reinforced locker holding the charges. She reached the bow . . . and slipped.
No doubt about it, she thought with an odd disinterest, her ankle was definitely broken. She lay breathing heavily, rain pelting her mud-streaked face. Her arms moved weakly on the wet ground.
Have to . . . get . . . charges . . .
Despite the pain, she inched forward. The earth grew wetter, more slippery beneath her. Must ignore the pain, she told herself. Pretend it doesn't exist. Refusing to accede to positive thinking, the pain grew worse. Her femur was a log in a fireplace, burning evenly.
She paused for breath. Moisture covered her mouth. She licked her lips. Not water: thicker, pungent . . . familiar.
She glanced downward. She was lying not in thin mud; or a puddle of rain but in thick oil. It must, she thought wildly, be a natural pool, oozing to the surface. That meant a potentially huge field requiring little drilling. Just drop in the pumps and suck it out. The company would be pleased.
The boat, the boat . . . she forced herself ahead. Hand, knee, hand, knee . . . Maybe it wouldn't notice her, a dim, slow-moving little lump in the darkness. Her head bumped something: the side of the boat.
Up now, she ordered herself. Hand grip gunwale, other hand grip, pull . . . pull, dammit!
Her head was over the side. Ahead, still secure beneath the center seat, was the small metal locker holding the charges. It was neatly latched and untouched. She started to pull herself into the boat.
Something made her nose wrinkle.
Creosote.
They found the boat and the remnants of the tent a week later. The hurricane had spent its strength and petered out over Alabama.
'Damn shame,' Hardin muttered, kneeling to pick up a battered, broken shape. 'This might've been the radio.'
'Might,' agreed his disconsolate companion. Weinberger had worked in Styrene with both missing geologists. His eyes surveyed the storm-battered swamp, the bayou behind them where an iron ring was still tied to a stump of cypress. It was all they'd found of the survey party's missing outboard.
Nearby was a small pool of oil, a smudge on the earth. Stains showed it had recently been modestly larger. Shreds of clothing lay scattered around and within the stained soil.
'Looks like the storm tore the clothes right off their backs.'
Hardin, his hands on his hips, nudged the blackened fragments of polyester and nylon. 'Hundred-twentymile- per-hour winds could do that, sure. Looks like they found some oil, too.'
'Afraid not, Sheriff.' Weinberger eyed the stained earth and the bit of fluid remaining with an experienced gaze, indicated the traces of two similar pools nearby.
'They must have had it with them, though I'm damned if I can figure why. That old geezer back upstream said they only bought gas from him.'
A glint of me caught his eye, and he bent, recovering an oil-stained lump of dull gold-colored slag. It was about the size of a belt buckle.
'Wonder what this was.' He chucked it aside, sighed. 'Oh, the oil? It's fresh, new. Hasn't come out of the ground. No, I'm afraid they didn't find anything at all.'
PLEISTOSPORT
Sitting atop the TV in my study is the skull of a sabertoothed tiger (Smilodon californicus), cast in resin from the original and painted to look exactly like it. The lower jaw raises and dowers to show how the great slashing saber teeth passed neatly outside the bone. A stuffed Garfield sits beneath those impressive teeth, grinning imperturbably. Relatives, it would seem. I talk again of cats.
When I was growing up, paleontologists were so busy trying to sort out which head belonged to which skeleton and whether Iguanodon walked upright or on all fours that they had tittle time to devote to visuals. Color does not fossilize. Within the past decade or so artists such as William Stout, Richard Bell, Linda Broad, and John Sibbick have done for prehistoric life what Chris Foss did for spaceships. Patterning replaced monotones, and color took its rightful place in our picture of the ancient world.
Great gray eminences such as the sauropods and therapods were colorized not by Ted Turner but by reason and logic. Suddenly they were transformed from towering symbols of a bygone eon into living, breathing creatures. They acquired Color. Color for attracting mates, color to warn, color to camouflage. Nature did not invent man and the paintbrush simultaneously. Previously the Mesozoic was thought to be a dull place. Dinosaurs were large like elephants, so naturally they were portrayed in elephantine gray.
The later mammals fared no better. Herbivores were as brown as bison. The big cats and catlike carnivores were sandy yellow, like lions. It was obvious and most likely inaccurate. The ancient environments were as varied as those of today. As animal life expanded to fill specific niches in those environments, what more natural than that they should change color and size to fit them? No less could be expected of possible subspecies of Smilodon.
As far as I'm concerned, someone who hunts for food occupies higher moral ground than do those of us who go to the supermarket to buy our meat preslaughtered. But one who hunts for a ' 'trophy ' dwells below the moral and intellectual level of a diseased Neanderthal. To the former, respect and even admiration. To the latter, this story.
There is a beautiful painting done in colored scratchboard and airbrush by the noted California wildlife artist Lewis Jones that illustrates this tale.
Thackeray enjoyed the pleistocene.
Oh, he also liked the nest of the Quaternary period, but the Pleistocene was his favorite. It contained a greater variety of large animals than any other part of the Quaternary. And if you were lucky, you might catch a glimpse of one of the protohominids that might or might not be your great-grandpa several million times removed.
It was a shame, though, that the time puncture didn't encompass any more than the Quaternary. Still, one to five million years gave a man plenty of room to explore. If you tried for anything more recent than one million, the Chronovert just sat in its station stall and whined petulantly. Try for beyond five million and the Chronovert (and likely as not its passenger, too) ended up a pile of expensive slag.
If only the technicians could add another hundred million years to the puncture! What he wouldn't pay to be able to come back with the head of a tyrannosaur or a Deinonychus to mount in the aerie he'd built above Santa Fe. The boys at the club would vote him a life membership, at least.
Of course, those limp-wristed wimps who belonged to the Time Preservationist Society would launch into their usual tirades, just as they did now whenever he or a friend brought back a trophy. Ranting and raving they'd be about preserving the ecology and inviolability of the past. Well, he knew why they were so vitriolic in their condemnation of the Quaternate hunters. It was because none of the faggots had the guts to travel in the past themselves.
He scrunched lower in his seat. Snow was falling steadily outside the blind. The camouflaged tent kept him concealed and cozy warm. Ice goggles let him penetrate the drifting whiteness with relative ease.
The Wincolt .50-caliber lay close at hand, its forty-round high-power drum locked tight into the barrel, telescopic heat-sensitive sight ready to warn him if anything came within killable range, laser pickup itching to pick out a fatal spot. Thackeray was proud of his equipment. After all, he was a sportsman.
He reached behind the cushioned, electrically warmed chair and picked up the thermos of coffee. Part of his muffler blew into his mouth, and he irritably shoved it aside while he sipped the hot Kona. Beyond the triangular entrance to the blind and downslope tumbled a foaming river. To his right lay the edge of the primordial ice sheet. Somewhere beneath those miles of solid ice lay land that in his own time would be the province of Canada, subterritory of British Columbia.
