Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (33 page)

The vehicle halted as Vickers had ordered. Craig, the bodyguard, said, “You did this as an insult, didn’t you?” His voice was high, on the edge of control.

The guide turned in surprise. He had become accustomed to thinking of the bodyguard as a tool rather than a human being, an object with a programmed set of responses to stimuli . . . rather like his own Uzi submachine gun. It was disconcerting to hear Craig volunteering statements that had no bearing on his duties. It was more than disconcerting that the statements made no sense. Vickers wondered if the strain had in fact pushed the younger American off the deep end, ready to spray all those around him with bullets too small to be useful except on men.

Perhaps Secretary Cardway had the same thought. “Craig, what the hell do you mean?” he demanded with something less than his normal assurance. Greenbaum edged backward, trying to get behind the bodyguard without being obtrusive about it. Adrienne and Stern had been left in camp with the “vehicle that wasn’t running right” according to the story the Americans had been told. They would have been comforting companions at this juncture. Thomas Warren merely watched with a glimmer of a smile.

“He’s trying to shame you with this filth, sir,” Craig said. He gestured with his left hand at the landscape, the slaughtered dinosaurs lying like hillocks completely covered by the mass of creatures feeding on them. “This, this—disgusting . . . he’ll make you out to be a butcher to the world, sir. He’s just brought you here to discredit you!”

Vickers was very still. There was an instant’s fear within him that perhaps Craig had seen within him a truth that the guide had hidden even from himself. There was nothing unnatural about the scavengers, any more than the sight of maggots festering in a dead rabbit is unnatural. But it was true that this circus of carrion and corruption would affect many voters with the repugnance with which the machine gunning had affected the guide himself.

But Secretary Cardway blinked incredulously. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “I had to bring you but I don’t have to listen to crap. Keep your mouth shut if you still want a job when we get back.” He turned to Vickers, utterly ignoring the bodyguard whose insight he was unable to credit. “And we’re going back right now,” he said. “I’ve wasted enough time.” Rotating his head to fix the Prime Minister, he added, “If this is your idea of fun, Greenbaum, you must love campaigning. Heat, dust, rubber food, and idiots.”

The responder on Vickers’ wrist looked like a watch. It now gave a tiny chime and tickled his skin with just enough current to get his attention. The guide glanced down, certain that God must answer prayers in the Cretaceous. The device was tuned to the radio beacon Stern and Adrienne carried to tag the tyrannosaur. The responder’s face had lighted dull orange, meaning that the beast had popped back into the Cretaceous within two—or three, at the outside—kilometers of the responder. That was almost too close, since it would take some minutes to unload the tyrannosaur and ride the intrusion vehicle back Topside. But Vickers could easily kill time en route until Adrienne radioed with the coded message that gave him the all-clear.

“Well, this is a washout, it seems,” Vickers said, beaming at the others, “but there’s a spot I noticed just a—a few minutes from here where I’ll give you my word there’s a tyrannosaur.”

Even Greenbaum and Warren looked askance at the senior guide. Vickers’ enthusiasm had carried him momentarily out of the present setting. The incongruity of his triumphant tone did not strike him until he saw everyone else in the vehicle gaping as if he had lost his mind. “Ah,” he continued, in a more reserved fashion, “I’ll sit beside the driver there and guide him. Mr. Secretary, if you’ll stand ready but not shoot until Mr. Warren or I say, say to shoot, that is, we’ll put you in the best place.”

As the guide clambered down to exchange places with the holographer, he surreptitiously set his responder on search mode and swept it in an arc. The lighted face glowed green until the guide’s arm pointed within one degree of the beacon. There it flashed red, giving Vickers the bearing. Setting the little device back on ranging, he said to the driver, “We’re headed northeast, friend.” He gestured. “Take it easy. One of these trails to water should lead us back the way we want. When it branches, I’ll give you directions.”

The soldier frowned in puzzlement, but Stern had made it clear that morning that Vickers was to be obeyed no matter what he ordered. The vehicle shuddered into gear, then swung wide so that the driver could steer it into what looked like a suitable gap in the brush.

