by David Drake
“But why do you stay?” asked Molly, handling her plate ably on her knees as she squatted on the ground with the men.
“You see, it’s not really like this,” said Jimmy unexpectedly, lowering the dainty antelope femur at which he had been gnawing. He waved out at the endless, gullied night. “This was a great bay, ten times the Gulf of Mexico and more. Still water, hiding monsters the like of none on Earth today; still air with gliding reptiles greater than any birds. It’s—” He stopped, his lips still working as he decided what words to frame. More than the fire lighted his narrow face. He continued, “I’m at Haverford. Last year I heard Professor Cope lecture and . . . it wasn’t a new world opening, it was a thousand new worlds, as many new worlds as there had been past ages of our Earth. Can you imagine that? Can you—see tarpons sixteen feet long, flashing just under the surface as the mackerel they chase make the sea foam? Or the tylosaur, the real sea serpent, lifting itself long enough to take a sighting before it slides through the depths toward the disturbance? Can you see it?”
Bjornholm was nodding. “I’ve worked for Professor Cope—God rest his soul—on several occasions in the past. He sent Mr. Beadle to me with a letter of introduction; and Mr. Beadle has proven a splendid and trustworthy companion in my search of the world of two million years ago.”
“Two million?” Erlenwanger repeated. “Oh, yes, of course. Lord Kelvin proved from the temperature of the Earth that it could be no more than—twenty to forty million years old, wasn’t that the figure? I am sometimes amazed at the conclusions a great scientist can draw from data which a man of more—common—understanding would have found hopelessly inadequate for the purpose.” He smiled.
“Yes indeed,” agreed Bjornholm heavily. “I have always envied men like Professor Cope the understanding which I can only draw on second hand. I grew up in Cincinnati, where every building stone is marked by a crinoid or a clam preserved eternally from a past age. When I was fifteen, I determined that I would have some part in bringing that past to light, whatever it might cost me personally.”
He looked around the circuit of firelight, the tent and wagon, both of them worn; the tools and the brutal labor they implied; the faces of his companions, like his unshaven for the waste of water shaving would entail. “It has a cost. But though I’ve done things besides digging for fossils, nothing else will really matter after I’m dead except the part of the past I leave to the future.”
Corley spit into the fire. “Bones,” he said without looking up. “Bones and stones and durned fools.”
“And yet you’re here too, Jake,” Beadle said sharply. “A dollar a day, all found, and corn for your horses. Well, maybe those’re better reasons than ours, but—you’re here too.”
The fire popped back in emphasis, and the dark moved a little closer.
# # #
Leaving the tent and the great, hollow bulk of the airship behind, Professor Erlenwanger’s party climbed into the wagon with Corley and the equipment. There was barely light enough to see by. Carl was not surprised to notice that Professor Erlenwanger carried his camera cases. Bjornholm and his assistant rode their own horses, the burly man displaying a quiet mastery of his beast that belied his apparent clumsiness.
“Too much for the team to draw,” Corley grumbled as he harnessed the horses.
“With three months of my feed in their bellies, they’ll draw this load better than they did the empty wagon when I hired you,” retorted Bjornholm.
Jimmy Beadle directed them, scowling under his hat brim as he searched for landmarks in a country of ruts and scrub grass. He looked older by daylight than he had seemed around the fire. Far on the horizon they could see a pair of prong-horns. Beadle laid a hand on his saddle-scabbard, but Bjornholm noted curtly, “We’ve better ways to spend our time today.”
They skirted one gully and crossed a second, the wagon passengers dismounting as the iron-bound wheels crumbled the rock of the far rim. The Sun rose higher and the wind picked up with a burden of dust so finely divided that it looked like yellow fog. At last, as they approached a gully that almost deserved the name of canyon, Jimmy pointed and said, “There—on the far wall. See where the speck of white is?”
They halted at the rim, squinting across the hundred feet or so at a brighter splash against the yellowish chalk. “We can’t get across that,” Corley said suddenly. “It’s sixty feet down and durned near straight up and down on t’other side.”
