by Jack Dann
And in such moments I really, keenly regret that I am not better with my words. The Mesozoic always does that to me, makes me want to talk to Carol about what it was like to have been a young man back during the sixties and earliest seventies, when it looked as though there might be hope for humanity . . . when blacks were suddenly demanding the right to be people, when women were demanding the right to be human beings, when . . . when so many different voices were being raised, crying out for sanity and justice, when there were good and noble causes, worthy causes, when there was still time and the future that has come to pass was still a small, gray cloud hanging low on the horizon, when . . .
When the smell of extinction was not in the air.
But I can't make it live for Carol. She's too young. She was born after things had already gone to hell in a hand-basket. She was barely out of diapers when California broke up. (Good-bye, L.A. You always fascinated me.) She was just a kid when Texas made its abortive attempt to divide itself into five separate states, and as far as Carol is concerned, Texas has always been occupied by enemy troops.
Carol came too late, after there was no longer any place for hope in our lives. And I have never been able to explain to her the essential difference between the poor dumb earnest optimism of my youth and the inanely glowing stuff I write for TV.
Carol, Carol, dinosaurs and all their brethren were majestic creatures. How much so, you will never be able to understand, because you can't be told about it. You have to feel what it was like to be twenty meters long and the lord of the world. Or to glide on six-meter wings above the Kansas Sea. The dinosaurs were the most awesome things of all time, mountains made to walk. And, for all of their cranial density, Carol, they were nobler monsters than men. When the dinosaurs died, they left a clean world. They walked out of the world, and it was still full of living things. The dinosaurs died out gracefully.
When we die out, we'll take the whole world with us, one way or another.
I have such a mind for trivia. All morning long, I've been haunted by a song that I can't possibly have heard during the past twenty years. It's something from the sixties, I think, something by Bob Dylan. A cry of anguish, of disillusionment. "Oh, mama, can this really be the end, to be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?"
And this, from one of the stanzas: ". . . the ladies treat me kindly, and they furnish me with tape, but deep inside my heart, I know I can't escape."
Oh, but I try.
Today is Friday, Food Day at the commissary, and the streets are packed. I had to go to the studio. Pushed and fought my way to the mass-transit stop at the corner, and then the steam-bus was twenty minutes late. But it did arrive, and I did get a seat up front. It was a miserable ride, all the same. My respirator has sprung a leak. (God, who'd have thought that Austin, Texas, would ever have really bad smog?) The day was a scorcher, and everything stank, the bus, the streets, the people, the whole city. The smell of extinction.
And so I leaned my head back, closed my eyes and got away from them as best I could. All is calm, all is bright.
The Runners
by
Bob Buckley
Dinosaurs are often portrayed as ponderous, clumsy, slow-moving giants, but, as we have said, some of them were anything but slow—in fact, some of them may have been very fleet of foot.
But there are some things you can't run away from, no matter how fast you are.
Unless you have a little help.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Bob Buckley now lives in Trabuco Canyon, California. A full-time technical writer for the Burroughs Corporation, he made his first fiction sale in 1969, and has since become a frequent contributor to Analog. His first novel was World in the Clouds, and he is currently at work on a nonfiction book about dinosaurs called The Terrible Lizards.
* * *
I've discovered that I'm not that fond of dinosaurs. The big ones smell bad and haven't the wits of an insect, while the smaller beasts, though brighter, would just as soon chomp off an arm as grin at you. And I've never seen one of them grin. Not yet.
But there we were, right down among them . . . hell revisited. That's what Rogers calls the place.
I stood on the dry clay bank and looked out to sea. The sun was warm, but none of us wore much more than shorts, and a wide-brimmed hat was keeping my brain uncooked. Below me was a river. A broad expanse of bluish-brown water, unnamed, widening here at its mouth where it emptied into the sea. The Rockies should have been there, not a horizon-to-horizon body of water dotted with islands. But they weren't. They wouldn't appear until much later.
The waves were stained brown for some distance out. The channel carried a lot of sediment down from the arid highlands that began where the shoreline forests thinned, and a considerable delta had been built up. Mangrove-like trees covered the sandbanks and provided nesting sites for the thousands of shrieking sea birds that seemed to rise into the dark sky like towers of white smoke whenever a pteranodon sailed majestically past. I think they're pteranodons. James disagrees. I guess he should know. He's one of the paleontologists.
Just visible above the curve of the purple-misted horizon was the snow-capped cone of a volcano. It's a big one. Rogers has named it Feathertop, for the cumulus plume that sweeps off its eastern ridge. It's as good a name as any other, and I've marked it as such on the map we're preparing.
Beyond Feathertop are more volcanoes, and the rugged coastline of Cordilleran North America. One day it would all be California and the other West Coast states, including the long, dry finger of Baha. In this time, though, it was a gigantic island continent.
Presently, our method of dropping back to the Mesozoic Era is classified. And in such an unofficial accounting such as this, I doubt my explanation of the physics involved would make much sense, anyway. I'll leave it only to say that we didn't use a time machine. Our vehicle was a very ordinary pressure-resistant freight shuttle with a high thrust kicker installed on her stern. An automated fuel barge had accompanied us. We had left it parked in synchronous orbit over Cratonic North America, which is the landmass that lies East of the Sundance Sea and joins with Europe.
