The Wings Of A Bat

by Pauline Ashwell (as by Paul Ash)

If wolves and lions, when raised from infancy by doting humans, can grow up to be great big lovable pets, why couldn’t you do the same with a pterodactyl? That is assuming you like pterodactyls…

An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.

Notes

I do not like pterodactyls. No doubt they have their good points; the evening flight over Lake Possible lends a picturesque touch to the Cretaceous sunset, and breast of young Pteranodon, suitably marinated, makes a passable roast. But as a result of personal and unfortunate experience I have taken a dislike to them, and nobody can claim they haven’t heard me mention the fact—nobody, that is, at Indication One. And this means the whole—human—population of the world at the present date.

I am employed by the Mining and Processing Branch of Cretaceous Minerals, Inc. as a doctor—my contract says so. Of course, with a total planetary population of twenty-eight, there is not a great amount of doctoring to be done. I understand that the original staff list of Indication One did not call for a doctor; the Board intended to have all members of the team take a hypnocourse in nursing so that, if necessary, they could take care of each other. Yaro Land, the mining boss, knocked that idea on the head. He said he wasn’t going to have his staff tinkering with each other, and that if anyone got injured or sick, in the absence of proper medical attention, he would Displace them right back to 2071.

The Board amended its calculations and advertised for: Doctor, qualified; no dependents; willing to travel; Midget Preferred.

Time Displacement is expensive even now—or perhaps I should say, even then—even, that is, in the year when I was recruited, fifty-three years after I was born and somewhere between 100 and 110 million years after the date at which I am writing this.

When Dr. Winton Boatrace first displaced a milligram of matter it went back twenty-four hours, and the experiment cost him 272 Credits for power alone. CM. Inc.’s engineers can do better than that, but even so, the power to displace the average staff members cost about Cr.500,000, give or take Cr. 100,000—or thereabouts. It’s not the date that counts—Displacement is a threshold effect and it takes no more power to get to the Middle Cretaceous than to the middle of last week—it’s the weight. I suppose someone in Personnel did read my diploma and references, but their most important checking was done with a pair of scales. I weighed forty-one kilograms, and got the job. Except for Henry, I’m the smallest man here.

Yaro Land is the biggest—five-foot-seven, and stocky. I imagine the Board couldn’t get first-class knowledge of sea-mining, combined with all-round engineering experience, plus administrative ability—and the sheer guts to make the first displacement of all, not knowing whether he might find himself in the ocean or right in front of a Tyrannosaur—in a smaller package.

As a matter of fact, the details of my qualifications weren’t that important. Diploma or no, there are not so many things I could do that anyone else on the team couldn’t do almost as well. They’ve all been trained in the first-aid treatment of injuries, from a sprained pinkie to a fractured skull. The deep freeze contains a billion units of Unimycin, the latest, safest, most powerful antibiotic on the market, in self-injecting ampoules. And if anyone needs major surgery or really elaborate nursing he’ll still have to go back to 2071—or, to be quite accurate, 2071 plus however much time he spent at Indication One. But, if anyone gets moderately sick—the kind of condition that cures itself in a week or two, provided someone feeds the patient nourishing meals and keeps him from getting out of bed—I’m at hand.

No doubt any member of the team could do that, too. The weak point in the Board’s original plan was that it provided no spare wheels at all—for nursing, or anything else. Even the most skilled specialist sometimes needs a third hand, or an eye on dials somewhere at the back of his head. So it’s also in my contract that I lend a hand—or eye, or foot—as and when required. I don’t mind, even though I’m seldom trusted with anything that could not be done just as well by one of these dexterous little egg-eating dinosaurs, if you caught it and trained it young. I still have a good deal of free time; among other things I edit and print our weekly newspaper—with a great deal of interference from the subscribers and contributors. Within reason, I’ll do anything that’s asked… bring in the tapes from the meteorology station, watch dials on the mineral-ometer, cook supper. But I will not act as veterinary surgeon to stray items of the Cretaceous fauna. It isn’t reasonable, it isn’t in my contract, and one must draw the line somewhere.

I hold surgery every morning; that is, I sit in my office, and anyone who feels like it drops in for a chat. Mostly they come to complain about the cuts in their last literary effort. If anyone has any symptoms they care to discuss I’m there to listen and help. That Unimycin has been burning a hole in the deep freeze for over a year.

When Henry came in I was polishing up my editorial for the next issue, and I took the opportunity to read him part of it. He seemed restless, but I paid no attention; he usually is. Too much thyroid, I suspect. Also, we have different ideas on literary style. It was Henry who got the name of the paper, Weekly Bulletin of the Indication One Branch of Cretaceous Minerals, Inc.—which at least had the merit of accuracy—shortened to The Chalk Age Gazette. The switch, admittedly, was carried by the unanimous vote of the subscribers and contributors—the Editor abstaining—but it was Henry’s idea.

Halfway through my third paragraph he interrupted.

“Doc, it’s suffering! Please!”

“Henry,” I said, “I am accustomed to criticism. Lack of appreciation I have grown to expect. But downright abuse, combined with atrocious grammar—”

He pointed a quivering finger at my blotter.

“But it’s sick!”

I began to suspect that I had here the first case of delusional insanity in the Middle Cretaceous—which would, of course, be the earliest on record. I looked at the blotter. On it—put there by Henry, presumably, while I thought he was listening—was a lumpish something which seemed to be wrapped in large, withered leaves. I took it to be crude tobacco—the plant grows like a weed in this climate, but nobody has managed a satisfactory cure—and poked it experimentally with the tip of my pen.

Henry groaned—loudly. I looked up in astonishment, whereupon the pen jerked violently against my hand and was twitched away.

I looked down. The lump on my blotter had expanded to twice its previous size, revealing that the “leaves” were broad leathery wrinkled wings. A bloodshot little eye had opened in the middle. It had produced from somewhere a sharp, swordlike beak about seven inches long, and with this, and a set of bony fingers, like a spider’s legs, it was trying to dismember the pen.

