Dimension of Miracles (14 page)

‘You must change into a plant at once!’ the Prize said urgently.

‘But I can’t!’

‘You can’t? Then your situation is serious indeed. Let me see, you can’t fly or burrow, and I’d wager ten to one you’d never outrun him. Hmm, this becomes difficult.’

‘So what do I do?’

‘Well, under the circumstances, I think you should be stoical about the whole thing. I could quote Epictetus to you. And we could sing a hymn together if that would help.’

‘Damn your hymns! I want to get out of this!’

The flute had already begun to play ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ Carmody clenched his fists. The tyrannosaurus was now directly in front of him, towering overhead like a fleshed-out and animate derrick. It opened its awesome mouth.

CHAPTER 19

‘Hello,’ said the tyrannosaurus. ‘My name is Emie and I am six years old. What’s your name?’

‘Carmody,’ said Carmody.

‘And I’m his Prize,’ said the Prize.

‘Well, you both look very strange,’ said Emie. ‘You don’t look like anybody I’ve ever met before, and I’ve met a dimetrodon, and a struthiomimus, and a scolosaurus, and lots of others. Do you come from around here?’

‘Well, sort of,’ Carmody said. Then, reflecting on the dimensionality of time, he said, ‘But not really, actually.’

‘Oh,’ said Emie. Childlike, he stared at them and fell into a silence. Carmody stared back, fascinated by that huge, grim head, larger than a slot machine or a beer keg, the narrow mouth studded with teeth like rows of stilettos. Fearsome indeed! Only the eyes – which were round, mild, blue and trusting – refuted the rest of the dinosaur’s ominous appearance.

‘Well, so,’ Emie said at last, ‘what are you doing here in the park?’

‘Is this a park?’ Carmody asked.

‘Sure, it’s a park!’ Emie said. ‘It’s a park for
kids,
and I don’t think you’re a kid, even though you are very small.’

‘You’re right, I’m not a kid,’ Carmody said. ‘I stumbled into your park by mistake. I think perhaps I should speak to your father.’

‘Hokay,’ Emie said. ‘Climb on my back and I’ll take you to him. And don’t forget, I discovered you. And bring along your friend. He’s
really
strange!’

Carmody slipped the Prize into his pocket and mounted the tyrannosaurus, finding hand and foot holds on the folds of Emie’s iron-tough skin. As soon as he was securely in place on the dinosaur’s neck, Emie wheeled and began to lope towards the southwest.

‘Where are we going?’ Carmody asked.

‘To see my father.’

‘Yes, but where
is
your father?’

‘He’s in the city, working at his job. Where else would he be?’

‘Of course, where else indeed?’ Carmody said, taking a firmer grip as Emie broke into a gallop.

From Carmody’s pocket, the Prize said, in a muffled voice, ‘This is all exceedingly strange.’

‘You’re the strange one around here,’ Carmody reminded him. Then he settled back to enjoy the ride.

They didn’t call it Dinosaursville, but Carmody could think of it in no other way. It lay about two miles from the park. First they came to a road, a wide trail, actually, stamped to the firmness of concrete by countless dinosaur feet. They followed it and passed many hadrosaurs sleeping beneath willow trees by the side of the road and occasionally harmonizing in low, sweet voices. Carmody asked about them, but Emie would only say that his father considered them a real problem.

The road went past groves of birch, maple, laurel and holly. Each grove had its dozen or so dinosaurs, moving purposefully beneath the branches, digging at the ground or pushing away refuse. Carmody asked what they were doing.

‘They’re tidying up,’ Emie said scornfully. ‘That’s all that housewives ever do.’

They had come to an upland plateau. They left the last individual grove behind and plunged abruptly into a forest.

Evidently it was not a natural growth; it showed many signs of having been planted purposefully and with considerable foresight. Its outer trees consisted of a broad belt of fig, breadfruit, hazelnut and walnut. Past that there were several nicely spaced rows of tall, slim-trunked gingkos. Then, there was nothing but pine trees and an occasional spruce.