Getting back, according to the physicists, would be much trickier than our arrival. But the pay was indecently high, and the computers said it was possible, so we went.
The first crew that dropped back did so by accident. They had been gone so long that they had actually developed a taste for dried lizard meat. But they got back. And they haven't the least conception of the behavior of the Jovian Twist Effect.
It was our task to map the terrain, and document the interval of temporal transfer.
Our crew was small by necessity. Rogers was the geologist, and Jack and James were paleontologists. I was the pilot. But before going for an advanced degree at the Astronautics Academy, I had majored in Animal Behavior. And I had another hat to wear, as well. I was also the camp astronomer.
All this just to determine what year it was!
We were completely on our own. No calm banter with Mission Control. No encouraging messages from the girl friends. We were the only primates on all of Mesozoic Earth. I guess we should have felt proud, or scared if we were smart. But, mostly, we were too busy to feel anything but tired.
I had set the shuttle down on a lofty plateau of Precambrian basalt that reared out of the continental platform like a giant's black bench. Sixty million years later it wouldn't be there. Erosion would have spread it out across the surrounding valleys as a fine, dark sand.
There wasn't much growing on it. Some crevices had captured a few scanty drifts of soil, and here and there groves of cycads had taken roost. Some were huge, and even the little ones looked ancient.
James told us they were related to the Dioön, a genus living only in eastern Mexico in our time.
We soon discovered that they had spines which raised welts whenever they stabbed the skin as we unloaded the copter from the shuttle's hold. After we had finished, and I was examining the shuttle's air cu
shion landing gear for damage, James strolled up with some kind of pterodactyl flopping limply in his hands. He was examining it with a delighted, though slightly bemused expression on his face.
"Well," I asked, "what is it?"
On the long trip out we had argued extensively about how closely twentieth-century reconstructions would match reality. I personally doubted that we would recognize much of anything. The very nature of fossilization tends to destroy the various epidermal embellishments that make living animals so unique.
Now, seeing James and his puzzlement, I couldn't stop myself from grinning.
The creature was light tan in color. Its body, head and wings were covered with a very fine fur almost like felt. The jaws were long and toothy and protected by a beak of horn. The right wing was torn.
I took James' prize away. The corpse was still warm. I palpated the body and discovered a crop with what felt like a small lizard secreted within. There were other features, too.
"It's a male," I told him.
"How do you know that?" he demanded.
I flicked the bright-red, partially inflated wattles that depended from the underside of the throat.
"This is a display organ. Since your pterodactyl filled a bird-like niche in this environment, it's reasonable for us to assign bird-like behaviors to it. If you'll look around, I think you'll discover a nest with a female brooding young. I doubt infant pterodactyls could maintain their body heat any more than young birds can."
James took back his once-living fossil and gave me a puzzled, somewhat wounded look. He didn't say anything, but later I noticed him wandering about the plateau peering behind each clump of rocks. He never told me if he found a nest, though.
That afternoon, with Jack assigned to monitor us from the bridge of the shuttle, we left the plateau behind and followed the sea coast north. This was the first of our scouting trips. We hoped to compile enough data to allow us to date this time. The data was to consist of the animal life.
Rogers piloted. I was the spotter, and James sat beside me with a microfile on his lap. Its memory was stuffed with the reconstructions and skeletal overlays of every life form discovered to have existed in the Mesozoic. By keeping a tally on the identified genera we would develop a fauna which could be related to a sedimentary unit. This would give us a crude date, a period within the broad outline of the Jurassic, or Cretaceous. Later, I would use astronomy to provide us with the fine tuning.
Rogers flew low over the beach, startling small plesiosaurs who fled back into the surf with many a hump and tumble. These were juveniles. James wasn't prepared to identify them.
I think he was hedging. He was too fascinated with watching them to consult the file.
The beach curved. White sand was replaced with a low ground cover. Bushes, small trees. Here and there we saw animals, but only their backs and heads and necks. It wasn't good enough to make an identification.
James began to look unhappy.
We crossed a shallow bay. A mosasaur rolled below us and sounded again. That provided a small clue. Mosasaurs were monitors who adapted to live in the open sea. They were late to develop. But this one vanished before James could find it on the file.
It began to look as though the only way we might make a positive identification would be to catch one of the beasts and X-ray it, comparing its skeleton with the fossils in the file.
When I said this aloud James got an odd gleam in his eye. I knew at once I had made a serious mistake. I didn't want to see the three of us wrestling with six tons of angry dinosaur. I explained the difficulties of such a feat in great detail.
"We have our guns," James countered.
By "guns," James meant tranquilizers. We were to avoid killing anything. This was common sense. Of course, the dinosaurs were a dead line, without descendants. But the experts didn't want to take chances. What if Great Uncle Harry were to vanish? And so on.
The Tranq guns were bulky and badly balanced. But they used an electronic sight that couldn't miss, and a microcomputer to optically weigh, type, and select the proper dosage and formula of tranquilizer for a target.