This time, no one had suggested salvaging the dead dryptosaur. Vickers wondered silently whether even bagging a tyrannosaur would affect Secretary Cardway as Greenbaum and Stern hoped it would. Very possibly it would not—which was probably to the world’s benefit.

Branches flapped toward Vickers’ face and sprang away as the half-track crawled through brush that was growing denser. Occasionally a cluster of stumps would appear where some ceratopsian had sheared off a thicket near the ground and spent the next ten minutes stuffing it all down his gullet. More often, an alcove had been stripped of leaves and bark by some hadrosaur’s enormous battery of teeth. The naked white branch cores splayed skeletally toward the beaten trail, then were gone and past and replaced by similar signs.

Twice at a forking, Vickers checked his responder and pointed the driver on. Above and behind him, Secretary Cardway’s expression showed an increasing impatience for something to happen. The guide in turn was concerned that he had not yet received clearance from Adrienne. He was planning a delay—taking the next wrong turning should be enough—when Nature accomplished the desired end herself. Brush crashed to the right of the trail and a huge ceratopsian head loomed over the half-track.

“Hold it!” Vickers cried. The driver’s foot, poised between brake pedal and accelerator, slammed down on the former. The juddering halt sprayed dust forward, but their speed was low enough to avoid injuries. It was a triceratops, snorting a dozen feet in the air. Its beak was open, displaying rows of knife-edged shearing teeth behind it. “My God, Mr. Secretary!” Vickers cried as he swung his door open, “I think we’ve got a pair mating! I don’t think any clients ever had a look at this before!”

“Nail the blighter right through the throat!” said Thomas Warren in the box above.

Vickers, shocked and furious, spun around.
“Wait, for Chrissake!”
he shouted. Cardway had already leveled the Mannlicher and it was doubtful that he even heard. The guide leaped, trying to get out of the cone of shock when the big rifle fired. He was partly successful. The muzzle blast sledged him but did not knock him down with a nose bleed as would have resulted from slightly closer proximity. Leaves trembled in an arc to either side of the gun. The triceratops lurched upright with both its broad front paws lashing at the sky.

Vickers snapped off two shots at the dinosaur forty feet away. From his angle, all he could see beyond the brush was the creature’s weaving skull—but a shot anywhere else would be useless at this point anyway. Then a hawthorn thicket splintered toward the half-track to pass the female, charging with her head down and her black-tipped horns aimed at the cab.

If the two ceratopsians had stayed coupled, they would have been harmless even to spectators approaching close enough to touch them. Violently dismounted by her mate, the female’s certain reaction was to run in the direction she was facing. While that was not a charge, technically, the effect was the same on anything that happened to be in the path of the ten-ton missile. It was really the first time the heavy machine gun could have been useful. It was not useful, of course, because the range was too short and the gunner was unprepared for a target appearing twenty feet below the rearing head he had trained on. Vickers, leaning over the hood of the half-track, fired.

The tiny uranium penetrator, moving at 3,500 feet per second and no more affected by skull bones than it was by the air between muzzle and target, took the dinosaur just behind the right eye. Eight feet away, the bullet exited behind the left shoulder. The exit hole gaped momentarily like a hungry mouth, but flesh is plastic at hypersonic velocities: the wound spasmed back to normalcy almost as suddenly as it opened. Within the skull, however, the shock waves of the penetrator’s passage were still reverberating. The lump of nerve tissue serving the triceratops as a brain was scrambled as thoroughly as an egg dropped from an airplane.

The female’s hind legs continued to drive her, as a headless chicken’s will, but the thrust was no longer forward since the forelegs had buckled and the creature’s beak was gouging the soil. The right brow horn struck the frame under the vehicle’s left fender and pierced it with a crash like an anti-tank gun firing. The tip broke off. The dead triceratops came to rest with its eyes open and its vertical nose spike touching the bumper.

Vickers stepped to one side and smashed the sacral thickening of the spine to end the thrashing of the corpse’s hind legs. Then he looked up at the men in the half-track. Everyone else had been too startled to shoot. “Warren,” Vickers said, speaking loudly over the tinny ringing in his own ears, “if I ever hear you intend to go on a time safari again, I’ll come back from wherever I am and beat you within an inch of your life.”

