Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (35 page)
Read Dinosaurs & A Dirigible Online
Authors: David Drake
Henry Vickers straightened. Stern and Adrienne were dragging away the unconscious bodyguard. The official looked up. “Is there a chance?” he asked.
The guide grimaced. “Not even if it had happened in the operating room of Walter Reed,” he said. He turned and fired a single round through the carnosaur’s skull, aiming between the jaw hinge and the ear hole. The beast did not move as its brain was destroyed. “But I suppose it’s safe to drag out what’s left now,” he said quietly.
The Prime Minister was in a whispered conversation with the holographer who had been beside in the back. Greenbaum looked at the heavy rifle he still carried and set it down. “We have holographic tape of—what has happened, Mr. Vickers,” he said. “You attempting to finish off the animal before it harmed the Secretary, and the American bodyguard preventing you by his attack. The blame is clear.” The little Israeli paused, shaking his head. “It will not gain us the—end for which this exercise was planned, of course. That has become impossible. But at least we can apportion blame.”
Vickers jumped down from the half-track, holding his rifle at the balance in his left hand. Adrienne glanced at the unconscious bodyguard, now being trussed by Stern with a rifle sling. Seeing Craig was safe, the blonde woman poised to follow her husband. Before she could do so, Vickers looked back. “Adrienne,” he said, “there’s a net in one of those chests. Would you bring it, please?”
Adrienne blinked. “Why?”
Vickers gestured toward the titanopteryx. The creature mewled as it struggled back toward the shelter of the tyrannosaur’s carcass. Its left wing, injured by the sweep of the dinosaur’s tail, dragged behind it like the train of a troll queen. “We’re taking that back with us,” the guide said. “Alive.”
“D-darling,” said his wife, her mouth more dry with fear than it had been when she saw Craig aiming his Uzi at her husband, “I don’t think—”
The guide’s face contorted. “I’m through with killing-for-a-business!” he screamed. “Through with it! This is alive and I’m sending it back alive! And if I never see another tourist hunter, it’ll by
God
be too soon!”
The two soldiers and the older cameraman—the one who had served in the Golan—retrieved Secretary Cardway’s body. Greenbaum watched them grimly, holding the reloaded .470 with its muzzles an inch from Craig’s face. The bodyguard remained unconscious, slumped away from the stanchion to which he was bound. The younger PR man thought of taping that too, but the look on the Prime Minister’s face deterred him. Thomas Warren remained seated in the cab. Occasionally he would spit out another fragment of the plastic stem of his pipe.
It took Vickers, Adrienne, and Avraham Stern half an hour to capture the injured titanopteryx and load it onto a cargo skid. That was respectable time. The creature was half-again as heavy as any of the three of them, and it was capable of ripping the armored hide of a dinosaur with its beak. They made a good team, the blonde woman thought. All three of them were willing to do whatever was necessary to accomplish the task at hand.
“Ah, there you are, Mr. and Mrs. Vickers,” called the pudgy man with the clipboard. He began trotting toward them across the busy traffic of the hangar.
Avraham Stern paused in mid-sentence and turned from the Vickerses, to whom he had been talking. “Professor Wayne,” he said loudly, “we will have completed the final briefing in a few moments, if you please.” He managed a smile as he looked back at the American couple. “I should not be harsh with him, should I?” Stern said. “He was extremely helpful about releasing the tyrannosaurus to us when we came back for it. For all the good that that did.”
The Israeli official’s voice was surprisingly mild as he spoke the last words. Adrienne narrowed her eyes and said, “That’s over with now? The—the plan isn’t being carried out without US support?”
Stern shrugged. “The frigate
Gromky
docked in Tripoli seven hours ago,” he said. “Such cargo as she carried—a number of large drums—was immediately escorted by an armored convoy toward El Adem. The air base, you know. Where the containers go from there will be the question, of course.”
“They may stay there till the cans rust away,” said Vickers. “And . . . and anyway, it’s better than World War III, I think.”
Stern looked around. He was back in a dark business suit, a dumpy, balding man who might have chased ambulances or sold used cars for a living. “Among the three of us,” he said quietly, “I also think it is better. However, I do not think it is good.” He stretched out a hand to Vickers, paused, then gave his left hand to Adrienne as well. “God be with you,” Stern said. He began to walk away.
