Dinosaurs!

by Jack Dann

  The sun rose again, and was extinguished behind the hills in a matter of seconds. The flag-bedecked pavilion, which had been built for this very occasion, quickly disassembled itself. Harry pedalled ever faster, awed by the spectacle, hardly daring to believe it. He was actually travelling through time! Sunlight flashed and was cloaked with night, again and again, until the world flickered like a faulty electrical bulb. Soon the flickering became as quick as a hummingbird's wings—a dim, whirring light through which he could watch the world transform.

  The university spires vanished. The city shrank to a huddled group of tiny buildings, then to a few simple shacks. Thatched huts appeared, but soon even these were gone. Trees multiplied, growing into forests that closed in thickly around the chronokineticon.

  The trees disappeared, and rushing towards him over a suddenly barren plain was an immense glacier. Harry's tongue shot out in abject terror as the colossal wall of ice rumbled towards him. He closed his eyes and pedalled furiously. Somehow, he remained untouched when his glacier swallowed him. He was outside of time, he decided, invulnerable to the press of events—as long as he kept moving.

  But he couldn't keep up this pace for much longer. He pedalled for what seemed like hours, encased in ice, and then, abruptly, the glacier was gone, retreating sullenly towards the northern horizon. As he watched, the hills in the distance changed shape, enlarging, their summits becoming more peaked.

  Twice more the glaciers came and went, and when they had retreated for the last time, he noticed that the vegetation had changed too. The evergreens and birches had been replaced by ferns and cycads, vast jungles bordering morasses in which he glimpsed the movements of gigantic forms, of sinuous, snakelike necks lifting huge and dripping heads.

  He had done it!

  Harry slowed his pedalling and then stopped altogether. He had not realized that the chronokineticon was suspended a few meters in the air until it came crashing down, and he was sent sprawling into a clump of wildflowers. Panting, he sat up and took stock of his new surroundings. There was no doubt in his mind that he had gone all the way back to the Mesozoic. More specifically, to the Cretaceous. The colourful flowers that perfumed the air had not even existed until then.

  He caught his breath as he inhaled their sweet fragrances, the distensible pouch below his jaws ballooning. Removing his winter clothing, Harry changed into a pith helmet, shorts, and tropical safari blouse, which he had stashed in a satchel underneath the bicycle. Carrying a small hammer for chipping geological samples, a hatchet, pad and pencil, and a watch, he stepped off the main wheel at the base of the chronokineticon, onto the soft humus of the prehistoric world.

  An enormous dragonfly buzzed past his head. Other than that, the place was perfectly still . . . at least for the moment. Setting his watch at exactly twelve o'clock, Harry glanced back at the chronokineticon, which was partly hidden in a colourful tangle of wildflowers, before going on. Sir Brath-waite had yearned to claim the honor of being the first to go back to the Mesozoic for himself—or so he said, at any rate—but he simply did not possess Harry's youth and physical endurance, lacked the stamina to pedal hard enough, long enough. No, it made good logical sense that Harry should be the one to go. So here was Harry, seventy million years or so before his own birth, in a primitive world he'd never dreamt of actually seeing, until the brilliant if erratic Sir Brathwaite had stumbled upon the secret of time-travel. And Harry with a wife and hatchlings, too, back—or rather, forward—in the nineteenth century! He only hoped that Sir Brathwaite's theory about the time-line running to both past and future was correct.

  The humidity was overpowering. Harry walked slowly, until he came to a forest of evergreens and odd, tufted trees. With the hatchet, he cut a notch in one of the latter to mark his trail.

  Just as he finished chopping, he heard something move behind him.

  Perhaps, he reasoned, it was only the chronokineticon. Sometimes the main wheel creaked a little. But this wasn't merely creaking, by any stretch of the imagination. It was more of a rustling sound . . . His throat pouch swelling in fear, Harry remembered the huge figures he had glimpsed before in the swamp. He turned slowly, so that he wouldn't disturb it . . . whatever it was.

  A huge beaked head was blinking at him. He could tell from its bony, hooded crest that it was a chasmosaurus. He had never expected one of his ancestors to be pink, but this one was, shockingly so. Its feathered legs were as big around as tree trunks. Luckily, it was a vegetarian. The only real danger lay in being trampled by it.

