After six weeks of delays, the act itself was almost anticlimactic. The chronological displacement field shimmered, and I stepped through into another world.
There was no grass, only rust-brown dust underfoot. Scattered shrubs, bushes and low trees dominated the landscape, and a hot, dry wind blew whirls of dust into the air.
Off to the left was the research station, right where the Chronos Project technical geeks said it would be, a garage-sized concrete building with sliding Lexan windows and a solar power array on top. A weird, vulturine bird perched on one of the solar panels.
I raised my rifle and looked at the bird through the scope. “Pow,” I whispered to myself. The bird looked at me incuriously.
“Well,” I said, somewhat rhetorically. There wasn’t anyone else to talk to. There wouldn’t be, not for another forty million years or so. I was in the middle of the Oligocene Epoch, in the heart of what would one day be Texas, to spend a month doing a biological survey. The .416 Remington Magnum rifle I carried was for self-defense, although I secretly planned to get a little fresh Oligocene meat to supplement the frozen and canned supplies in the pre-stocked research station.
The Chronos Project selected the Oligocene for our first PastWalk expedition due to the relative dearth of fossils from that era. Or so I’m told. Fossils aren’t really my specialty; I’m a field zoologist.
Of course, I was briefed on some of the animals that are known from the era. Two of them, the horse-size omnivorous pig-like entelodonts and the even larger, carnivorous creodonts were the main reason I was packing the elephant gun.
I checked out the research station first. The heavy steel door pulled open easily. There was a pile of windblown dust in front of the door, and a few cobwebs around the windows. It looked like it had been sitting there a few weeks, subjectively. The support crew had displaced it yesterday – well, my yesterday – but they had aimed it back a little farther than when I was supposed to turn up, to make sure that there wouldn’t be any embarrassing traffic jams in the time stream. It just wouldn’t do to have me walk through and then have the big concrete station materialize on top of me.
As to why I was there alone, that was the strange bit. The chronological displacement field uses several different levels of resolution. They can use a fairly low resolution for large, simple, massy objects like a big concrete building. Smaller complex bits of equipment and supplies, like microscopes, computers, refrigerator/freezers and canned goods, those take a higher resolution setting, which costs a lot more in energy. Sending a human through, though, that’s really expensive. The energy required increases logarithmically as the resolutions used in the displacement field increase. Sending me through to the Oligocene used enough energy to power Dallas/Ft. Worth for an entire year.
The cheap bean-counting weenies in charge of Chronos’ purse strings weren’t going to spring for a partner to go through with me.
What the hell, I volunteered as soon as I read the proposal Chronos presented. I wouldn’t have missed the chance for anything, alone or not.
I took a look around the research station, and everything looked fine. The refrigerator/freezers were chugging away, the water tank was full and the auto-spike had sent the sand point down just fine. I wouldn’t run out of water, and the purification unit would keep the potable water tank full. I could even take showers. The lights worked, and the two computers booted up OK.
It was getting dark when I went back outside. Damn! It had been a few minutes after eight in the morning when I stepped through, and now here it was evening in the Oligocene. I guess I couldn’t expect the calibration to be that good. This would be like jet lag – I’d have to get my circadian rhythms sorted out. Well, there was nothing else for it. I wasn’t about to go stumbling around in the dark when there were God-knows-what big toothy critters out there wandering around. I went back inside, sat at one of the computers and played Combat Air Ace for a while (the Chronos IT types didn’t know I’d snuck that onto the system) and then went to bed. Sleep didn’t come easily, but I managed to nap for a couple of hours before the sun came up, shining in through the dusty Lexan windows.
Time to go to work. I got up and walked barefoot to the window.
My first customers were just outside. Two big, large-headed animals were about fifty yards away, staring at the concrete building. I figured them to be creodonts, probably a hyeanadont species.
One of them took a few cautious steps towards the station. I slid the window open a few inches. At the slight screeching sound, both animals’ ears pricked up.
They were faintly doglike, long-legged and sort of rangy, with long heavy tails. Their jaws were long and heavy, and I could see the heavy muscles around their faces. These things could probably crunch up heavy herbivore bones like a kid eating a sugar candy. Both animals had coats of light brown hair with faint yellowish stripes running down from their spines. One of the two, the larger, had an odd, upstanding crest of stiff black hair on top of his head, running down his spine to taper out just behind his shoulders.
