Read Dinosaurs & A Dirigible Online
Authors: David Drake
Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (25 page)
“If he doesn’t follow—” Vickers said.
The tyrannosaur stepped forward inexorably. The muddy water slapped as the feet slashed through it. Then the narrow keel of the breastbone cut the water as well. The tyrannosaur’s back sank to a line of knobs on the surface, kinking horizontally as the hind legs thrust the beast toward its prey. The carnosaur moved much more quickly in the water than did the vehicle it pursued. The beast was fifty yards away, now, and there was no way to evade it.
They were far enough out into the stream that Vickers could see the other pony winking on the bank a half-mile distant. Brewer had managed to get them out of the charnel house they had made of the camp, at least. “Give me your knife,” Vickers said. Twenty feet away, the ruby eye of the carnosaur glazed and cleared as its nicitating membrane wiped away the spray.
“Get your own damned knife!” Adrienne said. She half-rose, estimating that if she jumped straight over the stern she would not overset the pony.
Vickers saw the water beneath them darken, blacken. The pony quivered. There was no wake, but the tons of death slanting up from beneath raised a slick on the surface. They were still above the crocodile’s vast haunches when its teeth closed on the tyrannosaur.
The suction of the tyrannosaur going under halted the pony as if it had struck a wall. Then the water rose and slapped them forward. Vickers’ hand kept Adrienne from pitching out an instant after she had lost the need to do so. They drew away from the battle in the silt-golden water, fifty yards, one hundred. Vickers cut off the engine. “The current’ll take us to the others,” he explained. “And without the paddles we won’t attract as much attention.”
Adrienne was trying to resheathe her knife. Finally, she held the leather with one hand and slipped the knife in with her fingers on the blade as if threading a needle. She looked at Vickers. “I didn’t think that would work,” she said. “Or it would work a minute after we were . . . gone.”
The guide managed to laugh. “Might still happen,” he said, nodding at the disturbed water. “Off-hand, though, I’d say the ‘largest land predator of all time’ just met something bigger.” He sobered. “God, I hope we don’t meet its mate. I don’t want to drown. I really don’t.”
Water spewed skyward near the other pony. At first Vickers thought one of the clients had managed to detonate a grenade and blow them all to hell. “My God,” Adrienne whispered, “you said they couldn’t—”
At the distance they were from it, only the gross lines of the intrusion vehicle could be identified. A pair of machine guns had been welded onto the frame, and there appeared to be a considerable party of uniformed men aboard. “I don’t understand it either,” Vickers said, “but I know where to ask.” He reached for the starter.
Adrienne caught his arm. He looked back in surprise. “If it was safer to drift with the current before, it’s still safer,” she said. She pointed at the subsiding froth from which the tyrannosaur had never re-emerged. “We’re halfway already. And besides, it gives us some time—” she put her hand on Vickers’ shoulder—“for what I had in mind last night at the campfire.”
“They’re watching us with binoculars!” the guide sputtered, trying to break away from the kiss.
“They can all sit in a circle and play with themselves,” the blonde woman said. “We’ve earned this.”
Vickers held himself rigid for a moment. Then he reached out and began to spread the pony’s front awning with one hand.
The secretary wore a uniform and a pistol. When he nodded, Vickers opened the door. Stern sat at the metal desk. Dr. Galil was to his right and the only other occupant of the room. Vickers sat gingerly on one of the two empty chairs.
“I’m not going to debrief you,” Stern said. “Others have done that. Rather, I am going to tell you certain things. They are confidential. Utterly confidential. You understand that.”
“Yes,” Vickers said. Stern’s office was not in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism; but then, Vickers had never expected that it would be.
“Dr. Galil,” Stern continued, and the cherubic scientist beamed like a Christmas ornament, “located the insertion party by homing on the alpha waves of one of the members of it. You, to be precise. Frankly, we were all amazed at this breakthrough; it is not a technique we would have tested if there had been any alternative available.”
Vickers licked his lips. “I thought you were going to fire me,” he said flatly.
“Would it bother you if we did?” Stern riposted.
“Yes.” The guide paused. The fear was greater now that he had voiced it. He had slept very little during the week since the curtailed safari had returned. “It—the job . . . suits me. Even dealing with the clients, I can do it. For having the rest.”
Stern nodded. Galil whispered to him, then looked back at Vickers. “We wish to experiment with this effect,” Stern continued aloud. “Future rescues—or resupplies—may depend on it. There are other reasons as well.” He cleared his throat.
“There is the danger that we will not be able to consistently repeat the operation,” Dr. Galil broke in. “That the person will be marooned, you see. For there must, of course, be a brain so that we will have a brainwave to locate. Thus we need a volunteer.”
