And we all kept quiet and looked at our empty beer bottles and thought about it. All those dinosaurs—big as houses—killed by little lizards with guns. Killed for fun.
Then Joe leaned over and put his hand on the professor’s shoulder, easy like, and shook it. He said, “Hey, P’fessor, but if that’s so, what happened to the little lizards with the guns? Huh?—Did you ever go back to find out?”
The professor looked up with the kind of look in his eyes that he’d have if he were lost.
“You still don’t see! It was already beginning to happen to them. I saw it in their eyes. They were running out of big game—the fun was going out of it. So what did you expect them to do? They turned to other game—the biggest and most dangerous of all—and really had fun. They hunted that game to the end.”
“What game?” asked Ray. He didn’t get it, but Joe and I did.
“Themselves,” said the professor in a loud voice. “They finished off all the others and began on themselves—till not one was left.”
And again we stopped and thought about those dinosaurs—big as houses—all finished off by little lizards with guns. Then we thought about the little lizards and how they had to keep the guns going even when there was nothing to use them on but themselves.
Joe said, “Poor dumb lizards.”
“Yeah,” said Ray, “poor crackpot lizards.”
And then what happened really scared us. Because the professor jumped up with eyes that looked as if they were trying to climb right out of their sockets and leap at us. He shouted, “You damned fools. Why do you sit there slobbering over reptiles dead a hundred million years. That was the first intelligence on Earth and that’s how it ended. That’s done. But we’re the second intelligence—and how the devil do you think we’re going to end?”
He pushed the chair over and headed for the door. But then he stood there just before leaving altogether and said: “Poor dumb humanity! Go ahead and cry about that.”
HERDING WITH THE HADROSAURS
Michael Bishop
Michael Bishop is one of the most acclaimed and respected members of that highly talented generation of writers who entered SF in the 1970s. His renowned short fiction has appeared in almost all the major magazines and anthologies, and has been gathered in three collections: Blooded on Arachne, One Winter in Eden, and Close Encounters with the Deity. In 1981, he won the Nebula Award for his novelette “The Quickening,” and in 1983 he won another Nebula Award for his novel No Enemy but Time. His other novels include Transfigurations, Stolen Faces, Ancient Days, Catacomb Years, Eyes of Fire, The Secret Ascension, Unicorn Mountain, and Count Geiger’s Blues. His most recent novel is the baseball fantasy Brittle Innings, which has been optioned for a major motion picture. Bishop and his family live in Pine Mountain, Georgia.
Here he takes us, in company with a determined scientist, back millions of years for a visit with a group of hadrosaurs—a voyage of discovery that turns out to be full of surprises for both sets of creatures . . .
* * *
In ’08, my parents—Pierce and Eulogy Gregson of Gipsy, Missouri—received permission to cross the geologic time-slip west of St. Joseph. They left in a wood-paneled New Studebaker wagon, taking provisions for one month, a used ’Zard-Off scent-generator, and, of course, their sons, sixteen-year-old Chad (me) and five-year-old Cleigh, known to all as “Button.” Our parents rejected the security of a caravan because Daddy had only contempt for “herders,” detested taking orders from external authority, and was sure that when we homesteaded our new Eden beyond the temporal divide, reptile men, claim jumpers, and other scalawags would show up to murder and dispossess us. It struck him as politic to travel alone, even if the evident dangers of the Late Cretaceous led most pioneers to set forth in groups.
That was Pierce Gregson’s first, biggest, and, I suppose, last mistake. I was almost a man (just two years away from the vote and only an inch shy of my adult height), and I remember everything. Sometimes, I wish I didn’t. The memory of what happened to our folks only two days out from St. Jo, on the cycad-clotted prairie of the old Dakotas, pierces me yet. In fact, this account is a eulogy for our folks and a cri de coeur I’ve been holding back for almost thirty years.
(Sweet Seismicity, let it shake my pain.)
The first things you notice crossing over, when agents of the World Time-Slip Force pass you through the discontinuity locks, are the sharp changes in temperature and humidity. The Late Cretaceous was—in many places, at least—hot and moist. So TSF officials caution against winter, spring, or fall crossings. It’s best to set out, they say, in late June, July, or August, when atmospheric conditions in northwestern Missouri are not unlike those that hold, just beyond the Nebraska drop-off, in the Upper Mesozoic.
