Immortality (3 page)

Gracy walked into the wash of lantern light carrying two burgers and two beers. She put the food down in front of him.

“Stop pouting and eat something,” she said.

“Look at this scarred earth,” said Mark. “We’re not going to be happy until the entire country is paved with concrete. Except for the farms of course, and that land will be so heavily polluted with pesticides and nutrient depleted that we’ll all be eating hydroponic Spam or worse.”

“I knew I shouldn’t let you read before dinner.”

“Come on, this is serious.” Mark felt his body tensing up. “If it wasn’t for endangered species like the Spotted Owl, logging companies would have clear-cut the last of the Northwest years ago. We have inconsequential endangered species protecting the last of the great forests on legal technicalities. Talk about shaky ground. I just can’t fathom those loggers. If we let ’em do what they want and cut the forest, most of them will be out of work in ten years anyway. They want to trade ten years of income for one of the last strongholds of nature in America. What happens when their ten years are up? They’ll all be on welfare – with us footing the bill – after they pissed on their own backyard and our national treasure. And what about the loss to science and medicine? In the Brazilian rainforests, every twenty seconds they’re rolling the dice on plowing under the cure for cancer. Shit!”

“Cut the rant and eat your hamburger,” said Gracy. “You’re giving me a headache.”

Mark stared at her through sore eyes. What was wrong with her? Didn’t she get it? He sighed, then slowly shook his head. She did understand and she was
getting it
better than him. What could he do right now in the middle of nowhere except give himself indigestion? He needed to save it for the real fights that were coming in the years ahead. He had the ear of important people. He could make a difference and already had by working with the Sierra Club and powerful friends like Senator Ann Spector.

“Sorry,” he said. “You know I’m a little crazy at times.”

“I know,” said Gracy. “Part of why I love you is your passion, but sometimes you make me nuts.”

Gracy casually pulled a wrinkled joint out of a pocket. She lit it and passed it to him. She had brought along a quarter ounce of reality-altering Hawaiian pot. Mark took a series of hits off the joint, pulling the smoke deep into his chest. The smoke expanded as if pressurizing his lungs. He stared at his nighttime surroundings. This was a place where civilization had never reached. His head lightened. The glowing tents, the boulders, the plants, even the soil looked a little richer in detail. This piece of Earth was unspoiled. He relaxed and picked up the burger. His stomach grumbled with the first bite.

The fires were out. The lanterns were long ago turned off. Mark and Gracy were sharing a sleeping bag. The bag was unzipped. They had dragged it outside the tent and were enveloped in a world of stars. The air was so clear and thin that the stars no longer twinkled. Mark felt like he was being pulled into the depths of space. Gracy’s head was nestled inside the crook of his arm. She was gazing up into the sky with him. He had just finished off the last bits of a second joint. Mark felt uncomfortable for reasons he couldn’t understand. Moonlight was casting shadows into the house-sized boulders around them. He thought about his ex-wife and child. No, that was a road he was not going down tonight. To distract himself, he began telling Gracy a story.

“Did I ever tell you about my first political rebellion?”

“No, sweetie” she said dreamily.

“When I turned eighteen it was the middle of the Vietnam war. All I had was a choice between two ways of ruining my life. Either get drafted and play the Me Cong delta lottery or desert to Canada and become a draft resister. There was a great crisis of spirit back then. I had a lot of hate boiling up inside me. Hate for the government. Hate for big business profiting off the war. In my teens, I woke up every morning to news about body-counts, how many guys a little older than me had been killed in Vietnam the previous day. I knew in a couple years that was going to be me. I couldn’t see any future. I marched in my first protest when I was fifteen – long hair, bellbottom jeans, and Hell no we won’t go. We had to stop the killing.”

“I had a history professor who said the peace protesters extended the war,” said Gracy. “He believed that during the peace negotiations in Paris, the marchers gave hope to the North Vietnamese that America might pull out. A divided country was a sign of weakness.”

“That’s ignorance!” said Mark. “Without the protests, there would have been no pressure for Nixon to negotiate in Paris. If it was left up to those political sociopaths, we’d have kept on going until we ran out of kids to kill – or nuked Southeast Asia.”