There was a video camera behind me on a shelf, so I grabbed it and started shooting. Both hyeanadonts turned and walked parallel to the wall, cautiously, giving me a perfect broadside shot. The big one – definitely a male – bared huge, crushing teeth at me.
I slid the window shut again. After a moment’s thought, I decided to wait an hour or so before going outside. The two hyeanadonts looked hungry. So, I sat down and had some breakfast, and eventually the predators went off somewhere to do the same.
A little herd of odd, antelope-looking things browsed their way on past the station a while later, so I figured the hyeanadonts had left the area. It was time to go exploring.
There was a garage area in the back of the station with a powered door, and inside it was a military-spec Kevlar-armored Hummer, modified to operate on a hydrogen fuel cell. I made sure the hydrogen tank was topped up – there was a converter unit powered by the solar apparatus – and drove on out. I had 400 miles of cross-country range, and the back of the Hummer even had room to sleep in if I cared to. With the supplies and gear on board I could stay out four or five days if I felt like it, and the vehicle’s speed and Kevlar armor was more than enough protection against the biggest hyeanadonts that I expected to run into.
If they ever send me into the Jurassic or the Cretaceous, I’ll expect something stouter, like an armored personnel carrier. But the Hummer would do fine in the Oligocene.
Anyway, I banged off to the west for about twenty miles, raising a big cloud of red dust behind me as I rolled over the hardpan, dodging weird bushes and scattered trees. I had to ford one small creek, which was no problem at all once I found a decent crossing spot with low banks. The Hummer just splashed right through.
Finally I came to a big ridgeline that overlooked a wide river valley, with trees and brush more abundant that on the plains. I stopped the Hummer, and after a nervous look around for more hyeanadonts, I got out. I retrieved the big Remington from the dash rack, and pulled out a big pair of 36-power marine binoculars, a notepad, and a pen, and found a spot to sit on the ridge where I had a good view of the valley below.
The place wasn’t exactly brimming over with animal life.
I’ve been to Kenya twice and South Africa once. At times the savannahs in Africa can seem filled to the brim with wildlife, but there are other times where there’s not a critter to be seen.
It was at least half an hour before anything interesting showed up. I photographed several birds the flitted about me in curiosity, and a couple more of the weird vulture-things circled overhead for a while. Finally, two sandwiches and a half a bottle of water later, a herd of titanotheres browsed their way down the valley below.
Now this was interesting.
The titanotheres were big, rhino-looking things, but instead of a regular horn they had big, paddle-shaped spreading things on their nose, in front of a sort of dish-shaped face. The herd stuck pretty close together, in what looked like a typical herd pattern. A phalanx of big bulls formed the outer perimeter, and the smaller cows and calves were in the interior of the slow-moving group. A few minutes later I saw why; another pair of hyeanadonts was following the herd, a couple hundred yards back. Probably looking for stragglers, I doubt even those bone-crushing jaws would be a match for a huge bull titanothere. The one time I saw a hyeanadont get too close, one of the bulls turned and trotted straight at it, swinging its head back and forth and bellowing. The bigheaded creodont predator backed off, tail and head held low submissively.
An hour later, the herd and the attendant predators – or maybe they were scavengers – browsed out of sight. I got up; stretched, picked up the big Remington and my daypack to walk the few yards back to the Hummer.
First, a stop in the brush near the vehicle; the water I’d drunk was seeking an outlet. Funny how, even several million years before anything remotely human would show up on the Earth, I still felt the need to step into the brush to pee, but there you are.
Something a few steps away caught my eye as I stepped behind a large pile of something that looked like a creosote bush. I stopped, one hand on my jeans zipper, staring.
What I was seeing just wasn’t possible. But there it was. Nature’s call forgotten, I went over to pick the thing up.
The impossible thing was a basket. A basket woven of some kind of long, thick grass blades. A long, narrow, slightly curved basket with straps of woven fiber. One strap was broken and the bottom of the basket had a hole in it; in fact the whole thing looked rather old and used to the point of wearing out, which was probably why it had been discarded.
But discarded by whom?
At this point the urge to pee hit me rather badly. After taking care of that, I took a careful look around, but no footprints or other signs were visible. The basket – this impossible basket – had probably been laying here days or weeks.
