He looked around the assembled group, and they in turn looked at each other. There were no more questions forthcoming he decided.
‘Right, let’s get the packs on, and make a start on our journey. Oh, before we do, fill up your food containers with fresh water and try and seal the tops over, that way we will conserve our pack supplies.’ He tried to sound as confident and jolly as he could as he knew there where those among the group who wanted to return to the ship despite his explanation of why they couldn’t.
The little band set off down the slope, the strange green lake getting closer as they descended.
‘I suppose we could try and catch that odd looking fish thing we saw yesterday,’ said Arki, ‘it wouldn’t feed us all, but there might be more of them in the lake.’
‘The data sheet did say salt water fish, so I suppose there must be a reason for that, anyway, how do you propose catching them?’ Glyn was surprised at Arki’s question.
‘Must admit, I hadn’t given that a lot of thought.’ Arki replied, looking a bit sheepish, and wishing he had.
They walked on in near silence, just the odd murmur of discontent from one or two of the travellers, and the flap-flap of their feet on the ground.
At the bottom of the slope, a small stream fed into the lake and Glyn went ahead to test the water.
‘This is good to drink, so fill up now, we don’t know when we’ll find our next water.’
Brendon, who wanted to go back to the ship didn’t make any attempt to drink, standing back from the others as they had their fill. Arki sensed trouble.
‘I think it would be a good idea for you to drink.’ he said, turning to Glyn for backup.
‘So do I.’ said the leader, turning to face the man head on and sensing his defiant attitude.
‘I don’t feel thirsty at the moment.’ he said, with an air of defiance.
‘I didn’t ask if you felt thirsty,’ said Glyn angrily, ‘I said drink, and I mean it.’
‘You can’t make me.’ came back the retort, trying to see just how far he could push his luck.
‘If you don’t drink, your pack will be taken from you and you won’t get another drink until we find a new source of fresh water, the choice is yours.’ Glyn didn’t intend to fool around, the cohesion of the group depended on discipline, so he needed to make his decisions stick for the good of all.
Eventually Glyn stared the man out, and he reluctantly made his way over to the stream. The others had all drunk as much as they could, and now stood around waiting to see what would happen.
With a final sideways glance at Glyn, he bent over to cup his hands in the water, when Arki took a couple of quick steps forward and planted his foot firmly on the other man’s rear end.
The ensuing splash was accompanied by a round of cheers and a good deal of hand clapping. No one stepped forward to help the now thoroughly soaked man out of the stream, and he then realized he was a lone voice of discontent, with no backers.
‘Drink,’ thundered Glyn, ‘I’m watching.’
The whole party got underway again, and in a much more cheerful mood than before. ‘Perhaps the grotty one has his uses after all.’ Glyn thought to himself, trying to hide a grin of satisfaction.
At midday, Glyn called a halt to the march, pointing out that the sun was now at its highest point in the sky and clearly indicating where the South was.
By now they had left the lake behind them, and the terrain looked dry and uninteresting, with no vegetation, and rolling hills right out to the horizon.
As they rested, Glyn suggested that they drank half the water in their cartons, retaining the rest for the next break. No one needed a second bidding, and some suddenly couldn’t work out what half meant.
As they put their packs back on, Arki noticed something shining off to one side on the hill they were about to climb, and everyone agreed it was worthwhile going the extra little distance to see what it was. There had been nothing but stone, sand and rock so far on their travels, discounting the lake which everyone had written off as a dead loss.
Sticking up out of the barren ground for about two metres was a tubular structure, nearly half a metre across and made of a silver coloured metal. Arki, being its discoverer, stepped forward and gave it a whack with his foot, and the metal tube rang like a bell.
‘Must be something left over from our ancestors, I suppose,’ commented Glyn, ‘so how old would that make it?’
‘Don’t have a clue,’ replied Arki, ‘Brek is good at mathematics, he may be able to give us an idea.’
He was standing nearby, a tall elderly man with grey hair and a knowledgeable look about his face.
