The Worlds of Naughtenny Moore

Copyright © 2006 by David Brown

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form.

Edited by Kara Willey

Artwork by Tony Carrillo

An Open Page Publishing Book

Published by Open Page Publishing LLC

6340 S. Rural Rd.
Suite118-118
Tempe, AZ 85283

www.openpagepublishing.com

ISBN 0-9788660-1-0
ISBN-13 978-0-9788660-1-3

First Edition: December 2006

Printed in the United States of America

To Jeff and Cubby:
Not the inspirations for Carlos Wrzniewski, but good stand-ins when needed.

To my publisher/editor/lifelong friend Brandon, who saw this through all the way.

To Rachel and Renee (and Alex and Josh too):
Keep your sense of wonder and the love of dragons.

The story that ensues is that of my career as a professional time traveler. So I will start with how I got a job at Naughthenny Moore’s Time Travel Association. My parents were missionaries to the Central American Republic of El Salvador. I grew up there, and I spent half of my adult life there. I avidly followed the development of the time machine (or “Temporal Displacement Device”) since it was announced as a theoretical possibility in 2044. As an imaginative 11-year-old, I dreamed of going back in time and watching the Aztecs build their great temples.

At that time, the government of El Salvador was completing the world’s first anti-matter extractor, the only device that could possibly generate enough power to run a TDD. As of this writing, it is the world’s only anti-matter extractor, thanks to an international ban the UN Council on Science and Technology imposed the next year. I knew that when a TDD was built, it would be in El Salvador, and I spent the next 15 years making sure I had the right resume to ride on it. I decided my best course was to major in anthropology and ecology. To get the best possible credentials, I went to college in the United States, ended up majoring in ecology and minoring in anthropology, and was captain of the rugby team. I should mention that I’m just shy of seven feet tall and weigh 295 pounds. When the U.S. went to war with Indonesia in 2053, I was drafted.

Fortunately, I suffered a “million-dollar-wound” falling out of a sequoia, and by the time I got well, the crisis had blown over. I still had to do military service, but I wasn’t sent outside the U.S. Instead, I spent a couple of years helping the National Guard control forest fires. I then spent five years working as a forester in different parts of South and Central America. One of my jobs was the very hazardous task of spraying cocaine crops with genetically engineered blight in Columbia. In 2061, the news finally came: A working TDD had been built, and a consortium called “Naughtenny Moore” had been established to run it. I sent in a resume before it had even been tested. A month later, I was invited to come to the temporal displacement facility for testing.

I took a cab to the former air base where the time machine was located. The cabbie dropped me off in front of a rickety gate, which apparently hadn’t been painted since the base closed. There was a newly paved road leading to a large airplane hanger. I was walking down it when a Japanese man drove up in a plastic-hulled vehicle called a Thing, after a 20th-century vehicle that it casually resembled. “Hello,” he said. “Are you a job applicant or another journalist? If you are an applicant, you will have to show me the letter inviting you here.”
I gladly pulled out the letter. “Where do I need to go?” I asked.

“Hop in and I’ll take you there,” the Japanese man said. I got in the front passenger seat. A Thing’s steering system is more like an airplane joystick than a steering wheel, and there are two control yokes on the dash. I was already familiar with the system, but it was disorienting to ride without a steering wheel in front of me. As we drove toward the hangar, the driver introduced himself. “I am Louis Tanaka. I’m in charge of security. One part of my job has been screening applicants.” I glanced at him worriedly. “Don’t worry, the police report said you didn’t start that fight.”

At that moment, we reached the hangar I saw that the giant doors had been removed and replaced with a brick wall. The new wall held several normal doors, which we entered through. The vast airplane hangar had been transformed into a museum. The only exhibits so far were a pair of antlers ten feet in span, an animatronic dinosaur, and a pair of dinosaurian arms eight feet long. Lou identified the arms as the only known parts of “Deinocheirus mirificus.” The only other person there at the moment was a black man. “G’day, mate,” the black man said in a jarring Australian accent. “I’m Dr. Carlos Wrzniewski. Who are you?”
“I’m Ted Flockman,” I said. “I take it you’re the competition.”

“Not actually,” Tanaka said. “The Association’s goal is to form a three-person team to manage our expeditions. The team will be composed of a field manager, a field technology specialist and a scientific advisor. The field managers will delegate other jobs to paying members of an expedition. You applied as field manager, while Dr. Wrzniewski is applying to be a scientific advisor. Therefore, you are not in competition with each other. In fact, since the Association wants teams who work well together, you should strive to be polite and helpful to each other.”

“Maybe you can tell me what you have on this guy,” Carlos said jovially.
Lou cheerfully obliged: “Mr. Flockman is a professional forester, with over ten years of experience in his chosen field. He spent a short time in the United States National Guard. He is fluent in 3 languages, and has experience operating planes, bulldozers, heavy trucks and even tanks.” I winced at that last “credential”. Right after I left the National Guard, I had spent a few months with World War 2 Re-enactors’ Society. I quit after a disastrous recreation of the Ardennes Offensive ended in victory for the Nazis.

“What’s your background, Dr. Wrzniewski?” I asked.
“Please, call me Carlos,” Carlos broke in.
“As you may have guessed,” Lou said amiably, “Carlos is from Australia. For the last five years, he has been a Professor of Herpetology at the University of Sydney. He’s renowned for giving his students extensive hands-on training in the Australian outback. Before he received that position, he was a member of Australia’s armed forces.” Carlos grew visibly grim. I could guess why: He had undoubtedly been one of the thousands of Australian troops who fought in the war against Indonesia. Tanaka confirmed that thought: “During the ‘Short War’, Carlos was a corporal in a force sent to flank the defenders of Jakarta. Needless to say, he has a lot of survival skills. He also has several medals.”

“Now that Ted and I know each other’s backgrounds,” Carlos said, “what do we have to do to show that we’re fit for these jobs?”

“There will be a series of four tests,” Tanaka said. “You will take them together. But first, I’ll introduce you to our field technician.” We reached another former hangar, which was clearly being used to store vehicles. Carlos froze when he saw the large vehicle parked beyond the open door. Even I felt a twinge of fear when I realized what it was: an Indonesian Ora 6X6 armored car. The wedge-shaped vehicle resembled nothing so much as an enlarged late 20th-century sports car. This one was almost 15 feet tall, and sported wheels more than 5 feet in diameter. About six feet of its height was a second story added to the standard hull.

“Sweet Mother! It’s a command vehicle!” Carlos exclaimed. “How could they afford this?”

“Actually, it was donated,” someone said in a husky voice. I looked, and saw a red-headed woman descending a retractable staircase at the rear of the vehicle. She was about 5-foot-1 and a little on the stocky side, wearing shorts and a tank top. Suddenly, I felt nervous, and nearly didn’t respond when she held out a hand to shake. “I’m Dr. Dianna Gonzalez. Right now, I’m working on putting a tire on this thing. The big problem is that I have to reset the vehicle’s computerized air-pressure control system. Maybe you two can help.”

“I don’t know much about software,” I said.
Dianna laughed. “I won’t need help with that. I’m a doctor of computer science. I just don’t know much about off-road vehicles, and I certainly can’t install the new wheel all by myself.” She pointed to a giant wheel against the wall. “I’d welcome any feedback on what settings to use. I could also use a little help reading the Javanese instructions.”

The work went very well. Fortunately, we were able to use a forklift to carry the wheel up to the car. Carlos and I still had to manhandle the wheel a little before we could attach it. Once the wheel was in position, we screwed on the massive lug nuts. Then we helped with choosing the pressure settings. At first, I was a little distracted by Dianna, but the attraction quickly gave way to professionalism. Dianna spent most of the time asking Carlos questions about the vehicle. As we were finishing up, she asked him, “What does Ora mean?”

“Ora is another name for the Komodo dragon,” Carlos said. “That was a species of giant lizard that used to live on an island in Indonesia. They were killed off about 20 years ago, by a combination of habitat loss, disease and cannibalism. They were good swimmers and very stealthy hunters, so Indonesia named its line of armored cars after them.”

After the wheel was installed, Dianna gave us a tour of the Ora. The vehicle was 35 feet long. “This version of the armored car was designed as a mobile headquarters for military commanders. It ended up more like a rolling hotel room.” She pointed out different features as we walked through the vehicle. “It has several computers, beds, a shower, a toilet, a refrigerator, a kitchen and a miniature medical lab. It also has a little crane mounted in the rear; that will be handy for bringing big animals aboard. Once we get it running, this will be a perfect mobile base camp. But, we won’t be able to take it on our first expedition.” As I stepped out, I hit my head on the doorframe. It was the third time I had hit my head during the tour.
“It’s a bit cramped for an Anglo,” I complained.

“Well,” Dianna said finally, “you’re the most promising applicants I’ve worked with. Congratulations—you’ve passed the first test! C’mon, don’t look surprised. Did you think the Indonesians would sell us a car without all the wheels on? Or that I wouldn’t know the right settings? We wanted to test your skills with machinery, but we didn’t want you to either stress out over it or to treat it strictly as an abstract exercise. So, we staged it as an impromptu request. If you can do this well on the other tests, I’m sure we’ll be working together on a permanent basis. “You’re entitled to a break before your next test, and I’m overdue for lunch. Would you like to join me on the observation deck?”

I eagerly accepted, and Carlos went along. The observation deck was a kind of porch at the end of the lower balcony. The fridge was stocked with sandwiches. “So, how did you get a job here?” I asked Dianna.

“I got involved in time travel as a graduate student,” she said. “I helped Dr. Julius Werner choose the computer that controls the TDD. On my recommendation, he held up the construction of the TDD for a couple of years until we could get hold of the latest molecular computer. I also helped set up the control room; you’ll see that before the end of the day.” After a pause in conversation she asked Carlos, “Are you a Catholic?”

He seemed surprised by the question. “Ah. No, don’t misunderstand. I say naught against Mary nor Her Son, but the only one I’ll swear by or to is the good Earth Mother. I follow pantheism. Not much of a religion, really, more a set of guidelines for dealing with nature and each other.”

Dianna turned to me. “How about you?” she asked. “You follow any particular faith?”

“I was raised a Protestant,” I said circumspectly. “I haven’t gone to church in a while, though.” Not since my parents died, I added silently.

“Me, I’m a Christian,” Di said. “I grew up in the Catholic church. I don’t really identify myself with any particular denomination. You should go take your other tests. I may drop in to watch.” She walked away, acting nonchalant, but I noticed her glance over her shoulder.

“The dominant predator was Dimetrodon,” Carlos said. “You know, big critter with a tall fin. It looks kind of like a lizard, but it’s really a synapsid—one of the ancestors of the mammals—probably the first terrestrial animal to specialize in eating other large vertebrates. The only other large predators would be giant amphibians–picture salamanders with the size, shape and lifestyle of crocodiles.” He pointed to a pool. “We stay clear of that at all costs.” I spotted several lizard-like creatures, none of them large enough to threaten us. Then I spotted the sail. “Look,” I said. “That’s a Dimetrodon, isn’t it?”

Carlos looked at it critically.

“No, it’s not,” he said. “The ribs are the wrong shape. They’re curved, see? A Dimetrodon’s are straight. That would be an Edaphosaurus, an herbivorous synapsid. Perfectly harmless. But you see that thing there? Looks like a really tall fern? That is a Dimetrodon. And that dark shape in the water would be an amphibian. So, we’re good.” We strolled confidently through the artificial forest. Then Carlos froze. “You know that sail that looks like a fern?” he said. “Looking at it from this angle, I think it really is a fern.”

“Let’s stop and think things over,” I said. “Are there any more possible sails?” We looked around. There seemed to be none. “In that case, we should be looking for another amphibian.” We looked carefully. I was the one who finally found it. It was artfully concealed under a log. If we had stayed our course, we would practically have stepped on it. “Well,” Carlos said ruefully, “that shows how much help the experts are.”

For the next test, Lou led us to a firing range. There were a dozen targets shaped like various prehistoric animals. They were already so riddled with bullet holes that I could see foliage behind them. Lou unlocked a large shed. This took some time, since there were six separate locks on the door. The wooden door swung open to reveal a second, metal door with a panel full of buttons beside it. Lou punched eight buttons and inserted a key to open the second door. “This is the Association’s armory,” Lou said with obvious pride. “Take whatever weapons suit your fancy, but remember to give them back after the test. Hold on a moment while I open the safe with the really heavy stuff.”

I could understand why there were so many locks on the shed. The Armory was a true anarchist’s toy shop. The walls were lined with dozens of weapons, mostly rifles and shotguns. I took a look at the boxes of ammunition. Many of them were military armor-piercing rounds. I whistled in amazement, wondering what the “really heavy stuff” was. Carlos was more critical. “These are all 5.6 and 4.7 millimeter weapons. Minimal stopping power; I wouldn’t trust them for protection against anything larger than a dog,” he said. He hefted a semi-automatic .38 rifle. “But these Tactical rifles are very nice.”

Just then, Lou opened the safe. We stared in awe at what was inside. The safe held three identical rifles, each one four-and-a-half feet long. I quickly estimated that they were about .90 caliber. The weapons had a Spartan design, with the long barrel protruding from a boxy plastic frame. The guns had a forward-sweeping grip, which I had previously seen only on a vintage Boys anti-tank rifle. By all appearances, these weapons could have been built with the same purpose in mind. Every possible measure had been taken to reduce recoil. There was a large muzzle brake, numerous tiny holes in the barrel, a padded stock and a folding unipod. On top of these features, the barrel was designed to slide backward in the frame during firing. Two springs hooked the breach to the frame, so that the sliding barrel would stop sooner. I would later learn that there was a third spring inside the stock.

“The test will be in two parts,” Lou said. “First, you will be tested for proficiency with standard firearms, then you will be tested for your ability to handle one of these: the A-Cube Eliminator. It is a bolt-action rifle of 22 mm caliber, with a capacity of five rounds in a magazine in the stock plus one in the chamber. Each bullet weighs 125 grams. The cases are based upon the .50 Browning machine gun round. As you can see, extreme measures have been taken to mitigate recoil; but, it still knocks inexperienced users off their feet. In theory, it can be fired from the shoulder, but I definitely would not recommend it. The last applicant to try it was knocked back over a meter.”

When we came out, Dianna was waiting. “I always enjoy this part,” she said enigmatically. I was a little perturbed to find that Carlos, despite his military background, was not a very good shot. He averaged only one hit for every three-round burst from an assault rifle. This was in spite of an excellent gun sight and a sophisticated stock that kept the user from feeling any recoil until the end of a burst. He faired much better with a shotgun. In contrast, I was on the top of my form. I put shot after shot into the flat wooden targets, but in the end, I didn’t score many more hits than Carlos. On consideration, I decided that Carlos might be even more effective than me in dealing with emergencies. Where I would take time to aim at the most sensitive parts of an animal, Carlos would immediately fire an instinctive burst. In a crisis, he could be expected to shoot before I did.

“Excellent, both of you,” Lou said. “Now for the Eliminator.” Carlos went first. He handled the weapon as if it were a baby or a live bomb. He crouched, and set the unipod on a bench rest that had been provided for us. At his first shot, he hit a target painted to look like a mammoth in the ear. He cursed in pain at the recoil. He handled the second shot better, hitting the mammoth in the forehead. The third shot missed. Carlos handed the gun to me, shaking his head. “This gun ought to have wheels on it,” he said. “I think you can handle it, but don’t try anything fancy.”

I hefted the gun, examining it carefully. It was very light for its size at less then ten kilos. On impulse, I folded up the unipod. I glanced at Di through the corner of my eye. She was covering her mouth, as if expecting something horrible to happen. I felt like Arthur, gripping the hilt of Excalibur. Finally, I braced myself and pulled the trigger.

I don’t think words can describe what it feels like to fire an Eliminator. My first shot left me short of breath and a little dizzy. Spots flashed before my eyes. But I was still standing, right where I had been before, and when my vision cleared, I could see daylight between the mammoth’s eyes. Dianna whooped, then giggled self-consciously. I massaged my shoulder, and then fired again. The second shot seemed easier. Feeling new assurance, I aimed my last shot at the mammoth’s chest. The sheet metal target began to creak. Then, with an incredible crash, it fell to the ground. Now everyone cheered. “The final test should be strictly a formality,” Lou said. “Let’s go meet Lacerto Leo and Old Rip.”

“Lacerto Leo” turned out to be a reptile handler named Leonard Simmons. He led us to a large enclosure that held a twenty-one-foot-long crocodile. “Gentlemen, meet Old Rip, the salt water crocodile,” the trainer said enthusiastically. “He’s a professional movie star, and he attacks wildlife-management trainees as a side job. He will administer your test on rescue. You should know that he holds two Guinness World Records: one for being the largest reptile in captivity, and one for wearing the world’s largest set of dentures. He knocked out all his real teeth fighting with other crocodiles, and eventually they stopped growing back. His artificial teeth are made of rubber, so he probably won’t be able to bite any limbs off. However, he can still injure you, and if he manages to get you in his pool, he has a very good chance of drowning you.”

The trainer brought out a life-sized dummy. The dummy was quite crude; its face consisted of two blue eyes and a red “O” for a mouth. Simmons held up the dummy. “This is Mr. Bill,” he said. He opened the gate of the enclosure. The crocodile roused and made a few steps toward the gate. “Wave hello, Mr. Bill. Mr. Bill, I’m afraid I have to throw you to Old Rip, who will attack you savagely. But don’t worry. These men will save you. All they have to do is fight off Rip with their bare hands.” He heaved the dummy into the enclosure. The crocodile attacked as soon as it hit the ground.

“They’ve got to be kidding,” Carlos and I said to each other.
“You’d better get in there,” said the trainer. “Oh, no! Looks like Mr. Bill will never be a father.”

“We’re going to have to get the crocodile to let go of the dummy first,” I said to Carlos. “I have a plan. I’ve seen it work on alligators…” Pinching one nostril shut, I made a moaning sound, “MMMnnn, MMMnnn.” It’s a fair approximation of an alligator’s call. The big croc looked at me inquisitively, but held onto the dummy. I repeated the sound. Rip let go of Mr. Bill and snarled at me. Carlos rushed in and grabbed the dummy. But, as he tried to run back out, Rip caught him with a swing of the tail. Carlos threw the dummy as far as he could. I ran in to grab it, but Rip lunged for the dummy at the same time. Rip caught hold of a foot, while I wrapped my arms around the torso. I kicked Rip in the snout, while Carlos got the croc in a chokehold. “No unnecessary roughness!” Leo scolded.

After a few moments, Rip let go of Mr. Bill. The croc wasn’t done yet, though. Carlos relaxed a little when the dummy came free, and Rip positively erupted from his grasp and cut me off from the gate. I leaped over him, with the dummy over one shoulder. Just as I reached the gate, Rip caught me by the foot. I flung Mr. Bill over the finish line, just before Rip dragged me away. Fortunately, Rip was very gentle when he closed his jaws on my head. Leo tapped his pencil thoughtfully against his clipboard. “Not bad,” he said. “Apart from getting killed, I’ll give you a passing grade for effort.”

As I struggled to my feet, I saw Di outside the fence. I tried to straighten up and look strong and confident. “That was incredible!” she said. “You’re the first set of applicants to get the dummy out. Far as I can see, the jobs are yours for the taking. C’mon! I’ll take you to see Dr. Werner.”

I was simultaneously dazzled and confused by the machinery. The walls were virtually lined with computer screens, which displayed either indecipherable equations and lines of computer code or weird shapes. Several showed false-color images of landscapes viewed from above. The room was dominated by a three-dimensional layered LED display, fourteen feet tall, twenty feet wide and four feet thick, that stood in the center. It had obviously been used originally by air-traffic controllers to plot the positions of planes, but now it was nearly filled by a computer-generated geometric form that looked like macaroni stretched to infinity. “What is that?” I said.

The white-haired man turned around and said: “That is the Earth, represented four-dimensionally.” He held out his hand. “I am Dr. Julius Werner. I designed the Temporal Displacement Device. I also trained this lovely young lady.” Dianna blushed. “And you must be Ted Flockman. Dr. Wrzniewski, I already know. This is only the third time that applicants have come in here, so please excuse our lack of decorum.”

“That’s fine,” I said, smiling at the implied compliment. “So, what’s this about representing the Earth in four dimensions?”

“It is a visual representation of string theory,” Werner said. “The underlying premise is that any object, at a given point in time, is only one part of a four-dimensional string, or, to use a more colorful analogy, one segment of a worm. In this case, the object being modeled is our planet as it moves through space. We call this model the Earth-Worm. What you see is only a small portion. When preparing for a temporal displacement, we plot where, and when, we want to send the expedition on the model.”

“It’s my understanding that only a part of the apparatus actually moves through time,” I said. “What does that look like, and how does it move?”

“We call the mobile part of the device the time bell, after a diving bell,” Werner explained. “Like a diving bell, it has no motive power of its own, but must instead be moved by an external agency. The time bell is very simple: a square platform, with a pole on each corner. The poles contain machinery that generates a temporal displacement field. The power, both for going to the past and coming back to the present, is produced by the anti-matter generator. The course, for lack of a better word, is programmed by us. Since there is no contact between the time bell and the rest of the device, all time travelers will have to adhere to a plan more rigid than that of a space flight. You must return to the present after a fixed amount of time. In fact, the machine will do so automatically. You must have a specific amount of mass aboard. If anything goes wrong, we will have no way to help you.”

I felt a little intimidated. “Is it dangerous?”

“Of course,” Werner said. “That is why we need the very best staff for an expedition. But rest assured, we will do everything possible to keep you safe. We will provide you with the best weapons, the best vehicles and the best supplies to accomplish your mission. We will hire paleontological consultants to instruct you on what is known about past environments, and we will use “light probes” to map where you go ahead of time. All in all, you will face less risk working for Naughtenny Moore, Ltd. than you will crossing the street.”

“Not that I’m paranoid. . .but why couldn’t you help us?” I asked. “If nothing else, couldn’t you load a rescue party aboard, and send the time bell back to when it left?”

Werner shook his head. “That’s not an option. At the present time, all displacements have an uncertainty factor of plus or minus 50 years. There’s no way we could send a time bell back to exactly when it left.”

I examined the “Earth-worm” thoughtfully. “You seem to be able to travel in space, as well as time. Could this be used for space travel, as well as time travel?”

Werner laughed. “NASA has been very interested in that possibility,” he said. “Unfortunately, again, the answer is no. We can easily go to different places on the Earth’s surface, but two problems prevent travel to other planets. One is differential velocities. This is a problem even for the Earth. Because the Earth moves in different directions during its orbit, and because its rotation rate has steadily slowed over time, the time bell invariably will undergo an instantaneous change in velocity on arrival in the past. The time bell has massive shock absorbers, but if it landed at the wrong place at the wrong time, it would be smashed like a bug on a windshield. Most of the calculations we have to make are simply to prevent that from happening. If the target were a different planet, even in our own solar system, the difficulties, and the potential for disaster, would be infinitely greater.

“The second, even more fundamental problem rises from the nature of space-time. For generations, it has been recognized that large objects distort not only space, but time. The Earth-worm is not merely a plot of the Earth’s position over time, but a representation of a four-dimensional structure created by the Earth’s passage. All “points” on this structure are interconnected. That is why time travel is possible. As long as we travel to Earth’s past, space-time works in our favor. But if we aim at a point outside the structure, space-time is against us. To reach any such point would require energy expenditures millions of times greater than what is already necessary. The chances of such a point being occupied by a planet would be infinitesimal, even with the most careful calculations. Picture trying to shoot a gnat from a million miles away. That is what it would be like to try to go to another planet in another solar system. And if you do make it, there’s still the velocity problem…”

The whole time, Carlos was gazing thoughtfully at the model. Finally he spoke, with surprising softness, “Perhaps. . .perhaps this is the face of the Earth Mother.”