I wish the Chronos Project could figure out some way to send messages back and forth, but until they sent a retrieval beam after me a month from now, I was on my own. In the end I wasn’t any closer to figuring the thing out, so I laid it carefully in the back of the Hummer, loaded my rifle and daypack, and headed on up the ridgeline. It didn’t seem to be quite noon yet, so I planned to head another couple miles down the ridge above this river valley to see what lay in that direction.
Oh, this seems fun!
🙂
obligatory
If it turns out that the basket required more than two hands to weave, it can be a crossover!
A ticket, a tasket, a green and yellow casket! Woob woob woob!
*dramatic music sting*
*wonders what titanotheres taste like*
Your old boots probably taste better and are easier to chew. One commodity difficult to find in the wild: fat. Remember all of the discussion here over the taste of ‘grass fed’ vs. ‘corn fed’ and marbling etc.? Yeah. Old boot…raised on bitter weed.
No love for Bronto burgers?
Probably quite gamey tasting too. And what would you use for seasoning? Could you even find garlic and pepper?
Just throw it in a smoker it will be fine.
Sweet. I’m already invested.
Thanks, Animal!
OT – our mighty bastion of liberty!
Of course even if the SC ruled, again, the dissenting courts will continue to trickle out rulings intended to erode the holding.
Is it in anyway whatsoever an infringement? Why yes, yes it is. Maryland is the criminal in this case.
Not much of a crime when there is no punishment.
Yes. That is one of my complaints about our constitution. Lack of teeth. Of course there is the danger of using law fare which I am sure the founders were aware of . Still, it frustrates me that by lack of teeth they essentially gave us a self-nullifying contract.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other” so says John Adams. Leftists are fully aware of this thus their push for demoralization.
I have made it back to my house.
Of the two packages slated to be delivered friday, one was put in my mailbox and remained, the other has been delayed in transit and hasn’t made it out of Tennessee.
Since I hadn’t seen it and DigiKey packaging has bright red and white coloration, I’d assumed it was stolen, and was taking amusement from imaging a porch pirate opening the package to find nothing but Twenty-Five of These miniature slide switches. But, when I went to get that link for you, I saw that the order wasn’t showing as delivered and looked at the tracking data. FedEx being fuckups helped me. (There was no reason for it to get turned around in Ohio after making it that far from North Dakota)
A fantasy that every outdoorsman has had….has. This is a story that can get claws in me.
*Looking at the Daeodon’s teeth and feet I suspect ‘Hell Hogs’ were primarily scavengers. The creodonts would be a bigger worry. Then there are always the ones we dont know about.
Are. you going to address the problem of pathogens and parasites that a visitor will certainly be exposed to…ones we have zero resistance to? Magical kill-all vaccine?
Thought experiment: Imagine this scenario or one like it but you, and you alone, know about it and possess the keys to this entirely rich and unsettled land. What would you do? Would you let others know about it? Let others come to it?
Another thought. A common flaw in our imaginings – we look at fossil records and imagine all of these critters lived at the same time and place. Just a little difference in location of fossils can mean thousands of years difference in real time. My favorite example is the dramatic version of history where a giant meteor kills all of the dinosaurs in a biblical apocalypse!!!! When did the dinosaurs die out? They ‘disappeared’ 65 – 75 million years ago! “Uh, that is a ten million year tapering off. Besides, they didnt disappear. I am looking at one right now out of my back window.”
No, I am not trying to take the fun out of this. The reality of it would be stunning and I too would volunteer myself without hesitation. I might even prefer to go alone.
If it were a spatial teleport I’d definitely be looking to foster a colonial expedition.
As mentioned below (I didn’t realize you’d brought up pathogens until I re-read your comment here, sorry), I’d be way too nervous about Marty McFly-ing myself out of existence to even go to the Deep Past like this, much less try to actually colonize it and really royally mess up the timestream. Unless I knew I was forking to an alternate timeline guaranteed or something… then maybe I’d consider it.
So very precious
Domestically, Trump is expected to undermine the independent prosecutorial role of the Justice Department as he pursues political opponents and seeks to suppress what he sees as the ‘deep state’.
This does not mean the end of the rule of law – federal courts and state systems of justice will continue to operate as now. But without an independent and objective federal prosecutor, there is likely to be a significant weakening in business standards across the board.
At the same time, the push to reduce civil service headcount combined with a much deeper than usual politicization of the remaining bureaucracy and possible growth in favoured company influence (‘crony capitalism’) would over time see a widespread deterioration in the quality and effectiveness of the US civil service.
