It was building up to a sticky-hot day. Sterling Featherstone wandered by, saying: “Have you seen George around, Reggie? There’s a geological question I want to discuss with him.”
No, I hadn’t seen Romero; and a search of the camp failed to turn him up. Oh, lord, I thought: don’t tell me another of these coves has gone walkabout by himself! It wouldn’t have much surprised me with O’Connor, who seemed a vague, dreamy sort—but not George Romero, a brisk, no-nonsense field scientist. I once thought scientists of all people were supposed to have better sense, but I find that’s not necessarily so.
I made the round of the camp, questioning everyone as to what had become of George Romero. At last Todd told me:
“He said something, half an hour ago, about taking a little walk to watch the local fauna undisturbed by our presence. I’m sure he hasn’t gone far.”
The Raja saw I was about to blow my top over the matter. He said, “Calm down, Reggie; I’ll go hunting for—”
Then a disturbance interrupted. Around the bend of the hill came George Romero, doing a fair turn of speed in spite of being short and middle-aged. Right behind him ran a steno, trying to get close enough to flesh its fangs in his back.
A steno? That’s short for Stenonychosaurus, one of the saurornithoids of this period. We call them “stenos” because people find Stenonychosaurus hard to remember. They’re smaller flesh-eaters. One weighs around fifty kilos—in other words, as much as a smallish human being. They have a slim running shape, and when moving they come up about to your navel, with the head and tail sticking out horizontally. When they rear up, they can look you in the eye. They’re normally harmless, since their prey is little things like lizards, birds, and the mammals of those times, all of which looked much like rats and mice.
But here this bloke was chasing our scientist with obvious hostile intent. Romero ran through the camp and headed for the time chamber, which stood on a slight rise on the edge with its doors open.
I jumped for the Raja’s and my tent and came out with my heavy rifle, in time to see Romero dive in the doors of the chamber. Cohen was in the chamber, making adjustments, and I heard a startled yell from him. Then the doors slammed shut in the steno’s face.
The reptile went splat against the steel doors and backed off, shaking its head as if in wonder at human technology. It looked about, seeming to realize for the first time that it had blundered into territory off-limits to dinosaurs.
I hesitated to shoot, lest I hit somebody or something in the camp. The Raja came out with his gun, but he paused likewise. Then the steno set off at a dead run, out of the camp and around the curve of the hill from which it had chased Romero. In a few seconds it was out of sight.
By banging on the chamber door, we persuaded Cohen to open up. Romero, still breathing hard, came out looking like a lad caught with his hand in the lolly jar. He apologized all over the place: I had seemed too busy to bother, and he took only a little stroll, etcetera. Meanwhile Cohen locked the chamber doors behind him in a marked manner.
“But,” I said to Romero, “What on earth did you do to rile up that steno? Normally they leave us alone, since we’re much too big to serve as their normal prey.”
“It was this way,” he said. “I walked quietly around the hill till the camp was just out of sight. There was a pair of these stenos on a little flat place, doing a kind of dance. So I watched. One just stood, while the other went through what looked like the calisthenics I do when I get up in the morning. It did deep-knee bends, squatting down and rising up again; then it stayed up but bowed down and touched its head to the ground, over and over. Then it went back to squatting and rising.
“I figured out that this was a mating dance, and the one doing the setting-up exercises was the male, hoping to get the female into a receptive mood. It seemed to be working, because the male extruded that great long hook-shaped hemipenis—or rather, he extruded the half of it on the side toward the female. Then he grabbed the female with his foreclaws, hoisted one leg over her hindquarters, and started feeling around her underside with this organ to find the point of entry.
“I couldn’t resist the temptation to shoot a few frames on my camera. Whether the tiny click of the shutter aroused the male, or the motion of my arm, I don’t know. But he suddenly stared at me, let go of the female, and withdrew his hook inside him. He uttered a kind of caw, like a crow, and started for me. Not being armed, I ran for it.”
