Читать книгу The Lost World MEGAPACK® - Lin Carter - Страница 51

CHAPTER 7

CASTAWAYS IN YESTERDAY

Which did about as much good as pumping a shot into an oncoming locomotive. The immense reptile with the spiked, warty hide like an overgrown horned toad kept coming, not even wincing as the slug from my automatic slammed into it. Either the slug flattened upon impact or glanced off like a bullet ricocheting from steel plate…anyway, it didn’t even nick the monster’s horny hide.

“C’mon, Doc!” I yelled, jerking the old man to his feet and propelling him before me. We plunged into the reeds at breakneck speed. With that ton of beef to drag along, it didn’t look to me as if our club-tailed friend was exactly built for speed. And I figured we could outdistance him, with just a little luck.

But we ran out of luck—and land—at just about the same time.

That is, the jungle through which we were plunging suddenly gave way to pure, oozy swamp. I stopped short, ankledeep in yellow mud, and grabbed the Professor by one skinny arm just as he was about to plunge into the muck up to his middle.

“We can’t run through that, Doc,” I panted. “Looks like quicksand to me—quick the other way!”

But even as we turned to take another route and skirt the swampy area, the ground trembled beneath a ponderous tread and that immense, blunt-nosed, flat-browed head came poking through the brush. The dino had been able to move much quicker than I had thought possible.

I unlimbered my automatic again, feeling trapped and helpless. If one slug hadn’t even dented his warty hide, what good was a clipful of bullets? Right then and there, I could have written a five-year mortgage on a large chunk of my soul for one good big elephant gun.

The huge reptile came lumbering down to the shore of the swamp where we stood cornered with our backs to a lake of stinking mud.

Then it reached forward delicately and selected a mawfull of tender reeds which grew along the edge of the marsh. One chomp and it pulled up a half-bushel of reeds in its jaws.

And, with one dull, sleepy eye fixed indifferently upon the two of us, jaws rolling rhythmically like some enormous cow, it began chewing its reed salad.

I let out my breath with a whoosh; beside me, the Professor essayed a shaky laugh.

“Ahem! Ah, my boy, if I had only identified the creature a bit earlier, we could have avoided our precipitous flight,” he wheezed, climbing out of the muck on wobbly knees.

“What’s that mean?” I demanded.

“It means that I have been able to identify the creature,” he smiled. “From its appearance, it is clearly some genera of ankylosaur…I believe it to be a true scolosaurus from the Late Cretaceous…like so many of its kind—”

“—A harmless vegetarian?” I finished, sarcastically. He had the grace to blush just a little.

“Just so,” he said feebly.

We climbed back up to higher ground, circling the placid grass-eater as it mechanically munched its cud, glancing with an idle and disinterested eye as we passed.

* * * *

By now we were quite thoroughly lost. I cannot emphasize enough the peculiar difficulty—in fact, the utter impossibility—of finding your way about in a world that has no sun in its sky. Under the steamy skies of Zanthodon, where a perpetual and unwavering noon reigned, there was no slightest hint as to which way was north, south, east or west.

We might be fifty yards from the helicopter, or fifty miles. (Well, not quite that much: we couldn’t possibly have come so far in so short a time, but you get the idea.) We decided simply to keep going until we found either food or water—if not both—or the chopper. I was getting pretty depressed about then, what with being hungry, tired, thirsty, and splattered with mud halfway up to my armpits. Mud squelched glutinously in my boots with every step I took, and my clothes were still wet clear through from that warm shower we had sat through when the triceratops had us treed. And there are few things this side of actual torture or toothaches more uncomfortable than being forced to walk about for long in soaking wet clothes.

Zanthodon is a world of tropic warmth, but, lacking true sunlight; if you get wet it’s curiously hard to get dry again, due to the steamy humidity. Not at all the place I’d pick for a winter vacation: as far as I have yet been able to discern, there are no seasons here, and only one climate. Some of those hare-brained weather forecasters who litter the nightly news on television would certainly have a cushy job down here: Hot, humid, scattered showers and occasional volcanic eruptions…that would do for a good yearful of forecasts!

