Dinosaurs!

by Jack Dann

  "Somewhere around four. I don't want you to have to walk back for tea."

  "O.K.-here's hoping!"

  The machine disappeared in a cloud of dust, leaving two very thoughtful geologists standing by the roadside. Then Barton shrugged his shoulders.

  "The harder we work," he said, "the quicker the time will go. Come along!"

  The end of the trench, where Barton was working with the power drill, was now more than a hundred yards from the main excavation. Davis was putting the final touches to the last prints to be uncovered. They were now very deep and widely spaced, and looking along them, one could see quite clearly where the great reptile had changed its course and started, first to run, and then to hop like an enormous kangaroo. Barton wondered what it must have felt like to see such a creature bearing down upon one with the speed of an express; then he realized that if their guess was true this was exactly what they might soon be seeing.

  By mid-afternoon they had uncovered a record length of track. The ground had become softer, and Barton was roaring ahead so rapidly that he had almost forgotten his other preoccupations. He had left Davis yards behind, and both men were so busy that only the pangs of hunger reminded them when it was time to finish. Davis was the first to notice that it was later than they had expected, and he walked over to speak to his friend.

  It's nearly half-past four!" he said when the noise of the drill had died away. "The Chief's late—I'll be mad if he's had tea before collecting us."

  "Give him another half-hour," said Barton. "I can guess what's happened. They've blown a fuse or something and it's upset their schedule."

  Davis refused to be placated. "I'll be darned annoyed if we've got to walk back to camp again. Anyway, I'm going up the hill to see if there's any sign of him."

  He left Barton blasting his way through the soft rock, and climbed the low hill at the side of the old riverbed. From here one could see far down the valley, and the twin stacks of the Henderson-Barnes laboratory were clearly visible against the drab landscape. But there was no sign of the moving dust-cloud that would be following the jeep: the Professor had not yet started for home.

  Davis gave a snort of disgust. There was a two-mile walk ahead of them, after a particularly tiring day, and to make matters worse they'd now be late for tea. He decided not to wait any longer, and was already walking down the hill to rejoin Barton when something caught his eye and he stopped to look down the valley.

  Around the two stacks, which were all he could see of the laboratory, a curious haze not unlike a heat tremor was playing. They must be hot, he knew, but surely not that hot. He looked more carefully, and saw to his amazement that the haze covered a hemisphere that must be almost a quarter of a mile across.

  And, quite suddenly, it exploded. There was no light, no blinding flash; only a ripple that spread abruptly across the sky and then was gone. The haze had vanished—and so had the two great stacks of the power-house.

  Feeling as though his legs had turned suddenly to water, Davis slumped down upon the hilltop and stared open-mouthed along the valley. A sense of overwhelming disaster swept into his mind; as in a dream, he waited for the explosion to reach his ears.

  It was not impressive when it came; only a dull, long-drawn-out whoooooosh! that died away swiftly in the still air. Half unconsciously, Davis noticed that the chatter of the drill had also stopped; the explosion must have been louder than he thought for Barton to have heard it too.

  The silence was complete. Nothing moved anywhere as far as his eye could see in the whole of that empty, barren landscape. He waited until his strength returned; then, half running, he went unsteadily down the hill to rejoin his friend.

  Barton was half sitting in the trench with his head buried in his hands. He looked up as Davis approached; and although his features were obscured by dust and sand, the other was shocked at the expression in his eyes.

  "So you heard it too!" Davis said. "I think the whole lab's blown up. Come along, for heaven's sake!"

  "Heard what?" said Barton dully.

  Davis stared at him in amazement. Then he realized that Barton could not possibly have heard any sound while he was working with the drill. The sense of disaster deepened with a rush; he felt like a character in some Greek tragedy, helpless before an implacable doom.

  Barton rose to his feet. His face was working strangely, and Davis saw that he was on the verge of breakdown. Yet, when he spoke, his words were surprisingly calm.

  "What fools we were!" he said. "How Henderson must have laughed at us when we told him that he was trying to see into the past!"

