Dinosaurs!

by Jack Dann

  "A beauty," he told us. "And bigger than God's outhouse." Actually he had shot a previously unknown brachiosaur. "I squeezed it in with the tail cut twice, only three hours dead. All ready to fetch." He pulled out a muddy plastic. "Here's the print. And a tailmark. We can drag a bag of rocks for that."

  He flicked the recorder and the bellow was enough to knock us backward.

  "A thing like a big frog makes that, ours only does a silly little honk. The honorable will never know the difference. Now look!"

  He yanked at a lump by his feet. "Feel it. A live egg."

  "Good God—" We crowded up. "What if he takes it back and it hatches in Bethesda?"

  "I could inject it with something slow-acting," said MacGregor. "Keep the heart beating a while. An enzyme imbalance?"

  "Now for the trails," said Fitz. He unfolded a gory fin like a sailfish plate. "They mark up the trees with this. And they make a nest of wet reeds—our swampy bit there is just right. There's one thing, though."

  He scratched mud off his chest hair, squinting at Jeanne MacGregor.

  "The trails," he said. "It's not just footprints. They, well, they eat a lot and—have you ever seen a moose-run? Those trails are loaded with manure."

  There was a pause that grew into a silence.

  "Actually, the thought had—" said Priscilla Owens, the fat woman.

  It developed that it had crossed all our minds.

  "Well, for the sake of realism I'm sure something can be arranged," grinned Peshkov. "A token offering to your establishment, right?"

  "He's a hunter," said Rasmussen. "He'll be quite observant of such factors."

  Fitz grunted uncomfortably.

  "There's another thing. I forgot to tell you about the Senator's nephew. He puts on to be an amateur naturalist. As a matter of fact, he tried to tell the Senator there weren't any dinosaurs here. That's when I said about the roaring at night."

  "Well, but—"

  "And the nephew is coming here, with the Senator. Maybe I should have mentioned it. He's smart and he has a mean eye. That's why I got the egg and all. Things better be pretty realistic."

  There was a breath-drawing silence. Peshkov exploded first.

  "Is there anything else you conveniently forgot to tell us?"

  "You wanted to go dinosaur hunting!" Priscilla Owen blared. "You planned this! No matter what it costs science, no matter what happens to us! You used this whole—"

  "Prison!" Rasmussen boomed. "Illegal use of Government—"

  "Now, wait." MacGregor's dry voice brought us all up. "Argybargy won't help. First of all, Jerry Fitz, is there a Senator coming or was that part of the game too?"

  "He's coming, all right," said Fitz.

  "Well, then," said Mac. "We're for it. We must make it stick. Total realism!"

  Rasmussen took the bull by the, ah, horns. "How much?"

  "Well, a lot," said Fitz. "Piles."

  "Piles?"

  Fitz held out his hand.

  "It's not bad stuff." He flicked off more mud. "You get used to it. They're herbivores."

  "How long do we have?"

  "Three weeks."

  Three weeks . . . I will have a bit more of that aquavit, Pier. The memory of those weeks is very fresh, very green . . . Greens, of course, all kinds of greens. And fruits. God, we were sick.

  The MacGregors went first. Colic—you've never seen such cramps. I had them. Everybody had them, even Fitz. We saw to it that he did his share, I can tell you. It was a nightmare.

  That was when we began to appreciate Priscilla Owen. Eat? Great gorgons, how that woman could eat. We were all dying but she kept on. Mangosteens, plantains, wild manioc root, palm hearts, celery—anything and everything. How we cheered her! We could scarcely crawl but we actually competed in bringing her food, in escorting her to the swamp. It became an obsession. She was saving us. And science. A complete transvaluation of values, Pier. Seen from the standpoint of dung production that woman was a saint.

  Rasmussen idolized her.

  "Ten thousand dinars would not pay for the chicken she has eaten," he would croon. "The Persians knew."

  Then he would retch and stagger off to dig her roots. I believe he actually got her the Order of Lenin afterward, although her scientific work was quite trivial.

