When she opened her eyes, the doctor was standing before her, adjusting his shoulder which he had just dislocated.
“Jessica my dear, I do apologize.” He began walking toward her.
Jessica grabbed a canister of mace out of her purse and sprayed it at the doctor. He calmly twisted his eyes away and began coughing as she sprinted out of the room.
She ran down the chrome hallway as she heard the pounding footsteps of someone right behind her. Before she could even register them they increased to a rhythm that was too fast for her to pick up and Dr. Zaman appeared in front of her. His smile revealed his teeth which he had begun to lick.
“May 3rd 2021.”
She didn’t need to check to know that it was today’s date.
She sprinted through a side door and tried to hold it closed behind her. The hinges creaked and then the door flew off to the other side of the hallway as Zaman grabbed her and threw her after it.
She hit the cold floor and felt her head cut open. She tried to get to her knees but Zaman jumped what seemed like fifty feet to land on top of her.
“No!” she screamed.
“No? Why no Jessica? We all die. Now, or a thousand years from now, what’s the difference?”
“I don’t want to die!”
“Hmm. I suppose none of us do. But I have no intention of killing you my dear. In fact, I’m giving you a gift. You’re coming back with me. You are the progenitor of our species. It is written. They will assume your death on today’s date because we will replace your body with another. But I have so much to show you. And we do not need to go back immediately. Are you curious about what life was like in ancient Rome? I’ll take you. Do you wish to see one of Shakespeare’s plays with him as an actor? I will get us seats at the Globe Theater. The universe and all time are open to us.”
Zaman wiped the blood away from her forehead with his hand and tasted it. He stood and helped her up.
“You will come with me, and you will be the destroyer of the human race.”
“No…no, that can’t be true.”
“It is already true. Come, the portal is waiting.”
Within seconds, Jessica felt an enormous euphoria as a white light filled the room. It pulled her in, like gravity to a heavenly body, and she couldn’t resist. She looked to Zaman’s smiling face as the light engulfed her, and she disappeared.
FORMATION
The molten sun burned the sky a light shade of violet, the air humid enough to be noticeably wet. A cool breeze occasionally blew past the sandy beach and rustled the lush green vegetation twenty feet from shore. The smell of brightly colored plants with honey combed entrails drifted in the air as a small creature, no more than five feet tall, strutted to the shore line. Her later descendants would dub her Cro-Magnon, for “modern”, but for now, she was simply third youngest female in a pod of twelve.
Wearing a loose fitting skirt of grass and bark the little creature scurried into the water. When she was waist deep, she took the long leather hides off her shoulders and soaked them in the warm waters of the North Pacific.
Taking two stones from a pouch at her side, she banged them together against the leather to soften the wet animal hides.
The warm climate had lulled the creatures of the late Pleistocene into a comfortable existence. Some of the creatures would grow accustomed to the warm climate and the abundance of food. During the coming Ice Age, these are the creatures that would be selected to become extinct by nature’s harsh judgment.
Fifteen feet into shore, on the white sands of the beach, the creature’s mate exited a small tent made of hard leather.
The male came to the water’s edge and grunted loudly, capturing the female’s attention. She turned and smiled widely, returning his grunts, her small vocal chords straining to form a more pleasant sound. It would be from these small grunts that her later cousins would develop Indo-European, the first of man’s languages.
Her mate sat on the water’s edge and squinted from the glare of the sun off the cobalt-blue water as he went to work sharpening an antler with a smooth stone.
The male suddenly stopped his work and glanced about the water. He’d heard something and a tingling sensation gripped his stomach; something was wrong.
He stood and yelled at his mate, who turned and yelled playfully back. The male began running into the warm water and motioned with his arms, pointing with both hands back to the beach. The female sensed his being upset, but didn’t feel any danger.
The waters before her split in an orgy of white froth as a seven-foot dorsal fin shot out of the deep and sliced toward her. Carcharodon Megalodon, the greatest hunter the world had ever seen, had spotted her through a complex echolocation system.
The gray dorsal fin glistened in the sun as the female turned to see it for the first time, her heart nearly tearing away from her chest. The creature’s massive triangular head and ghostly black eyes fixed on her, its mouth opening slightly in anticipation.
She turned and began running for the beach as the massive shark bumped her with its snout. She fell forward, and before she could regain her balance, a nine-foot mouth clamped down on her mid torso.
The sea erupted in a pink froth as the megalodon jolted side-to-side, using its serrated seven inch teeth to saw through flesh, muscle and bone. It severed the small creature at the waist and dragged the rest of her out to sea, disappearing beneath the depths.
The male screamed in agony from the shore. He ripped shards of hair from his scalp as the rest of the pod ran to see the commotion.
With hot tears streaming down his face he began to run into the surf, to bravely chase a predator developed and perfected over four hundred million years of evolution.
Two elders grabbed him by the arms as he jumped into an oncoming wave. They pulled him to shore as he fought to release himself. One elder, fed up, took a palm-sized stone from his pouch and hit the male over the head. He calmed down, and quietly sobbed.
