Rodney Johnson was sitting in the crook of a large birch tree, rifle across his lap, smoking a Camel, when he saw the bear.

At first, he thought the huge blot meandering through the clearing below was some sort of hunched-over moose. He had to look twice before he could classify it as a bear.

Huge, it had long, wolflike legs and a short fighting-dog snout. It looked to be a little over five feet tall at the shoulder.

“Hot damn!” Rodney cried, dropping his Camel in the brush at the base of the tree. He had his rifle sighted on the bear’s pit bull head in an instant. He breathed carefully, propping the gun on his knee to keep his hands steady. He let out a breath slowly, and at the end of his breath, he squeezed the trigger.

In the clearing below, the monstrous bear reared up on its hind legs, easily twice Rodney’s height. Then, like a limp doll, the animal collapsed.

Hands shaking, Rodney pulled out another Camel and struck three matches before he could hold them steady enough to light it. He had just bagged himself a trophy bear. There was no doubt about it. An ugly bear, but still a trophy. The animal looked as if it had just come out of hibernation—it was as gangly as a yearling.

Only when he climbed out of the tree and drove his four-wheeler down to the carcass did he realize how gangly.

“Damn,” Rodney muttered, looking over the strange beast. “Looks like he was put on those growth hormones like all those basketball players in the Lower Forty-Eight.”

Slightly upset that his trophy bear looked anorexic, Rodney nevertheless proceeded with the task of skinning it. The hide alone weighed almost two hundred pounds. Grunting with the effort, Rodney hefted it onto the back of his four-wheeler and, with the skull and paws, drove home.

Little did he know that this skinny, mashed-faced trophy would get him put in jail for poaching.

The bear, they said, was extinct. Or, at least, it was extinct before Rodney killed it, which didn’t make any sense to him. How could something be extinct if it was right there to be shot?

Arctodus simus Yukonensis, the charges had read. He had read that line several times, not making heads or tails of it. Yukonensis sounded a lot like Yukon, but Rodney hadn’t shot it in the Yukon at all. It had been near the coast in Kenai.

His lawyer didn’t seem interested in helping him, either. He was more interested in exactly where Rodney had found the animal, since they both knew that he was guilty of killing it. And, since Rodney wasn’t about to give away his favorite hunting spot to this high-bred buffoon, he wasn’t about to tell him.

Before long, people began visiting Rodney in his jail cell, sometimes not even asking the guard to take them to a room to talk, but talking through the bars, instead. Rodney ignored those kinds. But there was something fishy about the way everyone kept coming to ask him where he had found that bear.

A few of his visitors were from Fish and Game, and they told him they were interested in finding the cubs of the female bear he had killed. She had been nursing, they told him, and they wanted to find her den and save her endangered cubs.

Rodney ignored them, though, because his lawyer told him they were just trying to find the dead cubs so they could add more counts of poaching to their list. Besides, it had been weeks. If the bear had really been nursing, the cubs were dead and they weren’t going to be anything but trouble.

The scientists were also mainly interested in the cubs, but there was one woman who made his hair stand on end. She was one of the few who actually asked the guards to transfer them to a private room and she gave him a smoke even though she wasn’t supposed to. Her name was Shan Hancock, and when he asked her if she had a nice signature, she showed him. It was kind of squirly, but it was nice enough. Better than his.

Once they got to talking, Shan told him that several other people around the world had found extinct creatures on that same day, in really weird places. And strange things had happened all over the globe. A whole apartment building had disappeared in a remote village in China, along with all of its inhabitants.

She, like all the others, wanted to know where Rodney had found that bear. He finally told her that he could show her if she could get him out of jail, but she shook her head sadly at that. “I don’t have that kind of money, Rodney. They’re asking two hundred and fifty thousand. I guess the Judge thinks you’re a high flight risk.”

Rodney scoffed. “I told them as soon as I got out of this Nazi death camp, I’d disappear and nobody would ever find me to accuse me of stupid crimes again.”

Shan winced. “That was probably the wrong thing to say.”

Rodney took a deep breath and sighed. “They ain’t gonna let me out of here, are they? Not ‘till I’ve served time for that stupid bear.”

Shan bit her lip. “Unfortunately, a lot of people are very angry at you, Rodney. That bear could have been the last of her kind, and she had cubs.”

