“I want a steak.”
“A milkshake!”
“A cup of tea—with lemon and extra sugar.”
“A shower! With hot water!”
“Oh, yes.”
“I’m going to turn off my brain and sit down in front of the television for a week.”
“I’m going to read a book I’ve never read before.”
“I’m going to talk to a stranger!”
Standing apart from the others, Leyster muttered fervently, “I’m going to kill Griffin for putting us through all this. Then, if there’s time, I’ll get Robo Boy as well.”
But he spoke quietly, to himself. Only the Old Man heard him. And when, a half hour later, the coals soaked with water and the half-roasted ankylosaur laid out for the scavengers, they lined up to step through the gate and out into the Crystal Gateway Marriott, Crystal City, Virginia, only he saw Leyster very carefully pick up a rock and slip it in his pocket.
The Old Man sighed, and opened the file folder on the desk before him. There were eight memos within. He read through them all carefully, then lifted one between thumb and forefinger and tore it in half.
Things had worked out much better the second time around. There had only been two deaths. He had to admire Leyster for that. The man had done much better with his charges than he had the first time through.
He regretted Lydia Pell’s death, of course, and that of the young man as well. But what was done was done. Second chances were so rare in this world to be almost miracles.
He decided to take one last look at Gertrude, solitary and splendid. She was a rara avis, perhaps the rarest in his private aviary of colleagues, and he liked to look in on the old bird from time to time.
A Lazarus taxon was one that disappeared from the fossil record, as if extinct, only to reappear later, as if rising from the dead. It pleased him to think of Dr. Gertrude Salley as humanity’s own Lazarus taxon. So long as she existed, the human race wasn’t really dead. Occasionally he paid her a visit, just to maintain her tenuous connection with humanity.
Sometimes they played chess. He always won.
Thus reminiscing, he opened a window into Gertrude’s tower, where she sat at her writing desk, working. Once, when he had done so, she had sensed his presence (she also had been given extraordinary tools) and, looking him directly in the eye, winked sardonically. Not today, though.
It was just as well. This was too solemn a day for laughter. This was the day when everything ended.
He signed off on the last of the memos, and dumped them into the tray for outgoing mail. The enterprise was over. As of this instant, he was as good as retired.
Slowly, he stood. The leather chair creaked as he did so, as if in sympathy for him. His body ached, but such pains came naturally with age. He was used to them.
There was only one thing left to be done.
20. Extinction Event
Crystal City. Virginia: Cenozoic era. Quaternary period. Holocene epoch. Modern age. 2012 C.E.
If the story could be said to have any end at all, then it ended on a bright spring day in Crystal City at the Crystal Gateway Marriott when some two hundred paleontologists gathered by invitation in the ballroom to watch army personnel assemble machinery unlike anything any of them had ever seen before and open a temporary gate through time.
“Stand back, please,” an officer said. There was some shuffling about, but nobody moved away. “Please! Gentlemen. Ladies.” He was clearly unused to dealing with civilians, and his urgings had little effect. Finally, exasperated, he turned to his second-in-command and muttered, “Oh, the fuck with it. Throw the goddamned switch.”
The switch was thrown.
Something hummed.
There was a flat metal plate on the floor, connected by thick cables to the alien equipment. The air above it puckered, crinkled, gleamed. A flat, circular area filled with sunshine as it opened into a brighter reality. The scientists squinted and shaded their eyes with their hands, straining to get a good look at what was happening.
“I think I see—” somebody began, and was silenced by a chorus of shushings.
Through that glowing disk stepped, one by one, the survivors of the stranded expedition. Leyster came first, scowling and clutching their field notes, and Tamara after him, with her spear. Jamal burst into a smile as he saw everybody waiting for them. Then came Lai-tsz, looking anxious, with Nathaniel on her shoulder, and after her Patrick, Daljit, and all the rest.
Somebody began to applaud softly.
Everyone joined in. A roar like surf filled the ballroom.
A bald old man with a flamboyant white mustache hobbled forward and, with the utmost respect, took the notebooks from Leyster’s hands. Then, with sudden flair, he raised them high over his head, grinning.
The applause redoubled.
Tamara was clutching her spear tightly in one hand, blinking at the flashing cameras and feeling disoriented, when she was suddenly overcome with the awareness of how bad she must smell. She looked around the ballroom, and then at the spear, and in a fit of revulsion, said, “Somebody take this thing away from me.”
A dozen hands reached for it. “We’d like to include this in one of our displays, if you’d allow us,” a woman said. A lifetime ago, Tamara had known her. Linda Deck, was that her name? Something like that. From the Smithsonian. “And… maybe your necklace?”
Tamara touched the tooth that Patrick had pierced for a length of cord and scrimshawed with a rather good likeness of the photo of her standing triumphant above the juvenile tranny. She flashed her teeth, and in a low, intense voice, said, “Over my dead body.”
The woman took a step back in alarm, and in a moment of sudden empathy Tamara realized just how fierce they had all become. “Hey, never mind me,” she said, as kindly as she could. “Just point me toward a shower and three bars of soap, and I’ll be fine.”
“We’ve booked a room for you.” The woman handed her a key card. “We booked rooms for everybody. There’s fresh clothes in there, too. Things you picked out for yourself next week.”
“Thanks,” Tamara said. “Keep the spear.”
Patrick carried his photo disks, wrapped with obsessive care in scraps of their softest troodon leather, in both hands. All the storage space on them had been used, and much of it had been overwritten three to seventeen times. A man in a suit started to take them away from him and then, when he yanked his arms away, laughed and said, “Now, is that any way to treat your editor?”
“What?”
The man took the disks and gave him a presentation copy of the book that would be made from them. Disbelieving, Patrick leafed through it. Ankylosaurs wallowed in the river mud. A tyrannosaur looked up suspiciously from its kill, blood streaming from open jaws. Pterosaurs skimmed low over the silvery surface of a lake. An unlucky dromaeosaur was caught in the act of being trampled under the feet of a charging triceratops.
He looked up from a photograph of titanosaurs at dusk. “This was printed too dark. You can’t make out the details.”
“Now, Patrick, we’ve already been through all—” The editor stopped. “At any rate, I’ve been through all that already, and I’m not really anxious to go over it again, particularly on a Sunday. Tomorrow morning you can drop by my office and start raising hell over color values. You’ll come over to my side by the end.” Then, ignoring Patrick’s obstinate look, “Let me buy you a drink. I’ll bet it’s been a long time since you’ve had a beer.”