I said: “Get that creature out of here!”

“But, Doc,” protested Henry, “she’s sick! and she’s only a baby!”

I valued that pen. Pouncing, I attempted to get it back. The “baby’s” grip tightened; pen, pterosaur and blotter slid towards me as a unit. The head drew back, preparing for a thrust. I reversed direction hastily and shoved the whole outfit to the other side of the desk.

“Henry, I will not have pterodactyls in my office! Take it away!”

I maintain that my attitude was not unreasonable, nor even unkind. I knew no more about the treatment of sick pterodactyls than Henry did—if anything, less. And, as I said, I dislike them. I had a very nasty experience once with a pterodactyl, and, if Henry doesn’t know that, he ought to; he’s heard the story often enough.

It happened when I was out on Lake Possible, fishing, in a glass-fiber dinghy—about six weeks after my Displacement—at the end of a beautiful day.

That lake! CM. Inc.‘s engineers claim that they understand Dr. Boatrace’s Theorems of Temporal Displacement—if “understand” is the word, when you have to plod through three brand-new systems of calculus before you can even begin—but they don’t pretend to know how he made his map of Indication One.

So far as I can see, getting a fix on a section of past time is like casting a line over weeks: you can be pretty sure the hook will catch somewhere, but. how far away depends not only on the length of your line but also on the current, the distribution of weeds, and how hard and fast you reel in. Boatrace’s “hook” was the gadget he called his Minimal Temporal Trace; I gather he was pretty sure he could Displace it to somewhere in the Middle or Upper Cretaceous, and so he did, but there’s still a slight uncertainty about the exact date—a factor of ten million years or so.

Once the Trace was fixed he could Displace other items to the same point—like sliding a ring along your snagged line. I understand that—I think. What I don’t see, and neither does anyone else, is how the Trace—a bit of metal and crystal no bigger than the top of my thumb—could send back and tell him what kind of place it had landed in.

Well, there it is. I’m told he used to Displace one, and shut himself up for several hours, then come out and Displace another. One day, he came out with a penciled map that looked as though Baby had got hold of the telephone pad, and told them he’d found what he wanted and they could dust off the big machine—the one built to Displace a man.

Yaro, who’s not afraid to use a dirty word when there’s no other that fits, told me once he reckoned the old man was using some form of Psi technique. Boatrace knew what he wanted—the ideal setup for sea-mining, a medium sized island with strong deep-water currents close by—and he just went on casting until the “feel” of the line told him that this time he was into a fish instead of a snag.

Another thing I’ll never understand is why Yaro was willing to make that first Displacement, with only Boatrace’s map as evidence that he’d find solid ground at the Exit Point. It’s just a faint wavering oval, about twice as long as it is wide, with a scribble underneath that reads—I’m told—“First Indication of Desires …” Not even his daughter can decipher the final word. There’s just one feature marked: a clear, hard-edged circle, near one end, about half the width of the oval. It looks as though he put a semi-credit on the paper and ran the pencil around it. By some freak the label he wrote on is quite legible, even to me: “Aq. p …? Lake, possibly??”

As a drawing of a natural feature, it’s about as convincing as a monocle on an amoeba. Well, I’m a respectable matter-fearing materialist, but if Boatrace was really using Psi… No. As a member in good standing of the WMA I prefer to assume he was using something else. (The principle of hyperdimensic transductility, perhaps, or a couple of patent double million magnifying gas microscopes of extra power.) But Lake Possible is a flooded caldera; seen from above—from the island’s central peak, for instance—it forms an unbelievably perfect ring.

Seen from dinghy level, that afternoon, it looked like the best fishing water I’d ever seen. Great clumsy twelve-inch insects, something like a dragonfly, were blundering into the wavelets, and big fat red-lipped fishes—a kind of coelacanth—were popping up to take them all around the boat. The only trouble was that they didn’t see the desirability of any lure in my book.

I didn’t really care; it was such a perfect day. The air was warm, but crisp, not steamy; there was just enough wind to dry the sweat on my face. However, our cook-housekeeper wanted to try her hand at fish chowder and I’d promised to bring in the raw materials. So an hour before sunset I decided to try trolling from a moving boat. I fixed a couple of rods, one with a minnow, one with a spoon, and hoisted the sail.

Close-hauled, the boat moved through the water at just the proper speed. I sat back, with half an eye on the rods and another half on the sail, leaving one to enjoy the general peacefulness of the scene. Then, after about ten minutes, I glanced over my shoulder, and the Devil was after me.

Well, what would you have thought? Bat wings, twenty feet across—rolling eyeballs, China white and black—a scarlet devil’s grin and a horn on its head.

I let out a yell, and ducked. The sail flapped, once; I automatically tightened the sheet and the rough feel of it brought me back to my senses—or I thought it did. The actual effect was to make me assume I’d had a brief hallucination; I simply could not have seen what I thought I had.

I screwed up my courage to look back—and there it was, huge, hideous and three-dimensional as I remembered it. Like the boat, it was headed into the wind. There was a single row of bony struts along the front of each wing, and the great leathery membrane was ballooning like a spinnaker behind. It wasn’t Old Nick, of course. However, I did not feel that much better when I realized that I was being followed by a Pteranodon.

I’d seen them often enough at a distance, planing slowly around the circle of the cliffs; or out at sea, skimming along with those incredible beaks half-opened, just above the surface of the waves. That had not prepared me for the sheer monstrosity of the creature riding the wind behind me, twenty feet away. It looked big enough to carry me off and feed me to its young.

The beak was foreshortened, of course, since I was seeing it head-on; it was also half agape, so that I saw the bright-red lining of the mouth. The “horn” was that great sloping bony crest that continues the line of the beak back over the shoulders, which was foreshortened, too, when I first caught sight of it.

