RIDING THE GIGANOTOSAUR

Michael Swanwick

"How does it feel?"

"It feels great!"

The physical therapist lifted one of George Weskowski's arms and flexed it, to check its range of motion. It took all of her strength to do so, even though George wasn't resisting. She frowned. "No need to roar," she chided.

"Sorry."

"There's a transmitter chip connected to your speech centers. Just subvocalize, and I can pick up what you're saying on this radio. Tell me how your head feels."

He considered. "Fine. Just fine."

"No aches, itches, irritation around the sutures?"

"No."

"Dizziness, nausea, hallucinations, phantom sounds or smells, mood swings, loss of appetite?"

"I could eat a horse!"

The therapist held up a mirror. "Now look at yourself." His skin was green, mottled with yellow, and covered with pebbly scales. His eyes were small, beady, homicidal. His arms, massive compared to what he had once possessed but puny compared to the rest of his new body, ended in three scimitar-taloned fingers. His legs were enormous. So was his tail. Opening his mouth revealed a murderous array of razor-sharp teeth.

"Oh yes," he cried rapturously. "Yes, oh my goodness, yes, absolutely, yes, yes."

"You like it?"

"It's everything I ever dreamed of being."

"The appearance doesn't bother you?"

"I look terrific!"

He did, too. Giganotosaurus was the biggest, baddest predator ever to walk the Earth --larger, heavier, and more fearsome even than the old record-holder, Tyrannosaurus rex. "The king is dead," George whispered to himself. "Long live the king."

"What was that?"

"I said I'm eager to begin therapy, Dr. Alvarez."

"Good. Then let's try standing up."

This, however, was nowhere near so satisfactory. George lurched eagerly to his knees and promptly overbalanced. He leaned against the side of the barn, making the wood creak, to ease his descent to the straw-covered ground. "Damn!"

"Careful --you weigh over eight tons now. And your leg bones are hollow

--like a bird's. You could easily break one doing that."

"I'll remember."

"Good. Now your problem is that you're pushing it. It's only your forebrain we've grafted atop the existing brain, remember, and it isn't familiar with the body. However, the hindbrain knows what to do. All the motor skills are already fully functional. Don't intellectualize. Just picture what you want. The original brain has no defenses against you; it accepts your thoughts as its own. What you have to do is learn to ride it."

"I'll try," he said humbly.

"Excellent. We'll begin by . . ."

Six hours later, George was walking easily around and around the corral. He had even essayed a few brief sprints, with varied results. As he walked, he breathed deeply of the Cretaceous air, savoring the intoxicating mix of greenery and resins, the dark, heady undersmell of decay.

Old Patagonia Station was located on a flood plain, with a fern prairie to one side, and a forest of towering conifers to the other. There was a stream nearby --he could smell it --and the glint of a lake far off in the distance. It was a fresh, wondrous, unexplored world, and he was anxious to be off and into it.

"When can I begin field work?" he asked. Dr. Alvarez pursed her lips. "You're still recovering from the surgery. We won't be making that decision for a few weeks."

"But . . ." He waved a futile little paw outward, toward the lands that stretched to a misty blue horizon and beyond, unspoiled, virginal, his for the taking. He'd have to travel clear around the world to encounter a man-made structure. All the way back to the time station and its outbuildings behind him --and once they were gone, there wouldn't be anything more like them for another ninety million years. "I thought I could get in some hunting before nightfall."

"That reminds me." The therapist went back into the barn and returned, dragging a heavy sack behind her. With a grunt, she hoisted it up and emptied it into a trough.

"What's that?"

"A specially-formulated blend of protein, roughage, and vitamins. The wranglers call it dino chow." She paused. "That's our little joke."

"You expect me to eat kibble?" he asked, horrified. The prairie to one side of Old Patagonia Station had been browsed clear by the migratory herds of titanosaurs, rebbachisaurs, and andesaurs that dominated the local ecology. The forest, though, with its close-thronged trees, presented the colossal herbivores with an impenetrable barrier. They could feed on the leaves at its border, but nothing more. The interior was forbidden them.

But not George.

Large as he was, he was slim enough to slip between the trees --just. He ran, leaped over the fence with a bound, and was gone into the woods. It was a beautiful, sunshiny day, and his greenish-yellow skin blended with the foliage perfectly.

