Dinosaurs II
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DINOSAURS II
EDITED BY JACK DANN & GARDNER DOZOIS
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-1-62579-111-5
Copyright © 2013 by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann
First printing: December 1995
Cover art by: Bob Walters
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Electronic version by Baen Books
Acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following material:
“The Big Splash,” by L. Sprague de Camp, copyright © 1992 by Davis Publications, Inc.; first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1992; reprinted by permission of the author.
“Just Like Old Times,” by Robert J. Sawyer, copyright © 1993 by Robert J. Sawyer; first published in On Spec, Summer 1993; reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Virgin and the Dinosaur,” by R. Garcia y Robertson, copyright © 1992 by Davis Publications. Inc.; first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1992; reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Odd Old Bird,” by Avram Davidson, copyright © 1989 by The Terminus Publishing Company, Inc.; first published in Weird Tales, Winter 1989; reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the author’s agents, Owlswick Literary Agency.
“Bernie,” by Ian McDowell, copyright © 1994 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines; first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1994; reprinted by permission of the author.
“Small Deer,” by Clifford D. Simak, copyright © 1965 by Clifford D. Simak; first published in Galaxy, October 1965.
“Dinosaur Pliés,” by R. V. Branham, copyright © 1989 by R. V. Branham; first published in Midnight Graffiti #4, Fall 1989; reprinted by permission of the author.
“Day of the Hunters,” by Isaac Asimov, copyright © 1950 by Columbia Publications, Inc.; first published in Future Fiction, November 1950; reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the author’s agents. Ralph M. Vicinanza, Ltd.
“Herding with the Hadrosaurs,” by Michael Bishop, copyright © 1992 by Michael Bishop; first published in The Ultimate Dinosaur (Bantam Books); reprinted by permission of the author.
“Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny,” by R. Garcia y Robertson, copyright © 1990 by R. Garcia y Robertson; first published in Pulphouse Eight (Pulphouse); reprinted by permission of the author.
“Trembling Earth,” by Allen Steele, copyright © 1990 by Davis Publications, Inc.; first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1990; reprinted by permission of the author.
For
Bob Walters
—Dinosaur Man
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors would like to thank the following people for their help and support:
Susan Casper, Janeen Webb, Peter Nicholls, Janet Kagan, George Zebrowski, Bob Walters, Michael Swanwick, Ellen Datlow, Sheila Williams, Ian Randal Strock, Scott Towner, R. V. Branham, Robert J. Sawyer, all the folks on the Delphi and GEnie computer networks who offered suggestions, and special thanks to our own editors, Susan Allison and Ginjer Buchanan.
PREFACE
Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
In the five years since we brought you Dinosaurs!, our first dinosaur anthology, almost everything that scientists then thought that they knew about dinosaurs has been challenged by someone, somewhere.
The theory, popular in the 1980s, that dinosaurs were hot-blooded, agile, fast-moving, socially interactive, and smart (itself an overthrow of a previous generation’s theory that pictured dinosaurs as immense, lumbering, stupid, cold-blooded lizards who spent their solitary days submerged up to their necks in deep water to help them support their vast weight) has been challenged by some scientists (although probably the majority of experts believe that they were hot-blooded—or at least that some of them were). The theory that birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs has been challenged (with at least one expert advancing the fiercely controversial theory that instead dinosaurs were the direct descendants of birds). The theory that all of the dinosaurs were killed off sixty-five million years ago by an immense asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous—one of the most widely accepted and talked-about scientific theories of the 1980s—has recently been challenged. Some scientists proposed the idea that the spread of disease germs from one continent to another, made possible by the development of connecting land-bridges between the continents, was the agent responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, who would have had no natural resistance to the new germs. Other groups of experts attributed the dinosaur-killing to a dramatic worsening of the climate at the end of the Cretaceous from vast, sun-blocking clouds of dust produced by a massive worldwide upsurge in volcanic activity, rather than to vast, sun-blocking clouds of dust kicked up by a huge asteroid impact. Some heretics even suggested that a few dinosaurs may have lingered on in Australia long after they were extinct in other areas of the world, past the sacrosanct “Cretaceous Barrier”—the famous layer of iridium in the rock—that is supposed to mark the end of their days.
No, there is no agreement among the experts. In fact, it seems that the controversies grow more heated rather than less so, the more that is written about dinosaurs—and more is written every day, a swelling tide of verbiage in scientific journals, popular science magazines, newspapers, and even in the tabloids.
One thing that hasn’t changed in the last five years is the public’s fascination with dinosaurs. In fact, they’re probably more fascinated now, as depictions of dinosaurs spill over into the movies (with Jurassic Park becoming the second highest grossing film of all time, and a thundering horde of sequels and imitations soon to follow), and onto our television screens, to say nothing of a flood of novels, comic books, children’s picture books, computer games, arcade games, posters, art books, coffee mugs, milk cartons, T-shirts, and so on. Dinosaurs even serve as children’s toys, peek out from computer screen-savers, and act as animated pitchmen on television commercials. In fact, in a rush to cash in on “dino madness,” entrepreneurs have put likenesses of dinosaurs on just about everything on which it is possible to put them, including underwear and condoms.
