The Zanthodon MEGAPACK ™: The Complete 5-Book Series

by Lin Carter

  The jungle seemed quiet during their morning meal, but the Baron took along a Mauser rifle and a few precious rounds of ammunition just in case. The Germans were on their way to the sea, which they believed to be somewhere nearby and to the west of their present campsite, but because of Colonel Dostman’s injuries, taken when they had been attacked by a stegosaurus, they must move by slow and easy stages, and it seemed wise to scout out the terrain in order to avoid rough or dangerous ground.

  The Oberlieutenant was a tall, well-built man, with an erect and military bearing. His close-cropped hair, once blond, was now silver-gray, and the years he had spent here in the Underground World of Zanthodon had left lines in his broad brow and had furrowed his lean, clean-shaven cheeks. But his pale blue eyes were sharp and keen as in his youth, and his step was light.

  During the long years since they had found their way down into the gigantic cavern-world beneath the trackless sands of the Sahara, Von Kohler had seen his company dwindle and diminish, some of his fellow officers and private soldiers falling prey to accident and illness, but most of them to the fangs of the fantastic prehistoric monsters who lingered on in this lost world, so much alike to that fabled Andean plateau of which he had read in Herr Doyle’s excellent romance in his boyhood back in Munich. And now that his senior commanding officer, Colonel Dostman, seemed unlikely to recover from the battle with the stegosaurus, Von Kohler was all too aware that soon the responsibilities of command would come to rest solely upon his own shoulders.…

  When the earthquake struck, he was traversing a ravine in which a small stream gurgled over smooth stones. The shock threw him prone, but he recovered himself a moment later, nerves tingling with shock. Scrambling to his feet, he recovered the Mauser he had let fall when thrown to the ground and fell into a fighting crouch, peering around alertly. Fortunately, the quake was a brief one and soon over.

  He climbed up out of the ravine, making a mental note of the fact that the steep incline would prove difficult for Schmidt and Borg to negotiate, as they would be encumbered by the crude litter in which the Colonel was to be carried. He must scout out a better way for them to travel than to climb down into the ravine.…

  A time later, having found a better means of crossing, he was continuing on toward the sea when a dramatic scene caught his attention and arrested his progress.

  Directly before him, through a thin screen of bushes, Von Kohler saw a young golden-haired woman in abbreviated hide garments, bearing a long spear and a bronze knife. He knew her at once for one of the Cro-Magnon savages they had seen but avoided heretofore in their passage through the jungle, and he lingered behind his screen of bushes, knowing that where there is one person there are probably many more, and that the savages of Zanthodon generally travel in full tribal strength. The German officer thought it prudent to conceal himself while investigating the situation.

  He saw, although she did not, the monstrous python whose heavy coils hung from the bough directly above her head.

  An instant later, the girl froze in terror as the giant snake swung its fanged and gaping maw toward her through the leaves.

  The German had been raised with all the chivalrous instincts of his class of the old nobility. Without a moment’s thought or hesitation he snapped the rifle to his shoulder and blew off the python’s head.…

  * * * *

  Head reared high above the seething waves, the yith gave voice to a deafening challenge, like the steam whistle of a locomotive. In response, the aurogh gave a vicious snap of its sharklike jaws, and submerged. An instant later the sea went mad, exploding in sheets of spray and boiling foam as the two prehistoric sea monsters closed in mortal combat to decide which of them would devour the hapless Hurok and his mate.

  The fearsome jaws of the ichthyosaur closed upon the scaly shoulder of the yith, which uttered a thunderous hiss and swerved its snaky head to rip and tear with saber-sharp fangs at the face and snout of its adversary.

  The seething foam became streaked with crimson as the marine monsters battled for their prey. Gorah rolled her eyes skyward and shuddered, as much from the terror of the scene as from the chill of the waves.

  Hurok strove again to right the boat, but again he failed, for with nothing against which to brace his huge splayed feet, he could gain no purchase on the wet and slippery wood, despite the iron strength of his burly shoulders and arms. In his struggle, however, he flailed out with both legs and the dugout floated away from the scene of combat.

  This gave the Apeman an idea, which he conveyed in guttural words to his mate. The two were clinging to the same side of the canoe, now, in unison, both kicked out with their strong legs, propelling the overturned boat slowly through the foamy waters.

  Peering hastily back over one furry shoulder, Hurok saw that the plesiosaur had wound its sinuous length about the giant shark-monster, and was ripping at its flesh with those dreadful fangs, and all the while the triple rows of teeth were crunching deeper and deeper into its mailed shoulder.

  As they paddled away from the scene of terror, the two monsters, locked in a murderous embrace, sank from sight beneath the bloody waves, and, although the water continued to rage in turbulence for a time, giving evidence of the titanic battle which roared on beneath the sea, neither surfaced again.

  Hurok gave a sigh of heartfelt relief. Had the Apemen of Kor any religious instincts, he would doubtless at this juncture have muttered a prayer of gratitude to whatever divinities watched over the warriors of Kor, but his people were too low on the scale of civilization to have developed more than a primitive awe of the spirits of their dead ancestors.

