“Calm down, Robert. Kelly’s will take care of us. He must have entered a bad variable.”
“No shit!”
“And he’ll find out what’s happened and take the appropriate action. Besides, the fail-safe will pull us out in time. Remember? We don’t belong here, and Time will see us safely home again.”
“Well I wish I could be so certain.” Nordhausen was still frustrated, but he slowly composed himself, accepting his fate.
Paul fingered the thin film of reddish-white substance on the rocks. “I’ll bet there’s iridium in this stuff.”
“Iridium?”
“Yes, it’s a common byproduct that fits with the major impact theory.”
“There you go with that asteroid business again. You’re not going to just sit here and talk disaster theory, are you?”
“Well why not? You put the clues together a moment ago. If we are where you think we are, then we’ve got a unique look at what may have happened during the last extinction event. No sense moping about it. Let’s do some science while we’re waiting for the retraction. All those clues were consistent with a major impact, right?”
“I suppose your going to feed me that nonsense about some mysterious dark star.”
“It’s not my theory,” Paul protested. “Alvarez and a few of his colleagues came up with the idea at U.C. Berkeley. They found all this stuff was prevalent on the K-T boundary: iridium, shocked quartz, tektites, little glass beads, and it was followed by a fern spike when most of the other pollen breeding plants died out. It’s happened before, you know.”
“Only too well,” there was a complaint in Nordhausen’s tone. “Mass extinctions seem to occur on earth every 26 million years, so they came up with the idea that a small dark star called Nemesis was disturbing debris in the Oort cloud outside the solar system, and sending a rain of asteroids and comets down on us. Yes, Paul, I’ve heard that rubbish.”
“Hell, Robert, look around! I’ll bet we’ve landed smack dab in the middle of the last major extinction event! We’re probably right on the K-T boundary, perhaps only a few years after the asteroid hit.”
The Alvarez theory had been debated for some time in the scientific community after the discovery of a thin layer of sediments in old rock formations dating back to the Cretaceous period. Iridium had been found there in concentrations well above the norm. It was a relatively rare element on earth, usually deep under the surface, but was thought to be present in asteroids that would strike the planet at regular intervals. The other clues all supported this possibility as well. Tektites and shocked quartz were also byproducts of a massive collision where the ejecta would have been thrown up into the atmosphere, falling hundreds, even thousands of miles away. The resulting obscuration was made worse as raging fires added smoke and cinder to the mix. Sunlight struggled to reach the surface, and temperatures dropped very suddenly—not a good thing for cold blooded creatures like the Dinosaurs. Mass extinction followed as hundreds of thousands of species were wiped out. It had happened before, five times, throughout the earth’s long history. The K-T event, as it was called, ushered in the new era of the Tertiary period, where humans arrived very late in the process of evolution.
“The K-T boundary. Yes, that makes good sense.” Nordhausen was finally starting to get his mind around the situation. “Looks like we’ve jumped out of the frying pan and landed in the fire. We were happily watching the sixth major extinction event, and now we get to take a peek at the fifth.”
“Sixth extinction?”
“Of course! We’re losing some 30,000 species or more per year in our time. That’s equivalent to the same die-off rate of this time period, the last great extinction that wiped out the dinos. Everyone focuses on them, God rest their souls, though the extinction in the marine life was much more severe. Maybe it was a comet or asteroid, though I’m inclined to side with the gradualists. Probably a combination of many things: climate change, competition from egg-eating mammals, volcanic activity, disease. They all played a part in the K-T event, and the asteroid was probably just the icing on the cake. It was one of your imperatives, Paul. They used to call them ‘Acts of God’ before you dreamt up your time theory, and what God wants, God gets. No more dinos.”
“Strange,” said Paul. “Is it really that bad—back home I mean?”
“What, the extinction? Certainly! Normal background loss for species is only about four or five per year. But we’ve been hard at work, day in and day out, doing the job of the next asteroid. Human civilization has had such a terrible impact on the planet that, by the time the next big hunk of rock arrives, the sixth extinction will probably have run its course. The asteroid will just be the icing on our cake, and the end of everything.”
“You mean we’re causing the sixth extinction?”
“Who else? We’ve been at it for thousands of years: invading and destroying habitats, cultivating one species in favor of another, introducing alien germs and creatures in unfamiliar environments, not to mention the pollution we cause. Hell, we’ve bred all the diversity out of wheat so we can have our toast in the morning. Now that plant is totally dependent on human cultivation to survive. That’s just one tiny example—I could go on for hours. If you ask me, we’ve been up to a great deal of mischief, just futzing about trying to amuse ourselves. Unfortunately the planet has been paying the price. The dinos are long gone and perhaps we’re next in line if things keep on. These Holy Fighters who blew up Palma are hastening the process, but the rest of us are just as guilty. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns! We spend all our energy selling trinkets and trifles to keep the masses fat and happy, while the planet is dying right beneath our feet.”
“Join the Green Party, Robert.”
“You know I’m not political. I just do my bit in the classroom when I can. I figure if we can raise a few heads at a time something might be done about it. We treat this planet like it was our own private amusement park. We’ll just amuse ourselves to death, I suppose.”
“Roger Waters,” said Paul.
“What?”
“Never mind. It was a great concert. You should have been there.” Paul’s eyes brightened with a thought. “Think there’s any dinosaurs left around here? We found that Ammonite thing. What if we come across a big dino carcass!”
“Forget it, Paul. This isn’t a romp through Jurassic Park. Enough of this nonsense. What are we talking about? Kelly botched up the numbers, just like I said he would. How the hell are we going to get back? Would you explain that to me?” Nordhausen returned to the more immediate problem. He would leave the fate of the dinosaurs, and the planet, to another time.
“We obviously can’t wait around sixty-five million years for the target trigger to pull us out,” said Paul. “But the fail-safe trigger is keyed to the half-life sequence and it should take effect in due time.”
“You mean we’re stuck here for a while? Why can’t he just pull us out now?”
“Kelly’s probably working on it,” Paul chided him. “If we went back too far, as we obviously have, the fail-safe would be timed to pull us out in due course. It’s really only a matter of hours in laboratory time. That would give us another shot at things. Kelly may be trying to hasten the process and work another solution right now.”
“Is that what happened to the visitor?”
“I think he was pulled out by the target trigger. Remember, he said he landed seven years before the target event, which was the night of our meeting. They knew they only had one shot at getting through the shadow of the Palma Event, so they didn’t program a fail-safe retraction. It was all or nothing. Our visitor just had to live out the seven years until the night of the meeting. It was his only chance of getting home—or of accomplishing his mission.”