Bridgers 1_The Lure of Infinity by Stan C. Smith

Author:Stan C. Smith [Smith, Stan C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SafeTrek Publishing
Published: 2018-05-14T22:00:00+00:00

10

Pets

August 4

Infinity’s eyes flicked open. Her surroundings had changed. Instead of darkness and stars she saw blue sky and bubble leaves. She wasn’t sure it was real. She had awakened so many times, each time struggling to differentiate between reality and disturbing dreams about Razor being attacked again and again by beaked predators. Something tightened around her waist. A warm arm.

“You really awake this time?” The voice was inches from her ear.

“I think so. Yes. Shit. I can’t believe I fell asleep.”

“You needed rest.”

“I suppose you stayed awake all night. Otherwise I would’ve fallen, and I’d be busted up on the ground.”

“Yeah. It’s a good thing I’m dehydrated. Taking a pee would have been awkward.” Desmond shifted his weight to the side, and hazy memories came back to Infinity of him doing that over and over during the night.

She pulled his arm from her waist and sat up straight. Her hip burned as she shifted, and she sensed that it would have been much worse if she hadn’t slept. “You’ve saved my life twice now,” she said.

“A couple more times and we’ll be even.”

She inspected her hip wound. It looked infected as hell, but it wasn’t bleeding. The plugs were doing their job. If she made it to bridge-back, they’d bombard her with antibiotics, give her a few weeks off, and then assign her to another excursion. She leaned back against the warmth of Desmond’s body. “It’s August. Why is it so cold?” She pulled his arm around her waist again, which helped.

He shifted again. “Like you said last night, the air here is dry, maybe because these trees don’t transpire like ours do. And there are countless other changes that could have occurred in the last eighty million years.”

She began weighing the merits of several courses of action. Based on the sun’s height above the eastern horizon, bridge-back was probably twelve hours away. Maybe the safest option was to stay where they were.

“We need to get back to Lenny and Xavier,” the tourist said, as if he had sensed what she was thinking. “They may need our help.”

“They’ll be safe until bridge-back. If the damn bird men are still crawling all over this area, the last thing we want to do is reveal your friends’ location by attempting to go there.” She was glad they were contained where they couldn’t get out. It gave her one less thing to worry about. But she decided not to share this with Desmond.

“Maybe you’re right. But I wish we could at least check on them—see if they made it through the night okay.”

She decided she’d better get his mind off that idea before he started dwelling on it. “Tell me about how you managed to arrange this excursion. Most tourists either pay for it with some kind of research grant or they’re filthy-rich adrenaline junkies. The three of you seem different.”

“I share an apartment with Lenny and Xavier back in Columbia—South Carolina, not the country. We’re all in biology degree programs at USC, so we have that in common.

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