Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (32 page)

“The expense of not being successful,” said Greenbaum in measured tones, “is the existence of Israel, I am afraid. Tell us what you need.”

“All right,” Vickers repeated. “There’s probably a tyrannosaur in the area . . . and butcher’s work like that on the creek bank may bring in more than that in a week or so. Food in that quantity overrides territory, while it lasts.”

“That’s fine, old chap,” said Thomas Warren. His voice had the sharpness of a man who knows he is considered second rate in the instant discussion. “But we don’t have a week or so.” In the close confines of the trailer, the British guide had not lighted his pipe. He gestured nervously with the stem, like a child holding a revolver. “And besides, you know as well as I do that there may be nothing bigger around here than the dryptosaur we took this morning. You know, I think that with a little better support, old boy, I could have convinced Cardway that it really was a—”

“Horseshit,” said Avraham Stern in heavy, careful English. Warren fell silent.

Vickers brushed his hand back and forth in frustration. “No, no,” he said. “Warren’s right. About being no tyrannosaur near enough, maybe. There’s only one living tyrannosaur we can locate for sure—and that’s the one in a cage at the Institute for Zoology. Topside in Tel Aviv. It’s also the one I want returned for Cardway.”

The other three men began to talk simultaneously, stopping themselves when they realized that Vickers was still poised to continue. “Please go on, sir,” the Prime Minister said. His hinted smile showed his awareness that the guide, too, was smiling.

“We’ll leave the compound in the morning,” Vickers said, “beat up the bait area. Who knows, maybe there’ll be something worth going after there. As soon as the Secretary is out of sight, though, Mr. Stern, here, and Warren carry Vehicle Beth—Aleph isn’t big enough for the cargo, and anyway, maybe the walls on Beth might help if the dino started to get loose early . . . anyway, they go back Topside. Avraham does what has to be done to rig the beast with a radio beacon and get it loaded.” The guide paused, then added, “Ah, you don’t think there’s going to be any difficulty getting your orders obeyed ASAP, do you? I mean, there’s not going to be much time, and I know what bureaucracy can be like.”

Stern snorted. “There will be no trouble,” he said. “Those who know me will obey. Those who do not know me will obey, or they will have a company of paratroopers in their offices until they
have
obeyed. I—I do not get much excitement anymore.”

“Then it’s just a matter of getting Dr. Galil to drop you a few klicks out,” Vickers continued. “We don’t want to turn a tyrannosaur loose in the compound, after all. That’ll take some very close figuring, but . . . well, it’s required. And Shlomo can do it, he’s never failed yet.”

“I don’t see precisely what I’m supposed to be doing, old boy,” said Thomas Warren. He was clutching his pipe against the row of looped cartridges over his heart.

“Well,” said Vickers, “ah, Thomas, I think it’s going to require more than one man to off-load the dino. And apart from the security angle, I think it has to be someone who’s familiar with the beasts.”

“I’m familiar enough with bloody tyrannosaurs that I don’t share an intrusion vehicle with living ones!” the Englishman exploded. He either did not notice or did not care that the trailer door had begun to open.
“You
can do silly-arse things like that if you want, but Mrs. Warren didn’t raise any fools!”

“I’ll go,” said Adrienne Vickers from the doorway.

“You’ve been listening?” Stern demanded.

The woman spun her cigar out into the darkness, then exhaled in jets from both nostrils before she squeezed into the trailer. She was in no hurry to speak. Though the nicotine had stripped her visual purple so that she could not see by the instrument lights, she knew that she was the focus of the eyes of the four men. “I don’t listen at doors,” Adrienne said at last, “though everybody in camp’s heard Mr. Warren’s little outburst, I’m sure.”

“Adrienne,” Vickers said, “this isn’t a game.”

“Look, dammit,” the tall blonde said. She leaned forward and gestured, her fingernails glinting. “There’s only one tyrannosaur we can promise, that’s really
promise.
The one Henry and I captured alive. I don’t have to listen to you talk to know that.”

“You didn’t say anything tonight,” her husband commented.

“Neither did you!” Adrienne responded sharply, though not in a loud voice. “And we didn’t have to, did we? We both knew what had to be done. Anyway”—she drew a breath—“anyway, I’m the one who needs to nurse the baby back. He’ll be sedated, but we don’t dare have him knocked on his ass, not if he needs to be upright for Cardway the same morning.”