  The funny thing was, she began to lose weight. All that roughage, you know, instead of the fatty stuff she usually ate. She became quite different-appearing. As a matter of fact, I tried to propose to her myself. In the swamp. Luckily I got sick. Oh, thank you Pier . . . She gained it all back later on, of course.

  Well, by the time the Senator and his nephew arrived we were all so sick with colic and dysentery and our obsession with the trails that we scarcely cared what would happen to our project.

  They came in the afternoon, and Fitz ran them around in the swamp a bit and had them find the egg. That quieted the nephew but we could see he was in a nasty temper at being proved wrong and was looking hard at everything. The Senator was simply manic. Little Jeanne managed to get a lot of liquor into them both, on the pretext of avoiding dysentery. Hah!—Thank you.

  Luckily it gets dark at six on the equator.

  A couple of hours before dawn Fitz sneaked off to the shack and materialized his brachiosaur carcass. Fresh from the upper Cretaceous swamp that had been there eighty million years ago, mind you. Hard to believe even yet—and ourselves in the Pleistocene. Then he pounded back in the dark and the recorded bellow went off on schedule.

  The Senator and the nephew came pouring out stark bare, with Fitz telling him where to stand and helping him point the artillery. And up come this huge head over the trees around the shack and the Senator lets fly.

  That was really the most dangerous part of the whole affair. I was under that head with the load-lifter and he nearly got me.

  Of course the Senator was in no shape to trek over the gorge—though it's surprising what your mesomorph can do— so Fitz was sent to haul the thing back. Once the Senator touched that horrendous snout he could not wait to take it home. That punished Fitz; I doubt he had realized he would lose his trophy. But he did save time travel. I think he got a Scottish decoration in the end. At any rate the nephew had no chance to pry and by lunchtime the whole thing was over. Almost. Incredible, really . . .

  Oh, yes, the appropriation went through. And all the rest followed. But we still had a problem, you realize . . . Are you sure you don't want a sip? One never finds the real thing nowadays. Pier, old friend, it's good to meet again.

  You see, the Senator liked it so well that he decided to return and bring his cronies. Yes. A very difficult business, Pier, until our funding finally stabilized. Do you wonder I can't stand the sight of salad since? And coprolites . . .

  What? Oh, that means fossil excrement. Paleobotanists used to have a big thing going there. No sense now, when we can just go back . . . And anyway, who's to say how genuine they are?

  Dinosaur

  by

  Steve Rasnic Tern

  Steve Rasnic Tem has sold more than a hundred short stories, and almost as many poems, and has appeared in nearly every magazine and anthology market in the business. He is especially well regarded in the horror and dark fantasy market, and has been nominated for both the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award for his short fiction. His first novel, Excavations, was published a few years ago, and, at last report, he was at work on several others. Tem and his wife, writer Melanie Tem, live with their family in Denver, Colorado.

  In the quiet, eloquent, bittersweet story that follows, he examines the old biblical injunction that "for every thing, there is a season."

  But what happens when that season is past?

  * * *

  Where did the dinosaurs go? The children looked down at their desks. A change of climate, ice age, caterpillars eating their food, disease, mammals eating their eggs. Freddy Barnhill was thinking these answers but was too self-conscious to raise his hand. The teacher waited. But nobody's really su
re, Freddy thought. Nobody knows.

  Sometimes he thought they might be lost somewhere. They couldn't find their way. They couldn't keep up with the others, the way the world was changing so. So they got left behind. They got abandoned.

  Twenty years later, Freddy drove the fifty-nine miles between Meeker and Rangely twice each day thinking about his father and thinking about dinosaurs. Only occasionally were there changes in subject matter, although he would have expected both topics to be exhausted by now. People might call him obsessed; hell, people would call him crazy.

  Along Colorado Highway 64, endless streams of yellow-blooming rabbit grass whipped by, each scrub-dotted washout and arroyo threatening to draw his eye up its channel and send him into the ditch. Almost as soon as he turned the pickup onto the road, he would start to see his father's enormous hands pressing down at him from above the bar. He'd feel himself suddenly afraid of his father's instability and scurry under the table to hide. Then he'd hear the sudden crash of his father's huge head on the table as he passed out. An endless crash; his father's head slammed the hard wood again and again the fifty-nine miles between Meeker and Rangely.

