I decided to wait one more day (one Devonian day, that is) before setting sail, though by the end of our second day on the island, I wished I hadn’t. We had made all the preparations we could on the first day, so all we could do on the second was wait and worry. Being around each other only made Dianna and me feel worse. It was that, more than anything else, which drove me to take the boat out for a test ride on the open sea. Carlos and Thatcher did most of the piloting. We circled the island for almost five hours. Thatcher had a rather unsteady hand at the helm, which made Carlos extremely upset. “The seals are holding, so we should be fine if you don’t tear any new holes in her,” he once snarled at the first mate. That was one of his milder comments. There were times when I feared (however unreasonably) for Thatcher’s safety.

I was relieved when we finally sailed back to shore. Dianna was waiting for us, obviously worried. The first thing she said as we came ashore was, “Why did you stay out so long?” Tears came unexpectedly to her eyes; she wiped them away in anger. “We were worried about you.” She turned around and stalked back to camp. Even from behind, I could tell that she was blushing furiously.

“Notice,” Carlos whispered, “that she was the only one worried enough to wait for us.”
We set sail at dawn, which in the eighteen-hour Devonian day comes only a few hours after sunset. We all were tired, and Dianna was feeling ill. She vomited so often that a shark could have traced our course just by following the puke. She tried to conceal how badly she felt, and loudly insisted that any signs of illness were purely the result of seasickness. I could tell, however, that she had felt bad even before getting in the boat. I once again feared that she had picked up some deadly Devonian disease.

While she was busy being sick, I put a hand to her forehead. It was much too warm, especially considering the chilly weather. “You have a fever,” I told her.
“I know,” she admitted wretchedly and then vomited again. A few minutes later, she sat up and looked at me. “Do you still think you’re in love with me?”
I gazed at her face for a moment, and then pointed at my chin. She understood my signal, and wiped a streak of slime from her own chin. She missed a spot, so I pointed again. When she was done wiping her face clean, I patted her on the shoulder and said, “More than ever.” Her reaction was a little hard to interpret. For one reason or another, she promptly got sick again.

Thatcher kept us at a cautious pace of 5 knots. Carlos berated him constantly for going too slow, while at the same time chastising him for carelessness whenever we came within a hundred meters of a possible reef. We had to go miles off of our hypothetical straight-line course to avoid all the reefs, so at sunset, we had come barely 20 miles closer to the time bell. We spent the night on another island. Though I felt Carlos was being too harsh with the first mate, I didn’t trust Thatcher to navigate through dangerous waters in the dark.

We only got about six hours of rest before setting sail again. I woke up at the crack of dawn, and found that Carlos was already awake. I discovered him on the shore, keeling in ankle-deep surf. “G’morning, Ted,” he said when he heard me approach. The sound of his voice chilled me. He was talking in a special tone of his, a strangely flat tone that is usually a sign of sheer, abject terror. “There’s something here I think you should see.”
I could already see it. I stepped closer, and cringed. For several minutes, we just stared. Then we heard soft footsteps behind us, followed immediately by a scream. I turned to see Dianna rush to the water’s edge and be sick again. She had awoken and come to see what we were doing, only to behold a sight that would make even a healthy person nauseous.

“Any idea what kind of fish this is?”
“It was a shark, beats me what kind. Don’t much matter.”

We woke up Smith and had him take a look. We didn’t want anyone else to have to look at the grisly find. “Stethacanthus,” he said immediately. “I can tell by the funny brush structure on its dorsal fin. Alive, it would have been about a meter and a half long. Too bad the rest of it is gone.” There was slightly less than half a meter of the shark left.

