61 One Of Them

The photographs in this episode were taken by Anne Cervenka of Palmer Alaska. She made the animals as well. Thank you, Anne, for always being such an inspiration to me!

The mammoth stretched its serpentine trunk toward Flash Meridian, and the saber toothed tiger licked his chops and crouched.

What could he do?  He would not be able to outrun them, and so he backed up against a tree trunk and pulled the pelt tighter around his body.  They might see him as one of them. It seemed more likely, however, that they were the ones who had devoured the flesh of the animal whose skin he now wore.  Well, the tiger, anyway. That was not such a pleasant thought. The only thing he felt confident about was that he would not freeze to death.

The mammoth snorted and trumpeted a short echoing blast into the air. 

Flash closed his eyes, awaiting the inevitable.

He felt a burst of hot air in his face and turned his head away. His eyes were still closed. 

He became aware of a deep tone. A rumbling humming sound so deep he and the tree he leaned against seemed to vibrate. The sound was so deep he couldn’t be sure if he actually heard it audibly. But he was very aware of it. 

Then he felt a blow to his chest. A punch that was, thankfully, softened by the pelt and his heavy clothing. He opened his eyes. The mammoth poked him again. The tip of its trunk was like a finger. 

For the first time, Flash noticed the scale of the animal.  It must have been a dwarf, about the size of a small cow.  It was shorter than him, and covered with a long protective coat that cascaded in knotted cords to the ground. It’s ivory tusks reached out toward him, curving dramatically. 

Another rumbling sound began. This one was clearly audible. The growling came from the great cat as it approached him. Once again, Flash closed his eyes and prepared for the worst. 

He had never before considered that he would meet his end by the fangs of a saber toothed tiger. What a way to go!  It was a shame that no one would know. 

The growling grew louder, and flash nearly lost his balance when the beast pushed against him. 

He opened his eyes again and saw the huge feline head rub against the black pelt… purring!

Instinctively, he reached out and petted the animal, digging his fingers into the heavy orange and brown coat as though it were an enormous house cat. 

“Hey, boy…” he cooed, afraid that the friendliness might be short-lived.  It paced back and forth, rubbing itself against Flash, who was constantly amazed at the wonderful things he was privileged to see. 

60 HideBy the time Flash made it back to the snow-covered plain, the animals were gone. 

He swooped down low over the area where he had seen them, and was able to follow their tracks toward an area where giant tree trunks protruded through the surface of the drifts. 

Here, he lost their trail, but the colossal trees intrigued him. He brought the ship down in a clearing that was more or less protected from the wind. 

The surface was firm, but Flash moved with caution on what could be unstable terrain.  He approached one of the trees but then stopped dead in his tracks.  It appeared that he was not alone. 

He drew his ray gun and pointed it at a large hairy animal laying in a hollow at the base of another tree.  Other than the wind blowing its shaggy black coat, the animal did not stir. 

Flash stood frozen in his tracks and barely breathed. Whatever this creature was, he did not want to startle it. But it was too cold to stand motionless for long.  With his ray gun aimed in self defense, he hollered.  Nothing happened. 

He threw a snowball at it. Still no response. Could it be hibernating?  

A barren branch jutted out above where the creature lay. Flash blasted the base of the branch which fell directly onto the animal. Still, it remained motionless, and Flash made a wide circle around it.  This was no living thing. He approached it and prodded it with part of the branch. It was a wooly black hide, and Flash stretched it out on the snow. It had been picked clean. 

The hide could come in useful. Flash gathered it up and headed back toward the TNI2. The pelt was heavy, and the wind was bitter, so Flash wrapped the hide around himself, and followed his tracks back to the ship. He heard something, and raised his gaze. A mammoth and a saber toothed tiger stood between him and his craft.

Wooly mammoths had a number of adaptations to the cold, most famously the thick layer of shaggy hair, up to 1 meter in length, with a fine underwool, for which the wooly mammoth is named.

59 The Hunt

Flash raised his binoculars to his eyes to determine exactly what was out there.  At first glance, it looked like a boulder, but it was moving. When he brought the image into focus, he could hardly believe what he saw. 

Moving slowly across the ice floe, waving its trunk in the air, Flash saw a wooly mammoth.  If this planet truly was like Earth, it was like Earth 10,000 to 150,000 years ago.  If natural selection had produced the specimen that stood before him, Flash wondered what other life forms he might encounter here. 

