Time Travel Omnibus, page 1110
There was a sign in front of the tent that said keep off the grass. Cute, Morrow thought, botanist humor. There was no grass in this world, no flowering plants at all. There were barely any plants, period.
“Dr. Payne, I presume,” Morrow said to the man.
“Yes.” Payne looked puzzled. He matched the description the prisoner on the ship had given: a tattoo of interlocked crescent-shaped designs adorned the left side of his neck, creeping into the hairline behind his ear.
“Dr. Payne,” Morrow said, “I am placing you under arrest for smuggling and related charges. You have the right to remain silent. If you do not choose to remain silent—”
“What? What’s this all about? This must be some kind of mistake.”
Morrow ignored the objection and finished reciting the list of the accused’s rights. Payne seemed too surprised to resist as the Marine staff sergeant puled his arms behind his back and snapped handcuffs around his wrists. Finally he managed to say, “There must be some mistake.”
Morrow gave him a tight smile. “Remember that big Navy boat anchored in the bay at Stink-town? There’s a scared swabbie on board there who’s in the brig. He knows he’s in deep ca-ca and thinks somebody else ought to be there to keep him company.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Smuggling biological specimens.”
“What do I know about smuggling?”
“They didn’t even have to use the rubber hose on him. They looked real mean at him, and he split wide open and out came his guts. Also a description of yourself. He’s facing dishonorable discharge and serious prison time. You’re looking at no more lecture and conference circuit, no more awards—and serious prison time. Even without the prison time, you’ll never be able to get so much as a job teaching General Science One-oh-one in Podunk.”
“Are you feeling well? You talk like a lunatic.”
“Yes, I am feeling well,” Morrow said, “and probably I am a lunatic. But that’s beside the point. The point is, your sponsor, whoever he may be, can’t or doesn’t want to come to the Paleozoic himself, so he’s having the Paleozoic brought to him, a tiny little bit at a time. Spores, DNA, air samples, soil samples. A little contraband specimen each time one of his people comes through the hole. He has to rely on human accomplices to actually go into Paleozoic time, though. No robot, however perfectly fashioned, is going to pass the physical. So he has to hire people to bribe other people who probably bribed someone else.”
The Marine staff sergeant began to push Payne, not roughly but firmly, toward the waiting helicopter. Morrow and Shelton fell in behind, and Sal said, with such bitterness in her voice that Morrow was startled, “Thank you so much, Dr. Payne.”
After a moment, Payne said, sullenly, “What for?”
“I started out in vertebrate paleontology. Absolutely loved dinosaurs, ever since I knew what a dinosaur was. Back then, in graduate school, I drew a lot of comments from invertebrate paleontologists. There’s no money in dinosaurs, they said. Study invertebrates, get a job in oil geology, make big money. Money didn’t tempt me, though. What finally tempted me was the spacetime anomaly. As soon as I heard there was this hole into Paleozoic time, I decided, I’m going. This was such a great thing, such a wonderful thing—if I believed in supernatural stuff I’d call this a miracle. And I wanted to be part of it. I figured, there may not be dinosaurs, but there’re plenty of other fascinating critters. I was in my fifties by then, but I did the necessary retooling, and here I am. And now—” she flung out a hand, taking in land and sky with the gesture “—it’s spoiled. Thanks to you and the people working with you and whoever all of you were working for.
This is the end in Eden. Sin has entered the garden.”
MATING HABITS OF THE LATE CRETACEOUS
Dale Bailey
They’d come to the Cretaceous to save their marriage.
“Why not the Paleogene?” said Peter, who had resolutely refused to look at any of the material Gwyneth had sent him. “Or the Little Ice Age for that matter? Some place without carnivores.”
“There are only two resorts,” Gwyneth said, waving a brochure at him. “Jurassic and Cretaceous. People want to see dinosaurs.”
She wanted to see dinosaurs.
“And I’m afraid travel to inhabited eras is no longer permitted, Mr. Braunmiller,” the agent put in. “Ever since the Eckels Incident. So the Little Ice Age is out.”
