The mobs that fed the guillotines raged, screaming, through Galiopolis, storming the Sixty Towers, dragging out the Lords and their executioners, their secret police, their paladins; holding mass slayings in the verdant gardens and tiled squares. The chunk of the blade became a regular beat in the great city of gold. The holiday cheers of the mobs rose round and round the onyx Towers as each Brother Lord in his turn was separated from his head.

And yet, miraculously, one Lord escaped. His spies among the poor had warned him that the vassals were beginning to talk of blood. They had warned him days ago. The last complement of peasant children taken for the arena had set the starving poor loose. They became a drum beating for death. He heard the swelling sound, and he took steps to protect himself if the worst should happen. Now, as the mobs became a tide washing through the great city, he fled as his Brother Lords died. He alone, of the sixty Brother Lords, escaped.

He used secret passages and hidden tunnels, and he escaped to the edge of the golden city. There at the verge of the forest, a rat pack close on his trail, he found the cleverly concealed pit that had been dug under the protecting, ground-sweeping branches of a thylax tree; and he buried himself, with only his dirt-smeared face and the muzzle of a stinger showing through the foliage. And he waited.

This Lord was known to the peasants as Garth of the Red Hand. And he knew how to wait. In the chambers of pain beneath his Tower he had absorbed the lessons of waiting: to enjoy with a gentle patience the exact science of his resident hectors as they pleasured themselves with razors and chemicals and fire. Masks and needles and paring knives and lasers. He could sit without moving for hours.

Now he waited in fear. For close on a thousand years the Brother Lords had ruled, and fear was unknown to them, but Garth was not ashamed to admit he was frightened. From the balcony of his throne room he had seen the mob dragging Oldan and his mistresses to the blade. He had seen them clubbed to their knees, their arms held straight back, and the thrashing in the moment before the sound of swish and chunk. He had seen that the blade had already grown dull, and that the peasants took pleasure in the fact: raising the blade for a second strike; the head only half-severed; the body twitching.

He was not ashamed of his fear. And he waited with the utmost patience. There was no alternative.

The pack came crashing through the forest, and from his pit he watched. He saw the head of his brother Wanzor, eyes still open, thumping at the belt of the pack’s leader.

Then they were gone, ripping away the entwined branches of the downswept trees, plunging deeper into the forest to find him. He had to believe all the others were dead now. They would … count heads. They would know he had not been sent to the blade. They would not rest till they had him.

There had to be an escape route. Nowhere in the world was safe. Nowhere in this world.

By now they had smashed open his treasure rooms and scattered his diamonds, killed his concubines, slaughtered his matched teams of horses and panthers. The thousand-year rule of the Brother Lords had ended.

There would be retribution when the peasants realized they could not rule themselves. When they called for their Lords to return.

Then he remembered what he had known a moment before; there were no more Lords. The fifty-nine Brothers were meat now, nothing but meat. And the sixtieth shivered in a hole in the forest.

Night came; and with it the merciless light of the full moon. Garth thought the time had come to escape. There was a way. He had spent his time waiting … and thinking. As he began to scoop away the dirt that hid him, torches moved into the forest. He could see their firefly light moving out from the burning core of Galiopolis. He waited till the hungry mobs had divided into hunting groups and had searched past his ignoble hideout. If he had sought hope in the delusion that they might have forgotten him, he knew, now, that they would never rest till they had located and slaughtered the last of the Brother Lords.

And so he burrowed deeper; he waited; crouched in the damp hole, his stinger aimed at the forest’s shadows — waiting for the first unfortunate piggish face to discover him.

He waited and waited, but they seemed to have returned by other routes, seemed to have bypassed him in the darkness. For now, for a while, he was safe.

Then, as dawn sent its first glow through the trees, he crawled out of the pit beneath the ground-scraping branches, and cautiously made his way into the city.

To the Experimental Buildings.

The Professor had survived because he had come up from peasant stock. But even though he had been granted an elevated position in the world of the Lords, he knew his place. He knew who was of the royal creche, and who was not. And so he cowered in fear as Garth of the Red Hand leveled the stinger at his face.

Rats danced in the Professor’s eyes, but he knew he was helpless. It was a tiny weapon, but it was in the hand of this Lord he had known all his life. Knew him as a thing that could kill without drawing a hesitant breath. He stared at this man, one of the former rulers of the world, whom he had never thought to see alive again; and he wished with a most unscientific intensity that there might be some way he could complete the moist job the peasants had begun.

