Joey wasn’t my kid. I’d never even seen him before. He was shaking harder than a holo T-rex for an old-movie revival ought to cause, and he came stumbling down the aisle to my seat.

“Mister, there’s a dragon in the lobby.”

“Son, that’s just a holo. It’s not real.”

“It ate the girl selling popcorn.”

Spielberg must have spent beaucoup bucks for a holo like that.

I could have been miles from any river, but Draco Day One found me in Loew’s Waterfront watching a lawyer meet his doom in an outhouse, grateful that 65 million years separated me from all those teeth.

Time was a much better barrier than distance, though, and when I peeked around the corner toward the refreshment stand, I saw that Joey had been right. Well, half-right. Most of the girl at the stand was gone, but the rest was draped across the counter. I could feel Joey still shaking, huddled up against the backs of my legs, hanging onto my hand, trying to drag me back into the dark theater.

I couldn’t see a dragon, but my suspended disbelief came down with a clunk.

The problem is, they’re amphibian, and they don’t care about salt, one way or another. Salt water, brackish, fresh, all the same to them. Guess what covers most of our planet? All over the world, it was trouble right here in River City: picnic on the beach, with us as entrée.

Remember that plane that went down in the Mon? Never was found. Most rivers are pretty murky. Swamps are even worse, but warm swamps have predators of their own, and so do the oceans. Boating became a little unpopular after that, waterskiing was suicide, and the RKBA guys had a field day. It was possible to kill the drakes – they weren’t immune to lead poisoning, or anything like that, but boy, could they reproduce! The thing was, finding the nests could be hazardous to your health.

It was all-out warfare in no time flat. After we’d killed a few, we knew more about them – thanks to the people at Pitt’s med school and us dinosaur specialists at Carnegie Museum. I’d been on a few of the digs out in the Dakotas, and once I saw these guys, they looked pretty familiar. Spielberg and the F/X guys got the musculature and movement pretty good, too, because they looked a lot like Velociraptors, quick and smart, altogether too smart. They must have had good language and technology, because they’d gotten here, from somewhere. Pat Davis and I were busily dissecting one when I noticed that she looked pretty unhappy. “Cat got your tongue?” I asked.

“Coyote got my cat,” she said. “I just heard a scream in the back yard, and then, when I checked, there was blood. I knew they were around, but I didn’t think they’d come that close to the house.”

“Probably been eating the cat’s food, got used to things.”

“Predators aren’t supposed to eat predators, are they?”

“Top-of-the-chain predators play favorites, but they’ll eat pretty much anything. Hell, look at us.” That’s when it hit me. I took an entirely new look at the Draco, and got on the phone to a buddy of mine down at the Strip cop shop.

“Marty, you know our tourist problem?”

“The ones with scales?” he asked

“Yeah. Those. I need one. A fresh one.”

“Dead or alive?”

“Preferably dead. I don’t want to have to negotiate with it.”

“Has somebody up there figured out a way to negotiate with the drakes?”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

“You heard that they ate most of the delegates to the United Nations, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. So much for negotiating.

“You care if it’s a head shot?” Marty was a pretty good marksman, but things had gotten hot and heavy, lately, and the police had taken to carrying some serious weapons. What he was saying was, there might not be any head left. I didn’t need a head.

Marty was as good as his word, but it was after midnight when he and I hauled the drake out of the back of his SUV and into the lab.

“It was worse than dragging a deer. I should have gotten it a little closer to the car,” he said, “‘Cause if it hadn’t been for Sam, I’d never have gotten it in. What are you going to do with it, anyhow?”

There had even been a sale on butter that week, and I’d melted some down in the lunchroom microwave. I thought that a nice loin chop would be a good place to start, and cut out a piece to try. Damn! Just like lobster! The reduction oven worked nicely as a broiler, and if I’d really been thinking, I’d have gotten a couple of potatoes and maybe some salad. I could see a whole new source of protein opening up for us.

“You lost your mind? That might be poison,” Marty stared at me in shock.

“I don’t think so. I think we have DNA in common. I think they’ve just been. . . on hiatus. You know, those dinosaurs had a lot of time to develop, and just because they haven’t been around for a long time doesn’t really mean they’re extinct. Maybe some of them were smart enough to go traveling. Why should they come to one little planet in a backwater system, unless they knew something? Like, say, salmon going back to where they were spawned?”

I don’t really have to work at Carnegie any more, but the research is fun. Before the drakes joined practically everything else on our menu, I made sure I got a cut of the profits. We almost had to declare them endangered, there for a while, but then we got that under control.

Tonight’s our Homecoming dinner at Le Mont. You’ll be there, won’t you? It’ll be just like old times.