ROBERT SILVERBERG
HUNTERS IN THE FOREST
A twenty-third century man finds love and adventure
in thelate Cretaceous. But
does he have the courage to bet his futureon a romance in the
age of dinosaurs?
Twenty minutes into the voyage nothing more startling than a dragonfly
the size
of a hawk has come into view, fluttering for an eye-blink moment in front of the
timemobile window and darting away, and Mallory decides it's time to exercise
Option Two:
Abandon the secure cozy comforts of the timemobile capsule, take his
chances on foot out
there in the steamy mists, a futuristic pygmy roaming
virtually unprotected among the
dinosaurs of this fragrant Late Cretaceous
forest. That has been his plan all along-to
offer himself up to the available
dangers of this place, to experience the thrill of the
hunt without ever quite
being sure whether he was the hunter or the hunted.
Option One is to
sit tight inside the timemobile capsule for the full duration
of the trip-he has signed up
for twelve hours-and watch the passing show, if
any, through the invulnerable window. Very
safe, yes. But self-defeating, also,
if you have come here for the sake of tasting a little
excitement for once in
your life. Option Three, the one nobody ever talks about except in
whispers and
which perhaps despite all rumors to the contrary no one has actually ever
elected,
is self-defeating in a different way: Simply walk off into the forest
and never look back.
After a prearranged period, usually twelve hours, never
more than twenty-four, the capsule
will return to its starting point in the
twenty-third century whether or not you're aboard.
But Mallory isn't out to do
himself in, not really. All he wants is a little endocrine
action, a hit of
adrenaline to rev things up, the unfamiliar sensation of honest fear
contracting
his auricles and chilling his bowels: all that good old chancy stuff, damned
well unattainable down the line in the modern era where risk is just about
extinct. Back
here in the Mesozoic, risk aplenty is available enough for those
who can put up the price
of admission. All he has to do is go outside and look
for it. And so it's Option Two for
him, then, a lively little walkabout and
back to the capsule in plenty of time for the
return trip.
With him he carries a laser rifle, a backpack medical kit, and lunch. He
jacks
a thinko into his waistband and clips a drinko to his shoulder. But no helmet,
no
potted air supply. He'll boldly expose his naked nostrils to the Cretaceous
atmosphere.
Nor does he avail himself of the one-size-fits-all body armor that
the capsule is willing
to provide. That's the true spirit of Option Two, all
right: Go forth unshielded into the
Mesozoic dawn.
Open the hatch, now. Down the steps, hop skip jump. Booted feet bouncing on
the
spongy primordial forest floor. There's a hovering dankness but a surprisingly
pleasant
breeze is blowing. Things feel tropical but not uncomfortably torrid.
the air has an
unusual smell. The mix of nitrogen and carbon dioxide is
different from what he's
accustomed to, he suspects, and certainly none of the
impurities that six centuries of
industrial development have poured into the
atmosphere are present. There's something
else, too, a strange subtext of an
odor that seems both sweet and pungent: It must be the
aroma of dinosaur farts,
Mallory decides. Uncountable hordes of stupendous beasts
simultaneously
releasing vast roaring boomers for a hundred million years surely will have
filled the prehistoric air with complex hydrocarbons that won't break down until
the
Oligocene at the earliest.
Scaly tree trunks thick as the columns of the Parthenon shoot
heavenward all
around him. At their summits, far overhead, whorls of stiff long leaves jut
tensely outward. Smaller trees that look like palms but probably aren't fill
in the
spaces between them, and at ground level there are dense growths of
awkward angular bushes.
Some of them are in bloom, small furry pale-yellowish
blossoms, very diffident looking, as
though they were so newly evolved that they
were embarrassed to find themselves on display
like this. All the vegetation,
big and little, has a battered, shopworn look, trunks
leaning this way and that,
huge leafstalks bent and dangling, gnawed boughs hanging like
broken arms. It
is as though an army of enormous tanks passes through this forest every
few
days. In fact that isn't far from the truth, Mallory realizes.
