by Greg Bear
"Molting," Shellabarger said. Ray sneezed.
They passed Trinidad early that morning, just after sunrise.
Libertad glided through the broad muddy outfall of the Orinoco River miles from shore. The water took on a brownish color and bits of log and scraps of vegetation drifted past. Anthony and Peter watched from the bow; OBie and Ray and the film crew were setting up some shots for their arrival. Captain Ippolito estimated they would be in the river's broad mouth by fourteen hundred hours: two o'clock in the afternoon.
The rest of the dinosaurs seemed to be doing well enough.
The cage with Sheila's body lay in the hold, covered with canvas. Shellabarger had been on the radio for hours but had not been able to get any offers from museums; none were willing to move five tons of decaying dinosaur so many thousands of miles. Anthony had tried the night before to get the National Geographic Society and the Muir Society to take charge of the ankylosaur, but with so little time to make preparations, and with more important work to do—getting the living dinosaurs up to El Grande—the directors of both organizations decided against mounting any effort.
"The captain says there have been heavy rains on the highlands," Anthony said. "The Orinoco's running deep. The rains will have lifted the Carom, too. We'll have to fight a strong, steady current upriver."
Peter unfolded a pocket map his father had brought along and studied the length of both rivers. The Orinoco was immense, flowing through the middle of Venezuela and cutting it in half; the Carom joined it about one hundred and twenty miles from where the Orinoco met the sea. Peter drew his finger down the Carom, into the brown spaces of the Guiana Highlands.
At noon, Shellabarger came from the bridge, where he had been on the radio to New York, Boston, Chicago, and even Miami. "No one will take her," he murmured, staring gloomily out over the muddy water. "I even called Truj illo's people in the Dominican Republic. He's supposed to be nuts about dinosaurs. But he bought all he wanted back in the thirties, and they're dead now. He's lost interest."
If something was not arranged soon, Ippolito said, it would be best to dump the body at sea before they journeyed up the Orinoco. The captain warned that there would be no place to store the body in San Felix or Puerto Ordaz, and that no one in either town was interested in dead dinosaurs. "They have thirty years' worth of dead dinosaurs to put in their museums—not to mention their town squares, their hotels, and their bars."
The captain climbed down into the hold to check the temperature. He pursed his lips unhappily and said, "We have maybe a day before it bloats and fills the whole cage and we have to dump it overboard, cage and all."
Shellabarger rubbed his grizzled chin. "All right," he said quietly. "We bury her at sea."
The water was calm enough now that rigging a boom presented little problem. The boom swung out over the open hold and heavy cables were attached to three points on the cage's thick bottom bars. Shellabarger and Keller rode the cage up out of the hold, getting off as it drew level with the deck. OBie and Ray used their portable camera to capture it all from the port side.
The boom swung the cage out over the water. Rob Keller had undone the cage door and tied a rope to a winch cable, which drew taught. The cage tilted. Sheila's head, neck, and side spikes continued to hold her in place; the cage tilted forty-five, fifty, sixty degrees.
With a sudden ugly snapping of her spikes, Sheila's body slid ponderously out of the cage and into the ocean. She nosed in with surprising grace and very little spray and sank out of sight.
Peter and Anthony went aft with Ray and OBie to see if the big animal rose to the surface, but she remained hidden in the ocean depths. " Some oil tanker is sure going to get a surprise in a few days," Ray said.
They observed a moment of silence.
As they walked forward, OBie said, "Tony, you used to work with Standard Oil people up north. What are they like down here?"
Anthony shook his head. "Never met any, personally. They're calling their Venezuelan operation Creole Oil. They might be real helpful . . . Or they might not."
From the Libertad's bridge, Anthony and Peter watched their progress into Boca Grande—the broad, muddy mouth of the Orinoco. The captain had sent his first mate down to the bow with a crew of five men to scrutinize the water ahead and take soundings; he guided the ship with nervous glances along both distant banks.
"Big trees float down here sometimes," he told Anthony, who was taking notes and snapping pictures. "Fifteen, twenty meters long. Put big dents in my ship, maybe even break the rudder or jam the screws. Snags, mudbanks, sandbanks, thick river grass . . ." He took off his hat and combed his fingers through his shiny black hair. "I am always nervous in the river."
