Senior agents were free to argue for promising assignments, and Jake had his own system for scouting fresh projects. Locking himself in his Syrtis Major studio, he would order up a pot of coffee and a pipe of opium. Properly blasted, he would then have Biofile send him the open cases one at a time.
Everybody was there—the good, the ugly, and the merely impossible. People wanted a word with long dead relatives . . . Psychics needed predictions tested . . . A Ph.D. at Tehran U. wanted to shoot some Persian history in fourth century B.C. Mesopotamia . . . SAVE THE CHRISTIAN MARTYRS had a long list of worthies they wanted plucked from the flames. THE JEWISH COMMITTEE TO EXPOSE THE SAINTS had an even longer list of worthies whose reputations they wanted blackened (and whom they wanted brought back to the future for trial). An el grosso Feelie mogul needed background for a porno mini-epic on the Marquis de Sade. Then came the cranks and the crazies . . .
How to decide among so many admirable requests? Jake’s opium-logged brain had not even tried. Peg and her Mesozoic proposal put everything else on hold. He must have replayed her proposal a dozen times, puffing on the opium pipe, getting every nuance of her voice, person, and presentation.
Her listings were incredible: Cuvier Fellow at the University of Paris at twenty-six . . . French, Latin, Classical Greek . . . swimming, yoga, aikido . . . Phi Beta Kappa, no criminal record . . . Reformed Vegetarian and practicing nudist. Endorsements by everyone from the World Paleontological Congress to the Teen Lesbians. A bright, well-balanced young professional, out to put her mark on the planet. Perfect. A field agent’s prayer. Where could Jake go wrong?
The results had him doubting the wisdom of making crucial decisions while in an opium stupor. But even his sober brain had failed to see the flaws. Uppermost Mesozoic was a brand-new period—further back than ever before, a high-risk, high-opportunity assignment Jake could not pass on; not if he wanted to stay at the cutting edge. Whoever came back from the Upper Cretaceous would own FTL.
Unless he fucked up. FTL was infamously unforgiving. Faster Than Light had an army of active agents, and files filled with wanna-bees; its ingratitude was boundless. One bad bounce, and Jake was out. FTL trips were too troublesome and expensive for failure. If you screwed the pooch in some godawful corner of the past, the agency advised you to marry that pooch and learn to farm—for surely there was no point in coming back.
Sitting in the dogwood-shaded wash, listening to Peg explain what a dolt he was, Jake thought about how he had to succeed. Hell, he had to excel. Picking a crazed partner because you wanted to fuck her did not justify failure, not to FTL. He tried to decide what would work best with Peg, contrite apology or a vicious tongue-lashing.
Challenger beeped him.
With a bang and a crash, the brush parted. A. megagracilis burst out of the magnolias. Jake recognized the rust-brown spots and the cleaner, smaller, more gracile variation of the basic tyrannosaurid build. There was no way to measure stride length, but the carnivore was going at least twice as fast as Jake could.
Nerves shot, Jake suppressed a shriek, calling for his stunner. He thrust his hand into an empty armpit. No holster handed him a weapon. He had hopped out of Challenger carrying nothing more deadly than a medikit. If this long-legged tyrannosaurid had a toothache or a broken toe, Jake could handle it—otherwise, he was caught short.
Fifty meters upwind, a juvenile duckbill broke cover. Squawking in horror, the duckbill bolted from a four-legged crouch into biped flight. The two-ton dinosaur’s green-and-black coloring, like old-fashioned camouflage, had made it nearly invisible among the ferns and dogwoods. Megagracilis must have smelled out the baby duckbill, because the tyrannosaurid showed no surprise, springing right for the spot where the duckbill emerged.
Seeing death coming, the terrified duckbill cut right. The tyrannosaurid cut even tighter, turning inside the bawling herbivore. They collided in a spray of dirt and gravel. Godzilla meets Baby Huey. Mercifully, it was quick.
Megagracilis got its jaws around the duckbill’s neck, biting down. The duckbill’s eyes bulged in terror. Slowly its thrashing subsided as A. megagracilis started to feed.
