But this is not a hospital, she told herself. These people simply work here. There's a difference.
"Animal, vegetable, mineral," Hoskins said. "Just as I promised. Animal right down there: our most spectacular exhibits. Before Timmie, I mean."
The space was divided into many rooms, each a separate Stasis bubble somewhat smaller than the one Timmie was housed in. Hoskins led her to the view-glass of one and she looked inside.
What she saw impressed her at first as a scaled, tailed chicken. It ran back and forth from one wall to the other in a nervous, frenzied way, skittering on two thin legs, looking this way and that. But there had never been a chicken that looked anything like this one: a wingless chicken with two small dangling arms terminating in handlike paws, which clenched and unclenched constantly. Its narrow head was delicate and bircUike, with weirdly glittering scarlet eyes. Its skull was surmounted by a bony keel a little like the comb of a rooster, but bright blue in color. Its body was green with darker stripes, and there was a gleaming reptilian sheen to it. The thin serpentine tail lashed nervously from side to side.
Hoskins said, "There's our dinosaur. Our pride and joy-until Timmie came here."
"Dinosaur? That?"
"I told you it was small. You want it to be a giant, don't you, Miss Fellowes?"
She dimpled. "I do, I suppose. It's only natural. The first thing anyone thinks of when dinosaurs are mentioned is their enormous size. And this one is, well, so tiny."
"A small one is all we aimed for, believe me. You can imagine what would happen here if a full-grown stego-saurus, say, suddenly came thundering into Stasis and started lumbering around the laboratory. But of course there isn't enough electrical energy in six counties to create a Stasis field big enough to handle something that size. And the technology itself isn't developed enough yet to allow for significant mass transfer, even if we could get the power we'd need to do it."
Miss Fellowes stared. She felt a chill. A living dinosaur, yes! How fantastic!
But so tiny-more like a bird without feathers, it was, or some peculiar kind of lizard"If it isn't big, why is it a dinosaur?" "Size isn't the determining factor, Miss Fellowes. What causes an animal to be classed as a dinosaur is its bony structure. The pelvic anatomy, primarily. Modern reptiles have limbs that go out sideways, like this. Think of the way a crocodile walks, or a lizard. More of a waddle than a stride, wouldn't you say? There aren't any upright crocodiles walking around on their hind legs. But the dinosaurs had bird-like pelvises. As everyone knows, many of them were able to walk upright as modern two-legged creatures do. Think of an ostrich; think of long-legged wading birds; think of the way our own legs are attached. Even the dinosaurs who stayed closer to the ground on all four legs had the sort of pelvis that allowed the legs to descend straight instead of sticking out to the sides the way a lizard's do. It's an entirely different evolutionary model, a line one which led down from dmosau-rian reptiles through birds to mammals. And the saurian end of it died out. The only reptiles that survived the Great Extinction at the end of the Mesozoic were the ones with the other kind of pelvic arrangement."
"I see. And there were small dinosaurs as well as big ones. It just happens that the big ones are the ones that captured our imaginations."
"Right. Those are the famous ones that everybody goggles at in the museums. But plenty of species were only a few feet high. This one, for instance."
"I can understand now why people lost interest in it so fast. It isn't scary. It isn't awesome."
"Laymen may have lost interest, Miss Fellowes. But I assure you that this Httle fellow has been a revelation to scientists. It's being studied day and night, and some veYy interesting things have been discovered. For instance, we've been able to determine that it's not entirely coldblooded. Which confirms one of the most controversial theories about dinosaurs ever set forth. Unlike any modern species of reptile, it has a method of maintaining internal temperatures higher than that of its environment. Not a perfect method, not by any means-but the fact that it has one at all backs up the skeletal evidence putting dinosaurs on the direct line of evolution leading toward birds and mammals. The creature that you're looking at is one of our own most distant ancestors, Miss Fellowes."
"If it is, aren't you messing up evolutionary history by pulling it out of its own era? Suppose this one dinosaur was the key link in the whole evolutionary chain?"
Hoskins laughed. "I'm afraid evolution doesn't work as simply as that. No, there's no risk here of changing evolutionary history. The fact that we're all still here, after this fellow has been transported a hundred million years across time, should be proof enough of that."
"I suppose so. -Is it a male or a female dinosaur?"
"Male," said Hoskins. "Unfortunately. Ever since we brought it in, we've been trying to get a fix on another of the same species that might be female. But doing that makes looking for a needle in a haystack seem like a cinch."
"Why get a female?"
He looked at her quizzically. "So that we might have a fighting chance to obtain some fertile eggs, and breed a line of baby dinosaurs here in the laboratory."
She felt foolish. "Of course."
"Come over here," Hoskins said. "The trilobite section. You know what trilobites are, Miss Fellowes?"
She didn't answer. She was watching the little dinosaur pathetically skittering around in its confinement area, bewilderedly running from one wall to the other. It would run right into the wall and bounce offbefore turning back. The stupid creature didn't seem to be able to comprehend the reason why it couldn't just keep going, out into the open, off into the dank swamps and torrid forests of its prehistoric home.
She thought of Timmie, penned up across the way in his own little set of rooms.
"I said, Miss Fellowes, do you know what trilobites are?"
"What? Oh-yes. Yes. Some sort of extinct kind of lobster, isn't that so?"
"Well, not exactly. A crustacean and extinct, but not at all like a lobster. Not much like anything now living, as a matter of fact. Once they were the dominant life-form of the Earth, the crown of creation. That was half a billion years ago. There were trilobites wherever you looked, then. Crawling around on the floor of every ocean by the millions. And then they all died out: we can't yet say why. Leaving no descendants, no genetic heritage whatever. They were here, they were fruitful and multiplied, and then they vanished as though they had never been. Leaving fossils of themselves behind in enormous quantities."
Miss Fellowes peered into the trilobite tank. She saw six or seven sluggish gray-green creatures three or four inches long, sitting on a bed of gray ooze. They looked like something you might see at the seashore in a tide-pool. Their narrow, oval, hard-looking bodies were divided the long way into three ridged sections, a raised central one and two smaller side lobes fringed with little spikes. Huge dark eyes were visible at one end, faceted like the eyes of insects. As Miss Fellowes watched, one of the trilobites pushed an array of tiny jointed legs outward from its sides and began to crawl-slowly, very slowly- across the bottom of the tank.
The crown of creation. The dominant life-form oTits time.
A man in a lab coat appeared, wheeling a tray on which some complex, unfamiliar device was mounted. He greeted Hoskins amiably and gave Miss Fellowes an impersonal grin.
"This is Tom Dwayne of Washington University," Hoskins said. "He's one of our trilobite people. Tom's a nuclear chemist. -Tom, I want you to meet Edith Fellowes, R.N. She's the wonderful woman who's taking care of our new little Neanderthal."
The newcomer smiled again, considerably less impersonally this time. "A great honor to meet you, Dr. Fellowes. You've got a tremendous job on your hands."