Dinosaurs & A Dirigible

by David Drake

  The woman blushed, a dark rush of blood to a face already as tan as Vickers’. “That’s neither here nor there!” she said. “Now, how can we capture a specimen?”

  “Oh, there’s ways,” the guide said. He put his hands in his hip pockets and turned away once more. For a moment he whistled snatches of “Blue Water Line” through his teeth. “Yeah, there’s ways,” he continued, “although it’ll be a lot easier if we can get Holgar to cooperate.”

  “He’ll cooperate,” Linda Weil said grimly. “I’m going back with my specimen. His choice is whether it comes aboard in a cage or gets packed in sealant like the rest.”

  “I got two,” Nilson said, thumbing toward the bloody tangle on the collapsible sled he was drawing. “A male and a female, I wanted. But when I dressed them out, both were pregnant, so I just left the other with the offal.”

  Vickers glanced at what was left of the hyena. For specimen purposes and the need to pack it in alone on the titanium sled, Nilson had used a heavy-bladed knife to strip the beast to head, spine, and limbs. The ribs, hide, and the whole abdominal cavity had been abandoned at the kill site as useless; and for that matter, this was about the first use Vickers had heard of for any part of a dead hyena. “Just about impossible to sex a hyena, even after you open them up,” he agreed. “I know people to this day who’ll swear they’re hermaphroditic, that if you shut two males in a cage for a week, one’ll change so they can screw.” Vickers’ eyes, but not the Norwegian’s, flickered toward the intrusion vehicle where Linda Weil occupied herself with a microfiche catalog of the Pliocene specimens known Topside.

  “Well,” said Nilson. He dropped the tow line and walked toward the frame-supported drum which stored their water. It was pumped through a plastic line from the stream a thousand feet east of them. The spigot could be adjusted to dribble sun-heated water in an adequate shower. The younger guide leaned his rifle against the trestle set there for the purpose, out of the splash but in easy reach if occasion demanded it. Vickers nodded in approval. The Mauser chambered powerful 9.3-by-64mm cartridges. Needlessly big for hyena, perhaps . . . but both the hunters were of the school that used what worked for them; and if their tastes were radically different, then they were alike in their scorn for purists who could not hunt without a battery of a dozen guns.

  “Ah, Holgar,” the senior guide said, knowing that he had to be the one to broach the subject but increasingly uncomfortable with his role, “I think we have to talk about this hominid business.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Nilson said, unzipping his filthy trousers and hanging them on the trestle.

  “Well, I don’t know that I do either,” said Vickers, “but I guess that isn’t an option.” He picked up the sprayer he had filled when Nilson approached the camp. It was Vickers’ task to seal the specimen since his partner had done the even messier job of dressing it out. More important, the work gave Vickers something to do with his hands. The stripped carcass was already black with flies, but the sealant would suffocate those it did not drive away. Vickers began to pump. Raising his voice to compensate for distance and the spatter of water, he continued, “While you were getting the hyena, we rigged a net trap down by our water supply. There’s a grove of locust trees there, and when we knew what to look for we found plenty of sign that the hominids were gathering pods. Maybe the troop we saw, maybe another one. It’s hard to guess what their ranges are.”

  “We ought to leave them strictly alone,” the younger man said distinctly. “We ought to get out of here at once, go back on the intrusion vehicle before we do irreparable harm. If we haven’t already done irreparable harm.” He twisted off the spigot and stepped barefoot away from the muddy patch under the tank.

  Vickers set down the sprayer but did not immediately turn the specimen over to cover the other side. “Yeah,” he said. “Well. Look, Holgar, we’re not going to hurt anything, we’re going to capture one ape to study.” The sandy-haired man did not at the moment mention Weil’s intention of carrying the specimen back Topside. “You know goddamn well yourself from baboons that we could take a lot more than that on a one-shot basis and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in five years’ time.”

