Over
a mile of golden sands, a sea that on good days was an amazing array
of blues, and foamy waves that could make Nadja's skin look as tan as
hers. The powerful waves were brutal, totally unlike any of the
piddling, domestic undulations on civilized beaches. What was more,
as if the god of that paradise didn't want to create any
disturbances, the strongest waves broke far enough offshore that she
could walk out for ages in shallow water, even swim with ease.
Nadja
Petrova waved to her from their usual spot. In just a few days, she'd
formed an easy, intense friendship with the young Russian
paleontologist, the way people often do when forced to live together
in isolated places. They had several things in common, in addition to
their ages. Enthusiastic personalities, sharp wit, and a way of
climbing the achievement ladder, step-by-step. In this, in fact,
Nadja was ahead of her. Born in St. Petersburg, she'd emigrated to
France as a teenager and worked nonstop until she obtained a highly
coveted scholarship to do her PhD with Jacqueline Clissot in
Montpellier, where she became Clissot's number one disciple. And all
of that without having a rich mother who paid for everything,
including her time. But when she spoke to Nadja, she never seemed
bitter or jaded. In fact, she always got the impression that she was
an open, friendly girl, with snowy skin and almost-white hair, who
put all of her time and energy into smiling. Elisa thought she could
never have found a better companion.
"Mmm.
The water looks so tempting today," Elisa said, dropping her
towel and bikini on the sand, then starting to undress. "I think
I'll go in and see if I drown."
"So,
you still haven't got it," Nadja said, smiling from underneath
enormous black sunglasses that covered half of her sheet-white face.
"What
I
did
get
was depressed."
"Repeat
after me. 'Tomorrow, I'll get it. Tomorrow will be the day.'"
"Tomorrow,
I'll get it. Tomorrow will be the day," Elisa obeyed. "Can
I alter the mantra slightly?"
"What
do you have in mind?"
"Well,
what about 'One of these days, I'll get it,' for example." Elisa
pulled the bikini bottom up over her hip and grabbed the top. "That
way I can keep hope alive but still not get bored."
"But
the key to a mantra is getting a little bit bored," Nadja
declared, giggling.
After
she had her top on, Elisa placed her clothes in a pile and weighed
them down with one of the countless bottles of lotion her friend
always brought with her. Then she spread out her towel and used more
bottles to weigh down each corner. The wind didn't seem as strong
today as on other days, but she didn't feel like spending her
downtime chasing her panties or towels across the sand.
Nadja
lay facedown. Elisa glanced at her thin body, beneath a curtain of
white hair, and saw the pink lines of her bikini strap. On the first
day, they'd laughed when they tried on the bathing suits Mrs. Ross
had found them (neither of them had thought they'd need a bikini in
Zurich). She got the pink one and Nadja the white one, but she had
bigger breasts than Nadja and the white suit was bigger and fit her
much better. They decided to switch right away.
"Still
stuck in the same place?" Nadja asked.
"Ha!
I wish. Every day I go farther backward, it seems. I'm going to end
up at the beginning." Elisa planted her elbows in the sand and
stared out at the sea. She turned to her friend, who was wagging a
bottle at her and smiling graciously.
"Oh,
sorry, I forgot."
"Yeah,
sure," Nadja said, untying her top. "More like you think
putting lotion on my back is undignified."
"Well,
I'm better at that than at doing calculations, that's for sure."
Elisa poured lotion into the palm of her cupped hand and began to
spread it over Nadja's back.
Her
skin glimmered under the ton of protection she wore, despite the fact
that she never came to the beach before late afternoon. Elisa felt
bad about her friend's "almost albino" condition. It was
such a disadvantage, given her profession. "I'm not an albino,
I'm
almost
albino,"
Nadja had explained. "Strong sunlight can really do me damage,
even cause cancer. And you might imagine that, as a paleontologist, I
have to be outside a lot, sometimes in the tropical sun or in the
desert." But, given her personality, she made light of it. "I
go out at night in search of merocanites and cephalopods. I'm like a
vampire paleontologist."
"Your
friend Ric is stuck, too. But he doesn't take it to heart so much. He
says he's going to beat you."
"He's
not my friend. And he always wants to beat me."
They'd
divided the work between two groups. Valente had joined Silberg's
team and she was on Clissot's. Her job was to find the exact energy
required (the solution required at least six decimal points) to open
a time string from 150 million years ago, which was four thousand
seven hundred billion seconds before she and Nadja had plunked their
bottoms down on this beach in the Indian Ocean. "A sunny, jungle
day in the Jurassic period," Clissot said. If they managed, the
results would be amazing, inconceivable. They could see the first
ever images of a living... (no, don't say it, we don't want to jinx
ourselves).
She
and Nadja dreamed of it.
