Cretaceous Sea

Con mulled over Rick's request. 'Green's like a lot of Daddy's friends. I didn't trust him even before you told me that stuff.'

'So, will you help me?'

Con made a face. 'You don't ask much!' She paused, then sighed. 'I'll try. I really will.'

'Thanks, Con. I know it's not a little thing. Now, let's fly away and forget Green and your dad.'

'Sounds good to me.'

ONCE THEY WERE in the air, Con's and Rick's moods lifted as the spirit of adventure took hold of them. Joe, also, seemed to be happy to be away from camp. Soon he was regaling Con with a humorous telling of his and Rick's first trip. 'Invisible?' he said, imitating his terror at seeing the Dromaeosauruses.

'I'm looking at my shak-ing hand and thinking, this sure doesn't look invisible to me! Some fine guide!

First day out, and I'm dinosaur shit.' Con was laughing so hard she had to catch her breath. 'Yessir, if that thing took one more step in my direction, I'd be needing a diaper!'

'You look unchewed,' said Rick.

'Unchewed, but unnerved. I'm a broken man!' wailed Joe in mock anguish. 'A broken man!'

'So that's Green's plan,' said Con, still laughing. 'To have Rick feed me to the dinosaurs.'

'Mr. Green doesn't have a plan,' said Joe abruptly. Then he cracked a smile, and said breezily, 'Except for you to have a good time.'

Soon they were flying above the cypress swamps of the low-lying coasts, and Con and Rick were intently peering at the scenery. Once they spotted a fifty-foot crocodile, a Deinosuchus, walking along the riverbank. They circled back around four times to view it before it disappeared into the river. As they headed upland, and the land became firmer, they saw their first dinosaurs of the day. A small group of hypsilophodontids were graz-ing on water plants in a shallow pond. The bipeds were shorter than a man, since a third of their nine-foot length was tail. Con said their short snouts made them look 'cute.' As they crossed over the uplands, they encountered a herd of two dozen sauropod dinosaurs grazing the tree tops. They were heavily built animals, thirty-five feet in length, with shoulders higher than their hips. Their necks were relatively short and thick for sauropods, making their heads look ridiculously small.

'Somehow,' said Con, 'I expected them to be bigger.'

'These are Alamosaurs' said Rick. 'The real giants, like the Ultrasaurus and the Diplodocus, went extinct tens of millions of years ago.'

'They don't look too shabby to me,' said Joe. 'One of those babies would make quite a barbecue.'

'For God's sake, don't tell that to Pandit!' said Rick.

'Speaking of food,' said Con, 'where are we going to picnic?'

'I thought the mountains might be nice,' said Rick.

'Sounds great to me,' said Joe. 'I don't like unex-pected guests.' They flew to the watering hole and the nesting site before Joe headed for the mountains to search for a land-ing site. He found a bare mountain peak not more than thirty feet wide, then impressed Rick and Con by neatly parking on it. On all sides, cliffs dropped precipitously, affording breathtaking views. On one side, a mountain range towered into the sky, while on the other, the land spread out to the gleaming sea. Below them, but still high above the foothills, huge pterosaurs wheeled gracefully on the updrafts. As far as the eye could see, the world stretched out like a green-and-blue tapestry, unmarred by the hand of man.

They lingered on the mountaintop long after they had finished eating and left it reluctantly. Joe guided their aircraft between the foothills and the coastal plain until they encountered the huge ceratopsid herd. Con let out a squeal of excitement as the plane slowly glided only yards above the animals' backs.

'We've got to land!' she said.

'No way!' said Joe firmly.

'You two did it. Like Rick said, we'll be invisible.'

'Look, if I came back short a guide, that would be one thing. You're different. If you get hurt, there'd be hell to