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“Park, it looks like someone was
making camp on the top of that hillock recently,” she reported. “Want us to
swing down and have a look?”

“I see the impressions in the
grass,” Park confirmed, “but you have a long way to go before you get to your
starting point. We’ll check this out and let you know what we find next time
you check in.”

“Roger,” Lucy replied with a nod.
Her buggy flew on while Iris flew downward on a spiral course.

“Definitely buggy tracks,” Park
decided as they hovered over the grass. “Let’s land and have a look around.”

“Hold up, Park,” Marisea stopped
him. “I’m scanning for animal life.” She paused and then announced, “Nothing
big enough to bother with within two hundred yards, but there are quite a few
larger creatures in the copses of trees to the north and to the west, and I
think there are some cold-blooded critters down in that water hole.”

“The ones in the trees may be
taking cover from us,” Sartena commented. “There aren’t a lot of flying
creatures on earth, but those
Tawatiri
,
what you call flying octopi, can be pretty nasty, especially when they attack
with electric shocks.”

“There are plenty of flying
insects all over the world,” Marisea pointed out, “and two orders of
postmammalian flyers, but those don’t come near the cities. I’m sure there’s
something that flies here too.”

“I know there is,” Park replied.
“Several large hawk-like neomammals were spotted and reported by the missing
teams. They’re half again the size of the neobats we’re used to.”

“They still wouldn’t go after
things the size of what I’m detecting,” Marisea announced, “but, like I said,
they seem to be staying back behind the tree line. I think it’s safe to go out,
so long as we keep an eye on our surroundings.”

“Right,” Park nodded. “Let’s go.”
He led the way out of the buggy, but a few minutes later concluded, “This was
just an over-night camp, I think. They had a small campfire over here.”

“Doesn’t look like they did any
cooking,” Iris remarked, “unless they buried the trash far away or took it all
with them. No sign of digging save for the fit pit itself.”

“And there will be nothing to
gain by looking any closer,” Park concluded.
 
“One team was here, but we don’t know exactly when and were probably not
here very long.”

“Shouldn’t they have been placing
survey markers?” Marisea asked. The markers were actually small transmitters
that would help them map an area and also measure any possible seismic activity
as well as act as repeaters for their radios.

“My fault,” Park admitted. “Karen
asked me about that in a report she sent to Owatino. We decided that in the
initial survey of Australis it would be fastest to just send a team or two in
to see what they could see. Since we had no plans for colonizing the continent
any time soon, we figured it could wait and the preliminary look would give us
an idea as to what and where to concentrate on when we made a serious
investigation. Oh, look down there,” he pointed at the woods to the north.
“Those must be what one of the teams called monopods.”

Turning, they saw a group of
brownish-gray animals slowly hopping out from between the trees. The larger
animals, quickly established a semi-circle about fifty yards out from the
trees, while the smaller ones hopped here and there nibbling on the grass and
other ground plants.

“They look sort of like kangaroos
or wallabies,” Iris remarked, “although their faces are different, squarer, I
think.”

“Definitely herbivores,” Sartena
remarked.

“At least that bunch is,” Park
nodded. “They might have omnivorous or carnivorous cousins. Certainly something
preys on them or they wouldn’t have formed a defensive line around their young.
Anything slinking through the grass?”

Iris, had a pair of binoculars
and she brought them up to take a look. “A pair of
reshti
is investigating.”

“I don’t think they’re
reshti
,” Marisea disagreed, “at least
not if they are what I saw in the waterhole. These are slimmer with longer
legs.”

Suddenly two of the largest
monopods bounded toward whatever was in the grass and the stalkers turned and
ran away, mostly on their hindlegs until they were safely away and then dropped
back down on all fours.”

“They move a lot faster than the
reshti
we saw in the Zontiso River,”
Iris remarked.

“And
reshti
do not have a bipedal gait,” Marisea added. “Their heads are
similar though. Close relatives, maybe?”

