Time Travel: Recent Trips Read online

  "Jesus, Gwyneth, do you want to break us?" Peter had asked when he'd seen the cost.

  She didn't quite have the nerve to respond as she had wanted to: We're already broken.

  Her foot slipped on an outcropping of stone, and she would have fallen but for Angela's steadying hand at her elbow. Gwyneth swiped perspiration from her eyes with the back of one hand.

  "Drinks, darling. The moment we return," Angela whispered—quiet being a condition imposed upon them at the beginning of the excursion— and Gwyneth laughed, and said, "By all means, yes," feeling closer to this virtual stranger than her own husband of almost a decade.

  That morning the two women had gravitated toward one another like old friends. They tramped side-by-side, midway in the group strung out along the trail like pearls. Their husbands forged along behind Wilson, who took the rocky path without effort, a canteen at his belt and a rifle slung across one shoulder. Late afternoon and the Cretaceous alive with sound, the hooting complaint of the striped, knee-high theropods that scattered into the underbrush before them, the steady hush of insects, the arboreal rustle of mammals the size of squirrels—"Our forbears," Wilson had said. "The meek shall inherit the earth."

  From on high the alien shriek of some sky-borne pteranodon drifted down.

  They stopped in a clearing of tall, flowering grass to search the thing out.

  It was Stafford who spotted it, his arm out-stretched. They gathered around him to stare at the creature circling high above them in a sky of sun-shot blue.

  "Quetzalcoatlus?" someone asked.

  "Nothing so large, I should think." Wilson unclipped his binoculars. "Looks to have a wingspan of maybe fifteen feet, about half that of Queztalcoatlus. Could be a juvenile, I suppose, but it's hard to tell at this distance. Anyone want to see?"

  The binoculars made the rounds. When her turn came, Gwyneth lifted them to her eyes, but she could never hold the image in frame long enough to get anything more than a glimpse of the creature, a fleeting impression of beak and bony crest, the vast leathery wings taut as a wind-blown kite.

  They moved on then, deeper into the woods. The familiar smell of pine needles and dry loam enveloped her, the scent of unfamiliar flowers. Stafford had acquired the aura of a minor hero. Wilson had clapped him on the shoulder. "Sharp eyes," he'd said, and the big man seemed to have expanded still more under the praise. Despite his size, he moved through the woods with a confidence Peter lacked, sure-footed, a creature of the physical world, his bearish frame poised over his center of gravity.

  The terrain grew more forgiving, dropping away into a broad vale. The pace slowed, as Wilson paused to point out the flowering angiosperms and broad-leaved deciduous trees that had only recently—geologically speaking—evolved to compete with the pervasive conifers. They paused for water. Wilson moved among them, spare and purposeful, no gesture wasted.

  "Okay, then?" he said to Gwyneth.

  "I'm fine."

  He nodded, and moved on.

  They got moving again fifteen minutes later.

  Not long after that the woods thinned. Another glade opened ahead

  of them. Moted beams of sunlight slanted through the treetops, firing the bracken with a yellow-green glow. The boles of trees climbed the heavens in dark silhouette, dwarfing Wilson where he stood black against the green effulgence, the back of his hand upraised in universal semaphore. He waved the straggling line to either side. Something snorted, blew out breath in a long waning note. It called out—a kind of groan, long and deeppitched, like a rusty nail being wrenched from an ancient board. Then it took a step. Weeds thrashed. Gwyneth slipped with Peter through the ferny undergrowth to the right.

  The trees fell away and the glade unveiled itself.

  Gwyneth gasped for the beauty of it, the shining clearing and the creatures that grazed there: majestic, ponderous beasts—three horned, twenty-five or thirty feet long, ten feet at the shoulder—cropping peacefully at the waist-high grass. Triceratops, Gwyneth thought, gazing in wonder at the massive bony frill that curved up behind their heads, flushed bright with pink and red. The breeze combing the grass smelled of the creatures in the glade, a scent of old leather and manure and fresh-mown grass.

  She caught snatches of Wilson murmuring—

  " . . . a bull, two cows—the smaller ones—and a yearling. See it?"

  He broke off as the largest of the dinosaurs—the bull—swung its elongated head in their direction. It regarded them with a single beady eye. In three quarter profile, the beast was more impressive still, battle scarred and ancient, the horns above its eyes razor-sharp spears of bone, jutting out three feet or more. It lumbered toward them, a single step, then two and three—

  "Steady, now," Wilson whispered. "Steady—"

  —chuffed, and paused, as if assessing the danger they posed; a moment later, it lowered its beaked snout and began to tear at the weeds once again. This close Gwyneth could see parasites—insects maybe—crawling across its mottled green and brown hide. She was about to ask about them, when her eye caught a rustle in the tall grass—

  The underbrush erupted, shrieking.