“Well, there’s a daddy bear out there somewhere,” Rodney pointed out. “Besides, Fish and Game took my trophy from me. Can’t scientists do something with that and clone her? They said they were gonna clone mammoths. I read about that.”

“There’s very little chance of that, now that the skin has been tanned. Perhaps if you had saved her ovaries, there might be some hope, but—”

Rodney scoffed. “I ain’t about to start saving ovaries. That’s like cutting off a guy’s balls.”

Shan sighed. She held Rodney’s gaze for long moments, then leaned forward conspiratorily. “Rodney, what would you think if I told you I think that bear you killed was already dead?”

He stared at her. “You mean you think I shot a ghost bear?”

She shook her head, a grin forming on her slender lips. “No, but I think it’s possible that your bear didn’t come from this time. I think it was pulled out of its own time and put here.”

Rodney frowned. “But then she wouldn’t have died yet.”

Shan made a frustrated noise. “But we’re talking about tens of thousands of years. If she had stayed in her own time, she would be dead by now.”

“So you’re saying I’m not guilty?” Rodney asked, his eyes lighting up.

Shan shook her head. “I don’t think I could convince the government that you killed something that should already be dead. Even the appearance of a small dinosaur in Brazil didn’t persuade them. They’re calling it a previously unknown land-dwelling crocodile.”

Rodney eyed her warily. “You’re saying a dinosaur came across this time-warp of yours?” Inwardly, he was calculating whether or not she had the symptoms of insanity.

“Time warps, plural,” Shan corrected. “I’ve located three for sure. The fauna in the warps were also extinct, suggesting that tiny spots of land are being moved along with the animals.”

“And you want to go find ‘my’ time warp,” Rodney guessed.

Shan nodded. “I have a team of undergraduate students waiting for me back in Kenai. If we can prove that your bear came out of a time warp, they might drop the charges.”

Rodney scoffed. “Might as well try to prove aliens exist, lady.” But he told her where he had seen the bear.

Three weeks later, Shan returned, breathless. Rodney had been stacking Dominoes that one of his buddies had sent him when she was escorted to his cell. The look of excitement on her face made him blurt, “So you found the time-warp?”

Rodney’s fellow inmates gave him funny looks, but he ignored them and followed Shan back to the visitor’s room.

“We found it,” Shan said breathlessly as soon as they were alone. She handed him a cold can of Pepsi. “And Rodney, it’s huge. Several acres wide. All grasslands from the Pleistocene epoch. We saw two wild horses, Rodney.”

Rodney’s excitement at having a Pepsi faded with Shan’s words. Maybe the woman was crazy, after all. “You found horses? So? They’ve been around forever. The Indians had horses.”

Shan reached out and took his hand. “Rodney, the Spaniards brought horses here when they found America. Wild Alaskan horses died off about twelve thousand years ago, around the same time Arctodus simus Yukonensis went extinct. Plus, the flora of the area keeps changing from present-day Alaskan to late Pleistocene, so there’s no doubt that something is happening.”

“So you’ve got what you need to spring me?” Rodney suggested.

Shan hesitated. “Rodney, I tried to present my findings to the scientific community, but they laughed at me. I even brought some of the plant life back with me. They thought it was a hoax.”

“Just great,” Rodney muttered. “So I’m gonna fry for killing something that already should have been dead.”

“You won’t fry,” Shan assured him. “At most, you’ll spend a few years in prison…”

“Someone should go in and blow all those stupid tree-huggers away,” Rodney muttered into his Pepsi can.

Shan glanced around them nervously. “Rodney, you really should try to work with the system.”

“The system is overrated,” he told her, then chugged the Pepsi.

Shan watched him for a moment, then said, “Rodney, I think these doorways to different time zones have been getting bigger. A woman found an extinct rhinoceros digging through her flower bed in eastern Pennsylvania. And, I know you’re not going to believe me, but you know what a pterodactyl is?”

“Big dinosaur with bat wings,” Rodney replied indifferently.

“One was spotted at the Grand Canyon. It was eating a California condor.”

Rodney’s attention sharpened. “Didn’t somebody go to jail for killing a condor?”

Shan nodded. “And a big fine, too.”

Rodney snorted. “I bet the tree-huggers are happy the pterodactyl isn’t gonna starve to death.”

“Actually, they’re pulling out their hair trying to figure out what to do,” Shan replied, smiling. Her blue eyes twinkled. “They’re going to relocate the Pterodactyl to a containment facility at one of the world’s zoos. Right now, they’re just trying to figure out who has the best claim on it, since everybody’s clambering to have it in their exhibit.”