But where are they?
Twenty-five minutes gone already and he still hasn't seen a
single dinosaur, and he's ready
for some.
"All right," Mallory calls out. "Where are you, you big dopes?"
As though on cue
the forest hurls a symphony of sounds back at him: strident
honks and rumbling snorts and a
myriad blatting snuffling wheezing skreeing
noises. It's like a chorus of crocodiles
getting warmed up for Handel's Messiah.
Mallory laughs, "Yes, I hear you, I hear you!"
He
cocks his laser rifle. Steps forward, looking eagerly to right and left.
This period is
supposed to be the golden age of dinosaurs, the grand tumultuous
climactic epoch just
before the end, when bizarre new species popped out
constantly with glorious evolutionary
profligacy, and all manner of grotesque
Goliaths roamed the earth. The thinko has shown
him pictures of them,
spectacularly decadent in size and appearance, long-snouted
duckbilled monsters
as big as a house and huge lumbering ceratopsians with frilly baroque
bony
crests and toothy things with knobby horns on their elongated skulls and others
with
rows of bristling spikes along their high-ridged backs. He aches to see
them. He wants
them to scare him practically to death. Let them loom; let them
glower; let their great
jaws yawn. Through all his untroubled days in the
orderly and carefully regulated world of
the twenty-third century, Mallory has
never shivered with fear as much as once, never known
a moment of terror or even
real uneasiness, is not even sure he understands the concept;
and he has paid a
small fortune for the privilege of experiencing it now.
Forward. Forward.
Come on, you oversized bastards, get your asses out of the swamp and show
yourselves!
There.
Oh, yes, yes, there!
He sees the little spheroid of a head first, rising above the
treetops like a
grinning football attached to a long thick hose. Behind it is an enormous
humped back, unthinkably high. He hears the pile driver sound of the behemoth's
footfall
and the crackle of huge tree trunks breaking as it smashes its way
serenely toward him.
He
doesn't need the murmured prompting of his thinko to know that this is a
giant sauropod
making its majestic passage through the forest"One of the
titanosaurs or perhaps an
ultrasaur," the quiet voice says, admitting with just
a hint of chagrin in its tone that it
can't identify the particular species-but
Mallory isn't really concerned with detail on
that level. He is after the
thrill of size. And he's getting size, all right. The thing
is implausibly
colossal. It emerges into the clearing where he stands and he is given the
full
view, and gasps. He can't even guess how big it is. Twenty meters high?
Thirty? Its
ponderous corrugated legs are thick as sequoias. Giraffes on tiptoe
could go skittering
between them without grazing the underside of its massive
belly. Elephants would look like
house cats beside it. Its tail, held out
stiffly to the rear, decapitates sturdy trees
with its slow steady lashing. A
hundred million years of saurian evolution have produced
this thing, Darwinism
gone crazy, excess building remorselessly on excess, irrepressible
chromosomes
gleefully reprogramming themselves through the millennia to engender thicker
bones, longer legs, ever bulkier bodies, and the end result is this walking
mountain, this
absurdly overstated monument to reptilian hyperbole.
"Hey!" Mallory cries. "Look here! Can
you see this far down? There's a human
down here. Homo sapiens. I'm a mammal. Do you
know what a mammal is? Do you
know what my ancestors are going to do to your descendants?"
He is practically
alongside it, no more than a hundred meters away. Its musky stink makes
him
choke and cough. Its ancient leathery brown hide, as rigid as cast iron, is
pocked with
parasitic growths, scarlet and yellow and ultramarine, and
crisscrossed with the gullies
and ravines of century-old wounds deep enough for
him to hide in. With each step it takes,
Mallory feels an earthquake. He is
nothing next to it, a flea, a gnat. It could crush him
with a casual stride and
never even know.
And yet he feels no fear. The sauropod is so big
he can't make sense out of it,
let alone be threatened by it.
Can you fear the Amazon River?
The planet Jupiter? The pyramid of Cheops?
