THE NIGHT-BLOOMING SAURIAN
Ah, now we can relax. No salad, never touch it. And take that fruit away too, just the cheese. Yes, Pier, much too long a time. One's ruts deepen. It's the damned little time-wasters. Like that fellow with the coprolites this afternoon; the Museum really has no use for such things even if they're genuine. And I confess they make me squeamish.
What? Oh, no fear, Pier, I'm no prude. Just to prove it, how about a bit more of that aquavit? Wonderfully good of you to remember. Here's to your success; always thought you would.
Science? Oh, but you wouldn't, really. Mostly donkey-work. Looks a lot better from the outside, like most things. Of course I've been fortunate. For an archeologist to have seen the advent of time travel—a miracle, really ... Ah, yes, I was in right at the start, when they thought it was a useless toy. And the cost! No one knows how close it came to being killed off, Pier. If it hadn't been for—the things one does for science ... My most memorable experience in time? Oh, my ... Yes, just a twitch more, though I really shouldn't.
Oh dear. Coprolites. H'm. Very well, Pier old friend, if you'll keep it to yourself. But don't blame me if it disenchants you.
It was on the very first team jump you see. When 122
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we went back to the OlduVai Gorge area to look for Leakey's man. I won't bore you with our initial misadventures. Leakey's man wasn't there but another surprising hominid was. Actually, the one they called after me. But by the time we found him our grant funds were almost gone. It cost a fantastic sum then to keep us punched back into the temporal fabric and the U.S. was paying most of the bill. And not from altruism either but we won't go into that.
There were six of us. The two MacGregors you've heard of; and the Soviet delegation, Peshkov and Ras-mussen. And myself and a Dr. Priscilla Owen. Fattest woman I ever saw, oddly enough that turned out to be significant. Plus the temporal engineer, as they called them then. Jerry Fitz. A strapping Upper Paleolithic type, full of enthusiasm. He was our general guard and nursemaid, too, and a very nice chap for an engineer he seemed. Young, of course. We were all so young.
Well, we had no sooner settled in and sent Fitz back with our first reports when the blow fell. Messages had to be carried in person then, you realize, by prearranged schedule. All we could do by way of signals was a crude go—no-go. Fitz came back very solemn and told us that the grant appropriation was not going to be renewed and we'd all be pulled back next month for good.
Well, you can imagine we were struck to the heart. Devastated. Dinner that night was funereal. Fitz seemed to be as blue as we and the bottle went round and round—Oh, thank you.
Suddenly we saw Fitz looking us over with a twinkle in his eye.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" He had this rococo manner, though we were all of an age. "Despair is premature. I have a confession. My uncle's wife's niece works for the Senator who's chairman of the Appropriations Committee. So I went to see him all on my lone. What could we lose? And—" I can still see Fitz' grin— "I chatted him up. The whole bit. Dawn of man, priceless
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gains to science. Nothing. Not a nibble, until I found he was a fanatical hunter.
"Well, you know I'm a gun buff myself and we went to it like fiddle and bow. So he got bewailing there's nothing to hunt back there and I told him what a hunter's paradise this is. And to make a long tale short, he's coming to inspect us and if he likes the hunting there's no doubt your money will be along. Now how does that smoke?"
General cheers. Peshkov began counting the Senator's bag.
"Several large ungulates and of course, the baboons and that carnivore you shot, Fitz. And possibly a ta-pir—
"Oh, no," Fitz told him. "Monkeys and deer and pigs, that's not his thing. Something spectacular."
"Hominids tend to avoid areas of high predation," observed MacGregor. "Even the mammoths are far to the east."
"The fact is," said Fitz, "I told him he could shoot a dinosaur."
"A dinosaur!" we hooted.
"But Fitz," said little Jeanne MacGregor. "There aren't any dinosaurs now. They're all extinct."
"Are they now?" Fitz was abashed. "I didn't know that. Neither does the Senator. Surely we can find him an odd one or two? It may be all a mistake, like our little man here."
"Well, there's a species of iguana," said Rasmussen.
Fitz shook his head,
"I promised him the biggest kind of beast. He's coming here to shoot a—what is it? A bronco-something."
"A brontosaurus?" We all jumped him. "But they're all back in the Cretaceous! Eighty million years—"
"Fitz, how could you?"
"I told him the roaring kept us awake nights."
