Laramidia was a fine place to roam and roar on a fine Late Cretaceous morn on this fine 27th of May, 67,000,002 years before now.
Miss Abigail Triplehorn ambled through her misty jungle in the shadow of the solitary, smoking mountain, her cares a million years distant, enjoying an endless buffet of ferns, cycads, and palms. Sometimes she preferred to eat palms, cycads, and ferns. The cycads’ big leafy bits stuck up from the middle of the stubby seed plant and proved irresistible to Miss Abigail Triplehorn. “Who can blame me for going back for seconds. Or thirds. Or –” That was as high as she could count, so she took another chomp. Day after pleasant day, her beak busily snapped one stalk after another after another, until her thirty-foot Triceratops frame boasted ten tons of thunderous power.
One day, while gleefully stripping everything green she could get her beak on, Miss Abigail Triplehorn met Wizard Mark.
Wizard Mark was a Purgatorius.
A Purgatorius was a tiny thing with a rather large opinion of itself.
With its long nose, scampering feet, and a bushy tail, Purgatoriuses were expert at not getting eaten. Much. Well, there was some amount of getting eaten, but that was just the way the world spun, wasn’t it? Watching Miss Abigail Triplehorn amble from leaf to leaf and meal to meal, Wizard Mark stared in awe, and he trembled. “Please do not mistake me for a nut or a flower.”
“You are not so pretty as a flower,” Miss Abigail Triplehorn responded, “and you smell far worse than any nut I have ever had the pleasure of eating. Fear not. I will not munch you. I like my splendid jungle salad. In any case, you are barely a morsel. A T-Rex might see your whole family and not bother to bend down to snatch you up.”
Wizard Mark took this comment one way, and then he tried to take it another. “I may not be much now,” he told her, “but give me time, and I’ll stand up straight and tall and oppose my thumb and rule the world!” As he finished speaking, a passing pterosaur dropped a nut on his head.
“How much time?” Miss Abigail Triplehorn asked.
“What? How much? Um… sixty or seventy million years ought to do it,” Wizard Mark said.
“You will be here after so much time?”
“I will. Well, not like this. I hope to be taller, and the thumb thing will come in time.”
It was a silly conversation to have with a Purgatorius, which was obviously a silly animal that would never amount to anything no matter how many millions of years rolled by.
Miss Abigail Triplehorn was about to head to the river, where she had spotted some tasty fiddle-head ferns still rolled tight when Wizard Mark added, “I will be here, but you will not.”
Miss Abigail Triplehorn stopped chewing. “And just what do you mean by that, o tiny pest with outsized dreams?”
“It’s just a little something in the sky. You can see it twinkling even in the daytime.”
“Twinkly things are called stars, little pest. Everyone knows what you see at night is the light of Alamosauruseses standing atop distant hills, lighting their farts. Boy Alamos, of course.”
“Of course. Everyone knows that,” Wizard Mark agreed.
“Those boys eat even more plants than I do, so they have to light their farts all night long. We must look at this logically, little pest. Logic tells us this daytime twinkler in the sky is nothing more than a great big farting Alamo.”
“Indeed.” Wizard Mark looked at her for a moment, then spoke again. “Would that it were so. As much as I dislike correcting you, I know that this daylight star is really a rock that is coming our way. It is getting ready to fall on our heads!”
“So what? A rock? What can a rock do to me? I have an armored collar in case you hadn’t noticed. So, fling as many rocks at me as you like.”
Wizard Mark sighed, then he tried again. “This is a big rock. Very, very big. And it is coming at us very, very fast. When it hits, it will raise fire and ash all over. The T-Rex, even the farting Alamos will fall to the terrible storm, and all the green leaves will vanish for many, many years. It’s true some things will survive, including my kind, but I do not like to think about what will happen to the dinosaurs and so many others.”
Miss Abigail Triplehorn said, “That sounds serious.”
Wizard Mark said, “It is very serious, I’m afraid.”
Miss Abigail Triplehorn looked glum. “How do you know this, little pest?”
“Because, in addition to being a Purgatorius, I am a wizard. Wizard Mark, at your service. I see things from far away and know the truth.”
“And, when will this big, fast rock hit us?”
“Soon,” he answered, not meeting her tiny eyes which were now filled with triceratears.
“Oh, dear! I wish that mean old rock would go away and not come back for a million years! You must do something! A wizard, you say? Darn it, Mark… WIZ!”
“But I have no such powers in that area. We would need help. Big help.” Right on cue, the ground rumbled, low, and loud, and long. Avians, both pterosaurs and the new feathery kind, rose like a cloud from the treetops, screeching and squawking as they went. “What was that?”
Miss Abigail Triplehorn snuffled up her snotty tears, and her tone turns serious. “How can you know things millions of years from now but not know what is happening on the other side of that jungle?”
“Some of us travel closer to the ground than others. The view is… different.”
“Oh.” She lowered her beak, pointing all three of her lady-like horns towards a solitary mountain that rose above the trees. “That’s Volcano King Eric.”
“A Volcano named Eric?”
“A Volcano named Eric. He has a wife named Ariana who lives far, far away. She’s a real hot-head!”
“I’ll bet.” A though suddenly beamed across Wizard Mark’s face. “Wait!”
“How long? That stupid rock is getting closer.”
“No, I mean ‘Wait, I have an idea.’ A wonderful idea. A tremendous idea. A – ”
“It’s a boring idea unless you share it.”