I couldn’t cram on more sail—I had only a little balanced lug—but I could get the wind behind me by heading in to the nearer shore. However, if I did that straightaway I would wind up at the base of a two-hundred-foot cliff. I would have to hold on for a quarter of a mile, then run for Landing Gap.

May I never have such a sail again. I tried to keep my mind on flag, sheet and tiller, but I couldn’t refrain, any more than Lot’s wife could, from looking back. Once when I glanced over my shoulder I found that frightful thing wagging its head at me—left, right, left, right, showing off the two-foot length of beak and the bright blue streaks on the side of the crest.

When I headed in to the Gap I hoped the wind would bother it, blowing directly from behind it, but it wheeled along with the boat and just flattened out a little, holding station without so much as a flap. Aerodynamically, those things aren’t primitive; they’re the culmination of seventy million years of evolution. The air is their home. I was in such a lather that I didn’t think at all about shedding way from the boat. I left the sail full until I heard the keel grate on the shingle. I had just enough sense, then, to let the sheet go, but it was too late. The mast was just a little pole of green wood—there had been no time to season it; even Yaro had been less than a year at Indication One—and it snapped clean in two. Down came the sail on top of me as I sprawled on the bottom of the boat, and by the time I mustered up enough spunk to crawl out from under, the Pteranodon had gone.

That’s why I don’t like pterodactyls—pterosaurs—Pteranodons—in the Cretaceous all three words come to the same thing. If the little fluttering Pterodactylus were still around, or even the hen-sized Rhamphorhynchus, I might be able to regard them as fellow-creatures, but they both died out at the end of the Jurassic. The creature Henry had dumped on my desk was another Pteranodon. It was a very young one, admittedly, about the size of a pigeon apart from those shrouding wings, and with only a faint ridge to mark the incipient crest. Nevertheless its beak was quite large enough to do damage.

“Doc, she’s sick,” Henry told me in accents of maudlin reproach. “I found her on the roof this morning… she must have lost her mammy during the night. Did you, Fiona?” He spread his hands in a protective gesture over the leathery bundle, removing them just in time to avoid a fast jab.

Pteranodons are viviparous, bearing one young at a time. After birth the infant clings head-down to the lower part of the mother’s belly, held in place partly by her feet, partly by its own and by the four unmodified “fingers” projecting from the second joint of the wing. I had no idea how big they were when they first ventured on independent flight.

I looked up at Henry in an incredulous double-take.

“What did you call her?” Hastily I recollected myself. “Never mind. Get her out of here.”

Henry is not quite twenty, and it has never seriously occurred to him that anybody might disagree with him, fundamentally, over anything that really mattered … such as the right-to-life—and hence to medical assistance—of a sick infant reptile of repulsive appearance and dubious disposition. He thought I was simply acting crusty and middle-aged for the fun of being a “character,” and hadn’t time to humor me.

“I think the trouble is exhaustion,” he said earnestly. “It’s been blowing half a gale for three days, so probably her mother couldn’t get fish for her. Are you hungry, Fiona?”

“Henry!” Yaro loomed in the doorway, monumentally disapproving. “We wait for you!”

“Better try her on fish Doc, there’s some in this can. I’ll be back as soon as possible, be good now Fiona,” said Henry on his way to the door, and was gone.

I had drawn the line at acting as vet, but Henry’s assumption that all good men come to the aid of the party was a powerful eraser. Besides, it’s very difficult deliberately to let an animal starve. I couldn’t even make believe that I was too busy. Yaro’s team were busy assembling and testing a cadmium extraction unit, which is not a job for unskilled labor, and the other specialists were immersed in their various routines. Even Elsa was doing the week’s baking—not quite like Mother’s, but you’d never think the base was carbohydrate extracted from pulped water-weed—and the kitchen was out of bounds until she finished.

Fiona had found my “in” tray and was squatting in it, tented in her wings. The pen lay on the desk, slobbered but undamaged. I rolled it cautiously towards me with a ruler and she opened her mouth—the lining was shell-pink, not the adult scarlet—and hissed faintly, but seemed to lack energy for anything else. I got out a pair of heavy gauntlets, made from the belly-leather of a sea-crocodile, and a pair of long bone forceps and opened Henry’s can. It contained pieces of steamed fish left from dinner the night before.

How do you persuade a pterodactyl to open its jaws? I hesitated to use force—the bones looked fragile. I tried tapping the tip of her beak with a morsel of fish, held in the forceps. She retreated promptly to the farthest confines of the “in” tray and pulled her wings over her head. I spread several choice fragments on a small dish and put them in front of her. Fiona inspected them with a red-rimmed eye, then, deciding they were harmless, paid no further heed to them.

I tried hissing, while waving the forceps under her beak; I even picked up bits of fish in my gloved fingers and thrust them upon her. No good. She hid inside her capacious wings and this time showed no sign of coming out. I removed some bits of fish from my chair and sat down to think things out.

Fish-eating birds, I seemed to remember, did not simply drop bits of fish for their offspring to pick up; they stuck food right down their throat. Which meant that the beak had to be open. Vague recollections of high-school biology indicated that the opening of the beak was often a reflex response to the sight of the mother—or father—bearing supplies. No, not even that. A dummy with just a few parental features would often set off the response.

Wildly I thought about draping myself in a tarpaulin to suggest wings. But in all probability the essential feature was the beak, from which, after all, the food would come. I considered ways and means of constructing one before I remembered that there were a couple of Pteranodon heads, dried and mounted, on the common-room wall. We did not hunt for amusement, but we had tested the edibility and other useful characteristics of every species on the island and somebody with baronial instincts had imposed this form of decoration. Elsa was always wanting to get rid of the trophies but so far as I remembered they were still in place.

They were. I unhooked the larger one and brought it back to the office. It had been varnished, and kept its color quite well; even the eye, thanks to the bony ring in the sclerotic, was still quite lifelike. I got a bit of fish ready, worked my hand into the skull, and hissed to attract attention.

