Dinosaurs & A Dirigible

by David Drake

  Carl licked his lips. “What did your real parents say?” he asked.

  Molly looked down. “I haven’t real parents,” she said softly.

  “Molly was a foundling,” Erlenwanger said. “She was in service at a house in Boston until she refused a—an improper demand by the master of the house. She was turned out of her place the day before I met her.”

  “I never told you that!” the girl blurted.

  “Nor do I mention it to embarrass you, my dear,” Erlenwanger said. “We will be together for some days and in close proximity, however, and I think it necessary that Carl understand your situation as clearly as you do his.”

  They proceeded through the airship’s two other stations. The motor-starting drill appeared to be ridiculously simple: depress the hydrogen feed for three or four seconds, release it, and flip the starter switch. Shut-down was even more basic, a third switch that “shut off the injectors,” which meant nothing at all to Carl but obviously seemed an adequate explanation to the Professor.

  There were a dozen circular gauges above the switch panel. “While the motor is running,” Erlenwanger said with a gesture, “the pointers should all be in the green zone. If one of the pointers falls into the red or rises to the white, tell me. Nothing very dreadful is going to happen without our hearing it, though, so don’t feel you have to stare at the dials.”

  “It isn’t really very simple, is it?” Carl said thoughtfully.

  “Umm?” said Erlenwanger, pausing in mid-step as he moved to the helm.

  “You make it look easier than running a feed mill,” Carl went on. “Maybe it is, too. But it’s not simple, it’s just simple to run. Being able to milk a cow don’t mean you could build a cow yourself.”

  “That’s true, of course,” the older man agreed with a pleased expression. “I’m really delighted to have met you, Carl. One has an emotional tendency to equate ignorance with stupidity, which meeting you—meeting you both”—and his hand spread toward Molly—“has dispelled.

  “But to answer your implied question, Carl, The Enterprise is unique in the world. However, if she were examined at length by today’s finest scientists and engineers, they would find only her workmanship to be exceptional. Others—many others today—have all the ‘secrets’ I have embodied in the Erlenwanger Directable Airship. I have refined metals to great purity and machined them to—great—tolerances; but all this can be duplicated.” The Professor paused and smiled again. “So while I will agree that the construct is not simple, my friend, it is simple enough.”

  The helm station was another example of the horribly complex overlaid by barnyard basic. Rotating the spokes did not change the direction of travel, as Carl had assumed from analogy to a steamship; rather, it controlled the amount of power the motor developed. “The diesel runs at constant revolutions,” Erlenwanger said, “with the output delivered through a torque converter.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh.” The Professor blinked. “Well, you know how a block and tackle work,” he began. At the end of half an hour’s discussion, Carl did understand a torque converter, because he had seen the one in the engine compartment. The diesel squatted there, hot and oily but as silent as heat lightning. The humming of the prop drew up and down the scale as the Professor adjusted its pitch to demonstrate. They went forward again, through the central compartment with its three fold-down bunks and a tiny but marvelously equipped lavatory. Carl was conscious (as he had not been before) of the machineness of what they were riding. Flying had been like drifting in a cloud or—better—floating on his back in the stock pond with water-wings at his ankles and neck. Now . . . the diesel made no sound, but the gondola trembled to its power; and the linkage of control to power to motion had become part of Carl’s universe. Amazed by the concept rather than any single object, Carl and Molly watched Erlenwanger change their direction by turning the helm on the axis of its vertical support.

  “What do these do?” Carl asked, reaching out a hand toward the levers in front of the helm.

  “Oh, careful—” Molly cried, her own hand catching Carl’s. “These spill the gas out through the top. As low as we are now, we could—well, it wouldn’t be a pleasant drop.”

  “I wasn’t going to move it,” Carl explained, but the incident reinforced the dangerous reality of what had initially seemed to be a fairy tale.

