It was hard being cooped up in our tents for four days, especially when the flood waters rose so high that they lapped at our ankles. We got through it, though, without being tempted to kill each other. The paleontologists spent the time happily studying the specimens we had already collected. Rivera and Wang got into a very heated argument about whether the “Nemegtosaurus” skull found at the kill site was in fact the head of Opisthoelecaudia. Nemegtosaurus had previously been known only from the skull, while Opisthoelecaudia had been known from a headless skeleton. Since the known remains of the two “species” had been classified as two different kinds of sauropods, generations of paleontologists had assumed that they couldn’t be the same animal. Wang insisted that the skull must belong to the dead Opisthoelecaudia, while Rivera insisted that it was an “evolutionary impossibility”.
“So, maybe they didn’t evolve,” Dianna remarked quietly.

I asked Carlos: “What happens if the species do turn out to be the same animal? What will we call it then?”

“That’s happened many times before,” he answered. “The rule is, whichever name was given first is the ‘valid’ one, even if it is obscure, based on poor material, or flat-out inaccurate. That’s why we got stuck with things like Apatosaurus instead of Brontosaurus, or a whale whose official name translates as ‘king lizard’.”

I spent much of the time with Dianna, either talking or helping her check our equipment for water damage. I learned more about her. Unfortunately, Dr. Zapata also talked to her whenever he could. I had never told her about his reputation, but she obviously realized that he was being more than just friendly. She stayed polite, but I could tell that he was getting on her nerves. “He knows I’m engaged,” she finally complained to me on the fourth day of the expedition. “Why doesn’t he give up and go away?”

“Guys can be very persistent,” I answered circumspectly. “If he’s bothering you too much, you can come out with me to check on the vehicles. He probably won’t follow you out in the rain.”
“I think I will.”

By then, the rain was dying down, so we didn’t get too wet. The vehicles were in perfect condition, except for the Amphibian. Water was flowing in freely through the damaged tailgate. We found three fish and an exceptionally strange bird swimming around inside the bed. The bird had teeth, ludicrously small wings, webbed feet and legs that were splayed out at right angles to its pelvis. I netted the bird, and then lowered the tailgate.

We brought the bird straight to the paleontologists, who identified it as a hesperornid. A little later, I decided to ask the gathered paleontologists: “Is it really true that there are no ‘transitional forms’ in the fossil record?”

The paleontologists seemed hesitant to answer. (I think it was because Dianna was around, and they didn’t want her jumping on anything they said.) I was surprised when Carradine spoke first. “It’s true enough,” he said with complete candor. “In the strictest sense, a transitional form would have to be, first, part of a direct chain of ancestry, and second, intermediate in form and lifestyle between its ancestors and its descendants. No such animal has been found, and there is no reason to expect it to be found. The fossil record is much to poor to offer any sequences of direct ancestry. The best we can hope to find are ‘cousins’ removed from each other in varying degrees. Furthermore, it is clear that evolution does not proceed in anything like a linear fashion. The bird you caught is a perfect demonstration. While some birds were evolving more and more sophisticated flight systems, the hesperornids’ ancestors were evolving equally exotic features for an aquatic lifestyle. Evolution did not go in one direction, but several.

“Since the late 1900’s, all technical analyses of evolutionary relationships have been carried out through cladistic analysis. Cladistics is founded on the recognition that every taxon has both uniquely evolved or ‘derived’ features, and ‘primitive’ features which are shared with other taxa through common ancestry. Through primitive and derived characters, we can determine which organisms share a common ancestor, even if the ancestor itself is never found.”

“That sounds like circular reasoning to me,” Dianna said. “You assume that the features are evidence of evolution, and then use a diagram to show what you think happened but can’t prove. If there’s no direct evidence for evolution, why bother with the theory?”

“We do have plenty of evidence for microevolution,” Hutchins said. “With time travel, we can better document how microevolution leads to larger changes.”

“But I thought the fossils already show that species stay the same,” Dianna said calmly. “Time travel will just prove what you already know.”

Things went on like that for quite a while. Finally, Carradine said, “Look, what this comes down to is that scientists have to rely on physical causes. It’s useless to appeal to a metaphysical force that we can never observe.”

“Is that really different from what you already do?” Di said. “You don’t see common ancestors, but you try using cladistics to describe them. You didn’t see the animal that attacked that tyrannosaur, but you recognized the `terrible hand’ from its prints. Why shouldn’t the hand of God leave the same marks on our world?”

Right about then, Carlos wandered in. He seemed preoccupied with other things, but stopped to put in a few words. “You can talk all you want about the supernatural intruding into our world,” he said. “But you don’t really know about it. You haven’t experienced it. If you had, I should think you wouldn’t want to know any more.” Then he grabbed a tool and walked out.

I decided to follow him. I found Carlos doing something with one of the shotguns. “Are you trying to re-enable the selective fire function on that gun?” I said accusingly. The combat shotguns were military surplus weapons. They had originally been capable of traditional pump action, semi-automatic fire and fully automatic bursts, but the third option had been disabled before the guns were sold to us.
“No,” Carlos said sheepishly. “I’m just, ah, cleaning it.”

“With a pair of pliers?” I asked rhetorically. “Carlos, you know it’s illegal for a civilian to buy, sell or restore an automatic shotgun. You could get five years in prison for that. I order you to stop.”

“Too late,” Carlos said. With a few deft movements, he reassembled the gun. “I’m finished.”
“If anyone else finds out about this, you’ll go to jail.”

“No, I won’t,” Carlos said. “It’s funny. There’s no law against owning an automatic shotgun, as long as it was purchased legally, and they can’t get me for modifying it here. That would be ex post facto law—70 million years post facto!”
“It’s still wrong,” I said firmly, “not to mention unsporting.”
Carlos laughed. “‘Sporting’ means the target has a chance,” he said with a trace of bitterness. “I wouldn’t dream of using a sporting weapon.”

‘There’re a few things I need to talk to you about,” I said to Carlos. “One of them is Zapata. He’s acting up. Dianna’s getting upset. What do we do about him? Hell—have you ever dealt with anything like this?”

Carlos contemplated the question for a moment. “Well, the first thing I gotta say is that things like this don’t happen that often—not nearly as often as most people would expect. The fact of the matter is, a field expedition is about the least likely place for two people to `hook up’. There’s a lot of structure, not much privacy or free time, an’, of course, completely unchecked BO. Not what most people would consider an environment for sexual escapades. For the most part, anything that goes on in the field is between spouses or otherwise ‘steady’ partners. Often as not, there will be a couple or two in an expedition sharing a tent. What goes on in there is their own business—but the easy money is on ‘not much!’

“A guy like Zapata is a pretty rare breed. One can work in the field for years without running into his like, but, on any given expedition, there’s likely to be at least one person who has. The typical profile is a respected, well-established professor, often married with grown children, who jus’ likes to bag some young meat once a year. The other party always seems to be a student or younger subordinate. I think what the type really gets off on is the feeling of authority, not the sex. They seem to be pretty good at seeing which ones will go for it and which ones won’t, and choosing their battles accordingly. S’long as it proceeds like that, it’s nobody’s business, least till they get home. The one time I’ve seen it get ugly was when there were two of ‘em on the same expedition, an’ they went for the same one…One man went at t’other with a rock hammer, t’other fought back with an axe, an’ I had to sit them down to chat with my 12-gauge. But that pretty colleen, she was brighter than most… She turned ‘em both down! That’s exactly what Dianna is going to do, an’ there’s nothing Zapata can do about it. Don’t worry about it.”

I nodded, feeling a little more at ease. “What did you mean in the tent just now?”
Carlos looked at me quizzically. “The best way I can answer that is with my own question. Will you accept that?” I nodded. “Good. Here goes. Do you really believe in your God?” I looked at him, stunned. “I don’t mean if you believe He exists. I mean, do you trust Him? And would you really want to know Him?”

“Yes,” I said, somewhat hesitantly.
“If you really mean that, you’re a more devout man than I,” Carlos said. “Me, I pray to the Mother. But I don’t treat Her like a best buddy or a bloody Member of Parliament. If I did, I don’t think I should like it if She responded. And why should you? What did the angels in the Bible always say? ‘Fear not!’ or ‘It’s good to see you, too’? Do you think any of the people who talked to them wanted to do it again?

“That’s the problem with modern religion, Christian or pagan. The old fears are gone, and the old respect has died with them. Instead of the Queen of Darkness, one gets Tinkerbelle. Not even that, really; the original Tinkerbelle at least had enough character to let Peter Pan pick up the poison! The ones that try to worship the Goddess in their cozy apartments with cards and Ouija boards and crystals—speaking of, what the f* do they think is in their crystals that couldn’t equally well be in a bag of sand?—they’re trivializing Her. They should be praying that She doesn’t take notice. They’re like the bloody old-fashioned alchemists, messing with things they don’t understand and hoping they don’t blow themselves up.”

The rain finally stopped that night. The next day was uneventful—that is until around sunset. Dianna decided to take a shower. I chivalrously stood guard, armed with an Eliminator. I was more concerned about Zapata playing Peeping Tom than about attacks from the wildlife. I surveyed my surroundings, if only to fight the temptation to take a peek at Di. When she was about halfway done, Carradine ran up. “Mr. Flockman, you must come immediately,” he said. “I’ve found an Alioramus print in the camp.”

I switched on the Eliminator’s night scope. “Dianna,” I called back, “I have to go attend to something.”

Carradine led me to the bottom of the next hill, at the very edge of the waters. Carlos was already there, with the newly modified shotgun in his arms. “The trace is under water,” Carradine said. “It’s just one toe print. I think it was made this morning, when the water was several feet higher.”

I gazed into the murky water. There was something there that looked like a print, on close examination, but it seemed quite unidentifiable. “Could it have been made by an aquatic reptile?” I asked. “Like, say, a turtle or a crocodile?”
“It’s unlikely,” Carradine said. “There’s evidence of a claw mark.”
“Besides,” Carlos said, “a crocodilian is about as dangerous as any dinosaur.”

I gazed through the scope. A somewhat primitive infrared sensor provided me with a black-and-white image of heat sources. All I saw was a faint gray speck, probably a drowned mammal. I double-checked, and found that I was looking at a living mammal that was paddling against the current. “The mud and the water are obscuring heat sources,” I said aloud. “The creature will be tough to find.”
That was when Dianna screamed.

Needless to say, Carlos and I rushed over as fast as we could. Long before we reached the hilltop, I heard a screech, and the sound of heavy feet retreating into the forest. I was relieved to find Dianna safe, crouched behind the shower curtain. Robertson was thirty feet away, with his pistol still in his hands. The only sign of the dinosaur was a streak of blood in the water. “I shot it in the chest. It won’t be back,” he said confidently. At that moment, there was another “chug-a-chug” from beyond the next hill.

“Damn right, it won’t be back!” I shouted as I rushed for the Amphibian. “We’re going to kill it!”

“Yeah!” Carlos said as he ran after me. “I mean, sneaking into camp was bad enough, but threatening a defenseless woman in the shower? That’s f*in’ melodramatic!”

We spent almost an hour driving around in the growing darkness, trying to track the wounded creature down. I drove the Amphibian, while Carlos blasted suspicious-looking objects with automatic bursts. “I got it!” he said after one object exploded in a red burst of gore. He squinted at what was left. “Well, I got something…” From far away, there was a defiant “chug-a-chug”.

“I want two people on watch all night!” I fumed as we got into camp. “If that thing comes within 100 meters of the camp, I want to know about it.” I angrily slammed the door and stalked away. Then I stepped on the tail of a very large lizard…

I was paralyzed but fully conscious as Carlos and Zapata rushed me into the dissection tent. The scent of the peppermint spray seemed more unpleasant than usual. I heard Dianna shout my name. When I didn’t respond, she came over to me and shouted in my ear. I was touched, but the sound was painful. “Don’t shout,” Carlos told her. “Making noise isn’t going to bring him out of this. Anyway, I think he can hear and see just fine. I’ve seen symptoms like this before, when one of the men I was training with got bitten by a blue-ringed octopus.” He sighed. “He didn’t make it, but others have.”

“Will Ted die?” Dianna asked bluntly. Her normally husky voice came out as a hoarse whisper.
The medic answered: “I can’t say without more information. What did this?”

“It was a lizard, probably genus Estesia,” Carlos said. “I had to sever its jaw muscles to make it let go. We can take a sample of the venom…”

“It won’t make much difference,” the medic said. “There’s no way we could create an anti-venom fast enough to do Mr. Flockman any good, even if we had the right equipment.”
Di said, “Level with me doc. Can you even do anything to help him?”

“Probably not,” the doctor said. “We don’t have even the most rudimentary equipment for treating a poisoning. Call it an unfortunate oversight. I suppose all we can really do is wait and pray.”
For a moment, Di leaned over me. “I intend to,” she said.

It was perversely difficult for me to get to sleep. Carlos talked to me for a while, even though I couldn’t respond in any way. “We’ll wait one more day for the water to subside,” he explained to me, “and then we’re moving out for the hunt. We have had sporadic responses from the tracking device, so we know roughly where to go. Dianna, the medic and Zapata will be staying in camp with you. I’m afraid we’ll have to take the heavy weapons with us, but you will have the assault rifle, the ‘modified’ shotgun and a few varmint rifles. Carradine told me to leave this by your bedside, just in case you have any more night visitors.” He showed me Carradine’s revolver, and then left it there. Dianna came in afterward and read from her Bible. Before she was done, I had finally fallen sound asleep.

In the morning, everyone came into the dissection tent and ate breakfast. I couldn’t raise my head to look around, but the sound of activity was soothing. Carlos and Dianna made a point of speaking to me. “You’re lucky,” Carlos said at one point. “You can have breakfast intravenously.”

I spent most of the day unconscious. At one point, I was rudely awakened by electrical shocks as the medic restarted my heart. Some time later, I heard the medic say, “The poison’s effects are strengthening, but they should reach their peak soon. If I can keep him alive through the night, he will probably make a complete recovery.”

The next memory I have is of waking up when someone touched my arm. Dianna was standing over me with a radiant smile on her face. Bright sunlight streamed through her copper-colored hair. “Good morning, Ted,” she said simply.

I don’t have many memories of that day. The medic watched me closely, and Di dropped in frequently. Carlos even talked to me over the radio. “Hang in there, mate!” he said cheerfully. “In another week, we can all go home.”

By late afternoon, I was able to speak again, barely. I told the medic about an unpleasant tingling sensation all over my body. “That’s a good sign,” he told me. “It means the neurotoxin is wearing off.”

Most of the memories I do have of that day are unsettling ones. Several times, I heard assault rifle or shotgun fire from very close by. Once, the sustained gunfire sounded like nothing short of a pitched battle. I later learned that a young ankylosaur had charged the camp, only to be felled by a score of assault rifle bullets and half a dozen shotgun slugs. I was even more disturbed afterward, when I heard Dianna and Zapata arguing at the edge of hearing. I correctly assumed that he was pressuring her to spend the night with him. The ultimate fright, however, came in the middle of the night.

I was awakened by a series of loud, short ripping sounds. I woke up gradually. I didn’t even open my eyes until after the fifth of those sounds. By then, I had no doubt that something was trying to break into the tent. Each rip was the sound of a claw stabbing through the bulletproof fabric of the tent. Any good stabbing weapon could penetrate the fabric; however, it was virtually impossible to tear or cut material lengthwise. The would-be intruder had to stab into the fabric repeatedly, until the holes it made combined to produce an opening big enough to walk through.

With curious detachment, I wondered what animal was trying to break in. The moonlight through the tent showed a silhouette scarcely taller than a chicken. Its claw thrust again, and I saw that it was straight, not curved. It could only be a Borogovia, perhaps one of the same pair that we had encountered at the sauropod kill. As I watched, the borogove pushed the fabric apart like a pair of curtains and entered the tent. Vivid zebra stripes and large, jewel-like eyes seemed to glow in the moonlight. I could see its head pan about, surveying what it had discovered. Suddenly, the whimsical name did not seem nearly as appropriate. It took a long sniff at a carton of PUCs beside it, only to turn away with a contemptuous snort. (As Carlos remarked later, this was surely a sign of its great intelligence.) That was when its luminous eyes fixed on me.

The borogove let out a quiet chirp. Another, larger borogove squirmed in through the hole in the fabric. The pair strode toward me, sniffing loudly. “Help!” I shouted. My voice was too weak for the others to hear, and may have convinced the dinosaurs that I was too feeble to defend myself. The larger borogove walked right up to me and pressed her snout against my belly. She took one last sniff, probably to determine if I was too sick to be edible.

I was already fumbling clumsily for the revolver. I almost knocked it to the floor. Finally, I managed to wrap my numb fingers around the grip and pick up the weapon. I took aim at the smaller borogove and fired. The bullet struck home, knocking the small dinosaur clear across the tent. His mate got nasty powder burns inside her nostrils. She made a hacking sound, like a cat coughing up a hairball, and then threw her head back and shrieked. I fired a second shot, missing her long and slender neck by a fraction of an inch. She had had more than enough. She turned and fled; I shot her as she struggled through the hole in the tent. She still managed to escape, but she didn’t get far. Seconds later, a burst of assault rifle fire rang out. Dianna had collected another, mostly complete troodontid for our team.

After two days, we were confident that the lizard’s venom wasn’t going to kill me. On the fourth day, I was lucid enough to monitor the hunting party’s progress through the audio-video feed. Their meandering path had taken them 15 miles northeast of base camp.

The day’s broadcast began with a calibration exercise. What I saw on the screen looked like a sparse pine forest in the middle of a snowstorm, viewed from the deck of a boat on rough seas. “Try adjusting the transmitter. There’s a lot of static,” I said. “Also adjust the gyrostabilizers; the camera must be bobbing like crazy.”
“—ell me ab— it!” Carpenter responded.

For several minutes, Carpenter walked around while Fernando fussed with the transmitter. The camera quickly stabilized, though there was still enough wobble to make me just a bit queasy. Getting a good picture was more difficult. “That’s making it worse,” I said. “That’s an improvement… better… getting worse again… okay, I suppose this is as good as it will get.” Most of the snow was gone, but the colors were throbbing like a strobe light. After a few minutes of watching the screen, I had motion sickness and a headache.
“Maybe you should go back to sleep,” Dianna whispered.
“No,” I groaned stubbornly. “I have to stay awake, give what help I can.”

Realistically, I couldn’t expect to tell the hunting party anything that they couldn’t figure out for themselves. However, I wasn’t going to get much sleep, either, as long as my colleagues were in a dangerous situation. I compromised by shutting my eyes while listening to the audio feed. “Carlos,” I asked, “how much ammunition is left?”

