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.”