Even as this thought crossed his mind, he saw something else moving in contrast to the expanse of white. The second form moved faster than the first, and seemed to be stalking it.  It fell beyond the rise of a drift before Flash could get a good look at it, and so he lowered the glasses and scanned the area.

It reappeared much closer to the pachyderm, and Flash prepared himself to observe an attack.  No person alive had seen an actual living mammoth, and now it seemed unlikely that this one would be alive for long.  Flash pressed the record button on his binoculars in order to capture the events that were about to unfold. 

The saber-toothed tiger, which Flash could see clearly now, was enormous. It was almost the size of the mammoth, which Flash now surmised to be a calf.  How could this be?  The creature had enormous, curving tusks. 

The great cat leapt into the air and came down on its prey.  Flash watched in fascinated horror, observing the primal laws of nature play out before him. 

No blood stained the pristine landscape. As He watched, the ancient elephant rose and charged the tiger. As the two circled each other, Flash Meridian realized, among paw and trunk slaps, head butts and posturing, that these were animals at play.  Their actions were much like those of a basket of puppies. 

At last, the cat sat, panting as the mammoth gently stroked its side with its powerful trunk. 

Flash found it difficult to pull himself away from this scene, but he had no wooly coat to protect him from the frigid temperature. The wind was picking up again, and so he reluctantly turned and went back to his ship. 

He boarded the TNI2, replaying the playful hunt over and over in his mind. And then he had an idea. 

While it was light out, he could survey the area from above. 

In the warmth and safety of the craft, Flash levitated and swung the ship around in the ample underground passageway.

He burst out into the bright light, hovering between sky blue and uninterrupted white. 

He crested the highest peaks, and followed their tapering slopes to the west. Deep chasms split the frozen surface in places, revealing deep blue openings, but most of the vista was smooth white. 

This exhilarating experience stood in stark contrast to the oppressive darkness of the cave the night before. 

58 Someone

Night fell, but Flash remained wide awake. The unchanging blackness beyond the reach of his incandescent beams configured itself in his mind into forms of black dogs, black horses and black cloaked men racing from the unknown darkness.  The imagined forms carried a threat and Flash tried to distract his mind from the phantoms. What could trigger this fear?  Whatever it was, he felt certain he was not alone.


For hours, he peered into the darkness, and the demons of his own soul surfaced, filling him with dread. Outside the ship, nothing changed. 


By morning light, Flash had devised a plan. He would excavate some of the solids held in the ice, run tests on the rock, and get a sense of the makeup of the planet. 

The soft blue of morning brought a renewed sense of peace and hope.  His fear had been unfounded. 

He ate a hearty breakfast thanks to the table of elements, gathered his tools, bundled up and left the warmth and security of the TNI2. 

The ice appeared opaque again in the light of day. Flash set about with a pickaxe, in a location he had memorized during the long, sleepless night. 

The brittle ice gave way, leaving a small crater, but loosening a chunk of blue crystal that clearly contained something. Flash placed this into a bucket and the bucket into the TNI2. 

He saw no signs of life, yet he could not escape the sense of something, or someone else. 


He walked to the opening of the cave, feeling very small beneath its arches. The cloudless sky looked down on him, and he turned his gaze from it to the icy plain below. It stretched as far as his eyes could see. It sloped down away from him to the sea, many, many miles in the distance.  Miles of snow, disturbed only by the wind, had quieted since the day before. 

Then Flash noticed something in the distance. Something large and dark lumbered across the ice. 

57 Caves

From his vantage point within the TNI2, Flash fell from black into pale blue, plummeting toward a world of pure white. A windswept plain stretched out below him, bordered on one side by the sea, and on the other by cliffs that rose to mountain peaks.  Cave openings riddled a section of a cliff at ground level, and this is where Flash decided to touch down. The rest of the area appeared to be smooth, open ice.  A vast, frozen desert.  The caves might offer some shelter, and maybe access to the geology of the planet. 

The small space ship came to rest in front of the entrance to an enormous cave, and Flash examined his surroundings from the safety of the craft. The opening was just one of many, and the interior walls were shadowed in deep blue and purple. Icy pillars lined the walls as deep as Flash could see.  The caves reminded him of stacks of eviscerated bisected whale bodies. 

