“Huh—” Nusa frowned. “What are you talking about?” “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.”
Her expression flickered with annoyance. ‘Is he—” Loevil nodded, looking at the space between his feet. He didn’t want to see her eyes. He looked questioningly at the rifle that she held instead.
“It’s Megan’s,” she explained. “It still has charges in it.” At the sound of Megan’s name, Loevil felt a grabbing in his stomach, a growing ache that filled his chest and overflowed his eyes. He looked back up to the spot where she had died—her blood was blackening on the rock, just a drying ragged smear—and his mouth became a line of pain, his face all screwed up tight in anguish— —but he turned to Nusa, stopped and took a breath. “It’s all right,” he managed. “We may need it.” He took it from her and gave her back her own—the one that she had taken from Tril the day before—or had that been a century ago?
Loevil’s voice was tight. “Let’s go.”
Nusa looked at the crossbow, then upslope. Aren’t you going to explain?
Loevil didn’t meet her eyes, he didn’t want to—he’d seen her expression when she was taking pictures with her holo-frame. “He’s going torpid again,” he said. “Let’s get out of here/’ That was explanation enough.
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He started down the slope, exhausted, favoring his hurt left leg.
Nusa followed, she didn’t even look to see if Tril was following her. “We have less than a day to pickup.”
“We can make it.” Loevil’s voice was almost inaudible. He brushed one hand through his hair tiredly, and a yellow blossom tumbled off and to the ground. He looked at it, half-annoyed, half-amused. Did I really go through all of that with a flower in my hair?
Behind them, Tril said softly, “Peep?”
They both turned to look.
, “Peep?” repeated Tril, still halfway up the slope, forlorn upon a shelf of rock, just sinking to her knees and looking sadly at the small and furry dead thing cupped within her hands. “Peep?” she pleaded with it, very softly, asking it as kindly as she could, Please, don’t be dead. Please, don’t be— “Peep?” she questioned it. “Peep?” Please—
Loevil and Nusa looked at each other.
Loevil climbed back up the slope to Tril and took the little dead thing from her. “Please . . . ?” he said. “Let me have it, Tril—”
Her big dark eyes followed the motion of his hands, intense with trust and need and caring. “Peep?” she asked.
“No,” said Loevil. “No more peep, Tril. No more.”
“Peep?” she insisted, blinking. Her eyes gleamed wetly. “Peep?”
Loevil was firm. “No,” he said.
“Peep?”
Something grunted deeply up the hill.
Loevil looked upslope and so did Nusa. Loevil nodded to her, “Come on. Give me a hand with her.”
Nusa came up, almost grumbling—but not quite; she didn’t think he’d let her get away with it. She took Tril by the arm and led her down the slope. Loevil followed
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sadly after, still holding the dead peeper in his hands and looking at it like a friend that he’d betrayed by accident. He stopped at the bottom of the rocks where the ground began again, and wished the world weren’t so unfair—at least not to the innocent little things like this. If he really had been someone’s great-umpteenth-great-great-grandfather . . . no. History wouldn’t be changed—they’d been reassured too many times. There’d been too many tests and simulations. Someone else would end up being someone’s great-umpteenth-great-great-grandfather—even the genetic loss was unimportant. A specific set of genes existed only for a single generation; it would be lost in just a few quick shuffles of the deck of chromosomes. Even two generations could do it
Loevil scraped a hole in the soft earth with the heel of his boot; it wasn’t hard to do; then laid the fuzzy creature into it. With his foot, he pushed the dirt back sidewise over it, stamping it down slowly and carefully. This was important to him. He had to do this right—the little guy deserved it; they owed him a quiet place to rest his bones for the eternity to come.
Something upslope grunted louder.
Loevil looked up toward the notch—he wished that there was something else that he could do—then gave the grave a couple of last taps with the sole of his boot. He looked up at the sky, measuring the daylight left— not too much, but enough. Thank God for northern latitudes and summer; the extra hours of sunlight might save their lives. He wiped briefly at his eyes and turned after Tril and Nusa, looking glum and feeling worse. His shoulders slumped unhappily as he followed them—the two women had already started on ahead, back the way they’d come.
