Free The Unscheduled Mission by Jonathan Edward Feinstein

have a name for them. We should ask.”
    “But that doesn’t entirely account for the environment of southern Africa and that had us confused for a while,” Park continued. “It took the better part of a year’s worth of observations to finally spot the cause. Monsoons.”
    “Monsoons?” Sartena asked.
    “Once a year the wind from the Sink,” Park explained, “that’s the large internal sea within Pangaea – reverses and blows up and through the gap between the Atlantics and those other mountains sending a long plume of wet air into southern Africa. That condition lasts about two months and during that time the grasses of the region turn from gold to green. Then it all dries up again, except along the system of streams that join up and flow back into the Sink. It totally changed our knowledge of weather systems within supercontinents, I can tell you, and I think we’ll find that area far more interesting than this collection of sand dunes.”
    “And there I thought you might want to visit the pyramids of Egypt,” Iris laughed.
    “I seriously doubt they’re still there. Most of them were in pretty bad shape in our day,” Park replied. “Impressive enough, given they were thousands of years old but by now they’ve crumbled to sand or less and we might be flying over them this very minute.”
    “Pyramids?” Marisea asked interestedly, so Park went on to explain the basic highlights of really ancient Egypt.
    They were still in the desert when the sun set behind the Atlantics, so Iris found a bare stretch of rock to park on for the night. “Deserts are rarely lifeless,” she remarked, “and what does live here may well be nocturnal.”
    “Odds are whatever lives here is even smaller than what we saw in the mountains,” Sartena pointed out.
    “You never really know,” Park commented, “and we didn’t really do a detailed study of the animals of the Atlantic Mountains. We were mostly in conifer woods and there wasn’t much there that could eat the needles of those trees, but to the north and south I know there are different sorts of vegetation, so the animals will be different there too. There may be animals who burrow under the sand and rocks here who come out at night and they might be big enough to give us trouble.”
    “So we look for them with the night scopes?” Marisea suggested.
    “If you want to stay up, sure,” Park nodded. “I could use the sleep.”
    Marisea and Sartena did stay awake another three hours during which they caught sight of   several dozen scurrying animals of some sort or other, but through the night scopes, everything was a fuzzy green and the details were difficult to make out. They decided, however, that the quadrupeds among them must be a fossil species of true mammal because they seemed to have hair and that the small bipedal creatures were miniature postavians.

Nine
     
     
    The next few days brought a bunch of surprises as they discovered hosts of new species. The animals of southern Africa were more curious than cautious about the people and their buggy and they often walked directly up to the parked vehicle.
    “Aww,” Marisea crooned as she bent down to pet one of the very rare true mammals left on Pangaea. It was about the size of a housecat with light brown fur that shaded somewhat darker on its head and down its back all the way to his short, striped tail. “This little guy is adorable! Look! He wants to shake hands.”
    “Hands?” Dannet   laughed. “You mean paws.”
    “No, he has hands with opposable thumbs, just like we do,” Marisea observed. “It’s so cute!”
    “Let me see,” Park requested. “Hi, little fella. Let’s take a look at those hands, hmm?” he spoke in a softer than normal voice. The creature’s hands were proportionately longer than a humans with much thicker nails, but they were most definitely hands. “Marisea, say hello to your cousin,” he chuckled at last.
    “What?” Marisea asked.
    “This little guy is a