Throwback

by Edward J. McFadden III

  A wave of sadness washed over him when a mouse-like creature that resembled his daughter’s hamster scuttled onto the path before him, stopped and looked him up and down, then bolted into the jungle. His daughter loved the little vermin more than she did her brother, and she took it everywhere. It rode shotgun in her breast pocket, and Hawk smiled as he recalled his wife telling him she’d gotten called to the school when Sally’s teacher had found a gnawed carrot in the child’s desk, and when questioned, discovered the furry creature in her hoody.

  The daggers of sunlight piercing the tree canopy faded when Hawk broke free of the jungle and saw the fence around their shelter. Hawk whistled, and Svet and Max came out to greet him. Svet and Hawk hugged, and Max patted him on the back.

  “You made it,” Max said.

  “Barely. Anything new here?”

  “You won’t believe what I find,” Svet said.

  9

  The markers were the same as the ones Hawk found. They formed an arrow in a clearing that shouldn’t exist about three miles from camp. Nine polyhedrons arranged largest to smallest, with a triangle tip pointing west. The sun was still in the east, having just risen above the rim of the world. It was hot, and Hawk wiped sweat from his brow.

  He held The Martian open to the map he’d drawn on the blank spread at the back of the book. He penciled in the location of the new markers as best he could, and drew dotted lines from the tips in the direction that point and they intersected.

  “You make anything of it?” Hawk asked Max. He handed him the open book and the physicist examined it, brow furrowed, face stoic.

  “I think if this is truly an intersection point, then there should be more markers. Perhaps one here,” Max said. He pointed to a blank area northwest of their position.

  “One here also, da?” Svet said.

  Max drew in the two proposed marker locations. Max’s site appeared to be a full day’s trek, assuming no delays. “If we find a marker there, the question becomes what’s at the intersect location? Another marker?”

  “Leading to yet another?” Hawk said. They had no clues. Like the first grouping he’d found, there were no markings on the polyhedrons, no signs or writing that would explain their purpose, or if they had a purpose at all.

  “I don’t know,” Max said.

  “That worries me more than anything else. Max unsure,” Hawk said.

  The German chuckled. “I can see how you might be frustrated, like when Google goes down.”

  “What do you think, Svet?”

  The cosmonaut ran her fingers through her greasy blonde hair. None of them had bathed in some time, and they’d have to remedy that before their stank brought unwelcomed guests. “I no understand. Maybe very old? Part of civilization long gone?”

  Max said, “Possible. What concerns me is the lack of vegetation in the clearing. It’s like a permanent dosage of poison covers the area. Even hardpan will soften in time as rain and sun perpetually stress the hard-packed dirt. Even with regular maintenance I don’t see how these areas can be free of plant life and creepers.”

  “Da,” Svet said. She bent and ran her hands over the concrete-like dirt. She rubbed her fingers together and sniffed her hand. “No smell anything. Nothing can be seen.”

  Max nodded.

  “Must be a reason?” Hawk said.

  “Agreed. I believe these markers were created as signposts,” Max said.

  “Da. Why?” asked Svet.

  Hawk and Max said nothing.

  That was the kicker, wasn’t it? According to Earth’s historical record there hadn’t been any civilizations on Earth during this era. If they were right about their time estimation, that is. Max had said they were roughly fifty to seventy-five million years in the past judging by the position of the land masses, the flora and fauna they’d seen, and the local animal life. T-Rex’s, for example, lived right up until the massive extinction, and weren’t prevalent in the Jurassic period as many portrayed them. Hawk also knew all the estimates were based on dating techniques that had inherent flaws, and their estimations could be off by millions of years, as could their assumption about prior lifeforms and what they may have left behind.

  “It doesn’t make sense, but the scientists of our time qualified all their findings going back this far,” Max said. “Perhaps there was a thriving civilization here and all signs of it were destroyed in the coming cataclysm that wipes out almost all life on Earth.”

