'What would it take to
destroy your confidence in the theory of evolution?'

Company policy discouraged the use of
ideologically-suspect words, of course, but JD was starting to get the
nasty impression that there was something wrong with the new kid. Nothing
specific as yet, but 25 years had given him a nose for it.
Then again, maybe it was just him, feeling his age, seeing a new generation
coming along. He wasn't sure which he wanted to be true, but had worked
hard at managing his uncertainties for a long time. The job sort of
demanded it.

They had been out in the Montana sun
all morning with the sledgehammers and heavy drills, smashing up fossilised
footprints. That part was straightforward enough, but the real art to
a job like this was in leaving the diplodocus prints twenty feet away
intact while completely obliterating all sign of the guy who had obviously
been herding them.

JD left the new kid battering away at
the spot where the dinosaur rancher had clearly paused for his packed
lunch, and checked on the mixer, where a few hundred pounds of soon-to-be-indistinguishable-from-the-real-thing
Jurassic limestone was churning away. The palaeontologist who'd uncovered
the tracks was still floating around, looking understandably nervous.
JD tried to hide his dislike for the guy; scientists made his teeth
itchy.

'Nearly done,' he said.

'Thank God,' the man said, then rapidly
paled. 'I mean - I don't actually -'

'Relax, figure of speech,' JD said. He
lit a cigarette. 'We've all been there some time.'

'It's just that there's a university
field trip out here next weekend,' the palaeontologist continued. 'God
- I mean - who knows what could have happened.'

JD allowed himself the expansive shrug
of an experienced professional. 'A few photos get on the internet, Rapid
Rebuttal assures everyone it's a hoax, we deal with the students, no
biggie. Still, prevention's better than cure.' Although he had to admit
that hunting down college kids with a tranq gun so the guys back at
the office could modify their brains had a certain appeal. He gave the
mixer another cursory check.

'You've been doing this for a while,
then.' The guy was clearly struggling to make conversation.

'It's a career,' JD said. 'Worked my
way up. Mainly in the field, I like the open air.'

'Ah,' said the palaeontologist. 'And your
partner?'

'Rookie,' JD said, trying to keep the
edge of resentment from his voice. 'We owed his uncle a favour. He's
high up in the Department of Justice, pulled some strings to get us
the result we wanted in the latest Intelligent Design ruling.'

The guy nodded. 'That one was close.'

'I hear about it in memos, mostly,' JD
said. 'I'm told Strategy are on top of it. I wouldn't know, Fossil Record
grunts like us are kinda the janitors of the whole outfit. No glamour,
but we keep the whole damn thing going.'

'Finished!' the new kid yelled from across
the way.

'Okay, let's get this new rock laid down,'
JD said, stubbing out his cigarette and switching off the mixer.

It was a slightly finicky job, but when
they'd eventually finished, the evidence that man and dinosaur had co-existed
had vanished forever. JD sculpted a few scuffs and striations into the
still-wet limestone to add some verisimilitude to the cover-up.

'Few hours and you won't see the join,'
JD said, and followed it with a grunt born of professional pride. 'Nice
work, Byron.'

'Thanks, Mr Hackenmeyer.'

'May as well start packing up now,' JD
said, wiping his brow with the back of his arm. He indicated the mixer,
hammers, and other tools and threw Byron the keys to the pickup. He
checked his phone; there was nothing pressing for them to do.

The palaeontologist was still hanging
around for some reason. Maybe he wanted a signed affadavit saying he
wasn't going to get into trouble over this. ' Keep you busy, do they?'

JD waggled his hand ambivalently. 'Kinda
varies. Less than some departments; Rapid Rebuttal's been up to their
asses since that damn Creation Museum opened. Someone dropped the ball
letting that thing get past the planning stage, I tell you.'

'Yeah, well. I'm sure the orthodox materialist
dogma is safe as long as men like you are around,' the guy said, apparently
sincerely.

'We're all in this together, buddy,'
JD said with what he felt to be a commendably straight face in the circumstances.
'You did the right thing calling us in.'

It was the palaeontologist's turn to shrug.
'I didn't really have a choice, did I? Gotta think about my own career.'

They finished packing up and started
back across the majestic landscape – serene, imposing, but of course
much less ancient than everyone had been led to believe. JD knew a good
steakhouse in the nearby town of Jordan and reckoned the two of them
had earned a decent meal.

'Man back there seemed nice enough,'
Byron said.

