Chapter 394

The Prison Planet

Morales was just waking up when his hen alarm went off as the first rays of morning crept into the cave. Sitting up, he looked toward the chicken. “Gertrude, you have to be sleeping with one eye open.”

She squawked back and fluttered her wings. Chuckling, he nudged Junior awake. “Up and at ‘em, Champ. Momma says it’s time to face a new day.”

“Cheep. Cheep. Cheep,” the tiny chicken responded as it staggered to its feet, bent its tiny neck back as it stretched, fluttered its wings and headed for the manure pile to do its business.

The two peed in the piss/brain bucket before Morales started a fire, rinsed and primed the percolator and put it on the center rock to heat. While waiting on the fire to burn down enough to cook their breakfast, he grabbed a shovel, and, with the wolf, went to do their business, the ever-present cocked crossbow with him.

Chuckling to himself, he thought, We used to kid Harry about being so paranoid that he took his pistol with him when he went to take a shit, but here I am doing the same thing – only there’s a very real possibility that I might actually need a weapon out here.

After he and Lobo had finished their morning ritual, they stood near the cave to watch the sun come fully over the mountains. “I really don’t know crap about this planet,” he told Lobo, “but those scientists surely wrote an enormous amount during the years they were here.”

He had been curious as to why there were small trees on the planet if none of them had ever been cut. There was everything from small saplings to giants that were ten and even sometimes fifteen feet in diameter. Finally, after many hours of fruitless research, he had stumbled onto an article written by one of the botanists. The article spoke of lightning frequently starting forest fires in the summer, mentioning that these fires usually burned until they reached an area that would no longer support combustion, or rain put them out. The article went on to describe the life cycle of the returning growth – in nauseating detail. Morales now looked around himself with a dawning, if very rudimentary concept of why the trees weren’t all towering giants.

Suddenly, he remembered all the lightning storms and was very thankful for the frequent rains the area had been experiencing lately. In his travels, he had seen several trees that had been struck by lightning. Had it been dry, they could have been the source of a forest fire.

Thinking about a forest fire caused him to start worrying about his vegetable valley. There are far more vegetables there than I’ll ever be able to harvest, but I need to continue working on it. I think my best bet is to pick as many of the peas and beans as I can, because storing them is simple and they’re supposed to last practically forever if they’re kept away from moisture.

Back in the cave, he cooked breakfast, and threw the chickens some corn before sitting down to eat. Junior ate some of the cracked corn, but soon hurried over to stand staring at Morales as he ate. With a snigger, he broke some of the bacon into small bits and held his hand out to the baby chick who went after the bits with a vengeance.

With a squawk, Gertrude came over as far as her leash would allow, then stood staring at him while making a soft clucking sound, obviously pleading for some of the bacon. “Well, shit,” Morales grumped as he broke up what bacon he had left on his plate before putting the meat down in front of the hen and her brood, saving a little for Junior who quickly finished off his part.

Lobo was making his chuffing sound as he grinned at the human. “No use gloating just because you got your half first,” the human tried to snarl, but inwardly, he was pleased that the hen seemed to be taming, and he knew the intelligent wolf was aware that he was kidding. I haven’t seen Gertrude trying for the entrance lately. Either she has given up that the leash is going to prevent her from escaping – or else she’s content. But how could that be? Hmmm. Maybe it’s the easily available food without having to worry about predators, not to mention having a solid roof over her head so she isn’t drenched by the rains or blown around by the wind. Then, thinking about it, Nah. She’s a chicken. She couldn’t have that much brainpower between those beady little eyes.

With a shrug, he said aloud, “Lay me another egg so I can put you and your brood in your new home.”

Gertrude focused one of those beady eyes on him for a second before continuing her search for one last bit of bacon.

After working on his pig hide for a while, he spent some time repeatedly stretching the two saber-tooth hides over the post, finally satisfied that they were becoming quite supple. “It’s about damn time,” he muttered, his hands and shoulders tired from the repeated effort.

After eating a lunch of black-eyed peas, mashed potatoes and ham, he considered picking more vegetables, but the noonday sun beating down while he bent over the bushes wasn’t something he wanted to deal with at the moment. He also needed to cut down and bring in another log, but either enterprise would be easier when it was a little cooler.

Thinking about cool turned his thoughts to the lower cave. Where does that cool air come from? But remembering that the cave spiraled ever-downward was giving him pause. “That part of the cave just feels ... odd,” he told Lobo. “It seems like a never-ending black tunnel, and for some reason it scares the heebie-jeebies out of me. How in the hell was it formed, and why does it continue to spiral?”

Lobo tilted his head a bit and bared his teeth.

“Yeah. Me too.”

