Countdown: 16

To really understand a man, you have to get inside his head.

—Rudolph L. Schroeder, Canadian clinical psychologist (1941– )

Mesozoic sunlight shone through the glassteel window that ran around the curving rim of the Sternberger’s habitat, stinging my eyes and casting harsh shadows on the flat rear wall. I woke up still feeling strangely light-headed and buoyant. I looked around the semicircular chamber, but Klicks was nowhere to be found. The bastard had gone outside without me. I quickly shed my PJs, pulled on the same Tilley pants that I’d worn yesterday, fumbled into my shirt, jacket, and boots, and opened door number one, bounding down the little ramp that led to the outer hatch. Much to my surprise, I hit my head on the low ceiling as I went down the ramp. Rubbing my bruised pate, I opened the blue outer door panel and looked down at the crater wall. In the brown earth, I could clearly see the skid marks made by Klicks’s size twelves. To their right, there were giant triple-clawed tyrannosaur tracks, made by the beasts that had reconnoitered us last night. Also visible: tiny two-pronged marks made by the minuscule tyrannosaur finger-claws.

I took a deep breath and walked forward. The first step, as the saying goes, was a doozy. The hull of the Sternberger jutted out from the crater wall, and I fell close to a meter before my boots connected with the crumbly, moist soil. Still, it was a surprisingly gentle fall, and I skidded with ease down to the mud flat, brown clouds of dirt rising behind me. At the base of the crater, I fell back on my bum; a rather ignominious first step into the Cretaceous world.

It was hot, humid, and overgrown. The sun, just clearing the tops of the bald cypresses, was burning brighter than I’d ever experienced. I looked everywhere for a dinosaur, or any vertebrate, but there was none to be seen.

None, that is, except Klicks Jordan. He came bounding around from behind the crater wall, jumping up and down like a madman.

“Check this out, Brandy!” He crouched low, folding his knees to his chest, then sprang, the soles of his work boots clearing the dark soil by a meter. He did it again and again, leaping into the air, a demented rabbit.

“What the hell are you doing?” I said, irritated by his childishness and perhaps a little envious of his prowess. I certainly had never been able to jump that high.

“Try it.”

“What?”

“Go ahead. Try it. Jump!”

“What’s gotten into you, Klicks?”

“Just do it, will you?”

The path of least resistance. I crouched down, my legs stiff from just having awoke, and bolted. My body went up, up, higher than I’d ever jumped before, then, more slowly, more gently than I’d ever experienced, it settled back to Earth, landing with a dull thud. “What the—?”

“It’s the gravity!” said Klicks, triumphantly. “It’s less here—much less.” He wiped sweat from his brow. “I estimate I weigh just over a third of what I normally do.”

“I’ve felt light-headed since we arrived—”

“Me, too.”

“But I thought it was just excitement at being here—”

“It’s more than that, my friend,” said Klicks. “It’s the gravity. The actual fucking gravity. Christ, I feel like Superman!” He leapt into the air again, rising even higher than he had before.

I followed suit. He could still outjump me, but not by much. We were laughing like children in a playground. It was exhilarating, and the pumping adrenaline just boosted our abilities.

You can’t avoid building up some decent leg muscles doing fieldwork, but I’d never been particularly strong. I felt like I’d drunk some magic potion—full of energy, full of power. Alive!

Klicks set off leaping around the crater wall. I gave chase. The donut of dark, crumbling earth had been providing some shade, but we came out into the fierce sun as we moved around back. It took us several minutes of mad hopping to circumnavigate the thirty-meter-wide crater, returning to the part of the wall upon which the Sternberger was perched.

“That’s amazing,” I said, catching my breath, my head swimming. “But what could possibly account for it?”

“Who knows?” Klicks sat down on the dried mud. Even in less than half a g, leaping up and down like an idiot is enough to tire you out. I crouched about ten meters away from him, wiping sweat from my soaked forehead. The heat was stifling. “I’ll tell you one thing it accounts for, though,” said Klicks. “Giantism in dinosaurs. Matthew of the AMNH asked the question a century ago: if the elephant is the largest size our terrestrial animals can now manage, how could the dinosaur have grown so much larger? Well, we’ve got the answer now: they evolved in a lesser gravity. Of course they’re bigger!”

I saw in an instant that he was right. “It also explains the extensive vascularization in dinosaur bones,” I said. Dinosaur bone is remarkably porous, which is part of the reason it fossilizes so well through permineralization. “They wouldn’t need as much bone mass to support their weight in a lower gravity.”

“I thought that vascularization was because they might be warm-blooded,” said Klicks, sounding genuinely curious. He was, after all, a geologist, not a biologist. “Haversian canals for calcium interchange, and all that.”

