I hadn’t noticed it at first, I suppose because I had been too shook up, but now I became aware of a musky smell. Not an overpowering odor, but a sort of scent—faintly animal, although not quite animal.
A smooth-sided hole and a musky smell—there could be no other answer: I had fallen not into just an ordinary hole, but into a burrow of some sort. And it must be the burrow of quite an animal, I thought, to be the size it was. It would have taken something with hefty claws, indeed, to have dug this sort of burrow.
And even as I thought it, I heard the rattling and the scrabbling of something coming up the burrow, no doubt coming up to find out what was going on.
###
I did some scrabbling myself. I didn’t waste no time. But about three feet up, I slipped. I grabbed for the top of the hole, but my fingers slid through the sandy soil and I couldn’t get a grip. I shot out my feet and stopped my slide short of the bottom of the hole. And there I was, with my back against one side of the hole and my feet braced against the other, hanging there, halfway up the burrow.
While all the time below me the scrabbling and the clicking sounds continued. The thing, whatever it might be, was getting closer, and it was coming fast.
Right in front of me was the nest of rocks sticking from the wall. I reached out and grabbed the biggest one and jerked and it came loose. It was heavier than I had figured it would be and I almost dropped it, but managed to hang on.
A snout came out of the curve in the burrow and thrust itself quickly upward in a grabbing motion. The jaws opened up and they almost filled the burrow and they were filled with sharp and wicked teeth.
I didn’t think. I didn’t plan. What I did was instinct. I dropped the rock between my spread-out legs straight down into that gaping maw. It was a heavy rock and it dropped four feet or so and went straight between the teeth, down into the blackness of the throat. When it hit it splashed and the paws snapped shut and the creature backed away.
How I did it, I don’t know, but I got out of the hole. I clawed and kicked against the wall and heaved my body up and rolled out of the hole onto the naked hillside.
Naked, that is, except for the bush with the inch-long thorns, the one that I’d jumped over before I fell into the burrow. It was the only cover that there was and I made for the upper side of it, for by now, I figured, the big cattle drive had gone past me and if I could get the bush between myself and the valley side of the swale, I might have a chance. Otherwise, sure as hell, one of those dogs would see me and would come out to bring me in.
For while there was no question that they were dinosaur herders, they probably couldn’t tell the difference between me and a dinosaur. I was alive and could run and that would qualify me.
There was always the chance, of course, that the owner of the burrow would come swarming out, and if he did I couldn’t stay behind the bush. But I rather doubted he’d be coming out, not right away, at least. It would take him a while to get that stone out of his throat.
###
I crouched behind the bush and the sun was hot upon my back and, peering through the branches, I could see, far out on the valley floor, the great herd of milling beasts. All of them had been driven together and there they were, running in a knotted circle, while outside the circle prowled the pinkish dogs and something else as well—what appeared to be men driving tiny cars. The cars and men were all of the same color, a sort of greenish gray, and the two of them, the cars and men, seemed to be a single organism. The men didn’t seem to be sitting in the cars; they looked as if they grew out of the cars, as if they and the cars were one. And while the cars went zipping along, they appeared to have no wheels. It was hard to tell, but they seemed to travel with the bottom of them flat upon the ground, like a snail would travel, and as they travelled, they rippled, as if the body of the car were some sort of flowing muscle.
I crouched there watching and now, for the first time, I had a chance to think about it, to try to figure out what was going on. I had come here, across more than sixty million years, to see some dinosaurs, and I sure was seeing them, but under what you might say were peculiar circumstances. The dinosaurs fit, all right. They looked mostly like the way they looked in books, but the dogs and car-men were something else again. They were distinctly out of place.
The dogs were pacing back and forth, sliding along in their sinuous fashion, and the car-men were zipping back and forth, and every once in a while one of the beasts would break out of the circle and the minute that it did, a half-dozen dogs and a couple of car-men would race to intercept it and drive it back again.
The circle of beasts must have had, roughly, a diameter of a mile or more—a mile of milling, frightened creatures. A lot of paleontologists have wondered whether dinosaurs had any voice and I can tell you that they did. They were squealing and roaring and quacking and there were some of them that hooted—I think it was the duckbills hooting, but I can’t be sure.
Then, all at once, there was another sound, a sort of fluttering roar that seemed to be coming from the sky. I looked up quickly and I saw them coming down—a dozen or so spaceships, they couldn’t have been anything but spaceships. They came down rather fast and they didn’t seem too big and there were tails of thin, blue flame flickering at their bases. Not the billowing clouds of flame and smoke that our rockets have, but just a thin blue flicker.
For a minute it looked like one of them would land on top of me, but then I saw that it was too far out. It missed me, matter of fact, a good two miles or so. It and the others sat down in a ring around the milling herd out in the valley.
###
I should have known what would happen out there. It was the simplest explanation one could think of and it was logical. I think, maybe, way deep down, I did know, but my surface mind had pushed it away because it was too matter-of-fact and too ordinary.
