Dinosaurs & A Dirigible Read online

  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.

  Louise giggled as she swung the gate in the protective railing closed behind her. “You’re going to be sore all over if you stand so stiff, Henry,” she said. “Relax.”

  She lifted the floater smoothly, setting the solar panels to fold while in motion. Directional control was by a principle similar to that of directing a plate spinning on a stick: By adjusting the angle at which the two charges repelled one another, Louise could move the floater in any direction she desired.

  The virtually frictionless motion made Vickers’ stomach turn. They were only a few feet in the air and travelling at less than ten miles an hour. Despite that, he felt as if he were in free fall and about to hit the ground hard enough to splash.

  They drifted through the forest wall. Louise lifted them so that they overflew most of the undergrowth, but leaves brushed the floater’s base. The roots of an air plant twitched Vickers’ hat. He grabbed the rifle’s charging handle before he associated the contact with its cause. He tried to relax. He had to keep control of his nerves. The jungle was creeping into his soul.

  Vickers took off his bush hat, then deliberately spun it over the side of the floater. The neck cord tangled in the saw-edged leaves of a clump of bamboo.

  Louise looked at him. “I won’t be needing that here,” he said.

  “You might when we’re above the canopy charging the batteries,” she said. “But I don’t suppose it matters very much.”

  She throttled back on the yoke. Vickers saw Pa Teng just ahead of them, walking easily despite the treacherous footing.

  The tyrannosaur had slipped through the undergrowth without damaging the foliage in any way that Vickers could see at this height and distance in time. The beast’s footprints were another matter. The clawed feet tore the thin soil like power shovels, scattering the brown leaf mold and leaving scars in the red clay beneath.

  Tracking the dinosaur from the floaters would be easy, especially since the beast was travelling in a straight line and ignoring the contours of the land. That surprised Vickers. The large mammals he had hunted almost invariably chose the path with the gentlest gradient. Perhaps he was making the mistake of measuring a predator against the herbivores which were the only land mammals approaching it in size.

  Louise turned on the six-inch audiovisual link attached to the railing beside her controls. After a burst of snow, the screen projected a wobbly close-range image of the canopy in full color.

  “Is it working at your end, Tom?” Louise called.

  “Yes, yes, I’ve got the display,” O’Neill replied. “There’s some updraft turbulence here, but that should steady before we have to change places.”

  His voice was thin but clear and static-free. For the sake of ruggedness, the links were military specification units. That meant they hopped frequencies to avoid detection also, which Vickers supposed did no harm.

  “I trust I’ll be able to handle it,” Louise said drily. “I have for three years, after all.”

  She raised the floater slightly to clear the upthrust roots of a fallen giant. The gap in the canopy already had been closed by half a dozen lesser trees, racing up the column of sunlight for a chance to succeed to mastery of the location.

  Louise was as expert as she had promised. Vickers was becoming used to the greasy feel of the floater’s progress. He now could twist his body normally to look around without fearing that he was going to flip them over like a tossed coin.

  Despite that, Vickers couldn’t relax. The jungle enclosed him, pressing down from all sides. It wasn’t a matter of visibility either. While the floater drifted at mid-height, Vickers could see much farther than was normal in the East African plains to which he was accustomed. There grasses grew ten, even twelve feet tall, forming an opaque curtain. But you could see the sky. The rain forest was a box—a box of enormous volume, but an enclosure nonetheless.

  Besides, it was very similar to the shadowed, windless jungle in which a younger Henry Vickers had hunted men. At the time, the events in which he took part hadn’t been a problem. The memories of them were something else again.

  The floater drifted beneath a tree whose limbs were covered with bromeliads. Spiky, red-tipped leaves sprang out in clumps wherever seeds had found lodging in crevices of the bark. Dried fronds hung down from the tufts like the hair of a drowned woman.

  Vickers swore very softly. He concentrated his attention on Pa Teng who sauntered along below.

  The tyrannosaur had collapsed the steep wall of a ravine in mounting it. Roots and flecks of glittering mica marked the fallen clay. The Punan hunter climbed the bank to the side of the beast’s path. He would have sunk ankle deep where the soil was turned.

  A tank couldn’t have driven a straighter track through the jungle. The tyrannosaur skirted large trees, but nothing else affected its course.

  A tree of medium height shot its leaves out in circular fans a yard across, trembling on twigs which sprang from the top of the trunk. Louise eased the floater lower and to the right to avoid brushing the foliage. Pa Teng was briefly invisible. Vickers heard him hoot with surprise.

  Vickers unslung the Garand and chambered a round with a clang of steel on steel. His eyes flicked through a 180-degree panorama. Everything around him was focused in his mind.

  Louise tilted the floater directly through a wall of saplings bordering a trail unseen until that moment. A sounder of long-skulled Malay hogs had been walking down the trail in single file when the tyrannosaur burst among them.