No, what he feels is anger, not terror. The
sheer preposterous bulk of the
monster infuriates him. The pointless superabundance of it
inspires him with
wrath.
"My name is Mallory," he yells. "I've come from the twenty-third
century to
bring you your doom, you great stupid mass of meat. I'm personally going to
make
you extinct, do you hear me?"
He raises the laser rifle and centers its sight on the
distant tiny head. The
rifle hums its computations and modifications and the rainbow beam
jumps
skyward. For an instant the sauropod's head is engulfed in a dazzling
fluorescent
nimbus. Then the light dies away, and the animal moves on as though
nothing has happened,
No brain up there? Mallory wonders.
Too dumb to die?
He moves up closer and fires
again, carving a bright track along one
hypertrophied haunch. Again, no effect. The
sauropod moves along untroubled,
munching on treetops as it goes. A third shot, too hasty,
goes astray and cuts
off the crown of a tree in the forest canopy. A fourth zings into the
sauropod's gut but the dinosaur doesn't seem to care. Mallory is furious now at
the
unkillability of the thing. His thinko quietly reminds him that these
giants supposedly
had had their main nerve centers at the base of their spines.
Mallory runs around behind
the creature and stares up at the galactic expanse of
its rump, wondering where best to
place his shot, Just then the great tail
swings upward and to the left and a torrent of
immense steaming green turds as
big as boulders comes cascading down, striking the ground
all around Mallory
with thunderous impact. He leaps out of the way barely in time to keep
from
being entombed, and goes scrambling frantically away to avoid the choking fetor
that
rises from the sauropod's vast mound of excreta. In his haste he stumbles
over a vine,
loses his footing in the slippery mud, falls to hands and knees.
Something that looks like
a small blue dog with a scaly skin and a ring of sharp
spines around its neck jumps up out
of the muck, bouncing up and down and
hissing and screeching and snapping at him. Its
teeth are deadly-looking yellow
fangs. There isn't room to fire the laser rifle, Mallory
desperately rolls to
one side and bashes the thing with the butt instead, hard, and it runs
away
growling. When he has a chance finally to catch his breath and look up again,
he sees
the great sauropod vanishing in the distance.
He gets up and takes a few limping steps
further away from the reeking pile of
ordure.
He has learned at last what it's like to have
a brush with death. Two brushes,
in fact, within the span of ten seconds, But where's the
vaunted thrill of
danger narrowly averted, the hot satisfaction of the frisson? He feels no
pleasure, none of the hoped-for rush of keen endocrine delight.
Of course not, A pile of
falling turds, a yapping little lizard with big teeth:
what humiliating perils! During the
frantic moments when he was defending
himself against them he was too busy to notice what
he was feeling, and now,
muddy all over, his knee aching, his dignity dented, he is left
merely with a
residue of annoyance, frustration, and perhaps a little ironic
self-deprecation,
when what he had wanted was the white ecstasy of genuine terror followed
by the
postorgasmic delight of successful escape recollected in tranquillity.
Well, he still
has plenty of time. He goes onward, deeper into the forest.
Now he is no longer able to
see the timemobile capsule. That feels good, that
sudden new sense of being cut off from
the one zone of safety he has in this
fierce environment. He tries to divert himself with
fantasies of jeopardy. It
isn't easy. His mind doesn't work that way; nobody's does,
really, in the nice,
tidy, menace-free society he lives in. But he works at it. Suppose,
he thinks,
I lose my way in the forest and can't get back to-no, no hope of that, the
capsule
sends out constant directional pulses that his thinko picks up by
microwave transmission.
What if the thinko breaks down, then? But they never
do. If I take it off and toss it into
a swamp? That's Option Three, though,
self-damaging behavior designed to maroon him here.
He doesn't do such things.
He can barely even fantasize them.
Well, then, the sauropod comes
back and steps on the capsule, crushing it beyond
use...
Impossible. The capsule is strong
enough to withstand submersion to
thirty-atmosphere pressures.
The sauropod pushes it into
quicksand, and it sinks out of sight?
