Harry Turtledove

by The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century

  The little spinning black hands of the dials slowed down and stopped. The operator looked at his ground-level gauge and turned the handwheel that raised the chamber so it shouldn’t materialize underground. Then he pressed another button, and the door slid open.

  No matter how often I do it, I get a frightful thrill out of stepping into a bygone era. The operator had raised the chamber a foot above the ground level, so I jumped down, my gun ready. The others came after.

  “Right-ho,” I said to the chamber wallah, and he closed the door. The chamber disappeared, and we looked around. There weren’t any dinosaur in sight, nothing but lizards.

  In this period, the chamber materializes on top of a rocky rise, from which you can see in all directions as far as the haze will let you. To the west, you see the arm of the Kansas Sea that reaches across Missouri and the big swamp around the bayhead where the sauropods live.

  To the north is a low range that the Raja named the Janpur Hills, after the Indian kingdom his forebears once ruled. To the east, the land slopes up to a plateau, good for ceratopsians, while to the south is flat country with more sauropod swamps and lots of ornithopod: duckbill and iguanodont.

  The finest thing about the Cretaceous is the climate: balmy like the South Sea Islands, but not so muggy as most Jurassic climates. It was spring, with dwarf magnolias in bloom all over.

  A thing about this landscape is that it combines a fairly high rainfall with an open type of vegetation cover. That is, the grasses hadn’t yet evolved to the point of forming solid carpets over all the open ground. So the ground is thick with laurel, sassafras, and other shrubs, with bare earth between. There are big thickets of palmettos and ferns. The trees round the hill are mostly cycads, standing singly and in copses. You’d call ’em palms. Down towards the Kansas Sea are more cycads and willows, while the uplands are covered with screw pine and ginkgoes.

  Now, I’m no bloody poet—the Raja writes the stuff, not me—but I can appreciate a beautiful scene. One of the helpers had come through the machine with two of the jacks and was pegging them out, and I was looking through the haze and sniffing the air, when a gun went off behind me—bang! bang!

  I whirled round, and there was Courtney James with his .500, and an ornithomime legging it for cover fifty yards away. The ornithomimes are medium-sized running dinosaurs, slender things with long necks and legs, like a cross between a lizard and an ostrich. This kind is about seven feet tall and weighs as much as a man. The beggar had wandered out of the nearest copse, and James gave him both barrels. Missed.

  I was upset, as trigger-happy sahibs are as much a menace to their party as theropods. I yelled: “Damn it, you idiot! I thought you weren’t to shoot without a word from me?”

  “And who the hell are you to tell me when I’ll shoot my own gun?” he said.

  We had a rare old row until Holtzinger and the Raja got us calmed down. I explained:

  “Look here, Mr. James, I’ve got reasons. If you shoot off all your ammunition before the trip’s over, your gun won’t be available in a pinch, as it’s the only one of its caliber. If you empty both barrels at an unimportant target, what would happen if a big theropod charged before you could reload? Finally, it’s not sporting to shoot everything in sight, just to hear the gun go off. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he said.

  The rest of the party came through the machine and we pitched our camp a safe distance from the materializing place. Our first task was to get fresh meat. For a twenty-one-day safari like this, we calculate our food requirements closely, so we can make out on tinned stuff and concentrates if we must, but we count on killing at least one piece of meat. When that’s butchered, we go off on a short tour, stopping at four or five camping places to hunt and arriving back at base a few days before the chamber is due to appear.

  Holtzinger, as I said, wanted a ceratopsian head, any kind. James insisted on just one head: a tyrannosaur. Then everybody’d think he’d shot the most dangerous game of all time.

  Fact is, the tyrannosaur’s overrated. He’s more a carrion eater than an active predator, though he’ll snap you up if he gets the chance. He’s less dangerous than some of the other therapods—the flesh eaters, you know—such as the smaller Gorgosaurus from the period we were in. But everybody’s read about the tyrant lizard, and he does have the biggest head of the theropods.

