Arrival

My first Jump through time is kind of disappointing. I expect there to be lots of crackling and blue lightning. A swirling vortex shredding time and space. Maybe my stomach leaping up through my skull. But I don’t even realize when the Jump begins. I expect an angry ramjet-roar when the Temporal-Displacement Field engine kicks in, but I don’t even realize it’s going until Dr. Zhang points out the low whir barely audible under the thrum of the Walcott’s four lift-fans. I feel it buzz in the plastic-leather of my seat and my heart thunders as I wait for the sky to open up and suck us in. I crane to look out the tiny porthole window, staring off into bright blue noon.

Then there’s a pop like a fuse blowing and suddenly it’s nighttime. The TDF engine fades to nothing. Captain Troughton comes on and says we’re now in the Early Middle Devonian, approximately 380 million years from when we started, and reminds us to clip on our seat belts as she takes us down.
Aside from the night sky, the scenery down below hasn’t even changed. Just ocean all the way to the horizon.

I’m not the only one who’s disappointed. “That’s it,” asks Latrice, our computer gal.

“You should be glad,” says Dr. Zhang, “first unmanned probe they sent through ended up embedded inside a mountain.” She peers out her starboard window then scoots across the seat to check the port. She hits the intercom. “Marie, where is Opitz Station?”

“Looks like we had a little spatial shift when we went back,” Captain Troughton replies, “I got a fix on their beacon to the west.”

We touch down on the sea and the lift-fans go quiet. Soon there’s another buzz as the Walcott’s marine screw comes to life. I wonder why Marie doesn’t just fly us straight to Opitz. Later she explains to me that the lift-fans use a lot more fuel than the screw— and we’re going to need lots of gas if we’re going to make it back into the air again; the Sawyer Effect* makes it way too dangerous to Jump on the ground.

Once the time-ship is moving along at an even pace, Marie tells us we can go check out the view on deck.

I should probably pause here a moment to mention the other folks who’re on this ship with me.

Professor Zhang Jingfei, the head of this expedition, is a Paleontologist specializing in Devonian biota. She’s originally from Yunnan University, though at the moment she’s one of the chairs at the Temporal Exploration Institute at Cape Canaveral. She’s not exactly what you’d expect from her name and occupation, seeing as how she’s got to be at least six feet tall and wears that white Stetson everywhere (seriously, I swear she had it on during the mission briefing at TEI headquarters last week).

Doctors Juan-Carlos Alonso and Gene Irvine are both marine researchers out of Woods’ Hole. Dr. Alonso is an ichthyologist while Dr. Irvine is an invertebrate zoologist specializing in echinoderms. They brought their senior-most grad students along—Mariska Newlin for Dr. Alonso and Art Yamaguchi for Dr. Irvine.

Dr. Carla Dixon’s a phycologist from the University of Auckland. Her grad student, Reese Mohi, is more of a botanist, so together they’ve got the land and sea pretty well covered when it comes to photosynthesizing organisms.

Professor Kale Kaupali is a parasitologist from the University of Hawai’I (first name’s pronounced “kah-lei”, by the way, not “kale” like the vegetable. He’ll give you a hard time if you screw that up). He’s also brought along his own grad student, Healani Nguyen.

Latrice Anderson is our computer technician. She’s going to be relieving the tech guy who came in with the engineering team about an hour ago to set up Opitz Station (hour by Present Time. In Devonian Time, they’ve been here about a month).

Then, of course, there’s our captain, Marie Troughton and her co-pilot Phil Leach. In addition to piloting the Walcott, they’ll also be in charge of the smaller vessels at the station.

Anyway, back to the narration:

Everybody’s eager to go outside and have a look at the Devonian night. We stop in the airlock to put on atmospheric-scrubber masks since there’s a lot more CO2 in this atmosphere than we’re used to, along with extra sulfur and a few other trace gases our lungs won’t like. Before we exit, Reese and I unfold a portable ramp so Doc Dixon can get her wheelchair up over the three steps leading to the deck.

Although the passenger cabin is cramped, the Walcott itself is huge. It has to be to accommodate all our scientific equipment, creature comforts and food for several months (Jumps get expensive fast, so the Institute tries to minimize the number of trips). As such, there’s plenty of deck space for us to spread out.

The sky is strange. In college I worked as a planetarium operator, so I instinctively look for the familiar constellations. But where there used to be (or rather, will be) patterns in the sky, there’s just a scattering of pale blue sand against a beach of obsidian glass, bisected by the soft smear of the Milky Way. The moon’s bigger, too. Not huge, but enough that you notice. I’m curious to see what effect it’ll have on the intertidal zone once we hit land. To the east there’s a blue star brighter even than Sirius in our time.