That evening he made his first kill.

He experienced his new life in three distinct phases. There was the initial heady rush of freedom, when he ran as far and fast as his powerful new body would take him, wild with animal joy. Then he settled down into a happy daze. No more bosses! No more networking, no more memos, no more meetings! He'd never see the inside of an office again, sweat out another cold sell, face down another IRS audit. He sauntered along aimlessly, occasionally letting out a roar, just to watch the bright flocks of birds with taloned wings take flight in fear. This phase lasted him about an hour.

Then his stomach rumbled, and suddenly he discovered what a frustrating time and place the Patagonian Cretaceous could be. The problem was that he hadn't the slightest idea of how to hunt, and he was too impatient to simply sit back and let the giganotosaur's old brain take over.

He tried. Twice he saw herbivores in the distance, and his body trembled with blood-lust and began striding toward them. But then --he couldn't help it --he'd bellowed with hunger and bravado, and charged. Each time, the creatures spooked and ran, too fast for him to catch up with them. Those suckers could move! They ran a lot faster than anything that size had any right to run.

He, in turn, was a sprinter --capable of the short, shocking dash that could do the job if he were close enough to overtake his target in the first mad rush of his attack. Before the creature could get it's unwieldy bulk moving. Then, briefly, he was the fastest animal in existence. But he could only maintain that insane spurt of speed for a few minutes. More than that, his energy would give out, and his prey would escape every time.

So he realized he would have to stalk the brutes. Running lightly along the fringe between forest and prairie, George saw in the distance a number of black specks. As he came closer, the specks resolved themselves into long-necked giants feeding upon the tall trees at the edge of the prairie.

Titanosaurs. They were immense things, averaging some twenty-five to thirty meters in length. It was hard to see how they managed to eat enough to keep such tremendous bodies fed. Even a small one would rot long before George could eat it all.

Slyly, he slipped into the forest.

With a stealthy ease that both pleased and astonished him, he sped quietly between the dark trees. It was a climax forest, so there was plenty of room between the trunks. The ground was covered with a litter of decomposing leaves, which deadened the sound of his footfalls. He was able to get so close to the titanosaurs that he could hear them chomping down on leaves and branches, and smell the stinking mounds of dung they left behind.

Cautiously, he drew closer.

Slanting rays of dusty yellow sunshine pierced the green canopy overhead and descended like beams of grace to its dark floor. Birds with toothed beaks flitted through the beams, like painted angels briefly glimpsed in the glory of early morning. George waited for his eyes to adapt, then crept into the new growth at the verge of the forest. He looked up at the nearest titanosaur. Its neck stretched up into the trees, taller than any giraffe's.

God, he thought. Look at the size of that monster. For an instant --only an instant --his spirit quailed. Then he gathered all his strength and, with a scream, ran straight at the nearest giant, intending to leap up at its soft, undefended throat, and tear it open. But it didn't quite work out that way.

The instant the titanosaur became aware of him, it shifted its weight onto its hind legs and wheeled about. That slender, endless tail came slashing around like a whip, straight at George. For an instant he could not think. His mind went completely blank with astonishment. That instant was the saving of him.

While George was mentally paralyzed, his giganotosaur reflexes took over, skidding his body to a stop, ducking frantically down, and scrabbling desperately with legs and stubby little arms to get away from the gigantic sauropod. The tail came crashing down and dealt him a glancing blow. He received the merest fraction of its force, but that was enough. It knocked him over and sent him tumbling back into the small trees and cycads at the verge of the forest. And it stung. It stung like blue blazes.

By the time George had gathered himself together and stood again, aching but unbroken, the titanosaur was gone. It had ambled away, further down the forest line, and its fellows with it, to look for some food that wasn't infested with impertinent little predators. George burned with humiliation.

This wasn't what he'd paid for. This wasn't what he'd spent a lifetime slaving away in the financial markets in order to buy. He'd wanted to be a carnivore, goddamnit, a killer in fact as well as in spirit. The ball-busting and competitor-breaking aspects of the business world had their satisfactions. But he'd wanted to experience competition in its purest form, murderous and merciless, as Nature had intended. It was obvious to him now that no predator, not even the mighty giganotosaur, was meant to prey upon the giant sauropods. They were protected by their size, their bulk, their mass. It had been folly to think he could hunt down and kill a titanosaur.