“Besides,” Gwyneth said. “I wouldn’t mind a few carnivores.”
Peter sighed.
Cool air misted down from unseen vents. The agent’s desk, a curved wedge of gleaming mahogany, floated in emptiness. Surround screens immersed them in sensory-enhanced three-dimensional renderings from the available eras. One moment the hot siroccos of some time-vanished desert stung their skin. The next, the damp, shrieking hothouse of a Jurassic jungle sprang sweat from their brows.
“Why not a sim?” Peter asked.
“I’ve had enough of simulations, Peter,” Gwyneth said, thinking of the expense. Over Peter’s protests, she had mortgaged the house they’d bought three years ago, cashed in retirement and savings accounts, taken on loans they couldn’t afford.
All for this.
“You’re certain, then?” the agent asked.
Peter opened his mouth and closed it again.
Twilight waters washed the barren shingles of some ancient inland sea.
“We’re certain,” Gwyneth said.
Tablets materialized in front of them.
“Just a few releases to sign,” the agent said. “Warranties, indemnities against personal injury—”
“I thought the yoke—” Peter said, and a fresh draft of whispering air blew down upon them.
“The lawyers insist,” the agent said, smiling.
An hour later, forms signed in triplicate, notarized, and filed away, the agent ushered them into an airlock. When they stripped, Gwyneth could feel Peter’s gaze upon her; she didn’t so much as glance at him, though he was lean and fit, as well muscled at thirty-five as he had been at their wedding seven years before. Stinging jets of anti-bacterial spray enveloped them. Industrial-strength compressors blasted them dry. They dressed in tailored, featherweight safari gear, and cycled through another airlock, their luggage hovering behind them. The adjoining chamber was bereft of luxury—no surround screens or polished mahogany, no calming mists of murmuring air. Their boots rang on polished concrete. Fluorescent globes floated high in the latticed spaces above them, leaching color from their faces. White-clad technicians looked up from their tablets as the airlock dilated. Behind them crackled the time machine, more impressive than Gwyneth had thought it would be, a miracle of sizzling yellow-green energy, the raw stuff of creation itself, harnessed by human ingenuity and bound screaming into colossal spider arms of curving steel and iron.
The technicians took charge of them. The hiss of hypodermic injections followed, then diaphanous bands of black that melted closed around their wrists like wax. The technician touched Gwyneth’s; far down in its polished depths a series of lights—orange and red and green—flashed once and was gone.
Her yoke.
The other technician, finishing up with Peter, smiled. “Your guide will meet you on the other side,” he said. “Ready to go?”
The time machine spat fire, throwing off scorching arcs of green and yellow.
They stepped into the light.
And were gone.
A sheet of green flame blinded them. Time blurred—a day, a week, a year, then more, the centuries peeling away like leaves, so that Gwyneth, who was barely thirty-four, felt young and alive as she had not felt in this last year. The time machine stank of history, of the sun beating down upon the tiered pyramids of new-built Aztec temples; of wheat flourishing for the first time under the hands of men; and further yet, of a dark age where shrewd monkeys huddled in terror around their lightning-struck fires. But Eckels had closed all that to them, and just as well, Gwyneth supposed, for he had bestowed upon them in its lieu the immense panorama of geologic time. And how she longed to step out of her life into a world fresh made, where great Triceratops lifted his three-pronged head and the sky-flung demon of the age, titanic Quetzalcoatlus, still spread his leathery wings; where the greatest of the thunder lizards, the tyrant king of all that he surveyed, Tyrannosaurus Rex, yet bestrode the terrified earth. Where, most of all, none of it had happened yet, and she could pretend that maybe it never would.
Then there was an enormous jolt, and Gwyneth cried aloud in terror or delight. Peter reached for her hand, and a lean, leathery man whose smile never reached his eyes stood before them.
They were there.
