The Lost World (12 page)

E
ddie Carr stood in the tail grass of the clearing, turned away from the flying dust as the two helicopters lifted off the ground and rose into the sky. In a few moments they were small specks, their sound fading. Eddie shaded his eyes as he looked upward. In a forlorn voice he said, "When're they coming back?"

"Tomorrow morning," Thorne said. "We'll have found Levine by then."

"At least, we'd better," Malcolm said.

And then the helicopters were gone, disappearing over the high rim of the crater. Carr stood with Thorne and Malcolm in the clearing, enveloped in morning heat, and deep silence on the island.

"Kind of creepy here," Eddie said, pulling his baseball cap down lower over his eyes.

Eddie Carr was twenty-four years old, raised in Daly City. Physically, he was dark-haired, compact and strong. His body was thick, the muscles bunched, but his hands were elegant, the fingers long and tapered. Eddie had a talent - Thorne would have said, a genius - for mechanical things. Eddie could build anything, and fix anything. He could see how things worked, just by looking at them. Thorne had hired him three years earlier, his first job out of community college. It was supposed to be a temporary job, earning money so he could go back to school and get an advanced degree. But Thorne had long since become dependent on Eddie. And Eddie, for his part, wasn't much interested in going back to the books.

At the same time, he hadn't counted on anything like this, he thought, looking around him at the clearing. Eddie was an urban kid, accustomed to the action of the city, the honk of horns and the rush of traffic. This desolate silence made him uneasy.

"Come on," Thorne said, putting a hand on his shoulder, "let's get started." They turned to the cargo containers, left by the helicopter. They were sitting a few yards away, in the tall grass.

"Can I help?" Malcolm said, a few yards away.

"If you don't mind, no," Eddie said. "We'd better unpack these ourselves."

They spent half an hour unbolting the rear panels, lowering them to the ground, and entering the containers. After that, they took only a few minutes to release the vehicles. Eddie got behind the wheel of the Explorer and flicked on the ignition. There was hardly any sound, just a soft whirr of the vacuum pump starting up. Thorne said, "How's your charge?"

"Full," Eddie said.

"Batteries okay?"

"Yeah. Seem fine."

Eddie was relieved. He had supervised the conversion of these vehicles to electric power, but it was a rush job, and they hadn't had time to test them thoroughly afterward. And though it was true that electric cars employed less complex technology than the internal-combustion engine-that chugging relic of the nineteenth century - Eddie knew that taking untested equipment into the field was always risky.

Especially when that equipment also used the latest technology. That fact troubled Eddie more than he was willing to admit. Like most born mechanics, he was deeply conservative. He liked things to work - work, no matter what - and to him that meant using established, proven technology. Unfortunately, he had been voted down this time.

Eddie had two particular areas of concern. One was the black photovoltaic panels, with their rows of octagonal silicon wafers, mounted on the roof and hood of the vehicles. These panels were efficient, and much less fragile than the old photovoltaics. Eddie had mounted them with special vibration-damping units of his own design. But the fact remained, if the panels were injured in any way, they would no longer be able to charge the vehicles, or run the electronics. All their systems would stop dead.

His other concern was the batteries themselves. Thorne had selected the new lithium-ion batteries from Nissan, which were extremely efficient on a weight basis. But they were still experimental, which to Eddie was just a polite word for "unreliable."

Eddie had argued for backups; he had argued for a little gasoline generator, just in case; he had argued for lots of things. And he had always been voted down. Under the circumstances, Eddie did the only sensible thing: he built in a few extras, and didn't tell anybody about it.

He was pretty sure Thorne knew he had done that. But Thorne never said anything. And Eddie never brought it up. But now that he was here, on this island in the middle of nowhere, he was glad he had. Because the fact was, you never knew.

Thorne watched as Eddie backed the Explorer out of the container, and into the high grass. Eddie left the car in the middle of the clearing, where the sunlight would strike the panels and top up the charge.

Thorne got behind the wheel of the first trailer, and backed it out. It was odd to drive a vehicle which was so quiet; the loudest sound was the tires on the metal container. And once it was on the grass, there was hardly any sound at all. Thorne climbed out, and linked up the two trailers, locking them together with the flexible steel accordion connector.

Finally, he turned to the motorcycle. It, too, was electric; Thorne rolled it to the rear of the Explorer, lifted it onto brackets, hooked the power cord into the same system that ran the vehicle, and recharged the battery. He stepped back. "That does it."

