Dinosaurs & A Dirigible

by David Drake

  Vickers laid the Garand carefully across the stool on which he had been sitting. He tested the dishwater with the tip of a thumb. “You know,” he said, “I’ve got some problems about carrying her” —he gestured toward the dull whimpering—“back with us, too. Look, you’ve got your camera, and they aren’t expecting us back Topside for three more days anyhow. Why don’t we stay here, you do your tests and whatever, and then—” Vickers spread his hand with a flare toward the hills, completing the thought.

  The look that flashed across the paleontologist’s face was as wild as the laughter bubbling from the throat of a hyena. Weil had control of herself again as quickly. “Do you really want to keep her three days in a cage she can’t stand up in, Henry?” the woman asked. “And you know that we couldn’t accomplish anything here, even with a reasonable length of time—which that isn’t. Quite aside from the fact that they’d all suspect I’d made the story up myself. A few photos for evidence!”

  “Holgar and I are here as witnesses,” Vickers said. He lifted the cauldron’s wire handle with a stick.

  “Marvelous! And where did you do your postgraduate work?” Weil snapped. She softened at once, continuing, “Henry, I know my colleagues. They’ll doubt, and they ought to doubt. It’s better than another Piltdown Man. Oh, there’ll be another expedition, and it may possibly be as incredibly fortunate as we’ve been—but then it’ll be their names on the finds, not mine. And it’s not fair!”

  Water sloshed as Vickers shifted the pot. A gush of steam and flying ashes licked his boots. “I don’t think she’s human,” he said quietly, “but if she is, I don’t think we’ve got any business holding her. Not here, not Topside. You know they’d never be able to find this, this slot in time close enough to put her back in it once she leaves.”

  “Henry, for God’s sake,” the dark-haired woman pleaded, “we’re not talking about some kind of torture. Good grief, what do you think her life span’s going to be if we leave her? Five years? Three? Before she winds up in a sabertooth’s belly!”

  Vickers gave the woman an odd look. “I think both the sabertooths in this range,” he said, “have eaten their last hominid.”

  “All right, a hyena then!” the paleontologist said. “Or until she goes into anaphylactic shock from a bee sting. The point is not just that when we go Topside, everything here will be dead for five million years. The point is that the specimen will live a much longer life in comfort that she’ll appreciate just as much as you do. And she’ll advance our knowledge of ourselves and our beginnings more than Darwin did.”

  “Yeah,” said the guide. He slid the trio of aluminum plates into the water. “I like modern comforts so much that I spend all the time I can in the bush.” He stirred the dishes morosely with the tableware before he dropped that in as well. “Okay, I’ve been wrong before. God knows, I’ve generally been wrong.”

  Five distant hyenas broke out in giggling triumph. No doubt they had just killed, Vickers thought. He spat in the direction of the sounds.

  Holgar Nilson swore in Norwegian. He had been doing a last-minute check of his ammunition as they all stood on the sun-struck platform of the intrusion vehicle. As rudimentary as their camp had been, it had taken four hours of solid work to strike it and restack the gear and specimens on the steel. “We can’t go yet,” Nilson said. “I can’t find one of my cartridge cases—we can’t leave it out there.”

  Vickers had already unlocked the vehicle’s control panel. Now he took his hand from the big knife switch, but his voice was sour as he said, “Look, Holgar, have you forgotten to count the one up the spout?”

  “No, no, it’s not that,” the big man insisted. “Of course, I don’t have a shell in the chamber for returning to Tel Aviv.” Nilson held a twenty-round ammunition box in his left hand. Twelve spaces were filled with empty brass; four still held live rounds, their cases bright where they showed above the Styrofoam liner. Only three of the remaining four spaces could be accounted for by the rounds in the Mauser’s magazine. “Leaving the brass here—what will it do to the future?”

  “Oh, for Chrissake,” Vickers said. “Look, we’re leaving the lead of every shot we’ve fired here, aren’t we? And this isn’t the first team that’s been sent back, either.”

