Read Captain Future 08 - The Lost World of Time (Fall 1941) for Free Online Page B

lower toward the moonlit Earth. They were going to crash in the western part of the great northern continent, he perceived.
    The cyclotrons started throbbing weakly as he closed the switch. He grasped the throttles of the bow rockets, his foot poised on the cyc-pedal. Now he could clearly descry a wild, forbidding landscape of reedy marshes and lagoons, stretching toward rolling country that was blanketed by thick jungle. Active volcanoes there flung up a red, smoky glare.
    The crippled ship screamed lower and lower. It was a moment to daunt the most fearless of spacemen, Curt's tanned face wore a mirthless grin as his fingers gripped the throttles.
    They flashed down over the watery marshes. The jungle rushed up at them with nightmare speed. The blasting roar of atomic flame shook the ship as Curt fired all the bow rockets together. The battered Comet bucked and spun wildly in mid-air from the impact, its strained metal beams creaking ominously.
    Tumbling over and over, hurtling toward the moonlit jungle, the ship seemed utterly out of control. But Captain Future was firing the bow tubes at precisely the right moment in the ship's spin, each time checking their fall by a new smashing impact of power.
    Suddenly he sensed the roar and flash of an explosion somewhere in the rear of the ship. He heard Otho yell shrilly:
    "Another cyc has blown!"
    Towering trees seemed to leap up at them in the moonlight. Curt jammed down the cyc-pedal and yanked open all the bow tube throttles. The impact smashed them deep in the recoil chairs, then was followed by a splintering crash and finally a heavier shock.
    The Comet had landed in the jungle and now lay tilted on its side.
     
    BRUISED and shaken, Curt looked around. The others were unhurt.
    "We made it!" Grag boomed triumphantly.
    "By the Sun, that was the greatest piloting you ever did, Chief!" cried Otho warmly.
    Reaction made Curt tremble involuntarily as he got out of the pilot chair and looked back through the interior of the ship.
    "More than half our cycs wrecked, the tubes almost torn away, the time-thruster temporarily useless," he said unhappily. "Somewhere on this wild world we've got to find metal for repairs, before we can go on to Katain."
    He and Otho removed their space-suits. Grag pried open the jammed airlock door by main strength. They stepped out of the ship breathing air that was hot, steamy and rank with the smell of rotting vegetation.
    The Comet lay at the end of a long, moonlit lane it had gouged for itself from the Mesozoic jungle. Around them towered stiff, grotesque palms and conifers and more familiar hardwood trees, a great mass of ferns, club-mosses and trailing vines. The ground underfoot was deep with cushioning mold. Had the Futuremen ever expected to visit the Earth of a hundred million years ago. They would not have anticipated crashing in a steaming jungle that was illuminated by two Moons.
    A buzzing, droning sound came from winged insects like big dragon-flies, flitting through the silver-barred jungle. From the great marshes to the west they heard the distant sound of sucking footsteps. And from the north a blood-chilling, hissing scream suddenly tore through the night.
    "Sounds as if there'd be good hunting here," commented Otho.
    "There will be," Curt answered grimly, "and we'll be the hunted ones, if we're not careful. We're in the time of the mightiest animals that ever walked this planet — the giant saurians of the reptile age. When day comes, we'll start prospecting for metal. We must get tungsten and chromium and a half-dozen other metals to synthesize inertron for new tubes and cyc parts. It'll take days, at the best, to do all that, but it mustn't take us an hour longer than necessary. We've got to get on to Katain."
    "Eek will help us find metals," Grag put in proudly. "He can sense them a long way off. See, he's looking for some now."
    Eek had cautiously emerged from the ship. Finding nothing alarming in sight, he was sauntering along