Rodney grunted. “Don’t any of them wonder why they found a pterodactyl munching on one of their condors?

“You know how science is,” Shan replied. “It always resorts to the strangest explanations last. Right now, my colleagues are still deluding themselves into believing that all these extinct animals have lived with us all along and are only now being discovered. The only people who believe my theory are my undergraduate students and you.” She gave him a grateful look.

Rodney shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Now wait a minute. I ain’t said I believe none of this…”

“Rodney,” Shan said, shoving an envelope at him, “Look inside.”

Reluctantly, Rodney did. Inside, he saw newspaper…and a white cast of a huge, roundish foot. He pulled it out and looked at it, frowning. “What is this?”

“That’s a wooly mammoth’s footprint,” Shan replied. “It was in that spot where the bear came out, squished into the mud.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Rodney said, shaking his head. “You mean there’s a mammoth out there?”

“It’s a distinct possibility,” Shan agreed. “This footprint might have been made before the time-switch, though.”

“Oh, I’d love to get my hands on one of ‘em,” Rodney said longingly, staring at the enormous white cast.

“Why?” Shan asked.

“To kill it, of course,” Rodney snorted, placing the cast back in the envelope and handing it to her. “I heard those tusks they find along the beach are big money. Carvers buy them because they can only carve with ivory from extinct animals. Unless they’re Indians.”

Shan sighed. “I suppose Fish and Game haven’t gotten their point across with you, have they?”

Rodney scoffed. “You said yourself that they were supposed to be dead. I’d just do what Nature intended.”

Shan left after chatting about mammoths for awhile. Rodney didn’t see her again until the stegosaurus put a hole in the jailhouse. Things had been eerily quiet the weeks before the big lizard freed Rodney. They could hear the guards watching the news in the other room, always about this new discovery or that. Extinct animals in the hundreds were being found all over the world. The President of the United States had proclaimed that all the newly-discovered animals were to be left unharmed, so that they could be preserved.

As it turned out, Rodney wasn’t the only one who went to jail for killing one of the weird creatures. After the president’s announcement, a guy killed a huge lizard that he found eating his dog in his backyard. He was awaiting trial, too.

They were listening to a broadcast from Thailand where a small herd of duckbilled dinosaurs were roaming downtown Bangkok when the stegosaurus slammed into the wall separating Rodney from the outside. Or, at least he thought it was a stegosaurus.

He was even less sure of the creature chasing it. If he had to guess, he would have said it was a tyrannosaurus rex, simply because that’s the only big-toothed, meat-eating dinosaur he knew the name of.

The stegosaurus, which had knocked a large hole in the wall with its bony body, was slowly getting to its feet. The tyrannosaurus swept in, ready to gut it, when the stegosaurus swung its spiked tail right into the meat-eater’s face. The stegosaurus had to tug its tail to dislodge the spines from its adversary’s neck and head.

Howling, the tyrannosaur took off in the opposite direction, blood running down its speckled green hide. The stegosaurus, a bright apple-red, unconcernedly turned its attention to the finely manicured shrubs leaning against the jailhouse.

It took only a moment of initial shock before Rodney—and his guards—realized that the hole in the cinderblocks was easily big enough for a man to get through. Rodney hesitated, watching the twitching, spiked tail that lay just outside on the grass.

“Don’t do it, man,” one of the inmates cried. “You saw what it did to that T-Rex.”

Rodney ignored him. Very carefully, he crawled over the debris and out onto the lawn even as his guards were sliding open the door to his cell.

As it turned out, the stegosaurus couldn’t have cared less if Rodney were a small boulder. It gave him a perfunctory examination, swinging its head around to stare at him with its green, fist-sized snake eyes. It twitched its tail in warning and then immediately went back to feeding. Rodney gingerly walked around it, and then out into the street, grinning as the guards stayed within the relative protection of the jail cell.

Rod called a friend from inside a gas station. Of course he’d help him escape those lousy tree-huggers, his buddy told him, and got there two hours later, an impressive feat considering the traffic the wounded tyrannosaur was creating in South Anchorage.

They made it all the way back to Rodney’s cabin in Kenai without being caught. Apparently, the Anchorage Police Department finally had more important things on their hands than an escaped poacher.