  The one in our period isn’t the rex, which is later and a bit bigger and more specialized. It’s the trionyches, with the forelimbs not quite so reduced, though they’re still too small for anything but picking the brute’s teeth after a meal.

  ———

  When camp was pitched, we still had the afternoon. So the Raja and I took our sahibs on their first hunt. We had a map of the local terrain from previous trips.

  The Raja and I have worked out a system for dinosaur hunting. We split into two groups of two men each and walk parallel from twenty to forty yards apart. Each group has a sahib in front and a guide following, telling him where to go. We tell the sahibs we put them in front so they shall have the first shot. Well, that’s true, but another reason is they’re always tripping and falling with their guns cocked, and if the guide were in front he’d get shot.

  The reason for two groups is that if a dinosaur starts for one, the other gets a good heart shot from the side.

  As we walked, there was the usual rustle of lizards scuttling out of the way: little fellows, quick as a flash and colored like all the jewels in Tiffany’s, and big gray ones that hiss at you as they plod off. There were tortoises and a few little snakes. Birds with beaks full of teeth flapped off squawking. And always there was that marvelous mild Cretaceous air. Makes a chap want to take his clothes off and dance with vine leaves in his hair, if you know what I mean.

  Our sahibs soon found that Mesozoic country is cut up into millions of nullahs—gullies, you’d say. Walking is one long scramble, up and down, up and down.

  We’d been scrambling for an hour, and the sahibs were soaked with sweat and had their tongues hanging out, when the Raja whistled. He’d spotted a group of bonehead feeding on cycad shoots.

  These are the troödonts, small ornithopods about the size of men with a bulge on top of their heads that makes them look almost intelligent. Means nothing, because the bulge is solid bone. The males butt each other with these heads in fighting over the females.

  These chaps would drop down on all fours, munch up a shoot, then stand up and look around. They’re warier than most dinosaur, because they’re the favorite food of the big theropods.

  People sometimes assume that because dinosaur are so stupid, their senses must be dim, too. But it’s not so. Some, like the sauropods, are pretty dim-sensed, but most have good smell and eyesight and fair hearing. Their weakness is that having no minds, they have no memories. Hence, out of sight, out of mind. When a big theropod comes slavering after you, your best defense is to hide in a nullah or behind a bush, and if he can neither see you nor smell you he’ll just wander off.

  We skulked up behind a patch of palmetto downwind from the bonehead. I whispered to James:

  “You’ve had a shot already today. Hold your fire until Holtzinger shoots, and then shoot only if he misses or if the beast is getting away wounded.”

  “Uh-huh,” said James.

  We separated, he with the Raja and Holtzinger with me. This got to be our regular arrangement. James and I got on each other’s nerves, but the Raja’s a friendly, sentimental sort of bloke nobody can help liking.

  We crawled round the palmetto patch on opposite sides, and Holtzinger got up to shoot. You daren’t shoot a heavy-caliber rifle prone. There’s not enough give, and the kick can break your shoulder.

  Holtzinger sighted round the last few fronds of palmetto. I saw his barrel wobbling and waving. Then he lowered his gun and tucked it under his arm to wipe his glasses.

  Off went James’s gun, both barrels again.

  The biggest bonehead went down, rolling and thrashing.
The others ran away on their hind-legs in great leaps, their heads jerking and their tails sticking up behind.

  “Put your gun on safety,” I said to Holtzinger, who’d started forward. By the time we got to the bonehead, James was standing over it, breaking open his gun and blowing out the barrels. He looked as smug as if he’d come into another million and was asking the Raja to take his picture with his foot on the game.

  I said: “I thought you were to give Holtzinger the first shot?”

  “Hell, I waited,” he said, “and he took so long I thought he must have gotten buck fever. If we stood around long enough, they’d see us or smell us.”

  There was something in what he said, but his way of saying it put my monkey up. I said: “If that sort of thing happens once more, we’ll leave you in camp the next time we go out.”

