Dinosaurs II

by Gardner Dozoi

  Varla and Tim flanked Bernie, their augmented bo sticks balanced on their shoulders, while Jill followed directly behind him, keeping a short rein on the leash. “Okay,” said Varla into her mike, “here we come.” Up ahead she could hear the murmur of the crowd above the slapping echo of Bernie’s giant Nikes.

  The service corridor opened onto the mall’s central hub, a recessed commons that had once been an ice skating rink. The area just beyond the corridor had been cordoned off with traffic barriers and uniformed mall security, creating an empty circular space about fifty feet in diameter. It was ringed by a crush of screaming, waving children and grim-faced adults who struggled to restrain them. “Bernie, Bernie, Bernie!” chanted the children. “We loooove you, Bernie!”

  Tasha and Dariush were already in position, waving uncomfortably to the crowd in their bulky suits. As usual, none of the children were paying them any attention. Varla hoped Disney had acquired the Turtles cheap, for their glory days were long past.

  Varla and Tim joined Tasha and Dariush in fanning out, so that the four of them faced the mob, each taking a quarter of the circle. Last week’s picketing in Charlotte had been the only sign of trouble so far, but they were paid to never drop their guard. Like Varla, the other three had sidearms holstered under their shells, and the fighting sticks they all carried were rigged to deliver an electric shock from one end and an anesthetic injection from the other.

  Behind Varla, Jill clapped her hands for Bernie to begin his “dance,” actually an exaggerated waddle, as she stood in the center of the makeshift ring, extending his wired leash and directing him around her like a show horse at the circus. The crowd of children roared their approval as the speaker implanted in Bernie’s throat began his prerecorded theme song.

  When I’m with you,

  And you’re with me,

  We’re as happy as we can be!

  There’s caring and sharing

  And hugs for free,

  When I’m with you and you’re with me!

  Varla didn’t turn her back on the crowd to watch Bernie, but she knew the routine. The song done, he would dip his head and bow to the audience, clapping gloved forelimbs together in apparent joy. Indeed, he seemed to like these live appearances well enough, and had yet to prove particularly intractable.

  A glassy-eyed young woman in a Bernie T-shirt was lining up the dozen lucky winners in the local “Meet Bernie in Person” contest. This time it would be Varla and Tasha’s turn to carry each child forward, so he or she could shake Bernie’s gloved “hand.” That was the part Varla really hated. Everybody’s attention would be on making sure that Bernie didn’t decide to bite his young fans, rather than scanning the crowd for potential assassins. Well, she hoped even fundamentalist loonies would hesitate to pop off a shot while kids were in the line of fire. If mall security was doing their job, no adults without children in tow were being allowed into the commons area, anyway.

  The first winner was a fat, pop-eyed little boy with short seaweed-colored hair and the kind of acne that usually doesn’t hit until adolescence. His mother, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, and whose complexion was scarcely better, handed the child to Tasha, who hefted him with an audible grunt. Tasha wasn’t very big, and the boy was certainly old enough to walk on his own, but it was better to carry the children rather than lead them by hand, as they were easier to restrain that way, and snatch away from Bernie if he got rambunctious. Behind her, Varla heard the little boy let out an excited piglet squeal as Tasha held him close to his idol, but Varla kept her eyes on the crowd.

  Standing next in line was a thin, red-headed little girl with a Bernie nose ring and glittery eye shadow. She was accompanied by an apple-cheeked, cherubic little man, apparently in his early fifties, with a high shiny forehead and a few cottony wisps of disheveled white hair. His smooth pink belly protruded out from under a faded, shrunken T-shirt of comparatively ancient vintage, for it depicted Bernie in his baggy purple incarnation, rather than as a real dinosaur. The man had one restraining hand on the little girl’s shoulder, while in the other he held a heavy-looking Toys R Us bag, no doubt laden with Bernie merchandise. “Hey, Uncle Andy, that hurts,” said the little girl, but he didn’t ease his grip on her shoulder. Despite his fixed smile, there was a cold glint in his eyes.

