Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (38 page)

“I wasn’t going to move it,” Carl explained, but the incident reinforced the dangerous reality of what had initially seemed to be a fairy tale.

They were heading west by southwest—255 degrees on the compass which somehow flashed onto the forward window when the Professor thumbed a button on the helm. The sky darkened with awesome suddenness. Because
The Enterprise
was headed into a horizon as rich with color as any Carl had seen since the aftermath of Krakatoa, even that darkening was not an immediate warning. “I think we had best find a place for the night,” Erlenwanger was saying. “The land beneath is a good deal more broken than that in the glaciated portion of the state, isn’t—”

The first gust of the storm racing down from the north caught
The Enterprise.
The gondola rotated twenty degrees around the axis of the buoyancy chamber.

Carl had youthful reflexes and a farmer’s familiarity with shifting footing. His left hand caught the edge of the diesel control panel, firmly enough to twist the light metal. His right hand caught Molly as she rebounded from the starboard bulkhead when the gondola swung back. Professor Erlenwanger was slower and in a worse position to act. A leather strap hung from the roof above him, but instead of snatching for it the older man froze on the helm. The helm simultaneously turned and pivoted, and the airship nosed into the squall with its prop idled and unable to keep a way on.
The Enterprise
tumbled in a horizontal plane, swapping ends twice and shuddering as updrafts sucked it toward the thunderheads invisible above.

Erlenwanger got his footing and thumbed a button. Lime-colored lights brightened the cabin. They were dim, but in contrast to the storm’s sudden blackness, they felt as warm as the kitchen stove in winter. The craft steadied, the motor giving them enough headway for control despite the buffeting of the wind. Rain slashed
The Enterprise
with a sound like tearing canvas, and the interior lights reflected in surreal nightmares from water-rippled windows.

Then the lightning bolt hit them.

Carl had heard the boiler blow at the Star Brewery in 1893. Perhaps that was louder than the thunderclap—but Carl had been half a mile from the brewery, not inside the boiler at the time. Now the thunder was only a stunning physical counterpart to the blinding dazzle of the lightning. Carl’s flesh tingled. Molly’s hair was standing out straight from her head like the fuzz on a dandelion, crackling with tiny blue discharges from the tip of each tendril. Rubber was smoldering everywhere. It did not occur to Carl to marvel that the direct voltage of the lightning had been insulated from the occupants of the gondola.

“I have to land,” Erlenwanger cried, his voice tinny in the aftermath of the thunderclap. “Molly, can you—?”

The girl nodded. The emergency lights were gone but St. Elmo’s Fire frosted all the external metal surfaces and illuminated the cabin through the glass. Molly’s mouth was open as she struggled to her feet, but the muscles of her cheeks were set in a rictus, not a scream. A fat blue spark popped to her fingertip. Her gasp was a soft echo of the spark, but she grasped her controls without hesitation and slid two of the levers down to their bottom positions.

They were presumably dropping, but with the darkness and the wind’s hammering it was impossible to tell. The altimeter column was invisible; it would have been uselessly erratic even if Erlenwanger had had enough light to read it. The Professor was leaning over the helm, peering helplessly at the black countryside. Carl wondered why the older man did not use the spotlight. Then he noticed that Erlenwanger was ceaselessly flipping a switch in the center of the helm, back and forth, back and forth, though he must have realized minutes ago that the lightning bolt had put the spot out of commission until repairs could be made.

Erlenwanger slid the gondola door open. Droplets slung from the doorframe eddied and spattered within the compartment. The tendrils of St. Elmo’s Fire were growing longer and brighter. They blunted the night vision of those in the gondola without helping to illuminate the ground beneath. Carl hung from the door jamb, his head and shoulders out in the onrushing night. Big, wind-flung raindrops bit his cheeks like horseflies. Molly sat at her controls, feet locked on the bench against the hammering gusts. Her face was pale but prepared.

“There’s a level field beneath us!” the Professor cried over a roll of thunder from half a mile away. “I’m going to void a tank to set us down quickly.” He reached for one of the levers beside the helm. A landing leg extended across Carl’s field of vision like the arm of a mantis. The boy peered forward, blinded by a lightning flash and trying to superimpose what its instant had showed him over the yellow after-image on his retinas.

“Trees a hundred yards ahead,” Carl shouted.

The Enterprise
lurched. In the same moment there was light, a great blue flare reflecting from the cloud ceiling as static ignited the hydrogen released from tank nine. Carl screamed, “Jesus Christ, we’re over water! Get up,
get up!”

