Predator

14

Steve and Jane returned to the camp first. As they walked out of the forest into the clearing, however, Steve stopped in alarm. The tent had collapsed. The sleeping bags were lying askew out on the ground and containers of food and equipment were spread around, some of their contents spilled out.

“What happened?” Jane asked, startled.

“Careful,” said Steve quietly. “Maybe the scent of the food attracted some dinosaurs.”

“I don’t see any. They must have gone.”

“Not all dinosaurs are real big. Some smaller ones might still be roaming around. Let’s go slowly.”

“All right.”

Steve moved up first, warily circling the tent and scattered belongings. Jane followed him. Finally, satisfied that the intruder or intruders had gone, he relaxed.

“Tell me,” said Steve, plodding wearily back to the tent and slipping the day pack to the ground. “Did we do anything today that was different from yesterday?” He started gathering up containers and checking the contents.

“Not much, I admit,” said Jane. “We were able to mark the latest tracks of MC 1, though.”

“What for? So we can do the same thing tomorrow? This is pointless.”

Jane sighed, nodding agreement. She picked up some of the equipment too. “It only means something if we start chasing him for real.”

They both turned as Chad rode into view. The front saddle was empty. He glanced around the camp.

“What a mess. Is Hunter back?”

“No,” said Jane. “What happened to him?”

“He jumped on a triceratops,” said Chad. “I was so surprised, I never had a chance to try to talk him out of it.”

“Really?” Steve grinned, amazed. “Even I know what that is. Wow.”

“The next thing I knew, it ran off with him. That was hours ago. I followed him for a while; that triceratops left a trail smashing through the forest that nobody could miss. But then I thought maybe Hunter had gotten off at some point and would just walk back to camp.”

“He hasn’t been here,” said Steve. “Unless you think the triceratops trampled everything here.”

Chad rode closer. “What kind of tracks have you found?”

“I haven’t looked yet.” Steve looked down at the ground. In most places, footsteps had left only dull impressions in the heavy sod, revealing very little. In a muddy spot, however, he saw a heel print.

“That’s no dinosaur,” said Jane, joining him. “And it’s too small to be Hunter’s.”

“It must be MC 1,” said Steve. He walked quickly back to the tent and the spilled containers. “Definitely. Some of these lines were actually untied, not just broken or pulled down. And no dinosaur could have unlatched these containers. Our salt and flour were opened and poured onto the ground, but nothing is actually broken.”

“I’m going to dismount in the corral,” said Chad. “Be right back.” He turned and rode away quickly.

“Now I have the answer to the question that was bothering me,” said Jane.

“Which one?”

“Why MC 1 was hanging around, evading us but never really running away.”

“What? You think he just wanted to trash our camp?” Steve bent down to pick up a few more items and set them upright. “He could have done it yesterday, but he didn’t.”

“It’s more than that, Steve. He wants to disrupt our search. Yesterday he probably studied our habits to figure out how he would do it.”

“So he’s trying to chase us away?”

“To discourage us, at least. He has an insurmountable problem, however. The First Law won’t let him do anything even potentially harmful to us humans, such as poisoning our food and water, or sabotaging our equipment.”

“Say, that’s right. But he dumped some food out onto the ground.”

“He knows we won’t eat it if we can see it’s not safe anymore. And I bet he left us enough so that we won’t starve. He can’t take that chance, either.”

Steve glanced into a few more containers. “Yeah, he did. We’re still okay.”

“He can’t even set traps for us or take our supplies away. He has to leave us everything we need to remain safe.” Jane smiled wryly. “Ina way, I feel sorry for him. He’s trying to do the impossible.”

“Yeah, I see.” Steve squinted toward the reddening sunlight filtering through the trees. “It’s too late in the day to track him now. At least tomorrow we can start following him from right here.”

“What a mess,” said Chad, joining them from the corral. He winced as he walked. “Riding that struthiomimus is fun, but I’m saddle sore.”

Jane laughed. “But you’re the first human ever to ride a living dinosaur. For a paleontologist, that’s quite a distinction, isn’t it?”

