“Oh, great, some droppings!” Peg poked and sniffed through a pile of wet turds squeezed out by the terrified mammal. “A genuine browser; bet he had real grinders.”
She climbed back aboard, patting the shock-rifle. “Stow the nuke. Your stunner would be more helpful.”
Jake slipped out of his shoulder holster, twisted about, and fit the holster over Peg’s bare shoulder. Her skin felt smooth and dry beneath his fingers. “Here, Annie Oakley, blaze away at the rodents, just don’t hit me.”
“Annie Oakley?”
“Friend of Sitting Bull’s. I’ll tell you about her someday—maybe introduce you.” When he was not on the warpath, Sitting Bull had a relaxed and amiable way with women, even Wasichu women, one of the reasons Jake admired the medicine man.
They did not see any more of the tiny horses-to-be. Jake spotted a foot-long tree rat, which Peg thought was a primitive possum. She could not be sure because she was slow with the stunner, not having the bioimplants to control the holster.
The streambed widened into a broad expanse of hardpan, cracked into blocks by the heat, each block as flat and regular as a piece of old paving. Jake smelled the oily reek of a jungle river. He halted, spotting a reptilian tail stretching back from the bank. Black fisher-storks stalked about, stepping over the scaly tail.
“That’s nothing.” Peg dismissed the tail with a shake of her head. “An archosaur, but hardly a dinosaur.”
Boosting up, Jake saw a dozen big crocodiles basking in the afternoon sun; five-meter eating machines—jaws, stomach, and a tail. (If you don’t believe there are crocs in Montana, just ask the River Crow.) These weren’t the gigantic dinosaur-eating crocodiles found in Texas, but all crocs were cunning, dangerous brutes who would outlive the dinosaurs. The nearest one looked maybe three times as long as Jake, and easily ten times as mean.
Peg put down her recorder. “It’s so non-essential, seeing everything but dinosaurs.”
“Relax.” Jake hopped down, keeping an eye on the crocs. He did not expect any to come dashing over the hardpan, but it never paid to turn your back on the reptilian brain. Gripping Peg’s waist, he swung her to the ground, feeling her skin, smelling her fragrance, forgetting all about the crocs amid the burst of flesh. Strange how her sweat didn’t stink. “I’ll show you more dinosaurs than you ever dreamed of.”
She smiled, “Not likely. I’ve dreamed nothing but sauropods since being picked for this.”
Pack saddle and equipment cases followed her onto the hardpan. Then Jake sent the reactor lumbering down to the river for a drink, trailing an anchor line.
The crocs looked up. One took a speculative snap at the big balloon tires. Jake sent it a jarring shock from the reactor’s defense system. After that the crocs ignored the reactor. Too big to swallow and too tough to chew. They let the ungainly newcomer waddle into midstream and toss out a second anchor.
While the reactor drank, Jake laid out sleeping bags and pink champagne, dragging in driftwood for a fire, telling the microstove to whip up dinner.
Peg was fetching in her stunner and shoulder holster, running about recording the sleepy crocs and the flowering trees, radiating megawatts of misplaced energy.
He watched her zoom in on the black fisher-storks that were stalking about the shallows like operatic vampires. The tall birds spread their wings before them, forming black feather capes, shading out surface glare. Ducking their heads inside the dark canopies, they would strike at fish, then step gingerly forward to find a new spot.
It took over two hours for the reactor to extract a half-ton of hydrogen from the river, pumping it into an elastic gas bag—the reactor opened as needed like an origami box. When the expanding envelope was sauropod-sized, fifty meters long and twenty meters tall, Jake told the reactor to reel itself back to the campsite. The newborn blimp drifted over to hang above him, blocking out the setting sun. He sprayed the skin with metallic sealant, covering everything but the line of vents along the top and the transparent windows on the cabin-space.
Dusk brought more brontosaurian insects. Peg retreated to the campsite, where Jake set up a sonic field to keep the bugs at bay. He popped the pink champagne, pouring them both glasses.
Peg sniffed her drink. “I don’t use alcohol at work. There is alcohol in this, isn’t there?”
You betcha. Alcohol was an archaic vice. If Peg was an inexperienced drinker, he hoped the champagne went straight to her inhibitions. “But we have a ship to christen.” Jake nodded toward the new fifty-meter airship floating above them, gleaming red and gold in the sunset.
