In which a spade comes in handy

“It was still wet in places,” said Tess, who had been to survey the scene of the crime. “Definitely done earlier today – and I have a pretty good idea who it was…”

They were in the museum shop later that afternoon, having just had a look at the exhibits in the museum. One room contained wooden display cabinets packed with fossils – mostly small and underwhelming – and the larger room had some dinosaur bones and rocks of different ages laid out. There was a lot of reading to do, which the children weren’t too keen on. They were grateful that Grandpa was with them to talk to Mr James, an enthusiastic local guide who knew far too much about everything and completely failed to notice when his listener had lost interest. He was a big man with a genial face and white hair swept over a shining head. Caleb and Beth had run out of energy for reading and listening and had returned to the shop.

“Can you clean it off?” asked Caleb.

“I’m sure we’ll find a way,” said Tess. “I’d like to get the culprits to scrub it off with soap and water!”

“Who do you think did it?” asked Beth.

“There are some local kids who sometimes come and make a nuisance of themselves,” explained Tess. “Dale Carnegie and his gang. I’ll have to tell the owner and he’ll probably call the police. He is rather insistent that the authorities take these things seriously. It’s no good telling their parents though – they are just as bad as the kids! Dale’s dad is always throwing his weight around and causing problems for the parish council. Don’t worry about them coming back any time soon, though. They usually lie low for a while after each bout of mischief.”

Just then Mum and Dad walked in and said their taxi was here. They were off to settle in at their Bed & Breakfast.

“We’ll be back at supper time,” said Mum. “Grandpa said he would take you on the beach before then to look for fossils. Take care and don’t forget your sun cream!”

Caleb and Beth said goodbye and went to look for Grandpa. He was exactly where they had left him, in the dinosaur room, still talking to Mr James. Caleb sighed and drifted over to a display showing an Ichthyosaurus, which the notice said was one of the first dinosaurs to be found on the south coast – in fact, in the whole of England. The model wasn’t very convincing, but there was a real fragment of its fossilised mouth on display. Amazing to think it came from a real animal, thought Caleb. He squinted and tried to imagine what it would have looked like, full size, swimming through the water.

“Come on,” said Beth. “Grandpa’s finished talking.”

Caleb looked up and saw that Mr James had a new victim. He walked over to where Grandpa was looking at a chart showing the different ages of rocks along the coast.

“Isn’t it incredible how as you move from west to east along the coast you get to see all the different ages of rock laid out before you – granite, mudstone, sandstone, limestone, chalk. It’s like walking through time, with the oldest fossils in the west, and the newest in the east.”

Caleb took his chance…

“Yes, amazing. Why don’t we go and see it for real?”

Grandpa smiled. “OK, I get the hint. Come on then!”

*

Half an hour later they were descending the rickety stairs down the cliff from the campsite. Caleb was travelling light, with just a towel. Beth had her towel and a bucket and spade. Grandpa was carrying his towel, which appeared strangely lumpy, and also his small leather shoulder bag where he always kept a notebook and pen.

“Let’s stop here,” said Beth, barely five metres from the bottom of the steps. There weren’t many people around, just a couple of small groups a safe distance away in each direction.

Grandpa looked around nervously. “Er, let’s go a little further.” He raised his eyebrows at Beth and patted the wrapped-up bundle in his hands meaningfully.

Caleb understood at once. Grandpa was always careful not to draw too much attention to his inventions. And he seemed particularly secretive about this one.

Beth scampered on ahead. The beach was stony with occasional patches of sand near to the water line. More sand would have been good as far as Beth was concerned, but Grandpa had explained that stony beaches like this were the best place to find fossils. To Beth the word ‘beach’ meant sand and as she walked along, she tried to think of a better name for these bits of coast that didn’t have sand. Maybe a rockery or a screach, or a pebbly-beach.

“This will do,” said Grandpa, looking back the way they had come to check they were at a safe enough distance.

