Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (14 page)

Vickers shook his head. He felt more frustration than disagreement, however. “The men
and women
in Tel Aviv,” he corrected. “Well, understanding the roots of their problem is fine, but I suspect that they’d trade it for a way to get a nuke into Berlin around ’32.” He sighed. “But this isn’t getting our job done, is it?” Vickers turned his binoculars onto the acacia grove again.

For a moment, Vickers was in doubt about the dark shape at the base of one of the trees. It could have been a root gnarling blackly about a boulder bared by ages of wind and rain. Then the shape rolled over and there could be no doubt at all that the sabertooth had slept where it killed. Vickers let the binoculars hang gently on their strap and lifted his Garand.

Weil’s breath sucked in. It was that, rather than her fingers clamping on his biceps, that caused Vickers to slack the finger pressure that would an instant later have sent a 150-grain bullet cracking downrange. The guide’s seated body held the rigid angle of which the rifle was a part, but his eyes slanted left to where the woman was pointing. “I’ll be damned,” Vickers mouthed. He lowered the butt of his weapon.

The sabertooth lay 200 yards in front of them, a clout shot at a stationary target. But a hominid was quartering toward the acacias from the left, already as close to the trees as he was to the watching humans. The hominid was sauntering with neither haste nor concern, a procedure which seemed both insane and wildly improbable for any creature his size when alone in this habitat. Vickers had the glasses up again. From the hominid’s build, from the way his arms hung as he walked . . . from the whorled grain of his fur that counterfeited two shades in a pelt of uniform gray . . . the guide was sure that this hominid was the one that had made the unsuccessful snatch at the carcass in the midst of the hyenas. That hominid had been present when the sabertooth struck—and therefore he could not conceivably be walking toward those murderous jaws in perfect nonchalance.

Weil’s camera was whirring. Vickers suspected that she would learn more through her binoculars than through the view finder, but there are people to whom no event is real unless it is frozen. No doubt many of them worked with bones. The hominid was only fifty yards from the sprawling cat. He stopped, scratched his armpit, and began calling out in a sharp voice. He was facing the end-most tree in the grove as if someone were hiding in its branches. Nothing larger than a squirrel could have been concealed among the thorns and sparse foliage.

The sabertooth’s wakefulness was indicated not by its movements but by the sudden cessation of all the tiny changes of position a sleeping animal makes. The great head froze; the eyes were apparently closed but might have been watching the hominid through slitted lids. The cat could not have been truly hungry after the meal of the previous day, but neither had the dun female provided so much meat that another kill was inconceivable. The cat grew as still and tense as the mainspring of a cocked revolver.

Vickers made a decision. He started to raise the rifle again. Linda Weil shook her head violently. “No!” she whispered. “It—it’s their world. But if none of the other primates are in sight, ah, afterward, kill the machairodont before it has time to damage the specimen.”

The guide turned his head back toward the grove with a set expression. He held the Garand an inch short of firing position despite his anger. But they were just animals . . .

The cat charged.

Considered dispassionately, the initial leap was a thing of beauty. The torso which had seemed to be as solid as a boulder was suddenly a blur of fluid motion. Vickers could now understand how he had been so thoroughly surprised by this killer’s mate; but the recollection chilled him anew.

The hominid himself was not in the least surprised. That was evident from the way he sprinted away from the cat at almost the instant that the carnivore first moved. There was no way that the hominid could match the sabertooth’s acceleration, however. When the forepaws touched the ground the first time, they had covered half the distance separating killer from prey, and when the paws touched the second time—

It was as if the sabertooth had stepped into a mine field, and the mines were alive. Vickers had counted six adult males in the hominid troop. The cat’s leap after the first had carried it into the midst of the other five. Sparse as the grass and brush had seemed, it had served to cloak the ambush not only from the humans but also from the sabertooth. Murderously intent on its running prey, the cat’s upper canines were bared and its claws were unsheathed to sweep its victim in. A pair of hominids leaped from either side like the jaws of a trap closing. If their own fangs were poor weapons in comparison to those of the 600-pound carnivore, then the blocks of stone they carried in their fists were impressive weapons by any standard. They smashed like sledge hammers, driven by the strength of the long arms.

