The Dinosaur Chronicles

by Erhardt, Joseph

  And then I saw a chance—a small chance.

  Among the rows of swollen gourds there lay one runt pumpkin. I ran to it and picked it up. The skin of the orb writhed in my hands. It was loaded with worms.

  I’d played soccer in high school. That was a long time ago. But I still knew how to effect a throw-in. Over my head, with both hands, I launched the honeydew-sized runt into a high arc. Even I was amazed at the loft.

  But if I was amazed, Jeremy was surprised. Resistance was something he hadn’t expected, and he reacted instinctively.

  He took his rifle and fired.

  I may be a city slicker, but I’m also a physicist. The bullet split the pumpkin into pieces, but the momentum of the pumpkin couldn’t be stopped by one mere bullet.

  And, just before the rain of orange pulp and wriggling white engulfed him, Jeremy let out this long plaintive wail:

  “Paaaaa—”

  I turned and hustled to the edge of the field. Shrieks of torment echoed through the valley, followed by rasps like the spitting of a wounded animal. But I kept running; I had no wish to gaze on the result of Jeremy’s error. No, Jeremy would never be welcomed as an Elvis lookalike again; perhaps, if he survived at all, he could usher at a Nightmare on Elm Street revival.

  I crossed the burn path once more. Behind me, the shrieks had become guttural, rolling sobs. Ahead of me, at last, was my sedan.

  I started the car, punched the transmission into drive and roared out of there, wheels spinning and gravel flying. I might be a physicist, but when I got back to Boyer State my first stop would be the biology department. I’d grab the department head, plunk him down at his desk, and tell him all about—punkin’ vipers!

  Afterword

  “Punkin’ Vipers” first appeared in Futures V.3/#22 (April/May 2001), as by T. Rex. The publication still exists as Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine, and is worth checking out.

  There are stories that are Great Fiction, and there are stories with Great Meaning. “Punkin’ Vipers” is a Halloween story, full stop. There are no Great Meanings to be culled from its pages.

  So go ahead: drop a rock in my trick-or-treat bag. I can take it.

  Evensong

  “Do what you can, yourself. Forget automation. Unhealthy. Sedentary. It’s why no one uses ‘bots these days—unless they have to. Understand?”

  Yeah, yeah, Ferguson thought as he shuffled across the unlit bedroom. The surgeon’s advice and his own stubbornness had sped his recovery, but there had to come a time when practicality superseded the dictum.

  He’d still be in bed now, not gliding about in icy slippers, if only he’d asked the house computing unit to close the window for him. A simple voice command. So why hadn’t he done it?

  Maybe he wanted the excuse to get up, to sort it out once more, to put the matter behind him—if he could. He hadn’t been asleep anyway when the storm began.

  As he stepped to the window, raindrops invaded the opening and pricked his bare shins like cold metal darts.

  He thumbed the sash control and the lower frame dropped smoothly to the sill.

  His right leg twitched uncomfortably, but he fought the urge to strap on the automatic crutch. It would be too easy to get used to it again.

  Instead, he pulled a chair to the window and sat.

  Storms here were sporadic curiosities, rarely violent. But violence, natural or deliberate, could never be wholly held back, not even in the whitewashed, house-and-garden hamlet in which he lived.

  A long flash of lightning lit up a steeple, barely visible in the distance. To the rear of that church lay the cemetery. And in that ground, awkwardly tipped in adjacent plots, lay the one close friend he’d had.

  —

  Ferguson met Tar F’set on the shuttle that bridged the twenty million kilometers from the hyperspace transfer station to the planet’s spaceport. He had been looking out the forward view panel, trying to keep his back to the other humans on the ship, trying to ignore the stares and the thoughts he knew were there: That’s Jack Ferguson, the man who put six billion out of work. An exaggeration, surely. Sixty million was closer to the mark, and the layoffs that resulted from his unwitting discovery had lasted but a quarter.

  Yet the feeling of being shunned persisted, and Ferguson wondered how much of it was real, and how much was overreaction—a psychological callus borne of the frictions that followed his disclosures.

