The Genial Dinosaur. John Russell Fearn

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СКАЧАТЬ plates before them. Cliff had often eaten his meals like this in the earlier days, and been a much happier man in consequence.

      “Any ideas on that earth tremor business, Nick?” one of the men asked, and his southern accent sounded odd in these regions north of the border.

      “None at all.” Nick was the foreman of the outfit, and like everybody else in the unit, had heard the news over the field radio. “I certainly felt it, and it struck me that it wasn’t very far from here.”

      “Do you suppose that our jabbings have had something to do with it?”

      “Not a chance!” the foreman scoffed. “Why, we’ve hardly scratched the subsoil as yet, and this tremor was traced to thirty miles down and more.”

      “Come to think of it,” one of the men said, pausing with a hunk of bread half way to his mouth, “I believe I can feel a sort of tremor at this very moment! How about you fellows?”

      The assembly looked about them in the gloaming. Away to the north and east the mountains had foundered into the purple of the summer night. To the south and west was rocky landscape, but it was more or less level. Here and there it was despoiled by mighty electric pylons carrying power, and the new McDermott River Valley Project.

      Tremors? Yes, there was something, and every man could sense it, probably because every man was seated and thereby directly conscious of ground vibration. It was a curious, intermittent shaking which seemed to be coming nearer. Just as though a vast pile driver or trip hammer was being released at intervals, and being brought closer each time.

      “What in blazes is it?” the foreman demanded at last, staring about him—but all he saw were the lights of the little ‘portable’ mining huts and domiciles and the brooding mountains grouped beyond.

      Then for a space the concussions ceased. The men resumed eating, and talking amongst themselves, Nick included. Then, as he talked to the man nearest him, he suddenly froze in mid-sentence and stared in paralysed terror into the gathering night.

      “What’s the matter?” asked the engineer beside him, chewing methodically.

      Nick swallowed and stared obliquely skywards. His mouth said; “Look!” but no sound came forth. His colleague gathered the drift and stared upwards. Then he too saw it and forgot everything else.

      Infinitely far overhead, as it seemed, was a lizard’s face. Or was it a lizard? It could have been some kind of sea serpent of stupendous proportions. No, it wasn’t that, either. It was an animal of some sort with a head as large as a comfortable-sized dwelling house. The head was moving around slowly against the twilight sky, perched on the end of a thick, bulging neck. It appeared that there were eyes catching the faint afterglow from the west, eyes as big as soup plates.

      “My God!” Nick whispered, and all of a sudden he shot to his feet and yelled at the top of his voice: “Take cover, boys! Animal of some sort watching us! Get the explosives over here quickly! Step on it!”

      For a moment the rest of the men, except his immediate colleagues, wondered if he had gone crazy, a thought which was instantly dispelled as from the monster’s cavernous mouth, with its triple rows of saw-like teeth, there shattered forth a ground-shaking bellow. Whether the noise was meant to be one of fury or just playful excitement, the startled miners did not know: what they did know was that the monstrosity was large beyond imagination, and that it was commencing to lumber down into their midst.

      The men flew for their lives, not sure where they were going, not caring indeed just as long as they put a good distance between themselves and the monster.… And the monster ploughed onwards. It descended the short slope on which the miners had been resting, rocks crumbling to powder under the weight of the gargantuan clawed feet. Then, when it reached the clearing where the equipment—abandoned now for the night—was lying, the creature halted and sniffed the warm breeze. The noise created by this performance sounded like an old-time express train moving at full speed with safety valve open.

      Cowering behind every available rock, boulder, and domicile, the engineers and miners had their first real vision of the monster that had come amongst them. They sweated, and gazed, and sweated again. The creature stood a good fifty feet high from ponderous feet to colossal head. His length was possibly a hundred and fifty feet to the tip of his broad, tapering tail, this in itself as thick at the base as any railway train. The back legs were short; the front ones longer and massive as grey pillars.…

      “I thought we’d bumped off all these damned things!” one of the engineers panted, glancing at his nearest neighbour. “It’s one of those blasted prehistoric monsters that used to roam about a couple of years back— Remember the fun there was? Wonder where in Hades this fellow came from? He’s the biggest I ever did see!”

      The dinosaur obviously did not hear the engineer, so it must have been chance that moved him in his direction. The ground quaked, the engineers and miners fled again, and then the monster was walking casually through the midst of the domiciles.

      They flattened like matchboxes, and where men were inside them, it was just too bad. Those who had been sent to get the explosives came courageously forward, dodging the vast feet and struggling to arrange detonators. The moment the huge beast had passed through the crumpled remains of the domiciles the explosives went off. Earth and debris blasted into the night to the accompaniment of blinding flashes and ear-shattering noises. But when all the confusion had died away, there was a vision, in the newly switched-on searchlights, of the dinosaur still going, head swaying back and forth as though he were trying to catch some particularly elusive scent.

      “Warn the authorities!” Nick shouted, as the men began to converge upon him. “If that brute gets loose in a city, anything can happen. It’ll be the former horror all over again!”

      A man fled for the field telephone just as the dinosaur—now a quarter of a mile distant—walked through the midst of the overland wires and snapped them like cotton threads. So, back at the mining base, radio had to he used. Across the country the warning was flashed that for the second time in the past few years prehistoric monsters were prowl­ing around. Well, one was, and that seemed to imply there might be others.

      This, though, was an exaggeration. There was only the one dinosaur abroad. Otherwise, everything was peaceful, and the skies were free of flying lizards and pterodactyls. No, there was only this lonesome giant, ambling now across the rugged Highland countryside towards nowhere in particular, and at the same time coming dangerously close to the high voltage lines powering half of Scotland’s cities as well as the McDermott River Valley Project.

      The dinosaur suddenly became entangled with the cables. Down they came, the pylons snapping at their concrete bases. Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen became partially blacked out, and desperate signals went forth to the maintenance engineers. From the McDermott Project engineers there also arose a cry for help. Millions of gallons of river water were relying on electric power to keep them dammed. If the power remained off for any length of time, the whole valley and generating station in the heart of it would be flooded out.

      The giant from the Jurassic Age knew nothing of these things. He was only aware of shooting pains through his armour-like hide as the live wires whipped and flashed around him. He roared with fury and pain and then broke into a run, snapping the wires in the process. With this the pains ceased, so the dinosaur slowed up and moved with its former Juggernaut speed over the rugged land­scape.

      The hue and cry was terrific once warning had been received. Out came the militia and the air force. The peace of the night sky was rent in twain by the scream of jet planes. Pilots, mistaking shadows below for the monster, dropped bombs on private СКАЧАТЬ