Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  The roadway was getting more narrow now, invaded by dense vegetation which had not been trimmed back in some time. They passed picnic sites which had been usurped by tall grass and weeds; a wooden sign with an arrow pointing to the Peckerwood Trail was almost completely overwhelmed by vines. Through the trees and underbrush he could see aluminum fencing and rows of coiled razorwire. The park which time forgot. “So tell me,” Steinberg asked. “How did a nice girl like you …?”

  “Get in a swamp like this?” Nixon cast him an amused glance. “I haven’t heard a line like that since I quit going to health clubs.” She swerved the Hummer around a pothole in the road. “Gotta fix that sometime,” she observed. “I hope this isn’t a pick-up scene, because it’s too weird if it is.”

  “What? Me?” he protested. Yet that was his intent, whether he cared to admit it or not. Studying her out of the corners of his eyes, Denny couldn’t help but to fantasize about a neat little sexual encounter over the next couple of days. A one-night stand in a tent, perhaps; the great outdoors already did things to his libido. Pete wouldn’t mind—since his divorce two years ago the senator had made time with some of the more desirable women on the Hill, discreetly out of view of the press—and the trip shouldn’t be a total loss. But he was careful not to let on how close to the mark Tiffany had come. “This is probably much the same thing as a gym,” he murmured, waving a hand at the jungle around them. “The reptiles here are only bigger, that’s all.”

  “How true.” She paused thoughtfully. “I was a lawyer before this. Contracts attorney with Meyers, Larousse & Sloane in Atlanta. I was your typical sixty-hour-a-week legal droid, working my butt off to become a full partner and unhappy as hell … all I really wanted to do was paddle a canoe around the Okefenokee on the weekends. I spent each week shuffling paperwork and waiting for Friday when I could load up my canoe and head down here.” She shrugged. “So one day I decided to pull the plug. Turn life into one long weekend.”

  “And become a naturalist in a wildlife refuge? That’s a switch.”

  “I know. The partners still haven’t figured it out. Ask me if I care what they think. Anyway, I had been working here for about two years when the Interior Department decided to turn the refuge into a research center for the project. They canned most of the staff when they closed the place to the public, but as luck would have it they still needed a naturalist who knew the swamps, so they kept me around.”

  Denny nodded his head, but remembered something she had said earlier. “But I take it you’re not happy about the dinosaurs.”

  “Take it any way you want,” Tiffany said noncommittally. She slapped the steering wheel with her hands. “So here I am … and here we are.”

  The other Hummer was parked next to a trailhead; she steered their own vehicle off the road, switched off the engine, and climbed out. As Steinberg got out and joined her on the edge of the raised wooden boardwalk leading into the brushes, he heard the clatter of distant rotors. “C’mon,” Tiffany said, heading down the boardwalk to a gate in the fence. “It’s almost time for the main event.”

  “Hmm?” Denny shaded his eyes with his hand and peered up at the sky. Was that the Osprey coming back? The swamp seemed more dense now, as if the green maze were moving in around them like the fronds of a pitcher plant curling in around its prey. “What’s that?”

  “Feeding time,” Tiffany said. “You’ll love it.” She opened the unlocked gate and looked over her shoulder at him. “Just like a budget hearing back in DC.”

  It was the second time that day he heard about feeding time, but she was already striding down the boardwalk before he could ask what she meant. He hurried to catch up with her.

  From the testimony of Dr. Bernard Cooper:

  KAPLAN: We realize that you’re upset with Rep. McCaffrey’s characterization of the project as reckless, in regards to the species of dinosaur which your team revived …

  DR. COOPER: “Upset” isn’t the word for how I feel, Mr. Kaplan …

  KAPLAN: … yet you have to realize that the burden of proof is upon you to convince this Commission that the project was not reckless, that you had taken adequate safeguards to protect visitors to the refuge. …

