Note: The original of this file got overwritten, so I had to rebuild it in early February 2012.  I've grown a bit as a writer in the last ten plus years, and I was incredibly tempted to give you a more professional version of the story, but I decided to restore the original so readers can see the progress between this and the kind of things I write now. It's still a fun little excerpt, though if you're a writer you'll have an overwhelming urge to edit it.

You don’t give an old line-hopper like Tim “Blarney” Smith an opening to get going on a story or you won’t get away from him until about 1 in the morning, and all of the good-looking girls will be paired off by then.  Happened to a bunch of us a couple of weeks ago.  Old Blarney was sitting there in his wheelchair drinking a cold one and giving all of the line-hoppers his been-there-seen everything routine.

 
We had a newby with us—real smart-ass.  He says to Blarney. “Bet you haven’t seen a line where dinosaurs and cavemen lived at the same time.”

 
Old Blarney just kind of looked at him for a couple of seconds and young smart-ass smirks, thinking he’s got the old man.  Of course the rest of us know better.  Blarney’s been there and done that—traded out in the wild lines as far as any man I know.  And if he hasn’t seen it, he’ll make it up and make you believe it.

 

“You mean Tyrannosaurs and Neanderthals and girls in dinky little fur bikinis?  Nah.  Ain’t seen nothing quite like that.  At least not if you’re going to be picky about things like those Latin names they give critters.”

 

The old man leaned back, drained his glass and motioned for the bartender to give him another.  “Now dinosaurs and not quite men in the same time-line, that I’ve seen.  Matter of fact, I may just have saved the human race in that time-line.”

 

We should have just walked on and got to work picking up the night’s entertainment, but the old man had a way about him, and I’ve got to admit that I was kind of curious.  Dinos bought it 65 million years ago and the first kinda-sorta men didn’t show up until 60 million-odd years later.  If you don’t zap the dinos, they run around for the next 60 million years changing everything.  Getting to humans takes a whole bunch of links on a real fragile chain.  With dinosaurs stomping around, that chain’s going to get kicked to pieces.  You see a line with dinos and you just automatically figure you won’t see people—at least I did.

 

Old Blarney picked up his glass and stared at it, eyes looking a thousand miles away or a thousand time-lines.  “It was back in thirty-one or thirty-two.  Jim Hogmier and me were out in the wild lines in an old two-man—Brumby 6000R.  Now that was line-hopper for you.  Temperamental, but it would last just this side of forever and when it broke you could fix it with bailing wire and a blowtorch.”

 

“Anyway, we came across this line, send out the nano-carms, and they start coming back with dinos.  Not civilized ones either.  Oh a couple of species had a little proto-culture—using sticks for a couple of things, but nothing to get anyone excited back home.  First glance says this is a typical dino-recovery time-line.  Yeah, the big stuff like T-Rex got knocked out by the K-T rock, but the tough fast little dinos just stepped in and our ancestors never got a chance to show what they could do.”

 

We all nodded.  Dinosaur recovery time-lines (we call them D-R lines) are common—more common than mammal-dominated ones.  Course most them have mammals—just nothing bigger than a house-cat except maybe in the trees.

 

Blarney continued.  “We were working western Asia—where Iran is in our time-line.  The Brumby was acting up, and I was ready to pack it in, but Jim noticed something odd.  Jim was a rat-and-mouse guru.  He could look at a little two-inch furball and tell you exactly what time-line it came from and the Latin name if it had one.  Now Jim starts talking about the rodents being way to close to ours for a D-R time-line.  Next thing I know, he sends out some gene-bots.  That’s when things really got strange.  The gene-bots come back saying that the DNA from those little fur-balls were under a million years away from ours—maybe as little as a couple of hundred thousand.”

 

Our young smartass said something about that being impossible.  Old Blarney just grinned and said, “Once we started looking closer we noticed a lot of other odd-ball stuff.  There were whales, dolphins, and seals in the oceans—real whales and stuff, not just animals that looked like whales.  Now think about that for a minute.  How do you get that in a D_R line?”

 

You’ve got to give it to Blarney.  He knows how to suck you in to the point where you may figure he’s feeding you bull, but you still want to hear what he has to say.  Our young smart-ass didn’t see the problem.  I told him, “The ancestors of all of those animals spent tens of millions of years on land in our time-line.  Those ancestors wouldn’t get the chance in a D-R line.”

 

Blarney looked at me and kind of snorted, then went on.  “We prodded around and came up with some pockets of relic mammal carnivores up in the mountains and out in the deserts—one species of little wild cat and a few of those little desert foxes with big ears—both real rare.”

 

“By this time the Brumby was telling us every way it could that things weren’t right with it, but we were both really curious, the kind of curious that gets cats killed.  We did some side-hops—checking out Australia and South America.  Nothing unusual either place—lots of little marsupials and a few mid-sized ones up in the trees.  And of course a lot of dinos—pretty much everything bigger than a fox was dinos.  Then we hit jackpot.  We hopped to Southeast Asia, where Vietnam is in our time-line.  The place was swarming with primates—Monkeys, Lorises, and even Great Apes—all of them very strictly tree-climbers.  And we found a human skull—fossil, no more than 70,000 years old.”

Blarney looked at our young companion.  “Close enough for you?”

Well, of course it wasn’t, but Blarney had something else up his sleeve.