Resonance - J. B. Everett (best novels to read for students TXT) 📗

Prologue

Twelve years ago, airline pilots had to recalibrate their compasses. This was because the exactlocation of the magnetic poles had drifted, and it was a first in aviation history. Six years ago thepoles had drifted even further, causing the need to again reset the compasses. They recalibratedagain three years ago, then two, then one, and are currently realigning every three months.

 

Approximately 200 million years ago map north was magnetic south. But ten million yearslater, the poles switched places. They’ve traded again approximately every sixty million years, thelast of which was sixty-five million years ago.

 

It is theorized that the dinosaurs achieved such great size due to the slightly larger magneticfield of their time.

 

Today some living things - like homing pigeons and honeybees - are highlydependent on the earth’s field. Even those creatures that don’t seem to notice it are in jeopardy if itchanges, since we don’t know how they use their internal magnetics, only that they have them.

 

Like us

 

And the earth we are sitting on is five million years overdue

Chapter 1

Stupid paleontologists, he thought to himself. Didn’t know how to grid a dig properly. Morons.

 

What had he been thinking? Sharing a site with the dino boys? And now he had chunks of strata strapped to his waist, each meticulously labeled in the dino boys’ lazy scrawl. Each clearly mislabeled for direction or depth of find. They had acted like they understood the dip and the horizontal. But the markings were clearly honked up. Yet, some of the rocks looked right. Which was the ultimate insult. David couldn’t even count on them to be wrong.

 

Maybe they were fucking with him, he sighed into the deep night, that was a sincere possibility. There was nothing like envy laced with continual disagreement to drive a wedge of dislike between two people. Those two people being him and anyone else on the dig. Your choice, as it was pretty much unanimous.

 

The paleo guys were all out for drinks and a discussion of the day’s successes. There was that one big heap of bones, and oh yeah, that other big heap of bones, then there were the bone chips.

 

Using the winch and harness system they had set up, David lowered himself down the incline, tiptoeing and letting out line as he went. Not because he couldn’t have scrambled his way down - he could have, the slope was a just walkable 45 degrees - but, in order to go on foot, he would have to dig in with his toes to get purchase and the dig would have been forfeit. Couldn’t have that. At least he and the dino boys agreed on this one thing.

 

The other thing they had agreed to was not to hang out in the dig alone. That, of course, made sense. No one wanted to be the one left at the base of the site with a broken leg while everyone else ate lunch, or worse yet stayed out all night drinking. And no one wanted to be the one who mucked up the site, with no one around to say what went where. But just because he had agreed to it didn’t mean that he agreed with it. And, well, if David was being honest, they had already ruined the site, what with all the mislabeling and everything. Therefore the only thing he was risking was his own night out under the big black sky with a few broken bones. So he slowly kept letting out the line, getting a little further down the slope each minute. He didn’t go too fast, for God’s sake he wasn’t stupid, and the pitch here was a bit on the sharp side.

 

His foot hit the first grid line. A thin white string wound round a short post hammered into the ground denoting the edge of the official dig area. David swore a few times under his breath, sure that he had scuffed a few loose pieces of rock into the dig. And that would earn him nothing but verbal and social hell come tomorrow morning. He decided to take it all a little more carefully. Besides now he was far enough down the backside of the slope that he wouldn’t be spotted. The camp was on the other side of the crest where it wouldn’t interfere with the dig, and no partypoopers making their way back early would see his beam as long as it was a small one. And that meant no bright headlamps. So he pulled the flashlight free, slipping it from the carabineer on his belt with a flick of his wrist.

 

Crap, he had shoved some pieces under the grid edge. Softly he stepped down and began flinging the loose gravel away. After five minutes at it he figured that he had covered his tracks well enough for a man who was probably going to get caught anyway and he decided to get down to brass tacks.

 

Pulling one zipper bag from its carabineer at his waist he tacked his line and used both hands to pull the rock from its baggie. Tilting his head, with the small Maglight firmly between his teeth, he read off the coordinates, then picked up the line. David let himself down a few more feet and high-stepped to the right about fifteen yards, watching carefully for the meter lines that ran the grid. They had originally been only a few inches off the surface, but as this dig had progressed they had altered the smooth plane to extremely uneven, leaving the ground anywhere from just a few inches to just over a foot below the grid lines. The perfect heights for getting an ankle tangled and then bashing into the slope of the dig. And, oh yeah, breaking said ankle and mucking up said dig while you did it.

