Episode 02 The Unearthly Earth

  Boiling water gushed in a stream in through the broken window of his rocketplane, and splashed across the faceplate of his pressure suit. The visor bubbled and darkened, blinding him. He could feel the flesh-roasting heat of the boiling lakewater through his suit fabric, but the seams were airtight, and so he was not scalded.

  Frantically, Preston hit the quick-release lever of his harness, and leaped out of his seat. Underfoot, he could feel the hull of his plane beginning to tilt her nose upward. From the sound behind him, he could hear water gushing in. He holstered his pistol and yanked off his helmet to allow himself to see: it was like sticking his head in a sauna. Steam was filling the interior of the aircraft.

  The Shooting Star was submerging.

  The deck was at a steep slant and growing steeper. The cabin was compact and narrow. There were two hatches: a round hatch aft and an oval hatch above the wing.

  The round hatch lead to the service module aft of the cabin. Here oxygen, water, and electrical power were stored. Certain tools, food and potable water and other gear that might have been useful was also stowed there; but Preston saw that the hull was warped from the crashlanding, and the seam around the hatch had sprung. Water and steam came around the rim, which was no longer true to the frame.

  There was a tightly-folded inflatable raft strapped against the cabin hull to one side, and a backpack packed with survival gear strapped to the other. Here also was his elephant gun.

  He threw his backpack, weapon and cartridge belt in a hasty, clattering mass over one shoulder and then put his hands the to wheel of the oval exit hatch.

  The wheel turned. He pulled, but the oval hatch did not budge.

  The lights of his control panel flickered and died as the electrical systems in the service module were drenched and submerged.

  The boiling water was already lapping his boots, and the deck was now slanted almost to the upright. Preston put his toes sideways into the slats ribbing the hull, even as the groaning the deck turned vertical. There came a loud report aft, and the hatch to the service module came free of its hinges. Preston was now inside the narrow hull with a gargling geyser erupting from the rear bulkhead. The ship was going down quickly.

  He realized that the airpressure inside the cabin was rising with the water, and this pressure was holding the hatch shut. The screaming whine in his ears were the airpumps, which had automatically come on when the hull was breached.

  He flattened himself as best he could against the hull, covered his face with one elbow, and pried open the safety tab, and pulled the cord to trigger the explosive bolts.

  The ringing in his ears told him he had gone deaf for a moment. The oval hatch soared, spinning, in a parabolic arc across the wing. He did not hear the sound of it bounce against the shattered, glassy surface of the great, black, curving wing, nor the splash as it fell into the bubbling waters.

  With hands and feet on the slippery hull, he climbed to the nose of the craft, which was rearing upward toward a sky the color of rosy wine.

  The flying monster that had slammed into the intakes, and been partly chewed by the turbine blades, was still lodged there, a tangle of naked, membranous wings, and a gargoyle skull as narrow as a knife. The creature's large body, easily twelve feet in wingspan, dripping with black blood and white boiling water, was being hauled up into the sky as the Shooting Star continued to raise her prow.

  Preston's helmet was gone: the sauna heat plastered his hair to his brow, and made him blink. The savory smell of boiling meat was in his nostrils.

  More by instinct than thought, he shrugged the rifle off his shoulder into his hands, broke it, and inserted two rounds. The rifle was a magnificent Holland & Holland double rifle. The round was a .700 Nitro Express, as was as long as a lady's finger. The piece handled like a shotgun, with the weight needed for powerful cartridges and heavy bullets.

  The nose of the craft was broad and flat. He put his feet under him and stood. He stared, squinting in amazement. The world around him was impossible.

  The clouds above were red and dim as if it were twilight, but the sun, a rose-hued bubble, was overhead. The disk was dim enough to look at directly, without wincing.

  The heavens were imperial purple. Stars burned pale as ghosts. The moon was also visible, if four times its accustomed width. It looked gigantic, ready to topple onto his head. But he saw the mottled markings: it was clearly Earth's moon. He had just been looking at it above the Caribbean skies.

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  About him loomed mountain peaks, white with snow and black with rock. From a near peak poured smoke in vast, inky clouds, giving a heaviness to the hot air as if a storm were forever brewing, forever about to break. It smelled of ash. The pall covered a quarter of the sky.

  Closer, he saw this high lake was in the crotch of a saddle between three mountains. The rocky slopes were lush and green, but long streaks of gray where the vegetation was dying formed claw marks across the crumpled knobs and steeps slopes.

  The verdure was tropical: cycads, palms, mangroves. Lianas, vines and mosses dripped from heavy limbs in gross profusion. Here and there orchids opened their bright, fleshy blooms. The smell of humid rottenness was everywhere.

  Earth's trees.

  But in the sky were a circling flock of batlike, naked flying things, with narrow skull-like faces beneath miters of bone.

  Bright against the dark purple sky, was the flying disk he had chased through to this place. It moved across the cloud as quickly as the circle of a flashlight a kitten chases along a dark carpet.