Most concerning is the prospect that public policymaking by the federal government will cease to be based on evidence or objective analysis. Being forced to ignore the evidence of the impact and consequences of climate change, for example, can be expected to have a corrosive effect on the quality of decision-making across public policy.
The Biden administration was the gold standard of legitimacy scientific governance. Trump will throw it all out the window.
Without our preferred astronomical cost and damage assumptions in the model those climate policies won’t look nearly as compelling (or desperately necessary), and we cannot have that. Trump will derail the gravy train.
The projection vis a vis the politicization of the Justice Dept is fucking insane, almost funny even but not quite.
Almost?
“There wasn’t anyone else to talk to. There wouldn’t be, not for another forty million years or so. I was in the middle of the Oligocene Epoch, in the heart of what would one day be Texas, to spend a month doing a biological survey.”
I’m hoping that HQ sent a variety of nudie magazines to pass the time when nights get lonely.
Time travel tech, but no sex bots. Sad!
“From behind a creosote bush, a fat green alien appeared. A fez was jauntily angled on his head.
‘Where’s the buffet and drink specials? This casino sucks!’ He lamented.”
“From behind a creosote bush, a fat green alien appeared. A fez was jauntily angled on his head.
‘Where’s the buffet and drink specials? This casino sucks!’ He lamented.”
🙂
Chupacabra says “Hi.”
Is that the guy from the party invite joke?
“Do me a favor, take the creodont for a walk.”
Yeah, hopefully they recall the poor guy before he reaches the ‘playing with his own shit’ level of insanity…
Is there a volleyball?
I know it makes for fun stories — but just the ideal of temporal tourism (as it were) scares the living crap out of me. Beyond the “step on a butterfly” effect (shoot the wrong beast… change the course of evolution!), the viral load of your average homo sapien is several million years of virulent (pun intended) evolution. One would think a modern virus could rip through the past ecosystem worse than anything in the Columbian Exchange…. and then it would have several million years to evolve before getting back to us if it didn’t dramatically change history.
I don’t remember the name — but there was a time travel / alt-history one I read a few years back of a present/near future where everyone was sick and they wanted to change history in the early 20th to try to cut down the overpopulation (I think… been a while). And literally introduced the Spanish Influenza without meaning to and secured their temporal loop or somesuch. Just imagining that having a few more geological ages to simmer….
Or – The modern viruses can’t infect the ancient animals because they’ve also evolved to reproduce in their current host species.
Ultimately, the full 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a 14-2 decision in August upheld Maryland’s law, finding the regime was a “shall-issue” licensing system that did not infringe upon Second Amendment rights.
We’ll definitely probably maybe consider issuing a permit after you jump though these hoops and prove your innocence and worthiness. Totally a “shall issue” regulatory framework.
Our court system, less so than everyone else’s, is still just a bullshit factory.
EVERYONE else’s? I’m not so sure that’s right because it sucks ass as far as I can tell.
Thanks Animal, this is going to be fun!
My first thought upon seeing that basket: “Fuck. I just cant get away from them. Now I am going to have to kill someone.”
Not much of a crime when there is no punishment.
Something something unconditional discharge.
Looking forward to the new story arc.
Thanks
I get a “Land of the Lost” feeling here.
Cha-Ka!
I am but a simple caveman lawyer, unfamiliar with your ways…
Hmmm. No one answered my question.
What question?
Never mind, you already did.
Oooh, that’s a nice cold open. “I secretly planned to get a little fresh Oligocene meat…” <– This thought resembles me. Me likey. I'd likely be too terrified but I *am* that impulse as well. (I've fired most types of firearms, including a canon!, but never I've never hunted or even fished. (Not my parents' thing.))
…”the elephant gun.” Shit. Dream of mine. You officially have further hooked me. (I guess ripped the hook out and threw me in your bucket.
I am thrilled with the hyeanadonts. I did my big, 400-level animal behavior research project on hyenas Profoundly interesting creatures.
Titanotheres! I’m enjoying looking these guys up. This biological era is a big blind spot for me.
This is outstanding and I thank you.
Reminds me of Sprague De Camp’s set of short stories about hunters going back in time to bag prehistoric beasts for trophy rooms, as recounted by the fictional Aussie Reginald Rivers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivers_of_Time