The Lost World MEGAPACK®. Lin Carter

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