  Nilson was toweling himself off without speaking. Vickers noticed that Linda Weil, a hundred feet away, was no longer even pretending not to be watching the men from the platform. Sucking on his lips in frustration, Vickers went on, “I cut a section off the end of the drive net we used for small animals. We’ve got it sprung between a pair of trees and it’s command-released so there’s no chance of it being tripped by a pig or going off when the hominid we want’s in a position to maybe get hurt. But that means that one of us has to be watching it in the morning when the foragers are out.”

  The younger guide left his bloody, sweat-stained clothes hanging and padded back toward the tent and his footlocker. “Holgar,” Vickers said, trying to control the tremor in his voice. His skin prickled on the inside with the dry anger he had not felt since his second wife left him. “I’m talking to you. Don’t walk away like that.”

  The Norwegian turned at the tent flap, rolled up during the day. “You haven’t said a thing that touches me, you know,” he said. “Not a damned thing.”

  “The hell it doesn’t touch you!” the older man shouted back. “Somebody’s got to watch the trap, and somebody’s got to squire Linda around tomorrow. She wants to poke through their old camp and see if she can locate the new one . . . And that’s her business! Now, you can do whichever you want, but if you think you’re going to pretend you’re nowhere around—look, buddy, I wouldn’t have to be a lot madder than I am before I’ll put a soft-nose through the chest of one of the goddamned animals and get a specimen that way. We’ve got jobs to do, and sulking like a little kid who didn’t get the bike he wanted for Christmas doesn’t cut it!”

  The bigger man slung his towel to the ground between them as if it were a gage of battle. “That slut up there,” he shouted, “she has everything to gain from meddling, does she not? And you—I know you, I’ve watched you—you have nothing to lose, that’s your trouble. But what about me and all the people like me? When we get back Topside, will it be all right for us if everything is the same—except the people all have purple skins and tails?”

  “Holgar, you’ve heard the options,” Vickers said in a voice as hard as a gunlock.

  “All right, I’ll mind the trap!” Nilson stormed. “You didn’t really think I’d go off with her, did you?” Still nude, the Norwegian snatched up his sleeping bag in one hand and his foot locker in the other, dragging them out of the tent. “And may God have mercy on your souls!”

  “Yeah,” said Vickers tiredly. “We all need a little mercy.” He walked away from the half-prepared hyena, scanning the horizon. He wished he saw something there that he had an excuse to kill.

  # # #

  “Will the machairodont still be at the camp site?” Linda Weil whispered in the near darkness.

  “Possibly,” Vickers said, more concerned with his footing than he was with the question. Early morning had seemed a likely time to observe hominids revisiting their former camp, so the guide and paleontologist had set out as soon as there was enough light to shoot by. “Frankly, I’m a lot more worried that it may be somewhere between here and there.”

  “Oh,” Weil said. Then, “Oh—that’s what you meant when you said we couldn’t leave before you could see to shoot.”

  The guide looked over his shoulder. “Good lord, yes,” he said in amazement. “You didn’t think I was planning to shoot one of them, did you?”

  There was more skylight now than there had been only minutes before. The paleontologist stepped around Vickers and a thorny shrub without pausing. “I don’t interfere with the hunting decisions you and Holgar make, you know,” she said. “The animals I’ve worked with all my life are bones that can’t hurt you unless you drop them on your foot. Or you let them lead you to an assumption that makes your colleagues say you’re a
fool—that can hurt too.”

  “I’d better lead,” said Vickers after a glance behind that assured him that the Sun was still below the horizon.

  There were several minutes marked by the whispering of grass against leather and the occasional clack of stones slipping under a boot sole. At last the guide said, “That hominid can’t have gone more than eighty pounds on the hoof, so to speak. Dressed out, maybe half that . . . and that’s counting a lot that that sabertooth eats and you and I wouldn’t. Now, I’ve seen lions gorge forty pounds in a sitting, and they were a lot smaller than our friend. Still, it was a good five days before a lion that full even thinks of moving on . . . All things considered, and assuming that the sabertooth kept eating the way it started yesterday while we watched it, I’d expect to find the fellow snoozing under the trees where it made the kill.”

