Dinosaur Thunder (45 page)

“That did it!” Conyers shouted, excited.

Jacob and Crazy had to climb up and over the ravine wall to the hill, then down and back in the passage to get to Conyers and Torino. The sky was a solid black cloud, the smoke thick. Fires lit their way, the ravine filled with flickering orange light.

“Crazy, take her through,” Jacob said. “I’ll bring Torino.”

“Thank you, Crazy. Thank you both.”

Sure Torino would follow, Conyers handed Jacob the reins, and then let Crazy put an arm around her waist, and then half-carry her into the passage. Looking at the oddly shaped opening, Jacob knew there was only a narrow passage high enough for the horse, and it was quickly shrinking. Just as he started forward, he heard a distant roaring. Looking down the ravine, Jacob saw the horizon rise up in a boiling black mass—this was new.

“Giddy up,” Jacob said, pulling Torino by his bridle.

The horse let himself be led, but when they came to the passage, it was too narrow for them both to pass through. It was also barely high enough, even with Torino’s drooping head. Releasing the bridle, Jacob left Torino facing the opening, and then walked to his rear, slapping him on the butt. The horse shuddered, but would not move into the opaque wall facing him. The roaring was getting louder, and Jacob did not have to look to know what was coming. Jacob walked back a few steps, picked up a fist-sized rock, assumed a pitching stance, and then reared back, and threw a fastball, striking Torino on the right haunch. The horse jumped forward, and was gone. Without looking back at what was coming, Jacob ran to the opening, bent low, and dived through.

Jacob landed at Torino’s feet, Conyers’s arms around the injured horse’s neck. Weller and the marines were there, sitting against the wall Crazy had chopped a hole through. Crazy was looking down on Jacob, smiling.

“All right!” Crazy said.

“Yeah,” Jacob agreed. “Everything is finally all right.”

“Question?” Crazy said.

“What?”

“How do we get the horsie out?” Crazy asked.

Jacob rolled up onto his knees and looked at the people-sized opening hacked in the door, and those in the wall. Then he laughed long and hard.

57

Report to the President

SARA CONWELL:
Is it true that the ticker tape parade in New York made your horse sick?

OFFICER KRIS CONYERS:
Torino is fine. He ate some of the shredded paper, and got a bit constipated, but we got him flushed out.

—Orlando Sentinel

Present Time
Washington, D.C.

“There was no way to cover this up?” President Brown asked.

“No,” Nick said. “Those returned from the past had to be reunited with their families. So, unless we intended to confine them indefinitely, it would be impossible to keep them from telling their stories.”

“We also lost marines,” John said. “They deserved to be recognized for their sacrifice.”

John Roberts and Nick were in the Oval Office, President Brown sipping tea, Nick and John sitting on a leather couch, drinking coffee from cups with the presidential seal. With his lower right leg in a cast, Nick had it stretched out, his crutches leaning against the end of the couch. This was Nick’s first in-person visit with the president since returning.

“Yes, of course,” President Brown said, “but now there are consequences that are difficult to deal with. The return of survivors from the Portland quilt has raised the hopes of people all over the world who lost family and friends in the Time Quilt, and now they have unrealistic hopes of getting them back. The State Department has been inundated with calls from foreign ambassadors, demanding to know how to recover their own people. Our most faithful allies are accusing us of holding back technology.”

“We’ve held nothing back,” Nick said.

“Haven’t we?” President Brown said.

“We knew almost nothing about the properties of the orgonic material that we recovered,” Nick said. “At least not before this. Even now we know precious little. However, if you believe it is best, we could release what we have learned. The fact that exposure to this material was necessary to pass through nexuses should reassure the public. It’s not as if someone could wander through accidentally.”

“And we’ve disposed of this time-bending material?” President Brown asked.

“The biggest portion of it,” Nick said. “The remaining material is dispersed for safekeeping.”

