by Jack Dann
Until morning, she decided, the best thing to do was rest. She intended to be as clearheaded as she could when day came. "No more screwups," she said firmly, getting out her bedroll. She set the hatchling down beside it. "If you want to go, go. Otherwise, I'll see you in the morning."
She thought she would be too keyed-up to sleep, but the next thing she knew, the sun was blasting full in her face. "East," she said: progress. She looked around for the baby hadrosaur. It was right where she'd left it, still sleeping, with its tail curled over its eyes.
"Wish I could do that," she said, and this time her chuckle was only one of honest amusement. The foolish little creature was good for her morale, and she needed all the help she could get. She picked up the hatchling—it let out a hiss at being disturbed, but quickly calmed—and started off.
Knowing which way she should go did not make the trip easy. Paula squelched into marshes (and discovered the hard way that there were leeches in the Cretaceous), scrambled around tangles of undergrowth too thick to walk through. A couple of times the leaves overhead hid the sun altogether and kept her from gauging shadows. Once she emerged to discover she was going east instead of north. Shaking her head, she turned left.
Her cheer when she saw the river frightened the baby hadrosaur, which curled its tail round her wrist, painfully tight. She felt like one of Xenophon's men spying the Black Sea.
She cautiously approached the water and drank, always keeping one eye—and part of the other—peeled for trouble. Crocodiles and worse things infested Cretaceous rivers.
She peered upstream and down. As she had feared, the two directions looked equally unfamiliar. She set the baby hadrosaur down, fed it a leaf. "You don't know which way to go either, do you?" she said accusingly.
She stopped and gave it another look, a good long one. "Or do you?" The hadrosaurs of the herd always came back to the same nesting ground to breed. Were they biologically programmed to do so, as salmon always returned to the same stream or birds to the same island?
Nobody knew. Even after years of time travel, there was so much nobody knew about dinosaurs. If Paula had some reason to think the hatchling could find its way home, she would feel vastly better about picking a direction. As things stood, choosing which way to go was like playing Russian roulette with half the chambers loaded.
Her mouth tightened. Maybe she could find out. She set the baby hadrosaur down. It didn't go anywhere at all. It stood there looking at her. "I wish you didn't think I was your mama," she told it.
She picked it up again while she thought. After a while, she got out several feet of light cord and tied a cord of harness around the hatchling's forelimbs and back. She tied the other end of the cord to a stout chunk of wood that she anchored firmly in the ground.
Then she went back into the forest, making sure she stayed downwind so the hadrosaur could neither see nor smell her. The tape she was looking for was labeled Nesting Ground—I. She put on her headphones and skipped through the tape until she found the section she needed.
She played the snorting call at top volume. The baby hadrosaur's head came up. It started confidently upstream—toward its nest, she hoped, for that was what the call meant. The harness brought the hatchling up short. It did not understand about ropes, and kept marching in place at the end of its tether.
When Paula showed herself again, the hadrosaur turned toward her. She picked it up, still in its harness, and carried it and the anchoring chunk of wood a couple of hundred meters upstream. She put it down there, went back into the woods, and repeated the experiment. The direction the baby went the first time, she reasoned, might well have been chosen randomly.
It started upstream again.
She went another couple of hundred meters and tried it again, with identical results. The baby hadrosaur did the same thing on the next three repetitions. Paula threw her hands in the air. She untied the beast. "All right, I'm convinced. Upstream it is."
After less than an hour, she began encountering hadrosaurs browsing near the river. She did a silly jig when she first came across country she recognized, and was amazed to discover how beautiful a stretch of two-meter mud nests could be. From the nesting ground, she knew exactly how to return to the time probe.
For the last time, she put down the baby hadrosaur. She played the return-to-the-nest call, softly now so as not to disturb other dinosaurs. As it had all along, the hatchling knew where it was going. It had no trouble finding its own nest among the hundreds around it. Climbing in was harder, but the little dinosaur managed.