Mallory is pleased with himself for coming up with
that one. It's good for a
moment or two of interesting uneasiness. He imagines himself
standing at the
edge of some swamp, staring down forlornly as the final minutes tick away
and
the timemobile, functional as ever even though it's fifty fathoms down in gunk,
sets out
for home without him. But no, no good: The capsule moves just as
effectively through space
as through time, and it would simply activate its
powerful engine and climb up onto terra
firma again in plenty of time for his
return trip.
What if, he thinks, a band of malevolent
intelligent dinosaurs appears on the
scene and forcibly prevents me from getting back into
the capsule?
That's more like it. A little shiver that time. Good! Cutoff, stranded in
the
Mesozoic! Living by his wits, eating God knows what, exposing himself to extinct
bacteria.
Getting sick, blazing with fever, groaning in unfamiliar pain. Yes!
Yes! He piles it on.
It becomes easier as he gets into the swing of it. He
will lead a life of constant menace.
He imagines himself taking out his own
appendix. Setting a broken leg. And the unending
hazards, day and night.
Toothy enemies lurking behind every bush. Baleful eyes glowing in
the darkness.
A life spent forever on the run, never a moment's ease. Cowering under fern
fronds as the giant carnivores go lalloping by. Scorpions, snakes, gigantic
venomous
toads. Insects that sting. Everything that has been eliminated from
life in the civilized
world pursuing him here: and he flitting from one
transitory hiding place to another,
haggard, unshaven, bloodshot, brow shining
with sweat, struggling unceasingly to survive,
living a gallant life of
desperate heroism in this nightmare world...
"Hello," he says
suddenly. "Who the hell are you?"
In the midst of his imaginings a genuine horror has
presented itself, emerging
suddenly out of a grove of tree ferns. It is a towering bipedal
creature with
the powerful thighs and small dangling forearms of the familiar
tyrannosaurus,
but this one has an enormous bony crest like a warrior's helmet rising from
its
skull, with five diabolical horns radiating outward behind it and two horrendous
incisors
as long as tusks jutting from its cavernous mouth, and its huge lashing
tail is equipped
with a set of great spikes at the tip. Its mottled and
furrowed skin is a bilious yellow
and the huge crest on its head is fiery
scarlet. It is everybody's bad dream of the
reptilian killer-monster of the
primeval dawn, the ghastly overspecialized end product of
the long saurian
reign, shouting its own lethality from every bony excrescence, every
razor-keen
weapon on its long body.
The thinko scans it and tells him that it is a
representative of an unknown
species belonging to the saurischian order and it is almost
certainly predatory.
"Thank you very much," Mallory replies.
He is astonished to discover
that even now, facing this embodiment of death, he
is not at all afraid. Fascinated, yes,
by the sheer deadliness of the creature,
by its excessive horrificality. Amused, almost, by
its grotesqueries of form,
And coolly aware that in three bounds and a swipe of its little
dangling paw it
could end his life, depriving him of the sure century of minimum expectancy
that
remains to him. Despite that threat he remains calm. If he dies, he dies; but
he
can't actually bring himself to believe that he will. He is beginning to see
that the
capacity for fear, for any sort of significant psychological distress,
has been bred out of
him. He is simply too stable. It is an unexpected
drawback of the perfection of human
society.
The saurischian predator of unknown species slavers and roars and glares. Its
narrow
yellow eyes are like beacons. Mallory unslings his laser rifle and gets
into firing
position. Perhaps this one will be easier to kill than the colossal
sauropod.
Then a woman
walks out of the jungle behind it and says, "You aren't going to
try to shoot it, are you?"
Mallory stares at her. She is young, only fifty or so unless she's on her
second or third
retread, attractive, smiling. Long sleek legs, a fluffy burst
of golden hair. She wears a
stylish hunting outfit of black sprayon and carries
no rifle, only a tiny laser pistol. A
space of no more than a dozen meters
separates her from the dinosaur's spiked tail, but
that doesn't seem to trouble
her.
He gestures with the rifle. "Step out of the way, will
you?"
