Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (21 page)

“You or I might have done the same thing,” Dieter replied.

“I’m not denying that,” the senior guide snapped. “But it has to be reported.”

The two men stood in silence, looking out at a forest filled with sounds that were subtly wrong. At last Dieter said, “Salmes goes up in the platform with you and Don tomorrow, doesn’t he?”

Vickers agreed noncommittally.

“Maybe you ought to go with Steve instead,” Dieter suggested. He looked at Vickers. “Just for the day, you know.”

“Washman just flies us,” Vickers said with a shake of his head. “I’m the one that’s in contact with the client. And Don’s as good as pilots come.”

“That he is,” the other guide agreed, “that he is. But he is not a piece of furniture. You are treating him as a piece of furniture.”

Vickers clapped his companion on the shoulder. “Come on,” he said, “Salmes’ll be fine when he gets his tyrannosaur. What we ought to be worrying about is three more for the others. If Salmes goes home with a big boy and the rest have to settle for less—well, it says no guarantees in the contracts, but you know the kind of complaints the company gets. That’s the kind of problem we’re paid to deal with. If they wanted shrinks instead of guides, they’d have hired somebody else.”

Dieter laughed half-heartedly. “Let us see what we can arrange for lunch,” he said. “At the moment, I am more interested in sauropod steak than I am in the carnivores that we compete with.”

“Damn, the beacon cut out again!” Washman snarled. There was no need of an intercom system; the shooting platform operated with only an intake whine which was no impediment to normal speech. The silence was both a boon to coordination and a help in not alarming the prey. It did, however, mean that the client was necessarily aware of any technical glitches. When the client was Jonathan Salmes—“Goddamn, you’re not going to put
me
on that way!” the big man blazed. He had his color back and with it all his previous temper. Not that the bruise over his right cheekbone would have helped. “One of the others paid you to save the big one for them, didn’t they?” he demanded. “By God, I’ll bet it was my wife! And I’ll bet it wasn’t money either, the—”

“Take us up to a thousand feet,” Vickers said sharply. “We’ll locate the kill visually if the marker isn’t working. Eighty tons of sauropod shouldn’t be hard to spot.”

“Hang on, there it’s on again,” said the pilot. The shooting platform veered slightly as he corrected their course. Vickers and Salmes stood clutching the rail of the suspended lower deck which served as landing gear as well. Don Washman was seated above them at the controls, with the fuel tank balancing his mass behind. The air intake and exhaust extended far beyond the turbine itself to permit the baffling required for silent running. The shooting platform was as fragile as a dragonfly; and it was, in its way, just as efficient a predator.

By good luck, the tyrannosaur had made its kill on the edge of a large area of brush rather than high forest. The platform’s concentric-shaft rotors kept blade length short. Still, though it was possible to maneuver beneath the forest canopy, it was a dangerous and nerve-wracking business to do so. Washman circled the kill at 200 feet, high enough that he did not need to allow for trees beneath him. Though the primary airflow from the rotors was downward, the odor of tens of tons of meat dead in the sun still reached the men above. The guide tried to ignore it with his usual partial success. Salmes only wrinkled his nose and said, “Whew, what a pong.” Then, “Where is it? The tyrannosaurus?”

That the big killer was still nearby was obvious from the types of scavengers on the sauropod. Several varieties of the smaller coelurosaurs scrambled over the corpse like harbor rats on a drowned man. None of the species weighed more than a few hundred pounds. A considerable flock of pterosaurs joined and squabbled with the coelurosaurs, wings tented and toothless beaks stabbing out like shears. There were none of the large carnivores around the kill—and that implied that something was keeping them away.

“Want me to go down close to wake him up?” Washman asked.

The guide licked his lips. “I guess you’ll have to,” he said. There was always a chance that a pterodactyl would be sucked into the turbine when you hovered over a kill. The thought of dropping into a big carnosaur’s lap that way kept some guides awake at night. Vickers looked at his client and added, “Mr. Salmes, we’re just going to bring the tyrannosaur out of wherever it’s lying in up in the forest. After we get it into the open, we’ll maneuver to give you the best shot. All right?”

Salmes grunted. His hands were tight on his beautifully finished rifle. He had refused Dieter’s offer of the less-bruising camp gun with a scorn that was no less grating for being what all the staff had expected.

