“Well, given what we know, I think my hypothesis is the best available interpretation of the facts.”
“It’s not parsimonious, though. It’s not the simplest possible explanation.”
Arguing and keeping a wary eye out for predators, they made another few miles’ progress through the forest.
They were following an old hadrosaur trail when the woods opened out into a bright clearing. It had recently been browsed almost to the ground, and was covered with new growth, fresh green shoots shot through with white silkpod blossoms and red-tipped Darwin’s broomsticks. A stream ran through it. On the far side of the stream, the woods resumed with a stand of protomagnolia trees in full bloom. Their scent filled the clearing.
Birds scattered as they stepped out of the darkness. They waited cautiously for a moment, then took a step forward. Then another.
Nothing attacked them.
Gratefully, Leyster let his knapsack slip to the ground. “Let’s take a break,” he said.
“Second the motion,” Tamara said.
“Moved and carried.” Chuck plopped to the ground.
They put their packs together, and sat leaning against them with their legs stretched out. Leyster rolled up his pants legs and checked for ticks. Chuck took off a shoe and rubbed his foot.
“Let’s take a look at that,” Tamara said. Then, “The sole is practically falling off! Why didn’t you say something?”
“I knew you’d want to tape it up, and we’ve got so little left.”
Leyster already had the duct tape out of his pack. “What do you think it’s for?” The shoe had been repaired before, but the tape had abraded where the sole met the upper. He rewrapped it with generous swaths of new tape overtop the old. “There. That should hold for a while.”
Chuck shook his head ruefully. “We have got to start making new shoes.”
“Easier said than done,” Leyster said. “We can’t do oak tanning because we haven’t found anything that looks to be ancestral to the oak. And the problem with brain tanning is that dinosaurs have such tiny little brains. We’ll have to harvest a lot of them.”
“Sounds like the pioneer method for making a toothpick,” Chuck observed: “First, you chop down a redwood…”
Everybody chuckled. They were silent for a while. Then Tamara lazily said, “Hey, Chuck.”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t really believe that stuff about the Chicxulub impactor making the Earth ring, do you?”
“What’s so difficult about that? The Earth rings for two to three weeks after a major earthquake, and the force of the collision was six times ten to the eighth power stronger than any earthquake. Now, most of that force went into heat and other forms of energy. If less than one tenth of one percent of that went into elastic energy, as seems entirely plausible, then the elastic wave propagation would be enough to make the Earth ring for a hundred years.”
“Oh.”
“The only question is how much the heat energy changed the properties of the crust. If it became more viscous and less solid, then the more viscous crust would damp out the elastic waves. However, I do not think that happened. Extremely unlikely, in my humble opinion. Though I am open to new interpretations, if the data are there to support them.”
Leyster smiled to himself. Chuck had a good mind. He’d make a fine scientist as soon as he learned to stop jumping to conclusions. He sighed, stretched, and stood.
“Time to go, kids.” Leyster took a reading, pointed toward the protomagnolias. Tamara came after him, and then Chuck.
They splashed through the stream and back into gentle shadow.
“Keep alert,” Chuck said. “Don’t be distracted by how peaceful it all looks.”
He had barely finished speaking when the dromies attacked.
Dromaeosaurs were not particularly large as dinosaurs went. They were the size of dogs, somewhere between knee– and hip-high to a human, but, like dogs, they were nothing you wanted to have attack you. This particular pack was covered in tawny green feathers, all short save for the wrist-fans on the females, which were used to shade their eggs when brooding. The feathers, the savage little teeth in their whippet-narrow heads, and the oversized claws on their hind feet combined to make them look like Hell’s own budgerigars.
They were ambush hunters.
As one, they burst out of the bushes and leapt down from the trees. The air was filled with flying bodies and protomagnolia petals.
Chuck screamed once.
Leyster spun and saw Chuck go down, covered with dromaeosaurs.
Instinctively, he dropped his compass and snatched out the axe. Hollering and swinging, he ran toward the swarming knot of dromies.
Tamara ran past him, yelling at the top of her lungs. She’d thought to drop her knapsack, where Leyster hadn’t. Her spear arm was cocked back, and there was murder in her face.
The dromies scattered.
There were enough of the creatures to kill Tamara and Leyster both. But they weren’t used to being challenged. Faced with a situation totally outside their experience, they retreated across the clearing and toward the shelter of the woods beyond.
Tamara hadn’t dared throw her spear while the dromies were on top of Chuck. She threw it now, shifted her second spear to her throwing hand, and threw that as well.
One spear flew wide. The other caught its target square in the chest.
At the verge of the clearing, a dromie turned to chatter defiance and was almost hit by a stone Tamara flung. Angry and alarmed, it darted back into the forest. Briefly, the brush was filled with dark shadows milling about in confusion. But when Tamara dashed in under the trees after them, they were nowhere to be found.
She turned back toward the meadow. “Chuck?”
Chuck had twisted as he fell. His body lay face down under the protomagnolias. Leyster knelt beside it and felt for the pulse, though he knew what he would find. There had been somewhere between six and nine of the little gargoyles, and they’d all gotten in several bites before being chased away. Chuck had been bitten in the legs, arms, and face. His throat had been torn open.
“He’s dead,” Leyster said softly.
“Oh… crap!” Tamara turned away and started to cry. “Damn, damn, damn.”
Leyster started to turn Chuck’s body over. But it didn’t move quite right when he shifted it, and something started to slide loosely from the abdomen. He remembered then how dromies would latch onto their prey with their forelimbs and use those enormous claws on their hindlimbs to eviscerate their victims. Chuck’s abdomen would be ripped open from crotch to rib cage.
He eased the body back into his original position, and stood.
Tamara looked stricken. He put his arms around her, and she buried her face in his shoulder. Her back heaved with her sobs. But Leyster found he had no tears in him. Only a dry, miserable pain. Living in the Maastrichtian, with violent death an everyday possibility, had made him harder. Once he would have felt guilty for surviving. He would have blamed himself for his friend’s death, and sought after a reason why he should have been spared when Chuck was not. Now he knew such emotions to be mere self-indulgence. The dromaeosaurs had chosen Chuck because he was last in line. If Leyster had been limping, or Tamara had been having her period, things would have gone differently.
It was just the way it was.
In survival training, they’d called it “the buddy system.” To survive an attack, you didn’t have to be faster than the predators—just faster than your buddy. It was a system that served zebras and elands well. But it was hell on human beings.