by Steven Utley
The author’s present story, along with “Perfect Everything” from our December 2008 issue and about two dozen other pieces, will be collected in Sleepless Years: Stories by Steven Utley, Boy Writer, forthcoming from Wheatland Press later this year. While Steven’s last story took place in space, he now returns to Earth to take a sharp and witty look at...
Parker has taken the point, and I slog along in his wake. The sun’s ghostly orb illumines a patch of overcast from which drizzle has been falling without let-up since we arrived. Grass has yet to evolve in this world, and without extensive networks of plant roots to hold soil in place the terrain has eroded into a labyrinth of ridges and ravines. Footing is treacherous, progress slow and exhausting. Enhancing the landscape’s distinctly prehistoric aspect are strange spiky plants, smooth-boled trees with feathery tops, and, in the distance, the smoldering peak of a cinder cone. The smells of sulfur and organic decay compete for dominance.
Parker is in heaven, going on and on—again—still—about the bounty of creation and how truly privileged we are among human beings. “We could,” he exults, “spend a year here,” a prospect that depresses me considerably as I plod along, mud sucking at my boots, my clothes heavy with water though we have only just left the time machine parked on a rare half-acre of level ground. “We could spend ten years here,” he goes on, “twenty!” On and on he goes with his rambling interminable monologue, leaping from conclusion to crazed conclusion almost too quickly for me to follow, do I but care to follow, which I don’t. The plain and simple truth is, I am ready to go home right now, this instant, being heartily sick of my mentally unhinged companion, who, far from running the expedition as it ought to be run, far from embodying the finest traits of our species to say nothing of the finest aspirations of our profession, is in no particular order of importance simply wrong about certain scientific matters, mentally unhinged, and neglectful of personal hygiene.
This expedition does not need a bad-smelling lunatic making life-and-death decisions. And now that I’ve been trapped with him here for seventy-two hours that begin to seem like seven and a half days in my memory, I find I could not care less about the prospects for research in this wilderness, either. The gray-brown-green vista is unrelieved by a single flower. The fauna tend toward mindless voracity. I want to go home, but I can’t, because Parker leads the way and I am supposed to follow.
The stock of the heavy elephant gun is slippery in my hands, the muzzle in tempting proximity to the back of the madman’s head. Who would be able to say that I had not simply slipped in the mud and reflexively squeezed the trigger—having, of course, already inadvertently thumbed off the safety? But I can’t bring myself to commit this act. I may as a matter of course feel completely murderous toward Parker, but I am not a murderer. I’m just a man who has taken all he can of drizzle, mud, itch, monsters, and a colleague who is the single worst person I have ever known, stupid, boring, obstinate, and disgusting.
Speaking of monsters, I become suddenly aware of something moving through the trees off to our right, across a shallow gully running parallel to its course and ours. The rain’s dull sush muffles the thing’s footfalls, and its somber pigmentation makes it difficult to see, but I cannot be mistaken about the deliberate care with which it places its feet. The thing stalks us. Parker hears my harsh inhalation and pauses on the lip of the gully to give me a questioning look. I shift my gaze and pretend to contemplate the leafy crown of a tree. Apparently satisfied, Parker slides to the bottom of the gully. I watch the monster slowly take form: an eight-meter-long biped like a cross between a crocodile and a rooster, with terrible jaws and mad blood-colored eyes. I hug the rifle against my breast and yearn for ordnance heavier even than the elephant gun, impractical though it might be. You want solid footing when you cut loose with big stuff.
Still ignorant of the monster’s approach, Parker starts climbing up the far side of the gully. Armed with only a handgun and sunk as he is to the shins in mud, he cannot save himself when the monster makes its move. It steps out of the trees and bends down, stretching forth its neck and balancing itself with its outstretched tail, and simply scoops Parker out of the gully like a dog snatching a mouthful of food from a dish. The sounds the bones in his shoulder and arm make as they snap at last galvanize me into action. I take deliberate aim at one of the monster’s hind legs and fire; still masticating the howling Parker, the monster collapses and topples into the gully. Its own bones start to pop, breaking under their own weight, as it thrashes helplessly in the mud. It lets go of Parker and utters a cry that saws through the drizzle like a blade through gristle. I draw a bead on the inhuman glittering eye in the wedge-shaped skull and put a bullet as large as a carrot through its teaspoonful of brains.