“Christen?” She was still dubious.
“Sure. In the old days, they launched an airship by having a woman toast the ship with champagne, giving her a name.”
“Didn’t the woman already have a name?”
“Yes, but she gave the ship a name as well—all ships are ‘her’ or ‘she.’ ” Jake assumed Peg had never been aboard an airship. At Home, ships of any sort were a rarity. A person could work, live, play, even travel from Montana to Pluto, without ever entering a vehicle.
“Well, what shall I call it . . . I mean her?”
“I was thinking of Challenger. You know, after Professor Challenger and his Lost World—the great jungle plateau full of dinosaurs.” He could see that she hadn’t read Conan Doyle.
“Is that fiction?”
“Very much, but we are real. So why don’t you name our ship?” Be a sport.
She took a deep sip, and smiled up at the dirigible. “I name you Challenger.”
The little ritual had served its purpose—the bottle was open, Peg had loosened up. He made sure the glass in her hand stayed full. Next stop, the cozy fire.
Jake was not thigh-struck enough to light his romantic campfire right under thousands of cubic meters of explosive hydrogen. The stressed metal skin was supposed to stop sparks, leaks, lightning, and St. Elmo’s Fire—but why chance spoiling the moment by being blown clear out of the Upper Cretaceous. He told the airship to go up a hundred meters. It hung in the last of the sunset, while Jake served up risotto a la milanese, with eggplant vinaigrette, and tofu szechwan in triple pepper sauce—simple safari fare.
As they ate, he heard crocs moving about by the river. Night birds cried. Things went thump and crunch in the brush. The Mesozoic night never seemed to get really quiet—too hot.
Jake cut his microamps, telling Challenger to watch for movement and illuminate the crocs. Then he settled in, shock-rifle on one side of him, Peg on the other.
Peg lay back against the pack saddle, fed and happy. She had put on a Crow gift shirt for dinner, fancier than Jake’s—fringed buckskin, beaded with porcupine quills—but she left off the breechcloth and leather leggings.
Hitting the champagne, she gave his leg a playful whack, trying out some of his English, “The fucking Mesozoic. We’re here! Aren’t you amazed, excited, dumbfounded? Do you even believe it?”
His leg stung from the slap. Champagne was making her frisky. But Jake could take a bit of physical abuse from a woman—administered in the right spirit. “Damn well feels like we’re here.” He slid an arm around her waist.
Seeming not to notice his arm, she stared moodily into the sizzling night. “All except for the dinosaurs.”
Right, no damned dinosaurs. He refilled her glass with his free arm, amused by her inebriated swings of mood.
Challenger beeped him. Crocs were moving down by the water. None were coming his way. He went back to admiring Peg’s thigh and the dark hollow between her legs.
She smiled over her champagne. “I mean, aren’t you disappointed?”
“Not yet.” His hand closed on the hem of her shirt, pulling her closer. Curved flesh felt warm beneath the buckskin. She had a gymnast’s body, taut and muscled.
Peg relaxed into him, saying nothing, wearing a dreamy, expectant look. A really essential look, one Time never touched. Jake had seen that look in the kohl-darkened eyes of one of Cleopatra’s handmaids. He’d seen it shining
across a dung fire in a yurt on the Camelback Steppe, beside the Sleeping Sands north of the Gobi. Jake had seen that exact look in a half-dozen centuries, on three habitable planets. Thank goodness it always meant the same thing. He and Peg were a millimeter away from foreplay.
Challenger beeped him again.
Jake checked the crocs—no change. Turning back, he found Peg’s red-haired head resting on his shoulder, waiting, eyes wide, lips parted. Her freckled face looked near perfect in the firelight. He leaned in to kiss her, sliding his hand under her hip for leverage.
Peg squealed, leaped up, lost balance, and sat back bare-assed on his hand, breathing hard and muttering, “Oh my, oh my . . .”
Staring at them from across the fire was a great, round yellow eye. The eye was set in a huge bony head, silhouetted by the night—half in shadow, half in light. Above the eye stood a horn as long as Jake was tall.
