Multiverse 1

by Chris Hechtl

  The mess finally had proper shade even though it was still out doors. The hospital area was on a slight rise, above the other areas and to one side of the camp. Wilson put a lot of effort into helping there, setting up better roofs and walls for the poor sods there.

  The seats had been set up as elevated beds for the injured. They were still uncomfortable, but at least something better than sleeping on the cold ground. When they had a surplus of seats, Klinger and Adam, the paramedic, insisted doc get the next bed. “Of course you're saying that so you get it too,” she teased Adam.

  “Too right,” he said with a grin. She smiled but agreed.

  Shawn Roberts made a show of helping to move the seats about and setting the hospital up. He scored a set of seats for his people and somehow wound up with one of the tiny bathroom sinks. Klinger ignored it for now.

  With Walter, Patty, Cloe, Hetty, and some of the other girls help, they made several more cooking and hand tools and used the sap to bind them more tightly to wooden handles. They managed to bake the sap around the handles, hardening it. The cooking tools were handed off to Cookie with grateful thanks.

  They also made a tower out of a pair of trees to make fishing line. A couple teens were assigned to work there. One would feed another at the top of the tower pieces of dripping wood. That was dumped into an improvised pot with the cut ends down for the sap to drip out. Heating elements from a coffee maker were used to heat the sap to boiling. Roy's solar blanket was borrowed to provide power, but he vowed to find a better solution soon. When the sap was judged ready, they dribbled the boiling sap carefully out a small hole in a handmade aluminum funnel. It ran a long line down before globing up in a messy puddle. Experimentation led them to take that line at the bottom and run it through a pipe they had in a fire. The heat from the fire finished vulcanizing and setting the polymer. Once it exited the metal tunnel, it was run through an improvised water trough and then wrapped around a spindle.

  It took them a day to get it right, but eventually they had an almost perfect product to hand off to the grateful fishers.

  Small lengths of the polymer were used to make test nets and straps. The longer lengths were used for line. The skipper reported success; the lines did a good job of holding up to the sea. They'd even caught one fish with them, a small strange looking thing with an extra set of fins on it.

  The weather was changing though, clouds were coming in and the winds were changing. The temperature dropped noticeably. The skipper reported he had been forced to pull his people from the headland when the seas got rough.

  ~~~~~O~~~~~

  The changing weather made everyone wary. Klinger kept the outdoor groups close to camp cutting wood and improving the shelters. He even had them dig drainage ditches and place the excess soil around the wall to help support it in the wind.

  Roy had the smiths move the scavenged goods up to the shelters and detailed a party to anchor the plane better. He tail was wobbling about in the stiff wind making the wreckage rock a bit.

  The storm broke just as the far-flung wood cutting parties called it quits and returned at a trot to get to shelter. People ran around the camp looking for cover and last minute supplies.

  That evening the storm lashed at the shelters, several breached, including the Roberts’s hut. The group took shelter in the hospital.

  ~~~~~O~~~~~

  The next day there were no fires; the wood was wet. It took a dollop of their precious fuel to get the fires going, but since the wood and fire-starting material was wet, it didn't last long. Pine needles were employed to keep it going long enough for some of the material to dry out and catch. Still, they didn't have much. They ended up eating a cold meal, which sunk their spirits and morale a bit.

  There was much acrimony from the Roberts over God’s wrath punishing them for the Satanist in their midst. “You do realize how full of shit you are?” Quinn demanded. Catrina drew herself up, clearly affronted. “It was your hut that was flattened, not Roy's or the rest of us,” he pointed out.

  Others snorted. It was true; Susan and Catrina had led Shawn into building an expansive structure for their hut, with only minimum support elements. “If you'd spent a little more time working on it and less time causing hate and discontent, bossing people around or trying to force them into your religion, then you wouldn't be homeless,” the skipper added.

  “We need to work together. Obviously, this isn't enough,” Shawn mumbled. “It wasn't my design,” he said looking at their resident architect. She shook her head.