“Oh, there’s probably a correlation there, too. But I’ve never bought the idea of warm-blooded brontosaurs, and even they have bones that look like Swiss cheese in cross section. I’m sure you’ve seen the studies that say they’d break their own legs if they tried to walk faster than three kilometers an hour. That figure assumed normal gravity, of course. And, say, speaking of odd bone structure—it never quite seemed possible to me that Archaeopteryx and the pterosaurs could really fly. Their skeletons are weak for normal gravity, but they should be more than adequate in this.”

“Hmmm,” said Klicks. “It does explain a lot, doesn’t it? We’ll have to have a good look at dinosaurian heat production while we’re here. I seem to remember that another argument in favor of warm-blooded dinosaurs was that their fossils have been found inside the Cretaceous Arctic Circle, where the nights would be months long.”

“That’s right,” I said. “The idea was that dinosaurs must be warm-blooded because they couldn’t have possibly migrated far enough to avoid the long nights.”

“Hell,” said Klicks, taking off his boot and shaking it upside down to get rid of a pebble that had found its way inside, “I could walk to here from the Arctic Circle in this gravity.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I’d still like to know why the gravity is less. I guess the gravitational constant could have increased in value over time.”

“That would mean it’s not much of a constant, then, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t know a lot of physics,” I said, ignoring his smart-ass comment, “but didn’t Einstein more or less pull the value for G out of the air to get his equations to balance? We’ve only been measuring its value for a century, and measuring it precisely for only a few decades. A general tendency for it to increase over time might not have shown up yet.”

“I suppose, although I’d expect to find—” Suddenly he fell silent, his head swinging around. “What was that?” he said.

“What?”

“Shhsh!”

He pointed to the deciduous forest, the sun now well above the trees. There was a rustling as something man-sized pushed aside fronds. I caught a flash of emerald in my peripheral vision. My heart began pounding and my mouth went dry. Could it be a dinosaur?

We didn’t have much of an armament. Hell, we didn’t have much of a budget. Someone had suggested we bring modern automatic assault weapons to protect ourselves, but no corporate donor came through with any of those—bad PR to be associated with killing animals, after all. All we had were a couple of old elephant guns, each holding two bullets at a time.

Klicks had brought his elephant gun with him when he’d come out this morning. It was propped up against the crater wall, about a dozen meters away. He sauntered over to it, casually picked it up, and motioned for me to follow. It took about forty seconds for us to reach the dense wall of trees. Pushing foliage aside with his hands, Klicks made his way into the forest. I was right behind him.

We heard the rustling again. Breath held tight, I strained to listen, scanning the dense growth for any sign of an animal. Nothing. Branches and leaves stood still, as if they, too, were frozen in anticipation. Seconds ticked by, heartbeats added up. Whatever it was must be nearby, either to my left or in front of me.

Suddenly in a flurry of motion the thick vegetation parted and a green bipedal dinosaur leapt into view, the top of its head coming to no more than the height of my shoulder.

It was a slender theropod, using a stiff, whip-thin tail held parallel to the ground to balance a horizontally carried torso. At the end of its darting neck was a head about the size and shape of a borzoi dog’s, drawn out and pointed. Two huge eyes, like yellow glass billiard balls, stared forward, their fields of vision overlapping, providing the kind of depth perception a predator needed. The creature opened its mouth, revealing small, tightly packed teeth, serrated like steak knives along their rear edges. Long, thin arms dangled in front of its body, the three-fingered hands ending in sickle claws. The animal flexed them in anticipation and I saw that the third finger was opposable to the other two digits. Bobbing and weaving its head, it cut loose a sticky sound like a person trying to kick up phlegm.

I recognized this creature in an instant: Troodon, long hailed as the most intelligent dinosaur, a carnivore armed not only with slashing claws and razor dentition but also with a hunter’s keen senses and—perhaps—with cunning. Although the best troodon skeletons were known from a time 5 million or more years before the end of the age of dinosaurs, fossil troodon teeth were found in beds right up to the close of the Cretaceous. These specimens were on the large side for troodon, but the shape of the skull was unmistakable.

Klicks had already brought up his elephant gun, its wooden butt resting against his shoulder. I don’t think he intended to fire unless the animal attacked, but he was aiming along the gun’s shaft, finger on the trigger. Suddenly he pitched forward. The gun went off, missing the troodon, the thunderclap of its report startling a flock of golden birds and a smaller number of white-furred pterosaurs into flight. A second troodon had kicked Klicks in the small of his back, its slender claws shredding the khaki material of his long-sleeved shirt. Two more troodons appeared from the brush. Each was hopping rapidly from foot to foot for balance, like shoeless boys on hot pavement. Klicks rolled over, trying madly to reach his gun. A three-clawed foot slammed into his chest, pinning him. The dinosaur let loose a sticky hiss, showering him with reptilian spit.