  For a moment, Gwyneth didn't see them, they were so well camouflaged. Then she did, three, four—was it five, or more?—green- and yellow-striped raptors the size of men or larger, hurtling across the clearing from half a dozen woody blinds, so fast that the eye could barely track them. Three of them corralled the yearling and herded it toward the trees. More than half the pack—there were seven of them, she saw—no, eight—wheeled away to face the charge of the bull Triceratops. Just as it lowered its head to impale them, they gave ground, hurling themselves at the monster's unprotected haunches, their razor-clawed feet digging for purchase in its hide. The animal's belly split, spilling a bulge of glistening viscera—

  Peter clutched at her, trying to drag her deeper under the trees. The bull Triceratops wheeled around, lunging at its tormentors. Its tail whipped the air, flinging a raptor screeching into the undergrowth, and somewhere at the edge of the clearing the yearling screamed and screamed and screamed, until, abruptly, it fell silent. Dear God, she could see the raptors tearing it limb from limb. Grass thrashed. Geysers of blood erupted. Her heart pounding, Gwyneth wrenched free of Peter's hand. She stepped into the clearing, she didn't know why. The yearling's companions, the bleeding bull among them, broke for the trees. As the remaining raptors swung around to their kill, they saw her—

  —they saw her—

  —and for a heartbeat—she felt a single nightmarish pulse at her temple— the moment hung in equipoise. Fathomless silence enveloped her. Then, shrieking, the nearest raptor hurtled toward her, its taloned feet clawing the earth. Gwyneth felt the tug of the yoke, like gravity seizing her as she careened through the loop of a roller coaster—

  Then Robert Wilson stepped up beside her, leveling the rifle. The thing was almost upon them—the scene going watery around her as the yoke began to draw her home—when he pulled the trigger. There was a sound of thunder. The raptor's skull dissolved into a spray of blood and bone. Its body spun convulsing to the ground. The next moment her vision cleared.

  The glade was silent and empty.

  "Quickly, now," Wilson said, touching her shoulder. "They'll be back soon."

  He spun her around and they retreated under the trees. The rest of the group awaited them there. She saw Peter, his long face pale with fury, and she reached out an entreating hand to him.

  "Peter—" she said.

  But he turned away.

  Then Angela was there, catching an arm around her waist and cooing, "It's okay now, it's all over." And then, half-supporting her as they trudged homeward through the suddenly menacing woods: "We'll get a drink into you first thing," she whispered. "A drink is what it wants."

  A drink, thought Gwyneth, with a mounting hilarity she did not recognize as her own. A drink would be just the thing.

  Yes, a drink.

  Maybe two, Gwyneth thought—definitely two, as it turned out,
and she sensed a third one coming on. Fire pits threw up sparks and music swirled in the night air. She leaned against the railing, lifted her face to the breeze, sipped her martini. The gin smelled of pine trees, of the vast conifer forest, unsullied by human hands, that sprawled across the continent.

  The scent triggered a flash of memory: the raptor hurling itself across the clearing at her, Wilson leveling the gun—

  And here he was, speak of the devil.

  Elbows on the railing, he leaned beside her. The party was in full swing now. Dancers twirled under muted lights. Wisps of conversation drifted through the air. She spied Peter, talking to Stafford by the buffet, and glanced away.

  Wilson set her empty glass on the tray of a passing server and handed her a fresh martini. "Cheers," he said.

  They touched glasses. She held the gin in her mouth, savoring it.

  They turned their backs to the party. For a long time, they leaned on their elbows, staring out into the dark. Before them ran the long blue savannah.

  "Something else, isn't it?" he said.

  She gazed up at the sky, bereft of the old constellations. Or was it new? She laughed, and a small voice inside her said, You must be careful. He'll think you're drunk. Which she was. Why it should matter, she could not say.

  "The stars look strange."

  "The skies change in sixty-five million years. Or seventy."

  "You don't know, then?"

  "No one knows."

  "But Eckels—"

  "The recent past they're pretty good at. The further back you go—" He shrugged. "Slippage."

  "And why is that, Mr. Wilson?"

  "You're talking to the wrong man, Mrs.—"

  "Gwyneth."

  "—Braunmiller. You'd need a physicist to answer that."

  "Yet you were waiting the moment we arrived."

  "Once they have a focal point to lock in on—once some brave soul plants a flag, so to speak—then you're fine."

  "But you don't know when that focal point is?"

  "Never will. Rough calculations can pin it down some—we're toward the end of the era, we know that. But dinosaurs don't keep calendars, I'm afraid."

  She could feel the alcohol buzzing through her veins. Her face was not unpleasantly numb.

  "Dance?" he said.

  "If you insist."

  Leaving their drinks on a nearby table, they stepped on to the dance floor.

  "I haven't thanked you for saving my life today."

  "I didn't save your life."

  "Didn't you?"

  "Your yoke would have saved you if it came to that. You could feel it, couldn't you?"

  "Like gravity moving through me. A roller coaster. That's what I thought."

  Her mind replayed that snippet of memory once again—the raptor lunging at her, Wilson lifting the gun—

  "Why did you wait so long to shoot?"

  "Wouldn't do to miss, would it? We're not all yoked."

  "You've been yoked before, Mr. Wilson?"

  "Yes."

  "And had to use it."

  "Oh sure."

  "What happened?"

  "Female tyrannosaur cornered me in a ravine. They're the bad ones. The females."

  He raised his eyebrows. She wasn't sure if he was joking.

  "What's it feel like?"

