Stairway to Forever by Robert Adams

Author:Robert Adams
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, General, Science Fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 9780671654344
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 1988-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

But the heavy brush only ran for a distance of some dozens of yards; then, as abruptly as if cut with a sharp knife, both the incline and the brushy woods gave over to a level plateau on which stately trees sprang up from short, almost lawnlike grass. There was no natural crowding of these trees—oaks, maples, elms, a few chestnuts and ginkos and, within his sight, one huge mimosa covered with a pink froth of flowers—they therefore looked less like a true forest than a carefully tended park.

Startled by the noise of the engine, two deerlike beasts looked up, then burst into full flight, quickly disappearing among the tree trunks and folds of gently rolling greensward. They were clearly not the white-tails of his own world and hunting experience, however; he got a good enough glimpse of the departing creatures to at least tell that much. For one thing, both of them were spotted, though obviously adult, and they bore antlers more like those of a moose than a deer or elk.

Nor were the cervines the only animals to be seen and heard in the parklike expanse. Squirrels scampered up trees, to turn and scold at him from safe altitudes; brown voles and striped chipmunks scurried through the grass and dove into their burrows among the spreading roots of the trees; while high in a persimmon tree, a scaly-tailed opossum blithely ignored the noisy, smelly intruder and went about gorging himself on the rich, yellow-orange fruits.

And there were the birds. He knew that he never had before seen so many different kinds of birds in one place at one time. They flew, they perched, they hopped and stalked through the grass, stopping now and again to peck at something that had caught their avian eye among the stems of the grasses. They were of every conceivable color and hue and of all shapes and sizes—flycatchers, larks, swallows, wrens, thrushes, warblers, sparrows, finches, doves, woodpeckers, clouds of multi-hued parakeets, a tiny hummingbird hovering with blurring wings to sip from mimosa flowerlets, a brace of huge, blue-and-yellow macaws assisting the opossum in stripping the persimmon tree of ripe fruit.

Farther along toward the line of steep, pine-covered hills that filled the northern horizon in the near distance, small green parrots fed on the green-and-purple fruits of berries of some strange tree, and a flock of grey pigeons marched in a skirmish line through the grass beneath and around that tree, policing the area of any scraps that the parrots dropped, the sunbeams flashing on the bright, metallic bits of color that flecked their drab bodies.

Closer still to the upthrust of the hills, the grasses grew higher and, within them, scurried quail and small, fuzzy rabbits. A family of one large and a half-dozen smaller raccoons dove beneath the thorny foliage of a clump of blackberries upon which fruits they had been feeding at the approach of the growling bike, while from out the other side of the spreading thicket, a creature a

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