She doesn't move. "Shooting it isn't a smart idea."
"We're here to do a little
hunting, aren't we?"
"Be sensible," she says. "This one's a real son of a bitch. You'll
only annoy
it if you try anything, and then we'll both be in a mess." She walks casually
around the monster, which is standing quite still, studying them both in an odd
perplexed
way as though it actually wonders what they might be. Mallory has
aimed the rifle now at
the thing's left eye, but the woman coolly puts her hand
to the barrel and pushes it aside.
"Let it be," she says. "It's just had its meal and now it's sleepy. I watched
it gobble
up something the size of a hippopotamus and then eat half of another
one for dessert. You
start sticking it with your little laser and you'll wake
it up, and then it'll get nasty
again. Mean-looking bastard, isn't it?" she
says admiringly.
"Who are you?" Mallory asks in
wonder. "What are you doing here?"
"Same thing as you, I figure. Cretaceous Tours?"
"Yes,
They said I wouldn't run into any other-"
"They told me that, too. Well, it sometimes
happens. Jayne Hyland. New
Chicago, 2281."
"Tom Mallory. New Chicago also. And also
2281."
"Small geological epoch, isn't it? What month did you leave from?"
"August."
"I'm
September."
"Imagine that."
The dinosaur, far above them, utters a soft snorting sound and
begins to drift
away.
"We're boring it," she says.
"And it's boring us, too. Isn't that the
truth? These enormous terrifying
monsters crashing through the forest all around us and
we're as blase as if
we're home watching the whole thing on the polyvid." Mallory raises
his rifle
again. The scarlet-frilled killer is almost out of sight. "I'm tempted to take
a shot at it just to get some excitement going."
"Don't," she says. "Unless you're feeling
suicidal. Are you?"
"Not at all."
"Then don't annoy it, okay? I know where there's a bunch
of ankylosaurs
wallowing around. That's one really weird critter, believe me. Are you
interested
in having a peek?"
"Sure," says Mallory.
He finds himself very much taken by her brisk
no-nonsense manner, her confident
air. When we get back to New Chicago, he thinks, maybe
I'll look her up. The
September tour, she said. So he'll have to wait a while after his
own return.
I'll give her a call around the end of the month, he tells himself.
She leads
the way unhesitatingly, through the tree-fern grove and around a stand
of giant horsetails
and across a swampy meadow of small plastic-looking plants
with ugly little mud-colored
daisyish flowers. On the far side they zig around
a great pile of bloodied bones and zag
around a treacherous bog with a
sinisterly quivering surface. A couple of giant
dragonflies whiz by, droning
like airborne missiles. A crimson frog as big as a rabbit
grins at them from a
pond. They have been walking for close to an hour now and Mallory no
longer has
any idea where he is in relation to his timemobile capsule. But the thinko will
find the way back for him eventually, he assumes.
"The ankylosaurs are only about a hundred
meters further on," she says, as if
reading his mind. She looks back and gives him a
bright smile. "I saw a pack of
troodons the day before yesterday out this way. You know
what they are? Little
agile guys, no bigger than you or me, smart as whips. Teeth like saw
blades,
funny knobs on their heads. I thought for a minute they were going to attack,
but I
stood my ground and finally they backed off. You want to shoot something,
shoot one of
those."
"The day before yesterday?" Mallory asks, after a moment. "How long have you
been
here?"
"About a week. Maybe two, I've lost count, really. Look, there are those
ankylosaurs
I was telling you about."
He ignores her pointing hand. "Wait a second. The longest
available time tour
lasts only-"
"I'm Option Three," she says.
He gapes at her as though she
has just sprouted a scarlet bony crust with five
spikes behind it.
"Are you serious?" he
asks.
"As serious as anybody you ever met in the middle of the Cretaceous forest. I'm
here
for keeps, friend. I stood right next to my capsule when the twelve hours
were up and
watched it go sailing off into the ineffable future. And I've been
having the time of my
life ever since."
