A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  The small room was very still.

  “It was my decision to send you out, Lee. There were no strings attached. You have had nearly a year to make up your mind. We have put no pressure on you. You asked for this audience. Come on, lad. Spit it out.”

  Lee stood there, his skin roughened by the sun and the wind. He felt strange, an outsider in the house of his own father. He could not find words that did not carry pain.

  Old John snorted. “Dammit, boy, I was born on earth. I crossed the gulf between the stars. I had the rug pulled out from under me on an alien planet. You can’t hurt me, Lee, except with silence.”

  “Okay,” Lee said slowly. “I think there is just one thing to do. I don’t like it, but there it is.”

  Old John smiled. “Where?”

  Lee did not return the smile. He had to force himself to speak. “There is no future here, in the Colony. The ships will never come back. We cannot bring the Outside People into the dome; it would kill everything that they are. The Colony itself cannot change; it is too precariously balanced, and the adults are locked into a life way they are afraid to alter. It has sustained them too long.”

  “It is a good analysis, if a trifle grim. And so?”

  Lee took a deep breath. “And so,” he said, “the young people must go Outside. They must go and try to make a new life, and they must go soon.”

  “Before they become too wise?”

  Lee shrugged. “Before they reach the same conclusions that your generation reached. Before they begin to—repeat.”

  Old John stared at his son. “All of the young people?”

  “All who wish to go. That will be most of them. It makes no difference, really. There will not be enough left behind to sustain the population.”

  “You’ve thought of that, have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are pronouncing a sentence of death.”

  “Yes. If there were some other way—”

  “But there isn’t. Either some die, sealed in this mechanical prison, or all die. Is that it?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  Lee hung his head. He could not face his father’s eyes. He kept remembering the emaciated old woman, out there by the spring in the sun and the wind. She, too, had faced death alone. She, too, had been abandoned by those who were young and strong . . .

  “When will you go?”

  “Soon. When we are ready.”

  “And will you—say goodbye?”

  “Yes, of course. And we will come back to see you.”

  “Occasionally. That would be—helpful.”

  A long silence fell between them.

  John Melner broke it. “We will be comfortable; that is something. Extinction, after all, is just an inability to change. You are right; we cannot change. But we can let you go, if we are big enough. We can give you the gift of hope. And perhaps, one day, you will remember . . .”

  “We’ll remember,” Lee whispered.

  Old John stood up, his face composed. “I’m getting maudlin in my senility,” he said. “I’m proud of what you have done, Lee—and of what you will do. Now go and leave me alone for a while. We both have much to do.”

  Lee left the room and the door hissed shut behind him.

  John Melner sat down and closed his eyes. He felt very tired.

  He did not try to fool himself; he had never done that. His son’s decision was probably the right one, the only one. He would support it. But the young could be cruel, cruel . . .

  He shook his head. Lee had not reckoned with the possibility that he might fail. It was all very well to march off into the sunrise filled with brave hopes and dreams. But there would be many sunrises and many sunsets. Dreams had a way of fading with age. He was not optimistic.

  Still, they had a chance.

  That was the only gift he had left to give.

  And the alternative—

  “The alternative,” he said quietly, “is to be like me.”

  He opened his eyes. He felt the half-forgotten tears, the tears for what was lost and for what might have been.

  Old John Melner looked at the closed door.

  “Lee, Lee,” he whispered. “God, if I could only go with you!”

  Slowly, the old man turned back to the papers on his desk and began to do what had to be done.

  THE THING FROM ENNIS ROCK

  Thomas F. Monteleone

  It was past midnight when the earthquake struck. The earth vibrated and shook beneath the bunkhouse, and Greg awakened from a deep sleep to hear the ominous rumbling beneath the floorboards. Jumping out of bed and pulling on his jeans, he ran to the window to see the ranch hands hurrying toward the moonlit corral. The horses were spooked, acting wild, crashing into each other and the fence. As Greg watched, the ranch hands scaled the fence and dropped into the corral to try to calm them down.

