More white patches appeared ahead, boiling rags of mist that swelled rapidly into cottony thunderheads, roots gray with rain. Peg was disappointed to find the horizon clouding up. “I cannot get a clear view of the coast.”
Not surprising. Weather was closing in from all sides. The barometer tumbled into freefall. For the first time, Challenger fought terrific headwinds. Rain splattered in the open window; fat searing drops hit Jake in the face.
Shielding her eyes with her viewfinder, Peg announced, “I see a black line to the south.”
“That’s the coast.” He watched her turn to maximum magnification. In this thickening storm, she had as much chance of sighting Rio as she did of seeing a sauropod.
“It isn’t getting any closer.”
Jake nodded. “This southeast headwind is a bastard. Maximum revolutions and ground speed is falling.”
“Is that possible?”
“I would not have thought so an hour ago. But it’s happening.”
Challenger’s twin propellers were churning at peak revolutions without gaining a meter. The headwind had topped 160 kilometers per hour. Strain on the ship was transmitted to Jake as a line of tension along his spine, humming from head to buttocks.
Peg complained that South America was slipping away. At last, she let her recorder fall. “It’s gone. Nothing but gray skies and gray wave caps.” They were being blown backward by gale-force winds.
###
Red Woman is the first woman. Like Coyote, she has always been with us, doing much that is bad and some that is good.
Pretty Shield, Crow Medicine woman and
wife to Goes Ahead, Custer’s scout
###
Red Woman
The storm seized them with astonishing speed. Inrushing winds immobilized Challenger. Radar reported ominous rings of cumulonimbus spreading through dense stratiform clouds—the signature of a truly intense cyclonic storm. A hurricane was being born around them.
Jake stole a glance at Peg. She did not look worried—nothing new there. As much as he admired her fine brain, Peg did not have the sense to be scared. Mesozoic weather was advertised as mild. At Home, cyclonic storms had long been tamed; satellites seeded them from orbit to remove energy as rain and limit crop damage. Aside from the unwary sailing buff, people simply avoided storms. No one except suicide cases went ballooning about in a typhoon.
But Jake had been through horrible blows before—rounding the Horn under hatches aboard a tea clipper, and clinging to the mast of a leaky Athenian coaster off Cape Matapan. He knew what it was like to have life hang at the whim of wind and sea. It was a lesson he did not need replayed.
Lightning scrawled across the sky, connecting thunderheads. A thermal tugged at the airship. Jake applied maximum down elevator, to keep Challenger below her pressure height. He did not want to vent hydrogen in a thunderstorm. The column of valved gas could act as a conductor, drawing lightning straight to the ship.
“There must be excess power in the reactor.” Peg was still set on seeing the sauropods of South America.
“Sure, the props could rip the reactor right off the hull. Wouldn’t help us much.” They had to run before the storm. He reduced power on the port propeller, using starboard rudder to bring the airship about.
Challenger struggled to obey. Headwinds beat at the control surfaces. Staggered by the buffeting, Challenger was blown sideways, then leaped ahead like a sprinting sauropod. Ground speed zoomed from less than zero to several hundred kilometers per hour.
Peg observed the transition with calm interest. “Where are we headed now?”
“Most likely north by northwest.” So near the center of the swirling cloud mass, winds shifted too rapidly to give a steady course.
Rain beat against the cabin, blotting out the sunlight. Windows closed. Interior lights winked on. Jake ordered a pot of coffee from the microstove. He started to pour, bracing himself against the heave of the storm.
Challenger shot upward, flinging hot coffee on Jake, Peg, and the surrounding bulkheads.
Yelling for more power and down elevator, Jake snagged a window frame with one hand and Peg with the other, keeping her from flying through the galley into the lounge. The ship continued to rise, sucked up at a sickening angle.
Jammed against Peg, with only wet coffee between them, Jake felt compelled to make conversation. “We’re caught in a convection cell!”
She nodded, eyes wide and staring.
Challenger started giving the altitude in hundred-meter steps as they neared pressure height. “Eight hundred meters, nine hundred meters, a thousand . . .”