  Mechanically, Davis moved to the trench and stared at the rock that was seeing the light of day for the first time in fifty million years. Without much emotion, now, he traced again the zigzag pattern he had first noticed a few hours before. It had sunk only a little way into the mud, as if when it was formed the jeep had been traveling at its utmost speed.

  No doubt it had been; for in one place the shallow tire marks had been completely obliterated by the monster's footprints. They were now very deep indeed, as if the great reptile was about to make the final leap upon its desperately fleeing prey.

  A Change in the Weather

  by

  Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

  Come to think of it, perhaps we should be glad that dinosaurs are extinct . . .

  * * *

  It looked like rain again, but Michael went for his walk anyway.

  The park was shiny and empty, nothing more than a cement square defined by four metal benches. Piles of rain-soaked garbage were slowly dissolving into the cement.

  Pterodactyls picked their way through the gutter, their legs lifting storklike as they daintily nipped at random pieces of refuse.

  Muttering, the old man shooed a pterodactyl from his favorite bench, which was still damp from the afternoon rain, sat down, and tried to read his newspaper. But at once his bench was surrounded by the scavengers: they half flapped their metallic-looking wings, tilted the heads at the ends of their snakelike necks to look at him with oily green eyes, uttered plaintive, begging little cries, and finally plucked at his clothes with their beaks, hoping to find crusts of bread or popcorn. At last, exasperated, he got suddenly to his feet— the pterodactyls skittering back away from him, croaking in alarm—and tried to scare them off by throwing his newspaper at them. They ate it, and looked to him hopefully for more. It began to rain, drizzling out of the gray sky.

  Disgustedly, he made his way across the park, being jostled and almost knocked over by a hustling herd of small two-legged dromaeosaurs who were headed for the hot dog concession on Sixteenth Street. The rain was soaking in through his clothes now, and in spite of the warmth of the evening he was beginning to get chilly. He hoped the weather wasn't going to turn nippy; heating oil was getting really expensive, and his social security check was late again. An ankylosaur stopped in front of him, grunting and slurping as it chewed up old coke bottles and beer cans from a cement trash barrel. He whacked it with his cane, impatiently, and it slowly moved out of his way, belching with a sound like a length of anchor chain being dropped through a hole.

  There were brontosaurs lumbering along Broadway, as usual taking up the center of the street, with more agile herds of honking, duckbilled hadrosaurs dodging in and out of the lanes between them, and an occasional carnosaur stumping along by the curb, shaking its great head back and forth and hissing to itself in the back of its throat. It used to be a person could get a bus here, and without even needing a transfer get within a block of the house, but now, with all the competition for road space, they ran slowly if they ran at all—another good example of how the world was going to hell. He dodged between a brachiosaur and a slow-moving stegosaurus, crossed Broadway, and turned down toward Avenue A.

  The triceratops were butting their heads together on Avenue A; they came together with a crash like locomotives colliding that boomed from the building fronts and rattled windows up and down the street. Nobody in the neig
hborhood would get much sleep tonight. Michael fought his way up the steps of his brownstone, crawling over the dimetrodons lounging on the stoop. Across the street, he could see the mailman trying to kick an iguanodon awake so that he could get past it into another brownstone's vestibule. No wonder his checks were late.

  Upstairs, his wife put his plate in front of him without a word, and he stopped only to take off his wet jacket before sitting down to eat. Tuna casserole again, he noticed without enthusiasm. They ate in gloomy silence until the room was suddenly lit up by a sizzling bolt of lightning, followed by a terrific clap of thunder. As the echoes of the thunder died, they could hear a swelling cacophony of banging and thudding and shrieking and crashing, even over the sound of the now torrential rain.

  "Goddamn," Michael's wife said, "it's doing it again!"

  The old man got up and looked out the window, out over a panorama of weed-and-trash-choked tenement backyards. It was literally raining dinosaurs out there—as he watched they fell out of the sky by the thousands, twisting and scrambling in the air, bouncing from the pavement like hail, flopping and bellowing in the street.

  "Well," the old man said glumly, pulling the curtains closed and turning back from the window, "at least it's stopped raining cats and dogs."

