by Ron Miller
Rex and his gang were putting on a great show. But it was more than just that, I knew. They were fully aware that they were fighting for their very existence.
Ito got most of his men to rally after the initial sortie by the dinosaurs and they began to fight back. Rifle fire was pretty much little more than an annoyance to the tough-hided beasts. The stinging bullets only seemed to make them angrier and steel their resolve even further.
Pat continued to pick men off with an almost mechanical regularity. She lay on her stomach, with only the top of her head and the muzzle of her rifle visible from the ground. I finally got over my fascination with the spectacle taking place in the clearing and settled down to see what I could do to match her score. I’m not a tenth the marksman she is, I’m the first to admit that, but I did all right.
We were both of us trying to get a bead on Ito, but he never presented himself as a target. He realized there was a danger other than the dinosaurs. I could see him looking around, trying to pinpoint where the rifle fire was coming from. He spotted us almost right away. He ordered one of the big guns turned around, but it would have been a nearly point-blank shot and there was no way he could get the elevation he needed to do us any harm.
Meanwhile, the big dinosaurs had done their work and the smaller ones were swarming onto the field. Most of them were hardly any bigger than the Japs themselves, but they were just as fearfully armed. They laid about them with razor-sharp talons like samurai gone berserk. Others leaped like kangaroos on their powerful hind legs, knocking their victims flat and going straight for their throats. I saw at least two soldiers get their heads bitten off in a single bite.
Meanwhile, several shots from below me had me risk looking over the parapet. There, stretched on top of the mountainous pile of rubble from the collapsed lintel, was Andrews, picking off Japs as calmly and methodically as Pat was doing. The two of them made me feel redundant.
I was so distracted by the carnage that I wasn’t aware of the tank until I realized it was already well on its way toward the forest. Ito was nowhere in sight, so I assumed he was on board.
“Pat!—” I began, but was interrupted by a rumble. I felt the wall shake under my feet. At first I thought some idiot had tried one of the guns after all, but I was wrong. It was another earthquake. Stronger than the last one, too, if I wasn’t mistaken.
“Pat! Ito’s taking off in the tank. He’ll be headed for the mountain. We need to stop him if we can.”
“Fine by me. That last quake made me feel pretty nervous being up here.”
I had a whistle that’d come with our survival equipment. I blew it. It was a prearranged signal and the brontosaurus we’d first been introduced to swung its head in our direction. I blew it again and the monster lumbered over, wading through Japs like an elephant through grass. Its head came even with the top of the wall.
“You rang?” it said.
“Yes. Ito, the man in charge of these soldiers, is making his escape. He must be stopped before all this can be over. Can you get us down from here?”
“Well, of course.”
As Pat and I climbed onto the broad, flat head, the brontosaurus asked, “I saw that strange thing but didn’t know what it was. It looked something like one of the armored plant-eaters, but I suspect it wasn’t.”
“It’s another weapon,” I said as the dinosaur turned and began its slow pace into the clearing, seemingly oblivious to what was going on around it. “A very powerful one. But the worst thing is what it has inside. Ito is bound and determined to destroy this island. He won’t stop unless we stop him first.”
“I suspect his goal,” Pat said, “is to reach high ground. When Buck highjacked the Venture, he also got away with Ito’s high-powered radio. He’s had no way of reaching his superiors. But if he has a radio in that thing—and I’m willing to bet he does—and can reach high enough ground to get a signal out far enough he can have reinforcements here in a matter of days. So long as he has a radio all he needs is sufficient power and a long enough antenna. A hundred feet of wire would do the trick.”
“I’m willing to bet we’d made a mistake thinking he had to transfer the radio equipment from the ship to his camp here. He probably had duplicate equipment. That’d make more sense.”
“If he gets a battleship or cruiser here, it’ll be all over for us.”
The brontosaurus set us down at the fringe of the forest. Behind us, the rout of the Japs was just about complete. I didn’t want to see what was going on now and, I noticed, Pat also deliberately kept her back to the scene. The sounds were bad enough.
“You feel that?” she said.
I did. The ground beneath our feet was vibrating continuously now. It was accompanied by an almost subsonic rumble, like heavy traffic in a city.
“Something’s going on,” she said, “and I don’t like it much.”
Neither did I.
I heard my name called and turned to see our friend Mr. Rex waddling up. The brontosaurus lowered its head until Pat and I were on the same eye level as the tyrannosaurus. I repressed a shudder at seeing the glistening red stains around its mouth.
I quickly explained the situation and asked if he knew any shortcuts to the mountain.
“Certainly,” he said. “As I told you the other day, that’s where our mines and laboratories are located. I make the trip there several times a week.”
Pat and I stayed aboard the brontosaurus. It was a pleasant ride. We were well above most of the trees—most of which were really little more than overgrown ferns and evergreens—and since the dinosaur kept its head on a level there was none of the seasick-inducing motion of, say, a camel. It was more like being in the basket of a balloon. Pat was sitting ahead of me. With her shorts and mostly bare back, she made a nice distraction from the jungle. I heard her laugh. She sounded like a kid on a fairground ride.