I ran toward Klicks and, approaching from the left side, brought my steel-toed boot up and under the creature, kicking it in the center of its yellow gut. I made no dent in the lean, muscular belly, but, much to my surprise, my kick lifted the thing clear off the ground. It must have massed less than thirty kilos and the reduced gravity magnified my strength. Freed, Klicks scrabbled for the gun again, his fingers clawing dirt.

The recipient of my kick turned on me, moving with surprising agility. I held my arms in front of my body, trying to grab its scrawny throat. Hands shooting forward in a green blur of motion, it seized my wrists with sickle digits. My spine arched back like a limbo dancer’s, trying to avoid the jaws at the end of that dexterous neck. The creature wasn’t built for fighting something more than twice its mass with muscles, such as they were, accustomed to more than double the gravity. I held my own for a good fifteen seconds.

Still gripping my arms, the troodon crouched low, folding its powerful hind legs beneath it, and kicked off the rich soil. The force of its leap knocked me backward and I hit the ground hard, rocks biting into my spine. Straddling my body, the crazed reptile arched its neck, opened its lipless mouth wide, exposing yellow knife-like teeth, and—

Kaboom!

Klicks had found his elephant gun and squeezed off a shot. He’d hit my attacker in the shoulder, sending the beast’s neck and head pinwheeling into the sky. Twin geysers of steaming blood shot from the torso’s severed carotid arteries. No longer balanced, the body tipped forward and the cavity of the open chest, sticky and wet, slammed into my face. Revolted, I rolled away, dirt clinging to the dinosaur blood that covered my face.

Klicks was taking a bead on another dancing troodon when the remaining two descended on him from opposite sides. One, balancing on its left leg, slashed out with its clawed right foot. The curving digits grasped the gun’s barrel. Using the leverage provided by its long, stiff tail, the dinosaur twisted the rifle free from Klicks’s hands and, with a deliberate movement, tossed it into the brush. In unison, it and its partner jumped on Klicks, pinning him to the ground again.

The remaining troodon, five meters away from me, crouched low, its slender legs folded at an acute angle. I had made it to my knees when it leapt, knocking the wind out of me with its impact. The creature stood over me, its long arms bent like less-than and greater-than signs. They reached forward, the crescent claws grabbing the sides of my head. If I’d made the slightest movement, those strong hands would have shredded my face, tearing my eyes from their sockets. I felt, for the first time in my life, that I was going to die. Panic gripped me like a shrinking sweater, binding my chest, constricting my breathing. The drying blood on my cheeks cracked as my face contorted to scream my final scream.

But death did not come.

Something was happening to the troodon. Its face convulsed, the tip of its muzzle twitched, and, much to my amazement, sky-blue jelly, faintly phosphorescent, began to ooze from the dinosaur’s close-together nostrils. I watched in horror, unable to move, thinking that the creature must be allergic to my strange twenty-first-century biochemistry. I expected the monster to sneeze, its clawed hands convulsing shut on my face as its body racked.

Instead, more of the jelly began to ooze from around its bulging eyes, rolling slowly along the contours of its face. The thick slime also began to bead up on the skin halfway down the reptile’s long snout, over the top of its preorbital fenestrae, those large openings in the sides of dinosaurian skulls. The thing was looking down at me, so all the jelly flowed toward the tip of its snout. It slowly ran together, joining into one viscous lump.

The mass continued to grow, seeping out of the creature’s head, until a glob the size of a baseball had collected at the end of its long face. It hung lower and lower, taking on a teardrop shape, until finally, horribly, the glistening, trembling lump dropped off the creature’s nose, hitting my face with a soft, warm, moist splat.

I had slammed my eyes shut just before the glob of jelly hit, but I could feel it on me, oozing like worms through the whiskers of my beard, pressing down on my cheeks, heavy on my eyelids. The mass was pulsing and rippling, almost as if probing my features. Suddenly it started to flow up my nostrils and then, a moment later, through the cartilage of my nose. I felt completely stuffed up, as though I had an awful cold. The mass within my nasal passages undulated back into my head. I felt pressure on my temples and, painfully, through the curving channels of my ears. The sounds of the forest muffled and finally faded away as the jelly pressed against my eardrums. All I could hear now was my own heartbeat, booming at a rapid pace.

Suddenly a burst of blue light appeared in my right eye and then, a second later, in my left. The phosphorescent slime had seeped through my clenched lids and was now sliding around my eyeballs. My lungs were burning with the need to breathe, but I fought the sensation, terrified to open my mouth.