In the hot, quiet clearing, Eddie stared toward the high circular rim of the crater, rising in the distance above the dense jungle. The bare rock shimmered in the morning heat, the walls forbidding and harsh. He had a sense of desolation, of entrapment. "Why would anyone ever come here?" he said.

Malcolm, leaning on his cane, smiled. "To get away from it all, Eddie. Don't you ever want to get away from it all?"

"Not if I can help it," Eddie said. "Me, I always like a Pizza Hut nearby, you know what I mean?"

"Well, you're a ways from one now."

Thorne returned to the back panel of the trailer, and pulled out a pair of heavy rifles. Beneath the barrel of each hung two aluminum canisters, side by side. He handed one rifle to Eddie, showed the other to Malcolm. "You ever seen these?"

"Read about them," Malcolm said. "This is the Swedish thing?"

"Right. Lindstradt air gun. Most expensive rifle in the world. Rugged, simple, accurate, and reliable. Fires a subsonic Fluger impact delivery dart, containing whatever compound you want." Thorne cracked open the cartridge bank, revealing a row of plastic containers filled with straw-colored liquid. Each cartridge was tipped with a three-inch needle. "We've loaded the enhanced venom of Conus purpurascens, the South Sea cone shell. It's the most powerful neurotoxin in the world. Acts within a two-thousandth of a second. It's faster than the nerve-conduction velocity. The animal's down before it feels the prick of the dart."

"Lethal?"

Thorne nodded. "No screwing around here. Just remember, you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot with this, because you'll be dead before you realize that you've pulled the trigger."

Malcolm nodded. "Is there an antidote?"

"No. But what's the point? There'd be no time to administer it if there was."

"That makes things simple," Malcolm said, taking the gun.

"Just thought you ought to know," Thorne said. "Eddie? Let's get going."

E
ddie climbed into the Explorer. Thorne and Malcolm climbed into the cab of the trailer. A moment later, the radio clicked. Eddie said, "You putting up the database, Doc?"

"Right now," Thorne said.

He plugged the optical disk into the dashboard slot. On the small monitor facing him, he saw the island appear, but it was largely obscured behind patches of cloud. "What good is that?" Malcolm said.

"Just wait," Thorne said. "It's a system. It's going to sum data."

"Data from what?"

"Radar." In a moment, a satellite radar image overlaid the photograph. The radar could penetrate the clouds. Thorne pressed a button, and the computer traced the edges, enhancing details, highlighting the faint spidery track of the road system.

"Pretty slick," Malcolm said. But to Thorne, he seemed tense.

"I've got it," Eddie said, on the radio.

Malcolm said, "He can see the same thing?"

"Yes. On his dashboard."

"But I don't have the CPS," Eddie said, anxiously. "Isn't it working?"

"You guys," Thorne said. "Give it a minute. It's reading the optical. Waystations are coming up."

There was a cone-shaped Global Positioning Sensor mounted in the roof of the trailer. Taking radio data from orbiting navigation satellites thousands of miles overhead, the GPS could calculate the position of the vehicles within a few yards. In a moment, a flashing red X appeared on the map of the island.

"Okay," Eddie said, on the radio. "I got it. Looks like a road leading out of the clearing to the north. That where we're going?"

"I'd say so," Thorne said. According to the map, the road twisted several miles across the interior of the island, before finally reaching a place where all the roads seemed to meet. There was the suggestion of buildings there, but it was hard to be sure.

"Okay, Doc. Here we go."

Eddie drove past him, and took the lead. Thorne stepped on the accelerator, and the trailer hummed forward, following the Explorer.

Beside him, Malcolm was silent, fiddling with a small notebook computer on his lap. He never looked out the window.

In a few moments, they had left the clearing behind, and were moving through dense jungle. Thorne's panel lights flashed: the vehicle switched to its batteries. There wasn't enough sunlight coming through the trees to power the trailer any more. They drove on.

"How you doing, Doc?" Eddie said. "You holding charge?"

"Just fine, Eddie."

"He sounds nervous," Malcolm said.

"Just worried about the equipment."

"The hell," Eddie said. "I'm worried about me."

Although the road was overgrown and in poor condition they made good progress. After about ten minutes, they came to a small stream, with muddy banks. The Explorer started across it, then stopped. Eddie got out, stepping over rocks in the water, walking back.

"What is it?"

"I saw something, Doc."

