Dinosaurs & A Dirigible

by David Drake

  “You shot the bear?” Carl asked, watching the older man. He was thumbing brass cartridges into the magazine from a box that had shared the drawer with the pistol.

  Professor Erlenwanger looked up sharply. “I fired into the ground in front of the bear,” he said. “That was sufficient.” He slid the reloaded magazine back into the butt of the pistol, his lips silently working as he considered whether or not to continue. “I dare say it is sometimes necessary to kill,” he said finally. “In order to stay alive, or sometimes for better reasons. But it isn’t a decision to be taken lightly or as anything but a last resort.”

  Erlenwanger shook his head as if to clear it of his present mood. He set the weapon and the box of ammunition back into the drawer and closed it. Smiling he added, “It’s an automatic pocket pistol of European manufacture. And I suppose you’re familiar with the use of explosive bullets in hunting dangerous game?”

  Carl nodded. “I’ve heard of that.”

  “Well,” the Professor said, “I had a—Belgian gunsmith of great ability make up some explosive rounds for the pistol. On stony soil they produced quite a startling effect, don’t you think?”

  Molly took a deep, thankful breath. “More to the point,” she said, “the bear thought it was startling.”

  “Goodness,” said the Professor, noticing that his wireless apparatus still sat out on the ledge, “I’d best complete my report, hadn’t I? Especially now that I’ve had a real adventure!” Chuckling, he sat down at the key again as the airship swept steadily westward through the calm air.

  Professor Erlenwanger looked at the altimeter, frowned, and glanced over at Molly’s bank of controls. They were all uncomfortably close to the top. Despite that, The Enterprise was within five hundred feet of the ground. The dry snow blew like fog around the trunks of the conifers marching up the slopes. “Between the thin air at this altitude and the film of ice we’re gathering,” the Professor said, “we need maximum lift. And I’m afraid that there’s enough condensate in several of the chambers that we aren’t getting the lift we should be.”

  Carl frowned back. “Are we in danger?” he asked, carefully controlling his voice. He did not want to sound as though he were on the edge of panic—but five hundred feet was a long way to fall, and the ground beneath looked as hard as a millstone.

  “Oh, goodness,” the Professor said, blinking in concern at the impression he had given. “Oh, not at all. I just propose to land in a suitable location—I’m sure there must be one.” He squinted through the forward windows. The cabin heat kept the center of each pane clear. The edges, where the aluminum frames conveyed the warmth to the outside more swiftly, were blind with frost. “I’ll vent and dry tanks three and seven—they seem to be the wettest—and recharge them. It may not be the most attractive country on which to set down, but I think I can promise you that we will do so gently.”

  “There’s a clear hill over there,” Molly said, pointing so that her finger left a smudge on the glass. “But you’ll need water to refill the tanks, won’t you?”

  “Oh, that’s quite all right,” Erlenwanger explained, already swinging the helm. “We can melt the snow for electrolysis, and goodness knows there’s enough snow. See if you can bring us down just a little above the tallest trees, my dear.”

  Despite the gusty winds and the lack of anyone on the ground to set their grapnel for them, Professor Erlenwanger brought them to the smooth landing he had promised. Twigs, poking through the crust of snow which had come early even for the mountains, snapped beneath the weight of The Enterprise. “Well,” said the Professor, “I think the first order of business is to clear the chambers, don’t you?” He gripped one of the vent levers and tried to slide it to the side. It did not move. All three people looked momentarily blank. “Of course,” Erlenwanger said, “the ice! The valve mechanism must be frozen shut.”

  “Something we can fix?” asked Carl, frowning again but without the immediate concern that the prospect of crashing into the ground had raised in him.

  “Well, yes,” agreed the older man, “but it means climbing up to chip the valve loose, and I’m afraid it’s really too near dusk to do that now. I had hoped to have the chambers refilling overnight.”

  Carl shrugged. “No problem,” he said. “I’ll take a lantern up with me and do it now.”

  Erlenwanger frowned. Then he, too, shrugged and said, “Well, that’s all right, I suppose. But don’t even think of getting above any other airship with an open flame. Blocking the percolation of hydrogen through the very atoms of the skin was perhaps the greatest of the advances incorporated into The Enterprise”—his grin flashed—“though it isn’t one I would expect an investigator of the present time to note.”

  Carl drew on the sheepskin jacket and cowhide work gloves the Professor had bought him at a rail siding the night before. Molly handed him the kerosene lamp she had just lighted. It whispered deep in its throat, and the yellow glow it cast was friendlier and more human than that of the chilly electrical elements. Carl stepped outside, bracing himself against the expected eddy of wind-blown snow. The lantern rocked in his hand but did not go out. He slammed the door and began to climb the open ladder just astern of it, up the side of the gas compartment. There was a slick of ice crackling on the rungs, and the lamp in his left hand made climbing harder; but Carl had carried shingles to the roof of the barn in a drizzle, and this was nothing beyond his capacity.