Little shantytowns lined the banks every few miles, or bigger whitewashed buildings surrounded by shacks. Mostly, however, there was flat mud and wetlands and broad expanses of jungle. Big birds with flame-colored wings filled the skies, landing to fish in the shallows less than fifty yards from the channel the ship was following.
Peter tended the animals with the roustabouts that afternoon while Shellabarger and OBie confirmed advance preparations on the radiotelephone. Peter, Rob Keller, and Keller's second, Arnie Kasem, rolled a side of beef from the ship's cold locker, heaved it over the side into the hold, cut it up, and tossed the pieces into the venator's cage. Peter watched the animal bend over and lift one twenty-pound chunk, fling it back, spraying a drizzle of watery blood, and snatch it out of the air. Dagger gave it several noisy chomps, bones and all, and swallowed it with that now familiar, still hideous sucking noise.
"Good fellow," Keller murmured, and grinned at Peter. The animal's steel and gold eyes followed their movements with cold interest and no gratitude. "Think he'll get even with old Vince before he runs off into the jungle?"
Peter blinked, shocked that the head roustabout would express that thought so boldly.
Keller chuckled. The venator grabbed another chunk and sucked it down. "Just like that," Keller said, turning his hands and forearms into big jaws, clapping his palms just inches from Peter's face. "That'd be fun to watch, hm?"
"He's joking," said Arnie Kasem, at twenty-four the youngest of the roustabouts. Kasem wiped his bloody hands on a filthy rag. "Don't mind him."
Keller swabbed up the bits of fat and blood and squeezed the mop into a bucket.
"No need for that," Peter said. "We're going to hose it all down in an hour."
Keller glared at him and continued swabbing. "Dagger likes a clean cage and a clean floor right after meals," he said. "He won't go after me when the time comes, because I take care of him."
Arnie Kasem followed Peter over to Sammy's cage. They rolled bales of alfalfa and some bundles of Shellabarger's special herbs up to the cage on pushcarts. The centrosaur rubbed the cage noisily with his horn-studded shield.
"Think they'll miss getting regular meals?" Kasem asked. "There's no meal ticket in the wild."
Peter liked Kasem. Strong, soft-spoken, and not very smart, Arnie Kasem had stayed quiet much of the trip, and only now seemed willing to talk with Peter, or anybody but his fellow roustabouts.
Ray came down to watch the feeding of the struthios, sketching the process quickly.
When they were done, Keller climbed up the ladder with most of the roustabouts, but Kasem and Ray stayed with Peter in the shadowy hold. They sat on a crate and listened to the sounds of the animals echoing in the dark spaces. Sammy's stomach made great liquid glurps as he digested his alfalfa.
"We're privileged," Ray said.
Kasem chuckled. "Listening to dinosaurs burp isn't much of a privilege."
"This is my first big adventure," Ray confided. "I've spent most of my life in California trying to get work in movies, making unreal things look real. I wasn't sure about all this at first, but now I feel privileged . . . just to be here."
"Oh," Kasem said. He rubbed his nose. "Yeah."
The venator chuffed behind the bars of his covered cage, and Kasem gave Peter an
odd, scared look, as if he had just seen a ghost.
Chapter Eight
Despite the captain's misgivings, the river was broad and deep enough to take them easily into Puerto Ordaz. There, the Libertad pulled alongside an old, half rotten wooden dock, beside a single rusted tanker that looked as if it had been there for twenty years. Pilings for a new series of piers were being pounded into the river bottom a hundred yards south of where they tied up, and stacks of fresh lumber lay in dirt yards waiting to be erected into warehouses.
On the bridge, Anthony said, "Oil's coming out of every port now, I guess."
"This is just a trickle compared to the gulf," Ippolito said. "But there are railways across the river at Palua, and towns going up all over where the rivers mingle. Soon there will be iron—there is much iron west of here—and even aluminum."
OBie smiled. "Think the tourists will ever come back to see dinosaurs?"
"Puerto Ordaz was the gateway to El Grande for years," Ippolito said. "I think the visitors will prefer iron and aluminum. And maybe gold and diamonds, too."