We can’t be too self-righteous about this, of course, since the book that you hold in your hands is, obviously, also calculated to cash in on the craze . . . but, we hope, in a way at least a little less cynical and more useful than some designer who slaps glow-in-the-dark dinosaurs on socks. For one thing, although these stories were written as entertainment, reading them may actually also teach you something as well, in a more enjoyable way than studying a dry textbook, or even watching Walter Cronkite pontificate about Apatasauruses on television while badly animated stop-motion models hop jerkily around the screen. Because, until someone invents a working time-machine, the best way to experience dinosaurs in all their intricacy and diversity, to feel the thrill of wonder and awe as you come face-to-face with these fabulous monsters, to marvel at their terrible immensity, to smell their deep musk and feel the ground tremble underfoot and hear them bellow, to see their gleaming eyes turn slowly toward you . . . or to know, with a shock of recognition, what it was like to be a dinosaur, to rend the steaming flesh of your prey, or to be so rended . . . or to know what it is like to sleep in the rock for millions of years . . . or to know what the world would have been like if the dinosaurs had never died, or if they lived again . . . is to see them through the inner eye of the imagination, the way that you’ll encounter them in the pages of a good science fiction story . . . stories such as the ones we’ve gathered for you he
re.
So open the pages of this book, and enjoy the dinosaurs you’ll find within. (But be careful! Watch out that they don’t step on you . . .)
THE BIG SPLASH
L. Sprague de Camp
L. Sprague de Camp is a seminal figure, one whose career spans almost the entire development of modern fantasy and SF. For the fantasy magazine Unknown in the late 1930s, he helped create a whole new modern style of fantasy writing—funny, whimsical, and irreverent—of which he is still the most prominent practitioner. His most famous books include Lest Darkness Fall, The Complete Enchanter (with Fletcher Pratt), and Rogue Queen. His short fiction has been collected in A Gun for Dinosaur, The Purple Pterodactyls, and The Best of L. Sprague de Camp, among many other collections. His most recent books include a novel written in collaboration with his wife, writer Catherine Crook de Camp, The Pixilated Peeress, and, of special interest to the readers of this anthology, a collection of his tales about Reginald Rivers’s time-traveling adventures, Rivers in Time.
The story that follows is one of those adventures, a direct sequel to de Camp’s famous story “A Gun for Dinosaur.” This one takes Reginald Rivers and a band of intrepid scientists back through time to observe the mysterious cosmic catastrophe that wiped out the majority of all living things at the end of the Cretaceous. As Reggie soon discovers, though, the problem is not to observe it so closely that you become extinct yourself . . .
* * *
What was my closest call, Mr. Burgess? Let’s see. There was the time that drongo Courtney James woke up a sleeping tyrannosaur by shooting a gun over its head . . . But if you really want to know, on these time safaris we haven’t had so much trouble from the animals as from the people, and we haven’t had so much grief from the people as we have from natural forces. Like that time we ran into Enyo. No, not Ohio, Enyo. That’s what those scientific blokes call the K-T Event. Somebody named it Enyo after some Greek goddess of destruction.
Ta, don’t mind if I have another.
The K-T Event? That’s what killed off all the dinosaurs; pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, etcetera at the end of the Cretaceous. So Rivers and Aiyar, Time Safaris, took a couple of scientists to the edge of the Event, hoping it would not kill us off along with the ornithopods. And it nearly bloody well did. If Bruce Cohen, the chamber wallah, had been a second sooner or later with the doors, Aljira only knows what—
Who’s Aljira? That’s the head god of one of the tribes of Abos—excuse me, Native Australians—in the outback. You see, down-under we have lots of wowsers, worse than your Puritans here in America. If they hear you say “By God!” they raise a stink. So I long ago got into the habit of swearing by Aljira to avoid arguments.
But to get back. The scientists had been arguing for half a century over the nature of the K-T Event. Some said a comet or a planetoid hit the Earth; others, that one or more of those big super-volcanoes, like the one that made your Yellowstone Park, cut loose with an eruption that blanketed the Earth with ash and smoke.
When Professor Prochaska, here in St. Louis, got his time chamber working right, and the Raja and I made a going thing of Rivers and Aiyar, a couple of big universities thought to settle the question by sending a pair of their biggest brains back in time for a first-hand look at the Event. One came from Harvard and one from Yale, since no other unis could have afforded the rates.
The man from Harvard was a paleontologist, George Romero of the Museum of Comparative Zoology; a short, plump, middle-aged fellow with sparse gray hair. The other was a geologist, Sterling Featherstone of Yale, a bit younger, a tall, angular, black-haired bloke of the kind they call “raw-boned.” Imagine a younger Abraham Lincoln without his whiskers and you’ve got the idea.
This pair came into the office together and broke the news. I had a pretty full schedule lined up, but in one slot I had only two cash customers ticketed: Clarence Todd, a trophy hunter, and Jon O’Connor, an artist. If you’re wondering why an artist should be keen to go back to the Mesozoic—or how an artist could afford the fare—he had a contract with that museum in San Francisco to paint Cretaceous scenes from life. They paid his way.