Not for the first time did I find myself wondering about this strange young woman. I couldn’t think of a moment during everything we’d been through together where she’d been clearly frightened. Annoyed, perhaps, even worried. But never frightened. In fact, she seemed to have fun in inverse proportion to whatever danger we faced. The worse things looked, the happier she seemed.
I’d heard about people like her, met more than my fair share, in fact. They are addicts who are hooked not on cocaine or morphine but excitement. And I was pretty sure that Pat was one of these. She craved danger and adventure like a dope fiend craves their reefer. What was scary was that I was pretty sure that, like a dope fiend, she’d do pretty much anything to get a fix.
*****
The brontosaurus cruised through the dense jungle like a ship through a calm sea. This gave me some hope since I knew that Ito and his tank wouldn’t be able to cover even half the territory in the same amount of time. Especially since Ito had to feel his way along as he went.
It took about an hour to reach the base of the mountain. It was a sugar loaf-shaped mass that punched out of the center of the island like a fist. It was perforated with cave openings. The three largest of these gave it its name. The shaking of the earth had gotten stronger the closer we got to the mountain. We could feel it clear through the mass of the giant reptile we were riding. The sound had become a constant rumble.
“If that thing’s a volcano,” I said, “it looks like we might be in for an eruption.”
“The mountain itself isn’t a volcano,” she said. “The whole island is. The mountain is just a gigantic volcanic plug. You remember? Like the one at Pelée after the big eruption in aught two? That wasn’t anything at all as big as this, but that’s what Skull Mountain is all right. Or maybe more like Devil’s Tower if you’ve ever seen that.”
“I’ll take your word for it. What did you mean when you said that the whole island is a volcano?”
“It’s part of a caldera, like Santorini in the Aegean. The island is just the center remnant of a much larger crater, most of which is underwater. The reefs we crossed coming in may be on top of
part of the rim.”
“You don’t say.”
We got about as far as the brontosaurus could go. The ground had been growing ever steeper and the beast was having trouble. The tyrannosaurus said we’d have to go on foot from here, but assured us it wasn’t much further.
We thanked the brontosaurus for its help and the courage it had shown back at the Battle of the Wall.
“Oh, gosh! It was nothing!” it demurred, dipping its head in embarrassment. “Really, it was no trouble at all.”
There was no time to waste, so Pat and I turned to follow Rex, who was already a dozen yards ahead.
There was a pretty clear trail and since it had been created by countless generations of animals the size of trucks, it was like a highway for Pat and me. We had no problem at all following the tyrannosaurus.
About half way up, we came to the mouth of a cave. It was a huge opening, maybe fifty feet high and wide. A trickle of greenish water drooled over its lip. Just as we were about to follow the dinosaur into the opening, the ground gave a convulsive leap beneath our feet, like a startled cat. There was a sound like two locomotives colliding.
“Quick!” Pat cried, giving me a shove. “Inside!”
We’d only just ducked beneath the overhang when an avalanche of boulders came crashing down the almost vertical mountainside above us. I could hear them smashing into the trees below.
“That was a close one!” I said. “Thanks, Pat!”
“Let’s get going. I get nervous when I’m underground during an earthquake.”
It was hard to argue with that.
We followed the tyrannosaurus down a passage that reminded me of one of the titanic bypass tunnels built for the big dam being thrown up across the Colorado River on the Nevada-Arizona border.
“Have you noticed how regular this cave is?” Pat asked.
“What do you mean?”
“It looks like the Holland Tunnel. I don’t think it’s entirely natural.”
“You think those animals built it? They’re smart, but they’re not exactly cut out for work like this. Besides, it would take tools to dig a tunnel like this and I haven’t seen them use even as much as a knife and fork since we got here.”
“Well, someone dug it,” she insisted.
Oddly enough, instead of growing darker, the tunnel had been growing steadily lighter. It was a kind of glow that pulsated between violet and green. It illuminated the curved walls ahead of us and it was getting brighter the further into the mountain we went.
We suddenly came to the end of the tunnel and neither of us could repress a gasp of astonishment.
The tunnel mouth opened into a vast cavern. It was bigger than any cathedral I’d ever been in. Where we stood, the lip of the tunnel was about half way between the floor and the domed ceiling above. It must have been a couple of hundred feet either way, and about the same distance to the far wall. Below us was the source of the light. A mound of gleaming metal maybe fifty feet across and twenty high. The metal was in the form of roughly cast ingots each a couple of feet long. They were stacked like logs in a woodpile or bonfire.
All around the pile were dinosaurs. Scores of them. Some were hauling metal in sledges from side tunnels, while others were returning with empty sledges. Yet others were adding ingots to the ever-growing stack. It was like an ant colony on a colossal scale.
Even though the ingots gleamed with a silvery sheen, they also glowed with a weirdly lambent light of their own. It had a shimmering, unreal quality to it, like the weird glow you see in a vacuum tube or an aurora. The air inside the cavern was cold, but I could feel my skin prickling with the heat the ingots gave off.