Even as Carl spoke, Molly was thrusting her levers to the top, a help but too slow a help. The silent fire still blazed above them, mirrored by clouds and the storm-tossed Missouri River beneath. It was a huge sheet of illumination a mile in diameter. The Professor slammed his throttle forward, to and through the gate that blocked it with an inch of potential travel. The diesel roared, racketing even against the storm as yard-long flames spurted rearward from exhaust cut-outs.
The Enterprise
wallowed like a bogged wagon. A landing leg touched a wave top and dragged a line of spray to tilt the gondola. They were over mudflats, the wind swinging them as they struggled to rise above the line of willows that fringed the Kansas shore. The storm whipped a willow-frond up at them, the tendril snaking in through the open door and stripping off its leaves on the trailing corner as they pulled past. But that was the last touch of the storm and itself more a love-pat than a threat.

They were skimming a pasture, the six-foot heads of bull thistles throwing sharp silhouettes against the cropped grass as lightning flared again. Erlenwanger throttled back and swung the airship into the wind. Molly’s fingers played on the controls. They sank, brushing the ground as they drifted back toward the dark bulk of the far hedgerow. The Professor edged his throttle a half-point open and the ship steadied, bumped, and settled solidly onto the field. The pumps whined to empty the tanks into the hydrogen reservoir. Lightning skipped across the sky to the south of them, but the thunder was half a minute coming.

The Professor looked at his companions, like him exhausted. He beamed. “I think we all owe ourselves a vote of thanks for able action under difficult circumstances. Now, who would care to join me in a supper of ham, fresh corn, and . . . cider, I think, from New Hampshire?”

Carl looked away from the sparse vegetation below them. “Are you trying to set a record time crossing the country?” he asked Professor Erlenwanger.

“Goodness no,” said the older man, squinting a little in surprise. “That’s for the railway barons, cleared track and fifty miles an hour. I will reach San Francisco in—a matter of time. But for me, the . . . well, the journey is itself the destination.”

Carl nodded. “I just wondered,” he said, “from the way we spent a day there at the river.”

“Oh, well,” Erlenwanger said, gesturing down at the alkaline landscape. “We needed to replenish our hydrogen, and I thought it best to do so before we got much farther west. As we have. Besides, the peddler we met was a fascinating person.”

“He was just a peddler, wasn’t he?” Molly asked. “I wouldn’t’ve thought you would want a picture of him in particular.”

The Professor bobbed his head, animated by the discussion though he disagreed with the implications of the statement. “Yes,” he said, “an ordinary peddler. But have you ever considered for how brief a time a peddler may be normal?” He spread his hands, palms upward. “With growing centralization, with the better communications that metaled roads will bring, there will no longer be a need for goods to be trucked from door to door, from farm to farm. That man with his mule and his wagon and his . . . little bit of everything civilized—he is on the end of a chain stretching back ten millennia. And he really is the end of it.”

Erlenwanger smiled at Molly to show there was no hostility in his disagreement. “He is very much worth—photographing—you see. Very much worth preserving for another age.”

From the air, western Kansas was a waste of chalk gullies and buffalo grass.
The Enterprise
had sailed over cattle too scattered to be called herds; there had been no other signs of human habitation for forty miles.

“That’s a campfire,” Carl said, pointing out the forward window.

“Why yes, I believe it is,” agreed the Professor. He tilted the helm a point, centering the tendril of gray on the pale evening sky. Molly sat quickly at her bench, waiting for instructions.

In the fading sunlight, the airship must have been a drop of blood to the slouch-hatted man who saw it as he tossed another buffalo chip on the fire. He yelped. The younger man across from him, turning the antelope haunch, spun around. He jumped to the rifle leaning against the wagon box and levered a cartridge into the chamber. The gondola door was already open. Neither the Professor nor Molly could leave their stations. Carl leaned far out into the air, clinging to the jamb as he had two nights before in the storm. He shouted, “Hey, what’s the matter with you? We don’t mean you no harm!”

“Great God, there’s men in it!” the rifleman blurted.

Behind him, the tent flap quivered to pass a third man wearing dungarees over a set of combinations. He was older than either of the others, balding and burly with a gray moustache drooping to either side of his bearded mouth. “Of course there’s men in it, Jimmy,” he thundered. “Did you think it was alive?” He glanced down at the meat and added to the slouch-hatted man, “Watch the roast, Corley, or it’s back to rice and beans.”