“If the Holocene gets too hot, Avraham,” Vickers called after the departing official, “you’re always welcome in the Cretaceous.”
Professor Wayne, head of the Zoology Section, had been waiting tensely a dozen feet away. Now he stooped like a hawk on the couple. He moved so suddenly that he almost collided with a quartet of turbine pumps whining toward the intrusion vehicle on fork lifts. The plump American professor scuttled safely through the equipment, his clipboard tight against his chest as if it were a poker hand he was hiding. “Ah, good, good,” he bubbled. “The committee—the Biological Oversight Committee—only now reached a decision. I was very much afraid that I would have missed you with the message.”
Adrienne smiled, more tolerantly than she would have been able to do a few years before. “We still have half an hour, Doctor,” she said. “Though I hope it won’t take that long, since we’ve got other business to attend to . . .”
“Oh, of course, of course,” said the zoologist, sounding shocked. “It shouldn’t take anything like that. It should—” he paused. “Well, it will take less time if I say it, of course. Very simply, we want you to hold the size of individual living specimens you send, ah, Topside, to two hundred kilograms apiece. Until we inform you otherwise. It’s a matter of space, you see. We hope to expand the facilities shortly, but for the next six months we can no more care for an adult ceratopsian than we could—eat one at a sitting.” He grinned brightly to emphasize his joke.
Adrienne responded with a frown as her fingers toyed with the sling of her rifle. “But you have thirty acres, don’t you?” she asked. “I mean—I was there just, well, ten days ago to bring back the tyrannosaur.”
“Oh, of course, but I mean
secure
space,” Wayne said. His tone was that he would have used if he had been accused of faking experimental data. “That is, an area not only free of birds and bird droppings, but sterilized. It’s quite amazing how virulent the least trace of ornithosis has proven to the higher Cretaceous life-forms. It seems to be no exaggeration to say that every archosaur you sent back from the previous base was killed by the sparrows in our compound here.”
Adrienne laughed. Vickers smiled, though it was through an unwillingness to dampen his wife’s good cheer than from any humor he himself saw in the wasted effort. Still, he and Adrienne had accomplished their own tasks. That was the only thing they would have had to be ashamed of . . .”
“How’s the pterosaur coming along, then?” the guide said aloud. “It’s within your size limit, I suppose?”
“Yes, yes . . .” the zoologist said, frowning. He tapped his clipboard with the hinge of his glasses. “Frankly, I don’t understand that at all. To begin with, I would have thought that the Order Pterosauria had diverged from the main stem of the dinosaurs—and birds, of course—so far back that they would not be susceptible to diseases of the latter. Of course, humans can catch ornithosis too, under extreme conditions . . . But still, I’m quite sure we kept the titanopteryx in a sterile environment from the moment you returned with it. And—”
“Wait a minute,” Vickers said, waving his free hand palm down. “You mean that it died?”
“Yes, this morning, that’s what I’ve been saying,” Wayne responded. “Technically, we’ll have to wait for the pathology report to be sure, but there’s no real doubt that it was ornithosis again. The surprising thing is that the pterosaur must have been infected before we received it. Infected in the Cretaceous, that is. Which ought to be impossible.”
Vickers and his wife stared at each other.
“Christ,” whispered the blonde woman, “the tyrannosaur. It had the bug, God knows, and we carried it back—”
“You took the tyrannosaur back to the Cretaceous?” the zoologist exclaimed. “Oh, my goodness—why did you do that?”
The guide shrugged away the question. “What’s going to happen?” he demanded. “I mean—back where we left the carcass. In the Cretaceous.”
“At the end of the Cretaceous,” Adrienne said, her eyes staring out beyond the walls of the hangars and the present time. “As close as Dr. Galil could place us to the boundary between the Cretaceous and the Cenozoic. Where the dinosaurs were the biggest, and just before they all disappeared.”
“Well, I don’t know, exactly,” the zoologist said with a look of increasing concern. “Introduction of the bedsonia-chlamydia organism causing ornithosis could radically reduce a non-resistant population, of course. But even myxomatosis didn’t wipe out hares in Europe and Australia, just reduced their numbers to a few percent of what they had been before the, well, plague. And that was only until natural increase built up the—oh, dear!”
