Day of the Dragonstar (18 page)

In addition to its chilling hunting techniques, the Deinodon had also been seen galloping into the middle of a meal being enjoyed by one of the really big predators such as the Gorgosaurus and literally steal the food from its huge jaws. It would perform this dangerous feat at full speed, snapping a chunk of warm flesh from the forelimbs or snout without breaking stride. The larger carnivores, though angered they might be, were usually so startled that they almost never gave fruitless chase. It was like a game the small predators played, and it gave credence to the idea that all dinosaurs were not the dull, dimwitted creatures formerly imagined. More than once Mikaela thought she detected the bright sparkle of cunning laughter in the small killer’s eyes.

Her observations also cemented the still-raging controversy of warm versus cold bloodedness in the dinosaurs. She had been working on the observations and calculations when Phineas Kemp entered her laboratory dome.

“How’s it going, Doctor Lindstrom?”

She looked up and saw the colonel. Blue eyes as bright as neon, sandy hair, and square, all-American jaw (though she knew he was from Canada). He was not a tall man, but he was trim and well-muscled, and quite handsome in the old-fashioned sense of the word.

“Oh, good evening, Colonel Kemp.”

“You can call me Phineas, if you’d like.”

“That would be nice,” said Lindstrom.- “I never was very high on formality. Everyone calls me Mickle . . . but, I prefer Mikaela.”

Kemp laughed. “I can’t even
tell
you what they call me! Behind my back, that is . . .”

Mikaela smiled and gestured that Phineas take a seat at the lab table where she was working.

“I stopped by to tell you that we will be sending out an expeditionary team in the morning—well-armed, of course—and I was wondering if you and your assistants would like to accompany us?”

Mikaela brightened and smiled broadly. “You were wondering?! My god, Colonel . . . I mean,
Phineas . . .
Ever since we got here, I’ve felt like a little kid outside the window, waiting for the candy store to open!”

“Yes, I’d rather expected that,” said Phineas, smiling. “I hope you understood my reasons for keeping everyone inside the perimeter. I thought it would be best if we secured the outside hull and got the outrigger engines in place before tackling the interior.”

“Are the engines ready?”

“Just about. Jakes says that the final emplacements will be made this evening. After that, all that will be necessary will be to secure the
Goddard
and
Heinlein,
patch in some computer-guidance to the outriggers, and we’re on our way. We should be firing the engines by tomorrow at mid-day.”

“How long will the return voyage take? Am I going to have much time to explore the rest of the interior?”

“I’m not sure yet . . . We only have some of the preliminary figures and projections at this point. It depends on how well the
Dragonstar
responds to course changes and deceleration. We’re moving along at pretty good rate right now. It’s going to be a tricky operation for awhile. No one’s ever piloted a ship this big before.”

“No, I don’t suppose they have . . .” Mikaela looked at Kemp and wondered if he was really that serious and wrapped up in his work, or if he was trying to “make conversation.” He did not act as if he was in any great hurry to leave, and she was of two minds about his intrusion on her thoughts and notes.

“Have you made any interesting discoveries or observations yet? I see that you’ve found plenty to write about, even by just watching them beyond the perimeter.”

Mikaela wondered if Phineas Kemp was actually interested in her notes, or whether he simply wanted to get into her pants. She hated to think of men in those terms alone, but her experiences with Matte and other men had taught her that most of them preferred to get physical first, then bother to get to know you later.

She decided to give the colonel the benefit of the doubt. “Well, since you’ve asked,” she said with a calculated smile, “I
have
come up with a few things that knock the hell out of the old ideas about the dinosaurs being reptiles . . . at least like the reptiles that we are now familiar with.”

“You mean that business about the hot-bloodedness?” said Kemp off-handedly.

Mikaela’s face must have revealed her shock that he would know something about her work.

Kemp smiled. “My dear Doctor Lindstrom, just because I am a lantern-jawed astronaut does not mean that I am a total dolt in terms of anything other than trajectories and g-forces . . .”

