Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 23

65 million years BC, jungle

‘Excuse me?’ said Laura. ‘ When did you say?’

Franklyn finished wiping his glasses dry and put them back on again. He took his time savouring the silent, rapt attention of the others sitting together in the clearing. ‘I said sixty-five million years ago.’

The others shared a stunned silence. Eyes meeting eyes and all of them wide. The enormity of the fact taking a long while to sink in for all of them.

It was Whitmore who broke the silence. ‘Sixty-five million years… so that definitely takes us to near the end of the Cretaceous period.’ He looked at the boy, whose glasses were already beginning to fog up again from the humidity. ‘It is the Cretaceous, isn’t it?’

Franklyn nodded. ‘Correct. Late Cretaceous, to be precise.’

‘We’ve travelled in time?’ uttered Kelly. ‘That’s… that’s not possible!’

‘Whoa!’ one of the other kids cried.

Whitmore and Franklyn were looking at each other warily, a gesture not missed by Liam.

‘What? Either of you gentlemen going to tell us what a bleedin’ late crustation is?’ Liam studied them suspiciously. ‘You two fellas looked at each other all funny just then. That means something, right?’

Whitmore pursed his lips, his eyebrows arched as if in disbelief at what he was about to utter. ‘If Franklyn here is right,’ he said, watching the foot-long dragonflies hover and drop among a cluster of ferns nearby, ‘then this is dinosaur times. We’re in dinosaur times.’

Laura gasped. ‘Oh God.’ She took two or three deep breaths that hooted like a steam train coming down a tunnel, like a woman in labour. ‘Oh my God! I was watching Jurassic Park last night! I don’t want to be eaten by a rex. I don’t want to be eaten by a — ’

Several of the other students, not all of them girls, began to whimper at the prospect; the rest began to talk at once. Liam watched Whitmore struggling with the situation himself, shaking his head incredulously and balling his fists in silence. Kelly meanwhile was gazing up at the blue sky and the slightly odd-coloured sun as if hoping to find an answer up there.

Somebody needs to take charge, thought Liam. Or they’re all going to die.

He was damned if he was going to volunteer, though — to be responsible for this lot. He and Becks were probably going to fare much better on their own. One of the three men was going to have to step up and take care of these kids. But, as it happened, as Liam was beginning to wonder how the pair of them were going to discreetly extract themselves — with Edward Chan in their possession — the decision was made for him.

‘You!’ said Whitmore, his lost expression wiped away, all of a sudden remembering there was an issue as yet unresolved. His voice cut across the clamour of all the others’. ‘Yes, you! The goth girl,’ he said, pointing at Becks. He looked at Liam. ‘And you. You know what happened, don’t you? The pair of you weren’t in my party. And you knew that explosion was going to happen. So you’d better start telling us who the heck you are!’

There was an instant silence as all eyes swivelled to him and Becks.

Liam grinned self-consciously. ‘Uh, we… that’s to say me and Becks here, we’re not er… students as such. We’re sort of agents from another time.’

Fourteen pairs of eyes on him and none of them seemed to have anything close to a grasp on what he’d just said.

‘See, we’re time travellers and we came along today to try to protect him,’ he said, pointing at Edward Chan who was sitting on the grass, arms wrapped round his huddled knees.

Edward Chan’s eyes widened. ‘Uh? Am I in trouble?’

‘You, Edward. We came to find out how we were going to protect you from an attempt on your life.’

The others looked at the small Chinese boy then back at Liam.

‘You better explain about him, Becks,’ said Liam. ‘You’ve got all the facts in your head.’

Becks nodded. ‘Listen carefully,’ she began. ‘Time travel will become a viable technology in the year 2044 when a Professor Roald Waldstein will build the world’s first time machine and successfully transport himself into the past and return safely to his time. The practical technology developed by Waldstein in 2044 is largely based on the theories developed and published in Scientific American by the Department of Physics, University of Texas in 2031. The article is entitled “Zero-point Energy: energy from space-time vacuum, or inter-dimensional leakage?”.’