  “Oh,” said the paleontologist. “Ah, do you think—I’d still rather call them primates—do you think they’ll come back even if the machairodont is gone?”

  Vickers laughed. “And do I think there’s life on Saturn? Look, how would I know?” By using common sense, the right half of his brain told him. It was always easier to plead ignorance, though . . . “All right,” the guide said slowly, “there was nothing permanent about that camp. The troop probably roams the area pretty widely. And they dropped everything when they took off, but everything wasn’t—anything, really. We saw some of them carrying rocks, but they were as like as not to drop them. And the roots and such they’d gathered, that wasn’t anything they were storing, just a day’s supply and as easy to replace as recover. So no, I don’t think they’ll come back.”

  Vickers missed Weil’s muttered response, but it might have been a curse. “You mean,” she said more distinctly, “that the chances are we won’t be able to get near the campsite because the cat’s still there, and even if the cat’s gone, there won’t be any real chance of seeing living hominids there again.”

  “Well, don’t worry about the sabertooth,” Vickers said, smiling at the term “hominid” which the other had let slip. “I—” his expression sobered. “Look,” he went on, “I blew it bad the other day and let that cat almost get me. That doesn’t mean I can’t nail one if it’s sleeping in a place you want to look over.”

  Weil nodded, though the guide in front of her could not see the gesture. “How is your chest?” she asked.

  Vickers shrugged. “It hurts,” he said. “That’s good. It reminds me how stupid I can be.”

  They were in sight of their goal now, though the paleontologist did not yet recognize the clump of acacias from this angle. The anvil tops of the trees, forty feet in the air, were already a saturated green in the first light of the Sun. Vickers touched Weil’s shoulder and knelt down. The dark-haired woman crouched and studied the scene. At last she recognized the swell of the hill to the right from which they had watched the camp and the kill the day before. “All right,” she whispered to the guide. “What do we do now?”

  “We wait,” said Vickers, uncapping his binoculars, “until I’ve got a clean shot at that sabertooth or I’m awfully damn sure it’s nowhere around.” With the lenses just above the thorny shrub between him and the acacias, Vickers studied the blurring gray-on-gray beneath the trees.

  Vickers could feel movements all around them. A trio of squabbling finches fluttered into the bush inches away from his face, then scurried back again without having taken any obvious interest in the humans. The grass moved, sometimes in sympathy with a puff of wind, often without. The landscape was becoming perceptibly brighter, its colors returning as pastel hints of the richness they would have in an hour.

  Over a ridge a half-mile south of the humans ambled a family of sivatheres. As they walked, the beasts browsed high among the thorny acacias. The sivatheres were somewhat shorter than the largest of the true giraffes with which Vickers was familiar, but that difference was purely a matter of neck length. The sivatheres were higher at the shoulder and were greatly more massive in build than giraffes Topside. Males and females alike were crowned with a cluster of four skin-covered horns, blunt as chair legs. “You know,” whispered the guide as he stared at the graceful, fearless creatures, “I ought to be able to get one of those for you if this doesn’t pan out . . .” The stocky man had done his share of trophy-hunting in the past, and the old excitement was back in a rush as he watched the huge animals move.

  “Quite unnecessary,” retorted Linda Weil. “I’ve compared their ossicones to those of known species, and there’s no correlation. These are a new species and that’s no help at all in the question of dating.”

  Vickers lowered his binoculars. He was conscious of the mechanism that had caused him to suggest the sivatheres as a target. Despite that embarrassment, however, he said, “But it’s the pattern of the teeth, not the horns, that’s really diagnostic, isn’t it? What you mean is, you’re more interested in the hominids than you are in doing your job.” The woman looked away, then met his eyes silently. “Look,” the guide continued, “I tore a strip off Holgar because he wasn’t doing his job. But if you’re going to pull the same crap yourself in your own way—well, we may as well go back Topside right now.”