“You heard all that strange stuff goin’ on out there?” his friend Rick Stefford asked him once they had started a fire and settled into Rodney’s two chairs.

Rodney nodded. “I told you what happened at the jail.”

Rick shook his head wistfully. “Wish I coulda stayed, man. I had my rifle in the back. Bet they needed help to kill that T-Rex.”

Rodney chuckled. “You wanna get put in jail, too? They’re not gonna kill it. The president pardoned all them new critters, just like Reagan pardoned Nixon. There ain’t nothing you can do that won’t end up with your ass in jail.”

“That ain’t right,” Rick muttered. “That monster is gonna hurt someone.”

“Probably already has,” Rodney agreed.

“You wanna kill it?” Rick suggested. “You and me?”

Rodney contemplated that before shaking his head. “Nah, that’s what they’ve got the Army for. I think I wanna go take a look around my huntin’ roost. This scientist lady says these things are coming from a time-warp somewhere around there.”

Rick nodded, “They’ve found four in Alaska, so far. A bunch more in the Lower 48. What’s that gal’s name?”

“Shan Hancock,” Rodney told him, suddenly interested. “She finally got through to them?”

“Yeah, that’s her,” Rick agreed. “They’ve got the military quarantining the areas where the animals keep showing up. They call them Time Contamination Areas and got snipers ready to pop you if you get too close.”

“Why?” Rodney demanded. He had been looking forward to exploring his time warp.

“Because they say that anything that gets stuck in there when it decides to bring us dinosaurs will get sent back to live with the dinosaurs.”

Rodney’s eyes opened wide as he contemplated that. “They’re sure about that?”

Rick grunted. “How can they be? But they’re keeping people away from it, anyway. They’re afraid we’re gonna change our own history, or something like that.”

Rodney thought about that a moment. “The way I see it,” he said finally, “If someone was going to go back in time, it has already happened, so nothing will change.”

“Try telling that to the Army,” Rick said disgustedly. “They turned our old hunting ground into a beehive. Got barbed wire up and everything.”

“I want to go,” Rodney said suddenly.

Rick frowned. “Go where? They won’t let you in.”

“I want to go wherever that T-Rex came from,” Rodney said, grinning. “Whoever heard of a better place to hunt?”

Rick stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

“No cars, no roads, no fences or buildings or private property,” Rodney continued, “Nothing but you and the great outdoors.”

“And a bunch of zillion-pound lizards that’d eat you for breakfast,” Rick countered.

“So?” Rodney demanded. “Bears eat people sometimes, but we still go out and hunt them. Think of it. We’re always talking about how stupid the government has gotten. Here, we’re as far away from the government as you can get, but we still have to pay taxes. What if you didn’t have to pay taxes?”

“That would be pretty neat,” Rick admitted. Rodney could see that his friend was beginning to consider the proposition.

“We’d stock up on knives, guns, ammo, matches, flint, rope, blankets, and anything else we might need, then sit in the time-warp and wait for it to zap us,” Rodney continued, getting excited now.

“I don’t know,” Rick said reluctantly. “I don’t know if I’d wanna tangle with a T-Rex.”

“Then we’ll get you a bigger gun,” Rodney replied. “Come on, what have you got to lose?”

“Dan and Tom might want in on it,” Rick said finally. He grinned. “After all, the world is going to pot.”

“Okay, so we get anybody who wants to come and go,” Rodney agreed. “We’d have the whole place to ourselves!”

Rick muttered something about meat-eating lizards, but Rodney ignored him. “We could do it. All we have to do is go find one of those time-warps that the government hasn’t found yet, which shouldn’t be too hard,” Rodney said.

“Lazy bastards,” Rick agreed. He got up. “I’ve got a friend in Fairbanks who might know where to look. Chuck Bernstein. He’s a pilot, said he’s seen lots of weird critters from his plane these last few weeks.”

In the end, five of them made camp in the center of a small time-warp in a swamp near Skwentna, loaded to the gills with backpacks full of ammunition, fire-starting supplies, knives, and other essentials. They were there three days before snapping branches heralded an intruder’s approach.

Shan Hancock came pushing through the thick marsh brush, her pack of college kids following closely behind her.

“Oh, good!” she shouted when she saw them. “I thought I was too late!”

“You’re not stopping us, lady,” Dan grumbled, gripping his hunting rifle. Everyone muttered their agreement and reached for their own weapons.