There were long moments of awkward silence before Carlos asked the obvious question: “What killed it?”
“It’s hard to say,” Smith said hesitantly. He stared at the remarkably smooth edge where the shark had been sheered in two. “Whatever it was, it cut this fish in half with just one bite. It did a very neat job of it, too—this thing looks like it was snipped in two with a giant pair of scissors.” He concluded with a sigh: “Most likely… Dunkleosteus.”
Smith carefully photographed the mutilated shark before we dragged it back out to sea. “There’s something else I should mention,” Smith said. “Sharks don’t have swim bladders, and so they sink to the bottom after they die. To be washed ashore, this shark must have been killed in shallow water. Chances are that the attacker isn’t far from here. It might still be in this harbor.”

“Great,” Carlos muttered. “Just f*in’ great.”
We had a mishap as we packed up our things. As he was taking down the tent, Jurgidsen found a strange, worm-like creature hiding underneath. “It’s an onychophoran!” he exclaimed. “Somebody get a specimen jar!”

Thatcher and I ran over to capture the creature. It was more than two feet long, and about an inch thick. It resembled nothing so much as a moldy kielbasa with lots of stumpy legs. We were out of empty specimen jars, so after some deliberation, we got rid of a coral sample and prepared to place the worm in the now-empty jar. Thatcher bent down to pick it up. “Which end is the head?” he asked.

“The end with those two feelers,” I told him. On a few occasions, I had seen and handled modern onychophorans. As Thatcher reached for the worm’s tail, it suddenly reared up like a cobra and turned to stare into his eyes. I suddenly remembered an important fact of onychophoran biology. “Watch out, they spit!” I said.

Thatcher looked at me funny. “What?” he said. At that moment, the onychophoran sprayed him with disgusting gray foam. He shrieked when some of it struck him in the eye.

“I said, they spit,” I repeated, very unnecessarily. “It’s how they catch their prey.”
The worm tried to make a low-velocity getaway, but it only got a few feet before Carlos stomped on it and cut its head off. He then helped me tend to Thatcher. We washed his eye out with purified water, but the damage was done. “I’m not blind,” the first mate groaned, “but I’m seeing spots.”

Carlos had to pilot us out to sea. Thatcher couldn’t resist the chance to belittle Carlos’s skill, and he groaned constantly about the pain in his eye. Carlos answered Thatcher’s criticisms with blistering profanity. Meanwhile, Dianna got sick again, and didn’t lean over the edge in time. As if that wasn’t irritation enough, Jurgidsen chattered incessantly about the significance of the onychophoran. “It’s the link between arthropods and earthworms,” he repeated at least a dozen times, “and this is the oldest terrestrial one yet discovered.” For once, Dianna passed up the chance to argue with someone about evolution. I grimly put it down to her ill health. After about thirty minutes of this misery and bickering, I felt quite prepared to start throwing people overboard.

“Ted?” Dianna groaned as we sailed out of sight of the island. I looked at her expectantly, hoping that she might have something personal to tell me. No such luck. “I think something is following us.”

She pointed to a patch of water about a hundred yards behind us. I looked closely. There was definitely an unusual amount of rippling at the surface, which would be consistent with a large fish near the surface. “Put the boat in low gear for a few minutes,” I said grimly. “I’m going overboard.”

I had abandoned my scuba gear on the night of the wreck, but I still had my goggles and flippers. I quickly donned those, and armed myself with our remaining boing stick. “Ted—you don’t have to— to—” Di stammered.

“I think I do,” I told her. “Don’t worry; I’m just going to see what’s down there. No matter what I see, I’ll be back in a few minutes.” I then jumped overboard.
The water was a bit murky, but there was no missing the creature nearby. In the bright morning sunlight, the Dunkleosteus’ silvery hide shone almost as brightly as the sun itself. It was obviously swimming after us, and it accelerated when it saw me. It kept correcting for a list to port, and once I saw a glob of blood pop out of its mouth. It was undoubtedly the same one I had fought before. It quickly closed to a distance of fifty yards, almost twice the range of the boing stick. I fired my single shot into a coral outcropping, gambling that the fish had learned to fear the weapon. As I had hoped, the fish turned and swam away. However, it retreated a bit too slowly for me to write it off as a threat.