  They were eye to eye, since the chasmosaurus was on four legs and the considerably more advanced Harry stood erect on two. The gargantuan creature exhibited little interest in Harry, however, despite their relative positions on the evolutionary scale. It lumbered past him and began to feed on ferns growing in the shadow of the forest.

  Relieved, Harry removed the pad from his pocket and took down a few notes about the primitive creature's appearance and habits. When he had finished writing, he moved on into the dark, rich-smelling jungle. He wasn't likely to find any big carnivores in here, so it should be reasonably safe. If the going became too risky, he could always make a run for the chronokineticon and cycle his way back to the future. He hadn't planned to stay in the Cretaceous for more than an hour, and in any event he had no intention of letting the device very far out of his sight. If by some freak chance anything should happen to the chronokineticon, he thought with a nervous little shiver, he might very well find himself in a frightful fix . . .

  Scratching an itching earhole with the tip of his tail, Harry began to force his way through the heavy foliage. He thought he heard voices from time to time, as he blazed a trail with his hatchet, but he dismissed them as a ringing in his ears, brought on by his chopping. As they grew louder, however, he stopped working and listened very carefully.

  Peculiar, rasping sounds, muffled by the forest, they were nonetheless real for all of that. Voices. They were garbled, but possessed the undeniable rhythms of a speech pattern. Two voices, one high-pitched, the other low. Harry crept stealthily closer to the sounds, and spread two palm fronds . . . and there they were.

  They stood erect and were dressed in silvery, tight-fitting outfits. Their heads were furry, and their faces were smooth, except for a handlebar-shaped crescent of hair on the larger one's upper lip. The other had swelling breasts and hips, suggesting that she was a female mammal of some sort. They were bulky, apelike things, very ugly . . . and yet they seemed to have a spoken language!

  Talking apes! It was a concept almost too strange and horrible to contemplate. Where could such bizarre creatures have come from? They certainly weren't denizens of the Cretaceous. As they continued conversing in their gibbering voices. Harry winced at the harsh, guttural ugliness of their speech, not a single civilized sibilant from either of them. They were obviously sapient, though. They were clearly talking. Perhaps they had come from another planet . . . intelligences vast and cool, and unsympathetic, regarding this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drawing their plans against it . . .

  But somehow Harry doubted it. These creatures looked as if they had evolved right here on earth. They were bipeds, after all, and their heads were in the right place, with the requisite number of eyes, nostrils, and ears . . . though they did have a rather disgusting shell-like covering or growth over their earholes. Would a creature from another world be so like a saurian? Harry shuddered in distaste. So like . . . and yet so dreadfully unlike . . .

  Harry carefully took out the pad, fingers trembling with excitement. As he pressed the pencil down, the lead snapped.

  Both of the creatures' heads jerked towards him. It was only then that Harry realized their eyes were in the front of their heads!

  With lightning rapidity, the two simians removed metal objects that were clearly sidearms from their holsters, pointing them at the cycads behind which Harry hid. The big one roared, obviously commanding Harry to come out into the open. Frightened as he was, and unarme
d save for the hammer and hatchet, Harry had no choice but to do as he was commanded. If only Sir Brathwaite had not been a pacifist as well as a vegetarian and a spiritualist, Harry might have been allowed to bring a revolver of his own! Feathers standing on end, he showed himself.

  Apparently, the creatures had not expected anyone like Harry. Their eyes momentarily doubled in size, showing white around the irises. They were truly a wild and terrifying sight.

  "Please don't shoot," Harry said, his voice cracking with fear.

  They stared at him curiously. Didn't they realize he was speaking to them? Once they noticed his clothing, appurtenances and gentlemanly demeanor, surely they would put down their weapons and welcome him as a civilized fellow sapient. Instead, they began chattering like monkeys as he stepped into the dappled light of the clearing, waving their free hands about and shrieking in a rather uncouth—and certainly undignified—display of emotion. Bad show, Harry thought, trying to keep his lip from curling in disdain.

  Once they calmed down a bit, the female beckoned for Harry to come closer. He walked slowly towards them, tail twitching, open hands held out before him.