Well, we were still a gloomy lot next day. Fitz was gone across the gorge to tinker with his temporal field rig. They were big awkward things then. We'd built a
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shack for ours and then moved our permanent camp across the gorge where our hominids were. A stiff climb, up and down through the swamp—it was all lush then, not the dry gorge it is today. And of course there was small game and fruit aplenty. Forgive, I think I will have just a bit more.
Fitz came back once to question Rasmussen about brontosaurs and then went back again. At dinner he was humming. Then he looked around solemnly—my God, we were young.
"Ladies and gentlemen, science shall not die. I will get the Senator his dinosaur."
"How?"
"I've a friend back there—" We always called the present 'back there'—"who'll push me a bit of extra power. Enough to jump me and a loadlifter to the big beasts for at least a day. And I can jigger up this breadbox for a signal and a split retrieve."
We all objected, though we dearly wanted to believe. How could he find his brontosaur? Or kill it? And it would be dead. It would be too big. And so on.
But Fitz had his answers and we were drunk on the Pleistocene and in the end the mad plan was set. Fitz would kill the largest reptile he could find and signal us to bring him back when he had it crammed in the transporter. Then, when the Senator was ready to shoot, we would yank the fresh-killed carcass across eighty million years and arrange it near the shack. Insane. But Fitz swung us all with him, even when he admitted that the extra power use would shorten our stay. And off he went next dawn.
Once he'd gone we began to realize what we six promising young scientists had done. We were committed to hoax a powerful United States Senator into believing he had stalked and killed a creature that had been dead eighty million years.
"We can not do it!"
"We've got to."
"It'll be the end of time travel when they find out."
Rasmussen groaned. "The end of us."
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"Misuse of Government resources," said MacGregor. "Actionable."
"Where were our heads?"
"You know," Jeanne MacGregor mused, "I believe Fitz is as eager to shoot a dinosaur as the Senator is."
"And that convenient arrangement with his friend," Peshkov said thoughtfully. "That wasn't done from here. I wonder—"
"We have been had."
"The fact remains," said MacGregor, "that this Senator Dogsbody is coming here, expecting to kill a dinosaur. Our only hope is to make some tracks and persuade him that the creature has moved away."
Luckily we had thought to tell Fitz to bring back footprints of whatever he managed to murder. And Rasmussen had the idea of recording its bellows.
"They're like hippos. They'll be swathes of stuff knocked down by the water. We can trample about a bit before Fitz gets back."
"He has risked his life," said little Jeanne. "What if the signal doesn't work?"
Well, we bashed down some river trails and then our apemen had a battle with baboons and we were too busy with blood typing and tissue samples to worry. And the signal came through and here was Fitz, mud all over and grinning like a piano.
"A beauty," he told us. "And bigger than God's outhouse." Actually he had shot a previously unknown brachiosaur. "I squeezed it in with the tail cut twice, only three hours dead. All ready to fetch." He pulled out a muddy plastic. "Here's the print. And a taihnark. We can drag a bag of rocks for that."
He flicked the recorder and the bellow was enough to knock us backward.
"A thing like a big frog makes that, ours only does a silly little honk. The honorable will never know the difference. Now look!"
He yanked at a lump by his feet. "Feel it. A live egg."
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"Good God—" We crowded up. "What if he takes it back and it hatches in Bethesda?"
"I could inject it with something slow-acting," said MacGregor. "Keep the heart beating a while. An enzyme imbalance?"
"Now for the trails," said Fitz. He unfolded a gory fin like a sailfish plate. "They mark up the trees with this. And they make a nest of wet reeds—our swampy bit there is just right. There's one thing, though."
He scratched mud off his chest hair, squinting at Jeanne MacGregor. -^
"The trails," he said. "It's not just footprints. They, well, they eat a lot and—have you ever seen a moose-run? Those trails are loaded with manure."
There was a pause that grew into a silence.
"Actually, the thought had—" said Priscilla Owens, the fat woman.
It developed that it had crossed all our minds.
"Well, for the sake of realism I'm sure something can be arranged," grinned Peshkov. "A token offering to your establishment, right?"
"He's a hunter," said Rasmussen. "He'll be quite observant of such factors."
Fitz grunted uncomfortably.
"There's another thing. I forgot to tell you about the Senator's nephew. He puts on to be an amateur naturalist. As a matter of fact, he tried to tell the Senator there weren't any dinosaurs here. That's when I said about the roaring at night."
"Well, but—"
"And the nephew is coming here, with the Senator. Maybe I should have mentioned it. He's smart and he has a mean eye. That's why I got the egg and all. Things better be pretty realistic."