A tingle of awe spreads through him. It is the strongest emotion he has
ever
felt, he realizes.
She is actually living that gallant life of desperate heroism that
he had
fantasized. Avoiding the myriad menaces of this incomprehensible place for a
whole
week or possibly even two, managing to stay fed and healthy, in fact
looking as trim and
elegant as if she had just stepped out of her capsule a
couple of hours ago. And never to
go back to the nice safe orderly world of
2281. Never. Never. She will remain here until
she dies a month from now, a
year, five years, whenever. Must remain. Must. By her own
choice. An
incredible adventure.
Her face is very close to his. Her breath is sweet and
warm. Her eyes are
bright, penetrating, ferocious. "I was sick of it all," she tells him.
"Weren't you? The perfection of everything. The absolute predictability. You
can't even
stub your toe because there's some clever sensor watching out for
you. The biomonitors.
The automedics. The guides and proctors. I hated it."
"Yes, Of course."
Her intensity is
frightening. For one foolish moment, Mallory realizes, he was
actually thinking of
offering to rescue her from the consequences of her
rashness. Inviting her to come back
with him in his own capsule when his twelve
hours are up. They could probably both fit
inside, if they stand very close to
each other. A reprieve from Option Three, a new lease
on life for her. But
that isn't really possible, he knows. The mass has to balance in
both
directions of the trip within a very narrow tolerance; they are warned not to
bring
back even a twig, even a pebble, nothing aboard the capsule that wasn't
aboard it before.
And in any case being rescued is surely the last thing she
wants. She'll simply laugh at
him. Nothing could make her go back. She loves
it here. She feels truly alive for the
first time in her life, In a universe of
security-craving dullards she's a woman running
wild. And her wildness is
contagious. Mallory trembles with sudden new excitement at the
sheer proximity
of her.
She sees it, too. Her glowing eyes flash with invitation.
"Stay here
with me!" she says. "Let your capsule go home without you, the way I
did."
"But the
dangers-" he hears himself blurting inanely.
"Don't worry about them. I'm doing all right
so far, aren't I? We can manage.
We'll build a cabin. Plant fruits and vegetables. Catch
lizards in traps.
Hunt the dinos. They're so dumb they just stand there and let you shoot
them.
The laser charges won't ever run out. You and me, me and you, all alone in the
Mesozoic!
Like Adam and Eve, we'll be. The Adam and Eve of the Late Cretaceous.
And they can all go
to hell back there in 2281,"
His fingers are tingling. His throat is dry. His cheeks
blaze with savage
adrenal fires. His breath is coming in ragged gasps. He has never felt
anything like this before in his life.
He moistens his lips,
"Well-"
She smiles gently. The
pressure eases. "It's a big decision, I know. Think
about it," she says. Her voice is
soft now. The wild zeal of a moment before
is gone from it. "How soon before your capsule
leaves?"
He glances at his wrist. "Eight, nine more hours."
"Plenty of time to make up your
mind."
"Yes. Yes."
Relief washes over him. She has dizzied him with the overpowering force
of her
revelation and the passionate frenzy of her invitation to join her in her escape
from
the world they have left behind. He isn't used to such things. He needs
time now, time to
absorb, to digest, to ponder. To decide. That he would even
consider such a thing
astonishes him. He has known her how long-an hour, an
hour and a half?and here he is
thinking of giving up everything for her.
Unbelievable. Unbelievable.
Shakily he turns away
from her and stares at the ankylosaurs wallowing in the
mud hole just in front of them.
Strange,
strange, strange. Gigantic low-slung tubby things, squat as tanks,
covered everywhere by
armor. Vaguely triangular, expanding vastly toward the
rear, terminating in armored tails
with massive bony excrescences at the tips,
like deadly clubs. Slowly snuffling forward in
the muck, tiny heads down,
busily grubbing away at soft green weeds. Jayne jumps down
among them and
dances across their armored backs, leaping from one to another. They don't
even
seem to notice. She laughs and calls to him. "Come on," she says, prancing
like a
she-devil.