“Yeah! I love that part.” He grinned, then looked past her toward the trees. “Hey, there’s Hunter now.”

“Hunter!” Jane called.

“You okay?” Steve asked.

“Yes, yes.” He hiked briskly toward them. “I am fine; no damage.”

“What happened, Hunter?” Chad asked. “I followed you for most of the day, or at least I followed the triceratops. Then at sundown I figured I’d better get back to camp.”

“I am glad you did,” said Hunter. “It means I can trust you to take care of yourself under my First Law responsibilities. As for myself, I rode the triceratops for quite a long time. It does not buck or roll over on its back, so I just hung on.”

“Then what happened?” Steve asked.

“It was a stalemate.” Hunter shrugged. “I was not strong enough to steer it by pulling on the brow horns and it could not get me off by charging around through the trees, as long as I stayed low. Finally I decided that I just was not accomplishing anything and jumped off.” He studied the camp behind them. “Did this happen while everyone was gone?”

“Yes, we had a visitor,” said Jane.

“So I see,” said Hunter. “What happened?”

“MC 1,” said Steve. “He left his tracks.”

Hunter studied the damage. “Not too serious, I see. But I think the delay in our direct pursuit of him has lasted long enough. I will have to alter my priorities after all. Tomorrow morning I will chase him on foot alone.”

“You and I can ride after him,” said Chad. “If you’re willing to leave all three of us on our own, then you can leave them and take me again.”

“I will be more efficient alone,” said Hunter. “And I will feel less pressure under the First Law if you three humans are together.”

“Wait a minute,” said Chad. “Why?”

“Then only one danger, if any, is likely to approach you. When you divide up, the chance of your encountering harm increases. Since I have only the one transmitter to warn me of danger to you, I must ask all three of you to wait here in camp for me tomorrow. Be ready to call me through the transmitter at the slightest hint of possible harm.”

“All right,” said Jane. “If this arrangement will help you track down MC 1 and grab him, then we can all go home sooner this way.”

“I could use a break from all this hiking around for no particular reason,” said Steve. “But right now I want to get dinner going.”

“The rest of us will help put the camp back into shape,” said Hunter.

“Good idea,” said Jane.

Chad hesitated, but when Hunter and Jane began raising the tent, he joined the manual labor. Steve grinned to himself, but said nothing. He made dinner with more of the fish that Hunter had caught.

As the humans ate and relaxed afterward, Hunter finished putting the camp back into shape. He was now eager to get on the trail of MC 1 himself, feeling that delaying to capture mounts might have been a mistake. However, he knew he could not set out tonight.

The day’s effort to ride the triceratops had used up too much of his energy. He did not have enough stored up to remain fully active until sunrise, when the light could replenish it. If he chased MC 1 during the night until his energy ran out, then stopped to wait for dawn, he would have none to use in the event of a First Law emergency at the camp. Besides, while the humans slept, they could be surprised by some problem that would prevent them from calling him on the transmitter.

Hunter sat down outside the tent. He stayed motionless in order to store his remaining energy, but kept his mind alert and all his sensors active to detect the sounds, sights, smells, and vibrations that would mean another visitor. If either MC 1 or any animal approached, he would still have enough energy to protect the humans.

In the morning, as soon as Hunter heard Steve stir in the tent, he returned to full activity. The dawn light was speckling the camp through the trees overhead. Hunter inspected the line of tracks that led away from camp.

“Hi, Hunter,” said Steve, as he came out of the tent. “You about ready to go?”

“Yes. Before I left, I wanted to make sure that at least one of you was awake to call me on the transmitter in the event of trouble.”

“Well, here I am.”

“Yes. There you are.” Hunter hesitated, not sure if this was a form of farewell or not. When Steve began inspecting the breakfast materials, Hunter decided that it was. He turned to the tracks and stored a careful visual memory of them. Then he set off at a jog.

As he made breakfast, Steve watched the struthiomimus with curiosity. It was wandering around the corral in apparent contentment, eating leaves from the trees. After breakfast Chad and Jane joined him in a walk to the corral, where they watched Strut in his temporary home.

