Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (23 page)

“Ah, Hank . . .” the pilot began. Then he went on, “Oh, hell, just don’t blow your shots. That’s all I ask.” He put the controls over and wicked up.

There was a noticeable lag before the turbine responded to the demand for increased power. The section of root slapped as it vibrated from the stator and shot into the rotors spinning at near-maximum velocity.

“If you’ll stand over here, Mis—Adrienne,” Vickers said, stepping to the back rail of the platform. The client followed with brittle quickness. “When I say shoot,” Vickers continued, “aim at the middle of the chest.”

Washman had put the platform in an arc toward the tyrannosaur. The big carnivore lunged forward with a series of choppy grunts like an automatic cannon. The pilot rotated the platform on its axis, a maneuver he had carried out a thousand times before. This time the vehicle dipped. It was a sickening, falling-elevator feeling to the two gunners and a heart-stopping terror to the man at the controls who realized it was not caused by clumsiness. The platform began to stagger away from the dinosaur, following the planned hyperbola but lower and slower than intended.

“Nail him,” Vickers said calmly, sighting his rifle on the green-mottled sternum for the backup shot.

Partial disintegration of the turbine preceded the shot by so little that the two seemed a single event. Both gunners were thrown back from the rail. Something whizzed through the side of the turbine and left a jagged rent in the housing. Adrienne Salmes’ bullet struck the tyrannosaur in the lower belly.

“Hang on!” Don Washman shouted needlessly. “I’m going to try—”

He pulled the platform into another arc, clawing for altitude. To get back to camp they had to climb over the pine forest that lay between. No one knew better than the pilot how hopeless that chance was. Several of the turbine blades had separated from the hub. Most of the rest were brushes of boron fiber now, their casing matrices destroyed by the peg or harmonics induced by the imbalance. But Washman had to try, and in any case they were curving around the wounded tyrannosaur while it was still—

The whole drive unit tore itself free of the rest of the shooting platform. Part of it spun for a moment with the rotor shafts before sailing off in a direction of its own. Had it not been for the oak tree in their path, the vehicle might have smashed into the ground from fifty feet and killed everyone aboard. On the other hand, Don Washman just might have been able to get enough lift from the auto-rotating blades to set them down on an even keel. Branches snagged the mesh floor of the platform and the vehicle nosed over into the treetop.

They were all shouting, but the din of bursting metal and branches overwhelmed mere human noise. Vickers held the railing with one hand and the collar of his client’s garment with the other. Both of the rifles were gone. The platform continued to tilt until the floor would have been vertical had it not been so crumpled. Adrienne Salmes was supported entirely by the guide. “For God’s sake!” she screamed. “Let go or we’ll go over
with
it!”

Vickers’ face was red with the impossible strain. He forced his eyes down, feeling as if even that minuscule added effort would cause his body to tear. Adrienne was right. They were better off dropping onto a lower branch—or even to the ground forty feet below—than they would be somersaulting down in the midst of jagged metal. The platform was continuing to settle as branches popped. Vickers let go of the blonde woman.

Screaming at the sudden release of half the load, he loosed his other hand from the rail.

The guide’s eyes were shut in a pain reflex. His chest hit a branch at an angle that saved his ribs but took off a plate-sized swatch of skin without harming his tunic’s tough fabric. He snatched convulsively at the limb. Adrienne, further out on the same branch, seized him by the collar and armpit. Both her feet were locked around the branch. She took the strain until the guide’s overstressed muscles allowed him to get a leg up. The branch swayed, but the tough oak held.

Don Washman was strapped into his seat. Now he was staring straight down and struggling with the jammed release catch. Vickers reached for the folding knife he carried in a belt pouch. He could not reach the pilot, though. “Don, cut the strap!” he shouted.

A large branch split. The platform tumbled outward and down, striking on the top of the rotor shafts. The impact smashed the lightly built aircraft into a tangle reeking of kerosene. Don Washman was still caught in the middle of it.

The limb on which Vickers and Adrienne Salmes balanced was swaying in harmony with the whole tree. When the thrashing stopped, the guide sat up and eyed the trunk. He held his arms crossed tightly over his chest, each hand squeezing the opposite shoulder as if to reknit muscles which felt as if they had been pulled apart. Nothing was moving in the wreckage below. Vickers crawled to the crotch. He held on firmly while he stepped to a branch three feet lower down.