This was a disappointment, but one he would have to live with. He was just going to have to scale down his expectations a bit. Someday, perhaps, he would know enough to take out one of those big bastards. But in the meantime, he had to get himself fed.

While he was preoccupied with his thoughts, the giganotosaur had gotten itself up and crept back to the verge of the forest. It found a place where it could crouch, hidden by the new growth, and there it waited. By the time George was able to focus outward again, his body had found what it wanted for supper. He didn't know what the creature was called. It was small for a dinosaur, about the size of a large boar, and went about on four legs, rooting in the dirt among the ferns and low bushes of the prairie. George watched it, motionless, from the edge of the forest. His binocular vision was excellent --better than what his human eyes had enjoyed for a decade. His body knew what to do. It quivered with tension, anxious to attack. But he held it back, with forced patience. He wanted his first kill to be a clean one.

The creature moved a little closer to him, a little further away, a little closer again. It was oblivious to his presence. Finally, he let slip the leash. His body charged forward, almost silently, head low and close to the ground. The creature looked up, saw him, and squealed. But before it could turn and run, he was upon it. His massive jaws closed upon its neck with a snap. Blood spurted, warm and sticky. He shook his head twice, to snap the beast's spine. And it was dead. He crunched it down to nothing in a matter of minutes.

Afterwards, he sought out a stream and drank until his thirst was slaked. The water was warm and brown. It tasted great. When he'd had his fill, he lay on his stomach in the ferns above the bank. Dragonflies came and hovered in the air before him like small helicopters. He stared dreamily out into the western sky, where the setting sun was painting the clouds gold and orange and red, and took stock. Since this morning he had experienced pride, anger, gluttony, and --now --sloth. Four of the seven deadly sins in the course of a few hours.

By God, that was the way to spend a day.

This was the life for a man.

They caught up with him a week later. He was tearing away great hunks of flesh from the side of an australotopsian he had killed, when he heard the growl of an internal combustion engine in the distance. He ignored it, crunching ribs and pushing his muzzle into the cavity thus opened in search of the heart.

He liked the heart best. It made him feel more of a predator to eat an animal's heart while it was still warm. How many times had he wished he could do this to one of his competitors? Countless times. Now he could. The Land Rover pulled up. Two figures got out.

"Having fun?"

George lifted his head from his prey. His muzzle was wet with blood. His eyes, surely, glittered with the savage joy of the kill. He knew that he must look the perfect image of Satanic fury. He grinned. "I sure am, Dr. Alvarez."

The man standing behind Alvarez involuntarily drew back a step. But she stood her ground. "Well, fun time's over. You've got work to do. I've come to take you back to the station."

He'd noticed the trailer behind the Land Rover, and suspected what it was for. But the australotops was the biggest thing he had killed so far, and he was glad to have witnesses.

"I've got an idea of how a giganotosaur could take out a titanosaur, doctor. If I were to charge it from the side, leap up, and then cling to it with my forearms --they're certainly strong enough; I could use them like grappling hooks --then I could kick quite a gash into its side with my powerful hind limbs. All I'd have to do then is drop off and follow the titanosaur from a safe distance. Even if it didn't die from loss of blood, the wound would be sure to get infected. Voila --a year's supply of hamburger!"

"Mr. Weskowski, nobody is interested in what hunting strategies a dinosaur with a human brain could come up with. We want to learn what hunting strategies it has. We want to learn how a giganotosaur really operates. And for that, we need you to come back, cooperate, and apply yourself to your studies."

George threw his head back and laughed. His auditors put their hands over their ears. "Let me talk to him," the man said then. He was a slender little fellow, with a thin mustache. "And who are you?" George asked. "I don't believe we've been introduced."

"My name is Ramon Delgado. I'm a doctor of paleontological transition psychology."

"I don't need a psychologist. Especially one with a specialty so new that I'm its only possible subject."