For the next few days, the male rarely did anything but sit on the shore of the beach and watch the surf. Occasionally, he would see a great fin rise from the shadowy depths and then disappear.
After the memory of his mate’s death faded for the rest of the pod, the male would still sit on the sandy shore and watch. He felt as if he were missing something and that sitting there, among the crashing surf and warm breezes, he would find it.
One day a young female ventured forth in the water with a stack of leather hides on her shoulder. She held them down in the water and soaked them before pulling out two small stones and banging them together over the hides.
The male, his eyes straining to look at the vast expanse of ocean before him, could see a stirring of the water ahead of her. His frantic grunts alerted the young female who ran back to shore, an immense dorsal fin coming to within feet of where she had been standing.
As the female walked back to the tents, the male ripped away the stones from her hands. He watched as the fin turned and headed back out to the depths.
Stepping into the warm water, he waded in until his knees were soaked. He leaned down, and began banging the stones together in the water.
More quickly than he could grasp, a giant fin streaked toward the beach with a massive triangular head in front.
He watched as the beast circled, and disappeared.
The male ran to the pod as they were gathered in a tent. He took the stones and bashed them together again and again. He threw the stones to the ground and made a wide motion with his arms and pointed to the sea.
Watching their eyes, he knew the pod understood. Hides would no longer be softened by stones.
His point made, the male walked back to the shore, rubbing a necklace of dead flowers and shells his mate had made for him. His instincts told him that he had made his pod safer. But his primitive brain had not yet developed an enlarged frontal cortex enabling him to understand the profundity of his discovery: for the first time in the history of the world, a glimmering method had shone,
and pulled a small section of humanity from the jaws of a dangerous, incomprehensible world. Science had made its first appearance.
DINOSAURA TEMPUS
Jonathan Mesh leaned against the wall of the hut. “Killing a dinosaur’s illegal on this planet you know.”
“I know,” Santiago said. He shifted in his chair and lit a cigar, letting the gray smoke whirl around him before speaking again. “But I’m willing to pay the going rate; 500 denima.”
“I’m taking a big risk just talking to you. With all the poachers and thrill killers the Plutisian government’s really cracking down. I think it’ll cost more.”
Santiago eyed him up and down. Jonathan was a stalky man with a serious expression always drawn on his face. But his eyes were rational; no hint of the denima fever that most guides got around a wealthy off-worlder. “1500,” Santiago said. “Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it.”
“Good,” Santiago said as he rose. “I’ll be back in the morning.” He began to walk out of the small cluttered hut but stopped by the doorway and turned back. “When is morning around this damned place anyway?”
“It’ll be two earth hours until nightfall and then eight hours of darkness. We’ll have ten hours of daylight for the hunt as well.”
“That’s more than enough; see you then.”
As Santiago left, Jonathan walked to the door and stared out into the forest. 1500 denima was enough to pay back what he lost at the Beccani tables. He’d be even with the owners of the gambling den, who were mostly bureaucrats for the government on top of business owners, and could go about like a normal business person instead of having to resort to clandestine meetings in a shabby hut on the outskirts of town.
Jonathan got a bottle of old rum down from a cupboard and poured himself a glass before stepping outside. The forest was a cacophony of the sounds of life. High-pitched chirps, rhythmic hoots … and the occasional roar. The roars were far off in the distance though, most of the larger carnivorous species liked to stay around the middle of the forest away from civilization.
The rum tasted like stale bread; he hadn’t had a good drink since leaving earth more than five years ago. Then again, who knew? Maybe this stuff was better? He’d heard people who’d never been to earth saying they couldn’t stand alcohol from there; tasted too bland, they said. Like it was made to be drunk in quantity rather than savored. Still, he missed it. You always miss what you’re used to.
Nightfall would come soon enough and Jonathan walked inside and locked the door behind him. He lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the forest. Sometimes, when the animals calmed down, he could hear a waterfall in the distance.
*****
The next day came with a bang rather than a whimper. A loud explosion shocked Jonathan out of bed. He stood up, groggy, and stumbled to the door. Santiago stood outside testing his rifle, an old model that shot hunks of iron out of the barrel at high velocities.
“What the hell is that?” Jonathan asked.
“Smith and Wesson 30/30. Big game rifle. Antique I picked up in the Canendor system.”
“It’s too loud.”
“Nonsense.”
“It’ll attract the wrong kind of attention.”
“And what attention is that?”
Jonathan took a deep breath and stepped out. He walked to Santiago and took the rifle from his hands, examining it. “You don’t know the first thing about hunting on this planet, do you?”
“Don’t you speak to me that way; I’m the customer. You’re providing a service.”
“Look, there’s a species on this planet called an efferusaur. It responds to sound.”
“Efferusaur,” Santiago said with a grin. “I’ve heard of them. I think I’d like to hunt that today.”
Jonathan shook his head in disbelief. He hated hunters who came here without any conception of what they were doing; they were a liability. “You can’t hunt an efferusaur.”
“Why not?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to.”
“Yes, I do. And if you want to keep your fee I suggest you help me.”
Jonathan mulled it over a moment and then said, “Forget it, find someone else. They’re too dangerous.”
