Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (17 page)

Vickers’ face lost its crinkling of humor. “If there’s any shooting to be done from the camp,” he continued, “that’s what does it. Unless Dieter or me specifically tells you otherwise. We’re not going to have the intrusion vehicle trampled by a herd of dinos that somebody spooked right into it. If something happens to the intrusion vehicle, we don’t go home.” Vickers smiled again. “That might be okay with me, but I don’t think any of the rest of you want to have to explain to the others how you stuck them in the Cretaceous.”

“That would be a paradox, wouldn’t it, Mr. Vickers?” Miss McPherson said. “That is, uh, human beings living in the Cretaceous? So it couldn’t happen. Not that I’d want any chances taken with the vehicle, of course.”

Vickers shrugged with genuine disinterest. “Ma’am, if you want to talk about paradox, you need Dr. Galil and his team. So far as I understand it, though, if there’s not a change in the future, then there’s no paradox; and if there
is
a change, then there’s no paradox either because the change—well, the change is reality then.”

Mr. McPherson leaned forward with a frown. “Well, surely two bodies—the same body—can’t exist simultaneously,” he insisted. If he and his sister had been bored with the discussion of firearms, then they had recovered their interest with mention of the mechanics of time transport.

“Sure they can,” the guide said with the asperity of someone who had been asked the same question too often. He waved his hand back and forth as if erasing the thought from a chalkboard. “They do. Every person, every gun or can of food, contains at least some atoms that were around in the Cretaceous—or the Pre-Cambrian, for that matter. It doesn’t matter to the atoms whether they call themselves Henry Vickers or the third redwood from the big rock . . .” He paused. “There’s just one rule that I’ve heard for true from people who know,” he continued at last. “If you travel into the future, you travel as energy. And you don’t come back at all.”

Mears paled and looked at the ceiling. People got squeamish about the damnedest things, thought Vickers. Being converted into energy . . . or being eaten . . . or being drowned in dark water lighted only by the dying radiance of your mind—but he broke away from that thought, a little sweat on his forehead with the strain of it. He continued aloud, “There’s no danger for us, heading back into the far past. But the intrusion vehicle can’t be calibrated closer than 5,000 years plus or minus so far. The research side”—he had almost said ‘the military side,’ knowing the two were synonymous; knowing also that the Israeli government disapproved intensely of statements to that effect—“was trying for the recent past”—1948, but that was another thing you didn’t admit you knew—“and they put a man into the future instead. After Dr. Galil had worked out the math, they moved the lab and cleared a quarter-mile section of Tel Aviv around the old site. They figure the poor bastard will show up sometime in the next few thousand years . . . and nobody better be sharing the area when he does.”

Vickers frowned at himself. “Well, that’s probably more than the government wants me to say about the technical side,” he said. “And anyway, I’m not the one to ask. Let’s get back to the business itself—which I do know something about.”

“You’ve said that this presentation and the written material are all yours,” Adrienne Salmes said with a wave of her hand. “I’d like to know why.”

Vickers blinked at the unexpected question. He looked from Mrs. Salmes to the other clients, all of them but her husband staring back at him with interest. The guide laughed. “I like my job,” he said. “A century ago, I’d have been hiking through Africa with a Mauser, selling ivory every year or so when I came in from the bush.” He rubbed his left cheekbone where a disk of shiny skin remained from a boil of twenty years before. “That sort of life was gone before I was born,” he went on. “What I have is the closest thing there is to it now.”

Adrienne Salmes was nodding. Mr. McPherson put his own puzzled frown into words and said, “I don’t see what that has to do with, well, you holding these sessions, though.”

“It’s like this,” Vickers said, watching his fingers tent and flatten against each other. “They pay me, the government does, a very good salary that I personally don’t have much use for.” Jonathan Salmes snorted, but the guide ignored him. “I use it to make my job easier,” he went on, “by sending the clients all the data
I’ve
found useful in the five years I’ve been traveling back to the Cretaceous . . . and elsewhere, but mostly the Cretaceous. Because if people go back with only what they hear in the advertising or from folks who need to make a buck or a name with their stories, they’ll have problems when they see the real thing. Which means problems for me. So a month before each safari, I rent a suite in New York or Frankfurt or wherever the hell seems reasonable, and I offer to give a presentation to the clients. Nobody has to come, but most people do.” He scanned the group. “All of you did, for instance. It makes life easier for me.”

