Target of Opportunity

Illustration by Alan Giana

The cockroach was slightly smaller than her foot, but it was large enough to make the blonde scream and keep screaming until after the rest of the party had recovered and begun laughing. I could’ve explained that none of the cockroaches here/now carry any diseases that are dangerous to humans, but I knew it wouldn’t make any difference; it never does. Someone would be bound to trot out the theory that it was roaches, migrating across the land bridges, that would wipe out the dinosaurs, and that’s a symbol too powerful for any logic to stand against, even though it’s never been proven.

The blonde was still red-faced when we walked inside, and I half-expected the sight of the borogove to start her screaming again; instead, she dropped her backpack, hunkered down, and began talking to him in a thick but beautiful accent while her husband hung back. “What’s her name?” she asked, the accent gone.

“Bruno,” I replied.

“How big does he grow?” asked her husband, loudly. He was taller than she was and much taller than me, and heavily muscled in a top-heavy way that always reminds me of therizinosaurs and Neandertals and gridiron players. His skin and hair and eyes were a pale brown that seemed to blend into any background like smart camo. I wondered if the screaming had been exaggerated for his benefit. I could be wrong—a lot of intelligent people have a phobia of cockroaches—but it didn’t improve my opinion of him any.

“He’s about full grown, but females are bigger.”

“What does he eat?” asked the blonde.

“Anything smaller than he is,” I said, a little sourly. “If there’s any food in your pack, he’ll find it before you can say Borogovia holtzi.” Bruno looked hurt, but it was true; he’s as inquisitive and unethical and almost as intelligent as a cat. His legs and flanks and face are striped like those of a tabby, he stands about a meter tall, and he’s easily domesticated by dino standards, meaning that he’s friendly as long as he’s well fed. We keep him around to keep the insects down and remind the travelers where and when they are; it wouldn’t be the Cretaceous without dinosaurs. Bruno could kill a human in a fair fight, but when did we ever fight fair?

The husband was admiring Bruno’s claws. “How closely is he related to the troodons?”

“They’re ninety-something percent similar genetically, but Bruno’s not local—he’s from Mongolia. A friend at the hostel there gave him to us; there were one female and two males in the clutch, and the males were always fighting.”

One of the women laughed, and the blonde asked, “Is he as smart as the troodons?”

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

“You don’t believe these stories about troodons making tools, then?” asked the husband.

“I’ve never seen it,” I evaded. The blonde looked crestfallen. “I’ve seen them hunting in packs, using ambush techniques, and I’ve seen them carrying food—mostly carrion—but that’s all. It’s a long way from tool use, much less tool making. Is that why you’re here?”

“She is,” the husband snorted. “I’m more interested in doing some hunting. When can we go out of the dome?”

“Any time you like,” I replied. I was beginning to dislike this one more and more every time he opened his mouth; why do so many intelligent, beautiful women marry such total dorks? “Closest exit’s down Horner Street, turn left on Sawyer, right on Russell. I recommend you take a respirator mask; oxygen content outside is higher than you’re used to, and it may make you overconfident.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Not really; we only lose two point three people per year, on average. Dinos don’t come too close to the city—most of them have zero curiosity, and I don’t think they like the smell—and the pterors won’t bother you unless they think you’re already dead or dying. None of the snakes are really dangerous, but don’t go swimming in the rivers; some of the crocs grow close to twenty meters long. But the local wildlife’s already learning to fear us; the biggest animals you’re likely to see are the dragonflies and butterflies, though they’re pretty spectacular. If you want to see dinosaurs, you take a flier.”

“These two point three victims,” said the husband. “What sort of dinosaur kills them?”

“Topsies—hornfaces—mostly,” I said. “Some tourists go too near the herds, and spook them. And sometimes it’s difficult to tell how the people died, especially if the scavengers get to them before we do. About one in ten are never found at all. Now, let’s get you all checked in.”

