Read Online The Zanthodon MEGAPACK ™: The Complete 5-Book Series by Lin Carter - Free Book Online
Authors: Lin Carter
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let out my breath with a whoosh ; beside me, the Professor essayed a shaky laugh.
“Ahem! Ah, my boy, if I had only identified the creature a bit earlier, we could have avoided our precipitous flight,” he wheezed, climbing out of the muck on wobbly knees.
“What’s that mean?” I demanded.
“It means that I have been able to identify the creature,” he smiled. “From its appearance, it is clearly some genera of ankylosaur…I believe it to be a true scolosaurus from the Late Cretaceous…like so many of its kind—”
“—A harmless vegetarian?” I finished, sarcastically. He had the grace to blush just a little.
“Just so,” he said feebly.
We climbed back up to higher ground, circling the placid grass-eater as it mechanically munched its cud, glancing with an idle and disinterested eye as we passed.
* * * *
By now we were quite thoroughly lost. I cannot emphasize enough the peculiar difficulty—in fact, the utter impossibility—of finding your way about in a world that has no sun in its sky. Under the steamy skies of Zanthodon, where a perpetual and unwavering noon reigned, there was no slightest hint as to which way was north, south, east or west.
We might be fifty yards from the helicopter, or fifty miles. (Well, not quite that much: we couldn’t possibly have come so far in so short a time, but you get the idea.) We decided simply to keep going until we found either food or water—if not both—or the chopper. I was getting pretty depressed about then, what with being hungry, tired, thirsty, and splattered with mud halfway up to my armpits. Mud squelched glutinously in my boots with every step I took, and my clothes were still wet clear through from that warm shower we had sat through when the triceratops had us treed. And there are few things this side of actual torture or toothaches more uncomfortable. than being forced to walk about for long in soaking wet clothes.
Zanthodon is a world of tropic warmth, but, lacking true sunlight; if you get wet it’s curiously hard to get dry again, due to the steamy humidity. Not at all the place I’d pick for a winter vacation: as far as I have yet been able to discern, there are no seasons here, and only one climate. Some of those hare-brained weather forecasters who litter the nightly news on television would certainly have a cushy job down here: Hot, humid, scattered showers and occasional volcanic eruptions …that would do for a good yearful of forecasts!
The Professor was a man of irrepressible enthusiasms, however; you could not keep him gloomy for long, not in a place like this, when everywhere he happened to look he spotted something or other that was (according to him) of unique scientific interest.
“Fascinating, my boy, utterly fascinating,” he burbled, jouncing along at my side as we trekked through the jungle.
“What is it now?” I sighed.
“The varieties of flora we have thus far encountered,” he said. “Perhaps I should have guessed as much from the variety of fauna we have already met with…you recall I remarked a while earlier that something like one hundred and fifty million years separated triceratops from the wooly mammoths of the Ice age…?”
“Yeah, I remember,” I said laconically.
“Well, do you notice anything different about this part of the jungle?”
I glanced around. We were tramping through a rather sparse growth of jungle at the time. Around us were things that looked like palm trees, but which had crosshatched, spiny trunks resembling the outsides of pineapples; and what looked like evergreen bushes, eye-high skinny Christmas trees; and tall, fronded, droopy-looking trees. Some of these grew about forty feet high, and there was hardly anything in the way of underbrush.
The Professor was right: this part of the jungle did look kind of different…so I said as much.
“ Precisely , young man!” he cackled jubilantly. “When we first arrived in Zanthodon, we found ourselves in a jungle landscape
“Ahem! Ah, my boy, if I had only identified the creature a bit earlier, we could have avoided our precipitous flight,” he wheezed, climbing out of the muck on wobbly knees.
“What’s that mean?” I demanded.
“It means that I have been able to identify the creature,” he smiled. “From its appearance, it is clearly some genera of ankylosaur…I believe it to be a true scolosaurus from the Late Cretaceous…like so many of its kind—”
“—A harmless vegetarian?” I finished, sarcastically. He had the grace to blush just a little.
“Just so,” he said feebly.
We climbed back up to higher ground, circling the placid grass-eater as it mechanically munched its cud, glancing with an idle and disinterested eye as we passed.
* * * *
By now we were quite thoroughly lost. I cannot emphasize enough the peculiar difficulty—in fact, the utter impossibility—of finding your way about in a world that has no sun in its sky. Under the steamy skies of Zanthodon, where a perpetual and unwavering noon reigned, there was no slightest hint as to which way was north, south, east or west.
We might be fifty yards from the helicopter, or fifty miles. (Well, not quite that much: we couldn’t possibly have come so far in so short a time, but you get the idea.) We decided simply to keep going until we found either food or water—if not both—or the chopper. I was getting pretty depressed about then, what with being hungry, tired, thirsty, and splattered with mud halfway up to my armpits. Mud squelched glutinously in my boots with every step I took, and my clothes were still wet clear through from that warm shower we had sat through when the triceratops had us treed. And there are few things this side of actual torture or toothaches more uncomfortable. than being forced to walk about for long in soaking wet clothes.
Zanthodon is a world of tropic warmth, but, lacking true sunlight; if you get wet it’s curiously hard to get dry again, due to the steamy humidity. Not at all the place I’d pick for a winter vacation: as far as I have yet been able to discern, there are no seasons here, and only one climate. Some of those hare-brained weather forecasters who litter the nightly news on television would certainly have a cushy job down here: Hot, humid, scattered showers and occasional volcanic eruptions …that would do for a good yearful of forecasts!
The Professor was a man of irrepressible enthusiasms, however; you could not keep him gloomy for long, not in a place like this, when everywhere he happened to look he spotted something or other that was (according to him) of unique scientific interest.
“Fascinating, my boy, utterly fascinating,” he burbled, jouncing along at my side as we trekked through the jungle.
“What is it now?” I sighed.
“The varieties of flora we have thus far encountered,” he said. “Perhaps I should have guessed as much from the variety of fauna we have already met with…you recall I remarked a while earlier that something like one hundred and fifty million years separated triceratops from the wooly mammoths of the Ice age…?”
“Yeah, I remember,” I said laconically.
“Well, do you notice anything different about this part of the jungle?”
I glanced around. We were tramping through a rather sparse growth of jungle at the time. Around us were things that looked like palm trees, but which had crosshatched, spiny trunks resembling the outsides of pineapples; and what looked like evergreen bushes, eye-high skinny Christmas trees; and tall, fronded, droopy-looking trees. Some of these grew about forty feet high, and there was hardly anything in the way of underbrush.
The Professor was right: this part of the jungle did look kind of different…so I said as much.
“ Precisely , young man!” he cackled jubilantly. “When we first arrived in Zanthodon, we found ourselves in a jungle landscape
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