  “The more time you bitch about it, the less you have to do something about it,” the skipper said. Everyone was on cleanup detail. “If you haven't noticed, we're burning daylight. We don't know if another storm is coming in either. So get busy,” he growled.

  “We need help,” Susan said. That touched off an argument.

  Roy did his best to ignore the crap. Quinn nodded, looking at him. “Wise of you. They piss and moan, but do they do much? Granted, they are close to God, but hey, I pray too! Doesn't make them any better than me!”

  “Whatever floats your boat as the skipper would say,” Roy said. “Come on, we've got work to do,” he said, lifting the hammer.

  Roy's smiths made a pair of evaporator pans to harvest sea salt for the fishers. The skipper set them up on the beach with sea water to evaporate, leaving natural sea salt for cooking and preserving.

  Harris came in with a cut-up dinosaur. He reported they had gone inland and found a grass plain. He'd been tempted to just harvest grass. He knew they used it for stuff, but when the honking biped had come along…he grinned. “Hell, it was in a group, but we had the bows, and I figured it was worth a shot,” he said, indicating the thing.

  “We left a lot behind. We had to get out of there; the blood attracted those birds and swarms of insects. Then scavengers started coming in, at first small lizard dino things,” a guy said.

  “It's fine,” Harris said. “Simmons get back yet?”

  “No, she due?” doc asked concerned as Sandy hefted a haunch with a pair of guys. It was big, easily two hundred pounds of meat, hide and bone. The biology student was spending more time in camp as the resident slaughter expert. She did the final dressing before handing it off to Cookie.

  “No, she's behind us. I just wasn't sure if she got around us or not,” PFC Harris said with a hand wave. “Oh well,” he said, smiling. “Tell her we're one up on her,” he said hefting his lance. He checked the tip and then his arrows. “And tell Roy he is a godsend. His weapons…” He shook his head. “Mind you, not as good as a rifle, but a hell of a lot better than those wood sticks we were using!”

  “I'll tell him,” doc assured him. “Now what?” she asked.

  “I think we're about done for the day,” Harris said, rubbing his back. “That was a lot of work hauling that puppy in. I'm going to take my crew to wash up, then see what we can bring in for firewood.”

  “Good,” doc said with a nod. They were now keeping in touch, letting each other know where they were going and for how long. “You do…stink,” she said, coughing.

  “The sweat of work, Doc,” Harris said. He batted away mosquitoes. “But yeah, just getting the smell out should…” he coughed. “Damn, swallowed a mosquito!”

  “Get out of here,” doc said with a dismissive wave.

  ~~~~~O~~~~~

  The Roberts formed a work party with the architect, Nima, and the Muhammad family to create a better shelter for themselves. True to their expansive nature they thought big, but this time planned it better with the proper supports.

  They talked about dismantling “unimportant structures” for material, eying the smith sheds, but Klinger and the doc both put that idea down hard. Roy picked up some of the talk, shook his head over their plans for an elaborate elevated house and chapel. He got back to work with the others cleaning the damage.

  The wind and tide had done most of the damage. Work crews were busy fishing flotsam out of the surf. Some used poles built to harvest
fruit from trees; apparently they didn't want to go too far out into the inky green water. Roy couldn't blame them. He'd seen the occasional shadow under the waves from time to time.

  The aircraft had survived more or less intact but had shifted about as sand had eroded out from underneath it. It had settled in deeper; mainly because they had removed some of the lower panels allowing it to sink instead of float out with the tide. There was a trade-off though; the lower compartments were now contaminated with sea water. The lower section was also a great deal harder to get into.

  The one remaining wing had weighed it down though, pushing deeper into the sand on that side. Shelters and gear stored there had been scattered about or lost. The forge area was in shambles. Roy made a note; they needed a better base. Definitely a better area to do the forging, somewhere up in the rocks to reflect and concentrate the heat, or someplace else. He wasn't sure where, but he decided he needed to take a personal hand the next day to find out.

