Crocamander Quest

Please, Ms. Brownlee! I assure you I have nothing against women. I’ve been married to one—the same one—for twenty-odd years, and we get along fine.

Even if I’m not a male chauvinist, though, I bloody well won’t change my rule against taking ladies on time safaris, at least along with men. Not that women can’t rough it in the outback as well as men. But when you mix the sexes in a small, close group, you’re asking for trouble. When people are thrown together so intimately, they either form close attachments or come to hate one another. Adding the sexual factor merely makes a difficult situation impossible. I’ll tell you how we once tried such a mixed party and what came of it.

If your women’s-rights organization would like to get up an all-woman time safari, we’ll consider it. Of course I should have to see how my wife would take it. When she heard I had signed up five clients, including a woman, to the Triassic, she said:

“Reginald Rivers, what on earth are you thinking of? Having a quickie in the cycads with this bird? You’re asking for problems.”

I assured her I had nothing of the sort in mind, but in the end she could have said: “I told you so!” Not that the dear girl ever said it aloud; but I knew she was thinking it.

About the time Aiyar and I launched this mixed safari . . . that’s Chandra Aiyar in the photo on the wall, the dark chap with the dead dinosaur. I call him “Raja” because he’s the hereditary ruler of some little place in India named Janpur. Of course that’s purely honorary nowadays, like the title of that Frenchman, the Comte de Lautrec, who had his head taken off by a flick of the tail of a sauropod he annoyed.

I’d been getting some flak about our men-only policy; so the Raja and I thought we’d try a mixed safari once to see how it worked. There was a couple named Alvarado, Tomás and Inez, who wanted to go back to the Age of Reptiles. Tom Alvarado was a stout Spaniard who made his living singing in operas. He must have been bloody good at it, to be able to afford a time safari. They weren’t much interested in hunting or trophy collecting; but they were ambitious travelers, who had covered all the continents and most of the countries of the present-day Earth and were looking for something new. They weren’t even going to take a gun; but I persuaded them to rent a nine-millimeter Mannlicher. Otherwise the party would have been a little too lightly armed for safety.

It jarred me a bit when Tom introduced Mrs. Alvarado as “my former wife, Inez.” (He pronounced it to rhyme with “Macbeth.”) When I asked him about this later, he said: “Oh, yes, Inez and I have been divorced for years. We could not stand living together; but then we found we liked each other better than anyone else around. So we do what americanos call ‘going steady’.”

Well, I didn’t consider his private arrangements, no matter how bizarre, any of my business. Inez was a Yank of, I believe, Mexican antecedents; quite a stunner in a black-haired Latin way.

The Raja and I decided we wouldn’t send them to the Jurassic or Cretaceous, when one finds the most spectacular dinosaurs, because of the risk. We also had a prospect who was keen to get to the Triassic but couldn’t afford to do it solo, because his grant from the Auckland Museum of Natural History wouldn’t cover the fees. We had to charge high to include the costs to Professor Prochaska’s laboratory, since the time machine uses fantastic amounts of electric power.

This third sahib was a New Zealander, Professor Doctor Sir Edred Ngata, a paleontologist. He was a picturesque bloke, two meters tall, built like a locomotive, with a leather-brown skin and bushy black hair just beginning to gray. He must have been at least three-quarters Maori. I was glad to have a Kiwi along, who wouldn’t poke fun at my accent.

The reason Ngata was keen for the Triassic, where the wildlife is less spectacular than it becomes later, is that he wanted to study all the little lizardy creatures to find out which were the ancestors of the reptiles and mammals of later times. He told me:

“Also, Mr. Rivers, I want to study the distribution of the later rachitomes—”

“Excuse me,” I said, “the racket whats ?”

“Rachitomes, or their offshoot the stereospondyls. They’re orders of amphibians, in decline in the Triassic but still abundant and including some large creatures like Paracyclotosaurus from your own Australia. Imagine a newt or salamander expanded to crocodile size, with a huge head for catching smaller fry, and you’ll have the idea.”

“Might call it a ‘crocamander,’ eh? At least that’s easier to say than the name you just gave it.”

Ngata chuckled. “True; but the short, easy Latin names have been pretty well used up by now.”

“I see,” I said. “Trouble is, I no sooner get one of those jaw-breaking names memorized than you blokes go and change them, or at least change the classification. But why particularly crocamanders?”

He explained: “They help to date the breakup of Pangaea.”

“You mean that super-continent that, they say, once included them all?”

“Right-o. The breakup started in the Triassic. First the northern half, which we call Laurasia, separated from the southern, or Gondwanaland, when the Tethys Sea formed between them. So if we find one of your—ah—crocamanders very similar to one of ours in the southern continent, in the land that became North America, we can be fairly sure that the land connection between the two parts of Pangaea still existed.”

“Why couldn’t crocamanders swim from one to the other, the way the saltwater crocodile does?”

“Because most amphibians can’t take saltwater, with those soft, moist skins.”

The fourth sahib was an American, Desmond Carlyle, who knew the Alvarados. He was a good-sized fellow, well-set-up with sandy hair and a little blond mustache. He had done a bit of mountaineering and had the old idea that it proves one’s manhood to hang the stuffed heads of large wild animals on one’s wall. I’ve outgrown that sort of thing myself; but I don’t discourage it because it keeps clients coming in to the firm of Rivers and Aiyar, Time Safaris. Carlyle hoped to work up to a Cretaceous safari for a Tyrannosaurus head but thought a Triassic jaunt would be a good way to get broken in.

