Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (16 page)

TIME SAFARI

The tyrannosaur’s bellow made everyone jump except Vickers, the guide. The beast’s nostrils flared, sucking in the odor of the light helicopter and the humans aboard it. It stalked forward.

“The largest land predator that ever lived,” whispered one of the clients.

“A lot of people think that,” said Vickers in what most of the rest thought was agreement.

There was nothing in the graceful advance of the tyrannosaur to suggest its ten-ton mass, until its tail side-swiped a flower-trunked cycad. The tree was six inches thick at the point of impact, and it sheared at that point without time to bend.

“Oh dear,” the female photographer said. Her brother’s grip on the chair arms was giving him leverage to push its cushion against the steel backplate.

The tyrannosaur’s strides shifted the weight of its deep torso, counterbalanced by the swinging of its neck and tail. At each end of the head’s arcs, the beast’s eyes glared alternately at its prey. Except for the size, the watchers could have been observing a grackle on the lawn, but it was a grackle seen from a june bug’s perspective.

“Goddamn, he won’t hold still!” snarled Salmes, the old-money client, the know-it-all. Vickers smiled. The tyrannosaur chose that moment to pause and bellow again. It was now a dozen feet from the helicopter, a single claw-tipped stride. If the blasting sound left one able, it was an ideal time to admire the beauty of the beast’s four-foot head. Its teeth were irregular in length and placement, providing in sum a pair of yellowish, four-inch-deep saws. They fit together too loosely to shear; but with the power of the tyrannosaur’s jaw muscles driving them, they could tear the flesh from any creature on Earth—in any age.

The beast’s tongue was like a crocodile’s, attached for its full length to the floor of its mouth. Deep blue with purple veins, it had a floral appearance. The tongue was without sensory purpose and existed only to help by rhythmic flexions to ram chunks of meat down the predator’s throat. The beast’s head scales were the size of little fingernails, somewhat finer than those of the torso. Their coloration was consistent—a base of green nearing black, blurred by rosettes of a much lighter, yellowish hue. Against that background, the tyrannosaur’s eyes stood out like needlepoints dripping blood.

“They don’t always give you that pause,” Vickers said aloud. “Sometimes they come—”

The tyrannosaur lunged forward. Its lower jaw, half-opened during its bugling challenge, dropped to full gape. Someone shouted. The action blurred as the hologram dissolved a foot or two from the arc of clients.

Vickers thumbed up the molding lights. He walked to the front of the conference room, holding the remote control with which the hotel had provided him. The six clients viewed him with varied expressions. The brother and sister photographers, dentists named McPherson, whispered in obvious delight. They were best able to appreciate the quality of the hologram and to judge their own ability to duplicate it. Any fear they had felt during the presentation was buried in their technical enthusiasm afterward.

The two individual gunners were a general contractor named Mears and Brewer, a meat-packing magnate. Brewer was a short man whose full moustache and balding head made him a caricature of a Victorian industrialist. He loosened his collar and massaged his flushed throat with his thumb and index finger. Mears, built like an All-Pro linebacker after twenty years of retirement, was frowning. He still gripped the chair arms in a way that threatened the plastic. Those were normal reactions to one of Vickers’ pre-hunt presentations. It meant the clients had learned the necessity of care in a way no words or still photos could have taught them. Conversely, that familiarity made them less likely to freeze when they faced the real thing.

The presentations unfortunately did not have any useful effect on people like the Salmes. Or at least on Jonathan Salmes, blond and big but with the look of a movie star, not a football player. Money and leisure could not make Salmes younger, but they made him look considerably less than his real age of forty years. His face was now set in its habitual pattern of affected boredom. As not infrequently happens, the affectation created its own reality and robbed Salmes of whatever pleasure three generations of oil money might otherwise have brought him.

Adrienne Salmes was as blond and as perfectly preserved as her husband, but she had absorbed the presentation with obvious interest. Time safaris were the property of wealth alone, and she had all the trapping of that wealth. Re-emitted light made her dress—and its wearer—the magnet of all eyes in a dim room, and her silver lamé wristlet responded to voice commands with a digital display. That sort of money could buy beauty like Adrienne Salmes’; but it could not buy the inbred assurance with which she wore that beauty. She forestalled any tendency the guide might have had to think that her personality stopped with the skin by asking, “Mr. Vickers, would you have waited to see if the tyrannosaurus would stop, or would you have shot while it was still at some distance from the helicopter?”

