Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (15 page)

Nilson found it easier to think of the creature as a beast now than it had been when he watched her moving freely at a distance. She was small, and small without the softness of a human child of the same size. Her jaw was prominent, her forehead receding, and her nose little more than the bare nostrils of a chimpanzee. Most of all, the covering of coarse brown fur robbed the captive of her humanity.

And the fur was as specious an indicator as the rest of them, which the guide knew full well. The hominid had no more hair than Nilson did himself. Only the fact that the body hairs of later-evolved hominids were short and transparent by comparison to those of the captive permitted Nilson to pretend the captive was inhuman. That did not matter. The fact that Nilson
could
pretend to be dealing with a beast and not an ancestor was the only thing that allowed him to do what circumstances forced him to do.

The big man set his captive down gently. With practiced speed, he extended the titanium frame of the sled and locked its members into place. He picked up the hominid again, lifting her off the ground one-handed instead of dragging her as a smaller and weaker man would have had to do. The sled had integral tie-downs with which he fastened his burden securely despite her squirming. It would be to no one’s benefit for her to break halfway loose and injure herself. The best Nilson could hope for now was that Weil would examine the hominid briefly and release her. Unharmed, the creature could go on about whatever business she would have accomplished had the time intrusion not occurred.

The guide settled his slung rifle and began trudging toward camp at a pace that would not upset the sled on the irregular ground. As a matter of course, he glanced around frequently to be sure that he was not being stalked by a predator. He paid no particular attention to the brush surrounding the locust grove, however.

Nilson would have had to look very carefully indeed to see the glint of bright eyes hidden there. The eyes followed him and the captive hominid step by step toward his camp.

# # #

“I’ll put a kettle of water on and do the dishes,” Henry Vickers said. “No need for you two to worry about it.”

The firelight brought out attractive bronze highlights in Linda Weil’s dark hair. It softened the lines of her face as well. “Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary,” she said with a comfortable smile. “We can carry them Topside dirty and let somebody there worry about them.”

Both men turned and stared silently at the beaming paleontologist. The hominid whimpered outside the circle of firelight. She was in a cage, the largest one available but still meant for considerably smaller specimens. Weil ignored the sound. She turned to Holgar Nilson who stared glumly at his hands. “Holgar,” she said, “you did a great job today. I know how much you hated doing it, but you did it splendidly, professionally, anyway. Because of that, we’re able to return Topside first thing tomorrow and not—not interfere with the creatures living here any further.”

Nilson looked up slowly. His face was as doubtful as that of a political prisoner who has just been informed that the revolution has made him president. “Do you mean,” he asked carefully, “that you’re already done examining, ah, it?” A quirk of his head indicated the cage at which Nilson had refused to look ever since he had transferred his captive to it.

The paleontologist gave a brief headshake, a tightening around her eyes showing that she was aware of what was about to happen. “No,” she said, “we’ll carry the specimen back with us Topside. The sort of testing necessary will take years.”

“No,” said the Norwegian flatly. Then he cried, “God in heaven,
no!
Are you mad? Henry”—turning to the senior guide who would not look at him, stretching out both hands to Vickers as if he were the last hope of a drowning man—“you cannot permit her to do this, will you?”

“Look, one cull from a troop,” muttered Vickers to his hands. “Not even breeding age . . .”

Nilson’s eyes were red with rage and the firelight. “I—” he began, but the alarm pinged and cut off even his fury.

Both men focused on the panel, their hands snatching up their rifles. Linda Weil was trying to place the source of the sound. The indicator for Sensor Five, northeast of the camp, was pulsing. From the dial, the intruder was of small to medium size: an impala, say—or a hyena.

The guides exchanged glances. The Norwegian shifted his rifle to a one-hand hold, its butt socketed on his hip. He picked up the spotlight. Vickers leveled the Garand, leaning into it with all the slack in the trigger taken up. He nodded. Nilson flicked on the light and slashed its narrow beam across the arc the sensor reported. Nearby bushes flashed white as the spot touched them; further out, only shadows pivoted about the beam. According to the sensor, the intruder was still there, 150 meters out in the night. It did not raise its eyes to give a pair of red aiming points when the light touched them.

“Turn it out,” Vickers whispered across the breech of his rifle.

After-effects of the fierce white beam shrank the firelit circle to a glow that scarcely cast the men’s shadows toward the bush. The sensor needle quivered as the intruder moved. Vickers fired into the night.