  There seemed to be little life in the gulleys and low hills. Harsh land which had to be struggled with, which swallowed any failed attempts. Early settlers had named this land with their complaints: Devil's Grave, Bitter Creek, Camp Misery, Bugtown, Poverty Gulch. Rotted houses around clumps of tumbleweed leaned from the hillsides like aged throats, their swollen walls collapsing. The broken ringers of ancient windmills reached toward and empty sky.

  Once he reached Rangely, the sense of lifelessness was even more pronounced—gray, lunar sandstone in ridges and flatlands as far as the eye could see. A wind-blasted landscape alive with sagebrush, little else. The oil companies' reservation: new and old riggings, abandoned shacks. His father had spent most of his adult life here, working for one outfit or another.

  Mel Barnhill had originally been a cowboy. A drifter. Then when things had begun to change with the oil wells coming in, he'd changed, too. He'd been a mechanic, construction worker, jack-of-all-trades. Freddy remembered seeing him work on some of the early crude equipment, even some of the steam-operated earthmovers. Enormous brown hands working with rough-made wrenches. Smiling, singing—he always had been happy working with machinery. Freddy had helped him, sort of, as much as any very small boy might help his father in his work. But that time had passed. As had the life of the cowboy.

  His father had liked to think of himself as an outlaw. "Don't need no laws, no woman to tie me down. Like to do as I please."

  Freddy remembered following his father up the street after one of the man's long drinking bouts. The swagger in the walk, he thought now, had been reminiscent of Butch Cassidy or professional killer Tom Horn, who used to hide out not far from there. Cattle were still being rustled at the time, and Freddy could recall more than once his father hinting that he had had a part in some of it. He'd wink at Freddy sometimes when he said this, but Freddy never could tell if that meant he was just joking, or that he really had done those things, and Freddy was supposed to be extra proud. The first time Freddy'd seen a John Wayne movie, he'd thought that was his father up on the screen. The walk was the same. After a time he began to wonder if his father practiced it.

  Dramatic gestures seemed to be a lot of what the old-timers in the area were about. Gestures for a fading way of life.

  When he thought about it now, Freddy believed his father had known the life was rapidly becoming obsolete, the cowboy and rancher becoming extinct. It was the end of an era. Not long after his father's time, they built that new power plant at Craig, and the old-timers suddenly didn't know every face when they came into town. People had to lock their doors.

  "Dumb cowboys! Stupid sodbusters!" Freddy's father had been drunk, screaming hoarsely in a corral outside a Rangely bar. Freddy remembered the incident vaguely; he'd seen only part of it through the bar window. But every time he ran into one of his father's old friends, it was recalled.

  His father had been drinking with some of his cowboy friends; there'd been an argument. They'd accused Mel of turning his back on them, becoming a city boy, because he worked for the oil companies.

  Little Freddy shuddered behind the window. His father was dragging a cow out of the barn. Before anyone could do anything, he shot it. The big brown animal collapsed as if in slow motion, its head making a sick thud on the hard ground. One of the waitresses had held Freddy so tightly it scared him, but it had calmed him down.

  This was the landscape Mel Barnhill had willed to his son. It provided the backdrop for most of Freddy's dreams. And yet it was at the outskirts of Rangely that, every day, Freddy started thinking about dinosaurs.

  Fourteen miles north of Rangely was the little town of Dinosaur. And twenty-seven miles west of there, just across the Utah border and above Jensen, was the big Dinosaur Quarry of the Dinosaur National Monument. One of the largest sources of dinosaur fossils in the world. Primitive land, or the way the earth might look after some catastrophe. Freddy didn't go any more. Standing up there looking out over the canyons, where the Colorado Plateau had crashed up against the Uinta range, it was as if his whole life might disappear out there someday, pulled into the emptiness.

  Over each street sign in the town of Dinosaur was a little red cutout of a Stegosaurus. The streets had names like Bron-tosaurus, Pterodactyl, Tyrannosaurus Rex. The town looked old, almost as old as the surrounding land, with tar-paper shacks here and there and rough board houses. It used to be called Artesia before the Interior Department set up the park.

