An instant later the reporter was trading blow for blow, fighting with grim desperation. He used his fists with boxing skill, weaving slowly to the side in an attempt to reach the door.
“Fool!” roared Hilliard. “Don’t you realize the chance of a lifetime is before you? I’m offering you the greatest adventure conceivable to man. And you fight to avoid it. Stupid fool!”
“In the interests of science, eh?” Jimmy panted. “Experiment on yourself if you want to. I’m—”
He seized an opportunity, shot forth two trip-hammer blows, slipped past the man, and raced across the floor of the laboratory. Five feet, ten feet, to the edge of the door, he ran. Then Hilliard, recovering his breath, jerked his hand to the zinc table and seized a heavy iron-handled spatula. He took instant aim and threw the instrument with all the force of his gaunt arm.
Jimmy had the door ripped open when the spatula struck. The ceiling seemed to crash downward upon his head. Colored lights whirled in his vision. For an instant he stood there, reeling. Then with a low moan he sank to the floor.
* * * *
When he awoke he was outside in the open air, and it was broad daylight. Sharp pains pulsed through the back of his head. His eyes were blurred, his brain confused, seeking to place in their proper order the events that had happened the night before.
He staggered to his feet unsteadily, took a step forward, then stopped with a short cry of amazement. A strange scene lay about him. He was in the midst of a fantastic world, an impossible world crowded with weird shapes and objects. Great palm-like trees, forty to sixty feet high, with great bush-like upper portions and curious scaled trunks, walled in the glade in which he stood. Enormous ferns, their stalks fat and dripping with over-nourishment, formed an undulating carpet that stretched to a wavering horizon.
To the left a reed-choked stream sent its oily water winding sluggishly between banks that were livid with white fungi and tangled yellow vines. And beyond the stream rose a jungle of growth, dark green, damp and forbidding.
Jimmy stood there, unable to believe his eyes. He walked forward, dipped his hand mechanically into the tepid water. He ran his hand over the woody frond of one of the ferns, drew it away, staring blankly.
Where was he? What had happened? The growth which pressed close about him on three sides was neither tropical nor subtropical. It was not the growth he was accustomed to nor that which he knew abounded in latitudes farther south. It was not of his world. And yet in spite of the utter strangeness of it all, in spite of the nightmarish dimensions and coloring, a faint chord of familiarity sounded far back in his mind.
For a moment he stood there, bewildered. Then like a knife thrust a thought came to him.
Back at Boston Tech in his senior year in historical geology he had built just such a landscape on a miniature scale. He had constructed a reproduction of this very vegetation, using bits of colored sponges, straw and plaster of Paris and the illustrations in his text books for models. His lips tightened slowly at the memory of that work and the more recent words of Professor Hilliard.
Horrible and impossible a realization as it was, he understood now. He was on the manufactured world in Hilliard’s glass case in the laboratory. He was a creature of microscopic size on a miniature man-made planet that revolved about a carbon arc instead of a sun. He was back millions of years in the midst of the Mesozoic age, the only man on a synthetic earth.
And somewhere up there in the sky, far beyond his range of vision, a colossal figure would be watching his every movement through a gigantic magnifying glass, while every moment in that world of his would constitute hours, days for him here.
For ten minutes Jimmy Blane stood there thinking. He was a castaway on a hideous, land, surrounded he knew only too well by hideous dangers. Yet somehow he did not wish to die. He was young, and life was sweet. He wanted to live.
He shaded his eyes and scanned the horizon. To the west the land seemed higher and dryer, leading off to a sort of tableland, marked by only an occasional clump of trees. Without knowing why the reporter scrambled up a little limestone acclivity and began walking in that direction. A hundred thoughts were whirling through his brain. He must find water, fresh water, and he must find food and a place to sleep.
And yet as he walked, he found himself unconsciously examining the curious growths around him, cataloguing them as the memory of his college studies slowly returned.