JD spat out of the truck window. 'Guy
was a damn fool being there in the first place. If he'd checked the
guidelines he'd a known that spot was smack in the middle of brontosaur
ranching territory. Shoulda stuck to the low-risk zones like everybody
else.'

'Ah well,' said Byron. 'No harm, no foul,
right?'

'Only cause we busted our asses in the
sun for five hours. It's not like we don't have other stuff on our plates,
and everything's gotta be taken care of right. One slip, one missed
thing, and you've got Joe Public doubting the veracity of the whole
evolutionist paradigm. And the next thing you know...' JD shuddered
instinctively.

'Mmm,' Byron said, with a mildness that
almost unnerved JD. He told himself again it was the kid's first day
out in the field. 'So, what's next?'

'We get – ' he checked his watch ' –
call it a late lunch. Then back to the office.'

For all that JD considered himself an
outdoorsman it was nice to be inside where it was air-conditioned again.
The regional office was, on the outside, discreet, but once you got
past the security barrier there was a kind of Black Museum in the foyer,
showcasing some of their previous triumphs as well as noteworthy items
they'd managed to keep out of the sight and minds of the general population.
As well as a well-preserved triceratops saddle and some coal with gold
coins inside it, there was a huge blow-up of six of the company's most
legendary operators, posing on top of a mountain somewhere in Asia Minor
in the 1930s. They were goofing around for the camera with the remains
of Noah's Ark in the background. They'd burnt it straight after taking
the photos, of course, but it was almost obligatory for company high-ups
to use chunks of charred gopher-wood as paperweights.

JD could tell the picture still fascinated
Byron. He grinned. 'See the big guy on the right, in the Stetson?'

'Yeah?'

'My grandpa.' He looked up at Hackenmeyer
the elder with a mixture of respect and affection. 'A very fine man.'

'Wow. I didn't know your family was –'

'Oh yeah, we go way back. My great-great-grandpa
met Darwin, so I guess you could say we were kinda there at the start.'

Just then Leland from Accounts turned
up from somewhere, on his way out of the building. 'Hey, JD. How's it
going?'

'Hey, Leland. You met my new trainee?
Byron, this is Leland Lyall from the accounts section.'

'Mr Lyall,' Byron said with a polite
nod.

'Hey, Byron. How you finding the job?'

'Well, it's not really what I expected,
sir.'

'You'll do fine, JD'll look after you.'

JD acknowledged the compliment. 'Where
you off to, Leland?'

'Another pointless argument with the
Grand Cabal of Particle Physicists. They want to cut back on their contributions
again –'

'Aw Jesus! How long has it been since the
last time? Why?'

Leland shrugged. 'Usual crap. Why should
they fund us since we never have to do anything for them?'

'They've been jealous of the Astrophysicists'
Cabal ever since we cut them that rebate because of the speed of light
proving the universe is thirteen million years old or something.'

'Yeah, maybe, but you ask me, they earned
it.'

'Damn right. I nearly believed that one
myself,' JD said. 'The opposition's still tied up in knots over it.'

'I said to the Particle Physicists last
time, if you can come up with something like that...' Leland shook his
head. 'Too busy looking for quarks in all the wrong places.'

The news had soured the day for JD. 'Don't
these guys get it? All the sciences are in this together. If people
stop believing in even one, then they'll all go down like goddam dominoes.
So what if particle physics is one of the ones that happens to be true?
That doesn't necessarily mean people are going to believe in it.'

'You're preaching to the choir, JD,'
Leland said. 'If you'll pardon the expression. Anyway, gotta get on.
You and Emmylou should come round again soon, Sandra keeps on at me
about it.'

'I'll give you a call,' JD said. 'Good
luck with those physicists.'

They filed the paperwork on the footprint
adjustment job and called it a day. First thing the next morning, the
phone went – it was Anachronistic Antiquities begging a favour. They
were working at full capacity and needed someone to fly over to Boston
and adjust some ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics in the Museum of Fine
Arts.

'Probably another mention of pterodactyls
roosting on top of the pyramids,' JD predicted gloomily. 'Every time
it's got a dinosaur in it, they call Fossil Record.' He shook his head
in dismay.

They postponed the fossil-planting job
they'd had scheduled for the day and caught the next plane east. JD
was not a comfortable flier at the best of times and didn't bother trying
to hide the bad mood that had been coming on for a couple of days now.
He could tell Byron had something on his mind but the kid was clearly
too intimidated to say anything. He could live with that, though.

