Dinosaurs!

by Jack Dann

  The following morning, on the pretense of examining a curious outcropping of stone, I brought Rogers along as I returned to the cleft. We fought our way through the grapevine jungle and up onto the shelf.

  I stopped him well away from the cave. I didn't want us attacked.

  "Where's this outcropping?" Rogers inquired doubtfully, gazing at the cliff before us.

  I didn't answer. I was shining a flashlight beam around the interior of the cave. It was empty. The shelf was bare. No eggs, no club, no bones. They had moved out during the night.

  Wisely, I told Rogers nothing. Instead, I showed him a rather ordinary limestone lens embedded in the cliff that reared over our heads.

  He was not impressed. He left murmuring unkind things about the judgment of laymen.

  A week passed. We were all busy, and my sighting of the intelligent dromaeosaur began to take on the aspect of a dream. I was no longer sure I had really seen it.

  I went back to my studies on the taloned killers.

  One day, while I was filming a hunt, however, something happened that restored my convictions.

  One of the runners had split from the main pack, which raced off in pursuit of an aging hadrosaur. Apparently it had detected another spoor. As it paced along a narrow trail through the dark and gloomy forest, I followed.

  A hadrosaur was down in a tiny clearing dappled with shafts of sunlight. It was a large one. Another dinosaur was in the process of dismembering the body. It was the male. I knew it at once, even before seeing the crude stone knife it held in one hand.

  The "wild" dromaeosaur attacked at once, leaping over the carcass toward the other with a hiss like an open valve on a steam engine.

  The knife wielder jumped to one side and stabbed. The stone tool had a point that was too blunt to do much more than damage the skin. But the impact knocked the attacker down. He stayed down, because I used my gun to tranquilize it.

  I stayed out of sight behind a tree while the other finished his job of butchering the hadrosaur. Then he started on the dromaeosaur. Between the two carcasses there was more meat than he or his mate could use in a week. As he staggered off with his gory burden, the scavengers began arriving in twos and threes.

  Again I followed, using binoculars to keep him in sight without being seen myself.

  The new nest site was in a cave a mile down the valley, where the cliffs were taller. I hung around making observations until just before nightfall. Then I returned to camp. No one was around. I ate and went to bed. Didn't sleep much, though. I was too excited for that.

  The next morning I returned to the vicinity of the cave to continue my study.

  Fascination has many meanings. James would not have characterized these dinosaurs as having very many human virtues. The male, and probably the female when she was off the nest, killed whatever they needed without the slightest remorse. And they were efficient killers. But they weren't human beings, and they lived in a world much different than ours. I didn't judge them, I only watched.

  Being unable to work directly with them, I was unable to make an estimate of the male's intelligence. I didn't doubt that, with the exception of us, his kind were the smartest beasts on the planet. But they were rare. A careful search showed that they were alone in the valley, and as much of the surrounding area that I was able to search.

  As times passed, I began to feel a certain custodial inclination toward these runners.

  By now we knew what time we were in.

  That afternoon, James and Jack held a brief meeting. The close of the Maestrichtian is arbitrary because the boundary is not a change in sedimentation, but rather a sudden absence of dinosaur bones. By chance, our journey had brought us to this period. An age was drawing to an end. We accepted this, but it brought about a change in our attitudes. We began to view things with nostalgic eyes. Much speculation was put to discovering the cause of the coming extinction.

  Jack and James were convinced that it had already been in effect for some time. There were seasons in the Mesozoic year. But they were mild. Even the winters were balmy. But now winter meant a time of growing cold.

  The mid-continental sea was shrinking steadily as the Laramide Uplift continued, forced by the slow compression of Cordilleran America into the west coast of Cratonic America, impelled by the subducting Pacific plate. As the land rose, the climate and environment were being changed. Warmblooded though they were, the large dinosaurs were without insulation. They were too big to den, could not hibernate during periods of cold, and so some of them had taken to migrating. We had already seen vast herds moving south along the river margins.