  Judging from the separate splotches of blood, the carnivore had scooped at least three of the four-hundred-pound mammals into its jaws and bolted them before the rest of the sounder fled. The dinosaur’s foot had ripped a gap in the far side of the trail where the beast pursued a hog trying to escape.

  Flies buzzed over the blood and fragments of flesh which had dribbled from the tyrannosaur’s jaws. The sound of the insects was louder than the torpid hiss of the floater’s propulsion mechanism.

  �
��Son of a bitch,” Vickers muttered.

  Louise set the floater down where the dinosaur’s track widened the trail. The stench of meat rotting in this heat and humidity was as foul as gases belched from the bottom of a swamp.

  Pa Teng stared at the carnage, gabbling in amazement. He held his shotgun out of the way. Now that the tigers and stunted rhinos had been hunted to extinction, no creature natural to the forest threatened an adult human. It didn’t occur to the Punan that he might need a weapon for defense.

  Not that a load of buckshot from a wire-wrapped water pipe would have been much use for the purpose.

  O’Neill dropped from the canopy with a crackle of foliage to land beside them. “I told you it would be able to find food in the forest,” he said with satisfaction.

  “I’m wondering just how it did that,” Vickers said. “The trail we followed is as straight as a compass course. To dinner.”

  Pa Teng had vanished into the forest. He called something to the Westerners, his voice directionless because of the baffling vegetation. Louise lifted her floater and followed the tyrannosaur’s obvious track. Vickers raised his rifle to his shoulder. He kept the muzzle high to prevent the front sight from snagging on branches.

  Twenty feet from the trail, a depression in the loam and undergrowth showed where the tyrannosaur had settled for the night. Blood spattered the ground; the head of a pig sat upright on the stump of its neck. The carnivore had caught its prey from behind this time. The serrated teeth sawed off the head when the jaws closed. Flies clustered on the eyes and blackened the hog’s open mouth.

  O’Neill settled alongside again. “I wonder how fast he’s travelling,” he said. His voice was artificially calm.

  “We’d best be getting on,” Louise said, a reply to the surface level of O’Neill’s question. “Tom, I need to recharge my batteries. Henry, would you mind changing to the other floater? Or . . .”

  “I don’t have any problem with riding with Mr. O’Neill,” Vickers said. He stepped out of Louise’s vehicle and unlatched the guardrail of the other. He paused to make eye contact with O’Neill before he got aboard. “Unless he’d rather otherwise?”

  “No, no,” the younger man said. “It’s my job.”

  He didn’t sound enthusiastic, but he seemed to mean what he said.

  Louise spoke to Pa Teng. The Punan hesitated a moment, then disappeared along the tyrannosaur’s track again.

  O’Neill lifted the floater. The little aircraft moved as smoothly as if it were on rails.

  “One thing I want clear with you, Vickers,” O’Neill said. He looked at his passenger without affecting the floater’s steady ride. Palmetto fronds wavered in the breeze of their passage. “You’re not going to shoot from my vehicle. Do you understand?”

  “I’ll do the job Dr. Mondadero hired me to do,” Vickers said. He watched Pa Teng as an excuse to avoid eye contact with O’Neill. “I’m not—” He turned toward the pilot after all. “Look, O’Neill, I’m not here to collect a new trophy. Louise has been a friend for fifteen years. She called because she was in a bind. I’d have come if what she needed was somebody to clean her cesspool, okay?”

  O’Neill transferred his attention to his flying. “The only way to protect the rain forest,” he muttered, “seems to be to make compromises. But that’s like sawing off your leg to prevent gangrene spreading. What you’ve got left isn’t what it should be anymore.”

  Vickers nodded. That was more nearly a direct apology than he’d expected from the younger man.

  “Do you know how the tyrannosaurus was caught in the first place?” Vickers asked, out of curiosity and to keep the conversation going in a neutral path.

  The floater dipped to avoid the blooms of orchids hanging as much as ten feet below the branch on which the roots were anchored. A delicate scent perfumed the still air. Dangling like this, the flowers weren’t hidden among the foliage of the parent tree and other epiphytes.

  O’Neill indicated the barrel of the capture gun clipped vertically to the rail beside him. “With these,” he said. “With the actual rifles, very possibly. The people who delivered the tyrannosaur trained Louise and me to use them in case there was a problem. The concern was that a tree might fall across the fences, both of them, in a storm. Not likely, but possible.”

  “That’s good,” Vickers said. “I wasn’t sure there’d been a field test. How long does the drug take to work?”

  O’Neill frowned. “Don’t be in a hurry to shoot,” he snapped in a return to his earlier tone. “They say up to thirty minutes, though it depends on where the dart hits. And a double dose is lethal, so I won’t be shooting more than once.”

  Assuming you hit it, boy, Vickers thought. Which I don’t assume. And that still leaves the question of how you think we’re going to carry our friend home.