“Yeah,” Vickers said. “Rabbits breed like rabbits. But some of the bigger dinos aren’t sexually mature until they’re thirty years old.”
“And the small ones, the ones that
do
breed quickly enough to build up an immune population,” said Adrienne, the distant expression still in her eyes, “they’re the ones that don’t have enough body weight to depend on for insulation. The ones that have already grown feathers. The birds are the only . . . dinosaurs to survive Secretary Cardway’s safari.”
“Oh, dear,” Professor Wayne repeated. He started backing away from the conversation, oblivious to the final loading operations still going on. “I really must discuss this—” A workman with a cartload of steel framing shouted an angry warning. Wayne stopped, turned, and walked quickly toward a door. The plump man was almost at a run when he disappeared from sight.
A technician called something unintelligible across the volume of the hangar. He reconsidered and spoke into a microphone. The speakers on Vickers’ and Adrienne’s lapels rasped, “Insertion Group? We will be ready for final countdown in ten, repeat, one-zero minutes.”
Vickers keyed his mike. “Acknowledged,” he said. To his wife he added, “I suppose we can board now. It’ll be . . . good to get back, I think.”
“Cardway brought the end of the dinosaurs,” Adrienne said. Even next to her, Vickers could barely hear the words. “If he’d lived, he would have ended . . . human civilization, wouldn’t he? Perhaps not over Avraham’s little plot—”
“It wasn’t his.”
“Whosever. Cardway would have had four, eight years of his own soon with his finger on the button. He—wasn’t going to make it that long without stepping into the deep end, was he?”
“Adrienne, I think we’d better board,” Vickers said. The hangar was growing quieter as the last of the workmen filed out through the doors to the storage bay.
“Henry, I was watching you,” his wife whispered. “I don’t think anyone else could tell, not even Craig. But you weren’t aiming at the tyrannosaur. You had your sights in the middle of Cardway’s back. And you didn’t fire.”
The guide’s face was as calm as a saint’s. He took Adrienne’s left hand in his own, but he was looking toward the loaded intrusion vehicle. “It wasn’t that he slapped me,” Vickers said, as softly as his wife had spoken. “I could have taken that. But it made me think . . . I don’t want to die, not anymore—” He squeezed the tall blonde’s hand, the pressure reassuring to him at a level below consciousness. “I thought for a moment that there were things more important than whether I lived or not, though. And there are. But I couldn’t pull the trigger, not on a man. Even a man like Luther Cardway.”
“You were wrong about your life not being more important,” Adrienne said. She broke into a bright smile and began leading the guide toward the intrusion vehicle. Her left arm crossed her chest to reach him. “The world can take care of itself,” she said. She laughed aloud and added, “As it did, you know. As it did.”
“It didn’t if you were a dinosaur,” Vickers replied bleakly. “And I was responsible for that, not the world.”
His wife sobered. “Henry, no one is responsible for what happens sixty-five million years before he’s born. Not even if he’s there. We
can’t
change the past—whatever the bloody-minded dreamers in the Ministry of Defense may hope. The Cretaceous
now
Topside is exactly the same way it was when Stern and I left here with the dino to go back.”
“Even if I didn’t change it,” said the hunter, “I made it happen!” In his mind, the tyrannosaurus still lay dying, its lungs destroyed by the disease, and the scene was multiplied millions, billions of times across the face of the Earth in ripples spreading from his action.
“All right then,” snapped Adrienne, “but think of
what
you made happen. You made a world that mammals could grow and evolve in. Are you going to be sorry about that? Are you sorry that you’re—that
I’m
not two inches long, snapping up bugs that blunder by in the dark? Because sure as hell that’s what we’d be if something hadn’t wiped out the dinosaurs!”
Vickers looked at his wife. After a moment he squeezed her hand. “No,” he said, “I’m not sorry about that.” Together, they began to walk slowly toward the intrusion vehicle.
TRAVELLERS
Carl had not seen it coming over the eastern horizon toward the farm.
As the trickle under which he had washed died away, Carl slid the bucket beneath the pump. He worked the handle with three smooth, powerful strokes, the creaking of the cast iron evoking squeals from the piglets in the shed. Over his head the sky was clear enough that stars already flecked it, but the west beyond the farmhouse was a purple backdrop of cloud. Carl stretched, sighed, and picked up the bucket his mother would need for the dinner dishes.
