"Michael Swanwick - Scherzo with Tyrannosaur" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

something big and hairy -- a Creationist bomb, or a message from a million
years upline -- he would have been.
When I showed up, everybody began talking at once.
"I didn't do nothing, man, this bastard -- "
" -- guilty of a Class Six violation --
" -- broke my fucking arm, man. He threw me to the ground!"
" -- work to do. Get them out of my kitchen!"
It turned out to be a simple case of note-passing. One of the waiters
had, in his old age, conspired with another recruited from a later period, to
slip a list of hot investments to his younger self. Enough to make them both
multibillionaires. We had surveillance devices planted in the kitchen, and a
TSO saw the paper change hands. Now the perps were denying everything.
It wouldn't have worked anyway. The authorities keep strict tabs on
the historical record. Wealth on the order of what they had planned would
have stuck out like a sore thumb.
I fired both waiters, called the police to take them away, routed a
call for two replacements several hours into the local past, and had them
briefed and on duty without any lapse in service. Then I took the TSO aside
and bawled him out good for calling me back real-time, instead of sending a
memo back to me three days ago. Once something has happened, though, that's
it. I'd been called, so I had to handle it in person.
It was your standard security glitch. No big deal.
But it was wearying. So when I went back down the funnel to Hilltop
Station, I set the time for a couple hours after I had left. I arrived just
as the tables were being cleared for dessert and coffee.
Somebody handed me a microphone, and I tapped it twice, for attention.
I was standing before the window, a spectacular sunset to my back.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I said, "let me again welcome you to the
Maastrichtian, the final age of the late Cretaceous. This is the last
research station before the Age of Mammals. Don't worry, though -- the meteor
that put a final end to the dinosaurs is still several thousand years in the
future." I paused for laughter, then continued.
"If you'll look outside, you'll see Jean, our dino wrangler, setting up
a scent lure. Jean, wave for our diners."
Jean was fiddling with a short tripod. She waved cheerily, then bent
back to work. With her blond ponytail and khaki shorts, she looked to be just
your basic science babe. But Jean was slated to become one of the top saurian
behaviorists in the world, and knew it too. Despite our best efforts, gossip
slips through.
Now Jean backed up toward the station doors, unreeling fuse wire as she
went. The windows were all on the second floor. The doors, on the ground
floor, were all armored.
"Jean will be ducking inside for this demonstration," I said. "You
wouldn't want to be outside unprotected when the lure goes off."
"What's in it?" somebody called out.
"Triceratops blood. We're hoping to call in a predator -- maybe even
the king of predators, Tyrannosaurus rex himself." There was an appreciative
murmur from the diners. Everybody here had heard of T. rex. He had real star
power. I switched easily into lecture mode. "If you dissect a tyrannosaur,
you'll see that it has an extremely large olfactory lobe -- larger in