A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales

Suomi isn't the official name of Keid A II. There was a Finn on this Japanese expedition who thought the planet ought to be called that, not because it's the Finnish name for Finland, but because a name meaning "marshland" seemed appropriate. A swampier planet I've never heard of. It hasn't much surface water, but a very low relief, with neither high mountains nor deep oceanic basins. So, what water there is is scattered over its surface in millions of ponds, lakes, and swamps, with a lot of little seas for them to drain into.

The dry surfaces — if you can call any place on Suomi dry — were covered with a thick growth that looked like the plants that grew on earth back in the coal age: like mosses and horsetails and ferns grown to tree size. Most of these plants are too soft and pulpy to be of any use to an expedition, and most are poisonous for a man to eat. It's an awfully monotonous flora; no flowers or broadleafed plants.

The animals are something like earthly amphibia, mostly eel-shaped, though they come in all shapes and sizes, with and without legs. Imagine a world swarming with frogs, tailed frogs, newts, congo eels, hellbenders, and things like that, in all sizes from a pinhead up to fifty feet long. Many have venomous bites. There are only a few small high spots you could really call dry on the whole planet, and those are polar. Therefore, no higher form of life has evolved a life-cycle with breeding out of water, since there's no large area for such a species to expand into.

We set up camp on the highest land we could find in our area. Behind us was a swamp so full of big rushlike plants, a hundred feet high, that it was almost impossible to enter it. In front was a little isthmus between two lakes, with more swamp and ponds beyond it. Beyond these lay the Beebe River.

The temperature's comfortable enough in the equatorial regions, where we were, but you have to adjust to a day of seventeen hours instead of twenty-four. The oxygen is high enough to breathe — sixteen per cent — but the carbon dioxide is too high at five and a half. You can stand it for a while, though it makes you pant, but several hours of it will poison you with acute acidosis. Hence, outside your tent, you have to wear a respiration-hood, a thing of thin transparent plastic with a chemical intake-filter to absorb excess CO2. It's not so bad as a regular oxygen mask, which pinches the bridge of your nose, but it's bother enough. You also spend your life in high rubber boots because of the mud.

So, picture our little camp with its air-tight tents, its chemical stove (since the native plants won't burn in that damp low-oxygen atmosphere) and the area where the scientists sorted and cleaned their specimens — the whole place swimming in slimy mud. Beyond, in all directions, a monotonous dark-green Wall of vegetation, things like giant rushes and asparagus spears without any real leaves.

And noise! Day and night, the animals kept up an awful racket of croaking, grunting, cheeping, bellowing, and burping. Mating calls, I suppose. If you looked carefully, you could sometimes see one of the grunters, usually nothing but a dark, shiny blob in the water.

The arthropods are like our insects, except that most are big two-winged things with only four legs. They look a little like flying spiders, and they get into everything. Some of them bite, too. They probably die of indigestion afterwards, but that doesn't help the Earthman.

Then, overhead is this hazy atmosphere that makes Keid look like an orange blob when you can see it. Mostly it's overcast, with a wind that blows from the northeast day and night, fifteen to twenty miles an hour. Once in a while a cloud drops a shower, but there are no really violent storms.

I soon learned that the expedition's secretary and youngest member, that is to say Roy Laskaris, was also the errand boy and handyman. We worked like fiends, sloshing around with a couple of pounds of mud on our boots; scrape it off, and it was back in a few minutes.

A couple of the biggest animals, the size of a crocodile, wandered into the camp and had to be shot to keep them from eating us with those triangular mouths that are standard on Suomian vertebrates. After that, a little electrified fence, a foot high, kept out all vertebrates big enough to be dangerous.

Winthrop Fish pitched in and worked like a beaver at the chores of the camp. In fact, he did more than I. Despite his pale unhealthy look, he was strong as a bull, while I was kind of skinny and under-muscled, though I got pretty well hardened by the time I'd been on three expeditions.

The work tapered off after the twelfth day, when we got the automatic apparatus set up. After that, I was kept busy by the scientists, who dumped mountains of records on me for typing and filing: sheets of illegible notes, index cards, slides, labels, and reports.