Ignoring this advice, we left in February. Still, our New Stu wagon (a sort of a cross between a Conestoga wagon and a high-tech Ankylosaurus) plunged us into a strength-sapping steam bath. All our first day, we sweated. Even the sight of clown-frilled Triceratops browsing among the magnolia shrubs and the palmlike cycads of the flood plains did nothing to cool our bodies or lift our spirits. It was worse than going to a foreign country knowing nothing of its language or mores—it was like crawling the outback of a bizarre alien planet.
Button loved it. Daddy pretended that the heat, the air, the grotesque fauna—all of which he’d tried to get us ready for—didn’t unsettle him. Like turret-gunners, Mama and I kept our eyes open. We missed no chance to gripe about the heat or our wagon’s tendency to lurch, steamroller seedling evergreens, and vibrate our kidneys. Daddy, irked, kept his jaw set and his fist on the rubber knob, as if giving his whole attention to steering would allow him to overcome every obstacle, physical or otherwise.
It didn’t. On Day Two, twenty or thirty miles from the eastern shore of the Great Inland Sea, we were bumping along at forty-five or fifty mph when two tyrannosaurs—with thalidomide forelegs dangling like ill-made prosthetic hooks—came shuffle-waddling straight at us out of the north.
Sitting next to Daddy, Button hooted in delight. Behind him, I leaned into my seat belt, gaping at the creatures in awe.
The tyrannosaurs were stop-motion Hollywood mockups—except that, gleaming bronze and cordovan in the ancient sunlight, they weren’t. They were alive, and, as we all soon realized, they found our wagon profoundly interesting.
“Isn’t that ’Zard-Off thing working?” Mama cried.
Daddy was depressing levers, jiggling toggles. “It’s on, it’s on!” he said. “They shouldn’t be coming!”
The scent generator in our wagon was supposed to aspirate an acrid mist into the air, an odor repugnant to saurians, carnivores and plant-eaters alike.
But these curious T-kings were approaching anyway—proof, Mama and I decided, that our scent-generator, a second-hand model installed only a few hours before our departure, was a dud. And it was just like Daddy, the biggest of scrimps, to have paid bottom dollar for it, his perfectionism in matters not money-grounded now disastrously useless.
“Daddy, turn!” I shouted. “We can outrun them!”
To give him credit, Daddy had already ruddered us to the right and was squeezing F-pulses to the power block with his thumb. The plain was broad and open, but dotted with palmate shrubs, many of which looked like fluted pillars crowned by tattered green umbrella segments; we ran right over one of the larger cycads in our path before we’d gone thirty yards. Our wagon tilted on two side wheels, tried to right itself, and, failing that, crashed down on its passenger box with a drawn-out KRRRRR-ack!
Mama screamed, Daddy cursed, Button yowled like a vivisected cat. I was deafened, dangling in an eerie hush from my seat belt. And then Button, upside-down, peered quizzically into my face while mouthing, urgently, a battery of inaudible riddles.
Somehow, we wriggled out. So far as that goes, so did Daddy and Mama, although it would have been better for them—for all of us—if we had just played turtle.
In fact, our folks undoubtedly struggled
free of the capsized wagon to look for Button and me. What Button and I saw, huddled behind an umbrella shrub fifty yards away, was that awkward but disjointedly agile pair of T-kings. They darted at Mama and Daddy and seized them like rag dolls in their stinking jaws, one stunned parent to each tyrannosaur.
Then the T-kings—lofty, land-going piranhas—shook our folks unconscious, dropped them to the ground, crouched on their mutilated bodies with crippled-looking foreclaws, and vigorously tore into them with six-inch fangs.
At intervals, they’d lift their huge skulls and work their lizardly nostrils as if trying to catch wind of something tastier. Button and I, clutching each other, would glance away. Through it all, I cupped my hand over Button’s mouth to keep him from crying out. By the time the T-kings had finished their meal and tottered off, my palm was lacerated from the helpless gnashing of Button’s teeth.