Last to join was a young man named Willard Smith. He was from one of those complicated families where both parents had been divorced and remarried ever-so-many times. One of his many stepfathers had given him the time trip as a present on his graduation from college. I’ve always heard that such extended families are a sure way to produce juvenile delinquents, addicts, and criminals; but young Smith didn’t show any such symptoms. He did, however, confide:

“Mr. Rivers, I hope you won’t mind that I’m a klutz.”

“Eh?” I said. “What’s that? Some sort of secret society, demanding compulsory birth control for comedians or something?”

“No, no, nothing like that. It’s Pennsylvania Dutch for an awkward, clumsy person.”

That gave me pause. I said: “Well, I don’t know. If you’re that kind of gawk, how do I know you won’t trip over a root and blow somebody’s head off?”

“Oh, I’m not interested in shooting,” said Smith. “I’ll be quite happy just tagging along and taking pictures. That’s my real enthusiasm.”

A little against my better judgment, I let Smith’s registration stand. I told myself to keep an extra-close watch on young Willard. In former geological eras, if you gash yourself with a skinning knife, or shoot yourself in the foot, or step in a hole and break your leg, there’s no telephoning the ambulance to come fetch you to the hospital. But if Smith didn’t carry a gun, at least he couldn’t accidentally shoot any of the rest of us.

Hunting dinosaurs isn’t especially dangerous if you make all your moves smoothly and correctly, and don’t commit foolish mistakes like catching a twig in the mechanism of your gun, or stepping on the tail of a sleeping carnosaur, or then climbing a small tree the dinosaur can pluck you out of. Even clumsiness isn’t fatal if you have sound judgment, are in complete control of yourself, and take whatever extra care is needed to make up for your lack of coordination.

So on a fine spring day we gathered with our gear at Professor Prochaska’s laboratory here in St. Louis. The service personnel were our longtime herder Beauregard Black, two camp helpers, and a cook. By then the Raja and I were experienced enough so we didn’t feel that both had to be along on every safari. One could stay behind to hold down the office; that’s why I’m here now, while the Raja takes a group back to the Eocene.

This time, however, we agreed that the Raja should come along, because the period was new and also because it was our first safari mixed as to sex and therefore an experiment. The Raja is better at human relations than I. He can calm down an excited man—excuse me, person—or cheer up a despondent one, or jolly along a bad-tempered one in a way I’ve always envied.

On other safaris we had taken the party coasting about the local area, breaking camp and setting it up again half a dozen times. We decided that this time, since we had some decided tenderfeet, one a female, we had better leave the camp where we first pitched it and merely make one-day walkabouts in different directions. So we didn’t need a train of packasses to haul our gear around the country.

Eh? Why don’t we use off-trail vehicles? In the first place, we could take only those of the smallest kind—practically toys—because of the size of the transition chamber. In the second, there’s no source of petrol in case we run low on fuel. In the third, Mesozoic country is often so overgrown and poorly drained that even the most versatile vehicle would have a hard time. And lastly, if your jeep breaks down or skids into the river, it’s done for; you can’t get it back to the transition chamber. The asses, on the other hand, can live off the country; and in dire straits you can eat them—if some hungry carnivore doesn’t beat you to it. You can’t eat a petrol-powered vehicle.

The sahibs, the sahiba, the Raja and I crowded into the transition chamber with our guns and packs. It was policy for the guns to go first, not knowing what sort of reception committee might be waiting for us. The operator squeezed in after us, closed the door, and worked his buttons and dials.

I had told the laboratory people to set the timer for May first, 175 millionB .C. So the chamber wallah set his dials for that date and pressed the red button. The lights went out, leaving the chamber lit by a little battery-powered lamp. The sahibs gave some grunts and groans at the vertigo and vibration, and that horrid feeling of being in free fall. But the Raja and I had been through all this before.

When the spinning dial hands stopped, the operator checked his gauges to make sure he could safely set the chamber down. It wouldn’t do to land it in an inland sea or on the side of a cliff. Sometimes he has to move the chamber back and forth in time by half a million years or so to find a soft landing. This time we were lucky to come down on fairly level soil. Another button opened the door.

As usual, I jumped down first, my gun ready. I hadn’t been in the Triassic before, but I’d read up on the period. I saw rolling country with water in the distance, and a fairly heavy growth all around of trees and shrubs you find nowadays only in the form of little “living fossils,” they call ’em, like horsetails and ferns. For real trees we had araucarias, trees of the ginkgo type, and cycads looking much like palms. No grass, of course; that didn’t evolve for another hundred million or so, and likewise no flowers.

The only sample of the fauna I saw on that first look-around was one little lizardy fellow running away on a pair of long hindlegs. I was watching it disappear into the ferns when Sir Edred Ngata shouldered me aside, whipped up his shotgun, and fired, bang-bang! at the vanishing two-legger. I said:

“Hey Sir Edred! You agreed to shoot only when I told you to!”

“I say, I’m frightfully sorry!” said Ngata. “But it looked like a thecodont, one of those that evolved into the big dinosaurs. One of my objectives is to get some specimens to mount or dissect. I suppose I missed; but please, let me go look!”

He started off, but I said: “Damn it, Sir Edred, reload your gun first! And keep heavy buckshot in one barrel!”

He turned back with a shamefaced grin. “You’re right, of course. And forget the ‘Sir.’ Just call me ‘Edred,’ will you, old boy?” Ngata was an amiable sort of bloke whom it was hard to stay angry with for long.

Meanwhile the rest of the party came out of the chamber, which vanished back to the present to pick up Beauregard and his crew and the kit. All this took a bit of time, during which I scouted around to pick a campsite near a stream.

