That’s how it was decided. The sahibs still grumbled; but their protests were muffled when Ming decided to come along for the whole stretch, so at least they wouldn’t have to cook and wash dishes. He explained:
“Mr. Rivers, someday I’ll have my own restaurant, and I’ll advertise myself as the world’s greatest cook for dinosaurs and other extinct animals. You shoot ’em, I’ll cook ’em. Besides, I want to try out that new set of kitchen hardware you bought for this time trip.”
###
The first problem, Mr. Burgess, was in setting down the transition chamber at the right time—within a convenient interval before the Event, but not so far ahead that we should grow old while waiting for it. The dating for rocks from the time of the formation had narrowed down the time of the onset of the Event to about a year and a half. They were pretty sure it began in 65,971,453 B.C. or the year following. They couldn’t get any closer, and certainly it was bloody marvelous to be able to pin it down to one part in tens of millions.
Neither would it do to overshoot our mark and land in the midst of the Event, which might cause the chamber and us inside it to go poof. It would also be unsatisfactory to land after it was over. If that happened, we could witness the aftereffects but we should not be able to tell what caused them. This was, after all, the main purpose of the project.
So we agreed that Cohen should pilot the chamber to somewhere in the low sixty-six millions, and then we should bring it forward in time by jumps of ten years, with Haupt setting up his instrument at each step to try for a dekko at Enyo—that is, assuming this asteroid or comet really existed. As we neared the date of the Event, we should shorten the jumps, first to a month each and then to a day.
The next question was, would the time we chose to settle in provide us with a suitable landing area? The chamber moves back and forth in past time but stays at the same latitude and longitude, and as the centuries fly past the land changes beneath you. For a part of the Cretaceous, the area around St. Louis, Missouri, was under an arm of the Kansas Sea, and the chamber’s not equipped for landing in water. At other times, this spot might be the side of a cliff, or a mucky swamp where the passengers couldn’t leave the chamber. This chamber has telescoping legs that allow it some latitude in terrain, but only within limits.
Since we couldn’t move the chamber horizontally over the Earth’s surface, we had to learn what we could from the sites we stopped at, whatever these turned out to be. The scientists—those who believe in an extraterrestrial Enyo, that is—had various ideas as to where it hit. The largest vote was for some place in the Caribbean Sea or the adjacent Yucatan peninsula. Others held out for India, and one group argued that the impact had caused the Bering Sea.
There was no sense in fetching the entire crew and equipment back with us each time. Each step required Haupt to sit up all night with his face glued to his eyepiece, while he twiddled knobs and either the Raja or I stood behind him ready to shoot any carnosaur that thought we smelled edible.
As things turned out, no carnosaurs came near us during a couple of score of these all-night vigils. As an astronomer, Haupt was used to these odd sleeping hours; but the Raja and I found them a bit—ah—taxing. We did see a lot of plant eaters, always much the more numerous in any fauna. Mostly smaller species of hypsilophodonts and hadrosaurids, they merely looked us over and waddled away, as if to say they didn’t know what sort of creatures we were but didn’t care to take chances on us.
I tell you, those months of popping in and out of the late Cretaceous and standing guard over Haupt while he fiddled with his instrument were just plain bloody hard, tedious work. Half the time, when we opened the chamber door, there’d be an overcast or rain. Then we should have to button up the chamber and go on to another day, better for Haupt’s seeing.
One night, after his usual hours at the eyepiece, Haupt said: “Don’t get your hopes up, Reggie; but I think I may have something.”
“You mean you’ve got this Enyo in your sights at last?”
“It looks that way. Something at about twice lunar distance is headed our way.”
“When’s it going to hit, and where?” I asked. I’m afraid I let the excitement show in my voice.
“Can’t tell yet,” said Haupt. “Let me finish my observations. When we get back to Present, I’ll have a stack of records for the boys to crunch in their computers. Want a look?”
I looked, but all I could see in the crosshairs was a little spot of light, like another star. “How do you know that’s it?” I asked.
