Time Travel Omnibus, page 1111
“Anyway,” Angela said. “We overheard—really we weren’t eavesdropping—that you weren’t going on the excursion today, and since we aren’t either—”
“Can’t swim a lick,” Stafford said. “Afraid of the water my whole life. Sink like a stone, and if I didn’t a dinosaur’d eat me for sure.”
“—we were hoping you might play tennis. Please say you do or we’ll just sit on the terrace and drink Bloody Marys all morning.”
“Terrible for the health, Bloody Marys.”
“I suppose we could play tennis,” Peter said, and then—was he mocking her? Gwyneth wondered—“You up for tennis, Gwen?”
And Gwyneth, thinking of the Kronosaur—the T-Rex of the seas—forced a smile. “Tennis it is,” she said.
Gwyneth and Peter lost in straight sets.
The Staffords were formidable opponents. Peter, a finesse player who relied on superior endurance, couldn’t handle Stafford’s powerful serves. Angela’s shots had a wicked backspin that Gwyneth never quite mastered.
“Luck, that’s all,” Stafford assured them, clapping Peter on the back, but as they headed back to the room to clean up, Peter whispered, “All the same to you, Gwen, I think I’d rather have gone snorkeling with the Karnosaurs.”
“Kronosaurs,” she said.
“Right. Except Frank Stafford is the damned carnivore,” he said. “Seriously. I think my yoke must be malfunctioning. I was getting the life beat out of me, and it didn’t so much as twitch.”
Against her will, Gwyneth laughed. Peter flung an arm across her shoulder, and for a moment the effortless camaraderie of their first years together—that playful, irreverent sense of humor, the easy way their bodies seemed to fit together—came back to her. For a moment she even thought of Peter’s hand upon her in the night, of how it might have been if she had turned to face him—
And then, of its own accord, her mind swerved away.
They showered and met the Staffords for lunch, where they learned that their tennis partner had been a subcontractor on the Museum of PostModern Art in D.C., among other things.
“Just a little piece of it,” Stafford said, holding up pinched fingers. “The duct work. Keep people cool in all that heat.”
“That’s a lot of duct work,” Peter said.
“You bet it is,” Stafford said, and Gwyneth suddenly had a sense of just how much she and Peter had sacrificed for this trip—of how much she had forced him to sacrifice. Stafford could buy and sell them a hundred times over, and she had nearly impoverished them.
“Angela’s idea, this trip,” Stafford was saying. “I told her I’d already found my niche. A lot of money in duct bills.” He dropped them a wink. “My little evolution joke,” he said.
“His only joke,” Angela said drily. And then: “What do you do, Peter?”
“I’m an assets manager.”
“Gambling,” Stafford said, thrusting his plate away. “Pushing money around, that’s all that is. End of the day, I like to put my hands on something solid. Like to say, I did that.”
Peter flinched, but if Stafford noticed, he didn’t let on.
Afterward, the men strolled off in search of cigars, though Gwyneth had never known Peter to smoke a cigar in her life. The two women found themselves in a secluded bar overlooking the cliffs.
“Sorry about that last bit,” Angela said over gin and tonics.
“Peter’s too sensitive.”
Gwyneth sipped her drink. She was beginning to feel the alcohol. The world had taken on a lush beauty. The edges of everything had sharpened. Each discrete bead of condensation glistened on her glass; every needle of the nearby conifers stood articulate against the azure sky. The full heat of the day had come on, and the plain below stretched empty toward the blue horizon. Gwyneth supposed the raptors must be lying up under the trees, and that made her think of Robert Wilson. She wondered if he had found his Kronosaurs, and if he was back from the sea yet.
“It’s very quiet in the Cretaceous,” Angela said. “There’s something missing, I can’t figure out what.”
Gwyneth listened.
But for them, the bar was empty. The barman stood polishing glasses. The stillness was pervasive. “Birds,” she said suddenly. “There were no birds”—and then, laughing, corrected herself. “There are no birds. Or hardly any. They haven’t evolved yet. Birds are dinosaurs. Or dinosaurs are birds. Or will be. I remember reading that somewhere.”