As soon as camp was pitched, our first job was to get fresh meat. Being unfamiliar with the period, I asked Sir Edred for advice. We wanted an animal, preferably a plant-eater, not too large (which would rot before we got it eaten) or too small (in which case there wouldn’t be enough to go round). Ngata said:

“If I were you, I’d try for a dicynodont. I think you’ll find them on the higher ground.”

“What’s a dicynodont like?”

“Just imagine a hairless, saber-toothed sheep and you’ll come close.”

Since it was too late in the day to start out, we stayed in camp. The service personnel bad set up one big tent for themselves and four small ones for the rest of us. I put Ngata and Alvarado in one tent, Carlyle and Smith in another, and gave one to Inez Alvarado. The Raja and I took the remaining tent, since we should have to consult on managing our party. Also, since we went watch-and-watch, there was no use waking up one of our lambs every time we changed watch.

If the Alvarados had been a normal married pair, I should have given them a tent to themselves. But I didn’t know if they were currently on a screwing basis—excuse me, Ms. Brownlee—and it’s not the sort of thing one cares to ask people right out.

Sleeping proved not so easy as one might think. Besides the big cockroaches, whom the smell of food brought swarming into the camp, the insects included a huge cricket whose chirp sounds like a burglar alarm going off.

Next morning we set out on our routine meat hunt. We went uphill, pushing through vast fern beds; there didn’t seem to be any game trails. A heavy growth of ferns can give you a real workout to wade through, so we were soon filthy and drowning in sweat. Besides, the ground is so broken by nullahs that every walk is an up-and-down scramble.

We saw a pair of coelophysids—slender, longtailed, bipedal flesh-eating therapsids weighing about as much as a small man—ah—person. They were prowling through a fern brake, looking for smaller creatures to snap up in those narrow, toothy jaws. As soon as they saw us they took off and vanished. Carlyle, our one really dedicated hunter, sent a shot after them but missed.

When we got to higher ground, the ferns thinned out. All the while, Smith clicked his camera this way and that. Ngata dashed excitedly about, banging away with his little 28-gauge shotgun. Now and then he came back holding up some little lizardy fellow before popping it into his collecting bag. Once I said:

“There’s a little one!”

I pointed to a stubby lizardlike animal, no bigger than a rat. Ngata brought up his shotgun; then said:

“No, better not. It looks like an ictidosaur, and I might shoot one of my own ancestors!”

“At which point, I suppose you’d vanish like a blown-out match flame?”

“Or all of us might,” he said.

“More likely, we should all be snatched back to our own times and torn to pieces in the process,” I said, “to prevent a paradox. That’s what actually happened to one client of mine, who tried to occupy the same time slot twice.”

After a couple of hours’ hiking, the Alvarados complained of sore feet. So I split up the party, bringing Carlyle and Ngata, as the ones most hardened to such stress, along with me, and leaving the others to take a spell with the Raja.

As we climbed, the landscape opened out, with more bare spaces between clumps of trees, mostly looking much like ginkgos, and conifers resembling the modern monkey-puzzle pine. People who expect a Mesozoic landscape to be colorful are apt to be disappointed, since all the plant life is pretty much the same dark, somber green, without flowers. Through one of the gaps in the forest we could see, beyond the next few rises, the big conical shape of a volcano, with a plume of smoke and vapor coming out the top.

Soon after leaving the others, I heard noises of animal life. Ngata began to burble and would have dashed ahead if I had not caught his arm.

“Easy, easy!” I said. “We want to see what we’re getting into first.”

“But there aren’t any Allosauri or Tyrannosauri in this period. . . .”

“I know,” I said, “but from what I’ve read, some of the carnivores are still big enough to kill you.”

So I led the way, peering ahead through the shrubbery and holding my rifle ready. The Raja and I were using .375 magnums. We had left our six-nought-noughts, our real dinosaur killers, back home, figuring that nothing we were likely to meet required such heavy artillery, which is a cow to drag through the bush.

At last we arrived at a little glade in which four dicynodonts were feeding. I crept up, keeping a clump of cycads between me and the animals, until I got a good view through the gaps. Carlyle had lagged behind us, and for some minutes I didn’t notice his absence.

There was one male, distinguished by his tusks, and three females. I can’t say they reminded me of hairless sheep. Hairless they were, but stoutly built, about the size and shape of your American black bear, with potbellied bodies tapering aft to thick reptilian tails. Their heads began with horny beaks like those of turtles, plus those saber tusks on the male.

All four were chomping away at leaves and fronds. Bloody ugly things, I should call them; but then I suppose we should seem equally so to them. When I got ready to shoot, Ngata touched my arm.

“Wait a bit,” he said. “I want to observe them first.”

So we stood watching, though seeing an animal simply eat, eat, eat soon loses its entertainment value. I was again getting ready to shoot, when Ngata whispered:

“Hold it, Reggie; something’s comingl”

The something turned out to be another male dicynodont. The resident male looked up from its eating and uttered a warning grunt.

The newcomer grunted, even louder. For most of a minute these two beggars stood glowering at each other, if anything so expressionless can be said to glower, and grunting.

Then the newcomer yawned, exposing his tusks. The resident male then yawned, too; and all the while they continued to grunt. During this time, Carlyle caught up with us, mumbling something about having to retie his bootlace.