He inhaled once as deeply as he could, testing the smoky afternoon air like a drug, then exhaled loudly and
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with sadness, a sound of resignation. They’d probably have to walk all night—and with wind-sprints too when the sun returned, if they were to get safely back. He wouldn’t get any sleep until they reached the Nexus and flashed back to their own time and home. And even then, there’s be debriefing—
—he didn’t look forward to that
He was tired, angry, upset—
—he wanted a moment for himself—to just sit down and scream. And then, when he was through screaming, he’d like to cry a while too.
He wanted to rest.
His knee throbbed painfully. He wanted to go to sleep and never have to wake up again and remember any of this. He wished it were a nightmare.
All he wanted was respite, just a bit of necessary
rest
He kept on walking. The tears came down his cheeks, leaving streaks of pink and dirt. His eyes ached with the glare of the horizon—he hated heading westward at this hour. He carried his rifle like a weight, and, for some reason, wore the crossbow on his back. Some small part of his mind was already composing answers to the questions he’d be asked when they got back—
He breathed like he was dying—he felt like it—but he kept on walking. Always walking.
And when they finally did stop for a rest, Loevil hurt so much he wished they hadn’t—all the pain and sorrow caught up with him and turned his bones to jelly. His eyes felt like two poached eggs in battery acid; his knee ached like fire—there were sharp pains every time he moved it, like the biting of an insect’s mandibles or a lobster’s red-hot pincers. His back felt tight, as if he’d been carrying a leaden yoke across his shoulders; his whole spine
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seemed made of gritty chalk; his neck muscles were so tense it hurt to turn his head; they felt like nylon cording stretched taut against a weight. It hurt to move and fight the pains—but it hurt more to sit and let them have their way.
He concentrated on his breathing, forcing himself into a series of relaxation exercises. “Let the mind unwind, let the juice flow loose, let the mettle settle, let the wax
relax ” He couldn’t remember how the rest of it
went
Tril was sunk to her knees in the dust.,Her face was still expressionless, but her posture was serious. Before, she had shown an innocent lack of expression. Now, although she still seemed vacant, there was a seriousness of intention in her manner, a kind of thoughtfulness, as if inside her there was something working, percolating slowly, carefully, and quite methodically, trying to formulate a question. Tril’s mouth kept forming words, but she did not speak them. Her eyes would start to come to life—then fade again. She was about to ask for something —-but she kept forgetting what it was, and had to think of it again. The quiet frown upon her face was the reflection of the intensity within.
Nusa was resting in a runner’s stoop, breathing hard but efficiently. She stood, her hands on her knees, her back arched, her head held low. She was counting steadily. She reached three hundred, then straightened and unbuckled her canteen. She uncapped it,
took a healthy drink and passed it on to Tril. Tril blinked at it, then gently took the water bottle out of Nusa’s hand. She raised it to her lips with both hands and let the water flow into her mouth. She didn’t spill a drop. She took only three swallows—and passed it back to Nusa, absent- mindedly. Now, what was that question she’d been thinking of . .. ?
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Loevil levered himself back to his feet and unclipped his scanner from his hip. He climbed wearily up on a rock and started turning slowly in a circle. He held the scanner at his waist and studied it with narrow-eyed suspicion. His face was drawn; the skin seemed stretched across his cheekbones as if his jaw was terminally clenched.
Nusa looked over at him tiredly. “What are you doing that for?”
Loevil shook his head without ever taking his eyes off the scanner’s screen. “Just checking.”
“Is there anything there?”
LoeviL didn’t answer. He was too concerned with the horizon.
Nusa said, “Are we being followed?”
Still turning, he said, “I don’t know.”
She straightened and stood up, fingering her rifle with a new concern.
“Maybe,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
That wasn’t good enough for Nusa. Her eyes were strange. “Is it coming after us—?”
