“What paper?” Thorne said.
The radio clicked again. “Roxton,” Levine said, “believed that tyrannosaurs had a visual system like an amphibian: like a frog. A frog sees motion but doesn’t see stillness. But it is quite impossible that a predator such as a tyrannosaur would have a visual system that worked that way. Quite impossible. Because the most common defense of prey animals is to freeze. A deer or something like that, it senses danger, and it freezes. A predator has to be able to see them anyway. And of course a tyrannosaur could.”
Over the radio, Levine snorted with disgust. “It’s just like the other idiotic theory put forth by Grant a few years back that a tyrannosaur could be confused by a driving rainstorm, because it was not adapted to wet climates. That’s equally absurd. The Cretaceous wasn’t particularly dry. And in any case, tyrannosaurs are North American animals—they’ve only been found in the U.S. or Canada. Tyrannosaurus rex lived on the shores of the great inland sea, east of the Rocky Mountains. There are lots of thunderstorms on mountain slopes. I’m quite sure tyrannosaurs saw plenty of rain, and they evolved to deal with it.”
“So is there any reason why a tyrannosaur might not attack somebody?” Malcolm said.
“Yes, of course. The most obvious one,” Levine said.
“Which is?”
“If it wasn’t hungry. If it had just eaten another animal. Anything larger than a goat would take care of its hunger for hours to come. No, no. The tyrannosaur sees fine, moving or still.”
They listened to the roaring, coming up from the valley below. They saw thrashing in the underbrush, about half a mile away, to the north. More bellowing. The two rexes seemed to be answering each other.
Sarah Harding said, “What are we carrying?”
Thorne said, “Three Lindstradts. Fully loaded.”
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
The radio crackled. “I’m not there,” Levine said, over the radio. “But I’d certainly advise waiting.”
“The hell with waiting,” Malcolm said. “Sarah’s right. Let’s go down there and see how bad it is.”
“Your funeral,” Levine said.
Arby came back to the monitor, wiping his chin. He still looked a little green. “What are they doing now?”
“Dr. Malcolm and the others are going to the nest.”
“Are you kidding?” he said, alarmed.
“Don’t worry,” Kelly said. “Sarah can handle it.”
“You hope,” Arby said.
Nest
Just beyond the clearing, they parked the Explorer. Eddie pulled up in the motorcycle, and leaned it against the trunk of a tree and waited while the others climbed out of the Explorer.
Sarah Harding smelled the familiar sour odor of rotting flesh and excrement that always marked a carnivore nesting site. In the afternoon heat, it was faintly nauseating. Flies buzzed in the still air. Harding took one of the rifles, slung it over her shoulder. She looked at the three men. They were all standing very still, tense, not moving. Malcolm’s face was pale, particularly around the lips. It reminded her of the time that Coffmann, her old professor, had visited her in Africa. Coffmann was one of those hard-drinking Hemingway types, with lots of affairs at home, and lots of tales of his adventures with the orangs in Sumatra, the ring-tailed lemurs in Madagascar. So she took him with her to a kill site in the savannah. And he promptly passed out. He weighed more than two hundred pounds, and she had to drag him out by the collar while the lions circled and snarled at her. It had been a good lesson for her.
Now she leaned close to the three men and whispered, “If you’ve got any qualms about this, don’t go. Just wait here. I don’t want to worry about you. I can do this myself.” She started off.
“Are you sure—”
“Yes. Now keep quiet.” She moved directly toward the clearing. Malcolm and the others hurried to catch up with her. She pushed aside the palm fronds, and stepped out into the open. The tyrannosaurs were gone, and the mud cone was deserted. Over to the right, she saw a shoe, with a bit of torn flesh sticking out above the ragged sock. That was all there was left of Baselton.
From within the nest, she heard a plaintive, high-pitched squeal. Harding climbed up the mud bank, with Malcolm struggling to follow. She saw two infant tyrannosaurs there, mewling. Nearby were three large eggs. They saw heavy footprints all around, in the mud.
