A MODERN DINOSAUR
The Very Young Man never knew quite how it happened. The Doctor had told
them to check their growth: and he took the drug abstractedly, for his
mind was on Aura and how she would feel, coming for the first time into
this great outer world.
What quantity he took, the Very Young Man afterward could never decide.
But the next thing he knew, the figures of his companions had grown to
gigantic size. The rocks about him were expanding enormously. Already he
had lost the contour of the ledge. The canon wall had drawn back almost
out of sight in the haze of the distance. He turned around, bewildered.
There was no precipice behind him. Instead, a great, rocky plain,
tumbling with a mass of boulders, and broken by seams and rifts, spread
out to his gaze. And even in that instant, as he regarded it in
confusion, it opened up to greater distances.
Near at hand--a hundred yards away, perhaps--a gigantic human figure
towered five hundred feet into the air. Around it, further away, others
equally large, were blurred into the haze of distance.
The nearer figure stooped, and the Very Young Man, fearful that he might
be crushed by its movement, waved his arms in terror. He started to run,
leaping over the jagged ground beneath his feet. A great roaring voice
from above came down to him--the Doctor's voice.
"Don't get smaller!"
The Very Young Man stopped running, more frightened than ever before
with the realization that came to him. He shouted upward:
"I can't stop! I haven't any of the other drug!"
An enormous blurred object came swooping towards him, and went past with
a rush of wind--the foot of the Big Business Man, though the Very Young
Man did not know it. Above him now the air was filled with roaring--the
excited voices of his friends.
A few moments passed while the Very Young Man stood stock still, too
frightened to move. The roaring above gradually ceased. The towering
figures expanded--faded back into the distance--disappeared.
The Very Young Man was alone in the silence and desolation of a jagged,
broken landscape that was still expanding beneath him. For some time he
stood there, bewildered. He came to himself suddenly with the thought
that although he was too small to be seen by his friends, yet they must
be there still within a few steps of him. They might take a step--might
crush him to death without seeing him, or knowing that they had done it!
There were rocky buttes and hills all about him now. Without stopping to
reason what he was doing he began to run. He did not know or care
where--anywhere away from those colossal figures who with a single step
would crush the very hills and rocks about him and bury him beneath an
avalanche of golden quartz.
He ran, in panic, for an hour perhaps, scrambling over little ravines,
falling into a crevice--climbing out and running again. At last, with
his feet torn and bleeding, he threw himself to the ground, utterly
exhausted.
After a time, with returning strength, the Very Young Man began to think
more calmly. He was lost--lost in size--the one thing that the Doctor,
when they started down into the ring, had warned them against so
earnestly. What a fool he had been to run! He was miles away from them
now. He could not make himself large; and were they to get
smaller--small enough to see him, they might wander in this barren
wilderness for days and never chance to come upon him.
The Very Young Man cursed himself for a fool. Why hadn't he kept some of
the enlarging drug with him? And then abruptly, he realized something
additionally terrifying. The dose of the diminishing drug which he had
just taken so thoughtlessly, was the last that remained in that vial. He
was utterly helpless. Thousands of miles of rocky country surrounded
him--a wilderness devoid of vegetation, of water, and of life.
Lying prone upon the ground, which at last had stopped expanding, the
Very Young Man gave himself up to terrified reflection. So this was the
end--all the dangers they had passed through--their conquests--and the
journey out of the ring so near to a safe ending.... And then this!
For a time the Very Young Man abandoned hope. There was nothing to do,
of course. They could never find him--probably, with women and a child
among them they would not dare even to try. They would go safely back to
their own world--but he--Jack Bruce--would remain in the ring. He
laughed with bitter cynicism at the thought. Even the habitable world of
the ring itself, was denied him. Like a lost soul, poised between two
worlds, he was abandoned, waiting helpless, until hunger and thirst
would put an end to his sufferings.
Then the Very Young Man thought of Aura; and with the thought came a new
determination not to give up hope. He stood up and looked about him,
steeling himself against the flood of despair that again was almost
overwhelming. He must return as nearly as possible to the point where he
had parted from his friends. It was the only chance he had remaining--to
be close enough so if one, or all of them, had become small, they would
be able to see him.
There was little to choose of direction in the desolate waste around,
but dimly the Very Young Man recalled having a low line of hills behind
him when he was running. He faced that way now. He had come perhaps six
or seven miles; he would return now as nearly as possible over the same
route. He selected a gully that seemed to wind in that general
direction, and climbing down into it, started off along its floor.
