gargled and whinnied, and his tongue shaped the sound into something that sounded, to his recollection, to be a very passable facsimile.
‘ Aye… ammmm… Fanck… leeeennn…’
CHAPTER 48
65 million years BC, jungle
The morning sun was already warm on his back and shoulders as Liam poked at the smouldering remains of their campfire with his spear, carefully probing the flaking ash remains of branches for what he was looking for.
‘Do be careful,’ said Jasmine, standing beside him. ‘They’re brittle when they’re still hot.’
‘All right,’ he said, going about it more carefully. Presently, the blunt end of thick bamboo cane hit something hard: a dull thunk.
‘I got one.’ He carefully pushed the ash out of the way and traced a rough rectangle outline, something approximating the size of a brick. ‘It looks like it survived the cooking without cracking.’
Using a fistful of waxy fern leaves as an oven glove he reached down and pulled it out, then quickly dropped it on the soft sand. ‘Ouch! Still bleedin’ hot!’ He squatted down beside it, gingerly wiping ash away from the rust- coloured surface of fire-cooked clay. The fine lines of letters and numbers were clogged with ash. The others gathered round and stared down at the small oblong tablet lying on the beach.
‘My God, look! It totally worked!’ uttered Laura.
The lettering was there to see, clear, unmistakable.
‘Of course it did,’ replied Jasmine. ‘I know what I’m talking about. Me and my mom make ceramic jewellery all the time. We sell it on eBay.’
Liam leaned over and blew at it, the ash fluttering out of the inscribed lines and curls of his handwriting in little clouds.
Take this to Archway 9, Wythe Street, Brooklyn, New York on Monday 10 September 2001.
Message: -89-1-9/54-1-5/76-1-2/23-3-5/17-8-4/7-?3–7/5-8-3/12-6-9/2 3-8-1/3-1-1/56-9-2/12-5-8/67-?8– 3/92-6-7/112-8-3/234-6-1/45-7-3/30-6-2 /34-8-?3/41-5-6/99-7-1/2-6-9/127-8-1/128-7-3/259-1-5/2-?7–1/69-1- 5/142-66. Key is ‘Magic’.
Whitmore was reading it over Liam’s shoulder. ‘You think that book code of yours is going to work? I mean, I don’t know what book you’ve used but I know every book has different editions. You know that, don’t you? And the page layouts and numbers change from edition to edition. Are you using some kind of internal agency manual or something?’
Becks answered. ‘It will work. My duplicate AI is working from the same database.’
‘Magic?’ said Juan. ‘Is that some kinda clue for which book it is?’
Liam nodded. He looked at Becks. ‘Do you think Bob will understand that clue?’
She pursed her lips and shrugged — yet another teenage gesture she seemed to have picked up in the last fortnight from the students. ‘I am unable to give you an accurate answer to that question, Liam.’
‘Well, put it this way… would you get it?’
Her eyelids flickered. ‘I have thirty-one thousand listings in my database against the word “magic”.’
‘Ah, Jay-zus,’ muttered Liam, frustrated. ‘Maybe we should have put more thought into the clue there. Maybe that one word on its own isn’t going to be enough for Bob to — ’
‘Saleena Vikram will understand,’ said Becks. She looked at Liam. ‘As “Bob” I discussed the book with her.’
Liam snorted. ‘You’re kidding me? You can actually discuss literature?’
‘I told her I very much enjoyed the magic in Harry Potter.’
Whitmore stood up straight and put his hands on his hips. ‘This is a joke, right? You’re not seriously telling me your super-secret-ultimate-time-police agency uses a kids’ book as a code key?’
Liam and Becks both looked up at him and nodded.
‘Jesus!’ Whitmore shook his head. ‘What kind of a Mickey Mouse outfit are you?’
‘Mickey Mouse?’
Liam waved at Becks to be silent. ‘It’s what works, Mr Whitmore!’ he replied, surprised with himself at how angry he sounded. ‘It’s what works… that’s what counts!’
Whitmore was a little taken aback by Liam’s uncharacteristic outburst. ‘Well, it’s just… it just seems so, I don’t know, a bit…’
‘Amateur,’ chimed in Franklyn. ‘We were thinking you guys had some sort of already-organized code system. You know? Like proper secret-agent types do?’
‘Yeah… don’t mean to be dissin’ you guys an’ all,’ said Juan, ‘but it does look like you makin’ this stuff up as you go along.’
‘Look,’ said Liam. ‘I’ll not lie to you… I’m quite new to this time-travel thing myself. And this is certainly the first time I’ve gone back to dinosaur times. So, I suppose if it looks to you like me and Becks are not working from some… from some sort of manual, well
… you’d be right.’ He stood up, brushing ash from his hands. ‘But I’ll tell you this much for nothing: the agency has saved you many times over. And the thing is each time it does that for you, each time it’s saved history and the world around you… well, it’s happened. And you all go on with your lives happily never knowing how close it’s all come to disaster.’
Liam pressed his lips together. ‘Me and Becks here have saved you once before.’ He half smiled. ‘A certain Hitler chap who won a war instead of losing it. Now that was a fine bleedin’ mess, so it was. But we managed to fix it up again. So will you not give us some credit here? We’re not completely useless, all right?’
‘What about your agency?’ asked Kelly. ‘Who are they?’
Liam was about to answer when Becks grabbed his arm to stop him.
‘Lemme guess,’ said Kelly sarcastically, ‘ classified data.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Liam, ‘that’s how it is. We return you to 2015, then the less you know about us, the better. But I’ll tell you this, though… they’re organized and they’ve got the best technology out there; computers and… and “robots” like Becks and oh… loads of other stuff. So, look — ’ he smiled — ‘you’re in good hands.’
They looked at him with an unreadable mixture of expressions.
Come on, Liam… be decisive.
‘Right, then, enough prattling like old fishwives. We have a job to do, so we have. These tablets, Franklyn? Mr Whitmore? Where exactly do you suggest we go and place them?’
They both looked at each other, an exchange of absentminded gestures — Franklyn pushing his cracked glasses up his nose, Whitmore scratching at his scruffy beard — and a muttered exchange of ideas.
Finally Franklyn turned to them. ‘I suggest we embed a couple in the beach. Dig a hole, deep… as deep as you can. And the rest — ’ he turned and nodded towards a nearby thicket of bamboos and reeds — ‘that freshwater stream. There’s silt banks and a bunch of marsh either side of it. I’m pretty sure that’s how they describe the fossil bed in Dinosaur Valley, that it was once… marshy.’
Liam looked at Jasmine. ‘And these clay tablets will last sixty-five million years?’
She shook her head. ‘Uh, well, no… I never said they’d last that long.’
Franklyn shook his head. ‘You really don’t know a great deal about fossils, Liam, do you?’
Liam hunched his shoulders. ‘Nope, Franklyn, I don’t. But you do. So why don’t you tell me how this works, then?’
Franklyn sighed. ‘They’ll most likely break up long before there are even monkeys on planet Earth, let alone Homo sapiens. But the impression they leave behind — like a cast or a mould on the sand — on the silt, which eventually will become a layer of sedimentary rock, that’s the fossil.’ He offered Liam a patient if somewhat patronizing smile. ‘Not those tablets. They’ll be long gone dust.’
Liam nodded thoughtfully. ‘All right, then. So now I know… strikes me that it makes no real difference — there’s still something left behind that a person can read, right?’
Franklyn nodded.