“24 rounds. On the next expedition, we’ll have to bring more. Wang and Fernando have the Eliminators; I’m using the Tactical.”
“Is Robertson still using his pistol?”
“Unfortunately, yes. But he has Carradine and Carpenter backing him up. George has a good chance of taking down a dinosaur with that 4-gauge, and Carpenter has a 12-gauge that will at least make a lot of noise. He could certainly make a hostile tyrannosaur think twice.”

“Any signs of the tyrannosaur pack?” I asked.
“We have found dozens of track ways,” Carradine said. “I have confirmed that there are no fewer than six individuals of various ages in the area. Interestingly, the tracks are rarely accompanied by spoor; I suspect that the dinosaurs are relieving themselves at fixed locations near the center of their territory. Unfortunately, neither the track ways nor the movements of the tagged juvenile have led us to a central nesting site. However, I am confident that one does exist somewhere in those hills.” I opened my eyes to see where he was pointing.

The hills in question were a string of five tall, lightly wooded hills about ten miles away from the hunting party’s camp. It was definitely a good place for a carnosaur nest. Several streams ran through the hills. Several game trails lay within a few miles of the nest; I could see a dozen hadrosaurs grazing nearby. There were enough trees to provide camouflage for the enormous predators, but enough open space for them to maneuver. The hills themselves were very steep; any dinosaur that tried to attack the nest would have a hard time reaching it. “Looks hard to climb,” I said. “I’m glad I’m here in bed.” I looked over the hills to the mountains beyond. “You know, Carradine, if your theory is right, you’re in prime Deinocheirus territory.”

I dosed off, and was awakened by Carradine’s excited shout: “We found the midden!” I opened my eyes to see a hummock where two hills joined. At the bottom of the furrow, sure enough, was an enormous mound of dinosaur bones and droppings. Over the audio feed, I could hear a loud buzzing which was not static. I soon saw the cause: a swarm of very large flying insects was hovering over the waste heap. As I watched, a squadron of the wasp-like insects flew toward the camera. Carradine continued: “This is a find that must be studied. Could someone fire a smoke grenade?”

Carlos fired two shotgun grenades. The hostile insects scattered to escape the resulting clouds of smoke. Carradine jumped out of the Amphibian and jogged toward the midden; the others followed cautiously behind. “Note how the midden is placed as far as possible from any water source,” Carradine shouted back. “This shows that the tyrannosaurs are fairly intelligent.”

“If they’re smart enough not to drink out of a toilet,” Carlos mused, “then they must be smarter than dogs!” Dianna and I smiled at the joke, but I could hear the strain in his voice. He was stalking cautiously toward the midden with the Tactical in hand. He might joke around to relieve the tension, but he was prepared for an attack that might come at any moment.

“I don’t want to stay here any longer than we have to, and I definitely want to get away from here before dark,” Carlos said. “If we’re going to study the midden and survey the hill tops, we may need to split up. Wang, Hutchins, Rivera—I want you to stay here. Wang, you will have to keep watch. Shoot any tyrannosaurs on sight. Robertson, Carradine, Fernando and I will go up the hills. Carpenter, I suppose you’ll want to come along too.” The camera wobbled as Carpenter nodded enthusiastically.

A few minutes later, Carlos shouted, “Halt! There’s a tyrannosaur at the top of that hill!” Carpenter did a pan of the nearest hill, but obviously couldn’t find the dinosaur.

“Shift left,” I said. “I think it’s behind those saplings…Yes, you’re pointing the camera right at it. Zoom in…Yeah, I’m sure.” The tyrannosaur was a young one, no more than six feet tall. It was a light tan color with green spots. I didn’t see any signs of a tag.

“The tagged individual is a kilometer away,” Carlos said. “Let’s take this one, quietly. Robertson, you do the honors.” The silent, deadly shot struck the dinosaur in the head. It fell, but let out a roar before dying. There was another, much louder roar from the next hill, and several answering roars from somewhere in the distance. Carlos swore vehemently.
“There must be an adult at the top of that hill,” Carradine said. “Chances are there’s a nesting site up there as well.”

“There she is!” Carpenter shouted. On the top of the highest hill, an enormous tyrannosaur reared above the treetops and roared. “She must be seven meters tall!”

Carlos fired three shots at it. “She’s mine!” Robertson snarled. He fired his pistol, and the dinosaur retreated with a visible wound on its shoulder. There was another deafening roar. I could make out another sound: shrill squeals that could only be young tyrannosaurs.

“You should send some people up the hill,” I said. “That monster may try to sneak around and attack your flank.” “Robertson, you go. Carradine, go with him,” Carlos said tersely. “The tagged juvenile has closed to 500 meters.” Robertson and Carradine went up the hill. Carlos climbed on top of the Amphibian’s bow. There were four shots from the direction of the midden.
I heard Wang shout, “T. bataal! T. bataal! Heading fo’ youuu…”

Fernando fired two shots into the trees. I got a glimpse of their target, a six-foot-tall juvenile tyrannosaur charging through the woods at more than 30 miles per hour. Fernando missed, and the juvenile ran straight for him. “Don’t piss around with that ammo!” Carlos shouted. He fired a spray of five shots, downing the tyrannosaur, and shot it twice more when it started to get up. “The tagged one is retreating,” he said. From the top of the hill, there was a shotgun blast. Carlos loaded a new clip. “No worries, mates—oh Sweet Mother!”

Without warning, eight adult tyrannosaurs came running out of the forest. Five razor-backed males led the charge, while three of the larger females followed close behind. Fernando killed the nearest male, while Carlos brought down another male and wounded a female. The pack fell into disarray. A male retreated into the forest, while the wounded female turned and ran in the general direction of the midden. However, the uninjured females pressed onward, driving the remaining males before them.

Fernando frantically reloaded the Eliminator with the last two shells in the hollow stock. Carlos also had to pause to reload. Carpenter held the tyrannosaurs off with a volley of poorly aimed shotgun blasts. He then turned and fired at the retreating female. “Don’t waste your ammo on her,” I said. “She’s moving away from the hill, so she shouldn’t be a threat to the rest of the party.” Shots rang out again; two from the Eliminator and five from the Tactical. Carpenter turned his head in time for me to see a female fall dead with an Eliminator bullet in the chest. A badly wounded male staggered into the Amphibian. The back end of the vehicle reared off the ground as the dinosaur collapsed on top of the hood. The damaged tailgate fell open with a loud thud. Carlos tumbled cursing from the roof. The injured male lurched back onto its feet and ducked its head to devour the noisy creature that had hurt it so grievously. Five more shots rang out, and Carlos’s attacker went down for good.

The last two tyrannosaurs had stopped in their tracks, as if trying to make sense of what had happened. They hissed and snapped their jaws in an obvious threat display. Fernando stood completely still, with his empty gun still raised. “Carpenter,” I said, “fire a blast into the air. It may scare them off.” He did as I suggested. The dinosaurs reared back and screamed. Red bulls’ eyes flared up in the centers of their green spots. The male took a step forward. “Now shoot the male—NO, FERNANDO! DON’T RUN!”

Fernando lunged for the Amphibian’s door, hoping to get more ammo from the cab. Though well-intentioned, it was the worst thing he could have done. One show of weakness was enough to convince the predators that humans were potential prey. Miraculously, Fernando reached the cab before the male could rush in and devour him. The charging male slammed into the Amphibian at high speed, nearly overturning the lightly built vehicle. When it slammed back down, a door swung open; the male immediately seized the door in his jaws and ripped it off its hinges. The female stood still for a moment. She swiveled her head back and forth, and finally rested her eyes on Carpenter. For a fraction of a second, she seemed to stare straight into the camera. Then the cameraman dove under the vehicle.

The video feed went out in a flurry of static as soon as Carpenter got under the vehicle. Dianna and I could still make out sounds, and they were not at all reassuring.
There were two loud thumps as the female climbed onto the bed of the vehicle. The vehicle’s suspension and aluminum chassis groaned in agony under her weight. Plastic scraped as she clawed at the bed. An Eliminator shot rang out. Moments later, there was a barely audible crash, which I suspected to be the sound of the windshield braking. Another shot was fired, but two roars immediately after showed that both tyrannosaurs were still alive and well. Metal screeched as the female clawed through the bed and into the chassis. “If she claws into a hydrogen tank, there could be an explosion,” I murmured.

Just when I thought that the tyrannosaurs had won, I heard the beeping of a horn and a volley of gunfire. The rest of the hunting party had come to the rescue. There was a loud thump as another tyrannosaur fell dead, followed by loud footsteps as the survivor retreated. Moments later, the picture returned. The first thing I saw was the retreating female, pursued by a car. The car turned around and drove up to Carpenter. Wang waved the Eliminator in triumph. Hutchins stuck her head out the driver’s side window. “I’d say this qualifies as a successful hunt,” she said, and then beeped the horn.

“I certainly succeeded,” Robertson shouted from the hilltop. “Look east and you can see something interesting.” Carpenter climbed unsteadily onto the flat bed. From there, he filmed a touching sight. At the other end of the chain of hills, a column of baby tyrannosaurs were retreating into the forest, escorted by an adult male, the injured female and an injured juvenile. As we watched, the fleeing female ran over to join them. Watching the family escape, I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty for what we had done to them.

“Did you get the big sow?” Carlos said. He was crouched next to the second male he had killed.

“Yes,” Robertson said proudly. “Dr. Carradine crippled her, and I finished her off with a bullet to the side of the head. She was quite cunning, and very large. Height is at least three meters at the hip—bigger than any fossil that’s been found.” He casually reloaded his pistol.

“I suppose we can haul her back to camp,” Carlos said wearily. “The Amphibian’s taken a major beating, but it should still run.”

I noticed a barely perceptible movement in the bushes near Robertson. “LOOK OUT!” I screamed. Robertson snapped the pistol shut and twirled around, just as his “slain” quarry erupted from the bush. He fired into the sow’s nose at point blank range, knocking her head to the side. But this time, it wasn’t enough. The carnosaur matriarch knocked him off his feet with a swipe of her injured snout. She then tried to snap up Carradine. The scientist dodged with surprising agility and fired the 4-gauge down her throat. The matriarch promptly collapsed and tumbled down the hill. Robertson rolled out of her way, just in time to avoid being crushed.
There was a long moment of stunned silence. Then Carlos spoke: “T. battle indeed.”
“Carlos,” I groaned, “if you keep making puns like that, I’m going to have to leave you behind.”

When the shooting stopped, I went right back to sleep. The hunting party worked until dusk, preparing dinosaurs for transport, making repairs and collecting as much data as possible. They managed to load the large sow, an adult male and two tyrannosaur heads onto the various vehicles. They also brought back the skeleton of a tyrannosaur hatchling that had been found in the midden. A few insects and insect nests were also collected; they would be a source of great excitement. Paleoentomologists concluded that they were a primitive type of bee that laid their eggs in dinosaur dung. Just as the sun was dropping below the horizon, the heavily laden vehicles began their journey back to camp.

That evening, Dianna had a fight with Zapata. She spent the night in the dissection tent with me. I had woken up by then, so we talked for much of the evening. She kept tight-lipped about her problems with Zapata. We talked about the day’s events, and then about our pasts. The conversation finally turned to the subject of what we would do after we got back. “Do you still want to be a professional time traveler?” Dianna asked.
“I wouldn’t dream of being anything else,” I answered. I silently added that I would have become a garbage man if it meant I could spend time with her.

I went to sleep late, and woke up even later. I would have slept even longer, if Dianna hadn’t shaken me awake. “The hunting party just called,” she said. “They found something you have to see.” I looked at the screen, and almost threw up at the gruesome scene.

Carpenter mercifully panned away from the carnage to Carradine. Beneath the scientist’s calm and clinical tone, I could hear a note of fear. “We found this Therizinosaurus carcass last night. We must have passed within two hundred meters of it on the way to the tyrannosaur nest,” he said. “It seems to have been dead for only a day or two. Judging from the Tyrannosaurus traces we have observed, we are just beyond the edge of the tyrannosaur pack’s territory. Judging from what was done to this dinosaur, we are currently in Deinocheirus territory.

“As you can see, this adult therizinosaur has been disemboweled, nearly beheaded and partially consumed. There are a number of unmistakable defensive wounds on its arms. Footprints indicate two attackers. As I reconstruct it, one attacker struck from the front, inflicting the wounds on its arms, while a second attacker snuck up and tore its belly open. The tactic of striking from behind to disembowel the victim also appears to have been used unsuccessfully against the juvenile tyrannosaur we captured. Here is the best predator print.”

Carpenter pointed the camera at a footprint more than five feet long. One of the three toes appeared to be nothing but a stump. “There appear to be only two toes,” Carradine said, “though if you look closely, you can see part of the ‘missing’ toe, which was being held off the ground. It presumably ends in a sickle claw, the dimensions of which we can only guess at. Judging from the length of the foot and the space between the prints, the attackers were at least fifteen feet tall. They can only be Deinocheirus.”

“This is great,” I said, “but why did you call me?”
Carradine took a deep breath. “The other paleontologists and I believe that we should pursue the Deinocheirus.”
“You can’t do that while you’re hauling 12 tons of tyrannosaur parts,” I said. “Even if you caught a Deinocheirus, you couldn’t bring it back.”

“We know. That’s why we, my colleagues and I that is, wanted to abandon all the tyrannosaur specimens and go after Deinocheirus. Robertson objects, of course, and so does Dr. Wrzniewski. I hoped that you might have a second opinion.”

“You’re talking about abandoning valuable, hard-won specimens to chase an animal you may not be able to catch,” I said critically. “You’re running low on ammo, anyway. Deinocheirus could turn the tables and kill some of you, especially if there are more than one.”
“We are willing to take our chances,” Carradine said in an ice-cool tone.

Wang spoke up: “You must realize that T. bataal is already known from many good specimens. Theh is nothing mo’ to be learned from our specimens that could not be learned from any otheh dinosaul.”
“Carlos, what’s your opinion?” I asked.

“I don’t think it would be especially dangerous to chase Deinocheirus,” he said, “but I don’t think we have a hope in hell of catching one. We’d have better chances if we waited here. I don’t think even that will work. As far as we can tell, they ran away as soon as we approached, and they aren’t likely to come back until we leave. I thought about taking our specimens back to camp and then coming back, but that would take too long.”

I had to agree. “I’m afraid I have to agree with Carlos on this one,” I said. You can examine the kill site for as long as you want, and collect anything you can carry, but be back here by sundown.” I expected protests, but there were none. However, the look on Carradine’s face was as disapproving as any words he could have said.

The hunting party returned at dusk. We spent the next day packing and preserving specimens. Using two winches, we managed to load the dead ankylosaur onto the time bell. I decided to leave the Amphibian behind to make room for all the dead dinosaurs. We had regular visits from carnosaurs, but none of them were large. The gallimimes had learned to stay away (Dianna and Zapata had killed two more during my convalescence), and we never found another trace of the Alioramus. On the day before we left, a small party went back to the therizinosaur kill site to look for signs of Deinocheirus. All they found were small scavengers. The giant predators had apparently never returned.

We ended up with nothing to do on the last day except wait for the time bell to retract. A few hours before we returned to the present, we had a surprise visit from a Deinocheirus. Hutchins was the first to see it. “It’s right across the river!” she shouted. We all gathered to look. It was standing out in the open, staring directly at us. Its golden, dark-spotted hide showed brilliantly in the setting sun. It had a long neck, though not as long in proportion to its body as a gallimime’s. Its head was about four feet long, and fairly slender. A vivid red crest jutted from its forehead like the horn of a unicorn.

“It looks to be about eighteen feet tall,” I estimated. “Its arms are a little less than half as long as its legs.”
“I wonder if it will come any closer,” Dianna mused.
We nearly jumped out of our skins when the dinosaur let out a piercing howl. It then turned and stalked away.

Everyone else began talking excitedly, but I kept my eye on the departing dinosaur. Soon, it vanished into the forest. I wondered if anyone would ever return to this time and place to try once again to collect that magnificent animal. I also couldn’t help wondering if its descendants would be ready for us.

In hindsight, the most significant event during my first year at Naughtenny Moore did not happen in the past, but in the present. Though we made little of it at the time, it was a reminder of how dangerous the TDD is, and what some people might do to use it or exploit it. There can now be little doubt that, even then, some were plotting how to use the time machine for their own gain.

We went on four expeditions our first year, an average we have maintained ever since. Besides Cretaceous Mongolia, we went to Late Permian Russia, Jurassic Colorado, and Pleistocene Mauritius. It was between the third and fourth missions that we had our first encounter with the legendary “Keystone Kommies.”

After the Jurassic trip (otherwise known as the Morrison expedition), the company was in dire straits. We returned from that grim adventure with $100,000 in damages to our vehicles, a brachiosaur heart, enough carnosaur heads and carcasses to glut the market, a video of Carlos using his “modified” shotgun, and one dead scientist. All this resulted in several lawsuits, including a wrongful death suit and a “breach of contract” suit from the museum that funded the expedition, and the indictment of Carlos for violating international firearms laws. To keep the company solvent, Carlos and I did advertisements for outdoor gear and vehicles. Our most lucrative contract was as spokesmen for International Composites windshield glass, in which we showed off a windshield with an allosaur footprint in it.

It was a dark time in our personal lives, too, especially for Dianna. Shortly after our return from the Permian, her fiancé broke off their engagement. One day, she came into work with no ring on her finger and a distant look on her face. It was a week before she talked to anyone about it, and she never did tell us much. Three weeks into the planning stages of the Morrison expedition, she went on sabbatical. She thus missed the fun and games of a Jurassic sauropod kill. Lucky for her!

On a fateful night in November, 2063, Carlos and I were going through a crate load of newly acquired equipment. “Ah, the new windshield for the Ora,” Carlos exclaimed. He hit it experimentally with a rock hammer. “They reinforced it. Good.” He then used the pointed end of the hammer to open a crate. When he saw what was inside, he looked ready to take the hammer to the contents. “Boing sticks. Bloody boing sticks,” he said murderously.

I looked at the clipboard. “Would these be the ‘underwater defensive devices’? It says here they were donated by the Army of El Salvador.”

“Figures. Even those dumb f*s in requisitions would know better than to pay money for this s*.” He took out something that looked like a giant dart gun and screwed on a shiny aluminum barrel with a 15 mm grenade protruding from the bore. “Officially, these are ‘defensive devices,’ not weapons. Everybody who’s had the occasion to use one of these says that’s at least half-right.”