 

He moved slowly and carefully, each footstep set methodically into the loose ground, so as not to grind or scour any of the precious soil or bone chips out of place. And lifted high with the same care. Right foot right, find footing, left foot follow, set down carefully. It seemed to take an eternity to get to the other side of the fifteen yard grid to the labeled home of his rock. As he landed, finally, in his square, he tacked the guide line again, allowing his weight to sit back against the taut rope. With the light in one hand he held up the baby rock and turned it over.

 

It was sedimentary, full of fossilized organic matter and exactly what anyone would expect of a layer from this location. His eyes perused all of this, reading it the way you would read a newspaper, for the whole story and never one letter at a time.

 

This piece had clearly belonged to an ancient streambed. From what the dino boys were finding, the water had nourished a whole bunch of critters up until the very last moment. What caused that last moment was David’s job.

 

He liked the rocks, and it was natural to assume that he had gotten into this profession because of his father. The layers reminded him of his Dad a lot: cold, hard, and unreadable to all but the most trained of observers. David was an expert reader of both. Although, in his estimate, the rock was always easier to get a bead on at first and easier to get along with. Also, the rock always gave up the whole story eventually.

 

The streambed and the sediment was ABCs. What David was reading as he rotated his chunk of old earth and his flashlight was the tiny shiny chips in his piece. Now they were talking. And they said that the Paleo boys were retarded.

 

Shaking his head, he used the letter and number code on the tape to line the rock up with the direction and pitch it was supposed to have come from. Letting a little more slack into the line, he leaned down and placed the rock into the spot it supposedly called home for eons, until yesterday. David’s head tilted. His Maglight circled, and he studied the lay of the strata in the bed and the rock. It looked a little too damn good.

 

Not to mention the remaining side of the bed from which the piece he held had been chipped. The two sides fit together like a puzzle piece. Shrugging, David slipped the rock back into its baggie and pulled the permanent marker from his back pocket. He checked the upper right side of the label and clipped it back to his pants just as his stomach let a loud growl. His head perked, just as it had when he was a boy afraid of getting caught.

 

But no one appeared to have heard. Hell, no one appeared to be within fifty miles of the site.

 

Cursing silently to himself, he wondered why it would have been so hard to slip a piece of jerky into a pocket, or for god’s sakes, make a sandwich. It wasn’t like he didn’t have a belt full of zipper baggies already. But he didn’t have time to go back. He needed to check his pieces and not make more enemies on the dig than he already had.

 

So he pulled the next rock from its zipper pouch and carefully began making his way to another grid square.

 

Lift foot, set foot, lift other foot, set foot.

 

Four hours later he hadn’t tripped at all, which was a miracle since he was silently swearing a blue streak.

 

The dino boys hadn’t mislabeled a single rock, which only made him more furious. Hell, you couldn’t count on them for anything.

 

And if the rocks were all aligned right, then the rest was all aligned wrong. An eddy in the stream could explain one spot, maybe even a few, but not the consistency of the whole dig. A bright light shone into his eyes, blinding him more easily than the dark of night ever had.

 

“Hey, pretty boy!” It was Greer. David had always figured that ‘pretty boy’ was the best Greer could come up with since he wasn’t one much inclined to the use of the more apt asshole.

 

“You done checking out our grid markings? You didn’t break any bones did you?!”

 

“No, Fuckwad, I didn’t.” David held his hand up in front of his face. He was going to catch hell for this. He knew it now.

 

“That’s too bad.” Greer directed his five-billion megawatt stadium light at the ground and slowly David’s sight came back. He started climbing the slope cautiously and methodically, as Greer taunted him all the way.

 

“Well, seems we disappointed you didn’t we? You thought we had mislabeled all your stones.”

 

“They’re not stones.” David growled as he climbed.

 

“Too bad. Now you’re going to have to do some real geology work. Not just come out and wave your hand like you always do and spout off what’s just so obvious that the rest of us must be blind.”

 

“Congratulations, Greer. You are right on so many counts. My rocks were in fact labeled correctly-”

 

“How many of them?” Greer taunted.

 

“All of them.”

 

“Uh huh.”

 

“And I do in fact have