A spotlight threw his long shadow on the ground before him. Carl turned, the bucket splashing some of the muck from his boots. The light was round and for an instant as harsh as the Sun. Prismatic changes flickered across the face of it. The beam spread to either side of Carl in a fan that illuminated but no longer blinded him. The light was hanging above the barn. There was a bulk beyond it, solider than the sky: an airship such as Carl had never dreamed he would see.
“Stand by to take a line, lad,” called a male voice. Carl’s knees were trembling and the bucket was forgotten in his hand as the airship drifted upwind toward him. Something aboard made a sound like chains rattling, muted where Carl stood but loud enough to have roused the cows. Their bawling would bring his father out at any moment, a part of Carl’s mind recognized, but nothing in the world of a moment before was real any longer.
The airship crawled directly over Carl. It was huge, blocking most of the hundred feet of sky separating house from barn. Besides the spotlight, now diffusing its radiance across most of the farmyard, there were rectangles of yellower light from the gondola hanging beneath the main hull of the airship. A hatch opened in the side, silhouetting a gangling figure. “Here it comes,” said the figure in the voice that had spoken before. A grapnel on a line thudded to the ground in front of Carl. It began to dig a double furrow in the dust as the airship drifted backwards. “Well, set it, lad—set it!” the voice called. “So that we can land.”
Carl came out of his numb surprise. He dropped the water bucket and ran to the line. It was of horsehair, supple and strong. Someone played it out above as Carl carried the grapnelled end to the pump. He hooked it to the underedge of the concrete well-cap.
As soon as Carl had set the grapnel, the line stiffened. There was another rattle from above and a whine like that of an electric pump. The airship began to settle. Four jointed, mantislike legs were extending from the belly of the gondola. Carl backed toward the house a step at a time while the great form sank into the farmyard. The legs touched, first one and then the four of them together. Their apparent delicacy was belied by the great plumes of dust which the contact raised. The whine rose to a high keening, then shut off entirely. The light died to a glowing ember in the night.
Behind Carl the screen door banged. “Carl,” called Mrs. Gudeint, “where are—oh, dear Lord have mercy! Fred!
Fred!”
The gangling man reappeared at the gondola door. He swung three metal steps down with a crash. The stranger wore a brown tweed suit of coarse weave with a gold watch-guard and a fob of some sort hanging across the vest. He smiled at Carl, crinkling the full moustache that looked so incongruous beneath his high forehead. Looking back into the gondola he said, “Oh—if you will snuff the light, my dear?” A girl appeared in the doorway, turning down the wick of an oil lamp. Carl stared at her as he had at the airship itself. There was a bustle behind him as his father and brothers pushed out of the house with eating utensils still in their hands.
The girl was beautiful even in the dim light. Her hair, caught neatly in a bun, was as richly black as the pelt of a sable. She wore a patterned percale wrapper, simple but new and of an attractive cut.
“Carl, what have you brought here?” Mr. Gudeint rumbled from close to his youngest son’s shoulder.
“Gentlemen,” said the stranger, turning again with the girl beside him and the airship a vast gray backdrop beyond, “I am Professor John K. Erlenwanger, and this is my daughter Molly.” The girl curtsied. Erlenwanger caught sight of Carl’s mother beyond the wall of broad-shouldered men. He made a little bow of his own. “And madam, of course, my apologies.
“Madam and gentlemen,” he continued. “I am, as you see, an aeronaut. My daughter and I are travelling from Boston to California, testing my airship,
The Enterprise
—which, I may say, contains certain advances over all earlier directable designs. We have stopped here for a safe mooring during the night and perhaps some assistance in the morning.”
“You’re from Boston?” demanded Fred, the eldest of Carl’s brothers. “You flew this thing a thousand miles?”
“We have indeed flown a thousand miles,” the Professor said with a quick nod, “and I expect to fly twice again that distance before completing my endeavor. But although we have set out from Boston, I am myself a Californian by birth and breeding.”
