Dinosaurs!

by Jack Dann

  * * *

  When the call came in at 2 a.m. I wasn't surprised. Timmy had warned me it was coming. "Today or tomorrow, Mr. Sanderson," he'd said. "Today or tomorrow for sure." His voice was serious, far too serious for his age. I've learned to accept his prognostications, at least when he was sure, so I had my people ready. When the colonel called, I was already reviewing what we could do.

  Timmy has a gift for time. He can, sometimes, see into the future, and a few days into the past as well. Perhaps because of his particular talent, he has a passion for paleontology. He's got quite a collection of fossils: trilobites and fossilized ferns and even one almost-intact dinosaur skull. He's particularly interested in dinosaurs, but perhaps that's not so unusual. After all, Timmy was only eleven.

  He has one other talent as well. I hoped we wouldn't have to depend on it.

  I found Timmy in his room. He was already awake, passing the time sorting his collections of fossils. We'll be joining them soon enough, I thought. Maybe in a million years the next species will be digging up our bones and wondering what made us extinct. We walked in silence to the conference room. Sarah and January were already there. Sarah was still in her bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Jan had managed to throw on a pair of rather tight jeans and a faded Coors T-shirt. A moment later, Jason, our hypnotist, arrived. There was no need to brief them. They already knew.

  Sarah was my number two talent. We found her while testing people who claimed to be able to locate subs underwater. We didn't find any, but we found her. She'd been one of the controls. Instrumentation for the control group had failed a lot more often than for the test subjects. Perhaps another project team might have ignored this, but I'd instructed my team to investigate the inexplicable—in any form. So we investigated the controls and finally came up with the cause: Sarah. She was a feisty, forty-year-old divorced housewife who had the Murphy talent, an ability to make complex equipment screw up. After some training, she'd even gotten to the point where she could control it. Some.

  My third talent was January. She'd shown an ability to enhance the rate at which things burn. With a little more training, she might be the most dangerous one of all. Now, though, she was just a college student with an untrained talent.

  I had a handful of other people, with an erratic smattering of other talents. Nothing that might be useful against what was coming, though.

  "Sarah, how you feeling?"

  "Burned out, Danny boy, feeling burned out. Never was good for much after midnight."

  "That's not so good. Let's see, you work best awake. Jan, how about you?"

  "I think I'd better go under, Dan. I'm too nervous to do any good awake."

  "Right." I nodded to Jason, and he went over to put her to sleep. "How about you, Timmy? Ready to go under?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "How are you feeling?"

  "I'm feeling really hot tonight, Mr. Sanderson." He grinned at me. "Real good."

  If so, he was the only one.

  Once I'd thought that being assigned to Project Popgun was the last stop in a one-way journey to obscurity, a deadend directorship of a make-work project. But even if I was relegated to a dead-end project, I resolved to make it the best-run dead-end project in the government.

  Maybe I should explain what Project Popgun is. Popgun is a tiny government agency set up to study what the military euphemistically call "long shot" projects. What they mean is "crackpot." Psychic assassins, voodoo priests, astrologers, tea leaf readers, people who claimed to be able to contact UFOs. Nobody really thought any of these would pan out, but they were each carefully investigated, just in case. Dogs who could foretell the future, children who could bend spoons, gamblers who could influence the fall of dice. There were always new crackpots to investigate as fast as the old ones were dismissed. After all, with the defense budget numbering hundreds of billions, a few million to check out crackpots is considered a bargain.

  The psychics, the palm readers and fortune tellers, none of them turned out to be worth the investigation. But here and there, in odd nooks and by-ways across the nation, I'd found a few genuine talents. I'd begged, bribed, coerced, and flat-out hired them to come work for me here in Alexandria, where we could study them, train them to use their talents, and maybe even figure out what they were good for.

