“How’s your foot?” I asked Smith.
“Sore,” he said, pulling up his wet trouser leg. His boot and thick sock had taken most of the punishment, but a few of the crocamander’s sharp little teeth had gone through and punctured his skin, where a pair of big purple bruises was forming from the pressure of those jaws.
I hauled out the tube of disinfectant and the roll of bandage that I carry. We never did learn whether the crocamander had really mistaken Smith’s foot for a fish or was trying, like a real croc, to pull him in to drown him. A crocodile would then cache him and eat him later when the corpse had softened enough to come apart easily.
“And what of you people?” said Carlyle, while I worked on Smith’s bleeding ankle. “What’s that beast?” He pointed to the carnosaur.
“By God! “cried Sir Edred, examining the carcass. “I’m damned if that isn’t a close relative of Teratosaurus! I want as much of it as we can take back with us!”
“Oh, no, you don’t!” said Carlyle. “I need the head for my wall!”
“I need the whole thing to study!” said Ngata.
Those two had a rare old row until I stepped in. “Now look here, fellas, you needn’t argue the toss. I shot the bugger, so I can do what I like with the remains. Since you, Desmond, have already got the phytosaur skin, I hereby give the carcass of the carnosaur to Sir Edred, to do with as he likes. If you two decide exchange your trophies, that’s all right with me, so long as everyone’s agreed.”
Carlyle looked sober. “We-ell, come to think, my walls are going to be pretty crowded already. So Edred can have the dinosaur and I’ll take the pseudo-croc.”
“Willard,” said Ngata to young Smith, “How about giving me a hand with this carcass? Skin and skeleton both.”
Limping but game, Smith did not object, since I suppose he was feeling guilt about having fallen into the river from sheer clumsiness. Ngata said to Alvarado:
“I say, old man, where did you learn to dodge slavering predators like that? I knew carnosaurs were not good at quick turns, but that’s not a theory I’m keen to try out personally.”
Alvarado grinned. “When I was younger, I wanted to be a bullfighter. So I trained for it, but I also practiced my singing. Now singing gives a man a big appetite, and so I got too fat for the corrida. At least, my torero training was not time wasted!”
There’s little more to tell. On the way back to camp, the Alvarados acted like honeymooners, and that night I avoided noticing any changes in sleeping arrangements. Next day the transition chamber appeared, right on schedule. We loaded the gear and service personnel in first, leaving the sahibs and the guns for last in case something inimical showed up at the site. It took an extra trip by the chamber to fetch back all the bones and hides and pickled heads and other specimens to the present.
Eh? About Tom and Inez? No, so far as I know the Alvarados did not remarry. I’m sorry I can’t give the tale a proper happy romantic ending. Despite all their endearments on the way back to camp, the last I saw of them, as they left Prochaska’s laboratory, they were quarreling furiously over something, but in Spanish too fast for me to follow. Watching them made me happy to have just a nice, steady, easy, humdrum domestic relationship. I get all the excitement I need on these time safaris.
So now you can see why I won’t mix the sexes on these expeditions. It’s not the dinosaurs and other animals that cause the main problems; it’s the human beings. It was more by luck than by management that neither Tomas Alvarado stabbed Desmond Carlyle, nor did Carlyle blow Tom’s head off. You can reason and argue all you like; but when the primitive sexual instinct takes over, anything can happen. One of those in a lifetime is quite enough, thank you.
I’ll admit that not even an all-male group is proof against such outbursts. Once I had an all-male party, of whom three—though I didn’t know it when I signed them up—formed the corners of a homosexual love triangle, which came within a whisker of another murder. But that’s another story.