Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (4 page)

Vickers rose to his feet. “You didn’t have your tracker look at the site when you found the tyrannosaurus was missing?” he said. Though he kept his tone neutral, the question itself was an obvious judgment.

O’Neill flushed. “We had things on our mind other than scrapings that didn’t appear to have anything to do with the problem. That still don’t have anything to do with the problem. A monitor lizard sniffed around the site when the gates were open.”

O’Neill spoke to the Punan, then strode past Vickers toward the trail to the site building. Pa Teng followed him. “I have equipment to prepare,” O’Neill called over his shoulder.

The unsurfaced road by which the construction material had arrived was being allowed to grow over again. It was noticeable only by lack of the middle-height trees between the undergrowth and the overarching canopy.

Vickers fell into step behind the other men. “I heard what Louise said about AIDS,” he said mildly, as though he hadn’t noticed O’Neill’s anger. “I’m not clear what a dinosaur has to do with it, though.”

“It shouldn’t have anything to do with it,” O’Neill replied. The jungle softened his voice, smothered it, even though he was only ten feet ahead of Vickers on the trail and generally visible. “Animal experimentation is wrong, and the end
doesn’t
justify the means. But the short answer is that pituitary hormone from adult reptiles has been found to have a degree of reversing effect on the decline in the human immune system.”

“I see,” said Vickers. He wondered if that was linked to the fact reptiles continue to grow all their lives, unlike mammals where growth basically stops at sexual maturity. Given the cost of this site, the effect had to be more than a wild theory. “But you can remove the hormone from
living
animals?”

“Oh, there you are,” Louise called from the open-sided building. “I was just about to check the floaters, but you’re better at that, Tom.”

She was holding two bolt-action weapons. Vickers recognized them after a moment’s reflection as capture guns: smoothbores which fired hypodermics loaded with anesthetic. The barrel tubes were startlingly thick, giving the weapons an awkward look. A tyrannosaur weighed as much or more than a bull elephant, so the dose of drug to bring it down would have to be correspondingly large.

“I’ll get them out,” O’Neill said. “I checked them before we picked up Mr. Vickers, of course.”

He looked at Vickers. “If the reptile is big enough, a pituitary probe can be inserted and left in place without sacrificing the animal, but the quantities of hormone available are extremely small even from large crocodiles. If you can accept the principle that man has the divine right to do anything he pleases with
lower
—”

The sneer in O’Neill’s voice was vivid.

“—forms of life, then the tyrannosaur was a very successful subject. Until it escaped, at least.”

O’Neill stalked off toward the metal shed while Vickers re-entered the building. Pa Teng lay down in a rattan hammock strung nearby.

“He’s upset about the escape,” Louise said quietly, nodding in the direction of O’Neill’s back. “I discovered it, but he’d made last week’s run. He thinks he must have failed to lock the compound properly. That’s nonsense, of course. The inner gate is never unlocked.”

Vickers opened his case and removed the four twenty-round magazines from their nests of foam. They were intended for use in a Browning automatic rifle. Vickers’ Garand had been modified to accept them in place of the normal eight-round internal magazine, greatly increasing his firepower.

“That cage is a pretty expensive construction,” he said without looking toward Louise, “and I don’t even want to guess what bringing a dinosaur here—to this time—would have cost.”

“Nothing else appearing,” Louise said deliberately as she removed and stacked packets from the open chests. “Sub-Saharan Africa will lose ninety-five percent of its population in the next twenty years. Not from AIDS directly, but because AIDS will have destroyed the social structure of the countries affected. Starvation killed more Peruvian natives after the Spanish conquest than measles and smallpox did directly. The diseases broke down the infrastructure which maintained the irrigation system necessary for agriculture.”

The rifle case held one hundred rounds of .30-06 ammunition, nose-down in the foam. Vickers began thumbing cartridges one at a time into a magazine. The rounds were hand-loaded from match brass, but the tips of the bullets themselves were painted black: They were military armor-piercing ball.

Vickers was willing to sacrifice some long-range accuracy for steel-cored bullets which he was
sure
would punch through the braincase of a charging cape buffalo, so long as the shooter was steady and knew where to aim.

At Dr. Mondadero’s request, the New York office of the Borneo Scheme had faxed four-view drawings of a tyrannosaur’s skull to Vickers before he left Nairobi. It gave him something to study on the long flight.