“Well, they’ll have dinner with us, surely,” said Carl’s mother, twisting her hands in the pockets of her apron. She looked up anxiously at Erlenwanger. “You will, won’t you? We’ve a roast and—”
The Professor cut her off with another half-bow. “We would be honored, Mrs. . . ?”
“Gudeint,” Carl’s father grunted. He wore a blue work shirt, buttoned at the throat and cuffs as it had been all day despite the heat of the Indian summer Sun. His sons wore sleeveless undershirts or, in Carl’s case, only a set of galluses that had blazed a white cross in his otherwise sunburned back. Mr. Gudeint extended his hand, broad and as hard as the head of a maul from fifty years of farming. “I’m Fred Gudeint and that’s my wife Maxine there—”
“Fred, I’ll take the stoneware off and put out the china and the silver since—”
Carl’s father turned on her, his red forehead furrowed like a field in springtime. “Maxine, you’ll pretend you’ve got the sense God gave a goose and do no such thing. We’ve already started eating from the stoneware!”
Mrs. Gudeint bobbed her head and scurried back into the house with a worried look on her face. Carl’s father shook his head and said, “Your pardon, Professor, but we’re not used to guests dropping out of the sky on us. It upsets the routine.” He grinned perfunctorily, as if that would make his statement less true. “That’s Fred there, my oldest”—Fred, his father’s surrogate in form as well as name, shook hands in turn—“George, Danny, and that’s Carl, the last by six years. Boy, be sure to fill that bucket before you come in.”
“Yes, Father,” Carl said. Professor Erlenwanger’s hand was cool and firm and smooth as a farmer’s hands can never be. As Carl’s father and brothers led the guests into the house, the Professor’s daughter tilted her eyes at Carl and gave him a timid smile. Why, she looks as nervous as I am, Carl thought as he pumped the bucket full again beneath the airship.
Carl entered the house through the side door to leave the bucket beside the sink. His mother had already slipped a third leaf into the table and replaced the checkered oilcloth with her best Irish linen table cover. As Mr. Gudeint had insisted, the stoneware plates still remained with the mashed potatoes and slices of beef with which they had been heaped before the excitement. The two new place settings, to right and left of the head of the table where Carl’s father sat, were of the Sunday china. The delicate cups and saucers looked particularly incongruous beside the heavy mugs at the other places. From the front room came the creak of Grandpa Roseliep’s rocker; nowadays, he always ate before the rest of them.
Carl sat quickly between his mother at the foot of the table and his brother George. He began serving himself. Danny was saying, “I’d read a story about your balloon in the
Register
last week in the barbershop, Professor, but I recall it gave the name as Cox. Sure, Cox.”
Professor Erlenwanger ladled gravy onto his mashed potatoes with a liberal hand. “I can’t say who Mr. Cox may be, sir, but I assure you that he and I are not the same. I have eschewed all publicity for the Erlenwanger Directable Airship—not balloon, I must protest, any more than your Guernsey milkers are steers—eschewed all publicity, as I say, until I have proven the capacity of my invention in a fashion none can doubt. Unless I am fully satisfied, no one will hear a word from my lips about it. Except, of course, for the good people like yourselves who have acted as hosts to my daughter and myself. Madam,” he added, nodding to Mrs. Gudeint, “these fresh peas are magnificent.”
Erlenwanger ate like a man who appreciated his food. His bites were gentlemanly and were chewed with the thoroughness demanded by a roast from a superannuated dairy cow, but he cleaned his plate handily despite the constant stream of questions directed at him by the Gudeints. Carl noticed that Molly spoke rarely and then with a distinct Irish brogue at variance with the Professor’s cultured accents.
Carl said little himself. The Professor’s descriptions—sunlight flaring from cloud tops, tailwinds pressing the airship along faster than a railway magnate’s special—were in themselves so fascinating that Carl was unwilling to interject a question. It might break the spell.
At last Fred, speaking through a mouthful of roast and gesturing with his fork, said, “Look here, Professor. You’re an educated man. What do you think about all this business about Cuba? Isn’t it about time those Dagoes’re taught what they can and can’t do on Uncle Sam’s doorstep?”