“I
know,
Colonel, it’s just that I didn’t expect very many people to—”

“To be interested in paleontology? Mikaela, when I was a boy, I think I read every book ever printed on dinosaurs! Those big buggers used to fascinate me. Used to dream about them still being alive somewhere in the world, and that someday I’d find them, or that one night, one of them would amble up to my bedroom window and peek in to have a look at me with his big yellow eye!”

Mikaela laughed along with Kemp, and she felt herself blush.

“I’m sorry,” she said, after a slight pause. “I guess that when you get so immersed in your work, you can sometimes forget that there are other people around who might understand and appreciate what you’re doing.”

“Yes, I know the feeling. I think it’s a common problem with people who really love their work. Sometimes they can let it get in the way of the
people
in their lives.”

“You mean the old ‘love me or love your work, but you can’t love both’ routine?” Mikaela smiled and shook her head. “Yes, I’ve been down that road a few times myself.”

“Well, I wasn’t trying to get into anything personal,” said Kemp quickly. “It just seemed like the appropriate thing to say . . .”

“Oh, I see,” said Mikaela. She noticed that he was a bit edgy when she relaxed the conversation. She had heard some of the crew members talking during the voyage about the colonel being involved with one of the missing people on the
Heinlein
expedition. He was probably having trouble dealing with the whole mess, and she decided she should respect his wishes and simply back off.

“Well, anyway, let me tell you what I’ve found out so far . . .”

“About the dinosaurs, you mean?”

Mikaela smiled. “Yes, of course.” She shuffled through her notes for a moment. “You see, it was generally believed for so long that the dinosaurs were just giant lizards that it was also assumed that they were cold-blooded, like the reptiles on Earth today. But reptiles are dependent upon the environmental temperatures for their own body temperatures. And even under optimum conditions, true reptiles can only produce about a
twentieth
of the amount of energy than hot-blooded animals, like mammals, of the same body weight.”

“And the bigger the body of the reptile, the
more
energy would be required to move it.”

“Of course,” said Mikaela. “And just in a couple of days, I’ve seen creatures like the Deinodon and the Compsognathus who move so quickly that they could not possibly be reptiles.”

“But if they’re not lizards, then what are they?”

“That’s what all the research will really be about. Can you imagine what we’ll learn when we can actually dissect a few of these animals? My feelings are that they are either a totally extinct class that resembles our modem reptiles in appearance only; or that they were a part of the reptile family that was hot-blooded and simply died off. We’ll find out lots of things before we’re done . . . now that we have this floating zoo.”

“
If
we are careful,” said Phineas. “That was one of the things I wanted to tell you about. When the expeditionary teams go out, I want you to realize that our first objective will be to search for any trace of the
Heinlein
team who might have survived. Scientific research will be secondary at this point, and I want you to understand that, okay?”

“Yes, that’s quite clear. Are we going to be going out on foot?”

“Maybe for the preliminary excursions. But I’m planning to have several omni-terrain vehicles assembled, plus an ornithopter which will be able to fly in the contained atmosphere of the cylinder. There are some tricky vortices and gravity gradients that we will have to play with before we really know what we’re doing.”

“Well, don’t worry about me and my people, Phineas. I promise that we will be cooperative. Nobody will go running off into the grinning jaws of old T. Rex.” She smiled and closed her notebooks, sensing that their talk was almost at an end.

“Speaking of T. Rex . . .” he said as he stood up. “I haven’t seen him yet, have you?”

“No, but I’m not surprised. Most of his fossil remains have been found in less densely foliated regions. He seems to have preferred hunting in more open territory, most likely because of the trouble he might have had, squeezing between air those redwoods in the thick parts of the forest.”

“That’s something good to know,” said Kemp, reaching out to take Mikaela’s hand, shaking it lightly. “Very well, then, it was good to have a chance to talk to you for a bit. We’ll be assembling at oh-eight hundred hours. See you in the morning.”

“That’ll be fine, Phineas. And thank you. Good night.”

Kemp smiled wanly, turned, and left the lab. Mikaela smiled to herself, thinking that she found him attractive in an odd way. There was something about his ram-rod mannerisms that didn’t seem right. There was probably a lot more to Phineas Kemp seething about just beneath the surface, waiting to be unleashed, and Mikaela had the notion that she might be the woman to do the job.