Washman dropped them vertically instead of falling in a less wrenching spiral. He flared the blades with a gentle hand, however, feathering the platform’s descent into a hover without jarring the gunners. They were less than thirty feet in the air. Pterosaurs, more sensitive to moving air than the earthbound scavengers, squealed and hunched their wings. The ones on the ground could not take off because the downdraft anchored them. The pilot watched carefully the few still circling above them.

“He’s—” Vickers began, and with his word the tyrannosaur strode into the sunlight. Its bellow was intended to chase away the shooting platform. The machine trembled as the sound induced sympathetic vibrations in its rotor blades. Coelurosaurs scattered. The cries of the pterosaurs turned to blind panic as the downdraft continued to frustrate their attempts to rise. The huge predator took another step forward. Salmes raised his rifle. The guide cursed under his breath but did not attempt to stop him.

At that, it should have been an easy shot. The tyrannosaur was within thirty feet of the platform and less than ten feet below them. All it required was that Salmes aim past the large head as it swung to counterweight a stride and rake down through the thorax. Perhaps the angle caused him to shoot high, perhaps he flinched. Vickers, watching the carnosaur over his own sights, heard the big rifle crash. The tyrannosaur strode forward untouched, halving the distance between it and the platform.

“Take us up!” the guide shouted. If it had not been a rare trophy, he might have fired himself and announced that he had “put in a bullet to finish the beast.” There were three other gunners who wanted a tyrannosaur, though; if Salmes took this one back, it would be after he had shot it or everyone else had an equal prize.

Salmes was livid. He gripped the bolt handle, but he had not extracted the empty case. “Goddamn you!” he screamed. “You made it wobble to throw me off! You son of a bitch, you robbed me!”

“Mr. Salmes—” Vickers said. The tyrannosaur was now astride the body of its prey, cocking its head to see the shooting platform fifty feet above it.

“By God, you want another chance?” Washman demanded in a loud voice. The platform plunged down at a steep angle. The floor grating blurred the sight of the carnosaur’s mottled hide. Its upturned eye gleamed like a strobe-lit ruby.

“Jesus
Christ!”
Vickers shouted. “Take us the hell up, Washman!”

The platform steadied, pillow soft, with its floor fifteen feet from the ground and less than twenty from the tyrannosaur. Standing on the sauropod’s corpse, the great predator was eye to eye with Vickers and his client. The beast bellowed again as it lunged. The impulse of its clawed left leg rolled the sauropod’s torso.

Salmes screamed and threw his rifle to the grating. The guide leveled his Garand. He was no longer cursing Washman. All of his being was focused on what would be his last shot if he missed it. Before he could fire, however, the shooting platform slewed sideways. Then they were out of the path of the charging dinosaur and beginning to circle with a safe thirty feet of altitude. Below them, the tyrannosaur clawed dirt as it tried to follow.

Salmes was crying uncontrollably.

“Ah, want me to hold it here for a shot?” Washman asked nervously.

“We’ll go on back to the camp, Don,” the guide said. “We’ll talk there, all right?”

“Whatever you say.”

Halfway back, Vickers remembered he had not dropped another marker to replace the one that was malfunctioning. God knew, that was the least of his problems.

“You know,” Brewer said as he forked torosaur steaks onto the platter, “it tastes more like buffalo than beef, but if we could get some breeding stock back, I’d by God find a market for it!”

Everyone seemed to be concentrating on their meat—good, if pale and lean in comparison with feedlot steer. “Ah,” Vickers said, keeping his voice nonchalant. He looked down at the table instead of the people sitting around it. “Ah, Dieter and I were talking . . . We’ll bunk outside tonight. The, ah, the rest of that pack of dromaeosaurs chased some duckbills through the camp this morning, Steve thinks. So just for safety’s sake, we’ll both be out of the tent . . . So, ah, Mrs. Salmes—”

Everyone froze. Jonathan Salmes was turning red. His wife had a forkful of steak poised halfway to her mouth and her eyebrows were rising. The guide swallowed, his eyes still fixed on his plate, and plowed on. “That is, you can have your own tent, ah, to sleep in.”

“Thank you,” Adrienne Salmes said coolly, “but I’m quite satisfied with the present arrangements.”