But the more he tried not to think about it, the more he did. Exasperated, he came to his feet. “Fuck it. I have a whole roll of parachute cord. I don’t think it was designed for climbing, but it will hold my weight several times over, and it should work just fine for a safety line.” Donning his weapon belt, and with two canteens of water, his lantern, spare battery, pockets full of jerky, and the paracord over a shoulder, he turned to Lobo who had come to his feet when he realized that his partner was going somewhere. “Let’s go find out where that cool air is coming from.”

After passing through the area where he stored his meats and, more recently his vegetables – having moved them to the cooler area fairly near the meat – he turned to Lobo. “From now on, I want you to stay behind me in case there’s a drop-off,” Morales instructed as he motioned to the wolf.

Lobo looked at him, obviously not pleased, but let Morales lead the way. When they reached the last area he had previously explored, Morales tied one end of the parachute cord to a boulder, making certain the knots were secure. With a loop around himself so that he could easily feed out the line, but hopefully stop himself if he slipped over a drop-off, he continued on, although at a much more cautious pace.

The whole tunnel after he passed his storage area began to be more cluttered with boulders scattered about, the cave sometimes looking as if a giant had tossed the huge rocks around. But the cave always remained a minimum of roughly ten feet wide, sometimes opening up to twice that, as did the height. With it spiraling slowly to the right, the slope continued its gradual and sometimes slightly steeper way downward but, so far, not requiring him to use the rope to descend. Still, though, he fed the rope around himself, frequently holding the lantern high above his head in order to peer into the blackness past more and more rubble. But the rubble was not so thick as to impede his progress, nor were there any branchings in the tunnel so that he might become lost.

He had gone only what he guessed to be a couple of hundred yards past his meat stash when he realized that the air was now drastically cooler, and a few minutes later, he could see his breath in the lantern light. A little farther along, he realized that the walls of the cave looked different. Instead of stone or dirt, there was the beginning seams of something that looked far different. Touching it, he realized that it must be ice – dirty ice. Astonished, he stopped to shine the light around, then toward the roof of the cave some ten feet or so away at this point. There was definitely ice mixed with the dirt, and within a short distance as he walked on, the ice increased until everything seemed to be composed of it.

Shrugging, he continued, though more uneasy than ever. After another few minutes of steady walking, the cave floor steepened considerably. In addition, he was nearing the end of the parachute cord. To go farther, he would have to go back, untie the cord, bring it down to this point and tie it off again.

In the last hundred feet or so, the ice had sometimes been almost clear for a little way, reflecting the light back to cause dancing shadows on the walls, ceiling and floor of the passage. Although there was dirt frequently mixed with the ice, his boots skated on the slick surface. “Fuck this,” he mumbled as his feet went out from under him for the second time and he almost didn’t catch himself before falling. As he stood shivering in the cold, “We’ve gone far enough. The whole tunnel is ice. I can store my meat here and it will freeze solid. Besides,” he quietly said as he raised the light above his head to look on down the tunnel, “it gets steeper from here. No way am I going to risk my ass on that without a very good reason. Let’s head back to camp, Boy.”

Again, he held the light up to stare down the slope one last time. “This must be a glacier or something. But how could that be with the temperature outside so hot?” After a moment, he continued. “Fuck it. I don’t know what this is, and I don’t want to know, but I’ve found a place to freeze our meat and keep it that way. Of course, I’ll have to walk a couple of hundred yards past where the meat is now stored in order to move it here, not to mention the trip back up this incline, but I guess I can’t have everything.” Shrugging, he again turned for home.

Morales had read an article where the scientists mentioned axial tilt and elliptical orbits as they discussed the planet. He had only the vaguest understanding of the concepts, but he was beginning to worry more and more about winter after finding ice not that far underground. So far, he had not found anything that described the winters in detail. He knew the information had to be there, but he wondered if he would ever find it in the giant database. “Fuck it. If I knew more about computers, I could probably find what I need to know, but oh no,” he snarled sarcastically, “I always had better things to do in school than study. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Ah screw it,” he told Lobo as they walked along while gathering up the paracord, “If it gets too cold at our campsite come winter, we’ll move farther back from the entrance in the main cave, but thinking about that cold is just more reason for us to build up our food supplies. Well, I was already worried about the animals migrating, but now that I’ve seen the ice, I’m even more concerned. Ten to one, most of those animals on the plains are going to be gone by the time cold weather gets here, and you can bet what few are left won’t be easy to find. And I still don’t know how cold it’s going to get or how much snow there will be. But if it snows like it rains, instead of the snow being asshole deep on a giraffe, it will be up to its tonsils.”

Lobo, now walking beside the human, grinned up at Morales as he asked, “How did you survive, Boy? Oh, I know you’re not grown – at least not completely, but you must have withstood at least one winter. Did you have a cave or a den of some kind?” But the wolf’s grin was his only answer.

Back at the campsite, he got out the trotline and with the second rolling case, headed toward the stream. He wasn’t in love with the idea of gathering grubs for fishing, but he now went about it matter-of-factly, thinking little about the gruesome task as his mind focused on other things.