Thin snouts spouted from the ships and purple fire curled mistily at the muzzle of those snouts and the dinosaurs went down in a fighting, frightened, squealing mass. Thin trickles of vapor drifted upward from the snouts and out in the center of the circle lay that heap of dead and dying dinosaurs, all those thousands of dinosaurs piled in death.
It is a simple thing to tell, of course, but it was a terrible thing to see. I crouched there behind the bush, sickened at the sight, startled by the silence when all the screaming and the squealing and the hooting ceased. And shaken, too—not by what shakes me now as I write this letter, but shaken by the knowledge that something from outside could do this to the earth.
For they were from outside. It wasn’t just the spaceships, but those pinkish dogs and gray-green car-men which were not cars and men, but a single organism, were not things of earth, could not be things of earth.
I crept back from the bush, keeping low in hope that the bush would screen me from the things down in the valley until I reached the swale top. One of the dogs swung around and looked my way and I froze, and after a time he looked away.
Then I was over the top of the swale and heading back toward the time machine. But halfway down the slope, I turned around and came back again, crawling on my belly, squirming to the hilltop to have another look.
It was a look I’ll not forget.
The dogs and car-men had swarmed in upon the heap of dead dinosaurs, and some of the cars already were crawling back toward the grounded spaceships, which had let down ramps. The cars were moving slowly, for they were heavily loaded and the loads they carried were neatly butchered hams and racks of ribs.
And in the sky there was a muttering and I looked up to see yet other spaceships coming down—the little transport ships that would carry this cargo of fresh meat up to another larger ship that waited overhead.
It was then I turned and ran.
I reached the top of the hill and piled into the time machine and set it at zero and came home. I didn’t even stop to hunt for the binoculars I’d dropped.
###
And now that I am home, I’m not going back again. I’m no
t going anywhere in that time machine. I’m afraid of what I might find any place I go. If Wyalusing College has any need of it, I’ll give them the time machine.
But that’s not why I wrote.
There is no doubt in my mind what happened to the dinosaurs, why they became extinct. They were killed off and butchered and hauled away, to some other planet, perhaps many light years distant, by a race which looked upon the earth as a cattle range—a planet that could supply a vast amount of cheap protein.
But that, you say, happened more than sixty million years ago. This race did once exist. But in sixty million years it would almost certainly have changed its ways or drifted off in its hunting to some other sector of the galaxy, or, perhaps, have become extinct, like the dinosaurs.
But I don’t think so. I don’t think any of those things happened. I think they’re still around. I think earth may be only one of the many planets which supply their food.
And I’ll tell you why I think so. They were back on earth again, I’m sure, some 10,000 or 11,000 years ago, when they killed off the mammoth and the mastodon, the giant bison, the great cave bear and the saber-tooth and a lot of other things. Oh, yes, I know they missed Africa. They never touched the big game there. Maybe, after wiping out the dinosaurs, they learned their lesson and left Africa for breeding stock.
And now I come to the point of this letter, the thing that has me worried.
Today there are just a few less than three billion of us humans in the world. By the year 2000, there may be as many as six billion of us.
We’re pretty small, of course, and these things went in for tonnage, for dinosaurs and mastodon and such. But there are so many of us! Small as we are, we may be getting to the point where we’ll be worth their while.
DINOSAUR PLIÉS
R. V. Branham
With only a handful of elegant and intricate stories like the one that follows, R. V. Branham has established a reputation for himself in the last couple of years as a writer to watch, and as one of the most distinctive and original new voices in SF. Branham’s fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Midnight Graffiti, Full Spectrum, Writers of the Future, and others, and at last report he was at work on a novel. Born in Calexico, California, he put in stints as an assistant X-ray technician, a rape crisis counselor, and an engineering research consultant on his way to becoming a writer.
Here he gives us a wry, tongue-in-cheek, and not very likely look at what dinosaur culture might have been like . . .
* * *
An Introduction
Welcome to audition and placement examinations for the Academy of Mesozoic Dance, First Year Forms. Applications are open to any dinosaur between two and six years of age, and must be stamped by a parent. (Biological parent only. No Guardians, except for Orphans or Parricides. If one has questions, one should wait until after the examination results are announced.)
As with years past, we shall use Le Sacre du Printemps for ambience.
And may the better dinosaur rip the flesh of the lesser, figuratively speaking of course.
Adolescent Dances
Will the Hadrosaurs—yes, all duckbills, please come to the bars as one’s name is announced: Parasaurolophus, Lambeosaurus, Saurolophus, Corythosaur.
Please, Madame Maiasaurus! One must either watch impartially or be asked to leave! We do not want to have to resort to calling in Officer Rex, now do we?
Excuse me, girls.
When I call out a position, it will be executed punctually and without inquiry. Are we understood? Failure to follow instructions accurately may result in immediate disqualification.