And then, mercifully, a reprieve was granted—or so I thought. The sickle troodon claws that had been holding my head let go. I waited for the hands to swipe back, julienning my face. Five seconds. Ten. I dared open one eye a slit, then, astonished, popped them both wide. The dinosaur was walking away with docile meter-long strides. It stopped, then turned around, its stiff tail clearing a wide arc. The thing’s cat-like eyes fell on mine, but there was no malice, no frenzy, no cunning in the dull gaze. Every few seconds, the creature shuffled its bird-like feet to keep balanced. I brought my hands to my face to wipe away the blue jelly, but there was nothing there except drying flakes of dinosaur blood, left over from the troodon Klicks had decapitated earlier.

My lungs were pumping like blowfishes in heat. Indeed, still panicky, I feared I was going to hyperventilate. I fought to bring my breathing under control. I tried to rise to my feet, my one wish being to get out of there as fast as possible, to find some solace from this madness. But instead of obeying my command, my right leg went rigid, the muscles locking like ossified tendons. Then my left leg began flexing at the knee, the foot pivoting at the ankle. I felt as though I was having a seizure. My jaw slammed shut, biting into my tongue, and my eyes pulled in and out of focus. Then my left eye irised wide, the Cretaceous sunlight feeling like a hot lance as it stabbed into my cornea. My heart raced. Suddenly, incongruously, I found I had an erection. And then, just as suddenly, my whole body went limp.

I caught a glimpse of Klicks, although the image kept blurring and I seemed unable to control the direction in which my eyes looked. The pair of troodons that had pinned him had also backed off and he was thrashing around facedown in the dirt.

Throughout, my ankle kept swiveling, my foot tracing out a small circle in the air. Such a contrast to the simple hinge of dinosaurian ankles. That didn’t seem to me the sort of thing I should be thinking at a time like this, but before I could wonder about that further, I lost control of my brain. It began running through emotions, feelings, sensations. Incredible trans-orgasmic joy, greater than any sexual pleasure I’d ever dreamed of, as if I’d become a mindbender, with a battery hooked to my pleasure center. No sooner had it started than it was replaced by searing pain, as though my very soul was on fire. Then deep depression—death would be a reprieve. Then giddiness, child-like giggles escaping my throat. Pain again, but of a different sort—a longing for something irretrievably lost. Anger. Love. Hatred, of myself, of everybody else, of nothing at all. A kaleidoscope of feelings, constantly shifting.

Then memories, as though the pages of my life were blowing in the wind: being intimidated by a bully in public school, him pushing me to the pavement, the skin on my kneecaps shredding, the dust jacket on the picture book Dad had lent me for show-and-tell ripping; my first awkward kiss, dry lips pressing together, then the delightful shock as her tongue pushed into my mouth; having my wisdom teeth removed, the unforgettable cracking sound as the dentist twisted each one free of its socket; the thrill of seeing my name in print on my first published paper, and the subsequent depression when Dr. Bouchard’s scathing letter about it was printed in the journal’s next issue; the sense of loss that just wouldn’t go away when my mother died, with me having left so many things unsaid, undone; the wonder of the first time Tess and I had made love, the two of us melding together into a single being with one breath, one thought.

And things long forgotten, too: a childhood camping trip in Muskoka; the only time I’d ever been stung by a bee; helping a blind man cross the street when I was four—a street my parents wouldn’t let me cross by myself. Spilling my Super-Size Pepsi at a football game and Dad throwing a fit over it. Humiliations, joys, triumphs, defeats, all jumbled together, fading in and out.

And then—

Images that weren’t mine; memories that weren’t my own. Sensations beyond senses. Weird, false-color views. Tints without names. Bright heat. Dark cold. The loudness of blue. The gentle susurration of yellow. A long sandy beach, running to a too-near horizon. A cool sea that I somehow knew was salt-free and shallow, waves lapping against the sandy shore heard not with ears but as vibrations throughout my entire body. My lower surface tasting the sweet flavor of rust. Differing electric potentials in the sand making sounds like Ping-Pong balls bouncing across a table. An easy sense that north was that way.

And more—

A pleasing awareness of thousands of others calling out to me and me calling back, gentle greetings carried on something more attenuated than the wind. A feeling of belonging like I’d never had before, of being part of a greater whole, a community, a gestalt, going on and on and on, living forever. I felt my individuality, my identity, slipping away, evaporating in the cool sunlight. I had no name, no face. I was them and they were me. We were one.

