After months of preparation, the day had finally come. It was time for me to go on my first official mission for Naughtenny Moore’s Time Travel Association. All of our equipment was loaded in the time machine. In a few minutes, an enormous apparatus would launch the mobile time bell into the past, where we would stay for two weeks. Before we left, I made one last inspection of the team I would lead.

The first in line were Carlos Wrzniewski and Dianna Gonzalez. Then there was our mechanic Fernando, and three other Association employees, including Dr. Ramirez, a field medic. That brought me to our clients. There were Kenneth Robertson, a South African industrialist and sportsman who was funding the expedition, and his cameraman, John Carpenter. Finally, there were the paleontologists: Pablo Zapata, an expert on mammals from Argentina, dinosaurologists Hal Wang, Luis Rivera, Eva Hutchins, and a man I had never seen before in my life. “Who are you?” I demanded irritably. “And where’s Dr. Romenko?”

Carlos gestured urgently for us to talk, privately. “I didn’t know you hadn’t heard. Dr. Romenko was replaced two days ago,” he explained. “Robertson demanded it. The new guy is George Carradine. Robertson had always wanted him to come along, and the association finally agreed this week.”

I was irritated at the last-minute meddling with the makeup of my team, but I wasn’t going to miss Romenko. The man was the world’s leading authority on ornithomimid dinosaurs, but he was opinionated and difficult to work with. Worse, he was 61 years old, and not in the best of health. I was surprised that he had been let go. Our expedition’s most important objective was to collect a specimen of a mysterious dinosaur widely believed to be an ornithomimid. “What does Carradine do?” I asked.

Carlos smirked. “He is the leading authority on dinosaur dung. Seriously, he’s what’s called an ichnologist. He specializes in dinosaur trace fossils, like footprints and droppings.” On consideration, the choice made sense. Someone with his knowledge could help us track dinosaurs.

We marched into the time bell. The time bell was a 50-foot by 50-foot platform with a 25-foot-tall pole at each corner. I took a quick look at our three main vehicles. There were two hydrogen-powered cars which could be converted into light trucks by lowering the back seats and raising a set of side rails. The cars had been dubbed ‘Things,’ after an ancient Volkswagen product that they resembled superficially. Their bodies were made of bulletproof plastic, their chassis of aluminum. Their most unusual feature was the absence of a suspension and a steering column. The designers had left them out to minimize the number of moving parts. The vehicle was steered by making the wheels on one side go faster than the ones on the other. The oversized, bulletproof tires functioned as shock absorbers. The other vehicle was a much larger, amphibious version of the Things. We also had an electric moped and an ultra light airplane packed up in crates.

Our geographic destination was Mongolia. Our temporal destination was the Maastrichtian epoch, or latest late Cretaceous period. The time and place were represented in the fossil record by the Nemegt formation. We would be going to a desert area with regular rainfall and light forest and had two major objectives. Robertson wanted to hunt and kill at least one specimen of Tyrannosaurus Bataar, a slightly smaller relative of the T. rex. Since he was the one paying for the trip, that was one of our official goals. Our other objective was, from a scientific standpoint, far more important. We hoped to collect a complete specimen of a dinosaur called Deinocheirus mirificus, or “Terrible Hand.” Paleontologists had discovered it in the 1960’s, but after almost a century, it was still known only from its arms. No one knew for sure what it looked like or what it ate, though we did know two things about it. First, it was one of the therepod dinosaurs, which almost always ate meat. Second, its arms were up to 10 feet long.

“We leave in five minutes,” I announced. “Because the Earth spun significantly faster in the Cretaceous, there will be a nasty jolt when we arrive. If you all seat yourselves in the vehicles and fasten your safety belts, you should be safe. Also, make sure your special watches are set at 0000 hours of day 1. You must be back on this platform when your watches read 2400 hours of day 14. At that time, the time bell will automatically return to the present, and anyone who is not aboard will be stranded in the past for the rest of his or her life. That’s all for now.” We all got into the vehicles; I strapped into the driver’s seat of the Amphibian.

Even the people who invented the Temporal Displacement Device don’t know for certain what exactly happens when the time bell goes through time. I’ll give a quick rundown of what one sees and hears inside the time bell. First, there is a rumble in the ground, as the anti-matter generator creates an enormous energy surge. That energy goes into some very complex machinery in the poles. Then there are some really impressive fireworks when an energy field forms around the time bell. Something about the field allows the TDD to push the time bell across time and space. The transition from the present to the past is instantaneous. I am always unnerved by the absence of any sensation, or even a perceived passage of time. I suppose what bothers me the most is that if something goes wrong, I might never know it. The time bell might collapse into a hyper dense super-particle, materialize in solid rock, or hang forever in some limbo outside space and time, without my feeling a thing.