“You’re very amusing, Gwyneth Braunmiller.”
The barman came and freshened their drinks. When he was gone, Angela said, “What do you do?”
“I’m a technical writer. I mostly write instruction manuals,” Gwyneth said. “Or rewrite them, anyway.” She laughed. “You’ve probably read some of my stuff.”
Angela absorbed this in silence.
“Do you have children?”
Gwyneth laughed ruefully.
“I’m awfully nosy,” Angela said. “You needn’t answer.”
“No, I don’t mind. It’s just—” She broke off.
“You haven’t reached an agreement on that issue.”
“No, I guess we haven’t.”
The truth was they’d never really talked about it much. Neither of them felt strongly either way, she supposed. The problems were deeper than that, harder to pin down—the way minor disagreements had of settling into arguments and arguments into something worse, a cool distance, like planets orbiting different stars. And then, not wanting to be rude, she said, “What do you do, Angela?”
“I sit on charity boards. I spend Frank’s money. You’d be surprised how taxing it can be—no pun intended.” She raised her eyebrows and smiled.
“Children?”
“None. Frank has a grown son from a previous marriage. Musn’t threaten the heir to the empire.”
The alcohol made Gwyneth incautious. “And what brings you here?”
“Our twentieth anniversary.”
She sipped her drink.
“I still remember the wedding. Predictions for longevity were dire.” Angela laughed and touched Gwyneth’s hand. “What a pleasure to have proven them wrong.”
“To love,” Gwyneth said, lifting her glass.
They were quiet then, listening to the birdless afternoon.
The next day they went hiking—fifteen of them, Wilson’s entire excursion group. Despite the novelty of the towering conifers and angiosperms, a bleak melancholy fell over Gwyneth. The medication prescribed by her psychiatrist—“just to get you through this rough patch,” she’d said—hadn’t helped, nor had the trouble with Peter, the—what, exactly? The silence where there had been voices, the blind staring into the dark, their bodies separate and apart. And underneath that, turning its immense body in the fretful depths of sleep that finally claimed them, that unspoken sense of despair that eluded words. Malaise? Ennui? She didn’t know. Day after day after day it had worsened, for months, for a year and more, until one listless afternoon, Gwyneth happened across a documentary on Time Safaris, Ltd. Not since college paleontology had she seen live footage of dinosaurs. A desire to see them for herself, to plant her feet on the soil of another age, had seized her. And something else, as well: the conviction that two weeks away from the world—really away from the world—might fix the broken things between them.
“Jesus, Gwyneth, do you want to break us?” Peter had asked when he’d seen the cost.
She didn’t quite have the nerve to respond as she had wanted to: We’re already broken.
Her foot slipped on an outcropping of stone, and she would have fallen but for Angela’s steadying hand at her elbow. Gwyneth swiped perspiration from her eyes with the back of one hand.
“Drinks, darling. The moment we return,” Angela whispered—quiet being a condition imposed upon them at the beginning of the excursion—and Gwyneth laughed, and said, “By all means, yes,” feeling closer to this virtual stranger than her own husband of almost a decade.
That morning the two women had gravitated toward one another like old friends. They tramped side-by-side, midway in the group strung out along the trail like pearls. Their husbands forged along behind Wilson, who took the rocky path without effort, a canteen at his belt and a rifle slung across one shoulder. Late afternoon and the Cretaceous alive with sound, the hooting complaint of the striped, knee-high theropods that scattered into the underbrush before them, the steady hush of insects, the arboreal rustle of mammals the size of squirrels—“Our forbears,” Wilson had said. “The meek shall inherit the earth.”
From on high the alien shriek of some sky-borne pteranodon drifted down.
They stopped in a clearing of tall, flowering grass to search the thing out.
It was Stafford who spotted it, his arm out-stretched. They gathered around him to stare at the creature circling high above them in a sky of sun-shot blue.
“Quetzalcoatlus?” someone asked.
