The Reluctant Warrior by Pete B Jenkins

stranger by the hour.”
    Jed smiled. “We’re explorers of the old school you and me. What we’ve stumbled on is a dream come true, it’s all our expeditions rolled into one.”
    “But no way of telling the outside world about it,” Rex said, morosely.
    “I guess we can’t have it both ways,” Jed said, hastily stuffing the contents of the drawers into his backpack. “Let’s see what Jonathon’s up to.”
     
    Jonathon emerged from a building just as they reached the centre of the compound. “Found anything of interest?” Jed called out.
    “A few cooking pots, some rifles with ammunition, and two grenades.” He stepped off the verandah. “Underneath the hangar roof there’s what’s left of two helicopters and four airplanes.”
    “It’s as if they left in a hurry,” Rex noted.
    “I think they may have been attacked,” Jonathon said. “The compound’s littered with arrowheads, and some of the outer buildings have been burned down.”
    “Arrows wouldn’t have been any defense against guns,” Rex said skeptically. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
    Jonathon shrugged his shoulders. “The place is deserted, so whoever attacked them must have been successful, primitive or not.”
    “It also means Montrose and his men aren’t the only ones here.” Jed bent down and picked up an arrowhead. “It’s metal,” he pronounced. “So they’re not as primitive as we first thought.”
    “Well, they’re dangerous whatever they are,” Rex stated bluntly. “We’ll have to be on our guard against them just as much as we’ll need to be against Montrose.”
    “At least now we’ve got firearms,” Jonathon said.
    Jed let the arrowhead drop from his hand. “Thank the Lord for small mercies.”
     
    That night they camped beneath the biggest trees that Jed had ever laid eyes on. They made the sequoia he had seen in California look like mere saplings. But then everything here looked to be bigger than on the earth’s surface. The climate seemed to be perfect, and with that central sun he suspected that it never changed all year round. With no cold or overly hot periods to check the growth of animals and vegetation it was no wonder they were so large.
    Jed remembered reading a book by a paleontologist a few years back who had discovered that the earth’s fauna and flora had been much larger than they are now. But some cataclysmic event had changed all that, and now everything up there on the surface was much smaller. He had also read in the same book that the atmosphere on the surface was once different as well. It didn’t rain; rather springs bubbled up through the earth’s surface and watered everything. The planet was shielded from the sun’s harsh rays by a thick barrier of water vapor, which no doubt created a type of greenhouse effect that caused everything to thrive. After the disaster had struck however, it had all turned to custard and the vapor barrier disappeared, allowing the sun to shine through hot and strong, upsetting the delicate balance of nature forever.
    Jed peered up at this world’s sun and noticed that it still had its vapor barrier in place. The balance of nature had not been disrupted here. Things would be different here and he must learn to expect the unexpected.
    He had to admit to himself that he had been more than a little surprised when they had discovered there were a primitive people living here. Montrose and his entourage he could understand, they had flown in. But how had the primitives got here? They couldn’t have walked in over the ice. They wouldn’t have had the modern equipment necessary to survive such a harsh trek. As it was, he and his friends had only made it here by a series of small miracles.
    Montrose was yet another puzzle. If the original Montrose and his fourteen hundred men had been given an assignment here and completed it then he could understand why the base now lay in ruins. They would have abandoned it to return back to America. But that