CHAPTER XXXIX
A MODERN DINOSAUR
The Very Young Man never knew quite how it happened. The Doctor had toldthem to check their growth: and he took the drug abstractedly, for hismind was on Aura and how she would feel, coming for the first time intothis 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 togigantic size. The rocks about him were expanding enormously. Already hehad lost the contour of the ledge. The canon wall had drawn back almostout 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, spreadout to his gaze. And even in that instant, as he regarded it inconfusion, it opened up to greater distances.
Near at hand--a hundred yards away, perhaps--a gigantic human figuretowered five hundred feet into the air. Around it, further away, othersequally large, were blurred into the haze of distance.
The nearer figure stooped, and the Very Young Man, fearful that he mightbe crushed by its movement, waved his arms in terror. He started to run,leaping over the jagged ground beneath his feet. A great roaring voicefrom above came down to him--the Doctor's voice.
"Don't get smaller!"
The Very Young Man stopped running, more frightened than ever beforewith 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 witha rush of wind--the foot of the Big Business Man, though the Very YoungMan did not know it. Above him now the air was filled with roaring--theexcited voices of his friends.
A few moments passed while the Very Young Man stood stock still, toofrightened to move. The roaring above gradually ceased. The toweringfigures 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 hestood there, bewildered. He came to himself suddenly with the thoughtthat although he was too small to be seen by his friends, yet they mustbe there still within a few steps of him. They might take a step--mightcrush 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 toreason what he was doing he began to run. He did not know or carewhere--anywhere away from those colossal figures who with a single stepwould crush the very hills and rocks about him and bury him beneath anavalanche 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, withhis feet torn and bleeding, he threw himself to the ground, utterlyexhausted.
After a time, with returning strength, the Very Young Man began to thinkmore calmly. He was lost--lost in size--the one thing that the Doctor,when they started down into the ring, had warned them against soearnestly. What a fool he had been to run! He was miles away from themnow. He could not make himself large; and were they to getsmaller--small enough to see him, they might wander in this barrenwilderness for days and never chance to come upon him.
The Very Young Man cursed himself for a fool. Why hadn't he kept some ofthe enlarging drug with him? And then abruptly, he realized somethingadditionally terrifying. The dose of the diminishing drug which he hadjust taken so thoughtlessly, was the last that remained in that vial. Hewas utterly helpless. Thousands of miles of rocky country surroundedhim--a wilderness devoid of vegetation, of water, and of life.
Lying prone upon the ground, which at last had stopped expanding, theVery Young Man gave himself up to terrified reflection. So this was theend--all the dangers they had passed through--their conquests--and thejourney 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 childamong them they would not dare even to try. They would go safely back totheir own world--but he--Jack Bruce--would remain in the ring. Helaughed with bitter cynicism at the thought. Even the habitable world ofthe ring itself, was denied him. Like a lost soul, poised between twoworlds, he was abandoned, waiting helpless, until hunger and thirstwould put an end to his sufferings.
Then the Very Young Man thought of Aura; and with the thought came a newdetermination not to give up hope. He stood up and looked about him,steeling himself against the flood of despair that again was almostoverwhelming. He must return as nearly as possible to the point where hehad parted from his friends. It was the only chance he had remaining--tobe close enough so if one, or all of them, had become small, they wouldbe 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 behindhim when he was running. He faced that way now. He had come perhaps sixor seven miles; he would return now as nearly as possible over the sameroute. He selected a gully that seemed to wind in that generaldirection, and climbing down into it, started off along its floor.
The gully was some forty feet deep and seemed to average considerablywider. Its sides were smooth and precipitous in some places; in othersthey were broken. The Very Young Man had been walking some thirtyminutes when, as he came abruptly around a sharp bend, he saw before himthe most terrifying object he had ever beheld. He stood stock still,fascinated with horror. On the floor of the gully, directly in front ofhim, lay a gigantic lizard--a reptile hideous, grotesque in itsenormity. It was lying motionless, with its jaw, longer than his ownbody, flat on the ground as though it were sunning itself. Its tail,motionless also, wound out behind it. It was a reptile that by itssize--it seemed to the Very Young Man at least thirty feet long--mighthave been a dinosaur reincarnated out of the dark, mysterious ages ofthe earth's formation. And yet, even in that moment of horror, the VeryYoung Man recognized it for what it was--the tiny lizard the Chemist hadsent into the valley of the scratch to test his drug!
At sight of the Very Young Man the reptile raised its great head. Itstongue licked out hideously; its huge eyes stared unblinking. And then,slowly, hastelessly, it began coming forward, its great feet scratchingon the rocks, its tail sliding around a boulder behind it.
The Very Young Man waited no longer, but turning, ran back headlong theway he had come. Curiously enough, this new danger, though it terrified,did not confuse him. It was a situation demanding physical action, andwith it he found his mind working clearly. He leaped over a rock, halfstumbled, recovered himself and dashed onward.
A glance over his shoulder showed him the reptile coming around the bendin the gully. It slid forward, crawling over the rocks without effort,still hastelessly, as though leisurely to pick up this prey which itknew could not escape it.
The gully here chanced to have smooth, almost perpendicular sides. TheVery Young Man saw that he could not climb out; and even if he could, heknew that the reptile would go up the sides as easily as along thefloor. 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 wouldbe futile. The reptile would overtake him any moment; even now he knewthat with a sudden spring it could land upon him.
