The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  Commotion in the cycads. Something’s coming in here! Long neck, small birdlike feet, delicate grasping hands. Not to worry. Struthiomimus, is all – dainty dino, fragile, birdlike critter barely two meters high. Liquid golden eyes staring solemnly at me. It swivels its head from side to side, ostrichlike, click-click, as if trying to make up its mind about coming closer to me. Scat! Go peck a stegosaur. Let me alone.

  It withdraws, making little clucking sounds. Closest I’ve ever been to a live dinosaur. Glad it was one of the little ones.

  0900 hours. Getting hungry. What am I going to eat?

  They say roasted cycad cones aren’t too bad. How about raw ones? So many plants are edible when cooked and poisonous otherwise. I never studied such things in detail. Living in our antiseptic little L5 habitats, we’re not required to be outdoors-wise, after all. Anyway, there’s a fleshy-looking cone on the cycad just in front of the cleft, and it’s got an edible look. Might as well try it raw, because there’s no other way. Rubbing sticks together will get me nowhere.

  Getting the cone off takes some work. Wiggle, twist, snap, tear – there. Not as fleshy as it looks. Chewy, in fact. It’s a little like munching on rubber. Decent flavor, though. And maybe some useful carbohydrate.

  The shuttle isn’t due to pick me up for thirty days. Nobody’s apt to come looking for me, or even to think about me, before then. I’m on my own. Nice irony there: I was desperate to get out of Vronsky and escape from all the bickering and maneuvering, the endless meetings and memoranda, the feinting and counterfeinting, all the ugly political crap that scientists indulge in when they turn into administrators. Thirty days of blessed isolation on Dino Island! An end to that constant dull throbbing in my head from the daily infighting with Director Sarber. Pure research again! And then the meltdown, and here I am cowering in the bushes, wondering which comes first, starving or getting gobbled by some cloned tyrannosaur.

  0930 hours. Funny thought just now. Could it have been sabotage?

  Consider. Sarber and I, feuding for weeks over the issue of opening Dino Island to tourists. Crucial staff vote coming up next month. Sarber says we can raise millions a year for expanded studies with a program of guided tours and perhaps some rental of the island to film companies. I say that’s risky for the dinos and for the tourists, destructive of scientific values, a distraction, a sellout. Emotionally the staff’s with me, but Sarber waves figures around, shows fancy income projections, and generally shouts and blusters. Tempers running high, Sarber in lethal fury at being opposed, barely able to hide his loathing for me. Circulating rumors – designed to get back to me – that if I persist in blocking him, he’ll abort my career. Which is malarkey, of course. He may outrank me, but he has no real authority over me. And then his politeness yesterday (Yesterday? An eon ago!) Smiling smarmily, telling me he hopes I’ll rethink my position during my observation tour on the island. Wishing me well. Had he gimmicked my powerpak? I guess it isn’t hard, if you know a little engineering, and Sarber does. Some kind of timer set to withdraw the insulator rods? Wouldn’t be any harm to Dino Island itself, just a quick, compact, localized disaster that implodes and melts the unit and its passenger. So sorry, terrible scientific tragedy, what a great loss! And even if by some fluke I got out of the unit in time, my chances of surviving here as a pedestrian for thirty days would be pretty skimpy, right? Right.

  It makes me boil to think that someone would be willing to murder you over a mere policy disagreement. It’s barbaric. Worse than that, it’s tacky.

  1130 hours. I can’t stay crouched in this cleft forever. I’m going to explore Dino Island and see if I can find a better hideout. This one simply isn’t adequate for anything more than short-term huddling. Besides, I’m not as spooked as I was right after the meltdown. I realize now that I’m not going to find a tyrannosaur hiding behind every tree. And even if I do, tyrannosaurs aren’t going to be much interested in scrawny stuff like me.

  Anyway I’m a quick-witted higher primate. If my humble mammalian ancestors seventy million years ago were able to elude dinosaurs well enough to survive and inherit the earth, I should be able to keep from getting eaten for the next thirty days. And, with or without my cozy little mobile module, I want to get out into this place whatever the risks. Nobody’s ever had a chance to interact this closely with the dinos before.

  Good thing I kept this pocket recorder when I jumped from the module. Whether I’m a dino’s dinner or not I ought to be able to set down some useful observations.