  “Tasha,” Varla said softly into her mike, “watch the next guy in line closely when I take his kid. I don’t like the look on his face.” It might be an adult’s normal reaction—both Varla’s mother and her mother’s lover had despised Bernie when Varla was a child—but you couldn’t be too careful.

  Tasha returned with the first contest winner. Varla slid her stick into its socket on the back of her shell and bent to pick up the little girl, who appeared to be about five or six years old. Varla’s goggles gave her an expanded field of vision, and as she turned away from the cherubic man, the corner of her left eye caught his right hand as it dipped into the Toys R Us bag, to emerge clutching something with a familiar black plastic sheen.

  There was no time to pull a weapon, but she was close enough to kick him, and she tossed the surprised little girl away from her as she spun around, some distant part of her thinking she’d just set the company up for a hellacious lawsuit if the child was hurt. Then she was staring down the barrel of a Glock 25 with a penlight laser undersight as the cherubic man, his avuncular smile now a frozen grimace, took a two-handed grip and sighted past Varla on Jill and Bernie.

  Varla’s green Y-shaped boot connected with his chest and he went over backward, firing into the air, her goggles darkening against the muzzle flash, the huge pistol’s thunderous retort ringing in her ears despite her helmet as the skylight shattered far above their heads. She was much bigger than him, it had been a strong roundhouse kick, and the tile floor was slick, so that the impact sent him skidding like a hockey puck into the crowd, which parted screaming to the left and right of him, effectively shielding his prone body from the mall’s own security people. She’d surely knocked the wind out of him, maybe even broken a rib, but the little bastard was tougher than he looked, or at least inhumanly determined, for he hadn’t dropped the damn gun. Yelling into her mike, Varla reached back for her fighting stick as she lunged forward.

  Tasha was drawing her ACP from under her shell, and the little man made the mistake of sighting on her first, even though Varla was closer. The Glock roared again, the .50-caliber round splintering Tasha’s carapace, and then Varla was jabbing the point of her stick into the gunman’s exposed midriff. The little man whuffed, dropped the pistol and went into convulsions as 40cc of dinosaur-strength anesthetic hit his bloodstream. Varla reversed the stick, smashed it into his groin, and gave him a jolt from the electroshock end for good measure, but he was already out cold, maybe even dead. She didn’t particularly care, although the publicity would be ugly if she’d killed him. The little girl, thankfully unhurt, ran to his side. “Uncle Andy, you tried to shoot Bernie!” she squealed in outrage while aiming kicks at his limp form. Then a mall security officer scooped her up, while another called for paramedics on his port-a-phone.

  Varla turned back to Tasha, whose shattered carapace hissed as it discharged chlorofluorocarbon vapor. Her ceramic chest plate had cracked, but the kevlar stopped the round, the impact triggering a phase change, so that the liquid in the bubble cells absorbed kinetic energy as it went gaseous, thus acting as a shock absorber, allowing a hundred-and-fifteen-pound woman to be hit at close range and stay on her feet. Thank God she’d taken it square in the chest, and that the Glock had been one of the older semi-autos, so she caught a single round and not a full burst. Tasha said something, but Varla couldn’t make it out, despite the augmented hearing in her helmet. People were screaming all around her, as parents scooped up their children and bolted for the exits, slamming into and trampling over each other in their frenzy.

  But what about Jill and Bernie? The broken glass had fallen behind Varla, back where they were. Cursing her own stupid negligence, Varla turned
and saw that Jill was on her knees, looking dazed and bleeding slightly from the scalp, glass fragments glittering like snow in her frizzy red hair. Bernie was hopping from foot to foot, hissing, blood running from a dozen minor cuts on his neck and flanks. Jill had dropped the handle of his wired leash, and the plastic grip lay between her and him.

  Shaking her head groggily, Jill dove for the leash, just as Tim and Dariush closed in on Bernie. That last was a mistake, for he leapt away from them as Jill grabbed the handle but before she could press the button, and when the wire brought him up short, the jack tore loose. Then he was bounding away into the mob, the clumsy shoes making him stumble each time he landed, but not appreciably slowing him down.

