Iterations and other stories (collection)

His nephew had told him that last time they were here—he’d been six back then, and could rattle off endless facts and figures about the great beasts—

Dinosaurs had been warm-blooded.

It was crazy.

Crazy.

And yet—

He had the tooth. He had it right here, in his hand. Serrated, conical, white—

White. Not the brown of a fossilized tooth. White and fresh and modern.

Dinosaurs in the sewers of New York.

It didn’t make any sense. But something had taken a huge bite out of Kowalski, and—

Jacobs ran out of the dinosaur gallery and hurried to the lobby. There were more dinosaurs there: the museum’s rotunda was dominated by a giant Barosaurus, rearing up on its hind legs to defend its baby from two marauding allosaurs. Jacobs rushed to the information desk. “I need to see a paleontologist, ” he panted, gripping the sides of the desk with both arms.

“Sir,” said the young woman sitting behind the desk, “if you’ll just calm down, I’ll—”

Jacobs fumbled for his hospital ID and dropped it on the desktop. “I’m a doctor,” he said. “It’s—it’s a medical emergency. Please hurry. I need to talk to a dinosaur specialist.”

A security guard had moved closer to the desk, but the young woman held him at bay with her eyes. She picked up a black telephone handset and dialed an extension.

Piezoelectricity.

It had to be the answer, thought Ludlam, as he watched the pale green light pulsate in front of him.

Piezoelectricity was the generation of electricity in crystals that have been subjected to stress. He’d read a geological paper about it once—the skyscrapers in New York are the biggest in the world, and there are more of them here than anywhere else. They weigh tens of thousands of tons, and all of that weight is taken by girders sunk into the ground, transferring the stress to the rocks beneath. The piezoelectric discharges caused the flashes of light— —and maybe, just maybe, caused a whole lot more.

“Son of a gun,” said David Ludlam, the paleontologist who agreed to speak to Dr. Jacobs. “Son of a gun. ”

“It’s a dinosaur tooth, isn’t it?” asked the surgeon.

Ludlam was quiet for a moment, turning the tooth over and over while he stared at it. “Definitely a theropod tooth, yes—but it’s not exactly a tyrannosaur, or anything else I’ve ever seen. Where on Earth did you get it?”

“Out of a man’s leg. He’d been bitten.”

Ludlam considered this. “The bite—was it a great scooping out, like this?” He gestured with a cupped hand.

“Yes—yes, that’s it exactly.”

“That’s how a tyrannosaur kills, all right. We figure they just did one massive bite, scooping out a huge hunk of flesh, then waited patiently for the prey animal to bleed to death. But—but—

“Yes?”

“Well, the last tyrannosaur died sixty-five million years ago.”

“The asteroid impact, I know—”