by David Drake
Salmes grunted. His hands were tight on his beautifully finished rifle. He had refused Dieter’s offer of the less-bruising camp gun with a scorn that was no less grating for being what all the staff had expected.
Washman dropped them vertically instead of falling in a less wrenching spiral. He flared the blades with a gentle hand, however, feathering the platform’s descent into a hover without jarring the gunners. They were less than thirty feet in the air. Pterosaurs, more sensitive to moving air than the earthbound scavengers, squealed and hunched their wings. The ones on the ground could not take off because the downdraft anchored them. The pilot watched carefully the few still circling above them.
“He’s—” Vickers began, and with his word the tyrannosaur strode into the sunlight. Its bellow was intended to chase away the shooting platform. The machine trembled as the sound induced sympathetic vibrations in its rotor blades. Coelurosaurs scattered. The cries of the pterosaurs turned to blind panic as the downdraft continued to frustrate their attempts to rise. The huge predator took another step forward. Salmes raised his rifle. The guide cursed under his breath but did not attempt to stop him.
At that, it should have been an easy shot. The tyrannosaur was within thirty feet of the platform and less than ten feet below them. All it required was that Salmes aim past the large head as it swung to counterweight a stride and rake down through the thorax. Perhaps the angle caused him to shoot high, perhaps he flinched. Vickers, watching the carnosaur over his own sights, heard the big rifle crash. The tyrannosaur strode forward untouched, halving the distance between it and the platform.
“Take us up!” the guide shouted. If it had not been a rare trophy, he might have fired himself and announced that he had “put in a bullet to finish the beast.” There were three other gunners who wanted a tyrannosaur, though; if Salmes took this one back, it would be after he had shot it or everyone else had an equal prize.
Salmes was livid. He gripped the bolt handle, but he had not extracted the empty case. “Goddamn you!” he screamed. “You made it wobble to throw me off! You son of a bitch, you robbed me!”
“Mr. Salmes—” Vickers said. The tyrannosaur was now astride the body of its prey, cocking its head to see the shooting platform fifty feet above it.
“By God, you want another chance?” Washman demanded in a loud voice. The platform plunged down at a steep angle. The floor grating blurred the sight of the carnosaur’s mottled hide. Its upturned eye gleamed like a strobe-lit ruby.
“Jesus Christ!” Vickers shouted. “Take us the hell up, Washman!”
The platform steadied, pillow soft, with its floor fifteen feet from the ground and less than twenty from the tyrannosaur. Standing on the sauropod’s corpse, the great predator was eye to eye with Vickers and his client. The beast bellowed again as it lunged. The impulse of its clawed left leg rolled the sauropod’s torso.
Salmes screamed and threw his rifle to the grating. The guide leveled his Garand. He was no longer cursing Washman. All of his being was focused on what would be his last shot if he missed it. Before he could fire, however, the shooting platform slewed sideways. Then they were out of the path of the charging dinosaur and beginning to circle with a safe thirty feet of altitude. Below them, the tyrannosaur clawed dirt as it tried to follow.
Salmes was crying uncontrollably.
“Ah, want me to hold it here for a shot?” Washman asked nervously.
“We’ll go on back to the camp, Don,” the guide said. “We’ll talk there, all right?”
“Whatever you say.”
Halfway back, Vickers remembered he had not dropped another marker to replace the one that was malfunctioning. God knew, that was the least of his problems.
“You know,” Brewer said as he forked torosaur steaks onto the platter, “it tastes more like buffalo than beef, but if we could get some breeding stock back, I’d by God find a market for it!”
Everyone seemed to be concentrating on their meat—good, if pale and lean in comparison with feedlot steer. “Ah,” Vickers said, keeping his voice nonchalant. He looked down at the table instead of the people sitting around it. “Ah, Dieter and I were talking . . . We’ll bunk outside tonight. The, ah, the rest of that pack of dromaeosaurs chased some duckbills through the camp this morning, Steve thinks. So just for safety’s sake, we’ll both be out of the tent . . . So, ah, Mrs. Salmes—”
Everyone froze. Jonathan Salmes was turning red. His wife had a forkful of steak poised halfway to her mouth and her eyebrows were rising. The guide swallowed, his eyes still fixed on his plate, and plowed on. “That is, you can have your own tent, ah, to sleep in.”