"Mr. Weskowski, please listen to me. You've gone directly from an aged, cancer-ridden body to one that's strong and extremely physical --it makes sense that you'd feel a certain exuberance. A sense of personal invulnerability. But you can't simply break all ties with humankind. Strong as you are, big as you are, you can't exist on your own."

"When I was a kid," George said, "the Speaker of the House was a man named Newt Gingrich. This was back in the United States, you understand, and at that time the Speaker of the House was an extremely powerful man.

"Now, old Newt decided he wanted something to brighten up his office. So he strolled over to the Smithsonian, picked out a Tyrannosaurus rex skull from their collection, and took it with him. Oh boy, how the curators hated him for that! But there was nothing they could do about it. Because he had the power. And they were just a bunch of scientists."

"I fail to see the point of your parable," Dr. Delgado said carefully.

"It's simply that there are people who have to do what they're told to do, and people who don't. I'm one of the latter. All my life, I was a renegade, a rule-breaker. Did you know that I was a pioneer in lawsuit futures?"

"I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the term."

"It's like junk bonds. You find a potentially profitable lawsuit like, oh let's say, against automobile manufacturers for making a product that kills tens of thousands of people a year. Now, normally a suit like that, against a multibillion-dollar industry, with countless lawyers and the willingness to spend decades in litigation, isn't worth pursuing. Who can afford to wait that long for the payoff? But here's the beauty part. We made up bonds selling a fixed fraction of the eventual settlement, enough to raise a war chest of several hundred million dollars. And, win or lose, we turned an immediate profit. Suddenly, the most unlikely lawsuits are doable!"

"This worked?" Delgado said dubiously.

"We unleashed a flood of lawsuits! The United States of America was paralyzed! The GNP took a nose dive! They had to pass laws against what we were doing to prevent the collapse of their entire economic system. But of course by then, I'd already made my bundle." Dr. Delgado looked sick. "You may have made a lot of money," he said.

"But at what cost in human suffering? For what?"

"Why, for this!" George dipped down to rip off another five-hundred-pound chunk of carcass. He swallowed it down whole, distending his throat grotesquely, then continued, "This is my retirement plan. Half my money went into a trust for the grandkids. The other half went to pay for this."

Alvarez stepped forward, her eyes flashing. "No, it only went partway toward paying for this. A great deal of the cost of this project came out of Argentina's science research budget. That's why you had to sign those contracts agreeing to pay us back with your labor as a researcher."

"Too bad," George said complacently. "Looks to me like you negotiated yourself a raw deal."

"We negotiated in good faith, Mr. Weskowski."

"You forgot to make it enforceable. You forgot to come up with a way to make Mr. Giganotosaurus give a damn."

He winked and was gone.

Time passed --a season, perhaps less. A cloudy day came when George was ambling moodily across the prairie, moving from stream to stream, watering hole to watering hole, just to see what terror he could stir up among the herbivores. He was feeling rather lonely. More and more, of late, he was feeling lonely. He was contemplating returning to the station, just to see how things were going. He wasn't about to give up his freedom and go to work for them, of course. But he'd learned a lot about being a giganotosaur. Maybe he could barter a bit of information in exchange for some companionship.

It was precisely then that he experienced something unlike anything he had ever felt before. One instant, everything was normal, and the next all was changed, changed absolutely. He smelled something! His head whipped around, seemingly of its own volition. Something alluring. Without understanding why, George found himself running. What's happening to me? he wondered. His mind felt dazed and confused, helplessly out of control, and at the same time strangely joyous. But the body knew what it wanted, and it knew, too, what to do. He crashed through the thin fringe of cycads along a stream, and splashed through the water and up the other bank. Leafy branches whipped away from his enormous body, and then he was face to face with the source of his new emotions: It was another giganotosaur. But this one was a female, a queen. He could tell by her scent. And she was waiting for him. He could tell that by her scent too. Their eyes locked. Mincingly, with coquettish little steps, the queen turned away from him, lowering her head, and raising her tail. Her eyes never left his. He would have thought that the bulge where the top of his skull had been removed and replaced with a ceramic cap to protect his human forebrain would have made him unattractive to a female giganotosaur. Particularly since the skin that had been force-grown over it was still new and pinkish. But it was obvious that this queen thought him a wholly proper giganotosaur.

