Weird West 04 - The Doctor and the Dinosaurs Page 16

  Marsh was apoplectic, but nobody else uttered a word.

  “All right,” said Holliday. “You wait here. We'll let Professor Cope know that he's got company, and since he's every bit as sweet and loveable as Professor Marsh, it'll probably take us a few minutes to explain to him that no one's going to shoot anybody. I expect you to stay right at this spot until we get back.”

  “Unless a dinosaur shows up,” said another man. “I can't speak for my friends here, but the second that happens I'm going to run like hell.”

  “Yeah,” said Cody. “I don't imagine you can reason with them.”

  “You can't outrun them either,” said Roosevelt. “I've only seen the one dinosaur, and he was charging into the worksite at the time. But in general, almost every carnivore that's ever walked the earth is programmed to chase just about anything that's smaller than itself and runs away from it. It'll take all your courage, but you'll be much safer standing your ground than running away.”

  “It sounds good,” said another of the men. “But saying it and doing it are two different things. Maybe I'll just jump off my horse and slap him on the backside. He'll take off like a bat out of hell. Let the dinosaur chase him and leave me alone.”

  “You could do worse,” said Roosevelt, nodding his approval. “All right, Doc, Bill—let's go.”

  It took them about ten minutes to reach the clearing where Cope had pitched his camp. It had a new shack, doubtless built to accommodate the remains of the tyrannosaur.

  “Howdy Doc, Theodore,” said Younger, walking forward to greet them. Finally he begrudgingly added, “Hello, Bill.”

  “Hello, Cole,” said Roosevelt. “We need to speak to the Professor.”

  Younger nodded and ushered them to the older shack, where Cope was cataloging the day's finds.

  “Theodore and Doc!” he said with a smile. “Welcome back.” He turned to Cody. “And the famous Buffalo Bill. I'm thrilled to see you've finally left that thieving swine.”

  “He loves you too,” replied Cody with a smile, and Younger laughed aloud at that.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” asked Cope.

  “We've brought you some other visitors,” said Holliday.

  “Visitors?” said Cope, frowning. “If that bastard thinks he's going to share my find…”

  “I hate to contradict you,” said Holliday, “but that wasn't your find. You didn't go looking for it. Hell, if anything we were its find.”

  “It's mine!” bellowed Cope. “Any court in the land would see that!”

  Holliday turned to Roosevelt. “Why don't I just kill them both? That ought to solve all our problems.”

  “I want you both out of my camp now!” yelled Cope. “Cole, run them out of here!”

  Younger looked at Cope as if he was crazy, and kept his hands in plain sight.

  “May I see your deed?” said Roosevelt.

  Cope merely glared at him.

  “Now, try to calm down enough to pay attention,” said Holliday. “Because a lot of lives depend on it. Some of them are important lives, and some are yours and Marsh's, but what we're going to tell you is vital.”

  “That's Professor Marsh,” said Cope.

  Holliday blinked his eyes very rapidly. “I thought you hated his guts?”

  “I hate the man, not the position.”

  “All right,” said Holliday, “Professor Marsh. Now, have you got all the screaming out of your system?”

  Cope glared at him and didn't answer.

  “Then I want you to listen, and pay attention. Do you know where you and Marsh—Professor Marsh—are digging?”

  “Wyoming,” said Cope sullenly.

  “That's true,” interjected Roosevelt. “But you're also digging—desecrating, one might say—a sacred burial ground of the Comanche.”

  “What do you want of me—of us?” demanded Cope. “We have to dig where we think the fossils will be.” He gestured to the piles of carefully stacked and marked bones. “And we were right. There's the proof of it.”

  “There's more proof than that,” said Roosevelt.

  Cope stared at him curiously.

  “That tyrannosaur was further proof,” concluded Roosevelt.

  “What are you talking about?” demanded Cope.

  “The reason we're here, Theodore and I,” said Holliday, “is because Geronimo warned me that—”

  “He's an Apache, goddamn it!” yelled Cope.

