End of an Era (9 page)

Given the dense foliage, we had been afraid that we’d be confined to the mud flats around the lake. But about twenty kilometers from the Sternberger we found a broad trail that had been trampled through the forest — by a herd of ceratopsians, judging by the footprints. Klicks turned onto that path, and we made our way into the highlands. We realized that the sound of the Jeep might frighten off some of the wildlife, but, then again, never having heard an internal-combustion engine before, the dinosaurs might also be attracted to the rumbling noise, wondering what strange beast had come into their territory.

We had a tape recorder going and we kept up a running commentary about what we were seeing, describing everything from the texture of the soil (firmly packed, but free of the pebbles so common in post-glacial tills), to the plants (hardwoods, lots of flowers, and a rich ground covering of ferns), to the sky (the clear bowl of earlier had given way to great towering mounds of cumulonimbus, like models of the Grand Canyon done in cotton). A Stedicam on the roof fed images into a VCR installed where the glove compartment would normally be, supplementing the images from our clip-on Micro-Cams. Also on the roof, various instruments recorded atmospheric information and strained the air for pollens that we could bring back to the twenty-first century.

After an hour, we had the most extraordinary bit of luck. There was a bend in the path where the ceratopsian herd had changed the course of its stampede to avoid a dense stand of conifers. We sailed around the curve and almost collided with what could only have been a Tyrannosaurus rex. It was easily double the size of the tyrannosaurs we’d seen the first night; a female of late years, a giant truly worthy of the name king — or queen — of the tyrant lizards.

Klicks hit the brakes. The beast, a dozen meters long, was flopped on its belly, torpid. It was apparently resting after having gorged itself on meat, for its muzzle was caked with drying blood. The giant warty head lifted from the soil and turned to face us. Rex had broad cheeks and fair binocular vision, its eyes gray and wet like pools of mercury. It let out a halfhearted roar, but it didn’t seem to feel any need either to run from us or, thankfully, to attack us. Klicks cut the Jeep’s engine and we sat there, about twenty meters away, drinking in the sight of this, the greatest hunter ever to stalk the Earth.

Some had suggested that tyrannosaurus was a scavenger, but I’d always rejected that idea. There are no purely terrestrial scavengers in the time of humans, since only birds and fish have the ability to search enough real estate to profitably find dead animals. Besides, Rex’s dagger-like teeth and bunching jaw muscles would have been unnecessary just to pick at carrion. Still, there was no carcass anywhere that we could see. I wondered why the beast wouldn’t have just taken a snooze at the site of the kill, but, after watching for a few minutes, the answer became obvious.

First one, then another, then finally a small flock of tiny yellow-and-green winged reptiles descended from the sky. They may well have been there earlier, but had been scared off by the arrival of our Jeep. The tyrannosaur opened its jaw, peeling back its thin scaly lips. Its teeth ranged from about seven centimeters long to maybe sixteen. Gobbets of flesh were crammed around the gums and fibrous pieces of meat were caught between adjacent teeth. Several of the bantam pterosaurs, wings half-folded, waddled into the great mouth and proceeded to peck at the remains of the carnosaur’s meal, cleaning its teeth and gums. One of the yellow-and-green flyers plucked out a particularly large hunk of meat and two of his friends began trying to grab it away from him. Rex snoozed on, indifferent to the squabble going on inside its gaping mouth. Other pterosaurs landed on its short back and thick tail, their beaks nipping in and out of the leathery skin like surgeon’s lances, rooting out worms and beetles that infested the predator’s hide.

This was clearly a familiar symbiosis for the tyrannosaur: we could hear a contented rumbling coming from deep in its chest. Heavy with its latest meal, Rex must have marched quite some distance from where it had killed its prey, since the pterosaurs would have had much richer pickings going over such a carcass.

We watched for over an hour, the heat mounting in the cab. Although the roof camera and our MicroCams were getting it all anyway, Klicks and I each brought still cameras to our faces and snapped off roll after roll of slides.

Suddenly I had an idea. I reached into my pack, on the floor behind my seat, and pulled out the loaf of bread we’d brought along to make sandwiches. Tearing a hunk off the crusty end slice, I rolled down the window and tossed the piece halfway between the Jeep and Rex. A couple of the pterosaurs took to the air, then fluttered back to the ground. One of them waddled over to the hunk of bread and eyed it suspiciously. After a moment, satisfied I guess that the bread wasn’t going to spit at it or something, it gobbled it up in its long beak.