Erlenwanger paused, staring across the table. The light reflected from his high forehead. He looked half the bulk of the big farmer, but at that moment, the stranger’s dominance was no less certain than that of a diamond over the metal of its setting. “I think,” he said with neither conciliation nor overt hostility in his firm tones, “that misguided men will fight a foolish war over Cuba very soon. The world as a whole will be none the better for such a war, and many individuals will be very much the worse.” He stared around the table as if daring anyone to disagree with him.
In a sudden rush of bitterness, Carl said, “The Army might be better’n the back end of a plow horse, day in and day out.”
“There are roads to adventure that are not built on the bodies of your fellow men, lad,” Erlenwanger said. He turned back to Fred and added more harshly, “And there are ways of honoring the flag that do not call for ‘civilizing’ native races with a Krag-Jorgensen rifle. It will take men a long time as a race to learn that; but until we have done so, we have done nothing.”
Mr. Gudeint sopped the last of his gravy in a slice of bread, swallowed it, and pushed his chair back from the table. Professor Erlenwanger cleared his throat and said, “You have been so generous to my daughter and myself that I wonder if I might impose on your time for one further moment? You will have noted the cases I brought in with me.” Erlenwanger nodded toward the leather grips now standing against the wall next to the curio cabinet. “They contain my camera equipment. I would be most appreciative if you would permit me to photograph your whole family together.”
“You mean in the daylight, don’t you?” said George, who had his own Kodak. “You can’t take one now?”
“On the contrary, the process I am using is so sensitive that what the eye can see, my lens can record,” the Professor replied. He turned to Mr. Gudeint. “With your leave, sir?”
Carl’s father frowned. “Strikes me that you’re wasting your plates, but then, I never saw a fellow fly before, neither. Sure, we’ll sit for you. How do you want us?”
“In your front room, I believe,” said the Professor, his hands already busy with the contents of one of his cases. “In whatever grouping seems good to you; though with seven subjects to fit into the plate, I trust you’ll group yourselves rather tightly.”
“Seven?” repeated Fred. “There’s only—oh, sure,” he broke off, looking at Grandpa Roseliep in his stuffed rocker.
“You will join us, will you not, sir?” Professor Erlenwanger said, looking up at the old man as he fitted his camera onto its collapsible wooden tripod. Beside him, Molly had removed a plate from the other grip and was carefully polishing dust from its surfaces with a soft cloth.
Roseliep was reading
Der Kanarienzüchter,
one of the three bi-weekly issues that had arrived from Leipzig in yesterday’s mail. From the shelter of the paper he grunted, “What do you want with me? I know nothing about cows, so I am useless—nein? And with these hands, I am surely no cabinetmaker anymore.” The paper shook, perhaps in frustration rather than from a deliberate attempt to emphasize the arthritis-twisted fingers which gripped its edges. “Go on, leave me alone.”
Professor Erlenwanger stood, the brass and cherry-wood of his camera glinting under the light of the dining room lamp. He spoke in German, briefly and fiercely.
Grandpa Roseliep set down his canary-breeders journal. His full, white beard blazed like a flag. The old man fingered the stem of his pipe on the end table, but he left that sitting as well. In deliberate English he said, “An old man is a man still? Wait till you become old, Professor.” The two men stared at one another. Abruptly, Grandpa Roseliep said, “But I will be in your picture, since you ask.”
The old man levered himself out of his chair, stiff-armed. Carl moved to him quickly, holding out an arm for his grandfather to grip. The old man’s shoulder brushed the covered canary cage beside his chair. One of the birds within peeped nervously. Absently, Roseliep soothed it with a murmur from deep in his throat.
Carl’s parents and brothers were standing by the fireplace, looking a little uncomfortable. The Professor had set up his tripod in front of the staircase across the room. Molly stood beside him, holding out the photographic plate. Carl led his grandfather into the center of the group between his father and Fred. He knelt down in front of them, facing the camera as the Professor loaded it.
Granda Roseliep turned slowly. His foot caught on the edge of the fireplace fender. He stumbled, gripping Mr. Gudeint’s arm to keep from falling. The farmer jerked back. He looked down at the knotted fingers with instinctual distaste.
Roseliep followed his son-in-law’s glance. “Yes,” he said, “but once they were strong, were they not? Strong enough to build this house for my daughter on her marriage.” With his left hand he rapped the carven oak mantelpiece. “And the house gives shelter yet.”