“Umm?” said Vickers in surprise. “Oh, wait, I suppose. If he doesn’t stop, there’s still time for a shot; and your guide, whether that’s me or Dieter, will be backing you. That’s a good question.” He cleared his throat. “And that brings up an important point,” he went on. “We don’t shoot large carnivores on foot. Mostly, the shooting platform—the helicopter—won’t be dropping as low as it was for the pictures, either. For these holos I was sitting beside the photographer, sweating blood the whole time that nothing would go wrong. If the bird had stuttered or the pilot hadn’t timed it just right, I’d have had just about enough time to try for a brain shot. Anywhere else and we’d have been in that fellow’s gut faster’n you could swallow a sardine.” He smiled. It made him look less like a bank clerk, more like a bank robber. “Three sardines,” he corrected himself.

“If you used a man-sized rifle, you’d have been a damned sight better off,” offered Jonathan Salmes. He had one ankle crossed on the other knee, and his chair reclined at a 45-degree angle.

Vickers looked at the client. They were about of an age, though the guide was several inches shorter and not as heavily built. “Yes, well,” he said. “That’s a thing I need to talk about. Rifles.” He ran a hand through his light brown hair.

“Yeah, I couldn’t figure that either,” said Mears. “I mean, I read the stuff you sent, about big bores not being important.” The contractor frowned. “I don’t figure that. I mean, God almighty, as big as one of those mothers is, I wouldn’t feel overgunned with a one-oh-five howitzer . . . and I sure don’t think my .458 Magnum’s any too big.”

“Right, right,” Vickers said, nodding his head. His discomfort at facing a group of humans was obvious. “A .458’s fine if you can handle it—and I’m sure you can. I’m sure any of you can,” he added, raising his eyes and sweeping the group again. “What I said, what I meant, was that size isn’t important; penetration and bullet placement are what’s important. The .458 penetrates fine—with solids—I hope to God all of you know to bring solids, not soft-nosed bullets. If you’re not comfortable with that much recoil, though, you’re liable to flinch. And that means you’ll miss, even at the ranges we shoot dinos at. A wounded dino running around, anywhere up to a hundred tons of him, and that’s when things get messy. You and everybody around are better off with you holding a gun that doesn’t make you flinch.”

“That’s all balls, you know,” Salmes remarked conversationally. He glanced around at the other clients. “If you’re man enough, I’ll tell you what to carry.” He looked at Vickers, apparently expecting an attempt to silence him. The guide eyed him with a somewhat bemused expression. “A .500 Salmes, that’s what,” the big client asserted loudly. “It was designed for me specially by Marquart and Wells, gun and bullets both. It uses shortened fifty-caliber machine gun cases, loaded to give twelve-thousand-foot-pounds of energy. That’s enough to knock a tyrannosaurus right flat on his ass. It’s the only gun that you’ll be safe with on a hunt like this.” He nodded toward Vickers to put a period to his statement.

“Yes, well,” Vickers repeated. His expression shifted, hardening. He suddenly wore the visage that an animal might have glimpsed over the sights of his rifle. “Does anybody else feel that they need a—a
gun
like that to bring down anything they’ll see on this safari?”

No one nodded to the question when it was put that way. Adrienne Salmes smiled. She was a tall woman, as tall as Vickers himself was.

“Okay, then,” the guide said. “I guess I can skip the lesson to basic physics. Mr. Salmes, if you can handle your rifle, that’s all that matters to me. If you can’t handle it, you’ve still got time to get something useful instead. Now—”

“Now wait a goddamned minute!” Salmes said, his foot thumping to the floor. His face had flushed under its even tan. “Just what do you mean by that crack? You’re going to teach
me
physics?”

“I don’t think Mr. Vickers—” began Miss McPherson.

“I want an explanation!” Salmes demanded.

“All right, no problem,” said Vickers. He rubbed his forehead and winced in concentration. “What you’re talking about,” he said to the floor, “is kinetic energy. That’s a function of the square of the velocity. Well and good, but it won’t knock anything down. What knocks things down is momentum, that’s weight times velocity, not velocity squared. Anything that the bullet knocks down, the butt of the rifle would knock down by recoiling—which is why I encourage clients to carry something they can handle.” He raised his eyes and pinned Salmes with them. “I’ve never yet had a client who weighed twelve thousand pounds, Mr. Salmes. And so I’m always tempted to tell people who talk about ‘knock-down power’ that they’re full to the eyes.”