Kelly’s tired face lit up. ‘You gotta be kidding?’

Whitmore looked at the bewildered young boy hugging his own knees on the ground in front of him. ‘So how does this affect this boy?’

Becks’s cool grey eyes panned smoothly across to Chan. ‘The article published in Scientific American is a reproduction of a maths thesis presented by one Edward Aaron Chan. An act of academic plagiarism by his supervising professor.’

Edward looked up at her. ‘Me? Really?’

‘Correct. You will submit your dissertation to the Department of Physics for evaluation with an almost identical title in the summer of 2029, when you are twenty-six years of age. The department head, Professor Miles Jackson, will attempt to take credit for your work when it is approved for publication several months later, but he will be exposed as a plagiarist shortly after the article’s publication.’

‘But you said you’d come to protect him from an attempt on his life… why would someone want to kill Chan?’ asked Whitmore.

‘Edward Chan is the true originator of time travel,’ replied Becks. ‘In the future, 2051, time-travel technology becomes forbidden under international law because of the danger it poses to all mankind. This law is a result of years of campaigning by Roald Waldstein, the inventor of the first viable time machine, to prevent any further development of the technology.’

‘Wald-… the man who builds this first machine?’ said one of the students, a tough-looking Hispanic boy. Liam noticed his name tag was still on his chest: JUAN HERNANDEZ.

Becks’s gaze panned across to him. She waited silently for him to continue.

‘Why?’ asked Juan. ‘Why build the thing, then, you know, campaign against usin’ it? Don’t make any sense.’

Liam answered. ‘Waldstein never ever revealed what he saw on his first and only trip into the past… never talked to anyone about it. It was a big secret what he saw. But he was once heard to say that he’d looked upon the very bowels of Hell itself.’ Liam could have added more, could have added that maybe he’d glimpsed, for a few seconds, something of that himself.

Becks continued. ‘Waldstein’s campaign gained popular support. It is logical to presume that it may be one of his more fanatical supporters who has somehow managed to travel back in time to find Chan and attempt to kill him, to retroactively prevent him writing his thesis, and thus prevent or forestall the invention of time travel.’

A long silence followed filled only with the gentle rustle of the jungle’s trees and the far-off high-pitched squawk of some jungle creature. It was Whitmore who cut it short. ‘Well, OK… that’s all very fascinating, but what just happened? Where are we and how do we get back?’

Becks’s eyelids fluttered for a moment. ‘The geopositional coordinates will not have changed. We are exactly where we were.’

‘Yeah, right, man!’ snapped Juan. ‘There ain’t no jungle like this. Not in Texas!’

‘We’re still in the same place,’ said Liam, ‘but it’s when we are that’s changed. Right?’

‘Affirmative.’ Liam nudged Becks. ‘Yes…’ Becks corrected herself.

‘Which, if Franklyn is correct, is sixty-five million years ago,’ said Whitmore, loosening his tie and unbuttoning the top button of his sky-blue shirt, already stained with dark underarm patches of sweat.

Liam smiled thinly. ‘Yup, that’s about it.’

The technician who’d survived and come through with them dipped his head and shook it. ‘Then we really are totally, totally in trouble, man.’

Liam wanted to say something like he’d been in this kind of mess before, that there might possibly be a way out of here for them, that at the very least they had a genetically enhanced and very lethal combat unit, with an embedded supercomputer, disguised as an oversized gothic Barbie doll, here to help them all out. But he figured right now that would probably be one detail too many for them to have to cope with.

Kelly removed his linen jacket, no longer looking smooth and groomed and, like Whitmore, sweating large dark patches in the hot and humid air. ‘So what are we going to do now?’

And, once more, all eyes rested on Liam.

Aw, Jay-zus… What? I’m in charge now?

It looked like he and Becks weren’t going to be able to sidle away, that they were lumbered with the others. Liam sighed. ‘Survival,’ he said eventually. ‘I suppose we’d better start thinking about that. You know? Water, food, weapons, some sort of a camp. The rest… if there is a rest… well, I suppose that can come later.’