  1830 hours. Twilight is descending now. I am camped near the equator in a lean-to flung together out of tree-fern fronds – a flimsy shelter – but the huge fronds conceal me, and with luck I’ll make it through to morning. That cycad cone doesn’t seem to have poisoned me yet, and I ate another one just now, along with some tender new fiddleheads uncoiling from the heart of a tree fern. Spartan fare, but it gives me the illusion of being fed.

  In the evening mists I observe a brachiosaur, half grown but already colossal, munching in the treetops. A gloomy-looking triceratops stands nearby, and several of the ostrichlike struthiomimids scamper busily in the underbrush, hunting I know not what. No sign of tyrannosaurs all day. There aren’t many of them here, anyway, and I hope they’re all sleeping off huge feasts somewhere in the other hemisphere.

  What a fantastic place this is!

  I don’t feel tired. I don’t even feel frightened – just a little wary.

  I feel exhilarated, as a matter of fact.

  Here I sit, peering out between fern fronds at a scene out of the dawn of time.

  What a brilliant idea it was to put all the Olsen-process dinosaur reconstructs aboard a little L5 habitat of their very own and turn them loose to re-create the Mesozoic! After that unfortunate San Diego event with the tyrannosaur it became politically unfeasible to keep them anywhere on Earth, I know, but, even so, this is a better scheme. In just a little more than seven years Dino Island has taken on an altogether convincing illusion of reality. Things grow so fast in this lush, steamy, high-CO2 tropical atmosphere! Of course we haven’t been able to duplicate the real Mesozoic flora, but we’ve done all right using botanical survivors, cycads and tree ferns and horsetails and palms and ginkgos and auracarias, and thick carpets of mosses and selaginellas and liverworts covering the ground. Everything has blended and merged and run amok. It’s hard now to recall the bare and unnatural look of the island when we first laid it out. Now it’s a seamless tapestry in green and brown, a dense jungle broken only by streams, lakes, and meadows, encapsulated in spherical metal walls some five kilometers in circumference.

  And the animals, the wonderful, fantastic, grotesque animals.

  We don’t pretend that the real Mesozoic ever held any such mix of fauna as I’ve seen today, stegosaurs and corythosaurs side by side, a triceratops sourly glaring at a brachiosaur, struthiomimus contemporary with iguanodon, a wild unscientific jumble of Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, a hundred million years of the dinosaur reign scrambled together. We take what we can get. Olsen-process reconstructs require sufficient fossil DNA to permit the computer synthesis, and we’ve been able to find that in only some twenty species so far. The wonder is that we’ve accomplished even that much: to replicate the complete DNA molecule from battered and sketchy genetic information millions of years old, to carry out the intricate implants in reptilian host ova, to see the embryos through to self-sustaining levels. The only word that applies is miraculous. If our dinos come from eras millions of years apart, so be it: we do our best. If we have no pterosaur and no allosaur and no archaeopteryx, so be it: we may have them yet. What we already have is plenty to work with. Someday there may be separate Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous satellite habitats, but none of us will live to see that, I suspect.

  Total darkness now. Mysterious screechings and hissings out there. This afternoon, as I moved cautiously but in delight from the wreckage site up near the rotation axis to my present equatorial camp, sometimes coming within fifty
or a hundred meters of living dinos, I felt a kind of ecstasy. Now my fears are returning, and my anger at this stupid marooning. I imagine clutching claws reaching for me, terrible jaws yawning above me. I don’t think I’ll get much sleep tonight.

  22 August. 0600 hours. Rosy-fingered dawn comes to Dino Island, and I’m still alive. Not a great night’s sleep, but I must have had some, because I can remember fragments of dreams. About dinosaurs, naturally. Sitting in little groups, some playing pinochle and some knitting sweaters. And choral singing, a dinosaur rendition of The Messiah or Beethoven’s Ninth, I don’t remember which. I think I’m going nuts.

  I feel alert, inquisitive, and hungry. Especially hungry. I know we’ve stocked this place with frogs and turtles and other small-size anachronisms to provide a balanced diet for the big critters. Today I’ll have to snare some for myself, grisly though I find the prospect of eating raw frog’s legs.

  I don’t bother getting dressed anymore. With rain showers programmed to fall four times a day, it’s better to go naked anyway. Mother Eve of the Mesozoic, that’s me! And without my soggy tunic I find that I don’t mind the greenhouse atmosphere of the habitat half as much as I did.

