by David Drake
Dinosaurs & A Dirigible
David Drake
Henry Vickers's job is to keep clients safe from the dinosaurs they're hunting. That's the easy part. The hard part is to keep the clients safe from themselves and each other. Men with enough money to go into the past to hunt the largest land animals of all time are powerful and self-willed. Some make an effort to act like decent human beings, but more are selfish, stupid, sadistic--or all three together. The few women are likely to be worse.
Vickers doesn't expect rich people to understand the dangers of where they are and what they're doing; he doesn't expect them to be competent with the powerful rifles they carry; and he particularly doesn't expect them to be reasonable. He treats his clients' behavior as he does the rain and the baking heat--the cost of having a life he loves and which he couldn't afford in any other way.
But no matter how detached Vickers tries to be, eventually there are moral questions that he can't ignore. And when Henry Vickers starts to behave like a human being instead of a hunting guide, things get really dangerous.
And in a complete change of pace: "Travellers." An airship is crossing the United States in 1897 in search of the weird and the wonderful. The two teenagers aboard know that the airship's captain is a great scientist and inventor--but they don't know how much more he is also.
All five of David Drake's time travel stories collected for the first time.
Baen Books by David Drake
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With the Lightnings
Lt. Leary, Commanding
The Far Side of the Stars
The Way to Glory
Some Golden Harbor
When the Tide Rises
In the Stormy Red Sky
What Distant Deeps
The Road of Danger
The Sea Without a Shore
Hammer’s Slammers
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Caught in the Crossfire
The Butcher’s Bill
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Dinosaurs & A Dirigible
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The Tide of Victory
The Dance of Time
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DINOSAURS & A DIRIGIBLE
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by David Drake. A shorter version of this volume appeared in 1982 as Time Safari.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Book
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3683-9
Cover art by Tom Kidd
First Baen printing, September 2014
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Drake, David, 1945-
[Novels. Selections]
Dinosaurs & a dirigible / David Drake.
pages cm
Dinsaurs and a dirigible
ISBN 978-1-4767-3683-9 (paperback)
I. Title. II. Title: Dinsaurs and a dirigible.
PS3554.R196A6 2014
813'.54--dc23
2014019714
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
eISBN: 978-1-62579-312-6
Electronic Version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
DEDICATION:
To Ralph H. Eisaman, MD.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Among the friends to whom I owe personal depts for help given me on Dinosaurs & A Dirigable are: Jim Baen, Bernadette Bosky; Jase Valentine; Karl Wagner, and my wife Jo, who is indeed a friend. They are not responsible for the mistakes, for the questions I didn’t ask and the advice I didn’t take, but bless them all for what they freely offered.
A LOOK INTO THE PAST
1
In the mid-’80s, I got a new editor at Tor and almost immediately handed in Bridgehead to her. A throwaway scene in the novel involves a distant world in which a family of creatures much like plant-eating dinosaurs are gamboling.
In good time I got back the manuscript. With it came a long editorial letter which, among other things, directed me to remove that scene. I don’t have the letter any more because in the aftermath—which involved me getting the wonderful Harriet McDougal back as editor—Tom Doherty, Tor’s publisher, suggested that I burn it. I haven’t forgotten the editor’s language after 30 years, though (and I’ll probably be able to quote it on my deathbed): “Dinosaurs are reptiles, and reptiles do not nurture their young.”
She was wrong about reptiles also (some of them do nurture their young), but the important point of this statement is that in 1985, an educated (if remarkably arrogant) person could believe that dinosaurs were reptiles and behaved like lizards, not mammals.
2
When Tor published three of the stories in the present collection in 1982 (as Time Safari), I wrote an afterword arguing forcefully for the New Dinosaur which the stories describe:warm-blooded, quick-moving, intelligent creatures. Dinosaurs and a Dirigible doesn’t include that afterword because there’s no point in it. Nowadays everybody knows that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, quick-moving, intelligent creatures. They’ve watched Jurassic Park and any number of CGI dinosaur recreations on PBS and The Discovery Channel.
But I had another reason to drop the afterword: it embarrasses me. My (for a brief time) editor on Bridgehead isn’t the only person in this story capable of behaving like an arrogant twit.
