Danger Dinosaurs! полностью

Masterson screamed, a terrifying scream that curled Chuck’s stomach into a rigid ball. He kept squeezing the trigger until he’d fired the seven shells in the clip. He unslung the rifle then and kept blasting away at the bloody, gigantic head. The jaws stopped working, opened wide to reveal teeth crimson with Masterson’s blood. Masterson dropped to the ground like a stone, and Allosaurus wobbled backward. His hind legs gripped unsteadily at the ground, his forefeet drooping weakly. Suddenly the beast toppled over like a giant tree falling. Down, down, he came, hitting the ground with a shock that caused the surrounding rocks to tremble. A great cloud of dust rose over the beast, covered him like a shroud and settled over his thick hide. He lay there in a spreading pool of his own blood, motionless, the flat eyes blank.

Allosaurus was dead.

Chuck looked down the face of the cliff to where Masterson lay crumpled against the rocks. One look told him all he had to know.

Masterson was dead, too.

Chuck stood on the ledge for a long time. He looked down at Denise, cradled in Dr. Dumar’s arms, sobbing gently. He glanced again at Masterson, a broken man with broken dreams. His eyes wandered to Allosaurus, the blood still gushing from his enormous head. The scavenger reptiles were already scrambling over the rocks, heading for the dead hulk, ready to tear it to pieces.

He looked toward the horizon, far out over the land. The sky was clear. The sun slanted down in fanlike rays, bathing the land in a golden wash of warmth. His eyes roamed past the boulders, past the rock-strewn clearing, past the bordering fringe of shrubbery, past the deeper greenery beyond that.

He opened his eyes wider.

His mouth came unhinged and his features fought the grin that tried desperately to form on his face. A shout rose in his throat, strangled itself. He wanted to laugh wildly and cry hysterically, and all he could do was stand there and shiver like an autumn leaf on a shedding tree.

Far off in the distance, looking like the outline of a postage stamp on the ground, was the white square that had been painted to mark off the exact relay area! “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey! We’ve found it!” He pointed wildly, looking down at Arthur, Dr. Perry and Pete as they ran across the clearing. “What?” Arthur yelled. “What, Chuck?”

“The rendezvous site! Over that way! We’ll get home, after all!”

His wrist watch said one o’clock.

They had traveled until dusk and then stopped for the night, because they did not want to lose their way by wandering hopelessly in the darkness. On the morning of the seventh day they had started their trek again-and now it was one o’clock.

Chuck glanced at his watch briefly. One o’clock. If they did not reach the relay area by two o’clock…

Doggedly, he led the party forward.

He tried not to think of the time limit imposed on the party. Instead, he tried to formulate the nature of the report he would make to the authorities. Somehow, though, the report did not seem very important. Someone named Masterson had paid for the expedition. But Masterson was dead.

He found it difficult to remember much about the man, although he knew that he should, because he did, after all, have to make a report. Somewhat vaguely, his mind struggled with the concept of Masterson’s and Gardel’s deaths. He knew he had thought over this very same problem not too long ago-but he didn’t know why. He understood clearly that Masterson and Gardel had ceased to exist long before they had been born-and he knew that the time stream would therefore make adjustments to account for their nonexistence. He knew, too, that eventually he would completely forget that either of the two men had existed. He knew this with a dead certainty. Yet he did not know why he knew it. He accepted it calmly as a fact. His store of experience told him that he had encountered this very same situation-or a parallel one-sometime not too long ago. He could not remember what that situation had been. He knew, though, that the memory of Masterson would fade, that he and his gaunt assistant would slowly slide into oblivion, leaving a completely adjusted set of circumstances, a set of circumstances that discounted the existence of the two men, that substituted a completely new train of events.

The idea was a strange one, but a familiar one. That he could not account for its familiarity did not disturb him.

He did wonder, however, how the time stream would adjust to Masterson’s absence. It would have to go all the way back, back to the beginnings, back to long before Chuck had even met the man. All traces of Masterson and Gardel would be erased, all contacts with any other men, all influences he may have had on the shaping of their characters or lives.