“Henry,” Adrienne Salmes said.

“Just wait, I’ve got to get him out,” Vickers said. He swung down to a limb directly beneath him, trying not to wince when his shoulders fell below the level of his supporting hands.

“Henry!” the blonde woman repeated more urgently. “The tyrannosaur!”

Vickers jerked his head around. He could see nothing but patterns of light and the leaves that surrounded him. He realized that the woman had been speaking from fear, not because she actually saw anything. There was no likelihood that the carnosaur would wander away from its kill, even to pursue a rival. Adrienne, who did not understand the beast’s instincts, in her fear imagined it charging toward them. The guide let himself down from the branch on which he sat, falling the last five feet to the ground.

Adrienne thought Vickers must have struck his head during the crash. From her vantage point, thirty feet in the air and well outboard on the limb that supported her, she had an excellent view of the tyrannosaur. Only low brush separated it from the tree in which they had crashed. The beast had stood for a moment at the point Washman lifted the platform in his effort to escape. Now it was ramping like a creature from heraldry, balanced on one leg with its torso high and the other hind leg kicking out at nothing. At first she did not understand; then she saw that each time the foot drew back, it caressed the wounded belly.

Suddenly the big carnivore stopped rubbing itself. It had been facing away from the tree at a 30-degree angle. Now it turned toward the woman, awesome even at three hundred yards. It began to stalk forward. Its head swung low as usual, but after each few strides the beast paused. The back raised, the neck stretched upward, and now Adrienne could see that the nostrils were spreading. A leaf, dislodged when Vickers scrambled to the ground, was drifting down. The light breeze angled it toward the oncoming dinosaur.

Vickers cut through one of the lower cross-straps holding Washman five feet in the air with his seat above him. The pilot was alive but unconscious. The guide reached up for the remaining strap, his free hand and forearm braced against the pilot’s chest to keep him from dropping on his face.

“Henry, for God’s sake!” the woman above him shouted. “It’s only a hundred yards away!”

Vickers stared at the wall of brush, his lips drawn back in a snarl. “Where are the guns? Can you see the guns?”

“I can’t see them! Get back, for God’s sake!”

The guide cursed and slashed through the strap. To take Washman’s weight, he dropped his knife and bent. Grunting, Vickers manhandled the pilot into position for a fireman’s carry.

The tyrannosaur had lowered its head again. Adrienne Salmes stared at the predator, then down at Vickers staggering under the pilot’s weight. She fumbled out one of her small cigars, lit it, and dropped the gold-chased lighter back into her pocket. Then she scrambled to the bole and began to descend. The bark tore the skin beneath her coveralls and from the palms of both hands.

From the lowest branch, head-height for the stooping Vickers, Adrienne cried, “Here!” and tried to snatch Washman from the guide’s back. The pilot was too heavy. Vickers thrust his shoulders upward. Between them, they slung Washman onto the branch. His arms and legs hung down to either side and his face was pressed cruelly into the bark.

The tyrannosaur crashed through the woody undergrowth twenty feet away. It stank of death, even against the mild breeze. The dead sauropod, of course, rotting between the four-inch teeth and smeared greasily over the killer’s head and breast . . . but beyond the carrion odor was a tangible sharpness filling the mouths of guide and client as the brush parted.

Vickers had no chance of getting higher into the oak than the jaws could pick him off. Instead he turned, wishing that he had been able to keep at least his knife for this moment. Adrienne Salmes dragged on her cigar, stood, and flung the glowing cylinder into the wreckage of the platform: “Henry!” she cried, and she bent back down with her hand out to Vickers.

One stride put the tyrannosaur into the midst of the upended platform. As flimsy as the metal was, its edges were sharp and they clung instead of springing back the way splintered branches would. The beast’s powerful legs had pistoned it through dense brush without slowing. It could still have dragged the wreckage forward through the one remaining step that would have ended the three humans. Instead, it drew back with a startled snort and tried to nuzzle its feet clear.

