The Other World: A Doc Savage Adventure by Lester Dent (pseud. Kenneth Robeson)

Author:Lester Dent (pseud. Kenneth Robeson)
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: fiction, Doc Savage (Fictional character), adventure
Publisher: Distributed Proofreaders Canada
Published: 1939-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter XII

THE PREHISTORIC WORLD

Fancife and Two Wink remained on the floor of the plane cabin, where they had been hurled. Both were so astonished that their expressions were blankly stupid.

Finally Fancife snarled: “How’d you—what—weren’t you in the plane when it blew up?”

Doc ignored them. The bronze man was working with the plane controls. Fancife had been too excited to realize that the wing flaps were set, cutting the speed of the ship a great deal. Doc remedied that error. Then, although the plane would have gone much faster, he deliberately cut the speed to let the pursuing horrors catch up with them.

Chris Columbus had taken one of Fancife’s pistols. He menaced Fancife and Two Wink with the weapon.

“Little surprised to see us, ain’t you?” he asked.

Fancife licked his lips. Surprised was no word for it.

“Doc Savage here”—Chris nodded at the bronze man—“figured back there in that clearing in the arctic that you had tampered with our plane so it would crash. It wasn’t reasonable to think you would let us go free.”

“How’d you get here?”

“Merely jumped out of Doc’s plane while it was at the far end of the clearing. It was too dark for you to see us. We took some equipment along. Doc’s plane was fixed with a robot and the controls could be locked. For a while we thought the plane wouldn’t take off by itself in that deep snow. But it did.”

“But how’d you get in this plane?” Fancife snarled.

“Simple. Plane was among the trees, you remember. We just hightailed it around to the bus, and climbed aboard. Nice big inspection port you’ve got back there into the rear of the fuselage. We crawled through that.”

Fancife swore.

Chris grinned. “After you got in the air, we cut some holes in the fuselage so we could see where you were goin’. Saw them big birds chasin’ us, and figured we’d better save our necks.”

Chris then peered out of the window. He paled.

“Hey!” he roared. “Them things has about got us!”

The whole thing might have been a sort of comic-paper affair of a plane being pursued by impossibly big and hideous birds—except that the thing was real. It was happening. It was not reasonable, not even close to the bounds of credibility, but here they were in the plane—and there were the fantastic flying things.

“They’re equipped with teeth!” Chris gulped.

Teeth was a mild word for the armament in the long, somewhat parrotlike jaws of the flying things. They were somewhat like magnified shark maws. The birds—they were at close range now, unpleasantly illuminated by the strange “sunlight”—were totally hideous.

Doc suddenly jammed the plane into a dive. One moment they were flying level; then they were roaring earthward.

The squadron of weird flying monsters went winging on, apparently unaware that their quarry was not ahead of them.

“They weren’t after us at all!” Chris exclaimed.

“Don’t fool yourself,” Doc said. “They were chasing us all right.”

Chris peered upward. “But look at the silly things. They’re flying as if we were still ahead of them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.