  “He's a medicine man, and he told me that if you insisted on digging in their burial ground, their medicine men weren't going to risk any braves by attacking you.” He paused and stared at the scientist. “They were going to resurrect some of these monsters and sic them on you.”

  “That's ridiculous!”

  “Then how do you explain the creature we killed, a creature that you yourself assured me has been extinct for millions of years?” continued Holliday.

  “I was wrong,” said Cope. “Some clearly survived.”

  Holliday sighed deeply and turned to Roosevelt. “Can I kill him now, Theodore?”

  Younger took a step forward, then decided that Holliday wasn't serious, and relaxed.

  “It's awfully tempting,” admitted Roosevelt. “Professor Cope, Professor Marsh and his crew are going to share your camp until we've resolved this problem. You can object all you want, but the fact of the matter is that due to the nature of Tom Edison's weapons and their need for a power source, we can't protect two locations at the same time.”

  “Let a carnosaur eat the son of a pig, and good riddance!” snapped Cope.

  “Clearly the two of you come from different backgrounds,” said Holliday with an amused smile. “He calls you a son of a bitch.”

  “I've unearthed twice as many species as he has!” yelled Cope. “I've written more than a thousand papers, and he's still short of two hundred. He should be working for me, not cursing and threatening me behind my back!”

  “I'm sure he feels the same way about you,” said Roosevelt.

  “I can vouch for that,” added Cody with an amused twinkle in his eye.

  “Now, are you going to tell your men to behave peaceably when Professor Marsh's men join them?” said Roosevelt. “Or do I tell both groups that the first one who misbehaves gets to face Doc Holliday?”

  Cope glared from Roosevelt to Holliday and back again.

  “For how long?” he said at last.

  “I don't know,” replied Roosevelt. “But it can't be too long. Either we find a way to smoke a peace pipe with them, or we're going to be facing more monsters than Tom and Ned's weapons can handle.”

  “Well?” said Holliday after a moment's silence.

  “I'm thinking,” answered Cope.

  “What's to think about?” demanded Cody. “You do as they say and you have at least a chance of living. Don't do it, and sure as hell you're some dinosaur's lunch in the next day or three.”

  “Sir,” said Younger, speaking up for the first time, “I don't mean to be disrespectful, and I'm sure as hell not being disloyal, but I'd listen to them if I were you. I've seen that damned critter, and I sure as hell don't relish seeing a whole herd of them.”

  They all turned back to Cope, awaiting his decision.

  “All right,” he said at last.

  “Good!” said Holliday and Cody simultaneously.

  “One more thing,” said Cope.

  “What?” asked Holliday.

  “I want that bastard to post his mealtimes and stick to them. I'll adjust my own schedule, but I don't want to see his loathsome face. It would ruin my digestion.”

  Cody agreed to get the schedule before Holliday could once again suggest killing him.

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN. There were two large fires, one at each end of the camp. Edison had spent most of the afternoon and evening picking Marsh's mind, learning what he could about the science of paleontology, and seemed somewhat disappointed that while his views differed in many particulars from Cope's, his conclusions were essentia
lly the same. Holliday and Roosevelt had decided to split up so neither side would think they were being favored, and now Doc sat in the glow of the fire, wondering if he could get any of the men interested in a few hands of poker.

  “I still can't imagine why the tyrannosaur came to this end of the burial ground,” said Marsh. “If it was resurrected by the medicine men, as Holliday and Mr. Roosevelt claim, what made it think it could find its prey here rather than at my camp thirty miles east of here?”

  “Just be glad he did come this way,” remarked Holliday.

  “Why?” demanded Marsh.

  “There are only two weapons that could bring him down before he killed anyone, and they were both in this camp,” answered Holliday.

  “That's right,” confirmed Edison. “We only made two.”

  “Can you make more?” asked Marsh.

  “Not unless we go back East to our lab,” said Buntline.

  “I heard you had a laboratory in Tombstone, and another one someplace in Colorado. Denver, perhaps?”

