The man saw K’tharr. His eyes went wide. “Alpha point located,” he said into a bead on his wrist. “Releasing temporal suppressant. Target: prehistoric Crocodylus niloticus . ETA to extinction: two thousand years.”
He settled back onto his mudbank, the one he had guarded for two thousand years before this moment. He closed his bad eye.
The man looked into K’tharr’s one good eye. “You don’t… understand. I’m from the year… 3000 AD. You were supposed to be a specimen. Just a… crocodile.” crocodile -2000-
K’tharr’s jaws, strong enough to crush a turtle’s shell, strong enough to hold a drowning ox, closed around the man’s middle. The white suit cracked. The clear helmet shattered. The stick flew into the water, hissing impotently.
K’tharr, the river’s oldest crocodile, was not a beast of myth or magic. He was just old. Older than the mud he napped in. Older than the village built from reeds. He had seen pharaohs who were not yet called pharaohs rise and fall. His left eye was a milky white cataract, his hide a mosaic of scars from hippo tusks and rival jaws. He was two thousand pounds of patience and hunger. The man saw K’tharr
But somewhere, in a timeline that would never exist, a team of scientists stared at a blank screen and whispered: “What happened to Unit 7?”
Hunger. That was all that was left. The oldest, stupidest, strongest thing in his brain. “Releasing temporal suppressant
The answer lay in the Nile, sleeping in the sun, with a taste of chrome on his tongue and all the time in the world.