Slam! Back to the past. Yorkview Public School. Miss Cohen’s class, her mane of gold hair fascinating me in a way I didn’t then understand. What did I learn in school today? Facts, figures, tables—rote memorization, harder to dredge up as the years go by, but never totally forgotten. A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y. I before E except after C. Nouns are people, places, or things. Verbs are action words. A bomb in a bull. Abombinabull. Abominable! I run. You run. He runs. We run. You run. They run. See Spot run! A is for apple. B is for ball. Adjectives modify nouns, adverbs modify verbs, advertisers modify the truth. Don’t split infinitives. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow … Avoid cliches like the plague. Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name … A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject. Alpha, beta, gamma—no, irrelevant. A, B, C…

And then, at last, it was over. My brain came back under my control slowly, numbly, like regaining use of a limb that had fallen asleep. I opened my eyes. I was flat on my back, a black cloud of tiny insects buzzing above my face. I tried to lift my head, but failed. In this reduced gravity, even weakened by a fight, I should still be able to do that. I contracted the muscles in my neck again. This time my head did rise from the dirt, but it had taken an extra effort to get it moving, as though … as though it had acquired some additional mass.

Klicks had also finished his bout. He had already regained a sitting position, his head propped up by arms resting on his bent knees. I sat up, too. After a moment, though, I felt something in my mouth like warm, wet cotton. Soon my mouth was full of sickly sweet jelly. I bent my head and opened wide, letting it ooze from between my lips. Klicks, too, looked as though he was throwing up blue Jell-O.

The stuff I was ejecting collected into a rounded mass on the ground in front of me, somehow the brown earth failing to stick to it. I had an urge to stomp on it, to bury it, to do anything to destroy the damned thing, but before I could act, a troodon walked over to it. The beast tipped its lean body down, the rigid tail sticking in the air like a car aerial. It laid its head on the ground next to the gelatinous lump, then closed its giant eyes. The jelly throbbed and pulsed its way, like a sky-blue amoeba, onto the dinosaur’s snout and settled into its head by percolating through the reptile’s leathery skin. Over by Klicks, a second troodon was likewise being entered.

I’d avoided the word, revulsed by the very idea, but the blue thing was undoubtedly a creature. Although I knew consciously that it was gone from me now, my body evidently wanted to be sure. I doubled over, my stomach muscles knotting, and racked with convulsions as vomit—what little was left of my last meal back in the future—burned its way up my throat and out onto the fertile Cretaceous soil.

After I’d stopped retching, I wiped my face with my sleeve and turned to face the troodons. The two that had been assimilating the jelly things had straightened and were now shrugging their shoulders. One threw back its curving neck and let loose a bleat; the other stamped its feet a few times. I had a brief picture of my father, back when he was well, stretching into his old cardigan after supper, trying to get it to sit comfortably. The third troodon hopped over to stand near the other two.

I looked at Klicks, raising my eyebrows questioningly.

“I’m okay,” he said. “You?”

I nodded. There we stood, face-to-snout with three crafty hunters. Shafts of sunlight pierced the leafy canopy over our heads, throwing the tableau into stark relief. We both knew the futility of attempting to outrun creatures that were mostly leg. “Let’s try backing away slowly,” said Klicks casually, presumably hoping a soothing tone wouldn’t alarm the beasts. “I think I can find the elephant gun.”

Without waiting for my answer, he took a small step backward, then another. I sure as hell didn’t want to be left there alone, so I followed suit. The troodons seemed content to watch us go, for they just stood there, shifting their weight between their left feet and their right.

We made it perhaps eight or nine meters back when the one in the middle opened its mouth. The jaw worked up and down and a raspy sound issued from the beast’s throat. Despite my urge to get out of there, I was fascinated and stopped backing. The creature produced a low grumbling, followed by a few piercing cries like those made by hawks on a hot summer’s day. I marveled at its vocal range. It then started puffing the long cheeks of its angular snout, producing explosive p sounds. Was this a mating call? Perhaps, for a ruby-colored dewlap beneath the thing’s throat inflated with each puff.

Klicks had noticed my dallying. “Come on, Brandy,” he said, a nonthreatening lilt to his voice, but still retaining a certain quiet edge conveying the message “Don’t be a fool.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

Wait up.”

It was an expression from my youth. To an adult, “wait up” means to refrain from going to bed until someone returns home, but to a child, especially one who was a bit on the pudgy side, as I had been, “wait up” was the plaintive call made to friends who were running faster than he could. Only one problem here. I hadn’t said those words and neither had Klicks. They had come, hoarse and booming, as though from a person who had been deaf since birth, from the carnivorous mouth of the middle troodon.

Impossible. Coincidence. I must have heard it wrong. I mean, get real.

But Klicks had stopped backing, too, his mouth agape. “Brandy—?”

