Dinosaur Beach

7

Dawn came, and with it the dinosaurs. I had seen them before, at a distance, usually; small, shy creatures that skittered out of sight at the first touch of the subsonic beams Jard had rigged up to discourage them. Before my time, it seemed, there had been a few incidents of big specimens wandering a little too close to the vegetable garden and having to be driven off with improvised noisemakers. They were too stupid to be dangerous, it was understood, except for the danger of getting stepped on, or accidentally grazed along with a clump of foliage.

This time there were three of them. Big ones, and no subsonics available, not even an ordinary noisemaker, except for my vocal cords.

Once, I remembered, a ‘caster named Dowl, out for a swim, had been trapped on the beach by a saurian with impressive teeth which had popped out of the woods between him and the station. He’d gotten out of it with nothing worse than a case of delirium tremens; the behemoth had walked past him without a glance. He was too small a tidbit, the theory was, to interest a stomach as big as that one.

I didn’t find that thought consoling.

The trio coming my way were of a previously unrecorded variety we had named the Royal Jester, because of their silly grin and the array of bright-colored decorations sprouting like baubles from the cranium. They also had legs like an oversized ostrich, a long neck, and far too many teeth.

I stayed where I was, flat on the sand, and played boulder while they stalked toward me, shimmering in the heat haze. There were two big ones and one giant, eighteen feet at the shoulder if he was an inch. As they got closer, I could smell the rank, cucumber-and-dung smell of them, see the strips and patches of reticulated purple and yellow hide scaling from their backs, hear the hiss and wheeze of their breathing. They were big machines, calling for a lot of air turnover. I busied myself with some abortive calculations involving lung capacity, O2 requirements per pound, and intake orifice area; but I gave up when they got within a hundred feet. At this range I could hear their guts rumbling.

Big Boy scented me first. His head went up; a cold reptilian eye the color of a bucket of blood rolled my way. He snorted. He drooled—about a gallon. His mouth opened, and I saw rows of snowwhite teeth, some of which waggled, loose, ready to shed. He steam-whistled and started my way. It was decision time, and I didn’t linger.

I took a final breath of humid beach air, a last look at the bright, brutal view of sea and sand, the high, empty, impersonal sky, and the jolly monster shape looming up against it. Then I played the tune on the console set in my jaw.

The scene twisted, slid sideways and dissolved into the painless blow of a silent club, while I looped the loop through a universe-sized Klein bottle—

Total darkness and a roar of sound like Niagara Falls going over me in a barrel.