“Of course. Walk with me. Better yet, you walk, I’ll ride.” So saying the little
Together, Wizard Mark and Miss Abigail Triplehorn struck off through the jungle in the direction of the rumbling mountain named Eric. Wizard Mark did a lot of talking, but Miss Abigail Triplehorn was too distracted by palms, cycads, and ferns and ferns, cycads, and palms to listen too closely to what he was saying.
After a time, they reached the volcano and began to climb its slopes. Eric was a twisty volcano king, as volcano kings go. This was lucky for the two pilgrims, since it meant they could use his gentle spirals to climb quite high up.
“That tickles,” rumbled Volcano King Eric. “Who’s nibbling at my ferns and palms?”
“And cycads,” answered Miss Abigail Triplehorn, her mouth full. It was a breach of etiquette to talk while munching, but the greenery on this fertile slope was simply irresistible.
“We are here to seek your help, o wise Volcano King Eric.”
“My help? Explain.”
“We need to play billiards with the universe,” Wizard Mark said.
“Uh…”
“As I was explaining to Miss Abigail Triplehorn, this involves a big rock that’s flying at all of use and will wipe most of us out – except me and my descendants, but never mind that – unless you do something.”
Volcano King Eric released a thoughtful puff of smoke. “Me? You think there’s something I can do?”
“Yes, because you are big and stronger than anyone else around. I have a plan.” Scratching with his tiny claws in the ash and soil on the mountainside, Wizard Mark explained, “It involves a man named Newton's universal law of gravitation: .”
“This again,” huffed Miss Abigail Triplehorn. “I apologize. He was spouting this sort of silliness all the way here.”
Volcano King Eric regarded the odd lines and curls Wizard Mark had scratched into his side. “I’m not really about math. I’m more about geology, but I’ll take your word for it. I have only one question.”
“Yes?”
“Who is Newton?” Volcano King Eric asked.
To which Miss Abigail Triplehorn added, “And what is a ‘man?’”
Wizard Mark’s shoulders slouched. “Let me put it another way. We’re looking at a big, fast rock. We need a big rock that’s much faster to hit it, like swatting away a pesky insect.”
Volcano King Eric stood stonily non-plussed. “And you see me, a volcano king, and assume any old volcano king can shoot rocks into the sky on a whim?”
“Uh… something like that.”
“No, I cannot simply do it on command.”
“There must be some way to make you… pop.”
“The last time I ‘popped’ was because a pterosaur dropped something into my caldera. I think it was a cycad. The darn things grow all over my slopes, and whenever they get close to my rim, I sneeze.”
Wizard Mark and Miss Abigail Triplehorn were hard at work before he finished his thought. They scurried about the fire mountain, as best as a ten-ton girl can scurry, ripping whole cycads out of the ground and stacking them on her back. Gathering the great haul near Volcano King Eric’s rim, they could feel his allergies kick in.
The ground rumbled mightily. “Aaahhhh… aaahhhh…” went Volcano King Eric.
Miss Abigail Triplehorn looked at the respectable mound of cycads they’d piled near the king’s rim. She looked them up and down, and a dribble of drool dripped daintily from her beak. “Surely, he wouldn’t miss one or two of those delectable cycads…”
“No, no! Please, Miss Abigail Triplehorn. Don’t eat those. We need every last one of them. That rock is getting closer and closer! It will make a big, big mess down here!”
“Oh, poo!” said Miss Abigail Triplehorn, kicking the dirt with her foot.
She lowered her horns and did what she hated doing. She pushed her precious pile of cycads over the top of the rim and into Volcano King Eric’s fiery caldera.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, something happened.
A fresh round of rumbles shook the ground so hard, creatures fell from their perches in the trees below.
Giant lizards and tiny mammals alike stopped in their tracks. “Aaaaaaaahhhhhh… aaaaaaaahhhhhh…” went Volcano King Eric.
The very air about them seemed to hold still, waiting for the inevitable. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh…” went Volcano King Eric.
And then…
“Pfwoot!” Volcano King Eric sneezed.
Oh, but this one no ordinary Pfwoot. This was a volcano king’s Pfwoot. A Pfwoot of grandeur. A Pfwoot of destiny. Dinosaurs, insects, and avians heard the great ‘Pfwoot!’ from one end of Laramidia to the other.
From his red-hot caldera, Volcano King Eric sneezed a rock of tremendous size, snottily shooting it into space at a speed not seen since the Big Bang. Looking up, everyone could see its dazzling tail arc across the sky until finally it collided with a strange twinkling star, knocking it so that the intruder moved ever so slightly to the left.
Laramidia was saved.
From a great distance, the Late Cretaceous, late May breeze carried the sound of Volcano Queen Ariana’s voice, offering a “Gesundheit.”
“Thank you, my dear,” replied Volcano King Eric.
“Lay off the cycads,” said Volcano Queen Ariana.
“Yes, dear,” said Volcano King Eric.
Miss Abigail Triplehorn and Wizard Mark thanked their new fiery friend and even promised to return from time to time to keep the cycads from growing too high on the mountain’s slopes – by eating them, naturally.
Going back to her preferred business – which was, of course, munching – she told Wizard Mark between mouthfuls, “I’m glad we were able to stop that stupid old rock.”
“No. We have not stopped it. We’ve merely knocked it into a wider orbit. It will be back.”
“When?” she asked.
Wizard Mark told her, “Just as you wished, in a million years.”
“A million years. That’s more than one or two. Very well, I refuse to worry about it any longer.” With that Miss Abigail Triplehorn went back to munching with great gusto, all cares a million years distant.
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