The gully was some forty feet deep and seemed to average considerably
wider. Its sides were smooth and precipitous in some places; in others
they were broken. The Very Young Man had been walking some thirty
minutes when, as he came abruptly around a sharp bend, he saw before him
the most terrifying object he had ever beheld. He stood stock still,
fascinated with horror. On the floor of the gully, directly in front of
him, lay a gigantic lizard--a reptile hideous, grotesque in its
enormity. It was lying motionless, with its jaw, longer than his own
body, flat on the ground as though it were sunning itself. Its tail,
motionless also, wound out behind it. It was a reptile that by its
size--it seemed to the Very Young Man at least thirty feet long--might
have been a dinosaur reincarnated out of the dark, mysterious ages of
the earth's formation. And yet, even in that moment of horror, the Very
Young Man recognized it for what it was--the tiny lizard the Chemist had
sent into the valley of the scratch to test his drug!
At sight of the Very Young Man the reptile raised its great head. Its
tongue licked out hideously; its huge eyes stared unblinking. And then,
slowly, hastelessly, it began coming forward, its great feet scratching
on the rocks, its tail sliding around a boulder behind it.
The Very Young Man waited no longer, but turning, ran back headlong the
way he had come. Curiously enough, this new danger, though it terrified,
did not confuse him. It was a situation demanding physical action, and
with it he found his mind working clearly. He leaped over a rock, half
stumbled, recovered himself and dashed onward.
A glance over his shoulder showed him the reptile coming around the bend
in the gully. It slid forward, crawling over the rocks without effort,
still hastelessly, as though leisurely to pick up this prey which it
knew could not escape it.
The gully here chanced to have smooth, almost perpendicular sides. The
Very Young Man saw that he could not climb out; and even if he could, he
knew that the reptile would go up the sides as easily as along the
floor. It had been over a hundred feet from him when he first saw it.
Now it was less than half that distance and gaining rapidly.
For an instant the Very Young Man slackened his flight. To run on would
be futile. The reptile would overtake him any moment; even now he knew
that with a sudden spring it could land upon him.
A cross rift at right angles in the wall came into sight--a break in the
rock as though it had been riven apart by some gigantic wedge. It was as
deep as the gully itself and just wide enough to admit the passage of
the Very Young Man's body. He darted into it; and heard behind him the
spring of the reptile as it landed at the entrance to the rift into
which its huge size barred it from advancing.
The Very Young Man stopped--panting for breath. He could just turn about
between the enclosing walls. Behind him, outside in the gully, the
lizard lay baffled. And then, seemingly without further interest, it
moved away.
The Very Young Man rested. The danger was past. He could get out of the
rift, doubtless, further ahead, without reentering the gully. And, if he
kept well away from the reptile, probably it would not bother him.
Exultation filled the Very Young Man. And then again he remembered his
situation--lost in size, helpless, without the power to rejoin his
friends. He had escaped death in one form only to confront it again in
another--worse perhaps, since it was the more lingering.
Ahead of him, the rift seemed ascending and opening up. He followed it,
and in a few hundred yards was again on the broken plateau above, level
now with the top of the gully.
The winding gully itself, the Very Young Man could see plainly. Its
nearest point to him was some six hundred feet away; and in its bottom
he knew that hideous reptile lurked. He shuddered and turned away,
instinctively walking quietly, fearing to make some noise that might
again attract its attention to him.
And then came a sound that drove the blood from his face and turned him
cold all over. From the depths of the gully, in another of its bends
nearby, the sound of an anxious girl's voice floated upward.
"Jack! Oh Jack!" And again:
"Jack--my friend Jack!"
It was Aura, his own size perhaps, in the gully searching for him!
With frantic, horrified haste, the Very Young Man ran towards the top of
the gully. He shouted warningly, as he ran.
Aura must have heard him, for her voice changed from anxiety to a glad
cry of relief. He reached the top of the gully; at its bottom--forty
feet below down its precipitous side--stood Aura, looking up, radiant,
to greet him.
"I took the drug," she cried. "I took it before they could forbid me.
They are waiting--up there for us. There is no danger now, Jack."