“Nothing so large, I should think.” Wilson unclipped his binoculars. “Looks to have a wingspan of maybe fifteen feet, about half that of Queztalcoatlus. Could be a juvenile, I suppose, but it’s hard to tell at this distance. Anyone want to see?”
The binoculars made the rounds. When her turn came, Gwyneth lifted them to her eyes, but she could never hold the image in frame long enough to get anything more than a glimpse of the creature, a fleeting impression of beak and bony crest, the vast leathery wings taut as a wind-blown kite.
They moved on then, deeper into the woods. The familiar smell of pine needles and dry loam enveloped her, the scent of unfamiliar flowers. Stafford had acquired the aura of a minor hero. Wilson had clapped him on the shoulder. “Sharp eyes,” he’d said, and the big man seemed to have expanded still more under the praise. Despite his size, he moved through the woods with a confidence Peter lacked, sure-footed, a creature of the physical world, his bearish frame poised over his center of gravity.
The terrain grew more forgiving, dropping away into a broad vale. The pace slowed, as Wilson paused to point out the flowering angiosperms and broad-leaved deciduous trees that had only recently—geologically speaking—evolved to compete with the pervasive conifers. They paused for water. Wilson moved among them, spare and purposeful, no gesture wasted.
“Okay, then?” he said to Gwyneth.
“I’m fine.”
He nodded, and moved on.
They got moving again fifteen minutes later.
Not long after that the woods thinned. Another glade opened ahead of them. Moted beams of sunlight slanted through the treetops, firing the bracken with a yellow-green glow. The boles of trees climbed the heavens in dark silhouette, dwarfing Wilson where he stood black against the green effulgence, the back of his hand upraised in universal semaphore. He waved the straggling line to either side. Something snorted, blew out breath in a long waning note. It called out—a kind of groan, long and deeppitched, like a rusty nail being wrenched from an ancient board. Then it took a step. Weeds thrashed. Gwyneth slipped with Peter through the ferny undergrowth to the right.
The trees fell away and the glade unveiled itself.
Gwyneth gasped for the beauty of it, the shining clearing and the creatures that grazed there: majestic, ponderous beasts—three horned, twenty-five or thirty feet long, ten feet at the shoulder—cropping peacefully at the waist-high grass. Triceratops, Gwyneth thought, gazing in wonder at the massive bony frill that curved up behind their heads, flushed bright with pink and red. The breeze combing the grass smelled of the creatures in the glade, a scent of old leather and manure and fresh-mown grass.
She caught snatches of Wilson murmuring—
“. . . a bull, two cows—the smaller ones—and a yearling. See it?”
He broke off as the largest of the dinosaurs—the bull—swung its elongated head in their direction. It regarded them with a single beady eye. In three quarter profile, the beast was more impressive still, battle scarred and ancient, the horns above its eyes razor-sharp spears of bone, jutting out three feet or more. It lumbered toward them, a single step, then two and three—
“Steady, now,” Wilson whispered. “Steady—”
—chuffed, and paused, as if assessing the danger they posed; a moment later, it lowered its beaked snout and began to tear at the weeds once again. This close Gwyneth could see parasites—insects maybe—crawling across its mottled green and brown hide. She was about to ask about them, when her eye caught a rustle in the tall grass—
The underbrush erupted, shrieking.
