Larry Niven: The Barsoom Project

The lava had reached the edge of the water covering the tar pit, and a feather of steam boiled up. The stench of sulfur grew chokingly strong. Rakes of gray ash streamed from the sky.

Eviane watched the lava with what Max couldn’t help thinking was a practiced eye. Quiet she was, but she’d Gamed. That key They’d found the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex, and the bones of a man within. Eviane’s stick had poked among the bones of the right hand, just enough to disturb them, to spring any trap; then the left, just enough to expose a glittering key. Tapped the key. Tapped the ground at her feet. Reached among the bones and plucked the key without brushing a single bone, and before any other player had planned a move.

Alura, the lovely cave girl who had guided them, pulled at Orson’s arm. “Must go.”

“Oh, what’s the poooint?”

“Orson, will you shut up? The point is that we came to play.”

Eviane nodded approval, and said her first words in two hours. “This isn’t right. They promised.”

“Darlin’, this whole thing hasn’t been right.”

“We go,” Alura said in her best mock-Paleolithic accent. “We go, worship. Pray for help.”

Orson pulled a face. “You’ve already gotten everyone else killed, you tryin’ for a perfect score?”

Max smiled benevolently. “You’re going to be a ball on the Ripper.”

“I wish I hadn’t come.”

“That makes many of us, Orson.” Max checked his watch. Eight minutes.

There were four players left: Max and Orson and Eviane and Kevin. Kevin Titus was a kid, and the only skinny one in the group. He was really skinny, painfully so.

In the two hours that the Game had been on, three of their four guides had been killed by various toothy carnivores. With the exception of the late lamented Professor, their guides had all been young, vivacious pidgin-English-speaking cave dwellers encountered on site. Max had chuckled quietly at the anachronism and followed the bouncing curves.

“They cheated,” Kevin said plaintively. The kid was five feet of knees and elbows, sugarcube teeth, frizzy brown hair, and nervous energy. He was panting with exertion, though even Max had his breath back. “They said that everything made sense.”

Eviane breathed hard, as if hyperventilation helped her memory. “They said that ‘given the stated Game situation, everything is accurate.”

“So they lied.”

The lava was getting close. The mouth of the cave was growing wanner. “No. They wouldn’t lie.” She repeated that as if it were an article of faith. “Dream Park wouldn’t lie. There’s an answer.”

“We go and pray! Gods must help,” Alura said almost calmly.

“Have they ever helped before?” Max asked hopefully.

“No.” Her shaggy blond head gave a mournful wag. Then she smiled ingenuously. “But maybe we pray wrong!”

“If Dream Park didn’t lie, then they’re idiots,” Orson whined. “There weren’t any goddamn cave people in the Cretaceous. Dinosaurs were dead for sixty million years before the first human being ever appeared. They blew it!”

Lava swept down the valley. The tyrannosaur’s tiny eyes bulged as the water around it began to boil. It screamed piteously when the lava hit it. The scream reverberated through Max’s bones, and a whiff of cooking lizard hit them in a blast.

Then the swamp was gone and the tar was exposed to the lava, and it all went up in a fireball. The Gamers threw themselves flat. The air whooshed, crinkling his eyebrows with heat. Max glimpsed big white bones before the lava rolled them under.

Damn! This is too much, too damned graphic, even for Dream Park. Thank goodness I haven’t eaten since breakfast!

Lava filled the valley below. It percolated like a demon’s cauldron.

“We’re screwed, I’m telling ya. I want everybody’s money back.”

Eviane was looking thoughtful, if her slightly crossed eyes could be interpreted as a thoughtful expression. “Something isn’t right here,” she said.

A flat certainty in her voice caught Max’s attention, and Orson’s too. She may look like a flake, but there’s somebody home in that head. Orson’s mood calmed in an instant. “What’ve you got?”

She shook her head. “It’s… it’s a puzzle. They always are, when they run over fifty minutes. There’s a clue.”

“What’s the clue?” Orson said. “I haven’t got a clue. I’m hungry and I’m tired, and we’ve got six minutes to live.”

“Think about it. What’s wrong with this?”

“Everything- Waitwaitwait.” Click: you could almost hear it. In some ways the brothers lived in different worlds. Max made his living as a very particular kind of clown, Orson as a computer programmer. But when the puzzle-solver in Orson’s head suddenly clicked on, Max vicariously shared the thrill. There was the brother he loved, the fastest question-crunching mind he had ever known.

“You’re right. There aren’t supposed to be cave people here. We found just one group, all about the same age. Everything else was right. All of the sauropods have been right for the era: we saw diplodocus and brontosaurus, but no stegosaurus or allosaurus mixed in.”

Kevin slapped thin hands against his head. “So what are the cave people doing here-”

Max caught the joke, and his laughter drowned out the rumble of the volcano. “Unless they’re time travelers too!” He turned to Alura, who had been cowering politely through the entire exchange. “Alura, take us to church!”

“This way!”

Behind them the sky glowed. The lava was filling the valley of dinosaurs, and in another few moments it was going to come roaring down the tunnel. The result was likely to use up all of his hit points in one hot second… so to speak.

They ran, or at least moved as quickly as girth and wind would allow. Kevin, a skinny little rabbit with barely enough meat to separate bones from skin, reached the chamber alongside Alura, way ahead of the rest. He was gasping, she wasn’t. Max clamped his mind down on the fatigue, but when he saw the chamber, exhaustion and confusion melted away like snowflakes.

The structure might have been carved from limestone by the passage of water, or it might have been an enormous gas bubble in a mountainous, sludgy wave of primeval lava. Whatever had carved it had done one hell of a job. It was huge, a crystalline cathedral with indirect lighting. (And where did the light come from? Oh, give it up. Phosphorescence, bioluminescence, whatever, it was gorgeous!)

Stalagmites rose from the floor like rows of fairy teeth. Thick spiderwebs festooned the corners, strange, baseball-sized husks dangling from them; but the room still sparkled.

In the center, surrounded by a cone of light, was what Max knew they would find.

Orson clapped his hands delightedly. “That’s it!” A platform with a metal post and a waist-high metal ring large enough for several adults to grasp simultaneously. “It’s an advanced version of Deveroux’s time machine.”

“Another group came back, with their kids-like taking a picnic.”

“Stopped to feed the dinosaurs-”

“Kids got stranded here, grew up with no adults.” They were laughing and hugging now. Even Eviane had abandoned her vow of silence, and was whooping louder than anyone.

“Let’s move!” Max said, checking his watch. He’d set it to count down. It gave him ninety seconds to end the Game.

Kevin and Orson examined the machine. Orson called, “It takes a key! Ev-Eviane?”

The only key still in the Game. Eviane tossed it underhand to Orson, who fitted it into a lock and turned it.

“Fits. It was drownin’ fair, after all.”

“Move it. We’re about to have company, say a million tons of lava.”