Timeline - Michael Crichton [81]
Once on the ground, Chris saw the riders moving off. They were coming to the tree with the muddy footprints. The black knight passed it, not noticing. Then the next—
The boy grabbed his arm, pulled him away, slipping off in the underbrush.
Then: “Sir Guy! Look you here! The tree! They are in the tree!”
One of the knights had noticed.
Shit.
The riders spun on their mounts, looking up at the tree. The black knight came back, skeptical. “Eh? Show me.”
“I do not see them up there, my Lord.”
The knights turned, looked back, looked in all directions, looked behind them. . ..
And they saw them.
“There!”
The riders charged.
The boy ran hard. “God’s truth, we are lost now,” he said, glancing over his shoulder as he raced forward. “Can you swim?”
“Swim?” Chris said.
Of course he could swim. But that was not what he was thinking about. Because right now they were running hard, flat out—toward the clearing, toward the break in the trees.
Toward the cliff.
The land sloped downward, gently at first, then more steeply. The ground cover became thinner, with exposed patches of yellow-white limestone. The sunlight was glaring.
The black knight bellowed something. Chris didn’t understand it.
They came at last to the edge of the clearing. Without hesitation, the boy leapt into space.
Chris hesitated, not wanting to follow. Glancing back, he saw the knights charging him, their broadswords raised.
No choice.
Chris turned and ran forward toward the cliff edge.
:
Marek winced as he heard Chris’s scream in his earpiece. The scream was loud at first, then abruptly ended with a grunt and a crashing sound.
An impact.
He stood with Kate by the trail, listening. Waiting.
They heard nothing more. Not even the crackle of static.
Nothing at all.
“Is he dead?” Kate said.
Marek didn’t answer her. He walked quickly to Gomez’s body, crouched down, and started searching in the mud. “Come on,” he said. “Help me find that spare marker.”
:
They searched for the next few minutes, and then Marek grabbed Gomez’s hand, already turning pale gray, the muscles stiffening. He lifted her arm, feeling the coldness of her skin, and turned her torso over. The body splashed back in the mud.
That was when he noticed that Gomez had a bracelet of braided twine on her wrist. Marek hadn’t noticed it before; it seemed to be part of her period costume. Of course, it was completely wrong for the period. Even a modest peasant woman would wear a bracelet of metal, or carved stone or wood, if she wore anything at all. This was a hippie-dippy modern thing.
Marek touched it curiously, and he was surprised to find it was stiff, almost like cardboard. He turned it on her wrist, looking for the latch, and a sort of lid flicked open in the braided twine, and he realized that the bracelet covered a small electronic timer, like a wristwatch.
The timer read: 36:10:37.
And it was counting backward.
He knew at once what it was. It was an elapsed counter for the machine, showing how much time they had left. They had thirty-seven hours initially, and now they had lost about fifty minutes.
We should hold on to this, he thought. He untied the bracelet from her arm, then wrapped it around his own wrist. He flipped the little lid shut.
“We’ve got a timer,” Kate said. “But no marker.”
They searched for the next five minutes. And finally, reluctantly, Marek had to admit the hard truth.
There was no marker. And without a marker, the machines would not come back.
Chris was right: they were trapped there.
36:28:04
In the control room, an alarm rang insistently. The technicians both got up from their consoles and started out of the room. Stern felt Gordon grab him firmly by the arm.
“We have to go,” Gordon said. “The air’s contaminated from the hydrofluoric acid. The transit pad is toxic. And the fumes will be up here, too, soon enough.” He began