For a moment, Gwyneth didn’t see them, they were so well camouflaged. Then she did, three, four—was it five, or more?—green- and yellow-striped raptors the size of men or larger, hurtling across the clearing from half a dozen woody blinds, so fast that the eye could barely track them. Three of them corralled the yearling and herded it toward the trees. More than half the pack—there were seven of them, she saw—no, eight—wheeled away to face the charge of the bull Triceratops. Just as it lowered its head to impale them, they gave ground, hurling themselves at the monster’s unprotected haunches, their razor-clawed feet digging for purchase in its hide. The animal’s belly split, spilling a bulge of glistening viscera—
Peter clutched at her, trying to drag her deeper under the trees. The bull Triceratops wheeled around, lunging at its tormentors. Its tail whipped the air, flinging a raptor screeching into the undergrowth, and somewhere at the edge of the clearing the yearling screamed and screamed and screamed, until, abruptly, it fell silent. Dear God, she could see the raptors tearing it limb from limb. Grass thrashed. Geysers of blood erupted. Her heart pounding, Gwyneth wrenched free of Peter’s hand. She stepped into the clearing, she didn’t know why. The yearling’s companions, the bleeding bull among them, broke for the trees. As the remaining raptors swung around to their kill, they saw her—
—they saw her—
—and for a heartbeat—she felt a single nightmarish pulse at her temple—the moment hung in equipoise. Fathomless silence enveloped her. Then, shrieking, the nearest raptor hurtled toward her, its taloned feet clawing the earth. Gwyneth felt the tug of the yoke, like gravity seizing her as she careened through the loop of a roller coaster—
Then Robert Wilson stepped up beside her, leveling the rifle. The thing was almost upon them—the scene going watery around her as the yoke began to draw her home—when he pulled the trigger. There was a sound of thunder. The raptor’s skull dissolved into a spray of blood and bone. Its body spun convulsing to the ground. The next moment her vision cleared.
The glade was silent and empty.
“Quickly, now,” Wilson said, touching her shoulder. “They’ll be back soon.”
He spun her around and they retreated under the trees. The rest of the group awaited them there. She saw Peter, his long face pale with fury, and she reached out an entreating hand to him.
“Peter—” she said.
But he turned away.
Then Angela was there, catching an arm around her waist and cooing, “It’s okay now, it’s all over.” And then, half-supporting her as they trudged homeward through the suddenly menacing woods: “We’ll get a drink into you first thing,” she whispered. “A drink is what it wants.”
A drink, thought Gwyneth, with a mounting hilarity she did not recognize as her own. A drink would be just the thing.
Yes, a drink.
Maybe two, Gwyneth thought—definitely two, as it turned out, and she sensed a third one coming on. Fire pits threw up sparks and music swirled in the night air. She leaned against the railing, lifted her face to the breeze, sipped her martini. The gin smelled of pine trees, of the vast conifer forest, unsullied by human hands, that sprawled across the continent.
The scent triggered a flash of memory: the raptor hurling itself across the clearing at her, Wilson leveling the gun—
And here he was, speak of the devil.
Elbows on the railing, he leaned beside her. The party was in full swing now. Dancers twirled under muted lights. Wisps of conversation drifted through the air. She spied Peter, talking to Stafford by the buffet, and glanced away.
Wilson set her empty glass on the tray of a passing server and handed her a fresh martini. “Cheers,” he said.
They touched glasses. She held the gin in her mouth, savoring it.
They turned their backs to the party. For a long time, they leaned on their elbows, staring out into the dark. Before them ran the long blue savannah.
“Something else, isn’t it?” he said.
She gazed up at the sky, bereft of the old constellations. Or was it new? She laughed, and a small voice inside her said, You must be careful. He’ll think you’re drunk. Which she was. Why it should matter, she could not say.
“The stars look strange.”
“The skies change in sixty-five million years. Or seventy.”
“You don’t know, then?”
“No one knows.”
“But Eckels—”
“The recent past they’re pretty good at. The further back you go—” He shrugged. “Slippage.”
“And why is that, Mr. Wilson?”
“You’re talking to the wrong man, Mrs.—”
“Gwyneth.”
“—Braunmiller. You’d need a physicist to answer that.”
“Yet you were waiting the moment we arrived.”
“Once they have a focal point to lock in on—once some brave soul plants a flag, so to speak—then you’re fine.”
“But you don’t know when that focal point is?”
“Never will. Rough calculations can pin it down some—we’re toward the end of the era, we know that. But dinosaurs don’t keep calendars, I’m afraid.”
She could feel the alcohol buzzing through her veins. Her face was not unpleasantly numb.
“Dance?” he said.
“If you insist.”
Leaving their drinks on a nearby table, they stepped on to the dance floor.
“I haven’t thanked you for saving my life today.”
“I didn’t save your life.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Your yoke would have saved you if it came to that. You could feel it, couldn’t you?”
