"Robert F. Young - When Time Was New" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

WHEN TIME WAS NEW
BY ROBERT F. YOUNG

ILLUSTRATED BY MORROW

He searched through time for a dream тАФ and didn't know it when it came
true!

I

The stegosaurus standing beneath the ginkgo tree didn't surprise Carpenter, but the two kids sitting
in the branches did. He had expected to meet up with a stegosaurus sooner or later, but he hadn't
expected to meet up with a boy and a girl. What in the name of all that was Mesozoic were they doing in
the upper Cretaceous Period!
Maybe, he reflected, leaning forward in the driver's seat of his battery-powered triceratank, they
were tied in in some way with the anachronistic fossil he had come back to the Age of Dinosaurs to
investigate. Certainly the fact that Miss Sands, his chief assistant who had cased the place-time on the
time-scope, had said nothing about a couple of kids, meant nothing. Time-scopes registered only the
general lay of the land. They seldom showed anything smaller than a medium-sized mountain.
The stego nudged the trunk of the gingko with a hip as high as a hill. The tree gave such a convulsive
shudder that the two children nearly fell off the branch they were sitting on and came tumbling down upon
the serrated ridge of the monster's back. Their faces were as white as the line of cliffs that showed
distantly beyond the scatterings of dogwoods and magnolias and live oaks, and the stands of willows and
laurels and fan palms that patterned the prehistoric plain.
Carpenter braced himself in the driver's seat. "Come on, Sam," he said, addressing the triceratank by
nickname, "let's go get it!"

Since leaving the entry area several hours ago, he had been moving along in low gear in order not to
miss any potential clues that might point the way to the anachronistic fossil's place of originтАФa locale
which, as was usually the case with unidentifiable anachronisms, the paleontological society that
employed him had been able to pinpoint much more accurately in time than in space. Now, he threw Sam
into second and focused the three horn-howitzers jutting from the reptivehicle's facial regions on the
sacral ganglion of the offending ornithischian. Plugg! Plugg! Plugg! went the three stun charges as they
struck home, and down went the a posteriori section of the stego. The anterior section apprised by the
pea-sized brain that something had gone haywire, twisted far enough around for one of the little eyes in
the pint-sized head to take in the approaching triceratank, whereupon the stubby forelegs immediately
began the herculean task of dragging the ten-ton, humpbacked body out of the theater of operations.
Carpenter grinned. "Take it easy, old mountainsides," he said. "You'll be on all four feet again in less
time than it takes to say тАШTyrannosaurus rex'."
After bringing Sam to a halt a dozen yards from the base of the ginkgo, he looked up at the two
terrified children through the one-way transparency of the reptivehicle's skull-nacelle. If anything, their
faces were even whiter than they had been before. Small wonder. Sam looked more like a triceratops
than most real triceratops did. Raising the nacelle, Carpenter recoiled a little from the sudden contrast
between the humid heat of the midsummer's day and Sam's airconditioned interior. He stood up in the
driver's compartment and showed himself. "Come on down you two," he called. "Nobody's going to eat
you."
Two pairs of the widest and bluest eyes that he had ever seen came to rest upon his face. In neither
pair, however, was there the faintest gleam of understanding. "I said come on down," he repeated.
"There's nothing to be afraid of."
The boy turned to the girl, and the two of them began jabbering back and forth in a sing-song tongue