I promptly returned to the boat. “It’s a `dunk’, the same one that got Captain Bill,” I gasped. “I scared it off with a shot, but it may be back.”
“Before we leave,” Carlos growled, “we really ought to kill that thing.”
It was a very long and very hard day for Dianna. On the day before, she hadn’t had to do too much work, because we had been more concerned with navigating the dangerous reefs than staying on a set course for the time bell. As we drew nearer the time bell and the beacon, it actually became harder to keep ourselves pointed in the right direction. She had to struggle to make sense of the readings, while her sickness only grew worse. I tried to comfort and encourage her as best I could. She seemed to be warming toward me, though I knew better than to assume that it was reciprocated affection. “I think this might be easier,” I told her at one point, “If we tried singing a song.”

“How ‘bout The Song for Gulf War 7?” Carlos suggested. “So long, Mom, I’m off to waste Saddam…”

Dianna skewered him with a bloodshot stare. No further discouragement was necessary. “I have a better idea,” she said. “Let’s do a song they used to sing at my church…”
I had never heard Di sing before. I discovered at that moment that she had an enthralling contralto voice. Soon, we all joined her in song.

I’ve followed another false shepherd
I laid with another wolf in sheep’s skin
No I’m all alone in a valley dark.
Will you leave the ninety-nine to search for me?
And the ninety-nine, will they mind?
Don’t they all get lost too?

They say, ‘You can’t cross the same river twice.’

You can’t go home again can’t do it over again
Forgetting is the best you can get.
Father, can you forget my sins? Can Your water wash my stains away? Can Your Spirit make me over again? Can I come home again?

And when I’m washed up on that furthest shore,
Will you sift the wreck for me?
And if you do, can you pick me up and say,
‘My child, I died for you to live again.
I have kept my best in store.
And it doesn’t matter where you’ve been
When you come home again.

Some time later, Dianna started talking to me about my spiritual life. Before long, the conversation wound its awkward way to the subject of my parents’ death. “Did something happen that made you stop going to church?” she had asked bluntly.
“I suppose I stopped attending church regularly after my parents died,” I said after a moment of thought. “I know I’ve told you about it before. They were both killed in a plane crash while they were on their way to a new mission field.”
“Did you blame God for that?” she asked softly. There was sympathy and sadness in her voice.

“I suppose there were times when I felt a little angry at Him,” I said, “but the real problem was that I blamed myself. When they died, I was on my way to the United States to go to college. If I hadn’t made the decision to go to a college in the US, I would have been flying the plane.” I stared gloomily into the distance. The black clouds of a storm front could be seen well above the horizon. When I looked closely, I could make out gray streaks of rainfall.

“You thought God wouldn’t forgive you for leaving your family?”
“I never really thought about it that way, but I suppose so,” I said. “I certainly put myself through a lot of grief, thinking over whether I should have stayed and whether I could have helped them.” I spent a minute in thought, and then continued, “I guess the worst thing the accident did was shake my sense of purpose. I had really felt that it was God’s will for me to go to the States, and I was sure that it was God’s will for my parents to go minister to hunter-gatherers in Ecuador. But after my parents died, it seemed like I couldn’t be sure of anything.”
There was more silence. Di finally said, “If it’s any help… If it wasn’t for you and your American training, I would be dead.”

“But if it wasn’t for you and me, Captain Bill would still be alive,” I said bitterly. I Looked into her face, and saw an expression of deep sadness and barely-restrained anger. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” I said immediately. The prompt apology didn’t help. Fortunately, Carlos broke in with something that did.
“You ought to know,” he said sternly, “that Captain Bill was going to go back no matter what. He would have done the same things you did, but without someone to back him up, he wouldn’t have had a chance, and he probably would have gotten himself killed in the process. Don’t either of you blame yourselves for what happened.”
Hours passed, largely in silence. The sun drew inexorably toward the horizon, and the storm front drew inexorably nearer. About half an hour before sundown, Dianna let out a horrible string of curses. What’s wrong?” I asked. “Did the device go out?”
“No, but I’ve been misreading it for the last half hour,” she said through tightly clenched teeth. “We’ve gone past the island where the time bell is.”
“That is bad,” Carlos said.