Fiona drew back the edge of her wing and peered at me suspiciously from one half-open eye. Then her wings shut down as abruptly as an umbrella and she was shuffling towards the head, beak gaping and neck outstretched. I pushed the bit of fish to the back of her throat.

Fiona closed her beak thoughtfully, and I whipped the head out of sight. The underside of her baggy throat heaved once, twice, and I thought she was swallowing. Then she stretched forward, shook her head up and down a few times, and opened her beak. The bit of fish fell out.

I rushed off to the kitchen and begged a raw fish from Elsa. This time I thought I’d got it; for about ten minutes Fiona gaped obediently at the dried head and then I thrust the fish into her beak. I saw it go down, until there was a distinct bulge under her sternum and she was weighed down in front. Apparently she would have gone on feeding forever, but I called a halt at that point, not knowing how to cope with indigestion in a pterodactyl. I left her, as I thought, digesting. About an hour later I heard a faint rhythmic gasping, and looking up from the proofs I was correcting I saw Fiona, beak downwards, regurgitating the lot.

The fragments were unchanged; no sign of digestion. Perhaps parent Pteranodons predigested food for their young. By this time my blood was up; I didn’t intend to let this infuriating creature die if I could help it. I’ve had less prepossessing patients in my time. I had no pepsin in stock, but Elsa had brought some pawpaw seeds with her, and while the resulting trees had not yet borne ripe fruit there were plenty of leaves. I knew these could be used as tenderizers; they might do the trick. I sneaked into the kitchen garden and removed a few, wrapped the remainder of the fish in them, and left them for an hour in the sun.

Henry came in as I was shoveling the messy, part-digested result into Fiona’s beak, and was, I am glad to say, impressed. He removed Fiona, the “in” tray, the forceps, and what was left of the fish, and I cleaned up the office and myself and went to lunch.

I felt distinctly pleased with myself, which was tempting Fate, of course, and I should have known better. The staff abounded in amateur naturalists, many of them with strongly-developed maternal—or paternal—instincts. I had a pretty picture of myself advising and directing them in the care and feeding of the young Pteranodon. What I had forgotten, of course, was that, however pleased they might be to baby-sit with Fiona, their professional schedules would make it impossible for them to do so during working hours.

There was great competition to take care of her once work was over; but Pteranodon, like most reptiles, is a strictly diurnal creature. Half an hour after sunset, which in those latitudes occurred every day at 18:15 hours, Fiona was asleep. At least I didn’t have to get up and feed her at dawn. Half the camp took turns at keeping her overnight, until nearly every cabin had acquired a faint lingering stink of predigested fish. Henry, with one person chosen by rota for the privilege, looked after her during the luncheon break. But from 8:00 till 12:30, 14:00 till 17:30 hours, she was mine, all mine.

You may wonder why, feeling as I did, I allowed myself to get stuck with the brute. The explanation, though complicated, can be given in one word: Morale. It’s a tricky thing in any community. When twenty-nine people make up the total population of the world and will for the next nine years, it’s the most important thing of all. It was outrageous of Henry to foist his beastly protégée on me, but then Henry, as I have mentioned, was quite incapable of seeing the matter in that light. A Henry who knew and accepted the fact that some men just don’t care to act as foster-fathers to the strayed young of other classes of vertebrates would be someone quite different from the Henry I knew. And sudden personality changes are upsetting in a small community. Or, to put it another way, we all had to depend on each other for things far outside the services we had contracted to supply, and anything that upset that dependence—reasonable or not—was dangerous and bad. Or, to put it in the simplest way possible, I simply hadn’t the moral courage to refuse.

Fiona ate voraciously and grew at an inordinate rate—she must have put on about two ounces a day. At the end of two weeks she weighed four pounds, with a wing-span of more than eight feet, and I began to think, hopefully, that any day now she would start flying and be able to fend for herself. My hopes took a severe setback when someone pointed out that, for all we knew to the contrary, she had no inborn instincts in that direction and would have to be taught to fly. Several people tried it; they took her out into the clearing around the cabins, perched her on rocks, trees, or roofs, withdrew to a distance, waved pieces of fish, and called her to come. Fiona, after gaping hopefully for some minutes—she had now learned to open her beak at the sight of a human being—usually turned her back on them and signified disapproval in a vulgar but unmistakable manner. To some extent I sympathized. After all, none of her would-be-instructors was able to fly.

Quite by accident, this time, I solved the problem myself. A small outdoor shelter had been constructed for Fiona alongside my office. Three weeks after her arrival I had given her the second feed of the day and returned to the office to read some manuscripts. It was becoming increasingly difficult to get people to write anything except Nature notes, a development which had started with Fiona’s arrival. I had just unearthed a perfunctory review on the latest batch of books—CM. Inc. sent us a dozen, on micro-microfilm, once a month—when I heard an irritable hiss, and there was Fiona shuffling through the door.

She made straight for the desk, gave an inefficient-looking hop and caught the raised edge at the back with the fingers of one wing. With a prodigious effort she got a grip with the other “hand,” and there she hung, feet scuffling at the smooth surface, waving her beak angrily at me over the top until I came out of my stupefaction and got to my feet. This seemed to stimulate her. She brought up one hind foot, took a grip on the raised edge, and heaved up and forward. A moment’s confused and indescribable activity and she landed with a flop on my pile of manuscripts.

Half of them shot off the desk, but she caught the top one in her foot and began methodically ripping it to pieces. I seized a towel which was hanging over the back of my chair—I needed a shower every time I fed her—and flapped it angrily.

“Go away, Fiona! Shoo—!”

Fiona unfolded her wings and flapped vigorously back, sending the remainder of the papers flying.

Idiotically, I flapped again. Fiona drew herself up, raised her wings as high as she could, ran at me over the blotter—and took off.

I, of course, knew that she ought to be able to fly, but I doubt whether she had ever suspected the fact. Anyway, there was no room to do it in the office. She sailed straight into the wall and was knocked out.