The Raja and I had the same thought, and we both burst out laughing. “Sport, he thought you were a rival, who wanted to screw his mate,” I said. “Naturally, no right-thinking bull steno is going to stand for that!”
The whole camp had a good laugh over the incident. But then our spirits sank as the clouds formed huge anvils, with lightning and thunder. By the time for tucker, rain was coming down in buckets.
It kept up the whole night. Maybe theropods gathered again round the sauropod carcass to resume their feast; but the storm made so much noise we couldn’t have heard them. The next day was more of the same, all day.
“Lousy luck,” said Featherstone. “If we can’t see the results of the impact from a distance, we don’t dare hang around until it happens. The shock wave might catch us unawares and smear us.”
Haupt said: “There may be enough light from Enyo to warn us as it makes its final plunge, even through the cloud cover.”
“How about the big wave?” asked Romero. “If that Thing lands in water, it’ll kick up the grandfather of all tsunamis. You know what they say: If you’re at the beach and see a tsunami coming, it’s already too late to save your life.”
“Unless,” said Featherstone, “you had a fast motor vehicle and floored the gas away from the beach.”
“And if,” said Romero, “the road wasn’t jammed with other people trying to do the same thing. But how about this tsunami?”
“Don’t worry,” said Haupt. “One might wash inland over flat country for a few kilometers—maybe ten or twenty—but we’re at least a hundred kilometers from any sea. The speed—”
“How do you know,” interrupted Todd, “that we’re a hundred kilometers from the sea, when we haven’t a map of the area for this period?”
Haupt answered with the forced patience of a school-ma’am with a backward pupil. “Because if it were closer, we could see it plainly from this altitude. The speed of the wave would be only a fraction of that of sound, which is a little over 330 meters per second, and which is also the speed of the shock wave.”
I held up a hand to quiet the argument and said: “Listen, please. We shall get up hours before the expected impact. Then we shall load into the chamber all the stuff we plan to take back with us and stand by the doors, ready to leap in the minute you blokes see a flash in the sky. We shan’t wait for any shock wave but take off for Present instantly.”
So it was decided; but as things turned out, that scenario did not prove necessary. During a day of rain, I had to listen to Todd’s complaints over not getting a second hunt, and O’Connor’s complaints over not being able to paint more pictures, as if I were somehow responsible for the weather.
The evening before the Event, the rain tapered off and the clouds broke up. We loaded into the chamber the stuff we were taking back, like Todd’s sauropod head and O’Connor’s pictures. Ming hauled a bag full of our new kitchen utensils; he wasn’t going to sacrifice them if he could help it.
###
When we got up before dawn, we had a clear, deep-blue sky-overhead, in which the stars were going out one by one as the glow of the coming sunrise brightened in the east.
“Where’s Enyo?” I asked Haupt.
“She’ll be up any minute,” he said. “The Earth has to turn more toward her—ah, there she comes! Call your gang together!”
Rising from the southeastern horizon, which was still a pretty dark blue, came another spot of light, somewhat resembling the planet Venus at her maximum brightness. I stared at it but could not see any relative motion betwee
n Enyo and the few stars still visible.
“Is she going to make it?” I asked Haupt. “She doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.”
“She’s moving, but too slowly to make out with the bare eyeball,” he said. After we had stood for a while, jittering and thinking—at least I was thinking—whether it wouldn’t have been smarter to have used robot instruments instead of human observers, Haupt said: “Look carefully, now. She’s visibly declining toward the horizon.”
I looked; and sure enough, the spot had moved. Down it went, at first as slowly as the minute hand of a clock, then faster.
“There she goes!” cried Haupt.
The spot disappeared below the horizon, but almost at once a glow sprang up in the southeast. The glow of the coming sunrise in the east was already quite bright, but it was as if two suns were rising at the same time, almost a right angle apart. The normal sunrise went on at its usual leisurely pace; but the other one brightened much faster. Then there was a perfect blaze of light from south-by-east. I shan’t say it was brighter than a million suns; but for a few seconds it made the true rising sun in the east look like a mere candle.