I finally raised what was perhaps the most vital question. “If we travel back in time, what are the risks of changing the past?” I was grimly recalling my disastrous attempt to replay history.

“One of the two expeditions that have already gone performed an experiment to test that,” Werner said. “Ten people went, on an experimental time bell slightly bigger than a freight elevator. Dr. Gonzalez was one of them, incidentally. They went to a desolate region of Israel, in the second century C.E. Their main objective was to study the Dead Sea scrolls when they were still intact. Nothing was collected. They simply went to the caves where the scrolls had been found, took them out, photographed them and then put them back. Utmost care was taken to make no changes, except one.

“In a carefully chosen spot that had never been surveyed by archeologists, the team bored a hole 20 meters deep and 20 centimeters wide. Into this hole, they dropped an airtight plastic canister, holding a titanium plate inscribed with the names of everyone in the expedition. Then they carefully refilled the hole. While the expedition was in the past, a whole crew of construction workers searched for the canister. They found it. It is now on display in the museum.”

I glanced at Dianna. She had a somber expression. It was Carlos who spoke: “What does that prove, exactly? Since it was planted in a place no one ever looked before, you don’t know whether the past was changed. To make the test conclusive, you should have dug it up before the expedition.”

“We know it is not entirely conclusive,” Werner said. “But we did make progress. We proved that a time traveler can have a tangible effect on the present world. That had been a subject of some debate. One school of thought has held that any trip to the past would create a timeline separate from the one from which the time traveler came. That view is entirely refuted. If it were true, the canister would exist in the new timeline, but not in ours. Another view is that the universe would somehow obliterate any changes, in which case seemingly chance circumstances would have conspired to destroy the canister, or even prevent it from being planted at all. They did not, even with 2000 years to work with. Most scientists have come to the conclusion that no changes occurred. The canister was always there.

“As you say, the conclusive test would have been to dig for it before the expedition left. But that was considered potentially hazardous to make such a direct test. The universe may be flexible in areas of uncertainty, such as ground where no one has dug, but not so where we have prior experience. UNCOST has passed a measure which will prevent any similar experiments. We are now prohibited from sending expeditions to any place and time where humans exist. They also made me install this.” He pointed to a large green button on a large console in front of the 3-D display. “That is a lockout button. If pushed, it will automatically lock down the controls. It was installed against the hypothetical event of an attempted hijacking. Quite nonsensical, since the typical band of terrorists couldn’t operate this machine if we gave them an instruction manual and a tech support hotline. There would be a greater risk of a chimpanzee flying away with a space shuttle!”

Werner folded his hands. “The question I am about to ask, gentlemen, is your final test. For all intents and purposes, you have earned your jobs. The only remaining question is, knowing what you do now, do you still want them? Two men have come this far before, only to say no. How about you?”

“Hell yes!” Carlos said. Werner smiled and looked at me. Intellectually, I could see that this would be a dangerous job, perhaps the most dangerous that has ever existed. Yet, when I thought about all I had gone through, and especially when I glanced at my lovely new co-worker, I didn’t feel like there was any question at all.

I said yes.

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.”

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.”

I gazed thoughtfully at the remarkable find. It was green, with a coating of milky white mucous. I hesitantly poked at a spot where the mucous had been removed. It was warm. “I don’t think this is a dropping,” I said after a moment’s thought. “It reminds me of an owl pellet.” Some people nodded, but others looked confused. “That’s a mass of bones and fur that owls spit out after digesting a meal,” I explained.

Carradine smiled in relief. “That means the carnosaur could be relatively small,” he said. “Perhaps no larger than a grizzly bear. A young T. Bataar, or an adult of a smaller species.” It was strange to hear the largest of modern carnivores described as “relatively small.”
“Aliolamus,” Wang said abruptly. Even the other paleontologists looked confused.

Hutchins furrowed her brow and then nodded. “Alioramus remotus,” she said. “It’s a poorly known predator from a slightly older formation, probably about the size of a juvenile T. Bataar. It’s generally thought to be a primitive tyrannosaurid.”

“If it’s primitive,” Di interjected, “then it shouldn’t be living alongside advanced ones.”

Dianna was openly skeptical of evolution, an attitude that grated on the paleontologists. There was a long, awkward silence. I tried to salvage the discussion and get back to the point. “I don’t want any big predators roaming around near our camp,” I said firmly, “and whatever made this pellet was a substantial predator by any standard.” I concluded with a sigh: “It would be in our best interests to hunt down this Aliol—I mean Alioramus as quickly as possible. Carradine, did you look for footprints around the place where you found this pellet?”

“I found a few traces,” he said. “I saw some indistinct prints that were unusually long. On consideration, the carnosaur may have been sneaking along in a plantigrade stance.” “Plantigrade” means that a creature walks with its feet fully on the ground. Most dinosaurs normally walked in a “digitrade” fashion, with only their toes touching the earth, like a human on tiptoes.
“Show me the tracks,” I said. “With any luck, we can kill this thing before nightfall.”

“You’re going nowhere,” said the medic. “You obviously sustained some injuries. I must insist on giving you a full examination before I let you go tromping through the wilderness.”

“Take his advice,” Dianna said sweetly. “You did a good job handling the problems with the plane. You deserve to take the afternoon off.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Flockman,” Robertson said. “With Dr. Carradine’s help, I can track the creature. If you will permit it, of course.”

“Give it your best shot,” I said. “Carlos, go with him. Oh, and Mr. Robertson, don’t try to take the carnosaur with your pistol. Take one of the Tacticals, or even an Eliminator.”

Mr. Robertson looked disappointed, but did not argue. “A .38 will be quite sufficient,” he said. He marched out of the tent with annoying solemnity.

“Okay,” I said, “we should set up the scent machine. It won’t do to have the scent of blood advertising this tent to every carnivore in the vicinity.” It only took about ten minutes to unpack the machine. The device was a rectangle, one foot long and six inches wide. A large can of peppermint extract fit into a hole in the top. The peppermint smell was unpleasantly strong, and there was a hint of something like bleach. The spray was known to throw bloodhounds off a scent. “Leave it on for fifteen minutes,” I said with a cough. I fled the tent before the scent could make me sick.

We spent the next couple of hours doing odd jobs. I helped Zapata set up live traps for small mammals. We heard many distant hadrosaur calls. Once, I heard a “chug-a-chug” sound, which I attributed to a large frog. We had a midday meal of Personal Universally Consumable Rations. (Take a guess what their nickname is.) One of these burrito-like abominations meets the daily dietary requirements of a soldier. They had been made in response to UN demands for a compact combat ration that would be “kosher” for people of any belief system. The result was something that no one would want to eat. In fact, several religious leaders had forbidden their followers from consuming them. Their gritty texture and saccharine flavor added a whole new dimension to the horrors of war. “Remind me to fire the commissar,” I said after choking down half of a PUC.

Around dusk, the hunting party came back with nothing but a pachycephalosaur to show for their efforts. “Other dinosaurs disrupted the trail,” Robertson said. “The carnosaur appears to have been stalking one of the hadrosaurs we wounded, until the other hadrosaurs chased it away. The pursuers obliterated its footprints in the process. We picked up the trail again, but by then, we were on rocky ground that is very poor for prints.”
“Did the hadros give you any more trouble?” I asked.

“No direct threats, but a couple of them trailed us for more than an hour,” Robertson said. “They kept exchanging calls with other hadrosaurs. They seemed too fearful to try to chase us away, but not fearful enough to run away themselves. We finally called it quits when we started hearing calls from hills on both sides of us. Carlos was concerned that they might ambush us.” There was a hint of disapproval in the hunter’s voice, as if Carlos had panicked and overreacted. Carlos scowled and pursed his lips. He seemed to be physically holding in an angry response.

“That was a good decision,” I said. Just then, there was a strange, unpleasant noise from the Thing. We all glanced in the direction of the sound, just in time to see the pachycephalosaur’s tail vanish down a carnosaur’s throat. I caught a glimpse of a red crest on its snout, the most distinctive feature of Alioramus. We all grabbed for our weapons, and Carlos got off a couple shots, but the creature had already vanished into the forest.

After dinner, I ordered a camp meeting. The first order of business was our quarry, Deinocheirus. “I want you to tell me everything you can about this animal,” I said. “Don’t be afraid to speculate. First of all, how big is it? The sources I read didn’t even agree on the length of the arms.”

“That’s because there’s disagreement about whether all the Deinocheirus specimens are one species,” Hutchins explained. “The type specimen is a pair of complete arms, which are eight feet in length. Fifteen years ago, a second specimen was found, even less complete than the first. It consisted of a forearm and manus, which were further damaged by incompetent fieldwork. It wouldn’t even have been of interest, except that it was larger than the forearm of the type specimen. Assuming the proportions are the same, the second Deinocheirus would have had arms nearly ten feet long. It’s so much larger that some scientists proposed a new species, D. giganticus.”

I smiled in bemusement. “As if the first wasn’t gigantic. So, if the arms are up to ten feet long, how tall would that make the complete animal?”

“That’s hard to say,” Hutchins said. “It would be very unusual for a dinosaur’s arms to be more than half as long as the legs. Among ornithomimids, it’s typical for the arms to be one-third the length of the leg. Do the math, and you get a hip height of up to thirty feet. I think even twenty feet is unlikely, but any height much less than fifteen feet is also unlikely. That’s taller than a T. rex.”

“Is it really a predator?” I asked.
“Celtainly,” Wang said without hesitation.

Hutchins pondered the question for a moment. “It probably hunted at least some of the time,” she said. “However, its arms were surprisingly weak, and the claws were too blunt for killing. Ornithomimids were usually herbivorous, so Deinocheirus probably fed mainly on plants.” Wang shook his head in silent disapproval. After our encounter with a living ornithomimid, I was equally skeptical.

Carlos spoke up: “The claws are so big that shape isn’t that important. With arms that big, the shock force alone would be enough to knock over a good-sized animal. Relatively blunt claws would simply spread the effect over a wider area. The rounds from the Eliminator are built on the same principle. Take a look: they’re practically cylindrical.”

“Doctah Lizniewski has a point,” Wang said. “However, it is possible that the claws were not used fol killing. Deinocheilus could have immobilized pley with its ahms and then killed it by some othel means.”

“Let’s get back to what kind of animal it is,” I said. “Dr. Hutchins, do you believe that it was an ornithomimid?”

“It certainly looks more like an ornithomimid than anything else,” she said. I was surprised. Her mentor, Dr. Romenko, vigorously opposed the ornithomimid theory. “For the moment, its taxonomic status is irrelevant. We need to find a complete specimen before we can reach any conclusions about how to classify it.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said. “Assuming that it is a predator, what would be its most likely prey?”

“Saulolophus is the most common lahge helbivole,” Wang said, “and the easiest to kill.”
“If the Saurolophus is alone,” Carlos corrected.

“It didn’t have to limit itself to herbivores,” Rivera said. “I’ve read a twenty-year-old paper that suggested that Deinocheirus preyed primarily on other carnosaurs. T. Bataar is very common in this area. We actually have reason to believe that it nested here. It’s unlikely that any terrestrial predator could survive feeding primarily on other predators, but during the T. Bataar breeding season, a Deinocheirus could have gotten a lot of food simply by killing or scavenging young tyrannosaurs.”

“For the moment, the most important question about Deinocheirus is not what it is or what it ate,” Carradine interjected. “The critical question is, where do we look for it? The area around us has several distinct ecologies, ranging from floodplains to forested highlands. It is vital that we search for the creature in the right one.”
I nodded. “Do you have a theory about where Deinocheirus lived?” I asked.

“I suspect that it lived in the highlands,” Carradine said. “If nothing else, that would explain why it is so uncommon in the fossil record. The Nemegt formation and its fossils formed down here in the flood plain, where very few highland animals would ever reach. Those that did would most likely arrive as floating, disarticulated carcasses.”

“In that case, we should definitely explore the highlands,” I said. “Even if we don’t find Deinocheirus, it would be worth it just to learn about an environment that we can’t study in the fossil record. There are just a few more orders of business I want to discuss. First of all, I’ve decided on a roster for guard duty. I only selected those who can handle an Eliminator, which narrowed it down to Wang, Fernando, Robertson, Carlos and me. We will each work a shift of four or five hours. I will keep the first watch. Finally,” I said, making eye contact with Robertson, “I’d like you to explain why you think you can kill a Tyrannosaurus with a handgun.”

Robertson chuckled. “I don’t think I can,” he said confidently. “I know I can.” He proudly held up his pistol. “This is 14.5 mm. It can fire an 1100 grain projectile for over a mile, with pinpoint accuracy. As you have seen, it is a silenced weapon.” He pushed a button, and part of the frame shot back to become a stock. “It has a retractable stock, which allows for greater accuracy. Hunters have killed elephants with guns smaller than this.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ve heard of a man named Schnyder who shot an elephant three times in the head with a .50 Magnum at a range of fifty yards. As I recall, the elephant ran for a hundred yards before it died. Snyder would obviously have been in a lot of trouble if it had run toward him instead of away from him.”

“In theory, your gun might work on T. Bataar, but I doubt if you could get within range, ” Hutchins said. “Tyrannosaurs have the largest nasal cavities among the dinosauria. They could smell you coming from a mile away.”

“You’re assuming that T. Bataar would flee from humans,” Robertson said. “They really have no reason to fear us. A dominant predator isn’t going to flee at the first whiff of an unfamiliar scent. In fact, it would be more likely to come closer to find out what the intruder is.” He had a point. I had heard of big cats in isolated areas walking right up to armed hunters.

“I’ll tell you one thing: There’s no need to worry about it not being powerful enough,” Carlos said. He held up a round for inspection. It was about 2 inches long, and most of its surface was covered by diamond-shaped dimples. “This is a Controlled Deformation projectile, otherwise known as a pineapple round. It was designed as a substitute for hollow-point rounds, to get around the conditions of an arms treaty. It has a light but tough outer layer, but the inside is soft and heavy. When the bullet hits, the interior expands and the jacket shatters. Sweet Mother, what a mess!”
“So, you think it’s adequate for killing a tyrannosaur?” I said.

“Yes—in theory. The problem is that, as the gallimime I shot demonstrated so vividly, there are different degrees of dead,” Carlos said. “If he hits the brain—and I think he can, four times out of five—there isn’t going to be much brain left. But we can’t count on that stopping it. Of course, the real problem is that if the first shot misses, or doesn’t work, or if there’s more than one dinosaur, then there’s not likely to be time for a second shot. It’s going to be vital that he has someone with a sporting rifle backing him up at all times.”

“There is no need to worry about that,” said Robertson. “I will have at least one person backing me up with an Eliminator, or my own 4-gauge. All I ask is to be allowed to take the first shot. Frankly, if you do not allow me to hunt a T. Bataar the way I want, I may have to fault the Association for breach of contract…” He didn’t need to remind us what would happen then; the company would be stuck with $15 million in unpaid bills.

Dianna came out to talk to me during my watch. “Do you feel okay?” she said. “The medic wanted to make sure you weren’t hurt,” she added, as if trying to allay any suspicion that she might be having unprofessional thoughts about me.

“I feel great,” I said. “Incidentally, how are you?”
“I’m fine,” she said. She ran her hands through her hair and sighed. “A little frustrated, but fine.”
I smiled. “Did you have trouble setting up the electronics, or did you get into an argument with the paleontologists?”

“A little of A, and a lot of B,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t understand why any of them believe in evolution. They would be insisting that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming one minute, and in the next, they would be admitting that even their best ‘transitional forms’ aren’t really ancestors of anything. But when I suggested that evolution wasn’t true, they looked at me like I’d suggested the Earth was flat.” She looked at me intently, her eyes shining in the moonlight. “Ted, what do you believe?”

“I’ve never felt informed enough to make a decision about evolution,” I said, truthfully enough. There was a moment of silence. “Dianna,” I said, a little nervously, “are you… seeing anyone?”

“Yes,” she said. I saw a gleaming of teeth as she grinned. “In fact, my boyfriend proposed two days before we left. I told him to hold onto the engagement ring until I get back.” My heart sank a little. I hadn’t had serious feelings about Dianna, but I had had hopes. I set my disappointment aside, and asked her about her new fiancée. One thing led to another, and we ended up talking for more than two hours.

Early the next morning, Carradine, Hutchins and I went out to look for traces of the Alioramus, while Carlos, Robertson and the other paleontologists went out in search of the tyrannosaurs’ kill. Carlos took the Amphibian, while my little group went out in a jeep. Before we went our separate ways, Robertson told Carradine, “You shouldn’t go out with only your .44 revolver. Do you know how to use a heavier firearm?”
“No, I suppose not,” Carradine said. “I haven’t had much practice with the revolver, either. I only carry it to kill snakes.”

“Well, then, I have the perfect weapon for you.” Robertson opened a carrying case and removed a weapon that looked like the missing link between a shotgun and the bazooka. “This is a 4-gauge recoilless shotgun. We used it for clearing out bunkers during the Five-Way War,” he explained. (In shotgun terminology, smaller gauge numbers denote larger shells. Thus, a 4-gauge is much larger than a 12-gauge.) “When you pull the trigger, blasts come out of both ends. Lethal shot comes out of the front, while relatively harmless plastic birdshot comes out of the back. You can hold it under your armpit or rest it on your shoulder. Make sure no one—especially yourself—is directly behind the back end when you fire. Don’t worry about aiming carefully. Just point it in the general direction of the animal you want to kill, and the scattering shot will do the rest. Pump it to reload. There’re three rounds in the magazine, plus one in the chamber.”

I drove my group out to the spot where the hunting party had given up the day before. This time, there were no signs of hadrosaurs. We got out of the car and started examining the ground. Occasionally, Carradine would scan some indistinct footprint with a Topographical Laser Scanner, a device that looked like an ordinary supermarket bar code reader. It was actually a sophisticated machine that could generate three-dimensional models of footprints. After scanning thirteen tracks, he sat down on a hill and started feeding data into his portable computer. Within ten minutes, he had reconstructed the dinosaur’s activities.

“The therepod came through here twice,” Carradine said. “I only scanned the freshest tracks.” His screen showed map of the hills with the thirteen prints marked in green. It was on a small enough scale that I could make out the dinosaur’s toes. Oddly enough, the number of toes varied from print to print. “Once again, the therepod was maintaining a plantigrade stance.” He pointed to a spot at the end of the hill where the footprints abruptly became further apart. “Here, the therepod ran out of natural cover, so it ran faster to avoid detection. The footprints lead toward that gully over there. If we follow the gully, we should see footprints where it came out.”

The gully in question was up to twenty feet deep and two hundred yards long. There was little vegetation, and evidence of a recent flood. “There’s lots of mud in the bottom,” I said. “We can follow the trail on foot.” I saw no need to mention that the sides of the gully were too steep for the Thing.

“I’ll follow the trail,” Carradine said. “You can pace me in the car.” As he climbed down the gully, I heard a loud “chug-a-chug” from somewhere close by.

We followed the gully for fifty yards before I called for a halt. “No need to follow the footprints any further,” I said. “I can see where the therepod went.” On a shallow hillside about a hundred yards away, a dozen ornithomimes were feasting on something large and dead. I could hear the clacking of their bloodstained beaks, and occasional crow-like calls. For a moment, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. Then I realized the truth. “They’re chameleons,” I murmured. As I watched, one of the beasts reared up as high as it could and sent ripples of crimson down its light tan back.

Carradine clambered out of the gully. “That isn’t surprising,” he said. “Several specimens of dinosaur skin have the features of color changers.” He frowned, as if he had just thought of something alarming. “Actually, most of those specimens are from tyrannosaurids.”
I let out a grim, humorless laugh. “So, the animal we’re hunting may be able to change color?”

“Exactly.” Carradine gazed at the kill. “Though it may not be a threat to us for some time. It must have made a kill, eaten its fill and then left. All those gallimimes wouldn’t be eating a carcass if a larger predator were around. As long as the therepod is full, it won’t try hunting us.”

“Actually, the Gallimimuses could have driven it away from the kill, the way hyenas do with lions,” Hutchins said. “If it’s still hungry, it will either wait around here for the Gallimimuses to finish, or go hunting for something else. It might wander toward the camp…”

“I know,” I said. “We aren’t safe as long as the Alioramus is running around. We have to find the trail. Let’s head for the kill site. We may have to fight off the gallimimes, but it’s the only way to pick up the trail.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Carradine said. “There are broken branches on a tree over there.” He pointed to a tree 100 yards away, on the far side of the gully. “I won’t be sure until I check for prints, but it looks like it was caused by a dinosaur going by. Do you want to drive the Thing across, or would you prefer to go on foot?”

“Let’s go on foot,” I said. My companions started on down, but I paused to get out the Eliminator. The gun is ludicrously overpowered for any animal smaller than an elephant (and overkill even for something the size of an elephant), but nothing else would guarantee an instant kill. As I strode toward the gully, I heard another “chug-a-chug”, much louder than before. For the first time, I wondered if it was really a frog. “Stop!” I called. Hutchins looked back at me. “Is something the matter?” she asked.

“Maybe… but stay where you are,” I told her. I raised the Eliminator and scanned the far side of the gully with its sophisticated sight. I covered the nearby stands of trees three times, and was beginning to cover them a fourth time when I spotted something. I had just traversed the rifle past a stand of trees about fifty feet away, and looked at it again on a hunch. I had to zoom in before I was certain. A dinosaur, at least 7 feet tall, was standing among the trees. Its colors matched the surrounding pines perfectly. The trees were swaying in the wind, casting dappled shadows over the dinosaur. Without those shadows, I might not have noticed it. It’s hard for me to remember just what I saw, but my impression at the time was that of an optical illusion: obvious if looked at one way, but obviously something else if looked at in another manner. I still wasn’t sure what it was, until I made out the horned crest. I drew a bead on the creature and fired just as it turned and fled. My first shot missed, and so did my second, and there was no time for a third. I was therefore able to watch it bound into the open, and change its colors to match its new, grayish-yellow surroundings in an instant. Then it vanished around a hill.

We pursued it, of course. We drove after it in the car, stopping whenever Carradine thought he saw a promising trace. The ride was very rough, and I repeatedly cursed the minimalist engineers who had built the car with no suspension. Once, we got close enough for me to take another shot at long range, but I missed again. After that, we never even found a good trail again. It seemed to have learned that we couldn’t track it across rocky ground. After almost three hours of fruitless pursuit, I was relieved when Dianna summoned us back to camp. My relief vanished when she explained the situation. “The other hunting party came back…and they brought a live Tyrannosaurus with them.”

“I must say,” I said, “I’m impressed that you were able to capture this animal alive. I’d be interested in hearing how you did it. More importantly, I very much want to know if any of you gave the slightest thought to whether or not we could keep this animal for almost two weeks!”

“We aren’t planning to keep it for two weeks,” Robertson said nonchalantly. He pointed to a signaling device that they had strapped to the creature’s tail. “We wouldn’t have brought it back to camp at all, if we had thought to bring this tracking device along. Our plan is to release the animal. It should lead us to the rest of the pack, saving us days of searching.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said, “but I’m not letting you release it anywhere near here. You have twenty minutes to do any additional research. After that, I’m driving it back to where you found it.” At that moment, the tyrannosaur managed to throw itself against the side of the Amphibian. For a moment, the vehicle tipped dramatically, then slammed back to the ground. “Give that thing more tranquilizers!” I ordered.

