Dinosaurs!

by Jack Dann

  It needed all the speed it could muster, too, for on its heels was one of the horrors that made even the bulky hadrosaurs nervous: a Deinonychus. The predator was about two and a half meters long, and built along the same general lines as the beast it was pursuing. But its long forearms ended in clawed, grasping hands, and the third toe of each foot in a vicious twelve-centimeter talon made for slashing.

  The Deinonychus ran the hypsilophodont down about a hundred meters from Paula. It seized its thrashing victim with those clutching forefeet, held it away from its own body so it could bring a hind foot into play for a disemboweling stroke. Its tail balanced it and kept it upright while it stood on one leg for the kill. When the hypsilophodont was dead, its slayer stooped over the carcass and greedily began to feed.

  Shuddering, Paula slapped the .45 on her hip. The Deinonychus could as easily have chosen her to attack, but a slug or two would have gone a long way toward changing its mind. She wished for a grenade-launcher, in case one of the bigger carnivores deigned to notice her. She was glad they were uncommon.

  She hurried after the hadrosaur, which had built up quite a lead. She was sweating hard by the time it reached the nesting ground, both from the exercise and from the muggy subtropical climate.

  The nesting ground reminded her of nothing so much as a sea-bird colony at breeding time. That was fitting enough, she thought, for what were birds but the feathered survivors of the dinosaur clan?

  Here, though, the scale was vastly larger. Each bowl-shaped mud nest was a good two meters across and more than a meter high. The musty odor of rotting vegetation overpowered the dinosaur smell in the area. The hadrosaurs did not sit on their clutches of eggs, but, like crocodiles, used the heat generated by the decaying plants they put in their nests to help hatch them.

  Not all the clutches had hatched yet; some still had parent dinosaurs hanging about to protect them from predators, as penguins guard their eggs against skuas. Paula saw one hadrosaur grunt threateningly and lower its head as if to charge at a Troodon, a small flesh-eating dinosaur of a type that often raided unguarded nests. The Troodon hissed but drew back.

  The hadrosaurs were not perfect guardians. A lizard scrambled off the side of a nest and scurried away, still licking yoke from its jaws with methodical flicks of its black, forked tongue. The parent dinosaur was only a couple of meters away, but made no response. To an adult hadrosaur, a lizard was so small as not to exist.

  Paula's hadrosaur pressed through the crowd of its fellows; she followed more circumspectly. Fragments of old egg-shell crunched under her boots. The hadrosaurs of this herd had been returning to their breeding site for uncounted generations. Again she was reminded of sea-birds.

  And so, despite its minuscule brain, her beast knew where it was going. As it approached the nest it had built, she shifted her video camera to telephoto. If she tried to get closer herself, the hadrosaur would drive her off as the other had the Troodon.

  Her hadrosaur leaned into its nest, dropped the load of ferns it had been carrying for so long. Instantly a couple of dozen hatchlings swarmed onto the food, eating as if there were no tomorrow. Their squeals of excitement were a soprano mimicry of their elders' deep-toned calls.

  Watching the babies, Paula could not help smiling. A seven-meter hadrosaur was a staid, serious beast, foraging with single-minded intensity. A thirty-centimeter, newly hatched hadrosaur was something else again. The hatchlings hopped about, falling over one another and leaping back in alarm from imaginary dangers. They squabbled over leaves and branches and bit each other's feet and tails.

  When one of the hatchlings tried to scramble out of the nest, the adult hadrosaur used its duckbill to bunt the little beast back. Another baby did succeed in getting out, and started to wander away. The full grown animal gave a snorting call. The youngster obediently turned around and climbed back into the nest.

  Paula wished she knew whether the adult was male or female; the sexes had no obvious differences. One school held that both parents cared for the young, the other that only the mother did. One day a team would stay in the Cretaceous for a whole year, and find out the truth. When the funding for that kind of project would come through, though, was anyone's guess. No time soon, Paula thought sadly.