  Gradually, our group drew together almost as though we had begun to need each other's company. In the evenings we sat around a fire listening to the hootings of feeding hadrosaurs while we discussed their demise.

  Rogers enjoyed putting himself in the role of devil's advocate. He doubted that the dinosaurs would become extinct merely because of climatic changes. No matter how cold it got, the tropics would remain a suitable domain. There was no reason why the dinosaurs already living there would not survive even an ice age. And why couldn't they produce insulation? The deterioration of the climate would take millions of years, time enough to adapt. Hair was merely a modification of reptilian scales. If this had happened once, it could again. Had not the mastodons and mammoths grown dense mats of hair during the ice ages and lost it once the weather had moderated?

  Jack jumped on that. Elephants had rudimentary hair even in our time. And though we ourselves appear naked, we possess the same number of hair follicles as any other primate. The difference lies in the density of the individual hair strand. It had been an easy task for the naked mastodon to sprout a rug. The dinosaur would need much more time. They had not found it.

  "Perhaps they should have invented clothes," Rogers joked lightly.

  "That wouldn't have helped either," I told them flatly.

  I had been in a black mood all day. The others hadn't missed it. James glanced at me uncertainly as I tossed a stellar radiation chart across the dinner table. The normal pattern of traces was overwhelmed in one corner by a swollen, cancerous blotch of white.

  "That's G0538," I told them. "You couldn't see anything wrong with the naked eye, but it's gone supernova."

  My companions stared upward as one into the shining, star-flecked blackness of the night sky.

  "We're safe for some time," I chided them. "The radiation storm won't get here for at least a year."

  "How far away?" James wanted to know.

  "I'm not sure. Maybe a couple of light-years. There's nothing left of it in our time, only a black dwarf whose hard radiations were discovered by accident during a solar study. The radiation shell of the explosion vanished into deep space millions of years ago."

  Rogers was the first to catch on.

  "The radiation will play hell with the upper atmosphere. I wonder what it will do to the animal life."

  "Only the smallest forms will survive," I guessed. "Turtles, snakes, lizards, crepuscular mammals, fish. Creatures that tend to hide in the ground by day, or night, or are shielded by water. Anything larger than a dog that stays continually out in the open will find itself fighting cold and radiation sickness."

  "Lord," Jack breathed aloud. "Just like wiping a slate. It's going to be a whole new ball game."

  James, possibly because he was the practical one among us, had thought of another aspect.

  "We can't hang around until the front hits. The radiation shielding in the shuttle wasn't designed to block off that kind of energy. And the radiation belts around Jupiter are going to flare up like neon tubes when the storm starts sweeping past. We're going to have to close this trip out early. When can you be finished with your study, Bill?

  About a week. Most of the star charts have been made. The computer can correlate them in space just as well as here."

  "Okay. We'll use you as the deadline. The rest of us will wrap things up and get ready to leave."

 
I've never known a week to go by more swiftly.

  The mood was grim, like waiting around for an execution. It was impossible to avoid the idea that somehow an entire class of life had been weighed and found wanting. Perhaps that was merely mammalian chauvinism, but as Jack had said, the slate was about to be wiped.

  We were far too busy to worry, though.

  I only had time for one more visit to the cave before we took the shuttle up and began refueling from the barge. I can't say my runners were glad to see me. I was forced to knock them both out before I could get free.

  But there was something I knew I had to do. I'm not sentimental in the least, so I don't know what drove me to do it. But there seemed to be a need. Certainly it was against regulations.

  Our last few hours in the Mesozoic were spent staring at the cloud-bloated eye of Jupiter as we spiraled in for the jump home. There's no doubt in my mind why it's called the King of the Planets. Jack went so far as to call it a god, but he's impressionable.

  No god would be so puny as to lock himself within a mere planet.

  Rogers says that, and I agree.

  Nor would a god deny himself the right to change his mind. I no longer feel our arrival was due to chance.

