Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 4

by Eric Flint

  With no further ado, the two male mosasaurs waddled off the dock and plunged back into the water of the harbor. Looking none too pleased, the female one turned to the plesiosaur.

  "You got it?"

  "Right here." The neck did that disconcerting loop and dive again, and the head came out of the pouch holding what looked like a harness. With a little flip, Asnip tossed the thing onto the mosasaur's back and the eurypterid began fastening it, using both its chelicerae and two front limbs.

  "I hate this thing," grumbled Rebecca. "It's vulgar. Practically demeaning."

  "How else are we going to carry them?" scritched Flowers. "You're just grousing because you lost the gnurkle flip."

  "I think Dave's jimmied that damn gnurkle," the female tylosaur said darkly. "He never loses. And why doesn't Matthew ever get stuck with it?"

  By now, the plesiosaur had dug something else out of the pouch. "I do," it mumbled around the weird looking gadgets in its mouth. "But not hominids. No point in it. Clumsy critters can't stay on my back when my flippers get going properly."

  Asnip tossed the things onto the dock in front of us. "Put them on. And don't dilly-dally."

  Speairs and I stared down at the things. There were two of them. They looked like a cross between a bicyclist's open-framed crash helmet, the sort of hats championed by little old ladies who wear purple and cite poetry about it, and . . .

  I dunno. The fringes around the side, hanging down, looked like nothing so much as miniature versions of those bead curtains that were popular back in the 60s among wannabe hippies.

  "What are those?" asked Steven.

  "Your breathing apparatus, of course," said Asnip. "What are you, morons? How else do you expect to survive in the water? They double as pressure suits, too, once we get deep enough."

  We went back to staring at the things. I couldn't for the life of me see how the gadgets could possible serve even the breathing function, much less put up any resistance to water pressure.

  "Put. Them. On." That came from Flowers, who was finished with his work. The sea scorpion waved a forelimb at the mosasaur, upon whose vast dorsal expanse two little saddles were now evident, attached to the harness. "Before Rebecca gets testy."

  She bellowed displeasure.

  "Testier," he qualified.

  We hastened to comply. Fortunately, the gadgets fit over our heads easily, even if I still couldn't see how they could possibly do what they were supposed to do. I felt like I was in drag, pretending to be an septuagenarian houri or something.

  Speairs finished first, and clambered onto York's back. For an instant, I didn't know whether to admire his sang froid or shake my head at his foolhardiness—until it dawned on me that the tylosaur, unlike Asnip, did not have a particularly flexible neck. She was built more along the lines of a giant crocodile rather than a turtle with a snake on top the way the plesiosaur was.

  The point being, perhaps the one place in the world she couldn't snap us up was when we were in those saddles. Not unless she shook us loose, at any rate.

  "Do these things have seat belts?" I muttered, as I followed Steven up. I noted sourly that he'd chosen the rear seat, leaving me the one closest to the maw.

  "To the sea! To the sea!" bellowed York.

  No sooner said than done. She waddled across the dock and plunged into the waters.

  * * *

  Sure enough—don't ask me how—the breathing gadgets worked. The pressure suit part worked also, which was a damn good thing because it didn't take Rebecca long to swim down to maybe two hundred meters below sea level. From there, the continental shelf flattened out and she stayed at more or less the same depth as she sped toward whatever destination she had in mind.

  "Sped" was the word for it, too. I wouldn't have thought a prehistoric monster that big could travel that fast. Once she was in the water, she kept her flippers pressed against her flanks and simply used her enormous flattened tail to drive us forward.

  As it turned out—again, don't ask me how—we could even talk using the headgear.

  "Where are we going?" Steven asked.

  "That's on a need-to-know basis," said Rebecca, her voice quite clear even underwater. "And you don't. Shut up. Those saddles irritate me enough as it is. Talking saddles is really pushing it."

  Speairs shut up, thankfully.

  For my part, I spent the time examining the surroundings. Clearly enough—don't ask, I don't know—we'd somehow traveled back in time. The shallow sea we were in was nothing that had ever existed in our own world.

  How do I know? Well, it was hardly the work of genius to figure it out.

  Item one. There were ammonoids all over the place. No ammonoids in our world.

  Item two. I saw a Ginsu shark. No Ginsu sharks in our world.

  Item three. I saw another plesiosaur, accompanied by a small one. Mother and child, perhaps. But it didn't matter. No plesiosaurs in our world, in any combination.

  There were more subtle indicators, as well. Too many of the filter feeders on the sea floor were brachiopods instead of bivalves. You can still find brachiopods in our world, true, but not this many. Not even close. In modern times, the phylum is almost extinct.

  We were in the Cretaceous, sure enough. Which still left unanswered the question of how a eurypterid like Gardner Flowers was here. He didn't belong there any more than we did.

  I looked back to see if he was following us. I didn't expect to see him, of course, since there was no way a bottom-walker like a sea scorpion could have kept up with the mosasaur's pace.