  The smaller creature, whose voice, although still raucous, was at least a bit more melodious than that of her companion, rattled off a long string of croaking, nonsense words. The big male shrugged, and they both holstered their weapons. They were at least as nervous as Harry, but their friendly behaviour seemed a good sign. Revolting as they were physically, they obviously possessed a rudimentary intelligence, and possibly even practiced some crude tribal customs that would serve as at least a remote approach to civilized manners; it was a place to start, anyway, and he would just have to be gracious enough to try to ignore their inevitable lapses in proper behavior. They couldn't help their degenerate state, after all, and at least they seemed to be making an effort to be accommodating.

  They gestured for him to follow them, and led him through the forest to an open place by a cliff. Here a waterfall sent up a shimmering, rainbow spray. A tyrannosaur drank from the stream below the waterfall. Curiously, the two apes didn't try to avoid the notice of the monster, whose jaws dipped repeatedly into the water. As they drew closer, Harry noted that the mighty carnosaur wasn't actually swallowing the water. It seemed posed, tail pointed straight back, barrel-like body parallel to the ground. Only the head bobbed up and down mechanically, its eyes expressionless . . . It was touching the water with its snout, but it wasn't drinking.

  As far as Harry was concerned, they were getting altogether too near to his gigantic ancestor now. The brute had not yet seen them, and Harry intended to keep it that way. He stopped and refused to go any farther.

  His two grotesquely-ugly companions made throaty, staccato sounds, throwing back their heads and baring their white teeth. Harry couldn't decide whether they were undergoing some sort of seizure or expressing mirth. Perhaps they intended to eat him or—even worse!—sacrifice him to the tyrannosaur in some bizarre pagan rite. They stood underneath its tiny forelegs now, in the very shadow of the monster.

  "I say, this could be extremely dangerous, you know," Harry said uneasily. "I don't like showing the white feather, and all that, but things really could get rather sticky if that brute should happen to notice you." Somehow, he felt duty bound to try to save these feckless creatures from themselves. Degenerate or not, they were, after all, more-or-less intelligent beings. "Please . . . it will gobble the both of you if you don't come away from there this very instant."

  Of course the stupid apes didn't understand a word he was saying. Ignoring him, the male ape reached up and seized a tuft of mauve fur on the giant's underbelly.

  Harry committed himself to his God, and waited for the great foot to come crashing down. Nothing happened. Instead of seeing the apes crushed or gobbled up, he watched in astonishment as a trapdoor opened in the tyrannosaur's belly.

  It was a machine! A clockwork Mock-Dinosaur! It must be—it had to be—these creatures' equivalent of the chron-okineticon! It had none of the chronokineticon's elegance, of course, but it had to be a crude, primitive time-machine of some sort. But what period could unwholesome creatures like these possibly have come from?

  The female ape pulled a little stepladder down from inside the monster. With her clumsy fingers, she gestured for Harry to enter with her and her mate. Harry followed them in.

  There was a small compartment within the tyrannosaur. In this cramped space, the unpleasant, musky odor of the intelligent simians, which had troubled Harry's nostrils before, became almost overpowering, but Harry tried to ignore it in the spirit of enlightened scientific inquiry. Two chairs faced a console with colored lights on its curved panel. Photographs of creatures of similar mien to his two companions decorated the walls. Miniature, bronze-coated shoes hung over the console, along with two black-dotted white cubes. Harry made a note of these objects, which seemed to serve no technical purpose. Were they fetishes of some kind? Magic? Could these beasts be so technologically advanced and yet so culturally primitive at the same time? Perhaps the Age of Enlightenment had not yet reached whatever strange backwater of the time-line they inhabited. They were only apes, after all—it would be a mistake to expect too much of them.

  Suddenly the little one pounded on her ample chest and piped something that sounded like: "Hue-man!"

  Clever little creature! She was evidently trying to communicate with him, beginning quite logically by telling him her name, but before he could respond in kind, the entire time machine was rocked with terrific force. Harry was sent sprawling onto the floor. Hue-man and her hairy-lipped companion fell on top of him in a tangle of arms and legs. Even through his terror, Harry winced at the contact. By Godfrey, did they stink!

