Читать книгу The Lost World MEGAPACK® - Lin Carter - Страница 49

CHAPTER 5

LAND OF MONSTERS

Now that my fears concerning the Professor’s safety were relieved, we had time to compare notes. It seems that the helicopter had emerged so suddenly into the vast open space, that it had taken Potter quite by surprise.

As I had not instructed him how to land the chopper—there being no particular reason to teach him that—he did the best he could in the few moments available to him.

We checked out Babe, and she was a sorry sight. Although not as much a total loss as she would have been had the gas tanks exploded, she was still a long ways from being airworthy. One rotor blade was snapped off short; another was bent. We would require the services of a blacksmith in setting that part of the damage to right. And where, in all of this incredible cavern-world, could we expect to find a smithy?

The Professor—predictably—was fascinated by his discovery. While I peered and poked and pried at the undercarriage, trying to ascertain the extent of the damage, he stared about him in dazzled wonder.

“Incredible, my boy, simply incredible!” he breathed enthusiastically. “Zanthodon is even more miraculous than I had dreamed…those trees over there are Jurassic conifers, extinct in the upper world for untold ages.”

“Yeah? And what are those feathery bamboo-type things?” I grunted, nodding at the tall growths which fringed the lagoon.

“Cycads, my boy…tree-ferns, likewise extinct. Utterly marvelous: a paleontologist’s dream come true!”

He had expected to find some interesting fossils, so I can readily understand his excitement at finding them alive and well, flourishing here beneath the earth’s crust where the temperature was humid, subtropical, and—above all—stable.

“Did you expect this place to be so big?” I inquired, rising to my feet and dusting off my knees. He shook his head, sun helmet wobbling.

“Not precisely. I estimate the cavern-world as being about five hundred miles by five hundred, almost perfectly circular,” he mused. That didn’t sound like so much to me, and I said so.

He snorted. “That means Zanthodon consists of a quarter of a million square miles, my boy.”

“That much?”

“That much!”

“Well, we’re stuck here for a while, at least,” I said grimly. “Babe can’t fly until we repair her rotors—yow!”

I yelled, ducked, hit the dirt—and the Professor was not far behind me.

“What was that?” I gasped, as the enormous kite-shaped black shadow sailed on over the lagoon. Glancing up, I saw wide, bat-like membranous wings, a long snaky head and tail, and a beaklike muzzle filled with an incredible number of very long teeth.

“Either a pteranodon or perhaps a true pterodactyl,” murmured the Professor abstractedly, peering at the soaring reptile. “How remarkable that here life forms otherwise extinct still flourish…no pteranodon has flown the skies of the upper world for seventy million years and more, yet here they seem to thrive, if yonder specimen is indicative…”

“Yeah,” I grunted, staring after the winged monster as it lazily flapped away over the treetops. “And come to think of it, Doc, how’d ‘you suppose the dinosaurs got down here, anyway? That volcano crater is straight down for miles and miles. Maybe a flying critter like that one that just went by could have gotten here under his own steam, but the protocroc we saw a minute ago certainly couldn’t.”

He frowned, rubbing his brow with a grubby forefinger. “There may well be, probably are, other entrances to Zanthodon besides the one by which we traveled here…side vents, volcano fumaroles…and some of them may perhaps descend into the cavern-world at an angle less steep, thus affording passage to the four-footed saurians.”

Warming to his latest theory, the Professor began a rambling discourse that was more like thinking out loud than anything else. No one quite knows what killed the dinosaurs off, but the difficulty of obtaining sufficient food, climactic changes to which the cold-blooded reptiles could not comfortably adjust, all these probably share the blame. He made it seem very understandable that some of the saurians, drifting down across Europe in search of food or warmer climes, might have crossed the Gibralter land-bridge (for in those ages, the Mediterranean was only a land-locked lake), finding their way to North Africa and, some of them, into Zanthodon.

His explanation sounded pretty reasonable to me, but then, I’m no scientist.

“Just think of it, my boy,” he breathed, eyes agleam with the good old scientific fervor, “living survivors of a lost age, dwelling here beneath the earth’s crust…ah, Holy Huxley and Dear Darwin! When we return again to the upper world, we shall astound the entire scientific community—or we could, that is; especially if we were to bring back a living specimen of a species known to have perished into extinction scores of millions of years ago!…Why, think of it!—Mighty Mendel, but it could make our names forever undying and immortal in the annals of exploration and discovery…!”

I could just imagine trying to cram several hundred pounds of fanged fury into Babe’s cramped little cabin, but I said nothing. No reason to shatter the Professor’s dream.

“If we get back,” I couldn’t resist pointing out. “The way things stand right now, Babe’s in no condition to handle that ascent. I couldn’t even get her off the ground, lacking those rotor-blades.”

He rubbed his hands together briskly, glancing around.

“Then we shall begin work at once,” he puffed. “We’ll make camp on that high ground…and we must find a source of fresh water, as I presume the lagoon is salty…some manner of rude palisade should keep the larger predators at bay while we effect repairs on your machine, Let me see, now…we can make charcoal with some of the dry wood from the jungle, build an oven with loose rocks, rig up some sort of smithy using spare parts from your tool box…the repairs will be crude, certainly, and only temporary, but surely with your strength and my skill, we can render the machine airworthy again within a matter of weeks—perhaps even days.”

“I suppose so,” I said, a bit dubious about the whole thing. “But the main problem is going to be keeping ourselves alive that long.”