And there we were, two scared human orphans in the problematic Late Cretaceous.
###
Every year since recrossing the time-slip, I see a report that I was a feral child, the only human being in history to have been raised by a non-mammalian species. In legend and literature, apes, wolves, and lions sometimes get credit for nurturing lost children, but no one is idiot enough to believe that an alligator or a Komodo dragon would put up with a human child any longer than it takes to catch, chew, and ingest it. No one should.
On the other hand, although I, Chad Gregson, was too old to be a feral child, having absorbed sixteen years of human values at the time of our accident, my little brother Cleigh, or Button, wasn’t. And, indeed, it would probably not be wrong to say that, in quite a compelling sense, he was raised by hadrosaurs.
I did all I could to pick up where our folks had left off, but the extended tribe of duckbills—Corythosaurus—with whom we eventually joined also involved themselves in Button’s parenting, and I remain grateful to them. But I jump ahead of myself. What happened in the immediate aftermath of our accident?
Button and I lay low. A herd of Triceratops came snuffling through the underbrush, grunting and browsing. Overhead, throwing weird shadows on the plains, six or seven pterosaurs—probably vulturelike Quetzalcoatli—circled our wagon’s wreck on thermal updrafts, weighing the advisability of dropping down to pick clean the bones of Pierce and Eulogy Gregson. They stayed aloft, for the departed T-kings may have still been fairly near, so Button and I likewise stayed aloof.
Until evening, that is. Then we crept to the wagon—I held on to Button to keep him from trying to view the scattered, collopy bones of our folks—and unloaded as much gear as we could carry: T-rations, two wooden harmonicas, some extra all-cotton clothing, a sack of seed, etc. TSF officials allowed no synthetic items (even ’Zard-Off was an organic repellent, made from a Venezuelan herb) to cross a time-slip, for after an early period of supply-dependency, every pioneer was expected to “live off the land.”
A wind blew down from the north. Suddenly, surprisingly, the air was no longer hot and moist; instead, it was warm and arid. We were on a Dead Sea margin rather than in a slash-and-burn Amazonian clearing. Our sweat dried. Hickories, oaks, and conifers grew among the horsetails along the meander of a river by the Great Inland Sea. Button and I crept through the glowing pastels of an archaic sunset, looking for fresh water (other than that sloshing in our leather botas) and shelter.
Which is how, not that night but the following dawn, we bumped into the hadrosaurs that became our new family: a lambeosaurine tribe, each creature bearing on its ducklike head a hollow crest, like the brush on a Roman centurion’s helmet.
Becoming family took a while, though, and that night, our first beyond the divide without our parents, Button snuggled into my lap in a stand of cone-bearing evergreens, whimpering in his dreams and sometimes crying out. Small furry creatures moved about in the dark, trotting or waddling as their unfamiliar bodies made them—but, bent on finding food appropriate to their size, leaving us blessedly alone. Some of these nocturnal varmints, I understood, would bring forth descendants that would evolve into hominids that would evolve into men. As creepy as they were, I was glad to have them around—they clearly knew when it was safe for mammals to forage. Q.E.D.: Button and I had to be semi-safe, too. “Where are we?” Button asked when he awoke.
“When are we?” or “Why are we here?” would have been better questions, but I told Button that we were hiding from the giant piranha lizards that had killed Daddy and Mama. Now, though, we had to get on with our lives.
About then, we looked up and spotted a huge camouflage-striped Corythosaurus—green, brown, burnt yellow—standing on its hind legs, embracing a nearby fir with its almost graceful arms. With its goosy beak, it was shredding needles, grinding them into meal between the back teeth of both jaws. Behind and beyond it foraged more Corythosauri, the adults nearly thirty feet tall, the kids anywhere from my height to that of small-town lampposts. Some in the hadrosaur herd locomoted like bent-over kangaroos; others had taken the posture of the upright colossus before us.
Button began screaming. When I tried to cover his mouth, he bit me. “They wanna eat us!” he shrieked even louder. “Chad—please, Chad!—don’t let them eat me!”