A lot of people come to Maia City for the dinosaurs, of course, but mostly we’re a stop-over, a waystation. It’s not possible to make a leap of less than twelve million years (please don’t ask me why not, I just work here), and more energy-efficient to go back or forward seventy or even two hundred million. It’s something like the slingshot effect they used to use to boost the speed of unmanned spacecraft, but not quite, and something like flying around the world instead of through it… anyway, anyone wanting to see something like the Little Big Horn or the Seven Wonders of the World or the Mediterranean being flooded has to go via a waystation in the past, then back to their intended time. The same for the return trip. And since stations and cities are hideously expensive to build and maintain, and Maia City has more to offer than the others, we get most of the tourist trade. Most of our guests stay for a few days, take a flier out to see the topsy and hadro herds or the pteror nests and maybe get a glimpse of some of the predators from a safe distance. Only students stay for more than a few days, and most of them choose to come here rather than the Hilton.

The blonde’s name was Sondra, her major anthropology (I’d guessed it wasn’t entomology), and she was headed for early Pleistocene Asia to study the technology of Homo ergaster for her master’s thesis. Her muscle-bound husband was Kevin, nominally a business student (his father and grandfather had both been major financial contributors to the college), and he was obviously here mostly to keep an eye on her. Picking her up was apparently the only thing he’d ever done that impressed his father and older brother, and he wasn’t going to risk losing her, which was why they’d married so young. I learned most of this from Amy, who was writing her dissertation on predator/prey ratios throughout the Mesozoic and had an excellent reason for detesting Kevin; he’d date-raped her when she was a sophomore. Amy was attractive in a dark, elfin sort of way, and since she was friendly and unattached and obviously intended to stick around for a few months, we ended up spending the night together. It was hardly her fault that I kept thinking of Sondra.

My room was little different from any other double in the hostel. I’ve never been one for souvenirs, or any other possessions, and the room contained nothing but a bed, desk, closet, chair, and the inevitable dinosaur holo-posters—excellent pictures of Maiasaura and Anatotitan. “How long have you been here?” Amy asked, as she picked her clothes up from the floor.

“Seven years.”

“You don’t look that old.”

“Don’t you believe it,” I said. “I was born in 1962. I could be your greatgrandfather.”

“I wish you had been,” she retorted. “I’d love to have inherited your eyes. Where are you from?”

“Vietnam. Little village called My Lai. I ran away from soldiers one day and crashed into an observation post, full of American history students watching their ancestors acting like monsters. I don’t know how I got in, I had no idea of what anyone was saying, but they decided that they couldn’t just send me out to be killed.” I can still remember the girl who’d held on to me while everyone else was arguing, the first blonde woman I’d ever seen. “So they took me home. I became something of a celebrity about the time you were born, the first war orphan in decades, and a couple who worked for ChronCorp adopted me. ChronCorp ended up giving me a scholarship with a two year bond, and when it ran out, I stayed. What do you want for breakfast?”

“Can the eggs be trusted?”

“I can make an omelet you could swear came from a chicken.”

“And can you take me to see some of the dinosaurs, later?”

“If you can wait until after lunch, sure.”

To my surprise and delight, Sondra came with us rather than accompanying Kevin on his hunting trip. I reminded her that we wouldn’t see any troodons unless we stayed out until nightfall—troodons were dusk feeders, with night vision that would do credit to a cat—but she didn’t even hesitate.

The three of us flew out to the floodplains near what would one day be Hell Creek, Montana, where Amy was able to pick out predators among the great herds of herbivores—a daspletosaurus waiting in ambush by the water, biding its time for something small and slow enough to take with one bite; a phobosuchus, a crocodile nearly fifteen meters long, sunning itself on a sandbar while small pterors picked parasites out from between its teeth (not a job I’d relish); a small pack of mottled dromaeosaurus, sickle claws hidden hy the undergrowth. A pair of ostrich-like dromiceiomimus sprinted away from us as we glided overhead; I clocked their speed at sixty-six klicks on the straight, and Sondra filmed one of them snapping up a drab butterfly without even breaking stride. A moment later, I realized they were running toward a small flock of birds. “Vultures,” said Amy. “Something’s dead.”