“I don’t know!” Loevil was angry and frustrated. Nusa’s voice was full of realization. “It’s not through with us, is it? That’s why you were rushing.”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know!” And then, he did admit: “Look, in this world, we have a distinct and highly unusual scent. He’s a carnivore with a proven taste for human flesh. I don’t know if he’s got a pretty good nose or not—maybe he doesn’t need it, but the evidence suggests he’s got it anyway. He can find us whenever he wants—we’ve certainly seen that proven—”
Her glance wavered in concern—her eyes flickered toward the darkened east.
“But, on the brighter side,” said Loevil, darkly, “he won’t move until nightfall—” He jumped down from the rock, wincing as he hit the ground, he’d momentarily
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forgotten about his knee— “Let’s move out. I want to put some more distance between us.”
Nusa pointed at the sun, a swollen disc perched on the edge of the western sky. “It’s awfully late already—” “Let’s get to the tar pits,” Loevil said firmly. “If we can get to the far side of them, we can take a longer rest. If he does come... maybe we can do something there. But it won’t be safe to travel during the darkest part of night, so we have to make the best of what light we have ”
Nusa helped Tril to her feet without reply. Loevil checked his scanner one last time, and they moved out.
Seventeen
"BEEP”
There was a clearing near the tar. There were rocks, the inevitable cluster of outsize boulders and wind-abraded outcrops.
They unloaded their gear in the dark, dumping it off their backs like so much rubble. The stars were already out—the night was cold and cloudless and the wind burned coldly around them. They were shivering in their jackets despite the heating coils.
Nusa climbed up on the rocks and looked back the way they’d come. She lowered her goggles over her eyes and studied the horizon with clinical detachment.
Loevil sat Tril down and handed her a ration bar from his own sidebag. She sat blankly with it in one hand, a canteen in the other. Loevil sat down across from her and lowered his head into his hands wearily. The strain was getting to him.
“I don’t see him,” said Nusa. “Yet”
“He’ll come.” Loevil was certain of that. “He’ll come.” She dropped down off the rock and began burrowing
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through her pack for a ration bar of her own. There were only two left. That was part of Ethab’s planning—they would carry only enough food for two days so they could travel lighter. The last half day, they could afford to be hungry. Nusa sighed, then looked across at Loevil, just a shadow in the darkness; he hadn’t lit his lantern and it didn’t look like he was going to. “Are we going to make pickup?” she asked.
Loevil shrugged. He didn’t have enough energy to care any more. “It’ll be close.” It was as accurate an answer as he could give.
There was a moment of silence then. For tonight anyway, events were beyond their control, and there was not a thing that they could do but wait and see...
Nusa picked up Loevil’s scanner and checked it thoughtfully. It might as well have been dead.
As she turned it back and forth, she asked in quiet tones, “What went wrong?”
Loevil didn’t even look up. “Everything,” he said.
“What are you going to tell them ... if we get back?”
A heartbeat passed into eternity while Loevil considered it. “I don’t know.” Another beat. “They don’t like it when the senior guide gets killed.” He took a breath. It needed a punch line. “I’ll probably get yelled at,” he finished lamely. He was trying to recapture his old cockiness, but he wasn’t doing a very good job of it.
They lapsed back into silence. The only sound was Tril’s methodical chewing. A ruminant chewing its cud would have shown more interest in its surroundings.
After a while, Loevil spoke again. This time his tone was lower and more serious. “I’ve never seen one act like this before ..he began. He, almost could have been talking for himself alone. He glanced backward, as if the beast was already in the neighborhood. Nusa glanced at the scanner she still held. Its screen was blank.
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“Blazers won’t stop him—” Loevil continued, “—won’t even scare him off. He’s too big, you can’t pump enough heat into him fast enough even to slow him down.” He spread his hands helplessly apart. “Even so, we have to be hurting him... and yet... and yet.... he just keeps coming—" As an afterthought, he added, “He attacks the source of his pain...” and shook his head in wonderment
“That doesn’t sound like a very good survival technique—”
“It is if you’re a nine-ton Tyrannosaurus Rex” Loevil was thoughtful. “If something hurts him, he kills it. And it stops hurting him.” He tried to make it a joke. “The worst case of compulsive paranoia I’ve ever seen. . .
