Child of Earth Read Online Free PDF Page B

Birdie said it wouldn’t hurt, but we might have queasy stomachs and diarrhea for a couple of days while we got used to their equivalents.
    And it’s not just the germs. It’s all the plants and all the animals too. We can’t risk accidentally introducing any of their species to our world, or our species to theirs. The Linnea we’d come back to when the gate was reopened was very different than the Linnea that had been there when the gate was closed. The scientists theorized that there had been some mass die-offs simply due to the consequences of exposure to terrestrial life.
    Birdie said this was the most difficult part of the job, keeping the world-gates biologically secure—a lot harder than learning the language or teaching people how to behave on a new world or even figuring out a valid set of coordinates for a new gate—because there were so many different interrelationships in an ecology, we could never know them all.
    That first day, we only visited two of the world-domes. The first one was the one with the dinosaurs. They weren’t the same kinds of dinosaurs like we’d had on Earth 65 million years ago, but they looked like they could have been.
    There weren’t any people living on dinosaur world, except a few explorers who only went over there to study it. Birdie said we probably weren’t going to colonize it. Maybe only a few little parts. Research stations, not real settlements. Because there was still so much that the scientists wanted to study that they didn’t want to risk contamination.
    We couldn’t go down to the floor of the dinosaur dome. It was too dangerous. Instead, we rode above the simulated savanna on a kind of aerial-car hung from the roof of the dome. It was almost like flying. The pilot could drive the vehicle almost anywhere he wanted because the suspension carriage navigated on a set of overhead cables, kind of like those overhead cameras they use at football games. Plus, he could lower the car to give us closer looks or raise it quickly if any of the bigger creatures got too close.
    There were a lot of different creatures in dino-dome. It was the biggest
of all the domes, covering more than a hundred square kilometers. There were at least fifteen different kinds of herbivores there, all sizes, but they didn’t have a lot of them, only a few small herds, but on dino-world some of the herds had thousands, even tens of thousands of individuals. There were birds too, of course, but not like Earth-birds. Some of them had long stringy feathers, some had fur; two of the birds looked more like big black bats.
    We saw a large herd of herbivores that looked like small gazelles, only they had long lizardly tails that they held up in the air behind them, and birdlike faces with sharp beaks. They nipped at the grassy tufts like chickens pecking for bugs. Another family of creatures thundered through the grass like armored tanks with horns; they were the size of rhinos. They were big and leathery and had little piglike eyes that made them look distrustful and mean. Birdie said they were distrustful and mean.
    And then we saw the biggest ones of all. They were the size of blimps, colored all shades of brown and gold, darker on top and brighter along their bellies; they had necks and tails longer than their bodies. They had to lift their tails every time they lifted their heads, something to do with equalizing blood pressure—but they could lift their heads high enough to peer into the monorail car. One of them did and all the little-uns screamed. Me too. But Birdie said there wasn’t anything to be afraid of. Birdie called them Patty-saurs, after the woman who discovered them. She said they only ate people by accident and usually they spit them out after a few bites because they didn’t like the taste. I didn’t know if she was joking or not.
    Birdie said that there were over a thousand species of smaller animals in this dome—a lot of