The prisoner looked toward the Alvarado clone and said, “He’ll prove that I am who I say I am. And you won’t have the guts to carry the pretense any further, will you, you test-tube fraud? Because half the staff in the hospital knows the real story already, and somehow the truth will get out. And it’ll bring you down. Once the country finds out that you’re a fake, that you simply seized power when the motorcade bomb went off. Once word gets around that I didn’t die, that you’ve had me hidden away in the hospital all this time with people thinking I was you and you were me, what do you think will happen to your regime? Will anyone take orders from a clone?”
“You mustn’t speak now,” Mondschein told him. “It’ll distort the test results.”
“All right. Yes. Listen, Rafael, no matter what you tell him, he’ll say that you identified me as a clone, but you know that it’s a lie. When you get back outside, you tell people the true story. You hear me? And afterward, I’ll see to it that you get whatever you want. Anything. Money, women, country estates, your own laboratory, whatever.”
“Please,” Mondschein said. “I ask you not to speak.”
He attached the electrodes to himself. He touched the dials.
He remembered, now. The entire technique. He had written these personality-organization algorithms himself. He closed his eyes and felt the data come flooding in. The prisoner’s brain waves met his own—collided, clashed, clashed violently—
To the Alvarado clone, Mondschein said, “The alpha match is perfect, Señor President. What we have here is a clone.”
“No, Rafael!” the prisoner roared. “You filthy lying bastard, no! You know it isn’t so!”
“Take him away,” the Alvarado clone said.
“No. You won’t do anything to me. I’m the only legitimate president of Tierra Alvarado.”
“You are nothing,” the clone told him. “You are a mere creature. We have scientific proof that you are simply one of the artificial brothers. Dr. Mondschein has just demonstrated that.”
“Balls,” the prisoner said. “Listen, Mondschein, I know he has you intimidated. But when you get out of here, spread the word. Tell everyone what your real reading was. That there’s a usurper in the Presidential Palace, that he must be overthrown. You’ll be a national hero, you’ll be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams—”
Mondschein smiled. “Ah, but I already have everything that I want,” he said.
He looked toward the Alvarado clone. “I’ll prepare a formal report and sign it, Señor President. And I will be willing to attest to it at the public trial.”
“This has been the trial, Doctor,” the clone said smoothly, indicating the ceiling of the cell, where Mondschein now saw an opening through which the snout of a television camera protruded. “All the information that we need has been recorded. But I am grateful for your offer. You have been extremely helpful. Extremely helpful, Señor Doctor.”
That night, in the safety and comfort of his beloved villa, Mondschein slept soundly for the first time since his return to Tierra Alvarado—more soundly than he had slept in years.
HUNTERS IN THE FOREST
One pleasant aspect of being a writer who dabbles in editing is that every once in a while you get to sell a story to yourself. Of course, I have to sell every story I write to myself before I can sell it to anyone else—if I don’t think much of it, after all, how can I offer it to someone for publication with a straight face?—but when I’m simultaneously both writer and editor I don’t have to worry, at least, about all those silly little editorial quibbles that other editors often insist on inflicting on me before they’ll publish something of mine.
In this case, the well-known book packager Byron Preiss was assembling a majestic coffee-table volume called The Ultimate Dinosaur, a large-size volume offering a mixture of scientific essays, short stories, and color plates, and I was serving as fiction editor for the book. I assembled a team of top-level science-fictionists (Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp, Gregory Benford, etc.) to write the stories, each of whom was matched in theme to one of the essays. And I grabbed the theme of “Dinosaur Predators” for myself and illustrated it with this nasty little item, in which, as often happens in my fiction, the most dangerous beast turns out to be something other than the obvious one.
I wrote the story in November, 1990. Omni published it in magazine form in its October, 1991 issue and The Ultimate Dinosaur appeared the following year.
——————
Twenty minutes into the voyage nothing more startling than a dragonfly the size of a hawk has come into view, fluttering for an eye-blink moment in front of the timemobile window and darting away, and Mallory decides it’s time to exercise Option Two: Abandon the secure cozy comforts of the timemobile capsule, take his chances on foot out there in the steamy mists, a futuristic pygmy roaming virtually unprotected among the dinosaurs of this fragrant Late Cretaceous forest. That has been his plan all along—to offer himself up to the available dangers of this place, to experience the thrill of the hunt without ever quite being sure whether he was the hunter or the hunted.
