The American nodded to herself. “So it will never be proved.”
“Anybody can deny anything. But there’s good news! One of our long-term projects is to make a series of brief forays into the time between stations, sampling twenty to thirty species once every hundred thousand years. The genetic baselines we establish will be the equivalent of taking a photograph of a rosebud once a minute in order to create a film of it blossoming. Which should be enough, I would think, to convince even the most hard-headed skeptic. That’s a lot of work, though, and the results won’t be in for quite a while. So we’ll just have to wait.” Her smile bloomed again, like a time-lapsed flower. “Are there any further questions? No? Well, then, next on our…”
The guide was a grad student, of course; otherwise she wouldn’t‘ve been stuck with the tour. Griffin made a mental note to find out her name and check her file. She had a real talent for this kind of blarney and was young and foolish enough not to keep that fact a secret. At this rate, she would find herself doing more and more public relations until by incremental degrees she was squeezed out of real paleobiology entirely. Griffin had seen it happen before. Something similar had happened to him.
The platform began emptying around him. Griffin leaned back into the wind and closed his eyes. His original thought had been to borrow a land rover and drive it west, through the Lost Expedition Foothills and beyond, into the Rockies. Or maybe he could take a jetcopter to Beringia and then backpack north. Or else commandeer a research boat out on the Western Interior or the Tethys. He could do some diving among the clam reefs, maybe even troll for sea monsters. He had months of accumulated vacation leave that he could dip into.
He stood without moving, savoring the sweetness of marsh and flowering brushwood wafted upslope by the gentle east wind.
Then he realized there was somebody standing at his shoulder.
He turned, and there was Jimmy Boyle, sleepy eyes and all.
“Good to have you back again, sir.”
“Jimmy,” he said, “since when has it been policy to let creationists come through on our VIP tours?”
“She’s just a sympathizer, sir,” Jimmy Boyle said. “The type who goes to church on Sunday, takes her minister’s word for what the Bible does and doesn’t say, and would be shocked if you told her he was an ignorant wanker who couldn’t find his willie if he used both hands. Harmless, really.”
“Harmless.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s harmless at all. People spout this nonsense and it spreads. It metastasises. Damp down a tumor here with carefully ordered arguments, and it sprouts up in a dozen new places. It’s easy for them; they can just make up their facts.”
Jimmy said nothing.
“What I found most depressing was that not one of the crowd of august decision-makers in the tour thought there was anything outrageous about her questions. They stood there, nodding and smiling, as if it were perfectly reasonable to be doubting evolution with dinosaurs all around them.”
“Well, they’re from the 2040s, after all, sir. You know what it’s like then.”
Griffin turned to face west. The mountains, he thought. Definitely the mountains. There were critters out there that no man had ever seen, even after all these decades. The mountain packies hadn’t been adequately studied; he could get a paper or two out of it. He’d bring along his rod and reel and catch a few sabre-tooth salmon. It would be fun.
At last his underling’s silence had gone on too long for him to ignore. “All right, Jimmy,” he said. “What is it? Why were you waiting for me?”
“The Old Man was here.”
“Oh, Christ.” In Griffin’s experience, it was always bad news when the Old Man was involved. A funding crisis in the 2090s. A memo from a hundred million years upstream. A rumble of displeasure from the Unchanging. “What is it this time?”
“He said you’d be coming here, and that there was something I should show you.”
They stood staring down at a wooden crate lying atop a long table in the only conference room in the world. There were five of them: Griffin, Jimmy, the security team of Molly Gerhard and Tom Navarro, and Amy Cho, an academic kept on retainer for exactly such incidents.
“Who do you think it’s meant to be?” Griffin asked.
“Adam would be my guess, sir. But I’ll defer to Miss Cho on this one.”
Amy Cho was a heavy matriarch of a woman, who gripped the knob of her cane with gnarled and overlapping hands. “Adam, yes. He’s certainly the most totemic choice. Myself, I’d throw in a brass dagger and an iron ring, and attribute the thing to Tubal-Cain. The first metal smith. Son of Lamech. But any nameless peasant drudge would suffice, so long as he died in the Flood.” She smiled humorlessly. “Even a woman would do.”
It was a human skeleton, and it was beautiful. The light sent prismatic smears of color dancing across the stone surfaces sticking out of the packing pellets.
“What’s it made of? Opal?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It must have cost a god-damned fortune.”
“That it must, sir.”
There were many ways to make a fossil. Not all of them were honest. This one had begun as a human skeleton. Somebody had buried it in silt within a pressurized low-temperature water oven of the sort that forgers called a “permineralizer.”
The device had several functions. First, it served as an incubator for bacteria living inside the bones themselves. Gently it encouraged them to grow and form biofilms—cooperative structures in the shapes of pipes and channels that brought water and oxygen to every part of the bone, and carried away the waste products. Then it fed them a slow but steady trickle of highly mineralized water. Forgers usually favored calcites and siderites to produce the characteristic pale or red-black luster of common fossils. But in this case, they had gone with silicates to achieve the sort of pre-Reformation splendor that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Vatican.
Warm and coddled inside their box, the bacteria happily ate, drank, and multiplied, until no organics at all remained in the bone. Then they died. Each one left in its place a tiny lump of minerals, taken in with the water they consumed but of no metabolic use to them whatsoever, and thus discarded.
In this way microscopic creatures excreted perfect replicas of the bones of a creature millions of times their size.
“Walk me through this one,” Griffin said. “Exactly what were they planning to do with this thing?”
“Well, first they’d bury it, sir. Likely they’ve identified a fossil bed in the late twenty-first century that was laid down right about now. Couldn’t say where that would be.”
“Holy Redeemer Ranch,” Amy Cho said. “They train their own paleontologists there. Last year they graduated six Ph.D.s in Deluge Biology. They excavated quite a nice Chasmosaurus skeleton, and then ground it to powder in the hope that they would get variant radiometric readings from different portions of the same bones, thus disproving traditional dating methods.” She hobbled over to a chair, and slowly began to sit. Jimmy hurried to offer her a hand. “They didn’t. Which is why they never published their findings.”
Seated at last, she added, “I went to a prayer breakfast there once. Had a lovely time.”
“What I want to know,” Molly Gerhard said, “is what possible good this would do them.” Molly was the younger of the security officers, a redhead, all but quivering for action. Tom Navarro was a bland and burly man, and clearly the mentor of the team. He was the falconer, and she the hawk he flew from his hand. “They plant some bones. So what?”