Dinosaurs & A Dirigible

by David Drake

  The presentations unfortunately did not have any useful effect on people like the Salmes. Or at least on Jonathan Salmes, blond and big but with the look of a movie star, not a football player. Money and leisure could not make Salmes younger, but they made him look considerably less than his real age of forty years. His face was now set in its habitual pattern of affected boredom. As not infrequently happens, the affectation created its own reality and robbed Salmes of whatever pleasure three generations of oil money might otherwise have brought him.

  Adrienne Salmes was as blond and as perfectly preserved as her husband, but she had absorbed the presentation with obvious interest. Time safaris were the property of wealth alone, and she had all the trapping of that wealth. Re-emitted light made her dress—and its wearer—the magnet of all eyes in a dim room, and her silver lamé wristlet responded to voice commands with a digital display. That sort of money could buy beauty like Adrienne Salmes’; but it could not buy the inbred assurance with which she wore that beauty. She forestalled any tendency the guide might have had to think that her personality stopped with the skin by asking, “Mr. Vickers, would you have waited to see if the tyrannosaurus would stop, or would you have shot while it was still at some distance from the helicopter?”

  “Umm?” said Vickers in surprise. “Oh, wait, I suppose. If he doesn’t stop, there’s still time for a shot; and your guide, whether that’s me or Dieter, will be backing you. That’s a good question.” He cleared his throat. “And that brings up an important point,” he went on. “We don’t shoot large carnivores on foot. Mostly, the shooting platform—the helicopter—won’t be dropping as low as it was for the pictures, either. For these holos I was sitting beside the photographer, sweating blood the whole time that nothing would go wrong. If the bird had stuttered or the pilot hadn’t timed it just right, I’d have had just about enough time to try for a brain shot. Anywhere else and we’d have been in that fellow’s gut faster’n you could swallow a sardine.” He smiled. It made him look less like a bank clerk, more like a bank robber. “Three sardines,” he corrected himself.

  “If you used a man-sized rifle, you’d have been a damned sight better off,” offered Jonathan Salmes. He had one ankle crossed on the other knee, and his chair reclined at a 45-degree angle.

  Vickers looked at the client. They were about of an age, though the guide was several inches shorter and not as heavily built. “Yes, well,” he said. “That’s a thing I need to talk about. Rifles.” He ran a hand through his light brown hair.

  “Yeah, I couldn’t figure that either,” said Mears. “I mean, I read the stuff you sent, about big bores not being important.” The contractor frowned. “I don’t figure that. I mean, God almighty, as big as one of those mothers is, I wouldn’t feel overgunned with a one-oh-five howitzer . . . and I sure don’t think my .458 Magnum’s any too big.”

  “Right, right,” Vickers said, nodding his head. His discomfort at facing a group of humans was obvious. “A .458’s fine if you can handle it—and I’m sure you can. I’m sure any of you can,” he added, raising his eyes and sweeping the group again. “What I said, what I meant, was that size isn’t important; penetration and bullet placement are what’s important. The .458 penetrates fine—with solids—I hope to God all of you know to bring solids, not soft-nosed bullets. If you’re not comfortable with that much recoil, though, you’re liable to flinch. And that means you’ll miss, even at the ranges we shoot dinos at. A wounded dino running around, anywhere up to a hundred tons of him, and that’s when things get messy. You and everybody around are better off with you holding a gun that doesn’t make you flinch.”

  “That’s all balls, you know,” Salmes remarked conversationally. He glanced around at the other clients. “If you’re man enough, I’ll tell you what to carry.” He looked at Vickers, apparently expecting an attempt to silence him. The guide eyed him with a somewhat bemused expression. “A .500 Salmes, that’s what,” the big client asserted loudly. “It was designed for me specially by Marquart and Wells, gun and bullets both. It uses shortened fifty-caliber machine gun cases, loaded to give twelve-thousand-foot-pounds of energy. That’s enough to knock a tyrannosaurus right flat on his ass. It’s the only gun that you’ll be safe with on a hunt like this.” He nodded toward Vickers to put a period to his statement.

