Dinosaurs & A Dirigible (9 page)

CALIBRATION RUN

The sabertooth sprang from cover just as Vickers bent to pick up the partridge he had shot. Holgar Nilson had been dynamiting rock samples a hundred yards away. He shouted as he leveled his Mauser. The blond Nilson would have had an easy shot—except that Vickers’ own body blocked the Mauser’s line of fire.

The thud of the cat’s paws crossing to leap again warned Vickers an instant in advance of Nilson’s cry. The sandy-haired guide was holding his shotgun at the balance, not ready to fire—and not that birdshot would have affected the 500-pound killer.

The cat swung down its lower jaw, locking out of the way everything extraneous to stabbing with its six-inch upper canines, as it made its third and final leap. Its bared palate was white as bone.

Vickers flung himself backwards, trying desperately to raise the shotgun. The sabertooth’s hide was mottled brown on black, its belly cream. As it sprang, its forelegs splayed and the ten black claws shot out of the pads. Every tense muscle of the cat’s body quivered in the air. Its weight slammed Vickers’ torso against the stony ground while the blast of Nilson’s rifle rumbled about them.

The cat’s eyes were a hand’s breadth from Vickers’ face as they glazed and the life went out of them. A shudder arched the creature’s back, rocking the serrated fangs downward. Vickers screamed but the points were not piercing his chest, only compressing it, and the thrust itself was a dying reflex. Blood had been spurting from the cat’s throat where the Brenneke bullet had entered. Now the nostrils drooled blood as well and the cat’s muscles went limp.

Holgar Nilson ran to the linked bodies, cursing in Norwegian. Vickers could not breathe. The carcass sagged over him like a bag of rice, pinning him so tightly that he could not move his index finger enough to put the shotgun on safe. The weapon was pressing against his right leg. It would blow his foot off if it fired now. Nilson tugged at the sabertooth ineffectively, his panic little less than that of his partner trapped under the cat. The big Norwegian was waving his Mauser one-handed while his eyes scanned the brush in quick arcs. “There was another one,” he gasped, “the male. But it ran off when I fired.”

“Here, let me help,” said Linda Weil, dropping the first-aid kit to seize one of the sabertooth’s fangs. The curved inner edges of the teeth could shear flesh with all the cat’s brutal strength behind them, but they did not approximate real knife blades. In any case, the fangs were the only handholds available on the slack carcass. Weil was a short, broad-hipped woman. She twisted, using the thrust of her legs against the passive weight of the sabertooth. The great brown-and-black body slumped away fluidly; its haunches still covered Vickers’ calves. Nilson stopped groping blindly and looked down. He gripped a clawed foot and rotated the cat’s hindquarters away from his partner.

Vickers was sucking deep breaths. His face and tunic front were covered with blood. He put the shotgun on safe and cocked an arm behind him to help him rise.

“No, no,” said the dark-haired woman, touching the guide’s shoulder with a restraining hand. “Just wait—”

Vickers lurched upright into a sitting position. “I’m all right,” he wheezed. Then, “It was my fault. It was all my fault.”

“The buckle,” said Nilson. “Look at your pack buckle.” The Norwegian’s composure was returning. His left index finger touched one strap of the pack Vickers had been wearing to hold small specimens. The steel buckle was warped like foil against its padding where it had blocked the thrust of the sabertooth’s fang. The brushing contact of Nilson’s finger caused pain to stab Vickers.

“Damn,” muttered the older guide as Linda Weil helped him off with the empty pack and unbuttoned his tunic. The blood that sprayed Vickers was the cat’s, but he knew from the pain that he might well have a cracked rib of his own. The female paleontologist’s fingers were cool and expert. She had been chosen as an on-site investigator for the Time Intrusion Project as much for her three years of medical school as for her excellent series of digs in the Sinai with a University of Chicago team.

A square mark larger than the buckle’s edges was stamped in white above Vickers’ left nipple. “I don’t hear anything grating,” Weil said. “We’ll strap it. Maybe when we get back to Tel Aviv they’ll want to drain the hematoma.”

“It was waiting for me like I was a goddamn antelope,” Vickers said. He was a stocky man of thirty-five who usually looked as calm as a fireplug. Now he rubbed the back of his hand over the sockets of his pale eyes, smearing the splotches of tacky blood. “Holgar,” he said, “I wasn’t ready. I wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell except for you.”

