Читать книгу The Genial Dinosaur - John Russell Fearn - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

RETURN OF A MONSTER

Clifford Brooks, the rangy mining engineer with a thirst for adventure, had definitely made history when, in blowing up the base of a basalt area, he had accidentally loosed upon the world the monsters of the Jurassic Age. But now that was over. It had happened two years ago, and the last monster had been eliminated. Indeed, even more than this, the dangerous nitrogene gas escaping from inside the earth and threatening the destruc­tion of humanity and perpetuation of the monsters had been sealed off. Yes, everything was very peaceful.

Well, almost. There was, of course, the usual daily talk of governmental and international upheavals; of the creation of new and deadlier weapons with which to destroy your next-door neighbour—and above all, there was the constant threat of alien invasion. The latter menace, though, was probably more the imagination of news writers who ought to have known better than a business to be taken seriously.

Proof of this invasion? Only strange flashes seen at intervals on the surface of Mars, and there was their possible tie-up with unusual objects glimpsed at times in the Earthly skies. These objects had nothing to do with flying saucers, and anyway they were differently shaped. Nothing like a saucer: wedge-shaped and moving at something like 18,000 miles an hour. The flying saucers of many years past had ceased to interest the public. Eminent high-ups had definitely proved them to be natural phenomena or the repercussions of indigestion, and that had to suffice. So, of course, this new business of wedge-shaped spots before the eyes moving at 18,000 m.p.h. provided something new for bored Mr. and Mrs. Everyman to talk about.

Not that Cliff Brooks was bored—hell, no. From being a first-rate mining engineer, he had graduated to that of chief consultant on mining and geology to the govern­ment’s South Regional Division. It carried a thumping salary, a stupendous amount of work, and absolute promise of a nervous breakdown. Actually, Cliff Brooks had only himself to blame. With his wife Joan, and, several other engineers—who had lost their lives in the process—he had descended a thousand miles into the Earth. Therefore, he alone possessed the valuable knowledge that geologists were constantly requiring in collusion with the mining companies. And in these days, when man was having to dive ever deeper for his raw resources in the nature of oil, coal, and mineral ores, the knowledge was worth a king’s ransom.

“Just the same,” Joan said one evening, when Cliff came home looking as though he had been through an atomic washing machine, “you ought to take things a bit easier, Cliff. What’s going to happen if you crack up?”

“I shan’t,” Cliff grinned. “I’m only young yet—far as vitality goes—and anyhow, I’d sooner risk cracking up and be worth a fortune than penniless and disgustingly healthy.”

Joan was silent. There was something in what he said, of course. His money in the past two years had enabled them to own a delightful detached home outside London, had provided them with every necessity life could offer.

“Yet sometimes,” Joan said, reflecting, “I rather sigh for the days we used to know. The little villa, you coming in full of bursting energy, me with the electric stove.… Remember the day you brought home the egg?”

Cliff did not answer for the moment. The mention of the dinosaur’s egg he had once brought home from the underground Jurassic Region, which egg had later produced the fantastic, terrifying diplodocus known as “Herbert,” was something he did not care to remember. Not because it filled him with horror: quite the opposite. He always felt miserable when he remembered Herbert. Poor, lumbering, eighty-ton Herbert, buried somewhere nearly a thousand miles down in the earth. Neither Cliff nor Joan could ever forget that they owed their very lives to the monster’s colossal strength. Without him they would never have returned to the surface of the Earth and the blessed light of day.

“Stop making me miserable, can’t you?” Cliff growled, as he headed for the lounge door to freshen up before the evening meal. “The past’s finished with, Joan—and Herbert with it. At least I hope so!”

“You don’t hope anything of the sort!”

Cliff paused at the door, looked back, then returned across the lounge to where Joan was standing. She was an ash blonde with hazel eyes—a most feminine girl, with plenty of courage, but not over-quick on the uptake, which was probably why she was so appealing.

“You dare to question my statement,, Mrs. Brooks?” Cliff asked severely, gripping her shoulders.

“I do, sir! You know as well as I do that if Herbert were to come romping across the ground of this wilderness of a house of ours, you’d be the happiest man alive! I know I’d be the happiest woman, anyway.”

“This is absurd,” Cliff muttered. “What kind of chumps are we, Joan? What in blazes have we in common with an eighty-ton beast from the prehistoric age? It’s ridiculous!”

“Not a bit—just natural love of animals. Doesn’t matter how big he is. We’re fond of him, and he’s fond of us. Not easy to forget an old friend when you’ve reared him from an egg.”

“The egg that you thought of using for omelettes!” Cliff reminded her; then with a gentle tilt at her chin he added: “And now I’ve really got to get changed, sweetheart. Can’t be as Bohemian as we used to be now there are servants around.”

Joan nodded and smiled absently, gazing outside on to the peace of the summer evening; then presently she glanced at the clock, saw it was time for the telenews, and pressed the button on the remote control. An immaculate announcer with an impeccable voice merged into view on the large flat screen.