Triceratops. No 3V imaging, no mounted skeleton, no Feelie stimulation did the dinosaur justice. Imagine a four-legged beast, big as a bull elephant, with an armored head, three tremendous horns, and a terrible cutting beak. Picture this behemoth appearing out of blackness, without warning, when you are sitting by a night fire in a strange place, half-foxed on champagne, your hand stuck under someone else’s butt. Jake was paralyzed.
And there were more of them. Immense six-ton bodies appeared on either side of the first, more wicked heads and horns. Hundreds were filling the dark wash, pushing toward the river.
Peg lunged forward to grab a recorder. Her tanned rear eclipsed the triceratops in front of Jake—but all thought of taking advantage of Peg had vanished. He yelled for Challenger to reel herself down the anchor line.
The ship did not come half-fast enough. Clutching his shock-rifle, Jake watched powerful jaws crunch ginkgo and magnolia like broccoli. Were it not for his fire, the fleshy avalanche would have trod Peg and him into the hardpan. It could still happen. The dinosaurs being pushed toward the fire acted dangerously agitated. A sneeze now might start a stampede.
Challenger’s balloon tires touched down atop the anchor grapple. Flames cast dancing shadows on the dirigible’s hull. Jake had forgotten the fire. He pictured half a ton of hydrogen gas exploding like a bomb in the midst of a triceratops herd—with him beneath it. The first Mesozoic expedition would be finished well ahead of schedule.
In a fever to get aloft, he heaved equipment into the cabin atop the reactor. Then he turned to Peg. She was sitting on her haunches, easy-as-you-please, panning the recorder, totally absorbed by the milling herd. He grabbed hold of the shoulder fringe on her Crow gift shirt, screaming, “Get aboard.”
Peg’s eyes shone clear and excited. “We found them!”
“Right, and this is too dangerous by half.” Unshipping the nylon ladder, he shoved it into her hands.
Reluctantly, she stowed her recorder, climbing the ladder. Armored heads crowded closer. Any moment a horn might puncture the thin plasti-metal gas bag, releasing a torrent of flammable hydrogen. Jake dropped the shock-rifle, planted his hand on Peg’s bottom, and shoved. “Put a wiggle on it!”
As he pushed Peg into the cabin Jake yelled to Challenger, “Up one hundred meters.”
They shot skyward. Jake clung to the last rungs of the twisting ladder, watching the campfire shrink to a spark, surrounded by the shadowy backs and heads of the herd. Fumbling above the sea of spikes, he got a foot on the bottom rung, and swung back and forth, full of fright and exhilaration, ninety-odd meters above the hardpan. Perfectly safe as long as he did not let go.
“Aren’t you coming up?” inquired a sweet intoxicated voice from above.
Without a word, Jake climbed the swaying ladder, tumbling into the lounge—the middle part of the cabin, with large entrance windows at either end—collapsing on the non-slip floor.
Peg hopped over him, full of alcoholic enthusiasm, trying to record from both ends of the lounge at once. Every so often, she ran over and shook him, with a bit of breathless news. “There are hundreds down there!”
A moment later she’d be back. “Make that thousands!”
Giggling hysterically, she tugged at him, “Come on, you have to see it.” She had all the running lights on, illuminating the herd below.
“And juveniles. Fucking juveniles, moving with the herd.” Then she would bound off again to lean out a window, only her legs and bottom in the cabin.
Jake had busted himself to pass the portal, find water, set up camp, get Challenger ready, start a fire, serve dinner, and seduce Peg. The moment he had her tipsy and in his arms, he’d been nearly trampled, dangled from a soaring airship, and come closer than he needed to being blown apart. All on a head full of champagne.
He decided he hadn’t a hope of calming Peg down and sliding her into a double sleeping bag. Finding his bag and kit, he crawled off to the privacy of a barren stateroom, cursing all thousand triceratopses for their pre-coitus interruptis.
###
T. Rex
Dawnlight angled in the stateroom window. Jake lay curled atop his sleeping bag, hammered by a vicious hangover. He’d forgotten how deadly sweet champagne was the next day. Peg padded back and forth in the lounge. Had she slept at all? Probably not. Groping about, he found his medikit, telling it to take away the pain. His head cleared. He felt not just better, but good. Last night’s prize fiasco faded into a few not unfunny episodes; today had to be near perfect—just to balance the statistics. Cheered by that gambler’s fallacy, he went to find Peg.