And that was going to be a problem!

* * * *

The only weapon I had thought to bring along was my .45, for which I had plenty of ammo. But the automatic was not going to be much good against any of the bigger dinosaurs, and the Professor and I both knew it. What we needed for that was a good, huge elephant gun. If not a mortar!

If I had known we were going to be marooned here, like characters out of King Kong or The Lost World, I could have bought some more sophisticated weaponry on the black market back in Cairo. A beltfull of fragmentation grenades would certainly come in handy, I thought to myself wistfully. The Professor pooh-poohed my fears.

“Cease your trepidations, my boy,” he huffed. “Most of the giant saurians are vegetarians, and no more dangerous than milk cattle…now let us begin looking for a source of fresh water.”

I thought to myself of a prize bull that had gored a careless farmhand to death back home when I had been a kid, but decided not to mention it. The Professor was a hard guy to argue with. He always had fifty-seven reasons why he was right and I was wrong, and I had to agree that he certainly knew more about dinosaurs than I did.

So we started out, searching for a spring. In order not to get ourselves lost, we decided to trace an everwidening circle, using the site of Babe’s wreck as the center of the spiral. Just in case we did run into trouble, I insisted on taking along a light backpack of medical supplies and food. He grumbled that this was an unnecessary precaution, but relented and gave me my head in the matter.

Under the steamy skies of Zanthodon’s perpetual day we started off. The Professor had a theory about the uncanny daylight which bathed the jungle country beneath the earth: he figured that the original explosion which had created the Underground World had reacted chemically with minerals in the vaporized rock to create an effect not dissimilar to chemical photoluminescence. He was probably right about this, for during all the time I was to spend here in Zanthodon the light never changed or faded or dimmed.

Strange, strange!…This world of eternal day where monsters from the prehistoric past roamed and raged amid jungles left over from Time’s forgotten dawn.…

But there were even stranger marvels yet to come.

* * * *

The first inkling we had that we were in serious trouble came swiftly.

A black shadow blotted out the sky and as we threw ourselves prone, there descended on flapping wings like those of a monstrous bat another of those ghastly winged reptiles we had seen earlier.

It was about the size of last year’s Buick, its lean and sinewy body covered with leathery, pebbled hide rather than scales, and it had the same long beaklike snout filled with an amazing number of long, sharp, white teeth.

The thing pounced down upon us like a chicken hawk on a couple of fat pullets, clawed feet reaching for our flesh as it fell. I felt a blast of hot, stinking breath and looked up into mad, hungry scarlet eyes—

Then I hit the dirt, rolled, snapped up, leveling my .45. I pumped two slugs into the pterodactyl as it scrabbled about in the mud, trying to get ahold of the Professor. The stench of gunpowder stung my nostrils and the explosion of the gunshots was deafening. The thing squawked, red blood spurted from one wing, and it fell over on its side, clawing at the ground as I dragged the Professor clear, tugging one leg.

“Th-thank you, my b-boy,” he panted. “That was a narrow shave…henceforward we must keep on the alert for such flying monsters—”

The underbrush rustled as something big and greenishbrown came pushing through. It was bigger than three oxen, with a head the size of an oil-drum. Its cruelly beaked snout bore a short, curved horn thicker than my thigh, and there was nothing but fierce hunger in its little pig-eyes. It looked like the granddaddy of all rhinos, and it came thundering down upon us like a runaway locomotive.

We sprang clear as it crashed into the crippled pterodactyl and sank that nasal horn to the hilt in the batbird’s leathery chest. It began to crunch and munch juicily, ripping off raw steaks, blood squirting all over; and it was one ugly customer, let me tell you! It stood about seven feet high and was about twenty feet long, and it must have weighed in at two or three tons. It had four squat legs, bowed out at the knees, and a huge, swaying paunch, and a thick tail like an alligator. The thing’s feet looked like those of an elephant.

“What the hell is it?” I whispered to the Professor as we took hasty refuge in the bushes.

“I don’t precisely know, my boy,” he panted. “Obviously a ceratopsian, perhaps a genuine triceratops, I don’t know…”

“You don’t know?”

He glared at me with some asperity.

“My boy, there are more than a dozen genera of ceratopsians, and I can’t be expected to recognize one at a glance! They look very different, you know, from their skeletons…but from the bony shield covering the monster’s neck, I should certainly say triceratops…but that is very interesting, very interesting indeed! For triceratops is known mostly from fossils found in North America—in the state of Montana, to be precise, where I believe the first skulls were discovered in 1888.”

“Well, what’s it doing here in Africa?” I wanted to know.

He shrugged helplessly. “My boy, your guess is every bit as good as mine!”

“I think we’d better find a tree to climb,” I suggested. “That triceratops of yours is just about finished with his pterodactyl snack, and may require something more substantial for the main course—like you and me.”

We found a huge, gnarly tree and climbed it. And not a minute too soon…

* * * *

Twenty minutes later we were still sitting there on a tree limb as the monster prowled with ponderous, earth-shaking steps around and around the tree, pausing from time to time to look up at us and grin, showing a vast pair of jaws and a mighty empty looking gullet. The thing’s head was at least seven feet from the base of that bony shield to the beaked snout, and looked fully capable of gobbling up both of us at one gulp.

And it didn’t look like it was getting bored waiting for lunch, either.

I gave the Professor a look.

“Mostly vegetarians, eh?” I said sarcastically.

Looking remarkably unhappy, the Professor made no comment.