The noise and stink of the big city was
as disagreeable as ever. They went straight from Logan International
to the museum, where the postgrad student who'd spotted the problem
was waiting for them. She was, unexpectedly, slim, blonde, and well-dressed,
and in possession of an ass which JD would happily have taken out a
mortgage on.

'Thanks for coming so quickly,' she said,
demurely.

'You can relax now, miss,' JD said, taking
his hat off. 'You have nothing to worry about.'

She led them down to the back rooms of
the museum and showed them the offending slab of stone. It wasn't actually
pterodactyls that was the problem, but while the inventory of the Pharaoh's
menagerie included elephants, cheetahs, and crocodiles (which were acceptable),
it also mentioned sabre-toothed cats and a stegosaurus (which clearly
weren't).

'Okay, miss,' JD said, starting to unpack
the drill and other tools. 'We'll take it from here. Seems straightforward
enough.'

'My father used to work for the company,
you know,' she said.

'Uh huh?' He got Byron to start looking
around for a socket so he could plug in.

'Yeah, he invented that so-called mistranslation
of the Bible where Leviathan's enormous tail supposedly got mixed up
with an elephant's...' she giggled, flushed a little in a very becoming
way.

'You mean trunk?' Byron asked.

'No, Byron, she does not mean trunk,'
JD said a bit testily. 'That was a neat one, miss. Your daddy's a smart
man.'

'Well, maybe. Perhaps we could have dinner
and I could tell you all about him?'

JD looked at her again and found this
to be an admirable idea. It would of course be wholly wrong for him,
as a married man, to indulge himself in the way that seemed to be on
the cards (or so he fervently hoped). Luckily, though, company policy
was that moral absolutes were outdated and dogmatic with no empirical
basis and should thus be disregarded. So it looked like he was in for
a good night provided he could ditch Byron.

'Yeah, sounds good. We'll talk later,
okay?'

She smiled and floated off. JD watched
her retreating figure, which left little to the imagination, then turned
his attention to the job in hand, which did. 'Okay then, we plugged
in?'

'Yeah,' said Byron. 'Don't go too fast,
will you?'

'You got something to say you goddam
say it,' JD grunted. He pulled out his copy of the field guide to adjusting
priceless archaeological relics and looked up the list of suggested
hieroglyphics for this situation. It seemed you could change the glyph
for 'sabre-toothed cat' into 'eunuch's sleeping quarters' fairly easily,
but 'stegosaurus' was a bit trickier. The guide suggested just scratching
out the offending glyph and making it look like it had weathered away.

This was a precision job and not on Byron's
training schedule so JD did it all himself. As the drill buzzed and
whined, biting into the antique stone, the younger man wandered around
the room, looking at some of the other relics. 'I can't tell which of
these are real and which are fake!' he said, wonderingly.

'General rule of thumb, anything pre-
about 2500BC is probably completely fake,' JD said, not looking up.
'Pre-1500BC it's probably been adjusted somehow.'

'Wow, a lot of effort's gone into this,'
said Byron.

'Yup,' JD said, forcing himself to take
his time. One mistake and they could have another Piltdown Man on their
hands. He was glad to hear Byron was starting to appreciate the legacy he
would be carrying on.

'Why?'

The drill bit skewed and slipped across
the stone, accidentally converting 'golden chariot' into 'venereal disease',
which brought a new and surprising tone to the list of things on display
in the royal parade. 'What?' JD growled.

Byron was clearly realising he'd committed
a serious error. 'Er, I was only thinking out loud.'

'Yeah, but just what were you thinking,
son?' JD fought down the urge to use the drill on him.

'Why?' Byron squeaked. 'Why make everyone
believe the world is four billion years old, or whatever, when we know
it's only six thousand? Why –'

'Listen,' JD said. 'I didn't spend my
youth spray-painting moths black and stapling them to trees just so
some young smartass could come in and stop questioning the fundamentals
of existence!'

'But surely philosophical questioning
is rendered redundant, given that we know the truth – '

'You asshole! Weren't you listening when
we were talking to Leland? Just because something's true, it doesn't
mean you're obliged to believe it! People have the right to believe
whatever they want to! Especially when a fake idea makes a lot more
sense than the truth.'

'Ah,' said Byron.

'The orthodox materialist dogma is rational,
Byron. It makes sense, it explains stuff, even if it is a crock of shit.
I wish I could really believe in it, but I can't, given my job.'
He sighed. 'But we can do our best to help all those innocent people
who still want a choice. Ours is a noble calling, one of public service
and self-sacrifice, as well as deceit and obfuscation on a massive scale.
Maybe it isn't for you – but you need to decide one way or the other.'

