Danger Dinosaurs! полностью

Chuck staggered away from the fire. It had happened already. Owen had been crossed out, eliminated, just as if he’d never existed. He understood now why the party had turned to him as leader. Their minds had already adjusted to the fact that there had never been an Owen. As far as they were concerned, Chuck had always been their guide. It was therefore logical that he should be the one to lead them back to the rendezvous site. Even their memories had adjusted themselves. The incident with the jeep had been nothing more than a very close call. No one had been killed because there had been no Owen as far as they knew.

Owen was gone. He had never been.

And everything around him had adjusted to his absence. Time had made its own repairs.

Chuck shook his head again. If they all… he didn’t understand. He simply didn’t understand. Why had they all forgotten there had ever been a person named Owen, when he still remembered? Was it that he had been closest to Owen, that Owen had had a stronger effect on the development of his personality, had contributed more to his memory? Was it just a matter of time then, until he, too, forgot all about Owen? Would he go on living as if he had never had a brother? Would his mind and his body and his memory eventually make the adjustment? And would it be the same with his parents? When he greeted them again in his own time, would they have completely forgotten Owen? Would a son and a brother be completely erased because of a sacrifice 100 million years in the past?

No! He didn’t want to forget Owen. Owen had existed.

Owen was his brother. He clung to those facts as he would cling to his sanity. He shook his head, trying to clear it. There were already things he could not remember about his dead brother. Had Owen’s bicycle been red or green? Surely, he should remember something as simple as that. He had seen the bicycle every day, behind the stairs in the basement. It was red, wasn’t it? No-no, it was green. He shook his head again. He didn’t know.

He wanted to cry. The tears gathered in his eyes and he fought to hold them back. He tried to remember what the name of Owen’s fraternity had been, but the Greek letters were blurred in his memory. Alpha Beta Tau? Why couldn’t he remember? Owen’s porcelain mug had rested on the corner of Owen’s desk for as long as Chuck could remember. Epsilon Delta Mu? His brows pulled together. No, not that. But what? What?

He was beginning to forget already. He bit his lip and felt the warm, salty blood flow into his mouth. He didn’t want to forget. He didn’t want to…

“Well, young man,” Dr. Perry said, “we’ve finished our lunch and we’re ready to move whenever you are.”

Chuck glanced up at the paleontologist. “What? Oh, yes, yes. Of course. I…”

“If you don’t mind, we’d like to go back to the cave for our instruments and some other things.”

“Not at all,” Chuck said.

“We’ll only be a few minutes.”

A few minutes, Chuck thought. It had taken only a few minutes for the brontosaurs to crush Owen into the earth.

And in those few minutes a lifetime had been lost.

They traveled until it was dark and then they slept for the night. In the morning they got an early start, anxious to find the rendezvous site.

The land was completely unfamiliar. Chuck remembered nothing about it. It was as if the party had been dropped in the center of the African wilds without a compass, without a map, without a guide. His mind wrestled with the problem. He knew that they could wander around forever, covering the same terrain over and again, without even knowing it. It all looked the same. The trees, the rocks, the animals-everything. It was like watching the same slide slipped in and out of the viewing screen of the same projector, over and over and over.

Beneath the pressing need for reaching the rendezvous site in time, another problem pulled and wrenched at Chuck’s mind.

He was forgetting more and more details about Owen’s life. He found himself wondering which college Owen had attended. He struggled with his memory for a full half-hour before he was forced to give it up as a bad venture. He tried to remember then what kind of automobile Owen had driven. He knew he had driven a car, and that was the maddening part. He had seen the car every day since Owen had bought it. He had helped his brother wax and polish it, had-in fact-learned to drive with it. He went through the names of every automobile he could think of and then gave up in despair.

It seemed impossible that Owen had been dead only since yesterday afternoon. It seemed even more incredible that they had been in Jurassic times for only three days. It felt more like three years.