  Hawk said nothing. The other possibilities were impossible to believe, yet they brought some hope. None of them said it aloud, but was it possible off-worlders had visited Earth, and placed the markers?

  “We’re going to find marker, ja?” Max said.

  “Da. See for sure.”

  Hawk closed his book and slipped it in a pocket. He looked up at the sun as it crept across the sky, and a warm breeze redolent of earth and shit pushed across the clearing. Swarms of gnats, flying beetles and mosquitoes hung around his head like a cloud, and he constantly swatted at them.

  “I think we need to check it out, or at least one of us does,” Hawk said. What choice did they have? They had nothing but time and the markers might provide clues to finding the light beacon, if in fact that was what the markers pointed to.

  “Nyet. We all go,” Svet said.

  Hawk started to speak, but Max beat him.

  “I agree with Svet. We shouldn’t split up again. If we get separated we’ll never find each other in the thick jungle.”

  “I don’t see why we all should be at risk,” Hawk said, but even as the words left his mouth he didn’t really believe them. Risk? Was he joking? Leaving the shelter in the morning to take a piss was a risk. Squatting under a fern to take a shit was a risk. Hunting. Risk. Drinking. Risk. Eating. Risk. He’d have to get used to the idea that risk management was a thing of the past. It was about survival.

  Svet and Max said nothing as they waited for him to work it out on his own. They both stared at him, eyes wide and patient. They’d been together long enough to know that he had to come to decisions in his own way, on his own terms.

  “Shit. You’re right. Staying in one place is dangerous. We need to move around. If we settled in the creatures we need to stay away from will surely find us.”

  “Da.”

  “Ja.”

  He spared them the shit joke this time.

  They left the next morning, and sealed up the shelter, leaving behind anything they felt they didn’t need. Svet and Max dismantled the fence Hawk had built, and used the thick sticks to close off their entrance. Max had argued that if they didn’t mothball their shelter, they were likely to find animals living in it if they returned.

  Using the sun as a guide, they headed northwest, doing their best to stay on line to where they expected to find another set of markers. They brought three days of food, and the last of their water. Searching would take time because they didn’t have the exact location, nor were they certain of the exact direction. There was also the possibility that they might be wrong, and had miscalculated entirely and there was no new signpost to find.

  They camped that night within the hollow of a massive dead tree that hadn’t had the courtesy to fall. It smelled of root and dirt, and Svet worried the thing might fall with them inside, to which Max pointed out from their position they’d be fine. They ate a meal of breadfruit and dinosaur jerky Svet had made from one of her kills. They were still using guns to hunt the big game, as none of them had mastered the construction of a bow and arrows, let alone mastered its use. The other weapons couldn’t take down large game. Svet had discovered several types of edible leaves, and many roots and fruits that weren’t poisonous, but tasted like cardboard.

  “We should be close,” Hawk said when they set out the next day. They had no way of knowing if they’d gone too far, and in the thick jungle, visibility was limited. They fanned out, separating themselves by a quarter mile or so, and combed the jungle, walking slowly, keeping in touch every few minutes with a yell. />
  This went on for the better part of the day before they found the third clearing, and the arrow there pointed southeast. They added it to the map, and when a third dotted line was added a clear intersection point stood out like a stegosaurus at a dance party.

  “So that’s it then,” Max said.

  “Da.”

  “Do we head straight there? Or head back to camp first?” Max said.

  Hawk weighed this as he examined the map, Svet and Max looking over his shoulder. “It looks roughly the same distance. I say we go see what’s there. We’ve got enough food.”

  “Ja,” Max said.

  They set out at once, following the line of the arrow through the thinning jungle. They hadn’t seen any animals bigger than a dog since leaving camp, but ahead in the jungle there was a loud ruckus; cracking tree limbs, grunts and wails of aggression and pain.

  Crack. Crack. Crack.

  It sounded like two rocks were being smashed together. Hawk escaped a thick tangle of ferns and two dinosaurs knocking heads and swinging club-like tails fought before him.

