Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

“All right, gang, let’s move ‘em out!” Leyster shouted, and bounded inside. “Richard Leyster, present and accounted for,” he told Robo Boy.

Robo Boy checked off their names, one by one, as they crowded into the cage. Somebody made a joke about stuffing college students into a telephone booth, and somebody else said, “Better than stuffing them into a tyrannosaur!” and they all laughed. He was careful not to make eye contact with anybody. He was afraid of what they might see in him if he did.

“That’s everyone. You may fire when ready, Gridley,” Leyster said.

“Wait a minute,” Robo Boy said. “Where’s Salley?”

“She’s not on this expedition.”

“Of course she is,” Robo Boy said irritably. “I saw her name on the roster yesterday.”

“Change of plans. Lydia Pell’s taking her place.”

Robo Boy stared dumbstruck at the roster, and for the first time looked at the dozen names as a whole. Salley’s was not among them. Lydia Pell’s was. It was a perverse miracle, a Satanic impossibility.

Fear clutched his heart. It was a trap! Molly must have fed him her information in order to force his hand. He saw that now. He’d believed her, and made his move prematurely, and was caught. In a second, Griffin’s uniformed goons would come pouring into the room to seize him.

“Urn… We’re ready if you are,” Leyster said.

He placed a hand on the switch, knowing how useless the gesture was.

He pulled.

They all went away.

For a long, silent minute, Robo Boy waited. He hoped it was the old Irishman who would come for him. He’d heard the young version was pretty brutal. They said he liked to break bones.

But nobody came into the room. The change in the roster hadn’t been a trap, after all, but only the gnostic and unfathomable workings of Griffin’s bureaucracy.

Which meant—he could hardly believe it—that he had succeeded! He might not have bagged Salley, but he’d gotten Leyster and eleven others, and that would have consequences back home in the present. They couldn’t hush this one up! There would be hearings. With luck, they would expose time travel and Darwinism for the diabolically-inspired lies they were.

He had struck a blow for God. Now they could arrest him, torture him, kill him, and it wouldn’t matter. He would die a martyr. Heaven, which would never have received him in his old, sinful state, was open to him at last. He was finally, truly, saved.

He leaned back against the wall, breathing shallowly.

Not long after, he heard a wolf-whistle outside.

“Oh, baby!” somebody cried happily. “I think I’m in love.”

“You wish.”

Salley swept into the room. She wore a red silk evening gown, and her hair was piled up elaborately on her head. Silver raptor teeth dangled from her earlobes.

“I have to be in Xanadu Station for a fund-raiser,” she said, handing him a transit form. “Fire up your machine and send me forward.”

His heart was still pounding like a jackhammer. But Robo Boy put on his pig face and went over the form slowly and carefully. Everything was in order.

Best to play it bland.

“I thought you were supposed to be on the Baseline Project expedition,” he said.

“Yeah, well, plans change,” Salley said carelessly. She stepped into the cage. The gate slammed shut. Automatically, he double-checked the authorization codes, did a visual confirmation of Salley’s identity, and pulled the switch.

She was gone.

Thirty seconds later, Salley walked into the room again. She was a good twenty years older than the Gertrude Salley who had just left, and there was a small, moon-shaped scar by the corner of her mouth.

“Hey!” he said, genuinely shocked. “You can’t be here! That’s against the rules!”

“And you care about the rules one fuck of a lot, don’t you, Robo Boy?” the woman said. Her eyes burned with wrath.

He shrank away from her. He couldn’t help it.

“Two decades ago, when I was young and innocent, I was made co-head of the first Baseline Project expedition. It was a simple but important gig. Starting at a hundred thousand years before the end of the Cretaceous, we were going to perform a series of mapping, recording, and sampling functions. Atmosphere, mean global temperature, gene specimens from select species. Then we’d hop back a million years and do it all over again. Seven weeks to do the Maastrichtian. Another five to cover the top third of the Campanian. Am I boring you, Robo Boy?”

“I—I know all this.”

“I’m sure you do. But something happened. There was an explosive device among our supplies. People died. Does any of this sound familiar to you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

She curled her lip scornfully. “Yeah, I didn’t think you did.”

Then she spun on her heel and strode to the time funnel. She stepped into the cage, and pulled the door shut.

“You’re not going anywhere! I’m calling Griffin. You’re in big trouble now.”

The woman took a plastic card from her purse and touched it to an inside wall. “Good-bye, Robo Boy,” she said, “you little shit.”

The car went away, and with it Salley.

The very first thing he had been told, when they trained him to operate the time funnel, was that under no conditions could the car be launched without his pulling the switch. It had never occurred to him that they would lie about such a thing.

Evidently they had.

For a long time he stood perfectly motionless. Thinking.

But finding no answers.

The important thing was to remain scientific. He must assume the language, behavior, and even the thought-patterns of his enemy. He must never let down his guard. He was a warrior. He was Thrice-Born. He was being tested.

His name was Raymond Bois. The girls all called him Robo Boy. He never could figure out why.

Lost Expedition Foothills: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 65 My B.C.E.

They tumbled out of a hole in time into a bright, blue-skyed day, whooping with excitement. The team had been deposited on a gentle rise above a small, meandering stream, which the students inevitably decided to name Hell Creek, after the famous fossil-bearing formation.

Leyster consulted with Lydia Pell, and they agreed to let the group skylark for a bit before putting them to work. It was their first time in the Maastrichtian, after all. It was their first time in the field and on their own. They needed to gape and stare, to point wonderingly at the distant herd of titanosaurs that was browsing its way across the valley, to breathe deep of the fragrant air and do handstands and peer under logs and flip over rocks just to see what was underneath.

Then, when Pell judged they’d let off enough steam, Leyster said, “Okay, let’s get these things unpacked and sorted out.” He waved an arm toward a stony bluff above Hell Creek. “We’ll pitch our tents over there.”

Everybody leapt to work. Jamal pulled the Ptolemy rocket launcher from the first pallet. “When do we send up the surveyor satellite?”

“No time like the present,” Leyster said. He ran a thumb down his mental list of who’d had what training. “You and Lai-tsz take it off a safe distance. Nils can carry the tripod.”

“Who gets to push the button?”

Leyster grinned. “Paper-scissors-rock works best for that kind of decision.”

Twenty minutes later, the surveyor went up. Everybody stopped whatever they were doing to gawk as the dazzling pinprick of light curved up into the sky, tracing a thin line of smoke behind it.

“You have just launched the missile,” a priggish voice said, a little too loudly. “Its electromagnetic signature has been picked up by a detector wired to this recording.”