Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (18 page)

Boots clanking on the metal stairs, the safari group mounted the vehicle. Four members of Dr. Galil’s team had climbed down already. They stood in a row beside the steps like a guard of honor in lab smocks. Galil himself waited beside the vertical control panel at the head of the stairs. The red panel was the only portion of the vehicle which looked more in keeping with a laboratory than a mineshaft. Even so, its armored casing was a far cry from the festooned breadboards that typically marked experimental machinery.

Not that anyone suggested to the clients that the machinery was as surely experimental as a 1940 radar set.

Dr. Galil shook hands with each member of the group, staff and clients alike. Vickers shifted his modified Garand rifle into the crook of his left arm and took the scientist’s hand. “Henry, I pray you God speed and a safe return,” Galil said in English. His grip was firm.

“God’s for afterwards, Shlomo,” the guide said. “You’ll bring us back, you and your boys. That’s what I have faith in.”

Dr. Galil squeezed Vickers’ hand again. He walked quickly down the steps. The hangar lights dimmed as the big room emptied of everything but the intrusion vehicle and its cargo. Vickers took a deep breath and unlocked the T-handled switch in the center of the control panel. He glanced to either side. Miss McPherson was to his left, Mrs. Salmes to his right.

Adrienne Salmes smiled back. “Did you put me with you because you think you can’t trust a woman’s shooting?” she asked.

Vickers cleared his throat. “No,” he lied. More loudly, he added, “We are about to make our insertion. Everyone please grip the rail with your free hand. Don’t let your rifles or cameras project more than two feet beyond the railing, though.” He threw the switch. A blue light on the hangar ceiling began to pulse slowly, one beat per second. Vickers’ belly drew in again. At the tenth pulse, the light and the hangar disappeared together. There was an instant of sensory blurring. Some compared the sensation of time travel to falling, others to immersion in vacuum. To Vickers, it was always a blast of heat. Then the heat was real and the Sun glared down through a haze thick enough to shift the orb far into the red. The intrusion vehicle lurched in a walloping spray. Ooze and reeds sloshed sideways to replace those scalloped out of the slough and transported to the hangar in Tel Aviv. The vehicle settled almost to the full depth of its legs.

“Christ on a crutch!” snarled Don Washman, hidden from Vickers by the piled gear. “Tell us it’s a grassy clearing and drop us in a pissing swamp! Next time it’ll be a kelp bed!” In a different voice he added, “Target.”

All of Vickers’ muscles had frozen when he thought they were about to drown. They were safe after all, though, and he turned to see the first dinosaur of the safari.

It was a duckbill—though the head looked more like that of a sheep than a duck. Jaw muscles and nasal passages filled the hollows of the snout which early restorations had left bare. The dinosaur had been dashing through the low pines fringing the slough when the crash and slap of the insertion caused it to rear up and attempt to stop. Reeds and water sprayed in a miniature echo of the commotion the vehicle itself had made.

The firm soil of the shore was only ten feet from the vehicle, roughly parallel to Side 4. The duckbill halted, almost in front of Washman and Jonathan Salmes. Scrabbling for traction in muck covered by two feet of water, the beast tried to reverse direction. The pilot leveled his grenade launcher but did not fire. Vickers stepped to the corner where he could see the target. It lacked the crests that made many similar species excellent trophies, but it was still two tons at point-blank range and the first dino the clients had seen in the flesh. “Go ahead,” he said to Salmes. “It’s yours.”

The duckbill lunged back toward the shore, swinging the splayed toes of its right foot onto solid ground. Salmes’ rifle slammed. It had an integral muzzle brake to help reduce recoil by redirecting muzzle gases sideways. The muzzle blast was redirected as well, a palpable shock in the thick air. The duckbill lurched, skidding nose-first through a tree. Its long hind legs bunched under it while the stubby forelegs braced to help the beast rise. If it could get to the well-beaten trail by which it had approached the slough, it would disappear.

“Good, good,” said Vickers. His voice was tinny in his own ears because of the muzzle blast. “Now finish it with another one at the base of the tail.” Fired from such short range, Salmes’ bullet could be expected to range through the duckbill’s body.

It was certain to rip enough blood vessels to let the beast’s life out quickly, and it might also break the spine.

