Timeline by Michael Crichton Page A

than a history professor.
    Yet he dressed the part of a typical college professor: even here in the field, he wore a button-down shirt and tie every day. His only concession to field work were his jeans and hiking boots.
    What made Johnston so beloved by his students was the way he involved himself in their lives: he fed them at his house once a week; he looked after them; if any of them had a problem with studies, or finances, or family back home, he was always ready to help solve the difficulty, without ever seeming to do anything at all.
    Chris carefully unpacked the metal case at his feet, removing first a transparent liquid crystal screen, which he mounted vertically, fitting it into brackets above the computer. Then he restarted the computer, so that it would recognize the screen.
    “It’ll just be a few seconds now,” he said. “The GPS is calibrating.”
    Johnston just nodded patiently, and smiled.
    Chris was a graduate student in the history of science — a bitterly controversial field — but he neatly sidestepped the disputes by focusing not on modern science, but on medieval science and technology. Thus he was becoming expert in techniques of metallurgy, the manufacture of armor, three-field crop rotation, the chemistry of tanning, and a dozen other subjects from the period. He had decided to do his doctoral dissertation on the technology of medieval mills — a fascinating, much-neglected area.
    And his particular interest was, of course, the mill of Sainte-Mère.
    Johnston waited calmly.
    Chris had been an undergraduate, in his junior year, when his parents were killed in an automobile accident. Chris, an only child, was devastated; he thought he would drop out of school. Johnston moved the young student into his house for three months, and served as a substitute father for many years afterward, advising him on everything from settling his parents’ estate to problems with his girlfriends. And there had been a lot of problems with girlfriends.
    In the aftermath of his parents’ death, Chris had gotten involved with many women. The subsequent complexity of his life — dirty looks in a seminar from a jilted lover; frantic midnight calls to his room because of a missed period, while he was in bed with someone else; clandestine hotel-room meetings with an associate professor of philosophy who was in the midst of a nasty divorce — all this became a familiar texture to his life. Inevitably his grades suffered, and then Johnston took him aside, spending several evenings talking things through with him.
    But Chris wasn’t inclined to listen; soon after, he was named in the divorce. Only the Professor’s personal intervention prevented him from being expelled from Yale. Chris’s response to this sudden jeopardy was to bury himself in his studies; his grades swiftly improved; he eventually graduated fifth in his class. But in the process he became conservative. Now, at twenty-four, he tended toward fussiness, and stomach trouble. He was reckless only with women.
    :
    “Finally,” Chris said. “It’s coming up.”
    The liquid crystal display showed an outline in bright green. Through the transparent display, they could see the ruins of the mill, with the green outline superimposed. This was the latest method for modeling archaeological structures. Formerly, they had relied on ordinary architectural models, made of white foamcore, cut and assembled by hand. But the technique was slow, and modifications were difficult.
    These days, all models were made in the computer. The models could be quickly assembled, and easily revised. In addition, they allowed this method for looking at models in the field. The computer was fed mapped coordinates from the ruin; using the GPS-fixed tripod position, the image that came up on the screen was in exact perspective.
    They watched the green outline fill in, making solid forms. It showed a substantial covered bridge, built of stone, with three water wheels beneath it.