“At twelve hundred meters, we’ll reach pressure height and have to valve hydrogen, or the gas cells will rupture.” His explanation sounded absurdly calm even to him.
“Pressure height,” announced Challenger. “Butterfly valves opening.”
Feeling hydrogen gush from the ship, Jake ordered down elevator. The stall alarm rang in his head, but still they kept rising, borne aloft by a rushing bubble of air.
“. . . fifteen hundred meters, sixteen hundred meters . . .”
More hydrogen spewed into the storm.
“. . . twenty-three hundred meters, twenty-four hundred meters, twenty-five hundred meters . . .”
They could defy gravity only so long. “Brace yourself.” He held harder to Peg.
At more than twice its pressure height, the airship lurched to a stop. They teetered for several seconds. Then Challenger plunged into the boiling darkness.
“Dump ballast,” Jake kept his lips tight, voicing the command in his head. Why show Peg how scared he was? Water ballast streamed from the ship. But now they were caught in a downdraft; deflating cells sucked up into the hull, offsetting the loss of water, threatening an oxyhydrogen explosion.
“Look, the ocean.” Peg pointed. Ruin-swept waves appeared us they plummeted through the bottom cloud layer.
Challenger righted herself so close to the whitecaps that Jake could see spray flying from the chop. She began to climb immediately.
Jake ordered added power and down elevator to counteract the climb. Each wild oscillation cost him both gas and ballast. The airship threatened to yo-yo until they lost all buoyancy and plunged into the sea.
Fresh water and hydrogen were all around him, but Jake had no notion of touching down to refill the tanks. Wind force had to be fearsome. He saw waterspouts, a conga line of twisters sweeping over the waves. Lightning struck the ship with alarming regularity.
A year or so before Jake shipped on the Graf, an American helium airship, the Akron, stronger and heavier than Challenger, touched down in seas milder than these. Three survivors were plucked from the Atlantic. Admiral Moffett and seventy-odd others went down with the ship, and so did a smaller airship sent to find them. Not enviable odds. And here there were no rescue ships. Jake didn’t like their chances of flagging a ride on a passing plesiosaur.
Altitude figures started to tumble. Another wet downdraft had Challenger headed for the wavecaps.
“Prepare for ditch procedure,” the airship advised in a disinterested monotone. “Your lounge chairs double as lift rafts.”
Jake clutched the window frame, staring at Peg. “Maximum power. Up elevator.” He could not see them riding out a typhoon in lounge chairs.
“Ditch procedure,” repeated the ship. Emergency circuits had made their heartless calculations. “Warm water ditching. Remove excess clothing. Place your head between your knees.”
Jake tuned Challenger out. He had played all his cards but one. Water ballast. Elevators. Reactor power. Still the rain-swept sea was only meters away. Jake wanted to escape, but he’d have to settle for a stay of execution.
“Jettison reactor.”
Propellers whirling, the reactor detached itself, plunging into the wavetops. An almighty surge lifted them up. Lightened by the loss of the reactor, Challenger shot skyward, reeling off new altitude numbers. “Six hundred, seven hundred, eight hundred meters . . .”
“What happened?” Peg sounded like she’d fully expected to get wet.
“I dumped the reactor.”
“Won’t we need it later?”
“It was that or touch down in berserk seas.” Compared to the reactor, provisions and inflated furniture did not mass enough to matter.
Challenger tore through her old pressure height, “. . . twelve hundred, thirteen hundred, fourteen hundred meters.”
At over two thousand meters they leveled off. Wind speed fell. The non-slip deck felt firmer now that they were free ballooning, no longer fighting the storm.
Jake let go of Peg and the window, walking slowly over to the microstove. Ordering a light lunch, he took it into the lounge. Water beaded on the windows.
Peg followed him. “What now?”
“Soufflé aux blancs d’oeufs. And the last of that Moselle. No sense saving good wine for after the crash.”
“Crash?”
“When the hurricane hits the coast of Asiamerica, we have to bring Challenger down.” Unless they missed Asiamerica. He pictured them shooting the gap between the two continents, sailing out into the near-limitless Pacific. That would pretty much match his luck.