“Well then,” the Prime Minister said briskly. “We are agreed?” Stern nodded. Warren shrugged.

“Does it ever bother you,” Adrienne Vickers asked, “that a—certifiable madman like Cardway has the sort of power you’re encouraging him to use? I mean, it’s your world. I’ve found I could do all right without it . . . though I suppose I’d have to get used to a crossbow and smoke banana leaves or something.”

“Banana leaves would be an improvement, I’m sure, Madame,” the Prime Minister said, bowing courteously.

“And we joke about it,” the woman continued wonderingly. “Well, it’s your world. For however long. Henry, I’m for bed.”

“We’ve said our say,” the guide remarked, reaching past his wife to the door catch. “We’ll see in the morning. We’ll all see in the morning.”

Either the sun slanting across their backs was hotter than it had been the day before, or the anger in the box of the half-track made it seem that way. The shadow of the dust they raised stretched ahead of the vehicle, bulking across the scrub like chaos made manifest. Secretary Cardway rode grimly at the front bulkhead, to the right of the cal-fifty. The gunner, wedged tightly between the Secretary and Vickers on the other side, looked nervous. He was the same soldier who had manned the gun the day before. What he had seen then had convinced him that both of the men beside him were dangerously insane.

In the distance, flecks spun against the white sky like flakes of cardboard hurled from a giant bonfire. Cardway’s face softened minusculy from the stony anger he had maintained since getting up in the morning. Vickers saw the interest and said over the intercom, “Pterosaurs again, sir. For the carrion. What we have to hope is that the bigger carnivores will be there too.”

The Secretary of State looked across at Vickers while the soldier between them cringed away. “You goddamn better hope so,” the politician said. His voice in Vickers’ ears was out of synch with his moving lips, because the sound was being picked up by Cardway’s throat mike.

In the back of the box, the Prime Minister frowned. Warren, beside him, appeared to take no notice. The Englishman had been morose all morning. When he looked at Vickers, it was with a degree of animation; but the spirit animating his eyes was one of dull anger. Warren had not been pleased to be subordinated to Vickers. It was now evident to him that his employers considered Adrienne also a far more valuable member of the operation than the junior guide was . . . and that made one more factor for Vickers to consider.

Craig and a holographer rode in the middle of the box. The PR staffer at least could be trusted not to actively endanger anyone else.

As they neared the scene of the previous day’s slaughter, the circling flecks resolved into pterosaurs descending. There were never fewer than a dozen in sight at a time, even though the lowest continually disappeared at the bottom of the falling helixes. Newcomers, by now from many kilometers distance, replenished the pattern from above. Their fragile wing membranes enabled the great creatures to lift from the ground in air so still that pollen scarcely drifted. The converse of that delicacy was the fact that severe braking forces like those habitually employed by the feathered scavengers of later ages would have shredded pterosaur wings at the first application. Silent and awesomely large, the creatures spiraled down with the gentle beauty of thistledown.

There was something angelic in the descent of the pterosaurs with their dazzlingly white upper surfaces. Then the half-track rumbled through the last of the masking brush. The ground on which the winged scavengers were landing was a living hell of previous arrivals.

Thirty meters in front of them, a dryptosaur glared up from the carcass of the duckbill it had finished disemboweling. The carnivore was probably one of the pair that had escaped the day before, a smallish male with scar tissue ridging the left side of its head including the eye socket. Not a choice trophy, but closer than Vickers cared to see a carnivore to one of his clients. “Go ahead, sir,” he said, aiming at the top of the beast’s sternum himself.

“It’s smaller than the other one,” Cardway muttered correctly. He sighted and fired anyway.

The dryptosaur was facing them astraddle of the herbivore’s neck. Its head and body were raised higher than they would normally have been. Like a dog on a morsel, the carnivore was trying to look as threatening as possible to drive away its competition. The half-track was probably equated in the beast’s limited mind with an unusually large ceratopsian—not a creature that a dryptosaur or even a tyrannosaur of several times the bulk would normally have charged. Still, the beast lived by killing, and a wound could be expected to bring a response. The guide tensed.

