Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (6 page)

Pa Teng took a disposable butane lighter from a belt pouch and applied it to his fireset. A smoky flame sprang up immediately.

Louise and O’Neill hung condensing cloths from nearby saplings before they unpacked other materials from the knapsacks. The cloths, one-meter squares of thick fabric, absorbed water vapor and wicked it into the clear plastic collecting bottle hanging from the center of each piece. In the forest’s saturated atmosphere, the bottles began to fill at once.

“Anything I can do?” Vickers asked. Insects crawled into the corners of his mouth. He ignored them, merely blinking to brush away the mites that settled in his eyes. He wasn’t wearing insect repellent. Not only did the long-chain molecules alert wildlife more quickly than a human’s normal scent, they degraded Vickers’ own sense of smell.

Besides, repellents didn’t work very well. Better to accept the bites and prickles as a cost of doing the business he chose to do.

“Just relax, Henry,” Louise said. She and O’Neill looked gray with fatigue also. They probably hadn’t gotten much sleep since the tyrannosaur escaped either.

Pa Teng had a haunch of the pig on a spit over his smoky fire. The bristles singed off with a stench worse than that of carrion. While his meat cooked, the Punan lopped bamboo for a shelter. His movements were casual but assured.

Vickers squatted down with his back to a tree, leaning the rifle against the trunk beside him. He closed his eyes to prevent gnats from crawling into them.

He didn’t realize he’d gone to sleep until he heard Tom O’Neill’s voice saying softly, “Should we wake him?”

“No need,” Vickers murmured. Tropic sunset had fallen like a knife-switch darkening the sky.

It was raining. He heard the patter of drops infinitely multiplied, spattering from leaf to leaf to lower leaf. Nothing seemed to reach the forest floor except a haze scarcely noticeable in the saturated humidity.

Pa Teng had finished the shelter. It had a floor of saplings and, for a roof, a slanting frame of poles covered with a triple layer of broad leaves. Smoke from the fire filled the covered wedge. The gray cloud might inhibit mosquitoes, but the cure struck Vickers as little better than the problem.

“We have stew,” Louise said, indicating a container at the edge of the fire. “Freeze-dried and reconstituted, of course.”

Strips of pork quivered on a dozen slight wands over the fire, drying in the smoke. Vickers wasn’t sure whether the meat could be said to be cooking in the normal sense of the word.

He got up. His legs were stiff, but he’d expected that and paused before he took a step.

“Ah . . .” Louise added. “Tom and I are vegetarians . . .”

“The stew has all the proteins required for healthy life,” O’Neill said. His tone was sharper at the beginning of the statement than it was by the time he’d completed it.

“Sounds good,” Vickers said. “But if you don’t mind, I’ll have some of Pa Teng’s meat, too. Seeing that it’s already dead.”

The Punan lay at the far end of the shelter. He was curled up and asleep, his head pillowed on his right arm.

“Of course not,” Louise said as she ladled up a mug of stew for Vickers. “We’ve eaten. I wanted to let you rest.”

Before he took the stew, Vickers removed the Garand’s magazine. He checked the rifle’s bore against firelight refleeting from the bolt face. The others watched him in surprise.

He set the rifle down in the shelter. “A thirty-caliber hole seems pretty small,” Vickers said, “but there are wasps that think it’s just the best place in the world to build a mud nest. I’ve seen what happens if a gun’s fired that way, and I don’t care to have it happen to me.”

The stew was good and the pork remarkably good, though Vickers couldn’t imagine why. The meat was unsalted, seasoned only by the tang of the smoke. He supposed he was glad to be back in the field on a real hunt.

“Do you suppose . . .” he said carefully. “The people with the time machine, the Israelis, let’s say. Do you suppose they might need an experienced hunter on their project?”

O’Neill had been staring pensively at the fire. He turned and in a voice of cold anger said, “You and your sort destroyed the wildlife of East Africa. Now you want to go back in time and denude the past too!”

“Tom,” Louise said, leaning forward so that her head and torso blocked the men’s view of one another.

“No, it’s all right,” Vickers said. He frowned with the effort of choosing the right words, choosing them for himself rather than out of concern for what O’Neill might think.

Louise leaned back on her arms again.

“What I’d like,” Vickers continued, “is to do the only work that I’m really good at. And you’re right, there isn’t a future for that in Africa, for a lot of reasons.”

