The clouds that had obscured the sky all day formed darker ma.s.ses tinted with pink to the east, and the black dot of a turkey buzzard wheeled soaring in the gloom. Carrying, in either hand, a barbed stick sparkling with plastic streamers, Fergus walked into the ring. His a.s.sistants cautiously flanked him with capes.
Moe dropped the pike and charged in the approved manner of a bull. Fergus raised the sticks high and brought them down on the humped back, although the back was not there. The sticks dropped in the sand.
As the killer leaped aside in the completion of a reflex action, a horn penetrated the seat of his trunks.
The Fergus Fanclub screamed while their hero dangled in ignominy from the horn. Moe ignored the flapping, frantic capes. The killer gingerly gripped a horn in either hand and tried to lift himself off. Gently, Moe lowered his head and deposited the man beside an opening. Fergus scrabbled to safety like a rat to a hole.
Four helpers with capes occupied the ring. When they saw death approaching on cloven hooves, two of them cleared the fence. The third received a horn beside his backbone and tumbled into the fourth. A dual scream, terrible enough to insure future nightmares, echoed above the screeching of the crowd. Moetossed the bodies again and again across the b.l.o.o.d.y sand.
Silence slithered over the Highland Bullring and over a scene reminiscent of the ring"s b.l.o.o.d.y parent, the Roman Arena. Men sprawled gored, crushed, and dead across the sand. A section of the blood-specked barrier leaned splintered and cracked, almost touching the concrete wall. Unharmed, Fergus stood on one side of the battleground, Illard on the other.
Fergus reached over the wooden fence for red flag and sword. Turning his back on the heaving Moe, who stood but ten feet behind, the killer faced the quaking flesh that was Ringmaster Oswell, high up in the official box. The killer"s voice shook, but the bitter satire came through the sound of departing boats and aircraft. Fergus said, "I dedicate this bull to Ringmaster Oswell who has provided for us this great Dependence Day Bullfight in honor of the Great Government on which we all depend." He turned and faced the bull.
Moe, for once, rushed the red flag, the only thing that made bullfights possible. His great shoulders presented a fair target for the sword.
Fergus, perhaps the only bullfighter ever to be gored in the brain, died silently. The sword raked a shallow gash long Moe"s loin.
In the sixth tier of the stands, saliva drooled from the slack mouth of the little man seated beside Stonecypher. "Now"s your chance, Illard!" the man squalled. "Be a hero! The last of the bullfighters! Kill him, Illard!"
Illard walked on shaking legs over bodies he did not see. He was short, for a killer, and growing bald.
He picked up the sword Fergus had dropped, looked into the gory face of the bull, and toppled in the sticky sand. The sword quivered point-first beside his body.
Recessional
A wind whipped down into Highland Bullring. Riding the wind, blacker than the clouds, the inquisitive turkey buzzard glided over the rim of the stands with air whistling through the spatulate feathers of rigid wings. The buzzard swooped a foot above Moe"s horns and soared swiftly over the opposite side of the ring.
That started the panic, although Moe"s charge accentuated it. He crashed into the sagging section of the barrier. Cloven hooves sc.r.a.ped the wooden inclined plane, and Moe stopped with front feet in the first tier of the stands. He bellowed.
The bull killed only one spectator, a man on whom he stepped. The hundreds who died killed themselves or each other. They leaped from the towering rim of the ring, and they jammed the exits in writhing heaps. Moe"s precarious stance slipped. Slowly, he slid back into the ring, where Ringmaster Oswell, quivering in a red toga, gestured from the darkness under the stands. The fat man squeaked and waved. Moe"s charge embodied the genuine fighting rage of a maddened bull. The scarlet door closed behind him.
Stonecypher, with fists b.l.o.o.d.y and a heap of unconscious fear-crazed spectators piled before him, sat down. "Well, Moe," he whispered, "I reckon you got even for a few of the bulls that"s been tortured to death to amuse a bunch of nuts. Maybe it wasn"t the right way to do it. I don"t know. If I"d only had the gun-"
Catriona turned a white mask of a face up to Stonecypher. "They killed him, in theah?"
"Sure. Bullfightin" never was a sport. The bull can"t win. If he"s not killed in the ring, he"s slaughtered under the stands.
"You have moah smart-bulls, Stony."