  “Yes, well,” Vickers repeated. His expression shifted, hardening. He suddenly wore the visage that an animal might have glimpsed over the sights of his rifle. “Does anybody else feel that they need a—a gun like that to bring down anything they’ll see on this safari?”

  No one nodded to the question when it was put that way. Adrienne Salmes smiled. She was a tall woman, as tall as Vickers himself was.

  “Okay, then,” the guide said. “I guess I can skip the lesson to basic physics. Mr. Salmes, if you can handle your rifle, that’s all that matters to me. If you can’t handle it, you’ve still got time to get something useful instead. Now—”

  “Now wait a goddamned minute!” Salmes said, his foot thumping to the floor. His face had flushed under its even tan. “Just what do you mean by that crack? You’re going to teach me physics?”

  “I don’t think Mr. Vickers—” began Miss McPherson.

  “I want an explanation!” Salmes demanded.

  “All right, no problem,” said Vickers. He rubbed his forehead and winced in concentration. “What you’re talking about,” he said to the floor, “is kinetic energy. That’s a function of the square of the velocity. Well and good, but it won’t knock anything down. What knocks things down is momentum, that’s weight times velocity, not velocity squared. Anything that the bullet knocks down, the butt of the rifle would knock down by recoiling—which is why I encourage clients to carry something they can handle.” He raised his eyes and pinned Salmes with them. “I’ve never yet had a client who weighed twelve thousand pounds, Mr. Salmes. And so I’m always tempted to tell people who talk about ‘knock-down power’ that they’re full to the eyes.”

  Mrs. Salmes giggled. The other clients did not, but all the faces save Salmes’ own bore more-than-hinted smiles. Vickers suspected that the handsome blond man had gotten on everyone else’s nerves in the bar before the guide had opened the conference suite.

  Salmes purpled to the point of an explosion. The guide glanced down again and raised his hand before saying, “Look, all other things being equal, I’d sooner hit a dino—or a man—with a big bullet than a little one. But if you put the bullet in the brain or the heart, it really doesn’t matter much how big it is. And especially with a dino, if you put the bullet anywhere else, it’s not going to do much good at all.”

  “Look,” said Brewer, hunching forward and spreading his hands palms down, “I don’t flinch, and I got a .378 Weatherby that’s got penetration up the ass. But—” he turned his hands over and over again as he looked at them—“I’m not Annie Oakley, you know. If I have to hit a brain the size of a walnut with a four-foot skull around it—well, I may as well take a camera myself instead of the gun. I’ll have something to show people that way.”

  Salmes snorted—which could have gotten him one of Brewer’s big, capable fists in the face, Vickers thought. “That’s another good question,” the guide said. “Very good. Well. Brain shots are great if you know where to put them. I attached charts of a lot of the common dinos with the material I sent out, look them over and decide if you want to try.

  “Thing is,” he continued, “taking the top off a dino’s heart’ll drop it in a couple hundred yards. They don’t charge when they’re heart-shot, they just run till they fall. And we shoot from up close, as close as ten yards. They don’t take any notice of you, the big ones, you could touch them if you wanted. You just need enough distance to be able to pick your shot. You see”—he gestured toward Brewer with both index fingers—“you won’t have any problem hitting a heart the size of a bushel basket from thirty feet away. Brains—well, skin hunters have been killing crocs with brain shots for a century. Crocodile brains are just a
s small as a tyrannosaur’s, and the skulls are just as big. Back where we’re going, there were some that were a damn sight bigger than tyrannosaurs. But don’t feel you have to. And anyway, it’d spoil your trophy if you brain-shot some of the small-headed kind.”

  Brewer cleared his throat. “Hey,” he said, “I’d like to go back to something you said before. About using the helicopter.”

  “Right, the shooting platform,” Vickers agreed.

  “Look,” said the meat packer, “I mean . . . well, that’s sort of like shooting wolves from a plane, isn’t it? I mean, not, well, Christ . . . not sporting, is it?”