  So he kept his eyes on the view panel, two thirds of which showed a fraction of the system’s huge red giant. The star was passing slowly to the right and looked through the viewfilters like a great hairy blanket, all afire. At the far left, his destination appeared as a small brown dot.

  In the reflection of the panel, Ferguson eyed the other travelers, and he saw Tar F’set, the shuttle’s one alien, approach. Ferguson would have ignored him as well, but with the size and bulk of a garden tractor, the creature projected a presence hard to ignore.

  “The world seems far too close to its sun, Human.” The alien’s voice crackled in the air. It wasn’t really a voice, but the work of vestigial wings stridulating over the creature’s carapace. Eons of evolution had replaced the beat-points on the creature’s back with a complex matrix of knobs and rills, giving it the ability to mimic speech. Ferguson had heard of the ability but until that moment had never experienced the synthesis personally. The effect was something like a voice broadcast over soft static.

  But how to reply? Ferguson knew little of the large, insectoid race of which the Tarapset was a member. After some thought, he responded with the obvious. “The red giant is a weak star. If the world were any farther, it would still be frozen, as it was for most of its history.”

  “In my mind,” the Tarapset said, “I understand. Nonetheless, actually seeing the situation is much different.”

  Ferguson knew what the creature meant. If the Tarapset’s presence was imposing, the red giant’s was overwhelming. And, there was the psychological hit of coming to live on a dying planet. The bloating of its star had made the world a habitable, even pleasant place for the moment, but its spring would be brief and come only once. “The astrophysicists,” he said, “say the situation will be stable for another twenty thousand years.”

  “Then,” the Tarapset added, “matters will again become more interesting.”

  The star would lose its momentary quiescence and resume its expansion. The planet would be boiled dry and any life on it would come to an end.

  Which was, of course, why they called the planet Evensong.

  And, in a decision Ferguson once described as the most arrogant assessment of Man’s future yet given, the Interworld Association had decreed that no permanent settlements would be allowed on Evensong, only research stations and retirement communities.

  “We can make plans to leave before that happens,” Ferguson told his accoster.

  The Tarapset produced a rough, rolling rendition of laughter, and Ferguson stared. The alien had evidently made a study of human social interactions. And why not? Thought Ferguson. If it intended to live on Evensong, it would have to know the people with whom it would associate. Ferguson doubted there was even one other of its kind on the planet.

  The effort required for such cross-cultural understanding by a being so unlike a man had to be considerable. Ferguson nodded his appreciation and soon found himself trading introductions with what he could only think of as an overgrown bug—a beetle on steroids.

  And later, because immigrants tended to settle in the most-recently built (and most vacant) of the planet’s communities, it came as no surprise to Ferguson that Tar F’set’s bungalow sat less than a kilometer from his own.

  —

  Ferguson pressed the sash control again, creating a centimeter-high opening. How quickly the room had become stuffy. But Ferguson remembered. His mind forwarded a year, and he recalled the exact date: April 34, local calendar.

  —

  In his yard, Ferguson sat hunched over a deck table. On the other side, Tar F’
set, who had no need of chairs, rested on his six legs. After several wavings of antennae, the bug grabbed his King’s Rook with his mandibles and deposited the piece deep into Ferguson’s portion of the chessboard.

  Ferguson had lathed, carved and stained the chesspieces himself. The lumber he’d gotten at the community general store. Life had hardly begun on Evensong before some ancient catastrophe had hurled the planet from its original orbit into one that would put it in deep-freeze for billions of years. So while the potential for life was there, all of the flora and fauna had been imported. But the local white oak was dense and even, and Ferguson had been satisfied with the results.

  True, he could have bought one of the holographic sets, but as he’d told a neighbor, you couldn’t slam down a holographic piece when issuing check, and that took half the life from the game.

  Ferguson watched the rook land and stared at the Tarapset with barely-controlled frustration. Six weeks earlier he’d taught the bug the game, and in the last two weeks winning for Ferguson had become as realistic a proposition as walking up a wall.