  The snow and the twilight made the evening seem bright, but the vents were deep in a shadowed recess. A catwalk ran along the airship’s spine. Without the lantern the trip would have been vain, though the yellow light paled everywhere but where it was needed. Carl set the lamp down on the walk and rapped the valve with the bolster of his clasp knife. He took the glove off his left hand and opened the blade to scrape the joints in the brass.

  Movement at the wood line caught the corner of Carl’s eye. A pair of steers bolted into the open. One had horns which had been cropped to stumps shorter than its ears. Carl stared, squinting into the failing light. “Professor!” he called, just as the light on the gondola’s prow spread its broad fan down the hillside. The floodlight glared red from the eyes of the cattle and the three horses following them. The nearest of the three riders was wrapped in a dark-colored blanket. Even his hands, gripping a long-barreled rifle across the saddlebow, were hidden. Trotting his pinto just behind the first rider was a second whose straight black hair fell to his shoulders. A youthful whoop died in his throat at the blaze of light. His left arm, upraised with an unstrung bow, jerked down as his right hand sawed the pinto’s reins back.

  The third Indian was far the oldest, though his twin braids were still so black as to give the lie to a face wrinkled like walnut burl. He wore a buffalo robe—as old, perhaps, as he was—pinned at the shoulder but open down the front to display a buckskin shirt. The old cap-and-ball revolver thrust through his waistband was nickeled. It sparkled like a faceted mirror in the instant before the rider slid it out and down into the shadow of his horse’s neck.

  The gondola door rumbled open, thumping against its stop. Carl peered over the side. The curve of the buoyancy chamber hid the Professor until the older man stepped out in front of his floodlight. His shadow flashed suddenly toward the Indians. Its outline was misshapen with the angles of camera and tripod.

  “Professor!” Carl called. “Those aren’t reservation cows!” If the older man heard Carl, he did not understand. He continued to walk downhill toward the Indians, calling to them in a language unfamiliar to Carl. Carl swung down the ladder, leaving skin from the palm of his left hand frozen to the top rung. He was muttering an unconscious prayer.

  The steers had shied from the light, disappearing again into the trees. The eldest of the riders spoke. The rifleman swung his weapon clear of the blanket. The knob of its bolt handle, polished by decades of wear, winked. As Carl jumped into the gondola, a trick of the breeze brought Erlenwanger’s words up the hill: “Why, my goodness, a Dreyse needle
gun here!”

  “Where’s the lantern!” Molly cried.

  “Jesus Christ, I left it!” Carl shouted, slamming open the pistol drawer. The cartridge box flew out, spilling the deadly brass to roll in a shifting pattern on the floor. Carl leaned out the doorway, leveling the unfamiliar pistol.

  Molly vented tank three. The hydrogen bathed the lantern and ignited in a blue glare spraying a hundred feet in the air. The pinto reared, spilling its young rider. The rifle muzzle wavered from Erlenwanger to the airship, then back into the woods as the leading rider wheeled his mount. Molly opened tank seven. The eldest Indian fought his horse for an instant, the reflection from his revolver no harsher than that of his eyes. Then he gave the beast its head to gallop into the forest, followed by the pinto and the third of the cattle thieves. That last Indian was holding the pinto’s reins with both hands and running along beside it. A steer bawled from a distance. Then the night was silent again, leaving the Professor poised awkwardly in the light of his own airship.

  Erlenwanger turned and began trudging up the hill. Molly cut the floodlight. Carl lowered the pistol which he had not fired. It apparently had a safety catch somewhere, like a hammerless shotgun. His left palm was burning and he noticed the blood for the first time.

  Professor Erlenwanger slid the door shut behind him and set down his camera carefully. “One can get carried away and make mistakes,” he said softly. “They were doing something illegal; and of course we frightened them.” He looked from Carl to Molly and back again. “When one does something foolish, as I just did, it’s important that one have friends with better sense and quick minds. Thank you both, for my life and for much more.” Carl set the pistol down to take and squeeze one of the hands the older man stretched to both of them.

  “Less than fifty years old,” the Professor said, apparently to himself, “and look at it even now.”

  Molly leaned forward for a better look. She had stared down on Boston, however, and the skeletal mass of lights in the pre-dawn did not impress her. Carl had never seen anything like San Francisco in his life. “Oh, if Dad could only be here,” he said. “He wouldn’t brag on his trip to Kansas City ever again.”

  “You can follow the veins of the city out beyond the lighted heart,” Professor Erlenwanger said. “Every one of those blue sparks is the collector arm of a trolley, bringing the late shifts home, carrying the earliest workers in to their jobs. Sometimes I think that cities live too, and that one day they will send travellers back in time to record their own births.”