He cleared his throat. “Well, in another way, we’re here to make life easier for you,” he went on. “I’ve brought along holos of the standard game animals you’ll be seeing.” He dimmed the lights and stepped toward the back of the room. “First the sauropods, the big long-necks. The most impressive things you’ll see in the Cretaceous, but a disappointing trophy because of the small heads . . .”

“All right, ladies and gentlemen.” said Dieter Jost. Vickers always left the junior guide responsible for the social chores when both of them were present. “Please line up here along the wall until Doctor Galil directs us onto the vehicle.”

The members of Cretaceous Safari 87 backed against the hangar wall, their weapons or cameras in their hands. The guides and the two pilots, Washman and Brady, watched the clients rather than the crew preparing the intrusion vehicle. You could never tell what sort of mistake a tensed-up layman would make with a loaded weapon in his or her hands.

In case the clients were not laymen at all, there were four guards seated in a balcony-height alcove in the opposite wall. They wore civilian clothes, but the submachine guns they carried were just as military as their ID cards. The Israelis were, of all people, alert to the chance that a commando raid would be aimed at an intrusion vehicle and its technical staff. For that reason, the installation was in an urban setting from which there could be no quick escape; and its corridors and rooms, including the gaping hanger itself, were better guarded than the Defense Ministry had been during the most recent shooting war.

Dr. Galil and his staff were only occasionally visible to the group on the floor of the hangar. The intrusion vehicle rested on four braced girders twenty feet high. On its underside, a cylindrical probe was repeatedly blurring and reappearing. The technicians received data from the probe on instruments plugged into various sockets on the vehicle. Eighty million years in the past, the cylinder was sampling its surroundings on a score of wavelengths. When necessary, Dr. Galil himself changed control settings. Despite that care, there was no certainty of the surface over which the travelers would appear—or how far or under it they would appear. The long legs gave the intrusion vehicle a margin that might otherwise have been achieved by a longer drop than anything aboard would have survived.

“Well, this is it, hey?” said Jonathan Salmes, speaking to Don Washman. To do so, Salmes had to talk through his wife, who ignored him in turn. “A chance to hunt the most dangerous damned creatures ever to walk the Earth!” Salmes’ hands, evenly tanned like every other inch of exposed skin on him, tightened still further on the beautiful bolt-action rifle he carried.

Washman’s smile went no further than Adrienne Salmes. The pilot was a big man also. The 40mm grenade launcher he held looked like a sawed-off shotgun with him for scale. “Gee, Mr. Salmes,” he said in false surprise. “People our age all had a chance to learn the most dangerous game on Earth popped out of a spider hole with an AK-47 in its hands. All the
men
did, at least.”

Vickers scowled. “Don,” he said. But Washman was a pilot, not a PR man. Besides, Salmes had coming anything of the sort he got.

Adrienne Salmes turned to Washman and laughed.

A heavyset man climbed down from the intrusion vehicle and strolled across the concrete floor toward the waiting group. Like the guards, he wore an ordinary business suit. He kept his hands in his pants pockets. “Good evening, ladies and sirs,” he said in accented English. “I am Mr. Stern; you might say, the company manager. I trust the preparations for your tour have been satisfactory?” He eyed Dieter, then Vickers, his face wearing only a bland smile.

“All present and accounted for,” said Dieter in German. At his side, Mears nodded enthusiastically.

“By God,” said Jonathan Salmes with recovered vigor. “I just want this gizmo to pop out right in front of a tyrannosaurus rex. Then I’ll pop
him,
and I’ll double your fees for a bonus!”

Don Washman smirked, but Vickers’ scowl was for better reason than that. “Ah, Mr. Salmes,” the guide said, “I believe Mr. Brewer drew first shot of the insertion. Fire discipline is something we
do
have to insist on.”

“Naw, that’s okay,” said Brewer unexpectedly. He looked sheepishly at Vickers, then looked away. “We made an agreement on that,” he added. “I don’t mind paying for something I want; but I don’t mind selling something I don’t need, either, you see?”

