Chapter 5: The Arrival

"Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world." ~Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Jensen, Utah, April 3, 140,001,991 B.C.

The Great Valley

"Chomper, wake up," a male voice gently called out. Chomper rolled over, still wearing a terrified expression on his face.

"No. Help! Ah!" Chomper was still letting out muffled screams, "Someone save me."

"We're here, Chomper, don't worry," a female voice quietly replied, "You're just having a nightmare." Ruby poked Chomper in the ribs. Chomper woke with a start. He stared blankly at Littlefoot and Ruby.

"Oh, I'll still alive," Chomper blushed slightly, "Sorry for waking you guys up. I was having a nightmare."

"We saw it on your face," Ruby noted, "On your face we saw it."

"Some old flyer was prophesying about swimming round teeth, moving pictures, and metallic flyers."

"What's 'metallic?'" Littlefoot asked inquisitively. Even though our dinosaur friends knew about the existence of shiny metals like gold and silver, they did not call the material "metal".

"I don't know," Chomper robbed his head, "Then, he talked about lying strangers and blood."

"Sounds disturbing," Littlefoot said, "But why were you crying for help?"

"He kicked me off a cliff."

"Oh… right."

"Anything else?" Ruby yawned.

"As I fell, I saw one of those metallic flyers. Its skin was hard, and it had no feathers or beak. It had a single, glowing red eye on the tip of its wing, and… and…" Chomper paused, "It had no soul."

The Florida Strait, December 5, 1945 A.D.

Kriegsmarine Submarine U-116, Type XB Mine-laying U-boat

One moment, Heinrich Müller was dozing in his chair, dreaming about his new life in Argentina. The next, he was sprawled out on the floor, clutching his head in pain. The 45-year-old Gestapo chief slowly got up from the ground and dusted off his uniform. He had a concerned look on his face. His first thought was that the submarine had crashed into an uncharted reef or beached itself. If that were the case, then there would be nothing he could do to save himself. Hundreds of yachts and aircraft roamed the Caribbean, and there was no way that they would ignore a sight as bizarre as a beached submarine. The American and British authorities would board the submarine, and he would be sent back to Germany to face trial for his crimes. Or worse, he could end up in the hands of the Soviets. He knew the Russian methods exactly, and he did not have the faintest intention of being their prisoner.

Heinrich Müller started towards the front of the U-boat. Lights above him flickered on and off, and loud metallic groans echoed throughout the submarine. Muller wasn't a submariner, but he didn't have to be one to know that something was seriously wrong. The shaking of the submarine was even worse than the aerial turbulence he had experienced as a pilot during WWI, and it was getting progressively worse.

Heinrich climbed up the ladder leading to the control room of the submarine. The situation there was no better. Navigation charts and broken glass were strewn out on the floor. Electrical cables spew out showers of sparks and smoke. Alarm bells and warning lights lit up the room in a dazzling mix of flashing red and green.

Captain Felix Steiner was at the helm, barking out orders and fervently scribbling down notes. He examined the instrument cluster around him, struggling to make sense of the wild readings. Most of the mechanical gauges seemed to be functioning normally. He was 40 meters below the surface of the Caribbean, and the pressure in the steam lines were all normal. The electromagnetic gauges, however, were going kaput. The electromagnetic compass was spinning in circles, and the voltmeters monitoring the electrical generators oscillated between zero and 400V. What concerned him the most, however, was the shaking of the ship. He had operated in the storms of the North Sea and operated during the hurricane season off the shores of the United States. He had even experienced maelstroms that plagued ships off the coast of Brittany. However, he knew of no phenomenon that could produce such strong underwater turbulence.

The Captain's concentration, however, was broken by a sudden change in the mood. Sailors around him stopped in their tracks, stood at attention, and directed Nazi salutes towards a smallish man with piercing eyes and thin lips. Felix grunted but eventually joined his subordinates.

"Heil Hitler!" The entire crew shouted in unison. Hitler had committed suicide seven months ago, but Heinrich didn't seem to care. He wanted to carry out Hitler's orders to the very end. It mattered not whether Hitler was alive or dead. He swore absolute allegiance until death to the Fuhrer, and nothing was going to stop him from carrying it out.

The qualities that made Heinrich the fearsome Gestapo chief were a poor fit for the noisy and cramped Type XB submarine. Discipline onboard submarines, even German ones, was lax. Sailors and officers often went about their business without saluting, shaving, or cleaning. There never seemed to be enough time for anything but survival. Felix was fine with that, but he knew that Heinrich would not be. The Gestapo—and its chief in particular—was infamous for their strict discipline and ruthlessness. There was no place for parade-ground formalities on the battlefield, but such concerns were completely lost on Heinrich. The chief believed that it was everyone's duty to obey the German state and its rules. He did not tolerate disobedience—or much of anything else, for that matter.

