Out of Times Abyss | Page 5

as he ran, Tippet raced after the great cave bear--the monstrous
thing that should have been extinct ages before--ran for it and fired
even as the beast was almost upon Bradley. The men in the trees
scarcely breathed. It seemed to them such a futile thing for Tippet to do,
and Tippet of all men! They had never looked upon Tippet as a
coward--there seemed to be no cowards among that strangely assorted
company that Fate had gathered together from the four corners of the
earth--but Tippet was considered a cautious man. Overcautious, some

thought him. How futile he and his little pop-gun appeared as he
dashed after that living engine of destruction! But, oh, how glorious! It
was some such thought as this that ran through Brady's mind, though
articulated it might have been expressed otherwise, albeit more
forcefully.
Just then it occurred to Brady to fire and he, too, opened upon the bear,
but at the same instant the animal stumbled and fell forward, though
still growling most fearsomely. Tippet never stopped running or firing
until he stood within a foot of the brute, which lay almost touching
Bradley and was already struggling to regain its feet. Placing the
muzzle of his gun against the bear's ear, Tippet pulled the trigger. The
creature sank limply to the ground and Bradley scrambled to his feet.
"Good work, Tippet," he said. "Mightily obliged to you--awful waste of
ammunition, really."
And then they resumed the march and in fifteen minutes the encounter
had ceased even to be a topic of conversation.
For two days they continued upon their perilous way. Already the cliffs
loomed high and forbidding close ahead without sign of break to
encourage hope that somewhere they might be scaled. Late in the
afternoon the party crossed a small stream of warm water upon the
sluggishly moving surface of which floated countless millions of tiny
green eggs surrounded by a light scum of the same color, though of a
darker shade. Their past experience of Caspak had taught them that
they might expect to come upon a stagnant pool of warm water if they
followed the stream to its source; but there they were almost certain to
find some of Caspak's grotesque, manlike creatures. Already since they
had disembarked from the U-33 after its perilous trip through the
subterranean channel beneath the barrier cliffs had brought them into
the inland sea of Caspak, had they encountered what had appeared to be
three distinct types of these creatures. There had been the pure
apes--huge, gorillalike beasts--and those who walked, a trifle more
erect and had features with just a shade more of the human cast about
them. Then there were men like Ahm, whom they had captured and
confined at the fort--Ahm, the club-man. "Well-known club-man,"

Tyler had called him. Ahm and his people had knowledge of a speech.
They had a language, in which they were unlike the race just inferior to
them, and they walked much more erect and were less hairy: but it was
principally the fact that they possessed a spoken language and carried a
weapon that differentiated them from the others.
All of these peoples had proven belligerent in the extreme. In common
with the rest of the fauna of Caprona the first law of nature as they
seemed to understand it was to kill--kill--kill. And so it was that
Bradley had no desire to follow up the little stream toward the pool
near which were sure to be the caves of some savage tribe, but fortune
played him an unkind trick, for the pool was much closer than he
imagined, its southern end reaching fully a mile south of the point at
which they crossed the stream, and so it was that after forcing their way
through a tangle of jungle vegetation they came out upon the edge of
the pool which they had wished to avoid.
Almost simultaneously there appeared south of them a party of naked
men armed with clubs and hatchets. Both parties halted as they caught
sight of one another. The men from the fort saw before them a hunting
party evidently returning to its caves or village laden with meat. They
were large men with features closely resembling those of the African
Negro though their skins were white. Short hair grew upon a large
portion of their limbs and bodies, which still retained a considerable
trace of apish progenitors. They were, however, a distinctly higher type
than the Bo-lu, or club-men.
Bradley would have been glad to have averted a meeting; but as he
desired to lead his party south around the end of the pool, and as it was
hemmed in by the jungle on one side and the water on the other, there
seemed no escape from an encounter.