Читать книгу The Lost World MEGAPACK® - Lin Carter - Страница 52

CHAPTER 8

THE SEA THAT TIME FORGOT

Since there were no dawns or sunsets here in the Underground World, we were going to have to get used to sleeping in the broad daylight of Zanthodon’s perpetual noon.

After some hours of weaving through the Devonian jungle, and going around ever-larger and muckier areas of swamp, we were both bone-weary and mighty hungry.

I brought down a small, plump critter that looked like a large lizard walking on its hind legs, planting one slug from my .45 right behind the shoulder. It went down, kicking and twitching, its jaws opening and closing spasmodically, long after its eyes had glazed over and gone dead.

The Professor identified it as a harmless coelurosaur, but you could have fooled me. It was, about a yard long and looked very lizardlike to my eye, except that its hind legs were much bigger and more developed than its tiny forelimbs, and it walked erect with a springy, long stride, rather like an ostrich.

As it hopped along, it kept bobbing its head back and forth, for all the world like an ordinary pigeon.

“Harmless?” I asked the Professor in a stage whisper—for a yard long is plenty long enough for something to take a chunk out of you. He shrugged.

“Harmless enough…a coelurosaur is a scavenger, an eater of dead things…no more dangerous than a vulture, and with similar tastes in nutrition.”

I wasn’t about to debate how dangerous vultures can or cannot be, although I remember a grisly tussle I had with a couple of the ugly birds in the Kalihari Desert (they insisted I was dead, and thus fair game; I insisted I was alive…I won).

“Harmless, then?” I repeated, unlimbering my shootin’ iron.

“Harmless.”

“Dinner,” I said succinctly, and pumped a slug into the little dinosaur. It expired, twitching, taking about as long to die as a snake does. With brains as small as most dinos are supposed to have, it must have taken quite a while for the notion that it was deceased to have penetrated that small, hard skull.

I could swear that it was still twitching, even after I had chopped it up and was roasting the more tender bits of it over a fire.

And thus it was we ate our first true meal in Zanthodon, living off the landscape in the approved pioneer manner.

And—incidentally—became the first humans on record to enjoy dinosaur steak. (Tough, and a little gamy; but not all that bad!)

* * * *

Getting to sleep in what could easily pass for broad daylight was another matter entirely. After we had chewed and swallowed as much of filet of coelurosaur as could be expected of us, we drank and washed our hands from a small bubbling spring which gushed from a pile of rocks, and started looking around for a safe place to sleep.

And learned there really are no safe places to sleep here in Zanthodon.

I knew this for a fact the third time I fished a wriggling nine-inch horned proto-lizard out of my bed of grasses.

We gave up the dry land and settled for a perch in a tree. And at that we had to tie ourselves to the trunk and sleep sitting up, straddling a branch between our legs.

I was so sleepy by that time that I just figured that anything smart or agile enough to climb the tree to get at us was welcome to the meal. Hell, a man has got to sleep once in a while…and it had certainly been a long and busy day.

I have no idea how long I slept—and I refuse to bore you by repeating all that stuff about no sun in the sky and so on—but whenever it was that I did wake up, I was stiff and sore in every muscle, and had a kingsize headache and a mouth that tasted as if a particularly nasty little furry animal had decided a few weeks ago to hibernate therein.

By the time I climbed down stiffly from the tree, I discovered muscles in places I had never known I had muscles. Since I am, by comparison, young and fairly limber, you can imagine how Professor Potter felt.

And not having a steaming hot mug of black coffee to wash down our breakfast of cold, greasy coelurosaur leftovers did nothing to improve our dispositions, I assure you. Still and all, the life in the great outdoors is supposed to be hearty and bracing, and also good for you. Maybe it is: it just takes a little getting used to.

We continued our trek through the Devonian jungle. And by this time I was getting pretty damn sick of that Devonian jungle. My idea of jungle comes from watching Tarzan movies, and I feel cheated without lots of jungle vines and exotic, flowering bushes and long grasses and stuff…and apparently, grasses, bushes and flowers just plain weren’t around during the Devonian.

We kept on going until we could go no farther.

We had run into a sea.

* * * *

We came to the edge of a bluff, and there before us stretched a vast, seemingly endless expanse of water.

Oily waves heaved sluggishly under misty skies, and the glimmering slimy tides broke with a slow, pounding rhythm against fanged barriers of lava rock thickly encrusted with sea growths. The sea expanded before us, stretching to the dim horizon, losing itself in the steamy fogs which hung low over the heaving rollers.

“It is like the first sea, on the very morning of Creation itself,” breathed the Professor, clasping his bony hands together in poetic exaltation. And I have to admit it certainly was. His expression became dreamy, as he repeated the old, old words:

“…and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep…and the evening and the morning were the first day.”

“Amen to that,” I said soberly. That vast, rolling expanse was like the first sea at the beginning of time, the mighty mother from whose tremendous, watery womb the first life stirred toward the dry land. It was a somber, an impressive, sight.

