When I arrived 65 million years ago, instead of a planet teeming with life, all I saw around me were barren cliffs and a few volcanoes erupting in the distance. As I expected, it took several days for her absence to be noticed and, after studying the time-travel charts, they inevitably reached me. As the team that was to send me to the Precambrian explained to me, in recent years all sorts of hypotheses had been put forward about the origin of life on Earth. The trouble began when I met Eliza, a tiny little bookworm, bespectacled and seemingly without any charm. That’s why all the competitors, and not just them, call it the Target Rock. According to their proposal, I should have reached the Earth’s past sometime 3.8 billion years ago, and the first time I heard this figure I burst out laughing: not even a billion years ago, at least to my knowledge, had anyone yet arrived. “I’m working pro bono today!” I said, and from the odd look she gave me, I got the impression that I had used that Latin expression in the wrong context, but I didn’t care and waved her to the saddle behind me. All I had to do was perform a time-travel for the researchers at the Institute of Time Research, take a few