The second shot did not come. The duckbill regained its feet. There was a rusty splotch of blood against the brown-patterned hide of its left shoulder. Vickers risked a look away from the shore to see what was the matter with Salmes. The client had a glazed expression on his face. His big rifle was raised, but its butt did not appear to be solidly resting on his shoulder. Don Washman wore a disgusted look. Beyond both gunners, Mr. McPherson knelt and shot holo tape of the beast leaping back toward the trees.

“Shoot, for Chrissake!” Vickers shouted.

Salmes’ rifle boomed again. A triple jet of smoke flashed from the bore and muzzle brake. Salmes cried out as the stock hit him. The bullet missed even the fringe of ten-foot pine trees. The duckbill disappeared into them.

Vickers carefully did not look at Salmes—or at Adrienne Salmes, standing immediately behind the guide with her rifle ready to shoot if directed. She had snickered after her husband’s second shot. “First, we’ll find a dry campsite and move the gear,” Vickers started to say.

The forest edge exploded as the duckbill burst back through it in the midst of a pack of dromaeosaurs.

In the first flaring confusion, there seemed to be a score of the smaller carnivores. In fact, there were only five—but that was quite enough. One had the duckbill by the throat and was wrapping forelegs around the herbivore’s torso to keep from being shaken loose. The rest of the pack circled the central pair with the avidity of participants in a gang rape. Though the carnivores were bipedal, they bore a talon on each hind foot that was a sickle in size and lethality. Kicking from one leg, the hooting dromaeosaurs slashed through the duckbill’s belly hide. Soft, pink coils of intestine spilled out into the water.

One of the half-ton carnivores cocked its head at the group on the intrusion vehicle. The men on Side 4 were already spattered with the duckbill’s blood. “Take ’em,” Vickers said. He punched a steel-cored bullet through the nearest dromaeosaur’s skull, just behind its eyes.

Washman and Adrienne Salmes fired while Vickers’ cartridge case was still in the air. The pilot’s grenade launcher chugged rather than banged, but the explosion of its projectile against the chest of a carnivore was loud even to ears numbed by the muzzle blasts of Salmes’ rifle. The grenade was a caseless shaped charge which could be used point-blank without endangering the firer with fragments. Even so, the concussion from less than twenty feet rocked everyone on the near side of the vehicle. There was a red flash and a mist of pureed dinosaur. A foreleg, torn off at the shoulder, sailed straight into the air. Two of the dromaeosaurs bolted away from the blast, disappearing among the trees in flat arcs and sprays of dirt and pine straw.

Vickers’ target had fallen where it stood. All four limbs jerked like those of a pithed frog. The dromaeosaur Adrienne Salmes had shot dropped momentarily, then sprang to its feet again. The tall woman worked the bolt of her rifle smoothly without taking the butt from her shoulder. The grenade explosion did not appear to have disconcerted her. The guide, poised to finish the beast, hesitated. Adrienne shot again and the dino’s limbs splayed. Its dark green hide showed clearly the red and white rosette between the shoulders where the second bullet had broken its spine.

Dieter Jost leaned past Mr. McPherson and put a uranium penetrator through the brain of the duckbill, ending its pain. All four of the downed dinosaurs continued to twitch.

“Jesus,” said Don Washman quietly as he closed the breech on a grenade cartridge.

Although he had only fired once, Henry Vickers replaced the 20-round magazine of his Garand with a fresh one from his belt pouch. “Mr. McPherson,” he said, “I hope you got good pictures, because I swear that’s the most excitement I’ve had in a long time in this business.”

Dieter had moved back to watch the slough with Steve Brady. Most of the clients crowded to Side 4 to get a better view of the Cretaceous and its denizens. Adrienne Salmes had not moved from where she stood beside Vickers. She thumbed a second cartridge into the magazine of her rifle and closed the breech. “Still doubt I can shoot?” she asked with a smile.

“Heart and spine,” the guide said. “No, I guess you can back me up any day of the week. I tell you, dromaeosaurs aren’t as impressive as some of the larger carnivores, but they’re just as dangerous.” He looked more carefully at her rifle, a Schultz and Larsen with no ornamentation but the superb craftsmanship that had gone into its production. “Say, nice,” Vickers said. “In .358 Norma?”