“Maybe you’re right?” said Gracy.

“I am right. I was seriously involved back then. I was a radical before I turned eighteen. Later, I became a draft resister and burned my card. I was attending UCLA when things got violent. Students were shot at Kent State and the underground was bombing federal buildings. You can’t imagine what it was like unless you were there.”

“Sounds like homeland war,” said Gracy. “People were killed by the police, right?”

“It was civil war,” said Mark. “I got a letter from Uncle Sam telling me to report for selective service or else my butt would end up in Alcatraz. I dropped underground. Later, I met some people who belonged to the SLA and ended up tagging along with them.”

“What’s the SLA?”

“Symbionese Liberation Army... They’re the ones who kidnapped Patty Hearst. Soon, I was breaking worse laws than draft resisting.”

Gracy got up on her elbows and stared into Mark’s eyes. Her expression changed. She punched him in the stomach.

“You’re lying,” she squealed. “You creep. I thought you were opening up and it’s all a lie!”

“I really did burn my draft card,” said Mark. He shrugged weakly. “I just never went underground or hooked up with the SLA.”

“Yeah, sure. You’re pathological. How can I believe anything you tell me.”

“Forgive me?”

“Never!”

“Please.”

“You are a bastard.”

Gracy started tickling him. Mark laughed while trying to protect himself. The sleeping bag soon had him hopelessly tangled.

“Stop fighting me,” said Gracy, “and take your punishment like a man.”

~

Mark awoke with the morning sun in his eyes. The grass was dewy. The air felt crisp. Each breath was like a small drink of life. Gracy had already risen and was off somewhere.

Mark stood up and stretched. Every muscle had been worked during yesterday’s hike. He ached with the pleasant sense of a freshly toned body. He ducked inside the tent. Inside his pack was a small plastic box that contained a digital instrument for measuring blood sugar level. In a separate thermal bag, next to a small block of blue-ice, were a bottle of insulin and a bottle of liquid vitamins. He pricked his thumb to draw blood. The meter read a little high. He prepared a small dose of insulin and injected it into his thigh. He’d been diabetic since early adulthood and had been fighting the inner battle ever since.

Mark heard the sounds of someone walking toward the tent. He quickly gathered up his supplies and shoved them into the backpack. Gracy crawled into the tent. She knew about his diabetes, but Mark couldn’t stand for her to see the evidence. He couldn’t stand for anyone to think of him as less than perfect.

“Ready for breakfast?” she asked.

“Maybe later...”

“You have to eat something. If you don’t, you won’t get any dessert tonight.”

“Well, when you put it like that …”

Marie, Tony, and Claire – the scouts – had reported they’d found an interesting site a half mile North of where the team had been digging the other day. Mark had decided to go alone to check it out. If it looked promising, he’d relocate the dig. The site was as promised: there were several indicators of a good fossil bed.

After the move, the team fell back into its normal rhythms. Gracy was supervising four students who were peeling off sheets of limestone. A rope grid was laid over the excavation to help identify the locations from which each fossil was removed. Mark was a short distance away with specimens scattered around him on sheets of brown wrapping paper. He sat on the ground with his specimens. He was examining a confused piece of fossil that contained several different types of marine animals. There were small crablike crustaceans and tiny fish and mussels. The sample looked like it was from the early Cretaceous Period. In one corner was something that might have been a speck of his matted bacteria but there wasn’t enough to be certain.

Mark was hungry, and lunch was a missed opportunity from hours ago. The students had stripped down several feet into the limestone and were peeling off segments from an earlier period.

