Tales of Old Earth by Michael Swanwick Page A

clutching what looked to be a broken arm. The TSO covered them both with a gun.
    The good news was that the Old Man wasn’t there. If it had been 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.
    â€œI didn’t do noth ing, man, this bastard—”
    â€œâ€”guilty of a Class Six violation—”
    â€œâ€”broke my fucking arm , man. He threw me to the ground!”
    â€œâ€”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.
    â€œLadies 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.
    â€œIf 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.
    â€œJean will be ducking inside for this demonstration,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to be outside unprotected when the lure goes off.”
    â€œWhat’s in it?” somebody called out.
    â€œTriceratops blood. We’re hoping to call in a predator—maybe even the king of predator, 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 proportion to the rest of its brain than that of any other animal except the turkey vulture. Rex can sniff his prey”—carrion, usually, but I didn’t say that—”from miles away. Watch.”
    The lure went off with a pop and a puff of pink mist.
    I glanced over at the de Cherville table, and saw Melusine slip one foot out of her pump and run it up Hawkins’ trouser leg. He colored.
    Her father didn’t notice. Her