The rex danced to the side, moving with surprising agility for a creature of its bulk, and once again it brought its terrible jaws down on the ceratopsian’s shoulder. The plant-eater was hemorrhaging at an incredible rate, as though a thousand sacrifices had been performed on the altar of its back.
The Triceratops tried to lunge forward, but it was weakening quickly. The tyrannosaur, crafty in its own way despite its trifling intellect, simply retreated a dozen giant paces. The hornface took one tentative step toward it, and then another, and, with great and ponderous effort, one more. But then the dinosaurian tank teetered and, eyelids slowly closing, collapsed on its side. Cohen was briefly startled, then thrilled, to hear it fall to the ground with a splash — he hadn’t realized just how much blood had poured out of the great rent the rex had made in the beast’s back.
The tyrannosaur moved in, lifting its left leg up and then smashing it down on the Triceratops’s belly, the three sharp toe claws tearing open the thing’s abdomen, entrails spilling out into the harsh sunlight. Cohen thought the rex would let out a victorious roar, but it didn’t. It simply dipped its muzzle into the body cavity, and methodically began yanking out chunks of flesh.
Cohen was disappointed. The battle of the dinosaurs had been fun, the killing had been well engineered, and there had certainly been enough blood, but there was no terror. No sense that the Triceratops had been quivering with fear, no begging for mercy. No feeling of power, of control. Just dumb, mindless brutes moving in ways preprogrammed by their genes.
It wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.
Judge Hoskins looked across the desk in her chambers at the lawyer.
“A Tyrannosaurus, Mr. Axworthy? I was speaking figuratively.”
“I understand that, my lady, but it was an appropriate observation, don’t you think? I’ve contacted the Chronotransference people, who say they can do it, if they have a rex specimen to work from. They have to back-propagate from actual physical material in order to get a temporal fix.”
Judge Hoskins was as unimpressed by scientific babble as she was by legal jargon. “Make your point, Mr. Axworthy.”
“I called the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller and asked them about the Tyrannosaurus fossils available worldwide. Turns out there’s only a handful of complete skeletons, but they were able to provide me with an annotated list, giving as much information as they could about the individual probable causes of death.” He slid a thin plastic printout sheet across the judge’s wide desk.
“Leave this with me, counsel. I’ll get back to you.”
Axworthy left, and Hoskins scanned the brief list. She then leaned back in her leather chair and began to read the needlepoint on her wall for the thousandth time:
My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time -
She read that line again, her lips moving slightly as she subvocalized the words: “I shall achieve in time … ”
The judge turned back to the list of tyrannosaur finds. Ah, that one. Yes, that would be perfect. She pushed a button on her phone. “David, see if you can find Mr. Axworthy for me.”
There had been a very unusual aspect to the Triceratops kill — an aspect that intrigued Cohen. Chronotransference had been performed countless times; it was one of the most popular forms of euthanasia. Sometimes the transferee’s original body would give an ongoing commentary about what was going on, as if talking during sleep. It was clear from what they said that transferees couldn’t exert any control over the bodies they were transferred into.
Indeed, the physicists had claimed any control was impossible. Chronotransference worked precisely because the transferee could exert no influence, and therefore was simply observing things that had already been observed. Since no new observations were being made, no quantum-mechanical distortions occurred. After all, said the physicists, if one could exert control, one could change the past. And that was impossible.
And yet, when Cohen had willed the rex to alter its course, it eventually had done so.
Could it be that the rex had so little brains that Cohen’s thoughts could control the beast?
Madness. The ramifications were incredible.
Still …
He had to know if it was true. The rex was torpid, flopped on its belly, gorged on ceratopsian meat. It seemed prepared to lie here for a long time to come, enjoying the early evening breeze.
Get up, thought Cohen. Get up, damn you!
Nothing. No response.
Get up!
The rex’s lower jaw was resting on the ground. Its upper jaw was lifted high, its mouth wide open. Tiny pterosaurs were flitting in and out of the open maw, their long needle-like beaks apparently yanking gobbets of hornface flesh from between the rex’s curved teeth.
Get up, thought Cohen again. Get up!
The rex stirred.
Up!
The tyrannosaur used its tiny forelimbs to keep its torso from sliding forward as it pushed with its powerful legs until it was standing.
Forward, thought Cohen. Forward!
The beast’s body felt different. Its belly was full to bursting.
Forward!
With ponderous steps, the rex began to march.
It was wonderful. To be in control again! Cohen felt the old thrill of the hunt.
And he knew exactly what he was looking for.
“Judge Hoskins says okay,” said Axworthy. “She’s authorized for you to be transferred into that new T. rex they’ve got right here in Alberta at the Tyrrell. It’s a young adult, they say. Judging by the way the skeleton was found, the rex died falling, probably into a fissure. Both legs and the back were broken, but the skeleton remained almost completely articulated, suggesting that scavengers couldn’t get at it. Unfortunately, the chronotransference people say that back-propagating that far into the past they can only plug you in a few hours before the accident occurred. But you’ll get your wish: you’re going to die as a tyrannosaur. Oh, and here are the books you asked for: a complete library on Cretaceous flora and fauna. You should have time to get through it all; the chronotransference people will need a couple of weeks to set up.”
As the prehistoric evening turned to night, Cohen found what he had been looking for, cowering in some underbrush: large brown eyes, long, drawn-out face, and a lithe body covered in fur that, to the tyrannosaur’s eyes, looked blue-brown.
A mammal. But not just any mammal. Purgatorius, the very first primate, known from Montana and Alberta from right at the end of the Cretaceous. A little guy, only about ten centimeters long, excluding its ratlike tail. Rare creatures, these days. Only a precious few.
The little furball could run quickly for its size, but a single step by the tyrannosaur equaled more than a hundred of the mammal’s. There was no way it could escape.
The rex leaned in close, and Cohen saw the furball’s face, the nearest thing there would be to a human face for another sixty million years. The animal’s eyes went wide in terror.
Naked, raw fear.
Mammalian fear.
Cohen saw the creature scream.
Heard it scream.
It was beautiful.
The rex moved its gaping jaws in toward the little mammal, drawing in breath with such force that it sucked the creature into its maw. Normally the rex would swallow its meals whole, but Cohen prevented the beast from doing that. Instead, he simply had it stand still, with the little primate running around, terrified, inside the great cavern of the dinosaur’s mouth, banging into the giant teeth and great fleshy walls, and skittering over the massive, dry tongue.
Cohen savored the terrified squealing. He wallowed in the sensation of the animal, mad with fear, moving inside that living prison.