End of an Era

Everything I knew about troodon came rushing back in a flood of memory. First described by Leidy in 1856, based on fossil teeth from the Judith River formation of Montana. Back in 1987, Phil Currie proved that troodon was the same as Stenonychosaurus, whose particulars were first published in 1932 by Sternberg, the man after whom we had named our timeship. I’d only been a kid at the time, but I remember the big fuss the media had made over the suggestion by Dale Russell, then of the Canadian Museum of Nature, that, had the dinosaurs not died out, stenonychosaurus-troodon might have eventually evolved into intelligent human-like "dinosauroids" who would have become the lords of creation. Russell even had a life-size sculpture made of his proposed reptile-person, a fully erect tailless biped with a braincase as big as a large grapefruit, three long surgeon-like fingers on each hand, and an incongruous-looking navel. Photos of it had appeared in Time and Omni.

Could troodon have been more advanced by the final days of the Cretaceous than anyone had previously thought? Could an elite few dinosaurs have had spoken language? Were they on the way to civilization, only to have their tenure on the planet cut short by some catastrophe? For me, a lifelong lover of dinosaurs, the idea was compelling. I wanted it to be true, but I knew in my bones that even the best of the terrible lizards, although not as desperately stupid as once thought, was still no better endowed mentally than a shrew or a bird.

A bird! Of course! Simple mimicry. Parrots do it. So do mynahs. We knew that birds were closely related to dinosaurs. Granted, our feathered friends hadn’t shared a common ancestor with troodon since the avian line split from the coelurosaurians in the mid-Jurassic, 100 million years before the time I was in now. Still, troodon was remarkably bird-like, with its keen binocular vision, quick movements, and three-toed feet. That’s it, of course. It must have heard me call "Wait up!" to Klicks and simply imitated the sound.

Except.

Except that I hadn’t called "wait up" or anything else to Klicks. And Klicks hadn’t said anything remotely like that to me.

I must have heard wrong. I must have.

"Wait up. Stop. Stop. Wait up."

Oh, shit…

Klicks recovered his wits faster than I did. "Yes?" he said, astonished.

"Yess. Stop. Go not. Wait up. Stop. Yess. Stop."

What do you say to a dinosaur? "Who are you?" asked Klicks.

"Pals. We pals. You pals. Eat an ant and I’ll be your best friend. Pals. Palsy-walsy."

"I don’t fucking believe this," said Klicks.

That did it. The thing launched into George Carlin’s list of the seven words you never used to be able to say on TV. The troodon’s speech was still difficult to understand, though. Indeed, it would have been incomprehensible if it weren’t for the fact that it put a brief pause between each word, the obscenities coming out like the sputters of a dying muffler.

"How can a dinosaur talk?" I said at last, to Klicks really, but the damned reptile answered anyway.

"With great difficulty," the troddon rasped, and then, as if to prove its point, it arched its neck and hawked up a ball of spit. The gob landed on some rocks at the base of a bald cypress trunk. It was shot through with blood. The effort of speaking must be tearing up the creature’s throat.

That the beast could speak made no sense, and yet the words, although not clear, were unmistakable. I shook my head in wonder, then realized what was doubly incredible was not just that the dinosaur was speaking, but that it was speaking English.

Now, in retrospect, it seems obvious that it wasn’t the dinosaur talking. Not really. It was just a marionette for the blue jelly thing inside it. I’d had a hard enough time accepting that some weird slime had crawled into my head. The thought that the stuff had been an intelligent creature was something my mind refused to accept, until Klicks said it out loud. "It’s not the troodon, dammit. It’s the slime-thingy inside it."

The talking dinosaur clucked like a chicken, then said, "Yess. Slime-thingy me. Not dinosaur. Dinosaur dumb-dumb. Slime-thingy smarty-pants."

"That one must have learned English from you," said Klicks.

"Huh? Why?"

"Well, for one thing, it sure didn’t get phrases like ‘palsy-walsy’ and ‘smarty-pants’ from me. And for another, it’s got your snooty Upper Canada College accent."

I thought about that. It didn’t sound to me like it had any accent at all, but then again it certainly didn’t have a Jamaican accent, which is what Klicks spoke with.