Starfire

9

Gordy Rolfe went over to the transparent door, and for an unpleasant moment Nick thought that he was going to open it. The plant life on the other side was dark, lush, and somehow ominous in the fading light. But Gordy sidled along the wall, looking through and beyond it until he had reached the rolfe rovers.

“How do you get them into the habitat without animals in the habitat getting back in here?” Nick asked.

“You’ll see.” Rolfe pressed a rover’s back simultaneously in three marked places, and the rolfe came alive. It stood, rotated the blunt vertical column of its neck, and clicked along on jointed legs to stand in front of the door.

“Same principle as an air lock,” Rolfe said. “You can’t have both sides open at the same time unless you take special steps to neutralize the controls. Which we’re not going to do.”

He went to the communications console and changed a setting, then came back to the wall and operated two mechanical switches. Nick realized that the thick door, apparently solid, was built in two parts with a sizeable space between. When the nearer side swung open there was space within for a rover or a small animal.

But not big enough, thank God, for a tall human or a dangerously large animal. Nick watched as the rover stepped forward into the opening. The nearer side of the door closed, and the far side opened to allow the rover into the interior. The door closed again to a seamless whole. The machine stood for a moment, as though making up its mind, then pushed its way into the green gloom beyond.

“Where is it heading?” In spite of himself, Nick was intrigued. He was seeing a new side of Gordy Rolfe.

“Nowhere special. Questing.” Rolfe walked back to the middle of the room, where the displays were located, and sat down. “Come join me. I have no idea how long this will take.”

“Questing for what?” Nick sat down also and stared at the display.

“Particular life forms. Animals. The rovers rely on olfactory signatures as well as visual ones, but it’s still not easy to track because the vegetation was designed to be dense. In most places the visibility is only a few yards. That makes the thermal infrared sensor useless most of the time.”

The field of view on the display changed constantly as the rover advanced and shifted and sometimes backtracked. Twice Nick saw animals, once a possum and once something, maybe a fox, that ran so fast into the undergrowth he couldn’t be sure. Those were apparently not what the rover was after, because the machine made no attempt to follow.

The binaural sensors were active, too, reporting soft clicks from the rover’s articulated limbs along with the crackle of branches and the rustle of dry leaves. Nick was becoming used to those sounds when they were interrupted by a coughing grunt, right in front of the rover.

“What’s that?”

“Homing in. We’re getting close to the targets.” Gordy Rolfe was perched on the edge of his seat. “Here we go.”

The rover had tracked around a stand of broad-leaved bushes. It halted, showing a view of a small clearing bordered by towering ferns. Three creatures tore at a bloodied corpse on the ground.

Nick took one look at the gray scaly heads with their sword teeth, at the thick tails and the massive hind legs, “Gordy, you’re crazy! If they broke through here . . .”

Rolfe cackled. “Not a problem! Try again, Nick. See the plants around them — and see what the three are eating.”

Nick looked again. The eyes were large, but black and expressionless as a fish’s eye. The hide was gray and thick, scaly except for a softer patch on the front of the neck where the skin formed a pouch like a heavy dewlap. The color there heightened to a warm beige. The forelimbs, in contrast to the heavy hind limbs, appeared weak and useless and too short to grasp or hold a prey. The animals, squatting back on their haunches, were clearly and comfortably bipedal, certainly meat-eaters, and definitely dinosaurs.

The shock of recognition was so great that Nick had been oblivious to everything else. Now he could recognize the scale of what he saw. The dead animal they were eating was a fat rabbit, fully half as big as the beasts around it. And as Rolfe said, the plants were the key to sizing other objects. The ferns in the background loomed over the rover, but the rover rolfes were only a couple of feet high, designed to wriggle their way easily through the jungle.

The minidinosaurs gave the new arrival one quick inspection, growled, and went back to their feeding.

“T. rex stock, of course,” Gordy said. “But I mixed in a fair amount of DNA from their own ancestors. You know, the early dinosaurs and most of the late ones weren’t particularly big. The ones we’re looking at are less than three feet tall.”

