"Isn't that 'Zard-Off thing working?" Mama cried.
Daddy was depressing levers, jiggling toggles. "It's on, it's on!" he said. "They shouldn't be coming!"
The scent generator in our wagon was supposed to aspirate an acrid mist into the air, an odor repugnant to saurians, carnivores and plant-eaters alike.
But these curious T-kings were approaching anyway--proof, Mama and I decided, that our scent-generator, a secondhand model installed only a few hours before our departure, was a dud. And it was just like Daddy, the biggest of scrimps, to have paid bottom dollar for it, his perfectionism in matters not money-grounded now disastrously useless.
"Daddy, turn!" I shouted. "We can outrun them!"
To give him credit, Daddy had already ruddered us to the right and was squeezing F-pulses to the power block with his thumb. The plain was broad and open, but dotted with palmate shrubs, many of which looked like fluted pillars crowned by tattered green umbrella segments; we ran right over one of the larger cycads in our path before we'd gone thirty yards. Our wagon tilted on two side wheels, tried to right itself, and, failing that, crashed down on its passenger box with a drawn-out KRRRRR-ack!
Mama screamed, Daddy cursed, Button yowled like a vivisected cat. I was deafened, dangling in an eerie hush from my seat belt. And then Button, upside-down, peered quizzically into my face while mouthing, urgently, a battery of inaudible riddles.
Somehow, we wriggled out. So far as that goes, so did Daddy and Mama, although it would have been better for them--for all of us--if we had just played turtle.
In fact, our folks undoubtedly struggled free of the capsized wagon to look for Button and me. What Button and I saw, huddled behind an umbrella shrub fifty yards away, was that awkward but disjointedly agile pair of T-kings. They darted at Mama and Daddy and seized them like rag dolls in their stinking jaws, one stunned parent to each tyrannosaur.
Then the T-kings--lofty, land-going piranhas--shook our folks unconscious, dropped them to the ground, crouched on their mutilated bodies with crippled-looking fore claws, and vigorously tore into them with six-inch fangs.
At intervals, they'd lift their huge skulls and work their lizardly nostrils as if trying to catch wind of something tastier. Button and I, clutching each other, would glance away. Through it all, I cupped my hand over Button's mouth to keep him from crying out. By the time the T-kings had finished their meal and tottered off, my palm was lacerated from the helpless gnashing of Button's teeth.
And there we were, two scared human orphans in the problematic Late Cretaceous.
)
A pioneering 22nd-century family escapes a decimated Earth by crossing one of the time-slip barriers opened by the impact of an asteroid. When the parents become T. Rex fodder on their first day in the steaming jungles of the late Cretaceous, the 16-year-old son and his 5-year-old brother learn to survive by joining a migrating herd of vegetarian dinosaurs--and avoiding the other humans who have crossed over.
