Robert Silverberg - Hunters in the Forest

His fingers are tingling. His throat is dry. His cheeks blaze with savage adrenal fires. His breath is coming in ragged gasps. He has never felt anything like this before in his life.

He moistens his lips.

“Well—”

She smiles gently. The pressure eases. “It’s a big decision, I know. Think about it,” she says. Her voice is soft now. The wild zeal of a moment before is gone from it. “How soon before your capsule leaves?”

He glances at his wrist. “Eight, nine more hours.”

“Plenty of time to make up your mind.”

“Yes. Yes.”

Relief washes over him. She has dizzied him with the overpowering force of her revelation and the passionate frenzy of her invitation to join her in her escape from the world they have left behind. He isn’t used to such things. He needs time now, time to absorb, to digest, to ponder. To decide. That he would even consider such a thing astonishes him. He has known her how long—an hour, an hour and a half?—and here he is thinking of giving up everything for her. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

Shakily he turns away from her and stares at the ankylosaurs wallowing in the mudhole just in front of them.

Strange, strange, strange. Gigantic low-slung tubby things, squat as tanks, covered everywhere by armor. Vaguely triangular, expanding vastly toward the rear, terminating in armored tails with massive bony excrescences at the tips, like deadly clubs. Slowly snuffling forward in the muck, tiny heads down, busily grubbing away at soft green weeds. Jayne jumps down among them and dances across their armored backs, leaping from one to another. They don’t even seem to notice. She laughs and calls to him. “Come on,” she says, prancing like a she-devil.

They dance among the ankylosaurs until the game grows stale. Then she takes him by the hand and they run onward, through a field of scarlet mosses, down to a small clear lake fed by a swift-flowing stream. They strip and plunge in, heedless of risk. Afterward they embrace on the grassy bank. Some vast creature passes by, momentarily darkening the sky. Mallory doesn’t bother even to look up.

Then it is on, on to spy on something with a long neck and a comic knobby head, and then to watch a pair of angry ceratopsians butting heads in slow motion, and then to applaud the elegant migration of a herd of towering duckbills across the horizon. There are dinosaurs everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, an astounding zoo of them. And the time ticks away.

It’s fantastic beyond all comprehension. But even so—

Give up everything for this? he wonders.

The chalet in Gstaad, the weekend retreat aboard the L5 satellite, the hunting lodge in the veldt? The island home in the Seychelles, the plantation in New Caledonia, the pied-a-terre in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower?

For this? For a forest full of nightmare monsters, and a life of daily peril?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

He glances toward her. She knows what’s on his mind, and she gives him a sizzling look. Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

A beeper goes off on his wrist and his thinko says, “It is time to return to the capsule. Shall I guide you?”

And suddenly it all collapses into a pile of ashes, the whole shimmering fantasy perishing in an instant.

“Where are you going?” she calls.

“Back,” he says. He whispers the word hoarsely—croaks it, in fact.

“Tom!”

“Please. Please.”

He can’t bear to look at her. His defeat is total; his shame is cosmic. But he isn’t going to stay here. He isn’t. He isn’t. He simply isn’t. He slinks away, feeling her burning contemptuous glare drilling holes in his shoulderblades. The quiet voice of the thinko steadily instructs him, leading him around pitfalls and obstacles. After a time he looks back and can no longer see her.

On the way back to the capsule he passes a pair of sauropods mating, a tyrannosaur in full slather, another thing with talons like scythes, and half a dozen others. The thinko obligingly provides him with their names, but Mallory doesn’t even give them a glance. The brutal fact of his own inescapable cowardice is the only thing that occupies his mind. She has had the courage to turn her back on the stagnant overperfect world where they live, regardless of all danger, whereas he—he—

“There is the capsule, sir,” the thinko says triumphantly.

Last chance, Mallory.

No. No. No. He can’t do it.

He climbs in. Waits. Something ghastly appears outside, all teeth and claws, and peers balefully at him through the window. Mallory peers back at it, nose to nose, hardly caring what happens to him now. The creature takes an experimental nibble at the capsule. The impervious metal resists. The dinosaur shrugs and waddles away.

A chime goes off. The Late Cretaceous turns blurry and disappears.

In mid-October, seven weeks after his return, he is telling the somewhat edited version of his adventure at a party for the fifteenth time that month when a woman to his left says, “There’s someone in the other room who’s just came back from the dinosaur tour too.”

“Really,” says Mallory, without enthusiasm.

“You and she would love to compare notes, I’ll bet. Wait, and I’ll get her. Jayne! Jayne, come in here for a moment!”

Mallory gasps. Color floods his face. His mind swirls in bewilderment and chagrin. Her eyes are as sparkling and alert as ever, her hair is a golden cloud.

“But you told me—”

“Yes,” she says. “I did, didn’t I?”

“Your capsule—you said it had gone back—”

“It was just on the far side of the ankylosaurs, behind the horsetails. I got to the Cretaceous about eight hours before you did. I had signed up for a 24-hour tour.”

“And you let me believe—”

“Yes. So I did.” She grins at him and says softly, “It was a lovely fantasy, don’t you think?”

He comes close to her and gives her a cold, hard stare. “What would you have done if I had let my capsule go back without me and stranded myself there for the sake of your lovely fantasy? Or didn’t you stop to think about that?”

“I don’t know,” she tells him. “I just don’t know.” And she laughs.