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Molly Gerhard felt a sudden chill. Without access to the fu
“Now don’t you worry one least bit,” Jimmy said. “Let me show you how we handle problems like this back in Belfast.”
Unhurriedly, but not slowly either, he walked up to the Unchanging on duty before the cavern’s entrance. “Excuse me just a sec,” he said. “I have something here that—”
He was alongside the Unchanging now. His hand came out of his pocket and moved with unca
There was surprisingly little blood. Just a spreading crimson stain on the robe where the knife hilt stuck out of the Unchanging’s back.
Quietly, without protest, it fell.
It was quite dead.
“If there’s only one of him, then he has to end somewhere,” Jimmy commented. “And if he ends here, then he couldn’t see it coming.”
He started toward the fu
16. Buddy System
Lost Expedition Foothills: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Senonian epoch. Maastrichtian age. 65 My B.C.E.
When sunset came, they set up the poptent in a sheltered spot in a grove of sycamores and fell asleep almost immediately.
In the morning, Chuck was the first out, whistling cheerily. The instant he left the tent, however, the whistling cut off.
He stuck his head back in and, with quiet urgency, said, “Don’t make any fast movements or loud noises. Grab your things and get out of the tent. Now.”
“I hope this isn’t another one of your—” Tamara began, crawling out, spear in hand and blouse only half buttoned. “Oh, shit.”
A herd of geistosaurs had moved into the grove. It was hard to count their numbers in the dawn light, but there were at least forty of them. They were unhurriedly stripping the leaves from the lower branches of the sycamores.
The geistosaurs were almost dead white, with blotchy black markings scattered across their bodies and thick black rings around their eyes. Those rings should have made them look comic, but did not. Their markings, combined with their absolute silence (Geistosaurus was the only mute hadrosaurine Leyster knew of) gave them a spooky solemnity, as if they were spirit animals that had wandered into reality from the totemic lands of the dead.
They dared not try to slip away. Any large animal was potentially dangerous. And though a geistosaur was no more aggressive than a Brahma bull or a water buffalo, it was considerably larger. If they startled one, it could easily trample them all.
Nor would climbing a tree be of any use. It might save them from a ceratopsian, but not a hadrosaur. When they reared up onto their hind legs, the geistosaurs could reach all but the highest branches. Those, they could shake savagely enough to dislodge anything clinging there.
So they sat scrunched up against the trunks of the sycamores for several hours, hoping to escape notice, while the ghostly white-and-black giants browsed their way through the grove, pale animals among the pale trees. “Under other circumstances,” Chuck muttered underneath his breath, “I’d be enjoying this. We’ve got front row seats here.”
“I can’t get a handle on their social interplay,” Leyster whispered back. “As a rule, the smaller adults seem to be subordinate to the larger. But—”
“Would you two kindly shut the fuck up?” Tamara whispered. “We don’t want to stampede them.”
At that instant, the phone rang.
As one, every geistosaur in the grove lifted its head in alarm. For a long, frozen instant, nothing moved. The phone continued ringing, an alien noise completely unlike anything these animals could ever have heard before.
Then they fled.
They scattered like pigeons. Briefly, they were everywhere, enormous, terrified. The juveniles dropped to all fours first, and trotted briskly off to the east and north. Then the adults, herding their young before them.
In its haste, a geistosaur brushed against the poptent, sending it leaping up a good six feet into the air. By the time it bounced back to earth, the grove was empty.
The phone was still ringing.
Shakily, Leyster stood. He stretched his aching muscles, then retrieved his pack, so he could answer the phone. It took a minute to unwrap the thing. “Yes?”
“This is Daljit. Lai-tsz called and told us she’s built a device for detecting infrasound and… Hey, how far have you guys gotten?”
“Not as far as we were hoping. But we’ll make up for lost time this afternoon. How’s Jamal?”
“It’s just a broken leg,” Jamal said in the background.
“I think it’s infected,” Daljit said. “Did you remember to bring antibiotics?”
“Of course we did.” Their last, though Leyster didn’t mention that. “Oh, and you’d better watch out for Chuck. He’s got hold of a theory.”
“Uh-oh. What is it?”
“I’ll let him bend your ear when we get there. Right now, tell us about the infrasound.”
While he listened, Chuck and Tamara repacked their gear. When he finally hung up, Tamara said, “We were lucky. The only thing that was broken was one of the tent’s support struts. We can make a replacement from a sapling.”
“Thank God,” Leyster said.
They were midway through the slow process of losing everything they had brought with them. The solar shower device went first, followed quickly by (of course) their consumer electronics—game players and music systems—and the batteries they required to function. Then a knife went missing, and a comb, and the next thing they knew, they were suffering serious inconvenience, and facing the possibility of genuine hardship. When one of his cameras died, Patrick went into mourning for a week.
Bit by bit, they were losing their grip on the machine age and sliding back into the stone age. It was a terrifying prospect not only because it was irreversible, but because they lacked the complex mastery of paleolithic technology that a stone age hunter had. Nils had spent most of the rainy season trying to make a bow before giving it up as a bad job. He hadn’t even been able to manufacture shafts straight enough for the arrows.
“Let’s go,” Leyster said, shouldering his pack. “I can tell you about the infrasound on the way.”
Lai-tsz had jury-rigged two recorders to detect infrasound. On their very first day using them, the crew back home had been able to establish that the valley was full of sub-audible communications. More, according to Daljit, the messages were profoundly moving.
“They sing!” she’d told Leyster. “No, not like whales. Much lower, much more vibrant. Oh, it’s exquisite stuff. They played some for us over the phone. Jamal says we should be sure to hang onto the copyright. He says he’s sure a music company would be interested.”
“I was joking,” Jamal said weakly in the background.
“Oh, hush. You were not. Fortunately, our original equipment included directional microphones. Since Lai-tsz rigged up two recorders, it’s possible to point one at a tyra
“So, do they?”
“Well, it’s a little early to say…”
“Don’t be a tease, Daljit,” Jamal said.
“But yes, yes it really does look like there is.”
When Leyster finished relating the conversation, Tamara said, “That is so neat!”
“Aw, c’mon,” Chuck said in a mock-hurt voice. “How can you be so impressed by something we already suspected, and not by my theory? I mean, let’s face it, it’s got the K-T extinction, continental drift, the Chicxulub impactor, and mass dinosaur madness all in one sexy package.”