The crack of the .30-’06 made Weil scream in surprise. The muzzle flash was a red ball, momentary but as intense as a bath in acid. Chips of jacket metal spun burning into the night like tiny signal rockets. The sensor jolted, then slipped back to rest position as the intruder bounded back into darkness.

“What was it?” Linda Weil demanded. Her palms were clamped to her ears as if to squeeze the ringing from the drums.

“I don’t care so long as it’s gone,” Vickers said, slowly lowering the Garand. “I’ve seen a man after a hyena dragged him out of his tent by the face.”

“The world might be better off if we
were
killed here,” said Holgar Nilson bitterly.

Vickers looked at the younger man. He did not speak. Nilson spat on the fire. “I am very tired now,” he said. “I will sleep.” He nodded toward the intrusion vehicle, its supporting beams sunk to knee- height in the ground. The metal glowed with a soft sheen of oil where rust had not already crept. “There. I wish you both comfort.”

The blond man’s footsteps could be heard on the steel even after his form had blurred into the night. “I shouldn’t care, should I?” said the woman, speaking toward the fire but loudly enough for Vickers to hear her.

Vickers walked to the water tank and began filling the eight-liter cauldron. The stream rang from the galvanized metal until the water buffered itself. “I don’t know,” the guide said. “If somebody thinks he’s accomplishing anything by sleeping on steel planking, I guess that’s his business.” He set the pot directly on the coals, twisting it a little to form a safe seat.

“After all, I was only recreation anyway, wasn’t I?” the dark-haired woman resumed. “What was a twenty-seven-year-old man going to want with a woman five years older when he got back to a place with some choice? Even if he didn’t already have a family!”

“Look, that’s out of my field,” said the guide. He had already switched magazines in the Garand. Now he checked his pockets to see if they held a loose round to replace the one he had just fired into the night.

“Well, he can
have
his damned security!” Weil said.
“I’ve
got success that he couldn’t comprehend if he had to. Do you realize—” her index finger prodded the air toward Vickers—“just how big this is? By bringing back this specimen, I’ve just become the most important researcher into human prehistory in this century!”

The guide’s expression did not change. Linda Weil pulled back with a slight start. “Well, we all have in a way,” she amended in a more guarded voice. “I mean, I couldn’t have done this here without you and, and Holgar, of course. But the . . . well, it’s my
field,
of course.”

Vickers laid the Garand carefully across the stool on which he had been sitting. He tested the dishwater with the tip of a thumb. “You know,” he said, “I’ve got some problems about carrying her” —he gestured toward the dull whimpering—“back with us, too. Look, you’ve got your camera, and they aren’t expecting us back Topside for three more days anyhow. Why don’t we stay here, you do your tests and whatever, and then—” Vickers spread his hand with a flare toward the hills, completing the thought.

The look that flashed across the paleontologist’s face was as wild as the laughter bubbling from the throat of a hyena. Weil had control of herself again as quickly. “Do you really want to keep her three days in a cage she can’t stand up in, Henry?” the woman asked. “And you
know
that we couldn’t accomplish anything here, even with a reasonable length of time—which that isn’t. Quite aside from the fact that they’d all suspect I’d made the story up myself. A few photos for evidence!”

“Holgar and I are here as witnesses,” Vickers said. He lifted the cauldron’s wire handle with a stick.

“Marvelous! And where did you do
your
postgraduate work?” Weil snapped. She softened at once, continuing, “Henry, I know my colleagues. They’ll doubt, and they
ought
to doubt. It’s better than another Piltdown Man. Oh, there’ll be another expedition, and it may possibly be as incredibly fortunate as we’ve been—but then it’ll be their names on the finds, not mine. And it’s not fair!”

Water sloshed as Vickers shifted the pot. A gush of steam and flying ashes licked his boots. “I don’t think she’s human,” he said quietly, “but if she is, I don’t think we’ve got any business holding her. Not here, not Topside. You know they’d never be able to find this, this slot in time close enough to put her back in it once she leaves.”

“Henry, for God’s sake,” the dark-haired woman pleaded, “we’re not talking about some kind of torture. Good grief, what do you think her life span’s going to be if we leave her? Five years? Three? Before she winds up in a sabertooth’s belly!”