  We made it back all in one piece. The return brought mixed reactions. But the eggs should hatch in a day or so. There are five of them. I'm hoping that there's a good proportion between males and females. Our runners need a chance.

  James and Jack have already declared themselves uncles.

  The Last Thunder Horse West of the Mississippi

  by

  Sharon N. Farber

  Sharon N. Farber made her first sale in 1978, and since then has made over fifteen sales to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, as well as sales to Omni, Amazing, and many other markets. Born in San Francisco, she now lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

  Here she spins a rousing, old-fashioned, Cowboys and Dinosaurs story for us . . . What, you've never heard of Cowboy and Dinosaur stories before ? Well, you have a treat in store for you, then, as Farber takes us on a fast and funny romp through the Old West, in company with a bizarre and eclectic cast of fossil-hunters—most of whom are real historic personages—who run into more than they bargained for.

  * * *

  The evening-suited men moved into the lounge. "I have not seen any recent publications by you on fossils, Professor Leidy," a German-accented voice said. "Will you be on another collection trip to the West this year?"

  "Hah!" another man commented. "Leidy's given up paleontology and gone back to microscopic studies—they're safer."

  "Safer? Of course. You refer to your hostile savages . . ."

  "No, not the Indians. I mean our battling paleontologists."

  The German gazed in bewilderment at the smiling company.

  A distinguished-looking older man said, "Please, gentlemen. I don't wish to cite personalities . . ."

  "Come now, Leidy, we all know who has driven you from your field. The feuding fossil hunters. Marsh with his uncle Peabody's fortune—he would outbid you for your grandmother's skull."

  "Have you heard the joke? Marsh is unmarried because he wouldn't be happy with one wife. He would want a collection."

  The assemblage laughed. The angry scientist continued, "And then there's Cope. Absolutely brilliant. He can stare over your shoulder at a bone, memorize its salient features, then rush into publication a description of your fossil."

  Leidy smiled ruefully at the German. "Now you've heard two good reasons why I have abandoned vertebrate paleontology."

  More scientists were entering the lounge as the Academy meeting concluded. Leidy withdrew an envelope from his inner coat pocket.

  "Formerly every fossil discovered in the States was sent to me. Now people send to Marsh and Cope and let them bid. But I still receive the occasional letter." He read, " 'Dear Professor Leidy.' The spelling, gentlemen, is unique. My rendition cannot do it justice—'Dear Professor Leidy. I hear as you like strange animals. Well Johnny and Dave kilt all the big ones but me and Sairie caught a baby down the gulch out Watson Crick. Doc Watson says it looks to be a vertebrate'—I believe he intends vertebrate; the spelling is so creative I can't really be sure—'but he never seed a lizard tall as a horse before and said we should write you. If you want to see it you come to Coyote near Zak City and ask. Anyone knows me.' It's signed 'Charley Doppler.' "

  The room had fallen silent while Leidy read the strange missive; a humming began as conversations resumed.

  "Doppler. Surely no relation to Christian Doppler of Prague?"

  "Probably not," a balding man said. "Have you heard how his formulae may be used to compute the distance to various stars by . . ."

  Leidy returned the letter to his pocket.

  Two men on opposite sides of the lounge separately checked their pocket watches, bid their companions hasty farewells, and rushed out to locate train schedules.

  That same evening a less elegant social occasion took place some fifteen hundred miles to the west, at the Dopplers' ranch on the banks of the Foulwater. Dr. Watson, the local homeopath, had just completed his regular weekly examination of Ma Doppler.

  "She gonna make it?" her oldest son asked solicitously. Johnny Doppler deserved his place on the wall of every frontier jail and post office, but he was second to none in filial devotion.

  "Ma's all right, ain't she, Doc?" Young Charley's question tagged along behind his elder's. Both brothers had black hair and white faces which never tanned, leading to Johnny's prison-pallor and Charley's burnt redness.