“There’s a little problem there,” Carlos said. “We didn’t give it tranquilizers. Robertson knocked it out with a 4-gauge plastic riot slug. It was the only option we had at the time, and Dr. Ramirez is reluctant to test our tranqs on an animal this big. We know absolutely nothing about the finer details of dinosaur physiology, so we can’t predict what affect the drugs we brought will have. Any given drug might be lethal, or useless, or get the dinosaur fighting mad.”

“That’s a problem,” I agreed. “But I’m willing to take the risk.” I listened carefully to the dinosaur. It was growling quietly, and swinging its tail. The dinosaur was obviously suffering from its hard knock. “Get an air gun and whatever tranquilizer you think will work best.”

Ramirez reluctantly filled a large number of darts with every tranquilizer we had. He chose a bird tranquilizer to use for his first shot. “Shoot it once,” I told him. “If it doesn’t go down, but seems to be getting drowsy, shoot it again with the same drug. If there is no effect, or if the animal becomes more violent, try a dart with a different tranq. If things really get out of hand, I’ll shoot it with this.” I hefted the Eliminator. Ramirez nodded reluctantly and fired a dart into the dinosaur’s thigh.

The dinosaur screeched and struggled to lift its head. The impact of the dart had upset it, but it soon began acting sluggishly. Its skin went from a reddish-brown color to a light tan. After five minutes, I decided that the first dose wasn’t enough. “Fire again,” I ordered. The second dart was almost too effective. The young carnivore whimpered, and immediately turned dusty white. In a matter of seconds, it collapsed, slamming its head against the back of the cab. The impact made the Amphibian lurch a few inches forward.

When the dinosaur was clearly unconscious, Carradine climbed into the back to examine its skin. I looked, too. Carradine pointed out large bumps placed at regular intervals on its skin. “These are enlarged scales, similar to those of a South American therepod called Carnotaurus, but even larger.” He prodded one of the bumps. “In fact, there could be actual bony material in here.” As he prodded, the bump and the skin around it turned pink. The tyrannosaur growled quietly, like a lion having a bad dream.

“If you want to see something really interesting,” Carlos called up, “take a look at its right side.” We did. Carradine whistled, and I tried not to be sick. Sometime in the recent past, something very large had tried to kill our captive. Three long scars ran down its ribcage. I gently touched one of the scars and felt a lump beneath the skin where a broken rib had healed imperfectly.

“A few feet further down,” I murmured, “and this guy would have lost his guts. This looks like a Deinocheirus attack.” I examined the scars more carefully. They went diagonally upward for about two feet before ending abruptly. I got the distinct impression that the attacker had had trouble striking low enough to injure the tyrannosaur.

“A full-grown Therizinosaurus might have inflicted these injuries in self-defense,” Carradine said. “But no—these scars look equally wide and deep. Therizinosaurs have one claw that is larger than the other. Besides, why would one of them attack from behind? Whatever did this was a predator, and only Deinocheirus answers the description.

“We have here an interesting opportunity to study Tyrannosaurus ontogeny. Its arms are significantly less robust than the largest fossil specimens. It is generally believed that the robust form represents a later stage of development, but it has been proposed that this represents differences between sexes, or even different species… Speaking of sexual differences, this animal has two possible display features which were absent on the one you photographed from the air. There is something like a horn developing over each eye, and then there is the crest along its back. There is no way to be sure without a dissection, but this is probably a male.”

I looked at the arm. It was half as long as mine, but more muscular, and I’m a big guy. Looking at the juvenile’s arm, I found it hard to imagine what an adult’s arm looked like. I had the unnerving realization that the animal could kill me with one swipe from its “puny” arm. “I think I’ll get out now,” I said. After climbing out of the bed, I asked Carlos: “Did you get anything else from the kill site you mentioned?”
“You bet,” Carlos said. “We found the remains of a sub-adult sauropod, like the ones you filmed from the airplane. Rivera said it was the species—What did you say it was, Luis?”
“Opisthoelecaudia,” Rivera said. “We also found a piece of a Nemegtosaurus skull.”

Carlos continued, “There wasn’t much left of the sauropod except bones. We couldn’t even find two of the legs. The tyrannosaurs probably ripped them clean off and carried them away. I’m sure they aren’t coming back, but there were little therepods all over the kill. I shot a couple of the little guys; they’re in the dissection tent right now. There’s a lot of trace data: footprints, shed teeth, teeth marks, everything. Carradine’s gonna love it. We brought back as many sauropod bones as we could. If we go back, we should try to get a few more.”
“Should be enough room. Let’s go,” I said. “By the way, whose idea was it to bring the tyrannosaur back to base camp?”
“It was mine,” Robertson said proudly.
I took the tranquilizer gun away from Ramirez and handed it to the billionaire. “In that case, you can sit in the back with the dinosaur.”

Carradine and Rivera sat with me in the cab of the Amphibian. Carlos, Carpenter and Wang followed in a Thing. They drove to the left of the Amphibian so that Wang could cover us with an Eliminator. Robertson also had one of the enormous rifles; I had ordered him to leave his revolver behind. The trip was uneventful, until we reached the river. At first, I thought the object in our path was a half-submerged boulder. Then it started moving. Muddy water streamed off its spiky, armor-clad body as it strode out of the shallows and onto the shore. I was so alarmed that it took me a moment to recognize the creature before me as an ankylosaur. It was almost seven feet tall and well over twenty feet long. “Rivera,” I said hoarsely, “we brought along a few armor-piercing rounds for the Eliminators. You can recognize them by their green tips. Open the glove compartment and see if we have any.”
“We do,” he said. At that moment, the ankylosaur squawked like a ten-ton parrot and moved toward us.

“If we shoot it, can we go over it?” I said to Carlos
“Sure, we could,” Carlos answered sardonically. “You could drive a Thing over a bed of nails. But those spikes on its side’ll tear up the cleats, and do you want that bumpy a ride with a live carnosaur on board?” The ankylosaur stopped in its tracks and squawked again. I got an all-too-close look at its fantastically bony head. I heard an ominous rumble from the tyrannosaur. “Here’s what we’ll do,” Carlos continued. “Let’s try to intimidate it by honking our horns at it. If that doesn’t work, we’ll shoot it and try to find a way around.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” I said. I opened the rear window of the cab and handed Robertson a couple of armor-piercing rounds. Then I started honking. The ankylosaur squawked, louder than before, and started swinging its clubbed tail. “If it even starts to turn around,” I bellowed, “shoot it!”

Carlos drove the Thing forward with the horn blaring one long, continuous note. “Move, ya dumb dinosaur!” he shouted. I winced and covered my eyes, expecting carnage to ensue immediately. But the tactic seemed to work. The ankylosaur backed up a few paces, though it bellowed again to save face. I put the Amphibian into its lowest gear and drove directly at the dinosaur, with the horn still blaring. It backed up even further, into the shallows. Seeing that I could intimidate it, I changed course and began forcing it to the right, away from the ford.

“Go around us!” I shouted to Carlos. “I can hold it back!” Carlos drove the Thing through the shallowest part of the river. He gave one last derisive honk as he reached the far shore. I drove across next. The ankylosaur let out a long bellow. I almost ordered Robertson to shoot, but told myself that it wasn’t making any hostile moves. There must have been something I missed. Just when we had made it past the dinosaur, it charged at us like a living torpedo. Its massive head, backed up by the full force of its enormous body, smashed into our right flank. The Amphibian spun 180 degrees. I heard a splash; that was Robertson falling overboard. I also hear water sloshing in through the damaged tailgate. The Amphibian’s nose rose high out of the water. Nevertheless, I could see the ankylosaur very well as it reared up and crowed in triumph. My heart almost stopped when the tyrannosaur roared back. The cables must have come loose!

I frantically threw the Amphibian into full reverse. The ankylosaur might not attack again if I made such a gesture of submission, and once I got near shore, I could lower the tailgate with a push of a button and release the tyrannosaur. I was alarmed but not surprised when I saw Robertson dogpaddle in front of me. The Eliminator was slung over his shoulder. In an outrageous display of optimism, he gave me an “OK” sign. When the ankylosaur came after us again, he somehow managed to get off a shot. He missed, and the recoil ducked him under the water, but the noise scared the ankylosaur away.

There was a thump as the tyrannosaur kicked the tailgate. I went ahead and pushed the button, hoping to spare the tailgate from further damage. The tyrannosaur climbed out with a splash and immediately waded to shore. It approached the Thing, but thought better of it when Robertson, just then swimming ashore, fired a shot over its head. I saw its hide turn tan with green spots as it fled into the bush. “Let’s go!” Robertson said. “We only have an hour before dark.”

We ventured out to the sauropod kill. There was indeed not much left except bones. When we arrived, we found about a dozen small dinosaurs feeding on the kill. Most were a beaked type with big triangular crests on their forehead, two meters long and 70 centimeters tall at the hip. These mainly chewed on the more fragile bones. “Ovilaptoh mongoliensis,” Wang said. As we watched, one of the small therepods snapped a bone with its powerful beak. It then began sucking out the bone marrow, making disgusting slurping sounds in the process. Another carnosaur shrieked at us. It was of a different, slightly smaller type, with an ordinarily-shaped head and scythe-like claws on its toes. “Bologovia,” Wang said. “They were not here before. They must hunt at dusk.”

Carlos took aim at one of the Borogovia, which ran away before he could shoot. He killed an Oviraptor with his second shot, scaring away the rest of the scavengers.

I stared in awe at the scattered bones of the sauropod. It may not have been an adult, but it was no baby either. In life, it had been no less than 30 feet long. The carnosaurs feeding on it had kicked in its rib cage and consumed the heart and most of the lungs. There was an enormous hole where one of its hind legs had been ripped out of its socket. Rivera casually explained that the species had unusually large hip sockets that allowed it to stand on its hind legs more easily than other sauropods. Carradine photographed the numerous teeth marks in the bones, and pulled out seven shed Tyrannosaurus teeth. One of the teeth was imbedded in the tendons of the neck.

“This appears to be the fatal wound,” Carradine said. “They couldn’t have done it to a healthy sauropod, though. It must have already been wounded and exhausted, with its head held much lower than usual. I wouldn’t be surprised if its belly had been ripped open. The tyrannosaurs probably ambushed it, inflicted a few bites, and then followed it while blood loss wore it down. It could have taken hours, even days, but the outcome was virtually inevitable. Bad way to go.”

He carefully examined the tyrannosaur tracks that were all over the kill site. “There’s so much overlapping of tracks that it’s hard to find identifying characteristics for individual track makers,” he said, “but there were clearly at least six tyrannosaurs at the site, ranging from juvenile to adult size. There are no signs of infant tracks. The missing limbs may have been carried back to a nest.”
“If it exists,” I said thoughtfully, “the nest is bound to be heavily guarded.” I shuddered at the thought of dealing with six of the monsters at once.

Our trip back to camp was uneventful, as was the evening. Zapata spent a large portion of the night showing us the small animals he had collected from his traps. There were strange lizards with just a few teeth, one unlucky toothed bird, and a lot of small mammals. The mammals, for the most part, were mouse- or shrew-like creatures that were hard to distinguish from modern ones.

I listened attentively to Zapata’s descriptions of them. He had divided them into two groups: Metatherians and Eutherians. The Metatherians, he explained, were ancestors of modern marsupials, while the Eutherians were the ancestors of modern placentals. In the Maastrichtian, however, most Eutherians still had a marsupial-type reproductive system. Surprisingly, Dianna listened to all this without arguing. I suspected that it was because Dr. Zapata was threatened by her. Ever since the group started training, he had been singling her out for his attention. So far, his behavior had been subtle and totally platonic, but Dr. Rivera expected his colleague to try to seduce her before the trip was over. “His exploits in the field are legendary,” Rivera had told me. As I watched Zapata answer a few questions from Dianna, I decided that it was about time to tell her about his reputation.

Dr. Zapata was very excited about two specimens that he was keeping alive in plastic cases. One was a squirrel-like animal that he believed to be a primitive primate. “I actually collected two; I have already dissected the other,” he said. He pointed to the other case. “This animal is even more significant. It is a monotreme.”

Dianna looked confused. The name sounded familiar, but it took me a moment to recall what it meant. “You mean an egg-laying mammal, like a platypus?” I asked. The scientist nodded. “I thought they were restricted to Australia, even in prehistoric times.”

“Not true,” Zapata said. “A few monotreme fossils have been found in South America and Antarctica. This is the first evidence that they reached Asia as well.”

I peered closely at the creature. It was certainly a strange creature. It was the size of a cat, which was as big as Cretaceous mammals got, and looked like a cross between a mole and a Tasmanian devil. As I bent down for a closer look, it snarled and took a snap at me. Its broad, hairless snout bumped harmlessly against the transparent lid of the case. The creature began to thrash about, hissing like a snake and scraping the case with its large claws and scimitar-like fangs. I noticed that its legs were splayed to the sides, like a lizard’s. The egg-laying platypus and echidna had a lizard-like posture, I recalled, because they had the same limb structure as reptiles. It was supposed to be because they were very primitive mammals that retained some features of their reptilian ancestors. However, the creature before me looked like an unusually sophisticated killing machine. The tiny primate heard the commotion, and began scrabbling desperately at the sides of its case. It obviously wanted to get as far away from its ferocious neighbor as possible. I pondered the fact that the primate was a possible ancestor of humanity, and wondered how it had survived long enough to leave descendants.

“That thing looks like a furry lizard from hell,” Carlos remarked. “Hey, that would make a good scientific name: Pilosaurus infernali’.” (When Zapata wrote the paper that formally described the species, that’s actually what he called it!)

The next day, it rained so hard that we had to spend the whole day in camp. The day after that, it rained even harder. We spent two more days waiting for the water to recede.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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 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.

“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.

“Don’t do it, Ted,” he told me. “That’s a valuable specimen, and it could make a good meal. But, ah, try to hold it over the water, at least until it stops moving.”

We finally ran aground about half a mile up the river. “Our first priority is to start a fire,” I announced. “Everyone except me, Dianna and Dr. Horne is on wood gathering detail. I’m staying here with the wounded.”
“Ted, I’m not hurt too badly to walk around,” Dianna said irritably.

“Di, you’re suffering from the early stages of hypothermia!” I shouted. She was taken aback by the outburst. I took her hands and helped her out of the boat. I then said, gently, “Your fingers are ice cold, and you can probably barely feel my hands.” She nodded reluctantly. “You’re in no shape to wander around gathering wood. Please, stay here, and I can help you get better.” She nodded again, and smiled. “Good. I have to change Dr. Horne’s bandage and put some more antibiotics on his wound, and then I’ll do yours. While I’m doing that, why don’t you take off those wet clothes? The blanket will keep you warm until we get a fire going. Don’t worry, I’m a gentleman. I won’t peek.”

I found myself thoroughly distracted by the sound of Dianna undressing. It was a struggle for me to keep my gentleman’s word. After what seemed like an eternity, Dianna walked back into view, with the blanket wrapped around her like a long, flowing robe. She huddled beside me in a fetal position. “I do feel warmer,” she said, “but I can’t wait for you to start a fire.”

Starting a fire proved extremely difficult. The wood the others gathered (if it could even be called wood) was green and usually wet. Even my most valiant efforts produced nothing more than feeble wisps of flame that burned out in a few seconds. The others soon built up a very large pile of wood, even as I tried in vain to light it. I grew increasingly frustrated. Finally, I made an outrageous proposal. “Carlos, couldn’t we start a fire with your incendiary grenade?”

“Sure,” he answered in a sarcastic tone. “The fire would burn itself out within 20 seconds, and it would endanger anyone within a radius of 20 meters, but yeah, you could start one.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Actually… There might be a way…”

Over the next few minutes, Carlos developed a fantastic plan. We moved the pile onto a sandy area next to the river, while Carlos dug a deep hole next to the pile. Carlos ordered us back 30 feet before planting the grenade. He set it for a timed detonation, dropped it in the hole and then frantically buried it. As he ran over to join the rest of us, he shouted, “Whatever you do, don’t look directly at the grenade!”

There was a brilliant flash and a muffled “wummpfsshh.” When I looked up, I saw a radiant column of dust and steam rising 30 feet into the air into the air. Within seconds, another column of steam rose from the woodpile. After about 10 seconds, the pile burst into flame. “It’s like when Elijah defeated the priests of Baal,” Dianna said through chattering teeth. Then she cheered.

We eagerly gathered in a semicircle around the fire. It wasn’t that warm, and it gave off an unpleasant moldy smell, but after the chill of the Devonian sea, it felt wonderful. Dianna curled up next to the fire, using her hands as a pillow. I knelt beside her and adjusted the blanket. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye and smiled. “Thank you, Ted,” she told me. “Thank you for everything.”
I nearly choked with emotion. “You’re welcome,” I said hoarsely.

Carlos provided a merciful distraction. “We ought to roast the eurypterid,” he said. “There’s only two days of food left in the boat, and we need to conserve it.”

We roasted the giant chelicerae over the fire. I took a bite, and decided it was fine. However, Dianna was reluctant to eat such an unsavory creature. Carlos tried to encourage her. “Think of it as a big freshwater lobster,” He said with forced cheerfulness.
“Carlos,” Dianna said somberly, “I know what lobsters eat.”
“In that case,” Carlos said with a sight, “just close your eyes and pretend it’s a PUC. That way, it will at least seem surprisingly tasty.”

We ate quietly for a while. I helped Dianna crack open an armored leg. I felt desperate to tell her what I had longed to for man months, but I had to wait for the right time. After an hour or so, the others started leaving to set up camp, until we had the fire to ourselves. As soon as we had privacy, I spoke loudly and boldly: “Dianna… Dianna, I love you.”

She looked up at me blankly, obviously uncertain how to react. “I-I-” Her words trailed off. After further thought, she answered, “I care about you, too.” She sounded hesitant, even reluctant. There was a full minute of silence. Everyone else tried not to look at us.

I reached down and took Di’s hand. “Di, I don’t just care about you,” I told her. “I strained to keep from shouting. “I love you. Don’t you understand? I’m in love with you!”

She gently pulled her hand free. In a voice even huskier than usual, she said, “Ted, I know you feel that way now, but…”
“I’ve felt this way for two years!” I shouted. Her sad expression nearly silenced me, but I continued brashly, “Every mission I go on, every morning I wake up, I hope that I can spend time with you, and get to know you better.” I paused to wipe a tear from my eye, and then continued in a whisper, “I meant it when I said I would save you or go down with you. I couldn’t bear to live without you!”
“Ted, don’t say that!” Dianna’s face and voice were full of despair.

I leaned closer to her. “It’s true,” I whispered. I stroked her arm, and let my fingers stray. “More than anything, I want to live and die by your side. I want to know you; I want to be with you. I want to—I want to have a family with you.”
“Ted,” Dianna said coldly, “take your hands off of me.”
I reluctantly let go. “Please, Di,” I said, “I couldn’t bear it if you said no…”

Dianna sat up abruptly. “That’s the problem,” she said. Her voice was almost a hiss. “Look, I want to get married as much as anyone, but I want to be a wife, not an idol. Are you ready to serve and be served? Are you really ready to spend your life with me—the real me? I don’t even know if you love me for who I am, or just for qualities you imagine that you see in me.”

I felt hurt, and a little ashamed. “Trust me, Di,” I told her, “I do love you for who you are. We’ve spent too much time together for me not to understand you.” I tried to pat her on the shoulder, but she pushed my hand roughly away. She then started scooting away from me. “Please, Dianna,” I begged, “just think about it.”
The indignation passed from her face. “I already have,” she said. “A long time ago. But I made a decision, and I thought you felt the same way.”

“Ted,” Carlos interrupted, “we need to go check whether the raft is repairable.”
Carlos and I inspected the raft. The extent of the damage was daunting, but there was nothing that we couldn’t mend in a day. We thanked our respective deities that the raft was made of bulletproof carbon fibers; otherwise, we would have sunk within minutes of the collision with the reef. Lesser materials would have ripped wide open. The fabric of the raft had instead received scores of tiny punctures. We actually had to look closely just to find where the raft had been damaged.

“Ted, I want to talk to you about Dianna,” Carlos said casually. “The way you feel is no secret to me. You know that. But this was a bad time, Ted. You’re hurting her when everyone needs to be at their best. Maybe when she isn’t—quite herself. That wasn’t necessarily just her talkin’. Apart from purely psychological trauma, she has a nasty wound in the leg and who knows what from the beating that dunk gave ‘er. We should check her over in the morning. By `we’, I mean NOT you.”

“Could this change her, permanently?”
“That’s a tricky question. The human brain is a fantastically resilient organ. I once met a guy in a VA hospital who walked right into a helicopter rotor, an’ could still do the junior jumble. On the other hand, it’s a very sensitive organ. I’ve seen guys die from head injuries that nobody even noticed till after the fact. The best advice I can give is to ease off. Let her recover, and keep yourself focused on getting all of us home alive. When the time comes, you will both know what’s right.”

At Carlos’s insistence, I slept as far away from Dianna as possible. I left my tent in the middle of the night, and wandered past Dianna’s tent. As I walked past, I heard a soft sound. I stepped closer, and confirmed that I had really heard what I thought I had. Dianna was crying. I went back to my tent feeling sadder than ever. At Carlos’s insistence, I slept as far away from Dianna as possible. I left my tent in the middle of the night, and wandered past Dianna’s tent. As I walked past, I heard a soft sound. I stepped closer, and confirmed that I had really heard what I thought I had. Dianna was crying. I went back to my tent feeling sadder than ever.

In the morning, Dr. Horne was dead. He had apparently died in his sleep from an infection. I ordered heavy applications of antibiotics even to minor wounds, though for all we knew, our drugs could be as useless against Devonian bacteria as an air pistol against a tank. I became downright paranoid about Dianna’s myriad cuts, scrapes and scratches. If I could have, I would have immersed her in a tub of antibiotics. She resented my fretful attention, and emphatically refused to let me administer the medication myself. I reluctantly let Thatcher do it. I stood by and watched nervously, fearing that that my dearest one might die if the first mate missed a single scratch. Dr. Smith tried in vain to dispel my fears. “He could have died of the injury itself, not bacterial infection,” he told me. “Maybe the pteraspid punctured a lung.” I could tell that he didn’t believe what he was saying.

Dr. Horne’s mortal remains presented quite a problem. It seemed inappropriate not to bring his body back to the present for burial. However, I loathed the idea of making a perilous sea voyage with a dead body aboard. The worst part was that we had no way to preserve the body. In fact, we had nothing except his own sleeping bag to cover him with. It did not help that giant arthropods were already finding their way to his carcass. With some reluctance, I suggested that we bury him in the past. The others readily agreed, though I sensed a measure of guilt behind their enthusiasm.

After burying Horne, Carlos, Smith and I got to work repairing the life raft. As I worked, I was annoyed in the extreme by a bumble bee-sized insect that kept flying in my face. I finally took off one of my moccasins and waited for the bug to land within range. Within moments, the arrogant arthropod landed right in front of me, and I smote it mightily. “Damn bug!” I said. It was only then that I noticed that the two paleontologists had stopped what they were doing.

Carlos stared intently at my shoe. “Dr. Smith,” he said, “Do you by any chance recall how old the first known winged insects are?”
“Early Carboniferous,” Smith answered, with a note of excitement mixed with dread.

