Dinosaurs II

by Gardner Dozoi

  “Closer.”

  “Down twenty meters.”

  He had Peg so pleased that she was running to the microstove to fetch him croissants and coffee, though the galley work was technically Jake’s. As he suspected, Peg would put up with almost anything filed under WORK. Like many people who get good at what they do, she was eager to learn and not afraid to sweat. All he needed to do was to slip “sex” into her job description, then she would bang away with her customary enthusiastic efficiency. Coffee and croissants were a start.

  The uplands were flat, rolling country—drier than a bottle of fine wine. Carbon lines in Hell Creek rock showed these high plains suffered from flash fires. Farther west, Jake could make out the wavy blue line of the proto-Rockies, a massive cordillera; young, vibrant, with gnarled valleys and active volcanoes. Mountain chains were the true terra incognita of the Mesozoic, mist-shrouded and mysterious—leaving no fossil record, they could be home to anything; unsuspected species, outrageous monsters, alien civilizations. Compared to the Rockies, Hell Creek was comfortably familiar.

  “There it is!” Peg pounded his shoulder, stabbing the air with her finger.

  Jake looked down. Nothing showed below but sand hills, clay pan, and steep gullies, held together by conifer stands and primitive broadleaf trees. He had seen several tanklike ankylosaurs and a herd of bipedal boneheads—but no sign of the carnivores Peg claimed were shadowing the herds. He descended, flushing out a flock of yellow-brown ornithomimids that looked and ran like ostriches. Suddenly, at the end of Peg’s finger, there was T. Rex.

  Jake had always pictured the brute striding along, jaws agape, striking terror among decent law-abiding dinosaurs—but this one seemed to be asleep, sprawled on its side. Jake did a low pass and pirouette. Stretched out, the tyrannosaur was over thirteen meters long—nearly three times as big as the crocs that had worried him yesterday. The tyrant king did not even look up.

  “We have to land.” Peg was already half out the window. He suspected she wouldn’t really feel she was there until she shared the ground with this great beast. So he dropped a grapple and anchor line, telling Challenger to reel herself down, keeping the ship “light,” ready for a fast take-off. Then he slipped on his stunner holster, following Peg out the window.

  Glare off the sandstone kicked in polarizers on his corneal lenses. The sleeping tyrannosaur had stood out like a small hill from the air, but the ground was a maze of dry wadis and cutbanks, divided by tall lanes of scrub and pines. Twenty meters, and they could no longer see the tyrannosaur, or the dead ground between them and the airship. If T. Rex decided to wake and stalk about, the carnosaur could appear anywhere. Jake’s stunner felt like a flyswatter tucked under his armpit.

  They came on the beast abruptly. One moment, the tyrannosaur was “somewhere over there.” A minute later, Jake was nose to nose with the napping monster, its enormous bulk half-hidden by a shallow wash. Mottled black-and-tan coloring broke up the big beast’s outline. Jake got an uncomfortably close view of great shearing jaws and saw-edged teeth. The boxy flat-sided head alone was bigger than he was, reeking of half-eaten meat.

  Peg went down on one knee, recording, while Jake kept nervous watch. Challenger was not near enough to warn him if another carnosaur popped out of a neighboring gully.

  “Look at the ropes of muscle in those cheek bulges!”

  Peg was clearly in awe of the nasty creature. “I wish it would open its mouth; we’d get a better view of the teeth and interior attachments.”

  The tyrannosaur opened one eye, looking right at Peg.

  “He knows we’re talking about him,” Jake whispered.

  “Don’t be a worrier. See that blood smeared on the premaxillaries? Probably sleeping off a kill. I doubt if we look much like a meal to him.”

  “Mere hors d’oeuvres!” The ogre could down them like a pair of oysters, and the gore on its fangs was not reassuring.

  “You are the nervous type, aren’t you?”

  “Not necessarily so.” Every epoch had its burdens to bear. The fourteenth century had the Black Death; the twentieth had world wars and commercial TV. The bane of Jake’s time and place was that people like Peg were too protected.

  “This isn’t a 3V or stimulation—everything here is real. Including him. Screw up, and no one’s going to drag you out of that gullet.”

  The bony muscular head lifted up, turning snout and teeth toward them, stretching its powerful neck. Jake nearly jumped out of his leggings.