  But he was there, sure enough. I was so astonished I almost fell out of the saddle. (No, it didn't have seat belts. Fortunately, it did have something pretty much like a pommel to hold onto.)

  (No reins, of course. I could just imagine how Rebecca York would have reacted to a bit in her teeth.)

  The damn critter was riding in a yellow submarine!

  Except for the color, though, it didn't look much like the yellow submarine that Steven and I had dealt with before. For one thing, it had a bubble-cockpit in the nose, through which the eurypterid was quite visible, manipulating the controls. The sort of thing you expect to see on a helicopter, not a deep diving submarine.

  For another, it had a big logo painted on the bow, just under the cockpit.

  Property of Paleotech Enterprises, Ltd.

  Keeping Up With Natural Selection!

  "Brave new world, that hath such critters in it," I muttered.

  * * *

  Eventually we reached our destination, which turned out to be just as hallucinogenic as everything else we'd run into since we'd come through the elevator-that-wasn't. I'd been expecting something that more or less belonged on a continental shelf. A coral castle, maybe.

  Instead, what we came upon looked for all the world like a gigantic tree rising from the ocean floor. Complete with what looked like leaves, gently undulating in the current.

  Thankfully, I didn't recognize the tree. A known and definable species would have been a bit much. No, oak trees can't live underwater, any more than humans can. Neither can maples or pines or eucalyptus. Not even mangroves can live completely submerged, two hundred meters below the surface. Even as big as the tree was, its topmost branches were not even close to reaching the sky above—which couldn't really be seen anyway. There wasn't much light filtering down this far.

  There was a lot more light down here than there should have been, though, I now realized. But in light of everything else—pun intended—that seemed a minor mystery. Positively picayune, in fact.

  The tree did have a vague resemblance to a New Zealand kauri, but that was mostly because of the its overall structure—its Bauplan, if you will—rather than any of the specific details. Mostly, a matter of a very massive trunk with no branches until the sudden profusion near the crown.

  As we drew closer, I could see that there was some sort of structure perched in the crown of the quasi-tree. I would have sworn it looked like a tree fort built by kids.


  Which turned out to be exactly what it was, allowing for a loose definition of "kids"—and allowing, of course, for a drastic adjustment in size. The dimensions of the thing were closer to Notre Dame than anything human children would or could have constructed. Nor would human children have used such massive timbers for the purpose. They looked like salvage from various shipwrecks. Masts, planking, that sort of thing.

  And if you're wondering what shipwrecks would be doing in the Cretaceous, so was I. But it seemed a minor enough problem, under the circumstances.

  There was a huge sign of some sort attached to the tree just underneath the fort. Once we got close enough, I could read the inscription.

  TREEFORT OF THE A-TEAM

  NO GIRLS ALLC

  I was pretty sure the final "C" was actually an "O." But that section of the sign was absent. At a rough estimate, the missing portion pretty well matched York's bite radius.

  She swam through the opening of the treefort. Shipwreck timbers, as I'd guessed, now that I was close enough to examine the details of the treefort's construction. One of planks even had a ship's name painted on it, in lettering that had faded from the effects of the water but could still be read well enough.

  Der fliegende Holländer

  Well, that figured.

  Inside, the treefort turned out to have a cavernous central area. About the size of Grand Central Station in Manhattan. Perched on a wide ledge to one side were Dave Pettibone and Lavanya Vijayaraghavan. Next to the two tylosaurs on the ledge or swimming nearby were several creatures we hadn't encountered yet, although I recognized all but one of them.

  Two of the beasties on the ledge itself were giant sea turtles, of the genus Archelon. They didn't look too much different from the modern leatherback turtles to whom they're related, other than being much larger. The bigger of the two was perhaps four meters long. Like all of the sea creatures we'd encountered so far except for Cthulhu himself and the eurypterid Gardner Flowers, they belonged to the late Cretaceous.

  Perched to the other side of the two mosasaurs was a trio of octopods. Tentatively, I assigned them to the genus Paleooctopus, although that was just a wild guess on my part motivated by the desperate desire to place some sort of order on our bizarre situation. The fossil record of soft-bodied cephalopods is risibly bad.

  Still, they bore a resemblance to what little we'd been able to determine about Cretaceous octopods. They had roughly the same shape, at any rate: a squat body with an indistinct head, a pair of noticeable fins, and eight short arms. It was hard to gauge their exact size, due to the blobby shape of the things while resting on a ledge, but I estimated their weight at several hundred kilos and their arm span somewhere between seven and ten meters. They were definitely larger than even a North Pacific Giant Octopus, the largest known species of octopus in the world Steven and I came from.

  For sure and certain, they were much larger than any Paleooctopus fossil ever found. That didn't mean much, though, since there are only a handful of such fossil specimens to begin with.