Thorne and Malcolm got out of the trailer, and stood on the banks of the stream. They heard the distant cries of what sounded like birds. Malcolm looked up, frowning.

"Birds?" Thorne said.

Malcolm shook his head, no.

Eddie bent over, and plucked a strip of cloth out of the mud. It was dark-green Gore-Tex, with a strip of leather sewn along one edge. "That's from one of our expedition packs," he said.

"The one we made for Levine?"

"Yes, Doc."

"You put a sensor in the pack?" Thorne asked. They usually sewed location sensors inside their expedition packs.

"Yes."

"May I see that?" Malcolm asked. He took the strip of cloth and held it up to the light. He fingered the torn edge thoughtfully

Thorne uncapped a small receiver from his belt. It looked like an oversized pager. He stared at the liquid-crystal readout. "I'm not getting any signal…"

Eddie stared at the muddy bank. He bent over again. "Here's another piece of cloth. And another, Seems like the pack was ripped into shreds, Doc."

Another bird cry floated toward them, distant, unworldly. Malcolm stared off in the distance, trying to locate its source. And then he heard Eddie say, "Uh-oh. We have company."

There were a half-dozen bright-green lizard-like animals, standing in a group near the trailer. They were about the size of chickens, and they chirped animatedly. They stood upright on their hind legs, balancing with their tails straight out. When they walked, their heads bobbed up and down in nervous little jerks, exactly like a chicken. And they made a distinctive squeaking sound, very reminiscent of a bird. Yet they looked like lizards with long tails. They had quizzical, alert faces, and they cocked their heads when they looked at the men.

Eddie said, "What is this, a salamander convention?"

The green lizards stood, watched. Several more appeared, from beneath the trailer, and from the foliage nearby. Soon there were a dozen lizards, watching and chattering.

"Compys," Malcolm said. "Procompsognathus triassicus, is the actual name."

"You mean these are - "

"Yes. They're dinosaurs."

Eddie frowned, stared. "I didn't know they came so small," he said finally.

"Dinosaurs were mostly small," Malcolm said. "People always think they were huge, but the average dinosaur was the size of a sheep, or a small pony."

Eddie said, "They look like chickens."

"Yes. Very bird-like."

"Is there any danger?" Thorne said.

"Not really," Malcolm said. "They're small scavengers, like jackals.

They feed on dead animals. But I wouldn't get close. Their bite is mildly poisonous."

"I'm not getting close," Eddie said. "They give me the creeps. It's like they're not scared."

Malcolm had noticed that, too. "I imagine it's because there haven't been any human beings on this island. These animals don't have any reason to fear man."

"Well, let's give them a reason," Eddie said. He picked up a rock.

"Hey!" Malcolm said. "Don't do that! The whole idea is - "

But Eddie had already thrown the rock. It landed near a cluster of compys, and the lizards ducked away. But the others hardly moved. A few of them hopped up and down, showing agitation. But the group stayed where they were. They just chittered, and cocked their heads.

"Weird," Eddie said. He sniffed the air. "You notice that smell?"

"Yes," Malcolm said. "They have a distinctive odor."

"Rotten, is more like it," Eddie said. "They smell rotten. Like something dead. And you ask me, it's not natural, animals that don't show fear like that. What if they have rabies or something?"

"They don't," Malcolm said.

"How do you know?"

"Because only mammals carry rabies." But even as he said it, he wondered if that was right. Warm-blooded animals carried rabies. Were the compys warm-blooded? He wasn't sure.

There was a rustling sound from above. Malcolm looked up at the canopy Of trees overhead. He saw movement in the high foliage, as unseen small animals jumped from branch to branch. He heard squeaks and chirps, distinctly animal sounds.

"Those aren't birds, up there," Thorne said. "Monkeys?"

"Maybe," Malcolm said. "I doubt it."

Eddie shivered. "I say we get out of here,"

He returned to the stream, and climbed into the Explorer. Malcolm walked cautiously with Thorne back to the trailer entrance. The compys parted around them, but still did not run away. They stood all around their legs, chattering excitedly. Malcolm and Thorne climbed into the trailer and closed the doors, being careful not to shut them on the little creatures.

Thorne sat behind the wheel, and turned on the motor. Ahead, they saw that Eddie was already driving the Explorer through the stream, and heading up the sloping ridge on the far side.

"The, uh, procomso-whatevers, Eddie said, over the radio. "They're real, aren't they?"

"Oh yes, Malcolm said softly. "They're real."