Parker, reduced to a wad of bloody rags, sprawls beside the carcass. I see—and smell—as I go down to him that he has let himself go about as far as he could, become a catalogue of human effluvia. Still, I kneel beside him, poke at his wounds. Bits of bone stick up through the shredded muscle, and two knife-like teeth broken off from the monster’s colorless gums stick down into it. Parker moans, opens his eyes, looks wonderingly first at the dead monster, then at me. “Why did you wait to fire?” he gasps. “You could have saved me.”
And I ask him, “Now do you admit you’ve been wrong all along?”
He stares at me in disbelief. I keep talking, earnestly, making my point, but I have just too much to say to him and not enough time in which to say it. He clutches my hand, squeezes it weakly; he sobs disconsolately, closes his eyes; he goes away.
I go through the motions, the ritual of feeling for a pulse, but I do not intend to hang around a few tons of freshly dead monster until every scavenger in the area shows up. Even as I scramble out of the gully, two small, crab-like scavengers are skittering around on the carcass, clicking their mandibles and pincers in a crickety tune of thanksgiving for that which they were about to receive. I felt calm, at peace.
* * * *
The attendant removes the helmet; Dr. Williams is shaking his head. “Well,” he says to me, “I suppose I should admit you are making some progress.”
“Progress!” Parker squawks indignantly. He glares across at me from the next table. “He let that creature kill me again!”
“Yes, but at least he’s no longer blowing your head off with the elephant gun. That’s progress. Not great progress, but still ... progress.”
Dr. Williams backs away so that he can frown at both of us simultaneously. “You two take the cake. Your families, friends, and colleagues prevailed upon you to submit willingly to this procedure. You came in under your own power, and you can leave the same way whenever you choose. The only thing you forfeit if you do quit is the sympathy of everyone who’s tired of your feud.”
Oh, no, I think, as Parker and I glare at each other, and each of us knows that he will never give the other the satisfaction of being the one who quit. What we would forfeit by quitting is moral superiority.
“The point of this therapy,” the doctor goes on, “is to help you, both of you, resolve your differences without resorting to personal attacks and fisticuffs in public, and bringing further discredit on the scientific community. Paleontology has all it can do these days to keep creationists and cryptozoologists from defining it in the public consciousness—particularly in the consciousness of people who hold the purse strings. We don’t need two of our own disrupting conferences with their personal animosities. After that last public scene of yours, you agreed, both of you, to submit to this therapy. Note that I say therapy, not role-playing adventure game. You two are supposed to be putting your personal differences aside, learning how to cooperate. You are supposed to advance through this scenario, learn as you go along, emerge better persons at the end.”
Well, I can’t speak for Parker, but I certainly mean to do better each and every time I put on the helmet. But I have begun to suspect that this therapy of Dr. Williams’ is less efficacious than he claimed it to be. Conceivably, some personalities are just too incompatible and implacable ever to achieve accord. The scientific bone of contention over which Parker and I have snarled and snapped seems to have called up in each of us a loathing for the other that knows few bounds short of actual homicide. It isn’t even a mere matter of bad personal chemistry: we don’t even have to be on the same continent to hate each other. We hate each other more and more by the moment; our hatred has passed beyond words, almost beyond endurance. And here we are, wired to each other and to Dr. Williams’ machines.
And even now I cannot resist sneering at Parker. “If you could have seen the look on your face when that dinosaur bit into you—priceless! Truly priceless!”
Dr. Williams motions to the assistants to replace the helmets on our heads. “Enjoy your little moment of triumph,” he says to me. “This time, you take the point.”