  DR. COOPER: Mr. Kaplan, the primary goal of Deinonychus Observation Project was not to establish a dinosaur petting zoo. When the Department of the Interior leased the Okefenokee refuge to the project, we did our best to make sure that the specimens would be isolated from the outside world and that the scientists conducting the observations would be thoroughly protected from the dinosaurs. Besides the fact that the Okefenokee Swamp was the most available site which approximately matched the natural environment of the Early Cretaceous era, it was also selected because of its isolation. Safety was a top priority and a considerable part of our NSF budget was spent on just that priority. The refuge was hemmed in with high fences with limited access to the swamp. Waterways such as Suwannee Canal were equipped with underwater fences to keep the dinosaurs from swimming out, even though this species isn’t amphibious by nature. Roads were blocked to prevent vehicles from entering so that entrance to the refuge could only be made by aircraft. The specimens themselves were surgically implanted with the electronic inhibitors I described earlier. Every precaution imaginable was taken to prevent injury or death to anyone entering the refuge …

  KAPLAN: And yet …

  DR. COOPER: Please allow me to finish, sir. We anticipated that we might have some privileged visitors to the project, such as members of Congress who oversee the National Science Foundation, and we were thoroughly prepared to make certain that they were safe. However, I must point out to the Commission that we did not expect that a presidential candidate might decide to spend his vacation with us, let alone one who might be a target for assassination by a right-wing extremist group. We did not invite Senator Chambliss and his party to the refuge. To be quite blunt, Mr. Kaplan, if it had been within my power to do so, I would have refused to let him in.

  KAPLAN: Then why did you allow the late senator to visit you?

  DR. COOPER: Because the project is at the mercy of congressional funding, and we need all the friends on Capitol Hill we can get. You know the old saw about where an 800-pound gorilla wants to sit? Mr. Kaplan, with all due respect to the deceased, he was an 800-pound gorilla. He sat wherever he damned well pleased.

  Under the rattle of an approaching aircraft, Steinberg heard the voices of the science team as he and Nixon arrived at the end of the boardwalk.

  “Pack acquired at three-ten degrees northwest, downrange two-point-two miles …”

  “Onboard telemetry good. We’ve got a clear fix. They’re still in the trees …”

  “Okay, bring in the Osprey for the drop …”

  The observation platform looked like a giant pinewood treehouse, perched fifty feet above the ground on the big toe of the foot-shaped Chessier Island. A high steel fence and more razorwire surrounded the platform; Denny was suddenly made uncomfortably aware how exposed they had been while on the boardwalk. One of the men on the platform noticed Steinberg and Nixon and buzzed them through the boardwalk gate. Nixon led the way up the spiral stairway to the top of the platform.

  The swamp opened up before him as a vast, primordial prairie. The plain of floating peat moss had been here for seemingly countless years, its mass having gradually bubbled up from the bottom of the swamp to form an almost-solid surface. The edges of the clearing were fringed with pine and cypress trees draped with Spanish moss; the prairie was covered with high, yellow grass which rippled like ocean waves as a warm breeze wafted across it. The rippling grew more intense as the Osprey came in over the treetops and hovered above the plain. A covey of white sandhill cranes, startled by the VTOL’s arrival, lifted off from the ground and flapped across the prairie straight towards the tower, irritably honking their distress, until they veered away from the tower and disappeared beyond the trees.

  Under the canvas awning stretched above the platform, a couple of researchers w
ere standing ready around their instruments: tripod-mounted Sony camcorders, Nikon cameras with humongous telephoto lenses, shotgun mikes, a dish antenna all pointed at the prairie. At a bench behind, a young man with a goatee beard and a ponytail was watching the screens of two Grid laptop computers on a bench, hardwired into a couple of CD-ROM datanets. The reels of an old-fashioned tape deck slowly turned, while a couple of monochrome TV monitors showed closeups of the swamp.

  Chambliss and Gerhardt were standing with Cooper behind the scientists, watching all that was happening before them. Like almost everyone else on the platform, they had high-power binoculars draped on straps around their necks. Stepping over the tangled cables on the floor of the deck, Steinberg walked over to them, hearing Cooper speak in a low voice: “… dropping them in just about …”

  “Sorry I’m late, Pete,” Denny interrupted. “I had to …”

  Chambliss impatiently shushed him. Cooper irritably glanced at him, then continued. “The pack won’t emerge until the Osprey’s gone,” he said quietly. “They’re pretty shy about the chopper and they tend to hide from it, but once they come out they’ll make pretty quick work of the bait. It’s not much of a challenge for them. That’s why the team has to record everything. Everything happens too fast to make many on-the-spot calls.”