  Linda Weil stood beside the wire mesh cage. The hominid hunched within, scratching at the dusty floor, did not look up. She had not eaten anything since her capture, despite offers of locust pods and what must have been to her an incredible quantity of antelope haunch. The paleontologist looked up from her specimen and said, “Yes, and after all, we’ve been evacuating wastes, breathing, sweating ourselves. I think it’s wise at this point to clean up as much as we can, but I don’t think we need be concerned over details.”

  “When I want your opinion, slut, I’ll ask for it!” Nilson shouted.

  Earlier that morning the younger guide had ignored Weil’s occasional, always conciliatory, comments. Now his face was red and the tendons stood out in his neck. The woman’s face distorted as if she had been struck.

  “Damn it all anyway,” said Vickers. “We’re about five minutes away from never having to see each other again if we don’t want to. Let’s drop it, shall we?”

  The other guide took a deep breath and nodded.

  Vickers reached for the control switch again. Actually, he wouldn’t have minded going on further intrusions with Nilson if the big man could get over his fear of possible future consequences. Nilson was hard-working, a crack shot . . . and besides, he had already saved Vickers’ life once.

  “Oh, hell,” Vickers said. He dropped his hand from the switch. “We forgot to pick up those goddamn rock samples in the confusion. Hell. I’ll get them.”

  Nilson held out a hand to stop the senior guide. “No, let me,” he said. Giving Vickers a sardonic smile, he inserted another fat cartridge into the chamber of his rifle. He had to hold down the top round in the magazine so that the bolt would not pick it up and try to ram it into the already-loaded chamber. “After all,” he continued as the action snicked closed, “it was I who forgot them. And besides, I don’t care to stay with the—remaining personnel.”

  “Do you think I care?” Linda Weil shrieked. The blond man ignored her, his boots clanking down the two steps to the gritty soil. Far to the west a storm was flashing over a rocky table, but here around the intrusion vehicle not a breath stirred. The grass was scarred by signs of human use: the blackened fire pit and the circle cleared around it; the trampled mud, now cracking, beneath the shower frame; the notches in the ground left by the sled’s sharp runners. A hundred yards away was the outcrop shattered by Nilson’s dynamite a moment before his shot saved Vickers’ life. Like the other damage they had done to the land, this too was transitory. It only speeded up the process that frost and rain would have accomplished anyway over the next five million years.

  Nothing in the landscape moved except Holgar Nilson, striding purposefully toward the broken rock.

  “Something isn’t right,” Vickers muttered. His eyes narrowed but they saw nothing to justify what he felt. Reflexively, he charged his Garand. The bolt rang like an alarm as it stripped a round into the chamber.

  “What’s the matter?” Linda Weil demanded.

  “Stay here,” Vickers said. “Holgar!”

  The Norwegian turned and waved. He had almost reached the outcrop. He continued walking.

  Vickers swung over the stairs, his left hand locking to the rail while his right controlled the weapon. “Holgar!” he shouted again. “Stop! There’s something—”

  When the younger guide paused a second time, the hominids sprang from ambush.

  Vickers set his feet and dropped the fore-end of the Garand into his waiting left palm. Nilson’s eyes widened, but the leveled rifle was a warning more certain than a shout. He was already swinging the Mauser to his shoulder as he spun to face his attackers. The six male hominids were strung in a line abreast, ready to cut him off whichever way he dodged. Their hands held stones. In t
he center of the rushing line, the blond-flashed leader was only twenty feet from Holgar.

  The big Norwegian dropped his rifle and turned. “Don’t shoot them!” he screamed to Vickers. “You’ll wipe—”

  Nilson crumpled, limp all over. The hominid standing over him raised his stone for another blow, white fur and white quartz and bright blood spattering both. Vickers fired three times, so swiftly that the last shot was still echoing before the brass of the first had spun into the bronze-red grass. He aimed for their heads because there was no time for anything but certainty and nothing but a head shot is instantly certain. Fresh brains are not gray but pinkish-white, and the air was pink as the three nearest hominids collapsed over the body of Holgar Nilson.

  The survivors were dashing away with the gracefulness of deer, their torsos hunched slightly forward. Vickers pounded like a fencepost running. He carried the Garand across his chest with its safety still off. After a long moment watching, Linda Weil picked up the medical kit and clambered down the steps to follow the men.

