it. So he moved on. Finally, he discovered the Thrice-Born Brotherhood, and they recognized his potential.”

“You can document this?” Griffin asked Molly.

“No, of course not. It’s the separation of Church and State. Religious organizations don’t have to file membership lists anywhere. These damned fundamentalists don’t appreciate how unregulated they are.”

“So this part of the presentation is speculative, then?”

“Well… yes. But”—she moved swiftly to her next suite of papers—“here, for his senior year, you’ll note that his tuition check was posted from an apartment near the campus, rather than from his mother’s house.”

“Which means what?”

“She threw him out. He’d be hard enough to take as a failure. Imagine him burning with the righteousness of a new convert! But here’s the interesting question: Where did that money come from? Not from Mom. The check is written on his own bank account. He couldn’t possibly have earned enough over summer break to pay for it. For that matter, there’s no record he had a summer job at all.” She placed a red question mark on the time line to mark that summer. “So where was he?”

“Well?”

“We know one particularly well-funded group, don’t we?” Amy Cho said. “Lots of rich old men hoping to squeeze through the eye of the needle. Capitalist carnivores desperate to lie down with the lambs before it’s too late. Oh, Holy Redeemer Ranch does not lack for money.”

“Is that all?” Griffin asked. “Suspicion, innuendo, and a complete lack of physical evidence?”

“Sir, there’s a pattern here!” Molly squirted up the remaining dates, then faded them down so that the time line was dominated by the series of dark red question marks. “There’s a Ranch-shaped gap in our boy’s life. Every summer, every break, he disappears from the records. Do you have any idea how difficult that is? He doesn’t use a credit card. He doesn’t write checks. Where is he?”

“He’s on retreat,” Amy Cho said excitedly. “He’s just spent nine months in the belly of Great Satan Academia, his soul in constant mortal peril from humanism and scientific rationalism. The very first thing they’d want to do is to offer prayers of thanks for his safe return. They’d kill the fatted calf. Followed by fasting and purification. Imagine how filthy the poor boy must feel, pretending to be one of the Devil’s lackeys. Then, when he’s cleansed and rested…”

“A few of the lads would take him out for a bit of Christian rage,” Jimmy Boyle said. “They’d beat up a drug dealer or two, some faggots, maybe an abortionist if they’ve got one lined up. Just to keep the edge on him.”

“I take it this is undocumented as well,” Griffin said.

“It’s what I’d do if I were running him. It’s what anybody would do.”

She had them now, everybody but Griffin. Unfortunately, she was running up against the end of her trail. This was the tricky part. She was not allowed to look very deeply into his post-recruitment history nor at any part of that history in any great detail.

She drew a thick slash across the time line. “Here’s where we recruit him. We could hardly have avoided it. He’d been very carefully prepped. He had skills that we particularly wanted. He looked like a very attractive candidate.

“So what became of him? Almost immediately, he faded into obscurity. He made a competent but unimpressive job of the stratigraphic work that was expected of him. Transferred to Carnival Station and kept the animal register for a time. Transferred to Bohemia Station and ran the bird colony. Transferred to Mjolnir Station and spent a few months preparing skeletons for exhibitions. That’s tedious work. Transferred to Origin Station and prepped tissue specimens. Even more tedious. Transferred to Sundance Station and maintained the boats. Transferred to Survival Station, where he now runs the commissary, stows supplies, and has complete access to the time funnel.

“That’s a lot of transfers, and a lot of wasted potential. But in less than two years, personal time, it’s got him exactly where he wants to be.”

Time for the big wrapup. Molly took a deep breath. “Sir, we’re requesting—”

Griffin held out a hand to stop her.

“It’s not good enough,” he said. “There is no judge anywhere I can take this to and get a warrant from.”

“I’m not requesting a warrant, just permission to run a proper investigation. Let me ask a few questions. Get the FBI to put a tracer on him one of those summers, see exactly where he goes. We know he’s our mole. I’m just asking that you let me prove it.”

“I’m afraid that can’t be done.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not the way it was done. Jimmy? If you would.”

