Sixty Five Million Years Of Courage
Chapter 4: Sixty-Five Million Years of Courage
They slept in the thermal shelter under the large tree.
The Cretaceous night was enormous and full of sound. Things called in the dark, establishing positions, announcing themselves. Something large moved past them at a distance and did not stop. The volcano glowed at its peak, a distant orange redness against the night sky.
Gian snored.
Nobita lay awake for most of it.
He was not thinking about the plan, exactly. He was thinking around it, the way you walk around a very large piece of furniture before deciding to move it. He was thinking about the cave and the junction and the five millimeters and the running. He was thinking about Doraemon's face when he came back out, which had been, for a fraction of a second, before it went back to normal, something like fear.
Doraemon was afraid too. That was something.
Not because it made things less frightening. But because it was true, and true things have a kind of weight that gets you through the night.
He fell asleep somewhere in the small hours of the Cretaceous morning.
The Anywhere Door was in the four-dimensional pocket.
It was exactly what it sounded like: a door. Not large — roughly the size of a cupboard door, with a pink frame and a round knob. When you placed it, you could designate an exit point. Open the door from any location; step through; arrive at the exit. The label on the inside of the frame read: ANYWHERE DOOR — FOLD-FLAT DESIGN — RANGE: UNLIMITED — EXIT POINT: SET VIA COMPANION MARKER — IMPORTANT: EXIT MARKER MUST BE PLACED FIRST.
The companion marker had been placed yesterday. In the third level of the excavation. At the central junction with the warped seam.
"The meteor arrives today," Doraemon said. He had checked this twice in the future index. "Not tonight. This afternoon. Early evening, local time."
He spread out the information he had assembled on the flat rock they used as a table — astronomical data reduced to a rough sketch in the dirt, trajectory lines, impact point, timing.
"The impact point is approximately here," he said, marking an X. "The volcano base — the Chitauri excavation — is here. Directly in the path. Thanos knows this. He needs the Stone before impact, or the meteor destroys his operation along with the Stone."
"So he's racing the meteor," Shizuka said.
"Yes. But the Stone is deep. His machines need more time than the meteor will give them." Doraemon paused. "That's actually why we can do this."
"Do what exactly," Suneo said.
"The Anywhere Door — if we place the entrance here—" he pointed to the impact trajectory in his sketch, "—and the exit is already planted at the excavation center — then the meteor's energy, when it arrives, passes through the door. Into the excavation."
Silence.
"You're redirecting a meteor," Gian said slowly.
"The energy of the impact. Yes. Through the Door. Into the base."
"To collapse it."
"And bury the Stone under the collapse. Under the lava flow. Under millions of tons of mountain." Doraemon looked up. "Thanos cannot dig through what the volcano buries. Not in the time he has. And we'll be gone. The Stone will be locked here, in the rock, for sixty-five million years, until it's too deep for anyone to reach."
Shizuka was doing the arithmetic in her head. "But the Door entrance needs to be placed," she said. "At the impact point. While the meteor is approaching."
"Yes."
"Someone has to go there and place it."
"Yes."
"While the Chitauri are still active."
"Yes."
"And then get out."
"Yes."
"How far out?"
Doraemon was quiet for a moment. "Far enough. The Takecopters will help."
This was not entirely reassuring. But it was what they had.
"I'll do it," said Nobita.
The morning was quiet. A bird called once from the canopy and stopped.
"Nobita—" Shizuka started.
"The marker is planted from my side," Nobita said. "It's my marker. The Door responds to it specifically. I know the layout. I've already been inside." He stopped. "And I need—" He stopped again. Tried again. "I've been running my whole life. From tests. From Giant. From things I'm scared of. Everything." He looked at the dirt. "Just this once. Let me run toward something."
Nobody said anything.
Gian looked at the ground. Shizuka put her hand over her mouth. Suneo turned away, which was his version of being moved by something.
"Okay," Doraemon said, quietly.
He handed Nobita the Anywhere Door. Folded flat, it was the size of a thin book. Nobita put it in his jacket pocket.
