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

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