Lost in Time(37)

Insects. They were usually safe. But not other bugs. Not spiders. Or ticks or scorpions. They were arachnids—with eight legs. Eight legs: bad. Six legs: good. Or, probably not death. Insects had six legs. And what else? Sam rubbed his temples.

Insects had… an exoskeleton. A three-part body. Six legs. And something else. But he couldn’t remember. He did know this: if he saw one, he would shove it in his mouth.

He was that hungry.

A week ago, he wouldn’t have dreamed of it.

Now, he was hungry in a way he had never known.

Mentally, he went over the rules he could remember. If the bug was hairy or had a stinger, it was best to avoid it. Same for anything brightly colored.

At the moment, Sam just wanted to get something in his system. Food was the lubricant he needed to make the gears of his mind work. And his mind was the only thing that could truly keep him alive out here.

He reached out and rubbed the fern leaf between his fingers. Probably not edible. The survival food pyramid recommended wild greens, berries, fruits, tubers, roots, shoots, and flowers.

Except berries and fruits were likely out. The books and articles Sam had read indicated that flowering plants that produced edible fruit and berries were nonexistent in the Late Triassic.

He figured his best bet was to find a plant that showed signs of having been fed on. If his new Triassic neighbors could eat it, that increased the odds that Sam could.

He began stepping through the forest, slowly, careful to place his footfalls in the moss or soft ground. Noise could be deadly.

As he walked, he took stock of the plants he saw, as well as the nuts and seeds on the forest floor. He thought it better to wait on trying those. A plant’s reproductive material naturally evolves to harm any predators that might snack on them.

Sam stopped and eyed a group of mushrooms, his mouth starting to water. They might be okay. But he wasn’t ready to take that risk. Not yet.

The ground soon began to incline. The moss grew thinner, and the ferns were smaller with each step. Rocks covered more of the ground.

Up ahead, the tree line broke. Sunlight poured in like dawn through a stained-glass window. There was a clearing ahead, calling to Sam like an oasis in the desert.

When the trees began to thin, he slowed to allow his eyes to adjust to the light.

The clearing was a rocky expanse about half the size of a football field. From where Sam stood to the trees across the way, the ground rose perhaps twelve feet. Sam figured this was a large stony outcropping on the side of a hill.

He glanced up and sighted the sun. It was halfway past the point of midday. It would set in perhaps three or four hours.

A few feet away, rising up from the white rock, was a small, wiry shrub. It had green fruit-like pods that looked like faded olives.

Sam ran to it and jerked one of the oval pods off and split it open. There was a hard, textured seed inside. Sam discarded the seed and lifted the plant to his nose and inhaled. There was no odor except for an earthy scent.

He stretched out his left arm and placed the split pod against the inside of his elbow, where blood might be drawn, letting the plant flesh touch his skin. He held it there, waiting for any reaction—skin irritation, itching, burning, or numbness.

A breeze barreled through the clearing, bringing with it a cloud of spores like dust in an Old West town. Insects followed the cloud, zooming in and out.

Sam inspected his skin where the plant had been. It was fine.

It would be best to boil the green pod, but there was no time for that. He held it to his lips and waited again for any reaction. He really needed a watch. Without it, in his hungry, exhausted state, it was hard for him to judge the passage of time.

Finally, when his lips made no reaction, he stuffed the fruit in his mouth and held it there, using his last bit of self-control to keep from swallowing it whole. It had a slightly bitter taste, but it didn’t seem rotten. There was no irritation in his mouth, but it soon filled with saliva.

His mind screamed for him to eat, and finally, Sam swallowed the fruit down. He told himself to wait before eating any more, to see if his body rejected the potential sustenance. But he couldn’t.

He snapped the green pods off the shrub, threw the seeds on the ground, and chewed and swallowed like a robotic farm drone as he moved around the rocky expanse. With each gulp, life flowed back into him.

His mind unfroze. As he munched on the green balls of life-giving food, the name came to him: a ginkgo. That was what he was eating—a ginkgo, a type of nonflowering seed plant common in the Late Triassic.

The name of the dinosaur he had seen occurred to him too. It was a Coelophysis. Daniele had pronounced the C like an S, the first part of the name pronounced like “seel,” the middle like “oh.” He was amazed that his mind worked like that—he could remember the tiniest details that fascinated him (like dinosaurs), but most days he could barely remember what he did the day before.

He decided to call the dinosaur a “seelo.” If he ever saw one again.

He hoped he didn’t.

Sam moved to the next ginkgo bush and began picking the fruits and stuffing his mouth. They needed a name too. Green pods. That worked. It wasn’t exactly inspired, but it would do.

That’s how his mind worked: he liked to name things and order them. That may have been what made him a successful physicist.

Almost against his will, Sam laughed at that. Successful. Yeah right. What a career he’d had: faking enthusiasm for a time travel machine he thought was baloney (in order to make money to save his dying wife), then accidentally helping to create that supposedly fake time travel machine, and finally being banished from his own universe with the machine he had faked enthusiasm for in the first place. There were disasters, and then there was his life.