Bones of the Earth

16. Buddy System

Lost Expedition Foothills: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 65 My B.C.E.

When sunset came, they set up the poptent in a sheltered spot in a grove of sycamores and fell asleep almost immediately.

In the morning, Chuck was the first out, whistling cheerily. The instant he left the tent, however, the whistling cut off.

He stuck his head back in and, with quiet urgency, said, “Don’t make any fast movements or loud noises. Grab your things and get out of the tent. Now.”

“I hope this isn’t another one of your—” Tamara began, crawling out, spear in hand and blouse only half buttoned. “Oh, shit.”

A herd of geistosaurs had moved into the grove. It was hard to count their numbers in the dawn light, but there were at least forty of them. They were unhurriedly stripping the leaves from the lower branches of the sycamores.

The geistosaurs were almost dead white, with blotchy black markings scattered across their bodies and thick black rings around their eyes. Those rings should have made them look comic, but did not. Their markings, combined with their absolute silence (Geistosaurus was the only mute hadrosaurine Leyster knew of) gave them a spooky solemnity, as if they were spirit animals that had wandered into reality from the totemic lands of the dead.

They dared not try to slip away. Any large animal was potentially dangerous. And though a geistosaur was no more aggressive than a Brahma bull or a water buffalo, it was considerably larger. If they startled one, it could easily trample them all.

Nor would climbing a tree be of any use. It might save them from a ceratopsian, but not a hadrosaur. When they reared up onto their hind legs, the geistosaurs could reach all but the highest branches. Those, they could shake savagely enough to dislodge anything clinging there.

So they sat scrunched up against the trunks of the sycamores for several hours, hoping to escape notice, while the ghostly white-and-black giants browsed their way through the grove, pale animals among the pale trees. “Under other circumstances,” Chuck muttered underneath his breath, “I’d be enjoying this. We’ve got front row seats here.”

“I can’t get a handle on their social interplay,” Leyster whispered back. “As a rule, the smaller adults seem to be subordinate to the larger. But—”

“Would you two kindly shut the fuck up?” Tamara whispered. “We don’t want to stampede them.”

At that instant, the phone rang.

As one, every geistosaur in the grove lifted its head in alarm. For a long, frozen instant, nothing moved. The phone continued ringing, an alien noise completely unlike anything these animals could ever have heard before.

Then they fled.

They scattered like pigeons. Briefly, they were everywhere, enormous, terrified. The juveniles dropped to all fours first, and trotted briskly off to the east and north. Then the adults, herding their young before them.

In its haste, a geistosaur brushed against the poptent, sending it leaping up a good six feet into the air. By the time it bounced back to earth, the grove was empty.

The phone was still ringing.

Shakily, Leyster stood. He stretched his aching muscles, then retrieved his pack, so he could answer the phone. It took a minute to unwrap the thing. “Yes?”

“This is Daljit. Lai-tsz called and told us she’s built a device for detecting infrasound and… Hey, how far have you guys gotten?”

“Not as far as we were hoping. But we’ll make up for lost time this afternoon. How’s Jamal?”

“It’s just a broken leg,” Jamal said in the background.

“I think it’s infected,” Daljit said. “Did you remember to bring antibiotics?”

“Of course we did.” Their last, though Leyster didn’t mention that. “Oh, and you’d better watch out for Chuck. He’s got hold of a theory.”

“Uh-oh. What is it?”

“I’ll let him bend your ear when we get there. Right now, tell us about the infrasound.”

While he listened, Chuck and Tamara repacked their gear. When he finally hung up, Tamara said, “We were lucky. The only thing that was broken was one of the tent’s support struts. We can make a replacement from a sapling.”

“Thank God,” Leyster said.

They were midway through the slow process of losing everything they had brought with them. The solar shower device went first, followed quickly by (of course) their consumer electronics—game players and music systems—and the batteries they required to function. Then a knife went missing, and a comb, and the next thing they knew, they were suffering serious inconvenience, and facing the possibility of genuine hardship. When one of his cameras died, Patrick went into mourning for a week.