“It occurs to me that many governments would consider a working time machine to be a military secret,” Vickers said as he began loading the second magazine.

“It is also true that the diplomatic leverage which a cure for AIDS would provide might look more important to a politically isolated country than the opportunity to make their enemies’ grandfathers vanish,” Louise replied in an equally oblique fashion. “Especially as I gather attempts to arrange the latter had been entirely unsuccessful. The time apparatus apparently works only in the far past.”

O’Neill drifted out of the shed in a floater, a cylindrical device with a static repulsion system. When the pilot was clear of the shed’s metal roof, he deployed the solar cells which recharged the zinc-air batteries in the floor of the floater. The floaters generated identical electrical charges in the unit and in the volume of air directly beneath, causing the device and its contents to float so long as the charges were maintained. The problem was . . .

“We’re going to use those?” Vickers said. “Look, Louise, I’d sooner hike. Those things are
way
too unstable to fly outside a closed hangar. I’ve seen it tried.”

“We’ve been using them for three years here in the field,” Louise said crisply. “The air beneath the canopy
is
almost as still as that within a closed room. Now, I’ll admit we have to get higher than that to recharge the batteries, but Tom and I both have a great deal of experience. And Tom could fly a brick if you gave it a power plant.”

Vickers sucked his lower lip in as he finished loading the fourth magazine. He split the twenty loose rounds remaining between the breast pockets of his shirt. He was carrying a ridiculously large quantity of ammunition, but he’d never gotten in difficulties from having too many cartridges.

“You’re in charge,” he said. His lack of enthusiasm was obvious in the thin tone.

O’Neill brought a second floater out of the shed. The little craft could only hold two adults and a small amount of stores. Vickers wondered how long the operation would take. Perhaps they would be able to live off the land.

“That’s not . . .” Louise said, her eyes on the Garand as Vickers lifted it from its nest. “That is, that’s a .30-06, isn’t it? I thought for this you’d bring something much heavier. An elephant gun. Ah—if cost . . .”

Vickers chuckled. “I’m not too poor to buy the tools I need, Louise,” he said. “This is choice. A lot of my friends think it’s a pretty screwy choice, but it hasn’t let me down yet. It’ll do its job on the tyrannosaurus if I do mine.”

“I . . .” Louise said. “I asked you to come because I trust you, Henry. To—back us up, and to keep your mouth shut afterwards, if that’s an option. So I won’t second guess you.”

Vickers laughed with real humor. Their positions of a moment before had been reversed. “Thank you, Louise, and I’ll ride in the floaters like a good boy.”

He hefted the Garand and locked a magazine home in the well before he continued. “Look, knockdown power, all that stuff, is a myth. To stop an animal, you’ve got to destroy major blood vessels or the central nervous system. With this—” He patted the Garand’s full wooden stock. “—I can get deep enough to be sure of doing that.”

The weapon was older than he was. It balanced well in his arms, and its ten-pound weight made it more comfortable to shoot than a lighter rifle would have been. While the recoil of a .30-06 wasn’t in the same league as that of the most powerful magnum cartridges, neither was it anything to sneeze at if repeated shots were necessary.

O’Neill rejoined them. The floaters waited in the sunlight of the clearing with their solar receptors deployed to top off the battery charge. The pilot looked at Vickers and the rifle with a hatred so fierce that his eyes glazed.

“You know . . .” O’Neill said. His voice was under control, his whole personality was under control—but that control was as tensely dynamic as that of the mainspring of a cocked pistol. “We shouldn’t be doing any of this. The tyrannosaur escaped to freedom. We’re being given a chance to let Nature go her own way.”

“Are you ready to go?” Louise asked. She hefted a pair of small knapsacks on one arm and held a capture gun in the other hand.

“Yes,” O’Neill said, nodding. “Yes, of course.” Then he added, “I mean it, Louise!”

“There’s nothing natural about a tyrannosaur in Borneo, Tom,” Louise said coldly. “The animal will starve if we don’t find it soon.”

Vickers opened his small satchel and judged the contents against the flimsy floaters. He took out two pairs of boot socks, put them in a cargo pocket of his trousers, and closed the satchel again. The weight of his rifle and ammunition was as much as he wanted to add to the load.