She raised her head and made a warbling noise. George felt a strange surging sensation down below, in his cloaca and penile nubs. Distantly, the human part of him felt a kind of repulsed horror. This is bestiality, it babbled, it's sinful, it's wrong, it's disgusting. But that was mere intellectualization. Waves of chemicals swept up from the brain stem and overwhelmed his thoughts, tumbling and drowning them in wild tides of a lust more pure and primitive than anything he'd ever felt before. He made a deep sound in the back of his throat.

She answered him.

He moved toward her.

She did not retreat.

They screwed right there in the open. The mechanics of it were awkward. They involved him getting alongside her and slowly forcing her to the ground, and then throwing one leg over her stiff tail, while she twisted around toward him, so their private parts could connect. It wasn't easy. But connect they did, and with a roar of triumph he entered her. It didn't last nearly as long as human sex did. Once they had forced their cloacae together, the act was half-done. But the experience was beyond words. It was the apotheosis of physical contact, all need and urgent selfishness, with not a thought for the pleasure or comfort of his partner. It was rutting, pure and simple.

And it felt great. Once, the queen moved as if to disengage. Quick as a flash, he seized her throat with his sharp-taloned little arms --now he knew what they were good for! --and didn't let go until he'd gotten everything he wanted out of her.

I have another data point for you, Dr. Alvarez, he thought fleetingly. Dino sex is terrific sex. He'd been to Thailand and he'd been to the Philippines, and wherever he'd gone, he'd bought the best. This was better.

Afterwards he lay sprawled on his back in the ferns, one foot dangling up in the air, like a tabby rolling in a catnip patch. Maybe I'll get a bumper sticker made up and stick it on my ass, he thought: Giganotosaurs Do It With Genitalia Bigger Than Your Entire Body.

He had his eyes closed and was savoring the heat of the sun on their lids when something thumped on the ground beside him. George opened his eyes. It was a juvenile sauropod leg, torn from a carcass that was, by the smell of it, still reasonably fresh. Above it loomed his queen. Obviously a girl who knew how to take care of her guy. Then he looked beyond her, and rolled over and up on his feet in astonishment. There were two more giganotosaurs standing behind her! They were both female as well. George smiled inwardly. Take a number, ladies, he thought, and we'll see what I can do.

Thus began the best period of his life. The queens filled his days with sex and companionship, hunting with him when he felt the urge, and hunting for him when he did not. The vague notion he had been incubating of returning to Old Patagonia Station faded to nothing, like the mists that dissolved each morning with the rising of the Mesozoic sun. The world was his. He filled it. It existed for him and him alone. He inhabited it in all its aspects. In George's universe, all that mattered was him and his three queens. They were his posse. They were the street gang he'd never belonged to as a kid. They were the outlaws he'd always wanted be one of, but never dared approach. They were the bad boys, the bullies, the kids from the wrong side of the track, whose lives had always looked so alluring and dangerous from the vantage point of his staid middle-class upbringing. They took what they wanted, fucked whom they wished, did whatever entered their heads, and never asked anyone for permission or forgiveness. Eat. Fuck. Kill. It was a relationship he could understand. It was life pared down to its essence. And--for a while--life was good.

Then, one day, they turned on him.

It caught him by surprise. The queens had been moody and restless all morning, but what of that? They were dinosaurs. They were carnivores. They were supposed to have an attitude. He was stalking in the lead position when one of his queens, the largest of the three and the one he had known first (Evem he had named her, and the other two were Slut and Scarface, though they would none of them ever know it), lengthened her stride and came up alongside him. He didn't turn to look. There was an australotopsian up ahead - -he could smell the fragile life within it, warm and appetizing--and George was hungry. All his attention was focused on his unwary prey. The queen matched strides with him. Her head twisted to face his.

Suddenly, without warning, she lunged. Her great jaws came crunching down on the side of his face. Those nightmare teeth pierced skin and flesh in a dozen places and, with a hideous grating noise, ground against the bones of his jaw and skull.

Jesus fucking Christ--that hurt! The pain was blinding. George jerked away, feeling his tough skin rip like paper as the queen's teeth slid free from his face. She lunged at him again. He veered clumsily away, only to find that Scarface had come up on his other side, blood-lust in her eyes. Then Slut screamed behind him, and he knew that he had neither friend nor ally in all the world.

