Delta Pavonis (5 page)

With discussion over, there was a brief, orderly bustle as boots were tightened, belts and packs were slung, canteens topped up and forgotten items were scrounged out of duffle bags. In five minutes, they were on the march.

The path Forrest chose paralleled a stream. Far ahead, above the scrubby trees, they could see a gorge where the stream cut through the cliffs. They were not under noise discipline, but there was little talking along the way. After a few hundred meters in the stifling heat, they had little breath to waste on idle chatter. There was no true trail, and they picked their way through the brush, where it seemed thinnest. Since time was not crucial, it was policy not to use machetes or other trail-clearing tools, since they could not be sure what chemicals might be released.

The trees seemed to be stunted, as might be expected on the narrow coastal shelf, where the only soil was a thin layer washed down over the millennia from the cliffs above. There were some troublesome vines, but most of the monotonously dark-green vegetation was no impediment. The rough, broken ground caused a good deal of stumbling and cursing. The growth was predominantly of two sorts: shrublike trees with twisted, woody trunks and spiky leaves, and, nearest to the water, a tall plant with a corrugated stem that looked like a bundle of reeds. It all looked strange but also disturbingly familiar. Dierdre couldn't put her finger on it, but there was something wrong with the vegetation. Then she knew what it was: the stuff just wasn't alien enough.

There was a sudden stinging sensation on the side of her neck and, without thought, she slapped it. She glanced at her palm and saw the squashed remnants of a minute creature with threadlike legs and a smear of red. She showed it to Colin.

"Look, this thing had red blood."

Colin examined it. "I think that's your blood."

She shook her head. "Nothing here should be adapted to drilling humans for blood. It's probably looking for something else entirely."

He slapped at something on his cheek. "They home on us like they were born to the trade."

Forrest called a break near the base of the cliffs. He looked decidedly preoccupied, unlike the businesslike persona he had shown earlier in the morning. Dierdre decided to risk another rebuff and walked to where he was sitting on a rocky outcrop.

"Boss, I don't want you to think I'm hallucinating or anything, but there's something weird about the insect life here."

He nodded abstractedly, studying inflamed welts on the backs of his hands. "I noticed. I told you my field was biology, didn't I?"

"You did."

"Well, there's something here that just doesn't compute." He turned and raised his voice. "Listen. I want samples of the insect equivalents that're crawling and buzzing around here. I know that's not a first-in team's job, but this may be important. I want samples to send back to the mainland with the first return boat. Be careful when you handle them; some of them bite and sting. Make sure you have antitoxins in your medkits and keep them handy."

"We were told nothing here—" somebody said.

"I know what we were told," Forrest cut in. "But we have to keep an open mind. We may finally have come to someplace where the local life is similar enough to ours to make us edible. That could mean vulnerable to their poisons. It might just mean susceptible to their diseases, too."

"We're supposed to be immune to everything," said Angus. He was a geology and planetology specialist from Avalon, slow-moving but observant. The pickhammer at his belt was the badge of his trade.

"Sure," Forrest said, "but lots of people have died making assumptions like that. From here on, we go on the assumption that this is a potentially inimical environment. You've all had the classes, you know there's no reason why we can't be harmed by microbes evolved in an ecosystem only roughly analogous to Earth's. Everybody worries about big animals eating us, but microscopic ones invading our systems are a lot more likely. They can, theoretically, do a great deal of damage before the differences in metabolic chemistry kill them off. No telling what toxins we might have to absorb."

Govinda chimed in: "The big stuff, even the bugs we can watch out for. What can we do about the microbes?"

They watched Forrest attentively as he considered the question. "I guess there's always prayer, and our broad-spectrum vaccinations. Other than that, use lots of disinfectant on cuts and bites, make double sure about sterilizing water, and try not to breathe too much. Okay, people, break's over. Team B head south, we'll go north. Comm check in thirty minutes."

Packs were reshouldered and the teams split up. The trek along the base of the cliffs was even rougher than that paralleling the stream. Loose soil and scree made the footing treacherous, and Dierdre found this stage especially arduous, since the lopsided mode of progress put unfamiliar stress on her ankles.