I guiltily lifted my shoe. About half of the insect was stuck fast to the sole. The rest was mashed into the bottom of the life raft. “You’re saying this is the first winged insect ever discovered?”
Carlos nodded. “And you just pulped it. I’m afraid you’re going to have to donate your shoe to science.”

I reluctantly handed over the shoe. My extra pair was back with the time bell, so I had to walk around barefoot. Dr. Jurgidsen carefully examined the pulverized insect. “This is actually no worse than a typical fossil insect,” he mused. “I can’t do a proper scientific description without a microscope, but I can tell that this is a new type of insect. Its wings could fold, so it must be more advanced than dragonflies. It would be wonderful if we could catch more specimens.”
“If we do, can I have my shoe back?” I griped.

In the afternoon, we piloted the raft through the brackish marshes around us to test my repair job. “This is the kind of environment where our ancestors thrived,” Smith enthused as we poled our way through a half-submerged prairie of horsetails.

“I guess we should be careful, or we might poke great-to-the-ninth-power grandfather’s eyes out,” Dianna snapped. I was troubled by her foul mood. She was always taking skeptical jabs at paleontologists over their belief in evolution, but she had always maintained a polite tone before.

We finally anchored the raft and climbed out to explore the marsh. The water was no more than waist-deep, so we could simply wade around. Dr. Smith speared a few fish, while Carlos and Jurgidsen caught small fish and a few invertebrates with butterfly nets, while I cast about with my trusty rod and reel.

The swamp held a menagerie of wonders and horrors. Dianna was attacked by a small creature that looked and acted like a leech, but was really a jawless fish. I pulled the mouse-sized thing off her leg, and then ordered her back in the raft. Dr. Smith speared a boxy placoderm called a bothriolepid, and made the unpleasant discovery that it could produce an electric current. Fortunately, all he suffered was a mild jolt. Once, we caught a glimpse of a heavily scaled fish the size of a crocodile. It swam away without showing any interest in us. The marsh plants rustled in its wake like long grass.

The arthropods we saw were far more pleasant. There were lots of spiders, some so small that they could barely be seen, and others as large as tarantulas. Some slid like ice skaters across the surface of the water, others sat in webs strung between the horsetails, and I saw a few that floated through the air on the breeze, casting out iridescent drag lines behind them. There were plenty of flying insects about, but we didn’t catch many. Once, a giant, six-winged dragonfly cruised over our heads. It was like an attack helicopter with a rainbow paint job. Carlos took a swipe at the bug, though its two-foot wingspan was almost twice as great as the diameter of his net. He managed to knock the titanic insect into a nosedive, but it recovered just before hitting the water and flew away.

“I need a bloody bigger net!” Carlos exclaimed.
“I wish we had a shotgun and some birdshot,” Jurgidsen said. “Then we could shoot it down.”
“What good would that do?” Carlos asked rhetorically. “The blast would tear it to pieces.”
“Probably, but all we need to describe the species is the genitals.”

I caught eight fish, mostly coelacanthoids. Dr. Smith joyfully identified one of my catches as a very early ray-finned fish. That evening, I managed to start a fire without the help of the grenade, so we were able to cook and eat some of my catches. The ray-fin went into a specimen jar.

I had a very strained conversation with Dianna. We both tried to avoid discussing the events of the night before. The conversation inevitably led to how we were going to get back to the time bell before retraction. Dianna was very concerned about our navigation sensor. “The weather is interfering with the signal from the beacon,” she said. “It keeps fading in and out, and sometimes I get false readings. On top of that, I think the device is damaged. It’s working now, but… there’s no telling if it will keep working all the way back to the bell.”

“Getting dropped in the drink could foul up most any machine,” I commented. A question rose to mind, about what was normally the definitive innocuous topic. “Um… How is the weather?”

“Hard to say,” Dianna said. “The storm front that swamped Kon Tiki has already passed us by, but the seas will stay choppy for the next day or so.”
“Will there be any more storms?”

“Yes,” she said with grim certainty. “I couldn’t give you a precise time, but there’s going to be another major storm within the next 48 hours, and once it hits, it could be days before it blows over. We obviously can’t afford to wait. If we don’t set out by the day after tomorrow, we won’t make it back.”

I was relieved when we finally sailed back to shore. Dianna was waiting for us, obviously worried. The first thing she said as we came ashore was, “Why did you stay out so long?” Tears came unexpectedly to her eyes; she wiped them away in anger. “We were worried about you.” She turned around and stalked back to camp. Even from behind, I could tell that she was blushing furiously.

“Notice,” Carlos whispered, “that she was the only one worried enough to wait for us.”
We set sail at dawn, which in the eighteen-hour Devonian day comes only a few hours after sunset. We all were tired, and Dianna was feeling ill. She vomited so often that a shark could have traced our course just by following the puke. She tried to conceal how badly she felt, and loudly insisted that any signs of illness were purely the result of seasickness. I could tell, however, that she had felt bad even before getting in the boat. I once again feared that she had picked up some deadly Devonian disease.

While she was busy being sick, I put a hand to her forehead. It was much too warm, especially considering the chilly weather. “You have a fever,” I told her.
“I know,” she admitted wretchedly and then vomited again. A few minutes later, she sat up and looked at me. “Do you still think you’re in love with me?”
I gazed at her face for a moment, and then pointed at my chin. She understood my signal, and wiped a streak of slime from her own chin. She missed a spot, so I pointed again. When she was done wiping her face clean, I patted her on the shoulder and said, “More than ever.” Her reaction was a little hard to interpret. For one reason or another, she promptly got sick again.

Thatcher kept us at a cautious pace of 5 knots. Carlos berated him constantly for going too slow, while at the same time chastising him for carelessness whenever we came within a hundred meters of a possible reef. We had to go miles off of our hypothetical straight-line course to avoid all the reefs, so at sunset, we had come barely 20 miles closer to the time bell. We spent the night on another island. Though I felt Carlos was being too harsh with the first mate, I didn’t trust Thatcher to navigate through dangerous waters in the dark.

We only got about six hours of rest before setting sail again. I woke up at the crack of dawn, and found that Carlos was already awake. I discovered him on the shore, keeling in ankle-deep surf. “G’morning, Ted,” he said when he heard me approach. The sound of his voice chilled me. He was talking in a special tone of his, a strangely flat tone that is usually a sign of sheer, abject terror. “There’s something here I think you should see.”
I could already see it. I stepped closer, and cringed. For several minutes, we just stared. Then we heard soft footsteps behind us, followed immediately by a scream. I turned to see Dianna rush to the water’s edge and be sick again. She had awoken and come to see what we were doing, only to behold a sight that would make even a healthy person nauseous.

“Any idea what kind of fish this is?”
“It was a shark, beats me what kind. Don’t much matter.”

We woke up Smith and had him take a look. We didn’t want anyone else to have to look at the grisly find. “Stethacanthus,” he said immediately. “I can tell by the funny brush structure on its dorsal fin. Alive, it would have been about a meter and a half long. Too bad the rest of it is gone.” There was slightly less than half a meter of the shark left.

There were long moments of awkward silence before Carlos asked the obvious question: “What killed it?”
“It’s hard to say,” Smith said hesitantly. He stared at the remarkably smooth edge where the shark had been sheered in two. “Whatever it was, it cut this fish in half with just one bite. It did a very neat job of it, too—this thing looks like it was snipped in two with a giant pair of scissors.” He concluded with a sigh: “Most likely… Dunkleosteus.”
Smith carefully photographed the mutilated shark before we dragged it back out to sea. “There’s something else I should mention,” Smith said. “Sharks don’t have swim bladders, and so they sink to the bottom after they die. To be washed ashore, this shark must have been killed in shallow water. Chances are that the attacker isn’t far from here. It might still be in this harbor.”

“Great,” Carlos muttered. “Just f*in’ great.”
We had a mishap as we packed up our things. As he was taking down the tent, Jurgidsen found a strange, worm-like creature hiding underneath. “It’s an onychophoran!” he exclaimed. “Somebody get a specimen jar!”

Thatcher and I ran over to capture the creature. It was more than two feet long, and about an inch thick. It resembled nothing so much as a moldy kielbasa with lots of stumpy legs. We were out of empty specimen jars, so after some deliberation, we got rid of a coral sample and prepared to place the worm in the now-empty jar. Thatcher bent down to pick it up. “Which end is the head?” he asked.

“The end with those two feelers,” I told him. On a few occasions, I had seen and handled modern onychophorans. As Thatcher reached for the worm’s tail, it suddenly reared up like a cobra and turned to stare into his eyes. I suddenly remembered an important fact of onychophoran biology. “Watch out, they spit!” I said.

Thatcher looked at me funny. “What?” he said. At that moment, the onychophoran sprayed him with disgusting gray foam. He shrieked when some of it struck him in the eye.

“I said, they spit,” I repeated, very unnecessarily. “It’s how they catch their prey.”
The worm tried to make a low-velocity getaway, but it only got a few feet before Carlos stomped on it and cut its head off. He then helped me tend to Thatcher. We washed his eye out with purified water, but the damage was done. “I’m not blind,” the first mate groaned, “but I’m seeing spots.”

Carlos had to pilot us out to sea. Thatcher couldn’t resist the chance to belittle Carlos’s skill, and he groaned constantly about the pain in his eye. Carlos answered Thatcher’s criticisms with blistering profanity. Meanwhile, Dianna got sick again, and didn’t lean over the edge in time. As if that wasn’t irritation enough, Jurgidsen chattered incessantly about the significance of the onychophoran. “It’s the link between arthropods and earthworms,” he repeated at least a dozen times, “and this is the oldest terrestrial one yet discovered.” For once, Dianna passed up the chance to argue with someone about evolution. I grimly put it down to her ill health. After about thirty minutes of this misery and bickering, I felt quite prepared to start throwing people overboard.

“Ted?” Dianna groaned as we sailed out of sight of the island. I looked at her expectantly, hoping that she might have something personal to tell me. No such luck. “I think something is following us.”

She pointed to a patch of water about a hundred yards behind us. I looked closely. There was definitely an unusual amount of rippling at the surface, which would be consistent with a large fish near the surface. “Put the boat in low gear for a few minutes,” I said grimly. “I’m going overboard.”

I had abandoned my scuba gear on the night of the wreck, but I still had my goggles and flippers. I quickly donned those, and armed myself with our remaining boing stick. “Ted—you don’t have to— to—” Di stammered.

“I think I do,” I told her. “Don’t worry; I’m just going to see what’s down there. No matter what I see, I’ll be back in a few minutes.” I then jumped overboard.
The water was a bit murky, but there was no missing the creature nearby. In the bright morning sunlight, the Dunkleosteus’ silvery hide shone almost as brightly as the sun itself. It was obviously swimming after us, and it accelerated when it saw me. It kept correcting for a list to port, and once I saw a glob of blood pop out of its mouth. It was undoubtedly the same one I had fought before. It quickly closed to a distance of fifty yards, almost twice the range of the boing stick. I fired my single shot into a coral outcropping, gambling that the fish had learned to fear the weapon. As I had hoped, the fish turned and swam away. However, it retreated a bit too slowly for me to write it off as a threat.

I promptly returned to the boat. “It’s a `dunk’, the same one that got Captain Bill,” I gasped. “I scared it off with a shot, but it may be back.”
“Before we leave,” Carlos growled, “we really ought to kill that thing.”
It was a very long and very hard day for Dianna. On the day before, she hadn’t had to do too much work, because we had been more concerned with navigating the dangerous reefs than staying on a set course for the time bell. As we drew nearer the time bell and the beacon, it actually became harder to keep ourselves pointed in the right direction. She had to struggle to make sense of the readings, while her sickness only grew worse. I tried to comfort and encourage her as best I could. She seemed to be warming toward me, though I knew better than to assume that it was reciprocated affection. “I think this might be easier,” I told her at one point, “If we tried singing a song.”

“How ‘bout The Song for Gulf War 7?” Carlos suggested. “So long, Mom, I’m off to waste Saddam…”

Dianna skewered him with a bloodshot stare. No further discouragement was necessary. “I have a better idea,” she said. “Let’s do a song they used to sing at my church…”
I had never heard Di sing before. I discovered at that moment that she had an enthralling contralto voice. Soon, we all joined her in song.

I’ve followed another false shepherd
I laid with another wolf in sheep’s skin
No I’m all alone in a valley dark.
Will you leave the ninety-nine to search for me?
And the ninety-nine, will they mind?
Don’t they all get lost too?

They say, ‘You can’t cross the same river twice.’

You can’t go home again can’t do it over again
Forgetting is the best you can get.
Father, can you forget my sins? Can Your water wash my stains away? Can Your Spirit make me over again? Can I come home again?

And when I’m washed up on that furthest shore,
Will you sift the wreck for me?
And if you do, can you pick me up and say,
‘My child, I died for you to live again.
I have kept my best in store.
And it doesn’t matter where you’ve been
When you come home again.

Some time later, Dianna started talking to me about my spiritual life. Before long, the conversation wound its awkward way to the subject of my parents’ death. “Did something happen that made you stop going to church?” she had asked bluntly.
“I suppose I stopped attending church regularly after my parents died,” I said after a moment of thought. “I know I’ve told you about it before. They were both killed in a plane crash while they were on their way to a new mission field.”
“Did you blame God for that?” she asked softly. There was sympathy and sadness in her voice.

“I suppose there were times when I felt a little angry at Him,” I said, “but the real problem was that I blamed myself. When they died, I was on my way to the United States to go to college. If I hadn’t made the decision to go to a college in the US, I would have been flying the plane.” I stared gloomily into the distance. The black clouds of a storm front could be seen well above the horizon. When I looked closely, I could make out gray streaks of rainfall.

“You thought God wouldn’t forgive you for leaving your family?”
“I never really thought about it that way, but I suppose so,” I said. “I certainly put myself through a lot of grief, thinking over whether I should have stayed and whether I could have helped them.” I spent a minute in thought, and then continued, “I guess the worst thing the accident did was shake my sense of purpose. I had really felt that it was God’s will for me to go to the States, and I was sure that it was God’s will for my parents to go minister to hunter-gatherers in Ecuador. But after my parents died, it seemed like I couldn’t be sure of anything.”
There was more silence. Di finally said, “If it’s any help… If it wasn’t for you and your American training, I would be dead.”

“But if it wasn’t for you and me, Captain Bill would still be alive,” I said bitterly. I Looked into her face, and saw an expression of deep sadness and barely-restrained anger. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” I said immediately. The prompt apology didn’t help. Fortunately, Carlos broke in with something that did.
“You ought to know,” he said sternly, “that Captain Bill was going to go back no matter what. He would have done the same things you did, but without someone to back him up, he wouldn’t have had a chance, and he probably would have gotten himself killed in the process. Don’t either of you blame yourselves for what happened.”
Hours passed, largely in silence. The sun drew inexorably toward the horizon, and the storm front drew inexorably nearer. About half an hour before sundown, Dianna let out a horrible string of curses. What’s wrong?” I asked. “Did the device go out?”
“No, but I’ve been misreading it for the last half hour,” she said through tightly clenched teeth. “We’ve gone past the island where the time bell is.”
“That is bad,” Carlos said.

As we tried to get the boat pointed back toward the island, things suddenly got much worse. Our boat was struck from below, so hard that we almost capsized. “What the hell’s happening?!” I shouted as our boat rocked for a second time.
“I think our acquaintance the Dunkleosteus is back,” Carlos said coldly. He drew the submachine gun and fired over the side. While he was shooting, the fish struck again from the other side.

“Shine the lamp on the water!” I shouted to Thatcher. I frantically replaced the boing stick’s barrel, and cursed myself for not replacing it sooner. But then, I reminded myself, if I had reloaded it sooner, I might not have remembered to save the barrel. “I’m going to toss the used barrel overboard,” I said. “With any luck, that will draw the fish away, and I’ll be able to shoot it.” Without waiting for replies, I tossed the spent barrel as far as I could. Thatcher shone the light on the rippling region where the barrel sank. I leaned over the side, ready to shoot the fish as soon as it showed itself. That was nearly the last thing I ever did. The Dunkleosteus leapt from the water like a marlin, lunging straight for me. Carlos grabbed me and pulled me back, saving my life. The fish still came within inches of biting my arm off. The fish slammed into the boat and sank its toothless jaws into a gunwale. I was thrown backwards onto Dianna. There was a volley of shots, followed by a hissing sound. Carlos had shot the fish at point-blank range, forcing it to let go of the boat. Air flowed freely from two large punctures.

Carlos emptied the rest of a magazine into the water. “Don’t like bullets, huh?” he shouted. “Well, you might as well give up ’cause there’s no way you’re gonna get us without taking a lot more of ‘em!” With my ear pressed against a gunwale, I was able to hear a shriek from the fish. It struck us yet again, this time from below, knocking the raft several feet into air. Miraculously, the boat landed right side up.

I lay groaning on top of Dianna, which would have been a rather pleasant way to spend my last moments if she hadn’t been throwing up. I expected a final strike that would sink our craft, but it never came. Moments later, Thatcher shouted, “It’s swimming away!”
“Must have decided we were too tough to handle!” Carlos cackled.
“No, it must have realized it had worse problems than hunger,” Dianna said between heaves. “Don’t you feel it?” I certainly felt it: the first rain drops of the arriving storm.
“We’ve got to hurry!” I said. “Get a bearing on the time bell, Di!”
She was already examining the machine. She shook her head, and then bent over and sobbed. “It’s no use. The machine’s broken. Or the batteries are dead.” She vomited again, which couldn’t have helped matters.

“Can you fix it?” Carlos asked.
“In the dark, on a leaky boat in rough seas, in fifteen minutes or less? Not a chance, even if it is repairable”

“Any idea which direction we should go? A guess?”
Dianna waved over her shoulder. “I don’t know!” she said through her tears. “That way, maybe. Who knows? Doesn’t really matter; we’re doomed anyway.” She threw herself flat in the rising water within the boat.

I hauled her up. “Stay together, Di,” I told her. “We’ll find a way out of this.”
She hugged me tightly. “I don’t think so,” she told me. “But you know something? I’m glad we’re in this together.”

Carlos actually turned the boat in the direction Di had pointed, but Thatcher was trying to stop him. “The fish could have spun the boat 180 degrees!” the first mate was shouting. “Even if she’s remembering the readings correctly, she may have lost her bearings during the attack. You’re gambling with our lives!”
“You got a better f*ing plan?” Carlos retorted coldly. He pushed Thatcher aside and reached for the throttle.

At that moment, I saw something. “Wait!” I exclaimed. Carlos hesitated. “The time bell should be that way,” I said, pointing about sixty degrees from our current heading.
“You sure?” Carlos asked. It sounded like a rhetorical question.
“Do you have a better plan?” I retorted, trying to match his caustic tone.
“Why not?” Carlos mused. He swung the boat around and gunned the throttle as hard as he could. Thatcher was too shocked to protest.

Minutes passed. The boat sank lower and lower. “I see an island!” Dianna cried out. My spirits rose when I saw the telltale streak of luminosity where the sea crashed against the shore. However, the boat sank lower yet. Carlos pumped the accelerator repeatedly in a desperate effort to nurse a little more speed from the boat, while the rest of us frantically bailed water with our bare hands. Smith dumped out the contents of one of the hard-won specimen jars and began using it like a bucket.

The island drew nearer. I felt almost certain that my hunch had been wrong. This was not where the time bell had landed. It was only by chance that I had led us to land at all. We might make it to shore, but we would never return to our own time. For a few minutes, I fantasized that we could still survive. We would live off the land. Dianna and I would start a family, and there would be a thriving colony of humanity. I mused about the shock and confusion that would occur if paleontologists in our own time were to find fossil evidence of our settlement. In the face of facts, however, my whimsies evaporated like snow in the desert. We were vagabonds 360 million years from home. Our supplies were already nearly exhausted. Even if we were able to keep warm and gather enough food to live on, we probably wouldn’t last long. Once our water filters failed, in six months at the most, Devonian germs would begin to take their toll. Some of us would be killed outright, while the rest would be debilitated until they succumbed to starvation or the elements. We would be lucky if any of us were still around after a year. Some of us would go much, much sooner, and I knew with heart-breaking certainty that Dianna would die first. Cold water sloshed freely into the boat. We would sink before we reached shore, I decided, and it would be very much for the best. I impulsively pulled Dianna to me and held her while I cried.

Just when I was resigned to our doom, Smith cried out, “I see light—light from the time bell!” I looked up, and through a mist of tears, I saw a shining electric star: a floodlight on one corner of the bell. I promptly let go of Dianna, and we both began bailing more furiously than before.

Despite our best efforts, it looked like our boat was going to sink just short of shore. “Sweet Mother, preserve us!” Carlos bellowed. He pumped the accelerator one last time, and the boat seemed to pick up speed. Suddenly, we accelerated even more, and our boat began to rise higher in the water. We were caught in an ocean swell. Thatcher seized the tiller and banked the raft to keep it from capsizing. Dianna took my hand, and we both murmured prayers as we cruised toward our destiny. Carlos cried out something much less spiritual. The next thing I knew, we head run aground on some rocks in about four feet of water.

We hastily unloaded the boat, racing the rising waves. Carlos and Thatcher ran ashore with the last of our specimens moments before an exceptionally strong wave sucked the boat out to sea.
“You gotta tell me,” Carlos said after we reached base camp, “how did you know the island was here?”
I sighed; it was time to confess. “It was just a hunch,” I said. Reluctantly, I explained, “I was just looking at the sea, and I saw this silver streak that I realized was the Dunkleosteus. It was heading this way.”
“WHAT???” cried Thatcher. Carlos was for once at a loss for words. He just stood and stared with his mouth hanging open, as if searching his vast vocabulary for words foul enough to express his feelings.
“I just figured, with a storm rising, the dunk would head for the nearest safe harbor, which would be on the island where we landed,” I finished lamely. Carlos’s legs seemed to get weak, and he abruptly plumped down in the sand. Finally, he responded, not with words but with laughter. He laughed and laughed until the Paleozoic woods rang with the sound. Every lungfish and giant bug in the vicinity must have been badly frightened.
Dianna smiled and said, “It just goes to show, even a vicious creature like that fish can do some good.”
“Yeah,” Carlos said, wiping a solitary tear from his eye. “So can a big, dumb meathead like you, Ted.”

I caught four fish in an hour, all fairly small. “I think something spooked the fish,” I said. “When we were here before, I did better than this in half as much time.”
“I can guess what spooked them,” Thatcher said. “Look!”
On the beach a few hundred meters away, a fish had washed up on shore. Carlos steered the tractor to shore to see what it was. It was a big placoderm, almost ten feet long, and it was not in good shape. Something had bitten off most of a fin and tried to crush its head. “Looks like our friend is back,” I said.
“Should we go back to base camp?” Thatcher asked.
“No,” Carlos said coldly. “We should troll the bay until we catch that dunk. It’s a matter of honor. Captain Bill could still be in that thing’s belly. There may not be much left of him, but we have to try to bring back whatever we can for a decent burial.” I could tell from the look in his eye that he was more concerned with avenging our captain than retrieving his body. I didn’t object; I felt the same way.