  Max inched out of the ferns behind him and said, “Ankylosaurs.”

  The beasts looked like living tanks; armored heads and tails the color of honey, and flecked with blood. The dinosaurs had black flanks and they swung their long powerful black tails, each of which had a knob-like club at its end. The beasts didn’t appear to notice them, and the threesome slipped by the scene, the pounding of cracking tails and the hiss and growls of battle fading as they trekked deeper into the jungle.

  It was mid-morning on the third day out when the large clearing appeared like a mirage. It was lined with thick palm trees that looked like they’d been planted in neat rows at the clearing’s edge. But instead of finding nine polyhedrons arranged as an arrow, they found something more interesting.

  Five polyhedrons fifteen feet tall stood at the center of the clearing. They were multi-sided, and each flat surface contained a hieroglyph. The markers were arranged in a similar fashion, and Hawk’s best guess was the arrow pointed in the direction of the light beacon.

  “Good God,” Max said.

  They entered the clearing with caution, guns at the ready, but everything was quiet.

  The hieroglyphs showed a series of scenes depicting stick figures that looked vaguely humanoid, and there was writing, but it was gibberish.

  “Look at this one,” Hawk said. He examined the head polyhedron that depicted several pictures of what looked like the Earth, but it had thin lines drawn from a large wound on the surface of the planet depicting an explosion, and several adjacent cells showed primitive drawings of destruction. Panels displayed drawings of objects that looked eerily like a modern cellphone, with numeric key pads, but instead of numbers there were odd shapes.

  “Is that what it looks like?” Max said.

  “What does it look like?” Svet said.

  Hawk jumped in before he could answer. “I think that thing in the lower quadrant is the beacon. The lines coming from it portray fire and destruction.”

  “Da. One here shows hole in that spot,” Svet said.

  “Oh, boy,” Max said.

  “What is it?” Hawk asked.

  “Not yet, let me take a closer look,” Max said.

  Svet and Hawk watched as Max examined each hieroglyph, even the duplicates. When he was done, he said, “I can’t be sure, and I’ll need more time to study these things. I suggest we use your book and copy all the pictures as best we can for future reference.”

  “Care to hazard a guess?” Hawk said.

  “Da?”

  “This is wild speculation at this point,” Max said. He sighed. “I think this here,” he pointed to the drawing of the bare spot in the middle of a drawing of some simple woods. Stick trees surrounded the empty area, and it had lines shooting from it. “This could be energy. An explosion. Who knows.” He paused and wiped the sweat from his face.

  “And?” Svet said, the impatience sharp in her tone.

  “And, I think the light beacon might not be a beacon after all,” Max said.

  “What the hell is it then?” Hawk said.

  “A monitoring device to record the event that killed off the dinosaurs.”

  10

  They set out for the beacon the following morning, using the towering tree on the horizon as a guidepost. Max’s revelation about the purpose of the light beacon hadn’t changed Hawk’s mind, if anything the speculation fueled his desire to find whatever they’d seen. If Max was right, and Hawk wasn’t certain he was, whoever had planted the device would want the data it created, and that implied some type of communication.

  They moved through a forest of trees even Max couldn’t identify. They had long broad leaves and large basketball-sized fruit hanging from thick limbs. Svet scaled one of the trees and they ate the fruit, and for the first time they all felt nauseous. Perhaps there was a reason the trees weren’t picked clean like most of the other fruit trees they’d seen.

  The party drank water from a thin stream and rested beneath a great fern. The jungle erupted with life around them: insects, birds, small dinosaurs and reptiles, each with a distinct color and manner, flitted around the two astronauts and one cosmonaut. They held their guns at the ready, but Hawk felt no danger, though he thought he’d never feel comfortable or at ease again.

  “So, now that I’ve digested what you said, I’m thinking it might be a stretch. I mean, if an alien society placed the monitor, why not just be here when the event takes place? Watch it with their own eyes, or whatever they use to see?” Hawk said.