Bit by bit, they were losing their grip on the machine age and sliding back into the stone age. It was a terrifying prospect not only because it was irreversible, but because they lacked the complex mastery of paleolithic technology that a stone age hunter had. Nils had spent most of the rainy season trying to make a bow before giving it up as a bad job. He hadn’t even been able to manufacture shafts straight enough for the arrows.

“Let’s go,” Leyster said, shouldering his pack. “I can tell you about the infrasound on the way.”

Lai-tsz had jury-rigged two recorders to detect infrasound. On their very first day using them, the crew back home had been able to establish that the valley was full of sub-audible communications. More, according to Daljit, the messages were profoundly moving.

“They sing!” she’d told Leyster. “No, not like whales. Much lower, much more vibrant. Oh, it’s exquisite stuff. They played some for us over the phone. Jamal says we should be sure to hang onto the copyright. He says he’s sure a music company would be interested.”

“I was joking,” Jamal said weakly in the background.

“Oh, hush. You were not. Fortunately, our original equipment included directional microphones. Since Lai-tsz rigged up two recorders, it’s possible to point one at a tyrannosaur and another at a herbivore, record both simultaneously, and then play them back to see if you’ve got anything that looks like interspecific communication.”

“So, do they?”

“Well, it’s a little early to say…”

“Don’t be a tease, Daljit,” Jamal said.

“But yes, yes it really does look like there is.”

When Leyster finished relating the conversation, Tamara said, “That is so neat!”

“Aw, c’mon,” Chuck said in a mock-hurt voice. “How can you be so impressed by something we already suspected, and not by my theory? I mean, let’s face it, it’s got the K-T extinction, continental drift, the Chicxulub impactor, and mass dinosaur madness all in one sexy package.”

“Yes, but those are just ideas. Forgive me, Chuck, but anybody can come up with ideas. What the guys back home have done goes way beyond ideas. They’ve established a new fact! It’s like the universe had this secret it’s been keeping since forever, and now it’s been found out. It’s like reading the mind of God.”

“Now who’s being grandiose?”

“Louis Agassiz once wrote that a physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle,” Leyster said. “I’m siding with Tamara on this one.”

Chuck shrugged. “Anyway, they’ve established that different species talk to one another infrasonically. I consider that step one toward proving my theory.”

“Whoah, whoah, whoah! That’s not the way science works. First you gather the data, then you analyze it, and then you come up with a hypothesis and a plan for testing it. In that order.”

“And yet scientists come up with idiot notions and set out to prove them all the time,” Tamara said. “I could name names, if you want. Your system works fine in theory. But things are different in the real world.”

“I’m going to move to Theory someday,” Chuck said. “Everything works there.”

“Sometimes you guys make me question my ability to teach. You can’t prove a hypothesis in paleontology—you can only test it to see if it can be destroyed. If, over time, a hypothesis resists every attempt made to falsify it, then you can say that it’s extremely robust and would require an extraordinary mass of data to unseat it. The germ theory of disease is a good example of that. The evidence for it is compelling. People bet their lives every day that it’s true. But it’s not proven. It’s simply the best available interpretation of what we know.”

“Well, given what we know, I think my hypothesis is the best available interpretation of the facts.”

“It’s not parsimonious, though. It’s not the simplest possible explanation.”

Arguing and keeping a wary eye out for predators, they made another few miles’ progress through the forest.

They were following an old hadrosaur trail when the woods opened out into a bright clearing. It had recently been browsed almost to the ground, and was covered with new growth, fresh green shoots shot through with white silkpod blossoms and red-tipped Darwin’s broomsticks. A stream ran through it. On the far side of the stream, the woods resumed with a stand of protomagnolia trees in full bloom. Their scent filled the clearing.