It was a resort, all right—a rugged dream carved out of the primeval wilderness. Below and to the west, a long savannah sloped away to a distant glimmer of sea. Above and to the east a jagged mountain range knifed through the earth’s crust, so that morning came late there and afternoons lingered into a blue twilight that seemed to stretch out forever. To the south and to the north, encircling arms of forest fell in ranks toward the distant plain. And in the heart of it all, like a precious stone set in swirls of green and brown, gleamed Cretacia, a maze of sandy paths and hidden glades where clear fountains tumbled and stone benches grew black with lichen. Private cabanas perched on tiers cut into the wooded ridges, and jeweled swimming pools glinted among the trees. Below the whitewashed sprawl of the hotel itself wound a quaint commercial district. Restaurants staffed by murmuring servers crowded up against narrow shops that sold books—actual books—and bath salts and summer dresses at such exorbitant rates that Gwyneth laughed in disbelief.
Yet her heart quickened in delight when the tall man with fine crinkles around his eyes—Wilson, Robert Wilson, he’d introduced himself—thumbed open their door for the first time and she saw the sheer decadence of the place: a bower of eggshell white and blue with a bed veiled in gauzy shadow, a vase of tropical flowers, and a south-facing floor-to-ceiling window (no sim screen, but glass, thick, reinforced glass) that gave upon a forested ravine, where something small and dappled scurried through the shadows, and if you stood on tip-toe and craned your neck, you could catch a glimpse of diamonds glittering upon the sea.
“I’ll leave you to unpack,” Wilson said, and turning from the window Gwyneth saw him—really saw him—for the first time: a hard, sun-baked man with sandy hair and an unhandsome face like a promontory of granite. His khakis were worn and stained, his boots scuffed. For a moment she was ashamed of their own gear, so new that it rustled when they walked.
“The concierge can take care of all your needs here on the grounds,” Wilson said. “If you want to go outside—when you want to go outside—I’ll be your guide.”
Turning from the window, Peter extended his hand. Gwyneth saw to her horror the folded fifty inside it.
Wilson stiffened. “No thank you, sir. That’s very kind of you.”
The door closed softly behind him.
“Peter,” Gywneth said. “You’ve insulted him now. He’s a wilderness guide, not a bellhop.”
“Just as well, I suppose. God knows we can’t afford to spend another dime.”
Then:
“Well, how was I to know?”
“Perhaps if you’d bothered to read some of the material I sent you—”
“This was your idea, not mine, Gwyneth.”
“But it’s our vacation,” she snapped. “And you ought to remember why and start acting like it.”
She crossed her arms and turned back to the windows.
It was still and peaceful out there.
A moment passed. They waited to see if what had been so long unsaid would break through the stillness. She knew that it would sometime soon, or that it had better. The wound had festered. It needed to be lanced and drained.
Peter came up and stood behind her, so close she could feel his breath, warm upon the back of her neck. “I’m sorry.” His hand came up to her lower back.
Did she flinch? And did he feel it?
She wanted this to work, yet her body betrayed her.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
When he leaned in to kiss her, she turned her face away.
They breakfasted on a long shaded terrace overlooking a pool. Fans stirred the air overhead. Just outside the compound, bright tiny dinosaurs strutted, pecking at the earth like chickens. Far below, beyond a stunning vista of tree-studded cliffs, huge sauropods feasted on towering groves of conifer. Something else had spooked a dinosaur herd. A cloud of dust obscured them, but their cries—a mournful lowing like the faraway lament of a foghorn—rose up to the terrace. Gwyneth wondered what had set them running.
“The coffee is fine,” Peter said, the meal done.
A server took their plates. He came back and used a long blade to scrape the linen cloth of crumbs.
Gwyneth took her coffee black; to please Peter she took a sip. “It is fine,” she said. Insipid banalities—that was all they could find to say. They’d forgotten the language of their own marriage, so they skated along the surface, stripping away any hint of ugliness as efficiently as the hotel staff spirited away a stained pillow. Last night, in a darkness rich with the strange music of the Cretaceous woods, he had reached out to touch her, and her body had gone rigid of its own accord. They had lain like that, so stiff and silent and distant that they might have been on separate continents, lying wakeful under foreign skies. Now, when he reached out to rest a hand upon her own where it lay brown against the white tablecloth, her fingers twitched and were still.