Whatever might have come of the tumbling kaleidoscope, it should have involved the death of the hominid acting as bait. The cat’s paws were spread, certain to catch and rend even if reflex did not also flesh the long fangs an instant later. The bait, the Judas goat, made one last jump that would not have carried him free had not the white-flashed leader risen behind the sabertooth and seized the cat’s rigid tail.

The hominid’s mass could no more have stopped the flying cat directly than it could have stopped a moving car; but 120 pounds applied to a steering wheel can assuredly affect a car’s direction. The cat’s hindquarters swung outward with the impact. Mindless as a servo-mechanism, the same instinct that would have spun the cat upright in a fall reacted to counter the torque. The claws twisted away from their target. The sabertooth landed on the ground harmlessly, and the thud of its weight was overlaid by the sharper sound of stones mauling its ribs and skull.

The cat had charged silently. Now it screeched on a rising note and slashed to either side. Hominids sprang away. This was not the blind panic of the previous day. Rather, they were retracting themselves as a rifle’s bolt retracts to chamber another round. The leader still gripped the base of the cat’s tail, snarling with a fury the more chilling for the fact it was not mindless. When the sabertooth tried to flex double to reach its slender tormentor, the hominid that had acted as bait smashed a rock against the base of the cat’s skull.

The sabertooth would have run then, but its left hip joint was only shards of bone. Escape was no longer an option. The cat tried to leap and failed in a flurry of limbs. Hominids piled onto the flailing body. One of the attackers was flung high in the air, slashes on its chest filling with blood even as the creature spun. That was probably the last conscious action the carnivore took. All that Vickers could see for the next several minutes was a montage of stone-tipped arms rising and falling with a mechanical certainty. They made a sound on impact like that of mattocks digging a grave in frozen soil.

“God,” whispered the hunter.

Vickers had seen baboons kill a leopard, and he knew of well-enough attested instances of dholes, the red hunting dogs of India, killing tigers that had tried to drive them off their prey. The calculated precision of what he had just watched impressed Vickers in a way that the use of stones as weapons had not, however.

“Oh, I’ve died and gone to heaven,” breathed the paleontologist. “This is incredible. It’s just incredible.”

Vickers shivered. He peered through his binoculars but kept a firm grip on the rifle with his right hand. He was checking, not wholly consciously, to make sure he could account for all six males of the troop. He had sometimes felt a similar discomfort in baboon country, though never so intense. “I don’t think,” he said carefully, “that we’d better track, ah, these further today. They’re apt to act, ah, unpredictably. Used to be I thought if worst came to worst and they rushed us, one shot’d stop them. Right now, I don’t know that would be a good idea.”

Weil looked at the guide’s thin profile, measuring his mind with her eyes. “All right,” she said at last, “we’ll go back for now instead of seeing where they”—she nodded—“head. We’ll see what Holgar has found. But it all depends on Holgar.”

“I hope to God you’re right,” muttered Vickers as he began the task of backing away without arousing the hominids’ attention. They were hooting cheerfully around the machairodont, surely dead by now. The furry arms still rose and fell.

The closest human-sized cover was 200 yards from the locust trees but that was close enough. Nilson had to admit that his senior had done a masterful job of arranging the trap. The section of netting lay flat. Each pair of corner ropes was slanted across the net to a bent branch on the other side. When the trigger peg was pulled out to release the branches, the net would be snatched upward and rolled shut simultaneously—while still under enough unreleased tension to prevent anything within from escaping unaided. The release line itself led to a patch of brush on a rocky outcrop. It would become unbearably hot by ten in the morning, but by then the hominids should have visited the grove if they were coming at all.

Nilson desperately hoped that the troop had completely evacuated the region in the aftermath of the sabertooth’s attack.

The Norwegian morosely fingered the handle of doweling around which Vickers had clamped the release line. Anyone else would have used nylon cord for the line; Vickers had disconnected the braided steel cable from the winch to use instead. The nylon could easily have taken the strain, but it would have stretched considerably over the distance when Nilson pulled on it. That could be enough warning to send the hominids scurrying away before the trap released. The steel would require only a single sharp jerk with enough muscle in it to overcome the line’s dead weight.