  It was coming back this way.

  He turned. Streaks of contrail and rocket exhaust reaching across the dome of the dark heavens dove down like a finger, pointing at this spot.

  The ringing in his ears diminished, and now he realized why he had so automatically readied his rifle. The sounds coming from the surrounding jungle were as of a stampede of many animals. Here also was the heavier tread, elephantine, of big game. The air shook with roars and calls, the hissing of lizards, the shrill cries of birds. He saw primates, perhaps lemurs, leaping from treetop to treetop in a flurry of motion.

  Suddenly, there was a movement in the water nearby, an eddy. He brought this rifle around just in time. A large snakelike neck ending in a head the size of a coffin, with nightmare jaws filled with a clutter of serried fangs, and two round, black froglike eyes protruding topmost, lunged out of the boiling waters toward him. The skin of the monster was white, translucent, like some freakish deep sea creature, but in shape and size, it was a dinosaur. It was a vertebrate. Its bones were visible as dark shadows beneath its flesh.

  He discharged his first barrel with a solid roar into the gaping jaws. Pale fluids like the blood of squids leaped upward in a spray. Perhaps he missed the walnut sized brain of the pallid monster, for it drove its white-splattered skull-like head toward him.

  Preston was pulled offbalance by his pack, slipped, skidding down the slope of the hull toward the boiling waters his suit could not possibly withstand.

  Frantically, he caught himself with one hand, and braced his feet against the smooth angle where the curving wing blended into the curving fuselage.

  The long neck of the monster was wobbling near. Its motions were blind and awkward, but it seemed to sense Preston was its prey.

  The jaws snapped down. Preston one-handedly raised and fired his second shot. It struck the joint where jaw met neck and shattered bone and vertebrae.

  It was not a clean shot. The recoil bruised his shoulder. He had been holding the double rifle stupidly, and the powerful weapon had a kick like a mule.

  The great nightmarish head of staring eyes and jagged fangs now writhed. Up reared a massive pale body round as the hull of a yacht. Great flippers like those of a sea turtle flailed frantically against the aircraft wing, as if the monster were trying to climb out of the water.

  And long, low, noise like a woodwind issued from the elongated neck. A death rattle. The head flopped down over the wing. The plane tilted in that direction. Preston slid toward vast, pale corpse.

  But even as the plane slid further under the boiling lake, more of the monster came to the surface. He saw the creature's body reached to a nearby rocky tussock.

  Without pause, Preston jumped onto the pale monster's spine, and in three rapid leaps went from shoulderblades to pelvis to the tussock. This was a back rock covered with slippery moss and coral growths sharp as knives.

  The backpack pivoted on his shoulder strap as he leaped, and nearly dunked itself into the water, but the straps got tangled in the thorny coral. Little stingers came out of the coral and scratched the canvass.

  Meanwhile his rifle slide down the mossy slope and vanished under the roiling surface. The thing was a work of art, his best friend, and his only hope for survival. Without pause, he plunged his hand after.

  The pain was blinding. He gripped the riflestock and pulled. With his other hand, he opened the backpack, yanked out one of the bags containing four ounces drinking water, ripped it open with his teeth, and poured it over his scalded fist.

  He had two hands, after all. But only one Holland & Holland.

  While he was doing that, a snakelike thing issue from a niche in the coral. He caught it between the craggy surface and the butt of his rifle. Drops of boiling water flew up as he hammered the creature to death.

  The thing struck, but neither bite nor sting penetrated his flightsuit. Blood oozed from the cracked carapace. It was a thing that looked like an armored centipede, except that it was three feet long and thick around as a garden hose. But with a dizzying sensation, he recognized it.

  Preston since childhood had been fascinated with prehistoric animals. Many a museum he had haunted, many books had collected, and many a paleontologist he had invited to dinner. He often joked he'd been born in the wrong epoch to face a true challenge as a hunter: mastodons were so much grander than elephants, smilodons more ferocious than tigers.

  The giant centipede was an Euphoberia. The lake monster was a Plesiosaur, even if no paleontologist had guessed it to be coated with such skin.

  Earth, then. But when? No year of prehistory held both dinosaur and flowers. The future? The flying disk implied as much. But then how did ancient monsters come here?

  Foolish question. They came as he had: through a vortex.

  A hiss from overhead drew his startled eyes. The Pteranodon flock was wheeling lower. The leader had folded wings and was stooping to dive. His hand was hurt and his fingers not responding. The ammo belt was twisted around and under the coral growth were his pack was snagged. He knew he could not break the weapon and reload in time.

  He slung the rifle, drew his pistol, which he braced carefully on his wounded wrist. It was a C96 Broomhandle Mauser firing 9x19 mm Parabellum rounds.

  Another hiss, and a second monster swooped, and then a third. The whole flock, like a flight of arrows, their bony beaks like spearheads, plunged down through the dark red air of the impossible world.

  There were ten rounds in the clip.

  He grinned an odd little grin and took aim.