Rivers of Time - Contents

Contents

• "Faunas" (poem)
• "A Gun for Dinosaur" - Rivers explains to a client the reason for his policy of only taking clients able to handle a heavy-duty gun back to the late Mesozoic, with a hair-raising narrative of what once happened to a client who couldn't.
• "The Cayuse" - Reggie tells the story of the only time they tried to bring a manned vehicle back to the prehistoric days, in which the gas fumes acted like a mating scent for a Parasaurolophus, leading it to try to mate with the car, leading to its subsequent destruction in the river.
• "Crocamander Quest" - Misadventures bedevil a trip to the age of Amphibians.
• "Miocene Romance" - An animal rights activist tries to go on a hunt to prevent anyone from shooting the extinct animals. When she is denied, she stows away. As the hunt goes on, the elder of the two sahibs kills animals just so he can say he has to his friends, and even kills an entire herd of gomphotheres.
• "The Synthetic Barbarian" - A client whose motive for financing a time expedition proves to be personal wish-fulfillment gets more than he bargained for.
• "The Satanic Illusion" - A challenge from religious fundamentalists to prove the theory of evolution through a time travel expedition serves instead to demonstrate the infinite capacity of the human mind for self-delusion, even if it has to involve murder.
• "The Big Splash" - An expedition to chronicle the K-T event and resolve rival theories about its cause nearly makes the time-travelers participants in the great extinction.
• "The Mislaid Mastodon" - A "bring-'em-back alive" expedition to retrieve a mastodon from the past to the present goes disastrously awry.
• "The Honeymoon Dragon" - Rivers and his wife visit his native Australia, where they themselves become guest on another time safari operation. The trip proves more dangerous than they expect when a fellow time-traveler with an inexplicable grudge against Rivers turns the expedition into a deadly trap.
• "Afterword" - A brief resume from the author on how the stories in the book came to be written.