The black copter came in with the sunset and hovered over the sand. The face of Duelmaster Smith peered out under his black tam, while a hooded man, with pistols tattooed on his hand, aimed an automatic rifle. The duelmaster smiled at Stonecypher and cried, "You really should have waited until you were farther out in the Lake, before you dropped that little buzzer in the water."
A Gun for Dinosaur
by L. Sprague de Camp
Preface by David Drake: The writers who created the Golden Age inAstounding were Heinlein on a level of his own, and de Camp, Hubbard, and Van Vogt right below him. (I"ll argue that statement with anybody who catches me at a convention, but n.o.body who has a right to an opinion will deny that it"s defensible.) Those four authors (in reprint) were all important to me when I started reading SF, but it was Sprague de Camp who most formed my view of what science fiction was and should be. I don"t know why, but the fact isn"t in doubt.
After World War II de Camp slid into a different sort of story, entertaining but not nearly as significant to the field. By the "50s de Camp stories were appearing mostly in lower-level markets, and he was putting much of his effort into revising and pastiching the work of Robert E. Howard, a writer whom he explicitly did not respect. (Late in life, Sprague described this to me as being the worst mistake of his career. I agree with him.) In the middle of this apparent decline, de Camp wrote two unquestionable masterpieces, the bleak and despairing "Judgment Day" ("That was really an autobiographical story," he told me-as if I"d been in doubt) and "A Gun for Dinosaur." Men-against-dinosaur stories are as old as magazine SF, just as there were horror novels beforeCarrie . King and de Camp turned what had been occasional subjects for stories into defined subgenres.That"s why "A Gun for Dinosaur" is important. The reason it"s here, however, is that it blew all three of us away when we read it the first time.
No, I"m sorry, Mr. Seligman, but I can"t take you hunting Late Mesozoic dinosaur.
Yes, I know what the advertis.e.m.e.nt says.
Why not? How much d"you weigh? A hundred and thirty? Let"s see; that"s under ten stone, which is my lower limit.
I could take you to other periods, you know. I"ll take you to any period in the Cenozoic. I"ll get you a shot at an entelodont or a uintathere. They"ve got fine heads.
I"ll even stretch a point and take you to the Pleistocene, where you can try for one of the mammoths or the mastodon.
I"ll take you back to the Tria.s.sic where you can shoot one of the smaller ancestral dinosaurs. But I will jolly well not take you to the Jura.s.sic or Cretaceous. You"re just too small.
What"s your size got to do with it? Look here, old boy, what did you think you were going to shoot your dinosaur with?
Oh, you hadn"t thought, eh?
Well, sit there a minute . . . Here you are: my own private gun for that work, a Continental .600. Does look like a shotgun, doesn"t it? But it"s rifled, as you can see by looking through the barrels. Shoots a pair of .600 Nitro Express cartridges the size of bananas; weighs fourteen and a half pounds and has a muzzle energy of over seven thousand foot-pounds. Costs fourteen hundred and fifty dollars. Lot of money for a gun, what?
I have some spares I rent to the sahibs. Designed for knocking down elephant. Not just wounding them, knocking them base-over-apex. That"s why they don"t make guns like this in America, though I suppose they will if hunting parties keep going back in time.
Now, I"ve been guiding hunting parties for twenty years. Guided "em in Africa until the game gave out there except on the preserves. And all that time I"ve never known a man your size who could handle the six-nought-nought. It knocks "em over, and even when they stay on their feet they get so scared of the b.l.o.o.d.y cannon after a few shots that they flinch. And they find the gun too heavy to drag around rough Mesozoic country. Wears "em out.
It"s true that lots of people have killed elephant with lighter guns: the .500, .475, and .465 doubles, for instance, or even the .375 magnum repeaters. The difference is, with a .375 you have to hit something vital, preferably the heart, and can"t depend on simple shock power.
An elephant weighs-let"s see-four to six tons. You"re proposing to shoot reptiles weighing two orthree times as much as an elephant and with much greater tenacity of life. That"s why the syndicate decided to take no more people dinosaur hunting unless they could handle the .600. We learned the hard way, as you Americans say. There were some unfortunate incidents . . .
I"ll tell you, Mr. Seligman. It"s after seventeen-hundred. Time I closed the office. Why don"t we stop at the bar on our way out while I tell you the story?