  Aloud he said, “Don’t worry about me being trigger-happy. Remember, I’m paid for showing my clients a good time. Shooting the wildlife myself doesn’t put dollars in my pocket.”

  Pa Teng suddenly knelt beside a log covered with orange shelf fungus. He took a shotgun shell from his macramé pouch and slipped it into the weapon. O’Neill brought the floater to a hover ten feet above and slightly to the side of the Punan.

  Vickers couldn’t see or hear anything but the normal forest noise. He still carried the Garand charged. His index finger clicked forward the safety lever at the front of the trigger guard, readying the weapon to fire.

  A pig stepped through the undergrowth on the other side of the fallen log. It raised its long snout in the air and snorted. Pa Teng pulled back on the rubber-band firing mechanism.

  O’Neill shouted and thrust his control yoke forward. The floater dived toward the hog, spooking it sideways. Pa Teng released the striker. The shotgun boomed. A cloud of smoke, remarkably dense and white because of the saturated humidity, enveloped both hunter and prey.

  The smoke cleared. The hog lay on its back, its legs thrashing. Pa Teng ran to his victim and cut its throat with his bush knife, an impressive tool whose clip-pointed blade was ground from a leaf of truck spring. O’Neill landed the floater and shouted to the Punan.

  Vickers got out of the vehicle. He didn’t notice the slight vibration of the floater’s suspension until his feet were on solid ground again. “What’s the problem?” he demanded. “We’re not close enough to alert the tyrannosaur.”

  O’Neill turned. “There was no need to shoot anything. We’ve got food along, plenty of food!”

  Louise landed beside the others. “It’s time we set up camp for the night anyway,” she said. “It was only a pig, Tom. Pa Teng wouldn’t understand not shooting a pig that offered itself.”

  The Punan paid no attention to the argument. He wiped the blade of his knife with a leaf, then dug dry punk from the heart of the fallen log. A few more swipes of the bush knife provided saplings for kindling.

  Vickers released the Garand’s magazine, tucked it under his belt, and pulled back carefully on the rifle’s charging handle to extract the round from the chamber. He caught the cartridge as the ejector started to kick it free of the weapon.

  The bolt closed on the empty chamber. Vickers slipped the extracted round into the magazine, which he replaced in turn in the receiver well.

  The only way to be absolutely sure that weapon was safe was to carry it with an empty chamber. If the Garand dropped on its buttplate—and who knew what could happen in the field?—there was a fair chance that the bullet would punch through Vickers himself the long way.

  Vickers was weary almost beyond words. He had been either moving or waiting on hard seats for two and a half days, ever since getting Louise’s panicked call. Despite that, he methodically made his rifle safe, because that was how he was.

  There were better marksmen than Henry Vickers—a few. There were better trackers, and many, many guides who formed better rapport with their clients.

  Vickers was steady. He’d made mistakes, but he’d never made the same mistake twice. He knew he lo
oked silly sometimes, but he followed procedures nonetheless. He’d stayed alive, and so had every other person for whom Vickers took responsibility.

  He’d wondered what technique the Punan would use to ignite the punk. Vickers had heard that some forms of bamboo had enough silica in the stems to strike sparks from a flint chip.

  Pa Teng took a disposable butane lighter from a belt pouch and applied it to his fireset. A smoky flame sprang up immediately.

  Louise and O’Neill hung condensing cloths from nearby saplings before they unpacked other materials from the knapsacks. The cloths, one-meter squares of thick fabric, absorbed water vapor and wicked it into the clear plastic collecting bottle hanging from the center of each piece. In the forest’s saturated atmosphere, the bottles began to fill at once.

  “Anything I can do?” Vickers asked. Insects crawled into the corners of his mouth. He ignored them, merely blinking to brush away the mites that settled in his eyes. He wasn’t wearing insect repellent. Not only did the long-chain molecules alert wildlife more quickly than a human’s normal scent, they degraded Vickers’ own sense of smell.

  Besides, repellents didn’t work very well. Better to accept the bites and prickles as a cost of doing the business he chose to do.

  “Just relax, Henry,” Louise said. She and O’Neill looked gray with fatigue also. They probably hadn’t gotten much sleep since the tyrannosaur escaped either.

  Pa Teng had a haunch of the pig on a spit over his smoky fire. The bristles singed off with a stench worse than that of carrion. While his meat cooked, the Punan lopped bamboo for a shelter. His movements were casual but assured.

  Vickers squatted down with his back to a tree, leaning the rifle against the trunk beside him. He closed his eyes to prevent gnats from crawling into them.

  He didn’t realize he’d gone to sleep until he heard Tom O’Neill’s voice saying softly, “Should we wake him?”

  “No need,” Vickers murmured. Tropic sunset had fallen like a knife-switch darkening the sky.

  It was raining. He heard the patter of drops infinitely multiplied, spattering from leaf to leaf to lower leaf. Nothing seemed to reach the forest floor except a haze scarcely noticeable in the saturated humidity.