Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (7 page)

“We’d best move on,” he said as he climbed aboard O’Neill’s floater.

O’Neill rose through the canopy in a gentle corkscrew. When he was clear of the branches, he unfurled the solar array. Now that the Sun was high, the opaque panels shaded the men in the floater. A glance at the charging indicator showed Vickers that O’Neill had run his batteries uncomfortably close to the end of their power.

O’Neill followed Vickers’ eyes. “I thought we’d make better time with me on the deck,” he said quietly. His words were unlikely to be intelligible through the link’s microphone. “I thought of suggesting that Louise and I change instead of you and Pa Teng. But she’d have been insulted.”

Vickers looked at the younger man with new appreciation.

O’Neill certainly was the better pilot. Under his control, the floater was as steady above the canopy as it had been in the still atmosphere of the forest.

The solar array was stiff when deployed. It acted as an airfoil, catching and multiplying the breezes that twitched across the high treetops. Since the fulcrum on which the floater balanced was beneath the floor, the wind’s torque acted through a long lever. Perhaps Louise had never been in danger of losing control of the floater, but Vickers’ heart had jumped several times when he thought she was.

“What do you think about the . . .” Vickers said, watching the forest. “The dreams.”

O’Neill glanced at him. “I don’t have enough data to think anything,” he said. He didn’t sound hostile so much as extremely careful.

After a few moments of steady flight, Vickers said, “Seems funny that dinosaurs were around for longer than mammals and still didn’t develop intelligence, isn’t it?”

“Fish have been around longer yet,” O’Neill said sharply. “Humans happen to have what we call intelligence, so we put a premium on it. Nature doesn’t. Besides, what’s so intelligent about stripping and poisoning our planet to the point that it may not be able to support
any
kind of life in the foreseeable future?”

“I was just wondering if the Israelis were sure about everything they brought back in their time machine,” Vickers said. Beneath him, light glinted from a branch covered with bromeliads. The upturned leaves trapped water in hundreds of tiny pools, spangling the normal patterns of green on green.

The flight fell into a rhythm. There was nothing to say, and only the same things to see. Vickers slipped into a familiar reverie, a gray background from which anything abnormal would spring out in brilliant light.

Shouts in Punan and a cry of inarticulate despair snarled through the link’s speaker. The TV image whipped violently as the lower floater swayed.

“Take us down!” Vickers shouted. He slipped the Garand’s charging handle back slightly to check the glint of brass indicating he’d already chambered a round.

O’Neill threw a lever on his control column. The solar array above the men began to fold by creaking stages.

“Forget that!” Vickers said. “Strip ’em off if you have to! If you don’t get us down fast, I’ll take her down myself!”

Pa Teng was hooting, a meaningless, repetitive pulse. Louise shouted to the Punan, raising her voice to be heard over his wail of grief. There was an edge of fear in her tone.

Louise’s floater landed, but Vickers still couldn’t make any sense out of the chaotic image her link camera sent. Broken poles and branches had been tossed in all directions. Some of them were tied to one another.

O’Neill dropped toward the forest floor as ordered. He used his body weight as well as the control yoke to hook the little vehicle around branches. Because the solar panels were still in the process of folding, their area and aspect changed continuously. For an instant, Vickers thought the floater had overbalanced; then, as O’Neill had planned, the braking effect of the part-furled array caught them and pulled the floater upright.

The smell of death and rotting flesh lay like fog over a low ridge. There had been four shelters in the nomads’ camp, each basically similar to the one Pa Teng built in a few minutes the night before.

Mats woven from bark fiber had softened the pole floors. The cloth was shredded now. The tyrannosaur’s jaws had torn a yard-long ellipsis through the center of one mat. The edges of the gap were bloody. Blood had sprayed twenty feet high on tree trunks. A ring of feasting flies emphasized each spatter with glittering chitin.

The tyrannosaur’s claws had scuffled through the fire at the open end of one shelter, scattering it. Debris and new growth on the forest floor were too damp to burn, but the hot coals had shriveled a wedge of ferns.

There had probably been twenty or so Punans in the camp. Because they were asleep when disaster struck, they’d been unable to flee instantly the way the sounder of hogs had done when it met the tyrannosaur.