  “Don’t startle it.” Peg held his stunner holster, keeping the gun from leaping out. Jake stopped breathing, staring at the tyrannosaur’s evil grin.

  The beast settled back, resting its chin nearer to them, seemingly more comfortable. The huge eye shut, shaded by its horny socket.

  Just as Jake thought it was all over, Peg put down her recorder. She took two purposeful steps, leaned forward, and touched the horrible toothed head lightly on the snout.

  The tyrannosaur snorted, nearly giving Jake a seizure.

  Walking back over thorny wadis, under an unblinking sun, Peg explained, “That creature has no natural enemies, nothing to fear or defend against. If you are not afraid, or appetizing, you have nothing to fear from it.”

  He didn’t argue. Maybe Peg was right; maybe she was merely insane. Either way Jake was not about to run back and pat T. Rex on the nose.

  He settled for picking up a shed tooth, notched with wear and larger than his hand. The cutting edges had fine bevels, like a jeweler’s saw.

  In the scorching air of noon, Hell Creek lived up to its name. Even Peg wound down under the incandescent heat. Shocked at the way Peg wilted, Jake realized she probably had not rested in a day and a half. Feeling a flood of concern and fondness that was less than two-thirds lust, Jake took Challenger aloft, so that she could sleep in the swaying air-conditioned cabin.

  The shimmering landscape cooled. Jake woke from his own noon sleep fresh enough to tackle tyrannosaurs—exactly what Peg intended. “Can you take me back to the river? To see how these carnivores handle the triceratops herd.”

  The navmatrix in his compweb let Jake retrace his every movement, never allowing him to get lost. Releasing the anchor grapple, he gave Challenger full port rudder, flying with up elevator, letting the terrain fall away beneath them.

  Peg kept urging him, “Closer.” Which meant venting hydrogen to get right down at the cypress tops.

  The glassed-in forward gallery looked out on green-tan countryside, cut by a vast loop of the red mud river channel. Jake saw bathing triceratopses, big crocs, and duckbilled hadrosaurs. Farther off, the river branched out into flat delta country, a collage of blue bayous and cypress swamps. In the far, far distance, his boosted eyesight made out a blue horizon line merging with the sky—the Middle American Sea, a shallow arm of ocean filling the Mississippi valley, connecting the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson’s Bay.

  “Here come the carnivores.” Peg pointed to the right. Jake applied starboard rudder and down elevator.

  Sneaking along a deep creekbed was a smallish, long-legged tyrannosaurid, about the size of a walking killer whale. Peg identified the skulker, “Albertosaurus megagracilis—a stalker and sprinter. It’ll hang about the herds trying to pick off a straggler or juvenile.”

  From a secure height, Jake liked the little fellow. A. megagracilis was rust-colored with brown spots, more compact and graceful than the tyrannosaur Peg had played tag with, but also faster, hungrier, and a greater threat to humans.

  Peg pulled on the leggings and moccasins that went with the Crow gift shirt, not bothering with the long, trailing breechcloth. The result was a short fringed mini-dress over hip-length leather. “I want to go down there, close to the herd. To cover the action from ground level.”

  Jake was not ready for another walk on the Mesozoic wild side. It was late afternoon. In the cooling half-light, carnivores were bound to be more active and dangerous.

  “Oh, you can stay up here. We’ll combine ground recordi
ngs with a wide-angle aerial sequence.” She panned her recorder. “Here come more carnivores! A whole hunting pack!”

  Jake looked the newcomers over; they were taller than A. megagracilis, chunkier too. Full-sized tyrannosaurids. A half-dozen black-and-tan boys (or gals) out to raise hell among the herbivores. They did not stalk the creekbeds, but ambled right toward the river, not caring who saw them coming.

  Jake had seen this dance of death before, on the steppes of Central Asia, on the plains below Kilimanjaro. Carnivores approached casually from downwind. The herd edged slowly upwind to keep from being ambushed, maintaining a healthy separation. Neither hunter nor victim moved too quickly—neither wanted to exhaust their reserves. In the ultimate rush, a labored breath might make all the difference.

  And Peg itched to be in the middle of it. Jake began to question the wisdom of picking an active young paleontologist who had never seen a battery of carnivore teeth outside of a fossil formation.

  He set down on the leeward periphery of the herd, giving her a comlink to clip to her ear. “Take this little fucker with you.”

