The Lost World MEGAPACK®. Lin Carter

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