“The radar gives the distance, now about eight-hundred-thousand kilometers, and also tells us it’s fast approaching. If we had a real star at that distance, we’d all be fried to grease spots in no time.”
“Could this be a near miss?”
“I doubt it. Its bearing is close to constant, which means we and it are on a collision course. Even if it’s not aimed for a bull’s eye, Earth’s gravity will partly correct that.”
“How soon will it arrive?”
He shrugged. “Have to let the number-crunchers chew on my results. As a rough guess, I’d say three or four days.”
“Stone the crows! That gives us bloody little time to get the reception committee in place. We’d better be off like a bride’s nightie to fetch our people, if O’Connor’s to have time for his paintings and Todd for his hunt.”
I admit that Haupt’s words gave me a bit of a shiver. I felt the way a fly must feel when it sees the swatter on its way down, and it’s too late to take off—if you can imagine an intelligent fly.
###
So Bruce Cohen took us back to Present and, yawning from being up all night, I rounded up the gang. When I had explained Haupt’s findings, Romero said to Featherstone: “Ha, Sterling! So much for your supercaldera theory!”
“Not at all, George,” said Featherstone. “If this thing hit, the impact would send the grandfather of all earthquakes roaring around the globe. Then any supercalderas in a stressed condition might be touched off in eruptions, which otherwise might not happen for thousands of years. A few of those would have a more global effect than just the one impact of Enyo.”
“Hm, we shall see,” said Romero. “Reggie, how would it be for us to sit out the whole sequence, to try to detect by instrument whether any such eruptions occurred right after the impact?”
“According to what you scientific blokes tell me,” I said, “the impact will send out a shock wave that will kill everything bigger than an insect and set fire to anything combustible, at least over the hemisphere in which the impact takes place. If you want to try it, you’ll have to sign forms releasing us of any responsibility if we go back to Present leaving you alone with your instruments. Myself, I wouldn’t dare try it; my wife would kill me for taking foolish chances.”
###
Beauregard and his boys loaded the equipment into the chamber, and in we piled. O’Connor complained he’d forgot his sheath knife, but we didn’t have time for him to go back for it.
The morning after Haupt’s all-night vigil that discovered Enyo, Cohen took the whole party back to midday of that same day. I let several hours elapse between the time Haupt and I left the Cretaceous and the time we returned to it, for safety’s sake. It wouldn’t do to try to occupy the same time slot twice, since that would create a paradox. Can’t have that sort of thing in a well-run universe, so the space-time forces snatch you back to Present and blow you to bits in the process.
The place we set down the chamber was about as good as we could have asked for. We were on the shoulder of a hill looking off to southeastward. There wasn’t much vegetation on the shoulder, just some scrubby cedars and one big tree like the bombax I used to see in India. On the edge of the shoulder and on down the slope grew some stilt-rooted pandanus trees or screw pines. If we cut down a couple of these, we should have a clear view to the south and southeast; in other words, straight at the area where the blokes who favored a Caribbean or Yucatecan impact thought it would fall. On a cl
ear day, Featherstone claimed he could see an arm of the sea on the horizon; but I doubt that. In any case, if the Caribbean bods were right, the thing hit at least two thousand kilometers distant. That was quite close enough for me.
Below the hill, the country was flat and, from what I could see through my glasses, swampy, with a dense forest cover. My American sahibs agreed that the trees were mostly a kind of bald cypress, like the one they knew from their own time.
I ought to know more about such things; but there’s a limit to what you can cram into one mind. It’s hard enough to master the fauna and flora of one area—say, within a hundred-meter radius of St. Louis—for one geological period. When you try to cover the biotas of a couple of hundred million years, it gets bloody hopeless.
As usual, the Raja and I jumped out of the chamber first, with our big guns ready, in case something hostile were out there to receive us. All we saw was a flock of black-and-white birds, which flew up out of a tree. They looked like normal present-day birds, like your American mockingbird. I couldn’t see whether they had teeth in their beaks, as some birds from this time have.