“Starvation
is
natural, dammit!” O’Neill snapped.
“Death
is natural; it’s being kept in a cage by humans that isn’t natural. For that matter, there’s millions of pigs in the forest. I’m not so sure that the beast is going to starve.”

“There are pigs, and there are Punan and Kayan tribesfolk as well,” Louise said. “In addition to which, there is the responsibility which we—you and I—accepted. Do you have a problem with that, Tom?”

O’Neill shook his handsome head. “No,” he said in a tired voice. “No, of course not. I’m sorry, Louise. My gear is already loaded.”

He turned and walked toward the floaters. “This is hard for him,” Louise murmured to Vickers as they followed the younger man at a distance of ten strides. “But he’ll be all right.”

Vickers hadn’t seen Pa Teng get up from the hammock, but now the Punan reappeared from the jungle wearing a broad smile and carrying a homemade shotgun. The gun barrel was a length of water pipe, and the lock mechanism appeared to involve a band of inner tube rubber driving a nail sharpened to form the firing pin. A pouch of knotted rattan cord held four green plastic twelve-gauge shotgun shells.

“I’d understood only traditional weapons were permit-led within the Scheme’s boundaries,” Vickers said quietly. “Blowguns and spears, that is.”

“If you ask the staff in New York, they’ll agree with you,” Louise replied. “Here on the ground, it’s necessary to make allowances. Even Tom agrees with that. We’re paying Pa Teng with shotgun shells.”

The base of each floater was a thick disk of gray plastic. Above it, plastic tubes formed a cage forty inches high to safeguard the passengers and to provide cargo attachment points. Several knapsacks were already strapped onto the frames.

The control yoke was on a column at one edge of the disk. The four square yards of solar collectors spread from an eight-foot staff on the opposite edge.

O’Neill and Pa Teng began to talk in Punan. Both men made quick hand gestures. O’Neill’s obvious fluency was another point in the man’s favor, but the exchange brought a tangential thought to the surface of Vickers’ mind.

“Pa Teng lives here at the site?” he asked, looking toward Louise.

“His family is here,” she replied. “They tend the pigs that we need for the tyrannosaur. Pa Teng himself spends much of his time in the forest.”

“Ask him if he or his family saw any strangers around the time the beast got out,” Vickers said.

O’Neill looked up from his conversation. “They didn’t,” he said. “Of course we asked.”

Louise spoke in Punan; Pa Teng replied at some length. She looked back to Vickers. “He says, ‘No one but the ghosts,’” she said, frowning.

O’Neill asked the Punan a further question. This time Pa Teng’s reply was shorter and coupled with a shrug that would certainly have meant indifference in a Westerner.

“Ghosts are ghosts,” Louise translated for Vickers. She still frowned. “He didn’t say anything about that before.”

“He hasn’t said anything now,” O’Neill said. “Not that makes sense.”

Pa Teng sauntered off toward the edge of the clearing. “He’s going to go on foot,” O’Neill explained. “He says he’ll ride later if he gets tired.”

“Could he track from the air?” Vickers asked.

Louise shrugged. “We can stay just above the ground,” she said. “The floaters are faster than walking, and obstructions—”

“There are ravines and steep slopes all through the area,” O’Neill said. “Don’t be misled by the canopy.”

“Yes,” Louise agreed. “Not that the terrain affects Pa Teng the way it would us.”

She indicated the floaters with her chin. “Tom,” she said, “I’ll take Henry and we’ll stay low. You go high so that you’ll have a full charge when we have to trade off.”

She looked at Vickers. “Do you agree with that, Henry?” she asked.

“I need to be where I can get a shot quickly,” Vickers said, focusing on Louise to avoid eye contact with O’Neill. “If necessary. That means on the deck in this cover.”

“Let’s go before we lose Pa Teng entirely,” O’Neill said as he got into the farther floater.

The younger man was making an obvious effort to avoid having a problem. As Louise said, it was hard for him.

Because it was obvious even to Vickers that if the terrain was as described, the capture guns were merely for show. There was no way in hell that they were going to get a five-ton dinosaur back to the compound alive.

As O’Neill took off, Louise waved Vickers aboard the remaining floater. Vickers slung the Garand so that he could grip the railing with both hands. He was as tense as if he were facing a firing squad.