  "Hmmn," the doctor said, seating himself at the whitewashed table and pouring a mixed drink—half whiskey and half Essence of Frankincense. He sipped, then added another jolt of the patent medicine. "Well, I tell you, boys, I think she's got a number of years left amongst the earthly host. You know widows, they act touchy, that's all."

  "Sure, look at Dave's wife."

  "She's not technically a widow, Charley. Red-Eye Dave is still alive, you see, even if he does tend to avoid Kate's company." The doctor sloshed some Essence of Frankincense onto the table and watched the whitewash dissolve. "How is Dave?"

  "Ain't here."

  "Oh? Your mother tends to worry about you boys when you're away."

  Johnny nodded slowly, eyes shifting back and forth as if he expected his doctor or his brother to draw on him. "Ma always had a fit when me and Dave'd go back to the war."

  Doc shuddered. He'd served with Johnny Doppler and Red-Eye Dave Savage a good ten, twelve years earlier. Johnny had been the Missouri irregulars' most feared sniper. His cousin, though, had never been sober enough for the precision work of sniping. Dave's specialty had been demolitions, his enthusiasm for blowing things up helped by his willingness to work with short fuses.

  War memories always made Doc uncomfortable. He rose, saying, "Thanks for the drink, friends. I'll send some more medicine over tomorrow; meantime, make sure she gets her Essence of Frankincense regular." He fingered the label with the smiling Indian Princess and the small type tributes, one from Mrs. Joseph Doppler herself. Then he left.

  Charley called after him, "Say Doc, I'll get the medicine. I'll be training my big lizard again tomorrow."

  Johnny scowled. "You're a fool wastin' time over there, kid."

  "I'll learn it to pull the plow, you'll see," Charley whined.

  His brother sighed. Charley wanted to be a farmer. Charley could be very trying sometimes.

  The tracks into Zak City were lined with the bleached bones of buffalo shot from train windows by bored passengers. Not a single living buffalo had been seen from the time the train left civilization to the time it pulled into Zak City and disgorged its passengers.

  Two of those passengers caught sight of each other at opposite ends of the boardwalk station, and scowled. They looked very different from the evening-suited images they had presented at the scientific meeting the previous week. Both were five feet, ten inches, the pudgy man by virtue of the heels on his high
hunting boots (guaranteed rattlesnake proof). Above the expensive footwear he presented an intentionally disreputable appearance, with slouch hat, corduroy suit, and a shooting jacket with the top button fastened and the sides flared out to either side of his substantial belly. A well-thumbed copy of The Prairie Traveller peeked out of one capacious pocket. He carried a pair of navy revolvers, a Sharps .50 caliber cavalry carbine, and a large hunting knife, and his small wide-set blue eyes were narrowed in advertisement of his toughness. He had a full reddish beard, a half-bald head, and a face with no apparent bone structure.

  The other man presented a less western, less martial picture. He was a decade younger, in his early thirties, and unarmed. His conservative suit conveyed the image of a foreign scholar. He had an oval face, trimmed beard, and thick brown hair.

  Each man stared at the other, distance diluting their malign expressions, then picked up their respective carpetbags and stalked off in different directions.

  The pudgy man found his way to a busy saloon. The customers had spilled out into the street and were engaged in conversation with some women in the second story of the building opposite. The man stopped before a small cavalry private.

  "I am Professor O.C. Marsh of Yale University, authorized by the Secretary of the Army to seek supplies and men from any government outpost." He patted the pocket in which he carried letters of introduction to the military, railroad officials, politicians, and sundry other frontier luminaries. "How do I locate the army?"

  "Enlist."

  "Where is your commanding officer?"

  "Don't know. I deserted."

  "I wish to hire a guide to take me to Coyote." He pronounced it carefully with two syllables, to show he was not a greenhorn.

  The raucous crowd fell silent. Finally someone said, "You crazy? Coyote? There's easier ways underground."