Free Mirabile by Janet Kagan Page B

but with a bit of a rising inflection.
    “If I tell them it’s ‘Earth-authentic,’ sure. But this one isn’t. Furthermore, nobody in his right mind likes it.”
    “I like it,” Susan said. When I didn’t respond to that, she said in a small amused voice, “Oh,”
    then giggled, then sighed in resignation. “So what do we do?”
    “Nothing, until we check out the situation locally.”
    The local situation hadn’t simmered down while it waited for our arrival. Not that I’d expected it to, but I could see that both Susan and Leo had. A third of the adults were guarding the sheep field with guns. Another third, I imagine, was guarding the kids likewise. The rest turned out to be a combination welcoming committee and lynch mob. Read: we were welcome, the kangaroo rexes were most emphatically not.
    I listened to the babble without a word for all of twenty minutes, motioning for Susan and Leo to do the same. Best to let them get as much of it out of their systems as possible while we waited for a couple of leaders to sort themselves out of the crowd—then we’d know who and what we were actually dealing with.
    In the end, there were two surprises. The first was that someone was dispatched to “Go get Janzen. Right now.” When Janzen arrived, Janzen got thrust to the fore.

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    Janzen was about Susan’s age. He looked at me, cocked an eye at Leo who nodded and grinned, then he grinned at me and stuck out his hand. That was when I noticed the striking resemblance the kid had to Leo. I cocked an eyebrow at Leo, whose grin got wider.
    Janzen took care of shutting down the general noise level and introducing us to the population at large. Leo got introduced by his previous job description—as Leonov
    Opener
    Denness—and, yes, Leo was Janzen’s granddad. Both of which upped our status exactly the way Janzen had intended them to. At a bet, a lot of the local kids had been through a survival course or two with Leo.
    The second surprise wasn’t nearly as pleasant. The other speaker for the populace—read
    “loudmouth” in this case—was none other than Kelly Herder Sangster, formerly a resident of Gogol. She’d wanted the kangaroo rexes near Gogol wiped out, and she wanted the same thing here and now.
    I knew from experience how good she was at rousing rabble. She’d done it at Gogol. I could talk myself blue in the face, put penalties on the shooting of a rex, but I’d lose every one of them to “accidental” shootings if I couldn’t get the majority of the crowd behind me.
    Sangster squared off, aimed somewhere between me and Janzen, shoved back her hat, bunched her fists on her hips, and said, “They eat sheep. Next thing you know they’ll be eating our kids!
    And cryptobiology sends us somebody who loves
    Dragon’s Teeth!”
    She pointed an accusing finger at me. “When they attacked us in Gogol, she wanted to keep them! Whaddaya think about that?” The last was to the crowd.
    The crowd didn’t think much of that at all. There was much muttering and rumbling.
    “I think,” I said, waiting for the crowd to quiet enough to listen, “I’d like to know more about the situation before I make any decisions for or against.”
    I looked at Janzen. “You were the first to see it, I’m told. Did it eat your sheep?”
    “No, it didn’t,” he said. That caused another stir and a bit of a calm. “It was in the enclosure, but it was chasing them, all of them, the way a dog does when it’s playing. To be fair, I don’t know what it would have done when it caught them. We caught it before we could find out.” He looked thoughtful. “But it seems to me that it had plenty of opportunity to catch a sheep and didn’t bother. Moustafa? What do you think?”
    Moustafa rubbed his sore jaw, glowered at Leo, and said, very grudgingly, “You’re right, Janzen.
    It was like the time Harkavy’s dog got into the sheep pen—just chased ‘em around. Plenty of time to catch ’em but didn’t. Just wanted