Birds scattered as they stepped out of the darkness. They waited cautiously for a moment, then took a step forward. Then another.

Nothing attacked them.

Gratefully, Leyster let his knapsack slip to the ground. “Let’s take a break,” he said.

“Second the motion,” Tamara said.

“Moved and carried.” Chuck plopped to the ground.

They put their packs together, and sat leaning against them with their legs stretched out. Leyster rolled up his pants legs and checked for ticks. Chuck took off a shoe and rubbed his foot.

“Let’s take a look at that,” Tamara said. Then, “The sole is practically falling off! Why didn’t you say something?”

“I knew you’d want to tape it up, and we’ve got so little left.”

Leyster already had the duct tape out of his pack. “What do you think it’s for?” The shoe had been repaired before, but the tape had abraded where the sole met the upper. He rewrapped it with generous swaths of new tape overtop the old. “There. That should hold for a while.”

Chuck shook his head ruefully. “We have got to start making new shoes.”

“Easier said than done,” Leyster said. “We can’t do oak tanning because we haven’t found anything that looks to be ancestral to the oak. And the problem with brain tanning is that dinosaurs have such tiny little brains. We’ll have to harvest a lot of them.”

“Sounds like the pioneer method for making a toothpick,” Chuck observed: “First, you chop down a redwood…”

Everybody chuckled. They were silent for a while. Then Tamara lazily said, “Hey, Chuck.”

“Yeah?”

“You don’t really believe that stuff about the Chicxulub impactor making the Earth ring, do you?”

“What’s so difficult about that? The Earth rings for two to three weeks after a major earthquake, and the force of the collision was six times ten to the eighth power stronger than any earthquake. Now, most of that force went into heat and other forms of energy. If less than one tenth of one percent of that went into elastic energy, as seems entirely plausible, then the elastic wave propagation would be enough to make the Earth ring for a hundred years.”

“Oh.”

“The only question is how much the heat energy changed the properties of the crust. If it became more viscous and less solid, then the more viscous crust would damp out the elastic waves. However, I do not think that happened. Extremely unlikely, in my humble opinion. Though I am open to new interpretations, if the data are there to support them.”

Leyster smiled to himself. Chuck had a good mind. He’d make a fine scientist as soon as he learned to stop jumping to conclusions. He sighed, stretched, and stood.

“Time to go, kids.” Leyster took a reading, pointed toward the protomagnolias. Tamara came after him, and then Chuck.

They splashed through the stream and back into gentle shadow.

“Keep alert,” Chuck said. “Don’t be distracted by how peaceful it all looks.”

He had barely finished speaking when the dromies attacked.

Dromaeosaurs were not particularly large as dinosaurs went. They were the size of dogs, somewhere between knee– and hip-high to a human, but, like dogs, they were nothing you wanted to have attack you. This particular pack was covered in tawny green feathers, all short save for the wrist-fans on the females, which were used to shade their eggs when brooding. The feathers, the savage little teeth in their whippet-narrow heads, and the oversized claws on their hind feet combined to make them look like Hell’s own budgerigars.

They were ambush hunters.

As one, they burst out of the bushes and leapt down from the trees. The air was filled with flying bodies and protomagnolia petals.

Chuck screamed once.

Leyster spun and saw Chuck go down, covered with dromaeosaurs.

Instinctively, he dropped his compass and snatched out the axe. Hollering and swinging, he ran toward the swarming knot of dromies.

Tamara ran past him, yelling at the top of her lungs. She’d thought to drop her knapsack, where Leyster hadn’t. Her spear arm was cocked back, and there was murder in her face.

The dromies scattered.

There were enough of the creatures to kill Tamara and Leyster both. But they weren’t used to being challenged. Faced with a situation totally outside their experience, they retreated across the clearing and toward the shelter of the woods beyond.

Tamara hadn’t dared throw her spear while the dromies were on top of Chuck. She threw it now, shifted her second spear to her throwing hand, and threw that as well.