They dance among the ankylosaurs until the game grows stale. Then she takes him
by the hand and they run onward, through a field of scarlet mosses, down to a
small clear
lake fed by a swift-flowing stream. They strip and plunge in,
heedless of risk. Afterward
they embrace on the grassy bank. Some vast
creature passes by, momentarily darkening the
sky. Mallory doesn't bother even
to look up.
Then it is on, on to spy on something with a
long neck and a comic knobby head,
and then to watch a pair of angry ceratopsians butting
heads in slow motion, and
then to applaud the elegant migration of a herd of towering
duckbills across the
horizon. There are dinosaurs everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, an
astounding
zoo of them. And the time ticks away.
It's fantastic beyond all comprehension.
But even so--
Give up everything for this? he wonders.
The chalet in Gstaad, the weekend
retreat aboard the L-5 satellite, the hunting
lodge in the veld? The island home in the
Seychelles, the plantation in New
Caledonia, the pied-a-terre in the shadow of the Eiffel
Tower?
For this? For a forest full of nightmare monsters, and a life of daily peril?
Yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
He glances toward her. She knows what's on his mind, and she gives him a
sizzling look. Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures
prove.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
A beeper goes off on his wrist and his thinko says, "It is time to
return to the
capsule. Shall I guide you?"
And suddenly it all collapses into a pile of
ashes, the whole shimmering fantasy
perishing in an instant.
"Where are you going?" she
calls.
"Back," he says, He whispers the word hoarsely-croaks it, in fact.
"Tom! "
"Please.
Please."
He can't bear to look at her. His defeat is total; his shame is cosmic. But he
isn't going to stay here. He isn't. He isn't. He simply isn't. He slinks
away, feeling
her burning contemptuous glare drilling holes in his shoulder
blades. The quiet voice of
the thinko steadily instructs him, leading him
around pitfalls and obstacles. After a time
he looks back and can no longer see
her,
On the way back to the capsule he passes a
pair of sauropods mating, a
tyrannosaur in full slather, another thing with talons like
scythes, and half a
dozen others. The thinko obligingly provides him with their names, but
Mallory
doesn't even give them a glance. The brutal fact of his own inescapable
cowardice
is the only thing that occupies his mind. She has had the courage to
turn her back on the
stagnant overperfect world where they live, regardless of
all danger, whereas he-he--
"There
is the capsule, sir," the thinko says triumphantly.
Last chance, Mallory.
No. No. No. He
can't do it.
He climbs in. Waits.
Something ghastly appears outside, all teeth and claws,
and peers balefully at
him through the window. Mallory peers back at it, nose to nose,
hardly caring
what happens to him now. The creature takes an experimental nibble at the
capsule. The impervious metal resists. The dinosaur shrugs and waddles away.
A chime goes
off. The Late Cretaceous turns blurry and disappears.
In mid-October, seven weeks after
his return, he is telling the somewhat edited
version of his adventure at a party for the
fifteenth time that month when a
woman to his left says, "There's someone in the other room
who's just come back
from the dinosaur tour, too."
"Really," says Mallory, without
enthusiasm.
"You and she would love to compare notes, I'll bet. Wait and I'll get her.
Jayne!
Jayne, come in here for a moment!"
Mallory gasps. Color floods his face. His mind swirls
in bewilderment and
chagrin. Her eyes are as sparkling and alert as ever, her hair is a
golden
cloud.
"But you told me-"
"Yes," she says. "I did, didn't I?"
"Your capsule-you said
it had gone back-"
"It was just on the far side of the ankylosaurs, behind the horsetails.
I got
to the Cretaceous about eight hours before you did. I had signed up for a
twenty-four-hour
tour."
"And you let me believe-"
"Yes. So I did." She grins at him and says softly, "It was
a lovely fantasy,
don't you think?"
He comes close to her and gives her a cold, hard stare.
"What would you have
done if I had let my capsule go back and stranded myself there for the
sake of
your lovely fantasy?"
"I don't know," she tells him. "I just don't know." And she
laughs.