  The guide had not raised his voice, but the iron in it jolted the woman as effectively as a shout could have. She touched Vickers’ wrist in a pleading, not sexual fashion. “Henry, this may not be exactly what they sent us here to find,” she said, “but I’m certain in my own mind that even the people in the engineering section will be able to see how desperately important it is. A chance through time intrusion to actually see which theories of human nature are true, whether our ancestors were as violent as Chakma baboons or as friendly as Capuchin monkeys. This might be a chance to understand for the first time the roots of the political situation that makes the—men in Tel Aviv so anxious to refine time intrusion into a, well, a weapon.”

  Vickers shook his head. He felt more frustration than disagreement, however. “The men and women in Tel Aviv,” he corrected. “Well, understanding the roots of their problem is fine, but I suspect that they’d trade it for a way to get a nuke into Berlin around ’32.” He sighed. “But this isn’t getting our job done, is it?” Vickers turned his binoculars onto the acacia grove again.

  For a moment, Vickers was in doubt about the dark shape at the base of one of the trees. It could have been a root gnarling blackly about a boulder bared by ages of wind and rain. Then the shape rolled over and there could be no doubt at all that the sabertooth had slept where it killed. Vickers let the binoculars hang gently on their strap and lifted his Garand.

  Weil’s breath sucked in. It was that, rather than her fingers clamping on his biceps, that caused Vickers to slack the finger pressure that would an instant later have sent a 150-grain bullet cracking downrange. The guide’s seated body held the rigid angle of which the rifle was a part, but his eyes slanted left to where the woman was pointing. “I’ll be damned,” Vickers mouthed. He lowered the butt of his weapon.

  The sabertooth lay 200 yards in front of them, a clout shot at a stationary target. But a hominid was quartering toward the acacias from the left, already as close to the trees as he was to the watching humans. The hominid was sauntering with neither haste nor concern, a procedure which seemed both insane and wildly improbable for any creature his size when alone in this habitat. Vickers had the glasses up again. From the hominid’s build, from the way his arms hung as he walked . . . from the whorled grain of his fur that counterfeited two shades in a pelt of uniform gray . . . the guide was sure that this hominid was the one that had made the unsuccessful snatch at the carcass in the midst of the hyenas. That hominid had been present when the sabertooth struck—and therefore he could not conceivably be walking toward those murderous jaws in perfect nonchalance.

  Weil’s camera was whirring. Vickers suspected that she would learn more through her binoculars than through the view finder, but there are people to whom no event is real unless it is frozen. No doubt many of them worked with bo
nes. The hominid was only fifty yards from the sprawling cat. He stopped, scratched his armpit, and began calling out in a sharp voice. He was facing the end-most tree in the grove as if someone were hiding in its branches. Nothing larger than a squirrel could have been concealed among the thorns and sparse foliage.

  The sabertooth’s wakefulness was indicated not by its movements but by the sudden cessation of all the tiny changes of position a sleeping animal makes. The great head froze; the eyes were apparently closed but might have been watching the hominid through slitted lids. The cat could not have been truly hungry after the meal of the previous day, but neither had the dun female provided so much meat that another kill was inconceivable. The cat grew as still and tense as the mainspring of a cocked revolver.

  Vickers made a decision. He started to raise the rifle again. Linda Weil shook her head violently. “No!” she whispered. “It—it’s their world. But if none of the other primates are in sight, ah, afterward, kill the machairodont before it has time to damage the specimen.”

  The guide turned his head back toward the grove with a set expression. He held the Garand an inch short of firing position despite his anger. But they were just animals . . .

  The cat charged.

  Considered dispassionately, the initial leap was a thing of beauty. The torso which had seemed to be as solid as a boulder was suddenly a blur of fluid motion. Vickers could now understand how he had been so thoroughly surprised by this killer’s mate; but the recollection chilled him anew.

  The hominid himself was not in the least surprised. That was evident from the way he sprinted away from the cat at almost the instant that the carnivore first moved. There was no way that the hominid could match the sabertooth’s acceleration, however. When the forepaws touched the ground the first time, they had covered half the distance separating killer from prey, and when the paws touched the second time—