While Molly tidied her papers into a pile, Jimmy Boyle placed one black binder before everybody’s place. Then, almost ritually, he helped Amy Cho back into her seat.

They all opened their binders.

Griffin took Molly’s pointer and erased everything from the whiteboard. He pulled up a new time line. “This is two years and three months of Robo Boy’s life, from his own perspective. During this time, he bounces all over the Mesozoic, but we’re ignoring that. Here to the left, it begins with his being recruited to join our merry little band of pranksters. To the right, at the end of our examined period, while he was working at Hilltop Station, is the date the opal man, Tubal-Cain or whoever it was supposed to be, was shipped. Okay? Robo Boy never picked it up. We had people watching, but he never came close to it. Something scared him off.

“Here, just before his transfer to Hilltop, is where our second sting is being placed. We’ve baited a trap with Salley and Leyster. He’s going to strand them in the Maastrichtian. We’re going to investigate. Again, there won’t be the physical evidence to prove he was at fault. But three months later, when we yank the expedition back, we can use their testimony to convict him.”

“Wait,” Tom said. “Why would you place a second sting just before the first? No wonder Robo Boy was spooked.”

“We already knew the first sting didn’t work,” Griffin said testily. “So we’re placing the second sting as early as possible in order to minimize the time available to him. We want to get him out of our hair as quickly as possible, remember?”

Molly flipped through the material in the binder, scanning the headings and subheadings, reading the captions. The final page was a casualty list.

She looked up. “Five deaths?”

“A terrible thing,” Griffin said. “But unavoidable.”

“Five deaths? Unavoidable?”

“They all knew the risks.” Griffin turned a page in his binder. “Tom, Molly, your part in this operation will be to—”

She stood so fast the chair toppled over behind her. “This isn’t what I took this job to accomplish. I refuse to be a part of it.”

“According to our files, you play your part as directed.” He tapped his binder impatiently. “So, please, spare us this display of histrionics.”

Jimmy Boyle’s face was like stone. Amy Cho looked alarmed. Tom Navarro had raised his hands and was shaking his head. Calm down, he meant. Choose your fights carefully. Never do anything irrevocable when you’re angry.

She ignored them all.

“You don’t intimidate me, and you can’t con me either. All this I-have-the-files-and-I-know-the-future bullshit doesn’t cut it. I’m not going to go along with your filthy little plan. I’m going over your head. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll quit. So your files are wrong. One way or the other, they’re wrong.”

Griffin made an elaborately bored grimace and flicked his fingers toward the door. “Go. See how much good it does you.”

In a rage, she left the room.

She stormed down the hall to the Old Man’s office. Normally, the door was closed and the office was dark. But on her first day here, the Old Man had promised that the door would be open, “anytime you need to see me.”

The door was open for her.

She went in.

The Old Man looked up from his work. It was uncanny how much he looked like Griffin while somehow feeling like a completely different person. More solitary, in a wolfish sort of way. More deeply scarred.

The fingertips of one hand lightly stroked the skull he kept on his desk. Involuntarily, she remembered the half-facetious rumor that it was a trophy from a hated enemy he had somehow defeated. “Come in,” he said. “Close the door, have a seat. I’ve been expecting you.”

She obeyed.

It was like entering an ogre’s den. Thick curtains kept out the sunlight. Heavy wooden furniture held a clutter of mementos and framed photographs. He even had an Quetzalcoatlus skull propped up in the corner. It was as if he dwelt within his own hindbrain.

“Sir, I—”

He held up a hand. “I know why you’re here. Give me credit for—” He stifled a yawn. “Give me that much credit, anyway. You’re hoping that age has mellowed me. But if it hasn’t, you think you’re prepared to quit.

“Alas, it simply isn’t that easy. Your Griffin made the decisions he did because I told him to. He didn’t like it any more than you do. But he understood the necessity.”

Molly’s heart sank. She prided herself on being able to see deeper into a face than most, but the man was unreadable. He might be a saint or a devil. She honestly couldn’t tell which. Looking into his eyes was like staring down a lightless road at midnight. There was no telling what might be down there. Those eyes had seen things she could not imagine.