The newcomer moved closer, yawning and grunting. The two circled each other until I was no longer sure which was the newcomer. At last one of the two, whichever it was, made a shambling dash at the other and slashed with his tusks. He laid open a gash in the other’s shoulder; and the other backed off, still yawning and grunting. When the wounded one had put enough distance between them, he turned and waddled away. That was all there was to this clash of the titans, if you want to call it that. All the while, the three females kept on munching vegetation as if this duel were no business of theirs.

“Can’t leave all three ladies husbandless,” I said, and to Carlyle: “Your shot. Take the one on the left.”

He fired at the nearest female, and down she went. The remaining three looked around in a vague sort of way but showed no disposition to flee.

“They’ve never developed a flight reaction to gunfire,” said Ngata. “I fear we shall have to chase them away.”

He picked up a cycad frond and advanced on the dicynodonts, yelling and waving the frond. Carlyle and I came with him, shouting and waving; and soon the three survivors turned and shambled off in no great hurry.

By the time we reached the carcass, Ngata fell to measuring and writing notes. While he was so engaged, the Raja called from the bush, and presently he appeared with the rest of our party. Young Smith was shooting pictures.

The Raja and I got out our knives to clean the animal, to lighten it for carrying back to camp. I had a folding magnesium carrying pole in my pack. But when I started to cut out the guts, Ngata cried:

“I say, Reggie! You’re not going to leave all those lovely intestines here?”

“Certainly,” I said. “What’s the point of lugging an extra thirty kilos of inedible stuff back to the camp?”

“I need to study all those organs! Don’t you realize that nobody has ever described the internal anatomy of a therapsid before? All we’ve had to work with were bonesl It’s as if we had stepped out on another planet!”

“Well, if you want to shovel that pile of guts into your specimen bag—”

“I can’t do that! The bag’s full alreadyl”

“I’m sorry, but we do what we can. What we can’t, just doesn’t get done. And you’ll have other chances. Come on, give me a hand with tying this bugger’s feet to the pole!”

By coaxing and bullying, the Raja and I got Sir Edred calmed down enough to lash our beast’s feet together so we could carry it suspended from the pole. Since Ngata and I were the biggest men of the party, it fell to us to bear the pole. The Raja carried my rifle as well as his.

Halfway back, I asked Willard Smith to take my end of the pole, he being the youngest and almost my size, and I not so young as I once had been. I had forgotten about his being what he called a “klutz.” But we hadn’t gone another fifty meters when Smith tripped over his own feet and fell at on the trail. Since Ngata remained upright, the dicynodont slid down the pole on top of Smith, who got pretty bloody.

So I took back the pole for the rest of the hike. We got back in time for billy, with enough time left over to clean up before a dinner of dicynodont steaks. Our cook, Ming, has learned never to be surprised by the creatures we bring into camp and tell him to cook for us.

While our tucker was cooking, we sat around the fire, telling stories and enjoying a lot of whiskey, while Mrs. Alvarado sat with her feet in a bucket of warm water. Alvarado and Carlyle and Smith also wanted to soak their feet; but there was only one bucket, so I gave Inez the first crack at it.

As for the whiskey, I had served out pretty potent portions; but then Desmond Carlyle demanded seconds.

“No, sorry,” I said. “I told you, that one’s it for tonight.”

“Liquor flows like glue here,” he grumped. “I could put away half a liter and not feel it.”

“Sorry about that;’ I said. “Our supply is calculated to last the fortnight. I don’t want to run short before the chamber returns.”

Actually I was more concerned with what might happen if one of my lambs got too disinhibited from liquor. I’d seen that happen on other safaris, where the imbiber did something silly like picking a fight. You never can tell how a person will react to liquor. Some get talkative, some amorous, some despondent, and some belligerent. The only way to find out is to get them drunk, and the risks were too great in these surroundings, a couple of hundred million years from help.

Carlyle’s drink was strong enough, however, to get him talking. He told a fanciful tale of hunting a lion in Africa. From what I know of Africa, it wasn’t much of a hunt; there isn’t any more of that, really, there. Somebody ran a lion farm and then, when a would-be hero with enough money showed up, he would turn one lion loose in a big private preserve and send the man in with a gun.

Since the lion was semi-tame and had never learned either to attack or to fear a human being, it just lay or stood quietly while the joker walked up and shot the poor beast. A pretty poor idea of sportsmanship, if you ask me. But then, I suspected Carlyle of being a skite with a lot of fictitious adventures he liked to trot out to impress the women.

Then my attention was drawn to Sir Edred Ngata. He was squatting in front of a cloth on which he had laid out a score of specimens he had brought down with birdshot. Except for one primitive tortoise, they were all lizardlike, looking pretty similar to my unscientific eye. The astonishing thing, though, was that tears were running down Ngata’s big brown face.

“Edred!” I said. “What’s the matter, mate?”

He looked up, choked back a sob, and took a swallow of his drink. “You wouldn’t understand, Reggie. I’m suffering from information overload.”

“So what? I never heard that too much news was anything to cry over.”

“No; it’s just that there’s such a damned colossal job here to be done, and only one man—me—to do it. I can’t even scratch the surface. It’s as if you were, say, a historian, and were sent back in time with a copying machine to the Library of Alexandria in the days of the Ptolemys and told you could photocopy all the lost manuscripts you could do in one hour. You’d know you couldn’t copy more than a fraction of one percent in the time allowed; and how could you choose among them? I’m in a similar fix.”

“Well, hadn’t you better get those specimens into the alcohol jars before they begin to stink?”

“Good-o,” he said, wiping away the tears.

