Years and years ago, I read a book about two time-traveling scientists. It was either a children’s book or a YA book…I forget how old I was at the time, but I imagine it would have been written between 1985 and 1995.
The premise, as I said, is that two scientists are sent back in time to the Cretaceous Period (I think). Immediately, they notice that gravity is much less. They begin observing dinosaurs, and ultimately realize that there is a conspiracy going on involving martians who have engineered the dinosaurs to be biological weapons in a war with another martian species. The lesser gravity is from martians fiddling with gravity-reducing satellites to make Earth more Mars-like.
Other random details:
- The martians are like giant amoebas with a hive mind. They can separate, then recombine to share memories. They use the dinosaurs as tanks, infecting them and then controlling them.
-The two scientists have a personal history. One of them hooked up with the other one’s wife. The ex-husband used to call his wife “Lambchop.”
-One scientists gets infected by the martians, and the other has to save him with an AIDS vaccine (yes, really). - Ultimately (spoiler!
) one of the scientists figures out how to destroy the satellites. This makes the martians unable to maintain larger-than-germ-sized bodies. The dinosaurs all die from the sudden increase in gravity, and the martians break down into modern-day germs and viruses.
I found it quite striking, obviously. I’d like to find it and see if the writing has held up in re-reading as well as it has in my memory. Does anyone have any ideas?