“They took one of the eggs,” Malcolm said. “Damn.”
“You didn’t want anything to disrupt your little ecosystem?”
Malcolm smiled crookedly. “Yeah. I was hoping.”
“Too bad,” she said, and moved quickly around the edge of the pit. She bent over, looking at the baby tyrannosaurs. One of the babies was cowering, its downy neck pulled into its body. But the second one behaved very differently. It did not move as they approached, but remained lying sprawled on its side, breathing shallowly, eyes glazed.
“This one’s been hurt,” she said.
Levine was standing in the high hide. He pressed the headset to his ear, and spoke into the microphone near his cheek. “I need a description,” he said.
Thorne said, “There’s two of them, roughly two feet long, weighing maybe forty pounds. About the size of small cassowary birds. Large eyes. Short snouts. Pale-brown color. And there’s a ring of down around the necks.”
“Can they stand?”
“Uh . . . if they can, not very well. They’re kind of flopping around. Squeaking a lot.”
“Then they’re infants,” Levine said, nodding. “Probably only a few days old. Never been out of the nest. I’d be very careful.”
“Why is that?”
“With offspring that young,” Levine said, “the parents won’t leave them for long.”
Harding moved closer to the injured infant. Still mewling, the baby tried to crawl toward her, dragging its body awkwardly. One leg was bent at an odd angle. “I think the left leg’s hurt.”
Eddie came closer, standing alongside her to see. “Is it broken?”
“Yeah, probably, but—”
“Hey!” Eddie said. The baby lunged forward, and clamped its jaws around the ankle of his boot. He pulled his foot away, dragging the baby, which held its grip tightly. “Hey! Let go!”
Eddie lifted his leg up, shook it back and forth, but the baby refused to let go. He pulled for a moment longer, then stopped. Now the baby just lay there on the ground, breathing shallowly, jaws still locked around Eddie’s boot. “Jeez,” Eddie said.
“Aggressive little guy, isn’t he,” Sarah said. “Right from birth . . .”
Eddie looked down at the tiny, razor-sharp jaws. They hadn’t penetrated the leather. The baby held on firmly. With the butt of his rifle, he poked the infant’s head a couple of times. It had no effect at all. The baby lay on the ground, breathing shallowly. Its big eyes blinked slowly as they stared up at Eddie, but it did not release its grip.
They heard the distant roars of the parents, somewhere to the north. “Let’s get out of here,” Malcolm said. “We’ve seen what we came here to see. We’ve got to find where Dodgson went.”
Thorne said, “I think I saw a track up the trail. They might have gone off there.”
“We better have a look.”
They all started back to the car.
“Wait a minute,” Eddie said, looking down at his foot. “What am I going to do about the baby?”
“Shoot it,” Malcolm said, over his shoulder.
“You mean kill it?”
Sarah said, “It’s got a broken leg, Eddie, it’s going to die anyway.”
“Yeah, but—”
Thorne called, “We’re going back up the trail, Eddie, and if we don’t find Dodgson, we’ll take the ridge road going toward the laboratory. Then down to the trailer again.”
“Okay, Doc. I’m right behind you.” Eddie lifted his rifle, turned it in his hands.
“Do it now,” Sarah said, climbing into the Explorer. “Because you don’t want to be here when Momma
and Poppa get back.”
Gambler’s Ruin
Driving up the trail, Malcolm stared at the dashboard monitor, as the image flicked from one camera view to another. He was looking for Dodgson and the rest of his party.
Over the radio, Levine said, “How bad was it?”
“They took one egg,” Malcolm said. “And we had to shoot one of the babies.”
“So, a loss of two. Out of a total hatching brood of what, six?”
“That’s right.”
“Frankly, I’d say it’s a minor matter,” Levine said. “As long as you stop those people from doing anything more.”