Option One is to sit tight inside the timemobile capsule for the full duration of the trip—he has signed up for twelve hours—and watch the passing show, if any, through the invulnerable window. Very safe, yes. But self-defeating, also, if you have come here for the sake of tasting a little excitement for once in your life. Option Three, the one nobody ever talks about except in whispers and which perhaps despite all rumors to the contrary no one has actually ever elected, is self-defeating in a different way: simply walk off into the forest and never look back. After a prearranged period, usually twelve hours, never more than twenty-four, the capsule will return to its starting point in the twenty-third century whether or not you’re aboard. But Mallory isn’t out to do himself in, not really. All he wants is a little endocrine action, a hit of adrenaline to rev things up, the unfamiliar sensation of honest fear contracting his auricles and chilling his bowels: all that good old chancy stuff, damned well unattainable down the line in the modern era where risk is just about extinct. Back here in the Mesozoic, risk aplenty is available enough for those who can put up the price of admission. All he has to do is go outside and look for it. And so it’s Option Two for him, then, a lively little walkabout, and back to the capsule in plenty of time for the return trip.
With him he carries a laser rifle, a backpack medical kit, and lunch. He jacks a thinko into his waistband and clips a drinko to his shoulder. But no helmet, no potted air supply. He’ll boldly expose his naked nostrils to the Cretaceous atmosphere. Nor does he avail himself of the one-size-fits-all body armor that the capsule is willing to provide. That’s the true spirit of Option Two, all right: Go forth unshielded into the Mesozoic dawn.
Open the hatch, now. Down the steps, hop skip jump. Booted feet bouncing on the spongy primordial forest floor. There’s a hovering dankness but a surprisingly pleasant breeze is blowing. Things feel tropical but not uncomfortably torrid. The air has an unusual smell. The mix of nitrogen and carbon dioxide is different from what he’s accustomed to, he suspects, and certainly none of the impurities that six centuries of industrial development have poured into the atmosphere are present. There’s something else, too, a strange subtext of an odor that seems both sweet and pungent: It must be the aroma of dinosaur farts, Mallory decides. Uncountable hordes of stupendous beasts simultaneously releasing vast roaring boomers for a hundred million years surely will have filled the prehistoric air with complex hydrocarbons that won’t break down until the Oligocene at the earliest.
Scaly tree trunks thick as the columns of the Parthenon shoot heavenward all around him. At their summits, far overhead, whorls of stiff long leaves jut tensely outward. Smaller trees that look like palms but probably aren’t fill in the spaces between them, and at ground level there are dense growths of awkward angular bushes. Some of them are in bloom, small furry pale-yellowish blossoms, very diffident looking, as though they were so newly evolved that
they were embarrassed to find themselves on display like this. All the vegetation, big and little, has a battered, shopworn look, trunks leaning this way and that, huge leafstalks bent and dangling, gnawed boughs hanging like broken arms. It is as though an army of enormous tanks passes through this forest every few days. In fact that isn’t far from the truth, Mallory realizes.
But where are they? Twenty-five minutes gone already and he still hasn’t seen a single dinosaur, and he’s ready for some.
“All right,” Mallory calls out. “Where are you, you big dopes?”
As though on cue the forest hurls a symphony of sounds back at him: strident honks and rumbling snorts and a myriad blatting snuffling wheezing skreeing noises. It’s like a chorus of crocodiles getting warmed up for Handel’s Messiah.
Mallory laughs. “Yes, I hear you, I hear you!”