“In any case,” said Stern, “even the genius of Dr. Galil cannot guarantee to place you in front of a suitable dinosaur. I must admit to some apprehension, in fact, that someday we will land an intrusion vehicle in mid-ocean.” He gestured both elbows outward, like wings flapping. “Ah, this is a magnificent machine, but not, I fear, very precise.” He smiled.

“Not precise enough to . . . put a battalion of paratroops in the courtyard of the Temple in 70 AD, you mean?” suggested Adrienne Salmes with a trace of a smile herself.

Vickers’ gut sucked in. Stern’s first glance was to check the position of the guards. The slightly seedy good fellowship he had projected was gone. “Ah, you Americans,” Stern said in a voice that was itself a warning. “Always making jokes about the impossible. But you must understand that in a small and threatened country like ours, there are some jokes one does not make.” His smile now had no humor. Adrienne Salmes returned it with a wintry one of her own. If anyone had believed her question was chance rather than a deliberate goad, the smile disabused them.

Atop the intrusion vehicle, an indicator began buzzing in a continuous rhythm. It was not a loud sound. The high ceiling of the hangar drank it almost completely. The staff personnel looked up sharply. Stern nodded again to Vickers and began to walk toward a ground-level exit. He was whistling under his breath. After a moment, a pudgy man stepped to the edge of the vehicle and looked down. He had a white moustache and a fringe of hair as crinkled as rock wool. “I believe we are ready, gentlemen,” he said.

Dieter nodded. “We’re on the way, then, Dr. Galil,” he replied to the older man. Turning back to the safari group, he went on, “Stay in line, please. Hold the handrail with one hand as you mount the steps, and do be very careful to keep your weapons vertical. Accidents happen, you know.” Dieter gave a brief nod of emphasis and lead the way. The flight of metal steps stretched in a steep diagonal between two of the vehicle’s legs. Vickers brought up the rear of the line, unhurried but feeling the tingle at the base of the neck which always preceded time travel with him. It amused Vickers to find himself trying to look past the two men directly in front of him to watch Adrienne Salmes as she mounted the stairs. The woman wore a baggy suit like the rest of them, rip-stopped Kelprin, which would shed water and still breathe with 80-percent efficiency. On her, the mottled coveralls had an interest which time safari clients, male or female, could rarely bring to such garments.

The floor of the intrusion vehicle was perforated steel from which much of the anti-slip coating had been worn. Where the metal was bare, it had a delicate patina of rust. In the center of the twenty-foot square, the safari’s gear was neatly piled. The largest single item was the 500-gallon bladder of kerosene, fuel both for the turbine of the shooting platform and the diesel engines of the ponies. There was some dehydrated food, though the bulk of the group’s diet would be the meat they shot. Vickers had warned the clients that anyone who could not stomach the idea of eating dinosaur should bring his own alternative. It was the idea that caused some people problems—the meat itself was fine. Each client was allowed a half-cubic meter chest for personal possessions. Ultimately they would either be abandoned in the Cretaceous or count against the owners’ volume for trophies.

The intrusion vehicle was surrounded by a waist-high railing, hinged to flop down out of the way during loading and unloading. The space between the rail and the gear in the center was the passenger area. This open walkway was a comfortable four feet wide at the moment. On return, with the vehicle packed with trophies, there would be only standing room. Ceratopsian skulls, easily the most impressive of the High Cretaceous trophies, could run eight feet long with a height and width in proportion.

On insertion, it was quite conceivable that the vehicle would indeed appear in the midst of a pack of gorgosaurs. That was not something the staff talked about; but the care they took positioning themselves and the other gunners before insertion was not mere form. “Mr. McPherson,” Dieter said, “Mr. Mears, if you will kindly come around with me to Side 3—that’s across from the stairs here. Do not please touch the red control panel as you pass it.”

“Ah, can’t Charles and I stay together?” Mary McPherson asked. Both of the dentists carried motion cameras with the lenses set at the 50mm minimum separation. A wider spread could improve hologram quality; but it might prove impossibly awkward under the conditions obtaining just after insertion.

“For the moment,” Vickers said, “I’d like you on Side 1 with me, Miss McPherson. That puts two guns on each side; and it’s just during insertion.”