“Stop you?” she cried. “We want to go with you.”

Suddenly, the five men found themselves looking at the three young women that followed the scientist. Send themselves into a world full of men? What had they been thinking?

“Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to have some company,” Rodney agreed quickly. “Get over here before it zaps us.”

The six from Shan’s party joined the five in the time-warp zone.

“Now you realize,” Shan said to them, “Assuming these animals have been coming from our own history, we’re all going to die, probably very quickly. The fossil record shows no human activity in the Cretaceous period. Only the great lizards roamed the earth at that time.”

“Why don’t you think we’ll end up with the mammoths?” Rick asked curiously.

Shan pointed to a short, squat plant sticking out between two bundles of supplies. It looked like a miniature palm tree. “Because those were the dominant species back then.”

Rick cast Rodney a worried look, but as soon as he could open his mouth, something grabbed them and hurled them like Cy Young would throw a baseball. Everything but their small circle became a blur. Colors—mostly milky green, flashed around them in a high-speed haze. Dan fell to his knees and started puking. Moments later, Rodney had joined him. As he was retching Rodney realized that everybody was on their knees, gripping their spinning heads as their stomachs upended themselves all over their gear.

The lurching stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and suddenly the day was filled with the heavy sound of buzzing insects. The air was acrid. In the distance, something roared.

“Is the forest burning?” Tom asked anxiously, glancing at the fine gray ash accumulating on the leaves.

“Volcanic eruption, most likely,” Shan assured him. “They were quite common in this era.”

“Okay, we’ve got to find shelter, first of all,” Rodney said, picking up his pack. “A cave would be best. Something those dinos can’t get into.”

Shan looked at him and laughed. “Animals equally unpleasant can get in caves, Rodney. Think of really big crocodiles that don’t need to swim.” She frowned at him. “You didn’t actually plan on surviving this, did you?”

“Of course I did,” Rodney growled.

Shan stared at him. “But that would be disastrous! It would mean we would change history.”

“So why did you come along?” Tom demanded suspiciously.

“Because it’s a chance of a lifetime,” Shan replied. “Just look at where we are.” She motioned toward the ash-covered foliage, which didn’t look that impressive to Rodney.

Rodney’s back was beginning to ache, so he shifted positions with his pack. “Look, the longer we stay here talking, the sooner we’re going to become lunch.”

“But history doesn’t lie,” Shan protested. “We aren’t going to make it. All your guns and knives will disintegrate with our bones, and there will be nothing left of us to show the future that we were already here.”

“Well, you can lie down and die if you want,” Rodney said, looking out into the thick foliage, “But I’m going to go dino-hunting.” He started off in the general direction where he thought he had heard the roar.

Shan was quickly at his side again. “Look, I’m not saying I think we should just lie down and die. I’m just saying that we can’t live. It wouldn’t work. History would have shown it.”

“Maybe,” Rodney agreed, pushing through the dense brush. The sharp leaves gave him cuts, and he began to get the paranoid suspicion that his blood was luring predators closer.

“These dinos must have thick skins,” Chuck commented behind them. They had fallen into a line, pushing the brush out of the way with their jackets so that they had as little contact with the sharp leaves as possible.

Another roar sounded in the distance, this one behind them.

“Man, I don’t wanna get caught out here at night,” one of Shan’s students said, glancing behind them.

“It’s highly unlikely that we’ll find a cave before nightfall,” Shan assured them.

“That’s right,” Rodney agreed. “That’s why we’re going to build a fire.”

“Considering their environment, these animals might not be afraid of fire,” Shan told him.

“Everything’s afraid of fire,” Rodney informed her.

They exited the forest at a river embankment. There, swarming with flies, they found their first signs of Cretaceous life. A carcass—Rodney wasn’t sure of what—lay half in and half out of the water, bloated, shredded, and stinking. The grasses along the riverbank were mashed flat and the mud near the water was a cornucopia of different sized tracks.

Rodney started toward the carcass to investigate, but behind him, Shan said, “Remember the crocodiles.” He stopped, frowning at the murky brown waters.

Just then, a huge two-legged lizard came charging down the bank from upriver, headed right toward them. It didn’t look as if it were running at them, but, remembering the T-Rex, Rodney brought his gun up and fired.

The dinosaur crashed to the ground in the wake of Rodney’s gunshot. Suddenly, the entire world seemed to grow silent.