  Above the general melee, there came a single terrified whinny. Skipper! Greg rushed outside to help.

  The earth beneath his feet groaned, creaked, and sometimes heaved as he raced to the barn. The door was already open, swinging on its hinges. Each time it crashed against the side of the barn, a terrified neighing came from within, to the rhythm of hooves beating against floor and stall.

  The rumbling noises stilled just as Greg reached his horse. The earthquake had ended. He got hold of Skipper’s halter and stroked the terrified animal’s head. “Hey, boy! C’mon, now . . . take it easy . . . that’s easy, now.”

  The horse’s eyes were rolled back, his lips curled to reveal gleaming teeth. Greg hung on and continued to speak soothingly, and slowly the big animal calmed down. After a time Skipper stood quietly, an occasional quiver rippling his muscles. Greg relaxed.

  Footsteps sounded, and the tall, dark silhouette of his father blocked the light in the doorway.

  “You all right, son?” The man stepped forward and dropped a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “Oh, I’m okay, Dad. It’s Skipper I was scared about.”

  His father nodded. “Everybody’s okay, now. That quake was a rough one, though. I’ll have to send some of the boys out tomorrow morning to check the fences for any damage.”

  Even though he was only eleven, Greg enjoyed trying to tackle a man’s work. He jumped now at the chance to go out with some of his father’s cowboys. “Hey, Dad! Can I—”

  “We’ll talk about it at breakfast, boy,” said the father. “Right now, you get on back to bed.”

  The sun was only just beginning to tint the highest peaks of the Madison Mountain Range when Greg rode out with the men the next morning. They headed toward the southeast acreage, checking fences for breaks that might have been caused by the quake or by herds of skittish cattle. As they cleared a rolling meadow, Dusty, the ranch foreman, pointed toward a low ridge of cliffs. “ ‘Will you look it there, now! Old Ennis Rock sure had one big tumble last night.”

  The ridge was still partly in shadow, and Greg squinted, trying to make out what Dusty was talking about. Then he saw it. An entire face of the cliff was missing. It was as though a giant had set his pickax into it and sliced off a big chunk. A mound of rubble at the foot of the cliff was all that remained.

  The men rode near, to inspect the damage.

  Three large holes had been opened in the face of Ennis Rock. Greg pointed to the biggest one. “Looks like a cave or something. I wonder what’s in there.” Visions of hidden treasure, of undiscovered gold, leaped before his eyes. “Hey, Dusty,” he said, leaning back in his saddle, “can we go up and have a look?”

  The cowboy trimmed his hat and smiled past a two-day-old beard. “Oh, I dunno about that. Your pa sent us out to do a job, not to go playin’ around in no rocks.”

  Greg’s enthusiasm wouldn’t be put down. “Aw, c’mon, Dusty—it won’t take long. Just one look, just for a little while. Please?”

  Dusty looked around at the men. They were smiling, exchanging shrugs. A couple of them nodded. “Okay, kid,” said Dusty. “But let’s make it qui
ck. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us today.”

  Greg chose the largest of the three caves to inspect, figuring he could always come back later to see what was in the others. Then he and Dusty and a hand named Cal clambered upward over the unstable mound of rubble. The pile formed a gradual slope that led almost directly to a point below the gaping hole. With the help of a hefty boost from Dusty, Greg made it nearly up to the ledge. He grabbed hold of an upthrust rock and pulled himself, panting, onto the flat surface.

  “I’m here,” he yelled triumphantly, lying on his stomach to catch his breath. After a moment he was in good enough shape to snare the rope Dusty tossed to him and to secure it to the biggest rock he could find. Dusty and Cal joined him on the ledge, and they stepped into the dimness of the great cave.

  The sunlight crept ahead of them, lighting a cavern that had been locked in ageless darkness before the quake. The walls were cool and moist, unlike the dry, hot rock outside. The air was heavy, musky, with an odor not unlike rotting fruit or aging garbage. Greg picked up an oddly shaped bit of rock and turned it over in his hand. It was surprisingly light. With a shudder, he realized he was holding a piece of bone. He dropped it and looked around. The floor was littered with the bone chips.