Paula never doubted it would. Though she would never know for sure, she was irrationally certain it would escape every Cretaceous predator and grow up big and fat and stupid, so that in the long run the beast's sad confusion about its relationship to her would not matter at all.
As she left the nesting ground, she felt a trifle sad just the same. After all, she had never been a mother before.
Getting Away
by
Steven Utlev
Dreams of flying are perhaps the most universal of dreams. Here we learn that some of those dreams may go way back . . .
Steven Utley's fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Universe, Galaxy, Amazing, Vertex, Stellar, Shayol, and elsewhere. He is the coeditor, with Geo. W. Proctor; of the anthology Lone Star Universe, the first—and possibly the only—anthology of science fiction stories by Texans. Born in Smyrna, Tennessee, Utley now lives in Austin, Texas.
* * *
There were soft-bodied creatures in endless variety and profusion on the bottom, and tentacled shellfish, odd orange scorpions, trilobites, grotesque wrigglers that looked like armored centipedes, an occasional fish, all grim mouth and dull eyes peering out of bone-rimmed sockets. There were clumps of pallid plants with segmented stems, rising like columns from the mud to support the rippling, translucent ceiling of the pond. Beyond the ceiling was a fuzzy-edged sun.
Devonian dreams. I woke up and went under again, and this time there were blue glacial cliffs on the horizon. Much closer, there was the stench of tar and decaying fish. The setting sun made molten silver of the rain water standing on the surfaces of the tar pools. Irregular lumps lay in some of the pools. Here and there could be seen a curved tusk; a not unrecognizably decomposed forepaw with long, hooked claws, a partially consumed hump of a half-submerged bison. Condors and jackals were everywhere, and I was with them.
Pleistocene images. I woke up and got out of bed. It was my day to fix breakfast.
This is my one real luxury, you understand—this journal, these precious sheets of paper. I indulged myself last week and paid through the nose for a hardbound book of blank pages. Two hundred sheets of paper, four hundred sides on which to record my every vagrant thought. Paper for which I have no nobler purpose in mind than Dear Diarying.
Welcome to page 2 of The Book of Bruce Holt, who'll probably be dead before he gets close to page 400.
"Why always dinosaurs and things like that?" asks Carol, the woman with whom I have been living. "And why always poems about 'the moment of extinction,' as you put it here?"
I am munching my toast and sipping my tepid soyva. Carol is leaning against the kitchenette's disposal unit, fanning herself with the carbon slate I use for first drafts and notes.
"That's what I see," I tell her. "Dinosaurs and things like that. That's what comes to me."
"It's all so damned depressing. You're getting that way in your stories, too."
"It's a natural reaction against the pap I write for television."
"That pap keeps food on the table."
I make a short, sharp chuckling noise—I am not so old that I do not remember real bread, real coffee—and force down the last of my breakfast, then fish in my shirt pocket for a cigarette. That last remark of Carol's has gotten to me, since it's true. My stories are fitful sellers. Too depressing for most people. Television keeps me going, and television wants optimism. Or, at the very least, sheer escapism. Old Jack
Woodford's formula for commercial fiction is a timeless one. Boy Meets Girl, Girl Gets Boy Into Pickle, Boy Gets Pickle Into Girl.
"I'm going downtown today," I say after a while. "Do you want me to pick up anything for you?"
Carol shakes her head slowly. "I can't think of anything. I may try to get into the commissary while you're out. I could make dinner tonight."
"It's my day to cook."
"It'll give me something to do."
"Finished reading your book?"
She uses her fingernail to trace a line across the bottom of the carbon slate. "I don't care for it much. Camus depresses me the same way you do."
"Always nice to hear that I've made it into Camus' league." I take my first long puff on the cigarette and wonder what in hell they've begun using to cut the tobacco. "Come on, Carol, what would you prefer that I wrote poems about? Babbling brooks and blue skies? None left, in the event it's escaped your notice."
