Dinoshift

A sigh. “When will you know enough to commit for launch?”

“We have enough to commit right now. We can tweak Bertha’s course as more data comes in.”

“OK. We need half a day for checkout. Launch any time after fourteen hundred hours tomorrow.”

Later, Gail slipped out of SD Control and hauled herself up the access well to the bridge. She found the captain alone, standing in front of a direct vision port and staring at the stars. The captain did not turn around as the journalist entered. Instead, she wondered aloud, “Do you think we will ever get there?”

“Where?”

Fuchs gestured. “Out there.”

“Of course we will.”

The captain turned around. Her thin, bony face was expressionless. “What makes you so sure?”

“Because there are people like you and—” Gail hesitated.

“Degruton?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder.”

Fuchs returned to the command chair. “I will do it, of course. Launch, I mean. And I will watch and dutifully applaud when Bertha explodes and nudges that asteroid so it won’t hit Earth sixty-something million years ago.”

“And then?”

“I won’t sleep a solitary wink until we get back and find home is where and how we left it!”

Gail sat down at the vacant first officer’s station. “Me too,” she admitted. She looked around the deserted bridge. “Where is everyone?”

“Down below, with Bertha. I may be uneasy about it, but I intend to have the job done right.”

“Gerry, the concept has been proved. Whatever new alternates we create or open up, Prime’s present is untouchable. It cannot change.”

The captain nodded. “You were there when they did the thing with the horses, weren’t you?”

Gail nodded. “I was also there when they time-shifted ahead fifteen centuries to see the outcome.”

“What kind of world was it?”

“Is,” Gail corrected firmly. She took a deep breath. “Steam trains, paddle wheelers, gas lights, one or two minor wars. A Tudor named Henry the Tenth on the English throne, and a North American federation of Inca chiefdoms with not much technology beyond good roads and the telegraph.

I could have survived on that world, I suppose, but I was glad beyond relief when we shifted back to Prime.”

“I can believe that.”

Fuchs stared at her visitor from below lowered eyelids. She found Gail Sovergarde pleasant enough, as long as she did not dwell on the contrast between the journalist s lush looks and her own scrawny hair-in-a-bun appearance. “You still wonder if we’re spitting in God’s eye, don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t put it that extreme.”

“I would. I have a nasty feeling we are going to regret this.”

“I already told you—”

“I know. We cannot change Prime’s past, and Freddy and his team have already proved it. But I suspect you don’t like this dinosaur thing anymore than I do, Gail Sovergarde.”

The other woman shrugged.

“OK, so we divert that asteroid. Then what?”

“We spot check over a few million years,” Gail replied, relieved the conversation had moved to safer ground. “See what happens.”

“Up until the present equivalent time?”

Gail shook her head. “I thought that was the obvious thing to do, until Freddy reminded me that we humans only got started pretty recently.”

“What has that to do with anything?”

“So what would we be like today, if our primate ancestors climbed down from the trees during the Mesozoic and not just four or five million years ago?”

“We’d be—” An awed expression crossed the captain’s thin face. “Pure intellect?”

“Perhaps. Or maybe we would have long since polluted ourselves to extinction. No one knows. The point is, Freddy would rather not expose us to whatever remote sensing capabilities those distant dinosaur descendants might have. Presuming they do evolve intelligence, we will shift back to Prime long before they develop space flight.”

Fuchs nodded, slowly. “It seems Freddy has thought of all the angles.”

“I think so. It is why my objections have been—” Gail’s smile was wan, “—muted.”

With a huge sigh of relief, the captain leaned back in her chair. “You know, although I felt in my bones there was something wrong, I could not figure out what it was. Now you’ve told me—and it’s pretty awesome—I am glad our lord and master decided to avoid it.” She smiled broadly. “Dammit, I feel much better!”

Bertha was launched on schedule. The detects had done their job, plotting the exact course of the mountainsized wanderer to a point of impact on the Earth’s surface corresponding to what would be—in sixty-six million years—the Yucatan peninsula.

The asteroid was still one hundred and ninety million kilometers from Sol’s third planet, when proximity fuses exploded Bertha’s fusion warhead just above the cratered surface. On the screens it was a mere wink of light.

For better or worse, it was done. There would not be another try. Bertha was a one-shot.

Detect 23 was destroyed by the blast, 8’s sensors were overloaded beyond recovery. So it was nearly three days before the Francis Bacon’s own instruments, plus data from the lagging Detect 48, finally confirmed that Mesozoic Earth was saved by a margin of slightly less than five hundred thousand kilometers.

A few years later, Gail Sovergarde dictated into her journal:

And then we flitted from eon to eon like gods watching the progress of their children. We saw icecaps advance and retreat. Deserts, forests and pla ins shrank and expanded according to the great cycles of nature. The dinosaurs themselves changed, becoming smaller, swifter and more intelligent. The giant carnivores and herbivores were extinct within ten million years after AV (asteroid avoidance), after which a few species of four-footed mammals emerged on the plains. There were no mammal primates.

We overshot the genesis of the dinosaur toolmakers by some one hundred thousand years, but not their early villages near the great rivers on both continents. We watched as the villages became towns, as agriculture spread and roads linked the towns in a great web of commerce. Square-riggers sailed the seas.

There were no wars.

Perhaps the lack of conflict is why technological progress was, by our standards, inordinately slow. It took more than five hundred centuries for the dinosaurs to evolve from early agriculture to the equivalent of a steam-powered industrial revolution.

It was another two hundred centuries before the development of the first dirigible, and centuries more before mixed fleets of dirigibles and lumbering heavier-than-air freight carriers flew in their skies. By our time, it was forty-five million years ago when we prudently shifted out from that timeline and returned to Prime’s familiar present.

For a few hectic months I traveled with the SD team from city to city, and then to the Mars colonies. I shared the accolades, although even Freddy freely admits my coaching contributed in no small degree to his blossoming as a public personality.

Still, as always, there were the questions.

Also, as always, the doubts.

No one, not even Freddy, was particularly surprised when the ban was imposed almost exactly one year after our return from the Dinosaur Alternate. Although the SD projects had not triggered the spacetime