Journey To The Underground World Page 5

  “Oh,“I said. “Well, what do you say we get out of this tree, anyway? I’d rather like to make tracks out of here while he’s still busy making strawberry jam out of the dino.”

  “Not a bad idea, my boy.”

  We climbed down out of the tree with a lot more difficulty than we had when going up it, because being chased by a hungry triceratops does tend to improve one’s agility. But we got down, anyway, and without attracting any attention from the infuriated mammoth.

  “Which way?“I muttered, looking about. With all the excitement, I had lost track of the direction from which we had come.

  “That way, I think,“whispered the Professor, pointing off to a grove of tree-sized ferns.

  About a half an hour later, we sat down on a rotting log to catch our breath, and had to admit to ourselves that we were thoroughly lost. It is peculiarly difficult to tell your direction in a place that has no sun to tell you east from west; but, still, as I sourly remarked to the Professor, I could have been smart enough to bring a pocket-compass along.

  “Please don’t castigate yourself on that omission, my boy,“he panted, fanning himself with the sun helmet. “In the first place, I rather doubt if a compass would work at this depth, and in the second… “

  But Professor Potter never got a chance to finish his statement, and I never did find out his second reason why I shouldn’t blame myself for forgetting to bring along the compass.

  For just then the long reeds before us parted, and there shouldered into view the ugliest monstrosity I had yet seen in Zanthodon.

  It had a small, flat-browed, wicked little head at the end of a thick, short neck, and it waddled out of the underbrush on four fat legs. The weirdest thing about it was that it was completely armored all over-in bands, like an armadillo. And these tough plates of horny armor were pebbled with hideous wartlike encrustations.

  They were also packed bristling with short, blunt spikes. From stem to stern: from the forehead (such as it was) down to the tail-and what a tail! It was shaped like the business end of a giant’s club, and boasted two enormous spikes. Since the waddling monstrosity rather looked to weigh a ton or more, I had a feeling that tail could total a Volkswagen with one good swipe.

  And it was coming straight at us-

  The Professor paled, and uttered a stifled shriek.

  As for me, I did a damnfool thing: I whipped out my .45 and put a slug right between its mean little eyes!

  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!

  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 king-size 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 th
ere 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.”