While the crew were setting up the camp, I told O’Connor: “You’d better get on with your painting, Jon. Don’t go away from the camp farther than shouting distance—say, fifty meters—and stay in sight.”
So off went O’Connor with his load of canvases, paints, and accessories. He was the youngest of our sahibs, with the shaggy-artist look. If he’d been cleaned up and given a proper haircut, he’d have been movie-actor handsome. Otherwise he seemed a mild, obliging sort of young man, if a bit vague about non-artistic matters.
Then up bustled little Mr. Todd, saying: “Look here, Reggie, with so little time, I ought to start my hunt right now.”
“Sorry, but we can’t,” I said. “The Raja and I are tied up with setting up the camp. In an hour or so, one or the other of us ought to be able to take you on a little recco.”
“But,” says he, “I want to go now, while the daylight lasts! If you can’t come along, I’ll go by myself!”
“Now, Clarence,” I said, “you agreed in writing that you’d follow your guides’ orders. It won’t kill you to wait a bit. When that Thing gets closer, we shall all have to stay close to camp, to be able to board the chamber in seconds.”
“You let O’Connor go off by himself!”
“Only to a distance of fifty meters, so we can watch each other. That distance wouldn’t do you any good for hunting.”
He turned away, grumping, and I went back to siting the tents and the galley. When that was done and the crew were filing back into the chamber, I asked Haupt:
“Is there any indication yet what part of the Earth that Thing will strike?”
“Give me another night, and I can make at least an educated guess. The distance of Enyo and its present velocity, with a correction for the acceleration by the Earth’s gravity, will tell us when it will arrive; and knowledge of the time tells us which side of the Earth will be turned toward—”
He and I both jumped at the thunderous bang of Todd’s heavy rifle. I looked around the camp but saw no sign of him. I yelled at the Raja:
“Did you see that bloke leave the camp?”
“No,” said Aiyar. “I was working with Ming on the supplies.”
I was so angry at Todd that I was damned if I’d go crashing off in the outback looking for him, although I had a pretty good idea of where the shot came from. So the Raja and I spent the next half-hour waving off Cohen and the crew in the chamber and getting our sahibs settled.
By then it was near sundown. O’Connor straggled in, loaded with canvases, stands, palette, paints, and a camera. The Raja and I agreed it was time for our evening’s spot of lubricant, so I called time. We were sitting round drinking our tot of whiskey. (I’m pretty strict about how much I allow per person. I’ve seen what can happen when someone goes over his limit on grog.) O’Connor showed off his sketches and talked a streak about reculement and other artistic matters that went over my head.
We all turned round as Todd came staggering up the slope. He was covered with blood, and for a bad second I thought he’d lost a chewing contest with a theropod. But he seemed cheerful, with his big-game rifle in one hand and his other arm around his trophy. This was the head of one of the smaller sauropods, the ones that look like a gigantic snake threaded through the body of an elephant. I think this was an Alamosaurus; there were still a few sauropods around at the end of the Cretaceous, though nothing like so conspicuous as they were in the late Jurassic. Todd had the head and almost two meters of the animal’s neck balanced on his shoulder like a drooping log.
I never advise my sahibs to shoot sauropods. It’s not at all sporting, any way you look at it. They’re harmless creatures if you leave them alone, pretty stupid even by dinosaur standards. I don’t mean that dinosaurs are extraordinarily stupid, any more than modern crocs and other reptiles. They have a set of serviceable instincts, which see them through most of the crises of their lives; and they can actually learn, though not so quickly as any mammal.
All the sauropods do, however, is eat, eat, eat anything green they can reach with those long necks. Some are bigger than people thought anything could be and still walk on dry land. But it seems the limiting factor is not the strength of their legs but how much greenery they can gulp down and process in those mighty guts in any one day.
They can survive a lot of gunfire, too. Todd was lucky to have got one in the heart with his first shot. And if you kill one, what have you got? Just that silly little head on that long stalk of a neck.