  “Losing to you, Tar F’set, has become a repetitive, though admittedly interesting, experience.” Ferguson looked again at the devastation that remained from his defense of 1 P-K4 with 1 ... P-QB4. F’set had played 2 P-KB4 and had by superior chess or Medieval alchemy converted the play into a perverted King’s Gambit Accepted—his favorite opening of that week—anyway.

  “Are you resigning, Human?” the bug inquired.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You have four moves left before mate.”

  Ferguson resigned.

  F’set finished logging the moves to the game into his portable computing unit and leaned back in what Ferguson understood was his “conversational” position.

  Ferguson said, “I’ve a confession to make. I’ve bought a copy of CyberKnight, the new 412 release. I intended to use it to sharpen my own skills, but I’d be interested to see how you can do against the program. It’s on the house computer.”

  The Tarapset beat his wings in the laughing mode again. “All right, Ferguson; I have no pressing appointments, no business to transact. If you wish to watch for several more hours, I shall be happy to try.”

  As Ferguson led his guest inside, he said, “You’re aware that the better chess programs have for years been unbeatable by any biological opponent, that the various contests against the programs have been to see which competitor could last the longest.”

  “I did read your bookchip,” F’set said, tipping slightly to squeeze himself through the bungalow’s back door, “and I know this. Your game accepts descriptive notation?”

  “If you want to use keyboard or voice, and not the pointer, yes it does.”

  “Fine. You know I consider the algebraic system, while more logical, far less poetic.”

  Two minutes later, Ferguson had initiated the program and had logged F’set on as opponent. F’set opted to defend.

  The program began 1 P-Q4.

  F’set answered 1 ... P-KB4.

  Ferguson put his hand to his mouth.

  “You do not approve?” the bug asked, and Ferguson’s cheeks warmed. He’d forgotten about the Tarapset’s eight eyes, two of which looked backward, and straight at him.

  “The Dutch Defense,” he coughed reluctantly, “is now considered broken. All I can do, Tar F’set, is wish you Good Luck.”

  Six hours later, on the 93rd move and to Ferguson’s astonishment, Tar F’set obtained a draw by repetition. The repetition sequence included moves by four queens—two white, two black—and took twelve moves for the cycle.

  The program rated F’set’s play at 3316.

  Ferguson whistled low under his breath.

  He didn’t tell F’set at the time, but he submitted the game to the Association Chess Quarterly. Three weeks later, he received a notice of acceptance. Also, his sovereign account registered a 500-credit increase; he promptly had the money transferred to F’set’s account.

  F’set seemed surprised by all the interest.

  “You’ve put life back into the Dutch Defense, that’s why,” Ferguson told him. “With so many of the old openings discredited, chess players lust after playable variety.”

  “But the 500 credits—”

  “Yours. You earned them. And I know that expenses are sometimes a problem for you, even if you don’t say so. I see you standing in line at the Asset Conversion Office at the end of the month, looking anxious.”

  Tar F’set could not, of course, blush, but there was a noticeable hesitation in his reply. “What of yourself, Human? Have you no needs?”

  “I was an electronic technician, and I’ve got a couple of minor patents to my credit. My monthly stipend suffices.”

  “I used to be—” the bug began, then stopped to pull the PCU from his thoracic belt. Ferguson saw F’set run his dictionary program. “I used to work in a clerical capacity,” the bug said finally, “and my financial situation, while bearable, is, as you have suspected, somewhat austere. Your gift is appreciated—and accepted.”

  Ferguson rapped the bug on his shell, where a shoulder would be, and said, “We can still celebrate your good fortune. We can go to our one-horse town’s lone watering hole and strike a blow for liberty.”

  By the time the two reached Granger Hollow’s only public house, F’set had worn the legends off his PCU keys but had just about extracted the gist of the colloquialisms.