With considerable effort, he cocked the weapon’s massive spring, but not quite enough for it to lock in place. “See, the barrel, cartridge and projectile are all combined into one air-tight unit. It gets set off by a spring-loaded firing pin. The grenade gets blown out of the barrel, and when the pointy tip sticks in something, the grenade goes off. Official effective range is 30 meters, but it’s general knowledge that one’ll be lucky to score a direct hit at 10. Then screw for your life, and repeat as necessary, if possible. Or, just throw the f*in’ thing at the shark, and hope the shiny barrel looks more edible than you.”

Right about then, they came.

The only warning we had was the sound of approaching footsteps. I might not even have looked up, if they had not been running. When I did look, I saw four complete strangers, all armed with some item or another. One had a small but wicked-looking axe. Another carried an old assault rifle, modified into a .50 suppressed weapon and fitted with a bulky electronic sight. A third, who kept to the rear, bore an improvised weapon commonly called a potato gun. Such weapons use some kind of propellant charge (usually commercially available aerosols) to launch a projectile from a plastic tube. This one appeared to be designed to release a blast at both ends for recoilless action. Duct tape figured prominently in the weapons’ construction. The fourth, clearly the leader, carried a .25 pistol. Carlos frankly appraised the threat. “Don’t let the duct tape fool you; that rifle is sniper grade. Way better than any of these guys could use. An’ if I am not mistaken, that potato gun is made from the liner of a jet nozzle,” he said. Glancing at the leader, he continued, “That guy, on the other hand, would be better off with the axe.”

The four abruptly started shouting, at us and each other. There was a polyglot of accents and dialects. “That’s not Spanish, is it?” Carlos said. For a moment, I was confused myself.

“No, it’s Portuguese,” I said. “They’re speaking at least two different dialects, and the one with the potato gun isn’t a native speaker.”

Then the leader was in my face, shaking his pistol at me. “Quiet! You give us guns!”

Carlos and I exchanged glances. “This isn’t where we keep our guns,” Carlos said. “This is a hazardous materials storage area. The gun shed is up an’ across the road.”

There was an outburst of incomprehensible dialect from the leader. From what little I could understand, he thought Carlos was pretending not to speak English. I tried to repeat what Carlos had said in Portuguese, but that only made him angrier. He waved his gun in an attempt to menace us. All this accomplished was to convince me that if he tried to use it, actually hitting something would be a matter of random chance.

Meanwhile, the potato gunner detached himself from the rest of the group. Two more figures came out of the shadows after him. Carlos’s face twitched. I finally made the leader understand that this was not the gun shed. Rather than take our word for it, he ordered the man with the axe to go inside and check. Then he was in my face again, shouting more threats. That was when, in what seemed like a quantum leap, Carlos hit him with the hammer.

The leader staggered back, leaning against the wall. Carlos grabbed him and hauled him forward, using him as a shield. The rifleman fired a short, hesitant burst. I dived behind a cart of diving equipment, and found a flare. I lit this and tossed it into the shed. This set off the fire alarm, which automatically lowered a series of fireproof bulkheads. The man with the axe, who would barely have had time to realize what was happening, was trapped inside. The slamming bulkheads did not quite drown out the sound of Carlos’s hammer fracturing the leader’s skull.

The rifleman closed in, spraying the front of the shed. Carlos grabbed the boing stick and fired a shot that was exceptionally wild even by his standards. The rifleman poured in more fire…until he hit a compressed air tank. Contrary to popular imagination, ruptured air tanks do not explode (though an explosion is a likely result if any flame is present). What they will do is fly through the air with considerable force, which is just what this one did. It leapt into the air like a salmon, throwing three more tanks into the air with it. Two of them hit the rifleman in the chest. “Holy s*!” Carlos said. “Who the hell are these guys?”

Across the way, there was an explosion. “The potato gunner just shot at the control tower!” I exclaimed. “Should we go after them?”

“What do you mean ‘we’?” Carlos said. “You do whatever you want. I’m going to teach these guys about effective automatic fire!” He pried the rifle from the hands of its stunned owner and ran for the hangar. After a moment of hesitation, I went after him.

As we ran, someone shouted to us to stop. Carlos spun around, dropping to a crouch in the process. He held his fire when he recognized the approaching man. “Lou! Where have you been?!” he shouted.

“Whoever is doing this has triggered false alarms all over the complex,” Lou Tanaka said. “Pretty much everywhere except where they actually came in. Sorry I left you in a lurch—though you seem to have dealt with it well enough on your own. I’m going in through the side entrance. You can go in the front.” He handed me his .45. “If you’re coming in with us, take this. I can do better without it.”

As we approached the hangar, there was an explosion. Body panels from a Thing rained out of the hangar door. “Bloody ‘ell, we just replaced the ones we lost in the Morrison,” Carlos said. We arrived at the left side of the hangar. I glimpsed two figures retreating deeper into the hangar. Carlos paused, surveying his options. “I go right, you go left.” Then he darted inside.

Carlos had given me the best route, with cover all the way. I made my way through a maze of crates and parked vehicles, trying to imitate the furtive movements I had seen from Carlos. I kept that up until I came within one step of walking into a potato gun blast. I tried to retreat around the other side of a Thing, only to be greeted by a burst of rifle fire. I heard the potato gunner reloading his weapon, and knew with sickening certainty that I would be dead with the next shot. Then Carlos came rushing out of his own meager cover, driving back the rifleman with a stream of continuous automatic fire. “You bloody idiot,” he said. “Even these jokers could blow your head off. If you had gone just a few more seconds without almost getting killed, I could have taken both of ‘em down. If you still want to do some good, head for the Ora. That seems to be their objective.”

I reached the Ora and found Lou. He was crouched by the front wheel. A few meters away, a gunman lay dead with a throwing knife in his heart. “He’s on the rear observation deck,” he whispered. “He seems to be looking for a way in. I’m going after him. Get inside just in case he does manage to get in.” I went to the main door, while Lou darted toward the rear. I absent-mindedly grabbed the handle before getting out my electronic key. The door swung open in my hand. I felt a chill and ran up the stairs where I reached a landing, halfway up the first deck. From there, one short stairway went down to the first deck, another up into the cab, and a full-sized stair led to the second deck. I heard a scrape in the darkness. The intruder was prying up the cover of a below-deck cargo compartment. I saw him by the hangar lights shining in the window, and drew a bead on him. “There’s nothing in there,” I said. “Now put your hands up!”

The cover loudly popped open, and the intruder reached for something in his jacket. I emptied the clip. A round object rolled out of his hands—a grenade. At that moment, Lou came in the back. Seeing the grenade, he lunged for it and grabbed it, just before it fell into the compartment. “Open a window! Quick!” he yelled. I loaded the spare clip and emptied it into a triangular pane, then kicked it until it peeled halfway out of the frame. Lou tossed the grenade out the window. It bounced twice and rolled under a Thing. A terrific flash filled the hangar, and the windows groaned from the heat. I jumped to my feet and looked out. The Thing was a pile of melted aluminum and fractured body panels. “That storage compartment is right next to the diesel tanks,” Lou said breathlessly. He pointed to a support column on the other side of the Ora. “If it had gone off in there, the Ora would have been destroyed, and the heat alone could have destroyed that column. Half the roof could have caved in.”

Across the hangar, there was another explosion, followed up by a volley of gunfire that ended with the emptying of a magazine. Lou and I rushed to the rear observation deck, just in time to be greeted by Carlos. “The potato gunner got away through a hole in the wall,” he said. “I don’t expect he’ll be back. What the hell just happened?”

We sat down numbly on the observation deck while we waited for police to arrive. Dr. Werner joined us as the police were leaving. The attack had taken a grim toll. Only the rifleman had lived to go into police custody, and it was doubtful whether he would live through the night. The one we trapped in the shed had killed himself. Another attacker and one of Lou’s men had been killed in skirmishes along the fence. “They were rank amateurs,” Lou fumed, “but damn it, they killed Jorge!”

Only then did I ask the obvious question: “Who were they? And what did they think they were doing?” There was long, empty silence. Then Carlos spoke.

“That doesn’t necessarily matter…Have you ever heard of the Keystone Kommies?”

I frowned. Lou laughed. “Yes. The legendary Keystone Kommies…the most active non-existent terrorist organization in the world.” I had heard the phrase before, and recalled the gist of the stories. The name was applied to various marginal, left-wing terrorist groups with no apparent connection to each other. It was mostly used as an inside joke among law enforcement and paramilitary personnel. But some openly insisted that there was more to it, that this menagerie of local extremists was really connected by an international central body. This was most commonly reputed to be a small but extremely wealthy cadre of communist hold-overs in China. (An international coalition of Jewish businessmen were the next most popular suggestion, and remnants of the South American drug cartels were a distant third.)

“Sure, the ‘KK’ don’t officially exist,” Carlos said. “And officially, winged monkeys could come out of my butt. But let’s just look at the facts. The people who attacked us tonight were from outside the country. Once the authorities come up with their background, they’re going to find that they were recent migrants with no local connections or acquaintances. It’s already pretty well certain that they had no lengthy acquaintance with each other. Ted says that they spoke different dialects, and that one of them—the one that got away—was from a different country. Those things, right there, meet all the proposed characteristics of a ‘KK’ attack. Am I right, Lou?”

Lou nodded.

“And then there’s the sophistication of their equipment. Untraceable, mostly old, and way better than that level of operation could get hold of. Those rifles were modified M16s, old but good, done with professional-grade conversion kits. And the sights! Also old but high quality, and well-maintained. O’course, it will turn out that they came up with everything themselves, or could have. But that’s saying nothing at all. Even if they bought and assembled those guns all by themselves, where did they get the specifications? The know-how? The money? Then there’s the potato gun. The cartridges were target practice rounds for an Atlatl missile launcher. I got a look at one of them. It’s a recoilless charge, originally designed to launch a missile before rocket ignition, but nasty in its own right. The shells: plastic explosives, also military grade. The tube: aerospace composites. Then there was the grenade. That was military issue, no question, though we’re in no position to prove it. On top of that, there’s the way they got in. Lou, I know you aren’t at leisure to discuss details, but how did they manage to get through?”

“It appears that they used improvised electronic-warfare equipment to disable a key checkpoint, as well as the Ora electronics,” he said guardedly. “They could have done it by firing low-grade radioactive material from a shotgun. The one Ted shot had a .410 gauge in addition to his rifle. The impact would create a momentary pulse of radiation, enough to disable unshielded electronics. It appears that they also compromised my communications system. We found nothing on the dead that would be adequate.”

“That means resources beyond what they could normally access or use—another characteristic of a ‘KK’ attack. Finally, there’s the sheer illogic of it. Anyone with a reliable source of the kind of equipment they were carrying would not need to rob our gun shed. I’m sure they intended to steal company weapons, but that would only have been an added incentive. They certainly had no motive to try to destroy the hangar, let alone attempt it after there was no chance of escape. Firing on the control tower was the most senseless act of all. Maybe they thought that was the center for our security system—but whoever set up the security breach should have known better. There really is no question: They were out to destroy the company, and they were not acting alone.”

Dr. Werner spoke: “I fear you are right, Dr. Wrzniewski, and I do see a motive for this attack. I will tell you this in strict confidence. The TDD has aroused great interest from a number of governments. Though no one will ever say as much, the main reason for this interest lies in the potential for nuclear applications. A time bell offers a perfect means for disposing of nuclear waste. Instead of building an expensive and controversial storage facility, one need only transport it into the very distant past—and by the time humans are around to be harmed, the waste will have naturally decomposed. It also offers a perfect loophole around restrictions on nuclear research. Some parties would undoubtedly prefer to destroy the time bell rather than see this come about.”

“How could anyone do that without the program being recognized?” I said.

“They would not do it—not themselves,” Carlos said. “Haven’t you ever heard of ‘Nth nation’ studies? Or Potemkin labs? Here’s how it works. Scientific research has always been a risky proposition, just from a practical perspective. Granting the bare physical possibility of a thing, it is a foregone conclusion that it can be done, with the proper application of time and resources. Problem is, one never knows in advance how much it will take, and the biggest, bitchiest problems are almost always practical, not theoretical. With sensitive and potentially dangerous technologies like nuclear technology, there is the additional obstacle of politics. If you try to do something, a dozen parties will gladly line up to stop you. That makes it impossible to secure long-term funding. The only practical solution is, very discreetly, to get someone else to do it for you.

“That’s where the ‘Nth nation’ comes in. The original ‘Nth nation’ study was conducted in the Cold War, to determine how easy it would be for a country to develop nuclear weapons. What happened was, a group of college students got a lump sum to design a nuclear weapon, using only what information they could find themselves. They accomplished it in 6 months. With all the hurdles UNCOST has thrown up, it’s more practical than ever to use the same approach for unresolved research problems. Just hand it off to a think-tank, or a corporation, or a real ‘Nth nation’—one of the so-called ‘rogue states’.

I stared, aghast. “Don’t act so shocked! Look at the Serbo-Albanian War. Both sides developed some serious s*, and used it,” Carlos continued. “It was the deadliest exchange of WMDs since the nuclear bombing of Japan. But, anyone familiar with the logistics of science and the state of both nations could see that, left to their own devices, the Serbos and the Albies couldn’t have bred so much as a bigger, badder potato bug. Sure, they had their own factories, and some research labs. Those were what we—the UN-EU troops, I mean—called the ‘Potemkin labs’: WMD research and manufacture facilities with first-rate equipment, first-rate staff—almost always foreign—but no infrastructure, no administrative paper trail, not so much as a plausible budget! The reports would always read, ‘Facility abandoned, administrative records destroyed.’ But everyone who was there knew better. They would have found something, if there had been anything to find to begin with. The only explanation is that the labs were supported by parties outside the country; and anything they found out would have been relayed back to those parties.”

Soon after, Carlos said an inarticulate good-bye and left. Lou walked me to my car. “What was that about?” I said. The question on my mind did not need to be asked.

“Only Carlos knows,” Lou said. “I am not at liberty to discuss it. But there’s one thing I can tell you. I’ve seen Carlos’ file. He joined the military in 2043. He resumed civilian life in 2048, until he was called up 6 years later for the Indonesia campaign. An interval of 6 months during his first stint is a blank. Classified.”

But I did not dwell on the shock of the “KK” attack, or on Carlos’s mysterious comments. There was too much work to be done, preparing for the trip to Mauritius. It was an unusually modest expedition, except in terms of the number of people involved. Forty people came along, with wildly varying degrees of knowledge and experience. About half of them were trained and experienced scientists and outdoorsmen. But the other half were little better than tourists, chosen as representatives of the public and private conservation groups sponsoring the expedition. Even then, I knew that many field workers were woefully inexperienced in the handling of firearms. This had led to our one fatality, a man I had judged more competent than most, who one day started to field-strip a Tactical with a round still in the chamber. The personnel on the Mauritius expedition seemed to strive to sink below my expectations. The lowest point was a running fire drill in which a man managed to shoot himself in the back. Fortunately, it was loaded only with harmless dye pellets. I ordered him removed from the expedition.

I was glad for one familiar face: George Carradine. “I work with the UNCOST Ecological Preservation Commission,” he explained. “Ichnology is important for determining which species exist in an area.” His cool head and dignified manner helped me to stay sane during the agonizing drills—a little.

Of course, the focus of our expedition was to find and study Mauritius’ most famous former inhabitant, the dodo bird. We first saw them within moments of our arrival. The time bell landed in a coastal lowland plain; further from shore, the plains quickly gave way to heavily forested hills and mountains. I scanned the landscape, and saw three gray, turkey-sized birds looking down on us from a hill. One was smaller and more lightly-colored than the others. At first, I did not think much of them. “What are those?” I said casually. Most of the staff looked, and froze. Then they spoke unanimously, some in awed whispers and others in nearly hysterical shouts: They were dodo birds. I got out a .17 assault rifle and shot the largest of the dodos. The other two ran away. Everyone fell silent, not so much in disapproval as in shock and disbelief.

“I know you’re used to trying to study animals while disturbing them as little as possible,” I said. “And with unlimited time and resources, maybe that’s the best way. But one of our expeditions has neither. We need to collect as much data as possible in a very limited amount of time, and that often means killing as many specimens as possible. Get used to it.”

Dodo birds appeared regularly around our camps. By the third day, we had 27 of them, including 10 captured alive. I was greatly surprised by how lean they usually were. As the conservationists explained passionately, the image of the dodo bird as known to the general public was derived from the work of a Dutch painter named Roelandt Savory, who had never set foot on Mauritius and might never have seen a live dodo bird. “It was a combination of bad art, bad science and bad taxidermy,” one person said.

We were also surprised by their temperament. They usually did not flee us, but this seemed to be more out of boldness than docility. The males, larger and armed with a heavier and more curved beak, were particularly aggressive. On several occasions, dodos actually charged us. One luckless man was seriously injured when a dodo pounced on him from an outcropping almost 2 meters above his head.

We had an even more unwelcome surprise when we discovered a rat in one of our live traps. According to biologists, rats had not reached the islands of Mauritius until as late as the 1500s, when European sailors began visiting the island regularly. Rats and other introduced species were universally blamed for the deterioration of Mauritius’s ecology thereafter. Did the rat represent an unexpected early arrival? Or had we unknowingly brought it back with us? The best scientists on the expedition set aside other duties to find out.

Carradine delivered the final diagnosis. “This rat has all the recognized characteristics of the common brown rat, Rattus rattus rattus. This subspecies is not known to have occurred in the Afro-Polynesian regions until after recent European settlement. It also bears several parasites of the genus Ctenocephalides, also of Eurasian origin. But the conclusive evidence lies in its biochemistry. Its tissues contain relatively high concentrations of heavy metals and chemicals found in insecticides. Most significantly, it has enzymes associated with resistance to warfarin, a man-made rat poison. There can be no question: We brought this rat with us.”

I was very troubled, remembering Dr. Werner’s discussions of possibly changing the past. “What if this isn’t the only one?” I said. “Could others form a breeding population?”

“That’s unlikely,” Carradine said. “Mauritius has plenty of native birds of prey. Our own expedition has already uncovered at least three raptorial species that had never been formally described from adequate material in modern times. Even here, rats could not multiply unchecked. But that is fairly moot. Warfarin resistance is characterized by rapid blood clotting. In an environment free of the pesticide, this quickly becomes a disadvantage. This rat already shows the beginnings of congestion in the blood vessels. If we had not caught it first, it would have soon died of arteriosclerosis.”