  At the tangle of bodies, Vickers slung aside one hominid still arching reflexively in death. Beneath him the leader was as rigid as the block of quartz still locked in his right hand. Neither the entrance nor the exit wound of the bullet had damaged the white fur. Vickers rolled that carcass away as well.

  Holgar Nilson was still breathing.

  The crown and brim of Nilson’s hat had been cut by the force of the blow, and the back of the Norwegian’s head was a sticky mass of blood and short blond hair. But the skull beneath seemed whole when Vickers probed it, and the injured man’s breathing was strong if irregular.

  “Why did you kill them if you cared so much?” Linda Weil demanded as she knelt panting in the bloody grass. “He told you not to shoot, didn’t he? He didn’t want it.”

  The guide shifted to give Weil more room. He did not speak as she soaked a compress from her canteen and held it to the gash. His index finger crooked up to put his rifle on safe, but his eyes had resumed their search of nearby cover.

  The dark-haired woman stripped a length of tape from the dispenser and laid it across both scalp and compress. “Do you want to know why?” she said. “You killed them because you hoped he was right. You hoped that you wouldn’t be a failure when we got back to the future because there wouldn’t be a human future any more. With all your talk, you still tried to wipe man off the planet when you got an excuse.” Her fingers expertly crossed the initial length of tape with two more.

  “Take his feet,” Vickers said. “The quicker we get him Topside, the quicker he gets to a hospital.”

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t want to be touched anymore,” said the paleontologist as she stood. “Not by a slut like me.” She closed the medical kit. “Besides,” she added, professionally rotating the head of the hominid leader to look at it, “I have my own duties. I’m going to carry this one back.”

  Vickers looked at the woman without anger, without apparent emotion of any sort. Holgar Nilson outweighed him by fifty pounds, but when Vickers straightened with his partner locked in a packstrap carry, the motion was smooth and perfectly controlled. The stocky man reached down with his free hand and gripped the sling of Nilson’s Mauser. He began walking the hundred yards back to the intrusion vehicle. His steps were short but regular, and his eyes kept searching the bush for danger.

  There was no couch but the steel floor of the intrusion vehicle on which Nilson had slept the past two nights. Vickers laid his partner down as gently as he could, using a sleeping bag as a pillow beneath the side-turned head. Only then did the guide let himself relax, dragging great shuddering gasps of air into his lungs. His Garand leaned against him, held by the upper-sling swivel. He wondered whether his arms were strong enough even to level the weapon if danger should threaten.

  Linda Weil had given up her attempt to carry the dead specimen. She was now dragging it by the arms, her back to the intrusion vehicle. Vickers started to go back to help her, then he looked down at Nilson. He eased back on his heels.

  The hominid had begun sobbing.

  Enough of the fatigue poisons had cleared from Vickers’ muscles that he was willing to move again. He knelt beside the specimen. Her long, furry hands covered her eyes and muzzle. A tear dripped through the interstices between her fingers and splashed on the floor. Vickers’ eyes followed the drop to the starburst it made in the dust. He was still heavy with fatigue. The tear had fallen beside one of the patterns the hominid had scratched in the dust with her fingertip. The guide stared dully at the marks. The abstract design suddenly shifted into a pair of stick figures. Once his mind had assimilated the pattern as a mother and child, Vickers could not believe that he had not seen it before.

  “Jesus,” the guide prayed.

  Long fingers could reach the latch of the cage through the mesh, so Nilson had wired it shut in lieu of a padlock. Vickers leaned his rifle against a stack of labeled cartons and began to untwist the wire with both hands.

  “Vickers!” cried the paleontologist. “What are you doing?”

  The latch clicked open. Vickers dropped the door of the cage.

  “Omigod!” the paleontologist shrieked, letting her burden fall so that she could run the last twenty yards to the vehicle.

  The hominid looked from the opening to Vickers through the mesh. Her eyes were brown and shining with more than tears. She leaped instead of crawling through the opening and hit the platform running. She broke stride when she straightened—the cage had been only a meter high—but her leap from the intrusion vehicle landed her ten feet out in the grass. Linda Weil made a despairing clutch at the little creature, but the hominid was yards away before the paleontologist’s arms closed. The adolescent ran in the direction the adults had taken after the ambush, and she ran with the same loping grace.