Everything I knew about troodon came rushing back in a flood of memory. First described by Leidy in 1856, based on fossil teeth from the Judith River formation of Montana. Back in 1987, Phil Currie proved that troodon was the same as Stenonychosaurus, whose particulars were first published in 1932 by Sternberg, the man after whom we had named our timeship. I’d only been a kid at the time, but I remember the big fuss the media had made over the suggestion by Dale Russell, then of the Canadian Museum of Nature, that, had the dinosaurs not died out, stenonychosaurus-troodon might have eventually evolved into intelligent human-like “dinosauroids” who would have become the lords of creation. Russell even had a life-size sculpture made of his proposed reptile-person, a fully erect tailless biped with a braincase as big as a large grapefruit, three long surgeon-like fingers on each hand, and an incongruous-looking navel. Photos of it had appeared in Time and Omni.

Could troodon have been more advanced by the final days of the Cretaceous than anyone had previously thought? Could an elite few dinosaurs have had spoken language? Were they on the way to civilization, only to have their tenure on the planet cut short by some catastrophe? For me, a lifelong lover of dinosaurs, the idea was compelling. I wanted it to be true, but I knew in my bones that even the best of the terrible lizards, although not as desperately stupid as once thought, was still no better endowed mentally than a shrew or a bird.

A bird! Of course! Simple mimicry. Parrots do it. So do mynahs. We knew that birds were closely related to dinosaurs. Granted, our feathered friends hadn’t shared a common ancestor with troodon since the avian line split from the coelurosaurians in the mid-Jurassic, 100 million years before the time I was in now. Still, troodon was remarkably bird-like, with its keen binocular vision, quick movements, and three-toed feet. That’s it, of course. It must have heard me call “Wait up!” to Klicks and simply imitated the sound.


Except.

Except that I hadn’t called “wait up” or anything else to Klicks. And Klicks hadn’t said anything remotely like that to me.

I must have heard wrong. I must have.

“Wait up. Stop. Stop. Wait up.”

Oh, shit…

Klicks recovered his wits faster than I did. “Yes?” he said, astonished.

“Yess. Stop. Go not. Wait up. Stop. Yess. Stop.”

What do you say to a dinosaur? “Who are you?” asked Klicks.

“Pals. We pals. You pals. Eat an ant and I’ll be your best friend. Pals. Palsy-walsy.”

“I don’t fucking believe this,” said Klicks.

That did it. The thing launched into George Carlin’s list of the seven words you never used to be able to say on TV. The troodon’s speech was still difficult to understand, though. Indeed, it would have been incomprehensible if it weren’t for the fact that it put a brief pause between each word, the obscenities coming out like the sputters of a dying muffler.

“How can a dinosaur talk?” I said at last, to Klicks really, but the damned reptile answered anyway.

“With great difficulty,” the troddon rasped, and then, as if to prove its point, it arched its neck and hawked up a ball of spit. The gob landed on some rocks at the base of a bald cypress trunk. It was shot through with blood. The effort of speaking must be tearing up the creature’s throat.

That the beast could speak made no sense, and yet the words, although not clear, were unmistakable. I shook my head in wonder, then realized what was doubly incredible was not just that the dinosaur was speaking, but that it was speaking English.

Now, in retrospect, it seems obvious that it wasn’t the dinosaur talking. Not really. It was just a marionette for the blue jelly thing inside it. I’d had a hard enough time accepting that some weird slime had crawled into my head. The thought that the stuff had been an intelligent creature was something my mind refused to accept, until Klicks said it out loud. “It’s not the troodon, dammit. It’s the slime-thingy inside it.”

The talking dinosaur clucked like a chicken, then said, “Yess. Slime-thingy me. Not dinosaur. Dinosaur dumb-dumb. Slime-thingy smarty-pants.”

“That one must have learned English from you,” said Klicks.

“Huh? Why?”

“Well, for one thing, it sure didn’t get phrases like ‘palsy-walsy’ and ‘smarty-pants’ from me. And for another, it’s got your snooty Upper Canada College accent.”

I thought about that. It didn’t sound to me like it had any accent at all, but then again it certainly didn’t have a Jamaican accent, which is what Klicks spoke with.

Before I could reply, the three troodons stepped forward, not menacingly, really, but they did manage in short order to form the vertices of an equilateral triangle, with Klicks and me at the center. Klicks nodded toward the dense undergrowth, a mixture of ferns, red flowers, and cycads. There, sticking up, was the barrel of his elephant gun, quite out of reach. “Enough said by me,” rasped the reptile, now standing so close that I could feel its hot, moist breath on my face and smell the stench of its last meal. “You speak now. Who you?”