Felix detested Heinrich nearly as much as he detested the Allied powers. The captain could not figure out how such an odious an opponent of the National Socialist movement could become the head of the Gestapo. It was rumored that he had referred to Adolf Hitler, the savior of the German people and a recipient of the Iron Cross First Class, as "an immigrant unemployed house painter" and "an Austrian draft-dodger". To his credit, he fought very hard against the left-wing movement in Bavaria, but it was clear that, if it had been his orders to do so, he would have acted against the Nazis in just the same way. His qualities of character were regarded in an even poorer light. He was greedy and ruthless for glory and claimed team accomplishments for himself. Those who he promoted were either more junior than him or those who were inferior in ability to himself. In this way, he could keep rivals at bay. In his choice of officials, he did not take account of political considerations. He had only his own opportunistic goals in mind. And his goal, then, was to escape to Argentina aboard the rickety submarine known as the U-116.

Felix and the crew members did not dare to drop their arms until Heinrich bent his right arm while holding an open hand towards the captain. They quickly dropped their salutes and scrambled back to their posts.

"What's the situation, Captain?" Heinrich asked, as if he were expecting a briefing from a low-level Gestapo officer. "Have we encountered mechanical difficulties?"

"No, mein Gruppenfuhrer," Felix replied, "All mechanical systems are functional. We are suffering some electrical failures, though." A shower of sparks flew out from one of the radios, as if to drive home the point.

"Do you know what is causing this?" Heinrich asked, "Is this a danger to our mission?"

"This could be a very bad thunderstorm or a hurricane, but I've never seen anything like this in my six years in the Kriegsmarine," Felix replied, much to Heinrich's disappointment, "We have lost too many of our navigational instruments, and the currents were—and still are—taking us off course. We'll have to surface and calculate our positions using celestial bodies."

Heinrich knew nothing about the celestial bodies, but he didn't have to be an expert sailor to read the chart on the table. The course of the submarine was being marked with a fine pencil line. The line originated in Keroman Submarine Base in Lorient, France. Despite being surrounded by the Anglo-American army, the defenders of the submarine base refused to surrender. The submarine then proceeded to make a stop off Cape Verde, where she was scheduled to rendezvous with an Italian oiler and refuel. The refueling process should have taken mere hours, but it was delayed more than a week due to bad coordination, poor weather, and prowling Allied destroyers. The pencil line was now crossing between some islands off America's East Coast. The dashed grey lines indicating Allied shipping lanes crisscrossed the area. They wouldn't be expecting a German submarine, but they wouldn't be blind either.

The submarine lurched again, as if it had collided with an undersea rock. Heinrich was thrown to the floor for a second time, and Felix barely managed to hold on. Oddly, there was no noise other than the alarms and the grunting of the men inside the machine. The large and sudden acceleration suggested a collision, but the sounds suggested otherwise.

"Skipper," a voice suddenly called out from the speaking tubes, "This is the engine room. The starboard electrical generator is on fire. It looks very bad. We'll have to surface."

Felix turned to look at the electrical voltmeters and ammeters. Both were oscillating wildly. That explained the problem. Fire onboard ships were bad, but fires onboard submarines were nightmare fuel. Not only did they threaten the hull integrity and systems of the boat, they also threatened sailors with toxic smoke. Worst of all, they rapidly used up all oxygen—perhaps the scarcest commodity on submarines.

"Okay. Cut off the fuel supply. We're surfacing," Felix shouted into the speaking tube, "Blow the ballast tanks. Bring us up."

"Jawohl, Skipper," the Chief Engineer replied, adjusting some of the levers. "The submarine is responding accordingly, sir." Felix breathed a sigh of relief. The mechanical systems were indeed still working.

Heinrich opened his mouth to protest, but no words came out. The captain knows best, he thought. German captains were the best trained, most experienced, and most daring. Felix was born in the United States, but he was a true German at heart. His service record was spotless, and his service to the German State was unquestionable. He was also a devoted believer of National Socialism. But no matter how devoted and skilled he was, he was still subject to the unbending laws of fortune and physics. Physics dictated that they surface, but whether or not they would make it to Argentina fell entirely within the purviews of fortune. There, luck, not skill, decided survival.

Roosevelt, Utah, April 3, 140,001,991 B.C.

The Mysterious Beyond

"Cleve? CLEVE! WAKE UP!"

Cleve felt pair of hands shaking and squeezing his shoulders.

"CLEVE! WAKE UP! Pull up!"

Cleve's eyes shot open. He was still sitting in the pilot seat of the Avenger, but his hands were no longer on the control stick. The plane was in a nosedive, and the ground was rapidly looming upwards.

"Crap!" Cleve cursed out. Instincts took over. Cleve screamed and pulled the control stick with all his might. The plane was exceeding its maximum intended speed, and shock waves from the wings and horizontal stabilizers rendered the elevators nearly impossible to use. Cleve groaned and pulled harder. He also lowered the flaps slightly. That helped slow the bomber. The elevators finally began to tilt. The plane gradually leveled off, just scraping by the tree tops.

Tree tops? Weren't we in the middle of the ocean?

