Captain Future 08 - The Lost World of Time (Fall 1941) (6 page)

"It wanted to carry off Eek and eat him!" Grag cried in outrage.

Otho chuckled. "Eek would make an indigestible dinner, even for a pterosaur."

The moon-pup had suffered no real harm from its momentary seizure by the flying reptile. But Eek, never long on courage, was now in a horrible panic, retreating into the
Comet
at a scrambling run. Grag was starting in after the moon-pup when, through the moonlit night, came a sound that froze them all in their tracks.

It was a long, ululating call in a human voice.

"Suns of Hercules, are we crazy?" gasped Otho. "I thought there weren't supposed to be any people on Earth in this age."

"There aren't supposed to be, but that was a human voice!" exclaimed Captain Future, thunderstruck.

They heard the call repeated. It was answered by the distant, thunderous bellowing of unimaginable creatures.

"They might be human visitors from one of the other planets," Curt said excitedly. "Maybe they're even visitors from Katain itself."

Intent on investigating the mystery, he hastily started forcing a way westward through the jungle. The others rapidly followed.

The jungle was weird in the moonlight. Small lizard-like creatures scuttled in front of them. Once Curt heard a crashing in the brush ahead and held up a warning hand. A great stegosaurus, clearly identifiable by the stiff plates of armor that stood up like hackles on its curved back, passed nearby, nibbling at young branches.

The jungle began to thin. They came to its edge and looked out over a broad strip of moonlit plain, at the vast marshes of waving reeds and gleaming pools. Thunderous bellowing broke loud on their ears.

It came from a half-dozen mountainous beasts that were wading clumsily through the marsh toward the shore. They averaged sixty-five feet in length, with small heads swaying at the ends of monstrously long, snaky necks. Their huge feet sucked noisily in the muck as they ponderously came shoreward.

"Brontosaurs, an advanced development of the earlier Getiosaurs," rasped the Brain. "Being completely herbivorous, they are quite harmless."

From the shore, not far from the Futuremen, came the clear, ululating human call. The eyes of all four turned instantly in that direction.

A girl stood on the shore, holding a long spear. She wore a short sleeveless garment, her arms and legs white
in
the moonlight, her dark hair flowing down her back. She was facing the oncoming brontosaurs.

"She's right in their path!" Grag exclaimed, horrified.

The girl again uttered the urgent, ululating call. And again, from the oncoming giant reptiles, came a bawling, Earth-shaking answer.

"Fiends of Pluto, she's
calling
them!" cried Otho.

The weirdness of that fantastic scene held the Futuremen spellbound. It was hard for them to realize that they stood on Earth. The scene before them seemed to belong on some alien planet far across the starry Universe.

THE two brilliant Moons in the sky, casting a silver radiance almost as strong as day, the vast marsh whose edge followed the jungle southward toward a distant group of red-flaring volcanoes, and above all the mountainous, bellowing brontosaurs clambering out of the marsh in answer to the girl's call — all these made the picture wholly unearthly.

"That girl's no visitor from another planet," said Curt Newton with conviction. "Her dress and the spear indicate that she belongs to some rather primitive people native to Earth."

"But there just weren't any native human being this early in time!" Otho protested baffledly. "No fossils have ever been found —"

"I know, but we can see for ourselves that Earth does have human inhabitants in this Mesozoic age," Curt replied. "A race that's even tamed some of the dinosaurs, Lord knows how."

"It wouldn't be so hard, lad, to domesticate those vegetarian reptiles," answered the Brain. "They're stupid and docile. They'd furnish a great food supply, a sort of reptilian cattle."

That the calling girl was anxious was evidenced by the urgency of her ululating summons and the way in which her white face turned constantly northward, as though in dread. The brontosaurs, too, seemed to sense something. The great reptiles were splashing and slipping in their haste to leave the marsh. Yet it was Otho, with his super-keen senses, who saw the danger before the girl did.