  They were heading west by southwest—255 degrees on the compass which somehow flashed onto the forward window when the Professor thumbed a button on the helm. The sky darkened with awesome suddenness. Because The Enterprise was headed into a horizon as rich with color as any Carl had seen since the aftermath of Krakatoa, even that darkening was not an immediate warning. “I think we had best find a place for the night,” Erlenwanger was saying. “The land beneath is a good deal more broken than that in the glaciated portion of the state, isn’t—”

  The first gust of the storm racing down from the north caught The Enterprise. The gondola rotated twenty degrees around the axis of the buoyancy chamber.

  Carl had youthful reflexes and a farmer’s familiarity with shifting footing. His left hand caught the edge of the diesel control panel, firmly enough to twist the light metal. His right hand caught Molly as she rebounded from the starboard bulkhead when the gondola swung back. Professor Erlenwanger was slower and in a worse position to act. A leather strap hung from the roof above him, but instead of snatching for it the older man froze on the helm. The helm simultaneously turned and pivoted, and the airship nosed into the squall with its prop idled and unable to keep a way on. The Enterprise tumbled in a horizontal plane, swapping ends twice and shuddering as updrafts sucked it toward the thunderheads invisible above.

  Erlenwanger got his footing and thumbed a button. Lime-colored lights brightened the cabin. They were dim, but in contrast to the storm’s sudden blackness, they felt as warm as the kitchen stove in winter. The craft steadied, the motor giving them enough headway for control despite the buffeting of the wind. Rain slashed The Enterprise with a sound like tearing canvas, and the interior lights reflected in surreal nightmares from water-rippled windows.

  Then the lightning bolt hit them.

  Carl had heard the boiler blow at the Star Brewery in 1893. Perhaps that was louder than the thunderclap—but Carl had been half a mile from the brewery, not inside the boiler at the time. Now the thunder was only a stunning physical counterpart to the blinding dazzle of the lightning. Carl’s flesh tingled. Molly’s hair was standing out straight from her head like the fuzz on a dandelion, crackling with tiny blue discharges from the tip of each tendril. Rubber was smoldering everywhere. It did not occur to Carl to marvel that the direct voltage of the lightning had been insulated from the occupants of the gondola.

  “I have to land,” Erlenwanger cried, his voice tinny in the aftermath of the thunderclap. “Molly, can you—?”

  The girl nodded. The emergency lights were gone but St. Elmo’s Fire frosted all the external metal surfaces and illuminated the cabin through the glass. Molly’s mouth was open as she struggled to her feet, but the muscles of her cheeks were set in a rictus, not a scream. A fat blue spark popped to her fingertip. Her gasp was a soft echo of the spark, but she grasped her controls without hesitation and slid two of the levers down to their bottom positions.

  They were presumably dropping, but with the darkness and the wind’s hammering it was impossible to tell. The altimeter column was invisible; it would have been uselessly erratic even if Erlenwanger had had enough light to read it. The Professor was leaning over the helm, peering helplessly at the black countryside. Carl wondered why the older man did not use the spotlight. Then he noticed that Erlenwanger was ceaselessly flipping a switch in the center of the helm, back and forth, back and forth, though he must have realized minutes ago that the lightning bolt had put the spot out of commission until repairs could be made.

  Erlenwanger slid the gondola door open. Droplets slung from the doorframe eddied and spattered within the com
partment. The tendrils of St. Elmo’s Fire were growing longer and brighter. They blunted the night vision of those in the gondola without helping to illuminate the ground beneath. Carl hung from the door jamb, his head and shoulders out in the onrushing night. Big, wind-flung raindrops bit his cheeks like horseflies. Molly sat at her controls, feet locked on the bench against the hammering gusts. Her face was pale but prepared.

  “There’s a level field beneath us!” the Professor cried over a roll of thunder from half a mile away. “I’m going to void a tank to set us down quickly.” He reached for one of the levers beside the helm. A landing leg extended across Carl’s field of vision like the arm of a mantis. The boy peered forward, blinded by a lightning flash and trying to superimpose what its instant had showed him over the yellow after-image on his retinas.

  “Trees a hundred yards ahead,” Carl shouted.