Cleve looked around in confusion. It was nighttime, but there was a full moon. The moon—for some reason—seemed a lot bigger and brighter than usual. The fog was gone. A few lay cumulus clouds lazily floated about. The ground in front of him was covered in an endless carpet of trees, ponds, and swamps. There was no sign of the ocean or any of the other planes. "The Everglades? How did we end up here?" Cleve mumbled.

"Cleve?" Alford responded in a shaky voice, "This… this… isn't the Everglades. This isn't even Florida."

"What are you talking about, Alford? Did you hit your head? We're over the mainland. Just look outside."

"Cleve… there are no volcanoes in Florida."

"Volcanos? What vol…"

Cleve looked around. Sure enough, there was a volcano just a few miles off the starboard wing. It wasn't erupting, but it was still billowing smoke. Cleve banked the aircraft slightly in the other direction; volcano ash and the internal combustion engine didn't go well together. Neither did Florida and volcanos.

Cleve searched his head for an answer. There were no volcanos on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. There were a few on the Caribbean islands, but he wasn't flying above an island. There were a few active volcanoes in Mexico. The Vulcan de San Martino and El Chichón volcanos were both located in eastern Mexico, but they were both more than 1,100 miles from Florida. He did not have nearly enough fuel for such a journey.

"Ruffy, do you know where we are?" Cleve asked. Ruffy still had the celestial navigation charts. The sky was clear enough for celestial navigation.

"The stars are wrong. It's almost as if we've been sent to another planet."

Cleve looked around. Sure enough, he couldn't recognize a single constellation. The sky was full of stars, but none of them were in the right places. Cleve scratched his head. He felt like he had become an unwilling character in a Franz Kafka story. Nothing seemed to make sense anymore.

The instruments were still not malfunctioning. Both the magnetic compass and the gyroscopic compass had stopped spinning, but they were pointing in different directions. The turn-and-bank indicator was very slow to respond. The random wind patterns inside the cloud had torn off one of the elevators, and the plane was subsequently harder to control. But it could have been way worse; the Avenger was a rugged plane and built to withstand such abuse. The engineers at Grumman had done their homework.

"Try to contact someone on the radio," Cleve suggested, "The fog's gone. Maybe that'll clear up our communications too."

Alford turned the radio dials, which had been knocked out of position during the rapid descent. The static seemed louder than usual. He turned to the frequency for Naval Air Station Ft. Lauderdale. More static greeted him. Then, he turned to the frequency for Banana River and the emergency frequency. No go. The only thing he got was a earful of static.

"Negative," Alford responded, "None of the ground frequencies are working. Maybe this thing took some damage during the fall."

It was possible, and it wasn't improbable either. Planes exceeding their recommended maximum speeds often landed with damaged ailerons, elevators, flaps, and antennas, if they were lucky to return at all. Pilots considered the Avenger a "dirty" plane, which meant that it was slow to accelerate in dives. Still, a broken antenna wouldn't be unusual, and the storm might have frayed the radio's electrical systems. The details didn't matter as far as Cleve was concerned. Neither problem was reparable while the plane was in flight. Cleve had other problems to worry about.

"I'm going to descend," he decided, "I don't know where we are, but unless you want to be stuck in the middle of some jungle, we have to find some signs of civilization. Keep your eyes peeled for lights on the ground."

"Look for the light," Alford muttered, "But I doubt that Admiral Mitscher will turn on the lights for us this time."

Despite their dire situation, both Cleve and Ruffy let out some chuckles. Admiral Mitscher was a hero among naval aviators. At the end of the Battle of the Philippine Sea, numerous American pilots lost their way in the darkness, unable to locate friendly carriers. Admiral Mitscher ordered his ships to turn on their lights, thereby guiding the lost pilots home. He risked detection by enemy submarines, but he accepted that risk in order to save his fliers. Admiral Mitscher saved Cleve and his crew them, but the admiral could not save them anymore. They had to depend on themselves. They flew onwards into the night, blissfully unaware that they had been transported 140 million years into the past, to a land before humanity.

Author's Note: Hello, everyone! It has been seven years since I first began working on his story, and it has been more than 15 years since I first got the chance to enjoy The Land Before Time. My favorite movie in childhood still remains vivid in my heart. Littlefoot's spirit, hope, and optimism will burn on.

In these past seven years, I have learned so much about the world. I graduated from college in May, and I will be starting medical school in August. It will be a very busy and stressful time for me, but I still hope to be able to devote some time to this story.

I recently had the opportunity to visit Ashley Valley in Utah, where much of this story is set. It was a beautiful and wondrous place. I became one of the "lucky hikers" who had the privilege of enjoying the view Littlefoot and his friends saw. I also had the chance to visit Dinosaur National Park. Being able to marvel at the fossils and remains of such majestic creatures was a sublime experience, and I hope to be able to visit again someday. If you would like some pictures, please visit The Game of Five thread on locations of the Great Valley.

I also went back and corrected some of the timeline inconsistencies and typographical mistakes earlier in this story.

Thank you for following The Land Before Time: the March of Man