“Yeah, I just hope he finds what he’s looking for.” He turned away. “And lives long enough to enjoy it.”
CHAPTER 46
Primordia was gone from the third planet, and already on its way to the middle star where it would be grabbed by its gravitational forces and then flung back to begin its decade-long elliptical voyage around our solar system all over again.
The monsoon-like rains dried, and the clouds parted, then cleared. The magnetic distortion on the eastern jungles of Venezuela had ceased, doorways closed, and pathways were erased. On the surface of the tabletop mountain, silence and stillness settled over the sparse grasses and fissured landscape.
A few tiny skink lizards, insects, some hardy birds, and a handful of human beings were all that remained on the huge plateau. The wettest season was at an end, and once again, there would be 10 years of calm over a single jungle mountaintop in the depths of the Venezuelan Amazon jungle.
CHAPTER 47
Nicolás frowned, fiddled with the resolution, and frowned even deeper. He leaned back.
“I think I can see something in there.”
“Huh?” Mateo turned. “In where?”
“The Amazon, ah, over that tepui. The clouds have dissipated, and the localized effects are now gone. That wettest season of yours seems over.” He licked his lips and rolled his chair in closer to his desk. “So I’ve been playing around with the saved data from the last twenty-four hours. And I can tell you there is, I mean was, something weird inside there.”
Mateo folded his arms and waited. “Weird, hmm?”
“It looked like a balloon, and it traveled into the eye of that storm, and then vanished.” Nicolás shrugged.
“Balloon, huh?” Mateo looked at him from under lowered brows. “Are you sure it wasn’t a lady with an umbrella?” He chuckled.
Nicolás didn’t get it. “No, a balloon. But it’s a little hard to make out as the image is heavily distorted. Plus, there looked to be a lot of other debris flying around.”
“Yeah, that happens in storms.” Mateo sighed and rolled his chair closer to where the young meteorologist had set himself up. His bank of screens were all analyzing the data, but the largest held an image of the swirling purple clouds that had hung over the tepui for over 24 hours.
Mateo squinted. “Could be.” He bobbed his head, and let the image roll forward and rewound it, and rolled it forward several more times. The entire grab was only three seconds, and blurred, but there was definitely something there. He thumbed to another server.
“Use the Paradox software to try and clean it up.”
“Oh yeah, yeah. Good idea.” The young man jumped from his chair and brought the smaller server online. The Paradox software program used a heuristic analysis application to apply a best-guess logic to images that were indistinct. It could never be relied on as 100 % accurate, but it did give the user a high-probability suggestion based on what it saw, and what it could be.
“Working now,” Nicolás said and craned forward, watching the screen closely. The image cleared, then cleared some more, as a bar along the bottom of the screen filled up to ping when at 100 % complete.
“Run it,” Mateo said.
Nicolás rewound and then ran the portion of video they were interested in. Their mouths hung open — a large orange balloon, with what could be several people jammed into the basket, dropped toward a funnel-shaped vortex in the center of the cloud mass. But what happened next had both men feeling lightheaded.
Things, big bird-like things, came out of the cloud and attacked the balloon. Then it was gone.
Nicolás ran and reran the film several more times, and for the last, he froze the image of one of the giant bat-like creatures on the screen. Both men just sat in silence, staring at it. Nicolás finally cleared his throat and turned to his senior colleague.
“What do we do now?”
Mateo blew air through pressed lips and shook his head slowly. “Normally, I would say, make a note, sign it, and then leave it for ten more years’ time. But instead, today I say, we didn’t see a thing.”
“But…?” Nicolás swung around.
Mateo held up a hand. “Don’t worry, we’ll check again.” Mateo rolled back to his desk. “In ten years’ time.”
EPILOGUE
The ocean seemed endless, and under a clear azure sky, the water was a blue blanket sprinkled with glittering diamonds as the sunlight caught tiny ripples on its surface.
On the cliff top, Andy turned his head slowly, scanning the horizon. There were no dots of ships, large or small, and wouldn’t be for another 100 million years. There was also no high-tide line on the beach crowded with rubbish, no islands of floating plastic, no slicks of oil, and no brown haze on the horizon creating unnaturally colored sunsets.
The young paleontologist inhaled the fresh sweet sea air, and his face split in a broad grin. He was in heaven and he only wished his sister could see what he was seeing.
He sat and wrapped his arms around his legs and watched as long necks of plesiosaurs rose from the sea surface, and then dived down, returning with flapping fish in sharp-toothed mouths.
In the time he’d been here, he’d seen ocean giants, like the mosasaur, tylosaur, and even once a monstrous kronosaur that was like a flipper-finned blue whale, attacking pods of plesiosaurs like those in the ocean now. He had watched, mesmerized, as gliding pterosaurs lifted fish from the sea surface, and also packs of theropods scouring the tide line for the carcasses of dead sea beasts washed up to scavenge upon.
Every day brought something weird, wild, or fantastic. He knew, to a man like Ben Cartwright, these things would have been perceived as a threat, and they were. But to him, they were his life’s work brought to life. Even if he only had one more day to live, he could die happy.
Down on the rocks below, there were the raw bones of a boat he had begun to construct. It would take him more months to build, using old construction methods of wooden pegs instead of nails, rope from vines, plant resins as sealants, and a beaten-out dinosaur hide as a sail.
But he knew he could do it. He figured the great land bridges between the continents would still be accessible, and the waters shallow all the way up the east coast.
Andy wanted to sail up along that shoreline and see what America was like. He felt a thrill of excitement run through him that made his scalp tingle.
“I have no bucket list left,” he said to the breeze. It had taken him three long months to reach the coast, using his knowledge of the great beasts, following the tips Ben had dropped, and traveling mostly by night. He even copied Ben by burying himself in mud when he needed to. But when he arrived, he knew he had found his heaven.
The young paleontologist turned in the direction of the plateau and contemplated the future, that was strangely, now his past. The paradox of the time displacement made him wonder whether the portal opened at the same time, every time, or did it move around, by years or even days.
He smiled; for all he knew, he and Ben were here at the same time. It hurt his head thinking about it, and he wished his sister were here so he could ask her about it.
But then again, he was glad she wasn’t here. He just hoped she wasn’t missing him too much. Andy sighed and turned back to the prehistoric ocean.