After the transition, there’s usually a split second of free fall as the time bell falls to the ground. When the time bell actually touches down, it feels like jumping off a train. The impact on my first mission was softer than I had expected. In fact, it was the softest I’ve had in all my missions. We landed in mud, which softened our fall. There was a loud “squelch” as the platform sank into the mud. The front end sank faster than the back, tilting the platform. One of the cars rolled right off the platform at high speed. I couldn’t see more than a few feet because of a thick cloud of mist. At first, I thought we were in a fog. Then I noticed that the mist was warm, almost painfully so, and that there was a loud hissing noise. The mist was not natural fog, but evaporated water. The energy of our impact was making the mud steam. I leapt out of the Amphibian and called out, “Is everyone okay?”

“We’re all right,” Robertson said. He climbed back onto the platform. “No one remembered to turn on the parking brake. When we came down, the car just started moving.” The car also proved to be unharmed. It had not even fallen completely off the platform. The rear wheels had stayed on the platform, while the rest of the car went nose-down into the dirt. We had to haul it back on with the other car’s winch.

The mist was slow to clear. We were at the bottom of a natural depression, which had probably grown deeper after our landing. The plan was for us to set up camp on top of a nearby hill. I decided to lead an armed party out to check for dangerous animals before anyone else came up. I chose Carlos, Wang and Hutchins to accompany me out of the depression and onto the prehistoric plains. Carlos and I hastily unpacked the weapons. Carlos checked a few at random. “Perfectly unsafe,” he said with satisfaction.

Carlos took a combat shotgun, while I used one of our two .80 caliber anti-dinosaur rifles. Wang, a burly Mongol who would have looked at home riding with Genghis Kahn, chose a .38 long-range sniping weapon. Hutchins, an athletic woman in her mid-forties, settled on a combat shotgun. Wang was one of Mongolia’s top paleontologists, while Hutchins was a leading authority on therepods. I hoped that they would be able to tell which animals were dangerous.

At the last moment, Robertson humbly insisted that he accompany us. “I have more experience than any of you in dealing with dangerous game,” he said, in a slightly smug tone that grated at my nerves. “Besides, I need to try this out on some real dinosaurs.” At that, he drew a sleek, torpedo-like weapon which, after careful examination, was recognizable as a pistol.

Robertson saw my interest. “This is the most advanced handgun in the world,” he said. “As you can see, it has two grips and two triggers.” In fact, the grips were joined together, as part of a plastic frame that seemed to ooze over the gun. “The second trigger is there for establishing a targeting lock with this military-grade electronic sight. Once a lock is made, the computer will maintain a digital marker that shows where to shoot.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” Carlos said.
I eyed the gun suspiciously. “There doesn’t appear to be a magazine.”

“That is because there is none,” Robertson said with pride. He opened the breech, which was well behind the trigger, and inserted a large bullet and a block of caseless propellant. “It is a single-shot weapon—altogether the ideal mode for caseless ammunition. Of course, I always make sure that I or one of my companions has a rifle as a back-up weapon. I have never failed to make the kill with my first shot.”

I was feeling quite alarmed, but I decided not to discuss his plans until after we had set up camp. When we stepped out of the depression, we found ourselves free of the mist. We were standing on a narrow stretch of flat ground between the depression and a wide, low hill. The earth was a grayish yellow color, like Grey Poupon, with a sparse covering of shrub-like ferns and conifers. I began walking up the hill when I heard a terrifying bellow.

The sound was like an oboe amplified by the world’s largest sound system. I looked up and saw the source: a large, yellow-skinned, purple-striped dinosaur standing halfway up the hill. I immediately recognized it as a hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur. “Saulolophus,” Wang said. The hadrosaur roared again. A pair of sacks running from its nostrils to the tip of its short crest swelled like red balloons. Several more hadrosaurs joined in with their own calls.

I counted a total of nine hadrosaurs on or near the hill. As I watched, four more sidled into view. They all bellowed in unison, and I heard the distinct calls of even more in the distance. I sized up our adversaries. None of them was smaller than a rhinoceros. What worried me the most was that eight of them were uphill from us. “We can’t risk a shoot-out here,” I said. “Any dinosaur that we bring down on the slope will slide the rest of the way down, and the whole hillside could come down after it.. Our best option is to scare them off.”

I fired the Eliminator into the air, hoping the noise would scare them without provoking a charge. The hadrosaurs only roared back in unison. Some began pawing the ground with their forelimbs. I stood my ground, hoping that at least a few of them might back off. I never found out if it would have worked, because a hadrosaur’s head burst open. The others looked to see it fall (there had been no audible shot) and then charged.

I killed two hadrosaurs with my remaining two shots. Both went down immediately and stayed down, though one thrashed and bellowed feebly. Wang emptied his magazine, killing or driving off the three on the left. One of his victims stumbled over the rim of the depression as it died. “Look out below!” I cried as the dead animal tumbled toward the time bell.