I watched Dianna out of concern, but soon decided that there was no reason to worry. She was quite talkative, though she seemed to take care to avoid discussing anything other than technical or intellectual issues. She took to the captive dodo birds; especially a young dodo nicknamed Raphael. He was only slightly smaller than the adults, but had a less robust beak and dirty white down instead of gray feathers. He seemed attracted to people, and we took to letting him wander around camp. I took a candid photo of Di holding Raffy in her arms.

I kept my distance from her, but she started seeking me out. Soon, we were talking often, sometimes long after everyone else had gone to their tents. She preferred discussing the Bible. Even to me, she rarely even mentioned her broken engagement—except one night, when I prayed with her, and put an arm around her while she cried.

Halfway through the second week of the expedition, we made another unnerving discovery. Carradine and I were exploring the island in a Thing with a boat-like amphibious hull. On one side of the island, we discovered a swath of injured, uprooted and dead trees, with shredded bark and roots that looked chewed. “A mammal did this,” Carradine said. “A big mammal—200 kilograms at least.” He pointed to an unmistakable brown mass. “And that proves it. Somehow, a large mammal made its way to this island.”

“Why wouldn’t it show up in the fossil record?”

“The fossil record can never provide more than a fraction of a percentile of the biota, and the record in Mauritius is exceptionally spotty. All the dodo skeletons previously known to science were collected from a single bog.”

“I’m radioing this back.” I tried to call, but there was no signal. We had frequently lost radio contact, but never had it been so worrisome. “We steer for camp, then!”

We had reached the point driving through the mountains, but to save time, I drove into the sea. Our propulsion came from the tires, which had been fitted with special hydrodynamic cleats. A retractable rudder aided in steering. Still, the amphibious Thing was not intended for the open sea (that role had been reserved for full-sized Amphibians with a heavier chassis, like the one we had left in Mongolia), and quickly proved dangerously ungainly. I had to constantly correct for yaw, but the tires at least kept it from pitching side to side as much as one might expect. After 15 hair-raising minutes, we rolled onto the shore 100 meters from base camp. As we rolled to a stop at the camp, Dianna greeted us sardonically:

“What were you thinking taking this away from shore?” We hurriedly gasped out a garbled explanation. She frowned, but became clearly concerned when Carradine showed her photos of the trees. “It looks like the damage a pig might do,” she said. “If it were twice the usual size…”

“I’ve been thinking over this,” Carradine said minutes later, as all present gathered in the center of camp, “and I believe the most probable explanation is that this is some sort of elephant. I noticed that the gouges in the bark and the earth appear to have been made entirely with downward strokes. This is not consistent with the range of motion of a pig, or an elephant for that matter. But it would be plausible from this.” He pushed a key on his data pod, and brought up an image of a strange skull. It looked like that of an elephant, except that instead of long and curved tusks like an ordinary elephant, it had a pair of short, stout tusks that projected downward from its chin like plowshares. “This is Deinotherium, once widespread in Europe, Asia and Africa, but apparently extinct no later than 1 million years ago. It would probably have weighed ten tons or more. The creature that did the damage we saw, on the other hand, weighed no more than one.” He looked at me. “Can we kill it?”

I shook my head. “We didn’t bring along any weapons heavier than a 12-gauge shotgun. Even that would do the job with the right loads, but all we brought is birdshot. The assault rifle could probably kill even a full-sized elephant if you aimed at the right place, but it wouldn’t be quick.”

“What about flares?” Di said. Our shotgun ammunition included pyrotechnic rounds, intended strictly for signaling. I nodded.

“Good thinking. Those would work on big game, at close ranges, and the noise and heat could scare an animal off.”

“As far as that goes,” Carradine said, “I still have my .44.” He handed it to me. “I’ve practiced a lot more in the last year, but you could probably still use it better than I could.”

I did a quick head count. Eight people were gone. I checked my watch. “The other party is 45 minutes overdue. Have you heard from them?”

“The last radio contact was an hour ago,” Di said. “They were held up by rough terrain. They mentioned fallen trees… and they’re overdue for a report.”

“That settles it. We’re going after them,” I said.

Dianna examined her signal logs. “The range-finding function hasn’t been working well, and I didn’t try to verify, but now that I look at the readings, I think they were at least two kilometers closer to camp than they thought. If they thought they were here, then they were probably really here. Alright, I have the location of their last transmission. We check here first.” We went out, just Dr. Carradine, Dianna and I. I gave strict orders that no one was to leave camp.

I silently fumed. The group’s navigation exercises had been even more appalling than the weapons drills. (At one point, one of them had asked me why we couldn’t use GPS in the past…) But I had to admit that the area was genuinely hard to navigate. Dianna and I had to correct each other several times, and once, we nearly got into a full-blown argument. After almost an hour of searching, we found the spot Dianna pointed to. Not 200 meters away, we found the lost party.

Six of them were standing at the top of a steep hill. The Thing they had been riding lay upside-down in a deep stream bed at the base of a steep and rocky hill. Another expedition member sat sheepishly on the bank of the stream bed, unable to get out. The last was trapped in the car, unhurt save for superficial cuts and bruises, but unable to get out without assistance. What came out was that, in an attempt to get back to what they thought was the trail back to camp, they had tried to go down the hill. The driver had let out all but one of his passengers on top of the hill, planning for them to climb down after him when he was halfway down. Unfortunately, the Thing had been fitted with an elongated van-like hull, which was harder to control than the standard configuration, especially if there were no passengers to add weight to the back. The driver had lost control, gone bouncing down the steepest and most obstacle-ridden part of the hill, and ended up trapped in the car where we found it.

I sent Dianna down to examine the damage. She reported over the other Thing’s radio, which proved to be functional but unreachable by either of the men in the stream bed: “This car is in good enough shape to run, except for a damaged fuel line, and anyway, we can’t just pull the driver” (I omit his name for my own protection) “out and leave it here. We have to cut him out, and we certainly don’t want to do that through the floor next to a broken fuel line. Can you drive down?”

“Not a chance. But if I back partway down, George can make it the rest of the way with the power winch.” I proceeded to do just that. I parked the car where it would be angled about 25 degrees from the horizontal, with the rear tires resting against a half-buried boulder. I started the winch going, and Carradine half-walked, half-repelled down the hill. Together, the three people in the stream hooked the cable to the van’s back bumper. I turned on the winch, and slowly, the van began to rise. My own vehicle began to slide back. I put it in low gear for more traction.

I lowered the power to the winch as the car reared up on its nose. “See if you can maneuver it so the front wheels touch the ground,” I said. “Then try rolling it forward, even restart the motor a minute, while I give you some slack. That way, we can get it right side up without dropping it.” Dianna found a log to put under one wheel, and then ran the engine for a few seconds. That was enough to get one wheel on the ground. From there, we were able to lower the whole vehicle gently to the ground. I stopped the winch while Carradine and the passenger went at the crumpled body with an axe and a pry bar. Soon he was free and they climbed up the cable and out of the ditch.

I restarted the winch, and began pulling the van up from the stream in earnest. The motor whined, and the whine was answered by a roar from among the trees. A dinothere emerged. It was about as tall as a donkey, but much heavier in build, and covered with stringy gray-brown hair. Carradine raised the shotgun, glanced at the Thing, then pumped out the flare round and replaced it with a birdshot round. He fired once over its head. The beast stopped, roared, and charged. Dianna fired two bursts from the assault rifle, striking it repeatedly in the head and chest. Carradine fired again, hitting it in the eye. It faltered, roaring in pain. Abandoning the controls, I emptied the revolver at it as it reared up on its hind legs. I hit it once in the head. It staggered, stumbled and fell into the stream bed, where it let out a steady howl of agony.

“Release the Thing!” I ordered. “We’re getting out of here now!” The van was almost out of the stream when Carradine unbuckled the cable, sending it crashing back down. The cable was tied instead about the driver’s waist. I set the winch in low gear and hauled him up, along with the passenger, who held onto his waist for mutual support. Three more dinotheres came out of the trees, roaring in answer to the other’s cries. Dianna coolly fired about twenty rounds at the first, bringing it down. Carradine shot another with a flare round. It fell over, its hairy hide in flames. The last one standing bolted blindly forward to get away from flames spreading through the brush. George and Di needed no encouragement to hurry up the hill.

The fleeing deinothere only scattered the sparks about, setting its own fur on fire. It tumbled down the bank and crashed into the Thing. Hydrogen does not burn that readily (even the Hindenburg went up slowly) but the fire and fuel created a steady jet of flame that ripped up the slope. I put the Thing into the next gear, hauling the driver along by the remaining meter or so of cable. “Get on or cut loose!” I said. He managed to haul himself up. The passenger ran along behind us. George and Di were only halfway up the hill, with the fire close behind them. I reached the top, and stared helplessly down. The fire seemed to spread in ripples, moving outward from the central jet wherever it touched a line of vegetation. Mercifully, it was already slowing down. I let the cable down to them, and hauled them up the rest of the way.

Patches of fire were still smoldering when we left, though we had done our best to put them out. Carradine had other things on his mind. “There are problems we haven’t come close to resolving,” he said as we loaded the dodos. “The deinotheres being there in the first place is odd enough, but not intractable. The whole region of the Mascarene Islands was a plateau in the Oligocene. As the sea rose, relict mammal populations could have escaped to the emerging islands, and then swum from one island to another. What is most puzzling is that I can find no evidence for a sustained breeding population on this island. All the deinothere traces I found form a continuous trail, ending where we killed those four. Could we have killed the last of a declining population? If so, then where are the signs of the ones that came before?”

“Maybe we killed the first to reach the island,” Di said. “Maybe that’s why there was never a native mammal fauna. Maybe that’s why the dodos survived so long.” She scratched the friendly dodo’s head. “But we can never answer all the questions, can we? C’mon, Raffy. Let’s go home.”

In everyone’s life, there are crucial moments that seemed unimportant at the time, but that one looks back on as life-changing events. One of those moments in my life was my first encounter with a highly unusual aircraft. I can look back on it now and see that it ultimately led to the best thing that ever happened to me. But I still wish I had followed my instincts and quit my job, rather than fly that plane.

On that fateful day, I had my first meeting with Naughtenny Moore’s latest client, a film maker named Dino Caproni. He wanted to make a documentary about Cretaceous Argentina, home of Giganotosaurus, the largest carnivorous dinosaur, and Argentinosaurus, the largest dinosaur. He was the heir to a very successful aircraft company, and promised to give the firm its biggest payment yet. However, the offer came with one important string: He would make the film from one of his company’s own planes. I was offered the honor of flying it.

Man, I wish I had quit my job!

I was standing in the company garage along with Carlos, Dianna and Dino, waiting for the plane to arrive, when I looked up and saw a flying saucer descending from the sky. It descended slowly, silently, almost vertically, as if it were being lowered by an invisible pulley. Its mirror-like surface made it shimmer like a disco ball. Dianna, Carlos and I stared in silent shock. I, with my training in aeronautics, had more reason to be startled than they did. Everything I knew about aircraft told me that what I saw was impossible. The craft was moving very slowly, I judged no more than 30 kilometers per hour, and at an angle of over 30 degrees. By all rights, it should have fallen out of the sky. For a moment, I thought that it might be a hovercraft, held aloft by a downward-pointing jet engine. But I already knew that was impossible. It was much too quiet. As we gaped, and Caproni looked on in silent glee, the plane touched down on a maintenance road and rolled for no more than ten meters before coming to a stop.

I ran forward to examine the strange craft. The first thing I noticed was that the skin of the craft was transparent plastic, ten meters wide, and a little short of two meters high. The second thing I realized was that it was not a “flying saucer” in the truest sense. Its shape was more like an egg, with the big end in front. Two vertical fins projected from the dorsal surface. A ducted propeller was in the rear. There was no discrete fuselage. The cockpit was in the center of the craft, and a protruding blister at the front contained space for recording equipment and for two observers, lying on their bellies. The only person in the craft at the moment was a pilot. I noted that he did not look happy.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” said Caproni. “Aeronautic engineers, they say ‘flying saucer’ not practical. And they mebee right, for most things. But for observation plane, flying saucer ideal. It go real slow, it go straight up or straight down, it practic’ly float in place. Only helicopter do that better, but de helicopter be more expensive, stay up not so long and scare all de animals away with de noise. For de intimate quality I want in my film, de Gossamer Starship is the only way. And I dink you mebee de best man to fly it.”

“Why is that?” I said warily.
“Well, de Starship, she be a great plane. But, she got no tail, and most pilots, dey used to tails, and when dey fly Starship, dey say, “I can’t fly it! It no good!” He glanced pointedly at the pilot who had just vacated the plane. “But you, I know you good pilot, no need tails.”
“I would think you could find someone at least as qualified,” I said.
“Mebee, but where, and for how much? You already work for company, you good wid planes. An’ besides, how many oder people can say dey win dogfight?”
“Do what?” Di said.

“When I was flying planes for the Columbian government, I once survived an attack from a hostile aircraft,” I said. “I can tell you about it some other time. Well, Mr. Caproni, let’s go ahead and get this over with.”

The Gossamer Starship took off after a short run down the runway. As we lifted, I made a grudging mental note that it would be easy to take off in the field, where runways were whatever we could find or make in the dirt. I soon found that it handled well, too, though anyone not experienced with tailless airplanes would have had a hard time. With Dino’s encouragement, I attempted the steep dives that he said it was capable of. It performed excellently. The transparent hull took a little getting used to, but soon I went from nervousness to a kind of euphoria. Together with the low speed and steep ascents and descents, the transparent hull encouraged the feeling that I was truly floating. I soon found myself attempting things beyond what Dino suggested. I did maneuvers which, in any other plane, would have brought me crashing into the ground. By turning into the wind, I even managed to hover in place. “Beautiful! Beautiful!” Caproni gushed.

After I landed, I personally shook Caproni’s hand. “This is the best plane I’ve ever flown!” I said. Looking back, I’m not sure why I felt the way I did. It was mainly the downright ethereal quality of the plane. I think I was also infected with Caproni’s perpetual enthusiasm. I think my mood was encouraged by Dianna’s newly bare ring finger.

Man, I wish I had quit!

That evening, Dino treated the staff to a dinosaur movie marathon, played on the Ora’s built-in video system. They were all very old, with the youngest being a little shy of 90 years old. Most featured dinosaurs created from small models, animated, and then projected against live-action footage to look like full-sized creatures. One was made by the even more primitive method of slapping artificial protuberances on dime store reptiles. Dino skipped to the next film after Carlos and the other paleontologists threw things at the screen.

We all watched with interest, sometimes bemused, sometimes perplexed, and sometimes thrilled with genuine wonder. The best were the two oldest: The Lost World and King Kong. Dino said that they had been made by an animator named Willis O’Brien. The models weren’t that good, especially in the former film, and much of the action was scientifically ludicrous. But I was very impressed, sometimes even unnerved, by the vivid aliveness conveyed through those silly-looking models. O’Brien’s dinosaurs were not impersonal, stone-faced monsters that devoured extras on cue. They were characters that did everything a living animal would. They scratched themselves; they snarled and lashed their tails; they would retreat, as well as attack; they even sneered at each other. At times, I couldn’t help feeling as if O’Brien had really seen the living animals, and then done the best he could to show them within the limitations of his medium.

King Kong got the most reactions. It was a story about an island infested with Mesozoic monsters, and ruled by a twenty-foot-tall ape called Kong. A mildly insane film maker went to the island, accompanied by a band of sailors and one beautiful woman. The woman, naturally, fell into the hands of the ape, first on the island and then in New York City. The paleontologists loved the dinosaur sequences set on the island, usually cheering for the dinosaurs and booing when they were defeated by the humans or the gorilla (though the one mammal specialist felt obliged to cheer for his own kind). Carlos led the wild cheering during an on-screen sauropod attack. While the humans were following Kong in a raft, a swimming sauropod sank their boat, killing four swimmers in the water and chasing the survivors onto land. When the slowest member of the group tried to take refuge in a tree, the sauropod sneered and plucked him out of the tree. The scene ended with the triumphant sauropod with its head to the ground, apparently feeding on its victim. The paleontologists loudly debated the merits of the scene. “It’s plausible enough,” Carlos opined. ‘Sure, sauropods were herbivores, but they still might bite someone to death as a matter of territoriality.”

The paleontologists really went wild over a wrestling match between the title ape and a carnosaur. The combatants punched, grappled and tossed each other in maneuvers that would have killed real animals of their size several times over. Of course, everyone but the mammalogist cheered for the dinosaur. When the dinosaur sprang back to its feet after being tossed, with its tail lashing defiantly, Carlos called out, “Yeah! Show that monkey who’s boss!” Even the mammalogist groaned when the gorilla killed the dinosaur by reaching into its mouth and breaking its jaws. “If that had really happened, the gorilla would have lost his fingers,” Carlos griped.

“You know something?” Carlos said to me after the film. “This expedition is shaping up to be just like King Kong. Think about it. We’re led by a crazy film maker. We’re going to a land filled with dinosaurs. We even have a beautiful damsel and a handsome adventurer.”

“Yeah? Well, we also have a big monkey,” I told him. “Just look in the mirror.”
“Ouch! Harsh, harsh. Too far, Ted,” Carlos said. He seemed to be waiting expectantly for further comment.
Finally, I said, “Look, are you insinuating something?”

“Insinuating? I’m flat out saying it,” Carlos said. “I know how you feel about her.”
“Well, I don’t know what you mean,” I said, feeling flustered.
“The gentleman doth protest too much,” Carlos said, feigning an English accent. “Would you know what I was talking about if I told you she felt the same way?” He laughed. “She thinks about it, too. Not as much, maybe, perhaps not even consciously, but the feeling is there. If you asked her, I think there’s a very good chance she would say yes.”

“Oh, shut up!” I said. “You’re being ridiculous. Besides, even if we did, we couldn’t. We’re professionals and coworkers. And I can’t very well make a move now. She’s hurting. That would be taking advantage of her when she’s vulnerable.”
“Maybe so,” said Carlos. “But that doesn’t mean she’d say no. C’mon. I’m sure I’m not saying anything you haven’t already thought about. You should be asking yourself, why not?”

“You’re imagining things, Carlos,” I said as I walked to my car. He just laughed. On the drive home, and all through the rest of the night, I furiously pondered everything he had said.

A month later (subjectively speaking, of course), we were in Cretaceous Argentina. We brought along four vehicles: two Things, the Ora armored car and, of course, Caproni’s plane. Over the first week, Caproni and I flew five successful missions, documenting the surrounding area. We would feed our footage directly to the people on the ground, who stood ready to drive over and provide close-up documentation of anything important we might see. A technician came along on each flight to maintain the camera equipment and communications gear. Usually, the technician was chosen from among Caproni’s group, but Di came along on one flight. We spent much of the time talking to each other casually, but inside, I felt excited and scared. I pushed the plane to its limits, secretly hoping to impress her.