  “Now, gentlemen,” said the Raja. “After all, Reggie, these aren’t experienced hunters.”

  “What now?” said Holtzinger. “Haul him back ourselves or send out the men?”

  “We’ll sling him under the pole,” I said. “He weighs under two hundred.”

  The pole was a telescoping aluminum carrying pole I had in my pack, with padded yokes on the ends. I brought it because, in such eras, you can’t count on finding saplings strong enough for proper poles on the spot.

  The Raja and I cleaned our bonehead to lighten him and tied him to the pole. The flies began to light on the offal by thousands. Scientists say they’re not true flies in the modern sense, but they look and act like flies. There’s one huge four-winged carrion fly that flies with a distinctive deep thrumming note.

  The rest of the afternoon we sweated under that pole, taking turn about. The lizards scuttled out of the way, and the flies buzzed round the carcass.

  We got to camp just before sunset, feeling as if we could eat the whole bonehead at one meal. The boys had the camp running smoothly, so we sat down for our tot of whiskey, feeling like lords of creation, while the cook broiled bonehead steaks.

  Holtzinger said: “Uh—if I kill a ceratopsian, how do we get his head back?”

  I explained: “If the ground permits, we lash it to the patent aluminum roller frame and sled it in.”

  “How much does a head like that weigh?” he asked.

  “Depends on the age and the species,” I told him. “The biggest weigh over a ton, but most run between five hundred and a thousand pounds.”

  “And all the ground’s rough like it was today?”

  “Most of it,” I said. “You see, it’s the combination of the open vegetation cover and the moderately high rainfall. Erosion is frightfully rapid.”

  “And who hauls the head on its little sled?”

  “Everybody with a hand,” I said. “A big head would need every ounce of muscle in this party. On such a job there’s no place for side.”

  “Oh,” said Holtzinger. I could see he was wondering whether a ceratopsian head would be worth the effort.

  The next couple of days we trekked round the neighborhood. Nothing worth shooting; only a herd of ornithomimes, which went bounding off like a lot of ballet dancers. Otherwise there were only the usual lizards and pterosaurs and birds and insects. There’s a big lace-winged fly that bites dinosaurs, so, as you can imagine, its beak makes nothing of a human skin. One made Holtzinger leap and dance like a Red Indian when it bit him through his shirt. James joshed him about it, saying:

  “What’s all the fuss over one little bug?”

  The second night, during the Raja’s watch, James gave a yell that brought us all out of our tents with rifles. All that had happened was that a dinosaur tick had crawled in with him and started drilling under his armpit. Since it’s as big as your thumb even when it hasn’t fed, he was understandably startled. Luckily he got it before it had taken its pint of blood. He’d pulled Holtzinger’s leg pretty hard about the fly bite, so now Holtzinger repeated the words:

  “What’s all the fuss over one little bug, buddy?”

  James squashed the tick underfoot with a grunt, not much liking to be hoist by his own what-d’you-call-it.

  ———

  We packed up and started on our circuit. We meant to take the sahibs first to the sauropod swamp, more to see the wildlife than to collect anything.

  From where the transition chamber materializes, the sauropod swamp looks like a couple of hours’ walk, but it’s really an all-day scramble. The first part is easy, as it’s downhill and the brush isn’t heavy. Then, as you get near the swamp, the cycads and willows grow so thickly that you have to worm your way among them.

  I led the party to a sandy ridge on the border of the swamp, as it was pretty bare of vegetation and afforded a fine view. When we got to the ridge, the sun was about to go down. A couple of crocs slipped off into the water. The sahibs were so tired that they flopped down in the sand as if dead.

  The haze is thick round the swamp, so the sun was deep red and weirdly distorted by the atmospheric layers. There was a high layer of clouds reflecting the red and gold of the sun, too, so altogether it was something for the Raja to write one of his poems about. A few little pterosaur were wheeling overhead like bats.

