Return to Skull Island (15 page)

“If he gets a battleship or cruiser here, it’ll be all over for us.”

The brontosaurus set us down at the fringe of the forest. Behind us, the rout of the Japs was just about complete. I didn’t want to see what was going on now and, I noticed, Pat also deliberately kept her back to the scene. The sounds were bad enough.

“You feel that?” she said.

I did. The ground beneath our feet was vibrating continuously now. It was accompanied by an almost subsonic rumble, like heavy traffic in a city.

“Something’s going on,” she said, “and I don’t like it much.”

Neither did I.

I heard my name called and turned to see our friend Mr. Rex waddling up. The brontosaurus lowered its head until Pat and I were on the same eye level as the tyrannosaurus. I repressed a shudder at seeing the glistening red stains around its mouth.

I quickly explained the situation and asked if he knew any shortcuts to the mountain.

“Certainly,” he said. “As I told you the other day, that’s where our mines and laboratories are located. I make the trip there several times a week.”

Pat and I stayed aboard the brontosaurus. It was a pleasant ride. We were well above most of the trees—most of which were really little more than overgrown ferns and evergreens—and since the dinosaur kept its head on a level there was none of the seasick-inducing motion of, say, a camel. It was more like being in the basket of a balloon. Pat was sitting ahead of me. With her shorts and mostly bare back, she made a nice distraction from the jungle. I heard her laugh. She sounded like a kid on a fairground ride.

Not for the first time did I find myself wondering about this strange young woman. I couldn’t think of a moment during everything we’d been through together where she’d been clearly frightened. Annoyed, perhaps, even worried. But never frightened. In fact, she seemed to have fun in inverse proportion to whatever danger we faced. The worse things looked, the happier she seemed.

I’d heard about people like her, met more than my fair share, in fact. They are addicts who are hooked not on cocaine or morphine but excitement. And I was pretty sure that Pat was one of these. She craved danger and adventure like a dope fiend craves their reefer. What was scary was that I was pretty sure that, like a dope fiend, she’d do pretty much anything to get a fix.

*****

The brontosaurus cruised through the dense jungle like a ship through a calm sea. This gave me some hope since I knew that Ito and his tank wouldn’t be able to cover even half the territory in the same amount of time. Especially since Ito had to feel his way along as he went.

It took about an hour to reach the base of the mountain. It was a sugar loaf-shaped mass that punched out of the center of the island like a fist. It was perforated with cave openings. The three largest of these gave it its name. The shaking of the earth had gotten stronger the closer we got to the mountain. We could feel it clear through the mass of the giant reptile we were riding. The sound had become a constant rumble.

“If that thing’s a volcano,” I said, “it looks like we might be in for an eruption.”

“The mountain itself isn’t a volcano,” she said. “The whole island is. The mountain is just a gigantic volcanic plug. You remember? Like the one at Pelée after the big eruption in aught two? That wasn’t anything at all as big as this, but that’s what Skull Mountain is all right. Or maybe more like Devil’s Tower if you’ve ever seen that.”

“I’ll take your word for it. What did you mean when you said that the whole island is a volcano?”

“It’s part of a caldera, like Santorini in the Aegean. The island is just the center remnant of a much larger crater, most of which is underwater. The reefs we crossed coming in may be on top of part of the rim.”

“You don’t say.”

We got about as far as the brontosaurus could go. The ground had been growing ever steeper and the beast was having trouble. The tyrannosaurus said we’d have to go on foot from here, but assured us it wasn’t much further.

We thanked the brontosaurus for its help and the courage it had shown back at the Battle of the Wall.

“Oh, gosh! It was nothing!” it demurred, dipping its head in embarrassment. “Really, it was no trouble at all.”

There was no time to waste, so Pat and I turned to follow Rex, who was already a dozen yards ahead.

There was a pretty clear trail and since it had been created by countless generations of animals the size of trucks, it was like a highway for Pat and me. We had no problem at all following the tyrannosaurus.

About half way up, we came to the mouth of a cave. It was a huge opening, maybe fifty feet high and wide. A trickle of greenish water drooled over its lip. Just as we were about to follow the dinosaur into the opening, the ground gave a convulsive leap beneath our feet, like a startled cat. There was a sound like two locomotives colliding.