Fortunately, Carlos wounded the nearest hadrosaur in the thigh. That slowed the creature down without knocking it off its feet, and the others had to either slow down to avoid running into it or go down the sides of the hill to avoid it. I reloaded the Eliminator and shot another hadrosaur as it ran down the right side. It let out a nasal bleat as it rolled harmlessly down the opposite side of the hill. A dinosaur following the same course turned and fled. Carlos fired bursts one on top of another at the remaining attackers. Hutchins fired a single blast. In a few seconds, it was over. Six hadrosaurs were dead, and the rest were retreating, except for the injured one on the slopes. Its bloodshot eyes radiated malevolence. I took aim at the dinosaur. “Stop,” Robertson said.

I held my fire, but kept the targeting laser squarely on the dino’s abdomen. Robertson moved left, drawing the hadrosaur away from the rest of us. Suddenly, it wheezed out one last bellow and reared up for a final charge. At that moment, Robertson fired a shot into its head, killing it instantly. The dinosaur flopped anticlimactically onto the flat ground at the hill’s base. The gun made no sound, except for an audible click when the breech came open. Clearly, he was the one who had fired that first shot. I glared at him, but
said nothing.

After our skirmish with the hadrosaurs, we had a pleasantly easy time setting up camp. We hauled our equipment out of the depression and set up our circus-sized “headquarters” tent on the hill where the hadrosaurs had made their defiant stand. We pitched our other tents on a taller hill next to it. As soon as we had all the tents set up, we set about the grisly business of disposing of the hadrosaur carcasses. A taxidermist named Mitchell oversaw the grim proceedings, while I did most of the butchering with a chainsaw.

In the process, we were able to conduct impromptu autopsies on the animals. We found that our weapons, though devastating, had done disconcertingly less damage than expected. Of the pair Robertson had shot, one had been killed by a direct hit to the brain, but the other had perished only after shards of shattered nasal bone entered the brain case. Wang had downed his pair with one lucky hit to the brain of the first and six shots to the chest of the other. The latter had suffered only four direct hits to a vital organ, including one to the heart. The most damage had apparently been done by a bullet that shattered a rib, sending splinters of bone into the pulmonary vein. Of the three I had shot, one had been killed instantly by a direct hit to the heart, another had died with a collapsed lung, and the third had been felled by a broken back.

“The problem is the bones,” Carlos said. “They’re like composite armor: hard on the outside, light on the inside, an’ tough and flexible throughout. A bullet can’t keep a straight trajectory. We can’t count on hits to a particular spot for a kill. It’s like I’ve always said: If you have to aim, you need a bigger gun.”

We had brought along a first-rate water purifier and a working showerhead. It took almost two hours to set these up, however. I spent most of that time standing around in my bloody apron. Everyone gave me a wide berth, except for curious carnosaurs. A spiny, toothless, square-headed dinosaur about two feet in height was the first to show up. Carlos killed it with birdshot while it was sniffing at my shoes. “An ovilaptol, possibly of a new genus,” Wang said after looking over the carcass. I shouted in alarm when I saw the next customer: a long-necked, birdlike dinosaur seven feet tall. The graceful but deadly looking creature strode arrogantly out of the grass. It looked me up and down with its big yellow eyes, as if trying to decide if I was a worthy meal. “A Gallimimus!”
Wang said excitedly.

I revved up my chainsaw in an attempt to scare off the dinosaur. It responded with an impressive threat display. It reared up as tall as it could and screamed, showing off a sharp beak. It then spread its arms, showing off equally sharp claws. “Excuse me,” I said, “but if you aren’t too busy debating what this is called, could somebody shoot the damn thing?”

At that moment, Carlos slapped a drum of buckshot into the combat shotgun and opened fire. One blast hit it in the chest, and a second took off the better part of its head. The dinosaur immediately rushed at Carlos, running for fifteen feet and then trying to jump the remaining ten. Carlos fired three more blasts at the charging dinosaur. The third blast hit his attacker in midair, causing its jump to come up short. It landed in a heap at Carlos’ feet. Even then, it still had a little fight left in it. When Carradine bent down to examine its claws, it hissed and slashed at him with its foot, and snapped with what was left of its beak. Even after Carradine shot it in the head with a revolver, it continued to twitch. I looked at its large arms, and shuddered at an alarming thought: somewhere out there, there was another creature whose arms were longer than this ornithomime’s legs.

“I don’t understand what happened,” Hutchins said. “Ornithomimids are proven herbivores. This particular genus has a beak like a goose. Why would it dry to attack another animal?”

Carlos pumped the shotgun. “Because,” he said, “some herbivores are less herbivorous than others.”

I looked Wang and Hutchins over. Both were unarmed, so I could not fault them for not taking out the dinosaur sooner. “All right, it’s time to set up some security procedures,” I said. “We have enough weapons for everyone, so I want everyone to carry a piece for as long as he or she can. While we’re handling a dead animal, everyone needs to be on full alert. Also, I’m going to set up a roster for guard duty. Now, if you all will excuse me, I’m going to take a shower.”