  Out to see what I can find.

  The dinosaurs are up and about already, the big herbivores munching away, the carnivores doing their stalking. All of them have such huge appetites that they can’t wait for the sun to come up. In the bad old days when the dinos were thought to be reptiles, of course, we’d have expected them to sit there like lumps until daylight got their body temperatures up to functional levels. But one of the great joys of the reconstruct project was the vindication of the notion that dinosaurs were warm-blooded animals, active and quick and pretty damned intelligent. No sluggardly crocodilians, these! Would that they were, if only for my survival’s sake.

  1130 hours. A busy morning. My first encounter with a major predator.

  There are nine tyrannosaurs on the island, including three born in the past eighteen months. (That gives us an optimum predator-to-prey ratio. It the tyrannosaurs keep reproducing and don’t start eating each other, we’ll have to begin thinning them out. One of the problems with a closed ecology – natural checks and balances don’t fully apply.) Sooner or later I was bound to encounter one, but I had hoped it would be later.

  I was hunting frogs at the edge of Cope Lake. A ticklish business: calls for agility, cunning, quick reflexes. I remember the technique from my girlhood – the cupped hand, the lightning pounce – but somehow it’s become a lot harder in the last twenty years. Superior frogs these days, I suppose. There I was kneeling in the mud, swooping, missing, swooping, missing; some vast sauropod snoozing in the lake, probably our diplodocus; a corythosaur browsing in a stand of ginkgo trees, quite delicately nipping off the foul-smelling yellow fruits. Swoop. Miss. Swoop. Miss. Such intense concentration on my task that old T. rex could have tiptoed right up behind me and I’d never have noticed. But then I felt a subtle something, a change in the air, maybe, a barely perceptible shift in dynamics. I glanced up and saw the corythosaur rearing on its hind legs, looking around uneasily, pulling deep sniffs into that fantastically elaborate bony crest that houses its early-warning system. Carnivore alert! The corythosaur obviously smelled something wicked this way coming, for it swung around between two big ginkgos and started to go galumphing away. Too late. The treetops parted, giant boughs toppled, and out of the forest came our original tyrannosaur; the pigeon-toed one we call Belshazzar, moving in its heavy, clumsy waddle, ponderous legs working hard, tail absurdly swinging from side to side. I slithered into the lake and scrunched down as deep as I could go in the warm, oozing mud. The corythosaur had no place to slither. Unarmed, unarmored, it could only make great bleating sounds, terror mingled with defiance, as the killer bore down on it.

  I had to watch. I had never actually seen a kill before.

  In a graceless but wondrously effective way the tyrannosaur dug its hind claws into the ground, pivoted astonishingly, and, using its massive tail as a counterweight, moved in a ninety-degree arc to knock the corythosaur down with a stupendous sidewise swat of its huge head. I hadn’t been expecting that. The corythosaur dropped and lay on its side, snorting in pain and feebly waving its limbs. Now came the coup de grace with hind legs, and then the rending and tearing, the jaws and the tiny arms at last coming into play. Burrowing chin-deep in the mud, I watched in awe and weird fascination. There are those among us who argue that the carnivores ought to be segregated – put on their own island – that it is folly to allow reconstructs created with such effort to be casually butchered this way. Perhaps in the beginning that made sense, but not now, not when natural increase is rapidly filling the island with young dinos. If we are to learn anything about these animals, it will only be by reproducing as closely as possible their original living conditions. Besides, would it not be a cruel mockery to feed our tyrannosaurs on hamburger and herring?

  The killer fed for more than an hour. At the end came a scary moment: Belshazzar, blood-smeared and bloated, hauled himself ponderously down to the edge of the lake for a drink. He stood no more than ten meters from me. I did my most convincing imitation of a rotting log, but the tyrannosaur, although it did seem to study me with a beady eye, had no further appetite. For a long while after he departed I stayed buried in the mud, fearing he might come back for dessert. And eventually there was another crashing and bashing in the forest – not Belshazzar this time, though, but a younger one with a gimpy arm. It uttered a sort of whinnying sound and went to work on the corythosaur carcass. No surprise: we already knew from our observations that tyrannosaurs had no prejudices against carrion.

  Nor, I found, did I.