After a half hour, Forrest tried a comm check. The other team's report was grainy but understandable.

It did not bode well for the future, though. The voice over the comm should have been as clear as if the other speaker had actually been present, even though the intervening distance was more than a hundred kilometers. They went another fifty meters and came upon something amazing.

Sims and Okamura were just out of sight ahead. Okamura's low whistle alerted them that the trail-breakers had stopped. "Hey, c'mere and looka this," Okamura called.

They found the men standing in the midst of a gray-white cage. Dierdre's mind did a flipflop adjustment of scale and she realized that it was a skeleton. The bones stretched for an amazing distance, tapering into neck and tail vertebrae, the partially-smashed ribcage arching higher than Sims's head. A smallish lump at one end, half buried in mossy soil, was the thing's skull.

"Hot damn!" Colin said. He began to scramble over the bones, checking out joints and muscle attachments while Forrest took a careful visual record with his shoulder-mounted unit. The others just stood and gawked.

Dierdre walked along the neck vertebrae until she reached the skull. It was small for so large an animal, and it wasn't the solid lump of bone she had expected. It seemed to be composed of rather delicate struts and buttresses. The bone had deteriorated more than the more massive ones, but she could see that the thing had had two eyes, and its jaws were lined with flat, peglike teeth.

"Colin," Forrest called, "isn't paleontology one of your fields?"

"More like a hobby," Colin answered, his voice a little shaky. "I never figured it'd be much use where we were going."

"Any idea what this might be?"

"Yeah, but I'm damned if I'm going to be the first to say it. They say, in the old days, skippers lost their ships for reporting sea serpents, and pilots got grounded for reporting flying saucers. I'm not about to earn a psych rating by speculating on what I'm pretty sure this is."

"Hey, Boss!" Dierdre said, triumphantly. "Remember that hallucination I had yesterday?"

"Okay, I take it back. You satisfied?" He continued taking his visual.

"No. Call the other team and tell them . . ."

"Back!" Sims barked. Something was making a lot of rustling and crunching noise at the top of the cliff. "There's something big up there! Everybody get back to the brushline."

Sims and Okamura stayed by the skeleton, kneeling, their beam rifles trained on the spot where they could see trees and brush shaking. Forrest stood behind them, leaning back, his recorder trained likewise. The other four made a hasty retreat to the brush. They gaped upward, where something huge and grayish was nearing the edge.

The cliff was about twenty meters high at this point, made up mostly of soft sandstone. Some of the overhanging vines dangled to no more than six or seven meters from their level. As the animal neared the edge, it started a minor landslide of loose rock and soil. Small creatures, startled, flew upward from the trees.

"Here he comes!" Okamura shouted excitedly.

"No shooting," Forrest ordered. "We're here for information, not trophies."

Dierdre was a little annoyed at his calmness. She suppressed a grudging admiration. She was still mad at him.

Abruptly, a head thrust through the brush. Dierdre gasped. She had been expecting something like the serpent-necked thing she had seen the day before, but this was entirely different. The head was immense, with a parrot beak surmounted by a short, upcurving horn. Above the bone-hooded eyes, two longer horns thrust forward. Behind the horns, a wide, semicircular frill spread over its back with incongruous elegance. Despite the size and the bizarre appearance, the most striking thing was the color: the horns were bright red, the beak mostly electric blue and the frill was startlingly patterned in red and yellow. What they could see of the body appeared to be slate-gray.

Its lower jaw worked methodically, gradually reducing a hanging mouthful of rough brush to swallowable pulp. The explorers all held their breath, but the thing made no sign of noticing them. The rhythmic crunching of its meal was the only noise. The last of the brush disappeared and the jaws stopped working. Now they could hear a low, continuous rumble; the sound of the beast's formidable digestive apparatus. After a last scan, its tiny eyes still showing no indication of noticing them, the head withdrew. The sounds of its leisurely regression faded away.

"Can I say it now?" Colin asked, shakily.

"I'll say it and take the risk of a psych rating," Forrest answered. "That thing was a dinosaur. A real, Earth-type dinosaur. I think it was a triceratops. Right, Colin?"