  Farther into the cavern, as far in among the lowering shadows as Greg and the men cared to go, Greg spotted a large, light-colored mound lying in a circle of stone. “Hey, look at this,” he shouted, rushing to it. “This looks like an egg. What do you think, Dusty?”

  It did look like an egg, but what an egg! It was nearly as big as a football, its surface mottled and stained with brown patches. Picking it up, Greg was amazed at how heavy it was, heavier than his book bag loaded with school-books.

  “Wow,” he said. “I bet this is a dinosaur egg. I bet it is.” Whenever Greg heard the word monster, he didn’t think of vampires or Frankenstein creatures or anything tame. Monster to Greg meant towering creatures, as high as three-story houses and as long as boxcars. Monster meant rows of giant, glittering teeth, bulging turretlike eyes, massive columnar legs, rippling muscles beneath scaly skin.

  He had read every book on dinosaurs in the Ennis Library. And more besides, because his family knew what to get him for birthdays. Greg was an expert on dinosaurs.

  Dusty and Cal helped him down from the ledge, gently, carefully, so as not to harm the ancient thing he carried. And he cradled it inside his jacket for the rest of the day as he followed the men on their inspection tour of the ranch.

  After supper that evening, Greg sat at his desk in the bunkhouse, the egg on his blotter. Studying the thing by the light of his desk lamp, he wondered what embryonic creature lay still and unborn inside its leathery shell. Perhaps he would ask his father if they could take it to some of the scientists at one of the national parks, maybe even to the Dinosaur National Monument. Maybe he would get his picture in the paper . . . Maybe he would even become famous for making the great dinosaur egg discovery . . .

  The fall weather had turned the nights into chilly, windy affairs, and Greg turned on his electric blanket as he got ready for bed. He shivered as he undressed and climbed into the already warm bed. He reached for the light switch, and as he did so, his glance swept across the egg. The cold egg. It had been cold for—who knew how long—tens of millions of years, maybe. And here he was with a nice, cozy electric blanket.

  He got back out of bed. Carefully he wrapped the egg in the folds of the blanket, turned the dial to low heat, and placed the nestlike thing on the floor at the foot of his bed. Then he dug around at the back of the closet till he found an old-fashioned un-electric blanket, wrapped it around himself, and settled down for the night.

  As he drifted off to sleep, he wondered if there was any chance of hatching the big egg. Even if it did hatch, though, it might only be some great big bird, like an eagle or something. What a disappointment that would be.

  A week passed, and there was no activity inside the egg. Greg began to feel a little silly for hoping the egg could hatch, even though nobody knew what he’d been up to. He had kept his plans for the egg a secret.

  More days passed. Another quake occurred, this one only a minor tremor and no cause for alarm. Slight activity was normal after a serious quake. Montana had always survived the few quakes that were ever called serious.

  The night of the second quake, Greg finished his homework and then got down on the floor and studied the egg, his big experiment. The shell seemed a little harder than it had before. Was that good or bad? Maybe the heat was damaging it. Maybe it would just get brittle and fall apart, and then he wouldn’t have anything to remind him of his great egg experiment. His hand touched the heat controls. Should he turn off the blanket? No, he decided. He would give it one more night, just one more. With that, he flipped off the light and went to sleep.

  Strange sounds scratched their way into his slumber—crackling, snipping—alien sounds in the silence of his bedroom. Greg sat bolt upright in the darkness, and as he did so, a scuttling, scraping noise was added to the other sounds. Something was rustling about on the floor next to his bed. He remembered the time last summer when a big pack rat had somehow sneaked into his room, scaring him badly. His heart thumping, his breath caught in his throat, he flipped on the lamp.

  A strange little thing was scraping awkwardly along the floor in a rocking, unsteady gait. About six inches long, the creature had the body of a lizard, a long tail, a pointy head, big eyes, and large, leathery batlike wings. It reacted to the burst of light by opening its long, pointed beak and emitting a shrill cry.

