by E. J. Blaine
Not far past the watering hole, the river narrowed again and tumbled through channels it had carved through upthrust fingers of rock. About twenty yards from the bank, Jack found an overhanging precipice that would hide them from the air. He stopped and let Doc inventory the small flowers along the riverbank while he checked it out. There was a flat space beneath the rock that they could clear easily enough. The stone overhang would be a low ceiling, but there was enough space for their tent with enough room left over to build a small fire. Best of all, Jack thought, they could build a lean-to from branches and vines that would hide them from outside. It would do, he decided.
“Okay, we camp here,” he announced when he came back.
Doc was kneeling beside a small flowering plant, taking notes. But now she put her notebook away. “All right, I’m back,” she said. “I can discover more things tomorrow. What do we need to do?”
He explained his plan, where he wanted to set up the tent, where the lean-to would go.
“Sounds good,” she said. She helped him clear the brush from beneath the overhang, revealing a hard packed earth surface with a fringe of grass at the edges. Once she decided it was time to put her toys away and get serious about helping them survive here, she had shifted gears completely. Jack asked her about it as they worked.
“I knew you had my back,” she said. “You were keeping us on course and watching for anything important. I knew while you were doing that, I didn’t have anything to worry about. I could afford to look for new plants and make sketches. You’d make sure I was safe. It’s just what you do.”
Jack stepped back and watched her as she unfolded their small tent and laid out stakes where it would go. She stretched the canvas shape up, checked the clearance beneath the stone roof, and decided she could move it back another foot or so.
She trusted him, he thought. Even in a place like this, where she had no idea what dangers they might face, she trusted him to keep her safe. She was right, he thought. No matter what happened, he knew he would protect her and their daughter to the end. It was a strange feeling. He’d always done his best to protect the men who fought alongside him in the war, and the crew of the Daedalus—including Doc—as they fought against the Silver Star. That was his responsibility. But this was more than that.
“What are you looking at?” Doc asked, looking up at him from the half-assembled tent. The look in her eye told him that she understood completely.
“Nothing,” he said. “I just like watching you put up tents. I just realized that.”
“Well, you’d be amazed at the things I can do,” she said with a grin. “Go get some branches and you can watch me build a lean-to. If you’re really good, I’ll let you help.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jack said. He threw her a playful salute and headed out into the forest.
He moved quietly along the game trail, listening for movement as he collected sticks. He heard only the cries of distant birds. Even those sounded strange, different from the bird calls he knew in some way he couldn’t put his finger on. It was all so unreal. How could a place like this exist? How had the various plants and animals gotten here in the first place?
He’d spotted steam vents from the air. The warmth had to be the result of volcanic activity. But the air pressure felt like normal sea level. If anything the air was richer in oxygen than what he was used to. He felt energized here. Could the volcanic vents be putting out oxygen? He had no idea. Perhaps Doc knew something about that.
But at any rate, the place was astonishing in every way. No wonder the Long Walker had decided this place overlapped with the spirit world.
He stopped suddenly, listening intently, his nerves singing as a rush of adrenaline hit him. It took him a second to realize what had caught his attention. There. A boot print in the soft earth at the edge of the trail. Definitely not his.
He listened, but still heard nothing. He studied the print. It looked fresh. The tread was obviously of modern industrial manufacture. The print’s edges were well defined and a twig lay snapped across its edge. Whoever made it had been here recently, no more than a day ago, he thought.
Jack quietly drew one of his .45s and looked for more prints. He found another one perhaps twenty feet down the trail. And then something else. A sapling just off the trail that had been bent over and tied down. He edged closer and glimpsed something metallic. Someone had built a snare trap along what looked like a small game run through the underbrush. He knelt down and carefully examined it. They’d bent over the sapling and fastened a wire loop to the end, then fashioned a simple trigger out of scrap metal. But not just any metal, Jack realized. They’d used tin snips to cut the pieces out of a cheap cooking pot. Jack felt his unease growing. He’d seen pots like that before. There was the particular curve of a lid that was meant to double as a dish once the meal was ready. He moved carefully around the trap, looking for the stamped inventory number he suspected would be there. And there it was.
The pieces had come from a Silver Star field mess kit.
Jack edged away from the trap, his mind racing. He’d been thinking of large search parties, awkward groups crashing through the undergrowth, making plenty of noise. Something they would hear coming and could easily avoid. But the real danger might be something else entirely. He quickly finished gathering branches and vines and headed back to their small camp.
As Jack expected, darkness came quickly. The sun fell behind the cliffs while he was still on the trail, and by the time he made it back to the tent, it was almost too dark to see where he was going. But the tent was set up and Doc had a small lantern lit. She was inside, laying out bedding and organizing their supplies. Jack dropped the sticks outside and joined her. He turned down the lantern’s wick to dim the light, and sat cross-legged with his back to the flaps so his body blocked most of the light from outside. Doc’s tone changed in an instant.
“What’s the matter?” she said, and Jack could hear concern in her voice. He quickly told her what he’d found.