The airship had drifted very close to the campsite. The landing legs creaked out. Carl picked up the grapnel and a handful of its coiled line. He had learned that the hooks were not a necessity but that they made a landing easier by keeping the vessel headed into the wind. “Can you set this solid?” he shouted and hurled the grapnel to the ground. The burly man took the idea at once. He nodded and wedged the hooks just downwind of the camp between a pair of the boulders that dotted the surface of more friable rock. A moment later they were down, the airship wheezing to itself as it resettled its hydrogen.

Carl stepped to the ground and shook the great, calloused hand which the eldest of the campers thrust at him. “Carl Gudeint,” he muttered.

“Claudius Bjornholm,” the other said. “And these are my assistants, Mr. James Beadle and Mr. Corley, whom I hired to drive and to cook for us.”

Carl found himself spokesman from his location. “Ah,” he said, “Professor Erlenwanger and Molly, ah, Molly Erlenwanger. The Professor built this bal—airship.”

There was mutual murmuring and shaking of hands, though Carl noticed that Corley was hanging back. Apparently he was afraid to step beneath the looming buoyancy chamber of
The Enterprise.

Most of the light now came from the campfire. Carl eyed the array of digging implements stacked near the wagon and asked, “You, you’re . . . prospecting?”

“You mean, ‘You’re crazy?’” Bjornholm replied good-naturedly. “No gold in this chalk, of course. But it could be that I’m madder still, you know. I’m here—we’re here—hunting for bones. It’s been my life now for thirty-seven years, and I expect to carry on so long as the Lord gives me the strength to do so.”

Carl and Molly exchanged blank glances. The youngest of the campers, Jimmy—he must have been Carl’s age though he was much more lightly built—knuckled his jaw in some embarrassment. Professor Erlenwanger, however, said, “Yes, of course. Searching for the fossils of the Great Nebraska Sea. Have you had much success?”

“Very little this far,” Bjornholm admitted, “though Jimmy believes he spotted something in a gully wall while bringing back our supper here—” he nodded at the antelope haunch. “We’ll see to it as soon as there’s enough light to work without chancing damage to the finds.” The big man looked at Erlenwanger appraisingly. “You’re a learned man, sir,” he said, “as one would have expected from your”—he nodded—“creation. It seems far too huge to be so silent.”

The Professor smiled. “People accuse machinery of being a curse when their real problems are with the side effects rather than the machines themselves. Noise is one of the most unpleasant side effects, I have found; but it can be cured.” Waving at the fire from which Corley had just removed the meat, Erlenwanger added, “Perhaps you’d be willing to share your fire? We can of course provide our share of the supplies. And—if possible—I would greatly appreciate it if we might accompany you in the morning on your search.”

Bjornholm straightened. With the glow of the fire behind him and the power of his stance and broad shoulders, he was no longer a part-dressed figure of fun. “Sir,” he said, “we would be honored by your presence—tonight and whenever else.”

Fresh vegetables from the airship were well-received by the bone hunters, but the greatest delicacy Erlenwanger provided was fresh water. Bjornholm savored his first sip, tonguing it around within his mouth until he finally swallowed. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he said slowly, looking at each of the visitors in turn, “to have nothing to drink for months at a time but water so alkaline that even a handful of coffee beans can’t kill the taste. Every mug is a dose of salts—literally, I’m sorry to say.” He nodded solemnly at Carl, who was farthest around the circle from Molly. “You waste away during a dig, and the good lord help the poor fools who try to live here and farm.”

“But why do you stay?” asked Molly, handling her plate ably on her knees as she squatted on the ground with the men.

“You see, it’s not really like this,” said Jimmy unexpectedly, lowering the dainty antelope femur at which he had been gnawing. He waved out at the endless, gullied night. “This was a great bay, ten times the Gulf of Mexico and more. Still water, hiding monsters the like of none on Earth today; still air with gliding reptiles greater than any birds. It’s—” He stopped, his lips still working as he decided what words to frame. More than the fire lighted his narrow face. He continued, “I’m at Haverford. Last year I heard Professor Cope lecture and . . . it wasn’t a new world opening, it was a thousand new worlds, as many new worlds as there had been past ages of our Earth. Can you imagine that? Can you—see tarpons sixteen feet long, flashing just under the surface as the mackerel they chase make the sea foam? Or the tylosaur, the
real
sea serpent, lifting itself long enough to take a sighting before it slides through the depths toward the disturbance? Can you see it?”