One spear flew wide. The other caught its target square in the chest.

At the verge of the clearing, a dromie turned to chatter defiance and was almost hit by a stone Tamara flung. Angry and alarmed, it darted back into the forest. Briefly, the brush was filled with dark shadows milling about in confusion. But when Tamara dashed in under the trees after them, they were nowhere to be found.

She turned back toward the meadow. “Chuck?”

Chuck had twisted as he fell. His body lay face down under the protomagnolias. Leyster knelt beside it and felt for the pulse, though he knew what he would find. There had been somewhere between six and nine of the little gargoyles, and they’d all gotten in several bites before being chased away. Chuck had been bitten in the legs, arms, and face. His throat had been torn open.

“He’s dead,” Leyster said softly.

“Oh… crap!” Tamara turned away and started to cry. “Damn, damn, damn.”

Leyster started to turn Chuck’s body over. But it didn’t move quite right when he shifted it, and something started to slide loosely from the abdomen. He remembered then how dromies would latch onto their prey with their forelimbs and use those enormous claws on their hindlimbs to eviscerate their victims. Chuck’s abdomen would be ripped open from crotch to rib cage.

He eased the body back into his original position, and stood.

Tamara looked stricken. He put his arms around her, and she buried her face in his shoulder. Her back heaved with her sobs. But Leyster found he had no tears in him. Only a dry, miserable pain. Living in the Maastrichtian, with violent death an everyday possibility, had made him harder. Once he would have felt guilty for surviving. He would have blamed himself for his friend’s death, and sought after a reason why he should have been spared when Chuck was not. Now he knew such emotions to be mere self-indulgence. The dromaeosaurs had chosen Chuck because he was last in line. If Leyster had been limping, or Tamara had been having her period, things would have gone differently.

It was just the way it was.

In survival training, they’d called it “the buddy system.” To survive an attack, you didn’t have to be faster than the predators—just faster than your buddy. It was a system that served zebras and elands well. But it was hell on human beings.

Leyster unhooked Chuck’s knapsack, so they could redistribute his things in their two packs. Mastering his revulsion, he went through Chuck’s pockets for things they might yet need. Then he removed Chuck’s shoes and belt. Until they mastered tanning, they couldn’t afford to abandon the least scrap of leather.

“I found the compass,” Tamara said. Then, when he shook his head in puzzlement, “You dropped it. I picked it up.”

She held the compass up for him to see, and began crying again.

“There are plenty of rocks in the stream. We should build Chuck a cairn. Nothing fancy. Just something big enough to keep the dromies off his corpse.”

Tamara wiped her eyes. “Maybe we should let them have him. That’s not an entirely bad way to dispose of a paleontologist—by feeding him to the dinosaurs.”

“That might be good for you and me. But Chuck wasn’t a bone man. He was a geologist. He’ll get rocks.”

Leyster wasn’t sure how many miles he and Tamara got under their belts before the night overcame them. Less than they’d planned. More than could be expected. They walked in a kind of daze, tirelessly. Later, he couldn’t remember whether they’d kept an eye out for predators or not.

Just before turning in, Leyster called Daljit and Jamal. He didn’t want to speak with them at all. He really wasn’t in the mood. But it had to be done. “Listen,” he said. “We had a little setback, so we’ll be later than we were expecting to be. But don’t worry, we’ll be there.”

“What happened?” Daljit asked. “You didn’t lose the antibiotics, did you?”

“The antibiotics are fine. We’ll tell you the details when we get there. For now, I just didn’t want you to worry.”

“Yeah, well, you guys better get here soon. Jamal’s not doing that well. His fever is up, and he’s delirious.”

“All I want is a bicycle,” Jamal muttered in the background. “Is that too much to ask?”

“Him and his damned bicycle! I’m going to ring off now. Give my love to Tamara and Chuck, okay?”

Leyster winced. “Will do.”

