Captain Future 08 - The Lost World of Time (Fall 1941) by Edmond Hamilton Read Free Book Online

the raw furrow in the jungle, searching with his queer senses for some edible bit of metal or mineral.
    A black shape suddenly obscured the two Moons. There was a swish of flapping wings. Down from the night sky flashed a great, batlike creature. A horny beak seized Eek and started to rise with him.
    "Pterosaur!" yelled Curt, his proton pistol flashing out.
     

     
Chapter 6: Unexpected Company
     
    GRAG, with a booming roar of rage, had leaped forward as the pterosaur started to rise with its prey. The robot's upreaching metal hand grasped the tip of the reptile's wing and dragged it down. The creature dropped Eek and, with red eyes glittering and a furious hissing, its snaky head struck at Grag. The beak made no impression on Grag's metal body. The big robot murderously seized the monster, heedless of its threshing wings, wrung its neck and tossed it aside.
    "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,