The Zanthodon MEGAPACK ™: The Complete 5-Book Series by Lin Carter Read Free Book Online

wobbling.
    “Not precisely. I estimate the cavern-world as being about five hundred miles by five hundred, almost perfectly circular,” he mused. That didn’t sound like so much to me, and I said so.
    He snorted. “That means Zanthodon consists of a quarter of a million square miles, my boy.”
    “That much?”
    “That much!”
    “Well, we’re stuck here for a while, at least,” I said grimly. “Babe can’t fly until we repair her rotors— yow! ”
    I yelled, ducked, hit the dirt—and the Professor was not far behind me.
    “What was that ?” I gasped, as the enormous kite-shaped black shadow sailed on over the lagoon. Glancing up, I saw wide, bat-like membranous wings, a long snaky head and tail, and a beaklike muzzle filled with an incredible number of very long teeth.
    “Either a pteranodon or perhaps a true pterodactyl,” murmured the Professor abstractedly, peering at the soaring reptile. “How remarkable that here life forms otherwise extinct still flourish…no pteranodon has flown the skies of the upper world for seventy million years and more, yet here they seem to thrive, if yonder specimen is indicative…”
    “Yeah,” I grunted, staring after the winged monster as it lazily flapped away over the treetops. “And come to think of it, Doc, how’d ‘you suppose the dinosaurs got down here, anyway? That volcano crater is straight down for miles and miles. Maybe a flying critter like that one that just went by could have gotten here under his own steam, but the protocroc we saw a minute ago certainly couldn’t.”
    He frowned, rubbing his brow with a grubby forefinger. “There may well be, probably are, other entrances to Zanthodon besides the one by which we traveled here…side vents, volcano fumaroles…and some of them may perhaps descend into the cavern-world at an angle less steep, thus affording passage to the four-footed saurians.”
    Warming to his latest theory, the Professor began a rambling discourse that was more like thinking out loud than anything else. No one quite knows what killed the dinosaurs off, but the difficulty of obtaining sufficient food, climactic changes to which the cold-blooded reptiles could not comfortably adjust, all these probably share the blame. He made it seem very understandable that some of the saurians, drifting down across Europe in search of food or warmer climes, might have crossed the Gibralter land-bridge (for in those ages, the Mediterranean was only a land-locked lake), finding their way to North Africa and, some of them, into Zanthodon.
    His explanation sounded pretty reasonable to me, but then, I’m no scientist.
    “Just think of it, my boy,” he breathed, eyes agleam with the good old scientific fervor, “living survivors of a lost age, dwelling here beneath the earth’s crust…ah, Holy Huxley and Dear Darwin! When we return again to the upper world, we shall astound the entire scientific community—or we could, that is; especially if we were to bring back a living specimen of a species known to have perished into extinction scores of millions of years ago!…Why, think of it!—Mighty Mendel, but it could make our names forever undying and immortal in the annals of exploration and discovery…!”
    I could just imagine trying to cram several hundred pounds of fanged fury into Babe’s cramped little cabin, but I said nothing. No reason to shatter the Professor’s dream.
    “If we get back,” I couldn’t resist pointing out. “The way things stand right now, Babe’s in no condition to handle that ascent. I couldn’t even get her off the ground, lacking those rotor-blades.”
    He rubbed his hands together briskly, glancing around.
    “Then we shall begin work at once,” he puffed. “We’ll make camp on that high ground…and we must find a source of fresh water, as I presume the lagoon is salty…some manner of rude palisade should keep the larger predators at bay while we effect repairs on your machine, Let me see, now…we can