“We already knew the Silver Star was here,” she said after a moment’s thought. That was true of course. But still there was something unsettling about the improvised trap.
“Why so far from their camp?” Jack mused.
“They’re not trapping small game for food,” said Doc. “I got a good look at that camp as we flew over. They must have a good fifty men there.”
Jack nodded. “They won’t feed all those mouths trapping a few rabbits, especially all the way out here. More likely they’re sending out hunting parties to shoot those things we saw before. The um…”
“Caprids?”
“Caprids. Yeah.” Then a thought occurred to him. “Do you think they could be trapping specimens for research?”
She shook her head. “They could do that closer to home. And if the Silver Star wanted to trap animals, they wouldn’t jerry rig something out of old pots. They’d show up with the best traps money can buy.”
Jack sighed. He’d reached the same conclusion. “They’ve got scouts out here,” he said with a resigned nod. It was the only thing that made sense. One or more experienced wilderness hands detached from the main camp and sent out to explore the valley, gather information, and draw maps. They’d travel light, moving around and living off the land. They’d be used to improvising with what they had. A Silver Star scout was who would have one of their mess kits out here. And that was who would cut it up to make a crude snare trap.
“You said the prints were recent?” Doc asked.
“No more than a day. And no reason for him to go off and abandon his trap. No, he’s still around here somewhere. And if I can find his trail, any half decent scout should have no trouble spotting ours. We’ve been gallivanting around like tourists all day.”
“We have to be more careful,” said Doc quietly. “Keep our eyes open out there.”
“Yeah,” Jack agreed. “I don’t know what else we can do though. We can’t just hunker down here and wait for them to find us. I guess just ke
ep in mind that someone’s out there and be alert.”
Soon after that, they put out the lantern and Doc went to sleep. Jack sat up with one of his .45s, gazing out into the night and going over the list of things out there that might kill them.
It was a list that kept getting longer all the time.
Chapter 15
The night was chill, and a cool breeze picked up from the south, coming down across the valley from the mountain peaks above. Jack and Doc were happy to be well-protected beneath their rock overhang. Jack got little sleep. He stayed up well into the night, keeping watch while Doc slept, and the wind rustled the crude lean-to that hid them. Someone was out there, and Jack didn’t know when they might appear.
But the night passed uneventfully. It rained at some point, but by dawn it had cleared, and the morning was clear and warm. Doc got to work with the test equipment she’d brought with her. It wasn’t much, but she was able to do some basic tests. She quickly determined that the river water at least was safe, and sent Jack off with a folding canvas bucket to retrieve some.
Then she started preparing samples. All morning she crushed leaves with a small mortar and pestle. She spread stains on slides and left them out in the sun. She painted plant resins on test strips and muttered to herself. Jack spent the morning working on the shelter. He strengthened the shield of branches and vines that hid them from outside view and extended it farther around the rock overhang. The problem with that was that it blocked too much of the daylight from outside, so Jack worked on a way to move the walls farther out from the rock and create a kind of skylight in the gap. That proved more difficult than he anticipated. It would have worked better with actual lumber, but he didn’t have the tools for serious woodworking. Besides, he concluded, that would make the shelter fairly obvious to anyone passing by.
By noon, it seemed that they were treating being marooned as some particularly exotic form of camping. Jack noticed that he kept planning new and elaborate conveniences for their campsite, and Doc was happily humming a Gershwin tune as she tested her specimens. It was almost as if this had somehow become their vacation, and when they were finished they would simply go home.
That changed after they ate lunch from their rapidly dwindling food supply. They both heard the steady drone of distant airplane engines.
“Southwest,” Jack announced after they listened in silence for nearly a minute. “Maybe five miles. Long way from here anyway, and they’re not coming any closer.”
After a few moments, the wind shifted, and the sound faded away.
Doc let out a sigh of relief. “It’s a big valley, but it doesn’t go on forever. You think they’ll keep looking for us until they find us?”
“Oh, yes,” Jack admitted. “They’ll have reached the crash by now, so they know we got out. And there’s no other way out of the valley, so they know we’re still back here somewhere. They can’t leave us running around loose behind their lines.”
Jack went outside and checked the lean-to again, adding more leaves and vines to conceal the underlying branches. Then he heard Doc call his name.
“This is it!” she said as Jack came back inside the shelter. She showed him a series of darkened test strips and a petri dish full of a yellow waxy substance lined with dark streaks.
“Some things the Long Walker said,” Doc said quietly. “I thought it might be this one.” She showed him a vial containing a sprig of something. The plant had lacy white flowers with pinkish stems emerging from a wooden twig.
“Take a good look, and keep away from it,” Doc said. “It’s all over the place out there. Whole meadows of the stuff.”
“This can do what we saw to a person?”
“Not like this,” Doc said. “The Silver Star version is an awful lot stronger. They must have found some way to refine it, amplify the effect. But it’s the same active substances. A lot like cicutoxin. That’s a central nervous system stimulant. Scopolamine. Some very complex plant alkaloids and other things I can’t even begin to identify. But this has everything I found in the poison samples we got from New York. Trust me, this will kill you dead enough on its own.”
