6
As the colossal beast charged down upon them Rowan stood motionless, stunned, seeing as though in some nightmare dream the great snaky neck and head, the gigantic, trampling feet, and hearing in his ears the deep bellow of the oncoming monster. Then suddenly Morton had leapt forward, beside him, uttering a high, harsh-voiced cry, a cry at which the thundering brontosaur suddenly slowed, stopped. A scant twenty feet from them it stood, regarding them suspiciously, and Morton turned swiftly to the other.
“Come on, Rowan!” he cried. “I heard the lizard-men direct these beasts with that cry—I think it’ll hold this one till we get past!”
Together they ran forward, down the corridor toward the gigantic brontosaur, which was regarding them with its small eyes in seeming perplexity, its head swaying to and fro on its sinuous neck as they neared it. Now they were to the great beast, pressing past it and between its great body and the corridor wall, its mighty bulk looming above them awe-inspiringly in the great corridor. As they ran past it the huge beast half turned, half stepped toward them, but as Morton repeated his strange high cry it halted again. The next moment Rowan breathed for the first time in seconds, for they were past the brontosaur and racing on down the corridor toward its open end.
As they neared that end they slowed their pace, crept forward more cautiously, until they were peering out into the great, crimson-lit street. The broad avenue seemed quite deserted and empty, and they sprang out into it, toward the central plaza where lay the lake of fire and its ascending and descending disk. But suddenly Morton turned, pointed back. Far down the street behind them a great mass of huge figures was moving toward them—a mob of mighty dinosaurs and lizard-riders which was coming rapidly up the avenue.
“They’re coming now!” cried Morton. “They’ve gathered—they’re ready—they’re going to go up the shaft, now!”
From the advancing horde they heard, now, deep, gigantic bellowings, answered far across the great gray city by others like it, by other masses of dinosaurs and lizard-men moving toward the central plaza and the great lake of flame. Then abruptly the two men had turned and were racing madly up the avenue toward that lake, up the broad and empty street toward the great disk that was their sole hope of escape.
On and on they staggered until at last they were stumbling between the last gray buildings of the street and into the broad, clear plaza, toward the rim of its central basin of fire. Rowan looked up, as they ran, saw high above them a dark, expanding circle which was dropping down from a round black opening in the rock roof far above, dropping swiftly down toward the lake of fire ahead. And then he cried out, for emerging into the empty plaza directly across from them were a half-dozen of the lizard-men, who saw the two running men, and, uttering rasping cries, sprang around the rim of the flaming lake toward them.
The mighty disk was sweeping smoothly downward, now, down until it hung level with the plaza, above the basin’s fires, and now Morton had flung forward across the two-foot gap and upon the disk. But as Rowan too leapt forward the racing lizard-men reached him, and as he threw himself upon the disk, which was rising now, one of them had leapt forward with him and pulled him back. He clung frantically to the great disk’s edge, and then the mighty platform was rising smoothly upward while he and his lizard-man opponent clung dizzily to its edge, swinging above the flaming lake and striking at each other with their free hands.
Rowan felt himself carried upward with ever-increasing speed, heard the roar of winds in his ears and glimpsed the raging lake of fire below, and then felt his strength slipping from him beneath the blows of the lizard-man, who clung to the disk with one taloned claw and struck out with the other. Then, as Rowan felt his grip on the disk’s edge slipping, loosening, there was a flashing blow from above which sent the scaled green body of his opponent whirling down into the flames beneath, torn loose from his hold. And as Rowan’s nerveless fingers released his own hold a hand above caught his wrist, there was a tense moment of straining effort, and then he had been pulled up onto the disk’s surface by Morton, and lay there, panting.
A moment he lay thus, then crept with Morton to the disk’s edge and stared down with him at the gray city which now lay far below. They saw, pouring into the plaza, a great mass of huge dinosaurs and a vast throng of the lizard-shapes, an eddying throng that was moving now toward the plaza and the fiery lake from all the city’s wide and branching streets. The next moment all this was blotted from sight as the disk shot smoothly upward into the darkness of the great shaft, flashing up that shaft amid a thundering of confined winds. Over the raging of those winds Rowan shouted in the other’s ear.