  The Night-Blooming Saurian

  by

  James Tip tree, Jr.

  As most of you probably know by now, multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author James Tiptree, Jr. was actually the pseudonym of the late Dr. Alice Sheldon, a semi-retired experimental psychologist who also wrote occasionally under the name of Raccoona Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon's tragic death in 1987 put and end to "both" authors' careers, but not before she had won two Nebula and two Hugo awards as Tiptree, won another Nebula Award as Raccoona Sheldon, and established herself, under whatever name, as one of the very best science fiction writers. As Tiptree, Dr. Sheldon published two novels, Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls From the Air, and eight short-story collections, Ten Thousand Light Years From Home, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, Starsongs of an Old Primate, Out of the Everywhere, Tales of the Quin-tana Roo, Byte Beautiful, The Starry Rift, and the posthumously published Crown of Stars.

  In the sly and wickedly barbed story that follows, she offers proof that, if pushed to the wall, the resourceful administrator can always find some unexpected resource to draw on in a crisis.

  * * *

  Ah, now we can relax. No salad, never touch it. And take that fruit away too, just the cheese. Yes, Pier, much too long a time. One's ruts deepen. It's the damned little time-wasters. Like that fellow with the coprolites this afternoon; the Museum really has no use for such things even if they're genuine. And I confess they make me squeamish.

  What? Oh, no fear, Pier, I'm no prude. Just to prove it, how about a bit more of that aquavit? Wonderfully good of you to remember. Here's to your success; always thought you would.

  Science? Oh, but you wouldn't really. Mostly donkey-work. Looks a lot better from the outside, like most things. Of course I've been fortunate. For an archeologist to have seen the advent of time travel—a miracle, really . . . Ah, yes, I was in right at the start, when they thought it was a useless toy. And the cost! No one knows how close it came to being killed off, Pier. If it hadn't been for—the things one does for science . . . My most memorable experience in time? Oh, my . . . Yes, just a twitch more, though I really shouldn't.

  Oh dear. Coprolites. H'm. Very well, Pier old friend, if you'll keep it to yourself. But don't blame me if it disenchants you.

  It was on the very first team jump you see. When we went back to the Olduvai Gorge area to look for Leakey's man. I won't bore you with our initial misadventures. Leakey's man wasn't there but another surprising hominid was. Actually, the one they called after me. But by the time we found him our grant funds were almost gone. It cost a fantastic sum then to keep us punched back into the temporal fabric and the U.S. was paying most of the bill. And not from altruism either but we won't go into that.

  There were six of us. The two MacGregors you've heard of; and the Soviet delegation, Peshkov and Rasmussen. And myself and a Dr. Priscilla Owen. Fattest woman I ever saw, oddly enough that turned out to be significant. Plus the temporal engineer, as they called them then. Jerry Fitz. A strapping Upper Paleolithic type, full of enthusiasm. He was our general guard and nursemaid, too, and a very nice chap for an engineer he seemed. Young, of course. We were all so young.

  Well, we had no sooner settled in and sent Fitz back with our first reports when the blow fell. Messages had to be carried in person then, you realize, by prearranged schedule. All we could do by way of signals was a crude go—no-go. Fitz came back very solemn and told us that the grant appropriation was not going to be renewed and we'd all be pulled back next month for good.

  Well, you can imagine we were struck to the heart. Devastated. Dinner that night was funereal. Fitz seemed to be as blue as we and the bottle went round and round—Oh, thank you.

  Suddenly we saw Fitz looking us over with a twinkle in his eye.

  "Ladies and gentlemen!" He had this rococo manner, though we were all of an age. "Despair is premature. I have a confession. My uncle's wife's niece works for the Senator who's chairman of the Appropriations Committee. So I went to see him all on my lone. What could we lose? And—" I can still see Fitz' grin— "I chatted him up. The whole bit. Dawn of man, priceless gains to science. Nothing. Not a nibble, until I found he was a fanatical hunter.

