William Rotsler - Which Came First?

The deino braked, twisted and came at me again. A lot of teeth and bad breath, very close. Too close. I swear its eyes were red. I put up my left hand to ward off its striking head before I realized that was the hand with the bag of eggs.

Scrunch! Deino s snout broke another egg, splattering us both. I moaned, spit out stuff, and ran. I couldn’t veer very far one way or the other or I’d never get to the TDC.

I could hear the thunderous footsteps of Momma Rex, then a horrible squeal, a throat-ripping cry of distress that stopped, suddenly. I shot back a look. The momma beast was throwing aside the pony-sized deino without slowing. I didn’t slow either.

I thought of Ray Jaroslava, who liked to hurt people, and of Millie’s Turn of the Century Burgers and ice cold beer and Len and Paul and Gloria and that sitcom set in the Moulin Rouge with all those well-built women and the one that looked like Suzanne and—

WHUCK!

I ran into another tree, but this time my left arm shot around it. The last egg was saved, swinging in the net bag with the gooey bits of its litter-mates. The beeper was leading me and I was leading an outraged mother monster who weighed more than an African elephant, only with claws and teeth.

Just a little farther.

I was pumping in the incredible smells and my side was hurting me like one of Ray Jaroslava’s “reminder” hits. Maybe I was hallucinating but I had this incredible thought: Momma Rex gets me and I’m dead, rotting, and all this 21st century bacteria inside me is what killed off the dinosaurs. I kill off the big lizards.

I was hallucinating. It flashed through my tumbled mind to stop, hold up the Python to the egg and snarl at Momma Monster, “Lemme alone or the kid gets it!” But the gun was back there somewhere, maybe to be found and wondered about down the pike by Ogg the Wonder Neanderthal.

Oh, god, I was hallucinating. Oxygen deprivation. Fear of imminent death. Did it matter?

Then there it was, just ahead, the time machine. No Wellsian dream of Victoriana, no gleaming capsule of super-steel with drifting steam and electronic music, no beep-beeping lights, just a rather fragile open gridwork I’d come in. I saw a red light blinking and for a second I couldn’t remember what that meant. Good? Bad? Usual?

Something yipped and fanged me in my boot. I kicked at it, yanked open the door and dived in, careful to keep the last egg from hitting anything. I stuffed it into the space provided even as I slapped the red button marked BACK. Then I just hunkered there, watching Mom knock down a tree and coming raging right at me.

Don’t blame you, I thought. I’d do the same.

The ground shook from her bellowing and I started to scream and—

—Stopped. They were staring at me. Physics weenies in white coats with pocket protectors, guys I knew. Sterile lab. They were outside the chamber, staring in. I was inside. I was back. In the isolation room. I was alive.

When they let me out the bug boys—as I called them—went silly over the stuff they found on and in my clothes. They went totally crazy over something they found in my shorts. That was in my shorts?

They rushed the remaining egg off to the incubator. In tact, they had several incubators. I’d disappointed them there.

But the thing that they loved was the dead but almost intact little bugger that had bitten into my boot. It was a whole different field or something and a separate team was put together for it.

They orchestrated the publicity thing quite well. The whole time travel thing was declared illegal or something and handed over to the military. I was a hero. My clothes ended up in the Smithsonian, along with the helmet-cam footage. Including the screaming.

I got pretty good at telling the story on the talk shows. A ghost writer began my autobiography. A pretty good actor with a history of adventure films—whose only resemblance to me was that we both had two eyes—was signed for a picture, but by the time it came out it didn’t do that well, because everyone had seen the helmet-cam footage a million times.

The dinosaur was born and is doing well. He eats a lot but they don’t show that much because he prefers carrion. I didn’t know what carrion was either, but it’s old dead meat. Smelly old. Ripe. They call him Rex, what else?

Tonight I have a date with a female cousin of the Jaroslava brothers. They’ve been handling my investments. They suggested it. But it’s been OK. No, really.

Things look the same. But then, if they didn’t, I’d be the only one to know. Rush Limbaugh isn’t king and only Cleveland looks like Cleveland, thank God. At first there was talk about me going back—I guess they wanted a sequel and figured they could talk the military into it—then suddenly no one was talking about it.

I had no intention to go back, at least not without the Marines or a SWAT team, but I got curious. How come the sudden blackout? Wilson finally told me, and Gold agreed.

Time travel to any period over 10,000 years ago was forbidden, verboten, a sincere forget-it. “Six million years ago,” Wilson said, “our genomes were a bit less than 2 percent different than a chimp. Today we’re only 1.6 percent different.”

“So?”

“Well, uh, that thing that bit you, it was, um, 18 percent different but it was seventy-one million years back.”

“So?”

“What it means is that thing that chewed your boot was an ancestor. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Close enough. We’ve stopped time travel to anything even close to that time.”

“So?” I hadn’t planned to go anyway.

“You might step on an ancestor, a crucial one. Maybe humans wouldn’t evolve, or not evolve the way they did,” He paused. “Uh, time isn’t as much of a ‘tapestry’ as we thought,” Wilson said, and Gold agreed.

“So I’m the only time traveler?”

“Scares ’em, huh?” I said.

“It should scare you, too,” Gold said, and Wilson agreed.

And it did.