“When we’re done with this business, I’ll talk to some people, Henry,” Louise said. Her mouth bent in a wry smile. “Of course, the way this turns out may determine whether they’ll be willing to talk to me.”

Borneo Scheme stores provided Mylar air mattresses that folded to the size of a cigarette pack but smoothed the irregularities of the shelter’s sapling floor. The conditions weren’t uncomfortable for someone used to being outdoors, but Vickers slept badly nonetheless now that the nap had taken the edge off his fatigue.

He wasn’t used to the humid atmosphere or the sounds of the rain forest. Branches creaking, the rain continuing to patter down from the canopy after the clouds had passed. Birds, frogs, monkeys and deep booming notes which Vickers guessed might be forest nomads like Pa Teng communicating by striking hollow logs to create the low-frequency sounds that carried farthest through the night.

Vickers dreamed. Three humanoid figures stared at him from a rosy glow. Their faces were triangular, and they had no clothing, body hair, or external genitalia. “What do you want?” the dreaming Vickers called.

“What?” said O’Neill. It was dawn. Clear light ignited the ground fog. The fire had gone out.

The alien figures had vanished. Everything else was as it had been a moment before in Vickers’ waking dream.

“I think we can follow the tyrannosaurus from the floaters,” Vickers said. “Especially if it keeps running a straight course. And I think we’d better, because it’s travelling as fast as we can—Pa Teng can—on foot.”

O’Neill looked up from his breakfast coffee. “It’s trying to get as far away as possible from the cage we held it in.”

Louise frowned. “There’s nothing familiar to it here,” she said. “It’s not running
away,
it’s trying to find the sort of habitat from which it was taken.”

“Look, it doesn’t matter what it’s doing,” Vickers said. “All that matters is that we catch up with it. Will Pa Teng ride in the floaters? Because if he won’t, I’m pretty sure I can follow the trail this thing leaves.”

The Punan was gorging on chunks of pig. He’d eaten pounds of meat the previous night and was well on the way to equaling his performance for breakfast. Vickers was reminded of the way lions bolted significant fractions of their body weight whenever meat was available. Natural patterns of behavior weren’t necessarily attractive.

“Yes,” said Louise. “Yes, he’s ridden with us for amusement before.”

O’Neill nodded agreement. “I wouldn’t take him above the canopy, though,” he said. “Forest people are uncomfortable in direct sunlight—even the occasional jungle clearing. If Pa Teng reacted badly, he could overbalance the floater.”

He spoke to Pa Teng. The nomad replied with hog grease dripping down his chin as he continued to chew a fist-sized chunk of meat. He didn’t seem perturbed or even terribly interested in what O’Neill was telling him.

Louise stood up. “I’ll take the high shift first,” she said. “And Henry’s right, the tyrannosaur isn’t wasting any time. So we’d better not either.”

The four of them moved together to the floaters. Pa Teng paused to stretch his arms. He let out a belch of happy repletion.

The canopy unrolled beneath Vickers with the varied sameness of a piece of carpeting. Individually each treetop differed from its neighbors. In the larger sense, the pattern was a single, seamless whole.

He kept his eyes lowered, on the jungle. They were heading east; the glare of the rising tropic Sun was punishing if he glanced up. He shouldn’t have made the gesture with his hat.

Vickers switched off the link between the floaters. “Could O’Neill have let the tyrannosaurus out?” he asked bluntly.

“Yes,” Louise said, “but he wouldn’t have. There is no possibility that he would have.”

“A lightning bolt didn’t neatly unlock the gates, Louise,” Vickers pressed. “Even if it had, it wouldn’t have slid the crossbars open.
Somebody
let the beast out, and I don’t believe your native staff could have managed the electronic locks even if they had the desire.”

A monkey leaped between treetops just below the floater. The beast’s arms were spread wide, its tail canted slightly. It caught a branch and vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. The monkey was the first forest mammal Vickers had seen in the forest since the hog that Pa Teng shot.

“I know how it looks,” Louise said. “Tom or me. I don’t buy his notion of Indonesian saboteurs any more than you do. But I’d as soon believe that
I
let the tyrannosaur out—and I didn’t.”

She looked at Vickers. The floater quivered, reminding Vickers that it was balanced on a ball of static electricity. The bobble made him nervous, though he didn’t comment.

