Timeline - Michael Crichton [3]
Ultimately, Oliver lost his impregnable castle when a spy opened an inside passage, allowing the Archpriest’s soldiers to enter. Such betrayals were typical of the complex intrigues of that time.
From The Hundred Years
War in France
by M. D. Backes, 1996
CORAZÓN
“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory
does not understand it.”
NIELS BOHR, 1927
“Nobody understands quantum theory.”
RICHARD FEYNMAN, 1967
He should never have taken that shortcut.
Dan Baker winced as his new Mercedes S500 sedan bounced down the dirt road, heading deeper into the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona. Around them, the landscape was increasingly desolate: distant red mesas to the east, flat desert stretching away in the west. They had passed a village half an hour earlier—dusty houses, a church and a small school, huddled against a cliff—but since then, they’d seen nothing at all, not even a fence. Just empty red desert. They hadn’t seen another car for an hour. Now it was noon, the sun glaring down at them. Baker, a forty-year-old building contractor in Phoenix, was beginning to feel uneasy. Especially since his wife, an architect, was one of those artistic people who wasn’t practical about things like gas and water. His tank was half-empty. And the car was starting to run hot.
“Liz,” he said, “are you sure this is the way?”
Sitting beside him, his wife was bent over the map, tracing the route with her finger. “It has to be,” she said. “The guidebook said four miles beyond the Corazón Canyon turnoff.”
“But we passed Corazón Canyon twenty minutes ago. We must have missed it.”
“How could we miss a trading post?” she said.
“I don’t know.” Baker stared at the road ahead. “But there’s nothing out here. Are you sure you want to do this? I mean, we can get great Navajo rugs in Sedona. They sell all kinds of rugs in Sedona.”
“Sedona,” she sniffed, “is not authentic.”
“Of course it’s authentic, honey. A rug is a rug.”
“Weaving.”
“Okay.” He sighed. “A weaving.”
“And no, it’s not the same,” she said. “Those Sedona stores carry tourist junk—they’re acrylic, not wool. I want the weavings that they sell on the reservation. And supposedly the trading post has an old Sandpainting weaving from the twenties, by Hosteen Klah. And I want it.”
“Okay, Liz.” Personally, Baker didn’t see why they needed another Navajo rug—weaving—anyway. They already had two dozen. She had them all over the house. And packed away in closets, too.
They drove on in silence. The road ahead shimmered in the heat, so it looked like a silver lake. And there were mirages, houses or people rising up on the road, but always when you came closer, there was nothing there.
Dan Baker sighed again. “We must’ve passed it.”
“Let’s give it a few more miles,” his wife said.
“How many more?”
“I don’t know. A few more.”
“How many, Liz? Let’s decide how far we’ll go with this thing.”
“Ten more minutes,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, “ten minutes.”
He was looking at his gas gauge when Liz threw her hand to her mouth and said, “Dan!” Baker turned back to the road just in time to see a shape flash by—a man, in brown, at the side of the road—and hear a loud thump from the side of the car.
“Oh my God!” she said. “We hit him!”
“What?”
“We hit that guy.”
“No, we didn’t. We hit a pothole.”
In the rearview mirror, Baker could see the man still standing at the side of the road. A figure in brown, rapidly disappearing in the dust cloud behind the car as they drove away.
“We couldn’t have hit him,” Baker said. “He’s still standing.”
“Dan. We hit him. I saw it.”
“I don’t think so, honey.”
Baker looked again in the rearview mirror. But now he saw nothing except the cloud of dust behind the car.
“We better go back,” she said.
“Why?”
Baker was pretty sure that his wife was wrong and that they hadn’t hit the man on the road. But if they had hit