  Another fully grown hadrosaur was leading an older brood, just out of the nest, on a foraging expedition. The juveniles were almost as long as Paula was tall, and were beginning to lose their immature blotching for the solid green-brown of the adults' hides.

  When her hadrosaur left to gather more food for its young, Paula cautiously approached the nest to learn exactly what plants it fed them. The hatchlings scrambled back in fear as she pawed through the remains of their feast.

  She was surprised to see one egg still standing upright, unhatched. A bit more than half of its twenty-centimeter length was visible above the rotting vegetation in which it had been laid. The gray-green shell was ridged, to give it more surface area to release the carbon dioxide the developing embryo produced.

  She thought for a moment that this egg was infertile, but then she noticed the crack running along one of the vertical striations. The baby hadrosaur was about to hatch; perhaps it had been delayed because its egg was not as well covered as the rest of the clutch and therefore incubated more slowly.

  She focused the video camera on the egg; as far as she could remember, no one had ever recorded a hadrosaur hatching. It was a shame the parent was not around, she thought, so she could see how it reacted to the new arrival.

  The emergence was a struggle—dinosaur eggshells were a couple of millimeters thick. At last the baby hadrosaur lay gasping in the nest, still wet with fluid from the inside of the egg. One of its brothers or sisters, utterly indifferent, walked on its head.

  It paid the sibling no more attention than it had been given. Paula, however, was big enough to notice. The baby hadrosaur opened its mouth and waited expectantly.

  Paula burst out laughing. She could not help it; the little animal looked just like one of the stuffed toys the university bookstore sold. "All right, pal, you've earned it," she said. She found some tender fern leaves the other hatchlings had missed, fed them to the youngest one. It chewed rapturously.

  A grunt from one of the adult hadrosaurs nearby made Paula jump away from the nest in a hurry. She did not want the beast mistaking her for a predator. It was too stupid to listen to explanations, and too big to argue with.

  Another grunt came from behind her, this one treble rather than bass. The newest hatchling had struggled up to the rim of the nest and was peeping about. When it saw Paula, it leaped down, landing in a heap at the base of the nest. It staggered to its feet and came after her.

  "Oh, for heaven's sake," she said in exasperation. She picked up the little hadrosaur. It wriggled and batted her wrist with its tail. As gently as she could, she set it back in the nest.

  She drew away before she upset any of the adults again. That same high-pitched grunt came from behind her. She turned and saw the hatchling land even more clumsily than it had before.

  "Stay where you are, would you please?" she told it, "I'm not your mama. . . . Or am I?" she added as it got to its hind legs and walked toward her.

  Her eyes wide. "You little son of a lizard, I think I've imprinted you!" Birds worked that way, she knew; they accepted the first thing they saw after hatching as their mother, which sometimes gave rise to such ludicrous spectacles as a long line of ducklings happily following a chicken.

  The scientific community had realized since the late twentieth century that birds were a modern offshoot of dinosaurs. Paula did not think anyone, though, had recorded an instant of imprinting among dinosaurs—or looked for one, for that matter. "Sometimes you'd rather be lucky than good," she breathed, and started talking into her recorder.

  She replaced the baby hadrosaur in its nest once more. "Third time's the charm," she muttered. She felt like shouting when the small beast again clambered to the top of the nest and looked about for her. To cel
ebrate, she pulled up a newly sprouted fern too tiny for an adult hadrosaur to notice and gave it to the infant.

  If anything, the second feeding strengthened the bond the little dinosaur had formed with her. "You think I'm the horn of plenty, don't you?" she said. As often as she returned it to the nest, it scrambled out again.

  She was surprised how low the sun had sunk in the west. Soon it would fall behind the Rockies, peaks taller and more jagged than they would be eighty million years from now. She grimaced. The baby hadrosaur, now coming up to her for the umpteenth time, had eaten up a big chunk of one of her precious days in the Cretaceous. No, that wasn't fair, she decided—what she was learning from it was worth the time.

  She picked up the hatchling and was about to replace it yet again when she heard the distress cries from the east: The adult hadrosaurs heard them too. Heads went up; eyes widened. Though they had seen nothing dangerous themselves, the adults echoed the distress call, alerting the whole herd for flight.