  “Keep kicking,” he growled to Gorah.

  * * * *

  In time they wearied, and, since neither of the marine monsters had made a reappearance, simply rested, clinging to the hull of the overturned dugout canoe, letting the slow and shallow surges of the subterranean sea drift them nearer and nearer to the shore of the mainland of Zanthodon.

  At length, Hurok felt solid mud beneath his feet, and from that point on the two Korians pushed their craft through the surf and dragged it up onto the sandy shore, and sat down wearily, letting the humid warmth of day dry their bodies and resting from their exertions, glad to feel the firm earth under their feet once more.

  Hurok privately swore never to venture any nearer to, the sea of Sogar-Jad than the beach thereof, for one ducking beneath the waves was enough to last him a lifetime, and few of the warriors of Zanthodon ever for a second time survive the fangs of the mighty monsters of the deep.

  “Where are we O Hurok?” inquired torah in faint tones, exhausted from the perils through which she had passed. Hurok looked around and heaved hairy shoulders in a shrug.

  “Hurok does not know,” he admitted. The simple fact was that one stretch of sandy beach fringed by the edge of the jungle looks very much like any other stretch of sandy beach fringed by the jungle.

  But as the Peaks of Peril were no longer in sight, the Apeman knew that they had drifted with the current very much farther to the south than he could have wished. His companions and the twin tribes themselves could be many days’ march away in either direction by now.…

  When they were dried and rested and had fully recovered from their dunking in the Sogar-Jad, the two Neanderthals got to their feet and began to explore. The only weapons they had retained from their sea adventures were the flint knife which Gorah carried at her waist and the heavy stone axe slung about Hurok’s hips on a tough leathern thong. These weapons were good enough for fighting at close quarters, but Hurok felt more comfortable with a spear’s length between him and whatever beast they might encounter. So they lingered in that spot long enough for him to hew down a sapling and trim its twigs and branches away with blows of his axe.

  With the sharp blade of Gorah’s knife he sharpened one end of the makeshift spear to a point. Then, hefting hi
s new weapon to his shoulder and taking Gorah’s hand in his huge paw, he began trudging up the beach, choosing the northerly direction at pure random.

  Hurok did not know just what he was looking for—some sign of his missing friends, I suppose—but what he found amazed and alarmed him. He pulled Gorah into the bushes and bade her squat there while he peered nearsightedly at the peculiar individual he spied coming down the beach.

  It was a man, but such a man as the Apeman had never seen or heard of, black as ebony from heel to crown.

  Roaring his challenge, Hurok sprang from the underbrush and leveled his spear at the breast of Zuma the Aziru—

  CHAPTER 19

  MEN FROM YESTERDAY

  The Professor had tramped through the jungle for quite some time now, heading in the direction of the active volcano in the swampy plains of the south. He encountered no dangerous beasts or reptiles along the way, and was feeling quite pleased and satisfied with himself for his mastery of woodsmanship—when suddenly a loud explosion rang out sharply through the silence of the deserted jungle.

  “Noble Newton, but if I didn’t know better, I could have sworn that was a rifle shot!” exclaimed the old scientist to himself as the echoes of the sound rang and died, smothered in the thick undergrowth between the boles of the trees.

  Inquisitive as always, Professor Potter diverged from his path to circle back, hoping to find the source of the sound. As the only firearm which existed here in the Underground World was my own Colt .45 automatic, the Professor was baffled as to what could have made such a noise—for it certainly was not the metallic bark of my pistol being fired.

  Emerging from the bushes, he halted suddenly, eyes goggling in amazement as he found himself looking upon a tense, dramatic scene.

  Directly in front of him was a grassy glade. In the midst of this open space there stood the supple, half-naked figure of a young golden-haired girl whom the Professor instantly recognized as Darya of Thandar.

  At her feet, writhing in slow death spasms, were heaped the thick, glistening coils of the most enormous python the scrawny savant had ever seen. It seemed to be without a head!

  Between the Professor and Darya stood a tall, well-built white man, facing the Cro-Magnon girl with a smoking Mauser rifle clenched in his hands.

  His back was turned to the Professor, but the old scientist saw with amazement that the man had close-cropped silver-gray hair topped with the battered remnants of an officer’s cap—an officer’s cap such as those worn by the German Army during the Second World War.

  The man was completely clothed in garments of faded khaki, very much worn and carefully repaired, but little more than a collection of scrupulously clean rags held together by needle and thread. The desert boots he wore were dilapidated and long unpolished, but scrubbed clean.

  Taking a deep breath, the old man stepped forward and put the point of his spear between the shoulder blades of the German, who flinched and tensed all over, but did not move or even turn his head.

  Darya blinked incredulously at the sudden appearance out of nowhere of her lover’s friend, then smiled.

  “I say, my dear, are you hurt at all?” quavered the Professor in a shaky voice. “If this brute has dared to lift a hand against you, I’ll—I’ll—”

  In his excitement, the Professor spoke in English, although he knew quite well that the Princess of Thandar knew only a few words of that language. But the man into whose back the point of his spear was pressing was acquainted with the language, and turned to look with amazement at his attacker.