Garth perched, hip cocked on the edge of a low experiment shelf, pointing the stinger directly into the Professor’s face. “I have been subsidizing you far too long, Professor; but your foolish experiments may at last proffer some reward.” The Professor looked confused. What could the Red Hand want that he could give?

“You will send me back one hundred years; and if you do not, I will burn out first your left eye; and then your right. And then your left leg; and then your right … and then … ” He spoke in a soft, steady voice. The old man knew he was serious; he would do as he said.

“But, my Lord,” he said, indicating the banks of time-stress warpers, “we have not yet perfected the machine. We can send you only to one historical era and only to one geographical coordinate: to the Mesozoic … more specifically, to the Upper Jurassic Period; approximately one hundred and thirty million years ago.”

Lord Garth studied the scientist with narrowed eyes. “Convince me this is not a trick, old man; or die here and now.”

The Professor replied with obvious fear in his voice. “We don’t yet know why this should be so, my Lord; it is the consuming subject of our studies. It is the reason we have not been able to repay your unceasing faith in our continuing experiments. But we have sent men back and we have brought them forward again, with no difficulty. A genuine breakthrough; some might call it a miracle of science.”

“And I call it useless for my purpose.” He was silent a moment. Then his face, all but his eyes, went dead. “And your widows might call it the cause of their loneliness.”

The Professor found breathing difficult. The tiny blind eye of the stinger stared unwaveringly at him.

“My Lord, please! It is only that we have not yet been able to develop a method for precise chronophase calibration.”

Garth read the old man’s fear. An unpleasant truth, that was what he was hearing. “Can you bring me back, after a suitable amount of time has elapsed here?”

“Yes, my Lord. You remain in the stress field, no matter where you go in that period. You could be brought back at any time.”

“Then you will do it,” Garth said. He lowered the stinger and stood away from the shelf as if ready for the journey.

“But …”

“You will do it!“Garth said softly. “And hear me, Professor. I have a trusted agent still at large; one who owes his life to me; one who will see your every action. If you do not bring me back when all this is ended … “He waved his hand toward the outside of the Experimental Buildings. “He will not merely kill you … oh no: he has instructions to kill your wives and all your children. Slowly. As they would have died in the rooms of pain in my Tower. Do you understand, Professor? Do you really understand?”

The old man nodded. It had all been bluff, but the Professor could not know Garth was lying. He felt the flames of hatred burn higher; this animal should be killed as quickly as possible, should not be permitted to escape. Even in an age one hundred and thirty million years gone, his evil was something that should not be permitted to exist.

But he was old, and easily frightened. He was hampered as Garth was not: he had love in him. He would do it.

The old man readied his machines. And when the bright, smooth metal transmission stage had been elevated, and when the banks of time-stress warpers softly hummed with power, and when the cone of orange light shone down on the stage, he told Lord Garth to stand on the circular plate.

The escape route lay open before the last of the sixty Brother Lords. He did not move.

“How strong is your hatred?” he said. He studied the old man. “Is it strong enough that you would condemn your women and all your children?” The old man was too terrified to speak.

“It might be that strong, though I think not. But I ask myself, ‘Why has the Professor not mentioned the dangers that I might face in that ancient time? Even if I should be there but moments, and years pass here, and the Professor grows older and returns me in the blink of an eye … what of the invisible microbes in that ancient world? What of the beasts that roamed there? Am I not being sent off too easily, with so little preparation?’ I ask myself these things, Professor. And you do not answer. “

The Professor clasped his hands nervously. “The danger, my Lord, would be to any creatures living in that time, not to you. Contamination from the future, from sophisticated viruses we might carry, that is the threat.” You are the threat, then as now, he thought. “And as you say … you will perceive the journey and your time there as merely an instant. Ten years here, even twenty … as you say … the blink of an eye.”

Garth looked at him. “Twenty years? You won’t live another twenty years.”

“But my wives and children will.”

“And what if you die before the time is right to return me?” He asked the question aloud, but it was as if he were worrying it in his mind.

“There is an automatic return mechanism, my Lord. It could be set before you go.”

“And what would prevent you from canceling it once I was gone?”

“I wouldn’t do that, my Lord. On my honor, I would not do that.”

Garth stared at him silently for a long time. Then, as if he had thought it through logically, considering every vaguest possibility, he said, “My agent will know when the time is right for my return, for the moment when your beloved peasants need a Lord to come again and rule them as before. Not sixty Brother Lords, but one. Just one.”

“Yes, my Lord. Your … agent … “

Garth considered the old man. He seemed cowed by the thought of shadowy watchers. “And what of the great saurians that dominated the world? I am no peasant, old man. I have studied. I know of these dinosaurs, these terrible meat-eaters.”