But it wasn’t funny.
He kept thinking of Megan. God, how he’d loved her—
He couldn’t understand how he would face all the long days ahead without her. How could he even continue as a guide without her—?
He wondered if she’d loved him as much.
She must have, he decided. She fired at the beast to distract it away from me, didn’t she?
And the beast had seen her firing, and come after her. It attacked the source of its pain.
There was something about that thought....
“That’s how we’re going to kill him,” Loevil said. He looked up suddenly, his face abruptly animated. He switched on the lantern at his feet, it threw off an orange glow, a warm pool of light in the middle of the cold and starlit night. They were a hundred million years from home and a thing as simple as switching on a battery lantern was enough to make them feel a little bit less lonely. He looked to Nusa, almost smiling—he had a plan. “Look, you’re going to be over there. I’ll be there”— he pointed as he spoke—“and we’ll use our blazer fire
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to get him to come toward each of us. If he gets too close to you, I’ll draw him toward me, and vice versa. If it works, we can pull him into the tar.” He added, “—if it works.”
Nusa was tired; tired of walking, tired of running, tired of all this killing. Nothing had been resolved and still it all kept on. “Why can’t we just leave him alone?” she asked. Her voice was surprisingly mild. “Why don’t we just go home?”
Loevil
was startled. He looked over at her with a blank expression. Was this a joke—or was she really serious? He couldn’t see her eyes—the light coming from below lit her face all strange and hollow. The shadows were reversed, they flowed up instead of down. Her eyes were darkling pools, and intense. She looked like an Egyptian statue—wailing.
Loevil made his explanation a matter of fact. “We can’t. He killed Megan.”
“Oh, God—” whispered Nusa at him. “Not you too—” All he could see was her mouth, the rest was shadow. “I—I’ve had enough of this, Loevil. Really. It’s too much for me. It’s not a game any more. This part is for real, isn’t it? Let’s just go home, please?”
“You could have stopped Ethab, couldn’t you—” he accused.
“No—of course not—you saw that!” She bristled at die charge. “I had no more power over him than you—”
“We were going to tranquilize him and bring him back,” said Loevil. “Megan was all ready with the dart when— when the beast came up—” He added, “We’d made up our mind to do it if we had to. And he’d used up all his time; we almost made it too....”
Nusa didn’t respond.
Loevil looked across at her. “There must have been something you could have done as well—”
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“No, I—I never—had any power over him at all—” Her eyes were invisible, but there were tiny pinpoints of orange where they should have been, reflections of the lantern off her corneas. “It was very important for him to be the man—” She hung her head. “I don’t know what I could have done to stop him.”
“Well... we have no choice now, anyway.” Loevil closed the subject. “It doesn’t matter what we did or didn’t do, it’s done. The beast isn’t through with us and that’s what we have to worry about. We can’t outrun him. We have to fight.” His words hung in the air like challenges. And then he admitted too, “Besides, I want to kill him now.”
• Nusa shook her head, a barely perceptible motion. She said, “I guess—” She stopped in midthought, then started again slowly. “I grew up—I was taught to hunt only for food. If you couldn’t eat it, you didn’t kill it. Save the charge.” Her soft monologue was punctuated by the motion of one hand, she pulled at the weeds, tugging them from the hardened ground. “But there’s nothing here that we can eat. It’s so empty, so unfinished—grasses and grains we know haven’t evolved yet. Oh, there might be some primitive roots or fruits, but dinosaur meat would probably be too tough—although if we had to—and some of the smaller lizards might be edible.” She kept tugging at the recalcitrant stalks; they were dry and tough and made her think of crabgrass in a vacant lot. “But this trip wasn’t for food; it wasn’t for anything—” She couldn’t remember why it had seemed so exciting before. The challenge of the moment seemed . . . stupid now that she had seen it, been a part of it. She thought about it for a while, then looked to Loevil. “Why do they allow it?” Loevil shrugged, it was the easiest answer to almost any question. “Why not? You want people like Ethab
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