By the time Liam arrived beside the campfire, breathless and sweating from the exertion, everybody stood poised with a weapon and ready to run for the safety of the palisade.
‘ What is it? ’ asked Kelly. ‘Something coming?’
Liam looked at them all. They were wide-eyed, some of the girls terrified even. Glances skipped from Liam to the far side of the clearing from where he’d emerged sprinting as if the devil himself was in hot pursuit.
‘What’s happened, dude?’ asked Jonah.
Becks said, ‘Your voice indicated a threat.’
Liam shook his head. ‘Ah no, not really. I just had an idea.’
‘ Fossils, that’s what you’re talking about,’ said Franklyn. ‘Fossils. They’re not even the original print that’s left behind, but just an imprint of the print: sediment that has filled the footprint, then hardened over thousands of years to become a layer of rock.’
‘Yes, but it’s still a mark that’s survived through all that time. An impression of that original mark.’
‘Of course,’ sniffed Franklyn. ‘Yes, of course that’s exactly what it is.’
Kelly shook his head. ‘That’s it? That’s how you intend to communicate with your agency? Leave a mark on the ground in the Cretaceous period and hope some lucky fossil hunter finds it?’ He shrugged, exasperated. ‘Oh, great…’ He gazed at the fire. ‘And there was me thinking you and your robo-girl here had some sort of high-tech beacon or something to bring them here!’
Becks shook her head. ‘Negative. No beacons.’
Liam raised a hand to hush her. ‘That’s just the way it is, Mr Kelly. There’s nothing I can do about that.’
Laura bit her lip. ‘That… that doesn’t sound like much of a chance, though — a message traced in the ground surviving millions of years in one piece?’
‘Survivin’ that long,’ added Juan, ‘ and bein’ found as well, man. What’s the chances of that?’
Liam shrugged. ‘Maybe we can improve our chances.’ He looked at Franklyn. ‘Do we not know where the first fossils were discovered? I mean historically? That’s actually known, right?’
Whitmore and Franklyn exchanged a glance. ‘Well, yes,’ said Whitmore. ‘It’s common knowledge where the first American dinosaur fossils were discovered.’
Franklyn nodded. ‘In Texas, of course. Right here in Texas.’ Behind his bottle-top glasses, his eyes suddenly widened. ‘Yes! Oh, hang on! Yes… Dinosaur Valley. Right, Mr Whitmore?’
Whitmore nodded. ‘Good God, yes, you’re right, Franklyn. Near Glen Rose, Texas.’
‘Glen Rose?’ Liam shrugged. ‘Would that be far away?’
Kelly’s scornful frozen expression of cynicism looked like it was thawing. ‘Not that far from where the TERI labs were, actually. About sixty miles away.’
‘Dinosaur Valley State Park,’ continued Whitmore. ‘It’s a protected area now, a national landmark. At the beginning of the 1900s, I think, some of the first fossils were found along a riverbed there. Lots of them.’
‘The Paluxy River,’ said Franklyn, ‘where the fossils were found, was thought to be the shoreline of some Cretaceous-era sea.’
Liam looked from Whitmore to Franklyn. ‘So? We could get to this place, right? You fellas know exactly where it would be?’
Both shook their heads. ‘Not really,’ said Whitmore. ‘How could we know that?’ He gestured around at the jungle. ‘It’s an entirely different landscape.’ He laughed. ‘Hell, it’s out there somewhere!’
‘I know where it is in relation to the TERI labs,’ said Kelly. The others looked at him. ‘Well, I drive in to work from Glen Rose. It’s where I live. I pass the signs for Dinosaur Valley Park every day on the way up to the interstate. It’s just outside Glen Rose, about a mile north of the town.’
‘I have geo-coordinates for the town of Glen Rose,’ said Becks.
Liam looked at her. ‘You do?’
‘Of course. It was part of the data package Maddy Carter uploaded prior to departure. I have the complete set of US Geological Survey maps for the State of Texas.’