We concentrated on observing the activities of a herd of argentinosaurs. There were almost a hundred of them, moving in a loose column along a fern prairie of shrubs and small trees. We frequently glimpsed smaller animals moving with the herd. Iguanodons and smaller sauropods stayed close to the argentinosaurs, presumably because the invincible giants afforded a measure of protection against predators. However, carnivores were not entirely deterred. Birds, lizards and small carnosaurs moved about with impunity, snapping up prey that was driven out in the wake of the herd. Occasionally, we caught glimpses of larger carnivores (though none comparable to Giganotosaurus), following at a distance and waiting for an opportunity to take prey. The ground crew found the aftermath of a successful hunt. A young argentinosaur, weighing “only” 15 tons, had been killed by a pack of one-ton predators called Megaraptor. Track ways revealed a grueling struggle, typical of dinosaur predation. The juvenile had been attacked by surprise and wounded. Over an estimated four hours, it had moved in and out of the herd, with the raptors following behind. Its elders protected the juvenile when it was in their midst, but paid no heed when it fell further and further behind. Eventually, the juvenile had been left behind entirely, and five predators had attacked in unison.

The kill provided our first evidence of Giganotosaurus. Among the carnotaur tracks were those of a much larger carnosaur, which had moved in and dispersed the pack. Several shed giganotosaur teeth were found in the carcass, and a front leg was entirely missing. The giganotosaur had apparently eaten its fill from the haunches and then carried away the forelimb, perhaps for later consumption, but more likely for a mate or its young.
Dr. Diego, a paleontologist specializing in taphonomy, estimated that the kill was about a week old.

It was debated whether or not to kill one of the argentinosaurs. Carlos and I opposed it emphatically. “I shot a sauropod once before, on our trip to the Morrison,” I said. “It was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. We got swarmed by carnosaurs, used up half our ammunition for the entire trip and finally had to leave most of the carcass behind. And remember, the biggest carnosaurs then only weighed one to two tons. In this time and place, that’s the lower limit for big-game predators!”

“What about Giganotosaurus itself?” said Dr. Indigo, the mammalogist. “Would that be worth shooting?”

I considered, but shook my head. “I don’t think so. We’d have the same problem with attracting other carnosaurs,” I said. “Besides, there’s not much we could learn from a carcass that we don’t already know either from fossils or other specimens collected through time travel. It would be more beneficial to observe the living animal.”

“Yes!” Caproni said. “And that is what we shall do!”

At the end of the first week, scouting ahead of the herd in the plane, I made an exciting discovery that would change the course of the expedition. I excitedly presented our photographs to the rest of the group that night. “The argentinosaur herd appears to be moving toward this thinly vegetated area here,” I said, highlighting an area of a few square kilometers. “About a dozen adult argentinosaurs are already there. If you look closely, you can see small depressions, about a meter wide. By our count, there are no fewer than 52 of them. We believe, and Dr. Jonston concurs, that these are nests!

“Our observations show that younger argentinosaurs are protected from predators by moving in the midst of the adults. Therefore, the arrival of the herd is most likely timed to coincide with the hatching of the first eggs. We estimate that the herd will reach the nesting area in the next two days. We have the unprecedented opportunity to observe a dinosaur hatching.”

We eagerly planned how we would photograph it. There would be daily fly-bys in the Gossamer Starship. As soon as the hatching started, the ground crew would move in to observe.

Carlos offered a voice of caution. “The argentinosaurs are protective of their young, and with hatchlings, they’re going to be especially vigilant. Those adults already at the site have probably been guarding the nests the whole time. They may not be the most attentive parents, but they certainly aren’t going to let us drive right in. Any close-up work will have to be conducted by a small group on foot. I nominate Ms. Gonzalez, Diego and myself. The Ora should be standing by a klick or two away. If things go wrong, the rest of the team will move in, kick ass with the 20 mil, pick us up and get the hell out of there.”

Over the next two days, we set the plan in motion. Three days later, Caproni spotted the first hatchling emerge from the nest. At Caproni’s request, I hovered about 100 meters above the nest. For the first time, nervousness broke through my delight at flying the plane. Hovering was tricky; there was always a risk that a change in the wind or some hiccup in the plane would break the delicate equilibrium and send the craft out of control. When I had hovered before, I had always been high enough that I could regain control if something went wrong. But now, we were so low that a problem could easily cause a crash. I realized that I had allowed Caproni’s infectious enthusiasm cloud my judgment.

I grew doubly nervous when the animals around us began to take notice of the starship. An argentinosaur reared on its hind legs, reaching well over 50 feet into the air, and roared. It undoubtedly mistook us for one of the large pterosaurs that were circling over the nest. Through Dino’s camera feed, I got a disconcertingly good look at it. It bared its teeth, just like the sneering dinosaurs of O’Brien, and two red sacks on its snout inflated. I didn’t worry about that, but I was more than a little perturbed by the pterosaurs. Some of them had wingspans even greater than my plane, and they were beginning to behave aggressively. One, with a wingspan of 40 feet, swooped down on me from above, pulling up just before it smacked into the canopy. I had won that game of chicken, but there was no guarantee that I could win the next. There was no telling what might happen if one collided with the plane. During standard aircraft tests, the plane had stood up to high-speed impacts from ducks and chickens. But a collision with a pterosaur weighing over 100 pounds would be an entirely different matter.

The pterosaur dive-bombed the plane again and again. After the third time, I pulled out of hover. That was a catastrophic mistake. Seeing my plane move away only encouraged the pterosaur to attack again. This time, it struck from behind, hitting my canopy and then getting sucked into the prop. The plane shook; gore spattered on the canopy, and the engine stopped. The Starship began losing altitude rapidly. Any other aircraft would have nosedived straight into the ground then and there. Instead, the Starship made a very steep descent, which grew steeper as we went lower. I managed to pull out of the dive with barely ten meters to spare. Just when it looked like I might get back in the air, a cantankerous argentinosaur stepped into my path. I pulled up steeply, just enough to crash into its neck instead of its descending feet.

*********************

I’m Carlos Wrzniewski. I convinced Ted to let me tell my part of this story, so we’ll take turns telling it for a while. Maybe this way you’ll get a few of the facts straight. When the Gossamer Starship crashed, I was driving a Thing toward the nest site. I wasn’t paying attention to the transmission, and didn’t realize anything was wrong until the transmission ended in static. Dianna screamed “TED!” so loud I almost got distracted from my driving. “What’s wrong?” I say.

“The plane crashed,” Di says. “It crashed into an Argentinosaurus!” Understand, she’s not being hysterical. She’s saying this almost dead pan, like she’s not sure if it’s real or not.
“Well, what do we do about it?” I say. And she’s just looking blank.
“We have to find them,” she says.

“What do you mean ‘we’?” I say. “You have all the gadgets. The plane has an automatic beacon. Take a bearing on his location.” So she does that, and starts plotting a course, but then the beacon goes out. “Well, where is it?” I say.
She says, “It’s gone!” I say, “OK, then where was it?” She gives me directions. And in a few minutes, we find the plane. It was upside down, about two klicks away from the nesting site. The thing was covered in blood. Dianna, she’s shaking, and Diego, he looks like he’s going to be sick.
I stop the Thing and get out. Before I go to check the plane, I get an Eliminator out of the back. Can’t be too careful, that’s what I always say. I touch Dianna on the shoulder and say, “Get the Tactical rifle and the camera.” But she just sits there, starting to cry. She says, “They’re all dead, aren’t they?”

I told her, “We won’t know until we check the plane. Are you gonna come?” She sits there a moment, then gets out and gets a gun. Diego opts to stay behind. I’m already convinced that at least two out of three crew members are dead. I can see that Caproni’s bubble is caved in, smashed against a tree trunk. Not one chance in ten he got out in time. As for Ted, I’m not even thinking about it. I can already see that the plane slid for quite a way upside down, and if the canopy wasn’t caved in, then it probably sheered clean off. I figure, the only person who had a snowball’s chance in Alice, Australia, of getting out alive is the technician. I look back at Di, and I can tell she’s thinking the same thing. I tell her, “Stay here. I’ll go look.” I shoulder the Eliminator, and it feels like it weighs 100 kilos instead of ten. I climb on top of the wreck (or, rather, the bottom) and look. And now I’m the one staring. Finally I say, “The plane’s empty!”

Dianna runs over. “What happened to the transmitter?” she says.
“Most likely, destroyed or disabled in the crash,” I say. Di just shakes her head.
“That beacon wasn’t a delicate piece of equipment. It’s designed to survive crashes a lot worse than this. The only way to disable it would be to bash it with something heavy on purpose.” She thinks a moment, “Oh, s*!”
I think I know what she’s thinking, and I don’t like it one bit. “The beacon was portable, wasn’t it?” I say. “If they had to leave the plane, they could have brought it with them so we could track them easily. But then maybe somebody is carrying it…”
Dianna’s frowning. “I didn’t register any significant movement between when the plane crashed and when the transmitter went out,” she says. “It must be within a few meters of here.” She thinks some more. “Is there a way to look around inside?”
“You mean besides the obvious?” I say. She blushes, and then looks through the transparent belly. “I can see where it should be,” she says. “It’s gone; they must have taken it with them…Oh, no. Oh, my God…” She just stands there, staring.
“What happened?” I say. She points.

“The transmitter is built to run on either internal batteries or on power from the plane. You see those rectangular things on the floor—well, the ceiling? Those are the batteries. The technician must have grabbed the transmitter and forgot the batteries. Unbelievable.”
I shake my head. “Not unbelievable, Di; it’s common. In military circles, this sort of thing is called ‘fog of war’. When people are in dangerous situations, they stop being rational. Instead of planning and thinking through their actions, they fall back on instincts and routines. It can save a man’s life, and his sanity. But sometimes, the process short-circuits. That’s when things like this happen.”
“So, what do we do? We can’t track them, and chances are they don’t know it. It seems…hopeless.”

“You ever study classical mythology?” I say. She shakes her head.
“I picked up bits and pieces in school and from books and movies. But no, I’ve never studied it. Why on Earth do you ask?”
“Well, in the old days, people had gods and goddesses for just about everything. One of the major goddesses was for hunting. The Greeks called her Artemis. The Romans called her…Dianna.” She just looks at me, kind of blank. “Look, I know that won’t mean much to you, but just think it over. The master of the hunt is your namesake. You gotta think like her and be like her. Do that, and nothing is impossible. Now—let’s hunt!”

*********************

While they were looking at the plane, I (Ted), Caproni and the technician (her name was Rosita Perez) were navigating the nest. We had survived the plane crash with nothing worse than bruises. Caproni had tumbled out of his bubble on impact. I had fared the worst. When the plane had hit the ground upside-down, the canopy over my head remained miraculously intact, but I hit my head against it repeatedly. I ended up unconscious, and Caproni and Perez had to drag me out.

I regained consciousness as a group of dinosaurs approached. I heard the telltale shrieks of carnotaurs. “Are you all right?” Caproni said.
“I can walk,” I said. “Do you have the shotgun? The transmitter?” They showed me both. Caproni also had a video camera. I took the shotgun. It was loaded with armor-piercing buckshot; I had three extra drums stored in my vest. “The carnotaurs will be interested in the plane, not us. But it will behoove us to get out of here. Come on!” I led them away, toward the nest.

On reaching the nest, we were greeted with a spectacular sight. The sauropod herd was marching past at a few miles per hour. Meanwhile, dozens of newborns were galloping toward them. The hatchlings were the size of large rabbits, and their gait was like a rabbit hopping. Six adults monitored the trail of the newborns, while another four watched the nest. There was little need for the adults to move about. With necks about 40 feet long, they could nudge a newborn or drive away a predator simply by swinging their necks. Despite the vigilance of the sauropods, predators took a steady toll on nestlings. Pterosaurs swooped down, carrying off baby sauropods the way hawks carry away mice. Crocodiles and large lizards lunged from the underbrush to seize infants. I saw one infant captured and smothered by a big snake. Small carnosaurs, ranging from the size of turkeys to the size of men, ran about snatching infants. The most successful of these were sickle-clawed dinosaurs called noasaurs, resembling but only distantly related to the famous velociraptors. These hunted in groups, with some feinting in and out of the underbrush to distract the adults while others made the kills.

I estimated that the predators were killing about one of every four infants that hatched. However, the predators took their own casualties. The sauropod adults frequently sniffed the bushes, and stomped if they smelled a predator. When in distress, the infants would let out a high-pitched whistle, which would draw one of the adults within seconds. The most successful predators were those that killed the infants before they cried out. If the infant did cry for help, a predator that did not run or hide fast enough would either be creamed with the swinging neck or seized with the teeth. In a spectacular fatality, a pterosaur, about as big as the one that struck the Starship, was hit by an adult’s swinging neck as it carried off a still-screaming infant. It was like a pigeon being hit with a baseball bat. The pterosaur flew for over a hundred yards before landing in a pitiful heap. Two adults sniffed and nudged at the infant, but it was dead. When the pterosaur tried to lift one of it broken wings, a third adult ducked its head, seized the winged creature with its teeth and flung it against a tree. “These guys would do Willis O’Brien proud,” I murmured.

The hatching went on for hours. The eggs at the edges were among the last to hatch, so it was some time before the attention of the adults came our way. We hid behind a heap of manure, hoping that it would mask our smell as well as hide us from sight. In his dedication, Dino crawled on top of the manure pile to continue filming. I switched the ammunition in the shotgun, replacing the buckshot with a drum of tungsten slugs.
Then we heard the shots.

Dianna and I (Carlos) are walking from the plane toward the nest when we run into one of the silliest-looking dinosaurs that ever lived: the Carnotaurus. A carnotaur is set apart from other dinosaurs by several features. For one thing, they have a broad, flat horn overhanging each eye. No one knows what they’re for. They’re too small and fragile to be of any use in combat. They can’t be sexual display features, because we’ve found them on both males and females. Who knows? Maybe they’re an evolutionary adaptation for keeping the sun out of their eyes. Another thing is that they have unusually short, deep skulls. Finally, the upper jaw is significantly longer and a lot more heavily built than the lower one. The net result is a babyish, buck-toothed, bunny-eared caricature of a dinosaur. Even their teeth look fragile, and hard to take seriously. The only thing that might keep you from laughing is the fact that they weigh one metric ton each.

“No worries, mate,” says I. “We can take down this guy easy. But we aren’t gonna shoot unless we have to. For every carnosaur we kill, the smell of blood could attract five more.” The carnotaur hisses, and changed its skin color to fluorescent orange. I fire the Eliminator into the air, which makes it take a few steps back. I work the bolt and load a new round. I’m playing it cool, but then Dianna loses hers and shoots the thing through the eye. A head shot with a dinosaur is always an iffy proposition, but it worked well enough this time. The dinosaur falls right over, for all intents and purposes dead on impact. Di’s drilled the brain practically front to back. Much to our dismay, the sound of our guns gets answered by the roar of an argentinosaur.
I lead the retreat to the Thing—or, rather, where we had parked the Thing. We get there just in time to see Diego driving away. “Sweet Mother!!” I say, “what are we gonna do now?”
Di looks over her shoulder. Then she says, like, deadpan, “I think we can rule out climbing trees.” I look, too, and I see a couple argentinosaurs coming straight for us. They aren’t running, in the technical sense; as far as we know, the big sauropods don’t even do that. But with those long legs, what’s a brisk walk for them is 20 k per hour. Something that big moving in that way messes with one’s sense of perspective. The first thing you think is that they’re half as big, half as close and moving at half the speed that they really are. When they’re maybe half a klick away, I fire. “You missed,” Di says.

“You think you can do better, you try shooting this thing!” says I. I reload, real fast. Di fires a couple shots with her gun, which is kinda like gunning for bear with a BB gun. I keep shooting. After three shots, the leading sauropod goes down, and the one behind it stops. But the one still standing rears up on its hind legs, and it wails. I fire my last shot into the argentinosaur’s chest, and it staggers back and falls over. It roars one more time and dies. That’s when we hear the answering calls. Dozens. Hundreds.

“Great,” Di says. “Now it’s calling reinforcements. Do you have a backup plan?”
“I’m thinking,” I say. Right then, three more sauropods come out of the forest. The sensible thing to do is run, but why bother? There’s no place to run to, and the sauropods have endurance on its side. Dianna starts firing two-shot bursts at the closest sauropod, first at the legs, then at the chest. It staggers and falls, but it’s clearly still alive. Another comes at us from a different direction, and it gets within biting range. It takes a snap at me, and believe me, those heads only look small compared to the rest of them. Then Di fires her last three shots at it, and Sweet Mother! She blows the thing’s brains out. Not that it makes much difference. The dinosaur keeps coming, with what’s left of the head hanging down like dead weight. We try to avoid it by going right, but it goes right too. For one horrible moment, I think it’s still trying to get us. Then I realize, it’s simply yawing off course. I lunge left, and knock Di right off her feet. The sauropod misses us, barely, and keeps going for maybe 300 meters before it falls over.

I point to a stand of bushes. “Let’s get in there and keep a low profile,” I say. “With any luck, the sauropods will look around a bit, decide the trouble’s over and go away.”
“And if we’re unlucky?”
“Then it’s not gonna matter much whether we’re hiding there or standing here, will it?”

*********************

The sounds of shooting drew two argentinosaurs away from the nest, but the rest only grew more suspicious. I (Ted) pulled Dino down when one of them came too close. The head came down so close I could have reached out and touched it. It seemed to be looking right at me. It twitched an almost pig-like nose, apparently sniffing me. The lips pulled back, making that horrid sneer. I was sure it was going to attack. But, for some unfathomable reason, the head pulled back, and the giant walked away. I looked at Dino and Perez. They were trembling.

“We’re safe, for the moment,” I said. “I think maybe the smell of the manure fooled that one. Now we have to go in the direction of those shots. The others may be in trouble. Is there any way to signal them?”
“The beacon can be used as a transmitter,” Perez said. She confidently pulled it out of her pack. “Strange. The battery light’s not… Oh, no! I left the batteries on the plane!”
I looked at her in shock. “You mean the beacon’s been down the whole time?” She nodded. I wanted to swear, but words seemed to fail. “All right,” I said finally. “It’s a problem, but not insurmountable. We know where the others are from the shots, anyway. They can radio for help. They probably have already. Let’s go…”

We moved swiftly but stealthily through the trees. There was very little in the way of cover; there was little underbrush, and the trees were nearly stripped of leaves. I watched the others. Perez moved and glanced about furtively, in a subdued kind of fear. But Dino still seemed genuinely excited. He still had his camera out, and he filmed the scenery with every appearance of happiness. I made a note to watch him carefully. The bellows of the argentinosaurs could be heard in every direction. I listened for the sound of gunfire. Finally, we reached where I thought the shots had come from.