He ran.

Blind with panic, he fled. Like furies, the queens pursued him across the rolling prairie. He let them chase him where they would, turning aside when a lake loomed up before him, and then up along a creek that fed into that lake. A stand of cycads forced him into the water, splashing frantically up the sandy stream bed, and then he had neither time nor the presence of mind to climb out. He had no choice but to go upstream, away from the lake.

They hunted him as a team--one queen on each bank, and Eve noisily splashing in the stream behind him. The banks rose to either side, which was all to the good, for it meant that only the one queen was an immediate danger to him. But sooner or later the stream would narrow, which was disastrous, for he knew that if ever Scarface and Slut got into a position to jump on him from above, they would do it. He had seen them practice such hunting maneuvers before. He ran in abject terror, leaping the fallen logs that formed dams and bridges across the water, slipping on the layers of wet leaves that gathered at the bottom of the creek's still pools, stumbling on sudden changes in texture of the creek bed. How many times had he run down game with them in this exact same manner? A dozen? A hundred? It hardly mattered. Now it was his turn. Ravening, the giganotosaurs harried him up the stream. So this is what terror feels like, he thought crazily. The water smashed underfoot and branches whipped his face. His legs ached and his lungs burned, and yet the queens --who could have been no less exhausted --did not fall back. They could smell his blood, and having smelled blood were mad for the kill. They screamed like harpies. It made no sense, damn it. It wasn't rational! What did the bitches want from him? If they meant to drive him away --then, yes, he would go, and happily, and never once look back, damn them. They didn't need to keep chasing him! But if they were hungry, there was a world full of game that could be run down with a fraction the effort they were expending now. Anyway, he was a carnivore --no animal killed a carnivore for food unless it was literally starving. His flesh simply wouldn't taste good! It didn't make sense. It just wasn't fair.

Why couldn't they see that? Coming around a curve he saw that the stream ahead ran straight and true, and for an instant his heart lifted, for he dared hope that he could put on a burst of speed here that would discourage and leave behind his pursuers. But then he raised his sight to the next bend, and all hope died within him.

A great mound of dead trees and branches, twice his height, clogged the bed there. The shallow stream as it was now could never have held such a load. This tangle had been deposited here by a spring flood that had swollen the creek far beyond its present banks, and then, subsiding, left its burden of debris behind.

There was no way around the thing--not without climbing up into the waiting jaws of either Scarface or Slut. He would have to climb over it. It was not at all certain that he could climb over it, though. The near uselessness of his tiny forelimbs would make it extremely difficult. As would the three raging queens snapping at his heels, ready to leap upon him should he fall. There had to be some alternative. Frantically he wracked his brain. Wildly, he looked around for some way--any way!--out of this predicament. There was none. So when he came to the tangle, he tried to run straight up it. His tremendous foot landed solid on one of the logs. He twisted his body and leaped for a second. That seized, he leaned his body forward, chest sliding against the branches, and surged upward. His feet scrabbled for purchase. He was now his own height above the streambed, and still climbing. He tried to fight his way yet higher. And failed.

A log rolled under his feet, and simultaneously Eve arrived at the log jam to find him out of her reach. Furiously she rammed her head into the tangle like a powerful hammer. The combination of his weight and her force set everything into motion.

The other two queens, meanwhile, had jumped down from the bank and were trying to reach him from either side. Screaming in rage, they leaped upon the overtoppling deadwood, splintering branches and further destabilizing the entire mass. All the world shifted underfoot. George fell over backwards, and the pile on top of him. Logs tumbled and rolled over onto his chest. A roaring confusion of noise filled his ears. He felt a leg snap between two tree trunks. Through a haze of pain, he saw logs settling down over him. The queens had leaped away when the deadwood began to slide. Now they returned to see if they could get at him. Once! Twice! Three times they rammed their massive heads against the pile, trying to force a way to George's still body. They could not. George was pinned down at the bottom of the pile, and no application of giganotosaur strength would suffice to dig him free. He was there permanently. Finally, they left him for dead. He was not dead, though. He only wished he were. Lying half in and half out of the water, with the crushing weight of the logs pressing down upon him, George rested his head against the cool, cool mud, and prayed for an end to his pain.