“You want a baseline,” Vickers said in response to what he had not been told. “You want to refine your calibration so that you can drop a man—or men—or tanks—at a precise time. And if your baseline is in the Cretaceous instead of the present, you don’t have the problem of closing off another block each time somebody is inserted into the future before you get the technique down pat.”
Stern grew very still. “Do you volunteer?” he asked.
Vickers nodded. “Sure. Even if I thought you’d let me leave here alive if I didn’t, I’d volunteer—for that. I should have thought of the—the research potential—myself. I’d have blackmailed you into sending me.”
The entryway door opened unexpectedly. “I already did that, Henry,” said Adrienne Salmes. “Though I wouldn’t say their arms had to be twisted very hard.” She stepped past Vickers and laid the small receiver on Stern’s desk beside the sending unit. “I decided it was time to come in.”
“You arranged this for me?” Vickers asked in amazement.
“I arranged it for us,” Adrienne replied, seating herself on the empty chair. “I’m not entirely sure that I want to retire to the Cretaceous. But—” she looked sharply at Stern—“I’m quite sure that I don’t want to live in the world our friends here will shape if they do gain complete ability to manipulate the past. At least in the Cretaceous, we know what the rules are.”
Vickers stood. “Shlomo,” he said shaking Dr. Galil’s hand, “you haven’t failed before, and I don’t see you failing now. We won’t be marooned. Though it might be better if we were.” He turned to the man behind the desk. “Mr. Stern,” he said, “you’ve got your volunteers. I—we—we’ll get you a list of the supplies we’ll need.”
Adrienne touched his arm. “This will work, you know,” she said. She took no notice of the others in the room. “Like the crocodile.”
“Tell me in a year’s time that it
has
worked,” Vickers said.
And she did.
BOUNDARY LAYER
The great carnivore’s jaws slammed like a tomb door. “Henry,” said Adrienne Vickers, “the drug’s wearing off. We’re going to have a very angry tyrannosaurus in a moment.” The blonde woman’s voice was slightly louder than was necessary to be heard over the unmuffled blatting of the crawler’s diesel. She lowered the muzzle of her rifle, well aware that if she stretched the weapon out at arm’s length, it would rap the dinosaur’s jagged yellow teeth.
Henry Vickers risked a brief look over his shoulder. Although the crawler moved at little more than a fast walk, it was twelve feet wide and the forest had not been cleared for its passage. The last thing the hunter wanted was to have to back the articulated vehicle, especially if the tyrannosaur shackled to the bed was really awakening. “Umm,” he said to his wife, “it’s probably just reflex. Anyway, we don’t have much farther to go. Give it another jolt from the capture gun if you have to—” he ran a finger down the barrel of the smoothbore clipped to the crawler’s splash board—“but we don’t want it to overdose and die on us.”
“We don’t want it to wake up and eat us, either,” the blonde woman said tartly. She was standing, facing backward in the open cab of the vehicle. Her buttocks rested on the rim of the splashboard. “Besides, it’ll die a few days after they get it back Topside anyway. From the fungus or whatever. You know that.”
Thus far, the dinosaur’s yawn did seem to have been an isolated incident, Vickers thought. He countersteered to square off his approach to the gap between two huge pine trees. “They may have cured that problem by now,” he said, keeping his voice more reasonable than he felt. The tyrannosaur’s teeth
were
very close to his back, and he too was far from certain that the shackles would hold if the creature lunged with all its strength. “Anyway, Adrienne, even if it dies, we’ll have brought back a live tyrannosaur. That . . . that’s worth having done, I think. I don’t need to apologize for the things I’ve brought in dead, but . . . I think this is worth doing.” After a pause he added, “Besides—I trust you to handle our friend if he gets rambunctious.”
Adrienne snorted, but she smiled as well. The flattery showed affection and, in addition, it was true. Vickers’ back was turned toward an eight-ton predator, with nothing but his wife’s cool accuracy to save him if the creature broke free. “Well,” the tall blonde said, “if it were me, they’d make do Topside with something a lot easier to handle than this boy, at least until I was sure they could keep it alive themselves. But I suppose I can humor you this once.”
The crawler bulled into, then mounted, the decaying mass of a fallen tree. Vickers had climbed the obstacle on the way out, racing from camp toward the drug-numbed tyrannosaur. Until he had returned with the crawler, his wife had to guard the creature alone and fend off lesser predators. The vehicle’s bed, a twelve-by-fifty-foot trough on six axles, had been empty the first time it encountered the tree bole. Now . . . the crawler had carried heavier loads: adult torosaurs with horns like flint spears, and once an immature sauropod which weighed at least twelve tons. Never before, however, had the cargo been so potentially dangerous if it awakened before being unloaded into the holding cage at the permanent camp.