  A hadrosaur burst from among the shrubs and tall ferns at the eastern edge of the nesting ground. Its waddling trot was desperately urgent. Alarm shot through Paula. Not many beasts were big enough to panic a dinosaur that weighed as much as a small elephant.

  Paula shifted the hatchling to her left hand and drew her pistol, wishing again for something with more punch. Sure, big carnivores were rare, but she should have realized that a concentration of large herbivores like a nesting ground would draw them if anything would. Even the grenade-launcher she had thought about before might not stop a tyrannosaur.

  The undergrowth shook again as the flesh-eater on the trail of the hadrosaur came crashing through. Paula's mouth went dry. It was not a tyrannosaur, but it was the next worst thing: the Gorgosaurus was nine meters long, three meters high, and armed with an enormous mouthful of ten-centimeter teeth. Paula wondered insanely whether a zebra cared if it was eaten by a lion or a leopard.

  No such abstractions burdened the hadrosaurs in the nesting ground. They fled the moment they set eyes on the gorgosaur, and woe betide the nests or hatchlings that got in their way. Paula ran with them, praying she would not stumble. None of her training had dealt with being part of a dinosaur stampede. The only thing she was sure of was that going with the tide was smarter than trying to stem it. She had always thought King Canute was a damned fool.

  The roar of the gorgosaur sounded like a steam engine with horrible indigestion. Paula could hear that the beast was gaining on the herd; she did not dare look back to see how quickly. Her breath sobbed in her lungs, but she kept running. In her undergrad days she had run a pretty fair 3,000 meters until the pressure of study made her quit the track team. Now she wished she had been a marathoner.

  Something bucked against her left wrist. She realized she was still holding the baby hadrosaur. It squirmed and writhed, trying to get away. She hung onto it. It was not interfering with her running, and if she let go it would be crushed in an instant.

  A whistling hiss came from behind her and to her right, signaling the arrival of another gorgosaur. That wasn't fair, she thought—the big carnivores were solitary killers. They did not hunt in packs as Deinonychus and other small meat-eaters often did. The furious bellow of the first gorgosaur declared how little it welcomed its fellow.

  Paula heard a shriek that reminded her of the scream of a wounded horse: one of the monsters had killed. Then the steam whistles started again, at double the volume, as the other gorgosaur disputed ownership of the corpse.

  As the two great carnivores quarreled with each other, Paula drew in a shuddering gasp of relief. It was over now; the rest of the herd was safe. Soon the hadrosaurs would stop, and she could get out from among them.

  Only they did not stop. Once begun, a stampede gains a momentum of its own, one with nothing to do with what had touched it off. Swaying with exhaustion, Paula loped a couple of paces to the side and rear of a fat hadrosaur with a limp. There was nothing else she could do, except give up and get trampled. The couple of times she tried drifting across the current toward the edge of the herd, she was almost run down. The same thing happened when she slowed. Gritting her teeth, she ran on.

  Then the hadrosaurs were in among the trees and ferns south of the nesting ground. Up ahead, the leaders of the herd swerved this way and that, sometimes on account of the terrain, sometimes for no reason at all. In the forest half-light, Paula soon had no idea in which direction she was going.

  She spotted a tree—a magnolia, of all things—that looked sturdy enough to hide behind while the herd streamed past. But as she swerved to make for it, one of the hadrosaurs caught her, quite by accident, with the very tip of its tail. She smashed against the trunk of the magnolia and remembered nothing more.

  It was dark when she returned to her senses. She groaned as she sat up. Pain thudded behind her eyes with every heartbeat, held her ribs in a vise, dwelt like fire in her right wrist.

  She cautiously took a deep breath. The ache in her chest did not get worse. No broken ribs, anyway, she thought.

  That wrist was something else. She could feel bone grate when she moved. As carefully as she could, she eased off her backpack. She fumbled in it left-handed for her flashlight.