* * *

Ross Canter entered the airlock of the
Goddard,
along with his co-workers on the outrigging project. As a flight engineer, he had not been dangling in space on an umbilical to do the actual labor on the engines but had acted as a supervisor and inspector of the work. The engines themselves were not as much of a problem as the proper placement and method of securing them to the hull and structure of the alien ship. It would have been much easier to have simply located the alien control section of the ship and used the on-board engines. Of course, Canter knew that there would be a whole new set of problems involved in something like that. It might be near to impossible to figure out how the engines worked without risking the destruction of the entire vessel; or it might all be in vain, since one, of the most probable reasons why the ship was orbiting the sun dead in space was some kind of engine failure.

As Canter entered the ready-room, where he and the others slipped out of their EVA suits, he realized how thankful he was to be almost finished with the job. He did not like EVA work, just hanging out there in the bottomless pit of space. It gave him a bad case of vertigo, especially when he was looking down the endless length of the
Dragonstar.
It was like he was falling outwards all the time.

The
Goddard
and the
Heinlein,
docked together to form one ungainly ship, had been attached to the side of the alien hull, and after a few more series of tests, Doctor Jakes and his men would be firing up the engines and the alteration of the
Dragonstar’s
orbit would begin. According to Canter’s timetable, that would be just about the right time to sabotage the communications centers of both the
Goddard
and the
Heinlein.
Once the later phases of the operation had commenced back on the moon, there could be no more contact with either ship.

He had gone over the plan of action in his mind many times, and he was confident that he would be successful. It was incredible when he thought about it . . . how easy it would be to do the job. In fact, having seen how far along the outrigging project had gone, maybe now was the best time to do it. Canter hung up his EVA suit in the locker and left the ready-room, walking quickly up to his crew quarters to pick up the few tools he would need.

Since he was a flight engineer, it was not unusual for him to be heading down the main corridor to the service module section of the
Goddard
with a tool belt dangling from the waist of his jumpsuit. No one paid him more than the usual attention of saying hello or simply nodding. Canter smiled back as he passed the few members of the skeleton crew on board either of the ships. Almost everyone was kept occupied either outside the alien ship, or down inside at the base camp.

After passing through the hatch to the service module, he locked it securely behind him, and paused to study the layout of the module, making sure that it coincided with the schematics he had brought with him. The module was one of the main ganglia in the nervous/electronic system of the ship. All the support and tactical systems for the
Goddard
originated here. Canter stood in the midst of a vast array of wiring, plumbing, modular paks, and harnesses, which would have stymied anyone without the explicit knowledge to understand it all. Canter traced the ventricular harnesses strapped along the bulkheads to the main bank of modular paks. Following the color-coded schematics, he located the pak which contained the monolithic micropressors in charge of Deep-Space tachyon communications. He pulled a small tool from his belt, a magnetic-driver, and unlocked the communications pak. It was so easy, he thought. A twist of the wrist, pull out the modular assembly, and the
Goddard
was deaf and dumb.

Placing the pak in his breast pocket, he stepped back and took his miniature welding-torch from his utility belt. A few deft strokes of the superheated beam of the torch and the busbar connectors for the modular pak were fused into slag. Even if Stores had replacement modular assemblies, no one would be able to repair the damages in time.

Canter put away his tools and left the service module, passing through the main corridor without being seen. He passed through the docking-collar lock into the
Heinlein,
which at the time was unoccupied, Fratz and Bracken having been reassigned to duty on board the
Goddard.
Canter had even less apprehension as he entered the service module of the smaller ship, where he disabled its communications facilities with ease.
This is for Nesrudah,
he thought to himself as he finished the job. He did not allow himself to think about what he was doing beyond that simple aspect. He had long ago learned that you only got yourself into deeper trouble when you tried to grapple with the implications of actions which were beyond the scope of your understanding. He only knew that he had been called upon to do a specific job, and that it was not his place to reason why, as the old poem said. He would leave that to his superiors.