Maybe a mud structure, like a swallow’s nest, as one consultant had insisted. No, like a bird nest, Wilson said, only bigger, and Gold had agreed. Not in a tree, probably not in a cave—they’re too big—Simpson explained. Maybe in the sand, like a turtle, Stillman suggested, adding that I should keep my eyes open.
Whatever. They didn’t know, I didn’t know, so go look. I went looking.
The paintings they had shown me of this period had all looked so clean, Busy, but clean. They left out the stink, the thousand-bug-per-square-yard count, the unseen bacteria, the wet, the heat, the watery sounds, the heavy air. Flies—or whatever they were—thought I was delicious. More stuff slithered around underfoot. Something howled, something grunted, something screamed. The trees looked the way a kid draws a forest. Not real, but big, simple.
I remembered something from all the damned lectures they set up for me. It was a Deinonychus, better known to dino-lovers everywhere as “terrible claw.” That meant I was in the Early Cretaceous. At least that’s where they said they were sending me, about sixty-five to eighty million years from breakfast this morning. The Triassic and Jurassic were history, and here I was.
It was a major effort to unclench my hand from the customized grip of the Python and holster it. The only reason they let me take it was because if something dined a la carte on imported moi they’d have to start over. Also they didn’t want to scare me into thinking I’d really need it.
So they kind of pretended not to see the holstered revolver and the filled cartridge belt. It was, after all, near the end of the Age of Dinosaurs—what real harm could I do? These guys had a date with a meteor, anyway.
So I trudged on, not turning my head too quick so that the helmet cam could get shots that didn’t make viewers seasick. The ground slanted up a bit and got less gooshy underfoot. The jungle thinned out and I got some Sun now and again. I was in central Montana, or what would be Montana. I saw a pterosaur flapping along, as big as a World War II fighter, and looking very much like a special effect.
Then I saw the nest.
I knew what it was right off. A kind of depression out in the warming Sun with three-foot prints all around it. The three big spotted eggs were a tipoff.
Now all this running around jillions of years before I was born was all very nice, and I’m sure there were some who would be taking notes like mad and peeing in their pants over the wonder of it all. I was on the verge of soiling myself all right, but mainly because the hard part was now here— stealing the children of something that made three-foot dents in the hard ground when it walked.
I hunkered down behind a spiny bush and fished out the field glasses and took a look around. I saw a lake and something that reminded me of the discredited Loch Ness monster in the shallows. It was placidly eating slimy plant stuff. Fine. It was the carnivores I had to watch for. Like the one who had laid those eggs.
I got out my net bag and started creeping up on the nest, out in the open—until I realized what I was doing and just straightened up, glanced around and stomped over and took all three eggs. They were big, heavy, speckled, warm, and dirty. I figured the shell had to be thicker and stronger than the chickens of my time, but I still put bubble packing around them.
I felt momma before I heard her.
I heard her all too well before I saw her, but by then I was running. I caught a glimpse as she came up out of the forest on one side and I fled in the other direction, adrenaline-powered.
The mother. Momma Tyrannosaurus rex. The biggest and most powerful of all the carnosaurs. This one was a good eighteen feet high, about forty feet long, and the Sun glinted off wet teeth as long as daggers.
I knew she wasn’t really smart, but since she ate mobile living things she had to be smarter and faster than animals that ate grass. As the man said, it doesn’t take many smarts to sneak up on a blade of grass. And this was all her turf.
OK, I was scared. I ran. If you thought you wouldn’t, you’re a liar. I slipped and fell, but I always held up the bulging net. Something small and snarly popped up in front of me, hissing horribly. I jumped over it, and kept going, breathing hard.
I activated the homer and it beeped me to the northeast a bit. Then I heard the roar. Then another roar. Momma had discovered the foul deed. She’d gone off for a moment and her eggs were gone.
I don’t know if things as big as loading cranes have a keen sense of smell or not, or whether she saw me, or what, I just knew she was on my trail. I could heard things behind me being stomped, squished, sploshed and splattered. Things cawed and squawked and hissed and flapped and scurried and burrowed.
My heart was beating so fast it hurt. My lungs hurt. Some kind of flying bug fluttered up in front of me and I took it right in my mouth and that was when I realized I was screaming. Well, maybe not screaming, but certainly breathing out hard, real hard. OK, I was screaming.
I spit out whatever I’d gulped, tumbled down in the muck, staggered up like a three-day drunk, spit some more, untangled my foot from what I thought was a root until I saw the scales—and ran some more.
I slipped and crashed into a thick, pineapply-looking tree and suddenly there was eggstuff all over the front of me. I held up the net bag, even as my feet propelled me onward, and saw that two of the eggs looked OK. But the smashed egg contained a pretty well formed—and decidedly ugly— Tyrannosaurus chick.
I plucked at a few of the larger shell fragments, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” But I knew, fully-grown that ugly little chick could have swallowed me whole, literally, and still be looking for dinner.
The beeper was beeping and out of the corner of my eye I saw something pacing me, slipping through the trees. Oh, my god! It was the fleet-footed Deinonychus again, or one just like it.
I was running, it was running and behind me Mother was very definitely after me, a flat-footed, ground-shaking, distance-chomping run. No sluggish dinosaurs here. Obviously not cold-blooded.
I began to wonder if they had told me everything I needed to know about the time machine. The Temporal Displacement Container, that is. Maybe it needed warming up. They had said they had “foolproofed” it— there was a red button labeled BACK. But maybe they had to burp first, or get it up to speed, or something they thought everyone knew but I didn’t. Maybe I should have paid more attention.
They had all treated me as if I wasn’t smart enough to understand anything, which I frankly resented, but I needed a fast ticket out of town. I knew I wasn’t going to have much of a “window in time” as professorial types talk.
My past and future difficulties with the Jaroslava brothers were unimportant compared to whether those lab-coated wimps had thought about the necessity of fast takeoffs. For all I knew, fast to them was a swift ten minutes of preflight.
The deino was angling his run. It was aiming to have eggs with his ham. I pulled out the Colt Python and was about to let one go in the scaly fella’s direction when my outstretched arm ran into a sapling and the gun spun off into the gooey mud. I yelped and groaned because it felt like my forearm was broken. That left just running, the most ancient of defenses.
The damned deino made an agile side jump over a fallen tree and damned near landed on me. This was not its first run-to-ground. I swung to the right and leaped over a thorny bush. Something snapped at my feet.
The deino braked, twisted and came at me again. A lot of teeth and bad breath, very close. Too close. I swear its eyes were red. I put up my left hand to ward off its striking head before I realized that was the hand with the bag of eggs.