It did not come.

After a time he noticed a protorat staring at him from deep within the tangled wood, its eyes glittery with terror. Looking back, he remembered a time not many days ago when for amusement he had stood spraddle-legged and motionless for almost an hour by the burrow of one of this creature's small mammalian kinsfolk. Waiting . . . waiting with dinosaur patience for the beastie to emerge, blinking and optimistic, into the dawn of an age that would soon, within another few tens of millions of years, end with the extinction of the dinosaurs and the opportunistic rise of this insignificant vermin's offspring. His patience had been rewarded. At last the creature had come forth, a small, hairy, and undistinguished animal, and quite possibly the direct ancestor of Man. The timid little thing reared up on its hind legs directly in front of George's stupendous body. Wee ancestor, George thought, you've just won the grand prize in the Evolution's Clearing House Sweepstakes. When I and my kind are gone, your descendants will get to rule everything. Then he had pissed on it.

How many gallons of urine had he drenched the little bastard with?

Impossible to say. It was a lot, anyway. Battered and hysterical, the mammal had fled back into the ground. George had roared with laughter then, over and over, startling and confusing his queens and shocking the prairie into fearful silence.

"Come to get your revenge, have you?" George muttered. "Going to defend the honor of your kind by gnawing on my bones?" But there was no radio anywhere near to receive his words, and even if the protorat could have heard them, it wouldn't've understood. In any event, it did not move. Its chest trembled with panicky breath and its dread-filled eyes jerked every time George shifted his gaze, but otherwise it was motionless. "Well, you're in luck," George continued. "I'm trapped, I'm in pain, and I don't think I'm ever going to get out of here." Those marcasite eyes jerked again, and George scowled. "Why are you still here? If you're so afraid of me, why haven't you run?"

He focused all his attention on the beast and discovered what he had missed before: That its tail was caught between two logs. It was as trapped as he was. There was irony here, if he only knew how to read it. Here he was, the biggest, meanest bruiser ever to walk the Earth--helpless. He was as irrevocably trapped as the weak, fearful creature quivering before him. They were one in their dilemma. Well, these past few months excepted, when hadn't he been trapped?

Caught up in his work, entangled in a marriage that had slowly turned grey and joyless, sandbagged by a detective with a camera in a hotel room in Albany and subsequently shafted in the divorce settlement, and finally, at age seventy-two, painted into a corner by his firm's mandatory retirement policy.

And what did he have to show for it all?

Now that he was going to die, what was he leaving behind? One very wealthy ex, three kids who didn't particularly care for him (not that he blamed them), and four of the sweetest grandchildren anybody had ever laid eyes on. The grandchildren, anyway, were good. The rest was not. He'd made a pot of money over a long lifetime running with the wolves in the financial markets, and spent it all on a much shorter lifetime running with the giganotosaurs in the wild. And in the end everybody --humans and dinosaurs alike --he'd trusted had turned on him. It only confirmed what he'd learned long ago. There was no loyalty in this world. Every man lived alone, and he died alone as well. That was simply the way it was. Something squeaked.

It was a very small sound, but it brought his attention back, with a start, to the trapped protorat. The animal's tail was caught in the junction of two logs, the uppermost of which also lay across the top of his own head and shoulder. He could not hope to free himself from the woodpile. But if he summoned all his strength, he could shift the logs a little. Not enough to do him any good. But maybe enough to free the terrified mammal.

"I could do it," George said, "but I'm not going to. If I have to die, then so do you." The protorat stared at him uncomprehendingly, still afraid. For a long moment he said nothing. Then: "All right, you sonofabitch," he rumbled, "live." He heaved his shoulder and the logs parted for an instant, freeing the protorat's tail. In a flash, it was gone.

"Didn't even . . . stay around long enough to say . . . thanks, did you?" George said. This last, pointless expenditure of energy had just about used him up. He didn't have any more reserves of strength to draw on.