  Linda Weil stumbled forward until she caught herself on the edge of the intrusion vehicle. The sounds she was making were not words, nor were they obviously human. Vickers stepped down and touched her shoulder. “You’ve still got your specimens,” he said quietly. “I’ll help you load them.”

  The woman raised her head, dripping tears and mucus and despair. “You did that because you hate me, didn’t you?” she asked in a choking voice.

  Vickers’ face was very still. “No,” he said. “I did it because I don’t hate anybody. Anybody human.”

  From the bush came the sound of joyful voices. The words themselves were not intelligible to humans born five million years in the future.

  TIME SAFARI

  The tyrannosaur’s bellow made everyone jump except Vickers, the guide. The beast’s nostrils flared, sucking in the odor of the light helicopter and the humans aboard it. It stalked forward.

  “The largest land predator that ever lived,” whispered one of the clients.

  “A lot of people think that,” said Vickers in what most of the rest thought was agreement.

  There was nothing in the graceful advance of the tyrannosaur to suggest its ten-ton mass, until its tail side-swiped a flower-trunked cycad. The tree was six inches thick at the point of impact, and it sheared at that point without time to bend.

  “Oh dear,” the female photographer said. Her brother’s grip on the chair arms was giving him leverage to push its cushion against the steel backplate.

  The tyrannosaur’s strides shifted the weight of its deep torso, counterbalanced by the swinging of its neck and tail. At each end of the head’s arcs, the beast’s eyes glared alternately at its prey. Except for the size, the watchers could have been observing a grackle on the lawn, but it was a grackle seen from a june bug’s perspective.

  “Goddamn, he won’t hold still!” snarled Salmes, the old-money client, the know-it-all. Vickers smiled. The tyrannosaur chose that moment to pause and bellow again. It was now a dozen feet from the helicopter, a single claw-tipped stride. If the blasting sound left one able, it was an ideal time to admire the beauty of the beast’s four-foot head. Its teeth were irregular in length and placement,
providing in sum a pair of yellowish, four-inch-deep saws. They fit together too loosely to shear; but with the power of the tyrannosaur’s jaw muscles driving them, they could tear the flesh from any creature on Earth—in any age.

  The beast’s tongue was like a crocodile’s, attached for its full length to the floor of its mouth. Deep blue with purple veins, it had a floral appearance. The tongue was without sensory purpose and existed only to help by rhythmic flexions to ram chunks of meat down the predator’s throat. The beast’s head scales were the size of little fingernails, somewhat finer than those of the torso. Their coloration was consistent—a base of green nearing black, blurred by rosettes of a much lighter, yellowish hue. Against that background, the tyrannosaur’s eyes stood out like needlepoints dripping blood.

  “They don’t always give you that pause,” Vickers said aloud. “Sometimes they come—”

  The tyrannosaur lunged forward. Its lower jaw, half-opened during its bugling challenge, dropped to full gape. Someone shouted. The action blurred as the hologram dissolved a foot or two from the arc of clients.

  Vickers thumbed up the molding lights. He walked to the front of the conference room, holding the remote control with which the hotel had provided him. The six clients viewed him with varied expressions. The brother and sister photographers, dentists named McPherson, whispered in obvious delight. They were best able to appreciate the quality of the hologram and to judge their own ability to duplicate it. Any fear they had felt during the presentation was buried in their technical enthusiasm afterward.

  The two individual gunners were a general contractor named Mears and Brewer, a meat-packing magnate. Brewer was a short man whose full moustache and balding head made him a caricature of a Victorian industrialist. He loosened his collar and massaged his flushed throat with his thumb and index finger. Mears, built like an All-Pro linebacker after twenty years of retirement, was frowning. He still gripped the chair arms in a way that threatened the plastic. Those were normal reactions to one of Vickers’ pre-hunt presentations. It meant the clients had learned the necessity of care in a way no words or still photos could have taught them. Conversely, that familiarity made them less likely to freeze when they faced the real thing.