  "The yoke?"

  "Yes."

  "Like being turned inside out."

  "So why aren't you wearing one now?"

  "Because it feels like being turned inside out."

  "Seriously."

  "It would hardly do if your guide disappeared, would it? If I'd been yoked today, we both might have gone home. Who'd have led your intrepid hikers back to the hotel?"

  She glimpsed Peter, watching them from the buffet, and had a momentary image of him trying to find his way back through the woods alone—Peter, who lived almost entirely in a world of complex financial transactions, a world where meaning was not innate, but created by the universal assent of billions. What had Stafford called it the other day? Pushing money around. He'd said something else, too: I like to put my hands on something solid. Like to say, I did that.

  Yet—

  "You risk your life for that?"

  "There's money, of course. And more."

  "More?"

  "It doesn't bear talking to death."

  She fell silent. They revolved to the music.

  Wilson said: "What the devil possessed you to do that, anyway?"

  The sound of the yearling screaming echoed in her memory.

  "I don't know," she said. She said, "I can't stand to see things in pain."

  "This is no good for you, then."

  "I'm not sure what's good for me, anymore."

  "Who is?"

  "You seem to be pretty certain."

  "I've stripped my life to certain basics, that's all."

  "There's no Mrs. Wilson?"

  "Not for many years now."

  "Are you lonely?"

  "You're very curious, aren't you? Let's collect our drinks."

  They stood at the railing again. Gwyneth sipped her martini. She was being careful now.

  "I thought perhaps some great heartache in your past—"

  "Nothing so romantic, I'm afraid. She wasn't willing to live with the risks I take. I wasn't willing to live without them."

  "Why not?"

  "Do you know Wallace Stevens? Death is the mother of beauty?"

  "Poetry, too?"

  "You know it then."

  "I've read it, I think. In college once."

  "You should read it again."

  She laughed. "What would I find there, Robert Wilson. Truth or beauty?"

  "A bit of both, maybe."

  "You must feel great disdain for your charges."

  He shrugged.

  "You must feel great disdain for me."

  "If I felt disdain, I wouldn't be talking to you, would I?"

  "What do you feel?"

  "Are you flirting with me, Mrs. Braunmiller?"

  "I'm curious, that's all."

  "What you did was very brave. Also very stupid. I admire the courage."

  "And the stupidity?"

  Wilson didn't answer. He lifted his glass and finished his whiskey. He held it in his mouth for a long moment. He set the glass on the railing. "Laphroaig," he said. "Nectar of the gods."

  "Mr. Wilson—"

  He squared up to face her. "I don't admire stupidity in anyone, Mrs. Braunmiller. But I admire courage very much. Courage compensates for many failings." Then, after a moment: "It was the yearling, was it?"

  "I suppose."

  "It won't do to anthropomorphize them. You're likely to get me killed that way."

  When she didn't answer, he said, "What have you come here for? Nobody comes here without a reason."

  "To see the dinosaurs, what else?"

  But he wouldn't take that as an answer. She could see it in the set of his shoulders, in the observing blue eyes that held hers to account.

  "I'm not sure," she said.

  "No one ever is," he said.

  The party settled into the languid rhythm that dying parties acquire. The band swung into something soft and jazzy. There was no more dancing. The guests who lingered clustered around the fire pits and talked quietly, occasional bursts of laughter lifting into the air like larks.

  Gwyneth stood at the edge of the terrace with a glass of wine, watching as someone threw a log onto a dying fire. A shower of sparks swirled up to print themselves against the swollen moon that had lately cleared the mountains. She felt a surge of gladness, a kind of nostalgia in reverse, that at least that had not changed. The old familiar moon still gazed down upon her from the alien wash of stars.

  A hand touched her elbow.

  She turned, half expecting to see Wilson—she wasn't sure where he had gone, or when—and found herself staring into Peter's face instead.

  "It's late," he said.

  She didn't know the time.

  They
leaned their elbows on the railing and stared into the night.

  "I waited up."

  "I thought you might." Her wine caught a spark of firelight and held it. "I didn't mean to worry you."

  "You didn't worry me."

  She saw the lie in the set of his jaw, the muscle twitching there.

  "I just wondered where you were."

  "I've been right here."

  "I know." That twitch of muscle. "I just wondered, that's all."

  They were silent for a time.

  "We didn't dance," he said.

  "You didn't ask."

  Gwyneth turned to look at him. In the moonlight, Peter's face looked older, gaunt, his eyes deeply shadowed. How strange he had become to her.

  What had happened to them?

  Peter laughed quietly. "No, I suppose I didn't."

  Then: "Was he scolding you?"

  "Mr. Wilson?"

  She hadn't thought so at the time, but—

  "Not scolding exactly," she said. "Reminding me, maybe."

  "Reminding you?"

  "That he wasn't yoked. That he was putting himself at risk in ways the rest of us are not."

  And now, for the second time that evening: "What possessed you, Gwen?"

  "Something came over me. I don't know."

  The whole thing—the entire trip from the moment she'd seen that footage on her screen back home—had been something she'd had to do, a mute imperative that she could not resist. Why did you come here? Wilson had asked her.