Here was the flora of a young world, vegetation in the early stages of development. Here were Thallophyta, Bryophyta, Pteriodophyta, cycads and conifers, curious bushy trees with stunted trunks, ferns of gigantic size, flaccid vines that spread their entanglement everywhere. But presently the jungle was left behind, and he emerged into the plain. There was no wind. The air was hot, lifeless, the sky above faintly blue, and the sun, now at its zenith, gleamed like a flat, white ball.
On and on he walked. The grass beneath his feet was thick and long. It rustled like silk, leaving the marks of his shoes clearly defined behind him. Ahead he saw that the plain was slowly descending again, leading into a lower swamp area that looked gloomy and forbidding.
Although as yet he had seen only botanical growths, Jimmy knew he was in a world teeming with life, life of strange forms and varieties. Yet had he been in the Proterozoic era, millions of years earlier, he could not have been more alone. Reptiles held sway now. It would be eons before the lowest type of ape would be born. Eons more before man would be created. Millions of years before some Babylon would raise its temples to the sky, before an Egypt would take form in a Sahara.
He had been walking in a daze, pacing mechanically while he lived with his thoughts. Now suddenly his mental train was swept away, and he stopped rigid, staring like a wooden image.
Twenty yards away a nightmare object had suddenly risen up before him, emerging from behind a clump of trees. Forty feet from head to tip of tail, it stood there staring at him with gleaming eyes. Jimmy’s heart leaped to his throat. The thing looked like a horribly malformed lizard, increased in size a thousand times. The head was small with a gaping slit for a mouth. A double row of great bony plates extended along the back and down the tail. It was a stegosaur, the great armored dinosaur of the Jurassic and Cretaceous, the colossal herbivorous reptile of a prehistoric age.
For a moment Jimmy stood riveted to the spot. He could hear the thing’s gasping, sucking inhalations of breath, and he could feel the ground tremble as it moved ponderously toward him.
Then, smothering a cry, the reporter turned and ran, ran blindly toward the nearest reaches of the marsh. Down the slope and into the foul ooze he raced, plunging through the thick water and into the dripping foliage. Insects swarmed about him in stinging hordes. Beneath his feet fat squirmy lengths of black horror wriggled to safety. Something ripped through his trouser leg, gashed through the flesh to the bone. Two crocodiles, twice the length of the modern gavial crocodile, came at him, white jaws agape.
He escaped them and plunged on. Not until he was far in the depths of the poisonous swamp did he stop. Then in a state of near exhaustion he climbed partway up a dead tree, flung his body over a wide limb and waited to regain his breath.
* * * *
It was twilight before he at last fought his way out of the marsh. The sun was sinking in the west, and a starless sky above was slowly darkening. It seemed strange, inconceivable that that sun was but a manufactured mango-carbon arc suspended from the roof of a glass case by a piece of wire. It was hard for Jimmy to realize that this vast world surrounding him was a globe so small it could be dropped anywhere in the streets of his own city without attracting the slightest notice.
He was in open country again. Despair was in his heart as he stood gazing. As far as he could see from an elevated ridge it was all that same wild, virgin, fantastic country. No distant sail, no thin streamer of smoke, no sign of habitation of any kind. He was alone, utterly alone in an alien world
.
Pangs of hunger and a sudden feeling of thirst sent him out of his brooding presently. He appeased the latter with long draughts from a clear spring that bubbled out of a fissure in the rock almost at his feet. Then, descending to the shore, he managed to find several species of mollusks which seemed edible. They were typical Mesozoic pelecypods, fossils of which he had studied in his student days. He gulped them down with repugnance, then hurried into the forest in search of dry wood and tinder.
The matches in his pocket were unharmed. He heaped several stones in a circle, forming a crude fireplace, shielded from the wind. Carefully he ignited the twigs.
And so Jimmy huddled close to his growing blaze and tried to convince himself that he was still in the midst of some wild dream from which he would rise shortly to laugh at his fears. But he knew it was no dream. The very sky above attested to that.