“Holgar, we’ll want the skull and limbs of this macheirodont when you have a chance,” said Linda Weil, pointing toward the sabertooth as she stood. She looked back at Vickers before she continued, “And frankly, I think that if anyone’s error can be said to have led to this—problem, near disaster—it was mine. Both of you are used to animals that’ve had hundreds of thousands of years to learn to fear man. That’s not the case here. As you said, Henry, we’re just meat on the hoof so far as the bigger carnivores here are concerned.
I’m
the one who should have realized that.”

Vickers sighed and stood up carefully. He walked over to the spur-legged partridge, ten feet away where he had dropped it when the cat struck. Raising the heavy bird, he gestured with it to Weil. “It’s a francolin like the one we got in the snare two days ago,” he said. “I thought I’d roast it for dinner instead of keeping it for a specimen.”

The dark-haired paleontologist nodded back. “After I get you bandaged,” she agreed. “I think we could all do with a meal and a chance to relax.”

# # #

Hyenas had already begun to call in the sullen dusk. Time spent in the African bush gave the ugly, rhythmic laughter a homely sound to the pair of guides, but Linda Weil shuddered with distaste.

Holgar Nilson laughed. He patted the paleontologist on the thigh with a greasy hand. “They are only predators like ourselves,” he said. “Perhaps we should invite them to join us for dinner one night, yes? We have so much in common.”

Weil switched the francolin drumstick to her left hand and squeezed Nilson against her thigh with her right. “I don’t question their right to exist,” the woman said. “It’s just that I don’t like them.” She frowned, scientist again. “We could use a specimen, though. There’s a good enough series of hyena fossils known Topside that fresh examples ought to be more datable than most of what we’ve gathered.”

“You know,” said Vickers, speaking in a conscious effort to break out of the shell of depression that surrounded him, “I’ve never quite understood what use the specimens we bring back were going to be. For dating, that is. I mean, taking radiation levels from the igneous rocks should give them the time within a few thousand years. And if I understand the Zeiss—” he gestured with his thumb—“its photographs ought to be down to the minute when they’re compared to computer models of star and planet positions.”

The 200mm reflector bolted to the intrusion vehicle was lost in the darkness, as was the normal purr of the motor drive that rotated it by microns along the plane of the ecliptic. As Vickers gestured, the mechanism gave one of its rare clicks, signaling the end of an exposure as the telescope reset itself to lock on another portion of sky. The click might have been that of a grenade arming for the level of response it drew from Holgar Nilson, though the younger guide kept the edges of his anger sheathed in bluff camaraderie. “Come, come,” he said, “machines fail. Anyway, the sky could have been overcast for months, for years, for all they knew Topside. And for the rock dating to work, they must compare the samples we bring back with samples from the same rock a million years in the future. How are they to be sure of that, hey? When they only
think
so far we are inserted into the same place, with latitude and longitude changing as the continents move.”

Vickers nodded, realizing why his partner reacted so defensively. “Sure,” he said, “and the more cross-checks, the better. And I suppose the astronomical data is going to be easier to correlate if they’ve got a fair notion of where to start.”

“Besides,” said Linda Weil harshly, “I don’t think anyone quite realized how useless anything I came back with would be for the intended purpose. Oh, it’ll have use—we’ve enormously expanded human knowledge of Pliocene life-forms, but as you say, Henry, for dating—”

She paused, looking out over the twilit hills. They had been fortunate in that their intrusion vehicle, an angular block of plates and girders, had been inserted onto high ground. During daylight they had a good view over the brush and acacias, the short grass and the beasts that lived there. Now the shadows of the trees and outcrops had merged with the greater shadow of the horizon, and the landscape was melding into a velvet blur. “The whole problem,” Weil said toward the darkness, “is that we’ve got an embarrassment of riches. Before—when I was Topside—a femur was as much as you were likely to get to identify an animal, and a complete skull was a treasure. We decided what the prehistoric biomass looked like by reconstructing a few fragments here, a few fragments there . . .” She chuckled ruefully and looked back at her male companions. “And here we are, in the middle of thousands and thousands of animals, somewhere in the past I’ve been studying for years . . . and I’m nowhere near being able to accurately place the time into which we’ve been inserted, the way I’ve been hired to do—because I can’t swear that a single species is one that we ‘know’ from fossils. I feel as if I’ve spent my working life throwing darts at a map and convincing myself that I’ve travelled to the places the darts hit.”

