Sapiosaurus | Out Of Time Read online

  Sapiosaurus

  Out of Time

  Lon McQuillin

  Dunluce Press • San Mateo, CA

  Copyright © 2014 Mahlon B. McQuillin

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Dunluce Press.

  Redistribution in any form without the express written consent of the author is prohibited.

  While some of the institutions and organizations depicted in this work do exist, all characters are fictional, and any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is coincidental.

  For Deirdre

  Now | Then

  Garlmek stood at the edge of the broad verandah surrounding the upper level of the mastaba as the twilight deepened. The evening air rippled with the slightest of breezes, bringing the fragrance of orchids from the gardens to the west.

  Resting his hands on the verandah’s railing, Garlmek looked out over Taark’i. Lights had been coming on for the last hour as the people prepared for night one last time. The lights were fewer than usual and the sounds of the city were muted, as many were gathered in groups in contemplation of and preparation for the coming event. More than a few had simply wandered into the forests surrounding the city, contributing further to the quietude.

  As the sky darkened, Garlmek raised his eyes to the stars, drinking in their beauty, while purposely avoiding the constellation of Lazoriz. In the short time before the moon would rise, the stars were especially brilliant, and he imagined himself out amongst them, traveling to distant worlds. It was a dream that was not to be; there had not been anywhere near enough time. How ironic that was.

  On the horizon a pale glow began to appear, as the moon began its ascent. It was nearly full, and the Third Face would be showing its myriad craters.

  The academicians were uncertain what the results of the impact on the moon’s surface would be, but many suspected serious or catastrophic effects, even though any such results would be… well… academic. The moon might leave its orbit, or even disintegrate, but in the end it wouldn’t really matter, since there’d be no one left to observe what happened.

  No one, of course, except Garlmek and Touolok and the Offspring.

  After many years.

  If they survived.

  As the moon began to rise, Garlmek finally allowed his view to shift to Lazoriz, to see the Intruder before the brightness of the moon obscured it. He first found the Sighting Star, then the Point Star, and finally, in the space two-thirds between and slightly below them, he found the Intruder itself. After a few minutes, as he stared at it, he was able to discern its slight movement against the background stars. Had he not known what it represented, he might have found it fascinating.

  As he stared at the sky, rapt in attention and immersed in his thoughts, he became aware of a presence at his side. He didn’t need to turn to know that it was Ghoakon, the Syroch of the Academic Council. Ghoakon had a distinctive scent, one that Garlmek found vaguely pleasant. It reminded him a bit of his father.

  Ghoakon moved abreast of Garlmek, and stood at the railing next to his younger friend. He lifted his gaze to the heavens, matching Garlmek’s, and finding the Intruder immediately. The two stood silent for minutes. Finally, Ghoakon spoke.

  “It does not appear so threatening.”

  Garlmek considered for a moment, and then permitted himself a small, wry smile.

  “The movement against the splendor of the static stars demonstrates the life of the All,” he mused. “It shows us that the All lives and evolves… even as we face our own end.” He paused, reflective. “The All will survive us, and see new life replace us.”

  Ghoakon looked at his protégé with narrowed eyes. “You are at once a pessimist and an optimist. You presume that our efforts at preservation will fail, yet that Our Place will survive to allow other species to flourish.”

  Garlmek bent his head, then shook it slowly. “No, my friend, you misunderstand me on both counts.” He lifted his gaze to his senior. “While I frankly doubt our chances against the force we face, I truly hope that we will succeed in our attempt to preserve the race.” He turned toward his friend, shifting his tail for support. “But at the same time, even if our species manages to survive this ordeal, any new life we find will almost certainly be much changed.”

  Ghoakon returned his eyes upward to the Intruder. He would never know the possibilities of the future, unlike Garlmek, Touolok and the Offspring, who, against all odds, just might.