I steered the flier over to where the scavengers were gathering. The “something” turned out to be a nodosaurid, probably an Edmontia, but it was a little late to be sure; a dryptosaurus was using its can-opener claw to pry the armor plates from its back. It might have found it dead, or it might have killed it itself, or it might have intimidated the real killers away, as lions and tyrannosaurs do. A few stygivenators and smaller carnivorous dinosaurs kept their distance, waiting their turn.

We watched until the sun started to set, so that Amy could count and identify the scavengers, and then I headed back to the city despite Sondra’s protests. The flier was solar-powered and could stay up for most of the day, but its battery was limited. A few minutes later, Sondra screamed dangerously close to my ear. “Down there!”

I looked, and saw a small pack of troodon running toward a clump of swamp cypress. “What?”

“One of them had a spear!”

I turned to Amy, who shrugged. “I think it was carrying something,” she said.

“Where is it now?”

“It ran back into the trees. Are they scared of fliers?”

“If they’ve got any sense, yes; most hunting is done from fliers.” The other troodons disappeared between the trees. “Did you film it?”

“I hope so,” Sondra wailed; she pressed the playback button, looked into the viewfinder, and smiled weakly. “It looks like a spear,” she said.

Kevin was in a foul mood when we returned, muttering about cheap Chinese lasers and the embargo on bringing your own weapons through the machine, and I suddenly realized why his surname was familiar—his family had been making small arms for generations before I was born. He was even less impressed by Sondra’s snapshot than we’d been, and less successful at hiding it.

The major problem with the picture was that the spear—or length of bamboo—was on the far side of the troodon’s body, and you couldn’t see whether it was holding it, or whether the end was lifted clear of the ground. It didn’t help that it didn’t look much like a spear, either. “If dinos made spears, wouldn’t we have found one by now?” asked Kevin, a little sullenly.

“Not if they were just made of wood or bamboo,” Sondra insisted. “Wooden tools don’t survive like stone ones. It’s like ergaster in the tropics; they probably had wooden spears, clubs, carrying bags, maybe even canoes or rafts, boomerangs, bolas… how much would survive of a bola, or even a wooden bow strung with sinew, after sixty-six million years?”

Kevin thought about this. “Forget sixty-six million years. How long’ve tourists been coming here? Twenty years? How come nobody’s seen this before?”

“Seen, but not photographed,” I answered, before Sondra could speak: she shot me a look of what might have been gratitude.

Amy laughed softly. “There’s a story my grandfather told me about baboons, when I was a little girl,” she said. “He said they were intelligent, even knew how to speak our languages, but were careful not to let white men hear them in case they made them work.”

“Do you believe that?” asked Kevin.

“Not any more, but I can’t disprove it.”

Kevin turned to me for support. “You’ve been here for years, you know about dinosaurs; what do you think?”

I could’ve lied, but what would have been the point? “I don’t know. Why would troodons need spears? They have claws. Weapons are for weaklings.” Kevin glared, and turned white. “Sorry, I put that badly. Our ancestors needed to make weapons because their claws and teeth were too small to be effective for killing, and there were plenty of predators who could out-run and outclimb them. I suspect they weren’t much smarter than baboons or gorillas; all they had were good grasping hands and an upright gait. If they hadn’t picked up antelope horns and thighbones, instant daggers and clubs, we wouldn’t be here. Troodons have the hands and the bipedal walk, but they also have pretty nasty toe claws, so they don’t really need spears.”

“Extra reach,” Sondra suggested. “Enough to attack an ankylosaur without getting too close to the tail. Or maybe it’s a javelin.”