“Or maybe not quite so close
relatives,” Park remarked. “These probably evolved from the Australian crocodiles;
probably the freshies is my guess. Given the way they move though, I think they
would also be neoreptiles, but perhaps not directly related to the neoreptillia
of Pangaea. Australis has been geographically isolated from the rest of the
world for very long time. There’s been enough time for evolution to go in all
sorts of directions, just as it did on the supercontinent. I’d love to get some
samples for the biology boys and girls back home, but…”

“But this is a search and rescue
mission,” Iris finished for him.

“Holman!” the radio blurted out
from inside the buggy, “This is Xaviera. Come in please!”

“Holman here,” Park replied after
making a few adjustments to his torc so it could relay the call from the flying
car. “What do you have?”

“Park, we found a wide area of
burn-out,” Chuck reported. “It might have been started naturally, as from a
lightning strike, but someone’s campfire might have gotten away from them too.”

“Where are you and how wide an
area is it?” Park asked. “Do you need help in the investigation?”

Chuck gave him the coordinates,
adding, “It stretches for miles and miles, Park. It will be faster for all of
us to fly search patterns.”

“All right,” Park decided. “I’ll
let Lucy know and we’ll be there in a couple hours, I think. I take it you
can’t pick up any buggy transponders?” He motioned to the others to start
heading back to the buggy.

“None and that’s a puzzle too,”
Chuck admitted. “Maybe the fire burned out the buggies too?”

“Possibly,” Park shrugged. “I
hope not, and as you said, this may have been a natural occurrence.”

“Even so,” Chuck remarked, “the
transponders ought to have been picked up by the low-orbit satellites two or
three times a day. The best conclusion is that both buggies were wrecked.”

“We won’t know for certain until
we find them though,” Park replied. “See you soon.”

The burnt-out area was
tremendous, although here and there were oases of green that had miraculously
been left untouched. The region Chuck’s team had first spotted was, indeed,
huge, but turned out to be near the leading edge of the still burning fire. As
Park’s and Lucy’s buggies came up from the south, they first spotted
 
a rough-shaped
 
area of burn out that eventually narrowed
 
down into several long tongues of charred
grasslands. Those long tongues merged again further north but until they got to
the area Chuck had first reported the signs were that this fire had been driven
northwestward by a strong wind until it was able to spread out again. The fire
had started somewhere to the southeast, but Park chose to finish the search in
area Chuck had found. “I think it more likely they could have been caught in a
wildfire than that they started one,” he explained to the others.

During the search they spotted
quite a few flying animals that looked like bats but were the size of vultures
and who seemed to fly and subsist like the scavengers as well. Many of the
Vulture-bats as Chuck had dubbed them were circling overhead, but they found
quite a few feasting on animals that had been caught groundside by the fire,
including what had to have been one of the tremendous elephantine
rabbit-descended creatures. “What else could be that large?” Iris asked. We
still don’t know what it looked like in life though.”

“The teams sent back pictures,”
Park told her. They were some of the first critters spotted from the air, in
fact, though I suppose it would be hard to miss them. I’m surprised we haven’t
seen any yet.

They flew deep into the night looking
for signs of the missing explorers or their vehicles, but eventually Park
decided it was time to get some sleep.

The following day he sent Lucy’s
team to investigate the fire’s origins, which as he suspected, seemed to have
begun well to the south and zig-zagged it’s way northwesterly until reaching
the largest zone of burn-out. Once that had been established he had her run
patterns over the smaller burn zones while he and Chuck continued to search the
largest area, but late the next day Park finally decided, “I don’t think
they’re here. If they got caught in the fire we would have at least spotted the
buggies. Besides, we’re a long way from the Thames River. Let’s all return to
our original search plans.”