Raggedly severed limbs lay all about the encampment. A child’s head and torso were face-down near where O’Neill landed the floater. The dinosaur had swallowed everything below the victim’s waist.

Pa Teng knelt, clinging to the guard rails of Louise’s floater. His face was turned upward. He keened like a distant siren, never stopping to breathe. Louise hugged the Punan and murmured in his ear. Her face was twisted with anguish.

Responsibility which we accepted,
she had said to O’Neill, meaning the tyrannosaur. In Louise’s mind, this carnage was her responsibility too.

Vickers stepped off the platform, the Garand cradled in his hands. He scanned the trees, some of them six feet in diameter. You could hide a regiment of tyrannosaurs in this jungle, each monster poised to lunge out behind a jaw full of serrated teeth.

In a fraction of a second, Henry Vickers could spin and point his rifle in any direction. In a fraction of a second, his eye could place the Garand’s sight picture on a spot between the gun muzzle and the big reptile’s brain. In a fraction of a second, his right index finger would squeeze the trigger off its sear and send a steel-cored bullet punching through flesh, bone, and soft nerve tissue.

There was no target. The slaughter around Vickers was hours old. The killer had passed on.

A voice called timidly from nearby.

“Don’t shoot!” O’Neill cried in English. He sprang toward Vickers, his arms spread while his eyes searched for the person who had spoken. It was next to impossible to tell the direction of a sound in the forest.

Vickers raised the Garand’s muzzle straight up to indicate that he understood. Louise stood and called out in Punan.

Pa Teng ceased wailing, though he continued to grip the floater. O’Neill spoke to him in a low voice.

Louise walked toward one of the collapsed shelters. The palm-leaf thatching shivered; a young woman wriggled out. The roofline had been undisturbed until she appeared. She’d lain where disaster covered her, afraid to move until she heard human voices.

Louise opened her arms. After a moment’s hesitation, the nomad woman embraced her educated sister.

Pa Teng clambered out of the floater. He and the Punan woman began to talk in quick, bubbling bursts. Vickers wasn’t sure that either was listening to the other or to the occasional questions that Louise or O’Neill added to the mix.

Vickers scanned the forest, moving his head and body slowly while his eyes flicked across the shadowed landscape. He was giving his peripheral vision full opportunity to identify a threat while there was still time to do something about it.

O’Neill turned and said, “According to the woman, ghosts brought the monster to them. They came in a ball of light, driving the monster before them.”

“They’ve been feeding it once a day,” Vickers said. He continued to watch their surroundings, though O’Neill’s information implied that the tyrannosaur had passed on. “I wonder what it’s getting for dinner tonight. Men again or pigs?”

Then he said, “I’d like to get moving soonest.”

A shrill electronic note quivered from one of the floaters. The jungle’s noises were so many and varied that, for a moment, Vickers thought the sound was natural. He whirled to see if a forest creature was warning of the tyrannosaur’s approach.

Louise stepped away from the Punans. She exchanged a glance with O’Neill.

“You were going to tell them not to contact you unless the world was about to end,” O’Neill said.

“Yes,” Louise agreed. “That’s what I told them.”

She stepped to the floater she’d piloted and threw a switch on the side of the link module. “Mondadero here,” she said in a flat voice.

“Dr. Mondadero?” the link’s speaker had a high-pitched male voice. “This is Carlsbad in New York. We’ve just processed EarthSat images and there’s
logging
going on within the Scheme borders. Logging! This is large-scale, absolutely blatant! You must act at once at your end while we protest to the Malaysian UN delegation. I’ve sent the images and Global Positioning Coordinates to the field database in Kuching for you.”

“Yes, I understand, Dr. Carlsbad,” Louise said. She was leaning over the guardrail to put her mouth closer to the module’s pickup. She looked unutterably weary. “I’ll get on that as soon as possible.”

“As soon as
possible!”
the voice at the other end of the satellite communicator repeated. “Doctor, did you hear what I said? A logging—”

“I’m quite busy now, Dr. Carlsbad,” Louise interrupted. “Good day.”

She broke the connection, then opened the link’s side panel and pulled the fuse. For a moment she stared at the silent module with her fist clenched; then she flung the fuse into the jungle.