The party was tired enough from the day’s hike so there was no argument over turning in early. In our headquarters tent, the Raja and I talked. It was unlikely there were any very spectacular sights to see within the radius of one-day excursions, such as a huge waterfall like your Niagara. There was that volcano we had seen from where we bagged the dicynodunt; but I think volcanoes, like the larger carnosaurs, are best admired from a respectful distance.

So we decided simply to box the compass, taking our lambs out in a different direction until we had covered them all in the two weeks allowed. Then the Raja said:

“Reggie, I have an uneasy feeling about our female time traveler.”

“Afraid she’ll collapse on the trail?” I said.

“No; she’s in good physical shape, even if she got sore feet the first day out. But it’s the sexual thing, The way she was trading long, speculative glances with some of the men—well, it gave me qualms. We had better keep an eye on her.”

Understand, Ms. Brownlee, I’m no wowser. Got nothing against sex. Marvelous institution and all that, but not when it interferes with the smooth operation of Rivers and Aiyar. So I said:

“Right-o, Raja!”

You see, the Raja’s one of these intuitive chaps. I’ve learned that, when he warns of problems building up in the human sphere, I’d better listen.

As I said, I had given Inez Alvarado a tent of her own. So I was surprised next morning, when I was making rounds just before dawn at the end of my watch, to see that great, hulking Maori, Sir Edred Ngata, coming out of the tent I had assigned to Mrs. Alvarado.

“What the hell?” I said, giving him a sharp look. “I thought you were in with Tom.”

He gave a kind of giggle, like a child caught out, and held the tent flap back to show the tent was empty. He finally said, between giggles:

“Well—ah—Inez begged me to change places with her. And—ah—what gentleman could refuse a lady such a simple request?”

“You knew they were an ex-couple?”

“Yes, I heard that. But some religions say, once married, always married. So I figured—ah . . .”

“Oh, cut it out, mate,” I said. “I have enough problems bringing my lambs through these safaris alive without trying to manage their sex lives as well.”

So I went about my business. When Inez came out of Alvarado’s tent, I just looked through her as if she weren’t there.

The Raja and I decided our lambs were bushed enough from the previous hike, so we went nowhere that day. Ngata spent it happily examining his specimens, dissecting those of which he had duplicates and getting blood up to his elbows, and explaining to anyone who would listen that this one was probably a rhynocephalian, while that one was more likely an eosuchian, like those ancestral to the dinosaurs.

“Aren’t there any real dinosaurs in this period?” asked Inez Alvarado.

“That depends,” said Ngata. “In one sense, it’s a matter of where you draw the line between the dinosaurs and their thecodont ancestors. Most of my colleagues put the coelophysids, which we saw yesterday, in with the dinosaurs. In other words, it’s a question of definitions.

“From another point of view, I could say no, there weren’t, on the ground that there really are no such things as dinosaurs.”

“What?” said Inez, startled. “But what about all those big skeletons in the museums? I know there’s that preacher who goes around arguing that all those fossil bones are just a hoax by Satan to destroy men’s faith. . . .”

“What I mean,” said Ngata, “is that the first paleontologists to dig them up, in the nineteenth century, assumed that all those giant reptiles belonged to the same order, which they called Dinosauria. Now we know that they fall into two long-separated orders: the Saurischia and the Ornithischia, no more closely related than, say, we are to bats. The difference lies in the shape of the pelvis. That difference goes way back, to some thecodont common ancestor in a period earlier than this one. My job is to try to straighten out these obscure family trees.

“You’ve seen an example of an early saurischian in those little coelophysids, which aren’t big enough to bother you. We call that bipedal, flesh-eating stem of the saurischians the theropods, the coelophysids, being one branch and the carnosaurs, like the famous Tyrannosaurus, the other. The other saurischian stem is made up of plant eaters ancestral to the sauropods, which became the biggest land animals ever. Those from this period look a little like long-necked versions of those cow dicynodonts we saw yesterday. All the rest of the so-called dinosaurs are herbivorous ornithischians.

“True, in the later Triassic beds one finds fragments of carnosaurs, such as the European Teratosaurus, large enough to be dangerous. But I don’t know that such organisms existed at the time we are now in; and even if they did, whether they ever got to these lands before Pangaea broke up.”

As we sat around, talking and examining equipment and listening to Sir Edred lecture, I began to sense a restlessness among the sahibs. After a number of these safaris—an Arab client on one of them said the correct plural was safarim —one comes to recognize the symptoms. Carlyle in particular seemed out of sorts, prowling about, cleaning and recleaning his gun, and generally acting like a caged animal. I heard him mutter:

“I’ve got to kill something!”

The Raja and I decided to lead the party next day northwest. We had gone pretty much due north on the meat hunt; so by going round the compass we could cover the territory within a radius of twenty or twenty-five kilometers from our base camp.

That night went off peacefully enough, if you don’t count the shrieks of those giant crickets advertising for a mate and the other rustles, grunts, and hisses of a Mesozoic night.

Next day we hiked as planned. We saw more dicynodonts, in fact whole herds. When we had finished our lunch and were plowing on a little farther before turning back, Inez Alvarado said:

“Reggie, would you mind taking the rest on without me for a bit? I’ll catch up.”

“All right,” I said, knowing that ladies, too, have calls of nature. We set out at a leisurely pace but had been out of sight of Inez for not more than ten or fifteen minutes when we heard her shriek:

“Help! Help!”

We raced back through the brush. She was standing before a little group of cycads, swinging her rifle—the nine-millimeter Mannlicher I had rented the Alvarados—by the barrel at a group of three quadrupedal flesh-eaters, which Ngata identified as rauisucbids. They were the size of a large dog, with thicker limbs and a body that tapered lizardwise into a thick tail. They had beads like carnosaurs of that size, with a mouthful of fangs.