We all stopped. Perez gasped. We were in a large clearing, close to where the plane had gone down. 15 argentinosaurs were wandering around, sniffing loudly and bellowing to each other. Three more argentinosaurs lay dead. I instantly dropped to the ground, for all the good it might do. Perez did likewise. Dino hid behind a tree. The dinosaurs showed no signs of noticing us. I watched them closely. They were not making any kind of systematic search; instead, they simply milled about aimlessly. (Dinosaurs obviously aren’t very smart, and there is little in the way of actual coordination between members of a group.) But, as I watched, the dinosaurs’ limited attention seemed to shift gradually toward an unusually dense clump of vegetation.
“I think there’re some people hiding there,” I whispered. “We need a diversion, something to draw their attention away from those bushes. Dino, can you play back what you’ve recorded?” Peering around the tree, he nodded mutely. “Good. Here’s what I want you to do…”

*********************

Dianna and me (Carlos) are hiding in the bushes. It’s working well enough; the only problem is, most of the bushes are gnetophytes. Never heard of them? No surprise; all but one genus are extinct, and good riddance. These are primitive flowering plants, which lack leaves. Instead, the branches have chlorophyll all over the surface, and all of these branches end in sharp little points. No wonder the argentinosaurs didn’t eat them. The whole time we’re hiding, the bushes are poking us. Fortunately, the argentinosaurs seem to have pretty thin skins. When one of them came sniffing after us, it would get a few good pokes in the nose and then back off.

So, it looks like everything will work out all right, until a certain big fat idiot decides we need help. As we’re sitting there, taking our pokes while we wait out the dinosaurs, we hear this high-pitched whistle. Suddenly, all the dinosaurs freeze. Then they all hustle for one spot, except for one which rears up on its hind legs and lets out this incredible roar. One of them carelessly steps in the gnetophytes, but we just barely avoid getting pulped. “What was that?” Di asks.
“I’m not sure,” I say, “but it sounded recorded… Sweet Mother. Ted’s trying a trick we used in the Morrison. He’s playing back a dinosaur call to draw away the dinosaurs. That idiot.”
“Did it not work in the Jurassic?” Di asks.
“Oh, it worked real well,” I say. “We used a recorded Allosaurus roar to scare off a whole pack of ceratosaurs. Unfortunately, it attracted several real allosaurs.” Meanwhile, I see that the trick really is working now. The whistle gets played again, this time on our left. The dinosaurs keep following the sound—all except one. It paces in circles, still sniffing. Then it turns its tail toward us, and suddenly I see this mist coming out of its rear end. It’s not urine (technically, dinosaurs don’t urinate) but fluid from a pair of scent glands at the base of its tail—like a skunk’s, only much larger and even fouler. It doesn’t just stink, it makes my eyes water and my skin burn. I have to pull my shirt over my face just to keep breathing. “Sweet Mother!” I say. “We’ve always figured the tails were most dangerous—but we never counted on the anus!”

Finally, the argentinosaur lets up and walks way. Rosie Perez runs over to us, then takes a few good steps back. Dianna shouts, “Where’s Ted?”
Perez looks like she’s about to cry (though maybe it’s just the sauropod spray. “He went with Dino!” she says. “He said Dino would have to have protection… so they went together. I think they gonna die.”

Now, Dianna bites both lips, and I’m sure I see tears coming down from her eyes. “He must have had a plan,” she says. “What does he want us to do?”
“He found a tree that’s climbable,” she says. “We’re going to climb as high as we can. The others will join us… if they are able.”
Dianna just stands there, like she’s in shock. “Di. You OK?” I say.
She looks at me, and her face is going red. I think she’s about to scream, but she doesn’t. Instead, she just says real soft, “How could I possibly be OK?”
I put a hand on her shoulder, and I’m ready to pull it back in case she tries to bite it off. “All right, bad question,” I tell her. “Do you feel well enough to run?” She nods. “Good. Let’s go.”

*********************

I (Ted) followed Dino in a full run. It was remarkable how quickly he could move. I had trouble even keeping him in sight. He played the call over and over again. We could hear the argentinosaurs’ feet pounding behind us. I worried that they would catch up with us too soon. They moved at about 12 miles per hour, which doesn’t sound like much, but just try maintaining that speed for more than a few minutes! I was already feeling exhausted, but Dino seemed to just go faster.

“Watch out!” I shouted to Dino. He stopped just short of a suspicious dark space beneath a fallen tree. It was none too soon. A lurking noasaur erupted from the hole. It was only three feet tall, but heavily armed. It could have killed him easily, but it hesitated to attack a prey so much larger than itself. It took a cautious swipe with a clawed hand. The film maker sidestepped the attack, then I blasted the noasaur to pieces. I winced when I heard angry bellows from the sauropods.

We finally doubled back, leaving the argentinosaurs to search in confusion for the young one they had been following. We moved further into the trees, hoping to avoid being spotted by suspicious stragglers. We encountered one watchful sauropod that was keeping an eye on an opening in the tree cover. We dropped to all fours before it could see us, and crawled past under the cover of a large log. However, we found the way blocked by a six-foot crocodylian lying beside the log. I threw a rock at the croc’s nose. It grunted menacingly, but did not move.

I pondered the dilemma. Trying to crawl by a live croc was obviously not an option. Shooting it was equally out of the question; that would only draw the sauropods to us. The same held true if I tried to shoot the sauropod. With a hit to the head or neck, I had a very good chance of killing it, but the blast would attract many more. The safest option was to try to outwait the sauropod. But how long would that take?
My blood froze when the sauropod roared. I was sure we were spotted. Then something roared back. I looked toward the trees, and spotted a carnosaur that had somehow escaped my attention. It could only be a giganotosaur. It stood well over ten feet tall. It was well-camouflaged in hues of brown and green, except for a bright red crest on its snout. The sauropod thrust its head over the log and roared again. The sound was deafening. The giganotosaur stepped forward, letting out a steady hiss. I feared that we might be trampled in a clash between the giants. But then the sauropod backed off and walked away. The giganotosaur let out a triumphant roar before retreating into the trees. It might have won the battle of wills, but more sauropods would be on their way. Dino and I got up and ran like hell.

About 20 minutes later, we were all together about 30 feet up a tree. We were safe, as long as no one fell asleep and dropped out. “Didn’t you once fall out of a sequoia?” Carlos asked.
“Yes, but it was someone else’s fault,” I said defensively.
“Is this really the best plan?” Di said. “I mean, as soon as the argentinosaurs leave, this place is going to be swarming with them. Mightn’t we be safer if we tried to get somewhere else on foot?”

I shook my head. “Going on foot would be too risky,” I said. “We would have the carnosaurs and the argentinosaurs after us, especially with the sauropod spray on two of us. Besides, we need to plan for rescue, not just temporary safety. The first rule for wilderness survival is to stay in one place, and this is the first place the rest of the party will look for us.”
“You’re assuming they will look at all,” Carlos said darkly. “For all we know, Diego may have told the others we’re dead.”
“I know, but this is still our best option. What do we have in the way of ammunition?”
“I have another clip of .38 ammunition,” Di said. “Carlos used up the Eliminator rounds. How about you?”
“I have two drums of shells, one buckshot and one of slugs,” I said. “That gives us a total of 29 shots. If one dinosaur attacks, we can stop it easily enough. I don’t expect to have any trouble, at least from the carnosaurs. They won’t bother climbing a tree to get at us when there’s 400 tons of dead meat on the ground. How about communications? Is there a way to contact the Ora?”

Di shook her head. “We weren’t able to retrieve the batteries for the beacon. We don’t have any other communications gear, except what was in the Thing.”
Carlos scratched his chin. “Actually… maybe we do!” he said. “Let me see the Tactical.” Dianna handed him the rifle. After a few moments of examination, he cracked the biggest grin I’ve ever seen. “Excellent! Take a look at this. There’re three settings: One for safety, one for semi-auto… and one for taking pictures. The electronic scope was built to double as a kind of camera phone. That way, if a `tactical marksman’ sees something important, but it’s too risky to shoot, he can photograph it and send the image straight to his superiors. It’s perfect for reconnaissance work. Normally, it sends signals with microwaves, which aren’t much good without satellites, but if they kept the gun to the original specs, there should be a back-up radio transmitter.” He frowned with intense thought as he flipped through the options in the gun’s little computer. “Here it is. Good!” He handed the gun back to Di. “Try sending a signal every thirty minutes. The others should respond eventually… if they’re listening.”

“This really a wonderful opportunity!” Dino said gleefully. “My camera, it shoot in the dark. I can film carnosaurs eating kill. It not be wonderful?” I and everyone else looked at him in stunned silence. Carlos looked like he was ready to throw Caproni out of the tree.
We tied ourselves to the branches with belts, ropes and clothing. Realistically, there was no way our improvised straps could hold up anyone who started to fall, but they would at least keep us from rolling off the branches in our sleep. Di tied herself in with a long-sleeved overshirt. I felt a little uncomfortable next to her, so I moved several branches over, almost to the other side of the tree. Then we waited, and waited. Once, we heard the sound of the Ora’s cannon. “Sounds like they’re five clicks away,” Carlos commented. The sound was repeated, more faintly. The Ora was moving away.

“Care to make a change of plans?” Di said loudly.
“No, they’ll come back when the sauropods clear out,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. “We’re still better off up here.”
Within a few hours, the sun was setting. As expected, the carnosaurs became bolder. Five giganotosaurs came out and started feeding on the dead sauropods. It was unclear whether they were a pack, or just individuals that converged on the same place. I’m inclined to think that the latter was true. Only two of them, apparently an adult and a juvenile, would even feed at the same carcass. Smaller carnosaurs gathered, waiting expectantly for the giganotosaurs to finish. Pterosaurs of all sizes swept down, snatching scraps of meat when the giganotosaurs weren’t looking. Gathering crocodiles were bolder. Dozens of them swarmed in like a Biblical plague of reptiles, tearing off chunks of meat with impunity. One of the gigans was driven away from its carcass by a pair of crocs even longer than itself. “Terror crocs,” Carlos whispered. “Probably genus Sarcosuchus.”

A little while later, a terrible contralto screech announced a new arrival. The gigans looked up from their feeding apprehensively. Moments later, an eight-foot-long, crocodile-like head thrust through the trees, and the scream was repeated. The noise was deafening. A gigan actually turned tail and ran. The creature advanced, revealing a bizarre body that seemed to go on indefinitely. It did not look much like a dinosaur, but it walked on two legs and was too big to be anything else. It was over 60 feet long, and stood well over twenty feet high. The arms were unusually long, and bore one long sickle claw on the largest finger of each hand. Perhaps a quarter of its height came from a tall sail on its back. I recognized it as a spinosaur, though if not for the sail, I would have been at a loss to identify it. The strangest thing about it was its bearing. It looked and acted more like a bloodhound than any carnosaur I had seen. Where an ordinary carnosaur on the hunt would stand tall, with head raised high on a curving neck, this one seemed to stoop, with the unusually long neck held straight, the claws nearly scraping the dirt, and the nose held mere inches above the ground. The spinosaur strolled through the clearing, indifferent to the roaring of the gigans and ineffectual snaps of the crocs. It began to feed on the abandoned carcass, and the gigans and crocs relaxed and resumed their feeding.

I dozed off, but was dimly aware of a rising wind that made the branches swing and creak. Most people would have found it unnerving, but I found it soothing—at least as long as I was too drowsy to give it much thought. An hour or so later, I was awakened by Dianna’s screams.

A pterosaur, with a wingspan of over twenty feet, was attacking her. It hung like a bat from a branch over her, while striking with its wing-claws and its beak. She dropped her gun, which landed with a loud thud. I heard tearing fabric; the pterosaur was shredding a shirt she had used to tie herself up. I had to lean out precariously to bring my shotgun to bear, and I could still only see the pterosaur’s left wing. My first shot was a miss, and the recoil from my awkwardly-held gun nearly knocked me out of the tree. I had to grab the trunk with both hands to steady myself. Fortunately, the gun was strapped to my shoulder. I heard a loosed branch tumble to the ground. When I raised the gun again, the pterosaur was hanging on to Di’s own branch and slashing at her leg with one wing. When it heard me pump the shotgun, it came at me with wings flailing, held aloft more by occasional contact with the branches than by the lift from the wings. I fired; its body thumped against the gun barrel, and claws scratched at my legs. Then the pterosaur went crashing down through the branches, still flapping its wings. I lowered my gun in satisfaction, then froze. The pterosaur’s severed head was lodged in the trunk a few inches from my ear.

“We got trouble,” Carlos whispered. I looked down, and almost cried out. The spinosaur was heading toward us, its long nose pointing at our tree like a compass needle. When it reached the tree, it sniffed around the base. There was a nasty slurping sound as it sampled what was left of the pterosaur. Then its head jerked abruptly up. It easily reached twenty feet in the air. Grasping the trunk with its forelimbs for support, it reared up higher still. After a moment of pondering, I fired at the sail. I hoped that a painful but not life-threatening blow would drive it away. The spinosaur roared in pain, and from that close, the noise was positively painful. Rather than back off, it swung its head in my direction. Three times, it inhaled loudly. Then, for reasons known only to itself, it turned away and returned to its carcass.

“That was too close,” I said.
“It ain’t over,” Carlos said. “We gotta get that gun back. And by `we’, I mean you.”
I gave Carlos the shotgun and started down. The climb was one of the most unnerving experiences of my life. It was considerably more difficult than the climb up, thanks to the close approach of the spinosaur. The dinosaur had scratched up the bark and snapped a number of branches, making it much harder for me to find handholds and footholds. Nevertheless, I made it down without serious incident. Then, just as I was bending over to pick up the Tactical, a giganotosaur roared. It was less than twenty feet away.
I snatched up the rifle, fumbling in my desperation. Before I could even get hold of the grip, the gigan had reached me. Imagine my shock when it walked right past me! It was the adult of the pair, and the youngster was right behind it. If the adult noticed me at all, it gave no sign, but the young one glanced at me and shrieked a warning. The elder gigan roared again. This time, something—several somethings, in fact—roared back.

Carlos says that in an emergency, people stop thinking and run by instinct. That was certainly how it was for me. I was ten feet back up the tree before I had any definite, conscious impression of what was going on. I nearly fell out when something ran into the tree. I had a brief glimpse of a dinosaur with big claws and no head pressing against the trunk, its legs still moving. I did not pause from climbing. It was now clear what was going on: We were in the middle of a carnosaur turf war, and the decapitated animal below me was the first casualty. A cacophony of hideous screams and colliding bodies made the branches shake. After almost falling out again, I stopped at a stout branch about twenty-six feet off the ground and held on tight. Three dinosaurs ran past the tree, making the branch swing. I recognized one as the little gigan by its screams. Behind me, there was an unfamiliar scream that was cut off in a gruesome, soggy crunch. Another dinosaur went by, so big and loud that it could only be the adult gigan. It was moving slowly, with the halting tread of a wounded animal. It staggered at the base of the tree and slammed against the trunk. The impact nearly catapulted me off the branch. Then the gigan started moving again, gaining momentum until it was managing a slow jog.

I felt something brush my shoulder. “Grab it, Ted!” Carlos told me. They had managed to make a rope out of two carrying straps. I mutely hooked tied the gun to the straps. They hauled it up, then lowered the rope again. I climbed up the rest of the way, holding onto the rope with both hands while pressing my feet against the trunk. I started to slip when a strip of bark peeled away, but found a footing on a sufficiently sturdy branch. Carlos took my hand and pulled me the rest of the way up. I felt Di’s soft hands strap me back in. By then, my eyes were shut, and soon I was fast asleep.

When I finally awoke, it was morning. The big carnosaurs were gone, except for a few stragglers who lay next to the sauropod carcasses, too stuffed to move. Glancing down, I saw the decapitated dinosaur lying on its side at the base of the tree. In the light of day, I could see that it was a Megaraptor. The crocs had chewed on it a little, but the carcass was largely untouched. One arm was missing, but it was clearly not a recent injury, let alone one from last night. I wondered if it had been lost in some previous conflict with a Giganotosaurus. A short distance away, there was another, hideously mutilated raptor carcass. I looked up, and met Carlos’s gaze. “There were six of them,” he told me. “Caproni filmed the whole thing, though I doubt if many people will want to see it. It looks like they weren’t interested in the sauropod carcasses. They were after the gigans, especially the little one. Two went after the little one, while the other four slashed the s* out of the adult. The gigan evened the odds real quick, though. It beheaded one, sent another away with one leg barely on, and then it turned around and walked right over that one. Last we saw of it, it was running into the woods with ten feet of intestine hanging out. I imagine it’s dead by now.”

I looked to my right, and saw Di sleeping on the next branch. Carlos leaned over and whispered in my ear, “She called out your name, you know. Once when the plane went down, and once when you were trying to get back up the tree.” Then he continued, in a normal voice, “We finally contacted the Ora. The others will be coming soon.”
Sure enough, it was less than twenty minutes before the Ora came in sight. They parked the Ora directly beneath the tree, allowing us to slide down the rope and land on the roof. Di allowed me to rest on a cot in the upper deck of the Ora, where she and the other women of the expedition normally slept. Once, I peered out through half-closed eye and saw her sitting beside me, her chin resting on the mattress.

That evening, Dianna and I had dinner together. We both felt awkward, and didn’t talk much, but it was still nice to have each other’s company. I finally told her the story of my “dog fight”: “It happened in 2059. It was the last big year in the campaign against the drug cartels. All along, it had been a war of attrition. We destroyed, on average, 90% of their crops—not counting the loss of productivity from area-denial agents. Meanwhile, they shot down 20% of our planes, mainly with missiles and flak guns. The only question was, which side could sustain their losses longer. The cartels were stretched to the limits of their resources, but they still had enough for a last push back. They started using things they had held in reserve before. One of those was the Black Baron.