“Maybe, but that doesn’t look like much of a point—it’s not stone-tipped, or even fire-hardened. And look at Bruno.” The borogove looked up at the sound of his name, realized that no one was about to feed him, then curled up again. “Those shoulders aren’t built for a strong overarm throw, and you’d need a lot of force to put sharpened bamboo through the average dino’s hide—unless you’re dealing with dinos that are even smaller than the troodons, and the troodons can run most of those down without much trouble.”

Kevin stared at Bruno, and nodded. “I’m sorry, honey,” he said, magnanimously. “But I’ll tell you what; I’ll come with you tomorrow, take a rover back to the same place, go into the forest and see what we see.”

Amy rolled her eyes; ain’t we got fun? “Okay,” I said. “But it won’t be a hunting trip; I’ll carry the gun, and you don’t use it without my say-so. Understood?”

I saw Kevin the next morning while I was having my shower. He enthused about hunting while he combed his hair, and when he noticed that I was replying in monosyllables, tried changing the subject to women, then to football. “You don’t like me much, do you?” he finally asked, his expression slightly puzzled, his body language defensive, as though it was important to him that I like him. “Is it something I said, or just because I’m rich?”

“Nothing to do with that. I’m just prejudiced when it comes to hunters and guns,” I admitted. “I know what it feels like to have someone chasing me with a gun, hunting me. My sympathies lie with the prey, especially if it can’t fight back.”

His brow furrowed as he considered this for a moment. “I’d never hunt humans,” he said, “but these are just big animals, not even as smart as deer.”

I shrugged. “I said it was a prejudice. Besides, I don’t think we have much in common.”

He laughed at that. “You like women, though, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Well, that’s something.” He was silent for a moment. “Have you ever tried it?”

“Tried?”

“Hunting”

“No.” I switched the shower from water to sonic.

“You’ve lived here for years and never gone hunting?” he yelled, over the sound of the shower.

“Never.”

“Maybe you should.”

“Maybe.” I switched the shower off, and grabbed my shorts.

“Why don’t you come with us tomorrow?” he suggested. “Sondra and me. I’m going after a—what do you call the big herbivores with the crests?”

“Lambeosaurines.”

“What’s the one with the really long crest, like a snorkel?”

“Parasaurolophus.”

“Yeah, that. The satellites show a whole herd less than a hundred klicks away. Why don’t you come with us?”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

We spent most of that day seeing the floodplains through nocs and the windows of a hoverover, while I watched the satellite pictures on the com and steered us away from the herds of triceratops and torosaurus and any large predators. After a less than enchanting day, we returned to the swamp cypresses just before nightfall. Sondra wanted to get out and walk into the forest, and when I expressed reluctance, Kevin opened the door on his side and jumped out without even donning his respirator. I cursed myself silently for not having locked his door, wondered what the hell he was trying to prove, and decided that I couldn’t let him go there unarmed and alone. “Okay,” I sighed, grabbing the laser. “Put your masks on, and let’s go.”

Kevin had a good head start and he kept increasing it, though he was careful to look back occasionally to make sure Sondra was watching, or safe; maybe both. A troodon stuck its head out from behind a tree, and Kevin yelled and charged toward it. Naturally enough, it disappeared. I resigned myself to an hour of searching fruitlessly for elusive, cunning, small dinosaurs in their own, well-shadowed territory, and reached into my pocket for my shades, setting them to infra-red.

A moment later, a male troodon, a length of bamboo in its hands, appeared just a few meters in front of Kevin. He turned toward it, and stopped. We were too far behind him to hear what he was saying, but it wasn’t hard to guess; Amy was muttering something in what I guessed was Zulu, and Sondra was squealing with joy. Slowly, and cautiously, the three of us advanced toward where Kevin was now standing. We were at the edge of the wood when the troodon looked at Kevin, tilting its head first to the left, then to the right, and then raised the bamboo to its mouth. After all the fuss, it looked as though the bamboo was just food, something to chew on—and then Kevin turned to face us, and I saw something small sticking out of his throat. The bamboo wasn’t food, or a spear, but a blowgun: I brought the laser up, thumbed the safety, and yelled to the girls to head back to the car.