  The two stood silent as the moon cleared the horizon. After a time, the Tone sounded from the three corners of the city, and Ghoakon straightened. He turned to Garlmek, and placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

  “It is time for me to go. The final Zhakrath is commencing.”

  Garlmek lowered his head in assent.

  “You have much to prepare,” Ghoakon continued, “I will return in the morning to help with the final arrangements.”

  Garlmek raised his head to peer closely at his mentor. “I will miss you — and the rest of the council,” he said, “and I know that Touolok feels the same way.”

  Ghoakon’s look was steady. “I… we… will miss you as well. We place our hopes, our future in your hands. I’m certain that our trust is well placed.” He bowed his head. “Until tomorrow,” he said, before turning and walking away.

  Garlmek watched him leave, and then turned back to the sky above the city. Inevitably, his eyes returned to the small speck of light moving so slowly — yet so quickly — across the night sky.

  Tomorrow he and Touolok would enter the mastaba if not for the last time, then at least for the last time in many years.

  He was about to turn toward the mastaba’s entrance when movement at the edge of the verandah caught his eye. As he hesitated, he saw that it was Touolok, on her way to meet him for the preparations. He moved to intercept her, and as they met, they embraced briefly.

  He searched for words, but anticipating him, she raised her hand to stop him. There was no need to speak.

  With slight smiles to each other, they turned and walked toward the entrance.

  As they reached the portal, neither could help themselves. They paused, turned, and both their eyes were drawn upward, where the moon’s brightness allowed only the faintest glimpse of the Intruder, moving silently amongst the stars.

  After a long moment, they turned toward each other, and then moved on into the sanctuary.

  How long it would be before they saw the stars again — or indeed, if ever they would — neither could guess.

  Chapter 1

  Discovery

  Hal Reynolds swore under his breath as he watched the drill shaft rotate in place on the video monitor. It was the same damn thing as the last time. He keyed his headset mike on.

  “It’s not going anywhere,” he told the team. The news was greeted by groans over the intercom.

  The core bit had stopped at 437 feet, hitting something too hard to penetrate.

  The current bit was designed to take ice core samples, not rock samples. While it could go through dirt and soft rocks, it couldn’t deal with harder material like granite, which was probably what they had hit.

  “I’m going out,” he said.

  “Wear a sweater,” Sinclair advised over the intercom. Reynolds allowed himself a grin. “Yeah, right,” he thought to himself.

  Reynolds unplugged his headset, zipped up his parka, pulled on his goggles, raised the hood and stepped out of the survey shack. The wind hit him like a piece of drywall.

  “This is summer?” he thought as he bent into the wind and worked his way towards the rig. “I hate goddamn cold,” he whined to himself, for at least the thousandth time since he’d been here.

  Summer in Antarctica actually could
be almost pleasant at times, with the temperature running up near or even above zero Fahrenheit, but such was the exception, not the rule. Today was more typical; despite the sunshine, it was minus 15 degrees and the wind chill factor, he decided, was approaching absolute zero.

  As Reynolds approached the drilling rig, Bob Sinclair came at an angle from the communications trailer and joined him. Leaning into Reynolds’ shoulder, he shouted over the wind.

  “We’re only 40 feet from the last hole. There’s gotta be something down there.”

  Reynolds nodded. “It’s a granite shelf or something,” he yelled.

  “But it wasn’t clear on the echoes,” Sinclair replied.

  “We saw shapes of something,” said Reynolds. “We just didn’t know how dense they were. The depth is right; we just gotta figure out what we’ve hit.”

  As part of their survey, long before they started drilling, the team had set off a series of small explosive charges, conducting echo soundings to try to determine what lay under the ice. The area they were working had proven interesting because of a large number of somewhat regularly spaced and shaped echoes, all at roughly the same depth. And while their funding was from Arcon, and they were in part looking for possible oil deposits, they were officially conducting surveys for the University of California at Berkeley. That gave them the luxury of investigating soundings that weren’t necessarily related to potential oil deposits.