“You understand,” said Romero, “that we shall also have to have an astronomer. We need him to keep watching the sky, in hope of calculating when Enyo will hit.”
“Who’s Enyo?” I said.
“That’s our name for the planetoid whose fall caused the K-T Event—”
“He means,” said Featherstone, “if, as he believes, the Event was the impact of an extraterrestrial body. I’m a supercaldera man myself.”
“Has anybody seen this body circling the sun?” I said. “They keep track of a lot of asteroids with their telescopes.”
“Of course not!” said Romero. “The impact vaporized it.”
“Silly of me. Have you picked your astronomer?”
“Yes,” said Romero. “If it’s okay with you, it’ll be Einar Haupt of Cal Tech.”
“I shall want to meet Mr. or Dr. Haupt,” I said. “We always like to judge our sahibs before we take them on. A crook choice can cause serious trouble later, as we’ve found to our sorrow. Right, Raja?”
“Absolutely,” said the Raja—that is, Chandra Aiyar. I call him “Raja” because he’s actually the hereditary lord of some place in India called Janpur. If he went back there now and tried to assert hereditary claims, the locals would probably throw things at him. I gather the last reigning Raja of Janpur, before the Republic, wasn’t universally beloved.
Dr. Haupt turned out to be a big, beefy fellow, almost my size, with red hair and whiskers. He needed the beef to lug his instrument: a super-scientific combination of telescope, transit, and radar set, all over knobs and lenses. By means of the radar he could get a quick reading on the distance of anything this side of Mars.
The first complication popped up when I talked to Beauregard Black, our camp boss, about the trip. The problem was that, since the Event was likely to be a bloody catastrophe for everything around, we had to have the chamber stay with us the whole time we were there leading up to the Event, so we could make a quick getaway. There’s no telephone line to Present, so you can ring up and yell:
“Come and get us, quick!”
Bruce Cohen, who ran the chamber, said that that was okay with him as long as he was paid his regular rate. In fact, he said, he was glad of a chance for a good look at one of these primeval landscapes he’d been ferrying people to. So far he’d only had brief glimpses when he opened the chamber doors for the time travelers to hop out and later back in.
When we explained this to Beauregard, he said he had to talk to the rest of the crew, the helpers and herders and Ming the cook. Next day he came back to say in effect: sorry, mate, no dice. The sahibs and I could go back and sit on a log to watch the end of the Mesozoic world, but to him and the others that was taking too much of a chance. He said:
“Mr. Rivers, I don’t know how fast we’d have to skedaddle; but it would sure be a lot faster than the usual way, with at least two trips in the chamber. With the jacks, it’d take at least three. And we jest ain’t gonna stand around watchin’ the world go up in smoke waiting for the chamber to come back for the next load.”
“We’re not taking the asses,” I said. “Since we don’t know the exact time of the Event, we shan’t dare go far enough from the landing site to call for moving the camp. So the crew will be smaller.”
Beauregard shook his head. “Jeez, I’m sorry, Mr. Rivers; but I’m afraid we jest ain’t gonna. I’ve talked with the other boys, and we all agree. We got families and that kind of thing.”
The Raja and I tried to argue Beauregard round, but we might as well have tried to knock over a mammoth with a flyswatter. I suppose I could have fired him and the others for breach of contract; but I doubted I should ever again find such a bonzer camp boss. We’d been on several safariin together, so I knew Beauregard pretty well. Not having our regular helpers would rather leave us up a gum tree. It’s not the sort of expedition on which you cou
ld rely on casual, untrained help. To push off with such a crew would be asking for disaster.
And so it turned out, when I discussed the problem with our five sahibs. The scientists complained that all the pitching and striking camp, cooking and cleaning up, etcetera, wouldn’t leave them time for their scientific work. O’Connor complained that it wouldn’t leave him time for his art. But the loudest complaints came from Todd, who was one of these little, Napoleonic types who tries to make up for his physical stature by a prickly, aggressive attitude.
“If this safari doesn’t have the things it was advertised as having,” he said, “I’m damned if I’ll go along on it. I won’t be able to get in a decent hunt if I’ve got to fuck around collecting firewood and all that nonsense. I’ll expect my deposit back, too.”
Later, when the Raja and I were alone, he said: “I believe I see a way out, Reggie.” Back down-under nobody calls me “Reggie.” There, it’s “Reg.” But the Raja had been through one of those English-style educations and picked up some pommy habits. Americans on these jaunts hear him and copy him; so to them I’m “Reggie,” too. I don’t mind; life is full enough of real problems without stewing over trifles. The Raja explained:
“Suppose Mr. Black and his crew come back to pre-K-T with us, set up camp, and then go back to Present. Then let Mr. Cohen bring the chamber back to pre-K-T and stay there. When time comes to leave, we shan’t strike camp in our usual environmentally careful way; just heave the small, valuable items like guns and instruments into the chamber and leave the tents, camp chairs, and so on where they are. The universities won’t like the cost of wasting that stuff, but we shall simply tell them this is the only way the job can be done.”