  Beauregard Black got a fire going. We’d started on our steaks, and that pagoda-shaped sun was just slipping below the horizon, and something back in the trees was making a noise like a rusty hinge, when a sauropod breathed out in the water. They’re the really big ones, you know. If Mother Earth were to sigh over the misdeeds of her children, it would sound like that.

  The sahibs jumped up, shouting: “Where is he? Where is he?”

  I said: “That black spot in the water, just to the left of that point.”

  They yammered while the sauropod filled its lungs and disappeared. “Is that all?” said James. “Won’t we see any more of him?”

  Holtzinger said: “I read that they never come out of the water because they’re too heavy to walk.”

  “No,” I explained. “They can walk perfectly well and often do, for egg-laying and moving from one swamp to another. But most of the time they spend in the water, like hippopotamus. They eat eight hundred pounds of soft swamp plants a day, all through those little heads. So they wander about the bottoms of lakes and swamps, chomping away, and stick their heads up to breathe every quarter-hour or so. It’s getting dark, so this fellow will soon come out and lie down in the shallows to sleep.”

  “Can we shoot one?” demanded James.

  “I wouldn’t,” said I.

  “Why not?”

  I said: “There’s no point in it, and it’s not sporting. First, they’re almost invulnerable. They’re even harder to hit in the brain than other dinosaurs because of the way they sway their heads about on those long necks. Their hearts are too deeply buried to reach unless you’re awfully lucky. Then, if you kill one in the water, he sinks and can’t be recovered. If you kill one on land, the only trophy is that little head. You can’t bring the whole beast back because he weighs thirty tons or more, and we’ve got no use for thirty tons of meat.”

  Holtzinger said: “That museum in New York got one.”

  “Yes,” said I. “The American Museum of Natural History sent a party of forty-eight to the Early Cretaceous with a fifty-caliber machine gun. They killed a sauropod and spent two solid months skinning it and hacking the carcass apart and dragging it to the time machine. I know the chap in charge of that project, and he still has nightmares in which he smells decomposing dinosaur. They had to kill a dozen big theropods attracted by the stench, so they had them lying around and rotting, too. And the theropods ate three men of the party despite the big gun.”

  Next morning, we were finishing breakfast when one of the helpers said: “Look, Mr. Rivers, up there!”

  He pointed along the shoreline. There were six big crested duckbill, feeding in the shallows. They were the kind called Parasaurolophus, with a long spike sticking out the back of their heads and a web of skin connecting this with the back of their necks.

  “Keep your voice
s down!” I said. The duckbill, like the other ornithopods, are wary beasts because they have neither armor nor weapons. They feed on the margins of lakes and swamps, and when a gorgosaur rushes out of the trees they plunge into deep water and swim off. Then when Phobosuchus, the supercrocodile, goes for them in the water, they flee to the land. A hectic sort of life, what?

  Holtzinger said: “Uh—Reggie! I’ve been thinking over what you said about ceratopsian heads. If I could get one of those yonder, I’d be satisfied. It would look big enough in my house, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’m sure of it, old boy,” I said. “Now look here. We could detour to come out on the shore near here, but we should have to plow through half a mile of muck and brush, and they’d hear us coming. Or we can creep up to the north end of this sandpit, from which it’s three or four hundred yards—a long shot but not impossible. Think you could do it?”

  “Hm,” said Holtzinger. “With my scope sight and a sitting position—okay, I’ll try it.”

  “You stay here, Court,” I said to James. “This is Augie’s head, and I don’t want any argument over your having fired first.”

  James grunted while Holtzinger clamped his scope to his rifle. We crouched our way up the spit, keeping the sand ridge between us and the duckbill. When we got to the end where there was no more cover, we crept along on hands and knees, moving slowly. If you move slowly enough, directly toward or away from a dinosaur, it probably won’t notice you.

  The duckbill continued to grub about on all fours, every few seconds rising to look round. Holtzinger eased himself into the sitting position, cocked his piece, and aimed through his scope. And then—