A Thing of the Past. John Russell Fearn
Читать онлайн книгу.
hatch it just for the hell of it.
“I found it in a glacier nearly three hundred feet down in the ground,” Cliff explained, hoping this information would stir up interest. “Very uncommon happening, I can tell you.”
“Uh-huh— Are you having the remainder of the cold meat or shall I make it up into rissoles?”
“It’ll do as it is,” Cliff replied absently. “Too hot for rissoles, anyway.”
Joan shrugged and wandered off into the kitchen regions. Cliff looked after her and sighed. Joan was a good sort in most things—nice cook, kept the house perfect, only she had very little imagination and relied far too much on gadgets to help her with her work, when a little physical elbow grease might have done her a world of good. Cliff never regretted that he had married her, but he could have wished for a girl slightly quicker on the uptake.
“Be back in a minute,” he called out as crockery rattled in the kitchenette.
“Back? You’ve only just come in. Where are you going?”
“To put the egg in the garage. Warm enough in there this weather to hatch it.”
“Oh!” Just that: nothing more. By the time Cliff had rid himself of the egg, freshened up, and was seated at the table Joan seemed to have forgotten all about the egg until Cliff jogged her memory.
“It’s possible,” he said, musing, “that the egg may have been buried down in that underworld glacier for many hundreds, or even thousands, of years.”
Joan reflected. She was a tired-looking young woman with ash-blonde hair and hazel eyes. Not so bad looking really, only the romance seemed to have gone out of life, and she found married domesticity pretty humdrum. The thought of an egg buried in a glacier for thousands of years was hardly the basis of a pep talk either.
“I’ve seen the geologists,” Cliff continued. “They’re going to explore the cavern where I found the egg and the shaft that leads down to it—” and he went on to explain in detail, including an account of the mighty gorge that he had been quite unable to fathom.
“You surely don’t suppose,” Joan asked at length, “that that egg can possibly have anything in it? Not after the hundreds or thousands of years you so cheerfully speak of. Why, it ought to be—be rotten.”
“Not if preserved in ice, dear. That’s the whole point. Do you realise that living bacteria, perhaps millions of years old, have been dug out of ice from time to time in circumstances very similar to these?”
“Think of that!” Joan went on with her meal. Eggs did not appeal to her in any case, either for eating purposes or for scientific investigation. In fact, the thought of an egg that size made her feel strangely queasy within. Cliff sensed this fact and slightly changed the subject.
“We got the site flattened out all right at last, thank goodness, but I don’t know what’s going to be done about that shaft. Maybe have to fill it in. Make foundations rocky if we—”
The front door bell rang. Throwing down his napkin impatiently he headed out of the room, returning with Bill Masterson, the thick-necked, bull-headed geologist of the mining concern.
“Howdy, Joan,” he greeted briefly, and then settled himself in the nearest armchair. “Don’t let me upset feeding time: I just wanted to tell you personally, Cliff, what I think you’ve run into back at the site.”
Cliff resumed his seat at the table. “You’ve examined he shaft then?”
“Certainly, and the cavern below. That explosion you set off to blow out the basalt opened a natural fissure that leads down into a completely preserved Jurassic Period. No doubt of it whatever. Up to now geologists have been content to find a few fragments of some past age—a bit of Triassic, maybe, or a bit of Eocene, but never have we landed on a whole area preserved exactly as it must have been in that period. You have done science a wonderful service, Cliff, and I intend to let the scientists know that.”
“Well, thanks very much. Sheer chance, anyway.” Cliff frowned as he ate his meal. “How do you mean—perfectly preserved? How could it be?”
“It’s like this. At the depth you reached—three hundred feet down—there was once a surface landscape of the Jurassic Period. Then something must have happened. Maybe a gigantic earthquake, or even a general sliding of the Earth’s surface. That area was covered with rock, but atmospheric pressures—steam pressures, that is, from inside the Earth—formed a gigantic blowhole in the shape of that cavern. A new surface formed over the hole and it’s lain there untouched ever since. As the pressures relaxed and the volcanic heat abated water vapour would form. Its drops caused the stalactites to form in the roof. It was after the Jurassic and Mesozoic Periods, the age of the dinosaurs, that a second glacial epoch descended on the world, and it is possible that that mighty buried glacier is a part of it, still unthawed because down in that huge cave there is so little warmth.”
Silence, save for the clink of knives and forks.
“How long ago did all this happen?” Joan asked finally. “The Jurassic Age, I mean.”
“Oh, around eighty million years ago.”
Joan smiled weakly and made no comment. Cliff, though, stopped eating.
“Eighty million years! But that egg I found just couldn’t be—”
“What egg?” Bill Masterson’s eyebrows went up.
“I found an egg in that glacier wall and dug it out. Maybe you noticed the space in the glacier where I’d been busy?”
“Frankly, no, and if I did I didn’t take particular heed.” The geologist’s face had become grim. “Where’s this egg now?”
“In the garage. I’m hatching it out just to see what’s in it.”
“You may be very horrified when you see what is in it. You surely know enough of geological history to realise that the things that existed eighty million years ago were huge and terrifying? The age of the dinosaurs, man!”
“Yes, but— This couldn’t be a dinosaur. It’s an egg. It can’t mean anything more than a bird.”
Bill Masterson sighed. “For your information, Cliff, the vertebrated animals of the Jurassic Age laid eggs. They did not procreate in the manner of the later, more refined creatures. If you take my advice you’ll smash up this egg from the glacier before things get too tough.”
Cliff shook his head. “I’m too inquisitive to do that. If something horrible turns up I can very soon destroy it. But I’m certainly going to see that egg hatch.”
“Very well.” The geologist gave a shrug. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“What about that deeper cavern, or canyon, which Cliff found?” Joan enquired, slowly becoming interested. “Any ideas on that, Bill?”
“I’m afraid not. I think the buried rumbling may be from great internal activity, or it may be the action of a mighty underground ocean.” Bill pondered for a moment. “Yes, on reflection I think an ocean is the best theory. If it were internal fire, there’d definitely be more warmth coming up the gorge than there is.”
“An underground ocean seems to suggest a whole world within the world,” Cliff said.
“Is that so impossible? If part of the Jurassic Age could be buried, so might a great deal more of it, or even parts of other Ages. I can’t help wishing with all my heart that that shaft had never been opened by the explosion, Cliff.”
Cliff grinned. “It was just one of those things, and I’ll be hanged if I see what you’re bothered about. Putting aside the scientific issue for the moment, what do we do with the site? Fill it in?”
“Yes.” Masterson got to his feet. “As quickly as possible, too. Just in case there might be a volcanic upsurge that would blow half of England off the map. You don’t seem