Dinosaurs & A Dirigible

by David Drake

  “I warned you!” Craig shouted.

  Adrienne Vickers did not fire. There were too many people in too confined an area, and a 250-grain gilding-metal bullet from her rifle would penetrate everything it hit except perhaps the engine block. Instead, the tall blonde dropped the Schultz and Larsen and leaped a five-gallon thermos of water to tackle Craig as he shot. Adrienne’s right hand gripped the bodyguard’s throat, her left seized the Uzi at the juncture of barrel and front sight. Together, the pair of them cannoned into Vickers. Craig fired a six-round burst through the bed of the truck before Adrienne’s leverage broke his finger against the trigger guard. His screaming stopped a moment later when Avraham Stern leaned forward. With a short axial blow as if he were playing billiards, Stern brought the butt of his rifle down on Craig’s skull. The Israeli official kept the muzzle of his FAL vertical, just in case the shock jarred the hammer off its sear.

  Vickers was jammed forward against the bulkhead while 9mm bullets blew splinters into his shins. He had not fired. The tyrannosaur’s head lifted an inch on its bed of wormwood. Its tail swept in an arc like a scythe, catching first the titanopteryx, then Secretary Cardway. The great pterosaur squawked and spun, hurled toward the carnivore’s thorax by the impact. That was accidental, however. The tip of the tail took the Secretary of State across the buttocks as the dinosaur had intended and flung him forward. The four-foot jaws were already open to receive him. When the jaws closed, they thudded like a casket dropping. The Secretary’s left arm flew off. His hand and chest disappeared into the carnivore’s mouth.

  The Israeli driver stood up in the cab, waving a short-barreled grenade launcher. The gunner in the back of the half-track was gripping his weapon, despite the group struggling at his feet. Neither soldier shot. Mordecai Greenbaum leaned over the side of the vehicle and fired the cast-off Gibbs double twice into the chest of the tyrannosaur, still belly-down in the white-dusted foliage. The dinosaur stiffened. A tiny, two-clawed forefoot flicked up, too short even to pick the beast’s great teeth. Then the carnivore relaxed, its head falling back sideways to the ground. The jaws lolled open. The Secretary of State, impaled on a score or more of four-inch teeth, did not spill out. His body above the rib cage lay within the dinosaur’s mouth. The left arm and the borrowed Mannlicher, dropped when the tail struck, lay on the ground like storm wrack.

  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 sho
uld—” 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.”