He cocks his laser rifle. Steps forward, looking eagerly to right and left. This period is supposed to be the golden age of dinosaurs, the grand tumultuous climactic epoch just before the end, when bizarre new species popped out constantly with glorious evolutionary profligacy, and all manner of grotesque Goliaths roamed the earth. The thinko has shown him pictures of them, spectacularly decadent in size and appearance, long-snouted duck-billed monsters as big as a house and huge lumbering ceratopsians with frilly baroque bony crests and toothy things with knobby horns on their elongated skulls and others with rows of bristling spikes along their high-ridged backs. He aches to see them. He wants them to scare him practically to death. Let them loom; let them glower; let their great jaws yawn. Through all his untroubled days in the orderly and carefully regulated world of the twenty-third century, Mallory has never shivered with fear as much as once, never known a moment of terror or even real uneasiness, is not even sure he understands the concept; and he has paid a small fortune for the privilege of experiencing it now.
Forward. Forward.
Come on, you oversized bastards, get your asses out of the swamp and show yourselves!
There. Oh, yes, yes, there!
He sees the little spheroid of a head first, rising above the treetops like a grinning football attached to a long thick hose. Behind it is an enormous humped back, unthinkably high. He hears the pile driver sound of the behemoth’s footfall and the crackle of huge tree trunks breaking as it smashes its way serenely toward him.
He doesn’t need the murmured prompting of his thinko to know that this is a giant sauropod making its majestic passage through the forest—“One of the titanosaurs or perhaps an ultrasaur,” the quiet voice says, admitting with just a hint of chagrin in its tone that it can’t identify the particular species—but Mallory isn’t really concerned with detail on that level. He is after the thrill of size. And he’s getting size, all right. The thing is implausibly colossal. It emerges into the clearing where he stands and he is given the full view, and gasps. He can’t even guess how big it is. Twenty meters high? Thirty? Its ponderous corrugated legs are thick as sequoias. Giraffes on tiptoe could go skittering between them without grazing the underside of its massive belly. Elephants would look like housecats beside it. Its tail, held out stiffly to the rear, decapitates sturdy trees with its slow steady lashing. A hundred million years of saurian evolution have produced this thing, Darwinism gone crazy, excess building remorselessly on excess, irrepressible chromosomes gleefully reprogramming themselves through the millennia to engender thicker bones, longer legs, ever bulkier bodies, and the end result is this walking mountain, this absurdly overstated monument to reptilian hyperbole.
“Hey!” Mallory cries. “Look here! Can you see this far down? There’s a human down here. Homo sapiens. I’m a mammal. Do you know what a mammal is? Do you know what my ancestors are going to do to your descendants?” He is practically alongside it, no more than a hundred meters away. Its musky stink makes him choke and cough. Its ancient leathery brown hide, as rigid as cast iron, is pocked with parasitic growths, scarlet and yellow and ultramarine, and crisscrossed with the gullies and ravines of century-old wounds deep enough for him to hide in. With each step it takes, Mallory feels an earthquake. He is nothing next to it, a flea, a gnat. It could crush him with a casual stride and never even know.
And yet he feels no fear. The sauropod is so big he can’t make sense out of it, let alone be threatened by it.
Can you fear the Amazon River? The planet Jupiter? The pyramid of Cheops?
No, what he feels is anger, not terror. The sheer preposterous bulk of the monster infuriates him. The pointless superabundance of it inspires him with wrath.
“My name is Mallory,” he yells. “I’ve come from the twenty-third century to bring you your doom, you great stupid mass of meat. I’m personally going to make you extinct, do you hear me?”
He raises the laser rifle and centers its sight on the distant tiny head. The rifle hums its computations and modifications and the rainbow beam jumps skyward. For an instant the sauropod’s head is engulfed in a dazzling fluorescent nimbus. Then the light dies away, and the animal moves on as though nothing has happened.
No brain up there? Mallory wonders.
Too dumb to die?