. . . It was about the Raja"s and my fifth safari into time. The Raja? Oh, he"s the Aiyar half of Rivers and Aiyar. I call him the Raja because he"s the hereditary monarch of Janpur. Means nothing nowadays, of course. Knew him in India and ran into him in New York running the Indian tourist agency. That dark chap in the photograph on my office wall, the one with his foot on the dead saber-tooth.
Well, the Raja was fed up with handing out brochures about the Taj Mahal and wanted to do a bit of hunting again. I was at loose ends when we heard of Professor Prochaska"s time machine at Washington University.
Where"s the Raja now? Out on safari in the Early Oligocene after t.i.tanothere while I run the office. We take turn about, but the first few times we went out together.
Anyway, we caught the next plane to St. Louis. To our mortification, we found we weren"t the first.
Lord, no! There were other hunting guides and no end of scientists, each with his own idea of the right way to use the machine.
We sc.r.a.ped off the historians and archeologists right at the start. Seems the ruddy machine won"t work for periods more recent than 100,000 years ago. It works from there up to about a billion years.
Why? Oh, I"m no four-dimensional thinker; but, as I understand it, if people could go back to a more recent time, their actions would affect our own history, which would be a paradox or contradiction of facts. Can"t have that in a well-run universe, you know.
But, before 100,000 B.C., more or less, the actions of the expeditions are lost in the stream of time before human history begins. At that, once a stretch of past time has been used, say the month of January, one million B.C., you can"t use that stretch over again by sending another party into it.
Paradoxes again.
The professor isn"t worried, though. With a billion years to exploit, he won"t soon run out of eras.
Another limitation of the machine is the matter of size. For technical reasons, Prochaska had to build the transition chamber just big enough to hold four men with their personal gear, and the chamber wallah.
Larger parties have to be sent through in relays. That means, you see, it"s not practical to take jeeps, launches, aircraft, and other powered vehicles.
On the other hand, since you"re going to periods without human beings, there"s no whistling up a hundred native bearers to trot along with your gear on their heads. So we usually take a train of a.s.ses-burros, they call them here. Most periods have enough natural forage so you can get where you want to go.
As I say, everybody had his own idea for using the machine. The scientists looked down their noses at us hunters and said it would be a crime to waste the machine"s time pandering to our s.a.d.i.s.tic amus.e.m.e.nts. We brought up another angle. The machine cost a cool thirty million. I understand this came from the Rockefeller Board and such people, but that accounted for the original cost only, not the cost of operation. And the thing uses fantastic amounts of power. Most of the scientists" projects, while worthy enough, were run on a shoe-string, financially speaking.
Now, we guides catered to people with money, a species with which America seems well stocked. No offense, old boy. Most of these could afford a substantial fee for pa.s.sing through the machine into the past. Thus we could help finance the operation of the machine for scientific purposes, provided we got a fair share of its time. In the end, the guides formed a syndicate of eight members, one member being the partnership of Rivers and Aiyar, to apportion the machine"s time.
We had rush business from the start. Our wives-the Raja"s and mine-raised h.e.l.l with us for a while.
They"d hoped that, when the big game gave out in our own era, they"d never have to share us with lions and things again, but you know how women are. Hunting"s not really dangerous if you keep your head and take precautions.
On the fifth expedition, we had two sahibs to wet-nurse; both Americans in their thirties, both physically sound, and both solvent. Otherwise they were as different as different can be.
Courtney James was what you chaps call a playboy: a rich young man from New York who"d always had his own way and didn"t see why that agreeable condition shouldn"t continue. A big bloke, almost as big as I am; handsome in a florid way, but beginning to run to fat. He was on his fourth wife and, when he showed up at the office with a blond twist with "model" written all over her, I a.s.sumed that this was the fourth Mrs. James.
"Miss Bartram," she corrected me, with an embarra.s.sed giggle.
"She"s not my wife," James explained. "My wife is in Mexico, I think, getting a divorce. But Bunny here would like to go along-"
"Sorry," I said, "we don"t take ladies. At least, not to the Late Mesozoic,"
This wasn"t strictly true, but I felt we were running enough risks, going after a little-known fauna, without dragging in people"s domestic entanglements. Nothing against s.e.x, you understand. Marvelous inst.i.tution and all that, but not where it interferes with my living.
"Oh, nonsense!" said James. "If she wants to go, she"ll go. She skis and flies my airplane, so why shouldn"t she-"
"Against the firm"s policy," I said.