Shellabarger came onto the bridge, the skin under his eyes dark with lack of sleep. He had lost weight in the last couple of days.
"I've been in the radio shack," Shellabarger said. "The Venezuelan Army's up in arms about some of Monte Schoedsack's advance people going to Pico Poco, they say without the necessary permits. The Army colonel in charge of the area around El Grande says he'll shoot any more trespassers. We got the permits from Caracas, though—Coop confirmed that in Washington." He shook his head in dismay. "God save me from little tyrants."
A jeep and two dark green trucks roared out onto the dock and parked. Five soldiers in shiny black helmets emerged from the jeep and the rear of one truck. They slung their rifles and stood in a line along the dock.
"We must be very polite here," Ippolito warned in a low voice. "The Betancourt junta is fragmenting. The Gallegos government is having a dispute with the Army and it does not look good. I think where you will be going, the Army will be in charge and will not listen to Caracas."
OBie's face suddenly brightened. "Well, if it's going to be a war, I know we'll have company," he said.
"Who?" Shellabarger asked, glaring at him.
"Monte and Coop will come south just to get in the thick of a good fight," OBie said.
"So who's the good guy and who's the bad guy?" Ray asked.
"Around here," Anthony said, "the Army's mostly bad."
Ippolito frowned. "I have warned you, senors. You have been reading too many Norte americanos newspapers."
The air of Puerto Ordaz was thick with the smell of petroleum. A long rainbow slick flowed north from the docks, dappled by big drops of rain. A few miles away, a bright torch blazed in the late afternoon sky like a candle planted on the jungle's endless green tablecloth: natural gas burning off from a wellhead. Rain fell in curtains from thick black clouds within the hour, and still the torch burned, lighting up the bottoms of the clouds with a ghastly yellow-orange glow.
Ippolito was in great haste to unload the animals and head downriver to the sea. He did not trust the river in the rainy season and did not want to be associated with Norteamericanos who were arguing with the Army.
Shellabarger was just as eager to get his beasts out of the hold. First, however, he wanted to go into town and make sure the boats that would take the animals to the rail station at San Pedro de las Bocas had been built and were ready.
Anthony, Peter, and Ray accompanied him. Keller and OBie stayed behind to make sure the animals weren't unceremoniously dumped on the docks. As they walked down the dock, the soldiers in shiny black helmets stared at them impassively. Nobody said a word.
Puerto Ordaz had indeed been the gateway to El Grande. Once, it had grown to ten thousand people, serving the hunters and scientists and hardy tourists who traveled up the Carom to the foot of Pico Poco. Indians had come from all over the Orinoco and Amazon basin, from as far west as Peru, looking for work, mingling their tribal cultures and languages, and forming new political coalitions.
After dictator Juan Vicente Gomez had succumbed to pressure from the United States and closed El Grande, Puerto Ordaz had withered. The Indian coalitions had disintegrated. Dozens of wood and whitewashed plastered brick buildings still stood empty along the muddy streets, many crumpled under the onslaught of ants and termites.
Away from the main streets, shantytowns were taking on new life, however, as oil workers and miners moved in. Many gold and diamond fortune hunters kept their families in Puerto Ordaz, and a few of the businesses along the main street bustled, their feeble yellow electric lights gleaming in the gray twilight and the frequent swirling brooms of warm rain.
In the town square, weathered dinosaur skeletons decorated an overgrown park. Benches had been made out of huge sauropod ribs, and Shellabarger led them past an outdoor bullring that had once seen the slaughter of dozens of animals like Sammy. The ring's ticket booth and round entrance was now barred by a half circle of the forbidding skulls of the ceratopsians that had died there. Their lower jaws had been removed, and their shields lay flat in the dirt, horns pointed outward, as if still defending the young and the females.
Ray stood by the skulls for a moment, chin in hand, lost in thought. "Did you ever see a dinosaur fight here?" he asked Shellabarger.
"Yes, to my shame," Shellabarger said.
Shellabarger walked them to a boatyard on the other side of the town. There, in the humid darkness, they met with a short, fat man in a yellow rain slicker. He smiled and assured Shellabarger that the big flat-bottom boats were ready.
