Then the saurian came down, crashing through the brakes. There was only a trickle of blood, but the bullet, like a Dum-Dum of three hundred years before, had exploded inside the monster's head, the minute atomic charge destroying everything within the thick bone walls of the skull but leaving skull and metal-tough skin intact.
Time flowed again. Mulveen returned the rifle to Gilbert and waded forward through the brackish water, his hipboots glistening.
"Beauty, isn't it?" Gilbert said with feigned professional enthusiasm Mulveen needed the enthusiasm: the big humanoid from the Sirian system had been a grumpy, fussy, dissatisfied hunter throughout the safari.
"Don't try and dun me for a tip," Mulveen snapped. "You get paid whatever the Earth company pays you." He was a big, bald man with a florid face, an amazing girth of shoulders, a barrel chest and almost pipe-stem legs which seemed barely able to support his weight.
He reached the saurian's five-foot-long head and walked around it, muttering to himself. It was a prize specimen: a faudi reptile from Epsilon Aurigae III, bred here on Earth in the huge, planet-wide game-farm. It was the sort of specimen a big-game hunter would give his proverbial eyeteeth to own, but Mulveen did not look happy. He merely said:
"So this is a faudi."
"Want me to prepare the skull, sir?" Gilbert asked. Gilbert was eighteen, one of the youngest guides in the game area known as Lewsanna. His father had been a guide for the hunters from the outworlds, and his father's father. His father had died tracking: it was a good, clean death and Gilbert's father had never known poverty. That was the most an Earthman could expect, Gilbert thought without bitterness. For civilization had left Earth behind. Earth was in the backwaters of galactic trade. Earth was a game-preserve, with the great beasts of five dozen worlds brought to it and bred here for the hunters. It figured, naturally: you couldn't deny it. The outworlds were new; they were built as twenty-fourth century worlds should be built. Earth had been a world of ancient cities and meaningless ancient traditions. Earth was the logical place for the game-farm. Earth, once the parent of all the galactic planets, reduced to a vacation spot for the very rich and the foolhardy....
"No," Mulveen said shortly. "Don't prepare the skull. I don't want the skull."
"But—"
"Forget it, kid! I've hunted everywhere, wherever there's hunting left on the outworlds. When I grew jaded, they said come to Earth. Earth will be different, a hunter's paradise. You know what? It isn't different. It's the same."