THE BIG SPLASH
L. Sprague de Camp
What was my closest call, Mr. Burgess? Let’s see. There was the time that drongo Courtney James woke up a sleeping tyrannosaur by shooting a gun over its head . . . But if you really want to know, on these time safaris we haven’t had so much trouble from the animals as from the people, and we haven’t had so much grief from the people as we have from natural forces. Like that time we ran into Enyo. No, not Ohio, Enyo. That’s what those scientific blokes call the K-T Event. Somebody named it Enyo after some Greek goddess of destruction.
Ta, don’t mind if I have another.
The K-T Event? That’s what killed off all the dinosaurs; pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, etcetera at the end of the Cretaceous. So Rivers and Aiyar, Time Safaris, took a couple of scientists to the edge of the Event, hoping it would not kill us off along with the ornithopods. And it nearly bloody well did. If Bruce Cohen, the chamber wallah, had been a second sooner or later with the doors, Aljira only knows what—
Who’s Aljira? That’s the head god of one of the tribes of Abos—excuse me, Native Australians—in the outback. You see, down-under we have lots of wowsers, worse than your Puritans here in America. If they hear you say “By God!” they raise a stink. So I long ago got into the habit of swearing by Aljira to avoid arguments.
But to get back. The scientists had been arguing for half a century over the nature of the K-T Event. Some said a comet or a planetoid hit the Earth; others, that one or more of those big super-volcanoes, like the one that made your Yellowstone Park, cut loose with an eruption that blanketed the Earth with ash and smoke.
. . .