“…can be discounted as nothing more than meteor strikes on Mars and atmospheric aberrations on Earth. Dr. Handersley thereby disposed of the prevalent myth that danger might threaten us from the planet Mars. If that were really so, the danger would indeed be extreme since, as yet, we of Earth have not completely—”

Joan yawned a little and settled herself on the chesterfield. Same old story. Threat of invasion from Mars being explained away by yet another of the so-called experts in the scientific field.

“From the region of the Scottish Highlands,” the announcer resumed, “there are reports of slight earth tremors. These are being experienced over an area of perhaps fifty miles, and seismologists and geologists are of the opinion that their cause is land subsidence some thirty miles down.… In the Commons today it was decided that a higher tax rate should—”

Joan switched off and yawned again. The heat of the summer evening was trying, and everything was so monotonous. For her, anyway. Cliff had his job to do, and therefore he was kept on his toes—too much so in fact. But for her things were slow indeed. Only this big house to supervise, a jaunt in the city now and again perhaps, and that was all. So different to the days when she and Cliff had been fighting for their lives a thousand miles down in the Earth.…

Then after a while Cliff returned, spruced up, but still looking like a man who is doing too much. He glanced at his wristwatch as he crossed the lounge.

“I’m too late for the news, I suppose?”

“’Fraid so,” Joan responded, rising. “I got some of it, but there’s nothing interesting—unless you’d call it interest­ing to hear that Dr. Handersley has decided that the so-called spaceships darting from Mars are actually atmos­pheric aberrations.”

Cliff reflected. “Atmospheric aberrations, my foot!”

“What? You don’t mean you actually believe the bunk about attack from Mars being possible? Why, everybody knows it’s a dead world with nothing but deserts! We’ve been sending TV cameras there for goodness knows how long.…”

“I only wish it were bunk, Joan, but I don’t think it is. There may not be any actual Martians around, but what if beings from another world have recently landed on Mars? I’ve made a special point of studying the various reports on the matter—cold, dispassionate, scientific accounts without the unimaginative bleatings of the boys of the Press—and I think there may be something in it.… Nothing we can do about it, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised at anything which might happen.”

Joan looked vaguely troubled, but said nothing. Cliff gave her a glance.

“Nothing else in the news worth having?”

“No—except for earth tremors in Scotland caused by land subsidence thirty miles down—or something.”

Cliff frowned. “That’s queer. In fact it’s almost unheard of. The Scottish Highlands are rooted absolutely deep, and the possibility of land subsidence, and thirty miles down at that, is almost impossible. Wouldn’t sur­prise me if I’m not contacted about it for an opinion—”

He paused as there was a gentle tap on the door. Parkinson, the, manservant, was there to announce that dinner was served.

* * * *

And away in the Highlands another dinner was being served—or it might equally have passed for supper or tea. It was, to be precise, the edible handout provided by the canteen of a mining contingent. Here, in the deeps of the Highlands, some forty miners and their engineering counterparts were based, probing for new sources of mineral deposit which instruments had definitely proclaimed were present.

So whilst Cliff and Joan sat in lordly and none too happy state in their palatial home, the mining engineers joked with one another in the warm summer gloaming, and ate the meal on the enamel 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 property and agri­cultural land, to the fury of the owners.… Red-faced commanders ordered guns to be fired at everything from a tree to a rock.… Nerves, naturally. The memory of the earlier invasion was still fresh in the minds of most people, and it produced something close to hysteria even amongst the ice-brained masters of army manoeuvre.

Daylight came early. Summer mists dispersed and warm sun poured forth. Courage rose. Planes by the hundred scoured and photographed the British Isles from end to end, but no signs of a monster or monsters were reported. The only assumption was that the mining engineers up in Scotland had tippled too much whisky and seen a pink elephant in a new guise.

And the blackout of Scottish cities? The broken pylons and telephone wires? The smashed miners’ dwellings and the score or so crushed bodies? Scotch whisky could not account for this.… All very mysterious and perplex­ing. Better go on searching, then. In fact, a good time was had by all, and especially by the mighty brute about whom all the bother had arisen. It could not be located for the simple reason that it had blundered into an old mine shaft and there fallen asleep, partly underground.

But when night came it was on its way again. Farms were denuded of cattle and livestock to satisfy the brute’s vast appetite. Entire ponds dried up to slake his thirst. And he went on remorselessly, yet with animal cunning enough to know that daylight might spell his doom. At the first sign of dawn he disappeared to the lowest level of land and there slept, secure in the knowledge that the fools of human beings would never distinguish his brown-grey colour against the similar hue of the countryside.…

So, gradually, as day succeeded day, the exciting news of a wandering monster died down. It was believed to be all talk, probably to take the public mind off the ever-present though indefinite possibility of invasion from Mars. Just the same, certain people in certain places—namely, Westmorland, York, Derby, Leicester, and Oxford—did swear they had seen by night a mighty bulk against the starry sky. Southward, ever southward: this seemed to be the dinosaur’s course.