Carlyle proved the fastest runner. When I puffed up after him, he already had his gun up. At the first bang, one rauisuchid flopped over, writhing and snapping. Bang! Down went another. The third seemed to get the idea, because it ran off. When I came up, I said:

“For God’s sake, Inez, why didn’t you shoot?”

“When I reached into my ammunition pouch, I found I’d left all my cartridges back at the camp. I’m sorry to be so stupid.”

I just sighed. This is the sort of thing one has to put up with in my trade, and fussing and fuming won’t help. “Oh, well, it’s time to start for home anyway. Want a trophy, Desmond?”

“You bet!”said Carlyle, and got to work on one of the carcasses with a big sheath knife.

Pretty soon, with help from the Raja, he had the head off. We set out with him carrying it in a scarf he wore. The scarf got blood-soaked; but since the animal lacked hair and external ears, there wasn’t any other easy way to hold it.

I suppose he could have put his fingers into the open mouth; but reptiles don’t die all at once. This fellow’s jaws kept snapping now and then for at least a quarter-hour after its head had been cut off. Or he could have whittled a point on a stick and impaled the head on it. The thought, when it came, reminded me unpleasantly of those French revolutionaries who made such a point of carrying people’s heads around on the points of spears. Bad taste, eh?

This time everybody was tired enough by cocktail time so that it was a subdued safari that sat around drinking our medicinal whiskey. The camp helpers had packed the rauisuchid’s head in salt.

Alvarado gave us a song. Carlyle told how he’d almost been eaten by a great white shark off an Australian beach. I know from the way he described the beach that he had never been near the place, but I thought it better not to say so. If he entertained the others, it didn’t much matter whether his tales were true.

This time there was no problem with getting everyone tucked into bed early. As usual, the Raja and I took watch-and-watch through the night. When the sky was lightening before dawn, who should pop out of Inez Alvarado’s tent but young Willard Smithl

“Hey!” I said, “What the devil . . . ?”

“Just me,” said Smith, “getting up to take a piss.” (Excuse me, Ms. Brownlee.)

“But what were you doing in that tent?”

He scuffed his feet, twisted his hands, and generally acted as if caught in the act of breaking all ten commandments, including worshiping graven images. If the light had been stronger, I’m sure I should have seen him blushing.

“Ah—Mr. Rivers,” he choked out at last. “There wasn’t anybody in that tent.”

“You were,” I said.

“Sure. But that was just because Mrs. Alvarado asked me to trade places with her. So I—well, what else could I do?”

“You could have asked me before making any change,” I began, “and let me as leader decide—”

Just then an angry shout aroused the camp, followed by yells and curses. Some sort of commotion was going on in and around the tent assigned to Smith and Carlyle. I got there in a dead heat with the Raja, who had been taking his turn to sleep.

The tent was heaving like a hooked fish, and as we arrived it collapsed. Out from the wreckage crawled Tom Alvarado and Desmond Carlyle, both in their underwear. No sooner had they cast off the folds of canvas than Alvarado sprang at Carlyle, grabbing for his throat.

As I said, Alvarado was a bit on the corpulent side, while Carlyle was in whipcord-tight physical shape, being in fact something of a fitness fanatic. Carlyle blocked Tom’s attempt to strangle him and knocked him down. Alvarado landed on something hard. He felt around beneath his body and came up with Carlyle’s big sheath knife. In no time he had it out and was lunging at Carlyle.

Meanwhile, Carlyle grabbed an edge of the canvas and threw it back, reaching for his rifle. In casting off the canvas he also uncovered Inez Alvarado, curled up on one of the bunks and naked as a frog. Before Alvarado got within stabbing distance, Carlyle stood up with his rifle.

The Raja tackled Alvarado, while I grabbed Carlyle’s gun and twisted it to point up. It went off with a bang, fortunately without hitting anything, and with another wrench I got it away from him.

I stepped away to cover both. The Raja had wrested the knife from Alvarado, though he got a cut on the arm in doing so.

“All right, you idiots!” I said. “Stand with your hands clasped behind your necks, or by God I’ll shoot off a member or two! Now, what’s the story? You first, Tom!”

Tom was so enraged that for the moment he forgot his excellent English. “¡Este cabrón coge a mi mujer!” he shouted, waving his fists and dancing about. He followed it with a translation, which I won’t trouble a lady’s ears with. Then Mrs. Alvarado, who stood up with a sheet wrapped around her, screamed:

“¡Ya no estoy su mujer! Hago lo que quiero!”

The two kept shouting until they ran out of breath. She argued that as a single woman she had the right to a trot in the sheets whenever and with whomever she liked. Besides, Tom had been pestering her to marry him again, and she wanted to sample the field to have a standard of comparison.

When his turn came, Carlyle shrugged the whole thing off. “What do you expect?” he said. “I knew they weren’t married. Even if they had been, what normal man would turn down such an offer?”

The Raja and I agreed on the following judgment: that everyone should thereafter stick to his or her own tent. If we found any more trading beds, we would tie up the culprits and leave them in camp while the rest of us went exploring. Ngata said confidentially:

“I’m just as glad, Reggie, that she never got down her list to me. I don’t know that my hot Polynesian blood would have let me turn her down!”

Most of the rest of the trip went off in a routine way, with nothing notable on the part either of my sahibs or the rest of the fauna. Alvarado and Carlyle were formal with one another, calling each other “mister” when they had to communicate. Ngata collected and dissected more pseudo-lizards.