It was insanity, this being questioned by a baby-talking dinosaur. But I couldn’t think of any reason not to answer its question. I pointed at Klicks, but wondered if the hand gesture would have any meaning to the beast. “This is Professor Miles Jordan,” I said, “and my name is Dr. Brandon Thackeray.” The troodon tilted its head in a way that looked like human puzzlement. It didn’t say anything, though, so I added, “I’m Curator of Paleobiology at the Royal Ontario Museum. Miles is Curator of Dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, and he also teaches at the University of Alberta.”


The reptilian head weaved at the end of that long neck. “Some words link,” it said in its harsh voice. “Some not.” I could hear an undercurrent of clicking as it spoke, the sound of its pointed teeth touching as its mouth made the unaccustomed movements. It paused again, then asked, “What is name?”

“I just told you. Brandon Thackeray.” Then, after a moment, I added, for no good reason, “My friends call me Brandy.”

“No. No. What is name?” It tilted its head again, in that puzzled gesture. Then it brightened. “Ah, word missing—indefinite article, yess? What is a name?’”

“What do you mean, what is a name? You asked me what my name was.”

Klicks touched my shoulder. “No. What it asked was, ‘Who you?’ That’s not necessarily the same question.”

I realized that Klicks was right. “Oh. I see. Well, a name is … it’s, uh, a—”

Klicks chimed in. “A name is a symbol, a unique identifying word, that can be rendered either with sound or with written markings. It’s used to distinguish one individual from another.”

Clever bastard. How did he think up such a good definition so quickly? But the troodon made that puzzled face again. “ ‘Individual,’ say you? Still not link. No matter. Where you from?”

Well, what do I tell this thing? That I’m a time traveler from the future? If it doesn’t understand name, it’s not going to understand that. “I’m from Toronto. That’s a city"—I looked up at the sun to get my bearings, then pointed east—"about twenty-five hundred kilometers that way.”

“What kilometer?”

“It’s—” I looked at Klicks and resolved to do as good a job as he had at making things explicit. “It’s a unit of linear measure. One kilometer is a thousand meters, and a meter is"—I held up my hands—"this much.”

“And what is city?”

“Ah, a city is, um, well, you could say it’s the nesting place for herds of my kind. A collection of buildings, of artificial shelters.”

“Buildings?”

“Yes. A building is—”

“Know do we. But no buildings here. No others of your kind, either, that we have seen.”

Klicks’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know what a building is?”

The troodon looked at him as though he were an idiot. “He just told us.”

“But it sounded like you already knew—”

“We did know.”

“But then"—he spread his hands imploringly—"how did you know?”

“Do you have buildings?” I said.

We don’t,” replied the troodon, with an odd emphasis on the pronoun. Then all three of them moved in closer to us. The leader—the one doing all the talking, anyway—reached out with its five-centimeter claws and slowly brushed some dirt from my shirt. This one seemed to have a diamond-shaped patch of slightly yellowish skin on its muzzle, halfway between its giant eyes and the tip of its elongated snout. “No cities here,” Diamond-snout said. “Will ask again. Where you from?”

I glanced at Klicks. He shrugged. “I am from a city called Toronto,” I said at last, “but from a different time. We come from the future.”


There was silence for a full minute, broken only by the buzz of insects and the occasional pipping call of a bird or pterosaur. Finally, slowly, the dinosaur spoke. Instead of answering with the disbelief a human might express, its tone was measured and calculating. “From how far in the future?”

“Sixty-five million years,” Klicks said, “plus or minus about three hundred million.”

“Sixty-five million—” said Diamond-snout. It paused as if digesting this. “A year is the time it takes for—what words to use?—for this planet to make one elliptical path—ah, one orbit, yess?—one orbit around the sun?”

“That’s right,” I said, surprised. “You know about orbits?”

The creature ignored my question. “A million is a number in … in base-ten counting? Ten times ten times ten times ten times ten times ten, yess?”

“Was that five ‘times tens’?” I said. “Yes, that’s a million.”

“Sixty … five … million … years,” said the thing. It paused, then hawked blood onto the ground again. “What you say difficult to comprehend.”

“Nevertheless, it’s true,” I said. For some reason, I took a perverse pleasure in impressing the thing. “I realize sixty-odd million years is an impossibly long time to conceive of.”

“We conceive it; we remember a time twice as long ago,” the troodon said.

“My God. You remember, what, a hundred and thirty million years ago?”

“Intriguing that you own a god,” said Diamond-snout.

I shook my head. “You’ve got a history of a hundred and thirty million years?” Dating back from here at the end of the Cretaceous, that would be around the Triassic-Jurassic boundary.

“History?” said the troodon.

“Continuous written record,” said Klicks. He paused for a moment, I guess realizing that the jelly creatures couldn’t possibly have writing as we know it, since they didn’t have hands. “Or a continuous record of the past in some other form.”

“No,” said the troodon, “we do not that have.”