The blonde woman smiled with pleasure. “It’s the same rifle I’ve used for everything from white-tails to elephant,” she said. “I’d planned to bring something bigger, but after what you said, I had five hundred bullets cast from bronze and loaded at the factory for me. Johnnie—” she glanced at her husband, now loudly describing how he had shot the duckbill to the other clients. “Well,” Adrienne continued quietly, “I’m the hunter in the household, not him. I told him he was crazy to have a cannon like that built, but he listens to me as badly as he listens to everyone else.”

“That may be a problem,” Vickers muttered. More loudly, he said, “All right, I think it’s time to start setting up camp on top of this ridge. Around now, it’s asking for trouble to be any closer than a hundred yards to the water, especially with this much meat nearby. After Steve and I get the ponies assembled, we’ll need everybody’s help to load them. Until then, just try not to get in the way.”

Sometimes working with his hands helped Vickers solve problems caused by the human side of his safaris. It did not seem to do so on this occasion. Of course, a client who was both arrogant and gun-shy was a particularly nasty problem.

But Vickers was irritated to realize that it also bothered him that Don Washman and Mrs. Salmes seemed to be getting along very well together.

The campfire that evening provided an aura of human existence more important than the light of its banked coals. The clients had gone to sleep—or at least to their tents. That the Salmes at least were not asleep was evident from the sound of an argument. The double walls of the tents cut sound penetration considerably, but there were limits. Steve Brady shoved another log on the fire and said, “Damn, but I swear that chainsaw gets heavier every time I use it. Do you suppose the Israelis designed them to be air-dropped without parachutes?”

“You want a high horsepower-to-weight ratio, you don’t use a diesel,” agreed Dieter Jost with a shrug. “If you want a common fuel supply for everything and need diesel efficiency for the ponies, though—well, you get a heavy chainsaw.”

“Can’t imagine why she ever married him,” Don Washman said. “Beef like that’s a dime a dozen. Why, you know he didn’t even have balls enough to chamber a third round? He’s scared to death of that gun, scared almost to touch it now.”

“Yeah,” agreed Vickers, working a patch into the slot of his cleaning rod, “but the question’s what to do about it. I don’t have any good answers, God knows.”

“Do?” Washman repeated. “Well, hell, leave him, of course. She’s got money of her own—”

Brady broke into snorting laughter. Dieter grimaced and said, “Don, I do not think it is any business of ours how our clients live. The Salmeses are adults and can no doubt solve their own problems.” He pursed his lips. The fire threw the shadow of his bushy moustache misshapenly against his cheeks. “As for our problem, Henry, why don’t we offer him the use of the camp gun? The .375? I think Mr. Salmes’ difficulty is in precisely the same category as the more usual forms of mechanical breakdown or guns falling into the river.”

“Fine with me if you can talk him into it,” Vickers said dubiously, “but I wouldn’t say Salmes is the sort to take a well-meant suggestion.” He nodded toward the tent. The couple within seemed to be shouting simultaneously. “Or any other kind of suggestion,” he added.

“Things would sure be simpler if they didn’t allow booze on safaris,” Brady said.

“Things would be simpler for us if our employers paid us to sleep all day and drink schnapps,” said Dieter Jost. He tugged a lock of hair absently. “That does not comport well with economic realities, however. And so long as each of our clients has paid fifty thousand American dollars for the privilege of spending two weeks in the Cretaceous, it is unrealistic to assume that the staff will be treated as anything but the hired help. If drunken clients make the job more difficult, then that is simply one of the discomforts of the job. Like loading gear in the heat, or tracking down an animal that a client has wounded. It is easier for our employers, Mr. Stern and those above him, to hire new staff members than it would be to impose their underlings’ view on persons of the sort who take time safaris.”

“Moshe Cohn was head guide when I made my first insertion,” said Vickers aloud. His cleaning rod rested on his lap beside the Garand, but he had not run it through the bore yet. “He told a client—a Texan, it was a US safari that time too—that he’d be better off to slack up a little on his drinking while he was in the field. The client was generally too stiff to see a dino, much less shoot one.” The guide’s forefinger tapped the breech of his rifle as he recalled the scene. “He said to Moshe, ‘Jew-boy, you sound just like my third wife. One more word and I’ll whip you with my belt, just like I did her.’ Moshe broke his hand on the Texan’s jaw. When we got back, the government—the Israeli, but very pragmatic, government—fired Moshe and denied him compensation for his hand. Ten days in the field with broken bones, remember.” Vickers paused, then went on, “That taught me the rules. So far, I’ve been willing to live by them.”