  Vickers shrugged. “I won’t argue with you,” he said, “and you don’t have to use the platform if you don’t want to. But it’s the only way you can be allowed to shoot the big carnosaurs. I’m sorry, that’s just how it is.” He leaned forward and spoke more intensely, popping the fingers of his left hand against his right palm. “It’s as sporting as shooting tigers from elephant back, I guess, or shooting lions over a butchered cow. The head looks just as big over your mantle. And there’s no sport at all for me to tell my bosses how one of my clients was eaten. They aren’t bad, the big dinos, people aren’t in their scale so they’ll pretty much ignore you. Wound one and it’s kitty bar the door. These aren’t plant eaters, primed to run if there’s trouble. These are carnivores we’re talking about, animals that spend most of their waking lives killing or looking for something to kill. They will connect the noise of a shot with the pain, and they will go after whoever made the noise.”

  The guide paused and drew back. More calmly he concluded, “So carnosaurs you’ll hunt from the platform. Or not at all.”

  “Well, what happens if they come to us?” Salmes demanded with recovered belligerence. “Right up to the camp, say? You can’t keep us from shooting then.”

  “I guess this is a good time to discuss arrangements for the camp,” Vickers said, approaching the question indirectly. “There’s four of us staff with the safari, two guides—that’s me and Dieter Jost—and two pilots. One pilot, one guide, and one client—one of you—go up in the platform every day. You’ll each have two chances to bag a big carnosaur. They’re territorial and not too thick on the ground, but there’s almost certain to be at least one tyrannosaur and a pack of gorgosaurs in practical range. The other guide takes out the rest of the clients on foot, well, on motorized wagons you could say, ponies we call them. And the pilot who isn’t flying the platform doubles as camp guard. He’s got a heavy machine gun”—the guide smiled—“a Russian .51 cal. Courtesy of your hosts for the tour, the Israeli government. It’ll stop dinos and light tanks without a bit of bother.”

  Vickers’ face lost its crinkling of humor. “If there’s any shooting to be done from the camp,” he continued, “that’s what does it. Unless Dieter or me specifically tells you otherwise. We’re not going to have the intrusion vehicle trampled by a herd of dinos that somebody spooked right into it. If something happens to the intrusion vehicle, we don’t go home.” Vickers smiled again. “That might be okay with me, but I don’t think any of the rest of you want to have to explain to the others how you stuck them in the Cretaceous.”

  “That would be a paradox, wouldn’t it, Mr. Vickers?” Miss McPherson said. “That is, uh, human beings living in the Cretaceous? So it couldn’t happen. Not that I’d want any chances taken with the vehicle, of course.”

  Vickers shrugged with genuine disinterest. “Ma’am, if you want to talk about paradox, you need Dr. Galil and his team. So far as I understand it, though, if there’s not a change in the future, then there’s no paradox; and if there is a change, then there’s no paradox either because the change—well, the change is reality then.”

  Mr. McPherson leaned forward with a frown. “Well, surely two bodies—the same body—can’t exist simultaneously,” he insisted. If he and his sister had been bored with the discussion of firearms, then they had recovered their interest with mention of the mechanics of time transport.

  “Sure they can,” the guide said with the asperity of someone who had been asked the same question too often. He waved his hand back and forth as if erasing the thought from a chalkboard. “They do. Every person, every gun or can of food, contains at least some atoms that were around in the Cretaceous—or the Pre-Cambrian, for that matter. It doesn’t matter to the atoms whether they call themselves Henry Vickers or the third redwood from the big rock . . .” He paused. “There’s just one rule that I’ve heard for true from people who know,” he continued at last. “If you travel into the future, you travel as energy. And you don’t come back at all.”

  Mears paled and looked at the ceiling. People got squeamish about the damnedest things, thought Vickers. Being converted into energy . . . or being eaten . . . or being drowned in dark water lighted only by the dying radiance of your mind—but he broke away from that thought, a little sweat on his forehead with the strain of it. He continued aloud, “There’s no danger for us, heading back into the far past. But the intrusion vehicle can’t be calibrated closer than 5,000 years plus or minus so far. The research side”—he had almost said ‘the military side,’ knowing the two were synonymous; knowing also that the Israeli government disapproved intensely of statements to that effect—“was trying for the recent past”—1948, but that was another thing you didn’t admit you knew—“and they put a man into the future instead. After Dr. Galil had worked out the math, they moved the lab and cleared a quarter-mile section of Tel Aviv around the old site. They figure the poor bastard will show up sometime in the next few thousand years . . . and nobody better be sharing the area when he does.”