Black as velvet without a single ray of light, it engulfed him on all sides. There was no moon, no stars, for the simple reason that Professor Hilliard had created no moon and no stars. He had placed in his glass case but two bodies, this world and the artificial sun. And that sun was now bestowing its light and heat to another hemisphere.
At length bewilderment and sheer exhaustion overcame him, and he fell into a troubled sleep.
It was dawn when he awoke. The sea glinted like hammered silver, and the air was growing warm and humid again. Jimmy waded out into the surf, dashed water on his face and hands. Then, considerably refreshed, he returned to the beach and took stock of his surroundings.
Before another day had passed he would have to provide himself with weapons for hunting and for defense. He would have to explore the immediate district and find or erect a shelter that would give him protection from the elements and all dangers. The thought occurred to him that if he could, climb to the summit of some mountain he might cast himself in bolder relief and beg the professor that he be returned to his own world.
In the eastern sky the sun still hung just above the horizon line. It seemed stationary, and the reporter found himself watching it curiously.
At intervals, all during the time he again searched the shore for more mollusks, he stared at it, wondering if his eyes were playing him tricks. Unless Hilliard for some unknown reason had slowed down the globe’s rotating speed, that sun should be considerably higher in the artificial sky by now.
Then suddenly it happened.
A huge elongated shadow shot down from above, darkening the heavens, spreading an eclipse-like gloom over the landscape. From somewhere in the invisible reaches of the sky there came a droning roar like the continuation of a hundred thunders. And then a vast cone-shaped object slanted down from the heights. It was a funnel-like steel tube, so large it seemed to cover the whole sky. Half a mile away its smaller end came to rest on a low hillock.
For several minutes while the colossal thing hung there motionless, Jimmy stood by the water’s edge, unable to believe his eyes. Then with incredible rapidity the thing shot upward again, faded to a blur in the heavens and disappeared.
But at its contact point with the distant hillock something had been left behind, something that moved, that turned and began to run in the direction of the reporter.
With a shout Jimmy flung down his mollusks and raced toward it. Even at that distance with the light of the day only half risen, he saw that it was the figure of a girl, and he guessed rather than knew who that girl was.
They met in a little glade, a hundred-yards from the shore. Breathless, puzzled, Jimmy looked at her, stretched forth his hand.
“Eve!” he cried. “Miss Manning! How did you get here? What has happened?”
She cast a quick glance at the fantastic growths about her, moved forward and smiled tremulously.
“I couldn’t let you stay here, marooned on this world, without trying to help,” she said. “I knew if I followed, Uncle would forget this mad experiment and do everything to bring me back. If we’re together, it would mean your return too.”
“But—but I don’t understand,” Jimmy stammered. “How could you—”
“The size-reducing machine was still connected with the glass case when Uncle left the laboratory a moment,” she told him. “I’d seen how he worked the apparatus, how he stopped the revolutions o£ the little globe in its orbit around the sun, how he adjusted the projector of the size machine to rotate at the same speed as the globe on its axis, and how he controlled that projector to touch the surface of the globe at a certain spot. I simply set the automatic controls, slipped into the machine’s cabinet, and closed the door.”
For an hour after that they stood there in the little glade discussing the situation. Quickly the reporter told her of the strange life that surrounded them, of the long day before and the subsequent night.
As she listened, the girl’s eyes grew wide with amazement.
“But scarcely two minutes passed,” she said, “from the time you were placed here to the time I followed. It doesn’t seem possible.”
They walked down the beach to the site of Jimmy’s camp fire. To the east the sun was moving again, lifting from the horizon in its journey across the sky.
With Eve watching him half in tragic curiosity, half in amusement, the reporter placed several flat-topped stones in the glowing coals and proceeded to bake the oyster-like varieties he had found along the shore.
Jimmy was jubilant now. “All we have to do,” he told her, “is wait until your uncle drops his projector down from the sky, rescues us and returns us to the laboratory. Man, what a yarn I’ll have to write when I get back to the office! McGraw—he’s city editor—will think I’ve been smoking opium.”