“Louise,” Tom O’Neill said, “we’ve got to stop the logging before it becomes an international event. It’s Nikisastro, I’m sure.”

Louise straightened. “Yes,” she said. She opened the gate of her floater. “Just as soon as we’ve dealt with the tyrannosaur. Let’s go.”

“No,
Louise!” O’Neill said. His voice was tight and desperate but not loud. “The logging is more important. The logging is the whole Borneo Scheme. We’ve got to deal with it first.”

“Can you look around you and say that, Tom?” Louise shouted. “Look at them! Look at them!”

In an excess of revulsion that was close to insanity, Louise thrust her foot against the child’s partial corpse beside her, raising a cloud of flies. Their wings thrummed a bass note.

“Louise, I see,” O’Neill said softly. “But this is more important. This is the whole world’s future here.”

“O’Neill,” Vickers said, “take the floater that’s partly discharged and do whatever’s possible. Louise, you and I’ll chase the tyrannosaurus in the other one. If it laid up for the night, then it can’t be very far ahead now. We’ll catch it soon.”

He looked at the Punans, Pa Teng and the female survivor. They sat alongside one another on a pole which had been part of a shelter’s floor frame. They were chanting together, their voices low.

“I’ll be able to track the beast,” Vickers said. “I doubt Pa Teng would come along now even if we needed him.”

“Yes,” Louise said crisply. “Yes, all right. Let’s get going.”

She got aboard the floater her subordinate had been piloting. The little craft started to lift as Vickers jumped aboard.

“We have two hours,” Louise said tightly. “After that, we’ll have to recharge for at least another hour before I’ll want to trust the batteries again.”

“Two hours should do it,” Vickers said. He didn’t have any real idea; he was speaking to calm a friend who’d just taken a series of emotional jolts. “If it continues this business of driving a straight line, we can probably shoot a compass course in the canopy if we have to.”

A casing of vines wrapped a tree so thoroughly that no sign of the support structure within was visible. A yellow-striped lizard watched from a gnarled loop. It flicked its forked tongue toward Vickers as the floater passed.

What are you hunting, little fellow?
Vickers mused.

The carnage in the Punan camp had unexpectedly relaxed him. They would catch up with the tyrannosaur, and when they did, Henry Vickers would kill the beast. There was no longer a need to wait for the Scheme officials to use their capture guns, to argue, to lapse into despair, and—as the beast started to regain consciousness—for Louise finally to tell Vickers to finish off the logy animal.

Vickers’ position had ceased to be that of friend to Louise Mondadero and employee of the Borneo Scheme. He was a human being, and the tyrannosaur had proved that it was too dangerous to live in a world with humans.

“I heard what you were saying to Tom,” Louise said, her eyes on her flying. “That you think the ghosts come from the past. They couldn’t. They would have left remains, just as the dinosaurs themselves did. Especially if they were . . . intelligent.”

“I don’t know where they came from,” Vickers said. “I don’t even know if they exist.”

A wave of small birds swept up from the rain forest floor, disturbed by the floater’s hissing passage. There were scores,
hundreds
of individuals, and at least a dozen species. Their calls were cheerful cacophony as they brushed and banked about the mechanical intruder in their domain.

“They could be from the future, though,” Louise said in a cold, harsh tone that Vickers didn’t like to hear from his friend. “From the time after we’ve wiped ourselves and most other life off the planet.”

The tyrannosaur had laid up near its kill during the night, crushing a thirty-foot circle of undergrowth. When the beast got up, its tracks resumed their straight line through the forest.

Vickers checked his compass surreptitiously. He wasn’t sure how Louise would react to what he was doing. Ninety-five degrees was as close as he could make it. There was, he now realized, a Global Positioning Satellite receiver in the link module which could give him a vector accurate to a few centimeters in a kilometer.

Vickers hoped O’Neill wouldn’t get lost, because Louise had disabled the other module completely. Well, she had a lot of things on her mind. Vickers had only one: centering his front blade in the ring of the rear sight, with the beast’s skull a snarling blur in the distance beyond them.

“People have been talking about the end of the world for as long as there’ve been people, Louise,” Vickers said. He was calm because he knew exactly what he was to do. “We’re still here.”