The shower consisted of a hose mounted on a pole, with a rubber mat for a floor and a translucent curtain on three sides. For modesty’s sake, everyone showered in a bathing suit. I was the first to use it and found it quite unpleasant. The showerhead blasted me with a stuttering, high-velocity spray that stung my skin. By the time I was finished, much of my skin had turned a faint pink. Just as I was finishing my shower, someone shouted, “Deinocheirus!”

I raced up the residential hill, still clad only in a bathing suit. Everyone except Fernando and Wang was gathered in a cluster. Dianna turned to me and spoke: “It’s right across the river. It must be twenty feet tall!” Her eyes lingered on me for a moment; she turned away with a blush when she saw that I had noticed.

I followed everyone’s gaze to a stand of trees on the far side of the river. It was my first good look at our surroundings. The river was about a mile away—hundreds of yards wide, with numerous streams intersecting it. Its variable course left large, barren mudflats along its banks. There were many shrubs and small trees in the hills and flatlands around the river. Herds of hadrosaurs grazed on the low-lying shrubs. About ten miles from our camp, the plains and stout hills abruptly gave way to taller hills and plateaus. Near this transition, an enormous two-legged dinosaur browsed on some tall pines.

I ran back to my tent, threw on some clothes, and grabbed my binoculars. Upon returning to the group, I focused my binoculars on the enormous animal. At that distance, it seemed small even through binoculars, but I could make out its features easily enough. It had a long neck and a ludicrously small head. Its jaws were curved and full of teeth. As I watched, it stripped the needles from an entire branch with one stroke of its head. I turned my attention to its huge arms. They were almost ten feet long, and extremely robust. “I’m surprised how thick its arms are,” I commented. “The Deinocheirus fossils looked relatively slender.”

Hutchins was examining the creature through her own set of binoculars. “That’s not Deinocheirus,” she said with a trace of bitterness. “It’s Therizinosaurus cheloniformis. It’s one of a whole group of herbivorous protobirds. If you look very closely, you can see a crest of feathers on its head. That’s the biggest therizinosaur, and one of the most poorly known.” The therizinosaur dropped to all fours and waddled away, giving us a glimpse of its bushy tail.

I lowered my binoculars with a sigh. “It’s disappointing,” I said, “but remember, this is only the first day. Fernando, is the plane ready?”

“Sí, señor!” Fernando answered enthusiastically. I looked down the hill, and tried to control my own anxiety as I gazed at the plane that I was expected to fly. The bat-winged contraption bore more than a casual resemblance to Da Vinci’s ornithopter. The fuselage—if it can be dignified with the name—was an open framework of aluminum tubes barely seven feet in length. Instead of ordinary landing wheels, it had a set of extremely floppy tank treads. The engine, a ducted propeller and a vertical fin were mounted directly behind the pilot’s seat, while a pair of stubby, wing-like canards was mounted on the front. The oddest feature was the all-fabric wings. Most airplanes have wing flaps for steering, but not this one. Instead, there was a network of cables that twisted the wings into different shapes. Some wag had painted the name MAYFLY on each wing.

Carpenter helped me don a special helmet with a built-in, gyro stabilized camera. While I was in flight, my helmet cam would record what I saw and send an audio-video feed back to base camp. I had to walk around for fifteen minutes so that Carpenter and Dianna could calibrate the camera, its gyros, and the transmitter. “The static just won’t go away, not completely,” Dianna said. “I think there’s some kind of unusual electromagnetic activity going on. Right now, we’re at least getting a pretty clear picture.”

A strip of flat ground had been chosen for us to use as a runway before we even arrived in the present. As soon as the plane was assembled, we loaded the 250-pound aircraft onto the back of a Thing. Carlos, Fernando and I drove to the site. The plan was for me to fly for five hours, photographing the area between the river and the highlands to the east. With any luck, I would be able to photograph at least one of the dinosaurs we were looking for. The runway was muddy, but not extremely so. We did have to shoot a three-foot-long lizard that was sunning itself on the path. We set the plane down in a spot where I would have five hundred feet of clear space to take off and land. There were streams on both sides, so if something went wrong during take-off or landing, the plane would at least come to rest in the water. I climbed into the pilot’s seat and fastened my safety belt. Carlos and Fernando helped start the engine. “Good luck!” said Carlos.

“Vaya con Diós!” said Fernando. I gunned the engine and started rolling. Carlos and Fernando yelped and sputtered when they were hit by a backwash of mud. The take-off was so bumpy that my plane bounced into the air several times before building up enough speed to actually stay airborne. Nevertheless, I made a successful, relatively normal take-off, more than one hundred feet from the end of the runway.

Within minutes, my plane had climbed to five hundred feet, an ideal elevation for my mission. The craft’s top speed was 80 miles per hour, but I held my speed at 65. Dianna’s voice came in through my ear phones: “Turn north, and you can get the wind at your back.”
“Already doing it!” I said enthusiastically.

I followed the river north, watching for evidence of dinosaur activity. I passed over more than twenty hadrosaurs. Some of the cantankerous dinosaurs reared up as high as they could and roared at me as I flew by. Several of the hadrosaurs were youngsters which explained why the adults were so defensive. I could just make out small carnivorous dinosaurs following the hadrosaurs at a safe distance. “They’re probably eating small animals that the hadrosaurs stir up,” Robertson suggested.