We discussed how to go about catching the Dunkleosteus. “We ought to use the power winch on the tractor,” Carlos said. “Maybe use a big fish for live bait.”
“No, you can’t cast with the winch,” I said. “It’s best if I reel it in with my rod and reel. Then we can sink a boat hook into it and hold onto it with the winch.”
“Holding onto it won’t be the problem,” Thatcher said. “The problem will be killing it before it can smash our craft to pieces. It must be at least twice the size of the amphibian.”
“The most important thing will be using the right bait,” I said. “We know the fish is attracted to shiny objects. I have an idea for something that could work even better than a real fish…”

Over the next fifteen minutes, I hastily assembled a new lure. I fashioned it from strips of silver fabric that I cut out from an insulated blanket. I attached them all to a small light, which would make the cloth shine even brighter. The final product was about two feet long. I proudly held up my creation and twirled it. The silver strands shone brilliantly in the sunlight. “No Dunkleosteus can resist it,” I said.

“I just hope you have better luck with fish than you do with women,” Thatcher said. I shot him a venomous glance.
“Are you sure you can take the dunk with that rod?” Carlos asked.
“No problem. People have caught great whites with this rod,” I said, a little defensively. “The estimated maximum load is three and a half tons.”
“That fish out there probably weighs more than that,” Thatcher said. “It’s as long as a prize great white, and its armor would make it hundreds of pounds heavier than a shark of the same size. One good tug could snap your rod like a twig.”
“It will hold up,” I said confidently. “Just remember, I’ll be counting on you to take it out as soon as I get it within range.” Doubt entered my mind when I remembered my own failure to kill the fish before. “Actually, I have more doubts about the boing stick than I do about the rod and reel. Do you think the grenade blast could get through all that armor?”
“It won’t matter, because I won’t be aiming for the head,” Carlos told me. “No offense, but that was one thing you did completely wrong when you fought it before. The boing stick is designed to be fired into the belly. The idea is for the shaped charge to cause massive damage to internal organs. Ideally, a shark will have its stomach blown out its mouth.”

On that optimistic note, we went back out to sea. After another hour of fishing, I hooked something BIG.
“Holy s*!” Carlos exclaimed. “That thing is gonna snap!”
“Don’t worry, it’s made of aircraft-grade graphite fibers,” I said. “Flexible, but incredibly strong.” The rod was bent into an “F” shape. As I slowly reeled the fish in, the rod bent ever closer to an inverted “U” shape.

Words can’t describe the grueling battle I had with that fish. I would reel in a few feet of line, only to be forced to let almost as many feet back out when the fish tried to pull free. I was slowly wearing the fish down, but I was being worn down too. My hands blistered, and the ache in my muscles grew exponentially worse. Every few minutes, we would hear an eerie hum over the noise of the engine. That was the Dunkleosteus’ scream, reverberating through our hull. Disconcertingly, the screams did not grow fainter or less frequent as the duel dragged on.

After three hours of fighting, I had the fish within shooting range. When it showed its metallic face, Carlos fired a grenade at it. There was a gout of blood, and I could tell that the fish had grown weaker when I resumed reeling the line in. However, there was still plenty of fight left in the fish. Soon, it was thrashing about at the surface, raising its body halfway out of the water. Carlos fired another grenade, but missed. “Steer for the shallows!” Carlos called to Thatcher. “We don’t want to give this thing room to dive!” He then tried softening it up some more with the Super Uzi.

Thatcher did as instructed. I continued to reel the fish in. Just when it seemed that victory was assured, catastrophe struck. Without warning, my reel exploded. Fishing line flew all over the deck. It then immediately began to move like a herd of earthworms as the fish rushed for freedom. I grabbed the loose spool off the deck and tried to pull it in by hand, but it was obviously a hopeless fight. All I got in return for my efforts was a nasty cut when the line slashed through my glove.

“I’ve got a better idea!” Carlos shouted. Dropping his weapons, he grabbed a fistful of line and knotted it around a fixture on the boat deck. “Haul ass, Thatcher!”
Thatcher brought the Amphibian to full power. To my amazement, Carlos’s hastily made knot held against the fish’s best efforts. “Don’t act so surprised,” Carlos said when he noticed me staring at the knot. “I wouldn’t have lasted long in the Indonesian occupation force if I hadn’t been able to tie people up securely.”

The fish fought back so hard that it made the craft rear back like a horse. It might have broken loose, if our tracks hadn’t finally touched bottom. The added traction allowed Thatcher to overpower the fish. Soon, we had the fish thrashing around behind us in waters barely five feet deep. As we neared dry land, Carlos pushed the boing stick into my hands. “Go finish the job,” he told me.

Filled with bravado, I climbed out of the Amphibian and waded toward my harnessed foe. The water was up to my shoulders. I held the boing stick just above the waves and carefully aimed at the fish’s body, just behind the pectoral fins. The fish raised its head out of the water and screeched. In the air, the noise was like nails on a blackboard. The fish slowly turned to face me, obviously preparing for a vengeful last charge. Still, I held my fire, savoring the moment. Finally, I spoke: “Smile, you spawn of a fish!” Then I fired. There was a spray of blood and flesh. The fish let out one last groan as it rolled over on its side. Then it was still, except for a feeble post mortem twitching of its tail.
Carlos waded up beside me. “Sheesh. Bad puns are supposed to be my department,” he said. I paid no attention. Something was happening to the slain fish. I waded nearer.
“Sweet Mother!” Carlos exclaimed. I shot him a dirty look. “Hey, no pun intended,” he said. We both stepped nearer. There was genuine awe in Carlos’s voice as he continued: “Maybe this was why it—she—was so aggressive. She was eating for…” His voice trailed off as he tried to count the slender, translucent young that were streaming out of the fish’s body. Each was about six inches long. By my count, there were at least seven of them. There’s no telling how close the mother had been to term, but her offspring were obviously quite capable of surviving on their own. We watched in silence as they swam swiftly away.

“It’s a shame you didn’t catch any of the young,” Smith told us after we hauled the Dunkleosteus back to camp. “However, this will vastly improve our knowledge of arthrodire biology. We should take a picture of the three of you with the fish, for posterity.

Carlos, Thatcher and I posed in front of the giant placoderm. At my insistence, Dianna stood with us. It took some persuading, for the dunk smelled even worse than ordinary dead fish. “Without your help, I wouldn’t have survived our first encounter with it,” I reminded her. Carlos and I put on our biggest smiles for the camera. Carlos held the boing stick, while I held my “trusty” rod. The damage to the rod was irreparable, but
I keep it on my wall as a trophy. The fish itself was shipped to the Smithsonian in an oversized cargo container full of formaldehyde. Careful measurements showed that it was 29 feet, 8.73 inches long and weighed 10,568.95 pounds. I have been officially credited with the largest fish ever caught with a harpoon, though they put an asterisk next to my name in the record books.

“Maybe they should have just created a new category: ‘fish caught with rod, reel, submachine gun, grenade launcher and tractor’,” Carlos mused.
The remains of Captain Bill MacGregor were found “mostly intact” in the fish’s stomach. He was buried in a cemetery in Maryland, as per his wishes. (It was obviously not an open casket service.) I still sometimes regret that we did not bring back Dr. Horne, but my guilt was assuaged when I learned that his will called for him to be cremated and his ashes scattered. I like to think he would have been satisfied to be buried in the prehistoric world he spent his life studying.

Hours before we returned to the present, I had a talk with Dianna. “I still haven’t made up my mind,” she told me. “To be frank, I think I need to get to know you a little better before I can make a decision. Please don’t ask me about it again; when I make my decision, I will tell you. Until then, be patient, and know that I do care about you.”
You might say it took a lot of time—360 million years, and 6 weeks.

Di’s treatments were overseen by a new company physician, named Charles Ling. He was Asian, with skin a shade darker than most, in his late 40s or early 50s. He usually wore a cell phone that clipped to one ear; a tiny attached screen hung like a monocle in front of one eye. He carried a large briefcase made of bulletproof plastics, presumably first used during a term as an UNCOST health adviser to some less-than-stable nations. He was a good-humored and charming man, but not afraid to state a problem bluntly. He was the one who told us (that is, me, Di and Carlos) about Dianna’s other injury, a few days after our return

“Dr. Gonzalez, you are making an excellent recovery,” Ling said. “The infection in your ankle is receding, and—as I am sure you have noticed—the swelling is going away. You are now well past the stage where amputation would have to be considered.” I could tell from the tone of his voice that the news was not all good. “We conducted a careful examination for other injuries, particularly in the head. We found fairly extensive head trauma. In hindsight, you must have suffered a concussion.” (I winced, remembering our night by the campfire, and realizing for the first time how much I must have put her through.)

“The most extensive trauma is in the right temple. You suffered a minor fracture, which has already begun to heal. More seriously, you suffered sub cranial trauma—in essence, a bruise on the brain. Blood is pooling in the space between your brain and your skull, and it is already causing cerebral tissue to become enflamed. It is vital to operate as soon as possible.”

There was a long moment of silence. I felt heartsick, just as I had when I feared her dead in the shipwreck. Di was the one who spoke, more hoarsely than usual: “What will it take to fix it?”

“By the standards of neurosurgery, the treatment will be routine,” Ling said confidently. “I have already contacted several highly capable physicians, and they will be able to operate within the week. There are, however, certain necessary measures that may seem drastic. To operate at all, it will be necessary to remove a piece of your skull. This can be reinserted after the surgery, but it will be necessary to install a titanium plate to hold it in place. This plate may be removed once the bone has fused, but I advise against it. During the surgery itself, it may prove necessary to operate below the surface of the brain, and even with the best non-invasive techniques, this will almost certainly involve the permanent removal of a small portion of the brain. I have a legal obligation to inform you of this, and you have the right to decline treatment.”

Dianna laughed, with more than a trace of bitterness. “What’s to choose? Go ahead.”
The operation, from the beginning of preparation to the last suture, took 22 hours. I stayed in the hospital the whole time. In hour two, Dr. Ling told me that the doctors were making the first incision in her skull. In hour five, he reported that the treatment of the injury itself had begun. At hour 12, he told me that the treatment was complete, and the doctors were now working to replace the detached portion of her skull. During hour 21, he reported that the bone was fitted in place, and the doctors were performing a skin graft. At hour 22, the operation was finished. 90 minutes later, they wheeled her into the visiting room.

I went in to post-op immediately, though I knew there was no chance that she would be in shape to talk. I was startled to find that her eyes were open. She raised her head with difficulty, and smiled at me. I darted to her side and took her hand, not withstanding the raised eyebrows of the attendant. “Rest, Reyna,” I told her. I stroked her face, carefully avoiding the stitches on her forehead. Her skin was moist, and slightly chilly. She lay back, squeezing my hand tightly. Then her grip loosened, and she went to sleep.

A week after the operation, she was sent home, with the understanding that she would undergo enforced bed rest and physical therapy. Over the next two months, Carlos and I visited regularly, and assisted her in every way possible. A number of past clients sent messages of support. Dr. Carradine flew to El Salvador for a visit. All the while, romance thrived between Dianna and me, though our times together could scarcely have been further from the usual romantic activities. I helped her with therapy, kept her apartment clean, and ran errands for her while she was bed-ridden. On more than one occasion, she rewarded a small favor by ordering a dozen roses.

It was clear to me that Di was changed. But I could not be sure how much of it was from the ordeal of recovery, how much was a reflection of her changed feelings toward me, and how much was a result of her injury. At times, being with her seemed like being with a different person—or, even, several people. I quickly observed several distinct demeanors. One I dubbed “bubbly Di”. This was the most surprising to see. When she was with others, she would be talkative, more outgoing, and a little less abrasive than in the past. She was also a little freer in her speech and behavior. She spoke more frankly about her own feelings, and about issues beyond the strictly intellectual plane she usually dwelt in. On occasion, she said things that were “off-color”, even profane. Once, at a dinner to celebrate two months of successful rehabilitation, she had too much to drink. When Carlos said as much, she answered, “No! Just enough!”

When she was alone with me, or in small groups, darker demeanors came forth. There were truly frightening phases, which I called “quiet Di”. There were many moments, significant in hindsight, when she seemed to “space out”: to stop talking, not notice her surroundings, or do things she could not explain or even clearly remember afterward. During one of these episodes, she struck me with no apparent provocation and knocked me unconscious. Carlos, who was fortunately present, said he had to pull her off of me and lock her in her bedroom. When I regained consciousness, perhaps twenty minutes after it happened, Carlos was standing guard at her door with a rock hammer he had retrieved from his car.

The most painful times, but in the long run, perhaps, the most helpful, came in phases I called “weepy Di”, characterized by depression, anxiety and occasional outpourings of shame over the past. On more than one occasion, I stopped her, and begged her to tell me no more. “I love you, and I want to marry you,” I told her at one point. “I forgive you, no matter what you’ve done, even if I never know just what I’m forgiving. Isn’t that how forgiveness is meant to be?”

She only cried harder. “That’s pretty much what my ex said,” she cried.” That’s what he said at first.” Then, after a few minutes rocking in my arms, she began to softly sing:

They say, ‘You can’t cross the same river twice’.
You can’t go home again
Can’t do it over again
Forgetting is the best you can get.

She looked up into my eyes. “If we could go back to our own past, and see those things… Would you keep them from happening, make them never exist? And even if you did, could you still forgive them?”

“If we did,” I responded gently, “can we be sure that we would still be here?” I embraced her, with tears trickling from my own eyes. “I know it hurts. But we can’t be who we are without our past, and we have to accept whatever evil we went through to get here along with the good we have even now. I guess even time travelers can’t get around that.” She threw her arms around me and cried harder.

As the weeks passed, she talked with increasing frequency and excitement about getting married. Things came to a head in the fifth week of home care. “I don’t really care about the ring, or even the ceremony,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, we can just have a civil ceremony and have a reception for friends and family. In fact—did you know we already meet all the prerequisites of a civil union? Listen to this form: ‘To establish a civil union, it is necessary and sufficient to demonstrate a prior relationship, including (but not limited to) the sharing of a common dwelling for four or more days a week; shared income; provision of medical or other care; a shared legal or biological offspring; an express wish to bear and raise a common offspring; and Other.’ All we would have to do is fill out this form and send it to a government office.”

I was quick to shush her. “I’m looking forward to getting married too, but I can wait. I’m glad to,” I told her at one point. “And this isn’t really about being excited, is it? You’re afraid that given enough time, I might decide to back out.”

She sighed. “Maybe you’re right. I’ve felt afraid… but not so much of that,” she said. “Sometimes… This will sound crazy, but sometimes I’m not sure how much time we might have. I go through times when I’m scared I won’t live another night. And I get nightmares.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.

“You were right. But it isn’t just that,” Di told me later. “I’ve been having these feelings of…of…total dread. Like there’s no future for me. Like there might not be a future for anybody. And I’ve been having nightmares.” With a little coaxing, she described it: “It’s not the kind of dream where I feel like it’s happening to me. It’s like I know I’m dreaming, but it still seems real. I’m on a road—and the road is time. Ahead of me is a man made of metal. It’s like he’s made of angles. He’s coming toward me… and he’s coming between you and me. And standing there by the road, just watching, is a man. At least, he looks like a man. But inside, he’s…chaos. Ever seen a representation of a shape that is geometrically impossible, or a graph of an equation with no real solution? I see him like that. And beyond him is a black wall—a black wall of nothing. Not emptiness; emptiness still has length, width and volume. Just nothing. And that’s when I wake up.”

“I can’t tell you what it means,” I told her. “But I can tell you this. I love you. I want to spend my life with you. No matter what happens, I will never leave you. If anyone or anything should come between us, I will fight my way back to you. That’s a promise. No form, no ceremony, no vow, no ring, no night together could be more binding than that. If you can’t trust me now, nothing else is going to make it better. Can you trust me?” After a long moment of silence, she nodded. From that evening on, she was happy, and “quiet Di” and “weepy Di” seemed to go dormant.

It was during an expedition to the Miocene a few months later that I finally proposed. After she said she was interested in pursuing a relationship, our courtship proceeded rapidly. I knew that we both felt there was no point in waiting any longer. I developed an elaborate plan to propose to her after a picnic dinner under a pristine sky where the stars shone undimmed by man-made lights. What I didn’t count on was that said sky was filled with smoke from a forest fire. I felt annoyed that my perfect plan had been so perfectly fouled up. The prospect of possibly being burned alive by the advancing flames was also a bit of a drag.

Hours before our return to the present, my fiancé and I watched the advancing flames from the edge of the temporal displacement platform. I sat, and Dianna lay on her back. The orange glow from the fire provided more illumination than the smoke-obscured sun. I reached over and rubbed her exposed midriff. She giggled and pushed my hand away. “I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too,” I said. I still felt a sense of euphoric fantasy every time I heard her say those words. I glanced at the fire, which was now about half a mile away. “Think it will reach us?” I asked.
“No, we’re definitely safe,” she said. “It’s, what, 15 minutes until we go?”
I glanced at my watch. “Thirteen minutes and forty seconds,” I said.

There was a long, somewhat awkward silence. A herd of Syndyoceras thundered by a hundred meters away. The animals looked like antelope, but the paleontologists said they were more closely related to camels. Then Carlos came stomping over. “Hey, lovebirds!” he shouted. “All the specimens and equipment are loaded, no thanks to you lazy bums.” He cracked a smile. “C’mon, it’s ten minutes until extraction. And by the way, Di, I totally agree with your decision. Ted’s genes definitely deserve to be preserved.”
Dianna took another look at the fire. “The wind’s kicking up. Sparks from the fire may reach us before we leave,” she said. “Is the Ora fireproof?”

The question was obviously meant for Carlos. As a former soldier, he had faced Ora armored cars in combat. “I’m afraid not,” Carlos said grimly. “The hull is almost impervious to heat, but the tires burn like sterno logs. If one of the middle tires catches fire, the flames can go straight from there to the fuel tank. If that happens… well, then we would have a `fiery dragon’ on our hands.” He wiped his brow, as if once again feeling the heat of some explosion from his army days.
“In that case, we should spray the tires with the fire extinguisher,” Di said
Carlos nodded. “Yes, that would work against stray sparks. I’ll handle it. You guys buckle up.”

I took the front seat, and Dianna rode shotgun. We had spent almost every night of the trip there in the cab, talking for hours about anything, everything or nothing. I flipped a switch, and heard a faint whir as four legs lowered from the vehicle’s sides. The legs had originally been designed to absorb the recoil of heavy weapons and to raise the vehicle during maintenance procedures. Now, they helped absorb the terrific shock that came with time displacement. “Stay buckled into your seats,” I said into the intercom. “Don’t brace yourselves; that will only make the shock worse. Just sit back and relax.” I gazed at Di. She blushed, but locked eyes with me. Then she reached out and took my hand.

“You know, I’ve been attracted to you since we met,” she said. “But it seemed like just a silly crush, and I was engaged…” She stopped to wipe a tear from her eye. She had not yet told me the full story of her breakup with her ex-fiancé. A bright bolt of electricity shot between the poles. The time machine was firing up.

I told her,” We both needed time to figure out what was right. Don’t be sad, and don’t be afraid. I’ll always be here for you.” For a moment, my eyes flicked to the windshield. In that moment, I saw something move outside. I stifled a curse and leaped to my feet. I grabbed the nearest weapon, which was an A^3 Eliminator hanging above the door. In the passenger area, I saw Carlos sitting down and preparing to buckle up. “Carlos, get a weapon! There’s a stowaway on the platform. SORRY ABOUT THIS, DIANNA!” Outside, the five-minute alarm sounded.

I got out the door and saw the stowaway. It was a Syndyoceras, undoubtedly a stray from the herd that had just gone by. It had 4 horns, two at the rear of its skull and two side-by-side on its snout. Carlos raised his weapon to shoot, but hesitated. Then he lowered the weapon. There reason was obvious: The syndie was standing in front of one
of the poles. A bullet that missed or exited the syndie might disable the time machine. “Aw, —–,” Carlos said. “What do we do now?”

“Let’s try to scare it off,” I suggested. I shouted an old soccer cheer while pounding the floor with the butt of the dinosaur rifle. Carlos joined in with a profane battle cry and 3 bursts into the air. I fired a thunderous shot of my own. Bolts of energy crackling through the air added to the noise. But the syndie was unperturbed. As the two-minute alarm sounded, it sat down.

Carlos finally took direct action. He fired one more burst and screamed, “Get off our time machine, ya cousin of a camel!” Then he rushed at the stowaway. The beast bounded to its feet. A disconcertingly human sneer was on its face; the hell glow of the forest fire made the expression even more unnerving. It charged and stabbed Carlos in the thigh with one of its rear horns. Carlos fell to his knees, and the syndie stood up on its hind legs and pummeled him with its hooves.

I circled this bizarre fight, trying to find a way to shoot the syndie without hitting Carlos or the pole. Before I could line up a shot, the syndie tried to retreat back to the corner. I stepped directly in its path. I couldn’t fire without hitting Carlos. Instead, I used the Eliminator first as a shield to block the thrusting horns, then as a club to drive the animal back. Unfortunately, the syndie reared up on its hind legs and countered with a hoof to the forehead. The gun fell from my hands as I went reeling into the pole. The syndie lowered its horns for a textbook goring. Before it could drive its horns home, a volley of shots brought it down.

“Carlos, are you OK?” I said.
“Jus’ a concussion and a bruised kidney or two,” Carlos mumbled. I saw that he was still kneeling. Dianna was standing next to him, with the rifle in her hands.
“90 seconds to departure,” she said succinctly.
She moved toward me, but I waved her back. “Get Carlos to his seat, and then strap yourself in. I’ll pitch the syndie overboard.”

I watched as Dianna led Carlos back to the Ora. Carlos was mumbling, “OK, here’s what we’ll say. A three-ton enteledont charged onto the platform, I was trampled during a heroic diversion, and Ted shot it when it was about to eat you.” The syndie may have damaged his body and his pride, but nothing could put a dent in Carlos’s sense of humor.

I turned to dispose of the syndie, and got a nasty surprise. It was back on its feet. Unable to gather enough strength for a charge, it staggered toward me with its head swinging. I took a step back, narrowly avoiding possible disembowelment, only to step right off the platform. I tumbled down the hill, but stopped myself by grabbing hold of a tree root. I felt a tingle of energy as I crawled back onto the platform. I found myself face to face with the syndie. It snorted in warning, spraying bloody saliva in my hair. I drew my bush knife, and grabbed one of its horns with my free hand. I held its head down just long enough to cut its throat. There was a sizzle as the dying animal tumbled through the energy field and off the platform. The time machine was safe. Now I had to get to my seat.

I dropped the rifle and ran into the Ora. I was halfway to the cabin when the time bell returned to the present. I felt another tingling sensation as we went from one time to another. For a fraction of a second after we arrived, nothing happened. Then the platform’s supports touched the ground. It is a little-known fact that the spinning of the Earth has slowed down over time. This makes returning to the present from another geologic era like jumping off a bullet train. In this case, the resulting jolt knocked me off my feet and into unconsciousness.

I woke to the sound of Dianna’s throaty voice: “Ted? Ted…” I became aware of motion and a pillow under my head. I was being carried on a stretcher. I opened my eyes to see lights and a steel ceiling. I was in the corridor leading to the temporal displacement chamber. Dianna’s face appeared overhead. She smiled and whispered, “I saw what you did. Thank you.”
I smiled back, and managed not to groan in pain. “Just doing my job,” I said. I sat up and spoke to the stretcher-bearers. “Guys! I can walk! Could you please let me down?”

Carlos’s grinning face came into view. “How ungrateful! I let you take the stretcher, and the first thing you do is complain.” There was a dull clumping; I looked down and saw that he was using the Eliminator as a crutch.
We took a left turn into the new infirmary. Carlos didn’t quite make it. There was a thump and a metallic ‘whang’ as he collapsed just outside the door. The stretcher-bearers set me unceremoniously on a bed and went back for him. Dr. Ling greeted us. “What seems to be the trouble this time?”