“He’s an honorable man, Henry,” Louise said. “He might have resigned because of his opposition to animal research. I can even
imagine
that he might have freed the tyrannosaur. But if he did, he would have told me immediately what he’d done. He wouldn’t have just left the cage empty for me to find.”

Vickers didn’t reply. Part of him wanted to sneer at the woman for denying on the basis of gut instinct what
had
to be true. The trouble was, Vickers trusted Louise’s instincts also.

“I . . .” he said toward the forest roof. A tree in brilliant red flower trembled with glittering motion. Sunlight was being reflected from the wings of nectar-drinking birds and insects which spread pollen as their payment. To give himself a moment to frame his next words, Vickers turned the television link on again. “Louise,” he said, “have you ever seen . . . men, I guess you’d call them, with faces like—” He sketched a triangle in the air with both hands, up from the chin and then across the flat top.

The floater wobbled violently. Louise refocused her attention on her flying. “Where did you see them?” she demanded in a tight voice.

“In a dream last night,” Vickers said. “This morning. What do you know about them?”

He stared at the tip of the woman’s right ear, poking out through her short hair. Her refusal to meet his eyes came from more than concern over controlling the floater.

“I’ve been dreaming about them, too,” she said. “For three nights. Since I came to Site IV and found the tyrannosaur missing.”

“Vickers?” O’Neill’s voice demanded through the module’s speaker. The sound shocked Vickers. The Scheme personnel were so used to operating alone that this was the first time they’d communicated through the link since they checked it. “Do you mean faces like wedges, very sharp chins?”

“That’s right,” Vickers said. “I—don’t think they’re human. If they’re real.”

“If we’ve all three been dreaming about them, they’re real
something,”
O’Neill said with a logic Vickers couldn’t challenge. “Their skin seems to be scaly.” He paused, then added, “I don’t see how this could have anything to do with the Javans, though.”

“Nor do I,” Louise said. Her voice held a touch of the mocking humor Vickers had heard before when O’Neill said something
young.
O’Neill was smart and able, but he had a tendency to get focused on the
answer. Experience would cure the problem, assuming he lived long enough.

The camera on the floater O’Neill piloted had been brushing through the pale, broad leaves of new growth. The shoots would die in a week or two unless chance brought down one of the giants shading them. The tyrannosaur’s clawed feet had punched as neatly as stencil-cutters into the loam.

Louise spoke in Punan. The transmitted image bobbed and swayed violently. O’Neill shouted in Punan also. The image steadied; Pa Teng spoke, his voice jaggedly animated.

“I’m sorry, Tom,” Louise said. “I should have realized that he’d jump if my voice addressed him out of the air.”

She glanced at Vickers with a faint grin. “He says those are the ghosts. That doesn’t frighten him. The surprise of my voice did.”

Vickers nodded, showing that he heard, though God knew he didn’t understand. Anything.

After a moment’s thought, he charged the Garand again. Sometimes a fraction of a second could be more important than an increased risk of accident.

# # #

After two hours of maneuvering through the forest at a rapid pace, O’Neill called Louise down. Vickers traded places with a nonchalant Pa Teng beside a steep-banked stream. The water six feet below was so clear that Vickers thought the gully was dry until he noticed the refraction of ripples downstream of each leaf and branch, standing waves in a fluid medium.

The tyrannosaur had crossed the stream at an angle, tearing a ramp in the bank. Such exhibitions of strength were becoming familiar by repetition. O’Neill stepped off the floater to loosen up with a few toe-touching exercises.

“It’s still moving in a straight line,” he observed.

“It’s moving in a different straight line,” Vickers said.

The Scheme officials looked at him in question. Vickers raised the lensatic compass from his side pocket, then let it drop back. A lanyard attached the instrument to a D-ring on his shirt. “From the cage to where it slept the first night,” he said, “the tyrannosaurus traveled an 83-degree vector, close enough. Since then it’s been moving at one-oh-two. Just as straight. Is there anything on this line?”

“Rain forest,” O’Neill said with a puzzled shrug. “There’s nothing else within fifty miles of here in
any
direction.”

Vickers looked upward. The treetops fitted like jigsaw pieces, irregular but never overlapping. Ragged lines of white sky separated each giant from its neighbors.