A cross rift at right angles in the wall came into sight--a break in therock as though it had been riven apart by some gigantic wedge. It was asdeep as the gully itself and just wide enough to admit the passage ofthe Very Young Man's body. He darted into it; and heard behind him thespring of the reptile as it landed at the entrance to the rift intowhich its huge size barred it from advancing.
The Very Young Man stopped--panting for breath. He could just turn aboutbetween the enclosing walls. Behind him, outside in the gully, thelizard lay baffled. And then, seemingly without further interest, itmoved away.
The Very Young Man rested. The danger w
as past. He could get out of therift, doubtless, further ahead, without reentering the gully. And, if hekept well away from the reptile, probably it would not bother him.
Exultation filled the Very Young Man. And then again he remembered hissituation--lost in size, helpless, without the power to rejoin hisfriends. He had escaped death in one form only to confront it again inanother--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, levelnow with the top of the gully.
The winding gully itself, the Very Young Man could see plainly. Itsnearest point to him was some six hundred feet away; and in its bottomhe knew that hideous reptile lurked. He shuddered and turned away,instinctively walking quietly, fearing to make some noise that mightagain attract its attention to him.
And then came a sound that drove the blood from his face and turned himcold all over. From the depths of the gully, in another of its bendsnearby, 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 ofthe gully. He shouted warningly, as he ran.
Aura must have heard him, for her voice changed from anxiety to a gladcry of relief. He reached the top of the gully; at its bottom--fortyfeet 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 himturn. The gigantic reptile appeared round the nearby bend. It saw thegirl and scuttled forward, rattling the loose bowlders beneath its feetas it came.
Aura saw it the same instant. She looked up helplessly to the Very YoungMan above her; then she turned and ran down the gully.
The Very Young Man stood transfixed. It was a sheer drop of forty feetor more to the gully floor beneath him. There was seemingly nothing thathe could do in those few terrible seconds, and yet with subconscious,instinctive reasoning, he did the one and only thing possible. A loosemass of the jagged, gold quartz hung over the gully wall. Frantically hetore at it--pried loose with feet and hands a bowlder that hung poised.As the lizard approached, the loosened rock slid forward, and droppedsquarely upon the reptile's broad back.
It was a bowlder nearly as large as the Very Young Man himself, but thegigantic reptile shook it off, writhing and twisting for an instant, andhurling the smaller loose rocks about the floor of the gully with itsstruggles.
The Very Young Man cast about for another missile, but there were noneat hand. Aura, at the confusion, had stopped about two hundred feetaway.
"Run!" shouted the Very Young Man. "Hide somewhere! Run!"
The lizard, momentarily stunned, recovered swiftly. Again it startedforward, seemingly now as alert as before. And then, without warning, inthe air above his head the Very Young Man heard the rush of giganticwings. A tremendous grey body swooped past him and into the gully--abird larger in proportion than the lizard itself.... It was the littlesparrow the Chemist had sent in from the outside world--maddened now bythirst 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 greatlizard rose high on its forelegs to meet this enemy. Its tremendous jawsopened--and snapped closed; but the bird avoided them. Its huge clawsgripped the reptile's back; its flapping wings spread the sixty footwidth of the gully as it strove to raise its prey into the air. Theroaring of these enormous wings was deafening; the wind from them asthey came up tore past the Very Young Man in violent gusts; and as theywent down, the suction of air almost swept him over the brink of theprecipice. He flung himself prone, clinging desperately to hold hisposition.
The lizard threshed and squirmed. A swish of its enormous tail struckthe gully wall and brought down an avalanche of loose, golden rock. Butthe giant bird held its grip; its bill--so large that the Very YoungMan's body could easily have lain within it--pecked ferociously at thelizard's head.
It was a struggle to the death--an unequal struggle, though it raged formany minutes with an uncanny fury. At last, dragging its adversary towhere the gully was wider, the bird flapped its wings with freedom ofmovement and laboriously rose into the air.
And a moment later the Very Young Man, looking upward, saw through themagic 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 allright now."
The Very Young Man sat awkwardly beside the frightened girl, who,overcome by the strain of what she had been through, was cryingsilently. It was strange to see Aura crying; she had always been such aSpartan, so different from any other girl he had ever known. It confusedhim.
"Don't cry, Aura," he repeated. He tried clumsily to soothe her. Hewanted to thank her for what she had done in risking her life to findhim. He wanted to tell her a thousand tender things that sprang into hisheart as he sat there beside her. But when she raised her tear-stainedface and smiled at him bravely, all he said was:
"Gosh, that was some fight, wasn't it? It was great of you to come downafter me, Aura. Are they waiting for us up there?" And then when shenodded:
"We'd better hurry, Aura. How can we ever find them? We must have comemiles from where they are."
She smiled at him quizzically through her tears.
"You forget, Jack, how small we are. They are waiting on the littleledge for us--and all this country--" She spread her arms toward thevast wilderness that surrounded them--"this is all only a very smallpart 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 thelittle ledge who were so anxiously awaiting them.
For half an hour the Very Young Man recounted his adventure, withpraises of Aura that made the girl run to her sister to hide herconfusion. Then once more the party started its short climb out of thevalley of the scratch. In ten minutes they were all safely on thetop--on the surface of the ring at last.