I threw another piece, this one only about half as far away. The pterosaur hopped over to it and pecked it up immediately. Klicks motioned that he wanted to try. He took a slice from the bag and began shredding it. Other pterosaurs came over to see what was happening. Soon we were throwing pieces as fast we could shred them and perhaps a quarter of the flock had decided it preferred Wonder Enriched to maggots off a tyrannosaur’s back. We threw each piece just a little shy of the last, drawing the pigeon-sized reptiles closer. Klicks tossed a few pieces on the Jeep’s hood, but the pterosaurs seemed to find the metal too hot to land on, and those went uneaten. Soon we were down to the last slice. Instead of tossing it, I broke off three choice chunks, placed them in my right palm, and stretched my arm out the window. After several minutes of me sitting motionless, one brave little pterosaur did hop up onto my arm, its talons sharp through the fabric of my sleeve. Its body was covered with down of emerald and gold. The loosely folded bat-like wings, with their tiny claws, fluttered in the breeze. With three quick darts, the toothless beak, like needle-nose pliers, snapped up the bread. A moment later the creature was gone.

We had exhausted the loaf about the same time as Rex’s teeth and back had been picked clean. As one, the pterosaurs rose into the sky, a cloud of shimmering gold and green. Klicks revved the engine and drove slowly past the resting hunter, continuing on our way.

Crrack!

"What the hell was that?" Klicks brought the Jeep to a halt. We were on a steep slope, having broken out of the forest halfway up the side of a mountain. The cumulonimbus overhead now covered two-thirds of the sky.

Crrack!

"There it is again!" I said.

"Shhh."

We listened intently. Suddenly I caught a blur of orange motion out of the corner of my eye. "My God!" I shouted. "They’re going to kill each other!"

Crrack! Crrack!

Off to our right, two individuals of the genus
Pachycephalosaurus
were butting heads. These two-legged giants were the big-horned sheep of this time. Holding their backs and necks parallel to the ground, they charged at each other, smashing the tops of their skulls together.

At first glance, pachycephalosaurs looked like the intellectuals of the dinosaurian era. They had high domed heads and a fringe of knobby horns around the back of the skull that gave the impression of being a balding professor’s remaining hair. But the erudite appearance was misleading. The domed skull was almost solid bone, more than twenty centimeters thick.

Crrack!

These must be males, for nearby a larger bonehead, darker rust in color, was using the bumpy knobs on its snout to dig up roots. This one seemed indifferent to the head-bashing going on nearby, but I was sure that it was the female prize the males were fighting for. At six meters in length, the male on the left was a good meter longer than the one on the right — and with reptiles, bigger meant older. The old guy was probably the female’s mate and here was being challenged by a young buck, ready to test his prowess in the way prescribed by his genes. I brought my binoculars to bear on the contest. The challenger was losing ground. Since we’d started watching, he had been forced to back away almost fifty meters.

Klicks pointed to the sky. A large pterosaur was circling above the fight, looking like a vulture waiting for the kill. I doubted that the boneheads routinely fought to the death, but this battle had gone on much longer than I would have anticipated a normal territorial challenge to last.

Time for both pachycephalosaurs to catch their breaths. They straightened, rising to their full heights, tilting their heads up and down in a ritualized display of their skullcaps. Although the tops of both their heads were now partially obscured by blood, I could see that there were bright display markings in yellow and blue on each pate.

The head-bobbing continued for a few minutes. Finally, the one who had been losing ground backed off a bit more, then charged forward at full speed, its three-toed feet throwing up divots each time they kicked off the soil. There was no roar to go with the charge, though. Each beast had its jaw locked shut, presumably to minimize the damage done by the impacts.

Old Guy stood his ground, his horizontally held back ramrod-straight, five-fingered hands at the sides of his head to steady it even more. When the impact came, the glass in our windshield rattled. I saw three chunks of the keratin veneer that sat atop the beasts’ skullcaps go flying. Old Guy had been knocked on his behind, his thick tail bending at an awkward angle. But he rose quickly, while the challenger staggered back and forth, dazed.

In the distance, we could hear more cracking sounds. Somewhere another pair of pachycephalosaurs were jousting. But the contest we’d been watching seemed to at last be over, the most recent impact finally proving too much for the challenger He raised his head and looked at his foe. Old Guy looked up too, and bobbed once, showing his display colors. Then he lowered his head again, ready for another charge. The challenger didn’t return the display. Instead, he turned tail and staggered away. Overhead, the frustrated pterosaur flapped its wings and headed off in search of something else to eat.