Nilson studied the watercourse through his binoculars, for want of anything better to do at the moment. A half-squadron of hipparions dashed up to the bank, paused, and dashed away again without actually touching the water. The nervous horses were ignored by the score or so of antelopes already drinking. From their size and markings they appeared to be impalas; but if so, the species was different enough from those Topside for the females as well as the males to bear horns. There was no sign of hominids.

The younger guide had considered failing to spring the trap or deliberately botching the operation—perhaps managing to frighten them away permanently without capturing one. But even though this was Holgar Nilson’s first expedition with Vickers as his partner, he knew already what result such sabotage would bring. If Vickers found the trap had been released at the wrong time, or that it had not been released when there was sign in the grove that hominids had been present . . . well, the senior guide was accurate out to 500 meters with his Garand. There was not the slightest chance that he would not shoot a hominid if he thought Nilson had tried to call his bluff.

The half-light had become true dawn. Even the gray of the bush pig’s hide was a color rather than a shade. The sow watched as her piglets drank and stamped at the edge of the water, light glinting on the spikes of her tusks.

Something was moving in the grove.

Even before he shifted his glasses, Nilson knew that the hominids had arrived as he had feared they would. There were three of them, all females. Two were fully adult, each carrying a nursing infant. The third was shorter and slighter, the adolescent who had received the infant from the tiger’s victim. Now she was holding a large leaf or a swatch of hide. Fascinated, Nilson forgot for a moment why he was stationed there, forgot also his fear and anger at the situation.

The adult hominids were gathering locust pods from the ground. When each had a handful, she dropped it onto the makeshift platter which the adolescent carried.

Nilson swore under his breath. An incipient basket was a more frightening concept to him than was an incipient axe. They were men, they were ancestors of him and of all the billions of other humans living Topside, who
had
been living Topside before the intrusion team started meddling . . .

One of the adults moved off to the left, hunched over and momentarily hidden by bushes. The other adult chittered happily. Ignoring the thorns, she began to climb the trunk of one of the trees that armed the trap.

The trap. The adolescent was holding her bundle in one hand and with the other hand was plucking curiously at the nylon meshes on which she stood. Nilson touched the release handle. He did not pull it. Then he had a vision of the hominid as she would look through the sights of Henry Vickers’ rifle, the front blade bisecting her chest and the whole head and torso framed by the ring of the rear aperture. Nilson jerked the line.

The whittled peg flipped from its socket and the two anchor lines slashed against the sky. Their twang and the victim’s shriek of alarm were simultaneous as the net looped crosswise in the air. It hung between the branches, humming like a fly ambushed and held by a jumping spider.

The two adult hominids and their infant burdens disappeared screaming like children near a lightning strike. The Norwegian hunter could not be sure that the one who had been climbing had not been flung from her perch and killed when the trap sprung. There was no time to worry about that now. Snatching up his Mauser and the sled, Nilson began running through the grass toward the grove. Antelope exploded from the water. Hipparions joined the rout with less grace but a certain heavy-footed majesty.

Nilson pounded into the grove, panting as much from nerves as from the 200 yards he had run. The net was pulled tight enough to bulge the meshes around the captive, though not so tight that it choked off the hominid’s helpless bleats. Locust pods spilled from a horsehide apron were scattered on the ground beneath the trap.

“Sweet Jesus,” the guide muttered. “Oh, my children, my Mary.”

Vickers had planned a safe method of completing the capture single-handedly as well. It proved as effective in practice as the trap itself had. The hominid hung six feet in the air, only eye height for the Norwegian. He flung a second square of netting over the taut roll. Then, through the edges hanging low enough to avoid the captive’s teeth and claws, he wove a cord back and forth in a loose running seam. When Nilson had reached the hominid’s feet, he pulled the cord and tightened the outer net over the inner one like cross-wrapped sheets. As soon as he tied off the lace, the guide had a bundle which the captive within could not escape even after the tension of the branches was released. Holding the head end of the bundle with his left hand, Nilson cut the anchor cords one at a time, dampening the backlash and ultimately supporting the hominid’s weight with his own unaided strength. She mewed and twisted within the layers of net, baring her teeth but unable to sink them into the Norwegian’s arm.