  “Leadville,” Buntline corrected him. “But we don't have the materials we need in those locations. The best I could do is make you a suit of brass armor that even a dinosaur couldn't pierce or flatten, but you'd probably expire from heat stroke or asphyxiation before you ever came face-to-face with a dinosaur.”

  “There's only been one so far,” added Edison.

  “And why did it visit that back-stabbing villain?” demanded Marsh.

  “Shall I assume you're speaking of Professor Cope?” asked Holliday with an amused smile.

  “Who else?” growled Marsh.

  “I hate to bring up a painful subject,” continued Holliday, who clearly didn't hate it at all, “but what the hell set you two off against each other?”

  “I had taken him under my wing, even gone out fossil-hunting with him,” said Marsh, glaring balefully into the fire. “In 1870 I was preparing to publish about the finds I'd made in New Jersey and Maryland”—suddenly he was shouting—“when that ungrateful bastard beat me into print, writing about my discoveries, my theories!” It took him a full minute to regain control of himself. “Even then I was prepared to forgive him, but what happened next made him my mortal enemy for all eternity. He stole my discoveries in North Carolina and wrote them up as his own! He took full credit for my work! And now, wherever I go, he's there too, even here, a thousand miles from anywhere!”

  Holliday had an almost irresistible urge to say, “But outside of that, what do you think of him?” and was barely able to contain himself.

  “Where are you going to dig next?” asked Edison.

  Marsh shrugged. “Colorado, probably.”

  “You know,” said Edison, “if you left now, you could collect all the best specimens before Professor Cope decides to follow you…if Colorado is one of his destinations.”

  “It will be,” said Marsh. “You can count on it!” He uttered an obscenity.

  Holliday pulled out his flask, tried to take a swallow, discovered there were only a few drops left in it, arose, and walked to the bone hut where he'd discovered Cope's stash of liquor during his last stay in camp. He filled the flask, took a long swallow, decided he didn't want to listen to any more of Marsh's ranting, and walked to the fire at the other end of the camp.

  “Come join us, Doc,” said Younger. “Theodore's just been picking the Professor's mind about dinosaurs. Maybe you can bring the conversation back to something reasonable, like whiskey or women or gambling.”

  “You going to become a paleontologist when this little crisis is over, Theodore?” asked Holliday, seating himself on a tree stump.

  Roosevelt shook his head. “I'm too many years behind our two geniuses here.”

  “One genius,” Cope corrected him, tapping his own chest with a thumb, “and one relatively bright but exceptionally bitter man.”

  “What's he so bitter about?” asked Holliday.

  “Losing,” was Cope's curt answer.

  Holliday took a swallow from his flask, then capped it and put it back in a pocket. “I heard his side of it. What's yours?”

  “We were friends once,” said Cope. “He was even my mentor for a few months. We went on digs together in the 60s, after the War Between the States. In 1869 I went on digs with him in New Jersey and Maryland. He's a Darwinian. Believes in evolution, and survival of the fittest. I buy some of it, but look around you and tell me if anything on Earth—men, lions, elephants, anything—was capable of killing off the tyrannosaur we encountered. So we found different fossils, and interpreted them differently, and because I'm a faster and more competent thinker and writer than he is, I published first—and he never forgave me for that.”

  “Calm yourself,” said Roosevelt.

  Cope, his anger building, glared at him and continued without missing a beat. “He tried to blacken my name throughout the community. Even then I'd have forgiven him, but I went to a site in North Carolina that he'd already been to, found some unique fossils he'd totally overlooked, and published—and he accused me in print of stealing the fossils from him, that he'd gone home for a week or a month or whatever, but that the site was his. But my men will vouch that there was no fence around it, no ‘Stay Away’ signs, nothing to indicate that we couldn't dig there.” Cope paused. “And that bastard has been defaming me, suing me, and sabotaging my work ever since.”

  “And of course you do the same things to him,” noted Holliday.

  “You fight fire with fire!” snapped Cope.

  Holliday turned to Roosevelt. “You do fight fire with fire,” he agreed. “But I don't think anyone will ever know who lit the first match.”