  The time-machine was buffeted a second time, even more savagely. One of the walls buckled. A siren began to howl. The two hapless apes were gibbering in terror.

  Harry lunged for the trapdoor, while the machine lurched like a ship on a storm-tossed sea. He managed to spring out through the opening just as the entire tyrannosaur frame tilted to one side and then went crashing to the ground.

  Harry rolled end over end in the sawgrass, the sound of crunching metal loud in his earholes. He finally came to rest in a hollow, and crawled behind a rock to watch the disaster that was unfolding before his eyes.

  An enormous, purple, polka-dotted Tyrannosaurus rex was rubbing itself against the hiked-up hind quarters of the toppled Mock-Dinosaur, apparently trying to mate with it. The monster didn't seem the least bit intimidated by the frightful shrilling of the siren, perhaps even finding its erotic, if its own lustful moanings in counterpoint were any indication. It made a particularly vigorous thrusting motion with its pelvis, tail lashing enthusiastically, and suddenly the entire time-machine collapsed under the brute's weight, ending the siren's wail for good. The tyrannosaur lost its balance and crashed to the ground on top of the collapsing framework, and then sprang back to its feet again. It seemed confused by the crumpling of its would-be mate, and perhaps by the abrupt silencing of the enticing siren. Scratching its head with a delicate forelimb, it looked around in puzzlement. It didn't see the female ape, who had jumped out of the ruined structure and hurriedly crawled into a clump of ferns. She shrank under their fronds until she was completely out of sight, while the tyrannosaur sorted through the wreckage with its claws. Suddenly, it hissed in triumph as it pulled the hairy-lipped male ape out of the rubble. The male ape screamed as daggerlike fangs closed on him, and he kept on screaming as the tyrannosaur slowly—almost contemplatively—chewed on him. At last the tyrannosaur swallowed him, licked its chops, and emitted a small, delicate belch.

  While the tyrannosaur rummaged through the ruins for more titbits, Harry crept even further behind his rock. Ancestor or no, that enormous carnivore would eat him too, given the chance. Would it find and devour the female ape as well? In spite of her loathsome appearance, he hoped not. However unprepossessing she was, it had somehow touched him that the poor creature had told him her name
.

  Finally, when the tyrannosaur could find no more meat in the twisted wreckage, it kicked spitefully at what was left of the time-machine and stalked off, steel crunching under its huge talons.

  Harry stood, shaken but unhurt. He walked to the clump of ferns where Hue-man hid. "You can come out," he said, forgetting that she couldn't understand him. "It's quite safe now."

  The tone of his voice seemed to reassure her a little. She crawled out, her once neatly-pressed uniform torn and dirty. Her eyes showed more white than ever, and—somewhat nau-seatingly—clear, salty fluid ran from them to form pale tracks in the dirty smudges on her cheeks. Nevertheless, she appeared to be unharmed. She jumped up and staggered about, chattering in shock and horror. It was a particularly disgusting display of emotion, but Harry supposed he would have to put up with it until Hue-man calmed herself.

  "There, there," he said stiffly, attempting to comfort the female simian. "The tyrannosaur is gone. Don't be frightened."

  Hue-man dried her eyes at last, perhaps resigned to the fact that her mate and the time-machine were no more. She gazed sadly at the wreckage of the Mock-Dinosaur as Harry slid his watch fob out of its pocket and checked the time. He had been in Cretaceous nearly two hours. After this disaster, perhaps he should tempt Fate no longer and expeditiously make his return to civilization . . . though what in the world could he do about Hue-man?

  He would simply have to take her back with him when he returned to his own time. It was the only decent thing to do. Hideous as she was, she did possess a dim intelligence, and he couldn't just leave her stranded here, to be eaten by carnivorous dinosaurs. Of course, there was no way she would be able to fit into civilized society save as a monstrous freak, a curiosity. Perhaps Sir Brathwaite would be able to help her return to her own time. Even if he could not, surely life in the nineteenth century, even as a scientific curiosity, was preferable to being torn apart by wild beasts. At least she would be able to live out her normal span, perhaps in a zoological garden. . . .