The three faces peering at Vickers over the front bulkhead of the truck were a study in contrasts. Secretary Cardway looked bemused. His rifle was raised. He had recocked it too slowly for a second shot at the male triceratops, and in his focus on the male, the Secretary had not noticed the rush of the female until it was over. The soldier in the middle gazed down at the dead female, well aware that he had been too slow to stop it with his cal-fifty. The gunner knew that he had not prevented disaster himself, and that had disaster occurred . . . shit rolls downhill, and he was on the bottom.

Thomas Warren was smiling, apparently because he did not know what else to do. It dawned on Vickers that the Englishman really was not aware that his advice to Cardway had almost gotten them all killed. Had Vickers been a hair slower or a hair less accurate, the ceratopsian’s charge would at best have left them stranded in the bush with no vehicle and no radio. The worst . . . a search team would have been hard put to find human traces after a creature larger than a pair of elephants had trampled them all into the ground. Warren’s own rifle had slumped back to high port—but like Cardway, he had been aiming at the male triceratops. It was as if the female of the pair, by being unseen, had become nonexistent.

Mordecai Greenbaum laid a hand on the shoulder of the machine gunner, rotating him out of the way to make room. “I do not think that will be necessary, Mr. Vickers,” the small Israeli said. His voice penetrated easily the sounds of the male triceratops dying close off in the brush. “When the beasts were mating, shooting one was sure to provoke the other, was it not? I do not think the Ministry of Tourism needs employees who exhibit such bad judgment. I will speak to Avraham.”

“Say, hold hard a minute,” said Warren. The fatuous smile dripped away as full realization of what was happening struck him. “We’re supposed to be entertaining the client, right? And he’s not a bloody photographer, he’s a gunner, so I—”

“Are we ready to proceed, Mr. Vickers?” the Prime Minister asked.

“
I
damned well am,” said the Secretary of State. He had lost the open-eyed stare he wore over his sights, relapsing into the arrogant impatience which Vickers found only a touch less intolerable.

“Now listen!” Warren shouted. “You sods aren’t going to do this to me! If you think I’m going to keep quiet while you—”

“Mr. Warren!” said Greenbaum. Listening to the snap of his voice, Vickers for the first time realized how the man could rule his coalition cabinet as if it were a drill team. “I will remind you that breaches of security can be viewed as treason, and treason trials may be held
in cameru
if the need warrants.”

“I’m not a Jew,” the guide said, gray-faced and too stunned to edit the words bubbling from his subconscious.

“You need not be Jewish to be tried for treason to the State of Israel,” Greenbaum said crisply, “nor even a resident to be tried. Eichman was not a resident either, you may remember . . . Driver, let us go on.”

“Mobile Two to Mobile One,” the radio said in Adrienne’s attenuated voice.

“Thank God,” said Vickers aloud before he thumbed his lapel mike. He raised his index finger unnecessarily to quiet the others before saying, “Go ahead, Mobile Two. Is everything all right?”

“More or less,” the radio hissed. Then, “Yes, it’s all right. We’re proceeding to join you. We’re on a pony, not the half-track.”

The guide blanked his face. Cardway probably did not know that the expedition had brought none of the four-wheeled utility vehicles, so Adrienne’s appearance on one would not give the deception away. Still, the initial plan had been for her and Stern to ride the intrusion vehicle back Topside after they had dropped the tyrannosaur in the bush, then to be reinserted at the compound. That way, everything at the camp when Cardway returned would look the same as it had when he departed. Instead, Stern and Adrienne had brought back a pony along with the tagged dinosaur, and they were obviously proceeding from the drop site rather than the camp if they expected to join the hunters before they made the kill. The change in plans concerned Vickers as much as did his wife’s initial “more or less” on the radio.

“We could name this one,” Warren said in an odd voice. Vickers looked up. The British guide’s face was stiff and his gesture toward the triceratops, dead under the wheels, was broadly theatrical. “We could call her Adrienne, do you think? And the other one, maybe we’ll name it Stern?”

“Warren,” Vickers said. His left hand touched the receiver of his rifle, but the fingers sprang away again as if the metal were afire.

“Or maybe, Washman, I hear he was one,” Warren continued. His eyes were unfocused and his voice had no inflection. “Of course, we could scarcely find all the names for—”