Free Timeline by Michael Crichton Page A

Elsie Kastner, the team’s linguist and graphology expert, sat in her own room, hunched over parchment documents. Chris ignored her and went straight ahead to the room crammed with electronic equipment. There David Stern, the thin and bespectacled technical expert on the project, was talking on a telephone.
    “Well,” Stern was saying, “you’ll have to scan your document at a fairly high resolution, and send it to us. Do you have a scanner there?”
    Hastily, Chris rummaged through the equipment on the field table, looking for a spare radio. He didn’t see one; all the charger boxes were empty.
    “The police department doesn’t have a scanner?” Stern was saying, surprised. “Oh, you’re not at the — well, why don’t you go there and use the police scanner?”
    Chris tapped Stern on the shoulder. He mouthed, Radio.
    Stern nodded and unclipped his own radio from his belt. “Well yes, the hospital scanner would be fine. Maybe they will have someone who can help you. We need twelve-eighty by ten-twenty-four, saved as a JPEG file. Then you transmit that to us. . . .”
    Chris ran outside, flicking through the channels on the radio as he went.
    From the storehouse door, he could look down over the entire site. He saw Johnston and Kramer walking along the edge of the plateau overlooking the monastery. She had a notebook open and was showing him something on paper.
    And then he found them on channel eight.
    “—ignificant acceleration in the pace of research,” she was saying.
    And the Professor said, “What?”
    :
    Professor Johnston looked over his wire-frame spectacles at the woman standing before him. “That’s impossible,” he said.
    She took a deep breath. “Perhaps I haven’t explained it very well. You are already doing some reconstruction. What Bob would like to do,” she said, “is to enlarge that to be a full program of reconstruction.”
    “Yes. And that’s impossible.”
    “Tell me why.”
    “Because we don’t know enough, that’s why,” Johnston said angrily. “Look: the only reconstruction we’ve done so far has been for safety. We’ve rebuilt walls so they don’t fall on our researchers. But we’re not ready to actually begin rebuilding the site itself.”
    “But surely a part,” she said. “I mean, look at the monastery over there. You could certainly rebuild the church, and the cloister beside it, and the refectory, and—”
    “What?” Johnston said. “The refectory?” The refectory was the dining room where the monks took their meals. Johnston pointed down at the site, where low walls and crisscrossing trenches made a confusing pattern. “Who said the refectory was next to the cloister?”
    “Well, I—”
    “You see? This is exactly my point,” Johnston said. “We still aren’t sure where the refectory is yet. It’s only just recently that we’ve started to think it might be next to the cloister, but we aren’t sure.”
    She said irritably, “Professor, academic study can go on indefinitely, but in the real world of results—”
    “I’m all for results,” Johnston said. “But the whole point of a dig like this is that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. A hundred years ago, an architect named Viollet-le-Duc rebuilt monuments all over France. Some he did well. But when he didn’t have enough information, he just made it up. The buildings were just his fantasy.”
    “I understand you want to be accurate—”
    “If I knew ITC wanted Disneyland, I’d never have agreed.”
    “We don’t want Disneyland.”
    “If you rebuild now, that’s what you’ll get, Ms. Kramer. You’ll get a fantasy. Medieval Land.”
    “No,” she said. “I can assure you in the strongest possible terms. We do not want a fantasy. We want an historically accurate reconstruction of the site.”
    “But it can’t be done.”
    “We believe it can.”
    “How?”
    “With all due respect, Professor, you’re being overcautious. You know more than you think you do.