“Quick!” Pat cried, giving me a shove. “Inside!”

We’d only just ducked beneath the overhang when an avalanche of boulders came crashing down the almost vertical mountainside above us. I could hear them smashing into the trees below.

“That was a close one!” I said. “Thanks, Pat!”

“Let’s get going. I get nervous when I’m underground during an earthquake.”

It was hard to argue with that.

We followed the tyrannosaurus down a passage that reminded me of one of the titanic bypass tunnels built for the big dam being thrown up across the Colorado River on the Nevada-Arizona border.

“Have you noticed how regular this cave is?” Pat asked.

“What do you mean?”

“It looks like the Holland Tunnel. I don’t think it’s entirely natural.”

“You think those animals built it? They’re smart, but they’re not exactly cut out for work like this. Besides, it would take tools to dig a tunnel like this and I haven’t seen them use even as much as a knife and fork since we got here.”

“Well,
some
one dug it,” she insisted.

Oddly enough, instead of growing darker, the tunnel had been growing steadily lighter. It was a kind of glow that pulsated between violet and green. It illuminated the curved walls ahead of us and it was getting brighter the further into the mountain we went.

We suddenly came to the end of the tunnel and neither of us could repress a gasp of astonishment.

The tunnel mouth opened into a vast cavern. It was bigger than any cathedral I’d ever been in. Where we stood, the lip of the tunnel was about half way between the floor and the domed ceiling above. It must have been a couple of hundred feet either way, and about the same distance to the far wall. Below us was the source of the light. A mound of gleaming metal maybe fifty feet across and twenty high. The metal was in the form of roughly cast ingots each a couple of feet long. They were stacked like logs in a woodpile or bonfire.

All around the pile were dinosaurs. Scores of them. Some were hauling metal in sledges from side tunnels, while others were returning with empty sledges. Yet others were adding ingots to the ever-growing stack. It was like an ant colony on a colossal scale.

Even though the ingots gleamed with a silvery sheen, they also glowed with a weirdly lambent light of their own. It had a shimmering, unreal quality to it, like the weird glow you see in a vacuum tube or an aurora. The air inside the cavern was cold, but I could feel my skin prickling with the heat the ingots gave off.

“Get back from there!” cried Pat, pulling at me.

“Why?”

“Look at arms,” she said.

I glanced down. The sides of my arms that had been facing the floor of the cavern were already turning red, like I’d gotten a bad sunburn. They were starting to itch.

“The dinosaurs are insane,” she said. “They can’t have any real idea what they’re doing.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“That’s
uranium
down there, tons of it.”

“So?”

“Uranium is radioactive. It’s where
radium
comes from. You’ve heard of radium?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of radium.”

“The rays it emits will burn you if you are exposed long enough. The dinosaurs are probably protected by their scales but the rays’ll kill if you if you’re exposed too long.”

“Jesus!” I said, backing a few feet further into the tunnel.

“There’s our secret,” said the tyrannosaurus, gesturing toward the pile of glowing ingots. “That metal is the heaviest natural element we know of. We’ve managed to collect countless tons of it. That’s just the top of our supply—there are caverns and caverns full of it, all over the island.”

“What the hell are you doing it for?”

“The earth is like a top, you see. So long as it’s in balance, it spins along smoothly. But if it gets even the least bit out of balance—well, over it goes!”

“
That’s
what this is all about? All that metal, it’s a kind of . . . of counterweight?”

“Certainly! We’ve been collecting the metal for ages. Its weight has already caused the poles to drift ever so slightly. Surely you’ve noticed that? This drift will only grow greater until, eventually, the entire planet tips over.”

I was speechless.

Pat wasn’t.

“This is crazy,” she said. “Uranium is radioactive. It creates heat. A mass of the metal that size would be molten, and it probably is down at the bottom of that pile. It’s probably melting its way through the rock around it. It may have even breached the magma chamber beneath the island. I haven’t the slightest doubt it’s the cause of the earthquakes.”

“I really wouldn’t know about these things,” said the dinosaur. “It’s a little beyond my area of expertise.”

“We’d better get out of here,” Pat said. “It ain’t healthy.”