  ~~~~~O~~~~~

  The next day Roy ranged out of the camp with the wood cutters. He decided to explore with the hunters. He didn't find much, the herds had moved inland. They ended up killing a few lizards, and a giant centipede predator that turned out to be poisonous. They picked up some grubs, snails and even a couple turtles. That eventually led to killing some sort of six-legged thing that had been wandering alone in the bush, apparently lost. It had a shovel head and rear, with eyes like a hammerhead shark out on the edges of the flat head.

  Taking it down had been hard, but fortunately a couple boulders dropped on it had knocked it down long enough for Simmons to get in and spear it in the eye. The group fell to slaughtering the animal, half on that duty while the other half watched the perimeter for scavengers or additional prey.

  Roy wandered out further from the group. Most stuck close to the main body, worried about being picked off by a watching predator. He, however, wanted to know and knew the group was drawing attention to itself, forming its own herd or pack.

  Exploring a half mile out he discovered a waterfall that fed the stream, and a southwestern-facing cave system nearby. There were armadillo creatures in it, but since they were snacking on some scorpion things he left them alone. Besides, he'd had quite a lot of food, and the hunters were producing regularly now.

  Once Simmons group had moved out in a convoy, Klinger sent Harris and his people off northwest while he took his own team northeast along the river. The plan was to follow it further into the hills until midday, then curve inward and back to camp, coming in through the narrow defile at the back of the camp. Roy joined them as the group broke up.

  Klinger had made himself a sling; using it and their limited archery sets, the hunters killed avians and small creatures. They ranged out, not finding very much else to add to the pot. Near noon they came to a grass valley and paused near the wood line, watching the giant dinosaurs and alien creatures ranging out.

  Klinger told him they had run into other predators, a near bear, raptors, giant insects, and a close brush with some sort of Rex descendent, but so far we've been lucky. No one has been killed,” he said.

  “We need ranged weapons,” a guy said. “More bows,” he said, indicating one of the bowman. “Or crossbows,” he said.

  “Why are you here? Why aren't you making more?”another guy asked.

  “Wood's wet from the storm,” Roy said with a shrug. That earned a grudging nod. “I thought I'd check things out here. See if I could find anything else of use.”

  “You should be making more stuff though,” another accused.

  “He can't start a fire if the wood's wet. Remember camp?” Klinger said, shaking his head.

  “We're a long way away from guns,” Roy said.

  Klinger snorted at that idea. “That's a pipe dream. We don't have the materials, the gunpowder…” he shook his head.

  Roy disagreed, shaking his head. “Break it down,” Roy said. “Start with the most basics and build from there. “We've got some of the ingredients, sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate. All we have to do is mix it in a three-two-one ratio carefully, grind up the paste into granules roughly the same size, and then let them dry. Once we do we will have black powder,” he explained.

  Klinger shook his head, but smiled at the very idea.

  “Is there anything you can't do?” one of the hunters asked.

  “Sure, build a plane,” another quipped.

  “He's the professor all right,” Klinger snorted. That earned a chuckle and a few back slaps on Roy from the hunters.

  He shrugged the accolades off. “Don't celebrate just yet. The gunpowder is one thing. We can get lengths of pipe from the wreck but I don't know if they will handle the pressure. We need something that can handle a minimum of twelve hundred feet per second muzzle velocity,” he said, looking thoughtful. “The barrel…” he started to continue but stopped when the chuckles from the others broke his concentration. He shrugged after a moment. “Well, you get the idea. But it can be done, in time,” he said defensively.

  “Good. Good,” Klinger said then put a finger to his lips. They froze. He pointed, then hand signed to the hunters. Roy looked, and found what the sharp-eyed corporal had spotted, a herd of deer like creatures.