  The Enterprise lurched. In the same moment there was light, a great blue flare reflecting from the cloud ceiling as static ignited the hydrogen released from tank nine. Carl screamed, “Jesus Christ, we’re over water! Get up, get up!”

  Even as Carl spoke, Molly was thrusting her levers to the top, a help but too slow a help. The silent fire still blazed above them, mirrored by clouds and the storm-tossed Missouri River beneath. It was a huge sheet of illumination a mile in diameter. The Professor slammed his throttle forward, to and through the gate that blocked it with an inch of potential travel. The diesel roared, racketing even against the storm as yard-long flames spurted rearward from exhaust cut-outs. The Enterprise wallowed like a bogged wagon. A landing leg touched a wave top and dragged a line of spray to tilt the gondola. They were over mudflats, the wind swinging them as they struggled to rise above the line of willows that fringed the Kansas shore. The storm whipped a willow-frond up at them, the tendril snaking in through the open door and stripping off its leaves on the trailing corner as they pulled past. But that was the last touch of the storm and itself more a love-pat than a threat.

  They were skimming a pasture, the six-foot heads of bull thistles throwing sharp silhouettes against the cropped grass as lightning flared again. Erlenwanger throttled back and swung the airship into the wind. Molly’s fingers played on the controls. They sank, brushing the ground as they drifted back toward the dark bulk of the far hedgerow. The Professor edged his throttle a half-point open and the ship steadied, bumped, and settled solidly onto the field. The pumps whined to empty the tanks into the hydrogen reservoir. Lightning skipped across the sky to the south of them, but the thunder was half a minute coming.

  The Professor looked at his companions, like him exhausted. He beamed. “I think we all owe ourselves a vote of thanks for able action under difficult circumstances. Now, who would care to join me in a supper of ham, fresh corn, and . . . cider, I think, from New Hampshire?”

  Carl looked away from the sparse vegetation below them. “Are you trying to set a record time crossing the country?” he asked Professor Erlenwanger.

  “Goodness no,” said the older man, squinting a little in surprise. “That’s for the railway barons, cleared track and fifty miles an hour. I will reach San Francisco in—a matter of time. But for me, the . . . well, the journey is itself the destination.”

  Carl nodded. “I just wondered,” he said, “from the way we spent a day there at the river.”

  “Oh, well,” Erlenwanger said, gesturing down at the alkaline landscape. “We needed to replenish our hydrogen, and I thought it best to do so before we got much farther west. As we have. Besides, the peddler we met was a fascinating person.”

  “He was just a peddler, wasn’t he?” Molly asked. “I wouldn’t’ve thought you would want a picture of him in particular.”

  The Professor bobbed his head, animated by the discussion though he disagreed with the implications of the statement. “Yes,” he said, “an ordinary peddler. But have you ever considered for how brief a time a peddler may be normal?” He spread his hands, palms upward. “With growing centralization, with the better communications that metaled roads will bring, there will no longer be a need for goods to be trucked from door to door, from farm to farm. That man with his mule and his wagon and his . . . little bit of everything civilized—he is on the end of a chain stretching back ten millennia. And he really is the end of it.”

  Erlenwanger smiled at Molly to show there was no hostility in his disagreement. “He is very much worth—photographing—you see. Very much worth preserving for another age.”

  From the air, western Kansas was a waste of chalk gullies and buffalo grass. The Enterprise had sailed over cattle too scattered to be called herds; there had been no other signs of human habitation for forty miles.

  “That’s a campfire,” Carl said, pointing out the forward window.

  “Why yes, I believe it is,” agreed the Professor. He tilted the helm a point, centering the tendril of gray on the pale evening sky. Molly sat quickly at her bench, waiting for instructions.

  In the fading sunlight, the airship must have been a drop of blood to the slouch-hatted man who saw it as he tossed another buffalo chip on the fire. He yelped. The younger man across from him, turning the antelope haunch, spun around. He jumped to the rifle leaning against the wagon box and levered a cartridge into the chamber. The gondola door was already open. Neither the Professor nor Molly could leave their stations. Carl leaned far out into the air, clinging to the jamb as he had two nights before in the storm. He shouted, “Hey, what’s the matter with you? We don’t mean you no harm!”