“Get back from there!” cried Pat, pulling at me.
“Why?”
“Look at arms,” she said.
I glanced down. The sides of my arms that had been facing the floor of the cavern were already turning red, like I’d gotten a bad sunburn. They were starting to itch.
“The dinosaurs are insane,” she said. “They can’t have any real idea what they’re doing.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“That’s uranium down there, tons of it.”
“So?”
“Uranium is radioactive. It’s where radium comes from. You’ve heard of radium?”
“Yes, I’ve heard of radium.”
“The rays it emits will burn you if you are exposed long enough. The dinosaurs are probably protected by their scales but the rays’ll kill if you if you’re exposed too long.”
“Jesus!” I said, backing a few feet further into the tunnel.
“There’s our secret,” said the tyrannosaurus, gesturing toward the pile of glowing ingots. “That metal is the heaviest natural element we know of. We’ve managed to collect countless tons of it. That’s just the top of our supply—there are caverns and caverns full of it, all over the island.”
“What the hell are you doing it for?”
“The earth is like a top, you see. So long as it’s in balance, it spins along smoothly. But if it gets even the least bit out of balance—well, over it goes!”
“That’s what this is all about? All that metal, it’s a kind of . . . of counterweight?”
“Certainly! We’ve been collecting the metal for ages. Its weight has already caused the poles to drift ever so slightly. Surely you’ve noticed that? This drift will only grow greater until, eventually, the entire planet tips over.”
I was speechless.
Pat wasn’t.
“This is crazy,” she said. “Uranium is radioactive. It creates heat. A mass of the metal that size would be molten, and it probably is down at the bottom of that pile. It’s probably melting its way through the rock around it. It may have even breached the magma chamber beneath the island. I haven’t the slightest doubt it’s the cause of the earthquakes.”
“I really wouldn’t know about these things,” said the dinosaur. “It’s a little beyond my area of expertise.”
“We’d better get out of here,” Pat said. “It ain’t healthy.”
The tremors continued to rock the mountain as we made our way back to the mouth of the cave. Pat had been right: they were getting worse.
“The island is doomed,” she said. “The dinosaurs have written their own death warrant. They’ve been a million years in doing it, but it’s finally coming due.”
I’d just stepped outside the cave entrance when there was a wicked-sounding crack! and a shower of rock splinters sprayed around me. I thought it was another landslide and ducked back into the shelter of the cave.
“It’s Ito!” Pat cried.
Sure enough, it was. About half a mile away, at the base of the talus that sloped away from the mountain, was the tank, a wisp of smoke drifting from the muzzle of its gun. There was a silent flash from it and another explosion just outside the cave.
“This is swell,” I said. “If we go back we get fried by atomic rays, we go out we get blasted by Ito.”
“Shut up. I’m thinking.”
Whatever she was thinking was interrupted by a convulsive leap of the mountain. There was a tremendous, continuous roar, like you hear in the Cave of the Winds under Niagara. A blast of hot air rushed over us, nearly knocking us over. Pat looked over her shoulder and screamed, “Get out, Carl! Get out!”
I glanced into the tunnel and saw a glow. Unlike the auroral shimmer I’d seen before, this was an angry red and was growing brighter. The air rushing past us was growing hotter, too. Pat again shouted at me to run, but she hadn’t waited for me to start. Her long legs had already carried her twenty yards away. By the time I caught up with her, we were bounding from boulder to boulder like a couple of mountain goats.
“This way!” she cried. “Get out of line of the tunnel!”
She was heading off at an angle and I followed only a few paces behind. Below us I saw the turret of the tank swivel in our direction. Ito took another shot and the shell burst close enough to knock me down. I could hear shrapnel p
inging on the rocks around my head. Pat hadn’t missed a beat, however, and was soon safely behind a set of towering monoliths that would shield her from Ito’s cannon. I scrambled to my feet and was beside her before another shot could be fired.
“Good God, Pat, what’s the big hur—”
I was interrupted by a low, guttural rumble, like that of an approaching freight train. One with a heavy load, too, like coal or pig iron. The sound quickly escalated to a mind-numbing roar when a jet of something red-hot burst from the cave mouth. It was like being next to a Bessemer convertor when a batch of steel is poured. The flood of molten rock splashed heavily onto the rocky slope below. I could feel it through the soles of my shoes.
“We’d better get further back,” Pat urged and I saw no reason to argue with her.
The lava was arching from the opening in a thick, incandescent paste. At first it stuck to the rocks beneath, but soon the sheer mass began to flow under its own weight. The first layer of lava had cooled too quickly to flow, but now that the molten rock was piling ever deeper, it stayed molten and viscous. Between its weight and fluidity, the lava began to flow down the slope like a red-hot glacier.
Ito immediately saw the situation he was in. I saw him and his men abandon the tank, but there wasn’t much of any place for them to go that the lava would arrive at sooner. The trail the tank had made in the forest was in the same direction the lava was flowing, and routes to the right and left were blocked by rocks and boulders. These could have been easily climbed, but not very quickly. Certainly not quickly enough as it turned out.