I’d been fascinated by dinosaurs all my life. When I was five, I read an article in Junior Natural History Magazine which told me that Brontosaurus couldn’t walk on land because its joints were too weak to support its weight without water buoying up its body. I read the wo
nderful Sept 7, 1953, issue of Life with a Brontosaurus peering at me from the cover. I read Roy Chapman Andrews’ account of finding a Protoceratops egg clutch over which a sandstorm had buried an Oviraptor, the dinosaur raiding the nest.
I even made a Triceratops out of clay in 1st grade art class. (It wasn’t very good.)
Then in the late ‘70s, new information about dinosaurs reached the general public. Brontosaurs could walk on land just fine, and indeed they would have bobbed like corks in deep water. That head on the specimen from which the Life cover was painted was actually from a wholly different species found miles from the Brontosaurus. Worst of all, the Oviraptor was actually protecting its own eggs, not raiding the nest of another species.
Triceratops hadn’t changed much. That was something.
Looking back to 1980, I realize that I was furious at the scientists who had lied to me when I was a kid. I wrote the afterword to Time Safari in that mindset. I was unfair, and more important I was wrong.
Nobody lied to me: very learned men were wrong. Perhaps some of them gave the impression of stating the revealed truth like priests, not scientists, but even those fellows were doing the best they could with the information available.
I was angry about a lot of things at the time, principally the Vietnam War (during which people in positions of power were definitely lying), and I was transferring that anger onto people who had simply made mistakes. I apologize.
3
Dinosaurs and a Dirigible contains four time travel stories centered on Henry Vickers, and one—Travellers—which is completely different. I sold the first Vickers story, Time Safari, to Jim Baen, for the Ace book/magazine Destinies.
That novella was intended as a one-off, but Jim almost immediately left Ace to join Tom Doherty’s newly founded Tor Books. He called me and asked if I could do two more novellas in series with that one so that he could bring them out as a book. I wouldn’t have needed much urging to do that even if I hadn’t just quit lawyering to drive a city bus for $4.05/hour.
Before I go any farther, let me say that (fictional) animals are most certainly harmed in the making of these stories. The impetus for the original novella was Sprague deCamp’s groundbreaking A Gun for a Dinosaur. I stole Sprague’s concept of safaris going into the far past to hunt dinosaurs.
(For what it’s worth, Sprague used the same situation in the story Impractical Joke, which came out at almost the same time as A Gun for a Dinosaur, but in a rival magazine. Joke involves interstellar exploration rather than time travel.)
For background I read many, many hunting memoirs. From them I gleaned a piece of information that becomes a common thread in both Sprague’s story and mine, but which I arrived at independently: a safari guide’s biggest problems come from the clients, not the wild animals.
After the film of Jurassic Park appeared, Tom Doherty asked me to do a new dinosaur story to replace Calibration Run from the original collection so that Tor could republish it under a new title (Tyrannosaur). (Tom has had better ideas, and I’ve agreed to better ideas.) I wrote King Tyrant Lizard for that use.
The four Vickers stories have never been bound together before the present collection.
4
Travellers is unique for me. I wrote it (like Time Safari) for Destinies. The story involves a dirigible crossing America from east to west during the Great 1896 Airship Flap. The Flap was real, in the sense that it was a real hoax by contemporary newspapers to raise circulation.
I use the British “ll” spelling of the title (my spell checker doesn’t like it, nor have copyeditors over the years) for a reason. My first story (Denkirch) came out in an Arkham House anthology which Mr Derleth titled Travellers by Night. I’ve used double-L spellings ever since.
Nowadays you could call Travellers a proto-Steampunk story. I meant it as a love letter to rural America, however. At a time when the world in my head was a very harsh place, I wrote a story which was positive and looked forward to a world which was intrinsically good.
I’m proud of what I created, and I’m still more proud that I was able to do so under those circumstances.
5
Above I’ve discussed the genesis of these stories. That first collection (titled Time Safari like the initial novella) has a deeper importance to my career than any book except for my first, Hammer’s Slammers. Tom and Jim were pleased with the way I had executed their directions, so (even before the collection came out as one of Tor’s first books) Jim called to offer me a multibook contract. Within a few months I quit driving a bus and became a full-time freelance writer, as I remain to this day.
All because I was a kid who loved dinosaurs.
