Dinosaurs & A Dirigible Page 3

  Vickers set his feet with care to avoid tripping on exposed roots or sliding despite the cleats on his ankle boots. The forest floor was damp, and the thin layer of loam slipped easily over the substratum of clay.

  It occurred to him that Louise had picked O’Neill of all her subordinates to share the secret of the tyrannosaurus. And he was a very good pilot.

  The leaves of the undergrowth tickled Vickers’ limbs. Narrow-crowned trees stabbed sixty to a hundred feet up into the twilight, while above them stretched a nearly-solid blanket of green, the main canopy. It was almost like being under water.

  Vickers wished he’d brought the Garand instead of leaving it cased in the shelter. The rifle would be of only psychological purpose at this stage in the proceedings, but he could use a security blanket.

  “Here’s the pen,” O’Neill said. “Don’t come any closer than you are until I shut off the field.”

  They’d arrived at a double gate in a twelve-foot chain-link fence. A second, similar fence stood sixty feet inside the first. The intervening space had been cleared of undergrowth, but the trunks of forest giants rose unaffected by the construction. The canopy remained unbroken, perfect camouflage against aerial surveillance.

  “How big is the fenced area?” Vickers asked.

  “About an acre,” O’Neill replied. He unfastened the padlock which held the gate’s crossbar, a six-inch I-beam, in place and put his weight against the bar.

  “Don’t,” he repeated as Vickers instinctively stepped forward to help. “The outer fence is protected by a low-frequency generator that’ll knock you out unless you’re wearing a cancelling device.” He patted a case the size of a cigarette pack clipped to the right epaulet loop of his shirt. Vickers had taken it for a communicator of some sort.

  O’Neill left the gate open as he walked to a switchbox on the inner gatepost. The scale of the project suddenly struck Vickers. Two thousand feet of fencing—minimum—plus the heavy beams required to support it, trucked into the middle of the jungle and erected. Then the fifty-foot-long lizard had to be brought in the same way . . .

  And just where had that lizard come from to begin with?

  O’Neill threw the main switch on the side of the box. “All right,” he said. “You can come in now. Not that there’s anything to see. The gates were open the night the tyrannosaur escaped, although the low-frequency generator was operating and the inner fence was properly electrified.”

  He looked at Vickers in cold challenge. “The Javans let him out. That’s the only possible explanation. They did it to sabotage the Scheme.”

  A tunnel of half-inch steel sheeting penetrated the inner fence beside the gateway. The tunnel was sharply conical, only a foot in diameter on the near end but widely flared inside the compound.

  O’Neill noticed Vickers’ questioning glance. He rang his knuckles on the tunnel wall. “For feeding the tyrannosaur,” he explained. “That is, for drawing the beast into position with hog carcasses so that the bottle which collects pituitary hormone can be changed.”

  O’Neill thrust his clenched fist through a hole in the side of the tunnel near the small end. “Could be changed, that is.”

  “Where . . .” Vickers asked carefully, “did the tyrannosaurus come from?”

  “That’s a secret,” O’Neill said. He opened the inner gate, similar to the outer one. “From me, at least.”

  “I’ve heard,” said Vickers, “that the Israelis have a time-travel project.”

  “The fellow in charge of the team trucking in the tyrannosaur was named Stern,” O’Neill said. “Not that that means anything. The Scheme’s General Secretary is a Hirschfeld, after all, and he comes from Montreal.”

  Vickers knelt to look at tracks in the gateway. “I don’t suppose it matters,” he said.

  Which was a lie. If this involved something that the Israelis considered top secret, then . . . Louise Mondadero might be at risk of losing more than her job.

  A male Punan stepped out of the forest. “Appeared” would have been a better description, because Vickers saw no movement, just a squat, dark man wearing blue Adidas running shorts and a sheathed bush knife on a belt of rattan fiber.

  The native smiled at Vickers, but he waited to speak until O’Neill noticed his presence. The two talked in a quick exchange.

  “This is Pa Teng,” O’Neill explained to Vickers. “He’ll track the tyrannosaur for us. He’s a great hunter.”

  “Ask him what these are,” Vickers said, pointing at the marks in front of which he squatted.

  “What?” said O’Neill. “The tyrannosaur’s tracks, of course.”

  “Not them,” Vickers said drily. The tyrannosaur’s huge clawed feet gouged deeply into the dense soil at each ten-foot stride. There was no mistaking them. The marks that interested Vickers were faint and slender, pressed against the clay when it was wet and remaining as vague hints now that the surface had dried. They appeared to be the tracks of something four-toed and too delicate for a human with a foot so long.

  “We looked at those,” O’Neill said dismissively. “Louise says they’re the outlines of leaves driven against the soil by rain. Otherwise maybe the Javans or their agents disguised their prints when they opened the cage.”

  Pa Teng squatted beside Vickers. He probed delicately at one of the markings with a leaf stem, then spoke in his own language.

  Vickers raised an eyebrow in query toward O’Neill. The pilot frowned and said, “He says they’re from a monitor lizard. I suppose that’s possible. I’ve seen monitors more than six feet long in the forest.”

  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 t
he 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.