As he started to walk away, Santiago yelled, “2500 denima.”
Jonathan stopped but didn’t look back. It was enough to pay his debts and buy him a ticket off this planet. Not enough to get passage back to earth, but enough to get closer than he was now. “All right,” he said. “But you can’t kill one with that thing.”
He walked into the hut and came back out with a Class A ion rifle. Technically, it was banned on this planet but so was hunting an efferusaur. “Use this,” he said, handing it to Santiago.
Santiago considered the weapon. It was smooth, but not metal; some sort of hard fibrous material. Though it appeared large, it weighed less than his other rifle. He grinned. “This will do fine.”
Jonathan nodded and turned to gather his things.
*****
The rover traversed the forest landscape as if it were traveling on oiled metal; hardly any bumps or jerky movements inside the cabin. This was due to the fact that the rover rested above ground on a ferrofluid force field—an ionized column of air interacting with a magnetic fluid—essentially, a giant magnetic bubble that the vehicle could lay on. Jonathan sat in the backseat while Santiago and his wife sat up front.
His wife was something of an enigma. He hadn’t introduced her and not once had he mentioned her beforehand, but there she was. Slim and with dark red hair, she was attractive for a woman her age but distant. Not really present in the moment she was in.
“We’ve been sailing for hours,” Santiago said, “and all I’ve seen is a herd of decapods and some mansueti.”
“Stop here,” Jonathan said, “we’re close enough.”
They stopped in a large grassy clearing. In the distance was Mount Flynn, named after the first explorer to climb to its snow covered peak. Above that, taking up the view of most of the sky, was Juno, a nearby planet with no inhabitants. It was over ninety percent water and appeared like a sparkling blue gem in the sky.
The air smelled of wild grass and the warmth of daylight was comforting. But the serenity of the moment came at a price: they were in one of the most dangerous spots on Plutus—in the center of a forest filled with herbivores. Wherever there were groups of herbivores, there were carnivores. And none came as ferocious as an efferusaur.
“Hand me your rifle,” Jonathan said. “The antique.”
Jonathan pointed the weapon up in the air and fired, the loud crackle scattering flocks of winged rodents and insects. He fired again, and again, then waited. “Are you sure that will attract one?” Santiago asked.
Jonathan didn’t respond. He was busy focusing on the tremors in the ground and a nearby rustling of trees. Something was approaching. “Get out of the rover,” he said.
Santiago jumped out, nearly falling flat on his face. Adrenaline was coursing through him, and it flushed his face red and quickened his breath. He aimed the ion rifle in front of him. “Where is it?”
Jonathan pointed to a cluster of trees on the edge of the clearing. “He’s coming from there,” he whispered. “Aim for the chest or head, anywhere else will just anger him.”
“You sure this gun’s powerful enough?”
“Yes,” Jonathan lied. In truth, the ion was a laser diode gun. It operated at a wavelength that caused the oxygen rich atmosphere around it to change into a plasma state. Using a laser induced plasma channel, an electric current was shot down the ionized plasma and out the barrel. It was the most powerful rifle available, but a particularly thick hide or too great a distance could negate its effects.
Jonathan hopped into the driver’s seat of the rover, glancing at Santiago’s wife. She was applying makeup to her face and watching a holovid on a small monitor in the dashboard.
“He’s quite the fool, isn’t he?” she s
aid, turning to him and smiling. “I’m Victoria.”
“Jonathan, nice to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
Jonathan pulled a lever that opened the harpoon gun on the bow of the rover. He scanned the edge of the clearing; there was still some rustling here and there, but nothing concrete. “How long you guys been together?”
“I’d rather not talk about him right now,” Victoria said, leaning back in her chair.
“He doesn’t seem so bad.”
“He’s an oaf. I only married him because my parents forced me; he’s wealthy, they’re wealthy … they thought social etiquette demanded it.” She glanced at him. “It’s amazing what you can get used to.”
“What’d you mean?”
“He … he beats me sometimes.”
“Why?”
“For his pleasure.” She chuckled softly. “He told me on our wedding night of all times that he’ll have to hit me sometimes, not because he hates me but because it’s arousing for him.” She looked off into the jungle for a moment and then back to Jonathan. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“No mate in your life?”
Jonathan shook his head. “Not with the kind of life I lead.”
“And what kind of life is that?”
He looked at her. She was wearing a tight beige uniform that exposed the soft, silky flesh of her legs. “An unstable one.”
Suddenly a thunderous roar tore through the air and whipped their heads around. It was followed by the crunching of tree branches and a bassed, rhythmic pounding—monstrous steps on the soft forest floor.
At first all they saw was a mass pushing aside the canopy of vegetation. Then, the mass took shape. A triangular head covered with gray flesh, a solid muscular body and two massive hind legs. The efferusaur’s lip quivered as it stared at its peculiar prey, its red eyes glinting in the daylight. It opened its gargantuan mouth, revealing row after row of serrated teeth, and let out a deafening roar that caused the rover to tremble with its pitch.
Star Dreamer: The Early Short Stories of Victor Methos Page 3