Jake sat rigid, so tense his muscles had set. Peg was right. To these terrible giants, two humans were a pair of odd bumps on the landscape. Insignificant bugs. While he and Peg argued, a game of eat and be eaten had gone on. Megagracilis had smelled out the hiding duckbill. The poor herbivore had watched death stalk closer, panicking at the last instant. Neither had paid the least attention to the humans. Very deflating.
A glance at Peg was even more deflating. She was on her feet, shooting each slice of flesh as it came off the duckbill. The look on her face was otherworldly, completely relaxed—not smiling, not happy, merely transported. By picking this young paleontologist, he had handed her the adventure of her life, an adventure at once astounding, romantic, professional, and damned near to orgasmic—an epic in which Jake himself was only a poorly written stanza, as necessary as the reactor, but certainly no more important.
Jake was just cynical enough to consider using that truth. He could point out to Peg that if it were not for him, then she would not be here. Jake was cynical enough to think it, but too proud to say it. He was not going to grovel.
He liked thinking of himself as witty, handsome, and as brave as he needed to be. Peg put a strain on that self-esteem. So it was time to give his libido a rest. Maybe they would not make love, but they would damn well work together. No more loose adventuring, waiting for lightning to strike. Gung Ho, or no go. What he needed was a plan, something he could hold Peg to when she veered off on her next tangent.
Telling the navcomputer to illuminate the darkening wadi, he trotted back to the Challenger, slipped on his shoulder holster and ordered an Irish coffee from the microstove. Mug in hand, he walked back to the wash to watch A. megagracilis demolish dinner.
Coffee and whiskey had just the right bite for his mood, and he got back in time to witness a tail-lashing feeding frenzy. Two of the larger tyrannosaurids came strutting back from the bend in the river. Perhaps this pair had missed their kills. Perhaps the pack had had a falling-out. In any event, the big tyrannosaurids decided that a baby duckbill would do nicely. There was some snapping and snarling as A. megagracilis made a pretense of asserting property rights. The smaller carnivore was too quick to be hurt badly, but the outcome was never in doubt. The two tyrannosaurs settled down to a thieves’ banquet. Megagracilis slunk off to hunt up another duckbill.
Jake saw a lesson in this. Megagracilis was a specialist, a speedy killer of small duckbills. Much as Jake admired its compact lines and well-honed technique, Jake was glad to be a generalist. The two tyrannosaurs were generalists—big enough to tackle a triceratops, but not too big to scavenge. Given enough time, generalists always won. Or so Jake hoped.
Peg, snub nose stuck in her view finder, was the specialist par excellence.
They walked back to Challenger together. Peg tossed her recorder on the chart table, propping moccasined feet beside it. “A totally essential day. I’m thrilled, famished, and exhausted—in about that order.”
She produced a huge shed tooth, pushing it toward Jake. “For your collection.” A peace offering. Dinosaurs shed their worn teeth, so tremendous canines weren’t rare, but Peg seemed eager to make amends, to be sociable, despite a gritty weariness in the corners of her eyes.
Jake was touched. He served up mushroom moussaka and cabbage borscht, accompanied by a favorite Moselle. Outside, snapping bones added to the night noises as great crunching jaws broke up the last of the duckbill.
Peg nodded toward the darkening night, “Giant carnivores are nice enough, in their bloody fashion, but I still want to see sauropods.”
Sauropods again. She had mentioned them the first day. Jake knew that these brontosaur-type, long-necked herbivores were the ultimate in dinosaurs—twenty to thirty meters long, weighing as much as a hundred tons.
Peg’s sleepy eyes glowed. “Sauropods are essential to this expeditio
n, essential to the extinction question. Essential to everything.”
“We’re unlikely to find them here in Hell Creek,” he pointed out.
She shrugged. “FTL picked Hell Creek. I wanted to go straight to the Morrison Formation.”
“Upper Cretaceous is as far as the anomaly goes.” Jake smiled. Peg’s overspecialization was showing; she was weak on Wormhole Theory. Jake was the one who had turned her original proposal into something workable. Morrison Formation was Late Jurassic, maybe eighty million years further back.
The Mesozoic was gigantic. He and Peg had only broken the surface. T. Rex was closer in time to human civilization than it was to brontosaurus and the Great Age of the Sauropods. Jake had brought them in as close as he dared to the mysterious KT boundary that marked the Cretaceous extinction, figuring that the end is never a bad place to start. Success here meant that they could look for other anomalies, going farther back, seeing more.