Old Guy made his way over to the foraging female and began rubbing his neck against hers, the bony nodes on the rears of their skulls making a sound like a washboard as they clicked together. The female seemed indifferent to the male’s attentions, but I suspected she was in heat and probably her scent had prompted the unattached younger male to make his challenge. Old Guy continued to rub necks with her, but she simply went about her feeding. After a while, though, she dug up a few more choice roots and, instead of eating them, left them on the ground for the male. He tipped his snout down and gobbled them quickly, obviously famished after his fight. This leaving of the roots was apparently a signal that the female was now ready. Old Guy moved in behind her and she went to her knees. The coupling only lasted a few minutes.

I guess they’d been mated a long time.

As a boy, I’d read a short story by Ray Bradbury called "The Sound of Thunder." It told of a time-traveler who had stepped on a butterfly in the Mesozoic, and that one event — the loss of that butterfly — had cascaded down the eons to result in a different future.

Well, we knew now that small events like that do have big consequences. Chaos theory tells us that the flapping of a butterfly’s wing in China really does determine whether it later rains in New York. This sensitivity to initial conditions is even called the Butterfly Effect. I got a kick out of the fact that Bradbury had beat the physicists to the punch. He had known how important butterflies were long before they did. In a way, he was the real father of chaos theory.

But Ching-Mei said we didn’t have to worry about any of that. The
Sternberger
was anchored to its launch point back in the sky over the Red Deer River. Her equations said that it would return there, regardless of what we did back here. She’d talked in terms I only half understood about the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, saying that our future would be safe.

And so we got to hunt dinosaurs with impunity…

"That’s the one," said Klicks, pointing.

"Pardon me?"

"That pachycephalosaur, the challenger. That’s the one we should kill. It’s exhausted by that head-butting contest, so it should be easy to take down. Besides, it obviously doesn’t have a mate depending on it."

I thought for a moment, then nodded. Klicks throttled the engine and we drove off in the direction the challenger had headed. It didn’t take us long to catch up with him. He was indeed looking bedraggled, but still, at about the same length as our Jeep, I doubted that he would be quite as easy to fell as Klicks hoped.

Klicks stopped the Jeep long enough to fire a shot from his elephant gun out his window. It hit the dinosaur in the shoulder. The beast yelped and turned on us. It apparently had no preprogrammed response for dealing with an attack by humans in a Jeep Iroquois. It bobbed its head at us, showing the blue and yellow display colors on its pate. Klicks swung the car around and fired again. This time the creature broke from instinct. It lowered its head and ran straight for us, a biological battering ram.

Klicks pulled hard on the wheel, but that just succeeded in bringing us broadside to the beast. It hit the passenger door, little shards of safety glass showering me, the metal bending as if we’d been in a high-speed automobile collision. We were sent spinning across the clearing and rammed into a tree. The air bags on the dash inflated. Klicks shifted to reverse and pulled us back a distance.

The air bags should have deflated automatically, but they hadn’t — so much for Chrysler’s quality control. Feeling like Patrick McGoohan in
The Prisoner
, I pushed against the white sheeting until I managed to find my dissection kit, sitting on the hump supporting the stick shift, and dug out a scalpel. I slit my bag first, then Klicks’s, the hot wind that spewed out as they deflated blowing things around the cab.

Klicks shifted back to first gear, and we jerked toward the reptile. The mechanism for rolling down my window had been wrecked by the impact. I found my rifle and used its butt to clear the remaining glass, then fired both rounds at the beast.

It had incredible stamina. Klicks ended up driving in circles around the hapless creature while I kept reloading and pumping round after round into its torso. Finally it staggered forward and slumped to the ground. We brought the Jeep to a halt, and Klicks opened the hood to help it cool off. I took my dissection kit and headed over to the carcass, as big as the biggest bear I’d ever seen at the zoo.

I’d never been good at it, but I did know how to butcher animals. During the Gobi dig that had been part of the Second Canada-China Dinosaur Project, we’d had no way to refrigerate meat, so we’d brought sheep and goats with us and slaughtered them as required. I slit the pachycephalosaur’s throat to drain the blood. Gallons of it — the wimpy metric liter was utterly inadequate to describe the flow — poured out onto the soil, steaming.