"Don't be nasty, Bruce. And there aren't any dinosaurs left, either, so touché to you."
I let the matter drop, because the power is suddenly uncoiling in the back of my skull, and I'm sliding away from her, into the first available mind: some woman named Sharon Kraft, who lives in the heart of the Nashville metroplex, in an apartment even smaller than ours. It's extremely cold in Sharon Kraft's room, and the single dirty window is frosted over on the outside. I, sweltering in August heat, have gone to her at the height of some recent winter. I didn't know Sharon Kraft before this moment, didn't know of her, and all I get from her during the four or five seconds that I'm in her is the usual stuff, flashes about food and money. Couched in leaden anxiety.
Carol slaps the carbon slate down on the table before me. "Don't do that when I'm talking to you!"
I snap out of it, rescue the slate from the toast crumbs, mutter an apology.
"You're always retreating from me like that!" Carol goes on, her voice rising up the scale. "That's all you ever use it for, isn't it? Things get touchy, and you go flying away into your little world for the duration."
I am trying not to let her irritation infect me. It's too hot for arguments. I offer her a drag off my cigarette. She shakes her head vehemently.
"Look," I say, forcing myself to speak calmly, soothingly, "I didn't ask for it. It just happened. I'm stuck with it, Carol."
"Stuck with it! You make it sound like a clubfoot!"
"Carol, honey, I have to get along with it the best I can."
"Then why don't you use it to make things better for us?"
"What do you want me to do? Go back and find out where Captain Kidd buried his loot?"
"I don't care what you do, but do something."
Carol has begun pacing back and forth in the kitchenette, three steps that way, three steps back. When she realizes that I'm not going to say another word, that I have no intention of scrapping with her, she stalks out of the kitchenette and wanders in a loose circle around the apartment's main room, touching the spines of my little library of tattered paper-bounds, glaring at the chipped plastic chessmen (still locked in last week's Mexican stand-off). And I sit trying to think of something to say that might restore me to her good graces.
But the rent is due next week, and my check from the studio is late, and she's bored and feels useless because she can't find a job, and I am convenient to blame, because I have the power. I have the extra Something that most people don't have. I have the gift. And it isn't doing us any good. And so . . .
And so I give up and carefully snuff out the cigarette in a clay ashtray, then deposit the tobacco from the butt in a Mason jar half-filled with previous savings. The best I can do is stay out of Carol's way for a while.
Still, I can't help being a little annoyed. We've been through this before, and you'd think that by now Carol would have accepted my limitations. How many times do I have to tell her that I can't make the extra Something do anything?
It comes. It goes. I have no control over it, none at all. Time snatches me out of my own head and takes me where it will. I can never say where I'm liable to end up, and, once there, I can't do anything except observe the goings-on through their eyes, ears and/or other sensory organs of whatever creature makes itself available to me. Watching trilobites through the eyes of (I presume) lungfish is not going to make me rich.
Oh, but I tried. I did try.
When I first started having these chronopathic flashbacks, I dismissed them as nightmares and walking dreams. Then came the doubts about my own sanity, the sessions with a psychiatrist, the numbing terror of madness. It wasn't until Dr. D.M. Mayes, of the University of Texas right here in Austin, issued his report that the nature of my affliction became obvious. Temporal dislodgement. Chronopathy. How much better I felt once I knew the name of my disease. How nice to hear that there were dozens like me.
The last I heard, they still didn't understand just how the human mind could travel through time. If physicists were baffled by the mechanics of telepathy, clairvoyance and telekinesis, they were absolutely infuriated by chronopathy, which brazenly refuted much that they held dear about the nature of Time and Space. But I have my own theory to explain why.
I think it was triggered by despair. Maybe chronopathy has always been latent in people, manifesting itself on occasion and giving rise to conjecture about ghosts and reincarnation. But the manifestations have become more widespread during the last quarter of this century. And I think it's due to an overwhelming sense of hopeless oppression in a worsening environment. People lost all faith in the future. Unhappy in the present, they longed for the past, ached for it, because it always looked rosier, simpler, easier.