And promptly felt a fool when the Mannlicher blasted and the dryptosaur crumpled like a wet sheet. Cardway had placed his bullet perfectly, shattering the carnosaur’s spine after wrecking the complex of blood vessels above the heart. The beast flopped over on its back, the hind legs kicking upward convulsively. A drop of blood slung from a talon spattered coldly on Vickers’ wrist, but the danger was over. “Perfect!” the guide said with honest enthusiasm. “Now—”

Secretary Cardway cut off the instructions with another thunderous shot. Beside himself, Vickers started to curse. Then he stepped back. There was no point cursing an avalanche or a waterspout. The Secretary was as ungovernable as those forces of Nature when he once began firing. The muzzle of the .458 jumped three more times, each thrust preceded by a momentary spurt of orange as the last of the powder charge burned outside the barrel. The reports lessened in apparent intensity, though only because they were literally deafening to the listeners. After the fifth shot, the ringing that persisted was loud enough to challenge the myriad squalling of the scavengers remaining on the scattered corpses. There were no herbivores in sight where there had been hundreds the preceding day. Possibly that was a reaction to the carnage itself, the slaughter and the stink of blood. More likely, the plant-eaters would avoid the area only so long as the sharp-toothed throng were bolting the carrion like locusts on Spring wheat.

“Pull up a hundred meters or so to the right,” Vickers ordered the driver. “Dead slow.” The guide squinted though the Sun was behind him as he surveyed the crop of vermin. Usually the presence of the pair of dryptosaurs—the second was slashing at a pentaceratops which had died on the far bank of the stream—would mean that nothing bigger had found the kill. A tyrannosaur would drive away the one-ton dryptosaurs, though it was likely to ignore anything smaller. Here, however, the volume of flesh was so great that Vickers hoped against hope that the clanking of their treads would lift the dragonlike head of the greatest of the carnosaurs into sight from where it rested behind a fallen triceratops or the like.

Nothing of the sort happened. Even the lesser meat-eaters, which
were
present, ignored the vehicle. That was just as well. There were at least a score of dromaeosaurs visible, half-ton predators with the habits and vicious temperament of hyenas. The slaughter had drawn several packs together, some of them surely out of their range. When the food had been bolted down to the last scraps, the bush would be the scene of fighting which nothing human could equal in savagery. For the nonce, all were fully occupied with stuffing down gobbets of meat. Their mouths expanded like snakes’ to accept larger pieces than rigid jaw hinges would have permitted. The number and proximity of the carnivores still made Vickers nervous, even with the heavy machine gun to back him up in an emergency.

Smaller than the toothed dromaeosaurs but still potentially lethal to a man were the ornithominids, beaked omnivores in appearance much like the ostriches for which some were named. Their normal diet was of seeds and insects. But as when the lemmings swarm in Norway, the reindeer feed on them, here a similar abundance of flesh had summoned the swift runners from far across the plains to feast. They pecked and squabbled, darting in to seize a strip of meat and dragging it back to a distance of a few meters. They bolted their food, defending it with glaring eyes and legs whose kick could rip sheet metal.

The least of the scavengers were feathered, though only a few of them were true birds in the sense that they or their ancestors could fly. Many of their descendants would, however. Warm-blooded creatures like dinosaurs needed either bulk or insulation to prevent their high metabolisms from outstripping any possible food source. The smallest of the dinosaurs crawling over the bloating carcasses were no bigger than chickens. Like chickens, they could not have survived without the dead air space provided within their layers of feathers—the feathers being modified scales, as was the fur of mammals and the pterosaurs. Some few had made the insulation do double duty, adding wing beats to the powerful thrust of their hind legs when they wished to climb a carcass or escape to a nearby bush with a chosen morsel. The high skies were still the province of the great pterosaurs now descending, however, their delicacy more efficient until the storms of the coming age swept them into oblivion.

There were no mammals visible save the occupants of the half-track. The night would bring them out again from the holes to which they had been driven tens of millions of years before by the ancestors of the dinosaurs. So long as Earth hosted the dinosaurs, the mammals would grub for insects in the dark and would fall prey to the least of the swift-striding creatures with whom they in no sense competed.