Day of the Predator - Alex Scarrow [38]
This place, this scruffy archway criss-crossed with cables, had begun to feel like a home, and Liam and Maddy … even Bob, like an odd new family. Now, in one moment, with one simple mistake, she wondered if that was all gone. She looked up from her hands, wrestling each other in her lap, to see Bob’s silent blinking response on the screen.
> Not necessarily.
‘What? What do you mean “not necessarily”? Do you mean not necessarily dead?’
> Affirmative. They may have been transported.
‘You mean like one of our time windows?’
> Correct. The sudden dilation of a dimensional pinhole being used to extract zero-point energy may have functioned in a similar way to a portal.
‘Where? Do you know where? Could we find them?’
> Negative. I have no possible way of knowing when they would have been transported to. It would be random.
‘But … but they could be alive, right? Alive, somewhere?’
> Affirmative, Sal. But in the same geographic location.
‘Is there anything we could do to try to find them?’
> Negative. We are in the same situation as before we sent the tachyon signal. If the explosion did not kill them, then they are sometime in the past or future.
The rising hope she was feeling that there might be a way to find them and bring them back in one piece began to falter.
> My AI duplicate and Liam may attempt to establish contact with the field office, provided it can be done with a minimum of time contamination.
‘You mean like Liam did with the museum guest book? A message in history?’
> Correct. If they have not been transported too far in time, it may be possible for them to find a way to communicate without causing a dangerous level of contamination.
‘So what … we wait? We wait and hope for a signal?’
> Affirmative. We must wait and we must observe. There is no other viable course of action.
CHAPTER 23
65 million years BC, jungle
‘Excuse me?’ said Laura. ‘When did you say?’
Franklyn finished wiping his glasses dry and put them back on again. He took his time savouring the silent, rapt attention of the others sitting together in the clearing. ‘I said sixty-five million years ago.’
The others shared a stunned silence. Eyes meeting eyes and all of them wide. The enormity of the fact taking a long while to sink in for all of them.
It was Whitmore who broke the silence. ‘Sixty-five million years … so that definitely takes us to near the end of the Cretaceous period.’ He looked at the boy, whose glasses were already beginning to fog up again from the humidity. ‘It is the Cretaceous, isn’t it?’
Franklyn nodded. ‘Correct. Late Cretaceous, to be precise.’
‘We’ve travelled in time?’ uttered Kelly. ‘That’s … that’s not possible!’
‘Whoa!’ one of the other kids cried.
Whitmore and Franklyn were looking at each other warily, a gesture not missed by Liam.
‘What? Either of you gentlemen going to tell us what a bleedin’ late crustation is?’ Liam studied them suspiciously. ‘You two fellas looked at each other all funny just then. That means something, right?’
Whitmore pursed his lips, his eyebrows arched as if in disbelief at what he was about to utter. ‘If Franklyn here is right,’ he said, watching the foot-long dragonflies hover and drop among a cluster of ferns nearby, ‘then this is dinosaur times. We’re in dinosaur times.’
Laura gasped. ‘Oh God.’ She took two or three deep breaths that hooted like a steam train coming down a tunnel, like a woman in labour. ‘Oh my God! I was watching Jurassic Park last night! I don