  Something by her left knee twisted in surprise as the light went on. "Are you still here?" she said, turning the beam away from the baby hadrosaur. After a moment's reflection, she decided the little beast had nowhere else to go. Away from its nest, what else could it do but stay by the one being that represented safety to it? There were dangers in the Mesozoic night: not only small marauding mammals, but also— and more to be feared—nocturnal cousins of Deinonychus that hunted the mammals and anything else they could find.

  Such musing was only a small concern as Paula dug through the pack for a vial of pain pills. She dry-swallowed one and then, a few seconds later, another one. While she was waiting for them to kick in, she pulled out a bandage-roll and found a couple of sticks to use in a splint.

  Her hurts began to recede. She undid the wrist strap that held her compass and the homer for the time probe. "Oh, Jesus Christ," she said. The drug made her sound detached and conversational but she could feel the scream behind her words. Both devices were smashed to worthless junk.

  She sat perfectly still, trying to will them back to life. When that did not work, she nodded bitterly, as if the failure were a petition a dean had rejected. She fought down panic. "First things first," she said, and went to work splinting her wrist.

  Even as she tightened the bandage, though, her mind kept yammering at her. If she was not at the time probe when it left the Cretaceous, she was stuck here-and-now for as long as she lived, which wouldn't be long. They had drilled that into her during her training. The releases she had had to sign would have made a small book by themselves.

  Perhaps it was the fear of being stranded, perhaps the blow to the head she had taken, but she made a bad mistake. Instead of waiting until morning and backtracking along the trail the hadrosaur stampede had left, she decided she had to know at once where she was and in which direction she should go. She got to her feet to look for a clearing so she could see the stars.

  The baby hadrosaur trustingly scuttled along behind her, as it might have after a real parent on the way to a patch of berry bushes. After a while, she stopped and picked it up. "We've come this far; we may as well stick together," she told it, as if it understood.

  The forest canopy kept all but the occasional star from peeping through. Paula kept walking—there had to be an open patch somewhere. Her flashlight beam drew insects, just as it would have in her own time. She drenched herself with repellant. Cretaceous biting bugs had mouthparts like drill-presses. They had to, to penetrate dinosaur hide.

  Two or three times, she saw pairs of eyes reflecting her light in yellow or red. As long as the eyes were close to the ground and close together, she did not let them worry her.

  "At last!" she exclaimed some weary time later. A forest giant had toppled, and in its fall taken s
everal smaller trees with it. Ferns and weeds were already filling the gap, but as yet the new growth was no higher than Paula's knees.

  She went into the middle of the clearing and turned off her flashlight to let her eyes adjust to the dark. She was no great shakes at astronomy, but she was confident she knew enough of the major constellations to figure out which way was which.

  Or so she thought, but when she looked up to the heavens, none of the patterns she saw meant anything to her. A red star stood almost directly overhead; it was bright as Venus. Several others here and there were nearly its match. The cluster close to horizon put the Pleiades to shame.

  "Shit," she said as the realization washed over her. To her, the stars were the stars, and pretty much unchanging. Over eighty million years, though, that wasn't so; the Earth was almost halfway round the galaxy from where it would be. They had talked about this in training, but she had only listened with half an ear: what they were saying hadn't seemed useful, not when she had simpler, more accurate ways of finding direction. Now she didn't.

  That old saw about moss growing on the north side of trees did not mean anything here, either. In this climate, moss grew everywhere.

  About then, she figured out what she should have done. If she could retrace her path to the clearing . . . her laugh held desperation. She had got so turned around looking at the stars that she wasn't even sure from which direction she had entered.

  "Stupid, Paula, stupid," she said. Before, being stupid had meant getting marked down in a seminar or having to do an experiment over. Now it was liable to kill her.

  She was grateful for the pain pills. They took the edge off her fear, left her able to think straight, if slowly. When the sun rose, she would be able to tell directions from the shadows it cast, well enough to go roughly north. That would get her to the river, and give her an even-money chance of heading back toward familiar territory.

  "Unless you have a better idea?" she asked the baby hadrosaur. If it did, it wasn't letting on.