  The back of Greg’s neck crawled. He had seen things like this. Not flying around at the ranch. Not in trips into the mountains. Not even on trips to the zoo. No. He had seen things like this in the dinosaur books he carried home from the Ennis library. This was a flying reptile, a pteranodon! Nothing like it had been seen on earth for millions of years! It really had been a dinosaur egg after all!

  He tried to touch the thing, but it cried out again and snapped at his fingers. It flapped its weak wings and tottered away from his outstretched hand. Quickly he gathered up his blanket and trapped it, bundling it into a soft, enveloping sack. Calling out, he woke some of the ranch hands. They came running to his room and stood, fascinated, as he unfolded the blanket. Gently holding the thing’s wings so it couldn’t escape, he explained about the strange, birdlike creature.

  The men shook their heads in awe. One of them rushed out to tell Greg’s father what had happened.

  For the next week, Greg’s life was a blur of excitement.

  People from Ennis, a photographer from the Gazette, friends from school—everyone stopped by to see Greg’s “living fossil,” as the man from the Gazette called it. A man even called from the university, saying he wanted to come out and see the creature. Greg loved the attention, and he was discovering new things about the ancient lizard every day.

  The little pteranodon preferred raw meat, especially hamburger, to all other kinds of food, although Greg was able to coax it into eating some fruit and lettuce. He never tired of watching his pet waddle toward him and pluck the food from his gloved hand. Occasionally, it attempted to fly. It climbed up his bedspread. Then, settling itself on the edge, it flapped its leathery wings and jumped off. It didn’t manage to glide though, as it might have if air currents were present as they would be outdoors. Greg winced when it thumped to the floor.

  While he was at school, or at night, he kept the creature in a rabbit cage that had belonged to his sister Julie. The little captive paced incessantly, scraping its wings and claws against the mesh screen.

  It had been almost three weeks from the day of his finding the egg when a disturbing thing happened.

  Early one evening he sat at his desk, doing his math problems. As usual, the pteranodon was moving restlessly in the rabbit cage, scratching at the mesh, emitting an occasional squeak. Suddenly, the horses out in the corral broke into an uproar, neighing and squealing. Greg peered out into the darkness. Maybe a c
oyote or a small mountain cat had wandered onto the ranch. The men would soon tend to it.

  Minutes passed. Then the darkness was sliced by an unearthly scream, followed by the rattling of wood beams and the muffled clatter of stampeding hoofs. The baby pteranodon went wild in its cage, flapping its wings, adding its own cries to the commotion.

  Greg darted outside, heading toward the corral. Somewhere in the darkness, just outside his field of vision, a dark shape moved. But when he turned there was nothing to be seen.

  Ahead, some of the men were clustered around the broken-down rails of the corral fence. All the horses had run off. Systematically, the men fanned out into the darkness, trying to round them up.

  One horse still remained in the corral, and Dusty and the rest of the men were crowded around it, bending down, shaking their heads in amazement and disgust.

  Greg went near, but stopped short when he saw the animal. It lay on its side, eyes open but seeing nothing in death. Large pieces of flesh had been torn from its body and its once velvety coat was reduced to tatters. The earth beneath it was stained with blood.

  Greg’s stomach knotted, and he had to fight to keep from getting sick. “What happened!” was all he could manage to say.

  “Dunno,” said one of the men. “Malcolm was in the barn when he heard all the uproar. He saw the horses break the fence and get out, but he didn’t see what did this.”

  “I seen a kodiak bear tear open a mountain cat like that once,” said one of the men. “But there ain’t no kodiak bears around here.”

  “And if it was a cat,” said Malcolm, “he was an awful big one.”

  Heartsick. Greg wished his father was home to help straighten out the frightening incident. But his dad was in Billings closing up a cattle deal, and he wouldn’t be back until the weekend.

  “Okay, boys,” said Dusty, “let’s get this place cleared up. Move this thing out of here. And. kid, you get back inside. There’s no knowing what’s prowling around here. It ain’t safe.”