She smiled with him, then suddenly grew serious. “It may not be as simple as all that,” she said, frowning slowly. “Uncle may not miss me for a long time. He hasn’t the slightest idea of what I’ve done, and until he sights the two of us here through his microscope, nothing will happen. Ten minutes of his time, you must remember, will constitute many days and nights for us here.”
It was true. Blane sobered and fell quiet. “You shouldn’t have come,” he said at length.
Several times while they sat there a huge gleaming body appeared at the surface far out in the sea, twisting and turning, showing a giant snakelike head:
“Mosasaur,” the reporter said quietly as Eve stared at it with horror. “Marine reptile. Carnivorous too. It shows definitely we’re in the latter portion of the Mesozoic. Lower Cretaceous probably. But I don’t think it will come any closer inshore.”
Huge repulsive-looking birds passed high over their heads from time to time, but did not trouble them. All had jaws with sharp teeth, and as the reporter said, probably belonged to the Ichthyornis order.
Noon came and passed with no sign of the projector. Jimmy, concealing his fears from the girl with a steady fire of conversation, set about to build a rough shelter for the night. It took long hours of tedious labor, that shelter, and crude and poorly fashioned as it was, dusk had come upon them before it was finally completed.
It was a lean-to, closed in on two sides, roofed with the fronds of a fern which Jimmy thought to be pteridosperm or plant of similar family.
Then once again, this time with Eve at his side, Jimmy stood on the summit of the ridge and surveyed the lonely scene. To the east stretched the sea, a leaden wedge continuing to the rim of the world.
To the west and circling far to the north and south rose the Cretaceous jungle, an impenetrable bastion of green, seething with unknown dangers.
“It’s frightening,” Eve said in an awed voice. “I can’t realize that all this is on a microscopic scale, that that ocean is really only a few drops of water on a globe which I could hold in my hand. Oh, why doesn’t Uncle do something?”
They returned to the lean-to shelter, ate a few more mollusks and lay down to sleep.
Outside there was black silence, b
roken only by the monotonous swishing of the waves against the lower shore.
Jimmy, tired unto exhaustion, drifted off quickly. He dreamed wild dreams of entering the Cretaceous jungle of this miniature world, losing his way, and walking on and on until his legs began to ache in their sockets and his whole body called out for rest.
Jimmy was awakened by a piercing cry. It seemed to come from far off, and it was repeated twice before his dulled senses grasped its significance. Then he leaped to his feet and looked about him. Broad daylight streamed through the front of the lean-to. But Eve—Eve was gone.
The reporter ran to the entrance, calling her name frantically. The ridge about the little camp was deserted. A hunched broom-like cycad tree waved its bushy branches in a low moan of mockery. Heart thumping, Jimmy raced higher up the acclivity and turned his eyes down toward the shore. And what he saw there froze him into immobility.
At the water’s edge, face white with terror, stood Eve. At her feet, scattered on the sandy floor where she had dropped them, lay a small pile of mollusks. And fifty yards down the shore, gazing at her like a creature out of hell, was a thing whose very existence the reporter found hard to believe.
It was a hideous giant-headed monster with fat, scaly body and cavernous, jagged-toothed mouth. It stood erect on its hind feet, the sharp claws of its forefeet extended, the long pointed tail thrown out far behind. Even as he stood there motionless, numb with terror, the reporter’s brain flashed back to his earlier studies and seized upon a name of classification. A theropod, a carnivorous Allosaurus agilis, the most ferocious of Mesozoic dinosaurs.
The horrible reptile was moving closer, heading slowly’ toward its prey.
Jimmy stooped downward, scooped up two heavy rocks and raced down the ridge. Before he reached the shore he snapped back his arm and flung one of the stones with every ounce of strength he could command. The missile fell far short.
The Mad Scientist Megapack Page 42