Dieter had refused to become involved in this, saying that interfering in the domestic affairs of the Salmeses was useless at best. Vickers was sweating now, wishing that there was something to shoot instead of nine pairs of human eyes fixed on him. “Ah,” he repeated, “Mrs. Salmes—”

“Mr. Vickers,” she overrode him, “who I choose to sleep with—in any sense of the term—is none of your business. Anyone’s business,” she added with a sharp glance across the table at her husband.

Jonathan Salmes stood up, spilling his coffee cup. His hand closed on his fork; each of the four staff members made unobtrusive preparations. Cursing, Salmes flung the fork down and stalked back to his tent.

The others eased. Vickers muttered, “Christ.”

Then, “Sorry, Dieter, I . . .”

The thing that bothered him most about the whole incident was that he was unsure whether he would have said anything at all had it been Miss McPherson in Don’s bed instead of someone he himself found attractive. Christ . . .

“Mr. Vickers?” Adrienne Salmes said in a mild voice.

“Umm?” His steak had gotten cold. With Brewer cutting and broiling the meat, the insertion group was eating better than Vickers could ever remember.

“I believe Mr. Brady is scheduled to take me up in the platform tomorrow?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Vickers agreed, chewing very slowly.

“I doubt my—husband—will be going out again tomorrow,” the blonde woman continued with a nod toward his tent. “Under the circumstances, I think it might be better if Mr. Brady were left behind here at the camp. Instead of Don.”

“Steve?” Dieter asked.

Brady shrugged. “Sure, I don’t need the flying time. But say—I’m not going to finish ditching around the tents by myself. I’ve got blisters from today.”

“All right,” said Dieter. “Henry, you and Don—” no one was looking directly at Washman, who was blushing in embarrassment he had damned well brought on himself—“will take Mrs. Salmes up after the tyrannosaur tomorrow.” Vickers and Brady both nodded. “The rest of us will wait here to see if the duckbills come through again as they have become accustomed. Steve, I will help you dig. And if the duckbills have become coy, we will ride down the river margin a little later in the morning and find them. Perhaps Mr. Salmes will feel like going with us by then.”

Thank God for Dieter, Vickers thought as he munched another bite of his steak. He could always be counted on to turn an impossible social situation into a smoothly functioning one. There would be no trouble tomorrow after all.

The bulging heads of three torosaurs lay between the gun tower and the fire. There the flames and the guard’s presence would keep away the small mammals that foraged in the night. As Miss McPherson followed her brother to their tent, she paused and fingered one of the brow horns of the largest trophy. The tip of the horn was on a level with the dentist’s eyes, even though the skull lay on the ground. “They’re so huge, so . . . powerful,” she said. “And for them to fall when you shoot at them, so many of them falling and running . . . I could never understand men who, well, who shot animals. But with so many of them everywhere—it’s as if you were throwing rocks at the windows of an abandoned house, isn’t it? It doesn’t seem to hurt anything, and it’s . . . an attractive feeling.”

“Mary!” objected her brother, shadowed by the great heads.

“Oh, I don’t mean I’m sorry that I didn’t bring a gun,” continued Mary McPherson calmly, her fingers continuing to stroke the smooth black horn. “No, I’m glad I didn’t. Because if I had had a gun available this morning, I’m quite sure I would have used it. And after we return, I suppose I would regret that. I suppose.” She walked off toward the tent. The rhythms of her low-voiced argument with her brother could be heard until the flaps were zipped.

“Dieter tells me they bagged sixteen torosaurs today,” Vickers said. “Even though the intrusion vehicle hasn’t room for more than one per client.” Only Washman, who had the watch, and Adrienne Salmes were still at the campfire with him.

“
I
bagged one,” the woman said with an emphatic flick of her cigar. “Jack Brewer shot five and I sincerely hope that idiot Mears hit no more than ten, because that’s all Dieter and I managed to finish off for him.” She had unpinned her hair as soon as she came in from the field. In the firelight, it rolled across her shoulders like molten amber.

“Dieter said that too,” Vickers agreed. He stood, feeling older than usual. “That’s why I said ‘they.’” He turned and began to walk back to the tent where Dieter was already asleep. There had been no point in going through with the charade of sleeping under the stars—overcast, actually—since the dromaeosaurs were daylight predators. They were as unlikely to appear in the camp after dark as the Pope was to speak at a KKK rally.