by David Drake
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 den
ying 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.
“We’d best move on,” he said as he climbed aboard O’Neill’s floater.
O’Neill rose through the canopy in a gentle corkscrew. When he was clear of the branches, he unfurled the solar array. Now that the Sun was high, the opaque panels shaded the men in the floater. A glance at the charging indicator showed Vickers that O’Neill had run his batteries uncomfortably close to the end of their power.
O’Neill followed Vickers’ eyes. “I thought we’d make better time with me on the deck,” he said quietly. His words were unlikely to be intelligible through the link’s microphone. “I thought of suggesting that Louise and I change instead of you and Pa Teng. But she’d have been insulted.”
Vickers looked at the younger man with new appreciation.
O’Neill certainly was the better pilot. Under his control, the floater was as steady above the canopy as it had been in the still atmosphere of the forest.
The solar array was stiff when deployed. It acted as an airfoil, catching and multiplying the breezes that twitched across the high treetops. Since the fulcrum on which the floater balanced was beneath the floor, the wind’s torque acted through a long lever. Perhaps Louise had never been in danger of losing control of the floater, but Vickers’ heart had jumped several times when he thought she was.
“What do you think about the . . .” Vickers said, watching the forest. “The dreams.”
O’Neill glanced at him. “I don’t have enough data to think anything,” he said. He didn’t sound hostile so much as extremely careful.
After a few moments of steady flight, Vickers said, “Seems funny that dinosaurs were around for longer than mammals and still didn’t develop intelligence, isn’t it?”
“Fish have been around longer yet,” O’Neill said sharply. “Humans happen to have what we call intelligence, so we put a premium on it. Nature doesn’t. Besides, what’s so intelligent about stripping and poisoning our planet to the point that it may not be able to support any kind of life in the foreseeable future?”
“I was just wondering if the Israelis were sure about everything they brought back in their time machine,” Vickers said. Beneath him, light glinted from a branch covered with bromeliads. The upturned leaves trapped water in hundreds of tiny pools, spangling the normal patterns of green on green.
The flight fell into a rhythm. There was nothing to say, and only the same things to see. Vickers slipped into a familiar reverie, a gray background from which anything abnormal would spring out in brilliant light.
Shouts in Punan and a cry of inarticulate despair snarled through the link’s speaker. The TV image whipped violently as the lower floater swayed.
“Take us down!” Vickers shouted. He slipped the Garand’s charging handle back slightly to check the glint of brass indicating he’d already chambered a round.
O’Neill threw a lever on his control column. The solar array above the men began to fold by creaking stages.
“Forget that!” Vickers said. “Strip ’em off if you have to! If you don’t get us down fast, I’ll take her down myself!”
Pa Teng was hooting, a meaningless, repetitive pulse. Louise shouted to the Punan, raising her voice to be heard over his wail of grief. There was an edge of fear in her tone.
Louise’s floater landed, but Vickers still couldn’t make any sense out of the chaotic image her link camera sent. Broken poles and branches had been tossed in all directions. Some of them were tied to one another.
O’Neill dropped toward the forest floor as ordered. He used his body weight as well as the control yoke to hook the little
vehicle around branches. Because the solar panels were still in the process of folding, their area and aspect changed continuously. For an instant, Vickers thought the floater had overbalanced; then, as O’Neill had planned, the braking effect of the part-furled array caught them and pulled the floater upright.
The smell of death and rotting flesh lay like fog over a low ridge. There had been four shelters in the nomads’ camp, each basically similar to the one Pa Teng built in a few minutes the night before.
Mats woven from bark fiber had softened the pole floors. The cloth was shredded now. The tyrannosaur’s jaws had torn a yard-long ellipsis through the center of one mat. The edges of the gap were bloody. Blood had sprayed twenty feet high on tree trunks. A ring of feasting flies emphasized each spatter with glittering chitin.
The tyrannosaur’s claws had scuffled through the fire at the open end of one shelter, scattering it. Debris and new growth on the forest floor were too damp to burn, but the hot coals had shriveled a wedge of ferns.
There had probably been twenty or so Punans in the camp. Because they were asleep when disaster struck, they’d been unable to flee instantly the way the sounder of hogs had done when it met the tyrannosaur.
Raggedly severed limbs lay all about the encampment. A child’s head and torso were face-down near where O’Neill landed the floater. The dinosaur had swallowed everything below the victim’s waist.
Pa Teng knelt, clinging to the guard rails of Louise’s floater. His face was turned upward. He keened like a distant siren, never stopping to breathe. Louise hugged the Punan and murmured in his ear. Her face was twisted with anguish.
Responsibility which we accepted, she had said to O’Neill, meaning the tyrannosaur. In Louise’s mind, this carnage was her responsibility too.
Vickers stepped off the platform, the Garand cradled in his hands. He scanned the trees, some of them six feet in diameter. You could hide a regiment of tyrannosaurs in this jungle, each monster poised to lunge out behind a jaw full of serrated teeth.