“How bad do you expect it to be?” Peg asked the question casually, as though it hardly involved her.
“Only been in one airship bang-up. Aboard the Graf Zeppelin, returning to Pernambuco from Rio, we hit a heavy tropical squall a hundred meters above the field. Drove us right down to the deck.” Remembering that nauseating crunch made him shiver. “We lost a rudder and came down hard on some poor Brazilian’s shanty. Rammed the chimney right into the Graf’s hull. Breakfast was cooking, so smoke and sparks poured over tons of hydrogen and fuel gas.”
He shook his head thoughtfully. “We’d have been blown back to Frankfurt, but an on-the-ball mechanic leaped out of his gondola and dashed in the front door of the shack. He grabbed a pot of coffee off the stove and put out the fire.” Zeppelin crews were the best; one reason Jake had trained with them.
Peg smiled at the story. Jake did not add that it was the sort of luck you could not count on twice. Over café au lait, he considered making a final stab at seducing Peg. But it would be only out of a sense of duty. The line he had been saving, “Look, I got you here,” was now wildly inappropriate.
Night fell. They dozed in their respective armchairs, behind black rain-streaked windows.
Near to dawn, Jake awoke. Light showed in the east. Thunderheads towered over a stratiform cloud plain—not a day for yoga and “Dawn Symphony.” Peg lay curled in her armchair, studying the cloudscape. “Did you ever see anything so lovely?” The cloud plain was flat as polished ivory.
Jake nodded to starboard. “First sign of land.”
A speck hung in the false dawn. Boosted vision brought it into focus—long leathery wings, a sharp pointed head, and the compact body of a pterosaur.
Peg hopped out of her chair. “Quetzalcoatl us.” Another non-dinosaur—merely a huge flying reptile, but sufficiently incredible, a living creature with the wingspan of a small aircraft.
The pterosaur flew in formation with the crippled airship, narrow pointed wings not even beating, slaying aloft through sheer mastery of the elements. Jake’s microamps played “Riders on the Storm.” Listening to the Doors, looking into Quetzalcoatlus’s wrinkled face, Jake felt the full eeriness of this other earth, where birds had teeth and huge reptiles had wings and beaks.
He also sensed the same evolutionary tension. The pterosaur was big, beautiful, and otherworldly, but fragile as well. Great size meant small numbers and overspecialization. If Quetzalcoatlus faltered, who would take its place? Not another pterosaur, because there were no others. Replacement would come from the flocks of tiny birds which were growing ever more numerous.
“But it’s not a marine animal.” Peg recorded and catalogued furiously.
“Exactly. We must be headed inland.” Assuming the pterosaur knew its way home. “Perhaps it was blown out to sea by the storm.”
“Something to put in the report,” she declared. Her certainty amused him. Jake guessed that it was an even bet that he would never get to file on this run.
Ghostly landforms appeared on the chart table. He announced, “We’re headed for the Texas coast.” This late in the Cretaceous, the Lone Star State was just taking shape. Much of what would be coastal plain was still beneath the sea. The New Mexico highlands were steeper, not nearly so far inland.
In open-mouthed astonishment, he watched the coast’s outline shift. Storm surge. Sea level was rising, submerging coastal islands, inundating lowlands. “This storm won’t let go,” Jake marveled at the flood. “Flats are filling up. There may be no place to land short of the highlands.”
Dawn turned to day. The tempest whirled inland, losing velocity. Jake watched the tail end of the proto-Rockies poke up through the cloud plain. Black islands in a foamy white sea.
“Gorgeous.” Peg was in rapture.
Jake scanned the mountain spine—no sign of a landing site. Ground speed was still formidable. Without power or aerodynamic control, Challenger would batter herself against the passes.
“Strap in.” The crash rushing toward them shriveled hairs on his spine.
“But I can hardly see from that chair,” Peg complained.
“We are going to hit badly.” A wild understatement.
“Will being strapped down make a difference?”
“It might.”