  Strangely enough, as long as I had reported negative results, I was commended for rigorous work and carefully controlled test procedures. Once I started to report something worthwhile, though, we were accused of sloppy research and even downright falsification. The investigating committee, although not going so far as to actually endorse our results, finally suggested that our findings "might have legitimate defense applications," and recommended that I be given limited scope to implement near-term applications. So I'd asked for—and received—a hardwire link to the threat evaluation center at NORAD, the North American Air Defense command. Voice plus video images of the main NORAD radar screen, carried on EMP-proof fiber-optic cables.

  Now we waited, listening to what was coming down across that link.

  "Surveillance satellites report covers are now coming off the silos."

  The President must be on the hot line by now, trying to avert the impending catastrophe. ICBMs were being readied in their silos for a retaliatory strike, waiting for the word.

  Across the U.S., fighter squadrons were being scrambled and ancient antiaircraft missile batteries armed to intercept incoming bombers. Those couldn't shoot down ICBMs, though. The last defense of the U.S. would not be fought from the ultra-hard command post under some mountain in Colorado, but right here, in an ugly, nondescript cinderblock building in the suburbs of Alexandria, all but ignored by the military high command. A housewife, a college girl, and an eleven-year-old boy.

  Sarah's talent, if she could make it work, would work best on missiles in the boost phase, January's during coast, and Timmy's any time.

  "Launches. Early warning satellites report launches from Eastern sector. Satellites report launches from Southern sector. Satellites report launches from Northern sector. " A pause. "Launches from submarines in polar sea. Launches from Baltic Sea. Launches from Black Sea. Launches from North Pacific. Total launches confirmed, 1419. Probables, 214. Failures on boost, 151."

  Not a so-called "surgical strike" like you sometimes read about in the papers, the strike at military bases and missile silos. This was a full scale attack, nothing held in reserve. Don't ask me why. I've never claimed to understand superpower politics.

  "Okay, Sarah, here it comes. Go for it!"

  "I'll see what I can do. I'm not making any promises, though." She closed her eyes and leaned back. I looked over to the TV screen. Still too early to see anything, I decided to pray. I'm an atheist, but maybe there was time to convert.

  Sarah opened her eyes. "Well?"

  We both looked at the monitor.

  "BMEWS confirms 1589 launches. 3 boosters failed second stage ignition. 26 minutes to first arrivals.

  "Damn," she said. "Some days you got it, some days you don't. Looks like today I don't." She leaned back to try again. Beneath her apparent calm I saw she was trembling slightly.

  "Confirmation from PARC radars. Confirmation from PAVE-PAWS." The first dots were beginning to appear on the screen. "Launch of second wave. Launches from North Atlantic. Launches from North Sea. 820 launches confirmed, 19 probable, 22 failures." The voice on the hardwire link was cool and professional. How could he remain so calm?

  Time to try January. She was fully relaxed, breathing deeply and evenly.

  "You are very calm. You're floating, higher, higher. You're above the clouds. You can see a metal cylinder moving through the air. It's coming toward you. You can imagine the explosive inside the cylinder. You can reach out and touch it. It's getting hot. It's getting very, very hot. Make it explode."

  The screen was filled with tiny dots, like ants crawling across the screen. Vicious angry ants, heading for us. "Burnout on all boosters. 18 min
utes to first impacts."

  "You can feel the missile next to you. Reach out and touch it, January. Touch the explosive inside. You can feel it! Make it explode!"

  A fire started burning merrily in a wastebasket across the room. On the video screen, though, none of the little dots disappeared. Time to try Timmy.

  "Surveillance satellites report first wave warheads have separated from the bus."

  Timmy had one more talent, in addition to being able to see a little through time. He could also make things disappear. Where they went, nobody knew. None of them ever came back.

  "Timmy, can you hear me?"

  "Yes."

  "Way, way up over us there are a whole lot of missiles flying through the sky. I want you to focus your attention on them. They're whizzing toward us at hundreds and hundreds of miles an hour. Can you picture them?"

  "Yes."

  "Lots and lots of them, Timmy. All around, coming at us. Now, when I count to three, I want you to concentrate real hard, and make them all go away. Ready?

  "One . . .

  "Two . . .

  "Three!"

