flowers, most of which gave off the aroma of rotting meat.
For the first leg of our journey, we had modern energy weapons hidden inside conventional-looking spears and axes. It would have been more sporting to face the Mesozoic fauna with primitive weapons, but of course we had no interest in that sort of adventure. We often did run into creatures resembling the Deinonychus (Lower Cretaceous period)âabout the size of a human but fast, and all claws and teeth. They travel in packs, evidently preying on the large placid herbivores. We never saw fewer than six in a group, and once were cornered by a pack of twenty. We had to kill all of them, our beams silently slashing them into steaming chunks of meat. None paid any attention to what was happening to his comrades but just kept advancing, bent low to the ground, claws out, teeth bared, roaring. Their meat tasted like chicken, but very tough.
It took us nine days to reach the coast, following a river. (Did I mention that days here are twenty-eight hours long? Our circadian rhythms had been adjusted accordingly, but there are other physiological factors. Mostly having to do with fatigue.) We found a conspicuous rock formation and buried our modern weapons a hundred meters to the north of it. Then we buried their power sources another hundred paces north. We kept one crazer for group defense, to be discarded before we reached the first island, but otherwise all we had was flint and stone and bicuspids with amazing memories.
We had built several boats with these tools during our training on Selva, but of course it was rather different here. The long day, and no comfortable cot to retire to at night. No tent to keep out the flying insects, no clean soft clothes in the morning, no this, no that. Terrible heat and a pervasive moldy smell that kept us all sniffling in spite of the antiallergenic drugs that our modified endocrine systems fed us. We did manage to get a fire going, which gave us security and roast fish and greatly simplified the boatbuilding. We felled two large trees and used fire to hollow them out, making outrigger canoes similar to the ones the Maori used to populate the sparse South Pacific. We werenât able to raise sails, though, since the Plathys donât have that technology. They wouldnât have helped much, anyway; summer was usually dead calm. We didnât look forward to rowing 250 kilometers in the subtropical heat. But we would do it systematically.
Herb was good at pottery, so I exempted him from boatbuilding in exchange for the fascinating job of crafting and firing dozens of water jugs. That was going to be our main survival problem, since it was not likely to rain during the couple of weeks weâd be at sea. Food was no problem; we could spear fish and probably birds (though eating a raw bird was not an experiment even I could look forward to) and also had a supply of smoked dinosaur.
I designed the boats so that either one would be big enough to carry all twelve of us, in case of trouble. As a further safeguard, we took a shakedown cruise, a night and a day of paddling and staying anchored near shore. We took our last fresh-water bath, topped off the jugs, loaded our gear, and cast off at sundown.
The idea had been to row all night, with ten minutesâ rest each hour, and keep going for a couple of hours after sunup, for as long as we could reliably gauge our direction from the angle of the sun. Then anchor (the sea was nowhere more than ten or twelve meters deep) and hide from the sun all day under woven shades, fishing and sleeping and engaging in elevated discourse. Start paddling again when the sun was low enough to tell us where north was. It did go that way for several days, until the weather changed.
It was just a thin haze, but it was enough to stop us dead. We had no navigational instruments, relying on the dim triangle of stars that marked the south celestial pole. No stars, no progress.
This was when I found out
For the first leg of our journey, we had modern energy weapons hidden inside conventional-looking spears and axes. It would have been more sporting to face the Mesozoic fauna with primitive weapons, but of course we had no interest in that sort of adventure. We often did run into creatures resembling the Deinonychus (Lower Cretaceous period)âabout the size of a human but fast, and all claws and teeth. They travel in packs, evidently preying on the large placid herbivores. We never saw fewer than six in a group, and once were cornered by a pack of twenty. We had to kill all of them, our beams silently slashing them into steaming chunks of meat. None paid any attention to what was happening to his comrades but just kept advancing, bent low to the ground, claws out, teeth bared, roaring. Their meat tasted like chicken, but very tough.
It took us nine days to reach the coast, following a river. (Did I mention that days here are twenty-eight hours long? Our circadian rhythms had been adjusted accordingly, but there are other physiological factors. Mostly having to do with fatigue.) We found a conspicuous rock formation and buried our modern weapons a hundred meters to the north of it. Then we buried their power sources another hundred paces north. We kept one crazer for group defense, to be discarded before we reached the first island, but otherwise all we had was flint and stone and bicuspids with amazing memories.
We had built several boats with these tools during our training on Selva, but of course it was rather different here. The long day, and no comfortable cot to retire to at night. No tent to keep out the flying insects, no clean soft clothes in the morning, no this, no that. Terrible heat and a pervasive moldy smell that kept us all sniffling in spite of the antiallergenic drugs that our modified endocrine systems fed us. We did manage to get a fire going, which gave us security and roast fish and greatly simplified the boatbuilding. We felled two large trees and used fire to hollow them out, making outrigger canoes similar to the ones the Maori used to populate the sparse South Pacific. We werenât able to raise sails, though, since the Plathys donât have that technology. They wouldnât have helped much, anyway; summer was usually dead calm. We didnât look forward to rowing 250 kilometers in the subtropical heat. But we would do it systematically.
Herb was good at pottery, so I exempted him from boatbuilding in exchange for the fascinating job of crafting and firing dozens of water jugs. That was going to be our main survival problem, since it was not likely to rain during the couple of weeks weâd be at sea. Food was no problem; we could spear fish and probably birds (though eating a raw bird was not an experiment even I could look forward to) and also had a supply of smoked dinosaur.
I designed the boats so that either one would be big enough to carry all twelve of us, in case of trouble. As a further safeguard, we took a shakedown cruise, a night and a day of paddling and staying anchored near shore. We took our last fresh-water bath, topped off the jugs, loaded our gear, and cast off at sundown.
The idea had been to row all night, with ten minutesâ rest each hour, and keep going for a couple of hours after sunup, for as long as we could reliably gauge our direction from the angle of the sun. Then anchor (the sea was nowhere more than ten or twelve meters deep) and hide from the sun all day under woven shades, fishing and sleeping and engaging in elevated discourse. Start paddling again when the sun was low enough to tell us where north was. It did go that way for several days, until the weather changed.
It was just a thin haze, but it was enough to stop us dead. We had no navigational instruments, relying on the dim triangle of stars that marked the south celestial pole. No stars, no progress.
This was when I found out
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