There was a breath-drawing silence. Peshkov exploded first.
"Is there anything else you conveniently forgot to tell us?"
"You wanted to go dinosaur hunting!" Priscilla Owen blared. "You planned this! No matter what it
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costs science, no matter what happens to us! You used this whole—"
"Prison!" Rasmussen boomed. "Illegal use of Government—"
"Now, wait." MacGregor's dry voice brought us all up. "Argybargy won't help. First of all, Jerry Fitz, is there a Senator coming or was that part of the game too?"
"He's coming, all right," said Fitz.
"Well, then," said Mac. "We're for it. We must make it stick. Total realism!"
Rasmussen took the bull by the, ah, horns.
"How much?"
"Well, a lot," said Fitz. "Piles."
"Piles?"
Fitz held out his hand.
"It's not bad stuff," He flicked off more mud. "You get used to it. They're herbivores."
"How long do we have?"
"Three weeks."
Three weeks ... I will have a bit more of that aquavit. Pier. The memory of those weeks is very fresh, very green ... Greens, of course, all kinds of greens. And fruits. God, we were sick.
The MacGregors went first. Colic—you've never seen such cramps. I had them. Everybody had them, even Fitz. We saw to it that he did his share, I can tell you. It was a nightmare.
That was when we began to appreciate Priscilla Owen. Eat? Great gorgons, how that woman could eat. We were all dying but she kept on. Mangosteens, plantains, wild manioc root, palm hearts, celery—anything and everything. How we cheered her! We could scarcely crawl but we actually competed in bringing ^ her food, in escorting her to the swamp. It became an obsession. She was saving us. And science. A complete transvaluation of values, Pier. Seen from the standpoint of dung production that woman was a saint.
Rasmussen idolized her.
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"Ten thousands dinars would not pay for the chicken she has eaten," he would croon. "The Persians knew."
Then he would retch and stagger off to dig her roots. I believe he actually got her the Order of Lenin afterward, although her scientific work was quite trivial.
The funny thing was, she began to lose weight. All that roughage, you know, instead of the fatty stuff she usually ate. She became quite different-appearing. As a matter of fact, I tried to propose to her myself. In the swamp. Luckily I got sick. Oh, thank you Pier . . . She gained it all back later on, of course.
Well, by the time the Senator and his nephew arrived we were all so sick with colic and dysentery and our obsession with the trails that we scarcely cared what would happen to our project.
They came in the afternoon, and Fitz ran them around in the swamp a bit and had them find the egg. That quieted the nephew but we could see he was in a nasty temper at being proved wrong and was looking hard at everything. The Senator was simply manic. Little Jeanne managed to get a lot of liquor into them both, on the pretext of avoiding dysentery. Hah!— Thank you.
Luckily it gets dark at six on the equator.
A couple of hours before dawn Fitz sneaked off to the shack and materialized his brachiosaur carcass. Fresh from the upper Cretaceous swamp that had been there eighty million years ago, mind you. Hard to believe even yet—and ourselves in the Pleistocene. Then he pounded back in the dark and the recorded bellow went off on schedule.
The Senator and the nephew came pouring out stark bare, with Fitz telling him where to stand and helping him point the artillery. And up comes this huge head over the trees around the shack and the Senator lets fly.
That was really the most dangerous part of the whole affair. I was under that head with the load-lifter and he nearly got me.
Of course the Senator was in no shape to trek over
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the gorge—though it's surprising what your mesomorph can do—so Fitz was sent to haul the thing back. Once the Senator touched that horrendous snout he could not wait to take it home. That punished Fitz; I doubt he had realized he would lose his trophy. But he did save time travel. I think he got a Scottish decoration in the end. At any rate the nephew had no chance to pry and by lunchtime the whole thing was over. Almost. Incredible, really . . .
Oh, yes, the appropriation went through. And all the rest followed. But we still had a problem, you realize ... Are you sure you don't want a sip? One never finds the real thing nowadays. Pier, old friend, it's good to meet again.
You see, the Senator liked it so well that he decided to return and bring his cronies. Yes. A very difl&cult business, Pier, until our funding finally stabilized. Do you wonder I can't stand the sight of salad since? And coprolites...
What? Oh, that means fossil excrement. Paleobotan-ists used to have a big thing going there. No sense now, when we can just go back ... And anyway, who's to say how genuine they are?