we got back to the twenty-first century…
“Uh-oh.”
I looked up to see what Klicks was referring to. Coming toward us was a small bipedal dinosaur, about the size of a chicken. It had a snaking neck, small pointed head, and a little round body looking a lot like a bowling ball. Its metatarsals were elongated, giving it three functional leg segments and a long stride, a common adaptation for high-speed running. It probably felt that its fleet-footedness meant we didn’t pose any threat to it, and certainly it was too small to be a serious threat to us. As it got closer, I saw that it was covered with short feathers and had a crest of red and yellow plumes coming off the back of its head. I guess it figured there was plenty of dead dinosaur meat to go around, and it made a beeline for the pachycephalosaur’s open chest cavity. I tried to shoo it away but it just squawked at me and helped itself to a prize chunk of gizzard.
Klicks was nonchalantly making his way back to the Jeep. I didn’t understand what he was up to at first, but a moment later he was coming back with our largest stasis box, a silver cube a meter on each side. He waited until the thief had nipped into the carcass for another piece of meat, then charged. The feathered dinosaur must have felt the ground vibrate as Klicks ran toward it. It swung its head right around to look at him, blinked twice, then scrambled forward, up onto the back of the dead animal. Klicks wasn’t to be deterred so easily. He climbed right up on top of the corpse, too, and proceeded to chase the little saurischian along the length of the pachycephalosaur’s spine. His prey hopped off and began to hightail it for the safety of a distant stand of trees, but Klicks had the advantage of muscles used to much greater gravity. His legs swung in giant strides, each one sending him sailing ahead three meters. He finally caught up with the tiny meat-eater. Pouncing, he brought the stasis box down upon it. The dinosaur let out a loud yelp, but it was cut off in mid-note as Klicks flipped the box around and slammed the lid, locking the interior into stasis. At least we’d have one live specimen to bring forward with us.
Turning back to my dissection, I slit through the stomach’s wall, taking care not to let the gastric acid spill on me. I wasn’t surprised to find it mostly empty; I wouldn’t want to start a head-butting contest on a full stomach either. What was within seemed to be soft vegetation, including well-chewed gunnera leaves. I wondered if—
There were tons of flesh spread out before me and it took me a second to see what Klicks was pointing at. There, down near the middle of the back, over the hips, a mound of blue Het jelly was percolating to the surface.
Countdown: 10
I jumped back, the thought of touching one of those alien slimeballs again being enough to send my heart racing. The blue jelly had finished exiting the pachycephalosaur and sat there, a pulsing mound, on its hip.
“What do we do with it?” asked Klicks, standing about five meters from the dinosaur corpse.
“I mean, we can’t just leave it here,” he said. “You’ve carved up its vehicle.”
“Serves it right. It almost wrecked our Jeep.”
Klicks shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Huh?”
“Well, you saw the way the pachycephalosaur behaved. A territorial challenge, a ritual head-butting. I think the Het was a passenger within it, not a pilot. It was observing the way the dinosaur behaved, rather than controlling its actions.”
I thought about that, then looked at the butchered mounds of flesh in front of me. External observation followed by dissection seemed inadequate study tools compared with climbing inside the animal’s skin, living its life, feeling its sensations. Klicks was probably right; the pachycephalosaur had been behaving of its own volition, not under Het control. And it had attacked the Jeep with considerable justification, after all.
I nodded. “Okay, then. What do we do?”
“We could take it back to the
It seemed a sensible course of action, except for one thing. “But, Klicks, if this one’s been up here in the mountains for the last few days, it may not know about us. As far as it’s concerned, we’re strange creatures it’s never seen before.”
“Good point.” Klicks cleared his throat and spoke to the blue mound. “Hello,” he said. “Do you understand me? Do you understand English?”
The thing pulsed more quickly. It was obviously reacting to the sound of Klicks’s voice, but whether with an attempt to respond or with sheer terror I couldn’t say.
“I’m sure it can’t talk without a vehicle with vocal cords,” I said.
“Maybe not,” said Klicks. “But it should be able to listen.”
“It has no ears,” I pointed out.
“But it surely can feel the air vibrating as I speak.” He turned to the creature again. “We come in peace,” he said. Funny, I thought, that our language should already have a cliche for greeting aliens. The jelly’s rapid pulsing continued; evidently those words hadn’t calmed the creature. Klicks pointed at the Het, then straight up, apparently trying to convey that he knew that the creature came from the sky. He hoped, I guess, that if the Het realized that we understood that, it would assume that we’d already made friends with others of its kind. There was no response at first, so he tried the gesture three more times. Perhaps the Het finally did catch his meaning, for it soon seemed less agitated.
“Well, I don’t know if I got through to the thing or not,” said Klicks with a shrug. Then an evil smile overtook his features. “Hey, man, perhaps you could lie down next to it and let it crawl into your head. That would be a good sign of friendship.”
“The hell I will! Why don’t you do that?”
“You’re the one whose English they seemed to like best.”
“No, thank you. Once was more than enough.”
“Well, then, what are we going to do?”
“Let’s leave it up to the Het.” I walked back to the Jeep and got a stasis box out of the rear compartment. I put it on its side near the grapefruit-sized mound of jelly. The Het was still for a while, then began to flow toward it, undulating its way along the pachycephalosaur’s haunch. It hesitated at the lip of the box, then pulsed its way into the dark interior. I went to close the lid.
“Don’t!”
I looked at Klicks. “Why not?”
“Once you close the lid, the stasis field will turn on. We can’t shut the field off without a Huang Invertor, and the nearest one of those is sixty-five million years in the future.”
“Oh, hell, right. Okay.” I picked up the box by its handles and looked inside. This was the first chance I’d had to examine a Het with any detachment. I felt a wave of revulsion as I looked at the thing, quivering and blue. It wasn’t uniformly transparent. Rather, there were cloudier parts within, representing places where the jelly was thicker or perhaps of a different constitution. And the faint phosphorescence I’d observed earlier came from thousands of tiny pinpoints of light. They swirled within the plasma, like fireflies moving through molasses. The pulsing of the body wasn’t a contraction and expansion, like a lung. Rather it was an arching motion, the Het pushing itself up from beneath, alternately forming then destroying a concave hollow under its body.