She felt tears well up, and choked them back, determined not to cry.
She said, “Peter—”
Then Robert Wilson was leaning over them, his own hand closing about the back rail of her chair and brushing her shoulder blade. He smelled of earth and dusty leather and the dry plain below. Gwyneth looked up through a sheen of unshed tears. When he returned her smile, his eyes remained as watchful and cold as marbles under the bony ridge of his brow. They were the color of agates, washed out and narrow from squinting across the blazing savannah. Something quickened inside her. She leaned forward and he wasn’t touching her shoulder anymore.
“Something spooked down there,” she said.
“Hydrosaurs,” he said. “Bloody cows startle easily enough. Could have been anything. A pack of raptors, maybe, but mostly they lie up under the trees until dusk.”
“But the big ones—” Peter said.
“The Alamosaurs. Go right on munching at the treetops, don’t they? Not much spooks an Alamosaur. A T-Rex maybe. Too big to worry about the raptors, and tails like whips. It’s an ecosystem, right? Like the African veldt. An elephant doesn’t worry much about a lion, does he?”
“Will we see a T-Rex?” Gwyneth asked.
“You’ll hear them cough at night if one’s around,” he said. “Last night was silent as a grave. Snorkeling today. Plesiosaurs, maybe a Kronosaur—T-Rex of the sea—if we’re lucky.”
“Sounds dangerous,” Gwyneth said.
“Feels dangerous,” Wilson said. “Safe as houses, though. Your yoke will see a Kronosaur turning aggressive before we even know it’s there,” he added, and for the first time Gwyneth noticed that his wrist was bare.
“You’re not yoked.”
He laughed. “I’m too ornery too eat.”
“Let’s take a pass,” Peter said. “I think we’ll spend the day settling in.”
“Your call. You’ll have plenty of time.”
Wilson nodded and strode away into the shadows.
They sat in silence for a moment, listening to the subdued babble of conversation around them.
“I think I’d like to be consulted about any future decisions, if you don’t mind,” she said quietly.
“Gwyneth—”
“It’s my vacation, right?”
“He’s talking about swimming with dinosaurs, for Christ’s sake.”
“Well, what did you think we were here to do, Peter?”
“To—”
“To what?”
“To try and fix things.” He shook his head. “To try and fix things, that’s all.”
“Well, we’re not going to fix them sitting on the terrace drinking coffee, are we? We might as well get our money’s worth.” She set her cup down and stood. “I think I’ll go change into something more appropriate for settling in.”
Gwyneth was halfway across the room, weaving her way between the tables, when someone reached out and touched her elbow. A woman—blonde and handsome, with a strong jaw line and narrow lips—smiled up at her. Her companion looked up from his breakfast.
“I’m Angela,” she said. “And this mannerless brute—”
—said brute swiped his face with a linen napkin—
—“is Frank—”
“Stafford,” the brute said, clambering to his feet. “Frank Stafford. But just Frank’ll do.” He took Gwyneth’s fingertips, and bowed slightly, lifting his eyebrows. Crockery rattled.
“Careful, Frank—” the woman—Angela—cried.
But by this time Peter had appeared at Gwyneth’s shoulder, and the brute—he really was something of a brute, Gwyneth thought, barrel chested and broad shouldered as an ox—was reaching past her to shake Peter’s hand.
“Just Frank,” Peter said—Stafford acknowledged this tepid witticism with a deep belly laugh—“Peter Braunmiller.”
“Here, have a sit.” Stafford shoved a chair in their direction, and when they were seated over fresh cups of coffee, he said, “That guy, Wilson, he’s your guide, too? What a piece of work, huh?”
“Fearless as a bandersnatch,” Angela said. “We did a trail with him the other day, and got within twenty feet of this awful thing called an anklysaur—”
“Armored bastard. Club on its tail the size of a fucking Volkswagen. He started to swing that thing when he saw us, and I swear to God I felt the wind on my face, we were that close.” Stafford laughed. “Felt my yoke give a good tug, I swear I did.”