  He saw a scrawny old man in tattered bits of fur, wearing an absurdly large and very dirty sun helmet, with a white goatee and pince-nez glasses perched insecurely on the bridge of his nose.

  All three looked at each other in wordless astonishment, while at their feet the giant reptile slowly, slowly, died.

  * * * *

  Recovering from her surprise, Darya lifted her own spear and touched the German officer upon the wrist. He knew precisely what she wanted him to do—drop the rifle—but as the weapon was not on safety and had a hair-trigger, he was reluctant to do so. Addressing the old man at his back in only slightly accented and formal English, he said gently:

  “With your permission, sir, I will lower my rifle to the ground, as to drop it might cause it to fire.” His voice had good timbre, resonant and cultured. The Professor nodded crisply.

  “Please do so, and take care!”

  The rifle safely laid at his feet, the officer lifted both hands in token of surrender and spoke again.

  “If I may introduce myself, sir, I am Oberlieutenant the Baron Manfred Von Kohler, late of the Ninth Attack Group of the Afrika Korps, at your service!” Worn bootheels clicked together as the officer made a slight bow. “I assure you, sir, that I meant no harm at all to the fraulein; my weapon was at the ready in case the serpent was not entirely dead.”

  The Professor came out of the bushes and looked his prisoner over narrowly. The officer was no longer a young man, and had suffered many privations in the jungles of Zanthodon, from the tattered but patched condition of what remained of his uniform, but his keen blue eyes were candid and alert and his voice was steady.

  For his own part, Manfred Von Kohler was examining the old scientist with equal interest and curiosity.

  “English?” he inquired with a slight smile. The Professor shook his head.

  “American—although I have spent much time in England, and, for that, Germany, too—although of course that was after the…the…”

  The Professor let his words trail away awkwardly into silence.

  “You meant to say ‘after the war’?” the German said, completing the Professor’s remark. And it was not really a question. The Professor looked a trifle unhappy.

  “Yes,” he said simply. The Baron looked at him for a moment, and then in quiet tones, asked the question.

  “My country lost the war.” Again, it was not really a question. The Professor nodded, and Manfred Von Kohler drew a long, deep breath.

  “So. Thank you for your candor,” he said softly. “The…Russians, I suppose?”

  Professor Potter shrugged. “The Russians, yes; and the Americans, and the British, and the Free French.…”

  The German nodded with a touch of sadness in his eyes.

  “So,” he breathed. “I knew it was a lost cause. To take on the whole of the civilized world was pure madness…I was only a boy when I entered the Army, but even then I knew it was madness. Still…all of these years we have spent in this fantastic world under the sands of the Sahara, with never a word of news, one could not help but entertain…hopes.”

  The Professor cleared his throat. “I…um…I’m sorry,” he said. The German shook his head with a polite smile.

  “Not at all. If I may presume, you will be wondering what I am doing here.”

  “As a matter of fact—?”

  Hands still raised, the officer gave a brief explanation.

  “My group was cut off from the main body during a desert battle,” he said quietly. “When our vehicles ran dry of petrol, we attempted to cross the desert afoot. A sandstorm drove us into seeking refuge in a cave. When the blown sand blocked the entrance to the cave, and we thought we should soon suffocate, we discovered that fresh air was coming from the other end of the cave. We followed the tunnel as it sloped down and down into darkness, and in time we found ourselves emerging into this perennial daylight, in a world left over from prehistoric ages in a cavern larger than we could comprehend. Ever since then, we have been trying to find our way back to the surface, but without any success, I fear.”

  “An amazing story, simply amazing!” breathed the Professor. The German shrugged.

  “We have been here ever since,” he finished. “It has been…many years now.”

 
“It has indeed,” agreed the Professor sympathetically, and he refrained from telling just how many.

  “There are more of you, then?” Potter asked.

  “In the beginning, we were three score, although several were wounded in the desert battle,” said Von Kohler. “The fantastic world, as you know, has many perils. Some of our numbers we lost to the depredations of the great prehistoric beasts, others to swamps, earthquakes, fever. But four of us remain alive, including myself. There is my superior, Oberst Hugo Dostman, who was very seriously mauled by a stegosaurus and whom we do not expect to live, and two soldiers, Corporal Schmidt and Private Borg, good and loyal men both. We are encamped not very far off; I came ahead to scout the safest path to the sea, and arrived on the scene just in time to assist the fraulein in eluding the fangs of the monster serpent.”

  Professor Potter was busy absorbing this latest of the many surprises Zanthodon’s jungles hide, and so was Darya, who was breathlessly hanging on every word. The conversation, by now, had fallen into a crude sort of lingua franca, part German, part in English, and part in the universal language of Zanthodon, the conversants picking up a term from one language where they lacked it’s equivalent in another.

  Darya was able to grasp about one word out of every four, but that was enough for her to get the drift of what the two men were talking about. She touched the professor’s arm.

  “It is true, what the stranger says,” she told him. “I did not even see the isst until he shattered its head with his thunder-weapon. Had he refrained from doing so, Darya would by now be dead and eaten—!” She shuddered at the idea.