  "Well, you know I'm a gun buff myself and we went to it like fiddle and bow. So he got bewailing there's nothing to hunt back there and I told him what a hunter's paradise this is. And to make a long tale short, he's coming to inspect us and if he likes the hunting there's no doubt your money will be along. Now how does that smoke?"

  General cheers. Peshkov began counting the Senator's bag.

  "Several large ungulates and of course, the baboons and that carnivore you shot, Fitz. And possibly a tapir—"

  "Oh, no," Fitz told him. "Monkeys and deer and pigs, that's not his thing. Something spectacular."

  "Hominids tend to avoid areas of high predation," observed MacGregor. "Even the mammoths are far to the east."

  "The fact is," said Fitz, "I told him he could shoot a dinosaur."

  "A dinosaur!" we hooted.

  "But Fitz," said little Jeanne MacGregor. "There aren't any dinosaurs now. They're all extinct."

  "Are they now?" Fitz was abashed. "I didn't know that. Neither does the Senator. Surely we can find him an odd one or two? It may be all a mistake, like our little man here."

  "Well, there's a species of iguana," said Rasmussen.

  Fitz shook his head.

  "I promised him the biggest kind of beast. He's coming here to shoot a—what is it? A bronco-something."

  "A brontosaurus?" We all jumped him. "But they're all back in the Cretaceous! Eighty million years—"

  "Fitz, how could you?"

  "I told him the roaring kept us awake nights."

  Well, we were still a gloomy lot next day. Fitz was gone across the gorge to tinker with his temporal field rig. They were big awkward things then. We'd built a shack for ours and then moved our permanent camp across the gorge where our hominids were. A stiff climb, up and down through the swamp—it was all lush then, not the dry gorge it is today. And of course there was small game and fruit aplenty. Forgive, I think I will have just a bit more.

  Fitz came back once to question Rasmussen about bron-tosaurs and then went back again. At dinner he was humming. Then he looked around solemnly—my God, we were young.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, science shall not die. I will get the Senator his dinosaur."

  "How?"

  "I've a friend back there—" We always called the present 'back there'—"who'll push me a bit of extra power. Enough to jump me and a loadlifter to the big beasts for at least a day. And I can jigger up this breadbox for a signal and a split retrieve."

  We all objected, though we dearly wanted to believe. How co
uld he find his brontosaur? Or kill it? And it would be dead. It would be too big. And so on.

  But Fitz had his answers and we were drunk on the Pleistocene and in the end the mad plan was set. Fitz would kill the largest reptile he could find and signal us to bring him back when he had it crammed in the transporter. Then, when the Senator was ready to shoot, we would yank the fresh-killed carcass across eighty million years and arrange it near the shack. Insane. But Fitz swung us all with him, even when he admitted that the extra power use would shorten our stay. And off he went next dawn.

  Once he'd gone we began to realize what we six promising young scientists had done. We were committed to hoax a powerful United States Senator into believing he had stalked and killed a creature that had been dead eighty million years.

  "We can not do it!"

  "We've got to."

  "It'll be the end of time travel when they find out."

  Rasmussen groaned. "The end of us."

  "Misuse of Government resources," said MacGregor. "Actionable."

  "Where were our heads?"

  "You know," Jeanne MacGregor mused, "I believe Fitz is as eager to shoot a dinosaur as the Senator is."

  "And that convenient arrangement with his friend," Peshkov said thoughtfully. "That wasn't done from here. I wonder—"

  "We have been had."

  "The fact remains," said MacGregor, "that this Senator Dogsbody is coming here, expecting to kill a dinosaur. Our only hope is to make some tracks and persuade him that the creature has moved away."

  Luckily we had thought to tell Fitz to bring back footprints of whatever he managed to murder. And Rasmussen had the idea of recording its bellows.

  "They're like hippos. They'll be swathes of stuff knocked down by the water. We can trample about a bit before Fitz gets back."

  "He has risked his life," said little Jeanne. "What if the signal doesn't work?"

  Well, we bashed down some river trails and then our ape-men had a battle with baboons and we were too busy with blood typing and tissue samples to worry. And the signal came through and here was Fitz, mud all over and grinning like a piano.