"Looked like it. That family had a lot of members, but that looked like the classic triceratops. The bones could be those of a diplodocus, but that'd take more detailed study."

"You're talking an impossibility," Hannie said. "This has to be some sort of parallel evolution."

"It's about as likely," Forrest said, "that we'd run into human beings speaking English. Evolution shouldn't be that parallel. Something big and vaguely reptilian, yeah, maybe. But not one of the classics like a triceratops."

"Or a stegosaurus," said Govinda, helpfully. "If we see a stegosaurus, we'll know for sure we're onto something weird."

Forrest was about to say something sarcastic when his comm unit beeped. "Talk to me," he said.

"Ray!" It was Fumiyo, Team B's leader. "Something just flew over us! You won't believe this, but it looks just like one of those pterodactyls or pteranodons or whatever the hell they were in Paleo class!"

"Wait'll you see what we just saw," he answered. "Bring Team B back to the splitup point right away. We'll rendezvous there. Things have taken a radical change."

"I saw one of those flying lizards last night," Dierdre said. "With my viewer."

"Then why didn't you say . . ." Forrest stopped himself. "Oh, yeah, well. . . . Come on, people, we're heading back."

Two hours later they were back at their beach camp, everybody looking subdued. They ran holos of the creatures they had seen. The flying reptile had a pale underside, but its back was yellow and the head a brilliant green. The back of the head was graced with a finlike crest.

"As I recall our comparative zoology classes," Fumiyo said, "bright colors aren't characteristic of very large animals, back on Earth. Drab colors or camouflage were the norm. Why is that triceratops's face so gaudy?"

"Maybe it's a sexual display," Colin said, "like some birds. Dinosaurs are supposed to be closely related to birds."

"This is all sort of dodging the major question, isn't it?" Dierdre said. "Shouldn't we be wondering just what the hell dinosaurs, for God's sake, are doing on a planet a good many light years from their place of origin, millions of years after their supposed extinction?"

"I'll confess that the question crossed my mind," Forrest said. "Unfortunately, we suffer from a severe lack of data."

"So what do we do?" Fumiyo asked.

"What do we do? We're explorers, aren't we? So we explore."

"You mean," Govinda said, slowly raising an arm and pointing to the top of the plateau, "we go up there, where all the dinosaurs and stuff are?"

"Sure," Forrest said, "why not?"

"We're out of touch with the mainland and the orbitals," Schubert pointed out.

"Remember what I said this morning? About how, if you're going to explore, you have to take risks? Besides, this may be the best thing that could have happened to us."

Everyone looked puzzled, but Dierdre thought she could see what he was getting at. "You mean, why should we share the glory?"

For the first time, he looked at her with approval.

"Right. Listen, people, if we report what we've seen, what's going to happen? This is probably the most important discovery since Derek Kuroda found the Rhea Objects years ago. It may be the key to how this screwy planet works. Do you think an exploration this important would be left to us?" He looked around, saw expressions of dismay, then anger. "That's right. The glamour boys would descend on this place like locusts, with their tame newsies in tow. We'd be hustled off to some new godforsaken hellhole to explore while they made sure nobody remembered we were the first here. I say, let's go in there and do a complete survey, gather all the data we can and when it's all in we shoot the whole thing straight up to Avalon, bypassing the Survey bureaucracy entirely."

"We could be jailed for that," Hannie said.

"Let's blame it on the sunspot activity," Schubert suggested. "Say we couldn't get anything out and transmitted directly to Avalon in desperation."

"What about Kurz and the other teams?" someone asked. "They'll be along in a few days."

"Kurz will love it, when I explain things to him,"

Forrest insisted. "We'll meet them as they land and clue them in. After all, he's the expedition leader, so it's his name that'll be attached to it. He's just like the rest of us; none of us may ever have a chance at a coup this big. Even if we all get sacked, so what? The publicity from this discovery will make us all famous, if we handle it right."

Dierdre could see right away that he had struck just the right note. The others first looked apprehensive, then skeptical, then, finally, enthusiastic. They had been virtually resigned to a career of dead-end positions on obscure expeditions. Trouble with the authorities had been an inevitability rather than a danger. The prospect of a big payoff made up for a great deal of risk.