“You don’t build — full-sized ones. Do you?”

“Not anymore. Of course, I did it years ago. Everybody wants to do a T. rex for starters. I mean, it’s so famous you more or less have to try.”

“You failed?”

“Oh, no. The genoforming was no problem — it’s actually more difficult to create dwarf variations, like these, because you have to change the proportions from the original.”

Nick examined the animals in the holographic display more closely. The midget dinosaurs had massive hind limbs and a thick tail, slightly out of proportion to their size. They also moved a little clumsily — but each of those needle teeth was close to an inch long.

“They look pretty dangerous to me.”

“No more so than a dog of the same size, and not nearly as intelligent. Each one of these weighs about thirty-five pounds, though there are a few larger sizes in the habitat — up to a hundred pounds. Mind you, I’m not saying they aren’t dangerous at all. Even with these minisaurs, you wouldn’t want to go alone into the habitat without a weapon. They’re not pack animals, and they don’t hunt in groups, but they’ll gang up to make a kill. Two or three might easily bring down a human.”

“What do they eat?” The rabbit had been dismembered and little of it remained.

“Ah, now that’s a curious fact. They’ll eat most things if they have to, amphibians and reptiles and other dinosaurs. But given a choice, they seem to prefer mammals. It makes you wonder if that reflects some ancient struggle. You know, we usually think of the mammals as coming after the dinosaurs had died off, but there were mammals — small ones — long before that. One old theory was that early mammals did in the dinosaurs, by eating their eggs. And maybe a preference for mammalian meat is an evolutionary survival mechanism for the dinosaurs.”

“Would a dinosaur eat a human?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t see why not. We’d make a good meal for a pack of minisaurs. Of course, for a full-sized allosaur or tyrannosaur a human wouldn’t be more than an appetizer. Do you realize how much it takes to feed a full-grown T. rex? Or a big herbivore, like a titanosaur? I tried it. This whole habitat can support only a handful of large plant-eaters — and they crap like you wouldn’t believe. The tyrannosaurs were even worse; I had to keep importing meat from outside. That screws up the whole idea of a self-supporting habitat. It just wasn’t worth it, and I went to the miniature forms. I found that I can do the experiments I’m interested in just as well with them.”

“Which are?” Nick could imagine some pretty unpleasant possibilities, none of which seemed beyond Gordy’s limits.

“Answering what-if questions. Nature was unkind to the dinosaurs. They existed in the same era as the mammals, but I don’t think the two forms ever had a real head-to-head competition. All the mammals were small when the asteroid hit Chicxulub and the dinosaurs became extinct. Flying reptiles went away at the same time, but I’ve not done any work with them yet. What I have done, though, is absolutely fascinating. It’s getting too dark to track in the habitat with visible light. Later we’ll watch the nocturnal forms, but meanwhile let me show you some of my results.”

Rolfe stood up and did something invisible at the console, then moved back to stand directly in front of the ten-foot holograph. The natural light had faded to a deeper gloom, and Gordy Rolfe became a small, dark figure, hopping about against the background of the three-dimensional display. When he spoke again, his voice matched the animation of his manner.

“Fourteen years ago I set up my first full-scale simulation. The habitat was self-contained and isolated except for the water supply and simulated solar radiation. I put in a mixture of plants from today and those found in this region a hundred million years ago — see, I didn’t want to tilt the odds one way or the other. I put in floor and ceiling sensors that can identify, track, and inventory every animal species, so there would be a continuous census of habitat contents. And I seeded the habitat like this.”

A big group of animals stood frozen in holographic relief. Nick recognized four large meat-eating dinosaurs, which he thought from their size were Allosaurus. They, together with four lumbering specimens of Diplodocus, dwarfed everything else in the holo frame.