She shrugged, strapping the belt and harness across her body. It was plain that Peg did not plan to spend her last moments with her head between her knees. She meant to enjoy them. And record them. Her 3V was taking in everything.
Black pine tops broke through the clouds below; a high saddle lay dead ahead.
“Present course will terminate in three minutes.” Challenger did not think they would make the saddle.
“Down five hundred meters.” No sense in staying up here. He had to find a landing spot, or all his maneuvering would only succeed in smearing them on the oncoming saddle. Pine tops grew larger. Jake’s enhanced vision searched for a clearing.
Challenger gave a two-minute warning.
“Down fifty meters.” Conifer forest reached up to tear the guts out of the airship. Still no gap in the canopy.
“One minute.”
No clearing. No opening of any sort. Jake had to choose between rocks and treetops.
“Release remaining hydrogen.” He braced himself.
Pine tops leaped at him. A giant sequoia slammed against the cabin, snapping and shuddering. Plastic shattered on impact; shards exploded through the lounge. Thrown against his straps, Jake heard Challenger cracking like an aluminum eggshell.
Metal shrieked as the cabin tore free from the hull. Another plunge. A jerk and fall, followed by a rain of debris. Then silence, eerie in its completeness.
Alive enough to hurt, Jake hung face down in his straps, tasting blood and vomit in the back of his mouth. His head sang with pain.
Twisting about, he tried to look over at Peg. It was blacker hanging in the treetops than it had been in the morning air above—the crushed and deflated hull formed a silver canopy, blocking the light. Rain dripped in. Through a screen of pine boughs he saw the back of her inflated chair.
“Peg, are you there?”
“Where else would I be? Was that it?”
“Was what it?”
“Are we going to fall some more?”
“Hell, I hope not!” A stupendous hunk of pine was thrust through the lounge into the chartroom; a meter more to port and it would have speared him on the way. It was thicker than Jake’s waist, unlikely to break.
“Good.” In a flurry of white limbs Peg unstrapped, dropping down to the rear bulkhead which had become a deck. She pushed aside the foliage. “What about you? Alive or dead?”
“Alive, I think.”
“Great.” She helped undo his straps. “How do you feel?”
“Like shit hammered through a
small hole.” The Mesozoic was still tumbling. Would his legs work? Apparently.
They knelt together on the bulkhead, feeling for breaks. First his limbs, then Peg’s. Then they felt each other’s bodies. Soon they were just feeling, then stroking and caressing. They kissed. His tongue still worked. “Sorry about the blood.”
“Oh, I don’t mind.” Peg had the Look. That same dreamy half-smile he’d seen by the campfire in Hell Creek.
Fumbling to get his pants down, Jake could barely believe they were finally going to fuck—in a shattered cabin, halfway up a tree.
She watched him strip, showing almost clinical interest. “You know, this is the wildest thing I have ever done.”
“Not nearly.” He kicked his pants off. “The wildest thing you ever did was to pat that tyrannosaur on the nose.”
She laughed. “The second wildest, anyway.”
“Wrong again. The second wildest was when you . . .” He pulled her to him. Seeing all those yoga positions had given him some great ideas.
“I mean I have never done anything like this before.”
“Never made love atop a sequoia after ramming into a mountain? It won’t be near so hard as it sounds.” He slid his hand between her legs. Peg felt as good as he’d imagined.
“No, I mean I have never made love. Not to a man.”
“Shit and damnation.” His hand stopped. How could an attractive twenty-six-year-old not have had heterosex? “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I just did.” She shrugged bare shoulders. “It makes this, you know, essential.”
After sleeping half the night in a chair and caroming off a mountain, Jake was not sure how essential he could be. “Why didn’t your sex therapist take care of this when you were a teenager?” Virginity had been cured ages ago.
“Sex therapy bored me. All those lectures on the joy of procreation.”
“Right, I got the procreation lecture, too.” But it hadn’t discouraged Jake from having heterosex—not completely at least. “So why are you starting now?”
“Because we made it. This is the fucking Mesozoic.” She whacked her hand on his hip. “Besides, you saved my life. I owe you for that.”
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