We take turns naming the sky. Doc Zhang’s apparently a big Precolumbian Mesoamerica nerd, so she picks out The Plumed Serpent Quetzalcoatl, The Giant Olmec Head and the Ahuizotl (some kind of water-monster, it seems). Reese names the Fish Hook of Maui, the Kiwi bird and Bird’s Saxaphone. Dr. Irvine picks out a Lion’s-Mane Jellyfish and an Outrigger Canoe with Crab-Claw Sail. Art sees a Hornet and an Aardvaark. I pick out an Anomalocaris. Latrice names a new Orion and a new Big Dipper. Healani names the Humumunukunukuapua’a and the Helmet Urchin.

No one can agree on what to call the new, bright star. Healani wants to call it Amaterasu after the Japanese sun goddess. Mariska wants the Gorgon’s Eye. Latrice likes Eastern Blue. I suggest Yuggoth. We decide to table the discussion for now.

We encounter the Glowing Sea about an hour after arrival. It starts off as a sprinkling of lights in the water, scattered enough that you’d mistake them for reflections from the moon or the ship’s own lamps. Soon the sprinklings grow into patches as big as a man. Then a truck. Then a plane. Suddenly the sea all around is filled with a soft ice-blue light. We send down a trawl net that comes up full of bioluminescent nautiloids (Doc Irvine later names them Glowworm Nautiluses, Velabrachius lucifer).

We speculate on why they congregate in such huge numbers. Dr. Alonso thinks it’s probably a mass spawning, although Dr. Irvine suspects they may be feeding. Possibly on all the Echidna Shrimp (Echinodorsus gladiocaudus) we bring up as well. We also catch a predator—a six foot long placoderm that resembles Dunkleosteus. Its entire head is smeared with bioluminescent slime-- ink from the nautiloids, maybe? It’s later described officially as a Bulletskull (Calvichthys triodon). Clinging to its fins are a couple of tiny, colorless, parasitic trilobites.

(I’ll post more on V. Lucifer, C. triodon and the other things we caught in the next entry.)

As we travel, one of the horizon stars grows steadily brighter. It’s a while before I realize that’s the light from Opitz Station. Soon a thin band of darkness forms above it, marking the higher land of the approaching continent. It’s strange to see that one light against the black. The only piece of human civilization on the planet. The Glowing Sea fragments and scatters around us, although the hull of the ship still glows for nearly half an hour after we pass the last of the swarm.

As we get closer to shore, buildings resolve out of the night. First is the long, plastiwood pier. It extends a long way out into the water, since the Walcott’s size means it can’t go into the shallows. There’s a square metal shack perched on the shore (the supply shack for the inflatable Zodiac motorboats, I later find out). Farther upland is the high dome of the main research laboratory, its base girdled by windows like the skirt of a deep-sea jellyfish. Coming off its sides are eight long metal arms that remind me of those 1950’s diners made from boxcars. These are the dormitories, engineering workshops and recreational rooms, as well as a few extra labs.

The land here looks odd. Manmade almost. Like sheets of corrugated metal. The ground seems to be tiled. I realize then that it’s columnar basalt. The whole shore, as far as the lights illuminate. Nothing but hexagonal pillars of dusty black rock. At the water line are bands of pink, white, green and orange-brown. Algae and barnacles (or a barnacle-equivalent).

As the Walcott glides in along the pier, the engineering team emerges from the laboratory dome to help us in.

Latrice points to the water. Dark shapes move against the sandy bottom. One enters the boat’s light field and we see that it’s a small, flat fish shaped like an armored frying pan. Later, Doc Zhang identifies these as Drepanaspis gemuendenensis, a species of jawless heterostracan fish.

There’re a couple hours of unloading and greetings to go around, but I won’t bore you with that. Check back in a few days for more reports.

*For those not up on their Time-Jump terminology, the Sawyer Effect is the tendency of a vessel traveling through time to maintain the exact same position with respect to the planet’s core. In other words, it usually stays at the same latitude, longitude and distance from the core as it travels along the time dimension. As any high school geology class will tell you, though, land shifts over millions of years, so the ship runs the risk of ending its Jump inside a mountain (as happened to the first unmanned time probe—the Jacques Cartier I), under the sea (as happened to the Jacques Cartier III), or high in the air. To avoid this, time ships are elevated at least a kilometer into the air when they Jump. Even then, as our Jump clearly illustrates, there’s still occasionally a bit of a shift in position.