THE OTHER WORLD - Vb-tech.co.za

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx THE OTHER WORLD xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Two Wink was crawling to Fancife’s
aid, working through a garden, all his
attention riveted ahead. Apparently it had
never occurred to him that danger would be
above.
He made a sound like a stepped-on
frog when Doc dropped atop him. Then, after
the bronze man hit him, Two Wink’s legs
twitched, and kept on twitching all the time
that he was unconscious, making the same
kind of involuntary movements as a nervous
sleeping dog.
Fancife—he was off to the right—
suddenly yelled out. His howl was angry,
threatening. Then his voice was frightened.
And then he was emptying his rifle. Five
times the gun whipped lead. After that,
Fancife got up and ran.
The inhabitants of the strange lostworld
valleys had turned upon him.
Fancife used a system in his flight.
He would spring until winded. Then he would
stop, reload his rifle and empty the weapon.
His pursuers did not press him too
hard. He was fleeing toward the great gates.
They were satisfied to let him go.
Doc said: “We may be able to head
him off from the gate.”
They failed to do it. Fancife had
forced the gate guards to twist the giant
windlass devices that opened the panels,
and he was sprinting through the
comparatively open area that was set with
the sharpened timbers that formed the outer
defense against dinosaurs.
Doc waited for Monk and the others.
“Careful!” the bronze man warned.
“He will take shelter in the jungle and use
that rifle on us.”
They got down—there was a
cropped weedy growth about two feet high
that concealed them—and crawled forward
with infinite care until they heard Fancife’s
rifle begin smashing as rapidly as the
mechanism would function.
No bullets came near them,
however.
“I wonder what he’s shootin’ at?”
gaunt Johnny pondered. He raised his head
cautiously, then erected his whole
considerable length. “I’ll be
superamalgamated!”
They could see Fancife, and what
was wrong with him.
Johnny muttered, “I’ll be
superamal—”
55
“You’ll be more than that if we don’t
travel,” Monk interjected. “Here come some
of the things this way! Come on!”
They put their chins up and tucked
their elbows close to their sides and ran. The
gates, fortunately, were still ajar. They piled
through, worked frantically with the big
winches.
A few of the animals—weasel-like,
except that they were near two feet in
length—got through before the gates could
be closed. Long Tom and Renny disposed of
them with clubs. They were the same type of
bloodthirsty little terrors that had given Doc
Savage such trouble earlier.
Renny came up, holding his arm,
grimacing. “You know what happened back
at the village?”
“What?”
“Two Wink—those people found him
and somebody—well, Two Wink is dead!”
Out at the edge of the jungle, Fancife
had stopped screaming. Renny took a look
through the gates, then stepped back swiftly
and looked as if he was going to be a little
sick.
It was a long time before anything
more was said.
“He came here looking for those
animals,” Monk muttered finally, “and they
found him.”
IT took four days for a rather
pleasant fact to dawn upon them; at least the
interval was four days according to their
watches, there being no other convenient
method of judging the elapse of time. Not
that a time measurement was needed—
because life in the canyons was almost
completely idyllic. Chris Columbus expressed
it most briefly.
“I’m not going back,” he said.
“Why not?” asked the astonished
Monk.
Chris said: “I like the place. I’ve got a
swell girl. Why should I go back?”
Decimo Tercio used somewhat more
words, but it amounted to the same thing.
“Long ago, I have figure it out,”
Tercio explained. “When I first get here, it is
not because I want to come, and I am very
impatient, because I do not know many
things. I do not know that there is no disease
here, and no war, because there is nobody
much to fight, except an occasional stupid
band of cave dwellers, and they never raid