The two consulted him on the matter, and were treated to a long diatribe of scientific terms and the threat of having an equation scratched out in the sand to enable them to understand the finer points he was making.
‘Just give us the bare outlines of what you think, that’ll do,’ said Glyn, when he could get a word in edgeways.
‘Well,’ began the tall man, wondering how he was going to explain something so involved to a couple of lay persons, ‘I have thought for some while the time we experienced onboard the ship was not the same time we would have experienced if we had been back on Earth, that was before we knew we had never left it. I managed to set up several experiments to prove that the rate at which the plants in the hydroponics gardens grew wasn’t that which they would have experienced on Earth. Also the gestation period for birth was a lot longer than it should have been. There are several other things which didn’t quite match up, and they all point to the fact that we were being fooled into believing that ours was a common time to that of the earth we had left, which it clearly wasn’t.
‘One reason for doing that would be to disguise the fact that we were living at an extended time scale to that of Earth. Why they wanted to hide that fact from us, I don’t know.’
‘What sort of time difference are we talking about?’ asked Arki.
‘Hard to tell really, I would say about a factor of at least five, maybe as high as ten,’ the tall one replied.
‘In other words, we as a race, have been inside that mountain for about three or four thousand years,’ exclaimed an astonished Glyn.
‘At least that long, maybe as long as ten.’ The tall one seemed totally unimpressed by the idea. Glyn and Arki were quite shattered by the revelation.
‘Whatever this thing is made of, it’s certainly worn well,’ commented Glyn.
Not really knowing why, Arki took a firm grip on the edge of the tube and tried to pull it over to see what the inside was like. It didn’t move a millimetre. Before long, everyone got into the spirit of the thing and tried to lend their weight to the effort. It still didn’t move.
‘It must be part of something much bigger, buried below the ground. I’d love to know what it is,’ Glyn was going to be unsatisfied on that account, it was immovable.
‘Although it’s shiny, the surface is quite pitted,’ someone commented.’
‘Probably wind born sand over the years. Someone give me a hand up, I want to have a look inside it.’ Arki looked around for a volunteer.
‘I’ll help,’ said Brendon, stepping forward.
Arki reached up to grip the rim of the tube and Brendon grabbed his legs and heaved.
‘I can see inside,’ Arki’s voice came back with a strange echoing quality to it, ‘and it just goes on down for ever. Pass me a stone and I’ll drop it in to see how far it falls.’
The stone left Arki’s hand and disappeared from view, but there was no sound of its landing on anything.
‘Pass me another one, as big as you can manage.’
That too fell into the depths, silently.
‘The chamber below must be very big and deep, otherwise over the years it would have filled up with wind blown sand. I think I know what it is,’ said Arki, ‘it’s an air vent for whatever is below.’
‘There must be some other way in then,’ said Glyn excitedly, ‘I wonder where it is?’
‘Could be anywhere, even kilometres away. I don’t think we stand much chance of finding it easily, so there’s not much point in looking,’ Arki replied. Glyn looked disappointed again.
They left the silver tube and the mysteries it held and headed back onto their original course, Glyn making a correction allowance for the sun’s angle as it began its journey towards the horizon.
The troop managed to cover quite a distance in the next few hours, not noticing the hard work of climbing up the hills and down again as conversation went back and forth between them, speculating as to what the tube and its chamber below could have been.
‘Don’t suppose it’s another space ship project, do you?’ someone asked.
‘I doubt that,’ Glyn replied, our ship must have stretched their resources to the limit, I would think.’
They had been going along a twisting valley between the hills for some time, as it was in the general direction Glyn thought they should go, when there was an excited cry from Arki, who had taken the lead.
‘This looks like a piece of dead plant,’ pointing to a gnarled and twisted stem which lay on the ground. The others gathered around to see what Arki had found.
‘Keep an eye out for more, this is the first sign that plants are growing here, there may be some live ones.
As they progressed up the valley, more and more stems appeared, until they had no option other than to tread on them. The sharp crackle of snapping twigs broke the otherwise eerie silence of the valley, and they were all glad of something to break the monotony of the journey.