For the rest of the morning she was punch-drunk, but I had discovered how to teach her to fly. She simply needed a stimulus: the sight of something that flapped. In Nature, no doubt, it would have been a parent’s wings, unfolding and limbering up, but the towel was a sufficient substitute. In a couple of days Fiona was flying from the top of the computer building right across the clearing—a distance of a hundred yards. In a week she had discovered how to use a thermal and would spiral effortlessly in the updraft over the sun-warmed rooms—and come down only to be fed.

That was the snag. Fiona had no idea of fishing for her own food. Taken to the lake, she would fly there for a while, but every time she got hungry she wheeled and planed unerringly for home. We tried throwing fish to her, to teach her to feed on the wing. If it fell on the ground, she landed and picked it up. If it fell in the water she squawked angrily, landed, and opened her beak to show us where it ought to have gone.

“The trouble is,” Henry informed me accusingly, “Fiona doesn’t know she’s a Pteranodon. She probably thinks she’s a human being,” He reflected. “Or perhaps she thinks Pteranodons look like you.”

It seemed improbable to me, but various works on animal behavior seemed to agree with him. A bird—and pterodactyls are more similar to birds than to any other Tertiary group—reared in captivity tends to direct many of its instinctive activities towards people, rather than its own species. Konrad Lorenz was fed on caterpillars by a pet raven; and there are numerous sad cases of geese and peacocks and other large birds which fell in love with their keepers and tried to lure them onto the nest. Henry and I were almost equally disquieted by what we read; Henry on behalf of Fiona’s psyche and future sex life, I because I was beginning to doubt whether I would ever be free again.

In the end, by simply throwing her fish into a small pool—dead at first, later on alive—I taught Fiona to take food from water. It was not at all the same thing as fishing on the wing, but it was the best I could do. Then Henry and I took her out on Lake Possible one evening, in the dinghy, and marooned her on a rock.

We rigged the sail to cover the boat, and, when she was not looking, crawled underneath it and hid. Presently we heard indignant hissings and the gulping squawk that indicated she wanted to be fed. Then there was a scrabbling on the side of the boat, and a weight descended on the canvas covering my back.

I kept as still as I could while Fiona shuffled around on my shoulderblades and finally came to rest on the back of my head. I wanted nothing to distract her at the critical moment, which must—I thought, resolutely stifling discomfort as sharp claws probed the crevice between my ear and my skull—come soon. Ten minutes later we heard a series of rustling flaps: the Pteranodons on their homeward flight dipping down to inspect Fiona, and rising again as they made for the caves and ledges of the cliffs. I began to think that we were on a fruitless errand; then I felt Fiona’s grip tighten on my occipital bones and heard her wings flap, once. Then nothing for a moment; until there was one last swooping rush above me—a belated member of the flock—and my face was pushed down onto the thwart as Fiona took off.

We waited until full dark, not to risk distracting her, then rowed to shore and plodded home. Henry seemed rather dispirited and I felt that a show of pleasure would be out of place. As we parted on the way to our respective cabins he looked back over his shoulder.

“Cheer up, Doc,” he said. ”At least we know that she knows the way home.”

I gave him a cold look—wasted, of course, in the darkness—and went off to shower and change. I slept badly that night—waking three or four times from a doze, in the belief that I had heard the click of claws on the fiber-glass roof. In the morning I opened the door cautiously, half expecting twenty pounds of young Pteranodon to come plummeting down with an urgent squawk, demanding to be fed. But no. Fiona’s favorite roosts and perches were still clearly marked, both to the eye and the olfactory sense, but they were all vacant. Fiona, it appeared, had left us for good.

The details of the mining operations are not, for the most part, relevant to this story, and some of them—for instance, the reason why it’s economically practical to carry out the process in the Cretaceous, although sea-mining in the Twenty-first Century pays no Displacement costs—form part of a very big industrial secret. So I’ll just say that the extraction units consist of gently-tapering tunnels about fifty feet long, constructed of hoops and slats, and lined with plastic-coated cloth. They’re not heavy—in fact, they are amazingly fragile for the work they have to do—but they’re unwieldy. When a whole battery of tunnels is complete, they are lashed side by side into rafts, towed out to sea, stacked one raft on top of another, and sunk in water deep enough to put them safely below the turbulence zone. The units float at first, but after an hour’s soaking they lose buoyancy. That’s the moment when you maneuver the next raft over the top and get them bolted together; then the next, and so on. The timing’s tricky, and the whole operation calls for a flat calm—twelve hours of it.

The first battery—thirty-five units—was ready for assembly just about two years after I arrived at Indication One. Yaro was closer to jitters than I’d ever have thought he could be. Those units represented two years of hard work for all concerned—even me. The assembly and sinking had to go right. This was the test. Of course, since all the basic manufactures—aluminum, fiber-glass, cloth, plastic—had been set up, it would only take three months to produce the next battery. If anything went wrong with this one morale would take a terrible beating and the whole project would be set back far more than three months. Besides, he needed to make tests, check that the thing really did work as it should—it would take most of a year to be certain of that.

We waited out three days of light winds and loppetty little waves—some people wanted to take a chance on them, but Yaro was taking no risks with this first batch of babies—and then on the fourth morning I woke to a flat, oppressive stillness and thought: This is it.

Everyone else thought so, too; breakfast arrived half an hour early and found everyone present, except for half a dozen who’d grabbed themselves sandwiches and gone to start the units on their way to the beach. At least, I hadn’t noticed that anyone else was missing, until Yaro wanted to ask Linda McDonough a question and then found that she wasn’t there.

Linda is our astronomer; she also took a six months’ cram course in meteorology before being Displaced. If you wonder why a mining company needs an astronomer—enough to pay Cr.500,000 just for her fare—I have to say that that’s part of the industrial secret aforesaid. The reasons why we need a meteorologist are obvious; we needed her particularly that morning and she was missing.