Carlyle shot a big knobby-headed anomodont with a parrot-like beak and hauled its head back to camp. Smith and the Alvarados took scads of photographs. We got soaked by a heavy thunderstorm, but that was all in the game.

Towards the end, I led our lambs westward, down a long slope to the water we could see in the distance. The Raja, whose arm was still bandaged from that cut, stayed in camp to supervise the packing up for departure.

The water proved a bend in a big river, which meandered through flat country with a lot of swamps and oxbow lakes alongside it. The going got really bushy, with masses of ferns as high as your head to hack your way through, and squilchy mud underfoot. If our sahibs thought they had got hot, sweaty, and dirty before, they soon learned it was nothing compared with this.

We finally found an area where we had a good view of the river and a bit more open country stretching back from it. The river gurgled and the insects swirled and buzzed and chirped. Desmond Carlyle said:

“Hey, Reggie! Look at that crocl Bet it beats any of those you have in Australial”

Sure enough, on a meter-high bank on the edge of the river was a big pseudo-crocodile, which Ngata identified as a phytosaur, dozing under a small conifer. It looked for all the world like the gavial or garial of modern India, except that its nostrils opened in a bump on its forehead instead of at the end of its snout. Ngata said:

“I don’t know, Desmond. The salt-water croc grows up to five meters, and I don’t think this one’s over four. Of course this may not be the largest of its kind.”

“Dangerous?” said Alvarado.

“Not really. Those narrow jaws say it’s a complete fish-eater. Of course if you walk up and kick it in the ribs, it’s likely to retaliate.”

Carlyle said: “May I shoot it, Reggie? I want the skin for my wall.”

“All right,” I said, “if you’ll skin and haul it. Be sure to sever the spine, or it’ll scramble into the water and be lost.”

Desmond stalked the phytosaur with his gun ready. At about thirty meters the brute saw him, opened its toothsome jaws, and hissed. Carlyle raised his gun, took his time, and squeezed off a round.

The phytosaur rolled over, writhing and thrashing. About half its length went off the bank and into the river; but Carlyle, running up, caught the end of its tail and pulled it back on shore. Being a reptile, it continued squirming and snapping long after it was officially dead.

Young Smith ran up, hopping around to get camera shots from different angles. The others also took pictures.

“Will!” said Carlyle commandingly, pulling out his big knife. “Can you lend a hand with the skinning?”

“If you’ll show me what to do,” said young Smith doubtfully. “I suppose you know how?”

“Oh, surel I’m an old hand with alligators and crocodiles, and I’m sure these guys work the same way.” He began to slit the skin from chin to belly. “Now catch hold here and pull the skin back. . . .”

Skinning any animal is a gory spectacle, though one gets used to it. But it’s also pretty dull. After the other lambs had taken all the pictures they wanted, Ngata fell to studying the guts of the phytosaur as Carlyle and Smith uncovered them. The Alvarados had been having some argument in an undertone. Tom Alvarado said:

“Reggie, if you do not mind, I will take a little walk with Inez. We have family matters to discuss.”

“Just don’t get out of sight,” I said, and turned back to watch Carlyle and Smith struggle with that huge hide.

Time passed, and insects buzzed. They had the skin almost all off when young Smith, stepping back from the carcass, backed off the bank and slid down into the water, knee-deep. Carlyle said:

“Oh, you idiot!”

I said: “Get out of there fast, Will! You don’t know what’s—”

Smith was already scrambling back up the bank; but then he gave a shriek: “Something’s got me!”

With a convulsive effort, he managed to clutch the trunk of the tree on top of the bank. I grabbed my gun and looked over the edge. Something had his right foot in its jaws—something with a wide head over a meter long, with a pair of goggle eyes on the flat upper surface.

“It’s a big stereospondyl!” yelled Ngata. “Hold on, Will, while I study it! It proves that Pangaea—”

“Study it, hell!” I said and fired. The bullet splashed right over that great head; but the crocamander seemed not to notice. Behind the head I could dimly make out a barrel body, four stout legs with webbed feet, and a long tail flattened for swimming. The animal must have been at least four meters long. You know how a creature like a snake or a newt swims, with undulating curves moving from front to back? Well, this bugger was undulating from back to front. In other words, it was trying to back water, to pull Willard Smith in with it.

“I think it mistook Will’s foot for a fish,” said Ngata. Carlyle and I fired again and again, to no apparent effect. One trouble was that the crocamander was under water, and even high-velocity bullets lose their speed fast in water. Besides, a cold-blooded life-form like that can take a lot of punishment without fatal effect.

“Grab his arm,” I told Carlyle, “and I’ll take the other, and we’ll pull him up. . . .”

Then I heard a shriek from inland. When I looked around, Inez Alvarado was legging it toward us. Behind her came Tom Alvarado, and behind him came a dinosaur—and never mind that Ngata claimed there were no such things. This was an unmistakable carnosaur, the same group that includes monsters like Tyrannosaurus and Epanterias.

This one was much smaller but still big enough to kill and eat a man, just as a lion or a tiger could. It must have been about four meters long from nose to tail. When it ran on its hindlegs, with its body horizontal, it came up to about belt height; but when it stood up, bracing itself with its tail like a roo, it towered up to Sir Edred’s height of two hundred centimeters.

I got ready to shoot; but I had to make sure neither of the Alvarados was in line with the carnosaur. This was a problem, since both were headed straight for me, and the carnosaur was pursuing them in as straight a line as if it were following a tape laid out on the ground.