But Peg wanted to see it all now. “What we have here in Hell Creek is an explosion of new types: tyrannosaurids, triceratopses, boneheads, ankylosaurs, and advanced duckbills. Evolution is fast-forward. But it’s essential to know what is happening to older types as well, and sauropods are some of the oldest.”
Jake admitted that he wasn’t a paleontologist, but he swore he could feel the great extinction coming. Hell Creek dinosaurs looked healthy enough—at petting range. T. Rex was frighteningly impressive—but there was a frantic quality to dinosaur life he didn’t see in the crocs and fisher-storks. The net connecting life to life hummed with tension.
“Sure, I’ve seen it, too.” Peg catalogued the symptoms: “Carnosaurs forced to squabble over kills. Triceratops herds surging across the landscape, searching for water and sustenance. Poor harassed duckbills unable to protect their offspring.”
Jake put in his pitch for generalism. “Aside from the ostrich-types, there are no hordes of small dinosaurs. No tiny generalists waiting to take over if the big boys falter.”
Peg shook her head. “The whole show is propped atop the food chain.” One day something would hit the props hard—the crash would be tremendous. Even as they talked, world calamity hurtled through space-time toward Earth. “But that’s why sauropods are so basic. They are well-established herbivores, who have already survived numerous extinctions and cosmic collisions.”
Jake liked the notion of a sauropod hunt. The long-necked herbivores were huge but relatively harmless, unless they stepped on you. Seeing a sauropod was such a sane ambition, compared to playing tag with tyrannosaurids. “So, where could we find large sauropods in the Uppermost Cretaceous?”
“Maybe in the Highlands; certainly in South America.”
Enjoying her enthusiasm, Jake had Challenger project maps of fossil finds onto the chart table. The maps reminded him of the charts that pretended to describe nineteenth-century Africa. Fossils formed where sediments were being laid down, so the maps showed coastlines, river deltas, floodplains, and the like. Continental interiors were great blank areas.
Peg dismissed the Euramerican sauropods, “So-called titanosaurs, they hardly live up to their name. Not much bigger than duckbills.” Euramerican predators were also small to medium—megalosaurs and dryptosaurs. T. Rex would have roared through them like a lion at a poodle show. Much of Europe was just plain underwater. Eastern North America, Greenland, and Scandinavia were united into Euramerica—but Southern Europe was a string of semi-arid islands, some inhabited by dwarf dinosaurs a couple of meters long, quaint rather than impressive. Peg did not have time for evolutionary U-turns.
Jake suggested that they ride the prevailing westerlies south and east, at least as far as North Africa. The Sahara was supposed to be a green tropical expanse, connected to Euramerica by the Spanish Isles.
Peg shook her head. “West Africa will have more of those misnamed titanosaurs—bigger than the ones in Euramerica, but not by much. We can look in on them later, on our way to India.” India was another huge blank spot, as mysterious as in the days before da Gama, thought to be terribly exotic—perhaps an island, perhaps attached to Africa.
She wanted to go straight to South America, even though it meant flying through the teeth of the megathermal, and the tropical storm belt. “There we are sure to see real sauropods.”
Jake weighed the iffy weather, then agreed. He would cheerfully face a dozen tropical cyclones if he did not have to endure another tyrannosaur chase.
Feeling like they had finally arrived, he took Challenger aloft for the night. In his evening systems check, he noted Peg’s recorder was drawing minimum power, on hold at the end of a file. She must have fallen asleep reviewing data.
Curious, he interfaced with the recorder through its power intake, telling his compweb to break any encryption. The recorder code was a simple digital transformation, keyed to Peg’s birth date—putting PEG with BIRTHDAY brought the date out of memory. The deciphered image went straight to Jake’s optical lobe.
He was surprised by a familiar purple-blue sky. White vapor streaked the ruddy horizon. The recording had to come from Home; the image was not from the Mesozoic. It was not even from Earth.