"Something coming down along the marsh-edge from the north!" he whispered, peering tensely. "Something big — Gods of Jupiter, look!"

His horrified whisper became a strangled cry. Curt turned and saw. And Captain Future, who had faced the weirdest monsters of scores of worlds back in his own time, felt the hackles rise on his neck.

It seemed at first only a big, formless shadow that was swiftly advancing in a hopping run along the marsh from the north. Only when it came closer did Curt's dilated eyes make out the twenty-foot-high reptilian body, the two giant legs on which it ran in ostrich fashion, the massive skull thrust slightly forward and grinning with great fangs.

"Tyrannosaurus, a flesh-eater!" he shouted. "It's after the brontosaurs. That's why the girl was calling them in. There it goes!"

Things happened with the speed of a meteor's rush in the next few seconds. As Captain Future spoke, the towering tyrannosaurus had rushed forward toward the ungainly brontosaurs, which had just reached shore. A hissing, hideous scream broke from the charging monster. With a hoarse bawling of utter panic, the brontosaurs turned and lumbered away in Earth-shaking flight.

The girl, seeking to turn and flee, was struck by one huge, sweeping tail and knocked from her feet. The tyrannosaurus, charging forward after its fleeing prey, stopped when it reached the girl. Her white body had attracted its wicked, glittering red eyes. Its massive head plunged down toward her —

A flash of white force quickly bored a tiny, seared hole in the tyrannosaurus' scaled breast. Captain Future had snatched out his proton pistol as he saw the girl fall. Stung by the burning beam, the tyrannosaurus whirled swiftly on its mighty limbs. Curt kept the beam boring into its scaled breast.

"Grag, Otho — use your rays on the same spot!" Curt yelled as the Futuremen came rushing after him.

Three brilliant proton beams tore into the towering horror's breast, enlarging the charred hole in its scales, yet the creature was not fatally wounded. The seat of its reptilian life was tiny, difficult to find, compared with its great body.

IT CHARGED forward with ground-quaking rush, directly toward Otho. With an agility no human being could have matched, Otho sprang out of its path.

"Its eye!" Curt shouted desperately. "We can't kill it through that armor. Use your beams on its left eye!"

He shot as he spoke, driving his proton beam toward the glittering red eye of the looming monster. With a heart-stopping bellow of rage and pain, the tyrannosaurus whirled again. Full in its path now was the girl, who had regained her feet and was darting away. One huge paw was held out to grab her as it charged.

Swifter than thought, the Brain flashed forward. With a thrust of his traction beams he sent the girl staggering aside an instant before the great paw descended.

"The eye — our only chance!" Curt yelled.

Three beams began driving into the blinded eye. The tyrannosaurus' wild rush slowed down. The monster rocked and swayed above them. Then it toppled and crashed into the swamp, splashing up a geyser of mud and water.

The proton beams had finally pierced through eye and bone to the creature's tiny brain. Yet even now, as it lay there, its mighty heart was throbbing audibly and its great jaws mechanically closing and unclosing.

The Futuremen looked at each other a little wildly. They had seen death a hundred million years before they were born.

Curt turned to look for the girl, half-expecting to find that she had fled. But she was still there, eying him and his comrades in silent awe. She was young and pretty, even by the standards of his own time, with dark hair and eyes and a supple, shapely figure revealed by the sleeveless, short, white, skin tunic she wore. Around her neck was a necklace of uncut green stones. The spear she carried was long and tipped with stone.

Curt could guess how alien and impressive they must appear to her dilated eyes. A man whose clothing and weapons were completely strange, the bodiless Brain, the lithe, unhuman android, and the great metal robot.

"She's a highly advanced human type," came the Brain's rasping voice. "But here in the Mesozoic age! This means that Pithecanthropus and Neanderthal had no connection with the real human stock, but were lower orders. The anthropologists have been completely wrong."

"To you, Simon, a pretty girl's nothing but an interesting problem
in
anthropology," Curt chuckled.

