The Unscheduled Mission (7 page)

“Then maybe you can answer a question I’ve wondered about,” Iris told her. “Park, I and the people of Van Winkle Town come from two hundred and fifty million years ago.”

“I know that,” Sartena nodded. “Pretty incredible if you ask me.”

“Yes,” agreed Iris. “And in that time evolution has never ceased. We woke up, so to speak, to find forms of life we never imagined; new classes, maybe even some new kingdoms. During our stasis, evolution kept going without stop. That includes not only the post-mammals, post-aves and the motile plants, but really every form of life on both the macro and micro scale.”

“Of course,” Sartena nodded.

“Why then weren’t there viruses and bacteria so evolved waiting for us that could kill us all in days?” Iris asked.

“Why should there have been?” Sartena countered. “I mean, you have to keep in mind that evolution is not an intelligent process and the changes are always going to be in response to the environment. Your sort of human has been gone for hundreds of millions of years. Why should any modern virus or bacteria even recognize you as a host? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but considering you’re still here…”

“And we haven’t had the Polka Dot Plague,” Park added irreverently.

“And you haven’t had the Polka Dot Plague,” Sartena echoed. “Do I want to know what that is?”

“Not really,” Park chuckled.

“Anyway, since you’re here and healthy, it is obvious that the forms of germs that knew you and preyed on you have either gone extinct from a lack of a food supply or evolved into something that does not affect you,” Sartena concluded.

“This week,” Park added. “Now that we’re back in circulation the local bugs will start to adapt to us, I’m sure. Come to think about that, I’d better make a note to have someone start work in antibiotics. Most of the medicines we know will probably be useless against the germs of today.”

“Have them contact their Mer counterparts,” Iris suggested.

“Good idea,” Sartena agreed. “The medical researchers of the Mer should
 
have a general and specific understanding of the germs of Earth now.”

“Sartena, I thought you were a navigator,” Marisea commented.

“I am,” Sartena admitted. “It doesn’t keep me from learning other things. Navigation is pretty straight forward you know. You note your current position, pick a destination, allow for galactic and solar system rotations, aim and then see if your course agrees with the one the computer came up with. If it doesn’t you run through your figures again and see which got it wrong. Usually it’s the navigator, of course, but every so often the computer bollixes a course so we always double check. In between though, there’s a lot of free time especially on interstellar trips. I read all sorts of books, fiction and non-fiction. I like reading about the sciences in particular.”

“Me too!” Marisea agreed, “actually, I like reading almost everything.”

“So what are you going to study in University?” Sartena asked.

“Can’t I study everything?” Marisea asked.

Iris laughed, “You can try, but the University will try to get you to specialize and a degree always looks better when it’s actually in something, but that doesn’t mean you can’t choose a subject that is fairly general in itself.”

“It also doesn’t mean that you have to get your second degree in the same field as your first,” Park advised her. “I have several academic degrees and none of them in the same field as the others. Besides in your first degree you won’t really be specializing. I’ve seen the degree requirements you have and they don’t look all that different from what I had when I was your age. The primary degree – we used to call it a bachelor’s – is just advanced education on a general scale. You’ll have a chance to emphasize a single field or two, but it is still not specialization. Later on, in the secondary, tertiary and doctorates you will specialize, and then not if you keep changing your field.”

“Besides,” Dannet added. “You have to start somewhere, even if you do want to learn everything.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Marisea agreed with all of them. “Thanks.”

Two days later, Sartena was the first one to notice the change in vegetation as they flew over one of the inner valleys of the
Atlantic
Mountains
. “There,” she said as she pointed northward. “I think the trees on the mountains to the east are darker.”

Park looked where she was pointing and squinted. “Yeah, I think you’re right. The change starts on that side of the valley. It’s subtle, but definitely different.”

“I don’t see it,” Marisea remarked.

“You’re probably looking too closely for a definite line of division,” Park told her. “Try unfocusing your eyes as you look. Just try to view it all at once. Don’t worry about details.”

