Cretaceous Sea

'I had no idea what had happened to you,' said Rick.

'They wouldn't tell me anything. I was afraid you were dead.'

'I feared the same for you,' said Con. 'It's been horrible. I'm so lonely without you. For the first time in my life, it feels strange to sleep alone.'

'How have they treated you?' asked Rick.

'They've left me alone, except to ask all sorts of questions about the time machine and stuff. The two guys act like I disgust them, but sometimes the woman's not so bad. I think she's studying me.'

'Yeah, Jane's the curious one.'

'Jane?'

'I gave them names,' said Rick. 'The two guys are Hitler and Stalin and the woman's Jane, after Jane Goodall.'

'Never heard of her.'

'She was a twentieth-century scientist who studied chim-panzees.'

Con smiled wryly. 'That's appropriate, they treat me like one. Did you know they call themselves Homo perfectusT

'Perfected Man,' mused Rick. 'That sounds about right.'

'Perfected?' said Con disdainfully. 'They look like big kids.'

'And we probably look like pinheads to them. They look like kids because of neoteny.'

'What?'

'It's the retarding of development so juvenile traits are retained in adulthood. It's why humans have large heads. It's why baby apes look more like humans than the adults. Our friends just took it one step further.'

'And those dots?' said Con. 'They can transmit infor-mation through them.'

'I think they're implants. A computer with a neural inter-face. I've seen them downloading to one another.'

'I have, too,' said Con. 'Jane complained that my 'inac-cessible mind' tired them.'

'Yeah,' said Rick, 'talking to us drives them nuts. We must sound like the world's slowest stutterers.'

'I noticed,' said Con. 'So yon think they have computers for brains?'

'More like a computer in their head that their brain can access,' said Rick.

'It'd sure make school easy,' said Con.

'Toddlers could get educated in seconds,' said Rick. 'It'd change the whole concept of intelligence.'

'But how could that happen?'

'It had to be genetic engineering. A change like that wouldn't happen naturally. Natural selection stopped work-ing on humans long ago.'

'Creating a new species of people?' said Con. 'That seems impossible.'

'It's not that far-fetched,' said Rick. 'You're souped. Joe worked on neural interfaces. Eventually, someone took it to the next level.'

'But why would people want to change?'

'I doubt most did,' said Rick. 'New species usually start out as small, isolated populations.'

'But that means there would be two kinds of people in the world and...' Con paused in alarm. 'Rick!