President Brown frowned, pausing to sip her tea before continuing. “The other problem is that people have stopped trusting in their future—or, more accurately, they don’t know what future and past mean anymore. Have you seen the polls? Only thirty-eight percent of Americans now believe that it is inevitable that they will move from the present to the future. Forty-two percent believe that they are just as likely to move from the present to the past as they are from the present to the future.”

“That’s just silly,” Nick said.

“Is it?” President Brown asked. “The Lewinskis, and that cop and her horse, are the darlings of the talk show circuit. The more they tell their stories, the more people believe that time has been irreparably damaged. And if Americans aren’t sure they are going to have a future, they don’t plan for their future. There has been a ten percent drop in university applications and a seven percent drop in the amount Americans save each month. And you know what’s happened to the stock market.”

“It’s temporary,” Nick assured the president. “When nothing else happens, people will forget and move on with their lives.”

“Can you assure me that nothing more will happen?” President Brown asked.

Nick squirmed, and then drank some coffee, taking several small sips as he composed his answer. “What I know is that time is a complex entity, with texture and strong and weak points, and that it interacts with both matter and form. Black holes distort time, transient dense matter creates time waves, and these waves travel forward and backwards in time. Holes can be punched in time, and the flow of time can be slowed, sped up, and even stopped. Knowing all this, we have taken every reasonable precaution to eliminate man-made time disruption, but as I said, time effects move both forward and back. The sins of the fathers may still be visited on the sons.”

“And daughters,” President Brown added.

“Yes, of course,” Nick said.

“So what do I tell the people?” President Brown asked.

“You give them something else to focus on,” Nick said. “Give them a new goal. Something that will distract them.”

President Brown looked surprised. Like all presidents, she wore the stress of the job in the new wrinkles around her eyes, and on her forehead, and the gray in her hair. She wrinkled her forehead now, looking puzzled. “Where are you going with this?” President Brown asked.

“Do you remember the preacher that we met on the other side?” Nick had picked up the media habit of calling the piece of the Cretaceous past they had visited the “other side.”

“The one they called Reverend? Yes.”

Opening his briefcase, Nick took out two sheets and handed one to the president and one to John. Each sheet had two images of the same man. “We have no photos of Reverend, but using descriptions from the survivors of his congregation, we created a digital image of what he looked like the last time he was seen, and what he might look like twenty years later. Does that look like him, John?”

“Yes, that’s him,” John said. “I knew him in high school. Everyone called him Cubby back then.”

“Why the interest in this man?” President Brown asked. “He never made it back, and neither did half his people.”

“The last time we saw him, he was helping an injured Dinosauroid toward his village.”

“What Reverend and his people called Inhumans,” President Brown said.

“Yes, and that’s actually accurate nomenclature, although meant to be derogatory,” Nick said. “They certainly weren’t human, but they weren’t subhuman, either, as the name suggests to some. They were evolution’s first attempt at a sentient species. I saw these people up close, and visited one of their villages. They were an intelligent, adaptable species that shared many human traits including speech, capacity for community, and the ability to domesticate animals. Like humans, the family unit was the basis for their social structure. Until a random cosmic event wiped them out, they were following an evolutionary path similar to humans.”

“Speculation about that is all over the talk shows too,” President Brown said. “It has stirred up a theological hornets’ nest.”

“Reverend would have been right in the middle of that debate, if he were here,” Nick said. “He is the one who first called them Inhumans, and labeled them demons. He once believed it was his destiny to cleanse the Earth of the Dinosauroids. But like Saul of Tarsus, Reverend had his eyes opened. The last time we saw Reverend, he was heading to their village to preach the Word of God to a people he considered heathen. He became a missionary.”

“Missionaries can do as much harm as good,” President Brown said.

President Brown was a Christian, Nick knew, and regularly attended a predominantly African American Baptist church in Washington. While a believer, she was also familiar with the risks of sending missionaries to developing cultures.

“At first I did not think Reverend had a chance of getting to the village before the asteroid hit, and even if he did, I was sure that the Dinosauroids would kill him,” Nick said. “Reverend had been their tormentor and nemesis for nearly twenty years. Now, however, I think he did make it to the village, and in fact went through the passage with the Dinosauroids to survive the Chicxulub impactor.”