Kevin staggered in our direction—the dart must have been poisoned, blowgun darts almost always are. I remembered reading that BaMbuti blowguns can bring down a gorilla or elephant, and tried to forget it. Another male troodon appeared, also with a length of bamboo; I fired, and hit the blowgun, which exploded into flames, as well as the troodon holding it and the tree behind him. The damn fool had set the laser to maximum power, enough to kill a tyrannosaur, leaving enough charge for maybe five or six man-killing shots.

The fire, and the crack of the laser, scared the troodons away for a few seconds, and then a dozen appeared, brandishing weapons better than any nature had given them—triceratops horns and diyptosaurus claws. Kevin ran, but they were much faster, and they soon surrounded him, herding him away from us. I heard Sondra screaming out to Kevin, telling him to stop, stand his ground. He continued to run—and then disappeared. I stood my ground and kept firing until Amy stopped the rover a few meters behind me, and then I ran too.

With the rover at maximum lift, I drove near the spot where the troodons were gathered, warning Sondra not to look down. Kevin was lying motionless in a shallow pit, impaled on topsy horns and stakes of sharpened bamboo. The troodons looked up as our shadow passed over them, then, obviously deciding that he was already dead, began hacking at him with the horns and claws. I made a note of the location, then drove away.

“Those weapons,” said Sondra, at breakfast the next morning. “The blowguns… the troodons are hunting us, aren’t they?” I raised my eyebrows, but said nothing. I could feel Amy watching me as she ate her omelet. “Those darts wouldn’t go through dinosaur hide.”

“They might, at close range. They’d only need to sting a little, like a horsefly, to get the dinosaur running, steer him toward—in the right direction.” The stakes would work anyway, like judo—you just use your opponent’s size and weight against him—but I didn’t want to say that. She hadn’t seen Kevin die, or what little they’d brought back in a body bag.

“How big was the pit?”

“Three or four meters; big enough for a juvenile hadro or topsy, and deep enough that even an adult might have difficulty getting out.”

“I don’t know,” she said, staring into her coffee. “I still think they’re hunting us. After all, we’re the weakest prey around, aren’t we, once you separate us from the herd?”

I looked at Bruno, and then at Amy, who suddenly seemed fascinated by a butterfly on the ceiling. “It’s much more likely they’ve been using the darts on birds or pterosaurs,” I said. “Or maybe on each other. But at most, they’re taking one or two humans a year—hardly a staple of their diet, more a…”

“Target of opportunity?” Amy suggested. I glared at her, then shrugged.

Sondra sat there silently for at least a minute, then drank the rest of her tepid coffee. “Well, we have evidence, now,” she said.

Kevin’s family threatened to sue, but Sondra and Amy supported my version of events; Amy even had a few hastily-taken snapshots as proof. I kept copies after the court cleared me of all blame; they’re the only souvenirs I own. They’re a little too gruesome for public display, but Amy likes to take them out and reminisce every time she visits. “Poor Kevin,” she sighed. “If only one of us had recognized those weapons for what they were, we might have been able to save him.”

“How could we?” I asked. “The pit was well concealed, so there was no way we could have seen it from ground level. And the blowgun just looked like a length of bamboo; I’d never even seen anyone use a blowgun before. Had you?”

Amy sipped at her tea. “No, but Sondra must have. I know that Homo ergaster had them.”

“Sondra?” I stared at her. “You can’t be serious. Okay, we both disliked him, but not enough to set him up to be killed. Right?” She hesitated, then nodded. “But Sondra?”

She shrugged. “I suspect she stands to inherit a lot of money. But I could be wrong.”

Amy moved to Maia City a few months later, renting a room around the corner from the hostel, though she stays here most nights. Sondra hasn’t been back, and sometimes I miss her, but that probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway. I suspect she’s a little too civilized for the Cretaceous.

But I could be wrong.