The Lost World MEGAPACK®. Lin Carter

a splendid young man whose caricature of a face would curse him through all his days.

      Curse him, and deny him the fruits of a happy life. But raw courage and high achievement would be his, and Crane knew in his heart that when ugly menace stalked the highways of crime, the Invisible Robin Hood would somehow be on hand, ever on the alert against men who would use the marvels of science for their own vicious purposes…

      Hugh Crane turned to Jondra. Thank heaven, she at least had come out of this all unscathed. And she was entirely visible. In fact, come to think of it, she was a most attractive-looking young lady.

      Jondra, with a woman’s intuition, read the message in Crane’s gray eyes.

      Her answering smile was the most visible thing Crane had ever seen.

JOURNEY TO THE UNDERGROUND WORLD, by Lin Carter

      Copyright © 1979 by Lin Carter. Reprinted by permission of Lin Carter Properties.

PART I: THE LOST LAND

      CHAPTER 1

      EAST OF SUEZ

      It was the glint of steel in the folds of the red burnoose that caught my eye—the bright flash of sunlight on a naked dagger!

      It was just half an hour before noon, in the native quarter of Port Said. I can be precise about the time because I recall that even as I glimpsed the glitter of bare steel, the ululating cry of the selâm was echoing from where the mueddin stood on the gallery of the little mosque behind me. And it was a Friday, for that wailing cry, that humble salute to Allah, is chanted forth upon that day and in that hour all across the East, and thus it has been for generations beyond the numbering.…

      The midday sun was roasting and the air was dry as dust and reeked of amazing stenches: goat urine and unwashed men and cooking sausages and raw onions and heady musk and sweet sandalwood and the fresh dung of camels. A medley of odors that, to me, will always say—Egypt.

      In the square before me surged a gaudy throng. Brown children shrieked and chased each other; mongrels growled over scraps of garbage, a lemonade merchant jangled his tin cups not unmusically; women robed and veiled in black, with only their kohl-rimmed eyes visible, shrilled as they fought down the price of bright cloth with a fat, fez-hatted shopkeeper; French girls in light frocks from the cruise ship moored in the harbor poked through a wooden tray of silver bracelets and turquoise brooches; oblivious to the noise, the stenches, the milling crowd, an elderly gentleman sat crosslegged under a striped awning, sipping tea with the serene dignity of a graven Ramses; two swarthy Armenians haggled over an opal large as a human eye.

      I had caught that bright flash of naked steel from the corner of my eye. Turning in the same instant, I peered into the mouth of a narrow alleyway behind the mosque. It was black as the Styx and choked with putrid garbage. But not so black that I could not see the three men who struggled there and even the reek of rotting garbage could not drown the cold and bitter smell of villainy and red murder—

      I sprang upon the taller of the red-robed men and knocked him face down on the slimy cobbles—turned to seize the bony dark wrist of the second man with my left hand, twisting it until the hooked dagger dropped to clang upon the paving stones while I drove the balled fist of my right into his lean belly.

      He paled to the hue of sour milk, sank to his knees, eyes rolling up to display bloodshot whites, then folded forward and began noisily to lose his breakfast. Stepping to one side I put my booted foot on the dirty wrist of the first assassin, who was worming stealthily toward the fallen knife; his wrist bones crunched under my weight and he squealed like a gutted lamb. Then I reached for the third man they had been about to mug, caught him by an upper arm and rapidly propelled him out of the fetid darkness and into the clamor and bustle of the marketplace.

      He blinked at the dazzling impact of the noontime sun and tottered woozily, panting to recover his breath. I looked him over. He was an odd, comical little man, very thin and quite a bit shorter than I, and somewhere in his sixties as far as I could judge. He was dressed in stained, disreputable khaki shorts and a safari shirt, both several sizes too big for his scrawny frame. A huge, old-fashioned sun helmet covered most of his bony, baldish head. His pointed nose supported a pair of antiquated nose-glasses—pince-nez, I think they are called—these teetered insecurely and were often askew.

      His eyes were large and watery and blue, under tufted, snowy brows, and looked curiously out of place in his leathery tanned face, which was bony and long-jawed. A stiff little tuft of white goatee jutted from the point of his chin, and a white mustache bristled from his upper lip, creating the illusion of a Vandyke. When he spoke, his voice was highpitched, querulous, with an Oxford accent; and he spoke in a rather verbose, slightly pompous, very pedantic manner.

      “Holy Heisenberg!” he wheezed. “You arrived in the very nick of time, young man!”

      “Are you okay?” I inquired. “Did they get your wallet?”

      “Eh? Wallet…?”

      I nudged his bony hip, felt a reassuring flattish bulge. How the two thieves had lured the old fellow into that dark alley I did not bother to inquire: he looked so absent-minded and unworldly and easily bamboozled, there was no reason to inquire. So I took his arm again, propelled him a quarter way around the square and into the cool dimness of the Cafe Umbala. The Nubian waiter, who knew me well, grinned, white teeth flashing in his ebony face, amused, doubtless, at the odd couple we made. The little man in soiled khaki kit came only to my armpit; he was thinner than the legendary rail, and my weight could have made three of him, or nearly. He waggled a stiff white goatee in my direction and attempted a jerky little bow, which made his old-fashioned sun helmet fall over his bald brow, knocking his glasses askew.

      “Your unexpected assistance, sir, was timely and most welcome,” he said breathlessly. “Those two ruffians—!”

      I drew him to a seat behind a tiny table set against a wall of flaking plaster adorned with posters advertising such varied amusements as a Parisian chanteuse, who really hailed from Constantinople, a Chinese magician who was actually an exBrooklyn cardsharp of pure Gypsy descent, and a brand of liquor fermented from overripe prunes and fit, from my experience, only for removing old paint from cheap furniture.

      “Relax—catch your breath, pop,” I counseled. At my elbow the Nubian waiter materialized like a genie from the Arabian Nights: “Dry mahtini, sah?”

      “Yep, Tabiz, the usual,” I said. “What’s your poison, old timer?”

      The white tuft of goat-beard jutted skyward stiffly and I received a frosty glare. “Potter is the name, my good man—Professor Potter.”

      “Okay, Doc, have it your way,” I grinned. “But what’ll you have?”

      He sniffed sharply. “As a rule, I do not indulge…still and all, I suppose…under the circumstances…just to restore the tissues…for medicinal purposes only, you understand!…under the advice of my physician…a drop or two of spiritous beverage can do no harm, surely?”

      “Surely,” I nodded.

      “Straight gin,” he snapped at the waiter. “Gordon’s, if you stock it; Boodle’s will do.”

      It turned out to be Old Mr. Boston, but gin (I have found) is gin.

      * * * *

      We talked over our drinks. For the past two months I had been out “east of Suez” as Sax Rohmer or Talbot Mundy would put it, in the desert country in Sinai, performing some rather delicate shipping flights in an old Sikorsky chopper supplied me by a Greek importer.

      Let’s not mince words: I’d been smuggling out antiquities for a fellow named Pappadappoulas who daren’t risk trying to get the stuff out through customs. Nothing much, just broken pottery and a couple of chewed-up Syro-Roman busts; anyway, the Greek either defaulted or got busted and I found myself with about seventy dollars American in my jeans and the proud owner of a beatup Sikorsky, which was probably also hot. As I carelessly filled the Professor in on my recent business venture, he interrupted me with excitement written