“The ‘Black Baron’ was a pilot, or, for all we knew, several pilots, flying a turboprop military trainer. It had been fitted with a full complement of weapons: missiles, machine guns, and a ‘Cyrano’ 57 mm cannon. It was painted black, with a red devil’s face on the nose. It wasn’t the only fighter they deployed, but there was no mistaking it. It appeared regularly in certain areas. Our planes were utterly defenseless. Have you ever seen an eagle go after a pigeon? It was worse than that. Our standard planes were ‘flying wing’ tankers. They had no tail and no discrete fuselage, just one huge delta wing, 60 meters in span and fat enough for a man to sit in the leading edge. They got the nickname ‘flying tortoises.’ The closest thing we had to weapons were some obsolete chaff launchers in the rear. In the event of hostile fire, the only thing we had going for us was that, apart from us, there wasn’t much in the plane to be hit. Even so, we might have been safe if we had had a military escort. But that was ruled out as a matter of legal etiquette. Officially, we were a civilian `agricultural’ project. Under any other name, what we were doing would have been illegal. Involving military air craft would have meant abandoning that pretense. So, the only remotely effective defense we had was protection in numbers. They sent us out in scores, even in hundreds. On a good day, an encounter with serious resistance would only wipe out half of them.

“When I met the Black Baron, I was flying in a mid-sized formation: two dozen planes. With a full load, the Tortugas had a speed of barely 200 kilometers per hour and a ceiling of well under 1800 meters. On this occasion, we were spraying secondary-growth rain forest between two mountain ranges. Guns in the mountains could shoot down at us. We flew in a zigzag formation, two alternating lines of planes. I was seventh in the staggered line

“The first plane in set off a cluster of off-route mines planted in the trees. That’s a mine turned on its side, designed to fire at passing vehicles. They launched a bunch of sub munitions, which exploded if they got near enough to an aircraft. All this made for a solid cloud of flak halfway across the valley. 3 planes got hit, one of which had two engines fail. That was enough to foul up our mission, because it wasn’t safe to turn around, so every plane behind it had to slow down or maneuver to get around it. Of course, we also had to crowd in to the middle to avoid the thickest of the trees. And, the narrowest part of the valley was still ahead of us.

“At the bottleneck, flak guns opened up. We started dropping our loads and pulling out. The first two got out with no problem. The plane with the broken engines was third, and it had trouble pulling up even with its load gone. The rest of us had to slow down and delay our own drops. The flak guns started eating away at planes here and there. One lost a pilot to a lucky shot, and a copilot took over. Then the hostile plane came down. The first we knew about it was when a missile blew out the whole cockpit of the plane ahead of me. It didn’t go down right away. Sometimes, one of these planes with no crew left alive would fly until they ran out of gas and then coast to a stop. The plane yawed right, into my path. I dumped everything I had and managed to pull up enough to get over it. A plane that had been ahead of me had to swerve to avoid me, and clipped another plane. They both went down. I almost rear-ended another plane, but at the last moment, it went down with the cockpit shot out. The Black Baron went right in front of me, blasting away with 14.5 mm wheel guns and that damn cannon. The planes that it didn’t get were driven right into the flak guns, the trees and each other.

“The Black Baron did a loop and shot up the planes behind me. It fired one more missile, a few short bursts with the cannon, and a steady stream of wheel gun fire. That was it—the entire flight, gone. Another plane came barreling up behind me, still in a steep banking ascent that the pilot started just before he was blown away. It almost tore my wing off. The whole time, we were getting major flack. Our radio man was killed. Then the cannons went quiet, and the Black Baron closed in.

“The first thing he did was fire the cannon. Pow-pow-pow-pow: half the engines are gone, and there’s a hole in my wing big enough to fly another airplane through. I barely kept it in the air. As it was, I ended up tilting to port. Then the wheel-guns started up. Every time one went into the plane, I heard it knocking around. These were smart shells, homing in on parts and crew. One of them found my copilot. When the wheel guns went silent, I was the only one left alive. I suppose the Baron thought I was dead. I was a little uncertain myself.

“I expected a coup de grace with the cannon or another missile. Like I said, even a Tortuga with no crew could still coast its way to a landing and get back in service. I had seen at least eight air-to-air missiles in the racks. The only reason I can conceive why he didn’t do it is that those missiles are worth almost as much as our planes.

“What he did instead was try to ram me. It’s a lot more practical than it sounds, against an unmanned aircraft. He slowed down and nosed up alongside me. First he sliced into the skin of the dorsal surface with his own wing. I was tempted to roll and take him with me. He probably thought the same thing, without realizing I was still alive, and went around to get at me from below. He jammed into the tip of my high wing. I started to roll…”

“—and then you brought the wing down,” Dianna said. There was a darkly satisfied tone in her voice.
“That I did,” I said. “I saw his canopy fly off, followed by one propeller. After I landed, they found blood and hair on the bottom of the wing. They also found this.” I solemnly took something out of my vest. Dianna gasped. I twirled the 14.5 mm shell in my fingers. “They found this in the floor of my plane, right under my seat. The explosive filling was removed, of course.” I shook it, and it rattled. “The bomb squad filled it with shrapnel they found in the rest of the cockpit, and gave it to me as a souvenir: the bullet with my name on it.”

“Wow.” There was a long pause. “God must think you are one special guy.”
I shook my head. “I survived by driving two other planes into the ground. Were the people in them not special enough?”
Dianna tried to turn the conversation. “You did quit your job, of course…”
I laughed. There was a trace of bitterness there, but it was still a healthy laugh. “The Colombians had me under contract. I flew for them at least a year, or they paid me nothing. I made a counterproposal: They let me go with pay for seven months’ work, or I showed this souvenir to the newspapers. A satisfactory arrangement was reached.” After a long pause, I tossed the shell to Di. She yelped in surprise. “Take it. It’s a gift.”

All the while, other people were talking and moving around below us, but we were not disturbed. Not until we heard Carlos speaking to Diego.
“I don’t hold what you did against you,” Carlos said, in a calm but utterly chilling tone. “A lot of people in your position would have done the same thing. Even I might have done it. But that doesn’t remove the need for discipline.” Diego said something I couldn’t make out.

I froze in alarm when I heard the sound of a drum being removed from a shotgun. “This is what we used to do in the army. If you slept or ran out on your duty and left your mates in a lurch, you had to play a game. It’s traditionally known as Russian roulette.” I heard the plink of shotgun shells hitting the deck. “We use different numbers of shells, mostly based on how serious the offense was. Sometimes, we’d leave only one shell in. Sometimes, we’d only take one out. I’d say you deserve about five. See? Every other shell, gone.” The drum went back in with a loud slap. I ran downstairs. “Round and round it goes. Where it stops, nobody knows…”

I reached the deck and found Carlos with his back to me. He had Diego backed into the corner of the lab. Just as I opened my mouth to call for help, Carlos pulled the trigger. The roar of the gun resounded through the lab. Carlos turned around and smiled. “Hi, Ted,” he said. Then he stepped aside. Diego was slumped against the wall, his chest a mass of red. Carlos nonchalantly picked up a shell and bit into it. His lips and teeth were stained pink.

“Riot shells,” he said, “full of rock salt. Somebody decided to dye it red for extra effect. Diego should figure it out when he wakes up.”
“If he had a heart condition,” I said, “you might really have killed him.”
Carlos grinned wider. “Who says I wasn’t trying?” He stalked out. I checked Diego’s pulse, and found that his heart was racing. After a few minutes, he got up and ran out of the Ora. To my knowledge, neither he nor Carlos has ever spoken about the incident. I suppose both of them will say I made it up. But I know what I saw.

I returned to Dianna. We talked some more, mostly aimless chatter. Finally, Dianna said, “I’ve had a really rough time the last few months. And the whole time, you’ve always been there for me. I, well, wanted to say thank you.” She leaned over and hugged me. I think my heart must have been beating as fast as Diego’s. I wanted to tell her how I felt. I wanted to show her. I yearned to kiss her on the lips. I nearly did. But I remembered the Starship. I had felt the same dangerous thrill at the stick of that plane. In the end, it was that thrill which had caused the disaster. I had a feeling that if I said and did what I wanted, the woman in my arms would not reject me. But I also had a feeling that it could lead to another disaster, which might be even more painful than the physical danger I had gone through in the plane crash.

I gently disengaged from Dianna. “You’re welcome,” I told her. Then I briskly walked out. I stepped out of the Ora, and walked for the better part of a hundred yards into the Cretaceous night. I had no weapons, and there had been reports of noasaurs prowling around camp. But I didn’t care. I stared up at the stars and the moon, shining brighter than they would in the clearest skies in the present. I felt as if my heart had been broken twice: first by a plane, and then by a woman.
I never heard the approaching footfalls. “Hey, Ted,” Carlos said. He did not try to start a conversation, but simply stood beside me, gazing up at the skies.
I finally broke the silence. “I haven’t told her yet.”
Carlos nodded. “That’s probably the right thing.” After long minutes of silence, he said, “Want to try to recover the Starship?”
“Hell no. I’d just as soon dynamite it.”
Carlos looked directly at me. “It’s been pretty bad, hasn’t it? But c’mon. That’s not really what’s on your mind. “
“I suppose, ‘Why?’ Just generally, why things are the way they are. Does that even make sense?”

Carlos grinned, his teeth glinting in the moonlight. “Maybe not, but I definitely understand. When I was at war, I would think ‘why?’ every day, every night, every hour. I would keep wondering if Somebody out there wasn’t looking after me. And sometimes, I wanted to tell that Somebody, ‘F* off! I just wanna live my own life!’” He chuckled. “It messes with your head. But if you’re really fit for the job, eventually you learn to stop asking so many questions, and just deal with whatever comes at you.”
“Have you ever actually done that?” I asked pointedly.
Carlos laughed long and loud. “Okay. So it’s more of an ideal than it is a practical philosophy. But I have learned to deal with it, and I think you will too. And who knows? Maybe, once you stop searching all the s* that goes on for mystical signs, Somebody will actually show you what you’re really meant to know.”

I smiled. “There’s a story in the Bible about a prophet who asked God to speak to him,” I said. “Afterward, there was a storm, and an earthquake, and probably some other stuff I can’t think of off the top of my head. But in the end, God really spoke through a still, small voice.”
Carlos nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. “Sounds like a very practical man. I like that. Incidentally, have you noticed what you’re standing in?” I looked down, and yelped in surprise. I had been dimly aware that I was standing in a depression. The moonlight revealed it for what it was: a giganotosaur track! Carlos laughed again, not unkindly. “See, Ted? That could be a lesson to everybody: If you’re looking for signs, look down before you look up. Now, let’s mosey on back to the Ora, shall we?”

I went back, feeling somehow comforted. I was still confused over what (if anything) to do about Dianna. But, when I looked past my imagined grievance with the Almighty, I could see that it had been the wrong time to try to start a romance. For the rest of the trip, I did my best to keep are interactions casual, and before long, I was back to thinking of her as a friend and coworker. And so it remained—until the next time we faced life or death together.

The expedition to the Devonian was the most ambitious yet. Thanks to new shock absorbers on the time bell, we were able to go further back in time than ever before—360 million years into the past. We arrived with the Kon Tiki, an experimental, lightweight catamaran that could be dismantled and loaded into a space a fraction of its size. When assembled, it was 80 feet long and almost twenty feet wide, but when dismantled, it could fit into a 50 x 50 foot time bell and leave room to spare for the amphibious tractor we used to launch it.

The Kon Tiki was a truly amazing boat. It was very light, and had redundant safety systems that would keep it afloat in the face of almost any disaster. If something ruptured one of the bulletproof inflatable pontoons, the pontoon could seal itself, and an elaborate computer system would pump in new air to make up for any drop in pressure. As if that wasn’t good enough, the pontoons had many internal chambers. A truly catastrophic rupture might flood one chamber, but the water would not spread to the next. The manufacturer had boasted that it was “unsinkable by natural forces”. Carlos shushed a salesman who repeated that claim. “Don’t say that!” he said. “The Earth Mother loves a challenge.” I’m not sure if he was being serious when he said that. In retrospect, his remark seems prophetic.

As usual, the expedition lasted two weeks. However, the days in the Devonian lasted only 18 hours, so we had less time than usual to explore the era. To make the most of our limited time, we planned to spend most of the trip on the open sea. We collected many specimens, and took measurements of temperatures. To our unpleasant surprise, the climate was very cold. After my trip to Cretaceous Australia, I had been looking forward to what I expected to be warm weather. Jurgidsen, one of the three paleontologists who came along, explained that this was a time of fluctuations in temperatures all over the world.

The trip was uneventful, until the ninth day. In the twelfth hour of the Devonian day, we sighted an approaching storm. Our captain, a retired US Navy man named Bill MacGregor, decided to wait out the storm in a small harbor formed by the coral reefs that we had been studying. I must mention the remarkable appearance of those reefs. In modern reefs, the individual polyps are all right next to each other. In many Devonian reefs, on the other hand, there were spaces between polyps, giving the coral a psychedelic polka dot look.

Carlos asked Captain Bill if he was afraid that the storm could sink the boat. “Boats less sturdy than this have survived worse storms,” Captain Bill answered, “but I never take chances. Besides, even a storm that doesn’t sink us or capsize us could still kill somebody.”

The storm was loud and fierce, but the reefs proved sufficient to protect us from the tall waves thrown up by the storm. Unfortunately, there was no protection available from the nearly horizontal rain that came streaking at us. Each drop hit like an air pistol shot. Needless to say, we all stayed inside as much as we could. I sat in a chair near the middle of the boat and talked with Carlos. In the third hour of the storm, our problems really started.

The first sign of trouble came from the boat’s computer. Dianna was the one who noticed the red-lettered message on the screen: “WARNING: multiple ruptures in starboard pontoon.” Not very concerned, she brought up a diagnostic display. According to the diagnostic readout, the ruptures were in two adjacent chambers, right next to the central transverse spar. (The central spar was one of three titanium beams that spanned the width of the boat.) She pointed out the problem to Captain Bill. “I wouldn’t worry about it, lass,” he said. “It would take a lot more than that to sink this boat. Besides, there’s not much we can do about it in this storm. Keep an eye on it, though.”

Fifteen minutes later, I felt the boat shudder. “Did you hear that?” Carlos said immediately. “It sounded like a muffled gun shot.”
“No,” I said, “but I felt something.”

At that moment, Dianna rushed past us. She hastily climbed up a ladder to the bridge, shouting to Captain Bill, “Another chamber just ruptured! The damage is spreading!”
Before she could climb up the ladder, Captain Bill came sliding down. “We’re going to have to make repairs, then,” he said calmly. “I’m going to suit up and go overboard. Flockman, come with me. Thatcher,” he called up to the first mate, “you’re in command.”

We both donned diving suits and went overboard. I was armed with a boing stick. With this notorious weapon, I was supposed to defend Captain Bill from any dangerous animals that approached. There were plenty of fish around, but the only ones that looked potentially dangerous were a large coelacanth and a couple of small sharks. Fortunately, they showed no interest in us. I felt safe enough to look at the ship for myself. I gulped when I saw the damage. There was a hole more than six inches in diameter in the bottom of the boat. Along the edges of the hole, shredded rubber and fabric bulged outward. I remembered the shudder I had felt, and guessed that a chamber had somehow become over-inflated, causing a rupture. (This is the most widely accepted explanation for the sinking of Kon Tiki, though no one has ever explained how the re-inflation system could have failed so grossly.) The hole was not the worst of the damage. Beginning at the hole, the bulletproof outer fabric had run like cheap pantyhose. The tear in the hull was four feet long, and grew by several inches as we watched.

Captain Bill didn’t need to see anything more. He immediately signaled me to go back up. I climbed aboard first, and the captain came after me. As soon as he was back aboard, he pulled off his diving mask and shouted, “All hands, abandon ship!”
The ship immediately fell into chaos. Carlos inflated a life raft, while the scientists frantically gathered what they could of our specimens and footage. Dianna tried to talk to the captain over the din. “What happened?” she asked.

“I think something—maybe the nose of one of those pteraspid jawless fishes—pierced the pontoon and went all the way through one of the walls between chambers, and then got stuck there until the re-inflation system pushed it free,” Captain Bill explained hastily. “That left a big hole, and the water that leaked in is sloshing around, creating stress and enlarging the leak. Unless this storm dies down, the leak will keep getting bigger, and the weight of the water will pull the central transverse spar loose. If that happens, we’re sunk.”

Meanwhile, Carlos was arguing with the other paleontologists about what specimens could come with us. “What’s this?” he asked, holding up one jar.
“That’s a soft coral colony, which may be the ancestor of the hexactilinian corals,” Jurgidsen said.
“And this?”
“Possible member of the extinct phylum Tullimonstra,” Jurgidsen said. “It’s more valuable than anything else we’ve collected, and possibly some of the staff.”
“They pay me to bring back live clients, not dead invertebrates,” Carlos said. He dropped the jar and picked up another. “What’s this, a hagfish”
“Yes,” Horne answered. “It’s the earliest true myxenoid yet discovered.”

“Back in the present, they haul up these by the thousand,” Carlos said. “Is there anything we can learn from this that we can’t learn from them?”
“Well, the internal anatomy is essentially the same as modern forms, but we ought to study the biochemical differences in their slime secretions…”
Carlos tossed the jar overboard. “There’s too much slime in the present as it is,” he said. He picked up a jar formed with a spiraling mass of brown matter. “Please tell me this isn’t a fish turd.”

“It could provide valuable information on the diet of early chondrichthyans!” Smith said. Carlos shook his head and threw it overboard without comment. This went on and on, until half of the specimens that the scientists considered important had been consigned to the depths.

After we launched the lifeboat, things went from bad to worse. After Thatcher, Carlos, two scientists and numerous specimens had been loaded onto the life raft; the Kon Tiki banged into it and slammed it against a coral reef. The result was a substantial leak. Captain Bill ordered the lifeboat moved a safe distance away from the ship and the coral. Thatcher finally piloted it to a spot 300 yards away, where a wall of coral provided even better protection from the waves. This was further than anyone could hope to swim safely, so Captain Bill had to start taking the rest of us over in a small, two-man submersible called the Manta. The first to leave was Rachel Larson, a marine biologist and filmmaker. I was left on the ship with Dianna, a scientist named Horne, and Leo De Ortega, our medic.

As Captain Bill drove away, there was a sudden, shrill squeal of metal, and the floor beneath us shook. That was when all hell really broke loose. The jolt knocked Dr. Horne and Dianna off their feet, and sent a tank full of live specimens crashing to the deck. Water and fish spilled everywhere. Horne screamed. At first, I thought he had only been hit by a shard of glass (of which there were mercifully few, thanks to the tendency of composite glass to stay together even when broken). Then I saw a foot-long pteraspid flopping along the deck, its triangular nose stained with blood. The fish had stabbed Horne in the shoulder, and now it was headed for Dianna. I grabbed her and pulled her to her feet, but I wasn’t fast enough. The fish’s deadly bill grazed her ankle and narrowly missed my foot. The fish continued to flop its way across the deck, until it finally managed to throw itself overboard.

