Mary Lang, Howard Emory, and Ken Jacobs were self-styled “guerrillas” in defense of helpless beasties everywhere, charter members of Persons In Defense of Animo-beings; P.I.D.A. for short. There was nothing they would not do to secure the rights of exploited and abused animals. This year alone they, personally, had already chalked up the release of several hundred prisoner-rats from a lab in Lisle, Illinois. It was too bad about the mutated bubonic plague spreading through Chicago afterwards, but as Ken said, people had choices, the rats didn’t. Tonight, they were after bigger game.
DinoSaurians. Patent Pending.
Real, living, breathing dinosaurs—slated to become P.O.Z.s (Prisoners of Zoos) the world over. And all because some corporate MBA on the Board of the San Diego Zoo had seen the attendance numbers soar when the Dunn traveling animated dinosaur exhibit had been booked there for a month. He had put that together with the discovery that common chickens and other creatures could be regressed to their saurian ancestors—the pioneering work had already been done on the eohippus and aurochs—and had seen a goldmine waiting for both the zoos and GenTech.
“How could they do this to me?” Mary whined. “They had such a promising record! I was going to ask them for a corporate donation! And now—this—”
“Money,” Ken hissed. “They’re all money-grubbing bastards, who don’t care if they sell poor animals into a life of penal servitude. Just wait; next thing you’ll be seeing is DinoBurgers.”
Howard winced, and pulled the collar of his unbleached cotton jacket higher. “So, what have we got?” he asked. “What’s the plan?”
Ken consulted the layout of the facility and the outdoor pens. It had been ridiculously easy to get them; for all the furor over the DinoSaurians, there was remarkably little security on this facility. Only signs, hundreds of them, warning of “Dangerous Animals.” Ridiculous. As if members of P.I.D.A. would be taken in by such blatant nonsense! There was no such thing as a dangerous animal; only an animal forced to act outside of its peaceful nature. “There are only three dino-animopersons at the moment, and if we can release all three of them, it will represent such a huge loss to GenTech that I doubt they’ll ever want to create more. There’s a BrontoSaurian here—” He pointed at a tiny pen on the far northern corner of the map. “It’s inside a special pen with heavy-duty electric fences and alarms around it, so that will be your target, Howard. You’re the alarms expert.”
Howard looked over Ken’s shoulder, and winced again. “That pen isn’t even big enough for a horse to move around in!” he exclaimed. “This is inhuman! It’s veal calves all over again!”
Ken tilted the map towards Mary. “There’s something here called a ‘Dinonychus’ that’s supposed to be going to the San Diego Zoo. It looks like they’ve put it in some kind of a bare corral. You worked with turning loose the rodeo horses and bulls last year, so you take this one, Mary.”
Mary Lang nodded, and tried not to show her relief. The corral didn’t look too difficult to get into, and from the plans, all she’d have to do would be to open the corral gate and the animal would run for freedom. “Very active” was the note photocopied along with the map. That was fine; the rodeo horses hadn’t wanted to leave their pens, and it had taken forever to get them to move. And she’d gotten horsecrap all over her expensive synthetic suede pants.
“That leaves the Tricerotops in the big pasture to me.” Ken folded the map once they had all memorized the way in. “Meet you here in an hour. Those poor exploited victims of corporate humanocentrism are already halfway to freedom. We’ll show the corporate fat cats that they can’t live off the misery of tortured, helpless animals!”
Howard had never seen so many alarms and electric shock devices in his life. He thought at first that they were meant to keep people out—but all the detectors pointed inward, not outward, so they had all been intended to keep this pathetic BrontoSaurian trapped inside his little box.
Howard’s blood pressure rose by at least ten points when he saw the victim; they were keeping it inside a bare concrete pen, with no educational toys, nothing to look at, no variation in its environment at all. It looked like the way they used to pen “killer” elephants in the bad old days; the only difference was that this BrontoSaurian wasn’t chained by one ankle. There was barely enough room for the creature to turn around; no room at all for it to lie down. There was nothing else in the pen but a huge pile of green vegetation at one end and an equally large pile of droppings at the other.
Good God, he thought, appalled, Don’t they even clean the cage?
As he watched, the BrontoSaurian dropped its tiny head, curved its long, flexible neck, and helped itself to a mouthful of greenery. As the head rose, jaws chewing placidly, another barrel of droppings added itself to the pile from the other end of the beast.
The BrontoSaurian seemed to be perfect for making fertilizer, if nothing else.
Well, soon he would be fertilizing the acreage of the Los Lobos National Park, free and happy, and the memory of this dank, cramped prison would be a thing of the past.
Howard disabled the last of the alarms and shock fences, pulled open the gates, and stepped aside, proudly waiting for the magnificent creature to take its first steps into freedom.
The magnificent creature dropped its head, curved its neck, and helped itself to another mouthful of greenery. As the head rose, jaws chewing placidly, it took no note of the open gates just past its nose.
“Come on, big boy!” Howard shouted, waving at it.
It ignored him.
He dared to venture into the pen.
It continued to ignore him. Periodically it would take another mouthful and drop a pile, but except for that, it could just as well have been one of the mechanical dinosaurs it was supposed to replace.
Howard spent the next half hour trying, with diminishing patience, to get the BrontoSaurian to leave. It didn’t even look at him, or the open door, or anything at all except the pile of juicy banana leaves and green hay in front of it. Finally, Howard couldn’t take it any longer.
His blood-pressure rising, he seized the electric cattle prod on the back wall, and let the stupid beast have a good one, right in the backside.
As soon as he jolted the poor thing, his conscience struck him a blow that was nearly as hard. He dropped the prod as if it had shocked him, and wrapped his arms around the beast’s huge leg, babbling apologies.
Approximately one minute later, while Howard was still crying into the leathery skin of the Bronto’s leg, it noticed that it had been stung. Irritating, but irritation was easy to avoid. It shifted its weight, as it had been taught, and stepped a single pace sideways.
Its left hind foot met a little resistance, and something made a shrieking sound—but there had been something shrieking for some time, and it ignored the sound as it had all the rest. After all, the food was still here.
Presently, it finished the pile of food before it and waited patiently. There was a buzzing noise, and a hole opened in the wall a little to its right. That was the signal to shift around, which it did.
A new load of fresh vegetation dropped down with a rattle and a dull thud, as the automatic cleaning system flushed the pile of droppings and the rather flat mortal remains of her savior Howard down into the sewage system.
Mary approached the corral carefully, on the alert for guards and prepared to act like a stupid, lost bimbo if she were sighted. But there were no guards; only a high metal fence of welded slats, centered with a similar gate. There was something stirring restlessly inside the corral; she couldn’t see what it was, for the slats were set too closely together. But as she neared the gate, she heard it pacing back and forth in a way that made her heart ache.