“Thank you,” Adrienne Salmes said coolly, “but I’m quite satisfied with the present arrangements.”
Dieter had refused to become involved in this, saying that interfering in the domestic affairs of the Salmeses was useless at best. Vickers was sweating now, wishing that there was something to shoot instead of nine pairs of human eyes fixed on him. “Ah,” he repeated, “Mrs. Salmes—”
“Mr. Vickers,” she overrode him, “who I choose to sleep with—in any sense of the term—is none of your business. Anyone’s business,” she added with a sharp glance across the table at her husband.
Jonathan Salmes stood up, spilling his coffee cup. His hand closed on his fork; each of the four staff members made unobtrusive preparations. Cursing, Salmes flung the fork down and stalked back to his tent.
The others eased. Vickers muttered, “Christ.”
Then, “Sorry, Dieter, I . . .”
The thing that bothered him most about the whole incident was that he was unsure whether he would have said anything at all had it been Miss McPherson in Don’s bed instead of someone he himself found attractive. Christ . . .
“Mr. Vickers?” Adrienne Salmes said in a mild voice.
“Umm?” His steak had gotten cold. With Brewer cutting and broiling the meat, the insertion group was eating better than Vickers could ever remember.
“I believe Mr. Brady is scheduled to take me up in the platform tomorrow?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Vickers agreed, chewing very slowly.
“I doubt my—husband—will be going out again tomorrow,” the blonde woman continued with a nod toward his tent. “Under the circumstances, I think it might be better if Mr. Brady were left behind here at the camp. Instead of Don.”
“Steve?” Dieter asked.
Brady shrugged. “Sure, I don’t need the flying time. But say—I’m not going to finish ditching around the tents by myself. I’ve got blisters from today.”
“All right,” said Dieter. “Henry, you and Don—” no one was looking directly at Washman, who was blushing in embarrassment he had damned well brought on himself—“will take Mrs. Salmes up after the tyrannosaur tomorrow.” Vickers and Brady both nodded. “The rest of us will wait here to see if the duckbills come through again as they have become accustomed. Steve, I will help you dig. And if the duckbills have become coy, we will ride down the river margin a little later in the morning and find them. Perhaps Mr. Salmes will feel like going with us by then.”
Thank God for Dieter, Vickers thought as he munched another bite of his steak. He could always be counted on to turn an impossible social situation into a smoothly functioning one. There would be no trouble tomorrow after all.
The bulging heads of three torosaurs lay between the gun tower and the fire. There the flames and the guard’s presence would keep away the small mammals that foraged in the night. As Miss McPherson followed her brother to their tent, she paused and fingered one of the brow horns of the largest trophy. The tip of the horn was on a level with the dentist’s eyes, even though the skull lay on the ground. “They’re so huge, so . . . powerful,” she said. “And for them to fall when you shoot at them, so many of them falling and running . . . I could never understand men who, well, who shot animals. But with so many of them everywhere—it’s as if you were throwing rocks at the windows of an abandoned house, isn’t it? It
doesn’t seem to hurt anything, and it’s . . . an attractive feeling.”
“Mary!” objected her brother, shadowed by the great heads.
“Oh, I don’t mean I’m sorry that I didn’t bring a gun,” continued Mary McPherson calmly, her fingers continuing to stroke the smooth black horn. “No, I’m glad I didn’t. Because if I had had a gun available this morning, I’m quite sure I would have used it. And after we return, I suppose I would regret that. I suppose.” She walked off toward the tent. The rhythms of her low-voiced argument with her brother could be heard until the flaps were zipped.
“Dieter tells me they bagged sixteen torosaurs today,” Vickers said. “Even though the intrusion vehicle hasn’t room for more than one per client.” Only Washman, who had the watch, and Adrienne Salmes were still at the campfire with him.
“I bagged one,” the woman said with an emphatic flick of her cigar. “Jack Brewer shot five and I sincerely hope that idiot Mears hit no more than ten, because that’s all Dieter and I managed to finish off for him.” She had unpinned her hair as soon as she came in from the field. In the firelight, it rolled across her shoulders like molten amber.
