The Monster Trilogy. Brian Aldiss
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came up behind Kylie and pulled her into the trailer, kicking the door shut. She tasted the whisky on his lips, and enjoyed it. Her upbringing had taught her that this was wickedness. She liked other wickednesses too, and slid her hand into Larry’s jeans as he embraced her. When she felt his response, she began to slide herself out of her few clothes, until she stood against him in nothing but her little silver chain and crucifix. Larry kissed it, kissed her breasts, and then worked lower.
‘Oh, you beast, you beast,’ she said. ‘Oh …’
She clutched his head, but he got up and lifted her over to the bunk.
Lying together on the bunk later, he muttered almost to himself, ‘Funny how the marriage ceremony annoys Joe. He just couldn’t face it … I had to go through with it to spite him … and to please you, of course.’
‘You shouldn’t spite your father. He’s rather a honey.’
Larry chuckled. ‘Pop a honey? He’s a stubborn-minded old pig. Now I’m adult, I see him in a more favourable light than once I did. Still and all … Grocery’s a dirty word to him. He resents me being in grocery, never mind I’m making a fortune. I’ve got a mind of my own, haven’t I? It may be small but it’s my own. To hell with him – we’re different. Let me fix you a drink.’
As he was getting up and walking naked to his baggage, from which a whisky bottle protruded, Kylie rolled on to her back and said, ‘Well, it’s Hawaii for us tomorrow. It’ll be great for you to get from under Joe’s shadow. He’ll change towards you, you’ll see. He may be an old pig but he’s a good man for all that.’
Larry paused as he was about to pour, and laughed.
‘Lay off about Joe, will you? Let’s forget Joe. For sure he’s forgotten about us already. Bernie Clift has given him something new to think about.’
Only a few metres away, Clift and Bodenland were walking in the desert, talking together in confidential tones.
‘This new daughter-in-law of yours – she is a striking young lady and no mistake. And not happy about what I’m doing, I gather.’
‘The religious and the economic views of mankind are always at odds. Maybe we’re always religious when we’re young. I lost anything like that when my other son died. Now I try to stick to rationality – I hate to think of the millions of people in America who buy into some crackpot religion or other. In the labs, we’ve also come up against time. Not whole millennia of time, like you, but just a few seconds. We’re learning how to make time stand still. As you’d expect, it costs. It sure costs! If only I can get backing from Washington … Bernie, I could be … well, richer than … I can’t tell you …’
Clift interrupted impatiently. ‘Rationality. It means greed, basically … Lack of imagination. I can see Kylie is a girl with imagination, whatever else …’
‘You have taken a fancy to her. I saw that when we met.’
‘Joe, listen, never mind that. I’ve no time for women. And I’ve got a hold here of something more momentous than any of your financial enterprises. This is going to affect everyone, everyone on earth … It will alter our whole concept of ourselves. Hasn’t that sunk in yet?’
He started off towards the dark bulk of the mountain. Bodenland followed. They could hear the one group of students who had not yet turned in arguing among themselves.
‘You’re mad, Bernie. You always were, in a quiet way.’
‘I never sleep,’ said Clift, not looking back.
‘Isn’t that what someone once said about the Church? “It never sleeps.” Sounds like neurosis to me.’
They climbed to the dig. A single electric light burned under the blue canopy, where one of the students sat on watch. Clift exchanged a few words with him.
‘Spooky up here, sir,’ said the student.
Clift grunted. He would have none of that. Bodenland squatted beside him as the palaeontologist removed the tarpaulin.
From down in the camp came a sudden eruption of shouts – male bellows and female voices raised high, then the sound of blows, clear on the thin desert air.
‘Damn,’ said Clift, quietly. ‘They will drink. I’ll be back.’
He left, running down the hill path towards the group of students who had been singing only a few minutes earlier. He called to them in his authoritative voice to think of others who might be sleeping.
Bodenland was alone with the thing in the coffin.
In the frail light, the thing seemed almost to have acquired a layer of skin, skin of an ill order, but rendering it at least a few paces nearer to life than before. Bodenland felt an absurd temptation to speak to the thing. But what would it answer?
Overcoming his reluctance, he thrust his hand down and into the ochre. Although he was aware he might be destroying valuable archaeological evidence, curiosity led him on. The thought had entered his mind that after all Clift might somehow have overstepped the bounds of his madness and faked the evidence of the rocks, that this could be a modern grave he had concealed in the Cretaceous strata at some earlier date – perhaps working alone here the previous year.
Much of Bernard Clift’s fame had sprung from a series of outspoken popular articles in which he had pointed out the scarcity of earlier human remains and their fragmentary nature in all but a few select sites round the world. ‘Is Humanity Ten Million Years Old?’ had been a favourite headline.
Orthodoxy agreed that Homo sapiens could be no more than two million years old. It was impossible to believe that this thing came from sixty-five million years ago. Clift was faking; and if he could convince his pragmatic friend Joe, then he could convince the world’s press.
‘No one fools me,’ Bodenland said, half-aloud. He peered about to make sure that the student guard was looking away, watching the scene below.
Crouching over the coffin, he scraped one shoulder against the rock wall and the stained line that was the K/T boundary.
The ochre was surprisingly warm to the touch, almost as if heated by a living body. Bodenland’s spatulate fingers probed in the dust. He started to scrape a small hole in order to see the rib cage better. It was absurd to believe that this dust had lain undisturbed for all those millennia. The dust was crusty, breaking into crumbs like old cake.
He did not know what he was looking for. He grinned in the darkness. A sticker saying ‘Made in Taiwan’ would do. He’d have to go gently with poor old Clift. Scientists had been known to fake evidence before.
His finger ran gently along the left floating rib, then the one above it. At the next rib, he felt an obstruction.
Grit trickled between his fingers. He could not see what he had hold of. Bone? Tugging gently, he got it loose, and lifted it from the depression. When he held it up to the light bulb, it glittered dimly.
It was not bone. It was metal.
Bodenland rubbed it on his shirt, then held it up again.
It was a silver bullet.
On it was inscribed a pattern – a pattern of ivy or something similar, twining about a cross. He stared at it in disbelief, and an ill feeling ran through him.
Sixty-five million years old?
He heard Clift returning, speaking reassuringly to the guard. Hastily, he smoothed over the marks he had made in the fossil coffin. The bullet he slipped into a pocket.
‘A very traditional fracas,’ Clift said quietly, in his academic way. ‘Two young men quarrelling for the favours of one girl. Sex has proved a rather troublesome method of perpetuating the human race. If one was in charge one might dream up a better way … I advised them both to go to bed with her and then forget it.’
‘They must have loved that suggestion!’