—Dave Drake
david-drake.com
KING TYRANT LIZARD
Henry Vickers sat motionless, watching the road and beyond it the forest where the tyrannosaur had escaped. Trucks hauling logging crews and their equipment snarled past him, raising a pall of reddish laterite dust: rain forest soil stripped of its cover, baked to a bad grade of limestone, and churned to grit by vehicles come to clear yet more land.
Vickers’ eyes were slitted, and he’d tied a blue-checked bandanna over his nose and mouth. The three khaki-clad police were in their dwelling across the road, ignoring the heavy traffic.
A metal-roofed shelter shared duty as a waiting room for the small landing strip as well as being the customs post on the Malaysian side of the border with Indonesian territory. Bornean sunlight had warmed the air inside to blood temperature, but Vickers was used to heat.
He was used to waiting as well. A successful hunter was first of all patient, willing to accept the things he couldn’t change and which made up most of his life. It seemed to Vickers that unchangeable things made up most of everybody’s life, though a lot of people tried to pretend otherwise.
The other passengers on the ancient DeHavilland Buffalo that brought Vickers to the border were locals, returning from the bazaars of Kuching. Immediately after landing, they had dispersed with their purchases: incredible loads of plasticware, batteries, and the miscellaneous paraphernalia of civilization. One man walked a well-used step-through motorcycle into a trail through the jungle wall. Vickers couldn’t imagine where the fellow would run the bike, assuming that it ran at all.
Because of the logging trucks, Vickers saw the shadow of the aircraft before he heard its engines. Winged blackness rippled over the sun-washed strip, paused, and shifted back abruptly. Vickers stepped out of the shelter, angling his head so that his hat brim shaded his eyes as he looked upward.
The plane was a shining tilt-rotor, transitioning from forward flight into a hover above the landing strip. The aluminum fuselage and stub wings bore a blue umbrella over stylized green trees, the logo of the Borneo Scheme.
Vickers had met Louise Mondadero, the Scheme’s Field Director, fifteen years before when she was a senior ecologist working for the government of Kenya. They’d gotten along well enough to keep in touch, even after Louise took over the Borneo Scheme.
Her phone call two days before had been a surprise to Vickers, though. Almost as great a surprise as the call’s contents.
When the twin nacelles locked into their vertical position, the tilt-rotor began to descend behind the wash of its props. Two of the Malaysian police got up from their hammocks to watch.
Vickers ducked into the shelter for his satchel and battered gun case, all the luggage he had brought with him from Nairobi. He started for the tilt-rotor as it touched down. To Vickers’ surprise, the pilot shut off his turbines. Louise had emphasized that haste was essential, and Vickers was ready to go.
The pilot, a young man wearing a multi-pocket cotton shirt and shorts, flopped down the left cockpit-access door and jumped to the ground. Ignoring Vickers, he strode instead toward the busy roadway. The feathered props continued to spin twenty feet in the air, slowing only gradually.
Dr. Louise Mondadero got out from the other side of the cockpit. “Tom!” she called, her clear voice carrying over th
e truck noise and the dying moan of the turbines. “This isn’t the time!”
Louise had cut her black hair short, and she looked noticeably older than she had when Vickers last saw her five—six, dammit—years before. As she trotted after “Tom,” she clapped a straw hat on her head. Sunlight made her sweat, though the dark olive complexion from her Brazilian ancestry—roughly equal measures of Mediterranean, African and Native American bloodlines—was impervious to sunburn.
Vickers opened the tilt-rotor’s side hatch and tossed his exiguous gear inside. Six tube-and-fabric seats were folded against the sidewalls. There was a wooden crate containing tools and ropes in the cabin, but it looked more like litter than cargo.
“Henry, I’m terribly sorry,” Louise called back over her shoulder. “We’ll be leaving in a moment.”
Vickers gave her a neutral smile. He sauntered after her, paying no attention to the implied order to wait. Ninety percent of a safari guide’s problems involved his clients rather than the wildlife. Vickers figured that made him a lot more of an expert in whatever wild hair had gotten up the pilot’s ass than Louise herself was.
The pilot was already across the road, shouting at the customs police and gesturing toward the vehicles crossing the border unimpeded. Vickers didn’t know a word of the standardized Malay dialects spoken in Malaysia and Indonesia (much less the local tribal languages), but it was easy enough to read what was going on.
The people on the ground had been paid off. By the time complaint could be made at a level higher than the bribes had gone, the damage would be done.