The most common animal types,
they saw in Australis, turned out to be the monopods. On close inspection, they
did seem to have evolved from a kangaroo. The roos, Park recalled could not use
its hind legs independently; they always hopped, using the legs together. For
some reason the monopods’ hind legs had grown to be a single hind leg. That leg
had two thigh bones that merged at a complex knee joint. The foot at the bottom
of the leg had eight toes – an odd discovery that made Park question whether
the monopods had evolved naturally or whether, like the Mer, some unknown
scientist had been tinkering with their genes. However they came to be, the
monopodia
, seemed to have replaced the
roos in Australis and now seemed to exist in a large variety of ecological
niches and ranging in size from that of mice to small horses.

As if the fire had been a turning
point, all teams started encountering the large elephant-rabbits. No one had
given them an official name yet and no one could quite agree on what to call
them. The huge creatures ignored the human and Mer explorers and their vehicles
and took more interest in the vegetation around them, which they ate with very
little discrimination. Grass, shrubs, trees and some plants for which the
humans had no adequate words were all fodder for the huge creatures.

“I wonder if our missing
explorers managed to anger one or more of these things,” Park commented as they
flew circles around a family group of two adults and three relatively smaller
children, although the juveniles were still larger than most cars.

“Short of crashing into one?”
Iris remarked, “I’m not sure that’s possible. The kids find us interesting, but
the adults act like they couldn’t care less.”

“Oh that, kiddies?” Sartena
chimed in, making believe she was an adult elephant-rabbit, “Just a bunch of silly
humans. Ignore them and they’ll go away. Now where’s the tree I was eating?”

“Sure looks that way,” Park
nodded. “I wonder what would happen, though, if we got too close.”

“We could be a third missing team
of explorers,” Iris told him. “Knowing their temperament could be important,
but that’s not why we’re here, remember?”

It was several days later, from a
hill overlooking the confluence of the unnamed tributary and the Thames, that
Park and his team found two wrecked buggies and flew down to investigate. Both
had apparently been tipped over and had rolled down the long hill. One had
apparently exploded on impact and the other had landed in the shallows of the
river. “Well, that could do a job on the transponders,” Park nodded as he took
a closer look at the damage, “but what happened and where are the people?”

While waiting for Chuck’s and
Lucy’s teams to join them, they kept looking and found the grisly discovery of
several gnawed human bones under the branches of a small copse of trees near
the top of the hill. “Odd looking trees, aren’t they?” Park remarked. “Ever seen
such a colorful tree trunk? Red, green, blue, purple…?”

“Yes, but not with leaves that
shape and size,” Iris answered. “The trunks look like
Eucalyptus deglupta
, but that species was not native to Australia.”

“Maybe someone introduced it?”
Sartena offered. “It is very pretty.”

“Maybe,” Iris allowed, “or maybe
this is something else or evolved from something else.” She crushed a fat round
leaf in her hand. “It smells like eucalyptus too, but the leaves are all
wrong.”

“A lot can change in two hundred
and fifty million years, dear,” Park reminded her.

“Park! This is Chuck!” an excited
voice called from within the buggy. “Are you there?”

“Right here,” Park responded
easily. “What’s wrong?”

“Are you underneath some
rainbow-colored trees?” Chuck asked worriedly. “If so, get away from them.
Fast!”

“Why?” Park asked. “They just
seem to be a form of eucalyptus.”

“We found some survivors, Park,”
Chuck told him. “Believe me, you don’t want to see what lives in those trees.”

Park automatically looked up into
the broad, rainbow-colored branches of the tree just in time to see a large
ball of fur move. He brought his rifle up to bear and as he did the furball unfolded
itself into a nightmarish perversion of a giant koala. The creature bared its
long fangs and started to leap at Park, just as Park pulled the trigger and
shot the creature three times as it fell to the ground beside him.

“I think I see why, Chuck,” he
remarked, rather shaken. The others were coming to see what had happened.

“The survivors called them ‘drop
bears,’” Chuck informed him. “Do they really look like the mythological Aussie
ones?”

“Sort of,” Park admitted, “but
they are huge, or at least this one was. Must be the size of a small grizzly.”

“They work in pairs,” a woman’s
voice said on the other end of the call.