  Max chuckled. “We’re talking about thousands of years here, Hawk. Even an advanced race might not know exactly when the extinction event occurred.”

  “Possibly dangerous, da?” Svet said.

  “Ja,” Max said. The scientist rubbed his forehead. “Hadn’t thought of that. Whatever caused the extinction event will be dangerous to any life forms on the surface, and waiting thousands of years in space wouldn’t be advantageous to anyone, even if the race had a life span well beyond ours.”

  Satisfied, Hawk said, “So you think the device can communicate?”

  “I would think the data would have to be received somewhere, otherwise what’s the point, eh?” Max said. Then his eyes grew wide as Hawk’s meaning dawned on him, and he said, “Maybe we can send a message?”

  “I realize it’s an extreme long shot, and even if we could there is no guarantee the message would be received. Even if it was it could take hundreds of years to get to its destination, and the race that received the message could be hundreds of light years away.”

  Max’s face fell and he looked away.

  Svet said, “So? What we do? I say we still go? What else is there?”

  Max and Hawk said nothing.

  “Maybe we find more clues? More… how you say, hero-glyphons?”

  “Hieroglyphs. Maybe,” Max said. “Whoever built and placed the markers obviously wanted them to be found and went through great efforts to make sure anyone who might stumble across them would know what they were.”

  “A warning? To other space travelers of the danger?” Svet said.

  “Maybe,” Max said.

  That was the hitch, wasn’t it? Hawk had done his best to keep the morale of his mates up, but with each passing hour their plight became more resolute. They were trapped here, and they were never going home. Even if the best possible scenario occurred, and aliens came to fetch them, unless they had a time machine, which hitherto wasn’t possible, they were stuck in this time. His stomach ached, and he was frustrated, angry, and tired, and he didn’t feel like doing much of anything.

  When the sun had passed noon, he said, “Let’s get moving.” Grunts and moans from Max and Svet, but they got up. “Chins up, this is the witching hour.”

  They’d found that the bigger dinosaurs liked to hunt in the morning and afternoon when it wasn’t so hot. This cycle was typical of lizards, and Hawk recalled an iguana he’d named Siggy that l
ived in a tree outside his bedroom window back in Florida. You could set your watch by the creature’s daily routine, and he was finding dinosaurs to be equally predictable, which was useful since they were doing everything they could to avoid the beasts.

  Hawk followed an animal trail that let around an odd assortment of rocks that was out of place and looked like they might have once been some type of structure or monument. Huge centipedes five feet long scuttled and slithered into the jungle as they examined the stones, but when they found no markings, Hawk put the location on their map and moved on.

  By nightfall they’d made a lean-to shelter with palm fronds and laid in some food and went in search of water. While they were gone something had tried to obtain access to their shelter. A pile of scat the size of a large cat stood in front of the shelter’s blocked entrance, as if the offending animal understood exactly where it was crapping.

  Hawk cleared it away with disgust, and pulled away the sticks that secured the opening. In their absence worms, beetles, and what looked like snakes with legs had burrowed through the dirt and infested their new home.

  Together they cleaned their sleeping areas, but Svet and Hawk climbed into the spacesuits, even though that meant sweating all night. Max laughed at them. “They’re only bugs,” he jested. “They can’t eat you.”

  At that moment one of the bugs he claimed couldn’t eat him gave it a try, and bit him on the arm. He screamed, a red welt rising on his flesh. He scratched at it. Svet had found what she believed to be some type of aloe plant, and she broke one of her leaves and rubbed the translucent jelly onto her friend’s arm, and it improved.

  The party woke the next day to water pouring through the ceiling of their shelter, and this hastened their exit. A torrential rain fell; thick, cold and biting. Mud slid through the jungle and soon everyone and everything was soaked through. Each carrying a bag containing their meager supplies, the party hastened into a thick stand of saw palmetto where the tree canopy blocked the fierceness of the weather.