The kerosene bloomed into a sluggish red blaze. The tyrannosaur’s distended nostrils
whuffed
in a double lungful of the soot-laden smoke that rolled from the peaks of the flames. The beast squealed and kicked in berserk fury, scattering fire-wrapped metal. Its rigid tail slashed the brush, fanning the flames toward the oak. Deeply indented leaves shriveled like hands closing. Vickers forgot about trying to climb. He rolled Don Washman off the branch again, holding him by the armpits. The pilot’s feet fell as they would. “While we’ve got a chance!” the guide cried, knowing that the brush fire would suffocate them in the treetop even if the flames themselves did not climb so high.

Adrienne Salmes jumped down. Each of them wrapped one of the pilot’s arms around their shoulders. They began to stumble through the brush, the backs of their necks prickling with the heat of the fire.

The tyrannosaur was snarling in unexampled rage. Fire was familiar to a creature which had lived a century among forests and lightning. Being caught in the midst of a blaze was something else again. The beast would not run while the platform still tangled its feet, and the powerful kicks that shredded the binding metal also scattered the flames. When at last the great killer broke free, it did so from the heart of an amoeba a hundred yards in diameter crackling in the brush. Adrienne and the guide were struggling into the forest when they heard the tyrannosaur give its challenge again. It sounded far away.

“I don’t suppose there’s any way we could retrieve the rifles,” Adrienne said as Vickers put another stick on their fire. It was a human touch in the Cretaceous night. Besides, the guide was chilly. They had used his coveralls to improvise a stretcher for Washman, thrusting a pruned sapling up each leg and out the corresponding sleeve. They had not used the pilot’s own garment for fear that being stripped would accelerate the effects of shock. Washman was breathing stertorously and had not regained consciousness since the crash.

“Well, I couldn’t tell about yours,” Vickers said with a wry smile, “but even with the brush popping I’m pretty sure I heard the magazine of mine go off. I’d feel happier if we had it along, that’s for sure.”

“I’m going to miss that Schultz and Larsen,” the woman said. She took out a cigar, looked at it, and slipped it back into her pocket. “Slickest action they ever put on a rifle. Well, I suppose I can find another when we get back.”

They had found the saplings growing in a sauropod burn. Fortunately, Adrienne had retained her sheath knife, a monster with a saw-backed, eight-inch blade that Vickers had thought a joke—until it became their only tool. The knife and the cigarette lighter, he reminded himself. Resiny wood cracked, pitching sparks beyond the circle they had cleared in the fallen needles. The woman immediately stood and kicked the spreading flames back in toward the center.

“You saved my life,” Vickers said, looking into the fire. “With that cigar. You were thinking a lot better than I was, and that’s the only reason I’m not in a carnosaur’s belly.”

Adrienne sat down beside the guide. After a moment, he met her eyes. She said, “You could have left Don and gotten back safely yourself.”

“I could have been a goddamn politician!” Vickers snapped. “But that wasn’t a way I wanted to live my life.” He relaxed and shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. She laughed and squeezed his bare knee above the abrasion. “Besides,” Vickers went on, “I’m not sure it would have worked. The damned tyrannosaur was obviously tracking us by scent. Most of what we know about the big carnivores started a minute or two before they were killed. They . . . I don’t mean dinos’re smart. But their instincts are a lot more efficient than you’d think if you hadn’t watched them.”

Adrienne Salmes nodded. “A computer isn’t smart either, but that doesn’t keep it from solving problems.”

“Exactly,” Vickers said, “exactly. And if the problem that tyrannosaur was trying to solve was us—well, I’m just as glad the fire wiped out our scent. We’ve got a long hike tomorrow lugging Don.”

“What bothers me,” the blonde woman said carefully, “is the fact it could find us easily enough if it tried. Look, we can’t be very far from the camp, not at the platform’s speed. Why don’t we push on now instead of waiting for daylight?”

Vickers glanced down at the responder on his wrist, tuned to the beacon in the center of the camp. “Five or six miles,” he said. “Not too bad, even with Don. But I think we’re better off here than stumbling into camp in the dark. The smell of the trophies is going to keep packs of the smaller predators around it. They’re active in the dark, and they’ve got damned sharp teeth.”

Adrienne chuckled, startling away some of the red eyes ringing their fire. Vickers had whittled a branch into a whippy cudgel with an eye toward bagging a mammal or two for dinner, but both he and his client were too thirsty to feel much hunger as yet. “Well,” she said, “we have to find something else to do till daybreak, then—and I’m too keyed up to sleep.” She touched Vickers’ thigh again.