“Be easier to hang down from the rim, wouldn’t it?” Beadle suggested. “It’s about halfway up the wall, and I’d sure rather swing down than climb up.”
“We’d have to climb that wall to be able to hang over,” Bjornholm said. “Unless you’ve found a way around this arroyo that I haven’t. We can get down this side easy enough—”
“Not the wagon!” Corley interjected.
“Not the wagon,” Bjornholm agreed, “but on foot. We’ll figure a way then to get up the other side.”
They used their hands to descend the draw, and Carl made the last ten feet in an uncontrolled rush besides; but they all made it. Molly had less evident trouble than Carl did, picking her footing and getting to the gully floor with no more than a smear of chalk dust on her linen wrapper. But the wall that loomed above them was nearly as straight as a building’s, though there was enough batter from the middle upwards to hide the fleck of bone from their eyes.
Bjornholm absently worried a twig from one of the mesquite bushes that pocked the arroyo. “We’ll have to cut steps,” he said. He set the blade of the shovel he carried against the wall and twisted with his weight on it. Flecks of chalk spat and the steel rang. “Have to use the hatchet, I guess,” he said disgustedly.
“I can get to it if you give me a boost,” Jimmy said, eyeing the stone.
Bjornholm frowned. He laid down his shovel, leaned on the arroyo wall, and looked upward. “It’s still too high,” he observed.
Corley said, “Bjornholm, if you can take the weight, I’ll stand on your shoulders and tug the kid up.”
The burly man turned his head to stare. Corley seemed to shrink inward, but he did not lower his eyes. “Climb up, then,” Bjornholm rumbled. He braced himself against the chalk. Corley gripped Bjornholm’s shoulder and raised a cracked boot to the bigger man’s jutting right hip.
“Here!” Carl said, springing to Bjornholm’s side and gripping a handful of Corley’s dungarees to haul him upward. The gangling teamster balanced bent over for a moment, then straightened with a boot on the shoulder of each of the bigger men beneath him. “All right,” Corley grunted, reaching one hand back and down for Jimmy while his other hand clamped a knob of rock. “Come if you’re coming, boy.”
Jimmy caught Corley’s hand, his boot a brief agony on Carl’s outthrust hip as the student pushed off. Then there was only the doubled weight being transmitted through Corley. Carl locked hands with Bjornholm, less for mutual support than for commiseration of the sharp leather soles cutting to their collar bones. Then Jimmy cried, “Okay, okay, I’m getting there,” and half the weight was gone. In relief as if he were wholly unburdened, Carl flexed his shoulders.
“Hold on, I’m coming down,” said Corley. He jumped, falling to hands and knees on the hard soil. Carl backed away, rubbing his muscles and staring up at Jimmy. The student was using minute projections and the slight tilt of the rock to climb steadily toward the exposed bone. From beneath, the watchers tensed as the student’s increasingly greater deliberation showed that he was nearing the prize.
“I’ve got it,” Jimmy said, the chalk muffling his voice. Then, “Oh . . . Oh.”
“What is it, Jimmy?” Bjornholm demanded hoarsely.
The younger man half-turned, no longer particularly interested in keeping his position. “It’s a buffalo thigh, Mr. Bjornholm,” he said flatly. “It must have rolled over the lip of the draw and caught here in a little crevice. I doubt it’s as old as I am.”
Bjornholm nodded silently, his great shoulders suddenly stooped. “A
nother time, then,” he said. “I’ve searched longer and found less at other times.” But the last words were spoken so softly as to be almost inaudible.
“Look out,” Beadle said. He dropped the buffalo femur. It clattered twice on the gully wall before raising a puff of dust on the ground. Bjornholm’s assistant eased one foot onto a lower projection, then the other. His boot soles slipped. Jimmy skidded down the side of the arroyo, boots and hips grinding away a shower of pebbles as they slowed him. Carl took a half-step to catch the sliding man, realized that the student was in control of everything but his speed, and got out of the way lest interference cripple both of them. Beadle hit the ground with his legs bent at the knees. His feet flew out from under him at the shock and he sprawled. Bjornholm and Carl both reached out to help the slender man up. “Well, that’s it for this pair,” Jimmy said glumly, sticking his hand through the hole the rock had abraded in his trousers. “The others haven’t been washed in six weeks, neither.”