As they rounded a bend their way was blocked by a wall of rock. The valley had come to an end.
‘We’ll have to climb out, by the look of it,’ someone said. There were a few groans of dismay, but it was their only option.
‘We’ll make camp here for the night, it’s sheltered, and the light will soon be fading.’ Glyn began looking around for a favourable spot when he noticed a dark opening in the rock wall ahead.
‘Hey, that looks like a cave, we could shelter in it and get some protection from the wind.’
The prospect of the long hard climb up the hillside was soon forgotten as they all headed for the dark opening at the end of the valley.
‘Better make sure nothing else has made a home here,’ said Arki, bravely entering the opening. He looked around, but could see nothing other than a thin layer of fine wind blown sand covering the floor of their proposed shelter.
The reason no one had noticed the straggly green bushes to one side of the cave, was because their attention had been taken up by the prospect of a shelter for the night.
Someone yelled out ‘Look at that’, and they all rushed over to see the first green plant since they had left the ‘ship’.
The plant was having a hard time of it by the look of its leaves, dark green, curled at the edges and brittle to the touch, and some had gone brown and fallen off.
Someone lifted a bunch of leaves up, and hidden beneath was a large black fruit.
‘It looks like the black berries we used to grow on the ship,’ Arki said, ‘but about four times the size. Do you think we could risk trying one?’
‘OK, but we’ll do the ‘under the tongue’ test first.’ Glyn was taking no chances.
Arki pulled the fruit off its slender stem and allowed a little of the juice to trickle into his mouth. Ten minutes later and he was still smiling, and making everyone else envious by smacking his lips every now and again.
Someone reasoned that for the plants to grow at all, there must be water present in the ground. Using a flat stone, they soon had a shallow hole dug, and it slowly began to fill with muddy water.
Using one of the empty food containers, after greedily drinking the remaining water in it, the muddy water from the hole was scooped out and poured back on the ground around the bushes.
The next time the hole filled up, the water was almost clear, and Glyn tasted it, considering it fit to drink, although a little earthy.
As the light began to fade in the valley, the fruit was pronounced safe to eat, as Arki was still grinning and seemed none the worse for tasting it.
‘Listen everyone, we can save a little of our rations by using the fruits, so if every pair of you open one food container and share it, the fruits will make up the difference, I hope.’ Glyn was feeling very pleased, things were going better than he had expected.
There were just enough berries to supply everyone with five, the extra large pips being spat out around the bushes so that new plants might grow there one day.
Night was closing in when Glyn noticed two of the men crouched over something on the ground, and asked them what they were doing.
‘We think that if we rub these two sticks together hard enough, the friction created should make them catch fire, and then we can have a little warmth to see us through the night.’
‘Good idea,’ said Glyn,’ but it looks like hard work.’
It was sometime later, when most of the troop had retired to the cave that an excited squeal and a tiny flicker of flame announced the success of the fire makers.
Eager hands gathered up bundles of dead stems and soon there was a cheerful blaze lighting up the valley around the cave mouth.
Despite being tired from their long march, most stayed awake for a while, huddled in the cave watching the flickering flames and enjoying the warmth from the fire at its entrance.
Next morning, everyone was feeling much better and in a positively cheerful mood. Glyn wondered if it had anything to do with the black berries, but the only effect they had was to make a few of the group run for the cover of the rocks before nature took its course.
They wondered about taking some of the sticks with them for a fire the next night, but the only thing available to tie them up into a bundle were the stems from the living berry bush, and no one wanted to destroy the bushes after robbing them of their fruit the previous night.
Brendon came up to Glyn and said a little timorously
‘Do you think we should have a look in our packs to see what tools we’ve been issued with?’
‘Not at the moment, I don’t think we’ll need tools just yet,’ Glyn replied, ‘I’d like to get a little further towards our goal first as that’s where we’ll be making a permanent camp, then we’ll need them.’