Gordy moved around on the edge of the holograph. “This is shown at one-quarter scale, but everything I put into the habitat was full-sized. See, here are the big modern predators — I chose tigers, because they function better than lions in a jungle environment. I didn’t want to use zoo specimens, they might be bred for docility, so I went to the Indian genome bank for original DNA templates. And here are hypsilophodons — small, fast herbivores, according to the books, but these seem more like omnivores, they’ll eat anything. And here’s a bunch of little saurischian plant-eaters, and these are wolves — no, I’m wrong, they’re hyenas — and if you look at the bottom, we have the smallest forms, shrews and mice and some of the saurornithoids that are not much bigger.”

Nick was listening, but with only half his attention. While Gordy Rolfe spoke with such enthusiasm about his simulation, the rover rolfe was still out in the real habitat. So were the meat-eating minisaurs. It was too dark to see anything, but the rover’s audio system was working. Unpleasant crunching sounds were interrupted by grunts and snorts and once by a startled, high-pitched squeal.

“Release them into the habitat all at once,” Rolfe went on. He waved his short arms. With a little imagination, the stooped, big-headed form silhouetted against the display could itself be one of the dwarf meat-eaters. “Provide water and light in realistic weather patterns, stay away, and see what happens. I did that, not once, but many times, and I let nature take its course. Do you know what happened, every single time?”

Nick was thinking of other things. He and Gordy Rolfe had formed their alliance because they needed each other to achieve a common goal: a world crippled by a space shield that would be only partially effective in deflecting the coming particle storm. The weak and the foolish would die, but Nick had his own personal hideaways dug deep beneath New Rio and the mountains of the Canadian Rockies. He did not begrudge Gordy Rolfe his secret headquarters. And beyond the particle storm lay the real goal, of ultimate personal power unimagined by most humans.

But the alliance carried its own price. Rolfe now held the stronger position. It was in part the power of a man indifferent to public opinion and support, versus one like Nick, who occupied a public and highly visible position.

There was also another, more important, difference between them. If you want to understand a man, find out what he does for recreation. Nick pursued men and women as well as power. Gordy was above — or below — the passions of the flesh. Gordy played God, and he was, in Nick’s opinion, becoming steadily more deranged. The lack of personal ties decreased his vulnerability and increased his megalomania.

“Did you hear me, Lopez?” Rolfe came closer, into the more brightly lit area beyond the holograph display.

“Do you know what happens when I seed the habitat with a variety of forms, dinosaurs and mammals, and let it run?”

“No. What happens?” Nick’s skin prickled with apprehension. The circular wall of the room seemed closer. He imagined he could smell a rank odor from the jungle beyond.

“The end mix of species in the habitat is different each time, depending on starting conditions and on random variations in food supply and weather.” Rolfe moved to stand next to where Nick was sitting. His head was level with Nick’s and he leaned close, gray eyes glittering with excitement behind the big lenses. “Sometimes the dinosaurs seem to have the upper hand, sometimes the mammals win out. But in every case, the small mammals do well. They never become extinct, and they always increase in numbers. Do you hear me, Lopez? Not big mammals. Small mammals win out, every time.”

Nick was six feet five inches tall. Presumably he did not qualify as a small mammal. Rolfe, stretched up to his full height in elevator shoes, was perhaps five feet two. Yet he was talking down to Nick — and loving it.

Nick nodded. “I take your point. That’s very interesting.”

There was one particular small mammal that he would like to see extinct. Not yet, though. This was a necessary partnership. He and Gordy Rolfe needed what only the other could provide: technological wizardry and industrial power from Gordy and the Argos Group, political savvy and clout from Nick and the WPF. The world’s greatest inventor and entrepreneur, teamed with the world’s savviest politician: a marriage made in heaven.

But in the long run? That was different. Nick knew very well that he and Gordy were two people as different as you could get, drawn together only by a shared desire for power and wealth. Somewhere in the undefined future, on an Earth ravaged by the particle storm, only one of the two would survive.

The competition between small and large mammals had yet to be decided.