The girl's wide, dark eyes clung longest to Captain Future's tanned face.

"Nyrala di athak Koom?"
she asked in a tense, undeniably feminine voice.

"That's no language I ever heard before," declared Otho. "I suppose she's asking you who's the handsome fellow with the green eyes."

The girl, puzzled by their failure to answer, pointed up into the starry sky, making a queer, quick gesture.

"Nyrala di Koom?"

"Looks like she's asking if we came from the sky," Curt guessed. "Maybe she saw the
Comet
falling." He nodded smilingly, pointing up at the stars. "Yes, that's where we came from, all right. From space — and from time, too, for that matter."

He knew the girl could not understand his words, but he saw an expression of utter awe and reverence appear on her pretty features.

"Di Koom!"
she breathed, her eyes shining.

THE girl began a rapid-fire chatter, pointing to the dead tyrannosaurus, then to herself, finally along the southern shore of the marsh, where the scared brontosaurs had stopped and were quietly grazing. Curt listened intently, watching her every gesture. He turned to his comrades when she was finished.

"I don't understand any of her words, but I can get a part of what she means by her gestures. Her name is Ahla, she says, and I gather that the village of her people is not far south. She wants us to go back there with her. I think we ought to go. We may be able to learn from her people where the nearest deposits of the metals we need are located."

"Maybe she's figuring they can feed us to those pet dinosaurs of theirs," suggested Grag suspiciously.

"Nonsense, she's fallen hard for me and wants me to meet her folks," scoffed Otho. "Can't you see the way she's been eying me?"

"Sure, she never saw a rubber man before," Grag retorted.

The girl, Ahla, chattering excitedly in the incomprehensible tongue to Captain Future, led the way along the marsh. They followed, approaching the huge brontosaurs. The Futuremen could not help feeling a certain trepidation at going so close to the mountainous beasts, but Ahla confidently walked right up to them, uttering the ululating cry and pricking their massive legs with the tip of her long spear.

The brontosaurs docilely fell in behind the girl and the Futuremen, following them along the shore. Their heavy tread shook the ground and their forward-craning, snaky necks were high above the Futuremen.

"Don't crowd us!" Otho exclaimed nervously to the gigantic brutes behind them. "There's no hurry."

Captain Future felt an intense curiosity about this unsuspected people of the Mesozoic. What had been their origin? Why had later man never dreamt that human beings existed in this early age?

They came into sight of a village, consisting of several scores of thatched huts on high ground above the marsh. It was surrounded by a high, thick wall of massive, roughly hewn stone blocks. There was but one narrow gate.

"They'd need such a wall to protect them from the carnivorous dinosaurs," explained the Brain.

Curt described behind the walled village a corral-like enclosure of great area, surrounded by a similar wall. In this corral the huge, dark shapes of a number of brontosaurs moved ponderously in the moonlight. Ahla's gigantic reptilian charges lumbered toward the corral. Curt glimpsed men opening an immense gate of wooden bars to admit the creatures. There was a bellowing from the enclosure.

"So that little place is their cattle pen," remarked Otho. "Grag, how'd you like to be a cowboy here?"

"Here come your girl-friend's folks," the robot said mockingly. "How'd you like prehistoric in-laws?"

THEY had followed Ahla through the gate of the village wall, a gate wide enough to admit only one man at a time and far too narrow to permit any of the huge carnivorous surians to enter. The moonlit village of thatch huts was aroused by Ahla's cry. Men and women who had been inside the huts, or gathered around cooking fires outside them, came running forward in a disorderly horde.

"Stand still and let Ahla do the talking," Curt ordered the Futuremen. "I don't think we'll have any trouble with these people."

The Earthmen before them were a primitive crowd. All wore short tunics of soft white hide that Curt guessed to be snakeskin. The men had snatched up stone-tipped spears and throwing knives. Physically they were a handsome people, with alert, intelligent faces.