Gracy carried a sheet of limestone over to Mark. A crooked smile was on her lips. Mark caught the expression immediately and got up. The limestone had several trilobite fossils scattered across the two foot piece. He took the fossil from Gracy and began closely examining it. Trilobites were marine arthropods that were plentiful during much of the Paleozoic Era. Mark judged the sample to be from the middle of that Era. This dated the fossil at approximately two hundred million years before the dinosaur extinctions. In the upper left side was a band of fossilized bacterial mat. He saw the signature characteristic of COBIC: a waffled honeycomb of stone that would crumble if pressed too hard. The honeycomb was made of cavities the size of pinpricks and looked more like petrified foam than anything else. The frothy appearance was the result of billions of tiny bacteria having been packed into microscopic globs. Over time, some of the bacteria decayed. What remained was fossilized, leaving behind a fine latticework of imprints. The bacteria embedded in the honeycomb could be seen only under a powerful microscope.
Nanofossil
was the technical term for the remains of these microscopic creatures. It was impossible for Mark to lug into the wilderness all the equipment needed to conclusively identify these nanofossils, but this honeycomb structure was good enough for a preliminary identification. No other bacteria produced mats like these except COBIC.

“I need to get an exact date on this strata,” said Mark. “It’s not the right age to be extinction matting, but it looks like it’ll fit into an earlier COBIC cycle. Tell the gang to move over a few yards and start sampling at the last Cretaceous layer and work down again.”

He gently set the fossil on a sheet of wrapping paper, then knelt down and began scribbling notes into his PC Tablet. This was it. He could feel it. Discovering this piece meant they were in the right place. He had never been able to explain why but COBIC mats tended to form in the same location eon after eon like growth rings in some great geological tree. It would only be a matter of time before they found additional fossils. He noticed Gracy’s shadow and realized she was still standing next to him.

“I want you to recheck the grid,” said Mark. “We can’t afford any mistakes. And keep them working at it.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “I’ll take that as a Job well done, Gracy!”

Mark had filled up the memory card in his digital camera with shots of the fossils. He could see Gracy recording the excavation work at the dig with a second Nikon. He pulled out a length of bubble-pack and started to box up the last sample. It was an excellent specimen. As soon as he got back to UCLA, this one was going under the electron microscope. He wished he could field-inspect the nanofossils. He was convinced this was his COBIC, but nagging doubt always plagued him until all the proof was in.

Two hours later, Mark had a prize specimen. This one was from the late Cretaceous Period, which put it within target range of the dinosaur extinctions. A more accurate date was needed for his work, but the estimate was close enough for now. He had what he was searching for – a huge slab of stone covered with the intricate froth-like patterns of bacterial mats.

The mother lode, thought Mark as he unpacked a field stereoscope. The device had a pair of binoculars eyepieces that were attached to what looked like a stubby microscope stage. The rig was mounted on a boom stand that floated it out over large samples. The scope could focus on a specimen from six inches away and magnify it a hundred times into a perfect 3D image.

Mark scrutinized every centimeter of the upper half of the slab, the area that contained the best preserved details. The telltale honeycomb structure screamed COBIC. He saw tiny pieces of seaweed twined into the mat and, a few inches away, a small fish that had lived during the Cretaceous Period. He cracked open a victory beer. It was the last one in the cooler.

The winds had picked up. Using the stereoscope, Mark had examined the entire the limestone sheet. A fat raindrop landed on his back. He ignored it. He rubbed blurriness from his eyes, then looked again. The mystery was still there. A piece of fossilized mat had come loose revealing a large insect hidden inside the fossil. He increased the magnification of the scope to fill his view with the prehistoric creature. The insect was embedded head first into the mat. A fossilized air sack and leg segments with fine hairs were visible – definitely a land creature. What was an insect doing in the middle of a marine fossil? Part of the creature’s body was splayed out as if it had been crushed under a shoe. From what was visible, he had the impression it was some kind of large almond shaped beetle.

Mark heard crunching footsteps heading toward him. He sensed it was Gracy. He continued peering into the stereoscope. Gracy touched his shoulder. He looked up at her. She gave him a slip of paper, like a judge at the Emmys handing out the name of a winner. He was annoyed at the interruption but started to read. It was a more accurate field dating of the second fossil. The date was solidly in the middle of the dinosaur extinctions. Mark crumbled the paper as he made a fist. Some of that nagging feeling had just vanished.

“Yes!” he yelled. “I’ve got you!”

Gracy started to laugh. He pulled her down to him and kissed her. Losing her balance, she tumbled into his lap.