Timeline : A Novel

Michael Crichton's new novel opens on the threshold of the twenty-first century. It is a world of exploding advances on the frontiers of technology. Information moves instantly between two points, without wires or networks. Computers are built from single molecules. Any moment of the past can be actualized -- and a group of historians can enter, literally, life in fourteenth-century feudal France. Imagine the risks of such a journey. Not sinceJurassic Parkhas Michael Crichton given us such a magnificent adventure. Here, he combines a science of the future -- the emerging field of quantum technology -- with the complex realities of the medieval past. In a heart-stopping narrative,Timelinecarries us into a realm of unexpected suspense and danger, overturning our most basic ideas of what is possible.

Michael Crichton’s novels include The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, Congo, Jurassic Park, Rising Sun, Disclosure, and The Lost World, and he was as well the creator of the television series ER. Crichton died in 2008.

He should never have taken that shortcut.

Dan Baker winced as his new Mercedes S500 sedan bounced down the dirt road, heading deeper into the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona.  Around them, the landscape was increasingly desolate: distant red mesas to the east, flat desert stretching away in the west.  They had passed a village half an hour earlier- dusty houses, a church and a small school, huddled against a cliff- but since then, they'd seen nothing at all, not even a fence.  Just empty red desert.  They hadn't seen another car for an hour.  Now it was noon, the sun glaring down at them.  Baker, a forty-year old building contractor in Phoenix, was beginning to feel uneasy.  Especially since his wife, an architect, was one of those artistic people who wasn't practical about things like gas and water.  His tank was half-empty.  And the car was starting to run hot.  

        "Liz," he said, "are you sure this is the way?"

        Sitting beside him, his wife was bent over the map, tracing the route with his finger.  "It has to be," she said.  "The guide-book said four miles beyond the Corazon Canyon turnoff."

        "But we passed Corazon Canyon twenty minutes ago.  We must have missed it."

        "How could we miss the trading post?" she said.

        "I don't know." Baker stared at the road ahead.  "But there's nothing out here.  Are you sure you want to do this?  I mean, we can get great Navajo rugs in Sedona.  They sell al kinds of rugs in Sedona."

        "Sedona," she sniffed, "is not authentic."

        "Of coarse it's authentic, honey.  A rug is a rug."

        "Weaving."

        "Okay." He sighed.  "A weaving."

        "And no, it's not the same," she said.  "Those Sedona stores carry tourist junk- they're acrylic, not wool.  I want the weavings that they sell on the reservation.  And supposedly the trading post has an old Sandpainting weaving from the twenties, by Hosteen Klah.  And I want it."

"Okay Liz."  Personally, Baker didn't see why they needed another Navajo rug-weaving- anyway.  They already had two dozen.  She had them all over the house.  And packed away in closets, too.

They drove on in silence.  The road ahead shimmered in the heat so it looked like a silver lake.  And there were mirages, houses or people rising up on the road, but always when you came closer, there was nothing there.  

        Dan Baker sighed again.  "We must've passed it."

        "Let's go a few more miles," his wife said.

        "How many more?"

        "I don't know.  A few more."

        "How many, Liz?  Let's decide how far we'll go with this thing.

        "Ten more minutes," she said.

    &#

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Excerpted from Timeline: A Novel by Michael Crichton
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