Mrs. Salmes giggled. The other clients did not, but all the faces save Salmes’ own bore more-than-hinted smiles. Vickers suspected that the handsome blond man had gotten on everyone else’s nerves in the bar before the guide had opened the conference suite.

Salmes purpled to the point of an explosion. The guide glanced down again and raised his hand before saying, “Look, all other things being equal, I’d sooner hit a dino—or a man—with a big bullet than a little one. But if you put the bullet in the brain or the heart, it really doesn’t matter much how big it is. And especially with a dino, if you put the bullet anywhere else, it’s not going to do much good at all.”

“Look,” said Brewer, hunching forward and spreading his hands palms down, “I don’t flinch, and I got a .378 Weatherby that’s got penetration up the ass. But—” he turned his hands over and over again as he looked at them—“I’m not Annie Oakley, you know. If I have to hit a brain the size of a walnut with a four-foot skull around it—well, I may as well take a camera myself instead of the gun. I’ll have
something
to show people that way.”

Salmes snorted—which could have gotten him one of Brewer’s big, capable fists in the face, Vickers thought. “That’s another good question,” the guide said. “Very good. Well. Brain shots are great if you know where to put them. I attached charts of a lot of the common dinos with the material I sent out, look them over and decide if you want to try.

“Thing is,” he continued, “taking the top off a dino’s heart’ll drop it in a couple hundred yards. They don’t charge when they’re heart-shot, they just run till they fall. And we shoot from up close, as close as ten yards. They don’t take any notice of you, the big ones, you could touch them if you wanted. You just need enough distance to be able to pick your shot. You see”—he gestured toward Brewer with both index fingers—“you won’t have any problem hitting a heart the size of a bushel basket from thirty feet away. Brains—well, skin hunters have been killing crocs with brain shots for a century. Crocodile brains are just as small as a tyrannosaur’s, and the skulls are just as big. Back where we’re going, there were some that were a damn sight bigger than tyrannosaurs. But don’t feel you have to. And anyway, it’d spoil your trophy if you brain-shot some of the small-headed kind.”

Brewer cleared his throat. “Hey,” he said, “I’d like to go back to something you said before. About using the helicopter.”

“Right, the shooting platform,” Vickers agreed.

“Look,” said the meat packer, “I mean . . . well, that’s sort of like shooting wolves from a plane, isn’t it? I mean, not, well, Christ . . . not sporting, is it?”

Vickers shrugged. “I won’t argue with you,” he said, “and you don’t have to use the platform if you don’t want to. But it’s the only way you can be allowed to shoot the big carnosaurs. I’m sorry, that’s just how it is.” He leaned forward and spoke more intensely, popping the fingers of his left hand against his right palm. “It’s as sporting as shooting tigers from elephant back, I guess, or shooting lions over a butchered cow. The head looks just as big over your mantle. And there’s no sport at all for me to tell my bosses how one of my clients was eaten. They aren’t bad, the big dinos, people aren’t in their scale so they’ll pretty much ignore you. Wound one and it’s kitty bar the door. These aren’t plant eaters, primed to run if there’s trouble. These are carnivores we’re talking about, animals that spend most of their waking lives killing or looking for something to kill. They
will
connect the noise of a shot with the pain, and they
will
go after whoever made the noise.”

The guide paused and drew back. More calmly he concluded, “So carnosaurs you’ll hunt from the platform. Or not at all.”

“Well, what happens if they come to us?” Salmes demanded with recovered belligerence. “Right up to the camp, say? You can’t keep us from shooting then.”

“I guess this is a good time to discuss arrangements for the camp,” Vickers said, approaching the question indirectly. “There’s four of us staff with the safari, two guides—that’s me and Dieter Jost—and two pilots. One pilot, one guide, and one client—one of you—go up in the platform every day. You’ll each have two chances to bag a big carnosaur. They’re territorial and not too thick on the ground, but there’s almost certain to be at least one tyrannosaur and a pack of gorgosaurs in practical range. The other guide takes out the rest of the clients on foot, well, on motorized wagons you could say, ponies we call them. And the pilot who isn’t flying the platform doubles as camp guard. He’s got a heavy machine gun”—the guide smiled—“a Russian .51 cal. Courtesy of your hosts for the tour, the Israeli government. It’ll stop dinos and light tanks without a bit of bother.”