None of that had stopped Todd. “See?” he said, grinning ear-to-ear. “I got my trophy, and all by myself. Hacked off the head with my machete, and here it is.”
“How far down the slope were you when you shot it?” I asked.
He waved. “Maybe two-thirds of the way down, just inside that timberline of bald cypress, where the trees are stunted and scattered.”
“And you left the carcass there?”
“Sure! Did you expect me to haul ten tons of dinosaur up that slope? Where’s the salt to preserve it with?”
“You bloody idiot!” I said. We get all kinds on these time safaris, but the buggers who cause the most grief are those out to prove their manhood. I went on: “Don’t you know the smell will draw carnivorous dinosaurs like flies? They’ll be having a grand carrion party before the night is over. That’s all right so long as they stay round the carcass; but what’s likelier is that a big one will chase off a smaller. Then the smaller, not to be done out of its tucker, will wander up here looking for more—us.”
“Scared, eh?” he sneered.
“Why, you ratbag—” I began. Things were making up to a first-class row, when the Raja took hold of Todd’s arm and led him aside, saying: “Now look, Mr. Todd, if we start off with a mutiny, we might as well all get back in the chamber and return to Present . . .”
They passed out of my hearing; but the upshot was that Aiyar calmed Todd down to the point where, looking crestfallen, he came back to me and mumbled something about hoping nothing bad would come of his impulsiveness. The Raja found him the preserving materials while Ming got our tea—what you fellows call “dinner.”
On a normal time safari, I take the sahibs out on the first full day to hunt fresh meat; that gives us the protein we shall need for scrambling around a rough landscape and also to judge which of the time travelers is to be trusted with a loaded gun. In the Mesozoic, that means one of the smaller herbivorous dinosaurs, like a bonehead or a thescelosaur. This time our stay was to be so brief that it didn’t seem worthwhile. We had enough food from Present to do us. Besides, Todd seemed the only one keen on hunting.
###
As I had predicted, the theropods gathered round the carcass of Todd’s sauropod down the slope. We could hear their grunts and bellows as they sorted themselves out into a pecking order; but there was so much meat there that they didn’t have to compete for it. Anyway, none came up
to the shoulder of the hill where we were camped.
When the sun came up next morning, the last of the theropods had gorged itself until it could barely waddle, and little by little they all wandered off into the cypress swamp. Looking through the glasses I could see a set of bare ribs sticking up.
I suggested there was still a fair amount of meat left on the carcass, so we had better keep our guard up against theropod visitors. We don’t get the famous Tyrannosaurus around our site at this particular time, but those we do get include an Albertosaurus big enough to make a snack of you.
Einar Haupt was up most of the night stargazing. After breakfast, he came up with a little pocket-sized computer, saying:
“Reggie, I think I’ve got Enyo’s arrival nailed down. According to my instruments’ figures, it’ll hit about dawn the day after tomorrow, and pretty certainly on this side of the planet.”
“Can you fix the place of impact any closer than that?” I asked.
“Nope. If we were back in Present, my fellow astronomers could dope it out; but we’re not.”
That gave me an idea of what those blokes must have felt in the two big wars, when they were in a city the enemy was going to bomb. You might comfort yourself with the thought that there was a good chance the bombs wouldn’t hit you; but it would be a lot nicer if they didn’t fall at all.
“In other words,” I said, “we may expect the lady in a little less than two complete revolutions of this bloody planet?”
“That’s right.” I hadn’t said “forty-eight hours” because at that time the Earth rotated a bit faster than it does now, so the hours—I mean the twenty-fourths of one revolution—were shorter. This complicates our efforts to run a safari on schedule, since the sahibs’ watches don’t conform to the movements of the sun. I’ve thought of having special watches and clocks made; but the Raja and I decided the expense would be out of proportion to the benefits. Such timepieces would have to be adaptable to the planet’s angular velocity for all the times back to the pre-Cambrian.
Dinosaurs II Page 2