  Reynolds and Sinclair fought their way through the wind to the rig, where Rank Matthews waited for them. Reynolds leaned close to Matthews and cupped his hands around his mouth.

  “Shut it down,” he ordered. “Let’s switch to a hard diamond bit and find out what we’re hitting.”

  Matthews gave an exaggerated nod. “Gimme about an hour to yank the drill. I might be able to get the new bit down today.”

  Reynolds smiled. “You’re a good man, Charles Brown,” he shouted.

  Matthews flipped him the bird. “Same to you, egghead!”

  Reynolds chuckled, and turned back toward the office shack. Matthews was one of those hardasses you could always count on.

  Matthews watched Reynolds and Sinclair struggle away through the wind, shaking his head.

  •

  Hal Reynolds had never left school. After receiving his B. S. in geology at Georgia Tech, he’d gone on to get his Master’s and Ph. D. at U. C. Berkeley — Cal, to its alumni — and stayed on to teach. At 42 he was tenured, and spending most of his time doing field research. Despite his credentials, he was the kind of professor who not only didn’t mind getting his hands dirty, he liked to. At a couple of inches over six feet and 210 pounds, he had no problem stepping in to help wrangle core pipes if the need arose.

  He returned to the shack, got a sandwich and a bottle of juice out of the refrigerator, and sat down to study the echo readings for the hundredth or so time. He’d never seen anything like them anywhere in Antarctica. There was a regularity to them that almost looked like whatever was down there was man-made.

  Which was, of course, impossible. This part of the Antarctic continent had been covered with ice for tens of millions of years, and the last time the sun had shone on the dirt and rock surface below, Antarctica hadn’t been at the bottom of the world, but rather, further north, in a more temperate latitude. Continental drift over the eons had changed the positions of all of earth’s land masses, and Antarctica, its luck running out, ended up at the bottom of the planet.

  Whatever had created the structural patterns in the rocks below would have to have been some process new to geology, and finding new geological things was Reynolds’ favorite activity.

  Reynolds was chewing the last bite of sandwich when Bob Sinclair came through the door, letting in a blast of wind. Reynolds looked up at his assistant, one of three graduate students at the site, and grinned. “Rank thinks this is a complete waste of time, doesn’t he?”

  “Well, yeah, pretty much,” Sinclair replied. “He’s an oil guy. He thinks collecting rocks is something that kids do.”

  “I never claimed I wasn’t still a kid. And these days I’ve got the neatest toys to play with.”

  “Yeah, well the way Rank sees it, you’re playing with his toys.” Sinclair opened the cupboard and peered in, trying to decide what he wanted for a snack. “We keep bouncing his bits off rocks, he’s liable to start making unpleasant noises about how much we’re spending on our hobby.”

  Reynolds leaned back in his chair and considered what Sinclair had said.

  The partnership of academia and industry had been generally beneficial to both, but there were times when the relationship could begin to chafe. Arcon wanted to know what lay under the Antarctic surface every bit as much as Reynolds did, but for their own obvious reasons. By combining pure research with oil exploration, they took the shared raw data and extrapolated their own information.

  But when the current type of situation presented itself, where time and money were being spent on work that clearly wasn’t going to help locate dead dinosaurs that could end up sloshing around in someone’s gas tank, the folks back at headquarters who got paid to count beans started tugging at their collars.

  Reynolds knew this, and reckoned that he had a fairly good idea of how often and how much to push, but he sometimes wondered if his zealousness took him a bit close to the edge. He knew that if the next attempt to get meaningful samples failed, it’d be time to stop pushing and let the crew move on to another site.

  “We’re dropping the bit into the hole we already drilled, so it won’t take long,” he said. “If we come up empty, we’ll move on.”

  Sinclair had selected a large chocolate-chip cookie. He nodded.

  Reynolds looked back at the echo plots.