He moves up closer and fires again, carving a bright track along one hypertrophied haunch. Again, no effect. The sauropod moves along untroubled, munching on treetops as it goes. A third shot, too hasty, goes astray and cuts off the crown of a tree in the forest canopy. A fourth zings into the sauropod’s gut but the dinosaur doesn’t seem to care. Mallory is furious now at the unkillability of the thing. His thinko quietly reminds him that these giants supposedly had had their main nerve-centers at the base of their spines. Mallory runs around behind the creature and stares up at the galactic expanse of its rump, wondering where best to place his shot. Just then the great tail swings upward and to the left and a torrent of immense steaming green turds as big as boulders comes cascading down, striking the ground all around Mallory with thunderous impact. He leaps out of the way barely in time to keep from being entombed, and goes scrambling frantically away to avoid the choking fetor that rises from the sauropod’s vast mound of excreta. In his haste he stumbles over a vine, loses his footing in the slippery mud, falls to hands and knees. Something that looks like a small blue dog with a scaly skin and a ring of sharp spines around its neck jumps up out of the muck, bouncing up and down and hissing and screeching and snapping at him. Its teeth are deadly-looking yellow fangs. There isn’t room to fire the laser rifle. Mallory desperately rolls to one side and bashes the thing with the butt instead, hard, and it runs away growling. When he has a chance finally to catch his breath and look up again, he sees the great sauropod vanishing in the distance.
He gets up and takes a few limping steps further away from the reeking pile of ordure.
He has learned at last what it’s like to have a brush with death. Two brushes, in fact, within the span of ten seconds. But where’s the vaunted thrill of danger narrowly averted, the hot satisfaction of the frisson? He feels no pleasure, none of the hoped-for rush of keen endocrine delight.
Of course not. A pile of falling turds, a yapping little lizard with big teeth: what humiliating perils! During the frantic moments when he was defending himself against them he was too busy to notice what he was feeling, and now, muddy all over, his knee aching, his dignity dented, he is left merely with a residue of annoyance, frustration, and perhaps a little ironic self-deprecation, when what he had wanted was the white ecstasy of genuine terror followed by the postorgasmic delight of successful escape recollected in tranquility.
Well, he still has plenty of time. He goes onward, deeper into the forest.
Now he is no longer able to see the timemobile capsule. That feels good, that sudden new sense of being cut off from the one zone of safety he has in this fierce environment. He tries to divert himself with fantasies of jeopardy. It isn’t easy. His mind doesn’t work that way; nobody’s does, really, in the nice, tidy, menace-free society he lives in. But he works at it. Suppose, he thinks, I lose my way in the forest and c
an’t get back to—no, no hope of that, the capsule sends out constant directional pulses that his thinko picks up by microwave transmission. What if the thinko breaks down, then? But they never do. If I take it off and toss it into a swamp? That’s Option Three, though, self-damaging behavior designed to maroon him here. He doesn’t do such things. He can barely even fantasize them.
Well, then, the sauropod comes back and steps on the capsule, crushing it beyond use…
Impossible. The capsule is strong enough to withstand submersion to thirty-atmosphere pressures.
The sauropod pushes it into quicksand, and it sinks out of sight?
Mallory is pleased with himself for coming up with that one. It’s good for a moment or two of interesting uneasiness. He imagines himself standing at the edge of some swamp, staring down forlornly as the final minutes tick away and the timemobile, functional as ever even though it’s fifty fathoms down in gunk, sets out for home without him. But no, no good: The capsule moves just as effectively through space as through time, and it would simply activate its powerful engine and climb up onto terra firma again in plenty of time for his return trip.
What if, he thinks, a band of malevolent intelligent dinosaurs appears on the scene and forcibly prevents me from getting back into the capsule?
That’s more like it. A little shiver that time. Good! Cut off, stranded in the Mesozoic! Living by his wits, eating God knows what, exposing himself to extinct bacteria. Getting sick, blazing with fever, groaning in unfamiliar pain. Yes! Yes! He piles it on. It becomes easier as he gets into the swing of it. He will lead a life of constant menace. He imagines himself taking out his own appendix. Setting a broken leg. And the unending hazards, day and night. Toothy enemies lurking behind every bush. Baleful eyes glowing in the darkness. A life spent forever on the run, never a moment’s ease. Cowering under fern fronds as the giant carnivores go lalloping by. Scorpions, snakes, gigantic venomous toads. Insects that sting. Everything that has been eliminated from life in the civilized world pursuing him here: and he flitting from one transitory hiding place to another, haggard, unshaven, bloodshot, brow shining with sweat, struggling unceasingly to survive, living a gallant life of desperate heroism in this nightmare world…