Dinosaurs -- Fiction; Fantasy fiction; Paleontologists -- Fiction; Science fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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