  “Little fucker?” English confused her again.

  “Technical term. Just keep the link open.”

  Slipping the comlink into her ear, she swaggered off toward the brush, showing long sweeps of thigh between the slits in her shirt and the tops of her leggings. Jake hoped this was not his last look at her.

  Fighting a crosswind, he kept Challenger positioned almost directly above Peg. A. megagracilis still worried Jake the most—but he had lost the cheetahlike stalker in the rough, and did not have time to hunt him up.

  “How does it look? I have the herd in sight.” Microamps made Peg sound like a flea in his ear.

  “A. megagracilis is missing. Those big tyrannosaurs are moving in line ahead, a couple of kilometers downwind.” Jake judged that the big ones were getting ready for a run in. The triceratopses thought so too. They were shifting their young into the herd center. Adults turned their horns toward the approaching carnivores, swiveling on their short front legs.

  A game of bait and bluff began. Nature’s ballet of death is never all-out battle. No carnosaur was going to charge into a hedge of horns. And no right-minded triceratops wanted to be separated from the retreating herd, singled out for slaughter. Heroism is not an herbivore survival trait.

  “What’s happening?” Stuck in the brush, Peg was missing everything. So much for being on the scene.

  “Tyrannosaurs are fanning out, trying to turn a flank.”

  Defenseless duckbills scattered for the brush along the river.

  “I’m heading over there.”

  “Don’t get stepped on.”

  At that instant, something spooked the herd—maybe the flanking tactics, maybe the bolting duckbills. For whatever reason, the triceratopses got the wind up and thundered downriver, tyrannosaurs sprinting at their heels. Thousands of elephant-sized dinosaurs stampeded at top speed, heads down and tails up, sides heaving. Even larger tyrannosaurs dashed in among them, slashing and snarling, attempting to cut down a victim while running flat-out, meters ahead of the horns.

  Death in the afternoon. Near-indescribable nightmare. The only thing Jake could compare it with was a breakneck Lakota buffalo hunt. The dust-covered tyrannosaurs reminded him of Crazy Horse and Company, whooping in to make their kills.

  Only this time they missed. Perhaps the horns came too close or the herd broke too soon, maybe it was all a feint—for whatever reason, the carnivores rolled out and regrouped.

  Peg missed it all. “I can see the dust raised by the herd, but where are the tyrannosaurs?”

  “They rolled right, half a kilometer short of you.” A good thing, too.

  “I’m going to work my way up this dry wash, staying to leeward of the herd.” The wash was a flood channel connecting two loops of the river, a shortcut that let Peg keep abreast of the frightened herd.

  Jake acknowledged, dipping down to scout the wash, looking for that sneaky culprit A. megagracilis, but the fast little bastard might be anywhere by now.

  A setting sun cast long, confusing shadows. Duckbills crouched like great frightened lizards in the greenery. The triceratops herd caught its collective breath. Rearmost adults turned, peering back into the dust, keeping a horned eye out for the pursuing tyrannosaur pack.

  Challenger beeped him.

  “Oh, I see them now!” Peg hooted with triumph. “Here they come!”

  “Who? Where?” Jake turned back to her. His jaw fell. Both he and the herd had been fooled. Under cover of dust and half-light, the tyrannosaurs had wheeled, shifting from line ahead to line abreast. Using Peg’s shortcut, they were starting another run smack at the middle of the shaken herd, aiming to split it into two panicked segments.

  Right in their path, Peg scrambled out of the wash, lying prone on the cutbank, her recorder running. Idiot luck had put her between the herd and the line of oncoming carnivores. Six frenzied tyrannosaurs rushed at her out of the twilight, teeth gleaming, tails straight, clawed feet chewing up the clay pan. For an awful instant, Jake saw her insanely refusing to move.

  The wave of claws, teeth, and muscle swept over her, and her comlink went dead.

  Seeing the Sauropod

  Jake’s job made him a generalist, but he did imagine himself a specialist on Time—Newtonian Time, post-Einsteinian Time, non-Euclidean Time. He had even yawned through an endless lecture by Plato on the subject. His navmatrix gave him a hyperlight time-sense that could carve days down to milliseconds or stretch them over millennia, never missing a click of the cosmic clock. The instant Peg disappeared beneath the charging carnivores, Jake started counting nanoseconds—screaming for Challenger to land.