  “Still, I’d sure like to know what’s down there.”

  Sinclair nodded again, his mouth full. “Me schew,” he replied.

  •

  At first glance, Rank Matthews was an old-fashioned oil man. Big, stocky and ox-strong, he put up a good front as a gruff rigger. What he almost never revealed to co-workers was that he held a degree in English literature with minors in physics and math, completed on a football scholarship at Florida State. Drafted as a defensive tackle by the Seattle Seahawks, his NFL plans were derailed when he blew out his right knee in the third game of his rookie season.

  With an education that qualified him to sit in an office pushing papers around, he opted instead to work outdoors, and following a buddy’s suggestion, found himself on an oil rig. In less than ten years he had worked his way up to chief rigger.

  He’d worked in Texas, Alaska, California, Kuwait, Nigeria and Chechnya before signing on with Arcon and being assigned to head the drill team in Antarctica. The project had interested him for several reasons, the primary one being the chance to spend some time on a continent that few people would ever see. The hardship pay didn’t hurt either.

  But despite his caustic comment to Reynolds, he was actually quite pleased to be working on a project that counted for more than just oil company profits. To get along with the rest of the crew he of course had to disparage the university guys, but that was for show. He was curious about what was down there as much as Reynolds and Sinclair, and the fact was that he wasn’t about to give up without finding out if he could help it.

  When the last section of pipe came out of the hole, he and Dave Howard, his chief assistant, disconnected the steel bit and attached a diamond core bit. They then started to lower the pipe, one section at a time, adding new sections as they progressed.

  An hour and a half later, the drill was down to its original level at the bottom of the ice pack, and once again pressed on the hard surface. With Reynolds, Sinclair, both of the other grad students and the drill hands watching, Matthews engaged the engine and started applying pressure. Despite the fact that there were gauges that would show how far the bit was cutting, all eyes were on the section of pipe that protruded from the hole. By watching a mark or scratch as the pipe turned, it was easy to tell
if the drill was making any progress.

  After a few long minutes it became obvious that the bit was indeed cutting into whatever was down there. “It’s biting,” Matthews shouted over the wind, not taking his eyes off the pipe, “but whatever it’s biting into is mighty tough.” He increased the pressure on the bit, but if the progress increased it wasn’t noticeable to the eye.

  Reynolds nodded. Even with granite, the bit should be making more progress than it was. An hour later, the progress began to slow, and by the end of an hour and a half, the bit would cut no further. They’d bored just under 10 inches into the material. Matthews released the pressure on the pipe and shut down the engine.

  “The bit’s shot,” he yelled. “I’m gonna have to pull it and replace it.”

  Reynolds stomped back and forth in an attempt to warm up. “It’s late enough. Let’s leave it down and pull it in the morning.”

  Matthews grunted. “Fine by me.”

  With the sun approaching its lowest point over the horizon, the group retired to their quarters.

  By early the next afternoon the crew had pulled the drill, replaced the bit and resumed the drilling. Reynolds was in the survey shack when the intercom crackled to life. It was Matthews. “Hal, you probably wanna haul your butt out here.”

  Reynolds keyed the mike. “What’s up?”

  “We just broke through. The drill’s into something a lot softer. I’m guessing it’s dirt.”

  “Be right there,” Reynolds replied.

  The wind was nowhere near as fierce as it had been the day before, and Reynolds didn’t bother to pull his parka’s hood over his head as he made his way to the rig. He’d alerted Sinclair, who arrived from the communications trailer simultaneously.

  Matthews was already pulling the pipe. As the pair approached, he pulled off his goggles. “We went through just about 22 inches of the hard stuff before the going got easy,” he said. “Another eight inches of the softer stuff to pack the end of the pipe, and we’ve got a sample coming up.”

  “Alright,” said Sinclair, “I wanna see what that stuff is.”

  “You ain’t the only one,” said Reynolds. Matthews shot Reynolds a quick grin.