"Your descendants . . . are going to be . . . just like you." Still--and inexplicably, for what use was a protorat's life to anyone, even itself? --it made him feel better knowing that if he had to die, he could at least postpone the experience for something else. Just as his eyes were closing for what he was convinced was the last time, he heard a throbbing noise, like the warm and beating heart of the world opening to him, to share with him some desperately important revelation. Lying with his face half in the water, he listened. And in the instant before the darkness closed around him, he penetrated the secret of that sound, and knew it for what it was: A helicopter.

Greyness wrapped itself about him then, like a thick wool blanket, and he fell into a troubled, painful sleep. Once he heard somebody say, "Oh, man, this is going to take a lot of antibiotic," and then no more.

"Well, if it isn't Peter Pan!"

"Dr. Alvarez," George mumbled. He did not meet her eyes. "And Dr. Delgado, too. It's good to see you."

"You're lucky we've been monitoring your vital signs," Alvarez said.

"Otherwise, you'd be dead."

"I know," George said meekly. Then, "You . . . had a chip in me? You knew where I was all the time?"

"It was in your contract. Surely you read it through."

"Oh, yeah. I remember now." George was hanging from the center of the barn in a kind of makeshift sling-and-traction arrangement. One leg was plastered into a cast. There were bandages everywhere, and wide strips of tape wrapped tightly around his chest. He'd been told some ribs were broken.

"So what happened?"

"My queens attacked me." George felt a great emptiness, a bottomless sense of betrayal. "For no reason! One minute everything was great, the next minute --bam! Dr. Alvarez, why did they do that? Why?"

"Your queens were in heat when you met them. Giganotosaurs, like every other theropod we know of, are only periodically interested in sex. Once the mating season was over they weren't interested in having you around anymore. You can't blame them for this --male giganotosaurs will eat their young if given the chance. We would have told you this, if you'd only listened."

"Oh."

He'd been a fool. Vast landscapes of his self-delusion opened up before him. Tears filled his great eyes. He hadn't known that dinosaurs could cry.

Dr. Alvarez snorted disdainfully. "This is what you wanted, Mr. Weskowski--nature red in fang and claw, right? Only, in reality life in the wild is usually solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." He made an unhappy noise in his throat.

But now Dr. Delgado stepped forward. "Please, Maria," he said admonishingly. "You're not helping. Go away." And to George: "I want to read something to you. I got this out of the library when I heard you were being airlifted back to the station. It's from a sermon by John Donne, and I think you're capable of understanding it now." He got out a small brown leather-jacketed book from his pocket, adjusted his glasses, smoothed down his mustache with two nervous strokes of a long, lean finger, and began to read:

"No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."

He looked up again, a serious expression on his narrow intellectual face.

"You tried to declare independence from humanity, and for several reasons it didn't work. Some of these reasons are pragmatic --access to decent medical care being one of them. Others, though, are matters of the soul. You never were a giganotosaur, you know. Only a man riding on top of one."

For a second time, George's eyes filled with tears.

"Well, Mr. Weskowski," Delgado said. "Are you ready to rejoin the human race?"

It was a bright Cretaceous morn. Claw-winged archaeopteryxes were singing in the trees. The gently mournful cry of the rebbachisaur sounded over the prairie. Dawn mice were scuttling furtively about, harvesting seed from the flowering plants that flourished in the shade of the woods. George ignored them. He stood waiting, as still and motionless as a billboard.

He'd been working for weeks following a small herd of titanosaurs, studying their behavior, their eating patterns, their rudimentary social structure. He could do that, for his smell was familiar and unthreatening to the titanosaurs, where that of humans was not. Every night, after they'd bedded down, he'd transmitted his findings back to Old Patagonia Station.

An engine sounded in the distance. This was not the first, but only the most recent of many such studies. He'd proven himself time after time as a capable and hard-working researcher. Now he was waiting for his reward. The engine noise grew steadily louder. It peaked and crescendoed. Almost here. George found himself trembling with excitement.

A jeep came up over the rise, and slowed to a noisy stop. Alvarez was in the driver's seat. She cut the engine and slammed open a door.

"Everybody out!" she shouted. The children came tumbling out of the jeep, laughing and shouting. They fell silent when they saw George. He stretched out his arms toward them. "Come on, kids!" he cried joyfully. "Let Grampa give you a ride on his back!" Click here to return to the feature Click here to enter to win a copy of Bones of the Earth

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