Liam’s eyes glistened by the light of the campfire. ‘We could actually do this!’ He looked at them all, piecing together on the fly something that was beginning to resemble a plan. ‘Then, in theory, Becks, you could lead us right to this place that will one day become this dinosaur park?’
‘Affirmative.’
‘And if we know some fossil-hunting fellas find a whole load of fossils, as you said, Mr Whitmore, sometime in the 1900s, then could we not place some fossils of our own right there?’
‘I suppose we — ’
‘Negative,’ cut in Becks. She understood now where Liam was going with this. ‘That would represent a significant contamination risk.’
Liam clenched his teeth in frustration. ‘Come on, Becks, we have to break a few eggs, so we do.’
She cocked her head. ‘Break eggs?’
‘You know… how does it go? To make an omelette. We leave a message to be found. So, all right, it causes a new load of contamination problems. But then we have a chance at being rescued, getting these people back home where they should be, and then… then we go and fix that little problem.’
‘This action introduces a third independent source of contamination.’ She looked coolly at the group gathered around the campfire. ‘Already there are two potential sources of time corruption. One in 2015 — the absence of Edward Chan. The second, this time, the presence of humans where there should not be any. Either or both contamination sources have a high probability of already causing significant time waves in the future.’
‘What if…’ started Jonah, but he almost stopped when every pair of eyes swung on to him. Clearly now wasn’t the time for some flippant wisecrack. But he continued anyway. It seemed like a smart idea to him. ‘What if… like… we left a message that was, you know, like, too important to become common knowledge.’
They stared at him in silence. No one was telling him to shut up, so he elaborated. ‘I mean, like hushed up. Like, say, Roswell.’
Liam shrugged. ‘Roswell?’
Kelly snorted a dry laugh. ‘The supposed sight of a crashed UFO in 1947. Conspiracy nuts love that story. According to them it was a real flying saucer from outer space with real live LGM onboard.’
Laura saw Liam purse his lips in confusion. ‘Little Green Men,’ she said helpfully.
‘Anyway,’ continued Kelly, ‘despite the fact it was most probably just a crashed test jet of some kind, you still get nut-jobs going on about wanting to free the little green men from their years of medical testing and enforced imprisonment.’
Jonah made a face. ‘Yeah… but how do we know for sure it ain’t true, Mr Kelly, eh? Point is, it could’ve been just a test jet, it could’ve been an alien spaceship, but the world will never know ’cause the government being, like, totally paranoid douche bags, hushed it all up. Kept the secret to themselves.’
‘Oh, come on, kid,’ said Kelly, ‘that’s a load of — ’
Liam waved him silent. ‘Hang on! No, wait! Jonah has a point… I think.’ He scratched his cheek, deep in thought for a moment. ‘Look, the point is people like the government… Your American government, right, if someone, some everyday person discovered a fossil that suggested something as amazing as the invention of time travel and they told the government, what would they do?’
‘You kiddin’?’ said Juan. ‘They’d end up all over it like a rash, man. Secret service, Homeland stiffs in black suits an’ dark glasses an’ stuff.’
‘I’ll tell you, dude. Whoever found it would end up having an unfortunate accident,’ said Jonah, looking at Kelly. ‘Always happens, like… always. In fact, anybody who knew about it, was related to somebody who knew about it, would end up dead or in Guantanamo or someplace. Either way, there wouldn’t be anyone walking around talking about it.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ said Liam. ‘It would remain a secret.’ He looked at Becks. ‘And so nothing major would be changed by it. The world wouldn’t be talking about it. The world wouldn’t know about it.’
Behind her narrowing eyes he guessed her computer was hard at work processing that notion. Looking for a percentage probability figure.
Whitmore nodded. ‘That’s how the intelligence agencies work, by putting up a poker face. Give nothing away. You know something? You keep it to yourself. You know something about the enemy, say the Russians… you don’t change a thing about the way you behave. You act normal so the enemy don’t know you’ve got something on them.’