  Finally, swimming not far from the ledge, was the first and only true fish we'd encountered. A genuine teleost, the so-called "bony fish" that completely dominate the vertebrate sub-phylum, whether measured by species count or sheer biomass.

  This one I recognized as a Xiphactinus, one of the large marine predators of the Niobraran Sea in the late Cretaceous. Presumably a Xiphactinus audax, since that was the only known species, but who could really say?

  Ugly damned thing. Think of an oversized tarpon—five meters long instead of two—and add fangs.

  By the time I finished examining the new critters, Rebecca had swum over to the ledge and come to rest upon it.

  "Get off," she said tersely. "And be quick about it."

  We hastened to comply.

  "Take off the fucking harness, too. Where the hell is Flowers when you want the damn spider?"

  As Steven and I complied with this second command—quickly, quickly; a grouchy mosasaur is really not something you want to irritate any further—I glanced back at the opening to the treefort. The last I'd seen of the eurypterid and his yellow submarine, they'd been not far behind us. He should have arrived by now.

  That was a disgruntled thought on my part, not an idle one. Far better the damn spider should be undoing York's harness instead of me and Speairs. That really was a bite radius you didn't want to think about.

  Just as we got the harness off, Matthew Asnip swam through the entrance and approached the ledge. "Gardner will be a bit late. He got detained by a pressing matter. He says we should start the meeting without him."

  The three tylosaurs stared at him. Then, at each other. Then—this was so quick I wasn't sure I'd even spotted it—the one named Pettibone gave a quick glance at the turtles and the octopods.

  "Well, okay," he said. "If that's what Gardner wants. He's the boss. But . . ."

  Now the tylosaur gave me and Speairs a quick glance. "Seems a bit—"

  "Shut up," growled Rebecca, wriggling her huge body as if she were trying to get rid of annoying itches left from the harness. Given the Bauplan, of course, mosasaurs are not well designed to scratch itches.

  No, I was not tempted to ask her if she wanted my help.

  "You said it yourself," she added. "Gardner's the boss."

  While they'd been talking, Asnip had been digging in his pouch. Quicker than you'd think, he had the tablet out and the scribe in his mouth. He didn't bring out the eyeglasses, though. Perhaps his vision was better underwater.

  "Minutes from the last meeting of the A-Team, gathered in full and formal assembly," he said. Underwater or not, the words still came out half-mumbled due to the scribe in his mouth.

  The other critters in the treefort had moved closer, in the meantime.

  "Move to dispense with reading of the minutes," said one of the giant turtles, sounding bored.

  "Second the motion," said one of the octopods. Don't ask me where the voice came from, because I have no idea. Whatever it had in the way of a mouth—presumably the same beak-like thing a modern octopus had—was hidden within the folds of the arms. They were webbed at the base, even more so than with late Cenozoic octopods.

  There was a moment's silence. Rebecca glared at one of the turtles.

  "Oh, sorry," it said. "I forgot I was supposed to be the chair in Flowers' absence. Call for a vote. All in favor of dispensing with a reading of the minutes."

  It had one of its own front flippers raised before it finished the sentence. So did the three mosasaurs, Asnip the plesiosaur, and the other turtle. For their part, the three octopods raised an arm.

  The turtle-chairman (chairwoman? who knows? I'm an expert on fish, dammit, not giant seagoing time-displaced reptiles and even herpetologists can't tell a male from a female turtle that easily) looked at the Xiphactinus, which had swum still closer. It raised one of its front fins.

  By then, fortunately, Steven and I were accustomed to the drill. Before the turtle chairman could look at us, we had our hands raised.

  "Aye. Aye."

  "I vote 'aye' as well," said the turtle. "That makes it unanimous. Motion to dispense with a reading of the minutes of the previous meeting passes."

  It was nice to see that something was still obedient to the laws of nature. By now, I was wondering when and if any of the marine reptiles around us were going to start suffocating. Unlike the teleost and the octopods, they needed to breathe air just like we humans did—and none of them had our breathing apparatus or the equivalent.

  Yes, yes, I know it seems like a minor conundrum among so many larger ones. Still, it was puzzling.

  The plesiosaur scratched the result on the tablet. "Next item on the agenda is a report on our negotiations with various and sundry flying Dutchmen for timbers from their ships to be used to expand the treefort."

  One of the octopods moved forward a little.

  "No real progress, I'm afraid. Wagner's fellow refuses to part with any more of his timbers unless we agree
to take his girlfriend Senta also. He says he can't stand her nagging any more. He'll toss into the deal a provision that we can eat her."

  Rebecca York made a derisive noise. "She's Norwegian. Been eating herring all her life. I like a gamy flavor as much any voracious marine predator, but that's over the top."

  "Sure is," grunted Lavanya. "I hate herring. Even herring-flavored meat. Really really hate it."

  "What I figured," said the octopod. "I told him it was either a straight up trade—one timber for one year off his curse, and no girlfriends involved—or the deal was off."

  Asnip scratched a note. "What about—"