The Zanthodon MEGAPACK ™: The Complete 5-Book Series (6 page)

* * * *

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?”