They moved through the jungle to the impact zone — a broad flat plain north of the volcano, where the trajectory data said the meteor would arrive. The Farscope confirmed: the Chitauri had their own sensors trained on the sky, but they were focused on extraction, not defense. They had not planned for intervention. No one in the Cretaceous era was supposed to intervene.
Nobita had about forty minutes before impact.
The edge of the volcano base was three hundred meters away. He could see the cave entrance, the guards, the equipment. The Chitauri moved in their usual lines, urgent now — the pace had increased. The deadline was visible to everyone.
And on the black rock platform: Thanos.
He had descended from the platform. He was at the cave entrance himself now, which meant the Stone was close enough to excavate by hand and he was not willing to wait. He stood with two of his largest guards and he was speaking, and the soldiers were running.
Nobita was very small and very far away and could not hear any of this.
He walked toward the base anyway.
His legs, for the first time all week, did not immediately attempt to take him in the other direction.
He was halfway to the entrance when Thanos looked up.
It was not clear what Thanos saw. A small shape, moving toward the base, when everything else was moving away. An irregularity. A wrong direction.
Their eyes met.
Thanos had the eyes of someone who had made very large decisions and not regretted them. They were the eyes of someone who understood the universe as a series of problems to be solved through sufficient force. They were, in Nobita's assessment, from a distance of one hundred and fifty meters, the most frightening eyes he had ever looked into.
Thanos pointed.
The soldiers came.
Nobita ran.
Not away. Toward. For the first time.
He ran toward the base entrance and the soldiers were behind him and the ground was shaking and the sky was beginning to do something unusual at its edge — a brightness that was not the sun, small and growing, that was the meteor arriving early or on schedule or exactly on time, and everything was happening at once.
He hit the cave entrance at a run.
The Chitauri inside the cave were looking outward at the commotion. He went through the gap between them and into the darkness and his feet knew the route now — third level, left, right, the metal smell, the heat, the low roaring sound.
He ran down through the levels.
He hit the third level.
The junction was there. The warped beam. The silver disc of the marker, still sitting where he'd placed it the day before.
He took out the Anywhere Door.
He unfolded it.
It opened like a book becoming a door and stood on its pink frame in the middle of the drilling level, completely incongruous, a door in the middle of a volcano, and through the round knob he could see the plain outside — the flat ground where the meteor would arrive, the sky where the brightness was now a shape, a real shape, moving.
The Chitauri found him.
Three of them, armor heavy, at the far end of the level, and they came fast.
Nobita shook.
He shook the way he always shook when things were frightening, which was badly and completely. His hands on the door frame shook. His knees shook. He could hear his own breathing and it was not steady. He was not steady. He was not brave. He was a boy who had failed a test three days ago and then accidentally fallen into the Cretaceous era and had spent most of the time since then running in the wrong direction.
He did not run.
He stood in front of the door and he shook and he was very frightened and he did not run.
The Chitauri were twenty meters away.
The brightness through the door was large now, and growing, and he could feel the heat of it from a hundred and fifty meters away through the open door, and the ground on the plain was trembling in a way that was nothing like the polite trembling of dinosaurs.
Ten meters.
Nobita reached into his pocket and pulled out the transceiver.
"Doraemon," he said. His voice shook. "Now."
The meteor hit the plain.
The energy came through the open door like a river through a burst dam. It was not exactly light and not exactly heat — it was something older and more fundamental, the kind of force that moves geological time. It came through in a column and hit the junction with the warped seam and the third level of the excavation went first, then the second, then the whole assembly — all the machinery, all the scaffolding, all the structures they had built into the mountain — came down in the slow, deliberate way that things come down when the thing holding them up is no longer there.
Nobita was hit by something and then he was tumbling and then there was the sound of the Takecopter activating, which was Doraemon, who had come in through the door the moment the energy passed, because Doraemon had been waiting right there, outside, and he had planned for exactly this, and Nobita's collar was in Doraemon's hand and they were going up, through the cave, through the rock, somehow, the Anywhere Door adjusting their trajectory the way it could, and then—
Light. Real light. Afternoon light. The sky of the Cretaceous era, blue and enormous and real.