“They’ve gathered down there!” he cried. “When the disk goes down again they’ll come up with it, after us! We have only minutes——”
Morton shouted back. “The switch! If we could open that wheel-switch up there, let loose those fires below——”
Rowan gasped. The switch! That switch which the lizard-men had themselves prepared, to use after they had all come up from their cavern-world. If they could open it, could release upon that cavern-world the raging fires which pressed against its walls, it would mean annihilation for the lizard-people and all their giant reptile hordes. If they could——
Abruptly he grasped the other’s arm, pointed mutely upward. Far above them a spark of pale white light was glimmering, a spark that changed to a spot and then to a little circle of pallid light as their disk-platform flashed up toward it with tremendous speed. And now, as that circle of white light widened, the disk was beginning to slow its speed a little, the downward-flashing metal walls beside them were moving past them more slowly. Up, up the great disk lifted, while the two men crouched tensely at its edge, and then it had floated up until it hung level with the mouth of the great shaft, beneath the radiance of the suspended bulb.
It was night once more on earth, Rowan knew, but the brilliance of the white bulb overhead was dazzlingly revealing as the disk swept up to hang at the shaft’s mouth. In the moment that it hung there both he and Morton threw themselves from it onto the surface of the mound, and then as the great disk sank downward once more into the shaft they saw that their movement had not been observed, since the only figures on the mound were a half-dozen of the lizard-men armed with the white heat-beam globes, who lounged near the great three-pillar switchboard, at the opposite edge of the mound from the two men. They had not turned as the great disk reached the shaft’s mouth and sank again, and after a moment of crouching Morton whispered to Rowan, who crept slowly off the mound in obedience to that whisper and into the shelter of the dark bordering forest around it. There he began to slip through the trees, stealthily, while on the mound itself he saw Morton crawling snakelike around the great shaft’s edge toward the switchboard. Minutes passed while the two crept on, from different sides, minutes that seemed eternities to Rowan, and then he had reached the edge of the mound near the switchboard and was gathering himself for a dash toward it. And in that moment he was discovered. There was a harsh cry from one of the lizard-men guards at the mechanism and instantly two of them had leapt toward him, across the mound.
Rowan sprang to his feet, but before he could gain the surface of the mound he was borne down by the charging of the two sealed shapes, thrust back into the swamp from the mound’s edge and struggling in their grip. He heard another cry, glimpsed the other guards on the mound springing toward Morton, who had half risen; then all other sounds in his ears, the rasping cries of his opponents, the deafening winds from the great pit, the panting of his own breathing as he whirled about—all these sounds were suddenly dwarfed by a sound that came to his ears like the thunder of doom, a deep, throaty bellowing coming faintly as though from far beneath but growing swiftly louder, nearer, coming up the shaft from the ascending disk there!
“Morton!” he cried. “Morton!”
Then he saw Morton whirl sidewise from the guards who ran toward him, saw him leap toward the great switchboard and toward the wheel-switch at its center, felt himself thrust backward as his two opponents rushed back onto the mound with frantic cries. At the same moment the giant disk swept up again to the shaft’s mouth, hanging there, crowded with massed lizard-men and a half-dozen of the huge tyrannosaurs. Out toward Morton leapt these gleaming-fanged monsters, and from a score of the lizard-men on the disk and on the mound there stabbed toward him rays of pallid light. But in the second before those deadly rays could be released Morton had grasped the great wheel, had spun it around in one frantic motion. The next moment the machine and Morton beside it had vanished in a flare of blinding flame, but even as they did so there came from far beneath a gigantic rumbling and crashing, a rending crash as of riven worlds, while the ground beneath Rowan swayed and rocked violently. The next moment there had burst up the shaft a vast gush of crimson fire, a molten flood bursting up from the suddenly released seas of molten fires below, annihilating the great disk that hovered in the shaft, raining in fiery death upon all on the mound, falling hissingly into the water and slime about Rowan. Then was another rumbling crash and the mound itself seemed to buckle, collapse, as the walls of the great shaft below it collapsed, and then before Rowan there lay only a vast, smoking gouge in the earth, with no sign of life in it.
For minutes Rowan stared, unable to credit the miracle which had taken place before his eyes, which had thrust back the lizard-men and all their dinosaur hordes at the last moment, annihilating them in their cavern world far below by the switch they had themselves prepared, by the molten fiery seas of earth’s heart which Morton’s hand had loosed upon them. But for all the incredulous emotion within him he could find no words, could but stretch out his hands speechlessly toward the steaming pit before him.
And then suddenly he became aware that he was weeping....