Knowing this, James was all ready to start hunting.
Rogers came to our rescue by explaining that the carrying capacity of our copter was limited. The telling point came when he said he was turning inland. The upland environments were known to be the habitats of ceratopsians. These giant grazers were well documented across the Upper Mesozoic.
Rogers gained altitude and we whirred off toward what would one day be Montana.
Eventually the sea faltered at our left, giving way to salt-flats and badlands. There were brackish swamps in the valleys, and a lot of bones gleaming whitely on the islands. But apart from some yellowish, sickly reeds, nothing grew there. It was a dead land. Even so, James wanted to land for a brief exploration.
Rogers refused and pointed to a scaly lump sheltering behind an eroded outcrop of limestone.
It was a carnosaur. Young, only slightly larger than the copter, scrawny as death, and sleeping. Times had been bad for the beast. Its hide was tawny brown in color, with streaks of green. This might have been pigmentation, or some exotic disease. He lacked the funny ridges on his spine that the movie monsters had. But he did have a brightly colored dewlap crumpled under his throat. "Probably a male," I told James.
He sighed. Images were fleeting across the screen of the microfile.
About that time the flesh-eating dinosaur woke up. He raised his head slowly and peered about the raw landscape with rheumy, bloodshot eyes. He looked like all the hangovers in the world rolled into one thundering headache.
I guessed that his good living had dried up a long time ago, and now even the dregs were gone. If we had passed this way one week later the scavengers would have been exploring his bones.
Awkwardly, using his forelegs as props, he pushed himself up into a standing position, his long tail thrust stiffly out behind, like the balancing pole of a wire walker. Snorting, he took a couple of shambling steps toward the copter. Our downblast was kicking up a miniature gale. It blew dust and rattled the reeds in their beds of dried mud. Nothing like us had ever appeared in his world before. But movement had always equated itself with food and he was hungry enough to eat whatever came within reach of his jaws.
Meanwhile, James had stopped fiddling with the controls of the microfile.
"I'm going to say it's a variety of dryptosaur. It's certainly not an allosaur, or ceratosaur. Of course, the juvenile characteristics confuse the issue. We only have adults in the record."
"Dryptosaurs are Upper Cretaceous, aren't they?"
"This might be a stem form. He's pretty generalized. Might predate Tyrannosaurus."
As the carnosaur neared, Rogers lifted the copter higher.
"Why don't we try to lead him out of his death trap?" he asked.
"That's manipulation, and we're to leave the environment alone as much as possible. If this beast starved to death in this swamp, we can't change it."
"Sounds hardhearted," Rogers countered. Then he laughed softly. "Of course, that ol' boy doesn't look much like a saint. Maybe this is his reckoning."
So saying, he swung the copter around and took us off toward some low hills that rose on the horizon.
I took some holo shots of the puzzled carnosaur and promptly forgot him.
He didn't forget us, though.
The hills were shrouded by a dense growth of conifers. We could see oaks in the valleys, and a few palms, and laurel. Here and there were glades filled with viburnum and draped with the sprawling vines of the wild grape. It was all very inviting. Homey looking, in an exotic sort of way. Man had never touched this land with either plow or foot. It was totally unspoiled.
Rogers put us down in a meadow carpeted with a plant that resembled grass, but wasn't.
I opened the door. The breeze that puffed in was chill. It brought with it the scent of invisible dogwoods and the sough of the pines.
James pointed abruptly.
/>
"Upper Cretaceous. No doubt about it, now. There's a hadrosaur."
We looked to where his hand was aimed.
The dinosaur was a big one, over forty feet long.
Hadrosaurs were bipedal vegetarians. As we watched, this one moved its dull gray mass out into the open. The head was flattened, and this variety lacked the characteristic crest. It was chewing on a pine bough. The hind limbs were large and muscular, the tail equally so, and flattened like the blade of an oar. While we observed, fascinated, it tore down another limb and ran it slowly through its great, broad beak, machining off the needles. The skin was smooth, but pebbled with tiny scales. While the predominant color was gray, the belly was light tan. But it might have been mud.
James had been busy with the file.
"That's an Anatosaurus. They were widespread throughout western America. This one is an adult."
He slung the file over his shoulder on its strap and reached for a tranq gun.
"Let's go out."
"It might not be safe," I said doubtfully.
"You didn't come over a billion miles and seventy million years to hide in a helicopter, did you, Bill?" He had me there.
We left Rogers with the copter. Someone had to guard our only means of rapid flight. I took another of the guns, and we wandered out into the meadow.
This was going to be our first face-to-face encounter. The behavior of the dinosaurs was pretty much of a mystery to us. All we knew was what we had seen so far, and what the ancient trackways had provided, which was damned little. Considering the tiny brains and massive bodies, though, there had to be a sizeable instinctual component to everything they did. That meant rigid behavior patterns. They didn't have enough brain for "reason," or much information storage.
I told James to keep behind me and we started out toward the forest and the hadrosaur. The "grass" smelled sweet as we pushed through it. Some clumps were knee-high, with spires of narrow seedcases. Sometimes we saw movements across the meadow as unseen inhabitants of the grassy sea scurried out of our way.