They were above the volcano. Below them, the base was collapsing inward — the lava following the machinery down, filling the space, burying everything under the weight of the mountain itself. The Chitauri were running. The equipment was gone.
And the Power Stone went down with it. Meters of rock. Then hundreds of meters. Then, as the volcano settled over it like a blanket over something sleeping, kilometers.
It would be there for sixty-five million years.
Thanos stood on the plain outside the cave. The Chitauri circled him. He was looking at the volcano.
He was very still.
Then he looked up.
He found them, effortlessly — five small shapes in the sky above the ruined base, watching from their Takecopters. His eyes found Nobita's with the same precision as before, across the distance, and Nobita braced.
Thanos looked at him for a long time.
Then he looked away.
He spoke once to the soldiers. They organized. They moved. They had, evidently, coordinates for another location. Another time. Another stone.
He had lost this one.
He had been beaten by a boy who could not pass a mathematics test.
He did not look back.
They found the Time Machine where it had fallen — wedged in the branches of the enormous tree, patient and white and slightly scuffed. Doraemon coaxed it down carefully and checked the dial and entered the coordinates for home. Nerima Ward. 2026.
Gian stood at the edge of the clearing for a moment, looking at the jungle. He looked like he wanted to say something large. He settled for: "Cool."
Suneo had mud on his clothes, which he was still upset about.
Shizuka looked at the jungle for a long time. "We should remember this," she said.
"We can't tell anyone," Suneo said. "Who would believe us."
"We know," she said. "That's enough."
Nobita sat in the Time Machine and looked at his hands. They were not shaking. That was new.
"You did well," Doraemon said.
"I ran," Nobita said.
"Yes. In the right direction, this time."
Nobita thought about this. He thought about being five millimeters tall, navigating between boots. He thought about the junction and the warped seam. He thought about standing in front of the open door while the soldiers came, shaking badly and completely, and not moving.
He had been afraid of everything.
He was still afraid of everything.
He had just kept his feet pointed at the cave anyway.
"Ready?" Doraemon said.
"Ready," Nobita said.
The Time Machine hummed. The dial turned. The jungle, which had been the world for three days, became a green blur and then was gone.
Back home.
Nerima Ward. Tuesday afternoon. The thin walls. The sound of a neighbor's television through the ceiling. The smell of dinner coming from the kitchen.
Nobita went upstairs to his desk.
The test was still there. The twelve, circled in red. A red circle that meant: try again, maybe differently, maybe harder, the result of taking the shortcut. His teacher's pen had been very precise.
He put the test in his bag.
Tomorrow there was another one.
He would probably fail it. He failed most tests. That was a fact about him, like being afraid of things and running from them, like being unremarkable and small and easy to miss. He knew this about himself. He had known it for a long time.
The thing was, he knew something else now, too.
Not a lesson. Not something he could write down in a vocabulary list. More like a stone that was in his pocket that hadn't been there before — smooth and solid and his.
He sat at his desk and opened his textbook.
Downstairs, Doraemon ate a dorayaki.
The house made its usual sounds. The walls were thin. The neighbor's cat snored, faintly, through the wall on the east side, which was a sound Nobita had heard every evening for as long as he could remember and which he had never particularly noticed before.
He noticed it now.
He had been sixty-five million years away and come back, and here it was: the neighbor's cat, and the thin walls, and the smell of dinner, and the ordinary Tuesday evening, continuing.
He read the first page of the textbook twice. He did not retain it. He read it again.
The bravest person, his teacher had once said, is not the one who is never afraid.
His teacher meant something different by that. But Nobita thought he now understood it in his own way.
It wasn't about not being afraid.
It was about being afraid of everything — the test, the teacher, the tyrannosaur, the soldiers, the enormous purple man on the black rock — and still moving your feet.
Just once. Just one step.
Just enough to be going in the right direction.
He read the page again.
It was, still, very hard to understand.
But he read it.