In the morning, as soon as Hunter heard Steve stir in the tent, he returned to full activity. The dawn light was speckling the camp through the trees overhead. Hunter inspected the line of tracks that led away from camp.
“Hi, Hunter,” said Steve, as he came out of the tent. “You about ready to go?”
“Yes. Before I left, I wanted to make sure that at least one of you was awake to call me on the transmitter in the event of trouble.”
“Well, here I am.”
“Yes. There you are.” Hunter hesitated, not sure if this was a form of farewell or not. When Steve began inspecting the breakfast materials, Hunter decided that it was. He turned to the tracks and stored a careful visual memory of them. Then he set off at a jog.
As he made breakfast, Steve watched the struthiomimus with curiosity. It was wandering around the corral in apparent contentment, eating leaves from the trees. After breakfast Chad and Jane joined him in a walk to the corral, where they watched Strut in his temporary home.
“Quite a creature,” said Jane. “The resemblance to an ostrich really is very strong.”
“Yes,” said Chad. “It was odd riding it, but I got used to it fast enough.”
“So what do you think about all these dinosaurs now?” Steve asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, before we got here, everything you knew about dinosaurs came from fossils and guesswork. Now you’ve seen them for real. What do you think?”
“I wouldn’t say it was guesswork,” Chad said huffily. “Paleontologists have been studying fossil remains and living entities for years with great care. We’ve figured out all kinds of things through more than guesswork.”
“All right, all right. But have you learned anything new since we’ve been here?” Steve demanded impatiently.
“Well, of course I have! We can surmise the color of some dinosaurs from their environment, and the kind of camouflage they must have needed-but now I know for sure what color some of them were.”
Steve was getting angrier by the moment. “Yeah? And how did you know what kind of environment they lived in from only a bunch of fossils?”
“From where they’re found,” Chad snapped. “We can tell from the kind of rock they’re in. To me, a fossil in sandstone means that the specimen died in water. The overall shape and other nearby fossils will tell me if it was a streambed or an ocean. To you, of course, sandstone is just a rock.”
“I can live out in the sand of a desert,” Steve said coldly, “where you’d die if you didn’t have all your modern conveniences and robots to protect you.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Jane. “Chad made a good point here. Paleontology isn’t a guessing game.”
“Don’t bother, Jane,” said Chad with a sneer. “I wouldn’t expect a desert rat to understand advanced logic.”
“Now you aren’t being fair either,” she said.
Chad ignored her. “For instance, dinosaurs walked with their legs nearly straight and erect; many of the bipeds were very active, fast runners; the bone tissue of some is similar to that of mammals, and some species seemed to travel in herds and take care of their young. Steve, can you tell me what theory these facts indicate?”
Steve glared at him, but had no answer.
“You know the term ‘endotherm,’ by any chance?”
“No.”
“Warm-blooded, Steve. All those characteristics I just listed are limited to warm-blooded animals in modern times. That means dinosaurs with those qualities are probably warm-blooded too. It’s not guesswork, but you can’t figure it out unless you actually know your stuff.”
“I’m sure that the entire planet has benefited from this knowledge,” Steve growled.
“And what have you ever accomplished?” Chad folded his arms, grinning at Steve.
“I take care of myself.”
“Yeah.” Chad nodded. “And exactly what good does that do for anyone else?”
“I don’t share anyone else’s water or energy,” said Steve. “I don’t take anything from anyone else or consume anything in the environment that can’t be replaced.”
“In other words, after you’re gone, no one will even notice you ever lived. Is that what you’re so proud on” Chad could hardly keep from laughing.
“He doesn’t bother anyone,” said Jane. “He hasn’t hurt anybody.”
“Neither do we,” Chad said sharply. “But we also contribute something to society.”
“Maybe she does,” said Steve, hotly. “Robotics is important to everybody in our time. But what good do you do for people-digging up fossils and trying to figure out what the animal used to be like?”
“Science doesn’t have to give you a specific goal,” said Chad, in a bored tone of voice. “Knowledge is good for its own sake. You can’t always plan what you can use it for.”
“Then what’s the point?” Steve demanded.
Chad grinned at Jane, who looked uncomfortable. “All right, I’ll explain. For instance, what if paleontology had never existed? I wouldn’t be in this profession now and when Hunter needed somebody to come back to this time period, no one would have been available. In science you never know what knowledge might be good for someday.” He shook his head. “Not that you’d understand that, of course.”
Steve had no answer to that. He turned and walked briskly away, not sure where he was going.
The other two were silent behind him. He remembered, of course, that they had all told Hunter that they would remain in camp. Just then, he couldn’t stand the thought of listening to Chad all day. He stomped past the tent, aware that he should find some excuse to stop and do chores. Instead, he just snatched up a rope and kept right on walking.
15
Hunter moved through the forest steadily, usually at a brisk walk or even a slow jog. Sometimes the dense trees and bushes forced him to slow down. He often had to climb over rocks and fallen tree trunks. Still, at the very least, he was sure that he was keeping an even pace with MC 1.
As Hunter maintained his pursuit, he recorded in his memory everything he saw and heard for future reference. He knew that MC 1‘s head start had begun from the moment the component robot had left the camp the previous afternoon. Still, he was hoping that MC 1 had continued his earlier pattern of staying close to the camp. In any event, Hunter would not go too far from it in case the humans called him with an emergency.
Near midday Hunter came to a sudden halt at the edge of the stream. He was upstream from the point where he and Chad had been fishing. MC 1‘s tracks led into the water, but he could see that they did not lead out on the opposite bank.
He is learning,Hunter thought to himself. He waded into the cold, swirling water and stopped to look upstream and downstream.
The water sparkled in the sunlight. If MC 1 had been only a short distance ahead, Hunter could have detected which way he had gone. If he had gone upstream, the water here would have been muddy for a while, with the muddy streambed kicked up by his footsteps. Conversely, if he had gone downstream, it would have remained clear.
The water was clear now, but too much time had passed for that to mean anything. MC 1 had certainly been out of the water for hours, giving the stream time to clear no matter which way he had gone. Hunter magnified his vision and carefully studied each bank on both sides, up and down the current.
Hunter saw no sign of footprints leaving the water. He had no way of judging how far to look in the direction that the stream was flowing before looking upstream instead. Fortunately, he found MC 1‘s tracks another nine meters downstream. MC 1 had left the water on the opposite bank, still running.
“Good move,” Hunter thought with grudging appreciation. MC 1 had certainly waded much faster than Hunter had been able to follow him. That meant MC 1 had gained some distance on him.
Hunter jogged after him, always alert for predatory dinosaurs. His senses brought him advance warning of heavy footsteps and sometimes sounds of eating or even breathing before he could see any animals, so he avoided most creatures of significant size before he encountered them. He could hear the smaller animals scampering out of his way through the underbrush.