“Look at the horizon,” said Romero. “I think the people who bet on Windward Passage are going to lose. The bearing indicates Yucatan.”
The bright light faded, but then followed something the like of which I had never seen. A kind of illuminated dome thrust up over the horizon. This thing went up and up, becoming the top of a vast single column. It was of mixed colors, mostly red. Along the top it was a dark red, with a kind of ragged appearance, as if made of a million separate jets of steam or water or lava. Further down the column, the color brightened to a brilliant yellow at the base, and little blue flashes of lightning played all over the surface of the whole fantastic thing. Romero said:
“What’s the azimuth of that, Einar?”
Haupt squinted and made an adjustment, with his eye to the lens. “Eighty-four—no, eighty-five degrees.”
“That would be the east coast of Yucatan,” said Romero.
I asked Haupt: “Why haven’t we heard anything?”
He said: “What do you expect? That’s about two thousand kilometers from here, so it’ll take at least twenty minutes for the sound and the shock wave to get here.”
I looked at my watch and said: “Twenty minutes, and we must all be in the chamber and buttoned up. Has anybody any last-minute thing he wants to do?”
The column continued to rise, although more slowly, and the colors darkened and faded a bit. It reminded me of a flick I once saw, showing the explosion of the American H-bomb on some poor little island in the Pacific. This was something like that, but on a vastly greater scale.
“Fifteen minutes!” I said. “Are you ready to let us in, Bruce?”
“Yep,” said Cohen.
“I’ll hold the door when he opens it,” said the Raja.
“Ten minutes!”
A band of darkness appeared above the horizon and seemed to be creeping closer.
“Dust, smoke, and water vapor, I think,” said Featherstone.
Change crept over the cypress-swamp plain before us. It started at the limits of vision and came swiftly closer. The change was the turning of the whole forest into a vast bonfire. The trees along the leading edge of the change blazed up in bright yellow and orange and then were hidden by a colossal cloud of black smoke, while the next nearer line of forest blazed up likewise.
“There’s our shock wave,” said Featherstone.
“Five minutes!” I said. “Into the chamber, all of you! Fast!”
We ran to the chamber, to find Cohen and the Raja on hands and knees in front of the closed doors.
“What in God’s name?” I cried.
“Bruce dropped his keys,” said the Raja. “Don’t anybody disturb the soil!”
They hunted and hunted, sweeping their hands over the ground. The time couldn’t have been more than seconds, but to me it seemed hours. I thought the dawnlight was already dimmed by the onrushing cloud of smoke, but that may have been my imagination.
“Let me,” said Todd. He produced an electric torch, which he played back and forth over the ground. Just as it looked hopeless, Cohen yelled: “Got ’em!” and pounced.
At any rate, Todd had proved himself something more than a mere pain in the arse. Cohen got the door open the quickest I’d ever seen, and we piled in. I counted noses as they went by and said:
“Where’s O’Connor? Oh, Jon! Where the bloody hell are you?”
“Coming,” said O’Connor, walking in a leisurely manner from the tents towards the chamber, with a framed square of canvas under his arm. “Forgot this sketch,” he explained.
“Run, God damn it!” I yelled.
At last I got him safely inside and then myself. Bruce Cohen, at the controls, had his hand out to the door-closing lever, when another shadow fell across the doorway. I was sure all my sahibs were in. Several set up a yell as the newcomer leaped in with more agility than any mere human being could command.
Cohen hesitated, then frantically pulled the lever. The doors slammed shut. The newcomer uttered a squawk, because the closing doors had snipped off the last centimeter or two of the point of its long tail. It was in fact a steno, like the one that had chased George Romero into the chamber two days before.
“Take her to Present!” I shouted at Cohen, who was already working his controls.
There was a motion of the chamber that was not just going through time; it was a physical movement in the late Cretaceous.