Elisa,
who had always loved dinosaur movies as a kid, thought there was
nothing she wouldn't do to achieve that goal. If her work could help
obtain the image of some great prehistoric reptile doing
anything
at all
(even
if it was just peeing on the grass!), then she would have seen and
accomplished everything she ever wanted to do.
Jurassic
Park
was
a joke compared to this.
Eat
your heart out, Steven Spielberg.
She
could die happy.
But
it was an incredibly complex, tedious task. In fact, she and Blanes
had split it up between them. While he tried to calculate the energy
needed to
start
opening
the time strings, she was searching for the final energy push. Then
they'd compare and double-check each other's work to try to make
certain they were the correct quantities. But she'd been lost in a
forest of equations for days, and although she hadn't given up, she
was afraid Blanes was regretting his decision to bring her on board.
"I'm
sure you'll get it soon," Nadja said encouragingly.
"Yeah,
I hope so," Elisa wiped her hands on her thighs to get the
remaining lotion off. "Anything new with the Perennial Snows?"
she asked.
"Are
you joking? I don't even know where to begin. Every time she sees the
image, Jacqueline discards twenty more paleogeological theories. It's
unbelievable. Those few seconds are enough to write a whole treatise
on the Quaternary period." Still facedown, Nadja bent her knees
and lifted her legs in the air, touching her toes together. Her
dainty feet were pretty and elegant. "You spend half your life
studying glaciation, you find proof in the subsoil of Greenland, you
dream about it... But then suddenly you see England under tons of
snow and you say, 'All the science and all the work of all the
professors in the world can't compare to this.'"
"It
must be the Impact. You're losing your mind," Elisa joked.
Surprisingly,
her friend took her seriously. "I don't think so. Though I
have
been
sleeping really poorly the past few nights."
"Have
you mentioned it to Jacqueline?"
"Yeah.
She's not sleeping well, either."
Elisa
was about to say something when, out of the corner of her eye, she
noticed one of those fighting crabs with one huge claw sidling up to
her left leg. Her friend had told her that in the jungle and at the
lake (which she had yet to visit) there were other species "of
great paleontological importance."
"Quick
question," Elisa said. "Is this creature that's about to
pinch my calf of great paleontological importance, or can I smash it
to smithereens?"
"Poor
thing," Nadja laughed, sitting up. "Leave it alone. It's a
fiddler crab."
"Well,
he can go play his music somewhere else!" She threw a fistful of
sand at it, changing its course. "Go on. Scram!"
When
the "danger" had passed, Elisa turned over and rested her
chest on the towel. Nadja did the same. They were very close and
stared at each other (Nadja at her, and she at herself in the
reflection in Nadja's glasses). She couldn't help but notice the
contrast in their bodies: cappuccino brown and vanilla ice cream
white. The breeze, the waves, and the afternoon temperatures relaxed
her so much she thought she was going to fall asleep.
"Did
you know that Professor Silberg has lots of different images saved?"
Nadja asked, nodding at Elisa's dumbfounded expression. "It's
true. They'd already done a lot of other experiments. The Unbroken
Glass and the Perennial Snows aren't the only ones. But don't get
excited; the rest of them are all blurry due to incorrect energy
calculations. They call them 'diffusions.'"
"How
did you find that out? And why haven't they told us?" Suddenly,
Elisa recalled Valente's words. Was it true that they were hiding
things?
"Jacqueline
told me. But Silberg swears you can't see anything in any of them. 'I
seenk I smell somesink feeshy, comrade,' " she joked, affecting
a terrible German accent. "But seriously, haven't you ever
wondered why they brought us to an island?"
"The
project's top secret. You heard Silberg."
"But
there's no strategic reason that we have to work from an island. We
could do this from Zurich. In fact, we'd attract less attention
there."
"Well
then, why do
you
think
we're here?"
"I
don't know. Maybe they want to keep us isolated," Nadja
ventured. "It's like... like they're afraid we might... I don't
know, become dangerous or something. Have you seen how many soldiers
there are?"
"There's
only five. Six, if you count Carter."
"Well
however many there are, it's too many."
"You're
a little paranoid, you know?"
"I
don't like soldiers." Nadja looked at her from over her
sunglasses. "I saw them all the time in my country. And I can't
help but wonder if they're here to protect us, or to protect everyone
else from us." The wind blew her hair into her face.
Elisa
was about to reply when they heard a shriek.
Someone
in a T-shirt and shorts ran across the sand, about a hundred feet
away. Another figure, in red Bermudas, chased after the first with
long strides. The person running away didn't seem very intent on
escaping; the second one caught up in no time. For a few seconds,
they stood very close, back-lit by the sinking sun. Then they dove
onto the sand, laughing hysterically.