The wind raged, and cyclones of snow and ice climbed toward the cloudless sky.  Within minutes, a drift began to form around the pod, and Flash felt the best option would be to move the ship inside. 

The undulating  purple and blue walls loomed above the ship, reflecting light at the mouth of the cave, and receding to darkness deeper inside. The ancient columns of ice dwarfed any built by man, and Flash felt secure against any threat of a collapse. The question was, how deep he should go. 

Deep enough to escape the fierce winds, but not so deep as to be engulfed in pitch blackness. He could, however, illuminate his immediate surroundings with lights on the ship. It remained to be seen what the patterns of day and night would be on this planet, if any. 

The walls of the cave rose like an enormous ribcage, and here, Flash was protected from the harsh windchills outside. 

Waves of deep blue ice rippled along the sides of the corridor and receded into the dark depths. 

The air was pure. The temperature was chilly. Flash was accustomed to being alone in the cold blackness of space, but he found it disconcerting to be enclosed like this. 

Thoughts of an avalanche sealing the portal, creatures appearing from the dark to feed in the open air, or gradually succumbing to the cold crossed his mind. 

The pale blue light that filtered into the cave turned slightly pink and began to fade. Flash fired up the lights on the exterior of his ship. The yellow glow cast eerie black shadows into the alcoves.  The blue walls appeared translucent green in the glow, and Flash could see indistinguishable forms suspended within the ice. 

www.sparkshooter.com

56 Building Blocks

As Flash traveled further and further from Olo, he realized that he had no particular destination in mind, yet he looked forward to whatever adventure awaited him.

Scanning the nearby star systems, he was able to glimpse, at great distance, fantastic nebulae in every conceivable shape and color.  These, he charted, photographed, and recorded. He was mindful of the fact that no other Earthling had ever seen the wonders that he beheld.  Gas clouds burst out like slow moving fireworks. A glacially slow celebration, which was breathtaking and vast. 

When he was not gazing at stars, he read from the book he had picked up back on Olo. The book was like an intergalactic garage sale find.  It was a well used item that had outgrown its usefulness to the former owner, yet it fit him perfectly. He could not understand how his own story could have been told in its pages, and every time he opened it, he wondered at it.  Upon waking, he would open the book to see if it had been a dream, but there it was in black and white. His own thoughts and actions were told, and interspersed with other beautiful, heroic, unbelievable stories. Could they also be true accounts, as his own story was?

Back on Earth, people crowded the edges of the water, building their homes, whenever possible, with a view of a lake, river or ocean. This was never satisfying for Flash, who wanted to touch, or be submerged in the water rather than just see it in the distance. 

When looking at a mountain, he wanted to climb it or explore a cave beneath it. 

This is how he felt as he looked at the distant stars with their rings of orbiting asteroids and planets, and so he began looking for one that would support life.

He zeroed in on a planet whose scan showed oxygen and water, and set a course toward it. 

The blue and white planet sparkled like a diamond on the screen, and Flash wondered what he might find there.  It was an icy planet, but contained the building blocks of life. 

As Flash approached the Earth-sized planet, he began to see its swirling blue and white surface in greater detail. He’d seen other watery planets which did not have continents, and in this case, he could not be certain whether he was seeing clouds, continents or simply vast areas of ice-covered ocean.  His readings indicated that it was cold, with temperatures ranging around 100 degrees below zero fahrenheit.  Cold… Dangerously cold. But he was prepared for those bitter conditions, and even colder.

He would be safe inside his ship, and he had gear to protect him outside the ship as well. Once again, Flash found himself looking down on a planet from orbit. It was clear from this vantage point that there were continents under the ice floes. Spiraling clouds hung in the atmosphere, and passed over the frozen expanse. Flash had second thoughts about this. A lush, warm planet would be more inviting for sure, and yet he felt he had chosen this planet for a reason. Out of an infinite number of choices, he felt almost as though he had been called to this one. There was something familiar about it, for all the hostility of its climate, and he wanted to know what mysteries it might hold. Unknown forces held it in eternal winter, though its proximity to its sun was similar to that of Earth. 

If he sat and thought about it too long, he figured he might change his mind, so he gathered cold weather gear and opened the hatch to the TNI2. The temperatures out here in space were far colder than anything he would run into down there. 

Flash gazed down at the rippling whiteness, set against the deepest blue he could imagine, separated by a dynamic, jagged shoreline. What could it be that drew him here?