  When the coast was clear, I crept out and saw that the two tyrannosaurs had left hundreds of kilos of meat. Starvation knoweth no pride and also few qualms. Using a clamshell for my blade, I started chopping away at the corythosaur.

  Corythosaur meat has a curiously sweet flavor – nutmeg and cloves, dash of cinnamon. The first chunk would not go down. You are a pioneer, I told myself, retching. You are the first human ever to eat dinosaur meat. Yes, but why does it have to be raw? No choice about that. Be dispassionate, love. Conquer your gag reflex or die trying. I pretended I was eating oysters. This time the meat went down. It didn’t stay down. The alternative, I told myself grimly is a diet of fern fronds and frogs, and you haven’t been much good at catching the frogs. I tried again. Success!

  I’d have to call corythosaur meat an acquired taste. But the wilderness is no place for picky eaters.

  23 August. 1300 hours. At midday I found myself in the southern hemisphere, along the fringes of Marsh Marsh, about a hundred meters below the equator. Observing herd behavior in sauropods: five brachiosaurs, two adult and three young, moving in formation, the small ones in the center. By small I mean only some ten meters from nose to tail tip. Sauropod appetites being what they are, we’ll have to thin that herd soon, too, especially if we want to introduce a female diplodocus into the colony. Two species of sauropods breeding and eating like that could devastate the island in three years. Nobody ever expected dinosaurs to reproduce like rabbits – another dividend of their being warm-blooded, I suppose. We might have guessed it, though, from the vast quantity of fossils. If that many bones survived the catastrophes of a hundred-odd million years, how enormous the living Mesozoic population must have been! An awesome race in more ways than their mere physical mass.

  I had a chance to do a little herd thinning myself just now. Mysterious stirring in the spongy soil right at my feet, and I looked down to see triceratops eggs hatching. Seven brave little critters, already horny and beaky, scrabbling out of a nest, staring around defiantly. No bigger than kittens, but active and sturdy from the moment they were born.

  The corythosaur meat has probably spoiled by now. A more pragmatic soul very likely would have augmented her diet with one or two little ceratopsians. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  They scuttled off in seve
n different directions. I thought briefly of catching one and making a pet out of it. Silly idea.

  25 August. 0700 hours. Start of the fifth day. I’ve done three complete circumambulations of Dino Island. Slinking around on foot is fifty times as risky as cruising around in a module, and fifty thousand times as rewarding. I make camp in a different place every night. I don’t mind the humidity any longer. And despite my skimpy diet I feel pretty healthy. Raw dinosaur, I know now, is a lot tastier than raw frog. I’ve become an expert scavenger – the sound of a tyrannosaur in the forest now stimulates my salivary glands instead of my adrenals. Going naked is fun, too. And I appreciate my body much more, since the bulges that civilization put there have begun to melt away.

  Nevertheless, I keep trying to figure out some way of signaling Habitat Vronsky for help. Changing the position of the reflecting mirrors, maybe, so I can beam an SOS? Sounds nice, but I don’t even know where the island’s controls are located, let alone how to run them. Let’s hope my luck holds out another three and a half weeks.

  27 August. 1700 hours. The dinosaurs know that I’m here and that I’m some extraordinary kind of animal. Does that sound weird? How can great dumb beasts know anything? They have such tiny brains. And my own brain must be softening on this protein-and-cellulose diet. Even so, I’m starting to have peculiar feelings about these animals. I see them watching me. An odd, knowing look in their eyes, not stupid at all. They stare, and I imagine them nodding, smiling, exchanging glances with each other, discussing me. I’m supposed to be observing them, but I think they’re observing me, too, somehow.

  No, that’s just crazy. I’m tempted to erase the entry. But I suppose I’ll leave it as a record of my changing psychological state, if nothing else.

  28 August. 1200 hours. More fantasies about the dinosaurs. I’ve decided that the big brachiosaur – Bertha – plays a key role here. She doesn’t move around much, but there are always lesser dinosaurs in orbit around her. Much eye contact. Eye contact between dinosaurs? Let it stand. That’s my perception of what they’re doing. I get a definite sense that there’s communication going on here, modulating over some wave that I’m not capable of detecting. And Bertha seems to be a central nexus, a grand totem of some sort, a – a switchboard? What am I talking about? What’s happening to me?