Severing the head was an arduous task even with my freshly sharpened bone saw. The vertebrae were stiffened and

reinforced to help withstand the head-buttings, and the nuchal ligaments running from the back of the head to the neck were exceptionally thick and strong. Being almost solid bone, the head was incredibly heavy even in the reduced gravity. Once I’d gotten it free, I held the head up with both hands and turned it so that its bumpy snout faced me.
Alas, Prehistoric! I knew him well…

We didn’t have a drill long enough to cut through the brain-case. However, the back of our Jeep was packed with Huang stasis boxes for keeping specimens in. Klicks had gotten several of them out and had brought them over to me. They came in a variety of different sizes and were one of the few really expensive pieces of equipment we had on this mission. Their walls were made of polished metal, inlaid with the hairline black strands of the stasis grid. Klicks opened the lid on one, and I placed the entire head into the flat-black interior.

We didn’t have much time in which to perform the autopsy before the animal’s remains would start to turn in the heat. Klicks was of minimal assistance — this wasn’t his line of work. But he displayed a commendable lack of squeamishness as he recorded everything with his clip-on MicroCam.

It didn’t take long looking at these sophisticated innards to convince me beyond a shadow of a doubt that pachycephalosaurs were warm-blooded, controlling their own body temperature through metabolism instead of relying on basking to heat up. The heart was a sight to behold, even with a bullet lodged in it. The size of a basketball, it was a lovely four-chambered mammal-like affair, with completely separate arterial and venous pathways.

There was an unusual organ behind the heart, yellowish in color, very fibrous in construction, and heavily serviced by blood vessels. It corresponded to nothing in modern birds or reptiles. I did my best to remove it intact and placed it in the ebony interior of another stasis box.

I decided to examine only one of the lungs, assuming the other would be similar. It had massive capacity, further evidence of high metabolism. I’d dissected and studied all kinds of animals over the years, but none matched the sophistication — the utter perfection — of the dinosaurian anatomy. I’d enjoy doing a proper job on that head once we got back to the twenty-first century…

"Uh-oh."

I looked up to see what Klicks was referring to. Coming toward us was a small bipedal dinosaur, about the size of a chicken. It had a snaking neck, small pointed head, and a little round body looking a lot like a bowling ball. Its metatarsals were elongated, giving it three functional leg segments and a long stride, a common adaptation for high-speed running. It probably felt that its fleet-footedness meant we didn’t pose any threat to it, and certainly it was too small to be a serious threat to us. As it got closer, I saw that it was covered with short feathers and had a crest of red and yellow plumes coming off the back of its head. I guess it figured there was plenty of dead dinosaur meat to go around, and it made a beeline for the pachycephalosaur’s open chest cavity. I tried to shoo it away but it just squawked at me and helped itself to a prize chunk of gizzard.

Klicks was nonchalantly making his way back to the Jeep. I didn’t understand what he was up to at first, but a moment later he was coming back with our largest stasis box, a silver cube a meter on each side. He waited until the thief had nipped into the carcass for another piece of meat, then charged. The feathered dinosaur must have felt the ground vibrate as Klicks ran toward it. It swung its head right around to look at him, blinked twice, then scrambled forward, up onto the back of the dead animal. Klicks wasn’t to be deterred so easily. He climbed right up on top of the corpse, too, and proceeded to chase the little saurischian along the length of the pachycephalosaur’s spine. His prey hopped off and began to hightail it for the safety of a distant stand of trees, but Klicks had the advantage of muscles used to much greater gravity. His legs swung in giant strides, each one sending him sailing ahead three meters. He finally caught up with the tiny meat-eater. Pouncing, he brought the stasis box down upon it. The dinosaur let out a loud yelp, but it was cut off in mid-note as Klicks flipped the box around and slammed the lid, locking the interior into stasis. At least we’d have one live specimen to bring forward with us.

Turning back to my dissection, I slit through the stomach’s wall, taking care not to let the gastric acid spill on me. I wasn’t surprised to find it mostly empty; I wouldn’t want to start a head-butting contest on a full stomach either. What was within seemed to be soft vegetation, including well-chewed gunnera leaves. I wondered if -

"Christ, Brandy, watch out!"

There were tons of flesh spread out before me and it took me a second to see what Klicks was pointing at. There, down near the middle of the back, over the hips, a mound of blue Het jelly was percolating to the surface.