Read Dinosaurs & A Dirigible Online
Authors: David Drake
Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (16 page)
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 the 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.
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 as 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.”