I stuffed the hem of a cotton tunic into Button’s mouth and pinned him down with an elbow the way the T-kings, yesterday, had grounded our folks’ corpses with their claws. I, too, thought we were going to be eaten, even though the creature terrifying Button had to be a vegetarian. It and its cohorts stopped feeding. In chaotic unison, they jogged off through the grove on their back legs, their fat, sturdy, conical tails counter-balancing the weight of their crested skulls.
“They’re gone,” I told Button. “I promise you, they’re gone. Here—eat this.”
I snapped a box of instant rice open under his nose, poured some water into it, and heated the whole shebang with a boil pellet. Sniffling, Button ate. So did I. Thinking, “safety in numbers,” and setting aside the fact that T-kings probably ate duckbills when they couldn’t find people, I pulled Button up and made him trot along behind me after the Corythosauri.
###
In a way, it was a relief to be free of the twenty-second century. (And, God forgive me, it was something of a relief to be free of our parents. I hurt for them. I missed them. But the possibilities inherent in the Late Cretaceous, not to mention its dangers, pitfalls, and terrors, seemed crisper and brighter in our folks’ sudden absence.)
The asteroid that hit the Indian Ocean in ’04, gullywashing the Asian subcontinent, Madagascar, and much of East Africa, triggered the tidal waves that drowned so many coastal cities worldwide. It also caused the apocalyptic series of earthquakes that sundered North America along a jagged north-south axis stretching all the way from eastern Louisiana to central Manitoba.
These catastrophic seismic disturbances apparently produced the geologic divide, the Mississippi Valley Time-Slip, fracturing our continent into the ruined Here-and-Now of the eastern seaboard and the anachronistic There-and-Then of western North America. Never mind that the West beyond this discontinuity only existed in fact over sixty-five million years ago. Or that you can no longer visit modern California because California—along with twenty-one other western states and all or most of six western Canadian provinces—has vanished.
It’s crazy, the loss of half a modern continent and of every person living there before the asteroid impact and the earthquakes, but you can’t take a step beyond the divide without employing a discontinuity lock. And when you do cross, what you see is fossils sprung to life, the offspring of a different geologic period. In Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica, it’s much the same—except that the time-slips in those places debouch on other geologic time divisions: the Pleistocene, the Paleocene, the Jurassic, the Silurian, etc.
We’re beginning to find that many parts of the world we used to live in are, temporally speaking, vast subterranean galleries in which our ancestors, or our descendants, stride like kings and we are unwelcome strangers. I s
urvived my time in one such roofless cavern, but even if it meant losing Button to the Late Cretaceous forever, I’d be delighted to see all our world’s cataclysm-spawned discontinuities melt back into normalcy tomorrow . . .
###
The Corythosauri were herding. The tribe we’d just met flowed into several other tribes, all moving at a stately clip up through Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the northeastern corner of old British Columbia. Button and I stayed with them because, in our first days beyond the divide, we saw no other human pioneers and believed it would be more fun to travel with some easy-going non-human natives than to lay claim to the first plot of likely looking ground we stumbled across.
Besides, I didn’t want to begin farming yet, and the pace set by the duckbills was by no stretch burdensome—fifteen to twenty miles a day, depending on the vegetation available and the foraging styles of the lead males.
It was several weeks before we realized that the Corythosauri, along with six or seven other species of duckbill and a few distant groups of horned dinosaurs, were migrating. We supposed—well, I supposed, Button being little more than a dumbstruck set of eyes, ears, and boyish tropisms—only that they were eating their way through the evergreens, magnolias, and cycad shrubs along routes well-worn by earlier foragers.
Where, I wondered, were our human predecessors? The time-slip locks at St. Joseph and other sites along the divide had been open two full years, ever since Tharpleton and Sykora’s development of cost-effective discontinuity gates. To date, over 100,000 people had reputedly used them. So where was everyone? A few, like our parents, had met untimely deaths. Others had made the crossing elsewhere. Still others had headed straight for the Great Inland Sea—to trap pelicanlike pterosaurs, train them on leads, and send them out over the waters as captive fishers. It beat farming, said some returning pioneers, and the westerly salt breezes were always lovely. In any event, Button and I trailed our duckbills a month before happening upon another human being.
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