De Ortega immediately grabbed a first aid kit and began tending to their wounds. Within minutes, he had Horne’s shoulder and Di’s ankle bandaged up. Upon his return, Captain Bill examined the boat from below. “The crossbeams between the transverse spars are buckling,” he told me. “It’s not safe to wait here much longer. I’ll take Horne now, and come back for Dianna. You and De Ortega will have to swim to the nearest reef. I’ll pick you up on the other side. If you have to abandon ship earlier than expected, send up a flare.” I wanted to protest that it was too dangerous, but I could tell from the tone of his voice that he already knew the risks. I held my tongue and accepted it. At least Dianna would get back safely…

De Ortega cocked our last boing stick. “Don’t worry, we can do just fine. Since I’m slower anyway, I’ll take the boing stick and cover your back,” he said. He attached a flashlight and turned it on.

The ship’s frame let out another squeal of distress. I thought I heard an answering scream from the water, but didn’t have time to wonder about it. The boat jolted again. De Ortega dropped the weapon, which went sliding across the deck. The medic ran after it, stopping it with his foot just before it slid overboard. When he bent down to pick it up, the floor beneath him suddenly caved in. De Ortega fell into the water, never to be seen again.

Water came rushing in through the hole in the floor, while the floor itself buckled and sank. I grabbed Dianna again and hauled her back from the invading sea, but there were no safe places left aboard ship. The crossbeams had given way, and now the Kon Tiki was freely tearing itself apart. The central spar slowly turned, tearing loose what remained of the boat’s internal structure and ripping both pontoons wide open. The back half of the boat plunged beneath the waves, leaving Dianna and me on the forward deck with perhaps a minute to go before the rest of the ship went down.

“That was sweet, Ted,” Dianna said. Tears ran down her face, but she managed to sound cheerful. “But it’s no good. Captain Bill won’t get back in time, and I can’t swim all the way to the reef with my ankle slashed up. You’re going to have to send up a flare and swim away without me.”
I clenched her shoulder tightly. “If I have to, I’ll do the swimming for both of us.”

“I suppose you would,” Dianna said soberly. “But I can’t let you. Ted, I have to stay. Even if we manage to swim to the reef together, Captain Bill will only be able to take one of us. If you try to swim to the lifeboat, or wait until Captain Bill comes back, you will be killed. If the waves don’t get you, the fish will. It wasn’t just internal stress that made the floor cave in.” I already knew it, and as she gazed into my eyes, I could tell that she knew that I knew it, but would make the attempt anyway. “Please, Ted,” she sobbed. “Just go.”

I was hopelessly torn. I couldn’t bear to abandon her to her death, but I couldn’t just refuse her request. It was the infinitely sad look on her face that made me relent. “OK, I’ll leave you here,” I said, “but I’m coming back for you.” I picked her up and carried her toward a cylindrical shark cage on deck.

She didn’t struggle, but made it clear that she did not approve. “Ted, you are out of your mind,” she said coldly as I set her down in the cage.

“This cage will at least keep you safe from fish,” I said with phony calm. I handed her a breathing mask and an emergency air tank. “There’s enough oxygen here to keep you alive for fifteen minutes. I’ll go to the lifeboat, get some more weapons and ammunition and then come back for you.”

“Good bye, Ted,” she said in an emotionless tone as I locked the cage. “I hope I’ll see you again, some time.”

“I’ll rescue you or die trying,” I said. I rolled the cage overboard before she could try to discourage me. The cage sank straight down, into a deep underwater gulch. A glowing pink buoy at the end of a rope followed the cage overboard. I sent up a flare and dived overboard, just before what was left of Kon Tiki sank.

I swam for about 100 yards before I reached the reef. I sat on the coral and waved one of the lights on my diving suit around. Within moments, Captain Bill arrived. “Where’s Dianna?” he asked.
“She’s in a shark cage, under water. I figured I could come back for her.”

“Carlos thought you might do something like that. We’re all behind you, but we can’t wait long enough for two trips here and back. The boat is taking on water too fast. Anything we do has to be done now. Carlos had me bring two underwater pistols, a couple of spear guns and a `boing stick’, plus four replacement barrels for the boing stick. I found a shorter route back to the ship; climb in and let’s go!”

We cruised along for several hundred yards before we found what we were looking for. It was a deep and narrow gap in the coral reef, just wide enough for two people to swim through. The Manta could have gone through the gap, but not safely. “Go on in,” Bill said. “I’ll circle and try to draw the fish away.”

I swung out of the Manta’s lower compartment and swam into the gap. I turned on my three lamps and drew the two underwater pistols. With five air-sealed barrels each, the pistols were quite bulky. Their range was twenty feet or less, and they weren’t very accurate, but they were better than a boing stick against multiple targets. With the pistols, I could fire five shots at a time (after which the barrels had to be replaced), whereas the boing stick could only fire one shot at a time. I wanted to save the boing stick for a carefully aimed shot against a very big fish.

Halfway through the gap, I ran into some nasty customers. A six-foot coelacanth approached, but swam away after I fired a shot at it. Moments later, I ran into a group of four sharks. Compared to a great white or a tiger shark, these slender, eel-like creatures were puny, but they moved with the same deadly purpose. One of them could clearly inflict serious injuries, and four of them attacking in unison could easily kill a man. I opened fire without hesitation, and didn’t stop shooting until both guns were empty. Two sharks fled, and another turned on its dying companion. I discarded the pistols and drew the boing stick. I swam past the two fighting sharks; I figured that any shark that was busy eating another shark was no threat to me.

I figured wrong. The unwounded shark attacked me from behind. Its teeth scraped harmlessly against my air tank, but the force of the impact slammed me into the coral. My goggles cracked, and my weapon fell from my hands. I rolled over and punched the shark in the snout. It responded with a snap at my air hose, but I was ready for it. I caught it by the throat and shoved my fingers into its gill slits. The fish writhed like a malevolent fire hose, its jaws snapping inches from my air hose, but I had just enough strength to hold it at bay. I drew my survival knife and tried to stab it in the eyes or the gills. Abruptly, the shark jerked free and swam away.

I looked over my shoulder to see what might have scared it off. I was shocked to see the boing stick being dragged along by a strange current. I had just enough time to get a grip on the stock. However, the current was so strong that I was dragged along, too. I was being sucked toward an enormous hole that was barely recognizable as the mouth of a large fish resting on the coral. That gaping maw would have made an anaconda envious. The fish itself was a flabby, nearly shapeless mass that had the same orange spots as the color around it. It looked to be at least eight feet long. The flattened fish seemed to coalesce into a torpedo shape and then surged forward like an aggressive black hole.

I held onto the coral with one hand and fired the boing stick with the other. The weapon’s massive spring slammed into the cartridge, setting off an explosion in the airtight aluminum barrel. A 15 mm grenade sailed straight down the fish’s cavernous throat. It closed its mouth, thinking it had caught a morsel. When the grenade went off, it swelled up like a puffer fish. It then sagged and shrank like a deflating balloon, finally collapsing into a shapeless lump with a bloody hole in it.

Soon, the end of the gap came into view. I could see the glowing buoy, 15 meters beyond it. The buoy was obscured for a moment when something big swam in front of it. Fearing that Dianna was in trouble, I swam forward as fast as I could. I almost swam straight into the mouth of a five-meter fish. It was one of the placoderms, a heavily armored class of fish that dominated the oceans during this period. Given its size, it could only be one of a predatory genus called Dunkleosteus. The fish was coming fast; I didn’t have time to do anything except curse myself for not reloading the boing stick. At the last second, the oncoming placoderm swerved to avoid me. I managed to avoid being struck by its tail as it swam away. It actually swam even faster, until it vanished from view. I was puzzled by its behavior, but within moments, I realized the truth: It was fleeing from another fish. For an adult Dunkleosteus, that could mean only one thing: another Dunkleosteus.

I had already guessed what I was looking for: a large placoderm, perhaps as much as 10 meters in length. As I searched the darkness for the fearsome predator, I realized that the buoy was shaking. It was then that I saw the shimmering scales of a giant fish. It was silver-colored, with black stripes that made it hard to estimate its shape and size. It appeared to be about 30 feet long, with decidedly serpent-like proportions. As I watched, the fish raised its head. I shuddered with horror when I saw that it had the shark cage clamped in its jaws. It began swinging the cage back and forth like a terrier shaking a rat, slamming it repeatedly against a coral outcropping.

I knew that the chances of Dianna still being alive were slim, and my chances of killing the fish even slimmer. The sensible thing to do would have been to turn back, but that course of action never crossed my mind. I was willing to take any chances to save her, or merely to avenge her. Cold fury filled me, and I swam forward with a shout.

The placoderm looked at me. It looked more like a machine than an animal. Its face and fins were covered by large, angular scales that undoubtedly functioned as armor, though its real armor lay beneath its thin skin. It did not have teeth, but a saw-edged beak, with four pick-axe spikes in front. Extensive scars showed where its hide had been pierced by its own kind. I aimed at its face, but changed my mind when I saw that the cage was still in its mouth. I could barely see Dianna inside; she seemed to be moving, feebly. I shifted my aim to the fish’s midsection and fired—and missed.

The Dunkleosteus dropped the cage, turned its head, threw open its gaping mouth and shrieked. It was a sound like water running through a pipe, modulated into a trilling screech. To my horror, the door of the cage fell open, but the fish’s attention was fully on me. I swam to the side, dodging a lunging attack from the fish. As it sailed past me, it did a tight turn. I found myself encircled by the predator.

The fish opened its mouth, and a powerful current almost pulled me in. I clung to the coral with one hand, while holding on desperately to the gun with the other. I managed to get one of the extra barrels loosed from my bandoleer, and let it fly into the fish’s mouth. The jaws closed on the shiny object. There was a double explosion, and the fish went reeling back. I swam away, furiously unscrewing the used barrel. When the fish came after me, I threw the barrel, and the fish veered off. But, when the barrel bounced harmlessly off its head, it advanced again.

I turned off all but one of my lamps and dropped the lit lamp as an extra distraction. I swam toward the cage, and screwed on a new barrel as I went. As soon as the replacement barrel was attached, I turned around for another shot. The fish was right behind me; the lamp had failed to distract it. I almost swallowed my breathing mask in horror. I barely had enough time to fire. The sharpened tip of the grenade plunged into the fish’s bony head, but the force of the impact was too great. The tip snapped before detonation, and the grenade ended up exploding in the midst of some coral. Fortunately, the explosion stunned it momentarily. I had just enough time to escape once again.

The fish had clearly had enough from me. It let out a warning shriek, and then turned back toward the shark cage. I couldn’t allow that! There wasn’t enough time to replace the barrel. I had to get the fish’s attention, and then somehow stay alive long enough to reload. I unscrewed the used barrel and then banged it frantically against the coral. The fish stopped, grunted and looked back at me. I threw a big chunk of coral, which bounced off the fish’s head. That was enough provocation for it to come back for more. As the fish wheeled around for another attack, I turned on a wrist lamp and pointed it at the fish’s eye. Its pupils contracted violently under the brilliant light. The fish shrieked in pain, and then launched itself at the agonizing light source. I dropped the lamp and the barrel, and then scrambled up the face of the reef. There was an impressive thump as the gullible and half-blinded predator smacked headfirst into a coral outcropping. I smiled and screwed in a new barrel.

In the bright moonlight, I could see the fish thrashing about like a drunken comet. I fired at the fish’s body, but missed by a matter of inches. The explosion left the fish unharmed, but angrier than before. Once again, I frantically removed the barrel. I realized too late that the fish was looking directly at me. It squealed like a pig and swam toward me. When I threw away the barrel, the fish paused to watch it fall, but did not try to eat the gleaming object. As soon as I pulled the last barrel from my bandolier, its gaze shifted back to me. I froze and tried to conceal the barrel in my clenched fist. The fish seemed to be unsure exactly where I was. I prayed that it would look away for just a few seconds. Instead, the fish swam slowly toward me.
There was a thunderous “CLANG-NG” from the direction of the shark cage. The fish froze. There was another clang, and the fish looked away. I brought the barrel and the boing stick together and started twisting. I followed the fish’s gaze to Dianna, who was now swimming away from the shark cage. Her copper hair shone in the moonlight. The fish squealed in alarm and went after its escaping prey. I paddled after it, attaching the barrel with one last twist as I swam. I turned on my headlamp to get the fish’s attention.

This time, the fish did not pause. It turned around and snapped at me with one smooth motion. However, I was ready for it. I pulled the trigger and fired a grenade at the joint between its head and its shoulders, where some flexible skin showed between the plates of armor. The grenade struck, stuck, and then exploded. The fish keeled over like a jack-knifing truck, landing on its side against the coral. It continued to move, but all it did was flop along the bottom. With the monster apparently out of the way, I swam to Dianna.

She was heavily bruised and bleeding in several places. Her skin was red from the cold. Nevertheless, she managed to swim sluggishly out to meet me. I clasped her clammy hands, and then embraced her fiercely. When I let go, her eyes were wide with surprise. I tried to break the tension by pointing to her tiny air tank. In response to my implied question, she showed me the air gauge. There was a little less than five minutes of air left, just enough to get her to the lifeboat. I locked arms with Dianna and swam back the way I had come. As we neared the gap in the coral, Dianna tugged on my arm and pointed the other way. I looked over my shoulder and gasped in horror. The Dunkleosteus was up and swimming, though it was listing to starboard. Blood poured from the side of its head like billows of smoke. The fish was obviously seriously injured, but it still looked quite deadly. I started paddling as fast as I could, draggling Dianna forward relentlessly. Behind us, there was that strange hydraulic scream. I didn’t have to turn around again to know that the fish was in pursuit.

When we were just a few feet into the gap, there was a second scream, closer than before. I estimated that the fish had halved the distance between us, but I wasn’t going to look over my shoulder to check. I tossed the boing stick over my shoulder and swam even faster. There was a fantastic crunch as the fish pulverized the weapon with a single bite. I had bought us a fraction of a second. There was thumping and more crunching as the fish crashed against the sides of the gap. The tight space was slowing the fish down even more, but the noises made it clear that the fish would soon catch up to us.

As we approached the end of the passage, a coelacanth (perhaps the same one I had shot at before) approached menacingly. As soon as it got a good look at our pursuer, however, it turned tail and fled. Just when it looked like we were both fish food, help came from a most unexpected source. The fifteen-foot Dunkleosteus that had fled before suddenly plunged down upon its rival. The force of the impact slammed the bigger fish into the coral. The sound of the collision was oddly melodic, like someone hitting himself over the head with a bottle. The vengeful smaller fish tried to wrap its jaws around the other’s throat, but it didn’t have enough gape to do more than scratch the other fish’s armor. The big fish retaliated by biting into its attacker’s right pectoral fin. A deafening shriek echoed through the gap, with the coral acting like a natural megaphone. I didn’t see any more of their battle, but we could feel the sounds of combat reverberating in our bones.

Captain Bill was waiting a few yards beyond the gap. I swam up to the captain, and we touched facemasks to talk. “Take the Manta, and get Miss Gonzalez to the lifeboat. I’ll swim back on my own,” Bill said. “I’m going back to the ship to retrieve some specimens.” Before I could protest, he twisted the Manta’s throttle and sent me careening away .

Just then, the smaller dunk emerged from the gap. I strapped Dianna into the lower compartment and then took the controls. I pulled away just as the victorious fifteen-footer emerged from the gap. It might have overtaken us, if Captain Bill had not fired a harpoon into its side. I pushed the craft to full throttle and quickly outpaced the fish. I looked over my shoulder and saw the fish still on our trail, dragging the captain behind it. “Didn’t have to swim back yourself, after all,” I said with a smile. My smile vanished when I saw the form of the larger Dunkleosteus lumbering along behind them both.

I surfaced dangerously close to the lifeboat. “Nice piloting, Ted,” Carlos snarled sarcastically. “Now get your sorry butt on board and help bail!”

I didn’t climb in until Dianna was safely aboard. By then, she was passed out. “Get her wrapped up in an electric blanket,” I ordered. I put a hand on her shoulder and whispered, “You’re a brave woman. You did great.” She sighed and smiled in her sleep. I gazed blissfully at her face, and wondered how I could have denied my feelings for so long.
A brawny hand clapped down on my shoulder. It was Dr. Smith. “Mr. Flockman,” he said, “where is Captain Bill?”
“He’s swimming back,” I said.

“He’s a bloody idiot,” Carlos muttered. The leaky boat suddenly rocked with an impact. A fish was attacking us. Dianna moaned and rolled against me. Carlos shouted, “Eat this!” and tossed a small object overboard. Seconds later, there was a blinding flash, a spray of steam and a stifled shriek. I looked over the side to see the fifteen-foot placoderm, glowing from within as if it had swallowed a 10,000-watt spotlight.

“What was that?” I asked Carlos in awe.
“An incendiary micro grenade,” he answered, after a moment’s hesitation. “Just a little souvenir I brought back from Indonesia. It contains a substance similar to thermate that burns quite a bit hotter.”

I remembered his legal troubles after using illegal flechette shells on one of our expeditions. “Is it legal?” I asked.
“Well…. it’s never been banned…”
“Do you have any more?” I asked.

“Yes, one more,” Carlos said warily. “We also have the last boing stick and the Super Uzi. Why do you ask?”

“Because there’s another placoderm around, twice as big as the one you just killed,” I explained grimly. “It almost ate Dianna and me. I wounded it with a grenade, and that fried fish down there attacked it, but the last I saw, it was coming this way.”

“You’re saying that there’s a predator out there that survived a hit from a 15 mm grenade,” Carlos said incredulously, “and Captain Bill still decided to come back on his own?” I nodded. “That f*ing lunatic!”

“Well, lunatic our no, we have to wait for him,” I said. “You’re the one who always says, `leave no one behind.”

Carlos shook his head. “No, we have to go. Bill ain’t coming, and if we wait, we could be in danger,” he said. “There’s an older tradition, y’see: ‘The captain goes down with the ship.’ Bill’s carrying it out. And I suppose that he’ll try to take the fish with him. He brought a case of dynamite, y’see…”

I needed no further convincing. I moved away as fast as the boat would go. Moments later, a column of water shot up from the depths. Dead fish and broken coral showered down. Our captain was gone. We all cried, but I grieved most of all for ourselves. For I was sure I could not fill his shoes.