“Quite a creature,” said Jane. “The resemblance to an ostrich really is very strong.”

“Yes,” said Chad. “It was odd riding it, but I got used to it fast enough.”

“So what do you think about all these dinosaurs now?” Steve asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, before we got here, everything you knew about dinosaurs came from fossils and guesswork. Now you’ve seen them for real. What do you think?”

“I wouldn’t say it was guesswork,” Chad said huffily. “Paleontologists have been studying fossil remains and living entities for years with great care. We’ve figured out all kinds of things through more than guesswork.”

“All right, all right. But have you learned anything new since we’ve been here?” Steve demanded impatiently.

“Well, of course I have! We can surmise the color of some dinosaurs from their environment, and the kind of camouflage they must have needed-but now I know for sure what color some of them were.”

Steve was getting angrier by the moment. “Yeah? And how did you know what kind of environment they lived in from only a bunch of fossils?”

“From where they’re found,” Chad snapped. “We can tell from the kind of rock they’re in. To me, a fossil in sandstone means that the specimen died in water. The overall shape and other nearby fossils will tell me if it was a streambed or an ocean. To you, of course, sandstone is just a rock.”

“I can live out in the sand of a desert,” Steve said coldly, “where you’d die if you didn’t have all your modern conveniences and robots to protect you.”

“Now wait a minute,” said Jane. “Chad made a good point here. Paleontology isn’t a guessing game.”

“Don’t bother, Jane,” said Chad with a sneer. “I wouldn’t expect a desert rat to understand advanced logic.”

“Now you aren’t being fair either,” she said.

Chad ignored her. “For instance, dinosaurs walked with their legs nearly straight and erect; many of the bipeds were very active, fast runners; the bone tissue of some is similar to that of mammals, and some species seemed to travel in herds and take care of their young. Steve, can you tell me what theory these facts indicate?”

Steve glared at him, but had no answer.

“You know the term ‘endotherm,’ by any chance?”

“No.”

“Warm-blooded, Steve. All those characteristics I just listed are limited to warm-blooded animals in modern times. That means dinosaurs with those qualities are probably warm-blooded too. It’s not guesswork, but you can’t figure it out unless you actually know your stuff.”

“I’m sure that the entire planet has benefited from this knowledge,” Steve growled.

“And what have you ever accomplished?” Chad folded his arms, grinning at Steve.

“I take care of myself.”

“Yeah.” Chad nodded. “And exactly what good does that do for anyone else?”

“I don’t share anyone else’s water or energy,” said Steve. “I don’t take anything from anyone else or consume anything in the environment that can’t be replaced.”

“In other words, after you’re gone, no one will even notice you ever lived. Is that what you’re so proud on” Chad could hardly keep from laughing.

“He doesn’t bother anyone,” said Jane. “He hasn’t hurt anybody.”

“Neither do we,” Chad said sharply. “But we also contribute something to society.”

“Maybe she does,” said Steve, hotly. “Robotics is important to everybody in our time. But what good do you do for people-digging up fossils and trying to figure out what the animal used to be like?”

“Science doesn’t have to give you a specific goal,” said Chad, in a bored tone of voice. “Knowledge is good for its own sake. You can’t always plan what you can use it for.”

“Then what’s the point?” Steve demanded.

Chad grinned at Jane, who looked uncomfortable. “All right, I’ll explain. For instance, what if paleontology had never existed? I wouldn’t be in this profession now and when Hunter needed somebody to come back to this time period, no one would have been available. In science you never know what knowledge might be good for someday.” He shook his head. “Not that you’d understand that, of course.”

Steve had no answer to that. He turned and walked briskly away, not sure where he was going.

The other two were silent behind him. He remembered, of course, that they had all told Hunter that they would remain in camp. Just then, he couldn’t stand the thought of listening to Chad all day. He stomped past the tent, aware that he should find some excuse to stop and do chores. Instead, he just snatched up a rope and kept right on walking.