“Guess the guns work,” Rick said, nodding thoughtfully. They walked over to the dead lizard, where Shan tisked.

“This is a plant-eater,” she said, crouching beside the huge head. “It wasn’t any danger to us.”

Chuck scoffed. “Lady, something that big isn’t harmless.”

“It’s a corythosaurus. The bison of the Cretaceous period.” Shan stood. “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter, since we can’t change history, but I would like to note that, unless you plan on eating it, random carcasses are just going to attract scavengers.”

“Meaning don’t shoot everything we see.” Rodney shook his head. “We only have so much ammo. We’re not going to waste it.”

Shan looked at the dead corythosaurus and then at him, an eyebrow raised.

Rodney cleared his throat. “Maybe we can take some meat along with us for the fire tonight. Save our supplies.”

“Won’t that attract predators?” one of the students asked. She looked worried.

“Maybe,” Rodney said reluctantly. He swallowed, realizing that they were waiting on him to make a decision. Finally, he said, “Everybody take as much as you can carry. We’re going to save our emergency supplies for when we need them.”

They hiked upriver, toward some mountains they could see in the distance. As night fell, they built a fire using the spongy wood of one of the dead palm-like trees. They threw the slabs of corythosaurus into the coals to roast and warily watched the blackness that enveloped their camp. No one slept.

The dinosaur meat was surprisingly good. It tasted like stringy turkey. They ate their fill and packed away what was left for breakfast. Still, no one slept.

“It’s pretty quiet out there,” Shan noted. For the first time, she looked a little nervous.

Other than for a large shape that moved along the outskirts of their fire, morning came without incident. They continued their march toward the mountains, snacking on leftover corythosaurus meat.

On the third day, they found people.

More than a dozen swarmed out of the rocks at their approach, shouting happily in what sounded like Chinese. Thin and bony, they all looked like they had been subsisting on the rocks they had been hiding in. Rodney gave them what was left of the corythosaurus meat, which they ate with gusto despite it being dry and the fact that it was quickly going rancid.

Feeling guilty, he made up for it the next day by bringing down another corythosaurus and camping beside the carcass. The newcomers ate their fill and stretched out by the fire contentedly. One woman managed to communicate that she wanted to borrow Rodney’s knife, which she used to peel the thick, speckled blue skin from the dinosaur’s body. She spent all night scraping at it, probably dulling Rodney’s knife something horrible, but by morning, she had a large piece of heavy-duty dino leather that she rolled up and carried with her. When she returned the knife, Rodney asked her with words and motions what her name was.

“Mingmei,” she said finally, then pointed at him and gave him a questioning look. She was very pretty.

“Rodney,” he said, grinning. She tried to pronounce it, then giggled at her clumsy attempts. From then on, Rodney and Mingmei walked together.

They reached the mountains and spent several days searching for caves. Shan’s protests that they weren’t meant to survive grew less and less frequent.

It was a young Chinese girl who finally found what they were looking for. It wasn’t a cave per se, but a crack in the rock that widened until it was just big enough to fit them all comfortably. Once they had all settled, Rodney decided to lead a hunting party into the valley below. From their ledge, they could see herds upon herds of corythosaurus, which they had begun calling platypuses. Dotted across the valley, the more subdued colors of the hunting lizards followed the herds of platypuses at a discreet distance.

All the adults were going, except for one Chinese woman who stayed behind to watch the three children. They emptied their packs of everything but a few days’ worth of survival food and headed back down into the valley.

Their first hunt was an unqualified success. They loaded up almost a thousand pounds of meat and carried it back to the cave, where they smoked and dried it. They also brought back the skin, claws, and some teeth, little trophies to give to the bewildered children.

Their first year went by quickly and easily. Mingmei got pregnant, as did four other women of the group. Rick and Shan took a liking to each other and had their first child the second year they were in the cave. Twenty-five years after that, their meager group of twenty had grown to almost seventy. They spoke in a mixture of Chinese and English, though the adults made sure that everyone could write in both.

Rodney, now fifty-four, was content to watch his grandchildren hunt corythosaurus. He and Mingmei had found a huge deposit of silver several years ago and he spent his time nowadays forming spearheads for his great-great-great grandchildren. He knew they would run out of ammunition eventually, no matter how carefully they used it. So here he was, at a makeshift forge outside the cave entrance, dino leather protecting his hands as he poured melted silver into triangle-shaped molds. Later, he would take the spearheads from the molds and sharpen them on the rocks. He already had a stack of over a hundred sitting against the back of the cave.