Claudius Bjornholm was not listening to him. The burly man had knelt, his mouth open and his tongue absently exploring his cracked lips. He brushed his left hand over the surface of the ground where Beadle’s boots had scarred it. After a moment he slipped a reground oyster knife from his hip pocket and began scraping. Jimmy looked down and his own jaw dropped. “Oh, oh . . .” he whispered, kneeling as if joining the older man in prayer.
Corley thrust his narrow shoulders between his two companions. “Goddamn,” he said, “that sure’s hell is a skull!”
“It’s more than a skull,” Bjornholm said, his big index finger pointing along the gully floor. Regular projections were visible against the chalk, now that they had been pointed out. They were bony knobs running for twenty feet in a straight line. It was as if the tips of a huge saw blade were sticking up above the gully floor. “I think we have—everything here. Just below the surface. Those are the upper processes of the vertebrae of a mosasaur, unless I mistake what I can see of this skull. If none of it has been lost by weathering, it will be as perfect . . . more perfect than anything I’ve—I’ve—” The big man paused, blinking back tears. “As anything I’ve found in thirty-seven years of searching.”
“Gentlemen,” Professor Erlenwanger said, “would you object to my taking a photograph?”
Carl looked around in surprise and saw that Erlenwanger really had set up his camera. How he had brought the cases down the slope without disaster was more than the boy could imagine.
“Of the find in place?” said Bjornholm, edging back so as not to block the field of view. “Of course, of course.”
“No,” said the Professor sharply. He gestured the three bone hunters closer together with both hands. “These bones have been in the ground a hundred million years. Others like them will still be there to be found in another hundred million years. But you’re like, with the whole of the past fresh under your fingertips—that will pass with your generation.”
“But you don’t want us, then,” Jimmy Beadle said with a puzzled frown. He was still kneeling. “You want a picture of the real greats . . . Well, Dr. Cope is gone now, but Dr. Osborne or Milius of Tubingen.”
Erlenwanger flicked his eyebrows back a millimeter in utter denial. “Did you shoot that antelope yesterday in the chest?” he asked.
“Huh?” said Jimmy. “No, it wasn’t but fifty yards away, so I shot it through the head.”
“That ruined the trophy, didn’t it?”
“Trophy?” repeated the student. “I don’t understand. I didn’t want a trophy, I wanted meat.”
The Professor’s smile was beatific. “So do I,” he said, and he bent back over the camera. The rim of the arroyo still hid the morning Sun. The three oddly assorted bone hunters linked arms and stared back at Erlenwanger, the triumph bright in their faces.
“I don’t know why anybody’d want to live like those cowboys in the line camp yesterday,” Carl said, staring through the side windows at the increasingly rugged terrain below.
Molly was at the helm while Professor Erlenwanger sent what he said was a “wireless message” back to his associates in Boston. She said, “It’s not that they want to, I think . . . any more than I wanted to be in service with the O’Neills. But I was willing—for a while. And those fellows were willing to live their lives in a little hut, ride fences while the weather lets them and spend three months of the winter reading the catalog pages pasted to the walls. Someday they won’t do that. They’ll get a few cows of their own and marry, or they’ll move in town and work at a feed store. But for now, they’re willing.”
Carl looked over at the Professor. His eyes were open but unfocused. His thumb and index finger made a muted tapping on the brass key he had set on the ledge in front of the buoyancy controls. “Did he take a picture of you too?” Carl asked quietly, still looking at the older man.
“Oh, yes—right there on the street before he bought me a meal,” the girl replied. “He—oh! Carl! Look at this!”
Both the men jumped to their feet, their eyes following Molly’s pointing finger down to the gullied foothills below. The scale was deceptive. The beast could have been a dun-colored hog rooting through mesquite until Carl took his thousand feet of altitude into account. “My goodness!” gasped Professor Erlenwanger, his wireless gear forgotten. “It’s a grizzly bear. I must get it!”