  —

  Ferguson chuckled as he recalled the puzzled look on F’set’s face. After a while, he’d come to read expressions into the unchanging features of the arthropod—the tilt of an antenna, the parting of a mandible, the curve of his proboscis. But when it came to reading body language, Tar F’set was the expert. Once he’d said to Ferguson, “We cannot change our faces as you can, so we must interpret the feelings of our brothers and sisters from the way they walk, the way they hold their antennae and mandibles, and so on. Learning to read human signals was not so difficult, though I am still confused about one thing.”

  “And what is that?” Ferguson had asked.

  “Wherever I go, I sense among your people conflicting reactions. In some, I sense fear. Fear, perhaps, of the unknown—which I must surely be to them—or fear of my bulk and physical abilities, for Tarapsetteans are hardly as fragile as humans. And I also sense respect, as one intelligent creature may show respect to another, and this results in great politeness. But there is also a third element—I have difficulty giving it a name—perhaps appreciation, though I do not know for what we should be appreciated.”

  The conversation had taken place outdoors, during the long twilight only a giant star can bring. F’set and Ferguson had taken a walk to the Hamlet’s newly-planted stand of birch.

  Ferguson looked up and pointed to where a few bright stars heralded the coming of night. “Look at the stars, my friend. For three hundred and fifty years we’ve had hyperdrive. In that time, our ships and probes have mapped some four percent of the galaxy. That’s not an insignificant sample. We’ve found other life-forms, but most have been primitive—sponges, mosses, algae, a few plants and worms. For three hundred years—until the time we discovered your world—our scientists and philosophers were getting more and more worried. It’s a big galaxy, and we were afraid—”

  “—of being alone?” Tar F’set finished. “I see.”

  They stood there, on a little rise outside the hamlet, and watched darkness fall. F’set said, “You too, are alone, aren’t you, Ferguson? ‘The man who put six billion out of work.’ Yes, I have heard this, yet my research shows your action was honorable, so I do not understand the shunning.”

  “It’s not as bad now as it was in the beginning,” Ferguson said. “And it’s an emotional reaction that only slowly succumbs to reason. Out here on the colony planets, plasjoint is the universal building material. And the building of houses, office buildings, bridges—you name it—drives the economy. When I found that insufficiently-cured plasjoint released n
euroactive chemicals into the air—resulting in premature dementia for people living in homes made of the stuff—there was hell to pay. It also didn’t help that I was an electrical engineer and not a chemist or biologist. My discovery—plasjoint induced dementia, or PJID—cast doubt on the credibility and competence of the government and the established scientific community. Until the curing vats could be retooled, the production of plasjoint was restricted to emergency use only, resulting in job layoffs, reverberations in related industries, and so forth. All this occurred in the midst of a recession, so weddings and surgeries were postponed, and more than once my home on Wellington’s Planet was sprayed with gunfire.”

  Tar F’set waggled one antennae. “As a matter of interest, just how did an electrical engineer make such a discovery?”

  Ferguson started a slow walk down to the hamlet, and Tar F’set followed. “A friend of mine, back on Wellington, had a sister who was hospitalized with psychosis. You know on colony worlds that housing is scarce. His sister for some time had tried to move, claiming that her house was ‘evil’ and sucking the life out of her. This was doubly confounding, because the woman had been a rational, level-headed individual.”

  “So your friend asked you to examine her dwelling?”

  “He did, after the local authorities came and found nothing. I told him it was totally out of my field, but as a friend I took air samples and made other tests. I didn’t find anything either, until I was trapped in her house one evening by a storm and—having nothing better to do—reran some of those tests. Turned out, the chemical release didn’t occur until late at night—when most people were sleeping—because a temperature drop was needed before the plasjoint seals formed microscopic gaps. The chemical itself degraded quickly and had to be inhaled shortly after release to be harmful. I knew I’d have trouble getting the planetary government to roll on this, so I hypergrammed Earth directly—sent my findings to the Centers for Disease Control. That really got a number of people upset—going over their heads like that. But there was nothing else to be done, and later even a few Wellington officials privately told me I’d done the right thing.”