“A llama creature kicked him in the head, and he got tossed when the TDD landed,” Dianna explained. “He also took a nasty cut to the chest.” I looked down, and saw that she was right. The syndie’s horns had come closer than I had realized.

“Well, we’ll patch you up, and do a scan to make sure we didn’t miss anything.” Ling turned to Carlos and said, more in weary cynicism than in shock, “Dear God! You let this man walk in here?”
“He was very insistent,” a stretcher-bearer said defensively.
“He yelled, and made some pointed gestures with the assault rifle,” Dianna whispered.
“Put some antibiotics on this man’s wounds and put a tourniquet on the leg, like you should have before you left the time bell,” Ling ordered. “Then give him a transfusion; his blood type will be on file. We’ll need to scan him to determine the extent of his injuries. Mr. Flockman, if you’ll remove your shirt, we can scan you right away.”

I obeyed, a little self-consciously. “Maybe I should go,” Dianna said.
“You’ve seen me shirtless before,” I told her. “I’d like to have you here.”
“Put these on,” an aide told me. He handed me what looked like a pair of sunglasses dipped in black paint. There was a series of blinding flashes from the scanner. When I took my glasses off, I saw several images of my insides on an oversized screen.

Ling peered at the screen and pronounced, “Looks like a broken nose, a broken rib on the right- pardon me, the left side, and some blunt force trauma to the forehead. Looks like the cut is only a flesh wound. No internal injuries.”
Carlos chuckled. “If I have any internal injuries, I sure hope they’re on both sides.”

The scan showed that he had none. Ling bandaged both our injuries, and warned Carlos not to put pressure on his leg. Then we all walked out together. We were greeted by Dr. Werner and Lou Tanaka. Dianna gave Lou a hug, and ecstatically showed off her engagement ring. “Oh, no, she’s got `fourth-finger syndrome,” Carlos said. I ignored him.
Lou and I enthusiastically bowed to each other. “Congratulations!” he said. “Have you decided on a date?”
“Not really,” Di said. She turned to me and said sweetly, “Is tonight all right?”
I laughed. “No, we haven’t set a date,” I said. “But whenever it is, we want you to be the best man.”

“I’m terribly sorry about the close call,” Dr. Werner said. “The time probes showed that there had been forest fires in the area, and I tried to avoid them.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “Forest fires happen all the time. I’m sure you did your best.”
“No, I didn’t,” Werner said. “I could have done much better. The problem is that the TDD is imprecise, and UNCOST won’t allow me to make the necessary improvements. The way it is now, there’s a margin of error of decades. But if they would only let me refine the program, I could be precise to within a matter of days. A new client is offering to pay for the installment. In fact, he’s hosting a dinner for the Naughtenny Moore staff next week. I hope you will all be able to attend.”

We exited the main building through what had become a trophy hall. Display cases, shelves and several complete specimens of very large animals were scattered about the former hangar. What little order there was based upon the order in which we collected them. A new arrival hung from the ceiling: a Dunkleosteus. As we walked under it, it snapped its jaws and screamed. Dianna gasped and pressed against me. “It’s an animatronic replica,” Lou explained. “We shipped the real one to the Smithsonian.” I gently moved away from Di, mainly so she wouldn’t feel me shudder.

“Dr. Wrzniewski!” someone called as we walked out the door. The speaker was a man in a business suit, with the look of an official. He walked up to Carlos and gave him a card. “This man wishes to speak with you.” The man got in his car and drove away. I saw that the car had official UN plates.

Carlos just stood there, staring at the card. When I tried to see it for myself, he stuffed it in his pocket. “Somebody wants to talk to me about something that happened when I was in the military,” he said. Then he went limping toward his car. I went after him.

“Come on, Carlos, talk to me,” I said. “What’s this about?”
Carlos turned his head. In his eyes, I could see the look of great but carefully veiled fear. “I can’t talk about it,” he said. “I’m not allowed to.”
“Can you at least tell me who wants to talk to you?” I said. “Can you tell me if you’re in trouble?”
“If you drive me home,” Carlos said, “I’ll tell you what I can.” I agreed.

I got in the driver’s seat, and he stretched out in the back. After a few minutes, he began to talk. “There’s no trouble—not legal trouble. As you’ve probably guessed, the man who wants to talk to me is with UNCOST. He’s in charge of an investigation into an incident that I was involved in, a long time ago.”

“It was Omega Facility, wasn’t it?” In the aftermath of the previous attack, I had discretely investigated Carlos’s background. I had suspected for some time that he had been involved in the Omega Facility incident. The so-called “Omega Facility incident”, is generally considered to be the deadliest episode in the history of biological warfare. Precious little is known about it, partly because of official secrecy, but also because nearly all the witnesses are dead. In the closing weeks of the Serbo-Albanian War, Albanian troops had closed in on a Serbian bioweapons facility. A deadly bioagent had been released. Thousands of civilians and military personnel on both sides were killed. It was very persistently rumored that a team of EU troops were sent to investigate, but never returned.

“Put the pieces together, did you? Well, I won’t deny it,” Carlos said.
“Has something been found?”
Carlos laughed bitterly. “If they did, do you think they would tell me? If they did, the question would remain of what they found.” I nodded again. The Serbs had not only developed conventional bioweapons, but pursued a program of ‘human enhancement’, led by the French biochemist. Dr. Arnault Chablan, sometimes known as ‘Dr. Nibeaux’. He had previously won a Nobel Prize for developing treatments of the congenitally ill. He had also been a leading investigator of ESP, and a prominent member of the Aryan Ophites, an occult society loosely rooted in Nazism. It was generally believed that Chablan had joined the Serb bioweapons program simply as a means to pursue the Ophite goal of breeding a physically and spiritually perfect form of the human race. No accounts of his death have reached the general public, but all official references say that he died in 2047. One of his known subjects, a convict and fellow Ophite known only as Zaratustra, had been briefly captured at that time, but escaped.

“But, that’s not what I really wanted to talk to you about. I asked you once before if you really believed in your god. Now, I want to ask you this: Do you believe in demons?” I was too surprised to answer. “Demons, now, Them I believe in. I believe in Them because I’ve seen Them. I saw them, there at Omega Facility. There were things there that looked human… except for the eyes. But they could do things—make things happen—that no man could do. And there is no doubt in my mind that the reason is that it wasn’t just the things there, but THEM working through the things. Whatever the men from UNCOST are investigating, it’s more of Their work. And I know if They are around, the only sensible thing to do is to run. That’s why, as soon as I talk to this man, I’m going on leave and taking the first flight to Canada. I suggest that you do the same. Marry Di soon—Hell! Call a justice of the peace and do it tonight!—and get as far away from El Salvador as you can.” I said nothing. What was there to say?

Soon, we reached Carlos’s house. After helping Carlos out of the car, I called Di and asked her to pick me up. “Thanks for the ride, and thanks for listening,” Carlos said. “I know you think I’m nuts. But still think about it!”

After the surreal conversation with Carlos, Dianna’s company was a welcome relief. Di sensed that I was troubled. “What’s the matter?” she asked.
I decided not to tell her about what Carlos had said, at least not in full. “Carlos seems upset,” I told her. “He’s planning to take a break and go to Canada.”
“Did he say anything about what that man wanted to talk to him about?”
“A little,” I said. “He says that it’s part of an ongoing investigation into something that happened years ago.”

“Was it in Serbia?” Dianna asked.
“Yes,” I said, startled. “Did he tell you he was in the Balkans? I didn’t find out until today.”
“He mentioned it, once,” Di said. We said nothing more about it. Dianna was clearly troubled. I suspected that Carlos might have told her even more than he told me.
I finally broached the question that weighed heaviest on both our minds. “Di, when do you want to get married?” I asked.

“To be frank, I really do wish it could be tonight,” she said. I was jolted by her answer, but she quickly added, “Of course, what we need is to wait. There’re things we still need to talk through, and I suppose we should get premarital counseling. I don’t care about planning a big wedding. Let’s aim to get it done by October.”

The woman spoke first. “Hello, I am Dr. Sara Marcos,” she said. “You must be Ted Flockman and Ms. Gonzalez.”
“Soon to be Mrs. Flockman,” she interjected.

Dr. Marcos gave a disdainful frown. “My companions are Albert Schwartz and his sons, Harold and Henry,” she said. I took another look at the twins. Their pallor and features were almost Asiatic. Their “father”, on the other hand, was the quintessential Nordic, with skin so pale he might be mistaken for an albino. I decided that they had to be adopted, though I was struck by a fundamental similarity in build. In spite of his greater height, the elder had the same stout build as the twins. Marcos noticed me looking at her companion’s sunglasses, and gave him a nudge. He hastily took them off, though the gloves stayed on. She then continued, “We are working for Charles Hodges on the upcoming expedition.” I recognized the name, and was immediately impressed. Hodges was one of the wealthiest men in the world. Given his reclusive reputation, I was surprised that he was hosting a dinner.

I was decidedly put off by Dr. Marcos, and was glad when Lou came over. “I see you’ve met Marcos and the Schwartzes,” he said. “Come on to the dining hall and meet the host.”

Counting ourselves, there were 33 people at the dinner. Dianna and I were seated as guests of honor at the same table as our host. Drs. Werner, Marcos, and Ling, the Schwartzes and an unfamiliar man in a wheel chair were also seated there. The man in the wheel chair was introduced as Dr. Paulus. Hodges himself required no introduction.

The billionaire was very different from what I had expected. The first thing I noticed was that he wore frameless sunglasses with mirror-like lenses that wholly concealed his eyes. The spoon-like lenses distorted and fractured what they reflected, like the eyes of an insect. I immediately felt embarrassed for staring at Schwartz. The second thing I noticed was how youthful he looked. I had known he was young, only 27, but his appearance and especially his behavior was more fitting for a nine-year-old boy. His child-like qualities were reinforced by an unusually large head and a disorderly mop of a haircut. He tended to talk quickly, on a bewildering range of topics, and as he spoke, he would nod his slightly oversized head like a living bobble head doll.

“I’m very glad to meet you,” he said on introduction. “I’ve read all about your work. Would you like some soy steak? I’m a vegetarian. I don’t eat animal meat or products. If you wanna real steak, I can tell my cook to fix you one. It’s wonderful to meat you, just wonderful.”

“The soy steak is fine,” I said.
“I would like a real one,” Di said.
“Very well,” said Hodges. “Waiter! Two steaks, one soy and one beef. It’s unfortunate that Dr. Wrzniewski could not be here. I was looking forward to meeting him.”
“Carlos was injured on our last expedition to the Miocene,” I said. “He’s decided to take time off until he recovers.”

“Unfortunate. Unfortunate,” Hodges said. “I was looking forward to meeting him.”
He then began to enquire into my various adventures. I was pleased by his interest, but his limited attention span kept me off-balance. Many times, when I began to answer a question, he would say something like, “Fascinating, fascinating,” and then ask another question about a completely different topic.

There was a break in the conversation when a waitress served us soup. “Careful, it’s hot,” the waitress warned. I sipped a little from my own spoon. I had to disagree with the waitress: It was scalding! Beside me, I heard a loud slurp. I turned and saw the elder Schwartz drinking from his upraised bowl as if it were a coffee mug. He showed no signs of displeasure.
Dianna struck up a conversation with Dr. Marcos. “What kind of research do you do?” Dianna asked.

“I’m a Professor of Chiropterology at the Federal University of Jakarta,” Marcos replied. When she saw our confusion, she explained, “I study bats. In fact, I’m one of the premiere authorities on the subject. I have reason to believe that a fragmentary fossil mammal from Cretaceous Montana was either a bat or one of their immediate ancestors. If we can collect a living specimen, it could solve a lot of puzzles about bat evolution.”
I braced myself, expecting Di to challenge Marcos’s belief in evolution. Instead, she simply asked, “What puzzles?”

“For one thing, we aren’t sure whether bats evolved flight once or twice,” Marcos said. “The bats are divided into two suborders, the Megachiroptera and Microchiroptera, and we aren’t sure if they arose from a common flying ancestor or if the two suborders evolved flight independently. I lean toward the latter view. There are also questions about pre-adaptation. For example, the Microchiroptera hunt and navigate by sound. But, is the echolocation system one of their adaptations to flight, or did something like it already exist in a flightless ancestor?”

“Those are certainly some tricky questions,” Di said evenly. She saw my somewhat relieved expression, and squeezed my hand under the table.

“Mammal research will only be one facet of the expedition,” Hodges said. “We will also be conducting research on dinosaurs, of course, and particularly dinosaur behavior. We will be using some rather innovative methods. The Schwartzes will perform a demonstration tomorrow.”

The steaks arrived. The Schwartzes fell upon theirs like carnosaurs, quickly but methodically cutting away large bites and swallowing them after only a little chewing. I noticed another oddity about Albert. The middle finger on his right hand did not bend when he picked something up. This made his grip on his knife a little unsteady, and obviously made for social awkwardness. I concluded that he must have lost his finger somehow, and replaced it with a rigid prosthesis. That would explain why he wore gloves. I considered asking about it, but decided not to.

For the first time, Ling spoke. “Your kitchen staff is very good,” he said. “Are they your own staff?”
“Of course,” Hodges said. “My father gathered some of the best chefs in the world to serve in his household, but he made sure that others could enjoy their labors whenever possible. I continue that tradition.”

“I’m surprised you don’t hold dinners like this often,” Ling commented. “Your father was famous for holding extravagant social functions.”

Hodges laughed. “Quite true. I could put it down to humility, but the real truth is that I’ve never gotten used to crowds. I spent most of my childhood indoors do to health problems, and appearing in public tends to draw altogether negative attention. So, I keep a low profile.”

He did not say anything about what his illness was, and it certainly would be impolite to ask. I suspected that it was somehow connected to his bizarre behavior.

In between swallows, the Schwartzes conversed with each other and with Werner and Paulus in German. Though I didn’t understand them, they seemed cheerful and animated. However, I noticed that when the laughed, Werner would usually look upset. Albert also talked with Dianna, with a level of familiarity that made me a little resentful. I didn’t follow much of it. At one point, the conversation somehow turned to Friedrich Nietzsche, a subject on which the elder Schwartz spoke eloquently. “The main reason that Nietzsche is so misunderstood is that so many of his words are taken out of context,” he commented. “Take his most famous words, `God is dead.’ It is so frequently repeated as to be a cliché. But one almost never hears the second part of the statement: ‘—And we have killed him.’ Only then is his real thought clear. He was not really denying the existence of God- at least, that was not his primary intent. His point is, rather, that our idea of God was restrictive and sterile. And that says far more about us than it does about God.”

After a while, Hodges brought up the issue of changing the past. “Do you ever worry that time travel might destroy the present?” he asked.

“That’s a tricky question,” Dr. Werner said. “In our one experiment, we recovered an artifact intentionally planted by one of our expeditions. However, there is disagreement as to the import of the experiment. Most of my colleagues take it as evidence that any action by time travelers is already part of our time line. Therefore, it would be changing the past NOT to go. But I am not convinced. It is my own opinion that time travel may genuinely alter history, but the universe works to dampen any such effects.”

“Dampened how?” Dianna said critically. “Do you think the timeline actually defends itself, the way a body defends itself from disease?”

“A lot of people take that possibility very seriously,” Werner said. He chuckled. “I recall reading a story from the mid-20th century about a time traveler who saves himself from being shot, only to be killed by a meteorite. Of course, that begs the question why the universe would behave that way. I suppose a pantheist like Dr. Wrzniewski would say that the universe itself is sentient, and I assume you are suggesting that the universe is controlled by an outside intelligence.”

“Why should we content ourselves with only one intelligence?” Dr. Marcos said. “I know the story you’re talking about. It was one of several about a `change war’, where two rival armies of time travelers are trying to change history toward their own ends. It parallels the common religious idea of two opposing supernatural powers—God and Satan, Ormazd and Ahriman, Yin and Yang. Perhaps the supernatural conflict is fought through changes in what we perceive as history.”

“I’ve thought about this before,” I said, “and what bothers me is, if the past changes, what happens to the time traveler. To use the classic scenario, suppose somebody kills his own grandfather, and his own birth is erased. In that case, who will go back and kill his grandfather? It’s an irresolvable paradox.”

Albert spoke up, much to my surprise. “I read a story once with a very interesting solution to that problem,” he said. “It goes like this. A scientist uses a time machine to send a small metal cube five minutes into the past. After the cube arrives five minute in the past, the scientist decides to perform an experiment: He will not send the cube the cube to himself five minutes later, and see what happens to the cube from five minutes in the future. And what does happen?” He paused, and grinned. “The cube from the future stays. But the rest of the universe…vanishes!” He continued to grin, but everyone else frowned. Dr. Ling seemed especially disturbed.

Partway through the meal, Dianna and I stepped out into the museum. We wandered through the trophies. Di stopped beneath the Dunkleosteus, and let it make its tinny screams. “It’s not really the same, is it?” she said clinically. “The real thing, we could feel in our guts.”
I put an arm around her. “Do you really want to stand under…that?”
“Yes,” she said. “And I want you here with me.”

I don’t know how long we had been standing there when we heard another scream. I remember hearing it as a weird whistle. The next clear recollection is being on the museum floor with Dianna pinned under me. The doorway to the museum was smashed, and a thin, acrid smoke still hung in the air. I traced a plume of especially thick smoke to a mounted Saurolophus. Something was embedded in the dinosaur, and its tail was still burning. I jumped to my feet and threw Di over one shoulder, and ran for the ravaged door. A second projectile came in, whipping right past my face. I staggered from the deafening noise and the blinding, stifling smoke. I ran on. There was an explosion behind us, just as I did a flying dive through the glass.

I lay next to Di, gasping for air. “You’re very sweet,” Di whispered in my ear, “but I actually can walk.”
Lou came racing over. He wore a gas mask. “Get back! Get back!” he said. I could barely hear him. A cloud of smoke was rolling lazily through the museum. I pulled Dianna to her feet and kept running. “All staff clear!” he shouted into a radio. There was a loud bang and a bright flash from the museum. It was an implosion grenade, designed to suck air out of a room. The tide of gas was pulled back. “Are you all right?” Lou said.

“My ears are ringing something fierce, and my face feels like it just went through a cheese grater,” I said. “But under the circumstances, yes, I suppose I’m okay. What was that?”

“Home-made rockets, fired from an improvised projector,” Lou said. “Who knows what they were loaded with… We already have it traced back to a spot 300 meters beyond the fence, but there’s no sign of the operator.”
“We don’t really need to find him, do we?” I said.
“Right. Modus operandi tells us enough. The Keystone Kommies are back.”

The “equipment” was a combat exoskeleton—in essence, a mechanized suit of armor. It had a distinctly angular look, like faceted gems assembled into the shape of a man. An outer layer of padding softened the angles somewhat. The helmet, which looked like a five-sided pyramid, was grimy and bettered compared to the rest of the suit. At some point, someone had attached a crown of steel rods, now rusted and bent with age. Two bulky radiators hung from the back like vestigial wings. The man in the suit moved toward us, moving just as quickly as an ordinary man. “Greetings, Mr. and soon-to-be-Mrs. Flockman!” he said cheerfully. He removed the wedge-shaped face mask. “Lovely day for a field test, isn’t it?”

“Exactly what kind of research do you intend to do?” Di asked, a little bemused. Behind the bemusement, I sensed a lingering fear. I then recalled the figure in her dream.
“The up-close kind,” Schwartz said. “Mr. Hodges shall explain the details.”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that suit before,” I said. “Who makes it?”

“It is a Russian 311A combat exoskeleton, the heaviest one ever fielded in combat,” he said. “Variants of the 300 exoskeleton are used by civilian and military forces all over the world. This variant is made of alternating layers of titanium alloy and ballistic fiber glass, with an outer layer of Kevlar and shock-absorbing foam. The chest plate is 50 mm thick, but because of the multiple angles and the sophistication of the materials, the protection it offers is equivalent to 800 millimeters of steel armor. In combat conditions, it has been proven to withstand anything short of an anti-tank missile—and those can easily be defeated with countermeasures.”

“What’s the gross weight of the suit?” I asked.
“With me in it, about 200 kilograms,” he said. I was startled when the twins walked over in their own suits, minus helmets. “It is considerably less for my sons.”
“How many suits do you have?”

“In theory, we could assemble 18 essentially exoskeletons,” said the elder Schwartz. “But in practice, we will only be deploying four. The rest of the components will be held back either as spare parts—exotroopers in the field commonly require enough spares to build two suits- or for unarmored ‘high-mobility’ rigs. Our support staff will need the high-mobility suits to keep up with us. They, in turn, will be supported by light tractors. The system may seem cumbersome, but it is essential for keeping exotroopers mobile.”

“Fascinating,” Dianna said. “I’ve heard about things like this, but I’d never thought about the logistics of it. Were you in the military?”
“No,” Albert said. “I learned how to use an exoskeleton as a hazardous materials handler in the civilian sector. There are actually many more civilian exoskeleton operators than military exotroopers. In fact, one of the earliest modern exoskeletons was designed for bear research.”
“How well will the suit hold up against a dinosaur?” I asked.
“That is what we are here to see,” Albert answered.

The trials were held with Dr. Ling and his aids standing by. The twins also stood by, ready to help repair their father’s suit or pull him out of danger. I helped in a number of them. In the first test, I tried to ram him with a Thing. He jumped out of the way twice before I hit him. The result was a very serious dent in the hood. Schwartz, who was thrown for over ten feet, got up without a scratch. Then he overturned the Thing. In the second test, I shot the detached chest plate and helmet three times with an Eliminator from 100 meters. (Schwartz wanted me to shoot while he was in the armor, but I refused.) Not one of the rounds penetrated. However, I did knock the helmet off. “That is the most common cause of exotrooper casualties,” Schwartz said, “but rarely a cause of serious injury. Of course, it would be very bad for one if the enemy closed in for a coup de grace, but that is why no exotrooper works alone.”

In the next few tests, we subjected the suits to attacks from devices built to simulate dinosaur attacks. A miniature wrecking ball knocked him down, but Schwartz immediately got up. A pile driver with a sharpened point knocked him for ten meters and left him unconscious, but failed to inflict anything worse than bruises. Finally, we attacked the suit and its components with “Jaws”, a light construction vehicle fitted with a claw apparatus to simulate animal bites. All components tested well. Even what seemed like the most vulnerable part, a hydraulic line connecting the engines to the lower body, failed to rupture under the bite pressure of a hyena. In the final “Jaws” test, I used the claw to pick up the whole suit with Schwartz in it, applied half a ton of pressure to the torso, and then tossed him ten feet. Schwartz got up immediately and dusted himself off.

In the final test, Schwartz faced my old acquaintance, Old Rip the crocodile. “I put in his good teeth for this!” the trainer cackled. Albert faced the same test I did. A dummy, this time dubbed “Kenny”, was thrown to the crocodile, and he had to rescue it. Schwartz literally leaped into action, flying over two meters and landing between the dummy and the crocodile. When Old Rip took a snap at him, Schwartz stepped on his snout, forcing the jaws shut and pinning the head to the concrete floor. “Henni! Heidi! Come!” he shouted. His sons rushed in and carried away the dummy. “Now, reptile, we shall see which of us is the stronger,” he said.