  But most of the tourists went over to Utah, to Jensen and Vernal. Dinosaur was just a place people passed through on their way to somewhere else; there was no restaurant, not even a half-decent service station. Only a few hundred in population—there hadn't been many people in the first place, and most of them had gone a long time ago. The red on the dinosaur cutouts looked a lot like rust.

  Freddy worked in Rangely, just as his dad had, but he lived in Meeker. He liked Meeker, although most of the other men his age complained that there was nothing to do. It was a quiet town; there weren't too many cowboys, and it lacked Rangely's construction and oil workers. Freddy was relieved.

  The pickup slid in gravel, and Freddy fought to right it. You had to be careful driving the roads out here; they lulled you, made you careless. The truck seemed so easy to drive, it had so much power, that you sometimes forgot how dangerous one slip might be. One of the drawbacks to advanced technology, and to evolution. It made you reckless; it became too easy to lose control over the power. And that power could leave you upside down off an embankment.

  Again, his father's enormous head crashed into the table. The glasses fell in a rain of glistening shards. His father's shapeless mouth opened to expose rough, broken teeth.

  Dinosaurs used to walk the hills here, but it had been different then. Freddy thought about that a lot, how things used to be so different. And how they might be different again, with new monsters walking the barren land: giant rats and scavenging rabbits, but maybe rabbits like no one's ever seen before—long claws and hind legs strong enough to tear another animal apart. Just before the dinosaurs came, low-lying desert then, the early Jurassic Period. No animals. Great restless sand dunes towering seven hundred feet, snaking and drifting like primeval dreams. Fading, dying away in the distance.

  The earliest home Freddy could remember was an old boarding house a few hundred yards from one of the early oil rigs. A white-washed shack, really, several crate-like rooms strung together. He and his father had shared one. He couldn't remember his mother, except as a gauzy presence, more like a ghost, something dead and not dead. He didn't think she had ever lived with them in the rooming house, but he couldn't be sure. It bothered him that he could remember so little about her—a hint of light, a smell, that was all. She had vanished. She left us. She left me, he corrected himself. His father had always told him that, but it was still hard to believe.
>
  The land sank. An arctic sea reached in. Millions of years passed, and in the late Jurassic it all rose again. The dinosaurs were coming; the land was readying itself.

  He sometimes wondered if he had ever known his mother at all. Maybe his memories were false. Maybe she had died when he was born. Maybe she'd gone away to die, her time done once she'd given him life.

  The land just come from the sea was much more humid. Flat plains. Marshy. Great slow streams loaded with silt flowed out of the highlands to the west to feed the marshes and lakes. Dust floated down from the volcanoes beyond the highlands. Araucaria pines towered 150 feet above the forest floor, the tops of ginkgos, tree ferns and cycads below them. Giant bat-like pterosaurs flapped scaly wings against the sky, maintaining balance with their long, flat-tipped tails. Crocodiles sunned themselves by the marsh.

  And yet he did remember his father complaining about her. How she never cleaned, never helped them at all. He held a mental image of his father throwing her out. Her screaming, crying, reaching. "I want my baby, my baby!" Freddy couldn't be sure.

  Apatosaurus raises its great head above the plants. Forty tons, plant-eater. Cold eyes. Its head comes crashing.

  Freddy loved a woman in Rangely. Because of her he allowed himself to stay overnight there on Fridays. But it scared him, loving someone like that. She might leave. She might vanish. And he didn't like waking up in Rangely; the first thing you saw were those barren white sandstone hills.

  He loved her. He was sure of that. His love filled him, and formed one of the three anchors of his life, along with the memories of his father and the thoughts of dinosaurs. But lately something felt lacking. Some crisis, some drama. Loving her didn't feel like quite enough.

  He wasn't sure why they'd never gotten married. The time had never seemed right for either of them, but after a time he realized that the time would never seem right. One time she was going to have his baby, but she miscarried. No one else had known about it. Wasn't time for it, he supposed; its time had passed. He didn't believe in God or heaven, but sometimes he wondered if the baby might be somewhere. Hiding from him. Or waiting for him.