Thus were the shackles within the human psyche struck off.
So, anyway, at age thirty-eight, I turned out to be chronopathic. Learning to live with it wasn't easy, but I've managed. I guess.
Once, I even sought out Mayes and offered my services. But he had already assembled a team of chronopaths, men and women whose abilities were finely honed, who had all of the necessary paleo-, archeo-, and anthropological schooling to complement their talents. I was untrained. I had no control over my power.
I was, in short, a semigifted amateur, a layman, a hack writer and minimally successful poet to boot.
We appreciate your thinking of us in this regard, Mr. Holt, but . . .
Not suitable for present needs. Terrific. The story of my life.
Last night, I watched from the crowd as Louis XVI went under the blade. You should have seen the expression on his face, Dear Diary. He really did not believe that we'd go through with it. Right up to the moment that the executioner dropped the blade, he refused to accept the reality of the situation, and then, just as the blade began to fall, I saw him crane his head up as far as it would go. I would have sworn that I saw his lips form the words, Mon Dieu.
Ah well. Where did I leave off in the continuing saga of Bruce and Carol?
The other day, while I was waiting for her to get over her mad, I put my ancient Olympia portable on the table and got to work on the latest installment of my TV soap opera. I was halfway down the page when Carol bumped into something and made a lot of unnecessary noise on her way to the John. She was, I'm certain, deliberately trying to provoke me. But I settled back in my chair, closed my eyes and felt myself leaving again.
When I got there, the sky was overcast, and warm rain was falling. The low clouds had a faint greenish tinge. I crouched in a snug hole on the face of a cliff that dropped straight down into the sea. My niche stank of rotting fish and excrement, but the stench did not cut too sharply. My host's sense of smell seemed atrophied. However, even in this murk, its vision was exceptional—the only other time I had ever experienced such incredible clarity of vision was the time I rode along with what must have been one of the very last eagles.
The rain ceased by and by. My host—no, I—stirred and stretched pathetic little hindlegs to restore circulation, unfurled wings that were membranous and covered with a fine down. The wings were braced by an
enormously elongated digit. I now knew what, when and probably where I was.
Pterosaur, Cretaceous Period. By the inland sea of Kansas, perhaps.
I waited until the updraft from the sea felt right, and then I gently kicked away from the face of the cliff, dipped, rose and was airborne.
I had the sky all to myself.
Eventually, my host brought us lower and skimmed along above the waves, watchful of silver shadows just below the surface. My long, toothless beak dipped in suddenly and scooped up a thrashing fish that went down my gullet whole.
Then my host climbed, still the only creature in the sky. The sun was starting to slide below the horizon. I could not escape the feeling that this might indeed be the last evening of all, that I had happened upon the very last of the dragons. I had come to the Mesozoic Era many times before, I had been Gorgosaurus and Plateosaurus, I knew my way around in the Age of Dinosaurs. But something was different now. The land, sea and sky looked as they had always looked on my previous visits to Late Cretaceous times, my host flew on as though nothing were strange, but I knew, I knew, that aerial reconnaissance of the land to the east would reveal it to be empty of giants. There was only my host, gliding silently toward what I had, in a poem, termed "the moment of extinction." It seemed an invasion of privacy to remain and witness this final pterodactyl's fall, so I pulled away and got on with my typing.
I had a severe headache when I was finished at the typewriter. Carol had subsided to the point where she could collapse on the sofa-bed with The Stranger. But she was flipping the pages angrily. She had noticed my unoccupied meat.
I went over to her and got very tender and caressing and so forth, and we were back on more or less friendly terms after about thirty minutes. We realized that we hadn't had our last falling-out about the extra Something, but we were all cuddly and content for the time being, the storm had passed, we could look forward to a little peace before the subject again reared its head.