When he raised his foot, the first thing Old Rip did was turn around and try to hit him with its tail. Schwartz jumped over the swinging tail, and landed astride it. A taser shot out from a pod in his right arm, shocking the crocodile. Old Rip tried to retreat, but Schwartz held onto him by the tail. The crocodile lashed his tail mightily, and finally knocked him over. Rip turned around and caught Schwartz by the arm, then tried to drag him to his pool. Retractable climbing claws shot out from Schwartz’s fingers and his feet, and he dug into the concrete with them. With great effort, Rip pulled him a foot further. The reptile was clearly wearing out, and finally stopped and lay there, with Schwartz’s forearm still in his mouth. In a seemingly effortless maneuver, Schwartz thrust his free hand into Old Rip’s mouth and pushed the jaws away. The old croc slunk meekly into his pool.

The trainer was fuming. “That was the most dangerous, outrageous, contemptuous performance I’ve ever seen!” he yelled to me. “That joker could have hurt my crocodile! And he was lucky not to get hurt himself.”
The elder Schwartz laughed. “I showed him enough respect to test myself to the fullest. Is that not better than going against wild animals with unproven equipment?”
Hodges gave his usual double nod and said, “Excellent, excellent. As expected, the exoskeleton is a complete success. Now we shell test the other equipment.”

I gaped when I saw what else he planned to send into the past. Where the exoskeleton was the height of sophistication, the weapons and vehicles were themselves relics of another era. “I am a corporate sponsor of the World War 2 Re-enactors’ Society,” Hodges said. “Rather than buy new equipment, with all the expense and red tape that entails, I used surplus historical gear. These, in particular, are mainly left over from last year’s reenactment of the Battle of Moscow. Did you know that that is generally considered the decisive battle of World War 2?” I nodded absent-mindedly, concerned principally with examining the equipment. It consisted mainly of replica World War 2 Soviet vehicles and weaponry. There were 7 vehicles: 3 Soviet half-ton GAZ trucks, a larger ZIL truck, a Russian artillery tractor, and 2 weird German vehicles called kettenkrads (essentially a motorcycle with tank treads in the rear). In addition, there were 3 German demolition drones: two small Goliaths, and a vehicle called Borgward big enough for a man to ride in.

I rapped on the hulls, and found them to be made of fiberglass. “Of course, they aren’t exactly the same as the originals,” Hodges said, a little apologetically. “We had to replace the hull with ballistic composite plastic to meet safety regulations, and the engines were made diesel electric to meet modern emission standards. Just as well, for the present purposes: With those few modifications, these are almost as light, safe and fuel-efficient as modern ones. The demolition vehicles aren’t as close as the others to originals. In reenactments, they carry reloadable pyrotechnic devices rather than demolition charges. We intend to use them for carrying cargo. The Goliaths can carry up to 100 kilos, and the Borgward carries 500.”

The weaponry was a mixture of vintage Soviet and German equipment. The collection was dominated by 7.62 mm automatic weapons. I was leery of the large array of pistols and submachine guns. “It’s not a good idea to hunt dinosaurs with pistol rounds, let alone ones this small,” I said.

“Do not underestimate their performance,” Hodges said. “In terms of range and accuracy, these are the best weapons of their kind ever built. All of them fire a 7.63 x 25 mm round, first developed for these Mauser C96 pistols. The earliest C96s had sights that were good to a thousand meters, and with a long-barreled variant fitted with a stock, and a sturdier breech to accept cartridges loaded with modern propellants, a skilled marksman can indeed perform to that range. The same round was adopted by the Soviets for these Ppsh41 submachine guns—testimony to how effective they were. Of course, we would not attempt to use them on game larger than man. That is what our larger weapons are for.”

This brought us to the heavy weapons. The smallest of these were a pair of 7.62 mm DP machine guns. The rest were genuine anti-vehicle weapons. There was a 14.5 mm single-shot PTRD anti-tank rifle, four bazookas, and two grenade-launching Kampfpistoles. There were also a 20 mm quick fire cannon and a few mortars. “The PTRD rifle and the cannon are modified to fire modern ‘air-burst’ shells,” Hodges said. “If you look carefully, you will notice that they are equipped with modern electronic sights. They make them small enough now that they can be fitted to a vintage weapon like this without spoiling the illusion. The mortars will be used primarily for launching research rockets.”

I stated the obvious: “All this is a bit much, even for hunting dinosaurs. What can you really do with a bazooka that you couldn’t do with a good rifle?”

“I do not want to kill dinosaurs,” Hodges said. “It is my hope to capture them alive. For that purpose, a rocket-propelled grenade filled with gas or liquid tranquilizers will be better than a tranquilizer dart. We also have a compressed-air cannon for launching nets.”

My mind boggled at the idea. “Could you really take a dinosaur back to the present with what you have?” I asked.

“Our largest truck can carry up to four tons,” Hodges said. “We could certainly transport a relatively small dinosaur.”

I was not convinced. “That may seem good on paper, but remember, you’ll be off-road,” I reminded him.

He laughed. “The GAZ and ZIS trucks were practically off-road vehicles to begin with,” he said. “They had to be, to navigate what passed for roads in mid-20th-century Russia. Our trucks can handle any terrain.”

I oversaw a weapons drill for Hodges’ men. There were thirty of them, from a remarkably diverse range of nations. 5 were Chinese or Japanese, 3 were Chechens, and 10 were from Germany. A one-armed technician introduced as Omar was from Kazakhstan. The remainders were stocky, quasi-Asiatic people like Schwartz’s twins. What they all had in common was that they handled weapons well. I was used to dealing with clients whose knowledge of firearms seemed to be limited to which end the bullet came out of. But Hodges’ team showed professional marksmanship. The elder Schwartz showed off his skills and the strength endowed by the suit by firing the anti-tank rifle from the hip with only one hand. What I found even more impressive was the degree of coordination they showed. In group drills, I had seen even expert marksman fail. The underlying problem is that people who pursue shooting as a solo activity tend to be unprepared for coordinated fire, sometimes even less so than people with no prior firearms experience. But these people seemed not even to require instruction. They covered each other commendably, providing overlapping fields of fire without wasting too many shots on a single target. I quickly decided that my instructions were entirely redundant.

A few weeks later, the day of departure arrived. The day, as it would prove, of disaster…
When it all started, Lou and I were at the gun shed, supervising the loading of Hodges’ weapons. It was almost 7:00 PM, and we had been working since 7:00 in the morning. The ZIS truck was already loaded and aboard the time bell. One GAZ truck was at each of the major storage locations: the gun shed, the hazardous materials shed, and the hangar. Albert Schwartz used his exoskeleton to load huge crates onto the truck. His sons were assisting in the loading at the other locations. I loaded the last crate, just to feel useful, and the vehicle drove for the time bell. There was still just enough light to see the truck driving down the runway. Then there was a muffled thump, followed moments later by a continuous burst of similar explosions. Translucent objects started falling lazily out of the sky. The first one hit the runway and flattened.

“Aerial deployment mines!” said the elder Schwartz. The GAZ truck roared forward, swerving around the mines. Several of the projectiles visibly changed course to follow it. Schwartz fired a double-barreled grenade launcher into the sky. It released a thick cloud of smoke, streaked with brilliant streaks of light. A dense haze quickly descended upon the parking lot. Outside, shots rang out, a rocket shrieked, and two mines exploded. There were shots, screams, and dull splats from bullets striking exotrooper armor, with an occasional clang when a bullet reached the first layer of metal, which soon gave way to the sound of heavy blows and the occasional patter of flechettes.

Albert advanced into the haze. Lou prepared to follow. He looked over his shoulder and told me, “Stay in the shed. It’s not safe out here.”
“My bride,” I said, pointing toward the hangar, “is out there.”
“Very well. Follow me. It may behoove you to bring a weapon.”

I grabbed a Tactical rifle. I turned on the Tactical’s night scope, hoping to see what was happening in the parking lot. The asphalt glowed with dissipating heat. The countermeasures prove to glitter in the infrared spectrum, diffusing heat radiation into a sparkling mist. The cloud revealed streaks of light that could only be the lasers and infrared beams of our attackers. Lou emptied his .45 along one of these beams, which went dead. Schwartz showed as a dark shape, a silhouette within the landscape of heat. He marched across the pavement, while Lou scurried along behind him. There was a furious volley of gunfire from the hazardous materials shed, and the roar of a truck’s engine. A mine went off, and the truck swerved off the road with a flat tire, stopping in a ditch just a few meters away. A shredded canvas door dropped open, and one of the stocky Asiatics fell out, apparently in shock. The better part of one arm was missing. I almost went to help him but Lou urged me onward: “He’ll get help in moments. Now come on, or you will have to make it the rest of the way alone!”

Looking forward again, I saw three glowing white figures running across the luminous field of the asphalt, shooting at the truck with .50 assault rifles. The walls of the hazardous materials shed behind them were veritable constellations of hot bullet hits and fresh blood. Suddenly, the rearmost of the figures was ravaged by a spray of flechettes. As I watched, a constellation of spattered blood and impact points detached itself from the surrounding ruin and arranged itself into the form of another exotrooper. The other two looked over their shoulders in terror. The leader fired wildly, killing his hapless companion while scoring only one or two hits on the exotrooper. That was when the elder Schwartz struck, charging with his crowned head down like a bull. The gunman probably never knew what hit him.

More mines were falling out of the sky. A group of men jumped out of the disabled truck to fix it. The elder Schwartz shouted a command to his son (I heard the name Heidi), who ran out to assist them. A crew of three stocky men emerged from the hangar, carrying a capture net canister. They fired a shot that scoured the asphalt, detonating several mines. One of these mines fired a secondary charge into the air. If it had detonated in midair, as it was undoubtedly intended to, it would have killed the crew, but instead, it hit the ground and exploded. One of the men lost both legs. His companions, totally unphased, reloaded the launcher and fired another net. Shots were still being fired from the direction of the south fence. Lou loaded another clip into his .45 and shot back.

As we approached the hangar, I saw a crouching figure with a familiar briefcase. “Dr. Ling!” I shouted involuntarily. He turned, revealing a machine pistol in one hand. He fired a 4-gauge grenade that knocked over Albert. Before he could shoot at anyone else, Lou was upon him. There was no theatrical volley of fast and fancy moves, but only a weird tableau of two professionals trying to kill each other in the quickest and most efficient fashion possible. Lou kicked the machine pistol from Ling’s hand and got him in a headlock. He then attempted a slow but sure procedure for dislocating his neck, while Ling tried to drive the briefcase into his kidneys. I fired a warning shot from the Tactical. This broke their concentration, and Ling made the most of it. He broke Lou’s hold and threw him over his shoulder, then snatched up his machine pistol. That was when the elder Schwartz sat up. Ling fired a burst into the exotrooper’s face mask, and then retreated around the building.

Schwartz sprang to his feet and ran for the hangar. I followed. Then the exotrooper froze. I stopped, and looking past him, saw what had made him stop. Di lay on the asphalt, just inside the hangar. There were no obvious wounds, but I knew at a glance that something was grievously wrong. I dropped the Tactical and rushed for her, but the exotrooper stepped in my path and held me back with one raised arm. I wanted to pound against the unyielding armor. But my grief was too great. All I could do was lean against him and cry.

I barely registered the conversation. I stood against a wall, barely supporting myself. The elder Schwartz crouched brooding by Dianna’s side. She was alive, but there was no telling how long she would stay that way. One thing did register with me: a smell, a somehow familiar smell that seemed to be coming from the broken crate. I moved toward the crate, and as I did, placed the smell: It was a marking scent of a genetically engineered fungus, with which the Colombian government had wiped out 90% of the coca harvest. I lifted a chain of linked Thing cleats for a closer look. Only then did I realize that all eyes were on me.

“Kill this man,” Hodges said tersely. Both bodyguards pointed their weapons at me at once. Before they could try to fire, someone came between me and the guards. It was Dianna! She struck the nearest guard in the face, scratching at his eye. Without flinching, or giving any sound of pain, the guard fired three rounds into her chest. She fell, still scrabbling at his gun hand. He fired another shot; I heard a distinct metallic noise as it bounced off the plate in her head. I slung the cleats over my shoulder, for impromptu armor and rushed for the guards. A bolt from Lee’s crossbow was stopped by the cleats. Finally, I was upon the guard who had shot Di. I swung the cleats like a whip, throwing off his aim, and lunged inside his reach. I hit him twice, as hard as I could, but he absorbed the blows with barely a stagger. I wrapped the cleats around my hand like a brass knuckle and struck once more. The guard fell, the right side of his face a bloody pulp.

I seized the Mauser pistol and pointed it at Hodges. “Hands up!” I ordered. Hodges laughed, but the noise was not that of a human, but some primeval beast. I hesitated, and then pulled the trigger. I distinctly heard the bullet bounce off a steel support directly behind Hodges. I stopped in uncomprehending horror. Hodges was completely unharmed. Then I was struck from behind. The gun went off once more, and then I was down, and the gun pulled from my hands. I raised my head to look at my attacker.

“You should have stayed in the shed,” Lou said sadly.

Hodges stalked toward me, a look of irritation on his face. Schwartz came up behind him. The exotrooper let out a snarling cough and struck, not at me but at Hodges. His right fist (with its perpetual insulting gesture) swung forth with blinding motion, backed by the power of a combat exoskeleton. But somehow, Hodges blocked it. For a moment, I glimpsed the incredible tableau of the exotrooper in the very act of a mighty blow, arrested by Hodges’ raised hands. Schwartz’s prosthetic finger protruded through one palm. Hodges made a strange contortion of his jaw, like a cow chewing cud. He bit down on his own tongue hard enough to draw blood, but did not seem to notice. He let out a contralto squeal that had no comprehensible meaning but the unsettling suggestion of words. I distinctly heard the exoskeleton motors whine from strain. “I thought you knew better, Zaratustra,” he said, in something close to his normal voice. “But I do not hold it against you.” Then he made one last eerie grunt, gave a hard push, and sent the exotrooper tumbling like a pill bug. “Lee, call Heinrich and Heidrich. Prepare for an assault on the museum.”

His gaze turned to me, and only then did I realize that his glasses had fallen off—and that he had no “gaze” at all. One eye was glazed over, and clearly useless. The other was apparently functional, but rolled in random directions, never focusing on anything. Hodges grinned and straightened his neck. I knew then what his perpetual slouch was really like: a puppet held up by stings, a puppet imperfectly animated by another being.” What are you?” I said.

A long strand of bloody saliva dripped from his gaping mouth. Then, abruptly, he spoke, in a different voice, the same one he had used when Zaratustra tried to strike him: “You ask what I am? Ask rather what I have been! Before the Law was spoken, I was Lawlessness. Before there was Light, I was Darkness. Before there was Fire, I was Ice. I am the incarnate Tiamat, Primal Chaos! Bow before me, mortal, and you shall only die!” With one last chuckle, he turned to leave. “Tanaka, you know what to do.” He, Lee and the injured guard climbed onto the truck, and it rolled out of the hangar.

Lou drew his .45. I gazed into his eyes. Somehow, I was not surprised or angry but only deeply sad. “Why, Lou?” I said.

“For my country. And because I know which way the winds of change blow. I hope, in the new world, we might be friends again.” What happened was too quick to perceive. One moment, I was looking down the barrel of a gun. The next, Lou was on the floor with a broken neck, and Di on top of him.

Just then, an explosion roared through the hangar. The doors leading from the museum flew off their hinges. I was thrown back to the floor. A familiar voice called out, “I’m here to kill Ophites an’ sell AmWay—and I seem to have left my briefcase in Saskatchewan!”

Carlos came into view. He was armed with a caseless 7 mm assault rifle, fitted with an over-under 4-gauge grenade launcher. “Zaratustra! I’m the last surviving member of Long-Range Reconnaissance Team 557!” he shouted.
“Come forth, Zaratustra! We have business to settle, and let’s keep it between us!”

The exotrooper seemed to pop out of the darkness. He carried Dianna in his arms. I stepped between him and Carlos. “Are you for us or against us?” I said.
“I am for myself, and my boys,” he said. “And I am against the God who made this world. All other attachments are only a matter of expediency. And who are you for?”

I stood there in stunned silence. Finally I said, “I am for Dianna.”
“Not a pious answer, but a noble one,” he said. “And what will you fight for when she dies—in all likelihood within the hour? All life is loss, Flockman. Surely you have seen that. Why should you fight? What for?”

“If not for what I have, then for what was lost,” I said, “and for what
might be had again.”

“Listen up,” Carlos said. “Here’s what I propose. Ted, you go forward. Get Dianna. Come back to where you are now. Then step aside.” I numbly did as he said, dreading every step closer to the man of metal. Finally, Zaratustra gently put Di in my arms. Her heart was still beating. In my
elation, I did not see the elder Schwartz bringing his wrist canisters to bear, until I was looking down the barrels. But, at that moment, Carlos fired a brilliant flare round over our heads that made the exotrooper stagger. I lurched out of the way. A second genade exploded in the air. This one shot a needle-like subprojectile downward into Zaratustra’s armor. The exotrooper went tumbling across the concrete like a pill bug, his armor striking sparks on the concrete. With a great crash, he made his unplanned exit from the hangar.

“You challenged him to a duel, and then you cheated?” I said in a daze.
“Right, and he cheated back. So, on average, it was a fair contest.” A volley of bullets started whizzing in from outside. “Hold your fire,you bloody idiots! We’re on the same side!” Carlos shouted. Moments later, half-a-dozen armed men were in the hangar. One of them greeted Carlos.

“So, Dr. Wrzniewski, you made it,” Dr. Ling said.
“Should I be pleased?”
“I think the question is, should I be pleased that you showed up,” Carlos said.

I touched Dianna’s face, and she sighed faintly. “She’s still alive,” I said. “We need to help her.”

“You think that any of us can help her?” Ling said. “Don’t you understand what is going on? Charles Hodges Jr. is an Aryan Ophite Perfect. He is leading a conspiracy to change the past. We do not know the details of his plan. We do know that he has several dangerous bioagents, including the Yersinia strain released at Omega Facility. We have good reason to believe that he also has a radiogenic device. Given his equipment, there is no question where he is going: the eastern front, circa 1941. By all objective reckoning, the decisive period in the most important theater of the Second World War. And if he succeeds, what will happen to her, and to all of us? We are in a battle, not only for our lives, but for our existence—perhaps even for our souls.”
“More than that, maybe,” I said. “Remember Schwartz’s story? He said a paradox might destroy the universe… Why? Why would anyone do it?”

“It’s a matter of applied theology,” Carlos said. “The Ophites have no allegiance to any god of this world. Quite the contrary: they believe this world is the creation of an evil demon called—Yaldaboth? Yog-Sothoth? Somethin’ like that. They believe that human—or at least, everyone of the right color—are pieces of the true God that was overthrown, trying to escape. For the true god to reign again, this world and its God must be destroyed. So, to them, the end of the universe isn’t just an acceptable outcome, but an ideal one!”

“Hodges,” I said dazedly. “What is he, really?”
“Human. Technic’ly speaking,” Carlos said.
“What about his head?” I said.
“That’s simple to explain: He’s hydrocephalic,” Ling said. He pronounced it strangely as “hi-dro-kef-ay-lic”, but I understood it well enough to stare at him in disbelief. “That’s correct. The majority of his brain case volume—possibly on the order of ninety percent—is filled only by water. Most hydrocephalics show a degree of mental impairment, but often much less than would be expected, and some perform so well that they reach adulthood before being diagnosed. Usually, the condition is a congenital defect, but Hodges’ condition is more likely a result of cancer. By age seven, he was a patient at one of Chablan’s clinics. The late doctor specialized in treating congenital defects. But he used his legitimate research to pursue his real interest of `psychic’ research. He believed that those with sensory handicaps or abnormal brain development were more likely to display psychic or paranormal abilities. He personally believed that these abilities were nothing less than the power to channel an occult force, or being.”

“Aye,” Carlos said. “And don’t tell me he couldn’t get results. Suppose that at some point, Hodges became ‘Hodges plus X’. And the real question then is, what’s the X? The only answer I’ll swear to is, something we have to kill at any cost…if we can. And I think we can. We can’t count on any weapon, and the more technologically sophisticated the weapon, the less it can be trusted. But even it must have limitations. It’s not of flesh and blood, or metal and fire, but not necessarily superior. That’s the only explanation why Hodges didn’t stay here to wait for us. Its power isn’t strong enough—yet. It gets its power, I should think, from all the things one would expect: fear, hate, treachery, sacrifices made in its name. Evil begets evil, as they say—and greater evil. Evil squared or cubed! But that, I think, is its weakness. If a lesser evil begets greater evil, then even a small good may undo great evil. It will send its servants in first, so as not to take chances, and grow stronger, if need be, by their deaths. Then it will come. When it does, I will be waiting for it with this—” He patted his assault rifle. “—And this.” He showed me a hammer tucked in the back of his belt.

“A number of his men appear to be Chablan’s subjects,” Ling said calmly and clinically. He touched a pool of blood on the floor, where the guard I struck had fallen. Only then did I see that it had a strange, rusty hue. “This could only have come from one of the ‘supermen,’ a genetically altered subject. This blood is a different color, because it has a different type of hemoglobin. It is also already coagulated. Only the opening of an artery could have caused the loss of this much blood. I suppose he fell down and appeared to lose consciousness? That is their way of responding to injuries. They become immobile; their metabolism slows down. But they can recover within minutes.”

“What about Zaratustra?” I said. “Is he a ‘superman’?”
“No—not exactly. He appears to have gotten the way he is naturally,” Ling said. “From childhood, he displayed abnormal psychology and physiology. He was born to Ophites of an unusually radical faction. At age 7, his parents were jailed, and he was placed in a psychiatric care facility. His psychological evaluation became a published case study, which described his condition as Hyperactive Obsessive-Compulsive Dissociative Disorder. He was placed on a high-powered amphetamine, which, in the reverse of the usual effect, moderated his behavior. He was released in 2035, and promptly reconnected with the Ophite movement. He was jailed by the Serbians in 2038 for the killings of three other Ophites. Dr. Chablan appears to have requested his release into his custody for the express purpose of replicating his condition. He was the prototype for the supermen that followed, and also served as Chablan’s de facto head of security. He was captured by EU troops in 2046, and sent to a field hospital with an untreatably infected injury to the third finger of his right hand. He escaped shortly after the digit was amputated. He is probably the most dangerous human being on the planet, dead or alive. ”

“You seem to know a lot about him,” Carlos said darkly. “Would you by any chance know how he escaped from the hospital? Or where Dr. Nibeaux really got his funding?”
“What do you expect me to say?” Ling said. “Certain decisions were made by certain parties, with unexpected negative repercussions.”
“You mean, the Ophites turned around and bit certain parties in the butt, and my unit got wiped out by their mess. Under any other circumstances, I would shoot you right here, right now.”

Ling answered, “It is far too late to discuss what was done. For now, all that matters is stopping Hodges. We had contact with an insider who could have locked the Ophites out of the TDD computer. He failed, and the launch is already initiated. It cannot be stopped. If we can hold the museum, we can at least prevent Hodges from loading his most dangerous bioagents. If that should fail, the final contingency is to take the control room.”

I dropped wearily to my knees. “I don’t care what happened,” I said. “I don’t care what’s happening now. We have to help Di.” I stroked her face. Suddenly, her eyes flew open.
“Hi, Ted,” she said weakly. I jerked back involuntarily. “Don’t be afraid. Just me… We’re at the wall, Ted. The wall of darkness. I understand it better now. At first, I thought it was death. But now I see… it’s uncertainty. Can’t see beyond it, ‘cause the outcome is unknown, undetermined. But you can break through it, Ted. I’ll be waiting for you on… the other side.” Then her eyes closed. I stood up jerkily.
“Fight now, cry later,” Carlos said. Then he hurried off.