“Dieter said that too,” Vickers agreed. He stood, feeling older than usual. “That’s why I said ‘they.’” He turned and began to walk back to the tent where Dieter was already asleep. There had been no point in going through with the charade of sleeping under the stars—overcast, actually—since the dromaeosaurs were daylight predators. They were as unlikely to appear in the camp after dark as the Pope was to speak at a KKK rally.
To the guide’s surprise—and to Don Washman’s—Adrienne rustled to her feet and followed. “Mr. Vickers,” she said, “might I speak to you for a moment, please?”
Vickers looked at her. As the staff members did, and unlike the other clients, the blonde woman carried her weapon with her at all times. “All right,” he said. They walked by instinct to the shooting platform, standing thirty feet away at the end of the arc of tents. The torosaur heads were monstrous silhouettes against the fire’s orange glow. “Would it bother you as much if I were a man?” she asked bluntly.
“Anything that makes my job harder bothers me,” Vickers said in half-truth. “You and Don are making my job harder. That’s all.”
Adrienne stubbed out her small cigar on the platform’s rail. She scattered the remnants of the tobacco on the rocky soil. “Balls,” she said distinctly. “Mr. Vickers—Henry, for Christ’s sake—my husband was going to be impossible no matter what. He’s here because I was going on a time safari and he was afraid to look less of a man than his wife was. Which he is. But he was going to be terrified of his rifle, he was going to pack his trunk with Scotch, and he was going to be a complete prick because that’s the way he is.”
“Mrs. Salmes—”
“Adrienne, and let me finish. I didn’t marry Jonathan for his money—my family has just as much as his does. I won’t claim it was a love match, but we . . . we seemed to make a good pair. A matched set, if you will. He won’t divorce me”—her dimly glimpsed index finger forestalled another attempt by the guide to break in—“because he correctly believes I’d tell the judge and the world that he couldn’t get it up on our wedding night. Among other things. I haven’t divorced him because I’ve never felt a need to. There are times that it’s been marvelously useful to point out that ‘I do after all have a husband, dearest . . .’”
“This is none of my business, Mrs. Salmes—”
“Adrienne!”
“Adrienne, dammit!” Vickers burst out. “It’s none of my business, but I’m going to say it anyway. You don’t have anything to prove. That’s fine, we all should be that way. But most of my clients have a lot to prove, to themselves and to the world. Or they wouldn’t be down here in the Cretaceous. It makes them dangerous, because they’re out of normal society and they may not be the men they hoped they were after all. And your husband is very goddamned dangerous, Adrienne. Take my word for it.”
“Well, it’s not my fault,” the woman said.
“Fault?” the guide snapped. “Fault? Is it a pusher’s fault that kids OD on skag? You’re goddamn right it’s your fault! It’s the fault of everybody involved who doesn’t make it better, and you’re sure not making it better. Look, you wouldn’t treat a gun that way—and your husband is a human being!”
Adrienne frowned in surprise. There was none of the anger Vickers had expected in her voice when she said, “So are you, Henry. You shouldn’t try so hard to hide the fact.”
Abruptly, the guide strode toward his tent. Adrienne Salmes watched him go. She took out another cigar, paused, and walked carefully back to the fire where Washman waited with the alarm panel. The pilot looked up with concern. Adrienne sat beside him and shook her hair loose. “Here you go, Don sweetest,” she said, extending her cigar. “Why don’t you light it for me? It’s one of the things you do so well.”
Washman kissed her. She returned it, tonguing his lips; but when his hand moved to the zipper of her coveralls, she forced it away. “That’s enough until you go off guard duty, dearest,” she said. She giggled. “Well—almost enough.”
Jonathan Salmes hunched in the shadow of the nearest torosaur head. He listened, pressing his fists to his temples. After several more minutes, he moved in a half-crouch to the shooting platform. In his pocket was a six-inch wooden peg, smooth and close-grained. It was whittled from a root he had worried from the ground with his fingers. Stepping carefully so that his boots did not scrunch on the metal rungs, Salmes mounted the ladder to the pilot’s seat. He paused there, his khaki coveralls strained, white face reflecting the flames. The couple near the fire did not look up. The pilot was murmuring something, but his voice was pitched too low to hear . . . and the words might have been unintelligible anyway, given the circumstances.
