Part 14 (1/2)

”Water?” Chet questioned.

”Yes; I saw a lake.”

”Cover? Trees? Not the man-eating ones?”

”Everything: open ground, hills, woods. It looked good to me then; it will look a lot better now,” said Walt enthusiastically.

”Walk faster,” said Chet; ”I'm stepping on your heels.”

They reached the valley floor some distance above the fumerole and the clouds of poison gas; and the march began. The attack of the flying reptiles had taught them the danger of exposure in the open, and they kept close to the trees that fringed the valley.

Once Chet left them and vanished among the trees, to return with the body of an animal slung over one shoulder.

”Moon-pig!” he told the others. ”Ask Doctor Kreiss if you want to know its species and ancestry and such things. All I know is that it has got hams, and I am going to roast a slice or so before we start.”

”Bow and arrow?” asked Harkness.

Chet nodded. ”I'm a dead shot,” he admitted, ”up to a range of ten feet.

This thing with the funny face stood still for me, so it looks as if we won't starve.”

The sun had swung rapidly into the sky; it was now overhead. One half of their first short day was gone. And Chet's suggestions of food met with approval.

”I can't quite get used to it,” Diane admitted to the rest; ”to think that for us time has turned back. We have been dropped into a new and savage world, and we must do as the savages of our world did thousands of years ago. Now!--in nineteen seventy-three!”

Chet removed a slab of meat from the hot throat of a tiny fumerole.

”Nineteen seventy-three on Earth,” he agreed, ”but not here. This is about nineteen thousand B.C.”

He called to Kreiss who was digging into a thin stratum of rock. The scientist had a splinter of flint in his hand, and he was gouging at a red outcropping layer.

”Old John Q. Neanderthal, himself!” said Chet. ”What have you found, silver or gold? Whatever it is, you're forgetting to eat; better come along.” But Doctor Kreiss had turned geologist, it was plain.

”Cinnabar,” he said; ”an ore of hydrargyrum!” His tone was excited, but Chet refused to have his mind turned from practical things.

”Is it good to eat?” he demanded.

”_Nein, nein!_” Kreiss protested. ”It is what you call mercury--quicksilver!”

”Ladies and gentlemen,” said Chet dryly, ”I see where this man Kreiss is to be a big help. He has discovered the site for the thermometer factory. He will be organizing a Chamber of Commerce next.”

He left out a portion of the cooked meat for Kreiss' later attention, and he and Harkness rolled a supply into leaf-wrapped packages and stowed them in the pockets of their coats before they started on. Again the little procession took up the march with Harkness leading.

”Leave as little trail as possible,” Harkness ordered. ”We don't want to shout to Schwartzmann where we have gone.”

They left the Valley of the Fires to follow the stream-bed in another hollow between great hills. Chet found himself looking back at the familiar flares with regret. Here was the only place on this new world which was not utterly strange to his eyes. He continued to glance behind him, long after the smoky fires were lost to sight; but he would not admit even to himself that it was for another reason.

Nineteen seventy-three!--and he was a man of the modern civilization.