We moved into the museum. I took Lou’s .45 and a spare clip. Ling handed me a .50 revolver, which resembled a scaled-up version of Robertson’s pistol. “This is a .50 Browning weapon, loaded with hyper-velocity rocket-assisted AP rounds,” he said. “There are five rounds in the cylinder, and here are five more. It may penetrate exotrooper armor. Peak velocity is reached 30 meters from the muzzle. Remember that at shorter ranges, they hit harder when the target is further away.”

There were twenty of us, all together. Ling ordered half of them to cover the front of the museum. “These guys couldn’t stop a persistent salesman, let alone a full frontal attack,” Carlos said in cheerful Indonesian.

“Of course not,” Ling said. As he spoke, there was a strange, electronic “ZZZap”. One of the KK dropped dead. I recognized the strange electronic sound of an electromagnetic rail gun.

Everyone ran for cover. Dr. Ling and I got to the shelter of two L-shaped wooden display cases, at the lower left corner of the intersection of the main aisles. Together, the cases formed a square enclosure. One of them consisted mainly of a fiberglass tub that held a 12-foot-long armored amphibian. Ling crouched behind his briefcase, and carefully raised his machine pistol. He had barely begun to raise the weapon before someone opened fire. There was another “ZZZap”, and a projectile tore through the intervening wood (and the amphibian) and shattered against Ling’s briefcase. Carlos fired two bursts and one grenade, and the KK joined in with a veritable storm of fire. Both potato guns went off. “I didn’t see him; I just fired where I thought he was,” Carlos explained sheepishly.

I scuttled from the dubious shelter of the case to a steel beam twenty feet to the right. As I moved, I caught a glimpse of two disks, shining in the shadows like the eyes of a cat. “He’s on the stairs!” I shouted as I dived to safety. “I think he’s wearing glasses!” A shot bounced off the beam. Carlos, Ling and the others returned fire, driving the terrorist deeper into the shadows.

“That’s Omar,” Ling said. “I have dealt with him before, even met him once. He was a specialist in electronic weaponry who left a job for a military research firm to take up bank robbery, piracy and counterfeiting. It’s not so much a career for him as it is a means to some very peculiar ends…” Ling nimbly avoided a furious volley of shots. “He seems to recollect our encounter.”

I peered around the girder, hoping to get a shot at Omar, when I heard the terrorist say one word: “Now.” I took cover just in time to avoid a three-round burst from an automatic shotgun. Two dozen tungsten pellets chewed into a nearby steel beam like metal piranhas. Omar’s gun fired again, but now the sound went, “Zzzap-pft.” I smelled smoke and heard him cursing. He was clearly going to be out of the fight for the moment. Marcos fired four more bursts in Carlos’ general direction. “If you’re going to spray, at least control your weapon!” Carlos shouted defiantly.

I peered around the beam and saw the second terrorist, standing next to an ankylosaur across the aisle from us. He was firing the weapon like a berserker would use a broadsword, flailing wildly, destroying almost at random. For some reason, there were pieces of duct tape all over the gun. The shotgun jammed, and the terrorist yelled and removed a piece of tape. I was startled to recognize “his” voice. “That’s Dr. Marcos!” I exclaimed. A Kommie just venturing into the open perished under a burst. Another volley nearly bored a hole in the case I hid behind.

I fired Lou’s .45 at her around the corner of the case, but missed. I thought I heard the click of the shotgun jamming. Marcos retreated between the ankylosaur’s front legs. She said something indecipherable and pulled off a piece of duct tape. Then she fired a blast that nearly took my head off. I got a glimpse of a strange, hand-painted symbol that the duct tape had covered. I quickly concluded that it was an occult sigil. Marcos was trying to use magic to keep her gun working! After the last blast, she retreated.

“Turn off your sights,” Carlos said. I was the only one to comply. Suddenly, the museum lights went out. There were cries of dismay from the KK: Whatever had knocked out the lights had also knocked out their laser sights and night scopes.

“They must have an EMP device!” someone shouted.

“Not a device,” Carlos said. “It’s HIM.”

There was a prolonged, unnerving silence. Ling fired a smoke grenade. Something in the smoke revealed a beam of light, almost a meter wide, that played back and forth across the museum. “We’re being painted! Take cover!” Ling shouted. “Be sure there’s something over your head!” He held his open briefcase over his head. Carlos dived under the ankylosaur. I retreated back to the cases.

It was none too soon. PTRD bursting rounds pounded methodically through the walls. Whoever was firing was getting off shots faster than many men could with a bolt-action rifle. I knew it had to be one of the Schwartzes. Three men were killed by as many shots. I fired the revolver along the line of the spotlight, resting a folding unipod on the case. The next shot embedded itself in the wooden case, mere inches away from my face. I fired two more shots, and the search light finally went out.

I turned on the night scope on the revolver and looked outside. The squat form of a demolition drone was making its way toward the front door. I fired the last two shots in the cylinder at it. It spun in circles, spurting smoke and sparks. Moments later, the armored tractor came roaring toward the front door. A machine gun on the hull opened up, killing another hapless Kommie. A potato gun shell exploded against the hull, knocking out the machine gun. When the tractor came to within five meters of the door, five men climbed out. Four of them had the unmistakable form of supermen. They all wore armor-plated gas masks, but I recognized one by his missing arm. Hodges had sent at least one of his casualties back into combat! The two leading supermen carried heavy bullet-proof shields, as thick as an exotrooper’s breastplate. The leader fired a smoke grenade through an opening in his shield.

Under the cover of the smoke, the Ophites fanned out. The potato gunner got off one more shot, killing the one “normal” man as he moved against our right flank. He lived just long enough to scream. A concussion grenade silenced the potato gunner for good. On the left, two more Kommies retreated from an onslaught of submachine gun fire, only to be cut down by Dr. Marcos. I glimpsed a shield bearer through the smoke as he wound his way through a cluster of display cases of Nemegt animals. I fired the revolver. The shot punched through his shield and body armor before the rocket motor was spent, and exploded. The man fell without a cry. The other shield bearer abruptly emerged from the smoke and dropped to his knees next to a pareiasaur, 15 meters away. I fired twice more and scored a hit to his shield, but the round hit with insufficient speed and ricocheted. Some sort of burden fell off his back. He fired a grenade that crashed into the case. It was a dud, but it still hit with enough force to knock me down with splinters of wood and glass in my cheek.

At that moment, Heidi came crashing in through the ceiling. He hit the Dunkleosteus on the way down, and crashed head-first into the ankylosaur. He landed on his side, and immediately fired a burst of chaff at Carlos. Carlos retreated across the aisle, taking cover behind the dicynodont. The exotrooper unlimbered a machine gun and started blasting. Two more Kommies perished. The gunfire was joined by the whiz of a bowstring. Lee had crept in through the passageway to the time bell, and moved to cut off the retreat.

When I tried to get up again, I was greeted by yet another volley from Marcos’ shotgun, and a short burst of machine gun fire. I took several hits to the chest. The Thing cleats stopped them, but I had the wind knocked out of me. Peering around an opening between the cases, I glimpsed the machine gunner. It was a legless superman; presumably the same one maimed clearing mines, firing from the cover of the pareiasaur. The leader’s “burden” had been another fighter.

Dr. Marcos moved toward me, while the shield bearer and the one-armed superman ran toward the storeroom, killing or driving back KK who threatened Heidi’s flanks. Only Ling prevented a total rout. He leaped from between the display cases, blocking a blast from Marcos’s shotgun with his briefcase, and stunned the exotrooper with a grenade to the helmet. He followed that with a short burst that hit the shield bearer in the leg. The superman staggered, and Ling hit him in the face mask, knocking him down. He loaded another grenade for a coup de grace. Before he could shoot, the legless superman shot him in the right arm. His shot went high and wide.

Ling switched the pistol to his left hand and fired back at the machine gunner, but the angle was poor, and he could not control his gun with his weaker hand. Fortunately, the superman faired no better. His gun jammed, and he rolled to cover beneath the pareiasaur, leaving it behind. Ling did succeed in driving Marcos back to cover; she fired one more blast and retreated to the Mongolian diorama. Meanwhile, the one-armed man rushed in and supported the shield bearer. The last of Ling’s men fired at them, but his shots only bounced off the shield, and Lee took him down from behind. Peering over the ravaged display case with revolver in hand, I saw the shield bearer take off his mask. I recognized him by the hideous wounds on his face and neck; wounds I had inflicted in the hangar. I cried out Dianna’s name and fired instinctively, without resting the unipod on the case. The recoil hurt as much as actually getting hit and the rocket round went wide and exploded against a beam in a miniature blue-white fireball. There were cries from the supermen, and several shots that might otherwise have found Dr. Ling as he retreated went wide.

Heidi and the shield bearer stood together before the closet. A Chechen emerged from the closet, “walking” a kettenkrad in low gear. He was clearly shaken. Omar came down from the balcony and climbed into the driver’s seat. At Omar’s order, the Chechen took a shield. The men with shields stepped to either side of Omar. The one-armed superman and the bowman took position just behind them, while the exotrooper stood before them all, a machine gun in his hands. Together, they moved forward.

Ling handed the case to me. “Hold this up, and give me some cover,” he said. “I’m going to take down the exotrooper.” The exotrooper was standing with his back to us, firing a machine gun at Carlos. Holding the gun with both hands, Ling scuttled out crabwise from the cases. I moved toward Marcos, holding up the suitcase with both hands. A single blast struck the suitcase. I shifted the case to my left and drew a pistol with my right. When I tried to return fire, I got a very nasty surprise. A spray of bullets came at me from the other side. It was the legless superman, firing through a display case about 10 meters away with a Mauser pistol. He paused to reload and clear away some broken glass for a clearer shot. Marcos used a spell and took aim, not at me but at Dr. Ling. I emptied the .45, hitting her several times in the chest and head. She stumbled in mid-burst and fell. I dropped the pistol and snatched up the briefcase with both hands.

There was a loud bang, an audible metallic clang, and an eruption of smoke from the direction of the legless superman. His pistol had backfired, sending the breechblock into his face. Meanwhile, Ling brought down the one-armed man with a short burst that penetrated an eyepiece of his mask, then fired his grenade launcher at Heidi. The launcher released three pairs of steel balls, each pair connected by a wire. Two sets of balls bounced or broke, but one wrapped around the exotrooper’s ankles. He stopped, and then came crashing to the floor, directly in the path of the kettenkrad. Omar swerved to avoid the exotrooper, almost running down the shield bearer. The shield bearer leaped out of the way, leaving Omar and the kettenkrad vulnerable.

Unfazed, the legless man pulled off his ravaged gas mask and came tumbling and rolling at me with a knife in one hand. He covered the distance in a matter of seconds. I dropped the suitcase and hit him over the head with my best judo chop. All I got for my troubles was a bloody gash on my own wrist. He countered with a devastating punch with his knife hand; the weapon had a set of brass knuckles built in. He grabbed me by the hair with his other hand and twisted me around for a more efficient throat-cutting, presumably assuming I was too dazed to resist. Almost involuntarily, I grabbed hold of the briefcase, and brought it up just in time to block the knife. Before he could strike from another angle, I grabbed his arm and hauled his whole body forward. His head slammed against the corner of the briefcase with a loud crack. I threw him over my shoulder. As he let out a single animal grunt, I grabbed the briefcase and lunged between Ling and Marcos, just in time to block another blast. Ling made good on the time. He fired into the kettenkrad’s drive train, causing the vehicle to fish tail. Omar was thrown from his seat. Lee vaulted onto the trailer and shot out its coupling with the tow vehicle, just before the vehicle overturned.

The last superman advanced on Carlos, blocking a hail of bullets and one grenade with his shield and countering with a chaff grenade. Omar, Lee and the Chechen moved in to push the cart themselves, while Heidi struggled to untangle his legs. I darted back to the shelter of the cases. I had one shot left in the revolver. Another blast from Marcos hit the case. As I drew the weapon, the legless man suddenly landed with a dull thud beside me. He wearily raised his knife. Suddenly, there was a muffled explosion. The grenade had gone off! The superman fell forward, a gaping hole in his back and a visible convexity in the body armor over his chest. I snatched up the rifle and aimed upward, at the damaged supports of the Dunkleosteus. I didn’t fire until the dunk screamed. The fish broke loose and came swinging down, crushing the superman. Just as Heidi extricated himself from Ling’s snare, Carlos leaned around the dunk and shot him in the neck joint with a grenade, blowing the helmet off. The Chechen dropped his shield and shouted, “There is no God but Allah—and he is against us!” Then he drew a pistol and shot Lee. Then he turned to Omar and cried to him in an unfamiliar tongue. In answer, Haman pulled out a knife and stabbed him in the heart. The dying man shot him point-blank in the chest. The Kazakh fell back against the trailer.

Ling returned to me and retrieved his briefcase. He pulled out his machine pistol, and advanced toward the case with gun in one hand and the briefcase in the other. “Ling,” I shouted, “look out!” Dr. Marcos had just emerged from cover. Ling raised his briefcase just in time to stop a blast of flechettes. Her gun jammed again. Omar called out to Marcos for help. She used another spell, but instead of trying to fire immediately, she pulled out a knife and cut Omar’s throat. He fell down, convulsing. As if given new strength, Marcos flung herself against the cart and pushed it along, firing all the while. Her wild volleys kept Carlos and Dr. Ling at bay. I crawled out of the enclosing cases, putting a little extra wood between me and her.

Marcos’ gun did not go silent until she ran out of ammunition. She continued to push the cart with all her might. Ling leaned out from an opening between the cases and shot off one of the wheels. This not only slowed down the cart, but caused it to swerve left. Moments later, it crashed into the case. Marcos tried to pull the cart back on course, but it was hopeless. She collapsed in exhaustion beside the cart.

Ling stood up and opened his briefcase. In an efficient but unhurried manner, he placed an explosive charge on the cart. “This is a thermate charge,” he explained. “It will burn the bioagents.” He quickly hooked it up to an electronic detonator. But when he pressed the button, nothing happened. He inserted a magnesium fuse and tried to light it, but his lighter would not work.

Hodges’ laughter echoed down from above. “What good is a bomb, little man, if it will not go off? What good is fire against the Lord of Ice and Darkness? Now, untermensch, die!” There was an ominous groan from the fish’s remaining support. Ling pulled out a match and struck it against the book. It did not light. He struck it again, and yet again. The fish broke loose, and its tail fell forward onto the ankylosaur. On the third try, the match lit, but it was too late. The fiberglass fish slid sideways, and the very tip of its tail shattered Ling’s skull. Hodges emerged imperiously from the passage to the time bell. “All in all, very impressive, for a bunch of untermenschen,” he said. “But you will still all die.”

“And I shall punish them for it. Carry the bodies to the time bell. We need ballast, and we can use the gear,” Hodges said. His head bobbed as he walked, a motion which now called to mind a stalking carnosaur. But his perpetual slouching brought to mind another image: a puppet, imperfectly controlled by invisible strings. Two bodyguards followed behind, obviously very nervous. I felt a rough-edged blade press against my throat. Marcos was back up. Meanwhile, more Ophites came out. Some hauled away the cart, while others carried away bodies. Zaratustra shouldered Heidi, armor and all, and carried him out. All of them studiously ignored us.

“Now that we have you at our mercy,” Hodges said, “what shall we do with you?” He stopped in front of me, and smiled. “Before you die, shall I tell you everything your betrothed hasn’t shared with you?” I struck him reflexively. His head jerked, and his eyes rolled, but the rest of his body seemed unaffected. My hand went numb. He went on toward Carlos without comment, as if my blow were too inconsequential to respond to. “And you, Wrzniewski, what are we to do with you? You knew what I am and what I can do, yet still you came to fight me. You stupid Aborigine—and all the more stupid for your learning. Did you think sheer incorrigibility could save you?”

Carlos ejected the bad cartridge and loaded a new one. A guard stepped between them, preparing to shoot Carlos, but Hodges waved him aside, and then moved toward Carlos. “What I find truly unfathomable,” he said cheerfully, “is that you have no faith. You trust no God, true or false. The closest thing you have to an object of faith is the weapon you hold in your hand.” With one short lunge, he reached Carlos and pushed the gun aside before he could even try to fire. “But in the end, your gun is no more effectual than a totem of a superstitious savage—less so, in fact, since the savages at least have faith in something beyond themselves and their works. You, Wrzniewski, are nothing more than a savage stripped by civilization of the savage’s one redeeming virtue. And so you hide, not behind a sacred amulet, but behind the latest technological toy. Did you really think it would do you any good, even if it worked?”

Carlos answered: “I didn’t come because I thought I could beat you. I came back because I never leave my mates in a lurch, and because I finally realized that I just couldn’t let a nasty f* like you get his way unopposed. And faith? I guess you could say I have a kind of faith. The faith of every Mesozoic fuzzball that ever stood its ground before a carnosaur. The faith of every man who ever stood unarmed against a lion. The faith of the mustard seed that throws the mountain into the sea. You act big, but I know what that means. You’re like any predator. When men run away, you crush and kill. But what happens when someone stands his ground?”

“So,” Hodges said nastily, “you think courage can save you?”
“Did I say anything about `saving’?” Hodges froze. “You hesitate, and that means one of two things. Either you might not be able to kill me, or if you do kill me, you get weaker. Either way, you walk out of here over my dead body—and maybe that’s all that ever really matters. So, shall we test a hypothesis? Or call it a draw and all go home?” Hodges grinned. He set his gun to Carlos’s brow and pulled the trigger.
It jammed.

Carlos laughed, long and loud. A guard dropped his weapon in shock. “Now try and jam this, you SOB!” Carlos cried. He whipped out his rock hammer and swung. Hodges raised his arm to intercept the blow. I think he caught it—but it certainly didn’t do him any good. The hammer struck home with a loud crunch of bone, and Hodges fell like a puppet with its strings cut. The other raised his weapon to fire, but Carlos fired the rifle with his free hand and got him first. Then Hodges started to rise. There was a steadily rising hiss, which I realized came from his throat. Carlos stared into the inhuman eyes. “So that’s how it’s going to be, aye?” he said. “Well, I came prepared for that.” He pulled out a double-barreled flare pistol. One barrel jammed, but the other fired a flare right into Hodges’ chest. He fell over, a cloud of smoke rising from his wound. This time, instead of landing in an inert heap, he writhed about and howled, with a sound that seemed impossible from a human throat.

“Drop the hammer, or I’ll cut his throat!” Marcos warned. She pressed the knife closer to my throat. Incredibly, Hodges began to rise yet again. He let out a demonic cackle. Carlos stepped back, but held his hammer at ready. Marcos drew back her blade ever so slightly. One guard ran for the door. The Hodges-thing slavered a command in German, and he froze, pleading, “Nein, nein!” Meanwhile, the plume of smoke rising from Hodges’ chest became a flame, and then suddenly, his whole body burst into flame. I glimpsed this burning effigy of a man lunging for the guard, and Carlos stepping between them with hammer raised. Then the sprinklers activated, and we were all enveloped in a haze of water, smoke and steam.

Marcos and I were hit by a blast of scalding steam. I protected my face with my hands, but she got it right in the face. For a moment, she went rigid from the pain, and I pulled myself free. Swinging blindly, I pummeled her with my fists. She tried to strike back, but she could see even less than I could. Listening for her painful grunts and the telltale whistle of her blade, I dodged her wild strokes. Finally, I got her right on the chin with a powerful upper cut. She went down, and her knife rattled on the concrete. I picked it up gingerly. It was a traditional Indonesian blade, so roughly made that it looked like it was forged from iron filings. A green fluid covered the blade. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that I was very lucky she hadn’t even scratched me.

Meanwhile, I heard the sound of Hodges moving, making disgusting squelching noises as he moved, and the guard screaming, and Carlos swinging his hammer. Once I heard the hammer strike home, not with a crunch but with a splat. Then I heard Carlos swear, and moments later the guard’s scream came echoing out of the tunnel. Then I heard the sound of very heavy footsteps. I heard Dr. Marcos’s voice through the fog: “You fools, you’ve accomplished nothing. It was already too late to stop the launch, and now we have our weapons—and our leader, too. You destroyed…only a vessel. Schwartz will return, and he will kill you. You shall not win, for it is prophesied…no gun will slay him.”

The smoke was still too thick to see clearly. From the corridor, I heard Zaratustra say wryly, “What, flames already?” Carlos fired a wild volley of bullets and grenades into the corridor. The exotrooper did not even break stride. Before I could even see him, he fired a volley of flechettes that almost minced Carlos. Then he made a final leap, and landed beside me with a mighty thump, as if he had dropped from the sky. A very large and very modern pistol was in his hand. Before I could react, he planted a targeting laser on my chest and pulled the trigger, but his gun jammed. He pointed at a nearby dinosaur and pulled the trigger, and the head disintegrated in a cloud of sawdust. But when he pointed the gun back at me, it jammed again. “Interesting,” he said. He holstered his gun and unsheathed his claws. “I shall have to dispatch you with weapons that will not jam.”

I retreated, and Schwartz pursued, easily closing the distance. Carlos fired a high explosive grenade, which narrowly missed. The blast rocked Schwartz, but failed to slow him down. Then Carlos fired a flare shell. Zaratustra froze and covered his eyes. For the first time, he screamed. Carlos fired a second HE grenade, and hit Zaratustra right in the chest. He toppled rump-first into the display case, where he became soundly stuck.

Carlos fired a smoke grenade at the tiny gap between helmet and breastplate. The grenade was too big to penetrate, but the explosion made the helmet jump visibly. Thin streams of smoke came from behind the face plate. Schwartz must have been blind, nearly deaf, and barely able to breath. “Come on,” Carlos said, aiming the rifle almost point-blank at the terrorist’s face mask. “Let’s see those pretty blue eyes.” Schwartz tasered him and sent him flying with a slap.

“You can’t take both of us down that easily,” I said. I picked up a dead guard’s AK 47, which was fitted with a bayonet. “If what the witch said is true, I won’t be able to shoot you, but she didn’t say anything about knives.” I poked experimentally at the belly armor.

Schwartz caught the bayonet in his left hand and snapped it off. “The question is academic,” he said. He coughed, spitting up red foam that trickled out from under his mask. “Observe.” He drew his gun. Before I could react, he pushed the gun under his face mask and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He holstered his gun. “You see?” he said wearily. “18 years ago, in Serbia, I was cornered, ready to take my own life. I tried. I could not. Then they appeared to me in a vision. I asked for death. They said I did not know what I asked. And they showed me what awaits me. Truly was it said: `better to have a millstone tied around his neck and be cast into the sea! Better if he had never been born!’ Still, I said, give me death, for there was no better that They could give me. Finally, They said that They could not. They told me I was marked for a course, and that I could not die until I had run the measure of my destiny. But, They said that they could offer something better. The one thing I truly desired: Oblivion, sleep without dreams—a consummation devoutly to be wished!” He planted hands and feet against the wood and began to push, struggling to free himself. The already ravaged case shook and groaned. I stepped back.

“And you, you are one marked as I was. That is why Hodges did not harm you. He could not. But I am not under his limitations. He is opposite; I am equal. Now let us see who is stronger.” With that, he gave a great push, and did a spectacular back flip out of the hole. He landed on his feet with enough force to leave shoeprints in the concrete.

I emptied the AK 47, hitting him repeatedly in the helmet. One struck a bullet lodged in his forehead and drove it deeper, knocking him down, but not unco