He stowed away the phone and returned to the fire. He hadn’t gone far from it. Just enough that there wouldn’t be any chance of his dropping the phone where it might get scorched.

“You didn’t tell her?” Tamara said.

“I couldn’t.” He sat down beside her. “Time enough when we get there. She’s got enough to worry about, as it is.”

They said nothing for a long while, silently watching the fire burn slowly down to coals. Finally, Tamara said, “I’m going in.”

“I’ll join you in a bit,” Leyster said. “I want to sit and think for a bit.”

He sat, listening to the night. The syncopated music of frogs, and the steady pulse of crickets. The lonely cry of the moon-crane. There were other noises mixed in there as well, chuckles and distant warbling cries that might be dinos and might be mammals and might be something else entirely. Ordinarily, he found these sounds comforting.

Not tonight.

There were more than three hundred bones in the skeleton of a triceratops, and if they were all dumped in a heap in front of Leyster, he’d be able to assemble them in an afternoon. The sixty-three vertebrae would all be in the proper order, from the syncervical to the final caudal. The elaborate fretwork of the skull would be knit into one complex whole. The feet would be tricky, but he’d sort out the bones of the pes, or hindfeet, into two piles of twenty-four, starting with metatarsals I to V, arranging the phalanges in a formula of 2-3-4-5-0 beneath them, and capping all with an ankle made up of the astragalus, calcaneum, and three distal tarsals. The manus, or front foot, almost simple by contrast, contained five metacarpals, fourteen phalanges arranged in a formula of 2-3-4-3-2, and three carpals—still, it was a rare ability to sort them by sight. Leyster knew his way around a skeleton as well as any man.

He knew, as well, the biochemical pathways of the creature’s metabolism and catabolism; many of the subtleties of its behavior and temperament; its feeding, fighting, mating, and nurturing strategies; its evolutionary history; and a rough outline of its range and genetic structure. And this was but one of the many dinosaurs (to say nothing of non-dinosaurs) he had studied in depth. He knew everything it was possible to know, with the resources at hand, about the life and death of animals.

Except, perhaps, the central mystery. All he had were facts, and none of his knowledge was necessary. The bones found their proper order with every triceratops born. The biochemical pathways policed themselves. The animals lived, mated, and died quite successfully without his intervention.

Chuck was here and he was gone.

It seemed impossible.

He didn’t understand it at all.

The forest was black upon black. It made his sight swim. It made him feel small, just one more transient mote of life moving inexorably toward death.

For all his knowledge, he knew nothing. For all he had learned, his understanding was nil. He stood at the lightless center of a universe totally devoid of meaning. There were no answers here, no answers within, no answers anywhere.

He stared off into the darkness. He wanted to walk straight into it and never come back.

So great was his unhappiness at that moment that it seemed to him that the night itself was sobbing. All the bleak forest and starless sky shook with a low, muffled noise that was the perfect embodiment of misery. Then, with a start, he realized that the sound was Tamara weeping softly in the tent.

She hadn’t gone to sleep after all.

Well, of course she hadn’t. After what had happened to Chuck, how could she? Even if she hadn’t seen it happen, even if they hadn’t been close, his loss reduced the human population of the world to ten. It was an unparalleled catastrophe. It was cause for terrible grief. Which made it his duty to go into the tent and comfort her.

His spirit quailed at the thought. I can’t, he thought angrily. I don’t have any comfort in me. There’s nothing here but misery and self-pity. He had no strength at all, no power to endure. He felt that if he took on a single grain more of the world’s pain, it would crush him flat.

Tamara went on crying.

Well, let her! Maybe it was selfish of him, but he wasn’t going to subject himself to anything more. He couldn’t! What did she expect of him? Tears were running down his cheeks, and he despised himself for them. What a fucking hypocrite he was! Of all the people there ever were, he was the last one that anybody would turn to for solace.

Still, Tamara did not stop crying.

You have to go in, he told himself. He couldn’t go in.

He went in.