  No sound, nothing seemed to happen at all. The dots on the display screen just vanished. "They vanished. " For the first time, the voice on the hardwire link lost his cool. "They vanished. I don't believe it. "He started to giggle. "The whole Russian attack just disappeared."

  Jason looked stunned. Sarah jumped up and hugged me. "Dan, we did it! Timmy did it!" I hugged her back. She was laughing, laughing and crying at the same time.

  It wasn't quite over. We had to use Timmy's talent twice more, on the second wave and again on stragglers. After about an hour, we heard the announcement that the bombers were returning to base. Then we knew it was all over.

  Maybe we could have counterattacked with our own missiles, or maybe we should have announced that we had a secret weapon and asked for unconditional surrender. Maybe we could have done any number of things. It was pretty clear, though, that one thing we couldn't do was announce what really happened. Not unless we knew we could repeat it.

  So the U.S. government just ignored the attack. Pretended it never happened. I think that this unnerved them worse than anything else we could have done. They never knew what had happened. It would be a long, long time before they'd try another first strike.

  They kept secrecy here, as well. After all, it had all come and gone at two in the morning, and there had been no general alarm. Naturally, there were a lot of rumors that something had happened that night, but who could have guessed that a full scale attack had been launched? And who would believe it?

  We did all get to meet the President. In secrecy, naturally. I wasn't surprised, but then, I hadn't voted for him either. Timmy was pretty excited about it.

  Some days later, things were back to what passed for normal. Timmy sat at his desk, flipping through a book, The End of the Dinosaurs.

  "Gee, Mr. Sanderson," he said, "I wonder what really did happen to dinosaurs?"

  I thought about the iridium casings on nuclear warheads, about clouds of soot and ash rising from atomic explosions, setting off a long nuclear winter. I thought about Timmy's two strange talents, one dealing with time, one completely different. A talent to make things go away. And where do they reappear? I've often wondered. But I think I know now.

  I could almost picture the warheads, six thousand of them, raining down on the forests of the Mesozoic. Poor dinosaurs, they never had a chance. And in sixty-five million years, even the last faint traces of radioactivity would have decayed to nothing.

  Yes, I think I know who killed the dinosaurs. But I didn't say it.

  "I don't know, Timmy," I said. "I doubt if anyone will ever know for sure."

  Dinosaur on a Bicycle

  by

  Tim Sullivan

  But what if dinosaurs hadn't become extinct? After millions of years of evolution, they might have developed a culture like the one in the story that follows. Or maybe not . . .

  Tim Sullivan's fiction appears with some regularity in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, as well as in The Twilight Zone Magazine, Chrysalis, and New Dimensions. He reviews regularly for The Washington Post Book World, U.S.A. Today, Short Form, and contributed many of the horror movie reviews for the recent Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural. His most recent books are the novel Destiny's End, and, as editor, the well-received horror anthology Tropical Chills. Coming soon is a new novel, The Parasite Wars. Born in Bangor, Maine, Sullivan now lives in Los Angeles.

  * * *

  Harry Quince-Pierpont Fotheringay climbed onto the enormous penny-farthing bicycle and began pedalling. His three-toed, booted talons fit snugly over the pedals, and vapor steamed from his snout in the morning chill. His kid gloves did not prevent the metallic cold of the handlebars from penetrating his clawed hands. Nor did his greatcoat, jodhpurs and tam-o-shanter help a great deal, either. He should have picked a warmer day to travel backwards in time.

  But there was no turning back now. A smattering of applause rose from the audience surrounding the chronokineticon, as the chain attached to the bicycle's huge front wheel began to turn the ponderous gears Harry had so meticulously helped design and build over the past seven years. He was the only assistant of his learned friend, Sir Brathwaite Smedley-Groat, M.S.E., Ph.D. (Member of the Saurian Empire, Doctor of Philosophy), whose brainchild the chronokineticon was.