Beth laid her towel out on the stones and set off with her bucket and spade to look for some sand.

Caleb dropped his towel where he stood and looked expectantly at Grandpa.

“OK,” said Grandpa. “Let’s get started.”

He knelt down at the foot of the cliff where some larger rocks hid his bundle from view. Grandpa carefully folded back parts of the towel to reveal a bizarre, hybrid contraption, as strange as any Caleb had seen before. Laying on the towel was something that looked a little like a machine gun, though it stretched the meaning of the word to the absolute limit. It didn’t have a trigger and there were all kinds of lumps and bumps where you wouldn’t expect them. There was a padded shoulder support where the butt would normally have been and two handles halfway along its body stood out at ninety degrees from each other. Along the barrel were half a dozen glass lenses of diminishing size and closer to the handles were three sets of tightly wound wire coils, like those you see when you take a motor apart, only much bigger. At the tip of the gun was something that looked like an antenna – a straight rod with a small round lump on the end.

“What is it?” asked Caleb, with a sense of déjà vu.

“This,” said Grandpa, “is the Resurrection Ray-Gun.”

“Seriously?” asked Caleb. “Does it bring things back to life?”

“Ha, no!” chuckled Grandpa. “I thought you’d say that! No, it doesn’t, but it sounds good and it does kind of makes things alive again.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when you catch a fossil in its ray, it lights up green and the glow and the way it quivers is rather like it has had the flesh put back on it. It may just be me, but I can almost imagine what it might have looked like when it was alive.”

Caleb was intrigued. “Can we try it?”

“Yes, of course. I didn’t lug it all the way here just to talk about it!”

Grandpa looked up and down the beach again before lifting the ray-gun to his right shoulder. He took hold of the downward pointing handle in his left hand and used his other hand to turn it on and adjust a dial.

“It probably won’t work so well on such a sunny day, but I’ll turn the power up to maximum.”

Caleb hoped that would be safe. He could make out a green circle of light on the cliff directly in line of sight of the gun, as big as a football.

“Right, so now what you do is hold this other handle in your right hand and push it slowly downwards towards the other one.”

As he did so, the beam narrowed and the light seem to shimmer and Caleb almost felt as though he could see into the cliff. A few flecks of brighter green began to appear.

“The narrower the beam, the deeper it penetrates. It’s all to do with the crystalline structure of the fossils and the refraction of light,” explained Grandpa. “Now, if we aim it at the ground, we’ll soon find something.”

He adjusted his footing and aimed the ray-gun downwards. It was like shining a torch on the ground at night except this was all happening in bright sunlight. Grandpa narrowed the beam.

“Look, there!” said Caleb.

He had seen a bright glow coming from below a couple of large pebbles on the surface. “Is it safe for me to put my hand in the ray?”

“Yes, perfectly safe. It’s just a beam of light, with a particular range of frequencies.”

Caleb was a little hesitant but put his hand in the ray and began to remove pebbles aside until the glowing object was exposed. “Can I pick it up?”

“Yes, go ahead.”

Caleb lifted the rocky shape and held it in the palm of his hand. It was about three inches long and pointy at one end.

“Is it a tooth?” he asked.

“I’d say that was a belemnite. It’s a shellfish, like an ammonite, but straight. Though it is more like a cuttlefish really, as it had its shell on the inside.”

Caleb turned it over in his hand. It felt exactly like rock, and he knew that was because it was rock. The shell itself had decayed millions of years ago leaving a void in the soil, which had been flooded by soft mud. Over time this had hardened into rock, taking the exact shape of the shell that had once lain there.

“If you put it back in the light ray, you’ll see what I mean about it coming back to life.”

Caleb put the belemnite back on the ground and Grandpa focused the ray-gun on it. The main form of fossil glowed bright green, but around it a quivering secondary glow suggested movement and texture and at the blunt end a tail of light what might have been soft tentacles.