Marisea tried again and a moment later remarked, “Oh yeah. Now I see it.”

“I learned that trick from an archaeologist,” Park explained. “He was near-sighted and had to wear glasses most of the time, but when out in the field and looking for things like crop marks and other subtle color differences, he could just take off his glasses and could see lines like this one effortlessly.”

“Glasses?” Sartena asked just ahead of Dannet.

“Corrective lenses in frames,” Marisea explained. “It’s a Human thing.”

“The Mer all have perfect vision,” Park commented, “and from your reactions I guess your people do too. Makes sense. If you’re going to juggle your genes for perfect adaptation to an environment, it would be silly to not improve everyone’s eyesight at the same time. Well, back before we went into stasis there was an old saying, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ That included how well our eyes worked, but we were able to correct that with glass lenses to bend light just right to make up for various deficiencies in the natural lenses inside our eyes.”

“Some of the humans at Van Winkle wear them,” Marisea added. “They sit on the bridge of your nose and have a couple of hooks that go behind your ears. There are also sunglasses with dark lenses to make the bright sun easier to take. I have a pair of those with me.”

“We have several pairs on board,” Park told them. “The windows on this buggy are polarized so we don’t need them, but if you find the sun too bright outside, let me know. Iris, I think we ought to land and take samples on both sides of this valley.”

“We should also set seismometers on both sides too,” Iris replied and she started looking for a landing site. “This must be a fairly active area even for these mountains.”

“Good point,” Park agreed. “In fact, I think we should set most of the seismometers along this boundary and then maybe place the rest to the east of here.”

They spent the next few days traveling over a thousand miles along the Africa-America border, setting up not only the seismometers, but the other monitoring equipment. Merely placing them was easy enough, but it took some time with each one to activate it and connect it to the
 
communications satellite so reports would filter directly back to Van Winkle Town.

“Whew!” Dannet laughed on the second evening after finding the boundary. “You call this a vacation? Next time let me pick the place, will you? We have some very nice beaches on Dennsee with people to serve fruity drinks while we just soak up the sun.”

“I’d have been glad to visit this time,” Park chuckled. “Well, maybe by next year we can. But you have to see, for me this is a vacation. Yes, we’re working hard, but it’s the first time in months I’ve been able to get out here and just explore the world. We’re in completely unknown territory here. There are no recorded visits of this area so if we aren’t the first people to come here since the continents crashed together, we might as well be.”

“As a boy I always wanted to be an explorer,” Dannet admitted, “but I never realized it required so much physical labor.”

“It’s never easy,” Park told him. “It’s not enough to be the first to go somewhere. You have to bring back the knowledge of what you learned. That’s why Iris is making those charts, why Marisea and Sartena are taking as many photos as they can and why we’re all collecting rock samples. Just be thankful we’re not taking plant and animal samples as well this trip. That will have to wait for the next expedition.”

“So what are the rocks telling us?” Dannet asked. “They all just look like rocks to me.”

“Not to a trained geologist, though,” Park replied, “which I’m not, but I did have a fair number of classes on the subject. Well, we’re finding mostly metamorphic rocks on both sides of the border, right?”

“What are metamorphic rocks?” Dannet asked.

“You’re kidding me, right?” Park asked. Dannet shook his head. “Well there are three main categories of rock. There are sedimentary rocks, those that were formed in layers of material to settle out of the air or water either in suspension or solution. Basically, the components just formed layers, such as silt at the end of a river, and those layers eventually became lithified. They include limestone, shale, sandstone and so forth.

“Then there are igneous rocks,” Park continued. “They were formed by having melted and then cooled off. There are volcanic rocks, like basalt or obsidian, that have cooled fairly quickly at or near the surface and there are plutonic rocks that cooled off much more slowly beneath the surface, allowing large crystals to form of the minerals within. These would be your granites and diorites, andesites and so forth.