  The airship had met a mass of cool air over the bay and dropped to about five hundred feet. Molly started to nudge a pair of levers up, but the Professor’s hand stayed her. “No,” he said. “I’m going to land here.”

  “Are we staying in San Francisco?” asked Carl, a little surprised because of the Professor’s previous avoidance of populous areas. But after all, they were on the West Coast, now; there was nowhere further to go.

  The Professor cocked the helm slightly, searching the terrain below so that he did not have to look at his companions. The sky beyond the hills was metallically lighter. “I’m going to land you here and go on,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed your company more than I can tell you, but it is time for me to leave. I am not”—he swallowed—“simply abandoning you; I will leave you with five hundred dollars in gold pieces—”

  “Professor, no!” Molly cried, her hand shooting out to touch but not grip his elbow. “We didn’t come with you for the money—but don’t leave us!

  Erlenwanger’s fingers squeezed the girl’s hand to his tweed sleeve briefly, then detached it. “You didn’t come with me to save my life, either; but you saved it,” he said firmly. “The money is something for which I have no further use anyway.” he touched his lips with his tongue. “Please believe me when I say that you cannot accompany me further. It is not something I say lightly. We will meet again, I promise; though that lies still in the future.”

  Very quietly, Carl said, “I’m not going back to the farm. Not now.”

  “Bring us down to one hundred feet, please, Molly,” Professor Erlenwanger said. He half-turned from the view forward. “You needn’t go back, you know,” he said. “Kummel and Son, the meat canners on Market Street, will have openings for a stock clerk and a receptionist this morning.”

  Carl frowned. “I’m not a stock clerk,” he said.

  The Professor shook his head abruptly. “You’re a strong young man who has worked with cattle all his life. You’re bright and you’re honest—and you will remind Mr. Kummel of his only son, who died last week of influenza.” Erlenwanger tongued his lips again. “Kummel’s is a very small firm now—only a few years ago it was a butcher shop. But if gold should be discovered on the coasts of Alaska and Canada, the inevitable rush will be supplied from San Francisco. A firm with a solid reputation will be able to expand greatly; and employees who have been trustworthy in small things . . . will be entrusted with great ones. You may live to endow your grandson’s education at . . . the California Institute of Technology, for instance.”

  Erlenwanger trimmed his prop pitch fine. “Set us down gently, now,” he said as the landing legs squealed and extended. Molly was blinking back tears, but her fingers worked the controls with practiced delicacy. The spotlight of The Enterprise stabbed narrowly, then flooded a barren area at a touch of the Professor’s wrist. Gas standards reached up forlornly, installed but unlighted along a three-block line of vacant lots. The older man coarsened the prop to give him a touch more helm and bring the airship’s nose around. Carl swallowed and slid the door open. “I don’t think we will need the grapnel,” Erlenwanger said. They were barely moving forward, sinking as slowly as bodies in a still, cold lake. A moment before they touched, Molly eased back on a lever. The nose tilted up minusculy and the rear landing leg cut the rank grass before the front did. They were down with less jolt than a man got stepping out of bed.

  The Professor opened the sleeping compartment and handed out the two small suitcases that were all Carl’s and Molly’s possessions. They took them silently, Molly holding the grip with both hands and her lower lip with her teeth. Even the cases had been the Professor’s gift. Erlenwanger slipped a heavy purse into the side pocket of the girl’s coat. He kissed her very gently on the cheek, just forward of her ear. “There’ll be a trolley in two minutes,” he said without pulling his watch from his vest pocket. “One thing,” he added. “There is both good and bad in every life, every age. But always remember what—relatives of mine told me when I was very young: you must never give up on Mankind. Because Mankind never quite gives up on itself.” He shook Carl’s hand and turned him to the open door.

  Carl stepped down. Molly followed, her head bent over. Neither of them spoke. From the gondola behind them they heard the Professor call, “Goodby, Pops. Goodby, Mama Gudeint. I’m proud to have known you.”

  Air billowed sluggishly as The Enterprise rose. Carl and Molly raised their faces to watch the airship. The great cylinder was climbing very swiftly on an even keel. A few hundred feet up it caught the sunrise over the hills and blazed like a plowshare in God’s forge. The suitcases were forgotten on the ground. Molly’s fingers squeezed Carl’s in fear. “What’s happening to it?” she demanded.

  The blur of light was higher, now, and farther west, but it was growing fainter more quickly than it rose. It seemed to merge with the sky or something beyond the sky. Carl licked his lips. “Goodby,” he whispered. He squeezed Molly’s hand in return. Still staring at the empty sky, he said, “It’s all right. Wherever he’s going, he’ll get there. And so will we . . . and it’ll be all right.”

 

 

 
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