Which Came First?
by William Rotsler
Illustration by Darryl Elliott
It’s hard to run for your life carrying an egg as big as a watermelon. An egg is awkward to carry when it’s over a foot long, delicate, you’re out of breath, and your side hurts. And it’s umpteen-ton mother is thundering along after you. You tend to look over your shoulder a lot and trip on roots and vines and maybe scream now and again.
It was not the only dinosaur egg in the world—not that world, anyway— but if I could get a few hundred yards farther and nothing happened to the time machine, it would be. Sixty-five to eighty million years from now. The dinosaur egg, that is.
They wanted a dinosaur and they knew they weren’t going to get any dinosaur anyone would pay to see into the TDC—Temporal Displacement Container, as they flat out refused to called it a “time machine.” So some bright physics weenie figured out the egg came first, and it was a lot more portable. Two or three eggs would be even better.
A lot they knew.
All they needed was someone dumb enough to say, “I’ll go,” and I was the one that said it, for reasons of my own. “Uh, OK, I’ll do it.” But I’m no dummy, I’d read SF. And real science, too.
I understood what was needed. “I go back, get an egg or three.” I had looked around the conference room and continued. “OK, that means that particular dinosaur never existed, never had his or her own family of little dinos, which in turn never had kids, etcetera, etcetera.”
Several people nodded wisely. “So I swipe some eggs and whammo, there’s no civilization-as-we-know-it, everything looks like Cleveland, the Chicago Cubs win the Series, and Rush Limbaugh is king.”
No, no, no, they said. They talked—with their hands, too—a long time, often at the same time, selling me the idea. It boiled down to this: Time was not linear, not exactly, or more exactly, it was a whole lot of lines, rather like a tapestry. You cut one thread, the design doesn’t change, certainly not significantly. They talked well.
They’d gone to a lot of school, and had capital letters after their names.
Get the egg, they say, and some other thundering lizard will fill in as guest ancestor, and we here in the Oohs would have the most incredible draw ever. The year 2009 would be the year Johnny Ryan brought back the first dinosaur. Live. And in whatever color they came in.
Think of the merchandising alone, Johnny, Parkinson said. Five hundred million, at least, and you’ll get a piece. Movies, TV, your life story, you’ll be on every talk show in Christendom, on every best-seller list—we’ll make billions.
Bring back eggs of different types, Stillman said, it’ll help merchandising. Oh, and science will love you.
More things to sell, Wilson said, and Gold nodded in agreement. We’ll have eggs and little dinos, grown-up dinos, ferns, a model of the TDC. We’ll have clothes for you to wear that can go on action figures, Miller added. They’ll have lots of pockets—so pick up anything interesting, he said.
We’re developing a helmet cam, Simpson said, adding that it would run from the time I left until I got back, so watch my language. Plus before and after interviews with scientists to postulate and evaluate.
So I said I’d do it. They seemed relieved, so I guess volunteers weren’t so easy to find, after all. But I didn’t do it for the reasons they thought. They thought I wanted the money and the starlets and the groupies and the Fame. (When they said it, Fame was always capitalized.) I did it because I had to get out of town for awhile. And quickly. There was this misunderstanding with the Jaroslava brothers and they’d given me a deadline I hadn’t a chance in hell of meeting, or postponing.
It wasn’t until the countdown started that I realized something terrible, and then it was too late. “See you in a few minutes,” the weenie in the white lab coat said.
“A few minutes?” I croaked. Inside, I was going Whaaat?
“Oh, it won’t seem that way to you,” he grinned back. “You could be there a week, an hour, a year, you’d still come back in…” he looked at a dial. “Ten minutes. Just long enough for the gaffers on the frandistats to cool down and the gamel-brinners to get back up to speed.”
OK, so that’s not exactly what he said, but that’s what I heard. “But, I—”
Then things shimmered and lurched and suddenly everything stank and I was in some kind of weird fantasy forest. I knew at once I was in even bigger trouble that I had run away from.
For one thing there were bugs. Big bugs. All over. It was hot and humid beyond belief. I hate heat and humidity. I hate bugs, I hate anything with more than four legs and less than two.
As the air I’d brought with me dissipated I felt there wasn’t enough air in the air. Even so, I might have said OK, I can live with it, if it hadn’t whirled around and looked right at me.
It was a reptile, as big as a mean pony, but with two legs and a long neck with a small head, big eyes, and a tail that whipped up and straightened out as it ran at me. It looked vicious, hungry, and an efficient killer. It also looked—I swear—eager.
Squish, skoosh, splot, it came charging, slashing through these fern things, around some kind of spiny tree, and it took that long for me to unfreeze and react.
Keeping the “tapestry view of time” in mind, I had brought along a Colt Python .357 with hollow point ammunition. Before I was eaten, one or more things were going to eat lead. I didn’t care if a Volkswagen in Idaho or a Formula III on the bricks coughed and stopped, because there was no gas in the tank, because I’d clobbered a family line of lizards. I squirmed out of the TDC and hauled out my pistol.
I hadn’t counted on my hand shaking. I forgive myself—after all, it was the first time a Homo sapien had ever faced a dinosaur who fancied him for lunch. No matter how many caveman movies you’ve seen.
So I shot. It was very noisy. Besides all the squish, splat and glop, there was Awk and a kind of Spaa—! that really disconcerted me more than somewhat. The jungle I was in came alive.
Again, unlike the movies, big guns make Big Noise. KA-BOOM! it went— just like they say in the comics. The first noise of its kind in the history of the worlds, strictly speaking.
But I missed. Startled, this scaled “it” started running in the other direction while it was still on its kill-run at me and ended up tangled in its own feet, falling heavily on its side, splashing me with sticky, oozy, stinking mud that had things crawling in it.
It whapped its tail against the tree I had jumped behind. The tree shook, showering down a lot more creepy-crawlies. Everything around me started running, hopping, inching, galloping and humfullnating away. Things came up out of the mud and slithered off. Birdoids with very long tails flap-flap-flopped away. Some made noises, some saved their breath.
The big scaly thing that had prompted this display of sincere but erratic marksmanship, kicked and scrambled to his, her, or its feet, scattering mud and greenery, and went off that way, zero to sixty in ten seconds. I was left alone, comparatively speaking.
Well, not quite alone. Things crawled on me. I itched, I dripped, I stank, I shivered, and I thank God that Wilson had insisted on all those shots and Gold had agreed. I slapped off what I could and started walking. I was supposed to be searching but I was really just walking.
I knew what I was looking for, of course, I just didn’t know what it looked like. No one did. Dinosaur nests hadn’t made it into the 20th century.