  Denny watched as the Osprey settled down to within a few feet of the peat moss surface. Although its landing gear was lowered, the aircraft never actually landed on the swamp, undoubtedly because the floating surface of the swamp would never sustain its weight. The rear cargo hatch cranked open and he could dimly make out one of the crew members climbing out to pull down the tail ramp. Steinberg ducked beneath Chambliss’s line of sight and scuttled over to Gerhardt. “What’s going in?” he whispered.

  “Feeding time at the OK Corral,” the Secret Service agent murmured, still watching the swamp.

  “I keep hearing that. What are they feeding ’em?”

  Gerhardt looked at him and said, “Mooooo …”

  Steinberg glanced down at one of the close-up monitors in time to see the bait being led down the Osprey’s ramp by the crewmember: a full-grown cow, its bovine head twisting back and forth as it was dragged out of the hatch by a rope around its neck. “I don’t fucking believe this,” he murmured.

  “There’s a ranch in Folkston where they’re kept,” Tiffany supplied. He hadn’t noticed that she had slid up beside him. She handed a spare pair of binoculars to him. “Did you know there’s an overabundance of cattle in the country?” she asked softly. “This is how they get rid of the surplus. Feedstock for the dinosaurs.” She smiled grimly. “They’re not vegetarians and Purina doesn’t make Dinosaur Chow, even if they would eat it. And they won’t touch dead meat. They like their food fresh, if you know what I mean.”

  “Don’t they get enough to eat out there?” Gerhardt asked.

  “Are you kidding? They’d knock off every bear and deer in the refuge in a week if we let them forage, and the ambient ecosystem would be shot to hell. Even the gators are too scared to take ’em on.” She grimaced. “Not that the fuckers don’t try,” she added.

  “Hmm? The gators?”

  “The dinosaurs. They’re eating the swamp alive. That cow’s just subsistence rations for them.” There was an expression in her face which was hard to interpret; there was something in her eyes which was hidden as she raised her binoculars to study the prairie.

  Once the cow was on the ground, about two hundred yards from the platform, the crewman hastily pushed the tail ramp back into the Osprey and pulled himself into the hatch. He looked like he was in a hurry and Denny couldn’t blame him one bit. The Osprey ascended, twin rotors counter-rotating like scimitars, and peeled away toward the distant compound. Abandoned in the middle of the prairie, the cow watched the aircraft depart. It lowed once, a lonely sound which the shotgun-mikes picked up, and it made a few tentative steps across the wobbly earth until its instincts took over and it began to graze on the tops of the high grass. The ASPCA would just love this, Steinberg thought as a chill swept between his shoulder blades.

  “We’ve got movement at three-twelve degrees northwest,” the Team Colorado researcher watching the computers said. “Downrange two-point-one miles and closing. They’re coming in.”

  “Okay, it’s lunchtime.” Cooper absently twirled his index finger in the air. “Recorders on, Andy, logon DinoRAM. Look sharp, boys and girls.”

  As the researchers switched on the camcorders and focused in on the cow, the young man behind the computers tapped codes into one of the Grids which brought a new, map-like display onto one of the screens. Looking over his shoulder, Steinberg recognized the general geography of the Chessier Prairie, with tiny blinking spots denoting the locations of the heifer and the three monsters lurking just out of sight in the far treeline.

  “It’s called DinoRAM,” Cooper quickly said to Chambliss. “It runs off the transceiver in their inhibitors. We use it to mimic the feeding habits of Jason, Michael and Freddie. In the collect mode Andy’s running, we can instantly file new data from this day’s feeding activity, then rerun it through the computer at our leisure, putting in different stimulae, weather variables and so forth to see what kinds of results emerge, sort of like a simulator. Nice little program.”

  Chambliss dubiously massaged his chin between his fingers. “Kind of hard on the cows, though, isn’t it?” he asked, but Cooper didn’t seem to hear him. Denny was about to add his own comeback when one of the researchers spoke up from the camera array.

