“I guess you don’t have any idea what causes these things.”
“Not really. I suppose I could hazard a guess.”
“Hazard away.”
The mammal avoided Jim’s eyes. “I’m not sure I like to.”
Jim was starting to lose patience. After all the mammal’s boasting about what a desperado he’d been back lifeside, his sudden passivity was decidedly irritating. Could it be a practical, small-animal caution was progressively eroding its former cowboy recklessness? “Why not?”
“You might take it personally.”
“Are you saying that I might have something to do with it?”
The mammal answered reluctantly, “It’s possible. You or the UFO. One or both of you may have caused a rupture.”
Jim started to grow angry. “I didn’t ask to come here.”
“There you go. You are taking it personally.”
Jim sighed. “No, I’m not. I’m just wondering what to do about it. Maybe if it was me that caused it, I could somehow stop it.”
“Maybe.”
“But you don’t have any suggestions?”
“Not a one.”
“Damn.”
The world was now nothing more than a gray blur with twinkles and sparkles dancing in the middle distance and a faint blue line where the horizon used to be. Clearly something had to be done, but Jim had no idea what, and the mammal was no help. Jim thought for a moment, if, indeed, moments truly existed in their current predicament, but all he could come up with was the one thing that had stood him in reasonable stead since his death. “When in doubt, do the obvious.”
The mammal looked puzzled. “Say what?”
“I said, when in doubt, do the obvious.”
“And what might that be?”
Jim couldn’t help himself. “I’d have thought it was obvious.”
The mammal looked offended. His eyes were doglike in their reproach. “Now you’re fucking with me.”
Jim felt bad. He was a sucker for reproachful eyes. “Yeah, I’m fucking with you. I shouldn’t do that. You’re not the one responsible.”
The mammal nodded forgivingly. “That’s okay.”
“Let’s try something.”
“Try what?”
“Watch and learn.”
Jim took a deep breath, inflating his lungs to their fullest. He had always managed to achieve things with his voice. He turned and faced the blue line of the horizon and bellowed with all his might, “HAVE THIS STOPPED!”
And it stopped. Time reverted to normal, leaving them in the dark of night. Stars twinkled overhead, things rustled in the reeds and tall grass; in the distance, a dinosaur was singing. The mammal looked up at Jim with undisguised admiration. “Wow.”
“Pretty neat, huh? Pretty good?”
“I have to hand it to you.”
“Except that it’s now the middle of the night, and for all I know, we could be ten thousand years in the past.”
The small mammal thought about this. “Would it really matter?”
Jim nodded. “It would matter to me.”
“It would?”
“I’d be dead before I ever got born. I’d be a walking paradox.”
The mammal’s voice took on a tone of you-think-you-got-troubles. “I’m dead before I was born and my species doesn’t have a name.”
“So you really are a walking paradox.”
“I guess I am.”
“But that doesn’t really help our current situation.”
The mammal shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t. I was just figuring, since you’d already found yourself washed up in the Jurassic, ten thousand years either way isn’t going to make all that much difference.”
Jim looked around but could see very little in the darkness. “Maybe I could work the same trick again.”
He took a second deep breath. “NOW PUT US BACK WHERE WE WERE!”
Nothing happened except the dinosaurs paused in their song. The night remained impenetrable. Jim scowled. “Shit.”
The Mammal was philosophical. “I guess you can’t win them all.”
“So it would seem.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”
“I guess we don’t get to go to the old mansion in the swamp after all.”
The mammal frowned. “Why the fuck not?”
Jim looked at the mammal. He really could be pretty obtuse at times. “Because we don’t know if it even exists in this time frame.”
Now the mammal looked at Jim as though he were the one being obtuse. “It exists.”
“It does? How do you know that?”
“You can see its lights.”
Jim peered into the black of night. “Where?”
The mammal extended a paw. “There.”
Now Jim saw it, a pinpoint of light way off in the distance. “Is that it?”
“That’s it. The lights are always on at night.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
Jim sighed. He supposed living in the Jurassic without a name would make anyone slow. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that before I started all that yelling?”
“You didn’t ask.”
***
As the parade finally arrived at the area where the detonation would take place, Semple saw that as much trouble had gone into the planning, arrangement, and construction of the viewing area and picnic site as into the procession that had brought them there. Necropolis might be sinking into ruin and decay, but when it came to one of Anubis’s pet obsessions, apparently no effort was considered excessive. Semple’s first impression was that the design of the Divine Atom Bomb Festival was a fanciful attempt to marry a medieval tournament with a hippie rock festival of the late 1960s. Long lines of covered bleachers had been erected so the rich, powerful, and well connected could idle away the event in varying degrees of luxury, sheltered from the bright, iron-gray sky and the relentless desert sun.
Each section of these bleachers came with its own attendant clustering of tents, marquees, and pavilions, where food and wine were served and musicians serenaded the drinkers and diners. Blue smoke and a variety of cooking smells rose from al fresco barbecue kitchens, where sweating chefs basted the browning flanks of whole roasting steers or labored over broiling racks of smaller delicacies. Bunting tossed and fluttered in the afternoon breeze above open-air stages on which jugglers and illusionists, fire eaters, and escapologists performed, and dancing girls and young men displayed both their moves and their bodies. Flag-draped booths hawked all manner of mementos, from commemorative plates to souvenir dark glasses, all of which bore the black and gold mushroom cloud that was the Divine Atom Bomb Festival merchandising logo. For what seemed to Semple a highly unnecessary additional diversion, wild animals were displayed in cages, human criminals had their bodies bent out of shape by creatively crafted sets of mobile stocks, and here and there bottom-feeding slave dealers with wheezing, vapor-leaking portable steam computers were running fast-bargain, knockdown auctions of fetch-and-carry domestics, disposable body serfs, and low-grade sex objects.
It was, however, only the rich who got the goodies. All of these treats, diversions, and spectacles were exclusively lavished on the extended court of Anubis and the invited guests from the affluent elite. The city’s rabble of poor were expected to devise their own protection from the sun and provide most of their own predetonation amusement on a large and increasingly dusty tract of open land, well in front of the facilities provided for the aristocracy. Here, despite considerable discomfort from heat and insects, the proles were hunkered down, waiting for the Holy Explosion. The lower classes had largely provided their own refreshments, although beer, soda, and junk food were being dispensed by pushcart vendors each with his own teakettle computer running the barcode scanners.
The most popular prebomb recreations for the proletariat seemed to be sex and gambling. As the procession passed through the area set aside for the poor, Semple had noticed couples unselfconsciously copulating on the open ground without any apparent shame. Men huddled around dice games, while professional card cutters spotted and isolated their marks. Larger groups gathered around pairs of fighting animals. Roosters, pit bulls, and small bipedal lizards snarled and slashed at their opponents while spectators yelled and cursed.