The Professor was a man of irrepressible enthusiasms, however; you could not keep him gloomy for long, not in a place like this, when everywhere he happened to look he spotted something or other that was (according to him) of unique scientific interest.

“Fascinating, my boy, utterly fascinating,” he burbled, jouncing along at my side as we trekked through the jungle.

“What is it now?” I sighed.

“The varieties of flora we have thus far encountered,” he said. “Perhaps I should have guessed as much from the variety of fauna we have already met with…you recall I remarked a while earlier that something like one hundred and fifty million years separated triceratops from the wooly mammoths of the Ice age…?”

“Yeah, I remember,” I said laconically.

“Well, do you notice anything different about this part of the jungle?”

I glanced around. We were tramping through a rather sparse growth of jungle at the time. Around us were things that looked like palm trees, but which had crosshatched, spiny trunks resembling the outsides of pineapples; and what looked like evergreen bushes, eye-high skinny Christmas trees; and tall, fronded, droopy-looking trees. Some of these grew about forty feet high, and there was hardly anything in the way of underbrush.

The Professor was right: this part of the jungle did look kind of different…so I said as much.

“Precisely, young man!” he cackled jubilantly. “When we first arrived in Zanthodon, we found ourselves in a jungle landscape quite definitely situated in the Early Cretaceous, what with its typical flora of palmlike cycads and tree ferns, and the ancestors of the modern evergreen and gingko…”

I recalled the landscape in which we had first found ourselves, and nodded, if only to keep the old boy happy. For he was never so much in his element as when lecturing somebody about something. It is, I understand, an occupational disease of scholars and scientists.

“Well,” he continued in a sprightly tone of voice, “we now find ourselves in a landscape decorated with vegetation distinctly Devonian.”

“Yeah?” I grunted. “Listen, Doc, these names don’t actually mean all that much to me, you know?”

He sniffed reprovingly.

“The Cretaceous began about one hundred and thirty million years ago,” he informed me. “But the Devonian is vastly earlier…three hundred million years ago, at least.”

I glanced around me at the peculiar trees.

“And this stuff is Devonian, eh?”

“Quite indubitably…those are aneurophytons over there, a variety of seed fern…and those odd-looking bushes are a variety of horsetail called calamites…”

“What about those funny-looking trees over there?” I asked, nodding at something that looked as if it had grown from a few seeds dropped down from Mars.

“Archaeosigillaria, a true lycopod, commonly known as club-mosses,” he said dreamily. “And these pallid, slenderfronded growths through which we are at the moment strolling are psilophyton, a very primitive form of plant life.”

His gaze became ecstatic. “Think of the marvel of it all…these very earliest forms of vegetable life died out and became extinct long before the first mammalian brain sluggishly stirred toward a spark of sentience…hitherto we have only known them from their fossilized traces or remains—but to actually look upon the living plants themselvesl Noble Newton!”

I did not exactly share his excited fervor, but I could understand it, I suppose.

“It’s like as if we had a Time Machine,” I mused, “and had gotten lost in the prehistoric past…”

“Precisely so,” he sighed. “Castaways of time, marooned in a forgotten yesterday countless millions of years before our own modern age.…”

Just then I took a false step and went to my knees in yellow muck, and rose dripping and foul.

“Very poetic,” I grumbled, “but give me the sidewalks of Cairo or a good filet mignon on Park Avenue.”

“My boy,” he sighed, “you have no soul!”

“I got plenty of soul, Doc!” I protested. “It’s just that I would be enjoying this time trek a lot more if I had brought along a motorcycle. Or a good dry canoe,” I added grimly. For we had come to the shore of another lake of watery mud, and it looked like a long walk around it.

Poetry is all very well, and I have nothing against souls, either, for that matter.

But I hate wet clothes and a bootfull of squishy mud can ruin my whole morning!