Sometimes humans have to visit the dinosaurs on their own turf. Ron Collins offers a colorful tour of prehistory in "The Test of Time." His tale of a scientist marooned in the past by a sleazy assistant who wants to swipe his invention has a not-unpleasant old-style pulp feeling to it.

Review by Ann-Marie Horcher
The Web's Review of Short Fiction

A milquetoast scientist is set adrift in his own time machine to end up in the Mesozoic era. A jealous research assistant has smashed the time-navigating mechanism that would allow the good doctor's return. With the doctor mired in the past, the research assistant can steal the invention and the credit. Luckily, our time-traveler uses his brain to survive in the primeval swamp and design an alternate time-navigation device. With a little help from his friends, a drugged tyrannosaurus and his prey, the doctor returns to the present and justice is served. This story bogs down when our hero became stranded in the prehistoric swamp, but then came roaring back for a satisfying finish.


On Writing "The Test of Time"

Mike Resnick pulled me aside one day and said, "I need five to six thousand words by October twentieth."

Words that will ring in infamy, I'm sure.

Writing to a deadline, I was about to discover, can be an intimidating process. I struggled for a couple days, writing the openings to five different stories before settling on "The Test of Time." I even went as far as to finish one other, so I got two stories for the price of one! Actually, it was quite fun. I would love to do it again. You listening, Mike?

I've always been afraid of time travel stories, because of their inherent disregard of physics and all the weird paradoxes associated with the concept. Besides, David Gerrold wrote the ultimate of time travel stories in The Man Who Folded Himself. Who was I to challenge that?

Ron Collins, that's who!

The particulars of this story came to me in a roundabout fashion. I had written a little opening with an off-world tyrannosaurus rex clone chasing a guy into a cave. Originally, our hero was an Indiana Jones type guy. But that was to change after I realized this actually happened some sixty-five million years ago. That's when Professor Gregory Paul was brought into this world. Moments later, I knew how the story would end. Knowing how it would end made me adjust the story opening, leaving the T. rex for a middle-of-the-story chase scene. The clip at the top of the page is the new opening.

For a first attempt at writing to a deadline, I'm quite proud of it. At least three other people must have thought it was at least okay, as it has been the first story of mine to ever gather attention in the Nebula Award process!