One of the girls went to her cabin, and came back in a hurry for me. I went—in fact, I ran; not that Linda sounded dangerously sick, but it was the first call for my professional services in over a month.

I found Linda half-dressed and very cross with herself for oversleeping; she was also feverish, puffy, and covered with an irritating rash.

She admitted having been slightly off-color for several days. It was plainly an allergy of some sort. I was planning scratch tests, and had just realized the interesting possibilities—she hadn’t been affected by any of the common allergens in the Twenty-first Century, such as eggs, or shellfish, or pollen, but proteins, as well as physical structure, can undergo a lot of evolution in a hundred million years—when Linda gave me details. For the last few days, since she’d done all the calculations she could on the data available and further observation had been impossible owing to overcast, she’d been helping to apply plastic to the filter-cloths for the extraction units. She began to feel seedy the following day.

That left nothing to investigate, except which of the plastics caused the trouble. There are several in use here, all with molecules so complex they’re halfway to being alive; the whole extraction process depends on their peculiar properties. I had to admit, though, that the question was of purely academic interest. Standard anti-allergen treatment would clear up the trouble and she’d have to stay away from the filters, whichever plastic she was allergic to. Linda said that she wasn’t going to be scratched to bits simply in the name of medical science—a deplorable attitude and an extreme overstatement—and we were still arguing when Yaro arrived, wanting to know whether the calm would last out the day, or not.

Linda tottered over to her desk and found the latest computer-digest of the meteorology data. Her eyes were watering and she obviously found it hard to concentrate. After several minutes she announced that there had been a slight, steady drop in the barometer readings for two days, which probably meant a blow coming up; it might be today or it might be tomorrow but without last night’s data tapes she couldn’t be sure.

I thought Yaro was about to explode. It was very unlike him—or very unlike anything I knew of him so far—but the situation was clearly getting on nerves he had never realized he possessed.

“I’ll go and get the new tapes,” promised Linda feverishly, reaching for her clothes. “I’ll be able to tell you in an hour or so.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” I told her. “I’ll fetch the tapes. I’ve done it before.”

“But if I go I can get a direct reading on the barometer and call Yaro on the radio and—”

“Young lady,” I said, “that meteorology diploma has gone to your head. I was reading barometers before you were born.”

“Why I permitted that station to be set up on a hill top two miles away…” came in a threatening background rumble. I knew that the site had been chosen, with his approval, for several excellent reasons, and that Linda had suggested asking for a few duplicate instruments to be kept in the settlement—but that, on grounds of Displacement costs, Yaro had turned her down.

Plodding up the way to the Peak, with the two-way radio strapped to my back, I found myself thinking: The calm before the storm. In our weather-controlled society the cliché has lost all contact with its real meaning. I simply didn’t know whether it applied to this situation, or not. There had been quite a number of gales in the two years I had spent at Indication One; I seemed to remember that there had been an interval of calm before most of them, but how long it lasted, and whether calm was always followed by a storm, I simply could not decide. There seemed, now, an ominous heaviness in the air. I was not sure that I had noticed it before Linda had mentioned the drop in barometric pressure.

Yaro’s dilemma was plain. If he called off the assembly of the battery today and there was no storm—or if it held off for twelve hours—he would have wasted the best opportunity he was likely to have for at least a week, and probably more. It would give his reputation a heavy knock, which was important; faith in Yaro’s judgment was a very vital factor in general morale. In some ways it might be worse than losing part of the battery in an unexpected storm that could be written off as bad luck. Holding things up unnecessarily might be considered old-maidish.

I came out on the first ridge, high enough to see over the rise on the other side of the settlement, and caught a glimpse of the sea. It was so smooth it didn’t even sparkle, though that might have been partly due to the haze of overcast. There were no distinct clouds; I found I didn’t care for the look of the sky.

A long train of light, big-wheeled carts was assembling at the edge of the settlements. There were caves—pumice—in the hillside and we used them for storage and for working on rainy days—mostly we worked out of doors. At the moment those precious extractor units could be wheeled back under cover in ten minutes or less, but once they’d been taken down to the beach it would need an hour. If they’d been unloaded from the carriers—

I dropped that line of thought and pressed on. The path led through a strand of cycads in a sheltered dip, then out onto bare rock, where it was marked only by cairns. One of the things one misses in this era is grass, also heather, gorse, bracken—cover-plants in general. I had been walking rapidly for twenty minutes, most of it uphill, and was sweating freely, but I was pleased to note that my respiration was steady and undistressed. Two years ago I’d have been panting after half as much exercise.

The Met station was on top of a bluff; the shortest way up to it involved leaving the path and climbing twenty feet of rock-face. It was easy enough in daylight, broken into convenient ledges. I knew that Linda used the path only after sunset or when her hands were full.

I had just got up onto the first ledge and was reaching for a handhold when two things happened simultaneously. The radio receiver gave a loud click, indicating that someone had turned on a transmitter, and a huge triangular shadow slid suddenly down the rocks and away over my head.

For a moment I simply froze; then I got a grip on a knob of rock and turned my head very carefully to look behind me.

Yaro’s voice said sharply, “Doctor, have you read the barometer?”

His voice seemed to come from my shoulderblades, which was one minor element in my confusion—I kept wanting to get around and see where it was coming from. However, my attention had already been split three ways. Part for his question—by no means the biggest part. Another—even smaller—for an unexpected glimpse of the sea, with a dull steely shine to it now and a dark purple line on the horizon that had not been there before. But the largest—paralyzingly large—fragment was taken up with the full-grown Pteranodon that was just wheeling to pass over me again.

“Doctor, answer, please. What is the pressure?”

I said, “I can’t—” Then, at the top of my voice, “Go away!”