  "I say, Harry, can't you set about this with just a trifle more vigour?" Sir Brathwaite called, speaking from outside the chronokineticon's perimeter. He sat on a shooting stool, tail wrapped around its wooden stem, observing the machine's whirling clockwork movements and timing the revolutions of the great main wheel with a stopwatch. He wore a bowler hat, greatcoat, leggings, and a colourful scarf. His forked tongue flicked nervously in and out of his mouth. "Put a little more muscle into it, can't you, old thing? There's a good lad! Push! Push harder!"

  It was all Harry could do to stop himself from shouting an angry reply. While Harry groaned and sweated at the pedals, Sir Brathwaite sent his liveried servant scurrying off through the crowd to purchase a cup of hot tea to keep the cold from his ageing bones. Vendors, many of them small hatchling urchins, peddled not only tea, but hot chestnuts, batter-fried insects, mulled wine, ale, and a variety of other comestibles. There were nearly a thousand souls gathered at this meadow on the outskirts of the university, here to watch the chronokineticon's maiden voyage. The presence of these refined gentlesaurians—the ladies attired in feathered hats, hoop skirts, fur and mufflers; their dashing male companions in starched white collars, top hats, tails, morning coats and umbrellas—all avidly peering at the chronokineticon through their lorgnettes, monocles, and pince-nezes, caused Harry to remain silent in spite of Sir Brathwaite's typical insensitivity. This auspicious day would not be marred by a display of ill manners on his part. After all, he could have told Sir Brathwaite to find someone else, but he had wanted to be the chronokineticon's first pilot from the moment he had heard about his mentor's plans to build the fantastical machine. It seemed safe enough, especially considering Sir Brathwaite's calculations indicating that the chronokineticon could only stay in the past for six hours. The Law of Forward Time Conversion, as Sir Brathwaite somewhat grandly called it, would perforce come into play after that. Thus only a short junket in the prehistoric past would be possible, and this was a pleasant enough prospect, at least as far as Harry was concerned. He was, after all, a student of sauriankind's remote ancestors, and he wanted to see those ancient titans for himself at least once. Sir Brathwaite had mentioned something about regression and de-evolution once or twice, but had assured Harry that such a possibility was unlikely in the extreme.

  "Faster, Harry, faster!" urged Sir Brathwaite. Seeing that the servant had returned, running all the way to insure that the tea remained hot, Sir Brathwaite took time out from browbeating Harry long enough to accept the cup. "There's a good fellow," he said absently to the panting servant, before returning to the business
at hand. "Really, Harry, old chap, I must say, you'll have to do better than that, you know!"

  Harry watched steam rise from the tea cup with envy, though his exertions were at last warming him up a bit. The bicycle had been constructed three times the normal size— the better to power the chronokineticon—and the muscles in his legs strained as he pedalled harder, his heart pounding. Soon he was perspiring freely, but he couldn't stop working long enough to unbutton his greatcoat.

  Harry pedalled until he began to wonder if this contraption of chain-driven wheels and cogs was going to do anything except whirl about him. Sir Brathwaite's scientific studies had indicated that a time-line opened into the past from this very spot. Unfortunately, this marvel of nature could only be exploited through the use of an intricate clockwork device such as the one Harry powered with his legs at this moment. Or so Sir Brathwaite's calculations indicated . . . if they were correct. It wouldn't be the first of his inventions or theorems to fail miserably. There had been that wretched business with the automatic bustle-tightening machine, for instance. . . .

  "By Jove, I believe something is happening," Sir Brathwaite said, waking Harry from his depressing reverie. "Jolly good!"

  Sir Brathwaite was quite correct. There was another sudden burst of applause from the crowd, more enthusiastic this time, and Sir Brathwaite had time to call out, "Good show!" Then the ladies in their feathered, broad-brimmed hats were blurring out of focus, as were the gentlemen in their top hats and morning coats. The spectators and Sir Brathwaite, who was waving his cane excitedly, were now only ghostly figures on the greensward, mere spectres, fading into unsubstantiality. As they vanished altogether, the sun suddenly arced overhead and set behind the hills to the east of the city.