  “Movement on the treeline,” she snapped, peering through binoculars at the far side of the clearing. “Three-thirteen degrees northeast and … okay, they’re out of the trees.”

  “What type of approach?” Cooper asked, leaning on the back of Andy’s chair to watch the computers.

  “Walking,” Andy replied. “They’re bunched together, standard triangle formation.” Three blue dots were diagrammed on DinoRAM’s screen; he opened a window in the corner of the display and studied a graph. “Seventy-three-point-three percent probability that Freddie’s in the lead. Lauren?”

  The young woman who had made the sighting chuckled. “Good call. Freddie’s still leader of the pack. Guess he won another argument with Jason.”

  Raising the binoculars to his eyes, Denny watched the prairie. At first he couldn’t see the pack. Then they moved, and he could make out three sleek, man-sized shapes at the edge of the trees. “Damn, but they’re small,” he murmured aloud.

  “You were expecting Godzilla?” Gerhardt whispered back. But he nodded in agreement. “Yeah. Cute little fuckers, aren’t they?”

  Suddenly, the three deinonychi began to sprint forward, running through the high grass towards the cow. “Here they come,” Lauren said as the team members operating the camcorders tracked to follow them. “They’re beginning to spread out …”

  “Three-prong attack,” Andy murmured, watching his screens. “Michael’s heading southwest, Jason’s cutting off the southwest, and Fred’s going straight in for the kill.”

  Steinberg’s mouth dropped open. “Jesus!” he said aloud. “You mean they’re organized?”

  “They’re not dumb animals,” Tiffany said quietly.

  Suddenly the deinonychus to the far right changed course, veered in closer to the cow. “Hey!” Andy cried out. “Mikey’s going for it! He’s going to get that cow first!”

  “Keep your voice down,” Cooper said calmly. He studied the action through his own field glasses. “Jack, Jeff, keep a camera on Michael but make sure you follow Freddie and Jason. Don’t let any of them out of your sight.” The grad students behind the camcorders swiveled their instruments to keep all the dinosaurs in their viewfinders.

  Now Steinberg could clearly see the deinonychus pack: each was about six feet tall, with light brown skin mottled with dark red tiger stripes, running erect on muscular hind legs, slender forearms tucked in close to their chests. They were somehow smaller than he had expected, but their very weir
dness somehow made them look much larger, even from the distance. Although each had a total length of eleven feet, they only stood six feet high; the rest was a long, sinewy tail which lashed about high in the air. He had read that they didn’t weigh very much either: an average of 150 pounds, which accounted for their ability to stride across the floating ground without sinking.

  In fact, they could have been mistaken as being harmless mini-dinosaurs—surely not as formidable as the ruling carnivorous dinosaurs of their time like the allosaurus or the albertosaurus—were it not for their heads: long and wedge-shaped, with wide, wild eyes under bony ridges and massive jaws which seemed perpetually frozen in a demonic grin, exposing razor-sharp teeth. One look at that face, and all notions of cuteness disappeared: they were creatures which nature had designed to be killers.

  Strangely, they somehow seemed more avian than reptilian. Of course they would, he reminded himself. They’re ancestors to birds, aren’t they? Yet knowledge of that clinical fact didn’t help to shake his unease. They were too goddamn alien …

  By now the pack was close enough that they could be seen without the aid of binoculars. The breeze shifted just then. It was either because of the wind shift, or because it heard the swift approach of its killers, that the cow looked up. Seeing Jason coming in from in front, the cow quickly turned and made a waddling effort to run in the opposite direction—only to find that route cut off by Michael and Freddie. Braying in terror, the heifer clumsily veered again and began to gallop toward the observation platform. “Oh shit, bossie, don’t come this way!” one of the camcorder operators hissed.

  “Forget about the bait, Jack. Keep your camera on Michael and Freddie.” Cooper was intently watching the two deinonychi, who were practically running neck-and-neck now. “Well, now. Let’s see if they’d rather fight or feed.”

  Freddie’s massive head suddenly twisted about on its long neck and, in apparent mid-stride, it snapped savagely at Michael. The shotgun-mike picked up the rasping sound of its teeth gnashing together. Daunted, the other deinonychus slowed abruptly and peeled off as Freddie continued to careen forward at full charge.