Frozen in the 3V foreground was a group of teenage girls—young, gawky, big-eyed—leaning on each other, tired and triumphant. They wore respirators and altitude suits, but had doffed their masks for the recording. Thin lips were blue from cold and lack of oxygen. They were on Mars, the western summit of Olympus Mons; Jake recognized the red ochre Amazonis Planitia in the background.
Olympus Summit was a typical tourist destination, but these weren’t typical tourists. They had climbed the sucker, the biggest mountain on a habitable planet. You could see the incredible hike in the girls’ faces.
And Peg was in the middle—very adult, very in charge.
Of course. Teen Lesbians. She was probably a Pack Mother or something. Her proud look, backed by the Plain of Amazons, explained part of his problem.
Next morning they scouted the proto-Rockies, finding dense impenetrable forest. Peg thought the highlands might hold large sauropods. Jake did not disagree. “There might be ultrasaurs down there, or lost cities, or leprechauns, but the only way to know is to tether Challenger to a tree and blunder about on foot—two people and no shock-rifle. The sauropods of the Rockies will have to wait.”
Bayou country came next; lower, swampier, opened by waterways. Jake played cajun tunes in his head, while Peg catalogued flora and fauna from the air. “Swamp cypress, cycads, tall stands of fir and pines . . .” They spotted a pack of small tyrannosaurids—Albertosaurus lancensis, Peg thought, but she could not be sure without seeing teeth and other internal parts. Nothing remotely resembled a sauropod.
Then came the sea. Green-white shorebreak. Blue water. Reefs and atolls. Challenger descended to top off the water ballast and fill the hydrogen cells. Peg took sea water samples and swam nude inside a reef. Small-toothed shore birds wheeled above.
Leaving balmy Montana, they sailed south and east along the Dakota shoreline. Kansas was completely underwater. Peg sat on the transparent cabin deck, shooting straight down to the sandy sea bottom, picking out marine reptiles, twelve-to-sixteen meter plesiosaurs, long-necked versions of the Loch Ness monster. She still worked in the nude aboard ship—but that had become mere entertainment. Jake admired her yoga positions over breakfast, then relaxed into his role of flying chauffeur.
He swung far enough east to sight the Euramerican shore, seeing duckbills in the Alabama swamps. “Alabama Song” played in his head as he set a mental course for South America. He flew in bright sunshine alongside immense flocks of long-legged ducks, as big as flamingos.
This part of the trip was like coming home. Jake had learned airship technique in the twentieth century aboard the original Graf Zeppelin, working as a rigger for Lufthansa on the South America run—Frankfurt to Recife to Rio, then back to Germany by way of Seville. That was when Rio was Rio, not just another branch of Megapolis. He remembered fevered nights full of music, women, and
mardi gras, with Nazi reichsmarks burning a hole in his pocket. Not a bad time and place—between the world wars and before the AIDS pandemic—unless you were poor, or perhaps a Jew. He rummaged through his music files for a samba, or maybe the Bolero.
By now they were in the megathermal, the fevered blanket circling the waist of the planet—a perpetual steambath with temperatures in the wet 100s. Everything was sopping. Decks and bulkheads sweated. Pillows turned to warm sponges. Buckskin came apart in soggy clumps. Jake took to wearing only light cotton pants; anything more was intolerable.
Approaching the equatorial trough, wind died to a whisper. Depressed by the heavy air of the doldrums, Jake dumped ballast and headed farther out to sea, hoping that the higher marine air would be cooler. A mere ribbon of water separated South America from Asiamerica and Africa, a seaway too small to be called the South Atlantic. The fishlike shadow of the airship swam over the waves.
Weather radar noted convective turbulence, an easterly wave of low pressure signaling a weak equatorial low.
Peg stood, recorder ready, anxious for her first glimpse of South America and its sauropods. After tracking them across two continents, her eagerness was easy to see. Jake decided that as soon as they found a decent-sized sauropod, he was going to hit on her again—catch her in a paleontological frenzy, and anything was possible.
Tall anvilheads reared before them, a fluffy colonnade leading up to Olympus. High sea-surface temperatures created warming unstable air masses. Typhoon weather, with storm pillars ten kilometers high.
Seeing a gap, Jake shot for blue sky and blue water, hoping to put the emerging storm cells behind him.
Dinosaurs II Page 8