Vickers gave the woman an odd look. “I think both the sabertooths in this range,” he said, “have eaten their last hominid.”

“All right, a hyena then!” the paleontologist said. “Or until she goes into anaphylactic shock from a bee sting. The point is not just that when we go Topside, everything here will be dead for five million years. The point is that the specimen will live a much longer life in comfort that she’ll appreciate just as much as you do. And she’ll advance our knowledge of ourselves and our beginnings more than Darwin did.”

“Yeah,” said the guide. He slid the trio of aluminum plates into the water. “I like modern comforts so much that I spend all the time I can in the bush.” He stirred the dishes morosely with the tableware before he dropped that in as well. “Okay, I’ve been wrong before. God knows, I’ve generally been wrong.”

Five distant hyenas broke out in giggling triumph. No doubt they had just killed, Vickers thought. He spat in the direction of the sounds.

Holgar Nilson swore in Norwegian. He had been doing a last-minute check of his ammunition as they all stood on the sun-struck platform of the intrusion vehicle. As rudimentary as their camp had been, it had taken four hours of solid work to strike it and restack the gear and specimens on the steel. “We can’t go yet,” Nilson said. “I can’t find one of my cartridge cases—we can’t leave it out there.”

Vickers had already unlocked the vehicle’s control panel. Now he took his hand from the big knife switch, but his voice was sour as he said, “Look, Holgar, have you forgotten to count the one up the spout?”

“No, no, it’s not that,” the big man insisted. “Of course, I don’t have a shell in the chamber for returning to Tel Aviv.” Nilson held a twenty-round ammunition box in his left hand. Twelve spaces were filled with empty brass; four still held live rounds, their cases bright where they showed above the Styrofoam liner. Only three of the remaining four spaces could be accounted for by the rounds in the Mauser’s magazine. “Leaving the brass here—what will it do to the future?”

“Oh, for Chrissake,” Vickers said. “Look, we’re leaving the lead of every shot we’ve fired here, aren’t we? And this isn’t the first team that’s been sent back, either.”

Linda Weil stood beside the wire mesh cage. The hominid hunched within, scratching at the dusty floor, did not look up. She had not eaten anything since her capture, despite offers of locust pods and what must have been to her an incredible quantity of antelope haunch. The paleontologist looked up from her specimen and said, “Yes, and after all, we’ve been evacuating wastes, breathing, sweating ourselves. I think it’s wise at this point to clean up as much as we can, but I don’t think we need be concerned over details.”

“When I want your opinion, slut, I’ll ask for it!” Nilson shouted.

Earlier that morning the younger guide had ignored Weil’s occasional, always conciliatory, comments. Now his face was red and the tendons stood out in his neck. The woman’s face distorted as if she had been struck.

“Damn it all anyway,” said Vickers. “We’re about five minutes away from never having to see each other again if we don’t want to. Let’s drop it, shall we?”

The other guide took a deep breath and nodded.

Vickers reached for the control switch again. Actually, he wouldn’t have minded going on further intrusions with Nilson if the big man could get over his fear of possible future consequences. Nilson was hard-working, a crack shot . . . and besides, he had already saved Vickers’ life once.

“Oh, hell,” Vickers said. He dropped his hand from the switch. “We forgot to pick up those goddamn rock samples in the confusion. Hell. I’ll get them.”

Nilson held out a hand to stop the senior guide. “No, let me,” he said. Giving Vickers a sardonic smile, he inserted another fat cartridge into the chamber of his rifle. He had to hold down the top round in the magazine so that the bolt would not pick it up and try to ram it into the already-loaded chamber. “After all,” he continued as the action snicked closed, “it was I who forgot them. And besides, I don’t care to stay with the—remaining personnel.”

“Do you think I care?” Linda Weil shrieked. The blond man ignored her, his boots clanking down the two steps to the gritty soil. Far to the west a storm was flashing over a rocky table, but here around the intrusion vehicle not a breath stirred. The grass was scarred by signs of human use: the blackened fire pit and the circle cleared around it; the trampled mud, now cracking, beneath the shower frame; the notches in the ground left by the sled’s sharp runners. A hundred yards away was the outcrop shattered by Nilson’s dynamite a moment before his shot saved Vickers’ life. Like the other damage they had done to the land, this too was transitory. It only speeded up the process that frost and rain would have accomplished anyway over the next five million years.