The Professor threw open the dunnage locker in the rear bulkhead. Carl expected him to draw out an express rifle, but instead it was the pair of camera cases again. “Carl,” he said as he unlatched the equipment, “will you take the helm and bring us up to the bear dead slow? And Molly, since you’re more experienced with altitude correction, can you drop us to twenty feet and hold us there?”
Molly throttled back and handed the wheel to Carl. “You’re going to take a picture from the doorway, Professor?” she asked in some concern. Her fingers began playing with the gas chamber controls.
“Well, from this instead, I think,” Erlenwanger said. He lifted a ladder of ropes and wooden battens from the locker and fastened the ends to staples set in the floor for that purpose. Then he slid the door open and tossed the ladder out to twist and dangle, blown sternward despite their present slow speed. “I think I will need the greater field of view, since the bear may have its own notions about being photographed. And—well, this keeps The Enterprise herself a little further from the ground in case something . . . untoward happens.” His tongue touched his lips. Molly, keeping a close watch on the terrain which they now had approached so closely, blinked but said nothing.
The Professor fitted the strap of the bulky camera over his left shoulder. He looked down at the dangling ladder. “Well . . .” he said, and paused. He turned and opened a drawer beneath the engine control panel which Carl had not noticed before. From it he took an angular handgun. He stuck the weapon into his hip pocket where the tails of his tweed coat hid it. “Well,” he repeated, and he began to climb carefully down the ladder.
They were barely moving forward now. The bear was a hundred feet ahead, ambling between dwarf cedars with an odd, sidelong gait. It looked very large. Molly bit her lip and made an infinitesimal adjustment to a pair of her controls. The airship dipped. Carl thought the girl had overcorrected, but they recovered and stabilized with the ground just twenty feet below them as the Professor had directed. Carl eased on a little more throttle and started his final approach.
The only sound The Enterprise made was the minute whistle of the air curling around it, and that was lost in the rustle of the trees. When their sharp-edged shadow fell across the grizzly, however, the brute paused and turned with its snout raised. Erlenwanger was steadying himself with his arms through the loop of the ladder as if it were the sling of a rifle. His camera was ready. The bear coughed and charged without hesitation.
Carl’s heart leaped as he saw through the port in the gondola floor that the grizzly was rearing onto its hind legs. The beast slashed the air with its claws, black and worn by use to chisel edges instead of points. The g
ondola lurched as the Professor jerked his knees up to his chest, supporting his whole weight on his arms. Then they were safely past. Carl turned to call something to Erlenwanger, and five thousand feet above them a cloud passed before the Sun. The hydrogen cooled and shrank. The airship lost buoyancy almost as suddenly as if Carl had dumped a tank. The Enterprise dropped ten feet to a new equilibrium. The end of the rope ladder clattered on the ground. The gondola itself was well within the range of claws that could rip open trees to get at the honey within.
The grizzly coughed again and charged, as quickly as a cat sighting prey. Professor Erlenwanger had pulled his torso into the gondola. Carl leaped from the controls to drag him the rest of the way to safety. The older man, gripping the jamb with his left hand, drew his pistol. The shots rattled like a dozen lathes cracking, sharp but overwhelmed by the blasts of the bullets themselves bursting on the ground beneath. Shards of rock sang off the underside of the gondola. One bit hummed through the doorway to sting Carl’s outstretched hand. The snarl deep in the bear’s throat whuffed! out instead as a startled bleat. The Professor laid his pistol on the gondola floor. “Now, Carl,” he gasped. “If you would.”
Carl grasped the older man under both armpits and hefted him aboard. Molly had slammed all her levers upward when she realized what was happening. The airship was soaring and already near its normal cruising altitude. Beneath them the grizzly sat back on its haunches, washing its face with both paws.
Professor Erlenwanger unstrapped his camera and slid the door shut. He was breathing heavily. Carl had returned to the helm but kept only steerage way, uncertain of what the Professor would want to do. Molly had leveled them off at a thousand feet again. She was beginning to regain some of her normal color. “I think we can resume course,” Erlenwanger said at last. He picked up the little handgun and extracted the magazine from its grip.