“Isn’t it strange?” Shan asked one day, coming up to him. She had a couple sheets of the cardboardish paper she made from local plants stuck under her arm. “I mean, I wonder what happened to our own time when we came here. We jumped back at least sixty-five million years. We’ve only had civilization for about a hundred thousand. Our people have only kept histories of ourselves for a few thousand. It only took three hundred years to go from riding horses and subsistence farming to commercial airlines and space exploration.”

“So?” Rodney asked, glancing at her papers. As she had done every day since she had figured out how to mash plants and press them to make paper, she had been writing down every detail of the modern world that she or anyone else could remember.

“So, we have millions of years to evolve. I don’t see us dying out anytime soon, so what’s going to happen to history as we know it? Will there even be a place where we came from if we ever went back? And if there wasn’t, wouldn’t that mean that we couldn’t be here? And what would we look like, a hundred million years from now? The world can’t be the same.”

“You said so yourself,” Rodney told her, “Everything that we do has already happened. And besides, even if we do change history, I don’t really care. The world was messed up anyway.”

Shan’s frown remained, however. “I’d like to go back. See what we’ve done to change history. Do you remember where we first showed up?”

“I guess,” Rodney told her reluctantly. “But why do you care? I mean, what’s done is done.”

But Shan insisted.

Rodney finally gave in a few months later. They left in a group of ten. Six young people, plus Rodney, Mingmei, Shan, and Rick. After three weeks’ travel, stopping frequently for Rick’s back and Shan’s arthritis, they finally arrived at the riverbank where they had found their first dinosaur. The carcass was gone, long since carried away by scavengers, insects, and floods.

“Now for the hard part,” Rick chuckled as they looked into the bushy expanse of palm-tree forest.

Finding the spot wasn’t as hard as they thought it would be. Only an hour after setting foot in the razor-leafed forest, they found the mostly-eaten body of a dead rabbit. They circled the area, keeping an eye out for predators. Before they realized what they had done, they had stepped into the time-warp. Familiar black spruce and swamp grasses stuck out like sore thumbs against the palm-tree-like vegetation.

“It’s so much bigger,” Shan whispered, gazing out over the several-acre expanse of modern Alaskan plants.

Compared to the one Rodney remembered, this one was twenty or thirty times larger. And, if the rabbit was any indication, it was still active.

“So what are they going to do when they see us appear on the other side?” Rick demanded. “When we left, the military was setting up camp around the time-warps. What if they’ve kicked the tree-huggers out of office and started machine-gunning anything that shows up?”

Everyone glanced at each other warily.

“I’ll go alone if I have to,” Shan said firmly. She walked out into the Alaskan landscape and sat down on a fallen spruce.

Reluctantly, Rick, Rodney, and Mingmei followed her. The young people stayed behind, unsure about the strange foliage and the unnatural, furry beast that they had found. They stayed like that for two days, the elders waiting quietly in the center of the time-warp while their children watched nervously.

Halfway through the second day, they were wrenched back to their own time with the same stomach-humbling abruptness that they had experienced twenty-five years ago.

They were not, as Rick had hypothesized, mown down by machine guns the instant they were back in their own time.

They were, however, jolted by the sight of dozens of pale, egg-headed humanoid creatures that were gathered around the time-warp area.

After they got over their initial terror, Rick whispered, “They look like something out of Area 51.”

Shan sounded angry. “Look what we did, damn it. We changed history. I knew we shouldn’t have done it.”

Rodney, for once, had nothing to say. He stared at the short, egg-headed creatures, admiring their huge, liquidy black eyes. If they had shaped history, then these were their ancestors.

But then a human stepped out from behind the pale egg-heads and smiled at the four of them. “We have gifts for you,” the man said, walking up to Shan with a stack of books two feet high. He left them at her feet. “Our history,” he said, nodding at the stack. “The pages have been treated to withstand aging, though you will probably have to re-copy them in a few hundred years.” He walked back to the ring of alien creatures and picked up another stack of books, which he set at Rick’s feet. Glancing up at them, he introduced himself as Gene Fallbrook.

“Who are they?” Rodney asked, finally finding his tongue.

Gene glanced back at the Area-51 creatures and grinned. “They are us.” He tapped on the top tome at Rick’s feet. “It’s all in the books.” He went back for another load.