  They killed a couple near deer, before the others ran off, but were forced to leave one of the carcasses, when the bellow of a pseudo Rex came a little too close for comfort. They retreated, watching the family of feathered Rex's take over the kills. The Rex's were huge but looked odd with the bald head and feathered body. Most of the true feathers were reserved for the arms. The legs were bare skin from the knee down, much like a chicken.

  “That is so flipping weird, seeing dinosaurs with feathers. It's like getting chased out by an overgrown turkey vulture or something,” a guy said, taking a shaking breath.

  Roy snorted but he had to admire the guy's courage, he wasn't a quivering wreck after seeing the multiton predator a little too close for comfort. “You're stuck with the image built up from your childhood and movies like Jurassic Park and others, dinosaurs as lizards,” he said.

  The guy eyed him. Roy spread his hands apart slightly. “You think you are having it bad? Imagine someone like Walter or someone before his time, when they thought dinos dragged their tails and looked like giant iguana,” he said. That earned a snort of amusement.

  “Trust a professor to point stuff like that out,” the guy said, cocking his head in approval.

  “Professor of engineering. But I dabbled in other things from time to time,” Roy admitted. “I helped out on a couple body mechanic studies of dinosaurs and prehistoric animals at MIT a couple of times,” he said. He smirked. “I still remember when they stuck a plunger to the rear end of a chicken and did a study on its walk.”

  “Oh my god!” the guy said, laughing. A few others sputtered. “I think I saw that on TV or something,” he said. “Io9 or something,” he said thoughtfully nodding.

  Roy nodded in return. “Yeah, but a tail isn't this stiff thing. Oh, it is to some degree but not a stick sticking it out of your ass,” he said.

  “Tell that to the Roberts,” a guy said sputtering with mirth. That earned a chuckle from the group.

  “Yeah,” Roy said, “Some people are like that,” he said with a shrug. “Anyway, like I said, the tail is flexible; it moves with the body and acts as an active counterbalance. They had the right idea, but they over simplified it to prove their point.”

  “Kiss, Professor,” the corporal said, getting to his feet. “The Kiss principle.”

  Roy nodded. “I know, it's one of the maxims of engineering. We tend to forget it from time to time. My favorite is about a hammer,” he said with a grin. Klinger snorted as he dusted off his hands.

  “Come on people, time to get going. We need to bag another kill.” The group groaned softly, but swung into action.

  They were fortunate; they killed a near elk spooked by the sounds nearby as they left their temporary lunch camp. The animal bolted in the direction of
their previous kill. But a Rex stopped it with a look and growl. The animal turned and bolted back in their direction. Arrows flew into its mighty chest, cutting it down.

  One of the hunters went up and stuck it with the lance, prodding it as it quivered. He stabbed it in the throat to be sure, then nodded to the others. Klinger didn't like being so close to the feeding Rex family, so they took a risk and dragged the elk off over the hill and out of sight.

  Near the opposite end of the field they entered the edge of the tree line again. Roy picked up signs that the hunters had been there before. Some of the crew seemed more relaxed, like they were on home ground.

  Klinger, however, wasn't so relaxed; he knew better. He kept a wary eye on the area, constantly on the lookout for other animals. They spooked a group of six-legged creatures that had been resting or nesting in the bush. The animals bolted, too fast to hit with spear or arrow before they were out of range. Flocks of birds were also spooked; they filled the air for a few moments, then turned to dive bomb the intruders.

  Shit and angry animals rained for several minutes until they got under the shelter of the trees. Roy shook his head as he turned. They were taking a breather to take stock, so he checked the area. He saw some more animals in distance. There were massive herds of shovel-headed things wandering about, tall, incredibly tall with smaller ones of different shapes nearby. They wandered to the stream, ignoring the avians and things on their backs. The professor was amazed by the diversity of wildlife. “Truly amazing,” he murmured softly. He felt a thump and looked down to see a guy handing him a water bottle. He took a sip, then another, then passed it on.