"They are very tough, very sturdy," he said in Spanish. On the ship, Peter had picked up enough Spanish to understand most of what was said. "Yet just the right size to be loaded on train cars at San Pedro de las Bocas. I have followed the specifications of senors Grosvenor and Schoedsack . . . through their agent, Senor Wetherford."
Wetherford, they had learned, was waiting for them at San Pedro de las Bocas. It was Wetherford who had had the run-in with the Army, after scouting the trails and working with President Gallegos's engineers on Pico Poco.
"Show the boats to me," Shellabarger said. The owner waddled into his office and came back with diagrams, which he happily unrolled in the drizzle. Small drops of rain speckled the paper.
"The boats themselves, I mean," Shellabarger said.
The man's face fell. "It is dark, senor," he murmured.
"I want to see them now," Shellabarger said.
The man grudgingly brought a kerosene lantern from his brightly lighted shack and led them through the mud to the water's edge. There, in five big hangar-like sheds, the river boats sat on broad chocks, deserted by the craftsmen for the day, surrounded by scraps of lumber and piles of shavings and tables covered with tools.
Three scruffy, skinny dogs whined around their legs and the fat man shooed them away gently with his foot. He whispered affectionately to the thin animals while Shellabarger circled the boats, then took a workman's ladder and climbed up into one.
Shellabarger took the lantern and walked from stem to stern. The boats were each about forty feet long, fifteen feet wide across the beam, with flat bottoms and blunt prows and squared-off sterns. A single cubical cabin perched aft like a guardhouse.
"We do very good work," the boatyard owner said. "We work for Creole Oil and the U.S. Steel. The motors, they are new, they arrived a week ago, and have just been mounted from their crates. Big, fine diesel engines, very expensive!"
Shellabarger climbed down, handed the man his lantern, and said, "We'll need them launched and down by the Libertad tomorrow morning. Captain Ippolito's anxious to be on his way."
"Si, perfecto, senor! At dawn, I will begin."
As they walked back to the docks, Shellabarger pulled a pistol from his pocket and showed it to Anthony and Ray. "You were a soldier," he said to Anthony. "You ever use one of these?"
Anthony looked over the glittering long-barreled gun with a b
lank expression. Peter knew his father did not like guns. "No," he said. "I used an M-1."
"Gold and diamonds attract all sorts of freaks, and the Carom up to the railhead is thick with them. When we go upriver, there could be riffraff who'll shoot us just for fun. And there's always the Army, of course." He glanced around, shadows from a tavern's blinking sign swinging across his gaunt face. "This is a sad place now. You teach your son how to shoot?"
"No," Anthony said, jaw clenching. "I had enough shooting to last me a lifetime."
Peter glanced between them, then looked at Ray. Ray gave a little shrug.
"You ever fire a gun?" Shellabarger asked the cameraman.
"Just blanks," Ray said.
Shellabarger shook his head sadly. "I've not had to shoot a man in twenty years."
The next morning came an unexpected delay. More soldiers arrived in two more trucks, and a small, wiry, very dignified officer asked to inspect the animals on the Libertad. Peter was in town with OBie and Ray, trying to buy some wooden boards for laying between the cages, and when they returned, only a truck and four soldiers remained. Shellabarger was livid.
"I have never had to deal with such arrogant sons of bitches in my entire life," Shellabarger said. "They're forcing us to keep the animals on the ship another day while they get word back from Caracas. They ignored our permits and paperwork."
The day passed slowly, and by late afternoon, still without word from the officer in charge, Shellabarger was fit to be tied. He stormed back and forth on the deck. Ippolito watched him stoically, arms folded, nodding now and then whether or not the trainer said anything.
The presence of the soldiers seemed to have aroused dark and unpleasant memories in Anthony. He sat in their cabin on his bunk, arms wrapped around one drawn-up knee, smoking a cigarette he had borrowed from Shellabarger. The air in the cabin was hot and close and the smoke did not make things any better. Anthony rarely smoked. "If we get stopped here and they send us back, it's all over," he said. "We'll lose everything." He looked at Peter, face drawn, white lines around his lips. "Your ma will have me pegged exactly right."