The tremors continued to rock the mountain as we made our way back to the mouth of the cave. Pat had been right: they were getting worse.

“The island is doomed,” she said. “The dinosaurs have written their own death warrant. They’ve been a million years in doing it, but it’s finally coming due.”

I’d just stepped outside the cave entrance when there was a wicked-sounding
crack!
and a shower of rock splinters sprayed around me. I thought it was another landslide and ducked back into the shelter of the cave.

“It’s Ito!” Pat cried.

Sure enough, it was. About half a mile away, at the base of the talus that sloped away from the mountain, was the tank, a wisp of smoke drifting from the muzzle of its gun. There was a silent flash from it and another explosion just outside the cave.

“This is swell,” I said. “If we go back we get fried by atomic rays, we go out we get blasted by Ito.”

“Shut up. I’m thinking.”

Whatever she was thinking was interrupted by a convulsive leap of the mountain. There was a tremendous, continuous roar, like you hear in the Cave of the Winds under Niagara. A blast of hot air rushed over us, nearly knocking us over. Pat looked over her shoulder and screamed, “Get out, Carl! Get out!”

I glanced into the tunnel and saw a glow. Unlike the auroral shimmer I’d seen before, this was an angry red and was growing brighter. The air rushing past us was growing hotter, too. Pat again shouted at me to run, but she hadn’t waited for me to start. Her long legs had already carried her twenty yards away. By the time I caught up with her, we were bounding from boulder to boulder like a couple of mountain goats.

“This way!” she cried. “Get out of line of the tunnel!”

She was heading off at an angle and I followed only a few paces behind. Below us I saw the turret of the tank swivel in our direction. Ito took another shot and the shell burst close enough to knock me down. I could hear shrapnel pinging on the rocks around my head. Pat hadn’t missed a beat, however, and was soon safely behind a set of towering monoliths that would shield her from Ito’s cannon. I scrambled to my feet and was beside her before another shot could be fired.

“Good God, Pat, what’s the big hur—”

I was interrupted by a low, guttural rumble, like that of an approaching freight train. One with a heavy load, too, like coal or pig iron. The sound quickly escalated to a mind-numbing roar when a jet of something red-hot burst from the cave mouth. It was like being next to a Bessemer convertor when a batch of steel is poured. The flood of molten rock splashed heavily onto the rocky slope below. I could feel it through the soles of my shoes.

“We’d better get further back,” Pat urged and I saw no reason to argue with her.

The lava was arching from the opening in a thick, incandescent paste. At first it stuck to the rocks beneath, but soon the sheer mass began to flow under its own weight. The first layer of lava had cooled too quickly to flow, but now that the molten rock was piling ever deeper, it stayed molten and viscous. Between its weight and fluidity, the lava began to flow down the slope like a red-hot glacier.

Ito immediately saw the situation he was in. I saw him and his men abandon the tank, but there wasn’t much of any place for them to go that the lava would arrive at sooner. The trail the tank had made in the forest was in the same direction the lava was flowing, and routes to the right and left were blocked by rocks and boulders. These could have been easily climbed, but not very quickly. Certainly not quickly enough as it turned out.

There were brief puffs of either steam or smoke or both as the lava overtook the men and I may or may not have heard squeaks of terror and pain over the roar of the volcano. In any event, Pat and I had other things to worry about.

Not the least of which was the fact that the mountain was sinking.

“Carl! We’ve got to get out of here! We’ve got to get off this mountain!”

“I think we need to get off the island.”

As we clambered, scrambled and half-fell the rest of the way to the base of the mountain it became clear that my impression had been right: the Skull Mountain
was
sinking. We could feel it in our stomachs—and we could also see it. Huge gouts of jungle were tumbling into the chasm that had formed between the mountain and the surrounding land. Jets of steam, smoke and sparks were shooting from it.

Somehow or another we gained the trail that Rex had shown us, but we weren’t safe by a long shot. Enormous cracks were opening at right angles to our path. They were obviously part of a vast ring of concentric crevices opening around the disintegrating mountain. We leaped over them as we ran and at least once I glanced behind to see them turn into yawning pits before they collapsed into the ever-growing chasm that was spreading from the mountain’s base.