The Pteranodon was circling in a tighter curve than I would have believed possible for those twenty-foot wings. It was going to brush right over my scalp if it didn’t hit me in the face. I flattened against the rocks. There was a thump above me and the brief rattle of a pebble dislodged. I squeezed a glance past the rock-face an inch from my eyeballs, and saw the Pteranodon sitting on the ledge above me, huddled in its wings.

“Doctor, what is wrong? Did you fall just then? Are you hurt?”

I managed a rather croaky “No.” Then, coming to my senses with a rush: “I haven’t got to the Met station yet. I just started the final climb, but there’s a Pteranodon in the way!”

“A what?”

“It’s sitting on a ledge above me. Maybe it’s got a nest here or something. I’ll go around by the path; I’ll be there in ten minutes. Don’t worry, I’ll get that reading.” An idea which had been nagging away at the back of my brain suddenly surged to the front. “Yaro! Don’t let the carriers move any farther! There’s a storm coming up over the sea—I saw it!”

Yaro said sharply, “I am looking at the sea. I see nothing.”

“I’m higher up than you; I can see farther. Over the horizon, a dark line. I think it’s getting closer. Put those units under cover. If it comes up fast you won’t—”

“Calm yourself; they have not started the journey. This storm, how sure are you that it approaches us?”

That was a nasty one. The situation did not exactly make for accurate judgment, even if I’d had any experience on which to base one. That dark line might not be a storm at all. It was not as though I spent much of my time gazing out to sea; for all I knew the horizon might have a thick purple border every second day.

I didn’t want to be responsible for holding up the job, possibly for nothing. The answer, of course, was to get those barometric records as quickly as I could. I looked up at the Pteranodon and yelled, “Shoo!”

By way of answer the creature unfolded its wings halfway and leaned forward over the ledge, and I stepped backwards into the air and dropped four feet onto a rock.

It was a flat rock, and by some miracle I didn’t tumble backwards and break the radio; I managed a flop forwards and landed on all fours. I scrambled away crab-fashion, got to my feet, and ran. Fifty yards around the base of the bluff would bring me to a relatively gentle slope, and another hundred yards up that was the Met station. The first stretch was flat, in the sense that it wasn’t rising, but it was far from smooth. I was panting hard, now, and my legs were only half under control, but I had almost reached the beginning of the slope when there was a swoosh! A vast canopy of wings slid over me, dipped into a curtain, and then suddenly shut down into a shape no bigger than a two-year-old.

It had a beak, though. I stopped, and backed away. I was vaguely conscious of Yaro shouting to somebody—not me—he was calling someone to take over the radio. I sidled slowly along a wall of rock, keeping an eye on the enemy, remembering that presently I would come to a sort of niche or alcove about six feet wide. If I wasn’t careful I could get backed into it and trapped—

“Hey! Doc!” It was Henry, sounding excited. “What’s wrong? Yaro said you were having trouble with a Pteranoden. Is it Fiona?”

As though stimulated by the sound of his voice, the creature half unfolded itself, then shut down tight and waddled a few steps after me.

“Now look what you’ve done,” I muttered crossly. “Don’t shout.”

Henry obediently lowered his voice. “What’s happening? What’s she doing? Is it Fiona, Doc?”

With difficulty I kept my voice down to an infuriated whisper. “How would I know?”

It was nine months since I’d last seen Fiona. It was almost as long since I’d even thought of her. This creature was about twice as large as she’d been when I’d loosed her. Would Fiona be full grown now? I hadn’t the slightest idea. Nor did I find it even faintly reassuring that this creature might be my former acquaintance. Even when we were closest she had had no inhibitions about taking a peck at me.

The Pteranodon—Fiona or not—repeated its performance, opening, shutting, and coming a few steps closer. I backed, and found the rock curving away into the alcove. I hastily abandoned my hold on it and took two steps rapidly backwards, intending to get past the gap and have my back to solid stone once more.

With an angry-sounding squawk, the Pteranodon jumped. I did a complicated and ungainly dance-step that took me backwards and sideways—into the alcove. Then my foot slipped and I landed with a bone-shaking thump on hard dampish mud.

The reptile took a little run at me, folding its wings the while. I flopped wildly away from it on elbows and bottom until I hit my head on a rock. I was at the back of the alcove. Being unable to retreat farther, I sat up—there was just room to do so without braining myself on the overhang—and shrank into the smallest possible space: knees up, head down, arms folded over it to protect my eyes. There was a rustle and a hiss like a gas-leak, but no savage thrust. Instead, after a minute or so, I felt a sharp but not unfriendly nudge; I became conscious of a strong dry musky odor; and peeking cautiously under my folded arms I found the Pteranodon sitting quietly beside me.

Henry was uttering questions and exhortations in a steady, whispered string.

“Shut up!” I breathed back. “No, I’m not hurt. I’m in a sort of shallow cave. The brute’s right here alongside—if I try to escape it’ll probably attack.”

“Doc, listen, this is important. It must be Fiona. It’s like we said, she thinks she’s human, or maybe she thinks you’re a Pteranodon. What was she doing before? How did she get you into the cave?”

“For God’s sake!” I whispered fiercely. “Forget your blasted Nature Notes! I can’t get to the Met station. Tell Yaro I’m dead certain there’s a storm coming and I’ll take the responsibility if I’m wrong… No, don’t say that, just tell him I’m sure.”

I felt my voice weaken on the last word. I still wasn’t sure—and there was no way for me to take the responsibility for the decision. The team would still blame Yaro for trusting me if I turned out to be wrong.

Henry was still whispering. “Doc, did she keep opening and shutting her wings? Shutting them right down, as though she wanted to take up as little space as possible? And did she chase you into the cave? Did she—”

“Yes!” I screamed—so far as one can scream in a whisper. “Yes, she did! And now that you’ve proved how much you know about Tteranodons, will you get your alleged mind off your hobby and onto your job? Will you tell Yaro—”

“Doc, it’s all right. Yaro decided five minutes ago to put everything under cover; it’s being done right now. The cabins were battened down before he called you, just in case. You don’t have to worry. We can see the storm from here, now; the sky’s changing. There’s a sort of dark edge sliding up it. It’ll be overhead in two minutes. But listen, that opening and shutting the wings—that’s the Wind Dance. I mean that’s what the old Pteranodons do to warn the young ones there’s a blow coming and to get under cover. George and I saw them at it three or four times, and there was always a high wind afterwards. Maybe they see it coming from high up, like you did. Fiona was trying to warn you. that’s all.”