She was still wearing the fringed Crow shirt—her tired face full of heartless enthusiasm. “Have you seen them yet? They are ten times as thrilling by day!”
Easing back on the angle of attack, Jake gave her a professional greeting, and found the microstove, telling it to conjure up café au lait. He took a steaming cup into the cabin’s glassed-in nose to gauge the day.
The day was magnificent. The fore and aft ends of the cabin area were completely transparent. Light and power poured through windows and floor. Jake sat amid blue limitless sky filled with towering white anvilheads. Green-brown flood plain snaked beneath him, coiling round islands of red earth. Mountains thrust up in the distance. He had his microamps pound out “Dawn Symphony.”
The triceratops herd was truly awesome. Huge tawny bodies took up both sides of the river; moving, drinking, chewing up the greenery. Crocs had shifted to midstream to keep from being trampled.
He told the navcomputer to turn off the running lights, blazing uselessly in the daylight. Peg followed him into the glassed-in nose, constantly recording, shooting through the deck at their feet. “How long before we can get this ship moving?”
“Bored with dinosaurs already?” Jake noted dark circles under her bright eyes.
She waved in the direction the triceratops herd had come from. “It’s essential to test the theory that carnivores will be trailing the herd.”
He turned down “Dawn Symphony.” Unwashed, circles under her eyes, wearing only a badly wrinkled buckskin shirt—Peg was every bit as stunning as he remembered. Of course, she was the only woman on the planet, the only one in all creation, for that matter, which accounted for at least 10 percent of her attraction. “I hate to move ship in this condition.”
“What’s wrong with it?” She glanced at the pristine galley and empty chartroom located behind the forward windows.
“Nothing’s in place. Everything’s piled where I tossed it last night. Lounge looks like a crash site.” Challenger’s cabin was designed to give them breathing room. Lounge, galley, and chartroom formed a common area amidships. Twin staterooms aft were enclosed and independent. Fore and aft galleries gave each person a place to be alone with the vast landscape.
Peg agreed. Before he could finish his coffee, she was clearing up the litter in the lounge and inflating collapsible furniture, hips bending and swaying as she worked. He decided she was not only a nerveless idiot with no sense of self-preservation, but also a shamelessly cheerful worker. Jake had no good reason to grous
e. She finished off with yoga, moving to an inner music that needed no microamps. Her whole body sang. Peg was impossibly supple—chaste and naked at the same time.
Reeling Challenger down to the campsite, Jake hopped out for a final visit. Ashes formed a black scar on the dry wash, surrounded by bits and pieces left behind in the panic. A whole case of dehydrated paté had been mashed into the hardpan. The champagne bottle and glasses were ground to fine dust. Beside them was the gleaming stock of the shock-rifle. The rest of the weapon was gone, carried away between some thoughtless triceratops’ toes.
An absolutely fine thing to forget! He had set the gun down in order to shove Peg up the ladder. Now they had nothing fit to take down a dinosaur. “Shock-rifle—missing,” would raise a red flag in his report. Any weapon lost “out of period” was a headache. Debriefing would want details. He needed a better explanation than being caught in drunken panic with his hand on his partner’s butt. Happily, debriefing was months away. A suitable explanation would turn up. Without a shock-rifle, he could easily be killed—then the problem would have solved itself.
Jake turned to piloting, something he fancied he did well. Compweb and navmatrix made Challenger an add-on to his central nervous system. Machinery leaped to his least command. Vague curiosity produced immediate data on buoyancy and windspeed. He released the anchor grapple, feeling the snap. Challenger rose silently upward. The reactor extended twin propellers. They were airborne.
Turning west, Jake climbed in huge steps toward the highlands, feeling the ship’s balance as though the keel were a giant teeter-totter—anticipating trim changes, bracing for turns—flying a few tons heavy to maintain altitude aerodynamically instead of aerostatically. He relished the sense of control, and welcomed the challenge of translating Peg’s instructions into something Challenger comprehended.
“Over there.”
“Bearing two-nine-zero.”
“A little to the left.”
“Port five degrees.”
Dinosaurs II Page 6