As we tried to get the boat pointed back toward the island, things suddenly got much worse. Our boat was struck from below, so hard that we almost capsized. “What the hell’s happening?!” I shouted as our boat rocked for a second time.
“I think our acquaintance the Dunkleosteus is back,” Carlos said coldly. He drew the submachine gun and fired over the side. While he was shooting, the fish struck again from the other side.

“Shine the lamp on the water!” I shouted to Thatcher. I frantically replaced the boing stick’s barrel, and cursed myself for not replacing it sooner. But then, I reminded myself, if I had reloaded it sooner, I might not have remembered to save the barrel. “I’m going to toss the used barrel overboard,” I said. “With any luck, that will draw the fish away, and I’ll be able to shoot it.” Without waiting for replies, I tossed the spent barrel as far as I could. Thatcher shone the light on the rippling region where the barrel sank. I leaned over the side, ready to shoot the fish as soon as it showed itself. That was nearly the last thing I ever did. The Dunkleosteus leapt from the water like a marlin, lunging straight for me. Carlos grabbed me and pulled me back, saving my life. The fish still came within inches of biting my arm off. The fish slammed into the boat and sank its toothless jaws into a gunwale. I was thrown backwards onto Dianna. There was a volley of shots, followed by a hissing sound. Carlos had shot the fish at point-blank range, forcing it to let go of the boat. Air flowed freely from two large punctures.

Carlos emptied the rest of a magazine into the water. “Don’t like bullets, huh?” he shouted. “Well, you might as well give up ’cause there’s no way you’re gonna get us without taking a lot more of ‘em!” With my ear pressed against a gunwale, I was able to hear a shriek from the fish. It struck us yet again, this time from below, knocking the raft several feet into air. Miraculously, the boat landed right side up.

I lay groaning on top of Dianna, which would have been a rather pleasant way to spend my last moments if she hadn’t been throwing up. I expected a final strike that would sink our craft, but it never came. Moments later, Thatcher shouted, “It’s swimming away!”
“Must have decided we were too tough to handle!” Carlos cackled.
“No, it must have realized it had worse problems than hunger,” Dianna said between heaves. “Don’t you feel it?” I certainly felt it: the first rain drops of the arriving storm.
“We’ve got to hurry!” I said. “Get a bearing on the time bell, Di!”
She was already examining the machine. She shook her head, and then bent over and sobbed. “It’s no use. The machine’s broken. Or the batteries are dead.” She vomited again, which couldn’t have helped matters.

“Can you fix it?” Carlos asked.
“In the dark, on a leaky boat in rough seas, in fifteen minutes or less? Not a chance, even if it is repairable”

“Any idea which direction we should go? A guess?”
Dianna waved over her shoulder. “I don’t know!” she said through her tears. “That way, maybe. Who knows? Doesn’t really matter; we’re doomed anyway.” She threw herself flat in the rising water within the boat.

I hauled her up. “Stay together, Di,” I told her. “We’ll find a way out of this.”
She hugged me tightly. “I don’t think so,” she told me. “But you know something? I’m glad we’re in this together.”

Carlos actually turned the boat in the direction Di had pointed, but Thatcher was trying to stop him. “The fish could have spun the boat 180 degrees!” the first mate was shouting. “Even if she’s remembering the readings correctly, she may have lost her bearings during the attack. You’re gambling with our lives!”
“You got a better f*ing plan?” Carlos retorted coldly. He pushed Thatcher aside and reached for the throttle.

