Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The event itself was easy: One moment the operator was in his own
time, sitting in the cockpit with all of his gear piled around him, and the
next he was bobbing on the surface of an ancient sea. His first look was in-
stinctive: The numbets on the chronometet—the record of how far back
into time he had traveled—stared back at him. His own time was such a low
numbet fot such an old planet—to measure time in the number of years since
the birth of a man seems ignorant of how vanishingly brief has been our
human sojourn on earth, but a system of time measurement built on histor-
ical precedent is an intractable master. Hence the date on the console read
-76,600,000 ± 100,000: seventy-six million years before his time. To the
right of these numbers were the other displays, based on other types of time
keeping. The first display was marked Geomagnetic Polarity Time Scale: It
read magnetochron 33R, which told the operator that he was in the first
magnetic reversal after the Cretaceous long-normal interval. The display
marked Biostratigraphy Time Scale was subdivided into European Standard,
Western Interior, and Pacific Coast columns and was designed to indicate the
names of the stages and fossil zones. They read Campanian Stage:
Bostrycho-
ceras polyplocum
Zone,
Baculites scotti
Zone,
and Baculites inornatus
Zone, the
zones being named after the diagnostic fossil ammonites found in Europe,
the interior of North America, and the Pacific Coast of North America, re-
spectively. At the fat right, the instrument panel listed the sea level indica-
tor: Global sea level sequence Highstand 22. He stared at this panoply of
measurements of time, as recorded by years, magnetic reversal stratigraphy,
fossils, and the very level of the sea itself in its global basins, trying to decide
whether he felt any older, having become the first human on earth. Yet the
mishmash of numbers and letters only elicited a wry chuckle, for he, now
Master of all Time, was still its slave: Enmeshed in time's various reversible
threads was the most inexorable timekeeper of all, the wholly finite and ut-
terly determinate number of heartbeats measuring his own life—a stream
that could never to be reversed.
The repetitive commands of long training took over, and he found
himself pulling out the inflatable buoy with its line and anchor. He watched