“What about the other plants? Are they poisonous too?”
“Some of them,” said Doc. “Not all of them, and nothing like this. There’s got to be something we can eat around here. Those caprids we saw yesterday are herbivores. Hey, maybe we can watch them and see what they eat. That’ll give us a starting point for figuring out what’s safe. And I’ll keep testing.”
“All right,” said Jack. “You do that. I’m going to take a look around outside. See if there’s anything nearby we can use. Or something we should move away from.”
“Can you use my camera?” Doc asked. She collected it from a pile of gear next to the tent and offered it to him. “If you find something interesting, I’d appreciate some pictures. They could help.”
Jack nodded and slung the camera strap around his neck. Then he gathered a couple spare magazines for his .45s and a folding machete for cutting through brush, and set off.
They’d followed the river most of the way here, so Jack started out at a right angle to it, moving up a gentle slope and then down the far side of a ridge. In places the jungle was thick, and he had to cut his way through the underbrush. But he found clear areas that let him move more quickly and let those guide his path since he didn’t have any particular reason to choose one direction over another. He could still see the mountains on either side of the valley, so all he had to do to get back was head toward the northern edge of the valley until he hit the river. Then he could follow it back to camp.
As he wandered, noting landforms, plant life, and the occasional distant animal, he considered their longer term strategy. They couldn’t stay here forever. The Silver Star had plenty of men in the valley, and all the time they needed to mark the terrain off into grid squares and tear each one apart until they found them. Besides, Jack and Doc had a daughter waiting for them, and a life outside this place.
Their reason for coming here was to identify the poison, and Doc had done that with remarkable speed. She would find an antidote soon enough, if there was one to be found. And then they’d have no reason to stay beyond scientific curiosity. The place certainly deserved a real scientific expedition. But the two of them gathering samples and taking pictures while they dodged the Silver Star hardly qualified.
So they had to leave, and pretty soon, Jack guessed. And there was only one way to do that. Well, two actually, he corrected himself. It apparently was possible to get in and out of the valley on foot. The Long Walker had done it, and he seemed to think others had as well. But Jack had no idea how. The thin air outside the valley alone would make the trip next to impossible. Even without that, it would take world-class mountaineering skills to make it back to civilization over land.
No, the only way out for them was the way they’d come in. Which meant they needed an airplane. And of course there was only one place in the valley to find one of those.
He hadn’t gotten a very good look at the Silver Star planes; he’d been too busy dodging their machine guns. But they were pretty small. Still, they had to be able to carry at least one passenger. How else would the Silver Star have gotten their soldiers into the valley? Not to mention all the equipment and supplies to support them. So Jack was confident he could fly one of the small planes, and confident that Doc and their gear would fit inside somehow.
He was crossing a relatively open field now, in an area where the jungle had thinned out. He noticed that the valley shifted from one type of environment to another with surprising speed. Thick jungle gave way scrub brush and stunted trees, then to open grassland, and back to jungle again, all within a couple of miles. Doc would probably have some explanation for it, but it put Jack’s teeth on edge. The place just didn’t feel real somehow. Again, he thought of the Long Walker’s claim that this place touched the spirit world.
The ground was rocky where he was walking. It looked almost paved, with
flat stones scattered across the grassy landscape like cobblestones. Other rocks thrust up from the earth, looking like small huts. He rounded one of these latter, and stopped short. The ground here had been ripped apart. Several of the heavy, flat stones had been levered out of the ground, rolled aside, and left where they fell. Scattered piles of dirt surrounded a rough hole. The rains had rounded the edges and filled the bottom with muck. The hole had been here a while, and he couldn’t detect any signs of human presence. But someone must have been here. It would have taken several men most of a day to do this with shovels, rope, and heavy tools. Was the Silver Star digging for something? Perhaps there were valuable minerals here, or perhaps they were digging for some buried occult artifact. Jack unsnapped the case of Doc’s Leica and took some pictures of it.
When he’d done that, he glanced up at the sun. It was getting toward late afternoon and the night came quickly here. He decided he’d better start back.
He retraced his steps back to the north, letting himself take a different course. Once he spotted a hillside covered in the white flowers Doc had shown him and gave them a wide berth. There didn’t seem to be any other plants competing for the land and sunlight there, he noticed. Perhaps the plant’s poison leached into the ground and killed anything else that tried to take root.
But something wasn’t afraid of the poison, he realized to his surprise. There were animals on the hillside. They were small, four-legged mammals with brown fur and bushy tails. They looked like weasels, or maybe some kind of wild cat, but they were neither. Jack had no idea what they were. But they were eating the exact plants that Doc claimed were the source of the poison. He took several photos of them, and considered shooting one to take back to Doc. But he didn’t relish the idea of wading into the flowers to recover the body. In the end, he left them in peace, happily nibbling at the poisonous flowers.