“Earthquake!” cried Featherstone.
By then Cohen had us well on the time-travel route. The lights dimmed, and everybody felt the horrid vertigo and vibration and nausea. I looked toward our stowaway, huddled in a corner of the chamber near the door. What the hell should we do with it? To fire a shot in those close quarters would be suicide. On the other hand, to leave our people at the mercy of a Mesozoic carnivore . . .
“He seems unaggressive, Reggie,” said the Raja. “Must have remembered the chamber from the day before yesterday and, when he saw his world going up in smoke, figured that this was the safest place for him. They’re considered bright as reptiles—oh, oh!”
The nausea affected the Stenonychosaurus so that it puked up its last meal on the floor of the chamber. Bruce Cohen, when he saw, did some of the fanciest swearing I’ve ever heard. Made the most eloquent bushie seem like a schoolma’am.
The Raja was right about the steno’s being smarter than most reptiles. Some museum coves reason that if it hadn’t been for Enyo, the dinosaurs might still be going strong, and the steno’s descendants might have evolved into the reptilian equivalent of mankind.
“If we leave him alone,” said the Raja, “he’ll probably do likewise to us. He must have been more frightened by the Event than by us. Lots of zoos would love a live dinosaur. The museum that tried to bring back eggs had no luck; they didn’t hatch. I’ll see if he’ll let me bandage his tail; you know me and animals.”
“By God!” said Romero. “I do believe he’s my sometime rival for the affections of that female. Has the same scar on his muzzle. The poor girl will have been killed by the shock wave.”
“Too bad we couldn’t bring the pair back,” said Featherstone, “and breed them.”
I said: “If you museum blokes will produce the money to fetch a pair, you’ll find Rivers and Aiyar ready to talk business.”
And that, Mr. Burgess, is the story of my closest call. It’s like being shot at and missed. Makes you feel good at the time and gives you a story to dine out on; but on the whole you’d rather not take that kind of chance again. No more for me, thanks. My wife’s due to pick me up. Ta-ta!
JUST LIKE OLD TIMES
Robert J. Sawyer
Canadian writer Robert J. Sawyer is the author of five science fiction novels, a dozen short stories in magazines such as Analog, Amazing, and Canada’s On Spec; five hour-long documentaries about the SF genre; and over two hundred nonfiction pie
ces. His first novel, Golden Fleece, won Canada’s Aurora Award for Best SF Novel of 1990-1991. His other novels include the “Quintaglio” trilogy, Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner. His most recent book is the novel End of an Era. (All four of the last-mentioned novels are, in one way or another, about dinosaurs—making Sawyer one of the most prolific writers on the subject in modern SF.) He lives in Thornhill, Ontario, with his wife and “hundreds of plastic dinosaur models.”
Let the punishment fit the crime! An object all sublime! And yet—there just may be unforeseen consequences of doing that . . .
* * *
The transference went smoothly, like a scalpel slicing into skin.
Cohen was simultaneously excited and disappointed. He was thrilled to be here—perhaps the judge was right, perhaps this was where he really belonged. But the gleaming edge was taken off that thrill because it wasn’t accompanied by the usual physiological signs of excitement: no sweaty palms, no racing heart, no rapid breathing. Oh, there was a heartbeat, to be sure, thundering in the background, but it wasn’t Cohen’s.
It was the dinosaur’s.
Everything was the dinosaur’s: Cohen saw the world now through tyrannosaur eyes.
The colors seemed all wrong. Surely plant leaves must be the same chlorophyll green here in the Mesozoic, but the dinosaur saw them as navy blue. The sky was lavender; the dirt underfoot ash gray.
Old bones had different cones, thought Cohen. Well, he could get used to it. After all, he had no choice. He would finish his life as an observer inside this tyrannosaur’s mind. He’d see what the beast saw, hear what it heard, feel what it felt. He wouldn’t be able to control its movements, they had said, but he would be able to experience every sensation.
Dinosaurs II Page 3