PART II: THE UNDERGROUND WORLD

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 greenish-brown 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.

CHAPTER 6

BATTLE OF THE GIANTS

Before long it began to rain, which didn’t make the Professor any happier. He seemed to hate getting wet as much as any cat, and fussed and fumed as we sat there, treed by a triceratops, getting soaked to the skin in a warm drizzle. The shower, unfortunately, did not seem to dampen the enthusiasm of the lumbering monstrosity below, or diminish his appetite.

I said something to that effect, and the Professor snapped at me waspishly.

“The giant reptiles have very small brains, and the creature will lose interest before long and wander off, having forgotten what he was after in the first place,” he said brusquely.

Like most of the Professor’s predictions, this one proved to be wrong, too. For, half an hour later, the brute was still lumbering about beneath our perch, and he was beginning to get impatient, too. This impatience took the form of giving the tree we were in a nudge or two with his horned snout. And let me tell you, three tons of armor-plated super-rhino can really nudge! He shook the tree as easily as a housemaid shakes out a feather duster, and we had to hang on for dear life.

“Goodness, but I wish he would stop that infernal shaking!” wheezed the Professor, hugging the rough trunk in his skinny arms. “And if only he would go away—I am far too old for these acrobatics!”

Then followed one of the most ludicrous scenes I have ever witnessed. For, whipping off his sun helmet, to which he had tenaciously clung all this while, he began flapping it at the triceratops below like a man trying to drive away an annoying mosquito.

“Shoo, you nasty thing!—Go away!—Leave us alone, now!—We have no time for this nonsense—Shoo!” he shrilled in an exasperated tone of voice. The monster craned its neck skyward, blinking those tiny piggish eyes at the small, scrawny man above.

I began to laugh so hard I nearly fell off my branch, for the expression on the triceratops’ face (or what passed for its face, at least) seemed to me one of blank bafflement. Oh, sure, I know the monster’s leathery visage was incapable of displaying any expression, but that’s what it looked like to me. It was as if the brute was reacting to a novel experience: for, surely, not too many triceratopses in this day and age have ever been angrily “shooed” by a short-tempered professor!

* * * *

Our salvation arrived right on schedule, shortly after the shooing. And it took a quite unexpected form.…

Vegetation crackled, branches snapped and crunched, as a second huge form came lumbering out of the jungle. I took one look and let my jaw drop down to about here: for I had expected another dinosaur, from all the noise, but what emerged into view was a very big elephant wearing a fur coat!

Our visitor was easily twice the size of any elephant I have ever seen, and entirely covered with a long and wavy blanket of coarse red hair. From beneath its long, prehensile trunk sprouted two fantastic ivory tusks, each a good twelve feet long, and these were extravagantly curled.

I exchanged a look with the Professor, and he was as glazed of eye and dangly of jaw as I.

“But this is utterly impossible…” he whispered, half to himself. “A wooly mammoth from the Ice Age!…How could it possibly coexist with one of the great carnosaurs?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Why, the mammoths date from the Pleistocene, only one or two million years ago, and the triceratops is a Mesozoic reptile!…the two monsters come from ages nearly one hundred and fifty million years apart.…This is utterly fantastic!”

And what followed was even more fantastic: a duel to the death between hyper-elephant and superrhino.

Upon spying the dinosaur, the enormous mammoth stopped short. Flapping his ears he lifted his long trunk, giving voice to an enraged squeal of ear-ripping intensity, like a steam whistle gone mad. I got a hunch that this was Jumbo’s personal hunting ground, and that the triceratops was intruding where he was not welcome.

As for the dinosaur, he was in a furious temper, anyway, from his frustration at not yet being able to shake down the lunch he had treed. Squaring off, pawing the mud with one enormous forefoot, he lowered his head, aimed that thick, stubby, pointed horn—and charged!

He caught the mammoth right below the knee, goring him deeply. With a scream of pain and fury, the hairy brute went down on all fours with a thump that shook the ground. Then, swinging its huge head from side to side, the mammoth caught the triceratops across one beefy shoulder with the point of his curlicue tusks, ripping open a longjagged gash between two plates of the reptile’s armor.

Honking furiously, the dinosaur backed off, snorting and pawing the mud, gathering his energies for another charge. The mammoth climbed to his feet again, slightly favoring his gored leg.

The two monsters charged at each other, and when they met it was like two armored tanks colliding. The impact was terrific, but neither monster seemed even slightly dazed. And in the next instant they were at it fast and furious, goring with their tusks, trying to knock each other flat with those heavy hammerlike heads. The ground quaked and trees shook to the fury of their battle. It was an awesome spectacle, and the Professor was utterly enthralled.

“Precious Pliny! Think of it, my boy, we are witnessing a combat no human eyes could ever have looked on before in all of the world’s history…such a duel of prehistoric titans as could only occur here in Zanthodon! Two gigantic monsters from the far ends of time, one a survival from the dim and misty Mesozoic dawn, the other a creature from the Ice Ages, separated from each other by a hundred and fifty million years of evolution…incredible!”

I could understand his amazement; back home I have a friend who plays war games with miniature armies, and one of his favorite hobbies is to pit the great generals of history, divided by centuries, against each other: Napoleon against Peter the Great, or Alexander of Macedon against Hannibal, or Julius Caesar against Genghis Khan. My friend Scott would certainly have savored the rare spectacle we witnessed in that unforgettable battle between two titans from Time’s remotest dawn!

* * * *

It wasn’t long before I discovered something unexpected and even curious about the fight to which we were the only witnesses. And that is, it was really quite a one-sided contest.

Rather to my surprise it did seem that the triceratops was getting the worst of it all. I suppose that I was accustomed to thinking of the gigantic prehistoric dinosaurs as colossal monsters, virtually invulnerable—a habit I probably picked up from watching Godzilla movies—but now that I think back on that fantastic battle of maddened giants from the remote past, I have to remember that the mammoth was far bigger and lots heavier than the dinosaur, who was, after all, only about twenty or twenty-five feet long and who must have weighed no more than two or three tons at the most.

Well, the wooly mammoth was about seventeen feet high at the shoulder, and would probably have tipped the scales at two or even three times the triceratops’ tonnage. And his legs were like the trunks of the giant redwoods of California; when, after some trying, he finally got the triceratops under one of his legs, and had a chance to set his foot down upon the hapless reptile, he broke its back with a grisly snap that was sickeningly audible.

It was all over quite soon: streaming blood from a half-a-dozen places in his flanks where the triceratops had gored him, the furious mammoth trampled the crippled dinosaur into bloody slime.

And it suddenly occurred to me that this was our cue to make a hasty exit before the victor returned to the tree for the spoils. With his height, and that long trunk; the mammoth could pluck us from the bough as easily as an apple-picker plucks ripe fruit from the branch. I said as much to the Professor, and he chuckled nastily, as he often did when I displayed my ignorance.

“We have little to fear from the mammoth, my boy-although were we to get underfoot, he could make short work of us…but, at any rate, we need not fear the beast will attempt to eat us…for, unlike the triceratops, the wooly mammoth is a vegetarian like his remote descendant, the elephant.”

“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 themselves! 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 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, clumsy-looking 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.