And just then the sluggish waves broke into a glitter of flying spray, as something as long as a five-story building is high reared its small, snaky head atop its long, snaky neck out of the water.

Up and up that slender neck rose, until it didn’t seem possible that any neck could grow that long. Under the sliding lucency of the sea’s surface I glimpsed a fat, seal-like body, propelled through the waves by vast, flat flippers.

“Not to continue the Biblical parallels, but d’you suppose, that’s the serpent in Eden?” I said, flippantly.

The Professor huffed and snorted.

Then he peered more closely, eyes almost popping out of his skull with curiosity.

“A genuine plesiosaurus, my boy, or I’m a monkey’s uncle!” he exclaimed. “An aquatic reptile of the Jurassic, thought by some to be yet surviving in the greater oceanic depths…perhaps the true sea serpent of sailing lore…possibly even the Loch Ness Monster itself…gad, if only I could get a closer look at the creature—if I could but measure it!—I could at last resolve the old dispute concerning the inordinate lengths to which the sea monster is believed to have attained.”

The old boy was hopping from one foot to another in an agony of impatient and frustrated frenzy. I had to pity him: but his torment soon dissolved into another of those moods of dreamy rapture he was constantly falling into as he regarded yet another variety of prehistoric monster.

“…To think of it, my boy!…the original sea serpent of the Dawn Age, vanished from the earth before the first man stood erect…until now we have only been able to study the plesiosaurus from its fossilized remains—but to be the first living man to actually look upon the living monster itself—gak!”

Gak, indeed: for just then ten of the ugliest men I have ever seen came around the bluff and stopped short at the sight of us.

They were hairy and half-naked and had matted manes and beards, and hefted huge clubs and things.

And they were very definitely…men.

“Oh, my goodness,” whispered the Professor faintly in a faint voice.

“You can say that again,” I muttered, grabbing my gun and wishing I had packed along a good carbine and plenty of ammo, instead of one little .45.

They were nearly naked, and were about the hairiest men I had ever seen or heard of, with barrel chests and long apelike arms and thick, matted hair and dirty beards on their ugly faces. They walked with a gait somewhere between a shamble and a shuffle, huge, dirty splayed feet wide-spread, and they had poorly tanned animal hides tied about them with thongs made of gut. Grunting and snorting to each other, they looked us over suspiciously, with an expression of surly truculence.

“Neanderthals, or I’m a monkey’s uncle,” breathed the Professor, a look of angelic rapture on his face.

“Eternal Euclid, that I should live to see it…!”

“Neanderthals? You mean cavemen?” I muttered out of the corner of my mouth, not daring to take my eyes off the pug-uglies. He nodded vaguely.

“I should have guessed at the possibility of primitive man having found his way down here, when I saw the mammoth,” he said. “Both early man and mammoth must have fled here from the advancing glaciers when the Ice Age came down across Europe…probably via the same Gibralter landbridge the dinosaurs used, many millions of years earlier…”

All this was interesting enough, I suppose, but hardly relevant to the problem at hand. I didn’t bother asking the Doc if Neanderthal men were dangerous, because I had a pretty fair notion they were. And I believe I failed to mention they were carrying wooden clubs, stone axes, and a couple of long, clumsylooking spears tipped with sharply pointed bits of stone.

One perfectly enormous caveman stepped to the fore to look us over. He was a good head taller than I am, and must have tipped the scales at three hundred pounds, with those gorilla-like shoulders and huge, hairy paunch. He wore a crude necklace of seashells threaded on a string of gut around his fat throat: from this, and the way the others deferred to him, I reckoned him to be the chief.

“How,” I said, lifting my right hand slowly, palm open and forward, as they do in the movies.

He grunted and spat, looking me over sourly. I took the opportunity to take a good look at him.

He must have been the ugliest man I’ve ever seen, with a thick underslung jaw and a heavy brow-ridge, hardly any forehead to speak of, and a nose that had been squashed flat a few times. His skin was so dirty and matted with hair that it was almost impossible to tell what color it was. His hair, amusingly, was reddish, nearly the same shade as the mammoth’s coat. His eyes caught my attention: one of them was blank white, obviously blinded either from a cataract or an injury. The other eye was small and mean, buried in a pit of gristle under that bony shelf of a brow. His beard was short and scrubby, and he was crawling with lice: I know this for a fact, for while he was giving me the once-over, he plucked one of the vermin from his armpit, and cracked it between his teeth.

“Tasty, I’ll bet,” I remarked in an easy, conversational manner. “I can just imagine what your table manners are like!”

“Be careful, my boy, you might make him angry,” muttered the Professor nervously.

I grinned. The Neanderthal man evidently felt he was being talked about, or laughed at—or, possibly, both. Grunting, he spat between my feet, a murderous gleam in his one good eye.

In the next instant he came at me in a rush, growling like a lion at the charge.

I went for the automatic at my waist, but didn’t have time to use it. For the caveman slammed the flat of his stone axe up alongside my head, and, for me, the day was over.

PART III: MEN OF THE STONE AGE