“Or they could be eating roots that the hadrosaurs expose,” Hutchins added. “We just finished dissecting the little oviraptor, and we found a lot of vegetable matter in its stomach.”

After ninety minutes, I turned east toward the highlands. “Look at that!” I cried in delight. “Sauropods!” A small herd of long-necked dinosaurs was grazing in the forested hills. Many of them were waddling along on their hind legs, stripping foliage off high branches as they went. Sauropods had always been my favorite dinosaurs. Seeing them alive was a dream come true. The stout-necked dinosaurs were smaller and less graceful than the ones I had seen mounted in museums or reconstructed in movies, but I was too giddy to care. However, I did notice something that I found disquieting.

“Some of the ones that are standing up aren’t eating anything,” I said into the mic. “I think they’re watching for predators.” It was hard to imagine what those forty-foot dinosaurs might fear, but I would have bet dollars to pesos that it had ten-foot-long arms.

I saw another impressive sight to my left: a swarm of pterosaurs flying in a tight circle. I immediately thought of vultures circling a dead animal while larger predators ate their fill. I went in for a closer look. Six of the condor-sized pterosaurs swooped at my plane in unison, thinking that I was another pterosaur trying to steal their carrion. When I showed no signs of backing down, the flying creatures scattered. I descended to 200 feet, hoping to get a good look at a dinosaur kill. I saw something even better. As I closed in, a tyrannosaur stuck its head above the surrounding trees and roared. Or maybe I should say it screamed. The call was rather high-pitched, with a strong vibrato quality. The only time I had heard anything like it before was during my forest service days, when I cornered an exceptionally ill-tempered puma in a tree.

“Looks like we know where to look for T. Bataar!” I said as I pulled back up. “It might be a record-setting specimen. Those trees it reared over look to be more than twenty feet tall!”

“Yeah, but don’t try to measure a specimen before it’s collected,” Carlos said. “By the way, can you adjust the transmitter? We’re getting a weird hum.

I had noticed the noise some time before, but assumed it was a problem with the radio on their end. But if we were both hearing it, it might well be a problem with the plane. At that moment, something else that had been nagging at my subconscious mind finally registered. Throughout the flight, the plane had been sluggish in responding to the controls, a problem I had never had in the present. It was also ascending a little too fast. A knot formed in my stomach as an explanation came to mind. I glanced at the wings, and immediately went stiff with fear. “That hum isn’t from the radio, it’s from the cables,” I said. “They’re vibrating.” A horrific image came unbidden to mind: a suspension bridge shaking itself to pieces when a mild wind hit with just the wrong frequency.

“That shouldn’t be happening,” Dianna said. “The harmonics of the aircraft have been tested extensively. I’m gonna get Fernando.”

Moments later, the stall alarm sounded. The plane had nosed upward of its own accord to within a few degrees of losing lift. I slammed the stick forward as hard as I could, almost sending the plane into a nosedive. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the wings quiver, and I could feel vibrations through the stick. The wind grew stronger, and so did the vibrations and the humming. I struggled like a hooked fish, trying desperately to keep my plane from standing on its tail. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the static got worse.
Fernando came on line. “Sen—–ockman, I b-lieve I know what causes the problem,” he said breathlessly. “I made a –m—l change to the plane before w- left. —origin-l cables w—eplaced with new ones. Th– new cables are —– of lighter mat—rial —— 20 p—shent lighter. – didn’t have time to t—st ha-monic qualities.”
I am on record as saying, “You g—–m— of—–it—!!”

Needless to say, the remainder of the flight was quite harrowing. It was a struggle to keep my plane level, and a grueling battle to decrease my altitude. As I rushed toward the landing area at 30 miles per hour, I knew there was no chance of making a safe, normal landing. My only hope was to touch down in the mud and lose as much speed as I could before ditching in the stream. I’ll probably live, I told myself. With any luck, I’ll avoid serious injury. Heck, if I do a really good job, we might even be able to use this plane again. Eventually.

I didn’t even hit the ground until I was halfway down the muddy runway after which, I promptly bounced back into the air. Once I came back down, I hit the brakes as hard as I could. The landing gear squealed, mud squelched, and the cables hummed a merry requiem for the aircraft. Moments before I reached the stream, a track snapped, and the plane spun 180 degrees. I caught a brief glimpse of a toothed bird taking to the air to escape my runaway plane. The aircraft bounced over a boulder and sailed backwards through the air. Instead of splashing down in the stream, I sailed over it and landed in a small tree. “Fernando,” I groaned, “you’re fired, effective 70 million years from now!”

Within a few minutes, Fernando and the medic came to pick me up. The medic checked me over while we drove back into camp. Miraculously, I had nothing worse than a few bruises. I was surprised that only Carlos and Dianna were waiting for me. Even they seemed a little distracted. “If you’re all right,” Carlos said, “there’s something you should take a look at. If you’ll follow me to the dissection tent…”

I did as he requested. As expected, all the paleontologists were gathered inside. I had expected to find them examining an impressive new specimen. Instead, they were huddled around a small dissection table, examining something I couldn’t see. Mr. Robertson looked over their shoulders, with a deep frown on his face. “Ah—Mr. Flockman,” Carradine said with a nervous cough. “We found this a few hundred yards from camp.” He stepped aside, giving me an all-too-clear view of an egg-shaped object nearly two feet long. “This is the largest dinosaur dropping yet discovered. As you have probably heard, I’m an authority on the subject. The alarming thing is, it was made by a carnosaur.”