Dinosaurs & A Dirigible Read online

  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.”

  “Sure, Henry,” she said savagely. “Every year the air and water are poisoned a little bit worse, every year the land is stripped a little barer, every year there’s tens of millions more people to speed up the decline. And everything’s fine. Just the way you’re fine when you fall out of a window—until you hit the ground!”

  Tracking was even less difficult than Vickers had expected. The tyrannosaur’s strides were as regular as a heartbeat, each of ten feet or so through the undergrowth. They were a little closer on uphills, and they strung into long gouges on downslopes: the beast’s heels dug in, and sometimes there was the mark of a dewclaw.

  The floater swept beneath a branch from which hung scores of football-shaped nests woven from plant fibers. Nesting birds with slim, curved beaks cried raucously at the humans’ sudden appearance.

  A wasp stung Vickers on the forehead. Another settled on his right wrist. He slapped the second one and was stung on the back of the neck. Wasps shared the tree with the birds; they swarmed to defend it, though fortunately they didn’t pursue the human intruders far.

  Louise swung the floater around a tree. Orange flowers sprang directly from the trunk. A stray sunbeam touched a bloom and lighted it into a torch flame.

  The angry splotch of a wasp sting glowed on Louise’s right cheekbone. “They’re evil, Henry,” she said.

  He glanced at her. “The ghosts, you mean?” he said.

  “They’re not ghosts, they’re aliens,” Louise said. “Alien to us, at least. Maybe you’re right about them, them being from another time.”

  Vickers shrugged. “I don’t know where they’re from,” he repeated. “If they’re real—”

  In his gut, he didn’t believe the slender, scaled figures existed. Intellectually he knew that the evidence suggested the—ghosts, whatever—had to be real, but the emotional core of Vickers’ mind refused to accept that.

  “—then they’re sure not human. Doesn’t make them evil, though.”

  “The Punan camp,” Louise said grimly. The vine-covered branch of a fallen tree whanged the side of the floater. She had mistaken the obstruction for the whippy weakness of a sapling. They were traveling recklessly fast.

  “They needed food for the tyrannosaurus,” Vickers said. His voice was wooden in its lack of affect. “They’re not human, so pigs and men are all the same. It’s only evil if men do it to other men.”

  There had been other villages like that one, half a world and half a lifetime away. Vickers hadn’t forgotten those villages either.

  “It’s all right with you, Henry?” Louise shouted. “It’s all right? What’s the matter with you?”

  “I said they weren’t evil, Louise,” Vickers replied softly. “It’s not all right, no. But there’s only three of them and—”

  His face changed. His mind was so completely in the past that he forgot to keep his expression neutral.

  “—I’ve got a hundred rounds. That should be plenty.”

  The terrain was rising. Louise twitched the floater abruptly upward. She had almost plowed into the ground while transfixed by a glimpse into the soul of a man she thought she knew.

  They flew on. By this time, they could anticipate the twists to one side or the other when major obstructions diverted the dinosaur’s course. The track swung back, as surely as a pendulum.

  “Do you suppose they’re taking it to their ship?” Louise murmured. “Or machine. I don’t even know what the Israelis’ apparatus looks like.”

  Vickers shook his head. The question didn’t touch his area of present focus, so he barely heard the words.

  They were getting close. A smell that at first Vickers couldn’t identify made the hair on the back of his neck lift. A combination of snake smell and carrion . . . Although the tyrannosaur appeared to be an active hunter rather than a scavenger, flesh caught between its teeth would rot. There were no tick birds here in the forest to clean the beast’s jaws like those of crocodiles on a mudbank.

  Vickers began to hear a rasping quiver whenever the floater topped a ridge. At first he thought it was the sound of a distant storm, but it was too constant for that. “Louise?” he said. “Do you hear that noise?”

  She looked at him. “Yes,” she said, “but I don’t know what it is. It isn’t the tyrannosaur.”

  The tyrannosaur had brushed a tree, pulling aside the shrouding vines. The bark beneath was rough. Scales the size of Vickers’ thumbnail glittered against it. Most were dark, but one was a bright yellowish green.

  “We’re getting very low on power,” Louise said.

  The charge indicator was in the red zone. Vickers grimaced. “We’re nearly up with him,” he said. “Hold on for as long as you can.”

  The terrain climbed. When the floater crested the ridge, the sound hit them redoubled. Superimposed on the rumble of diesel engines was the high scream of a chainsaw. They were nearing the logging operation.