  “Say anything like that again and you'll no longer be welcome in my camp,” said Cope.

  Holliday smiled. “Once was enough.”

  Roosevelt began questioning Cope about dinosaurs again. Cope answered begrudgingly at first, then passionately, and just about the time Cope was explaining how he was able to tell from a jawbone or a femur what the entire creature had looked like, Holliday fell asleep.

  He was awakened by a high-pitched hissing sound. At first he thought it was a bee buzzing around his face and tried to slap it away, but there was nothing there. Then he decided it was a rattlesnake, and he jumped to his feet, only to find that there were no snakes in sight.

  The sun had just risen, and he blinked his eyes a few times, then looked around the campsite. Everyone at both ends had gone to sleep in their tents. Everyone but the shootist that no one dared bother or awaken, he thought ruefully.

  He was about to go to his own tent for another couple of more hours of sleep when he heard the sound again, and this time he realized it was coming from just beyond the camp. He could see trees and bushes sway as whatever it was made its way toward the campsite.

  He rushed to Edison and Buntline's tent, threw open the trunk as they opened their eyes and groggily demanded to know what he was doing, and pulled out the two weapons.

  “Theodore!” he yelled as he passed Roosevelt's tent.

  Roosevelt, his glasses off, stuck his head out of the tent. “What is it?” he mumbled.

  “Catch!” said Holliday, tossing him a weapon that Roosevelt barely caught before it hit the ground.

  A few of the men began emerging from their tents.

  “Stay back!” cried Holliday. “There's something coming this way, something big!”

  Cope, wearing only his nightshirt, was out of his tent instantly, running alongside Holliday, and from the other end of the camp the bearded, half-dressed Marsh was racing hell for leather to catch up with them.

  “I'll get my rifle!” yelled Cody.

  “Don't bother!” responded Roosevelt, out of the tent and catching up with Holliday. “We've got the weapons we need.”

  “Maybe so,” said Younger, joining them. “But I think I'll come along anyway—and I'll be armed. You too, Bill!”

  Holliday noticed that Younger was carrying his six-shooter in his hand.

  “You're
not going to stop it with that,” he said. “Just shoot it in the eye. It's your only chance of hurting it.”

  Then they were in the trees surrounding the camp. They could smell the pungent odor of the animal, whatever it was, and the hissing grew louder—and closer.

  Suddenly a huge head appeared between a pair of saplings, with two horns pointing forward from the top of its skull and what seemed like a high collar of bone surrounding it.

  “Triceratops!” breathed Marsh, stepping forward in rapt fascination.

  “Hold him back!” snapped Cope.

  “So you don't hate him,” noted Holliday as Roosevelt caught Marsh's arm in his vicelike grip.

  “I was here right beside you,” responded Cope. “I don't want that bastard claiming it's his just because he's ten feet closer to it when you kill it.”

  “My apology,” said Holliday, shaking his head in bewilderment. “All right, does this thing eat people?”

  “No,” said Cope.

  “Look at the size of its head!” said Roosevelt. “It takes up almost a third of its body!”

  “I'd say this one weighs about eight tons,” said Marsh.

  “Ten,” muttered Cope.

  “Theodore?” said Holliday, never taking his eyes off the dinosaur. “What do you think?”

  “We're not threatening it, and it's herbivorous,” replied Roosevelt. “Maybe it'll turn around and go back where it came from.”

  “No!” cried Cope and Marsh simultaneously.

  Cope found a small rock on the ground and threw it at the triceratops’ nose. At the same instant, Marsh pulled one of Cody's pistols from its holster and fired point-blank at the creature.

  The dinosaur's reaction was immediate and violent. Its hiss became indistinguishable from a roar, and it lowered its head so that its horns protruded ahead of it and charged.

  The assembled men broke for cover, all except Holliday, Roosevelt, Younger, Cody, and the two scientists. Younger emptied his gun into it with no discernible effect, and the first two shots Holliday and Roosevelt fired seemed to have no effect either.