“Well, you’ve travelled here, for certain,” said the blond man, “and
I
at least am glad of it.” He raised his hand to Weil’s shoulder and tried to guide the woman closer to him for a kiss.

“Holgar . . .” the woman objected in a low voice, leaning free of the big hand’s pressure.

“I’ll get a couple hyenas tomorrow,” Vickers said morosely. The fire he stared at glinted from his face where grease from the bird smeared him. “Unless I screw up again, at least. Christ, Holgar, maybe I’d have been better off if you were a second slower with your shot. Hunting’s about the one thing I’d decided I could handle. If I’m no good for that either, then I may as well be a cat’s dinner.” Unwatched, the shorter guide’s hands turned and turned again the section of francolin ribs from which he had gnawed only half the flesh.

Nilson looked disconcerted. He lowered his hand from the paleontologist’s back and resumed attacking his meal. Absently, Vickers wished that one of the three of them had had the skill to make gravy to go with the mashed potatoes, which were freeze-dried and reconstituted.

“Ah, Henry,” said Linda Weil, “I think that’s just shock talking. You aren’t incompetent because of one mistake—it’s the mistakes that make us human. The planning for this, this expedition, was mostly yours; and everything’s gone very well. Except that all I can really say about the time we’re at is that we’re a great deal farther back than the round million years they intended to send us.”

“You see, Henry,” Nilson said, “what you need is a wife.” The Norwegian gestured with the fork he had just cleared of its load of canned peas. “You have no calm center to your life. Wherever I go, I know that my Mary is there in Pretoria, my children are growing—Oskar, Olaf, and little Kristin . . . do you see? That is what you need.”

Vickers looked at the bigger man. Nilson had jarred him out of his depression as Linda Weil had been unable to do with her encouragement. The paleontologist’s complexion was dark, but it was no trick of the firelight that led Vickers to see a blush on her face. She looked down at her hands. “Maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong places,” Vickers said dryly. “Your wife is British, if I remember?”

Nilson nodded vigorously as he chewed another mouthful of peas.

“Both of mine were Americans,” the older guide said. “Maybe that’s where I went wrong.” He turned his face toward the night. His profile was as sharp and thin as a half-worn knife. “The sporting goods store I tried to manage was in Duluth,” he continued, “and the ranch was in Rhodesia. But I could hunt, that I could do. Well.” He looked at Weil again. In a normal voice he added, “Well, I still can. I’ll get you a hyena in the morning.”

“Actually,” said Weil, visibly glad of the change of subject, “what concerns me more is that something’s raiding our box traps. Several of those to the west had the lids sprung when I checked them this morning. The rest were empty. Probably
was
a hyena; I don’t think a mongoose would be strong enough. But apart from being interested in whatever’s doing it, I’d like to have the damage stopped.”

“We could lay a sensor from the intrusion alarm under one of the traps,” Holgar said. His enthusiasm rang a little false. It was a reaction to the embarrassment he finally had realized that his earlier comment had caused. “Sleep close with the shotgun.”

“I’ve got a three-bead night sight on the Garand,” Vickers said, the problem reflecting his mind away from the depression that had been smothering him. “I can sandbag the gun and the spotlight a hundred yards away. That ought to be far enough we won’t disturb whatever it is.” He frowned and turned to Linda Weil. “Thing is, I can’t make sure of something at night unless I give it a head shot or use soft points that’ll blow the body apart if it’s small. What’s your preference?”

The paleontologist waved the question away. “Save the skull if you can,” she said. “But—we’ve just seen how dangerous the predators here—now, that is—can be. Are you going to disconnect the warning system around us?”

“Just move one pick-up,” Nilson said with a laugh. His left fingertips caressed Weil’s cheek playfully. “Otherwise you might get a closer and sooner view of a hyena than you expected, no? And what a waste that would be.”

Vickers noticed that his hands were still trembling. Just as well the administrators Topside hadn’t permitted any liquor among the supplies, he thought. Though usually it wouldn’t have mattered to him one way or the other. “It’s all right,” he said aloud. “I probably won’t be sleeping much tonight anyway. Holgar, let’s rig something now while there’s still enough daylight to work with.”