Jonathan Salmes shuddered also. He moved with a slick grace that belied the terror and disgust frozen on his face. He slipped the dense peg from his pocket. Stretching his right arm out full length while he gripped the rotor shaft left-handed, Salmes forced the peg down between two of the angled blades of the stator. When he was finished, he scrambled back down the ladder. He did not look at his wife and the pilot again, but his ears could not escape Adrienne’s contented giggle.
“Hank, she just isn’t handling right this morning,” Don Washman said. “I’m going to have to blow the fuel lines out when we get back. Must’ve gotten some trash in the fuel transferring from the bladder to the cans to the tank. Wish to hell we could fuel the bird directly, but I’m damned if I’m going to set down on the intrusion vehicle where it’s sitting now.”
Vickers glanced down at the treetops and scowled. “Do you think we ought to abort?” he asked. He had not noticed any difference in the flight to that point. Now he imagined they were moving slower and nearer the ground than was usual, and both the rush of air and the muted turbine whine took on sinister notes.
“Oh . . .” the pilot said. “Well, she’s a lot more likely to clear herself than get worse—the crud sinks to the bottom of the tank and gets sucked up first. It’ll be okay. I mean, she’s just a little sluggish, is all.”
The guide nodded. “M—” he began. After his outburst of the night before, he was as embarrassed around Adrienne Salmes as a boy at his first dance. “Ah, Adrienne, what do you think?”
The blonde woman smiled brightly, both for the question and the way it was framed. “Oh, if Don’s willing to go on, there’s no question,” she said. “You know I’d gladly walk if it were the only way to get a tyrannosaurus, Henry—if you’d let me, I mean. We both know that when we go back in today, I’ve had my last chance at a big carnosaur until you’ve rotated through all your clients again. Including my husband.”
“We’ll get you a tyrannosaur,” Vickers said.
Adrienne edged slightly closer to the guide. She said softly, “Henry, I want you to know that when we get back I’m going to give Johnnie a divorce.”
Vickers turned away as
if slapped. “That’s none of my business,” he said. “I—I’m sorry for what I said last night.”
“Sorry?” the woman repeated in a voice that barely carried over the wind noise. “For making me see that I shouldn’t make a doormat of . . . someone who used to be important to me? Don’t be sorry.” After a pause, she continued, “When I ran for Congress . . . God I was young! I offended it must have been everybody in the world, much less the district. But Johnnie was fantastic. I owe what votes I got to hands he shook for me.”
“I had no right to talk,” Vickers said. By forcing himself, he managed to look the blonde woman in the eyes.
Adrienne smiled and touched his hand where it lay on the forestock of his rifle. “Henry,” she said, “I’m not perfect, and the world’s not going to be perfect either. But I can stop trying to make it actively worse.”
Vickers looked at the woman’s hand. After a moment, he rotated his own to hold it. “You’ve spent your life being the best man around,” he said, as calm as he would be in the instant of shooting. “I think you’ve got it in you to be the best person around instead. I’m not the one to talk . . . but I think I’d be more comfortable around people if more of them were the way you could be.”
With a final squeeze, Vickers released Adrienne’s hand. During the remainder of the fifteen-minute flight, he concentrated on the ground below. He almost forgot Washman’s concern about the engine.
Dieter Jost flicked a last spade full of gritty soil from the drainage ditch and paused. Steve Brady gave him a thumbs-up signal from the gun tower where he sat. “Another six inches, peon,” he called to the guide. “You need to sweat some.”
“Fah,” said Dieter, laughing. “If it needs to be deeper, the rain will wash it deeper—not so?” He dug the spade into the ground and began walking over to the table. They had found a cache of sauropod eggs the day before. With the aid of torosaur loin and freeze-dried spices from his kit, Brewer had turned one of them into a delicious omelet. Brewer, Mears, and the McPhersons were just finishing. Dieter, who had risen early to finish ditching the tents, had worked up quite an appetite.