  Louise’s face set. Neither she nor Vickers spoke.

  A hump in the ground ahead might once have been a fallen tree. Insects and microbes had reduced it to a mauve pile, covered now by broad-leafed ferns. The tyrannosaur had ripped through the obstruction without swerving. Torn fronds quivered at the edges of where the punky wood had fallen in to fill the gap.

  Louise pulled back on her control yoke. The floater lifted a foot, then staggered and dropped like a man falling down stairs.

  “We’ve got to get into the sun—” she shouted as the floater crashed through ferns in an explosion of brown spores “—light!”

  They came out the other side of the fern thicket. Louise fought her controls. The floater balanced but would not rise. The charge indicator pulsed red, and a warning buzzer sounded.

  “We don’t—” Louise said, and the tyrannosaur thirty feet away cocked its head toward them. Its belly scales were cream-colored, while its back was slate gray with vertical green stripes. The beast disappeared through a screen of elephant ear plants.

  Vickers stepped off of the floater without thinking at the conscious level. He’d gotten the Garand only halfway to his shoulder before the sudden target vanished. He ran after the tyrannosaur, holding the butt of the heavy weapon in the crook of his right arm so that he had a hand free to grab supports.

  Surface roots, hard and slippery, spread a net across the ground. Vickers stumbled. He caught himself on one of a trio of arrow-straight stems springing from a common base. Spines or an insect stabbed his palm, but the pain didn’t register for the moment. He continued to jog along the dinosaur’s track.

  Behind him, Louise spiked skyward in the lightened floater. Vickers hoped it wouldn’t lose power before she could deploy the solar array, but that was out of his hands.

  The ground climbed. The slope was no more than one in five, but Vickers’ legs were weak for lack of use in the past several days. He didn’t let himself think of failing. He would catch and finish his quarry if he had to crawl on his belly to do so.

  The noise of snorting engines hit Vickers like the first rush of a storm. He shouldered through a stand of saplings. Sword-shaped leaves sprouted directly from their trunks. Sunlight dazzled him.

  He was at the edge of a wide logging road. Diesel exhaust mingled with the sharp smells of turned earth and freshly cut vegetation. To his left, a four-wheeled grapple skidder with a ’dozer
blade in front and a hydraulic grab on the other end rolled thunderously down the middle of the road at a walking pace. The grab held the butt end of the hundred-and-fifty-foot tree the tractor was dragging toward the aerostat tethered at the edge of the forest a quarter of a mile away.

  The tyrannosaur was a hundred yards down the road to the right, among half a dozen Indonesian sawyers. Most of the men were running. A pair of bare legs protruded from the beast’s jaws. The tyrannosaur’s skull flexed like that of a snake swallowing. Peristaltic motion of the throat muscles dragged the victim the rest of the way down.

  Vickers clicked his safety lever forward. He dropped into a sitting position for steadier aim. That was a mistake. After Vickers’ days in the rain forest, the logging road looked like bare wasteland, but the trash of branches and bulldozed saplings formed a muzzle-high screen between Vickers and his target.

  He staggered to his feet again. He was breathing hard from his run, and his skin was slick with sweat.

  A sawyer turned with his chainsaw raised. The cutting bar was nearly as long as the man wielding it was tall. White exhaust spurted as the Indonesian revved the saw’s two-stroke engine. The hooked teeth glinted in the sunlight that filled the clearing.

  The tyrannosaur paused. Vickers aimed, breathed deeply, and began to let his breath out slowly as his finger took up the trigger’s slack. The muzzle had been describing a three-inch circle in the air. Now it steadied.

  The torque and weight of the big saw pulled the bar down despite the Indonesian’s desperate efforts to keep it between him and the tyrannosaur. The beast’s huge head darted forward like that of a robin taking a worm. Vickers slacked his trigger instinctively lest he hit the man instead of the tyrannosaur.

  The sawyer screamed and tried to fling the saw like an awkward medicine ball. The tyrannosaur’s jaws clopped shut in a spray of blood, severing the man’s torso at diaphragm level.

  The grapple skidder blocked any further chance of a shot, though Vickers caught glimpses of the chaos across the road. Men screamed as they ran, but human voices were lost in the continuing roar of logging machinery. A bulldozer with a high land-clearing blade and a roof of heavy screen sat empty and idling. The space between its treads would have been excellent protection, but none of the panicked loggers thought to hide there.