As they moved deeper into the forest, it became more and more crowded with dinosaurs. Most of these were theropods – carnivorous tyrannosaurs like Emie. But the Prize also pointed out several ornithopods, and literally hundreds of the ceratopsia offshoot represented by the massively horned triceratops. Nearly all of them moved through the trees at a canter. The ground shook beneath their feet, the trees trembled, and clouds of dust were flung into the air. Flank scraped against armoured flank, collisions were avoided only by quick turns, abrupt halts and sudden accelerations. There was much bellowing for right-of-way. The sight of several thousand hurrying dinosaurs was almost as fearsome as their smell, which was overpowering.

‘Here we are,’ said Emie, stopping so quickly that Carmody was nearly thrown off his neck. ‘This is my dad’s place!’

Carmody looked around and saw that Emie had, brought him to a small grove of sequoias. The big trees formed an oasis within the forest. Two or three dinosaurs moved among the redwoods with a slow, almost languid pace, ignoring the turmoil fifty yards away. Carmody decided that he could get down without being trampled upon. Warily he slid off Emie’s neck.

‘Dad!’ Emie shouted. ‘Hey, Dad, just look what I found, look, Dad!’

One of the dinosaurs looked up. He was a tyrannosaur, somewhat larger than Emie, with white striations across his blue hide. His eyes were grey and bloodshot. He turned around with great deliberation.

‘How often,’ he asked, ‘have I asked you not to gallop here?’

‘I’m sorry, Dad, but look, I found –’

‘You are always “sorry,”’ the tyrannosaur said, ‘but you never see fit to modify your behaviour. I have spoken with your mother about this, Emie, and we are in, substantial agreement. Neither of us wishes to raise a graceless, loud-mouthed hot-rodder who doesn’t possess the manners of a brontosaurus. I love you, my son, but you must learn –’

‘Dad! Will you please save the lecture for later and look, just
look,
at what I’ve found!’

The elderly tyrannosaur’s mouth tightened and his tail flicked ominously. But he lowered his head, following the direction of his son’s outstretched forepaw, and saw Carmody.

‘Well bless my soul!’ he cried.

‘Good day, sir,’ Carmody said. ‘My name is Thomas Carmody. I am a human being. I don’t think there are any other humans on Earth just now, or even any primates. How I got here is a little difficult to explain, but I come in peace, and – and that sort of thing,’ he finished lamely.

‘Fantastic!’ Emie’s father said. He turned his head. ‘Baxley! Do you see what I see? Do you hear what I hear?’

Baxley was a tyrannosaur of about the same age as Emie’s father. He said, ‘I see it, Borg, but I don’t believe it.’

‘A talking mammal!’ Borg exclaimed.

‘I still don’t believe it,’ said Baxley.

CHAPTER 20

It took Borg longer to accept the idea of a talking mammal than it took Carmody to accept the idea of a talking reptile. Still, Borg finally did accept it. As the Prize remarked later, there is nothing like the actual presence of a fact to make one believe in the existence of that fact.

They retired to Borg’s office, which was under the lofty green foliage of a weeping-willow tree. There, they sat and cleared their throats, trying to think of something to say. At last Borg said, ‘So you’re an alien mammal from the future, eh?’

‘I guess I am,’ Carmody said. ‘And you are an indigenous reptile from the past.’

‘I never thought about it that way,’ Borg said. ‘But yes, I suppose that’s true. How far ahead in the future did you say you came from?’

‘About a hundred million years or so.’

‘Hah. Quite a long time away. Yes, a long time indeed.’

‘It
is
quite a long time away,’ Carmody agreed.

Borg nodded and hummed tunelessly. It was evident to Carmody that he didn’t know what to say next. Borg seemed a very decent sort of person; hospitable, but set in his ways, very much a family man, no conversationalist, just a decent, dull, middle-class tyrannosaur.

‘Well, well,’ Borg said, after the silence had become uncomfortable, ‘and how
is
the future?’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘I mean, what sort of a place is the future?’