Suddenly, an idea occurred to him. “Do you know who we are?” Rodney asked, frowning.

“Of course,” Gene said, nodding.

“Who are we?” Shan insisted.

“I’d rather leave that to you to find out,” the man said, lowering another pile of books at Mingmei’s feet.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Rodney demanded. “And why are you giving us books?”

The man didn’t answer him, instead dropping another load at Rodney’s feet. As Rodney glared at him, he finally sighed and said, “Many things have changed in the twenty-five years you’ve been gone.”

“Wait,” Shan said, frowning, “We changed history, but somehow you still know about it?”

Gene laughed. “You can’t change history! It’s already happened.”

More confused than ever, Rodney tried to step out of the time-warp after Gene.

Two of the strange creatures stepped in front of him, their harmless expressions suddenly becoming very stern. Rodney realized with frustration that they did not intend to let them out of the warp. He fell back to stand beside Mingmei and frowned at them. He was pretty sure he could blow a few of them away, but they probably had ray-guns or something that would turn him into a puddle of mush before he could try.

“It’s all explained in the histories,” Gene assured him from the other side of the wall of alien creatures. “It’s incredibly fascinating.”

They stood like this for long minutes, staring at each other, until unexpectedly, they were yanked out of modern times and tossed back into the Cretaceous era. Blind with tears from vomiting, they didn’t see who had come to help them until familiar voices called their names. Panicked at seeing half their elders disappear, the young ones insisted on getting them to a good, dry camp on ‘normal’ soil. The books were collected as an afterthought.

On the way back to the cave, they theorized amongst themselves what might be in the heavy tomes that the youngsters now carried with them. As soon as they reached base camp, Shan commandeered the tomes, placing them on a high, dry shelf in the back of the cave. One by one, she began to read them and relate what she read to everyone who would listen. That was fine with Rodney—he had seen the tiny print and he was pretty sure that he would be bored after the twentieth page, not to mention blind and suffering migraines.

Most of the books explained science, math, chemistry, biology, and physics. A few of them, however, contained history.

It was on the fourth day that Shan made a startling discovery. “This is our history!” she cried, pointing out their names in the book. Everyone moved closer, shocked. Some were delighted to find their names repeated often within the volumes of text, while others were generally ignored.

As the months passed, Shan told them of what they would do in the years to come. “We’re going to build a society that lives completely off of solar power,” she said, pointing it out in one of the books. “Since there aren’t any oil reserves yet. Our civilization is big, but it doesn’t use up our natural resources. We find ways to sustain ourselves without damaging the environment. ”

“Damn tree-huggers,” Rick growled. “They sent us back with a whole pile of brainwashing.”

“No,” Shan said, shaking her head, “This is a guide. They want us to follow this.” She shook her head. “It’s amazing. In this book, it says that we wipe out every sign that we were here and leave the Earth thirty-five million years from now, right before the asteroid smacks into Mexico and causes the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, leaving mammals as the dominant species on the planet.” She frowns again, staring at the pages. “Guys, look at this.”

Rodney put down the spear-head he was sharpening and leaned closer.

“Guys, those weird creatures, they were us.”

“What, the area-51 dudes?” Rick asked, scanning the pages she held open.

Shan’s eyes grew wide. “That’s what our descendants are going to look like in thirty-five million years.”

“You said they left the Earth,” Rodney said, frowning. “So why were they there when Gene handed over those books?”

“They knew that the time-shifts were coming,” Shan said breathlessly, “Because their ancestors had experienced them. So they came back to save them, and to give us these guides to make sure that we survived here and they evolved from our offspring.”

“Wait, wait,” Rick said, shaking his head. “I don’t get it. You’re saying they left the Earth, letting the Neanderthals evolve into humans, who were really their ancestors because we went back in time and had babies.”

“And the only reason they exist at all is because they appeared that day we tried to go back and gave us these guides,” Shan said in awe. “Without the chemistry and math books, we probably would have died off as soon as we ran out of ammo. It even tells us which places we need to avoid on certain dates in order to avoid natural disasters.”

The spearhead Rodney was making suddenly seemed foolish. He looked up at Shan, frowning. “So basically, we didn’t change history at all? We did what we were supposed to do.”

“We did what we were going to do all along,” Shan said, her voice filled with awe. “And they knew it.”