The Very Young Man tried to silence her. A noise down the gully made him
turn. The gigantic reptile appeared round the nearby bend. It saw the
girl and scuttled forward, rattling the loose bowlders beneath its feet
as it came.
Aura saw it the same instant. She looked up helplessly to the Very Young
Man above her; then she turned and ran down the gully.
The Very Young Man stood transfixed. It was a sheer drop of forty feet
or more to the gully floor beneath him. There was seemingly nothing that
he could do in those few terrible seconds, and yet with subconscious,
instinctive reasoning, he did the one and only thing possible. A loose
mass of the jagged, gold quartz hung over the gully wall. Frantically he
tore at it--pried loose with feet and hands a bowlder that hung poised.
As the lizard approached, the loosened rock slid forward, and dropped
squarely upon the reptile's broad back.
It was a bowlder nearly as large as the Very Young Man himself, but the
gigantic reptile shook it off, writhing and twisting for an instant, and
hurling the smaller loose rocks about the floor of the gully with its
struggles.
The Very Young Man cast about for another missile, but there were none
at hand. Aura, at the confusion, had stopped about two hundred feet
away.
"Run!" shouted the Very Young Man. "Hide somewhere! Run!"
The lizard, momentarily stunned, recovered swiftly. Again it started
forward, seemingly now as alert as before. And then, without warning, in
the air above his head the Very Young Man heard the rush of gigantic
wings. A tremendous grey body swooped past him and into the gully--a
bird larger in proportion than the lizard itself.... It was the little
sparrow the Chemist had sent in from the outside world--maddened now by
thirst and hunger, which to the reptile had been much more endurable.
The Very Young Man, shouting again to Aura to run, stood awestruck,
watching the titanic struggle that was raging below him. The great
lizard rose high on its forelegs to meet this enemy. Its tremendous jaws
opened--and snapped closed; but the bird avoided them. Its huge claws
gripped the reptile's back; its flapping wings spread the sixty foot
width of the gully as it strove to raise its prey into the air. The
roaring of these enormous wings was deafening; the wind from them as
they came up tore past the Very Young Man in violent gusts; and as they
went down, the suction of air almost swept him over the brink of the
precipice. He flung himself prone, clinging desperately to hold his
position.
The lizard threshed and squirmed. A swish of its enormous tail struck
the gully wall and brought down an avalanche of loose, golden rock. But
the giant bird held its grip; its bill--so large that the Very Young
Man's body could easily have lain within it--pecked ferociously at the
lizard's head.
It was a struggle to the death--an unequal struggle, though it raged for
many minutes with an uncanny fury. At last, dragging its adversary to
where the gully was wider, the bird flapped its wings with freedom of
movement and laboriously rose into the air.
And a moment later the Very Young Man, looking upward, saw through the
magic diminishing glass of distance, a little sparrow of his own world,
with a tiny, helpless lizard struggling in its grasp.
* * * * *
"Aura! Don't cry, Aura! Gosh, I don't want you to cry--everything's all
right now."
The Very Young Man sat awkwardly beside the frightened girl, who,
overcome by the strain of what she had been through, was crying
silently. It was strange to see Aura crying; she had always been such a
Spartan, so different from any other girl he had ever known. It confused
him.
"Don't cry, Aura," he repeated. He tried clumsily to soothe her. He
wanted to thank her for what she had done in risking her life to find
him. He wanted to tell her a thousand tender things that sprang into his
heart as he sat there beside her. But when she raised her tear-stained
face and smiled at him bravely, all he said was:
"Gosh, that was some fight, wasn't it? It was great of you to come down
after me, Aura. Are they waiting for us up there?" And then when she
nodded:
"We'd better hurry, Aura. How can we ever find them? We must have come
miles from where they are."
She smiled at him quizzically through her tears.
"You forget, Jack, how small we are. They are waiting on the little
ledge for us--and all this country--" She spread her arms toward the
vast wilderness that surrounded them--"this is all only a very small
part of that same ledge on which they are standing."
It was true; and the Very Young Man realized it at once.
Aura had both drugs with her. They took the one to increase their size,
and without mishap or moving from where they were, rejoined those on the
little ledge who were so anxiously awaiting them.
For half an hour the Very Young Man recounted his adventure, with
praises of Aura that made the girl run to her sister to hide her
confusion. Then once more the party started its short climb out of the
valley of the scratch. In ten minutes they were all safely on the
top--on the surface of the ring at last.