"She can keep out of the way when we run up against the dangerous ones," he said.
"No, sorry."
"d.a.m.n it!" said he, getting red. "After all, I"m paying you a goodly sum, and I"m ent.i.tled to take whoever I please."
"You can"t hire me to do anything against my best judgment," I said. "If that"s how you feel, get another guide." "All right, I will," he said. "And I"ll tell all my friends you"re a G.o.d-d.a.m.ned-" Well, he said a lot of things I won"t repeat, until I told him to get out of the office or I"d throw him out.
I was sitting in the office and thinking sadly of all that lovely money James would have paid me if I hadn"t been so stiff-necked, when in came my other lamb, one August Holtzinger. This was a little slim pale chap with gla.s.ses, polite and formal. Holtzinger sat on the edge of his chair and said: "Uh-Mr. Rivers, I don"t want you to think I"m here under false pretenses. I"m really not much of an outdoorsman, and I"ll probably be scared to death when I see a real dinosaur. But I"m determined to hang a dinosaur head over my fireplace or die in the attempt."
"Most of us are frightened at first," I soothed him, "though it doesn"t do to show it." And little by little I got the story out of him.
While James had always been wallowing in the stuff, Holtzinger was a local product who"d only lately come into the real thing. He"d had a little business here in St. Louis and just about made ends meet when an uncle cashed in his chips somewhere and left little Augie the pile.
Now Holtzinger had acquired a fiancee and was building a big house. When it was finished, they"d be married and move into it. And one furnishing he demanded was a ceratopsian head over the fireplace.
Those are the ones with the big horned heads with a parrot-beak and a frill over the neck, you know.
You have to think twice about collecting them, because if you put a seven-footTriceratops head into a small living room, there"s apt to be no room left for anything else.
We were talking about this when in came a girl: a small girl in her twenties, quite ordinary looking, and crying.
"Augie!" she cried. "You can"t! You mustn"t! You"ll be killed!" She grabbed him round the knees and said to me: "Mr. Rivers, you mustn"t take him! He"s all I"ve got! He"ll never stand the hardships!"
"My dear young lady," I said, "I should hate to cause you distress, but it"s up to Mr. Holtzinger to decide whether he wishes to retain my services."
"It"s no use, Claire," said Holtzinger. "I"m going, though I"ll probably hate every minute of it."
"What"s that, old boy?" I said. "If you hate it, why go? Did you lose a bet, or something?"
"No," said Holtzinger. "It"s this way. Uh-I"m a completely undistinguished kind of guy. I"m not brilliant or big or strong or handsome. I"m just an ordinary Midwestern small businessman. You never even notice me at Rotary luncheons, I fit in so perfectly.
"But that doesn"t say I"m satisfied. I"ve always hankered to go to far places and do big things. I"d like to be a glamorous, adventurous sort of guy. Like you, Mr. Rivers."
"Oh, come," I said. "Professional hunting may seem glamorous to you, but to me it"s just a living."
He shook his head. "Nope. You know what I mean. Well, now I"ve got this legacy, I could settle down to play bridge and golf the rest of my life, and try to act like I wasn"t bored. But I"m determined to dosomething with some color in it, once at least. Since there"s no more real big-game hunting in the present, I"m gonna shoot a dinosaur and hang his head over my mantel if it"s the last thing I do. I"ll never be happy otherwise."
Well, Holtzinger and his girl argued, but he wouldn"t give in. She made me swear to take the best care of her Augie and departed, sniffling.
When Holtzinger had left, who should come in but my vile-tempered friend Courtney James? He apologized for insulting me, though you could hardly say he groveled.
"I don"t really have a bad temper," he said, "except when people won"t cooperate with me. Then I sometimes get mad. But so long as they"re cooperative I"m not hard to get along with."
I knew that by "cooperate" he meant to do whatever Courtney James wanted, but I didn"t press the point. "What about Miss Bartram?" I asked.
"We had a row," he said. "I"m through with women. So, if there"s no hard feelings, let"s go on from where we left off."
"Very well," I said, business being business.
The Raja and I decided to make it a joint safari to eight-five million years ago: the Early Upper Cretaceous, or the Middle Cretaceous as some American geologists call it. It"s about the best period for dinosaur in Missouri. You"ll find some individual species a little larger in the Late Upper Cretaceous, but the period we were going to gives a wider variety.