‘Very busy,’ Carmody replied. ‘Bustling. Many new inventions, a great deal of confusion.’

‘Well, well, well,’ Borg said. ‘That’s very much as some of our more imaginative chaps had pictured it. Some of them have even predicted an evolutionary change in the mammals, making them the dominant species on Earth. But I consider that farfetched and grotesque.’

‘I suppose it must sound that way,’ Carmody said.

‘Then you
are
the dominant species?’

‘Well …
one
of the dominant species.’

‘But what about the reptiles? Or more specifically, how are the tyrannosaurs doing in the future?’

Carmody had neither the heart nor the nerve to tell him that dinosaurs were extinct in his day, and had been extinct for sixty million years or so, and that reptiles in general had come to occupy an insignificant part in the scheme of things.

‘Your race is doing every bit as well as could be expected,’ Carmody replied, feeling positively Pythian and rather sneaky.

‘Good! I thought it would be like that!’ Borg said. ‘We’re a tough race, you know, and most of us have will power and common sense. Do men and reptiles have much trouble co-existing?’

‘No, not much trouble,’ Carmody said.

‘Glad to hear it. I was afraid the dinosaurs might have become high-handed on account of their size.’

‘No, no,’ Carmody said. ‘Speaking for the mammals of the future, I think I can safely say that everybody likes a dinosaur.’

‘It’s very decent of you to say that,’ Borg said.

Carmody mumbled something. He suddenly felt very ashamed of himself.

‘The future holds no great anxiety for a dinosaur,’ Borg said, falling into the rotund tones of an after-dinner speaker. ‘But it was not always that way. Our extinct ancestor, the allosaurus, seems to have been a bad-tempered brute and a gluttonous feeder. His ancestor, the ceratosaurus, was a dwarf carnosaur. To judge from the size of his braincase, he must have been incredibly stupid. There were other dawn-age carnosaurs, of course; and before them there must have been a missing link – a remote ancestor from which both the quadruped and the bipedal dinosaurs sprang.’

‘The bipedal dinosaurs are dominant, of course?’ Carmody asked.

‘Of course. The triceratops is a dull-witted creature with a savage disposition. We keep small herds of them. Their flesh rounds out a meal of brontosaurus steak quite nicely. There are various other species, of course. You might have noticed some hadrosaurs as you came into the city.’

‘Yes, I did,’ Carmody said. ‘They were singing.’

‘Those fellows are always singing,’ Borg said sternly.

‘Do you eat them?’

‘Good heavens, no! Hadrosaurs are
intelligent
! They are the only other intelligent species on the planet, aside from tyrannosaurs.’

‘Your son said they were a real problem.’

‘Well, they are,’ Borg said, a little too defiantly.

‘In what way?’

‘They’re lazy. Also sullen and surly. I know what I’m talking about; I’ve employed hadrosaurs as servants. They have no ambition, no drive, no stick-to-it-iveness. Half the time they don’t know who hatched them, and they don’t seem to care. They don’t look you forthrightly in the eye when they speak to you.’

‘They sing well, though,’ Carmody said.

‘Oh, yes, they sing well. Some of our best entertainers are hadrosaurs. They also do well at heavy construction, if given supervision. Their appearance works against them, of course, that duckbilled look … But they can’t help that. Has the hadrosaur problem been solved in the future?’

‘It has,’ Carmody said. ‘The race is extinct.’

‘Perhaps it’s best that way,’ Borg said. ‘Yes, I really think it’s best.’

Carmody and Borg conversed for several hours. Carmody learned about the problems of urban reptilian life. The forest-cities were becoming increasingly crowded as more and more tyrannosaurs and hadrosaurs left the countryside for the pleasures of civilization. A traffic problem of some severity had sprung up in the last fifty years. Giant saurischians like to travel fast and are proud of their quick reflexes. But when several thousand of them are rushing through a forest at the same time, accidents are bound to happen. The accidents were often severe: when two reptiles, each weighing forty tons, meet head-on at thirty miles an hour, broken necks are the most likely result.