  “Great God, there’s men in it!” the rifleman blurted.

  Behind him, the tent flap quivered to pass a third man wearing dungarees over a set of combinations. He was older than either of the others, balding and burly with a gray moustache drooping to either side of his bearded mouth. “Of course there’s men in it, Jimmy,” he thundered. “Did you think it was alive?” He glanced down at the meat and added to the slouch-hatted man, “Watch the roast, Corley, or it’s back to rice and beans.”

  The airship had drifted very close to the campsite. The landing legs creaked out. Carl picked up the grapnel and a handful of its coiled line. He had learned that the hooks were not a necessity but that they made a landing easier by keeping the vessel headed into the wind. “Can you set this solid?” he shouted and hurled the grapnel to the ground. The burly man took the idea at once. He nodded and wedged the hooks just downwind of the camp between a pair of the boulders that dotted the surface of more friable rock. A moment later they were down, the airship wheezing to itself as it resettled its hydrogen.

  Carl stepped to the ground and shook the great, calloused hand which the eldest of the campers thrust at him. “Carl Gudeint,” he muttered.

  “Claudius Bjornholm,” the other said. “And these are my assistants, Mr. James Beadle and Mr. Corley, whom I hired to drive and to cook for us.”

  Carl found himself spokesman from his location. “Ah,” he said, “Professor Erlenwanger and Molly, ah, Molly Erlenwanger. The Professor built this bal—airship.”

  There was mutual murmuring and shaking of hands, though Carl noticed that Corley was hanging back. Apparently he was afraid to step beneath the looming buoyancy chamber of The Enterprise.

  Most of the light now came from the campfire. Carl eyed the array of digging implements stacked near the wagon and asked, “You, you’re . . . prospecting?”

  “You mean, ‘You’re crazy?’” Bjornholm replied good-naturedly. “No gold in this chalk, of course. But it could be that I’m madder still, you know. I’m here—we’re here—hunting for bones. It’s been my life now for thirty-seven years, and I expect to carry on so long as the Lord gives me the strength to do so.”

  Carl and Molly exchanged blank glances. The youngest of the campers, Jimmy—he must have been Carl’s age though he was much more lightly built—knuckled his jaw in some embarrassment. Professor Erlenwanger, however, said, “Yes, of course. Searching for the fossils of the Great Nebraska Sea. Have you had much success?”


  “Very little this far,” Bjornholm admitted, “though Jimmy believes he spotted something in a gully wall while bringing back our supper here—” he nodded at the antelope haunch. “We’ll see to it as soon as there’s enough light to work without chancing damage to the finds.” The big man looked at Erlenwanger appraisingly. “You’re a learned man, sir,” he said, “as one would have expected from your”—he nodded—“creation. It seems far too huge to be so silent.”

  The Professor smiled. “People accuse machinery of being a curse when their real problems are with the side effects rather than the machines themselves. Noise is one of the most unpleasant side effects, I have found; but it can be cured.” Waving at the fire from which Corley had just removed the meat, Erlenwanger added, “Perhaps you’d be willing to share your fire? We can of course provide our share of the supplies. And—if possible—I would greatly appreciate it if we might accompany you in the morning on your search.”

  Bjornholm straightened. With the glow of the fire behind him and the power of his stance and broad shoulders, he was no longer a part-dressed figure of fun. “Sir,” he said, “we would be honored by your presence—tonight and whenever else.”

  Fresh vegetables from the airship were well-received by the bone hunters, but the greatest delicacy Erlenwanger provided was fresh water. Bjornholm savored his first sip, tonguing it around within his mouth until he finally swallowed. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he said slowly, looking at each of the visitors in turn, “to have nothing to drink for months at a time but water so alkaline that even a handful of coffee beans can’t kill the taste. Every mug is a dose of salts—literally, I’m sorry to say.” He nodded solemnly at Carl, who was farthest around the circle from Molly. “You waste away during a dig, and the good lord help the poor fools who try to live here and farm.”