“How could you know this?” President Brown asked.

“There is evidence, of a sort,” Nick said. He pulled two more photos from his briefcase, passing one each to President Brown and John. “You may recall that during the Viking One mission to Mars, the orbiter returned an image that included a human face,” Nick said. “This is the so-called face on Mars.”

President Brown and John looked at their photos of the Martian surface, showing a man’s face, with deep-set eyes and a wide forehead.

“That was just an anomaly,” President Brown said. “It’s a trick of light and shadow produced by natural rock features.”

“That’s what I thought,” Nick said. “Now, I’m not sure. Take a look at this photo.” Nick handed out two more photos from his bag. “The face is nearly three kilometers long and either naturally, or artificially, carved out of rock. It has seriously eroded over thousands of years, but you can still see the major features, including eyes, nose, and mouth. I had a series of photos produced, showing what the face might have looked like with different levels of erosion. What do you think, John? Is that your friend Cubby?”

John stared long and hard, moving from face to face on the sheet, finally resting on the representation with the least erosion. “It could be,” John said. “I think it might be.”

“There’s another reason to think that Reverend and the Dinosauroids made it to Mars. The face on Mars is located in a region called Cydonia. That face sits very near what used to be the shore of an ocean. It’s the kind of location where primitive people would settle.”

“Beachfront property,” President Brown said.

“Exactly,” Nick said. “You have the advantages of the abundance of the ocean, and also what the land can provide, all in one place. I expect there was a river near this location too.”

“Very interesting,” President Brown said, “but if they did make it to Mars, with or without the reverend, they are long gone. Mars is uninhabitable.”

“Yes, Madam President,” Nick said. “But I was thinking about something Reverend said before he left us. We don’t know where in Mars’s past they went. I have a dozen mathematicians trying to solve that problem, but we are eighty percent confident that it was at least sixty-five million years ago. If they did make it through to Mars, and had the time and resources to carve a monument to Reverend, then what else might they have accomplished? What archeological treasures are buried under the sands of Mars? And what about the biology of the Martian flora and fauna? Some of what we saw was unlike anything on Earth.”

President Brown was watching Nick’s face closely, but giving none of her thoughts away.

“And there is another remote possibility,” Nick said. “With the knowledge of Mars’s future that Reverend brought, and a clever industrious people like the Dinosauroids, and thousands of years to develop technology, it is possible that the Dinosauroids found a way to survive what happened to Mars.”

“By going underground?” President Brown suggested.

“Possibly, but more likely by leaving Mars,” Nick said.

“How? To go where?” President Brown asked.

“The only way to know is to go there and look around,” Nick said. He dug into his bag again to pull out a thick bound document, and handed it to President Brown.

“You’re proposing a mission to Mars?” President Brown said, looking at the cover. “A mission to Mars is proposed every few years, and presidents reach the same conclusion every time. Such a mission is technologically premature. Not to mention the cost of such a mission.”

“The biggest hurdle has been the weight/fuel problem,” Nick said. “Boosting ships into orbit is expensive, and a Mars mission means sending up the Mars Command Module, the lander, the Mars Habitat, and enough food and oxygen to keep a crew alive for the three years a mission would take. Then there’s the fuel to send the ships to Mars, the fuel for the descent and ascent phases, and enough fuel to get everyone home. Costs have been prohibitive, especially with the disaster relief needed because of the time quilting, so we’ve been waiting for advanced technologies to reduce the weight of the ships. If lifting mass were not a problem, we have the technology to go today. The good news is on page fifteen of my proposal. You can see that we may have solved the boost limitations. On page twenty, you can see that this solution drops the cost of the Mars mission by fifty percent.”

President Brown scanned the pages, her face reshaping into deep concern, and then relaxing. “I’ll consider it,” President Brown said, her tone telling Nick the meeting was over.