Cretaceous Sea

'Daddy!' she cried out.

Con's father turned and seemed to look straight at her. His face was red and blistered, except for two hand-shaped areas around his eyes. 'Pete!' shouted her father. 'The time machine! It's starting to work!' Green replied, 'Thank ...' The screen went blank. The man spoke, and it disappeared. Then the man put the rock away.

'Who were those two individuals?' asked the woman.

Con covered her face with her hands and began to weep. 'That's my father, my father.' When she looked up, one of the men had the weapon pointed at her. 'What happened to him?' she asked between sobs.

'No questions,' barked the man with the weapon.

'He was destroyed with the probe,' said the woman. The woman's reply sparked an angry discussion among the interrogators. Con continued to weep as they argued.

'Cease crying,' said the man with the weapon, when the argument ended. 'If you persist in being uselessly emotional, I will fire.'

Con stifled her sobs and told them about Peter Green and how he had acquired the time machine. Each state-ment she made elicited a rapid barrage of additional ques-tions. The interrogation continued for over an hour, and though Con answered every question directly and truth-fully, her interrogators became increasingly impatient and irritated. The men, in particular, seemed very an-noyed. The woman said something in their language, and the questioning stopped. 'It is tiring to deal with an inacces-sible mind,' she stated. The three moved to go. The man with the weapon raised it in Con's direction, but a rapid remark from the woman caused him to lower it. All three of them headed for the silvery panel, which opened as they approached.

'You said you'd tell me about Rick' called Con, as they departed. They did not answer her. The panel sealed itself as soon as they were gone.

Con was shaken and confused. The three individuals had told her nothing directly, except that her father and Green were dead, and she had already known that. Con was left to surmise what she could from her observations and from the nature of the questions she had been asked. Her first conjecture was that the people were from the future and their strange appearance was normal for their kind. They certainly were not children. Their somewhat androgynous bodies seemed strong and fully developed, though the woman's shape only hinted at feminine curves.

Con found their manner extremely upsetting. It went beyond condescension or even contempt. They acted like I wasn't human, she decided. The men took no more ef-fort to conceal their repugnance toward her than would a person before an animal. The woman was only margin-ally better. Her curiosity seemed stronger than her aver-sion. Only the woman had looked Con in the eye. The more Con thought about her interrogators, the more distraught she became. She was very worried about Rick. Is he alive? Why wouldn't they tell me that? A sickening thought came to her. Maybe they've disposed of him! 'Disposed' seemed the appropriate word. Con felt they treated her like a stray animal, to be locked up in an empty shed. How else could they have left me here, naked and dirty? Perhaps, she reasoned, they thought I wouldn't mind. It seemed hard to believe that people had grown so insensitive. Maybe I'm being punished for stealing the time machine. The time machine was clearly their major concern. Most of their questions were either about it or its asso-ciated technology. They primarily wanted to know about the time travelers' contacts with others. It seemed to Con like they were trying to track the path of a contagion. It was also clear from the interrogation that these people had been unaware of the observatory's existence. Appar-ently, only the data from the probe tipped them off that it existed. Con guessed that the rock-like object contained the information that had been sent to the future. Did it reach our time to sit around for centuries, perhaps mil-lennia? It was the least of the mysteries that bedeviled her.

Con was too agitated to sit still. She had her former body back and, with it, her restless energy. While she appreciated her renewed vigor, she suspected the motives of the strangers who had restored it. I'm not rescued, she thought as she paced across the sand- covered floor, I'm captured. Captured and caged.

In need of something constructive to do, Con grabbed the jacket and began to brush the sand off the bed. Once the bed was clear, she decided to tackle the floor. She scooped a handful of sand and threw it at the shimmering barrier between the columns. The sand passed through the barrier as if it weren't there. 'At least I can clean my pen,' said Con. 'I don't have to live like an animal, even if I'm treated like one.'

Con had cleared sand from only a small portion of the floor when the silvery panel opened. The woman entered, carrying the weapon in one hand and a large grayish pink cube in the other. Con rose slowly and raised her hands above her head. The woman advanced into the room and placed the cube on the corner of the bed. All the while, she kept the weapon trained on Con.

'You may lower your hands and feed yourself,' the woman said.

'You don't need to point that at me,' said Con. 'I'm not a savage.' The woman did not lower the weapon. 'A savage, I presume, is something that is dangerous?'

'You speak English so well, how can you not know what a savage is?'

'The data for your language came from this facility's verbal control system. It is incomplete and fails to define many of your words.'