She took a deep breath. “Then I’m afraid I must tender my resignation. Effective immediately.”

“Let me show you something.”

The Old Man removed a sheet of paper from a drawer. “This is a copy, of course. I just returned from a ceremony where you were presented the original.” He slid it across the table to her.

It was a citation. The date had been blacked out, as had most of the text. But her name, in black Gothic letters was at the top, and several phrases remained. “For Exceptional Valor” was one.

“I can’t tell you what you did—what you’re going to do—and I can’t tell you when you’ll do it. But twenty people are alive because of your future actions. You got into security because you wanted to make a difference, right? Well, I just saw an old woman kiss your hand and thank you for saving the life of her son. You were embarrassed, but you were also pleased. You told me that that one instant justified your entire life.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Of course you do.” He took the paper from her hands and returned it to his drawer. “You simply can’t imagine what I could possibly say to keep you on board.”

“No. I can’t.”

He looked at her with a strange glitter in his eye. He likes this, Molly thought. Corruption was the final pleasure of men such as he. Her original mission was lost. Now she wanted only to escape his presence before he managed to drag her down into the mire of complicity and guilt with him. She simply wanted to get out of this room unsoiled.

“Have you ever wondered,” the Old Man asked, “where time travel came from?”

Carefully, she said, “Of course I have.”

“Richard Leyster told me once that the technology couldn’t possibly be of human origin. Nobody could build a time machine with today’s physics, he said, or with any imaginable extension of it. It won’t be feasible for at least a million years.

“As usual, his estimate was correct but conservative. In point of fact, time travel won’t be invented for another forty-nine-point-six million years.”

“Sir?” His words didn’t make sense to her. She couldn’t parse them out.

“What I’m telling you now is a government secret: Time travel is not a human invention. It is a gift from the Unchanging. And the Unchanging are not human.”

“Then… what are they?”

“If you ever need to know, you’ll be told. The operant fact is that the technology is on loan. As is ever the case with such gifts, there are a few strings. One of which is that we’re not allowed to meddle with causality.”

“Why?” Molly asked.

“I don’t know. The physicists—some of them—tell me that if even one observed event were undone, all of time and existence would start to unravel. Not just the future, but the past as well, so that we’d be destabilizing all of existence, from alpha to omega, the Big Bang to the Cold Dark. Other physicists tell me no such thing, of course. The truth? The truth is that the Unchanging don’t want us to do it.

“They’ve told us that if we ever violate their directives, they’ll go back to the instant before giving us time travel, and withhold the offer. Think about that! Everything we’ve done and labored for these many years will come to nothing. Our lives, our experiences will dissolve into timelike loops and futility. The project will have never been.

“Now. You’ve met these people—the paleontologists. If you told them that the price of time travel was five deaths, what would they say? Would they think the price was too high?”

His face grew uncertain in her eyes. She squeezed them tight shut for the briefest instant. When she opened them again, she felt compelled to stand and turn away from him. On the wall was a photograph. It had been taken at the opening of the dinosaur compound in the National Zoo, and showed Griffin and the then-Speaker of the House stagily pulling opposite ends of a T. rex wishbone. She stared at their stiff poses, their insincere grins.

“I won’t be a part of it. You cannot make me responsible for those deaths.”

“You already are.”

She shook her head. “What?”

“You remember that week you spent at Survival Station? Tom told you to make sure that Robo Boy heard that Leyster and Salley would be leading the first Baseline expedition. Tom got his directions from Jimmy, who was acting in response to a memo that Griffin should be writing up right now. You’ve already played your part.”

The Old Man spread his hands. “Can you go back and undo everything you did and said back then? Well, no more can I undo these five deaths.”

“I’ll quit anyway! I won’t be used like this!”

“Then twenty people die.” Griffin smiled sadly and spread his hands. “This is not a threat. Later in life, you’ll happen to be the right person in the right place at the right time. Resign now, and you won’t be there. Twenty people will die. Because you quit.”

Molly squeezed her eyes tight, against her tears. “You are an evil, evil man,” she said.

He made a warm, ambiguous sound that might have been a chuckle. “I know, dear. Believe me, I know.”