  Vickers frowned at himself. “Well, that’s probably more than the government wants me to say about the technical side,” he said. “And anyway, I’m not the one to ask. Let’s get back to the business itself—which I do know something about.”

  “You’ve said that this presentation and the written material are all yours,” Adrienne Salmes said with a wave of her hand. “I’d like to know why.”

  Vickers blinked at the unexpected question. He looked from Mrs. Salmes to the other clients, all of them but her husband staring back at him with interest. The guide laughed. “I like my job,” he said. “A century ago, I’d have been hiking through Africa with a Mauser, selling ivory every year or so when I came in from the bush.” He rubbed his left cheekbone where a disk of shiny skin remained from a boil of twenty years before. “That sort of life was gone before I was born,” he went on. “What I have is the closest thing there is to it now.”

  Adrienne Salmes was nodding. Mr. McPherson put his own puzzled frown into words and said, “I don’t see what that has to do with, well, you holding these sessions, though.”

  “It’s like this,” Vickers said, watching his fingers tent and flatten against each other. “They pay me, the government does, a very good salary that I personally don’t have much use for.” Jonathan Salmes snorted, but the guide ignored him. “I use it to make my job easier,” he went on, “by sending the clients all the data I’ve found useful in the five years I’ve been traveling back to the Cretaceous . . . and elsewhere, but mostly the Cretaceous. Because if people go back with only what they hear in the advertising or from folks who need to make a buck or a name with their stories, they’ll have problems when they see the real thing. Which means problems for me. So a month before each safari, I rent a suite in New York or Frankfurt or wherever the hell seems reasonable, and I offer to give a presentation to the clients. Nobody has to come, but most people do.” He scanned the group. “All of you did, for instance. It makes life easier for me.”

  He cleared his throat. “Well, in another way, we’re here to make life easier for you,” he went on. “I’ve brought along holos of the standard game animals you’ll be seeing.” He dimmed the lights and stepped toward the back of the room. “First the sauropods, the big long-necks. The most impressive things you’ll see in the Cretaceous, but a disappointing trophy because of the small heads . .
.”

  “All right, ladies and gentlemen.” said Dieter Jost. Vickers always left the junior guide responsible for the social chores when both of them were present. “Please line up here along the wall until Doctor Galil directs us onto the vehicle.”

  The members of Cretaceous Safari 87 backed against the hangar wall, their weapons or cameras in their hands. The guides and the two pilots, Washman and Brady, watched the clients rather than the crew preparing the intrusion vehicle. You could never tell what sort of mistake a tensed-up layman would make with a loaded weapon in his or her hands.

  In case the clients were not laymen at all, there were four guards seated in a balcony-height alcove in the opposite wall. They wore civilian clothes, but the submachine guns they carried were just as military as their ID cards. The Israelis were, of all people, alert to the chance that a commando raid would be aimed at an intrusion vehicle and its technical staff. For that reason, the installation was in an urban setting from which there could be no quick escape; and its corridors and rooms, including the gaping hanger itself, were better guarded than the Defense Ministry had been during the most recent shooting war.

  Dr. Galil and his staff were only occasionally visible to the group on the floor of the hangar. The intrusion vehicle rested on four braced girders twenty feet high. On its underside, a cylindrical probe was repeatedly blurring and reappearing. The technicians received data from the probe on instruments plugged into various sockets on the vehicle. Eighty million years in the past, the cylinder was sampling its surroundings on a score of wavelengths. When necessary, Dr. Galil himself changed control settings. Despite that care, there was no certainty of the surface over which the travelers would appear—or how far or under it they would appear. The long legs gave the intrusion vehicle a margin that might otherwise have been achieved by a longer drop than anything aboard would have survived.