'Erm,' said Byron. 'When you put it that
way...'

'Look, I think you oughta go straight
back to the office and talk to someone, given you seem to be having
certainties. I can finish up here.'

'You sure? I don't want to –'

'It's been a big couple of days for you,'
JD said as soothingly as he could manage. 'It's understandable. I'll
see you back at the office in the morning.'

'Okay. Have a nice night,' Byron said,
picking up his stuff and going.

JD waited until he was out of earshot.
'I'm gonna do my god damned best,' he muttered.

They were out of the office again the
next afternoon, heading off to Wyoming to do a transitional fossil insertion.
This side of the job appealed to the artist in JD, but the downside
was that you invariably had the guy who'd paid for the privilege of
'discovering' the thing hanging around watching you work. He noted that
Byron was a bit subdued following his chat with the office counsellor.
He decided to cut the kid some slack: it was tough having everything
you'd ever believed in suddenly confirmed.

They arrived at the fossil bed where
the young hotshot from Yale was impatiently waiting for them. JD took
an instant dislike to him without even having to try very hard. The
guy went round to the back of the pickup without waiting to be invited
and looked rather disdainfully at the carefully mocked-up bones embedded
in the fake rock.

'As specified, one ancestral, transitional
proto-nodosaurus skeleton, partial,' JD said.

The hotshot sniffed. 'I paid a lot of
money, you know. This thing's hardly going to get me on the cover of
Time, is it?'

JD shrugged. 'Take it up with Accounts.
We just put the things in the ground. An' if you don't mind me saying
so, if you wanted to work in a field with mass-media sex appeal, why
the hell did you specialise in ankylosaurs?'

'Fair point,' sighed their client. He
looked at the fossil again. 'There are no obvious joins here, are there?
I've heard stories – '

'Europe and China have had quality control
issues in the past, it's true,' JD said. 'But this is 100% American
made.'

'But you're sure it's transitional enough?
I mean, properly? You guys always seem to err on the side of caution,
and it just means the other side can say there's no such thing – '

'Sir,' JD said. 'We're just paid to bury
this thing, so you can dig it up again. If you don't want to dig it
up, that's fine. Apply for your money back. We're still going to bury
it anyway. Now can we get to work, please?'

The guy went off in a huff as JD and
Byron got their picks and shovels out of the pickup.

'He's got a point,' Byron said, as the
hole started to take shape. 'Ancestral ankylosaurs aren't exactly big
evolutionary news.'

'Verisimilitude,' JD said. 'It'd be a
bit convenient if every new species that showed up was some kind of
vital missing link. Besides, you know how much the cheap-ass bastard
paid for this? Three grand. Guy doesn't know how hard it is to get a
fossil looking properly authentic.'

'Those German dudes did okay with the
archaeopteryx, back in the day.'

JD was glad to hear the rookie had been
paying attention during at least part of his training. 'Yeah, but it's
all dated now. And as for that whole protoavis texensis
fiasco - Jesus!' He shook his head.

JD started to feel cautiously optimistic.
Maybe it was going to work out with the kid after all. The afternoon
wore on, the hole got deeper, and pretty soon they were down to what
the company had decided to call the Cretaceous layer of rocks. He looked
up at Byron, about to ask him to start setting up the lifting gear so
they could winch the fossil down into the pit, but the kid was looking
at the setting sun with a dreamy sort of smile on his face. The words
died on JD's lips as he felt a terrible forboding.

'Seeing that beautiful sight,' said Byron,
'doesn't it kind of make you stop and wonder about –'

'No!' JD shouted. 'It doesn't! It's just
light and dust and your retinas! It doesn't mean anything at
all! It's completely bereft of any wider significance or insight into
universal truths.'

'But – '

'Not one word more, Byron!' JD sighed.
'I'm afraid you just don't have what it takes to work for this organisation,
son. It ain't for everyone. Just go and sit in the truck. I'll finish
this myself.'

Byron looked a bit down, but nodded and
went off to the vehicle. JD shook his head. He hoped this meant the
supreme court wouldn't reverse its ruling. He was a nice kid, but saddled
with a terrible tendency for telling the truth.

He glanced up as he worked and smiled
to himself. It sure was a pretty sunset, though.

'Fossil rabbits in
the pre-Cambrian period.' - J.B.S. Haldane

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08.02.10 Front Page

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