The diesel bellowed as the tracks of the cab unit bit, spewing fibers of russet, rotting wood over the bed and its burden. Then the log gave way and the multiple wheels lurched over its remains, squealing and creaking like sows at the trough.
There were no other problems before the crawler snorted out of the forest into the large clearing of the base camp. “Home is the hunter,” Adrienne murmured ironically as she glanced over her own shoulder. But it
was
home to the pair of them, though it had few enough amenities. They had never even bothered to name it. For safety from the things that rushed to water and the things that preyed on them there, the camp had been built five hundred feet from the river. The current drove rams that lifted water into a settling tank. Purification had proven unnecessary: repeated testing had failed to turn up any microbes which would be harmful to humans who had evolved some seventy million years in the future.
The house itself was on posts three feet high to discourage some of the nastier vermin. For a hundred yards in every direction stretched a belt of broad-leafed ground cover akin to ivy. Adrienne had wanted grass, but the Israeli officials Topside had vetoed the notion. True grasses had appeared in the Eocene, ten or so million years further up the line. It was no secret—to the pair of them in the Cretaceous base camp—that the intentions of the scientists working on time intrusion, and the orders of the government officials above them, were to modify the present by selectively changing the past. The potential for change from the early introduction of grass was considerable and of utterly unguessable direction. It was not a chance that those in charge were willing to risk for aesthetics.
There was a twenty-meter patch of raw earth and sand, well to the west of the house: the impact point for the intrusion vehicles which served as the only communication between the station and Topside. Topside was what had been the present when Vickers and Adrienne had volunteered to run a permanent base in the Cretaceous. When an intrusion vehicle impacted, everything within the sphere of its field was exchanged with an identical sphere at the impact point. On one-shot hunting intrusions, that was of no significance. Here, where repeated transfers would otherwise have dug a deepening pit in the Cretaceous soil, it had been necessary to stack the return point in the hangar Topside with sandbags. Vickers sometimes wondered what effect the synthetic fabric of the bags would have had if it had been discovered in Cretaceous strata during the historical past. But it hadn’t, of course; and if the non-degradable plastic
had
been dug up in 1920, say, then that fact would simply have become part of the present in which Dr. Shlomo Galil of Cambridge University developed a technique of time intrusion.
At least, that was one theory.
Vickers declutched the left track to swing the crawler wide around the impact point. The next intrusion was not due for forty hours, but there was no reason to take chances with an effect that could lop you into pieces separated by seventy million years. Adrienne looked from the holding cage they were approaching back to the slack-muscled tyrannosaur. “Well,” she said, “you were right, Henry. Though I’d as soon you were as careful with your own safety as you used to be with your clients’.”
If Vickers intended a reply, it was lost in the hissing of a corona discharge. An intrusion vehicle was appearing almost two days early.
Vickers halted the crawler in surprise, just short of the gate of the great steel holding cage. Adrienne touched her husband’s shoulder. Her eyes were back on their drugged captive. “Run it in, Henry,” she said. “They won’t be ready to load for a while anyway—” though the sides of the intrusion vehicle were down and the platform looked empty save for six passengers—“and I don’t want our friend to lie here with just the chains to hold him. Not any longer than he has to.”
The hunter nodded and drove on into the cage. He left the tyrannosaur shackled and the crawler in the cage instead of driving it out the far end empty. The two humans exited through the narrow escape hatch in time to meet their visitors in front of the house.
Five of the newcomers were young men in fatigue uniforms, glancing about nervously at the lowering forest as if they expected a pack of carnosaurs to burst upon them. The sixth man’s name was Avraham Stern, and he was head of the Time Intrusion Project. Only in its advertising was that project primarily concerned with safaris of rich civilians entering the past to hunt the biggest of game. Stern was a dumpy, bulky man who looked as uncomfortable in fatigues as he usually did in a business suit. “Mrs. Salmes,” he said, “Mr. Vickers, good day. I regret to surprise you this way.”
The captive dinosaur was beginning to gurgle with increasing power. Stern and Vickers ignored it, but the five young soldiers edged together instinctively. “Events,” Stern continued, “require that we borrow you from the, ah, habitat phase for a time. Since that means closing down this station, I thought it best to inform you in person. I have brought these gentlemen—” he nodded toward the clustered soldiers—“to aid in carrying materials to the intrusion vehicle.”
“What do you mean, ‘close down the station’?” Vickers asked very softly. Both Stern and the blonde woman showed they recognized the emotions underlying the words. The official ostentatiously moved his hand away from his sagging trousers pocket. Adrienne ran her finger along the noses of the bullets in her cartridge belt, counting the rounds.
“Nothing like that, I assure you,” Stern said in careful reassurance. “There will be another station soon, and you two will be manning it. Only . . . for the moment, we have need of the best Cretaceous hunting guide available. And that is you, Mr. Vickers.”
