In the Time of Dinosaurs Page 14

  My friends were there, too.

  I fired my dolphin echolocation clicks and "saw" ships in the water. And I felt the last, dying echoes of the underwater nuclear explosion that had first opened the Sario Rip.

  «We're right back when we began,» Ax said.

  We demorphed near the beach and when we climbed out, there was the boardwalk. It was still raining. There was no volcano. No giant footprints in the sand.

  We went to our homes, dazed, awed, and watched the news reports of the terrible disaster at sea. A disaster that, fortunately, had not resulted in any deaths.

  The Navy diver who was the hero of the rescue swore she'd been led to the submarine by dolphins. Some people suggested maybe she was suffering from hallucinations brought on by the depth and by breathing the wrong mix in her scuba tanks.

  I returned to my life, feeling strange and out of place. That night Jake came over. We went outside.

  "I tried morphing the Tyrannosaurus," he said. "Nothing. Didn't work."

  "You could ask Ax. He may know why."

  Jake laughed. "Yeah, but even if he explains it, I still won't understand it."

  "Maybe it was all just a dream," I said.

  "No. Not a dream," Jake said. "But it all happened a long time ago." Page 93

  K[1]._A._Applegate_-_Megamorphs_02_-_In_The_Time_of_Dinosaurs

  "Were we always there? I mean, were we meant to be there? To do what we did? Was everything supposed to happen a different way? Should this planet be ruled by the Mercora today? Or the Nesk? Should there still be dinosaurs stomping around? Did we make it all right or mess it all up?"

  Jake didn't have an answer, so I slipped my arm through his. We looked up at the sky for a while. "No comet," Jake said.

  "Not today, anyway," I said.

  A note:

  «Hi, it's me, Tobias. After we got back from our adventure in the late Cretaceous, I looked up some of the dinosaurs we encountered: Tyranno-saurus, Deinonychus, Saltasaurus, Spinosaurus, Elasmosaurus, Kronosaurus, and Triceratops. All of them were around during the Cretaceous Age. But paleontologists seem to think some of them, like Spinosaurus, were extinct by the middle Cretaceous, whereas we were in the late Cretaceous. All I can say is that I was almost eaten by a supposedly extinct Spinosaurus. So who are you going to believe? Me, or a bunch of scientists with some old fossils?»

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