  He knew that what was left of Peg needed immediate life-support. A body could be regenerated. Bit by bit if need be. But nerve cells were slippery cases. As they died, they took with them the memories that made Peg who she was. Brain dead was dead.

  He was out of the cabin before Challenger touched down, vaulting through a forward window, hitting the ground sprinting, medikit in hand.

  Jake calculated he could have Peg on life-support in seconds. Minutes would put her at the portal. But on the far end of the portal, real medical care was still centuries off. There was no direct connection between the Uppermost Cretaceous and Home. At the other end of the Hell Creek anomaly, medicine was still in the business of killing patients—cut-and-stitch butchery done by buffoons in disease-ridden hospitals. Surgeons paid by the limb spent their odd hours denouncing public health and germ theory.

  As he ran, his mind searched calmly for ways to push time back, to retrieve minutes, even seconds—to recapture the instant before this all happened. In theory, FTL made it possible to pull Peg out before the tyrannosaurs hit her. In well-traveled historical periods, STOP teams routinely performed impossible rescues.

  Not here though, not now. The Hell Creek anomaly was too new, so poorly mapped that Peg had worried about being in the Paleocene instead of the Mesozoic. A STOP team could not count on hitting the right millennium, much less the right moment. But if he could get her through the portal to a historical period—a STOP team could be waiting. That was Peg’s ticket to an autodoc.

  Simultaneously, Jake cursed himself for letting Peg wander about guided only by her daft death wish. He was despicable, a fool, doing his job with a hard-on, so obsessed with bedding Peg he had given in to her suicidal whims.

  Leaping over the crumpled lip of the wadi, he steeled himself for his first look at her. So much depended on what shape she was in. What he had to work with. What was left.

  Peg was sitting calmly, covered with dirt, elbows propped on her knees, recording the disappearing tyrannosaurs. Jake hit badly, doing a perfect pratfall.

  She turned, startled by his impact. “Are you hurt? It’s good you brought a medikit.”

  Taking the kit from his nerveless fingers, she was all over him, checking for injuries, helping him sit up, making him feel twelve times worse
. “Did you see the tyrannosaurids? That was a truly essential moment—they galloped right over me!”

  He sat there, stunned, saying nothing—flooded with relief and anger, feeling all the guilt and rottenness turn to cold, hard fury.

  “Feel better?” Her smile aimed at being helpful. “Could you look for my comlink? I think you landed on it. The little fucker flipped out in the fall.”

  Jake was wired to explode. But he had to work with this brainless waif. He dug her comlink out of the dirt under him and slapped it into her palm, replying as diplomatically as possible, “If you are dead-set on suicide, please do it on your own damn time, and have the decency to leave a note so mere bystanders won’t be blamed.”

  Peg looked at him coolly. “Don’t be anal. Ever since passing the portal, you have been in a testosterone frenzy—pawing me by the fire, bounding about saving me, making a farce out of a serious expedition.”

  He tried to argue, but her tone just turned huffy and academic. “Do you have any notion what the stride length of a tyrannosaur is?”

  “Damned large, like the rest of him.”

  “Running flat-out—four to five meters. All I needed do was drop down, and they sailed right over me.” Peg pointed to the first three-toed gouge, meters away in the middle of the streambed. One stride would have cleared a small ground car.

  “Stop thinking with your gonads. I was never in any danger. Basic carnivore behavior says that no seven-ton carnosaur chasing a six-ton herbivore is going to stop to bother with a fifty-kilo person in its path.”

  She gave him a concerned look. “You are so edgy. It’s a surprise FTL picked you for this.”

  Jake said nothing, knowing too well why he was here. FTL hadn’t picked him—he had picked Peg, snapping up her and her Mesozoic project like a lovesick teen.

  Cultural, academic, and entertainment institutions—as well as interested individuals—submitted field work proposals to FTL, which Faster Than Light filled at whim. Only STOP missions had instant priority. Cultural-scientific importance was meant to play some vague role in selection, but the real criterion was what veteran field agents thought they could accomplish. No one could be forced through a portal, and attrition was high, especially among first-timers. Field agents regularly succumbed to portal skips, excitable natives, and primitive medical beliefs. The stupid or gullible didn’t last long. Trips that looked too dangerous, or too trivial, had no chance of happening.