“How is it doing that?”

“I don’t know. It was an unexpected phenomenon, additional to what I thought would happen.”

“It’s awesome! Try somewhere else.”

Grandpa took a few steps and tried again. After a few minutes they had found what looked like an ichthyosaurus vertebra and a broken ammonite.

“I expect all the bigger stuff has been found already,” said Caleb wistfully.

“Well, yes, certainly on the beach. But there will be all kinds of fossils still hidden in these cliffs. Whole skeletons of prehistoric animals. Some of the most famous finds took place after a storm brought down sections of cliff to reveal what had previously been hidden from sight.”

“So could the ray-gun reveal where they are now?”

“In theory, yes, but it doesn’t penetrate very deep – it would only work if they were close to the surface.”

“Worth trying though,” enthused Caleb.

They spent half an hour scanning the cliff, up and down and side to side, stopping at one point when a family walked past. Grandpa laid the ray-gun on his towel and covered it over and he and Caleb looked out to sea casually.

They found what might have been some bone fragments and an ammonite, but Grandpa was reluctant to dig into the cliff as that wasn’t allowed in the fossil collecting code of conduct. Occasionally bits of rock and dust fell down without them even touching.

“One of the skills of the early fossil hunters was being able to figure out what they were looking at,” explained Grandpa. “What might look like some random bits of stone to us might have been parts of a fin or a skull.”

“Maybe Mr James could come and help us identify things?”

“Yes, though the beauty of this machine is that it will light up all of the bones if they are there, so you would soon know what you were looking at.”

As they had been talking Grandpa had been holding the beam at head height, focused on a glowing object that was long and thin. With a bit of imagination it might have been a rib… Suddenly, a small chunk of the cliff gave way and fell onto the pebbles below. Grandpa put his foot out to try and break up the clump of compacted mud and rock. Then, with an alarming crash, an even bigger piece gave way and slumped down onto Grandpa’s foot.

“Ow!” yelped Grandpa and hurriedly sat down.

“Grandpa! Are you all right?” gasped Caleb.

It wasn’t a huge amount of cliff, enough to start a small rockery perhaps, but it had landed square on Grandpa’s foot which was buried up to his shin. He looked in pain.

“Caleb, keep away! More may come down.”

“But I can’t leave you here – let’s dig it out quickly. Beth, quick, bring your spade!”

Beth had heard Grandpa cry out and was returning up the screach. She picked up her pace in response to Caleb’s call. Her face went white when she saw what had happened.

“Give me your spade, Beth, quick – and keep back.”

Caleb had lifted away some of the larger rocks, but there was still a mass of loose mud and rock fragments. The plastic spade wasn’t very effective, but it was definitely quicker than doing it by hand. After a while, with a bit of pulling from Grandpa, his foot came free.

“Right, let’s move down the beach a bit,” he said, shuffling on his bottom. “Can you bring the ray-gun Caleb?”

Caleb retrieved Grandpa’s towel and wrapped the ray-gun as best he could, which wasn’t very well. Beth took their other towels and the bucket and spade.

“Will you be able to walk back to the campervan?” asked Caleb.

In answer, Grandpa let out a loud, “Ouch!” He winced and lifted his foot off the ground. “I can’t put any weight on it. Maybe if you support me, we can go very slowly.”

“But I can’t carry the ray-gun and support you at the same time,” said Caleb. “Beth, leave the towels and bucket here and take the ray-gun. We can come back for them later.”

Beth dropped everything and put her arms out. The ray-gun bundle looked massive in her arms, but she took her new responsibility seriously and started to walk forwards, leaning her head to one side and trying to look below the bundle to see where she was putting her feet.

“Good for you, Beth!” laughed Caleb, as he accepted Grandpa’s arm over his shoulder. “Let’s get back to base.”

In all the excitement, they didn’t notice three boys hiding behind some rocks further along the beach who had been watching everything.