  “Shit,” roared Varla into her mike, “we’ve got to catch him!” Then she was charging full tilt into the crowd, cursing the awkwardness of her two-toed boots, but plowing through the panicked mass by virtue of her size and strength, hoping to God she didn’t trample any kids. The others were behind her, but Tasha and Dariush had much shorter legs, and Tim was stocky where she was lean and rangy, so she rapidly outdistanced them. All around her, chain-link and plastic barriers were sliding in place, blocking off store entrances, while terrified customers crowded inside, their pale faces imitating Munch’s “The Scream.” The mob thinned out and she saw Bernie ahead of her, pausing to kick at his own reflection in one of the mirrored columns that lined the promenade. Despite the heavy padding on his shoes, the tough glass shattered, and then he was bounding away again, emitting a loud squawking cry like that of a crow amplified by stadium speakers.

  The last store on the right was a pet shop, with a tiny corral in front containing a pair of miniature Zebu cattle. Bernie leapt over the plastic fence, grabbed the collie-sized bull by the head, and shook it fiercely. “Oh, shit,” thought Varla, “his ‘kill’ button’s been pushed.” Still, she didn’t draw her gun, for she could imagine the repercussions if she shot him. Maybe he’d stay busy with the bull long enough for her to get close and use her stick.

  No such luck. Dropping the dead bull, and ignoring the terrified cow, Bernie bounded over the fake rail fence and began butting his head against the plexiglass that had slid down over the pet shop’s entrance. Muffled by that barrier, dogs barked and parrots screamed inside, while some employees and customers pressed forward for a better look and others, more prudent, crowded back to the rear of the shop.

  This wing of the mall ended in the entrance to a Sears Department Store, and there the steel grid had not descended all the way to the grooved floor, leaving about a foot of unobstructed space. Now a tiny little girl in a white dress, with huge eyes and blue and red ribbons in her curly blonde hair, wriggled out from underneath the grid. Bernie was between Varla and the child, and the girl was closer to him than Varla was. “Bernie!” she yelled with glee as she ran to him with outstretched arms. “I love you!”

  Bernie cocked his head and watched her come, and Varla screamed in horror, expecting to see him kick the child like a soccer ball, but instead he reared back, opened wide, dipped down and gulped, then came back up with her entire upper body in his mouth, her plump legs kicking and her white dress bunched up around his bloodied snout, exposing her Bernie underoos, his jaws unhinging like those of a snake as he attempted to swallow her whole.

  This last action had kept him in one place long enough for Varla to catch up, and she slammed into him, ramming the electro-shock end of her stick into his belly. Bernie vomited out the child as he went over backward, his Nikes kicking spasmodically, his cloaca letting go in an acrid spray of sludgy white and yellow fluid. Seemingly unhurt, the little girl rose shakily to her feet, all huge eyes and saliva-plastered hair. “Bad Bernie,” she said in a high, tremulous voice. “Bad!” Then she was stumbling away, bawling, stooping to scuttle safely back under the Sears barrier.

  Before Varla could dose Bernie with the anesthetic end of her stick, he too was on his feet, shaking his head like a woozy boxer, his mouth open and his dewlap unfurled. “Caring means sharing,” he squawked, his famous catch phrase sounding shriller than ever before. Then he leapt at her, one foot lashing out in a kick that would have done a champion karateka proud.

  She jabbed as he jumped, and the injection went home as the padded size 32 sole of his left shoe smashed into her chest, knocking her onto her back and sending her sliding across the floor, much as Bernie’s would-be assassin had gone sliding a few minutes earlier. Her plastic carapace was split neatly in two by the blow, and she felt constricting heat against her chest as the liquid in the bubble cells beneath her armor expanded into gas, but the phase change had done little to absorb the shock of such a widespread impact. She gasped for breath, unable to rise, and then he was kicking her hard, stomping on her chest, pieces of the turtle shell breaking off and sticking in the sole of his pounding Nike.

  “Caring means sharing,” he said in a voice like tearing sheet metal. “Caring means sharing!” One more stomp and she’d pass out, but instead he straddled her, and all she could see was his calf’s-liver-colored gullet as his mouth closed over her head.