While I stood there for some seconds, with my gun raised but unable to shoot, I heard yells and splashing behind me; but I didn’t dare turn to look.

Then Tom Alvarado stopped, whipped off his bush jacket, and waved it at the approaching carnosaur in matador style. just before the creature reached him with jaws agape, he hopped to one side. The carnosaur went right past him.

Any carnosaur, large or small, can work up a fair turn of speed on a straightaway, but they can’t make quick turns. In other words, they’re not agile; something to do with the structure of their leg joints.

After three or four strides the bugger got it into its little reptilian brain that its prey was no longer before it; and it skidded to a stop, swinging its head this way and that. Seeing Alvarado waving his jacket behind it, it charged him again; and again he stepped nimbly aside. When I got a momentary clear view, I pulled the trigger. I got only a click, because I’d shot off my whole magazine at the stereospondyl.

This time the carnosaur did not overshoot its mark by such a wide margin. I started reloading; but Inez came up and grabbed me around the neck, squealing: “Help! ¡Ayúdame!”

I pushed her off, a bit roughly I’m afraid, saying: “God damn it, sister, will you get out of the way and give me a clear shot?”

Meanwhile Tom and the carnosaur had gone through their toreador routine for the third time. This time the carnosaur was only a few steps from Alvarado when it turned, so that one stride would bring it to a position to reach out and bite his head off. As it started forward, I got it into my sights and fired. The impact knocked it down, where it lay thrashing and snapping. When it started to get up, I gave it two more rounds. This time it stayed down, though it continued to jerk and thrash.

I turned back to see how poor young Smith was doing. You can fancy my relief when I saw him sitting at the base of the conifer with his back against the trunk, muddy but apparently unharmed. Carlyle explained:

“I couldn’t pull Will away from the beast alone, and Edred was loaded only with birdshot” (Ngata either forgot or ignored my order to carry buckshot in one barrel.) “So he jumped off the bank, waded out, and bashed the creature over the head with his gun butt. About the third bash, it got the idea that it wasn’t wanted and swam off.”

“How’s your foot?” I asked Smith.

“Sore,” he said, pulling up his wet trouser leg. His boot and thick sock had taken most of the punishment, but a few of the crocamander’s sharp little teeth had gone through and punctured his skin, where a pair of big purple bruises was forming from the pressure of those jaws.

I hauled out the tube of disinfectant and the roll of bandage that I carry. We never did learn whether the crocamander had really mistaken Smith’s foot for a fish or was trying, like a real croc, to pull him in to drown him. A crocodile would then cache him and eat him later when the corpse had softened enough to come apart easily.

“And what of you people?” said Carlyle, while I worked on Smith’s bleeding ankle. “What’s that beast?” He pointed to the carnosaur.

“By God! “cried Sir Edred, examining the carcass. “I’m damned if that isn’t a close relative of Teratosaurus! I want as much of it as we can take back with us!”

“Oh, no, you don’t!” said Carlyle. “I need the head for my wall!”

“I need the whole thing to study!” said Ngata.

Those two had a rare old row until I stepped in. “Now look here, fellas, you needn’t argue the toss. I shot the bugger, so I can do what I like with the remains. Since you, Desmond, have already got the phytosaur skin, I hereby give the carcass of the carnosaur to Sir Edred, to do with as he likes. If you two decide exchange your trophies, that’s all right with me, so long as everyone’s agreed.”

Carlyle looked sober. “We-ell, come to think, my walls are going to be pretty crowded already. So Edred can have the dinosaur and I’ll take the pseudo-croc.”

“Willard,” said Ngata to young Smith, “How about giving me a hand with this carcass? Skin and skeleton both.”

Limping but game, Smith did not object, since I suppose he was feeling guilt about having fallen into the river from sheer clumsiness. Ngata said to Alvarado:

“I say, old man, where did you learn to dodge slavering predators like that? I knew carnosaurs were not good at quick turns, but that’s not a theory I’m keen to try out personally.”

Alvarado grinned. “When I was younger, I wanted to be a bullfighter. So I trained for it, but I also practiced my singing. Now singing gives a man a big appetite, and so I got too fat for the corrida. At least, my torero training was not time wasted!”

There’s little more to tell. On the way back to camp, the Alvarados acted like honeymooners, and that night I avoided noticing any changes in sleeping arrangements. Next day the transition chamber appeared, right on schedule. We loaded the gear and service personnel in first, leaving the sahibs and the guns for last in case something inimical showed up at the site. It took an extra trip by the chamber to fetch back all the bones and hides and pickled heads and other specimens to the present.

Eh? About Tom and Inez? No, so far as I know the Alvarados did not remarry. I’m sorry I can’t give the tale a proper happy romantic ending. Despite all their endearments on the way back to camp, the last I saw of them, as they left Prochaska’s laboratory, they were quarreling furiously over something, but in Spanish too fast for me to follow. Watching them made me happy to have just a nice, steady, easy, humdrum domestic relationship. I get all the excitement I need on these time safaris.

So now you can see why I won’t mix the sexes on these expeditions. It’s not the dinosaurs and other animals that cause the main problems; it’s the human beings. It was more by luck than by management that neither Tomas Alvarado stabbed Desmond Carlyle, nor did Carlyle blow Tom’s head off. You can reason and argue all you like; but when the primitive sexual instinct takes over, anything can happen. One of those in a lifetime is quite enough, thank you.

I’ll admit that not even an all-male group is proof against such outbursts. Once I had an all-male party, of whom three—though I didn’t know it when I signed them up—formed the corners of a homosexual love triangle, which came within a whisker of another murder. But that’s another story.