Okay! Now—music, please! Girls: Demiplié, all positions, except the third. Very good. Watch your heads, use the second position of the head until told otherwise. Mademoiselle Lambeosaurus, must one be reminded that one is not holding a violin? Watch those positions ouvertes. Mademoiselle Corythosaur . . . do not separate the feet so wide. This is the Dance, not the ablution. Five poses derrières, followed by ten poses devants. Please give it more than your all, better than your very best.
And what is the meaning of this?!
Dress Rehearsal Abduction
Who’s responsible for this?!
Who let those Heterodontosauruses in, the randy buggers!?
Girls, come back! Where is Officer Rex when one needs him?
We might as well continue . . .
Rounds of Spring
Please come to the bars, yes, to the bars, when your name is announced. Now: Mr. Brontosaurus—you changed your name to what? To Apatosaurus? That all may be fine and well for your egocentric parents, but it wiillll not do for the Academy, it will not do at all. Mr. Brontosaurus, Mesdemoiselles Stegosaurus and Plateosaurus, Mr. Megalosaurus— please, members of the audience, one must refrain from fat jokes, one must shut up.
Yes. Music.
Please, young ladies and young gentlemen. Keep a very wide distance between one’s face and one’s neighbor’s tail. Speaking of tails, one must be very, very careful to control the motions of one’s tail during the Dance. It is the essence of the Dance.
Now! Five grand pliés! Fair—not bad, not good, but not bad. At all times both head and tails in first position. Very good, it shows pride. Positions soulevées, all of them—in no particular order. Improvise. Think cloud.
Better than one would expect. Interesting.
Games of the Rival Neighborhoods
Everyone, being all applicants, to the bars! Stretching exercises! One may play, but no duels, no combat.
We, being your examiner and head of this Academy, will take a brief break for evaluation considerations.
Again, behave. There will be monitors in our absence.
The Sagacious Elder’s Public Appearance
At this point in our auditions, it is customary to wait for the public appearance of the Sagacious Elder, who founded this, the Academy of the Mesozoic Dance. But . . . the Elder never appears. Never has, in anybody’s memory. But we are not barbarians. We wait.
Sixty seconds of quiet meditation, please.
The Earth Adored
And what time is it? Is it time for our lunch break? Is it time yet?
Earth Dance
It is, I believe, time for our lunch break. Let us reconvene these auditions in one hour or so. Let us now, then, fall upon the earth and feed our faces.
Another Introduction
Welcome back.
I am sure you have heard some rumors—it being a smallish community—about my departure. Some of them have regarded the theft of some eggs from the hatchery.
It is not true. And the parties responsible—we all know who they are—shall be hearing from my solicitor.
It is true, however, that we are retiring. But not departing from this dear circle of friends.
I can tell, from your restraint, from your lack of response, that you are deeply moved. We are deeply moved. One must, we suppose, show dignity.
This will be our last audition together. Let us strive, together, to make it the best in living memory.
Mysterious Arcs and Secants of the Adolescents
Oh, so our duckbills return, as supplicants, if these garlands indicate anything. We must suppose that one cannot be held to blame when one is being pursued by platoons of paramours.
But what, we must ask, are these arcs and secants upon the floor of the Dance? Is there a significance oracular, occult? Are they drawings of divinity or of delinquents?
Glorification of the Chosen Candidate
But, girls? You lay these garlands, these offerings, at my feet? It moves me to tears, to be so honored, and by those who will not even be my students (though I do indeed have a decision in their fates, as students of the Dance).
Conjuring the Ancients
It is now time, as tradition dictates, that we introduce our new Mistress. However, during lunch, she suggested a break with custom which would allow me a few more moments of glory.
I have gone over the examination result
s with our new Mistress, and selections have been made.
These selections will be announced later, at the banquet, to which all and sundry are invited.
So let us, instead, have another sixty seconds of quiet meditation. If not the Elder, then perhaps one of the Ancients may return.
The Ancients Ritual
No Ancients. No rituals.
Perhaps next year there should be a discussion among the Board regarding changing the format of these ceremonies.
Sacred Dance, the Chosen Candidate
Again, to the bars. I have decided to give you your first lesson. Why, some of you may ask, does one need the Dance? After all, it is instinctive with us dinosaurs. Yes and no, because yes you are born with basic techniques and the vocabulary of the Dance, and no because you are primitive and unrefined, with no sense of nuance or subtlety.
Also, there is no place in the Dance for humor, for japes, for puns. We heard that silly joke about us not being at the banquet, but being the banquet. Jokes about our weight are in bad form, and form is the essence of the Dance.
So, let us see some demipliés—I feel like a ringmaster, standing in these rings.
Demipliés, first and second positions—what’s this!
Back to the bars, everyone!
And would our audience be so kind as to return to their seats?
Now. Heads and tails erect, proud! Do not bare your teeth! It is rude to bare your teeth on the dance floor. It is a sort of sacrilege and a definite act of aggression! Do not wag your tails—we only do that when we are hungry. And have we not already had our lunch? Don’t wag your tails! Back, we say, back!
Dinosaurs II Page 15