  The helmet would have protected her even if he’d had his original teeth, but his beaky “lips” could crush her throat if he shifted his grip, and one good shake would break her neck just like that of the little Zebu bull. She punched out blindly, first hitting nothing, then connecting with his ribcage. She pounded him harder than she’d ever pounded the heavy bag in her apartment, hard enough that her skin tore on his scales and a knuckle broke on his rocklike ribs, and kept on pounding, but her blows had no effect. Then the grip on her head loosened and his limp weight settled for a moment on her tortured chest before being rolled off her.

  Three Ninja Turtle faces bent over her, their painted smiles mocking her pain, polarized lenses peering out impassively from their eye slits, and she heard Tasha’s voice in her ringing ears.

  “Honey, are you all right?”

  She tried to sit up, but the effort cost too much. They eased her back. “The paramedics are coming, boss, just lie still,” buzzed Tim’s disembodied voice. Looking at them like this, all stooped over her, her own vision dim, she had no idea who was who. For the first time she was scared, scared that she’d been hurt worse than she thought, and might die without seeing their faces.

  “Bernie?” she gasped. “What about Bernie?”

  Then Jill was bending over her, too, and she was glad for the sight of an unadorned human face, even if the blood trickling down Jill’s forehead made it look like her red hair was melting. “He’s out,” she said, gently squeezing Varla’s arm, “your injection did the trick. Thanks for not shooting him.” Jill disappeared, presumably to check on her charge.

  Varla held someone’s green hand and shut her eyes. There were sirens in the distance.

  ###

  Later, in the hospital, they all brought her flowers, even Jill, and the floral shop delivered a dozen roses from Steve, although she suspected Disney was giving him hell about how everything turned out. It was all over the news, of course, with lawsuits flying everywhere, and she couldn’t imagine what it meant for Bernie’s future.

  “No kids were badly hurt, so the judge ruled he doesn’t have to be destroyed,” said Jill, idly fingering the stitches in her scalp. “Instead, Disney’s selling him. To my Alma Mater.

  UCLA wants to test his problem-solving and language-learning abilities, and they’re hiring me to work with him. Thank God. I’ve had enough of show business to last a lifetime.”

  Varla agreed with that. She leaned back in the hospital bed, wishing she could smoke. She was getting out tomorrow, but it would be a while before her ribs and collar bone were fully mended, even with calcium acceleration. “Did you hear the latest shit? The guy who tried to shoot Bernie is suing us, claiming I used excessive force, that the combination of dino tranquilizer and electric shock stopped his heart, and he nearly died.”

  “I wish he had,” said Jill. “What was his deal, anyway? God knows, I’ve been trying to avoid th
e news.”

  Tim twirled his chestnut beard, which for once looked freshly washed. “His name’s Andrew Whaley. Used to wear the purple suit, back before Disney owned Bernie. When they got themselves a real dinosaur, he was out a job. Harbored a grudge ever since. He borrowed his sister’s kid, bribed somebody involved with the promotion to make sure his niece got one of the ‘Meet Bernie’ tickets, and used her to get close to him. Pretty cold, for such a harmless-looking little guy.”

  “He’ll get his,” said Dariush. “Let’s hope he’s sentenced before his lawsuit comes to trial. A lot of cons are big Bernie fans. I don’t think he’ll do very well in prison.”

  “At the very least, he’ll learn a lot about caring and sharing in the pen,” said Varla.

  SMALL DEER

  Clifford D. Simak

  The late Clifford D. Simak sold his first story in 1931, and was a towering ancestral figure in SF for more than fifty years. His famous novel City won him the International Fantasy Award; he has also won two Hugo Awards, one in 1958 for his short story “The Big Front Yard,” and one in 1964 for his novel Way Station. His other books include the novels Time and Again, Ring around the Sun, Time Is the Simplest Thing, They Walked Like Men, The Goblin Reservation, and A Choice of Gods, and the collections All the Traps of Earth, The Worlds of Clifford Simak, Skirmish, and The Best of Clifford Simak.

  Here he comes up with one of the most peculiar, and yet strangely logical, explanations for the extinction of the dinosaurs that anyone has yet devised . . .

  * * *

  Willow Bend, Wisconsin

  June 23, 1966

  Dr. Wyman Jackson,