“And finally there are the metamorphic rocks,” Park went on. “They are formed when another sort of rock is subjected to heat and pressure. So the original rock could be sedimentary, igneous or even an older form of metamorphic rock. To the east of here we are finding mostly gneiss and quartzite. At least that’s what they look like. I’ll let the petrologists do their chemical analyses and find out for sure. And to the west we’re finding a lot of slate.

“I honestly think we’re missing a lot and that slate could be old ocean floor for all I know,” Park admitted. “That’s why we need to take more samples further east. I doubt I ever knew what sort of rocks existed in
Africa and I’m not exactly sure just what part we’ve bumped up against here. In any case, in two hundred and fifty million years there has been plenty of time for new rocks to form and change, so it will be a while before we know what we have.”

“So we’re gradually emptying all those boxes of equipment and filling them with rocks,” Dannet observed.

“We’ll only fill one at best,” Park chuckled. “And we can store it in the spare bunk area. Cheer up. We’re almost done and then we can go on safari.”

“Safari?” Dannet asked. Park just laughed.

Sartena turned out to have a knack for finding the small animals of the mountains to photograph and under her tutelage, Marisea learned quite a lot. They returned with hundreds of
 
pictures of the miniature postmammalian and postavian species that lived in the high, forested valleys of the
Atlantic as well as
 
an almost cute and small land squid.

However, the most successful species they found in the mountains were a type of land crustacean that looked like a cross between a crab and a shrimp and ranged from one quarter to one half an inch long. They appeared to occupy the ecological niche once held by ants and were equally well adapted to breathing air and fresh water, often living beside small pools and puddles. Park concluded they were the primary scavengers of the
Atlantic
Mountains
.

As Iris had feared, the buggy could not directly fly over most of the mountains and even many of the passes between them were too steep for the vehicle to climb safely. The explorers rapidly made a habit of wearing their seatbelts whenever traveling and after two kitchen mishaps, made sure all the pots and pans were carefully stowed before taking off.

In the middle of the range, it became normal for the buggy to tilt alarmingly as Iris gunned it up the side of a pass and then back down again on the other side, but after another week of threading their way through the range they suddenly came out over an expanse of foothills that soon evened out into the dunes and rocks of Pangaean Africa’s great desert..

“Looks dry down there,” Dannet remarked.

“Probably a good spot for those who need to breathe dry air,” Park agreed. “Well, I did expect this. Satellite photos and other readings showed us this was a desert and we’ve wandered a fair way to the north. The environment is a good deal damper to the south.”

“The south?” Sartena asked. “That’s even further from the ocean than we are here. Why should it be damper there?”

“Yeah, that had our scientists concerned too for a while,” Park admitted. “We know from our own studies that in general supercontinents like Pangaea, tend to be dry. That’s because most of the moisture precipitates out before it reaches the interior. The area around Van Winkle is semi-arid these days but was actually quite wet in the Twenty-first Century. The only reason we have the moisture we do is that wet winds filter down from The Bay of Coolinda –
Hudson’s Bay we used to call it – and then precipitates out against the Atlantics, forming the head waters of the
Zontisso
River
.”

“That’s the longest river on Earth?” Dannet asked.

“It certainly is these days,” Park nodded. “So some of the humidity in the south of Africa now is what’s left after it makes its way down from the north and west and then gets squeezed out by the Atlantics and that eastern range that we haven’t named yet. Come to think of it the Atackack live to the southeast of those other mountains. They probably have a name for them. We should ask.”

“But that doesn’t entirely account for the environment of southern
Africa and that had us confused for a while,” Park continued. “It took the better part of a year’s worth of observations to finally spot the cause. Monsoons.”

“Monsoons?” Sartena asked.

“Once a year the wind from the Sink,” Park explained, “that’s the large internal sea within Pangaea – reverses and blows up and through the gap between the Atlantics and those other mountains sending a long plume of wet air into southern Africa. That condition lasts about two months and during that time the grasses of the region turn from gold to green. Then it all dries up again, except along the system of streams that join up and flow back into the Sink. It totally changed our knowledge of weather systems within supercontinents, I can tell you, and I think we’ll find that area far more interesting than this collection of sand dunes.”