At that moment, I saw something. “Wait!” I exclaimed. Carlos hesitated. “The time bell should be that way,” I said, pointing about sixty degrees from our current heading.
“You sure?” Carlos asked. It sounded like a rhetorical question.
“Do you have a better plan?” I retorted, trying to match his caustic tone.
“Why not?” Carlos mused. He swung the boat around and gunned the throttle as hard as he could. Thatcher was too shocked to protest.

Minutes passed. The boat sank lower and lower. “I see an island!” Dianna cried out. My spirits rose when I saw the telltale streak of luminosity where the sea crashed against the shore. However, the boat sank lower yet. Carlos pumped the accelerator repeatedly in a desperate effort to nurse a little more speed from the boat, while the rest of us frantically bailed water with our bare hands. Smith dumped out the contents of one of the hard-won specimen jars and began using it like a bucket.

The island drew nearer. I felt almost certain that my hunch had been wrong. This was not where the time bell had landed. It was only by chance that I had led us to land at all. We might make it to shore, but we would never return to our own time. For a few minutes, I fantasized that we could still survive. We would live off the land. Dianna and I would start a family, and there would be a thriving colony of humanity. I mused about the shock and confusion that would occur if paleontologists in our own time were to find fossil evidence of our settlement. In the face of facts, however, my whimsies evaporated like snow in the desert. We were vagabonds 360 million years from home. Our supplies were already nearly exhausted. Even if we were able to keep warm and gather enough food to live on, we probably wouldn’t last long. Once our water filters failed, in six months at the most, Devonian germs would begin to take their toll. Some of us would be killed outright, while the rest would be debilitated until they succumbed to starvation or the elements. We would be lucky if any of us were still around after a year. Some of us would go much, much sooner, and I knew with heart-breaking certainty that Dianna would die first. Cold water sloshed freely into the boat. We would sink before we reached shore, I decided, and it would be very much for the best. I impulsively pulled Dianna to me and held her while I cried.

Just when I was resigned to our doom, Smith cried out, “I see light—light from the time bell!” I looked up, and through a mist of tears, I saw a shining electric star: a floodlight on one corner of the bell. I promptly let go of Dianna, and we both began bailing more furiously than before.

Despite our best efforts, it looked like our boat was going to sink just short of shore. “Sweet Mother, preserve us!” Carlos bellowed. He pumped the accelerator one last time, and the boat seemed to pick up speed. Suddenly, we accelerated even more, and our boat began to rise higher in the water. We were caught in an ocean swell. Thatcher seized the tiller and banked the raft to keep it from capsizing. Dianna took my hand, and we both murmured prayers as we cruised toward our destiny. Carlos cried out something much less spiritual. The next thing I knew, we head run aground on some rocks in about four feet of water.

We hastily unloaded the boat, racing the rising waves. Carlos and Thatcher ran ashore with the last of our specimens moments before an exceptionally strong wave sucked the boat out to sea.
“You gotta tell me,” Carlos said after we reached base camp, “how did you know the island was here?”
I sighed; it was time to confess. “It was just a hunch,” I said. Reluctantly, I explained, “I was just looking at the sea, and I saw this silver streak that I realized was the Dunkleosteus. It was heading this way.”
“WHAT???” cried Thatcher. Carlos was for once at a loss for words. He just stood and stared with his mouth hanging open, as if searching his vast vocabulary for words foul enough to express his feelings.
“I just figured, with a storm rising, the dunk would head for the nearest safe harbor, which would be on the island where we landed,” I finished lamely. Carlos’s legs seemed to get weak, and he abruptly plumped down in the sand. Finally, he responded, not with words but with laughter. He laughed and laughed until the Paleozoic woods rang with the sound. Every lungfish and giant bug in the vicinity must have been badly frightened.
Dianna smiled and said, “It just goes to show, even a vicious creature like that fish can do some good.”
“Yeah,” Carlos said, wiping a solitary tear from his eye. “So can a big, dumb meathead like you, Ted.”