‘Loud and clear.’
Hefting a blaster from the locker, I clamped a Taser to the sticky patch on one thigh and hooked an industrial strength pepper spray to my belt. Closing my eyes I sprayed myself liberally with Professor Rapson’s Special Spray. Theoretically I now smelled vegetable rather than animal. In reality I smelled like a giant rotting cabbage. Checking the proximities one last time, I stood by the door, took a couple of deep breaths, jumped up and down, shrugged my shoulders twice, and said, ‘Door.’
Bloody hell, it was hot; like opening an oven.
And wet. I felt the sweat break out all over my body. Experience told me the inside of both pods would be unspeakable within a week.
And noisy; mostly chirping insects, but distant bellows and grunts hinted at larger stuff.
And green, with thick, lush growth everywhere. All the colours blazed bright and fresh and new as if the world hadn’t yet had time to wear them out.
And smelly; even the smell was green. Wet earth, wet foliage, wet shit; like the strongest farmyard smells ever, sized up a hundred times.
And eggs; faintly, I could smell bad eggs. I knew what that would be and sure enough, on the horizon, I could see smudgy shapes with suspicious clouds above them. Volcanoes and all the fun things they bring to the party; eruptions, molten lava, earthquakes, and pyroclastic flows. Yay! But all with luck a nice safe distance away. I turned around, looked up and nearly had a heart attack. All right, we weren’t at the bottom of the sea, which was good, but we did appear to have landed on the lower slopes of Krakatoa’s great-grandmother. The smoking summit looked a long way off, but it wasn’t really where we wanted to be in terms of Health and Safety. Still, Health and Safety is something that happens to other people and there was no time to stand and stare. Move!
‘To your right and downhill,’ said Sussman in my ear. Turning my head, I could see him, correctly dressed for once, standing in his own doorway.
‘On my way.’
The ground seemed firm enough. I set off downhill. After twenty paces I turned and looked back at my own pod so I could find it again, nestling just below the treeline on a small plateau. To my left, a thick wood sloped upwards. To my right, the slope continued down to a wide, flat, treeless area which served as a coastal plain for either a large lake or possibly a small inland sea.
I remembered to drop to one knee and not let go of the blaster, but that’s about as far as Guthrie’s careful training got me. Oh, and I remembered to shut my mouth. Otherwise, I just stared like a trainee. It was shameful. Good job there were no senior staff around to see it. A movement beside me made me jump a mile, but it was only Sussman.
‘Got fed up with waiting,’ he said crossly. ‘Fuck me!’
Now I knew why I did this job.
Below us, a small herd of what I recognised as Maiasaurae, the Good Mothers, plodded across the plain. They herded tightly together, nervously protecting their young from predators. I looked round to see if any Troodons were trailing the herd. They would be around somewhere. The procession continued out of view.
‘Ankylosaurus,’ whispered Sussman, pointing to his left and proving he hadn’t been wasting his time these last months. ‘The last armour-plated dinosaur. Just look at him.’ Hard not to – he was as big as a bloody tank.
‘Come on,’ I said, getting up. ‘Time for this later. Let’s do a recce.’ Even then, it took a few minutes to drag ourselves away. We were the first humans, the only humans, ever to see all this, but we had to have to sharpen up or we wouldn’t last ten minutes. Anything could have crept up behind us while we gawped like tourists.
‘Watch your step here,’ he warned, as we made our way to Three. ‘It’s a bit dodgy underfoot.’
It was a bit loose, but so long as we took things slowly and didn’t try it in the dark, we should be OK.
We grinned at each other in excitement. ‘Let’s do this thing!’
We were on Day 74 of a near-perfect mission.
The day everything blew up in my face.
We were so tired even I was sleeping like the dead. Sussman had been as good as his word about the housekeeping – well, most of it anyway – and each morning woke me with a cup of tea.
I don’t know why, maybe some deep-seated instinct kicked in, I don’t know, but I opened my eyes that morning to find Sussman kneeling over me with an erection the size of a telegraph pole and a not very nice expression on his face.
Instinct kicked in. Literally. I brought my knees up, slammed both feet into his chest and straightened my legs.