I was just preparing a comment when I heard the storm break.

It hit the settlement thirty seconds before reaching the Peak, so that I heard the rising howl twice over—once on the radio, once, incomparably louder, right overhead. Fiona also heard the transmitted sound of it and huddled even tighter into her wings. I saw the nictitating membrane slide over her eyeball—and then the wind came.

It whipped past the cave mouth with a noise like torn silk, carrying a mass of leaves and twigs ripped from the cycads a quarter of a mile away. It must have torn the trees bare in its first rush. One moment the air outside seemed solid with flying greenery, the next it had gone past, still in one mass—except for a small part that eddied into the cave and whirled around us before it was snatched out again.

The cave was about six feet deep; it kept us out of the path of the storm, but the stray tendrils that reached in the mouth of it were enough to pluck violently at my hair and clothes—and Fiona’s wings. I saw her quiver at the first tug of it, and put an arm across in front of her. Henry was yelling something about adaptive behavior, the one really dangerous enemy of Pteranodons being a really strong wind. I heard the words ritual behavior and adaptation emerging above the transmitted noise—Henry was indoors, of course. They were vaguely familiar to me from the reams of notes which he and several others, apparently mistaking the Gazette for The Journal of Animal Behavior and undeterred by previous rejections, were always sending in. Then, incredibly, the noise began to increase, to a level where not even Henry could compete. Battered by sheer volume of sound even more than by the searching ringers of the wind, I crouched dazedly at the back of the cave. I was vaguely aware of pressure as Fiona shoved in behind me—having done her bit by getting me under cover, she was now capitalizing on it. Then I ceased, really, to be aware of anything outside the small tight-packed huddle of my own body.

After the wind, rain. How long either of them lasted I had no idea. Suddenly the howling died, and a moment later the floor of the cave was swamped; its mouth was curtained with a waterfall, and my already-deafened ears were assaulted by the drumming of water on naked rock. That didn’t stop all at once; the rain eased off slowly, so that I was barely conscious that the noise decreased.

Then something moved beside me. Fiona pushed out from behind my back and waddled, squelching, to the cave mouth. She sat there for a minute or two, folding and unfolding her wings in an irritable manner. Then she waddled outside. Six feet away was a boulder; she scrambled up onto it, stretched to her full height, and began limbering up-shaking, flapping, jumping up and down.

I watched, without really taking it in. I hadn’t moved; I didn’t think I could move; I was stiff, soaked, and too numb to be really aware of it. Then I noticed Yaro. He was talking to me, from a little way off—quietly, insistently. I realized suddenly that he’d been talking for quite a while, but I hadn’t paid attention to him.

I said, “Sorry, Yaro. What did you say?”

That at least was the idea. It was kind of creaky and not, I gather, very audible, but it was speech of sorts.

There was a wild shout: “He answered!” It didn’t sound like Yaro at all. I mean, it was his voice, all right, but completely out of character: positively excited.

I said, “Sorry; must have dropped off.”

“Dropped off!” He sounded rather wild and positively hilarious. I began to feel something must be really out of key. “Caught out of doors in a hurricane, he drops off! Doc, you found some shelter? You are not hurt?”

Now that he mentioned it, I wasn’t sure. I tried to unfold myself and investigate, but my hands were locked around my knees and I seemed to have lost the combination; also, I had stiffened in one piece. I couldn’t figure out how to get undone. Then I realized that the view had altered outside. Something was missing.

“She’s gone,” I said. “Fiona. She’s gone.”

I managed to start moving after a while. I didn’t get very far, though. They came to fetch me as fast as they could—nearly every man in the team. There were all sorts of new gulleys in the way; a couple of temporary rivers several feet deep; tree trunks and boulders scattered in all directions. I could have walked, though; there was no need to carry me. But they did, taking turns until I came out of my daze sufficiently to rebel. I got back to the settlement walking on my own feet.

The damage was surprisingly small. Linda says we caught just the fringe of a hurricane, or maybe a typhoon—the Met station was blown right off the bluff, so she didn’t get the records to see how it developed. The units, and all the more important machinery, had been moved into the caves and the entrance blocked. Only one cabin blew away. They’re domes of fiber-glass, securely anchored six feet down—nothing for the wind to catch hold of, providing the windows and doors were properly closed. It was three weeks before the extraction units could be assembled, but when the weather finally quieted it was done without a single hitch.

There’s been a lot of nonsense about the whole affair. Maybe Fiona saved my life; I don’t know. I imagine one glance at the barometer would have been enough for me; I’d have run for shelter, and I might have reached it—there are lots of caves. But it’s certainly nonsense to say that her warning saved the whole of Indication One. Yaro had given the orders to batten down before he knew anything about the Wind Dance; in fact, I heard Henry and George explaining it to him next day, with pantomime—very odd they looked. And, if she’d only let me get to the Met station, the figures would have warned him a lot more convincingly than anything else could.

But there it is—nearly everyone is firmly convinced that Henry’s stray baby grew up to save the settlement, and, of course, me. It creates a sort of moral climate which is irresistible. I no longer dare to turn down contributions on natural history, and the name of the paper has been changed to The Chalk Age Gazette and Pterodactyl-Watchers’ Guide.

Notes and proofing history

Scanned with preliminary proofing by A/NN\A

December 4th, 2007—v1.0

from: World’s Best Science Fiction: 1967, Wollheim and Carr, ed.

Originally published in Analog Science Fiction - Science Fact, May 1966

Table of Contents

Notes