“That has been considered, my Lord. The experiments we have conducted, the men who have gone back, have selected the very site to which you will be transported. A safe location we have visited many times. The Morrison Formation, in the area they called Utah over a thousand years ago. Classic Upper Jurassic terrain, my Lord: warm, equitable climate; the seas have long since retreated to the north; this is a broad, low floodplain. Very sparsely inhabited by saurians, though our most recent expedition reported a herd of sauropods, very likely apatosaurus, but possibly diplodocus, foraging in the area.”

Garth tried to remember. “They were herbivores? They did not eat meat?”

The Professor nodded with enthusiasm. “Exactly. Harmless vegetarians. Safe, my Lord, absolutely safe for the few moments you will exist in that time.”

Garth ruminated a moment longer, then said, “I will watch as you set the return mechanism. Do it now.”

The old man went to a console of heat-sensitive controls, and Lord Garth stood over him as he explained the calibrations. “Set it for one hundred years from today.” The old man tapped out the proper coding, and the date appeared in a liquid-crystal display. Garth studied the console, and when he seemed satisfied he waited till the Professor had walked away from the mechanism and followed him back to the transmission stage.

The Professor stood waiting next to a single knife-switch. “Now what do you do to send me?” the Lord asked.

The Professor motioned to the switch. “Just this, my Lord, and it is done.”

Garth mounted to the transmission stage with one step, and stood bathed in the cone of orange light. “Send me away,” he said quietly. “And remember, Professor: You are not alone.”

There was smoldering hatred on the Professor’s face for an instant as he threw home the knife-switch, and it was the true face Garth had known he would see in that final moment. He smiled with satisfaction. As the orange light flickered, he raised the stinger and squeezed the trigger. An explosive dart erupted from the weapon, struck the Professor in the left eye and, as the laboratory wavered and dimmed around him, Garth saw the old man’s face erupt and the headless body thrown half across the room.

Now your wives and children need never fear, he thought. Nor need I. Concealing the location of the pharaoh’s grave with the execution of the grave diggers was always de rigueur.

All through the Experimental Buildings, down the corridors, to the subbasements, in the walls, the power of the time-stress warpers throbbed and hummed, the sound rising as the orange light that washed him grew stronger and the world of the sixty Brother Lords grew as ephemeral as clouds seen in a lake.

He felt a thin pain throughout his body, as if he were being sliced neatly by a giant scalpel …

The light strobed brilliantly. And then the transmission stage was empty. And then the automatic cut-off killed power to the banks of warpers. And then the laboratory was empty save for the smoking ruin that had been an old man. And Lord Garth of the Red Hand had drunk deeply from the time stream.

He drew a breath that scored his throat raw, and opened his eyes. For an instant he saw nothing, and the pain was cataclysmic. Then he swallowed and tried to get his heart to beat more slowly; and sight came back; and he was standing up to his ankles in water. His goldthread boots were soaked.

It was marshland. Reedy grass rose all around him.

He could look off across the floodplain to granite mountains that rose on the horizon. The sun was a melting bronze ball. To his right, very near, gigantic cycads stood in a forest crush that dominated the area. The palm trees had thick, unbranched columnar trunks. Thirty feet above his head, huge, leathery fronds formed a violently green canopy that blotted out the sunlight.

All around him in the water stood the sauropods. He had materialized in the middle of the herd. Massive bodies seventy feet long, gray-green hide all around him, sunk with their vast tonnage in the moist earth, fifteen-foot-long necks, their ridiculously small heads high in the foliage, risen on their hind legs, tearing at the fronds thirty feet overhead.

The sound of the instant of his arrival was the crack of lightning as air was displaced.

Directly above him the apatosaurus started at the report, twisted its great sinewy neck, and the projectile-shaped head plummeted toward Lord Garth.

In the instant of awareness as he saw the terrifying open mouth with its rows of long, narrow teeth rushing toward him, he had no time to scream, and only half enough time to think: But it only eats vegetation!

Nor did the gargantuan herbivore eat meat. As its great jaws clamped themselves onto Garth’s upper torso, masticating his head and shoulders between its pencil-like teeth, the dinosaur understood in its dim way that the new food it had found growing in the marsh grass was not a tender new kind of vegetation.

And from a height it dropped the unpleasant thing. It had needed to sample. To reject.

Lord Garth had fallen from a great height, bearing with him the answer to the question the Professor had often asked: Did dinosaurs think?

The answer was yes. But not quickly.