“But you just said you remembered a time a hundred and thirty million years ago,” said Klicks, frustration in his voice.

“We do—”

“So how can you—”

“But we not aware that time travel is possible,” said Diamond-snout, overtop of Klicks. “Last night, that black and white disk that crashed into the ground. That was your vehicle for time displacement?”

“The Sternberger, yes,” said Klicks. “Its technical name is a Huang temporal phase-shift habitat module, but the press just calls it a time machine.”

“A time machine?” The reptilian head bobbed. “That phrase appeals. Tell how it works.”

Klicks appeared irritated. “Look,” he said. “We know nothing about you. You’ve crawled around in our heads. What the hell are you?”

For the first time, I noticed the way the troodon blinked, an odd gesture in which it closed its left eye, opened it, then briefly closed its right. “We entered you only to absorb your language,” Diamond-snout said. “Did no harm, yess?”

“Well—”

“We could enter you again to absorb additional information. But time-consuming process. Clumsy. Language center obvious in brain structure. Much mass devoted to it. Specific memories much harder to faucet. Faucet? No, to tap. Easier you tell us.”

“But we could communicate better if we knew more about you,” I said. “Surely you can see that a common set of references would make it simpler.”

“Yess. See that and raise you—No, just see that. Common reference points. Links. Very well. Ask questions.”

“All right, then,” I said. “Who are you?”

“I am me,” the reptile said.

“Great,” muttered Klicks.

“Unsatisfactory response?” asked the theropod. “I am this one. No name. Name not link.”

“You’re a single entity,” I said, “but you don’t have a name of your own. Is that it?”

“It is that.”

“How do you tell yourself from others of your own kind?” I asked.

“Others?”

“You know: different individuals. One of you is inside this troodon; another is inside that one. How do you distinguish yourselves?”

“I here. Other is there. Easy as 3.1415.”

Klicks hooted.

“What are you?” I asked, annoyed at Klicks.

“No link.”

“You are an invertebrate.”

“Invertebrate: animal without a backbone, yess?”

“Yes. What are your relatives?”

“Time and space.”

“No, no. I—Damn. I want to know what you are, what you evolved from. You’re unlike any form of life I’ve seen before.”

“As are you.”

I shook my head. “I’m not too dissimilar from the dinosaur you are now inhabiting.”

“Dinosaur is efficient creature. Strong. Keen senses. Yours are dull by comparison.”

“Yes,” I said, irritated. For years, I’d explained to people that dinosaurs weren’t the sluggish, stupid creatures so often portrayed in cartoons, but somehow I didn’t enjoy hearing the same sentiments expressed by a reptilian mouth. “But we are more similar than different. Each of us is bipedal—that means we each have two legs—”

“Bipedal links.”

“And we each have two arms, two eyes, two nostrils. Our left sides are nearly perfect mirror images of our right sides—”

“Bisexual symmetry.”

“Bilateral symmetry,” I corrected. “Clearly, the dinosaur and I are related—share a common ancestor. My kind did evolve from ancient reptiles, but there are other creatures about, tiny mammals, that are even more closely related to us. But you—I’ve studied the history of life since it began. I don’t know of anything similar to you.”

“Its body is completely soft,” said Klicks. “Creatures like that might go undetected in the fossil record.”

I turned to him. “But intelligent life arising millions of years before the first human? It’s incredible. It’s almost as if—”

I’d like to claim that I was about to state the correct conclusion, that at that instant I had pieced together the puzzle and had realized what was going on. But my next words were drowned out by a great roaring clap, like thunder, followed by several bellowing dinosaur calls and the cries of flying things startled into flight. I recognized the noise, for my home was due south of Pearson International Airport and, despite the complaints from me and my neighbors, it had become part of the background of our day-to-day lives ever since Transport Canada had approved inland supersonic flights of the Orient Express jetliners. High overhead, three tawny spheres moving at perhaps Mach 2 or 3 streaked across the sky. At the least, they were aircraft, but I knew in an instant that they were much more than that.

Spaceships.

“You under a misapprehension operate,” said Diamond-snout once the sky had stopped rumbling. “We are not from this planet.”

Klicks was flabbergasted, which pleased me no end. “Then where?” I said.

“From—home world. Name I not find in your memories. It’s—”

“Is it in this solar system?” I asked.

“Yess.”

“Mercury?”

“Quicksilver? No.”

“Venus?”

“No.”

“Not Earth. Mars?”

“Mars—ah, Mars! Fourth from sun. Yess. Mars is home.”

“Martians!” said Klicks. “Actual fucking Martians. Who’d believe it?”

Diamond-snout fixed Klicks with a steady gaze. “I would,” it said, absolutely deadpan.

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