“The Carnian is a lousy place to look for dinosaurs,” he explained over a cup of tea. “That’s one reason everyone is so worked up over the gojirasaur—they’re rare. All the action here is in synapsids and non-dinosaurian archosaurs. They’re the ones who are busily speciating and competing for dominance of the community. The early dinosaurs are just bit players. But a funny thing is about to happen. The synapsids are going to take a major hit in the evolutionary sweepstakes. Most lines will die out completely. The only ones that’ll survive into the Jurassic are mammals, and then only because they colonized the small-animal niche. Which is where they’ll be stuck until the end of the Mesozoic and the onset of the Cenozoic. Following this so far?”

Molly nodded.

“Okay, now the non-dino archosaurs also suffer a reduction in diversity. But among the archosaurs is a group called the pseudosuchians, and their descendants include all the crocodilians. So they do pretty well. And dinosaurs come up winners. From the Triassic on, the Mesozoic belongs to them.

“But it’s important to understand that whatever favored dinos was opportunistic, not competitive.”

“Which means?”

“It means they didn’t supplant their rivals because they were inherently superior. Some of those archosaur groups are as hot-blooded as any dino. But the volcanic event that opened up the Atlantic Ocean changed the environment in ways that favored dinosaurs over their rivals. They just got lucky.”

He folded his arms smugly.

It was a good performance. He’d rattled off the lies as if he meant them, pedantically and with just the right touch of condescension. It astonished him how carefully Molly listened.

But then she said, “So do you think I could get a job in supplies, like you? I mean, it looks pretty simple. You just move things around with a fork lift, right?”

“No, I do not.” He didn’t have to fake his irritation. “They use fork lifts at the far end, where there’s plenty of electrical energy. I use a hand truck.” Supplies were shipped down the funnel in bundles lashed to pallets, and thus he measured the work in pallets. Three pallets was a light day, and ten was more work than he could do without help. “Everything gets loaded and unloaded by hand.”

“Cool. So how did you get your position in the first place?”

“I was transferred.”

It was easy to get transfers if you were a hard worker and willing to take on the grunt jobs nobody else wanted. Robo Boy was careful to make himself unpopular so that when he applied for a transfer, nobody ever made a strong effort to keep him. He had wandered from job to job, seemingly aimlessly, until he ended up deep in the Triassic, with complete control over the supplies and shipping, and, not coincidentally, one nexus of the time funnel.

“Well, how did you get your first gig?”

“I started out with a masters in geology. I got really good grades. I wrote my thesis on some stratigraphic problems that the people here were interested in.”

“That doesn’t sound like a terribly viable option for me,” Molly said.

“No, it doesn’t. Now what’s all this about Leyster and Salley?” He crossed his arms and leaned back, masking his interest with a skeptical expression.

Molly flashed that brainless smile of hers. “They’re going to be working on the Baseline Project. Together. If you can imagine that.”

“I find that hard to—wait a minute. That’s supposed to be a gen-three project.”

“Griffin’s promoting them both. At least that’s the offer he’s putting on the table. But can you picture either of them turning him down? Leyster’s pre-2034, so he’ll have to be shifted forward in time. But that’s not much of a sacrifice for him. Most of his friends are in paleontology, and I’m the only one in the family he’s actually close to.”

“I can’t picture those two working together. Who gets to be the boss?”

“Neither. Both. One’s in charge of the camp, and the other’s in charge of specimen collection. Lucky for them, they’ll be bossing around a batch of grad students so green they won’t have any idea what a fucked-up arrangement that is.”

“Huh,” Robo Boy said.

Briefly, he wondered how Molly had come into possession of such juicy inside dirt. Surely not from the notoriously close-mouthed Leyster. Did she have contacts in Administration?

He would have liked to ask her. But that wouldn’t be in character.

That was on Tuesday. Three days later a big rhynchosaur roast was held to celebrate the end of survival training. Everybody had too much beer, and then they built a campfire to sit around, though the nights never really got cold enough to need it. Leyster got up and made a little speech, and then introduced their guest-lecturer.

Sylvia Davenport was a generation-three researcher from Ring Station, located a hundred years into the aftermath. She stood by the campfire and talked to the new recruits about the K-T extinctions. Robo Boy listened scornfully from the shadows.

The upper Triassic was buggy and humid. The survival camp was, anyway, and he didn’t really care what it was like elsewhere. He never left the camp on expeditions or field trips, but stayed at home always, operating the commissary.

“We’ve looked,” Davenport said. “Enough dinosaurs survived the Event to repopulate the Earth with their kind within the millennium. Yet ten years later, there were only a fraction of the number of those that survived, and in a century, they were extinct. Why? Other animals adapted. Hell, there were dinosaurs that adapted—the birds. Why didn’t the rest? Non-avian dinosaurs had already survived the worst of it. Why couldn’t they adapt?”

Robo Boy leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. This was a trick he had learned in school. It made him look engrossed in the subject and allowed his mind the freedom to wander.

He shut out the speaker’s voice. Directly behind him, Leyster was murmuring something to the woman beside him, a gloss on what Davenport had just said. Robo Boy shut him out too.

He sank into the blissful silence of his own thoughts.

He despised the scientists for their constant inquisitive chatter, the way they leapt freely from possibility to possibility, postulating, positing, and speculating, with never an assurance that truth lay truly underfoot, unchanging, solid, inviolate. He could not live that way. If he were to admit, however briefly, that their tentative and provisional way might be valid, all certainty would dissolve within him, leaving nothing but chaos and the Pit. Stranding him in that emotional anomie he had inhabited before his Third Birth as a Midnight Christian. So he held them at an ironic distance. He spoke to them as from behind a mask—the mask of the worthless man he had been. In this way his old life had some value. It moved his new life closer to its validation.

Briefly, he thought about the time he had caught a glimpse of an angel. Then he wondered exactly when and where they might be—where they really were, as opposed to the party line of their atheistic humanist leaders. By his best guess, Robo Boy figured they were roughly six thousand years in the past, sometime between the Fall and the Flood. Physically, the camp lay somewhere east of Eden, in a land without flowers.

How astonishing to be alive in the time of the Patriarchs!

Sodom and Gomorrah were still thriving cities. Giants walked the Earth. Somewhere, Methuselah was living out his thousand years. Tubal-Cain was inventing metallurgy. The young Noah, perhaps, was seeking out a virtuous woman to be his wife. He felt blessed to be alive at such a time, and he thanked God for this blessing, and for the events that had brought him here.

It was a book that had changed his life, and a single sentence within that book which had done the work. The book was Darwin Antichrist, which he had bought to laugh at, and the sentence was, “If time travel is real, then why haven’t we found human footprints among the fossil dinosaur tracks?”