The Lost World MEGAPACK®. Lin Carter

air was steamy, moist and humid. And rank with the odors of the lagoon, stale mud, stagnant water, rotting vegetation. The ground was thick with moss, but I saw nothing in sight resembling ordinary grass or bushes or flowers.

      From the slight elevation on which I stood, I could see that the cavern world, if such indeed it was—and such indeed it was—was of enormous, virtually unlimited extent.

      I could see no horizon; the steamy air thickened, blurring far details. A ragged line of blue-green trees marked a jungle beyond the little lagoon, with dim hills beyond that, and then—vision ended.

      I had a sudden crazy hunch that this was a land that time had forgotten—a leftover from the prehistoric past! Memories of Burroughs’ Pellucidar, the world at the earth’s core, spun dizzily through my brain.

      Then the mud stirred and a clumsy shape came shouldering between the tall trees, and I stared into a grinning, lipless mouth lined with bristling fangs.

      And the world went mad.

      * * * *

      The thing was only, I suppose, about three or four feet long; but, then, so’s a king cobra. It was squat and bowlegged and built low to the ground and it walked with an odd, lurching waddle of a gait because its hind legs were longer than its forelegs. It was a mossy dark green all over its warty, armored hide, except in throat and belly, where the color paled to a muddy yellow. It had two rows of bony plates down its back and along the length of its thick, alligator-like tail.

      But its head wasn’t much like an alligator’s, being neckless and snubby in the snout. Under bony brows, its eyes were unwinking pits of bright ferocity, unnervingly scarlet. When it grinned, both jaws proved lined with sharp white fangs longer than my fingers.

      There were an awful lot of them, those fangs.…

      It gave me a long, unwinking gaze, then waddled around behind the wrecked helicopter. I heard a pounce, a squeal; and it emerged into view chewing on something that dribbled raw crimson down its pulsing throat.

      And quick fear welled up within me—

      “Professor!” I squawked, grabbing at my hip with shaking fingers, trying to fumble open the snap on the holster strapped to my waist, where a well-oiled .45 reposed.

      I ran around to the other side of the chopper, and stopped so suddenly a viewer might have thought I had collided with an invisible wall. For there he stood, sun helmet askew, pince-nez tilted to one side, a bruise on his cheekbone, but otherwise (as far as I could see) all in one piece. He stared after the reptile as it waddled unhurriedly away to finish its meal.

      “Eh? What, my boy?”

      “Just wanted to make sure that wasn’t a piece of you that pint-sized croc was nibbling,” I breathed, woozy with relief.

      In his rapt, entranced state he scarcely heard me.

      “Oh, by Linnaeus, Lamarck and Lydekker, my boy, isn’t it purely wonderful,” he murmured dreamily, gazing after the retreating reptile.

      “Ugliest damn croc I ever saw,” I said rudely. He blinked vaguely.

      “Eh, my boy?…Yes, you’re right…well, it is not exactly a true crocodile, but close enough, close enough…give the poor creature another thirty million years or so, and it will evolve into your true and genuine Crocodylus niloticus…unless, of course, evolution and its forces have been suspended here, as I more than half suspect to be the case…how beautiful!” he sighed, staring after the repulsive creature.

      “Beautiful?” I repeated, with a snort. “All depends on taste, I suppose. Give me Ursula Andress in a bikini, and you can keep all the dwarf crocs in the world…”

      But he was paying no attention to me, staring after the reptile. “Protosuchus,” he whispered, “as I live and breathe!…and hitherto found only in Triassic strata in Arizona…a descendant of the phytosaurs…utterly remarkable!”

      “You mean that was a dinosaur?” I demanded, my voice rising into a squeak at the end.

      “Yes, my boy,” he said dreamily, “that was certainly a dinosaur.”

      Welcome to Zanthodon, I thought to myself, feebly.

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