The hunter relaxed a trifle, but Adrienne asked sharply, “Getting one particular guide is that important? More important than the project?”
Stern frowned. “Mrs. Salmes—” he began.
“Mrs. Vickers now, as you damned well know,” Adrienne snapped.
“Mrs. Vickers,” the official continued, nodding again toward the soldiers, “you understand that while these gentlemen are discreet, they are young. And there is no reason for them to be concerned with the research aspects of our program.” No reason for them to learn, that was, that the permanent station was a hinge in experiments to calibrate the intrusion vehicles more accurately. When that governmentally desired end was achieved, it would be possible to insert a body of men into the historical past. With the Israeli government choosing the place and purpose of such an intrusion, the world could be expected to change very abruptly.
The blonde woman shook her head with the perfect arrogance of one born to wealth and beauty. “Give me a reason to believe you, Stern,” she said. “Sure, Henry’s the best”—she squeezed her husband’s arm without breaking eye contact with the Israeli official—“but you have other guides. I know how important this . . . habitat phase is to you. I don’t believe you’re closing it down, even temporarily, just because somebody wants to go hunting for dinos.”
Stern sighed. For a moment he looked less like a bear than like a great, sad ape who faced a world too complex to be understood and too dangerous to be ignored. “Mrs. Vickers,” he said, “a party of important persons will be hunting the Cretaceous. It is necessary that one of them . . . the US Secretary of State . . . have a good hunt in order that he become—receptive to proposals of the host government. Our government. Otherwise”—Stern tongued his lips but continued—“otherwise, it is believed in some quarters that there will be no time to pursue the habitat experiments to their conclusion. Madame, that is as open as I can possibly be.”
“All right,” said Vickers, touching his wife’s hand to end the discussion. He too had a weary look, that of a workman who had ended his shift and been unexpectedly recalled to deal with an emergency. Behind him, the tyrannosaur grunted savagely. “It’ll take two loads,” the hunter said. “I’ll put another dart in the dino and we’ll send him Topside alone. Then they can return the vehicle for the rest of us and the gear.”
Stern shook his head impatiently. “I regret, Mr. Vickers,” he said, “that I have not made myself clear. Duration in the past is concurrent with duration—Topside, as you know, unless the point of intrusion or of return is changed. There will be no second trip. Time, ah, Topside, is of . . . considerable importance. We cannot now afford the delay of staging a second intrusion into this time horizon. Further, there have been excellent results achieved by homing insertions in on your alpha pattern, Mr. Vickers . . . but it is by no means a certain technique. Even if
I
were willing to risk being stranded in the Cretaceous myself”—he ventured a smile that had as much humor in it as Stern’s smiles ever did—“I assure you that my superiors would be quite displeased at the realization that I had risked stranding
you
at this juncture. No, the animal stays.”
“Henry,” said Adrienne, “go ahead and give him another dart before he tears the crawler apart.” She looked at Stern. “The animal goes, I think,” she added calmly. “We’ll leave everything else except the guns and go back with the tyrannosaur ourselves.”
One of the soldiers blurted something in startled Hebrew. All five of the young men looked aghast. Even Stern seemed to have lost some of his aplomb. “Do you live to infuriate me, woman?” he demanded, his hands at his sides and clenched. “Is this your only joy? There are millions,
billions
of every sort of beast to be captured at your leisure. I have said
this
is an emergency. The creature will die within days anyway, surely you know that? Why do you persist in goading me?”
“Because,” Adrienne said in a voice as gray and frigid as her eyes, “we’ve taken a live tyrannosaur, Henry and I, and we’re going to bring it back no matter what happens to it then. Because we’ve come this far with it . . . and because it’s worth doing, I think.”
Henry Vickers chuckled companionably and turned. The great carnivore had lifted its head off the bed of the crawler and was making metallic noises as it strained against its shackles. The capture gun thumped. Its long, white-feathered hypodermic arched through the bars of the cage to bury itself in the tyrannosaur’s throat. Vickers broke the action of the gun and drew another dart cartridge from his pouch.
Stern blinked as if the previous conversation had not taken place. “You have only that with you, Mr. Vickers?” he asked. “Not a real rifle, that is?”
Vickers smiled, no longer weary. “I have Adrienne,” he replied. “I don’t have anything to worry about with her around, Mr. Stern. You of all people should appreciate that.” He began to laugh aloud as the drug took hold and the dinosaur shuddered back into restive somnolence.
Their boots clashed on the concrete floor as they inspected the equipment. The heels sent a babble of echoes whispering from one end of the warehouse to the other. Stern carried a briefcase, Vickers only the stapled flimsies listing the equipment and personnel of the safari. Both men were accustomed by their professions to speak in a voice that carried only to the intended listener; and even that murmur was masked by their ricocheting footsteps.