The two people in all Britain most interested in the reports of the dinosaur were Cliff Brooks and Joan. They gathered all the news they could, but most of it was fragmentary. So Cliff made a special trip to Scotland and there talked with the miners who had first sent forth the warning. The fact they had also seen colossal footprints in the softer parts of the region—and the broken pylons and flooded McDermott Project—convinced him that something had indeed made its appearance from below.

“Did you by any chance get a clear view of this monster?” Cliff asked Nick anxiously, when general questioning and investigation had finished.

“Yes, Mr. Brooks.” Nick gave a grim nod. “High as a three-storey building and heavy enough to make the ground shake. It’s had me wondering since if maybe the earth tremors around this region were not caused by that brute pulling down underground rockery. I just don’t understand it. I thought you and your wife, and those engineers who unfortunately lost their lives, sealed every­thing up to stop any more invasions from below.”

“We did.” Cliff gave a serious smile. “We took care to block up all monsters and pterodactyls—save one. That one monster was a diplodocus, the most fearsome of all prehistoric monsters. A brute weighing eighty tons. That one we didn’t seal off—at least not intentionally.”

“Oh?” Nick looked puzzled.

“My wife and I had a sort of affection for that one,” Nick explained uncomfortably. “We reared him from an egg and he kind of took to us. We called him Herbert—just for fun. He pulled our borer free of disaster when all human agency had failed. Saved our lives, in fact. But on the way home—about eight hundred miles below surface—rockery fell between him and us, and we believed that was the end of him.”

“Believed?”

“That’s what I said. Now I’m wondering. Plainly, this brute you have seen is a diplodocus, and far as I know the only diplodocus likely to be able to escape must be Herbert! It’s all very harassing.”

“Yes,” the foreman engineer agreed, staring. “Very. First I’ve heard of this—making friends with a dinosaur, I mean.”

“Why not? People make friends of tigers and elephants, so why not dinosaurs? All in the upbringing—”

To this Nick had no answer. He had heard from various sources that Cliff Brooks was overworking, and now he felt sure he had visible evidence of the fact. To talk in tones of the deepest sentiment concerning one of the most terrifying beasts ever known to exist just didn’t make sense. Cliff, for his part, gathered from the foreman’s expression what was being thought, so he did not delay any longer. He had learned all he needed, so the wisest course seemed to be to head homewards. Before he did so, however, he rang up Joan and gave her the news.

“Ten to one it’s Herbert, Joan,” he finished urgently. “If that is so, I don’t know whether to be glad or sorry. If he’s Herbert, he’s liable to get us into a whale of a lot of danger; and if he isn’t, there’ll be danger anyway.”

“We can discuss it when you get home,” Joan said, and her voice sounded rather formal—so much so indeed that Cliff raised his eyebrows.

“Anything wrong back home, sweetheart? What did I do to merit the cold shoulder?”

“Don’t be so silly, Cliff! It is difficult to say much, though. The vicar’s only in the next room!”

“Oh, him again!” Cliff made a wry face as he realised that genial, high-living gentleman had probably called for another fat subscription. “Okay—I understand. See you later.”

Cliff rang off and back home Joan put the receiver down and returned into the lounge. It was just after five o’clock, and the torrid summer sunlight was pouring in upon the rotund figure of the Reverend Grimsby Maxwell, vicar of the parish to which Cliff and Joan belonged. His visits were disturbingly frequent, and by no means concentrated upon dispensing the gospel, either. The reverend gentleman had his heart set on a new church, and the wealthy Clifford Brooks looked likely for becoming the financial pillar thereof. All very well in its way, but Joan did have the feeling that the reverend was somewhat exceeding the limit.

“Not bad news, I trust?” The vicar beamed and balanced a cup of tea dextrously on a plump knee.

“Pardon?” Joan looked at him vaguely and then started. “Oh, the phone, you mean? No, it wasn’t bad news—just my husband telling me about a relative of ours. Herbert, by name.”

“Ah, I understand. I had rather hoped I would see your husband, as there is a little matter I would like to discuss with him.” The vicar raised the tea and sipped it. “It concerns the new church annexe. He—your husband, of course—is so brilliant an engineer it occurred to me he might be able to help me.”

“My husband is concerned with mining, reverend—not engineering as such. Naturally, I’m sure he would be—”

Joan stopped dead, her hazel eyes as wide as they could go as she stared beyond the vicar’s comfortably obese figure. He hesitated, drank a little more tea, and then began to look uneasy.

“Is—is something the matter?” he asked hesitantly.

“Don’t move,” Joan whispered, without moving her gaze from something beyond him. “Stay exactly as you are and the possibility is that you won’t get hurt.”

“I—I beg your pardon?” It was the reverend’s turn to widen his eyes.

Joan did not explain further. She sat as though transfixed, watching something just beyond the immediate grounds of the residence. Where the railings of the grounds terminated there lay open country, and in the midst of this open country an object was moving and coming rapidly nearer, the sunlight reflecting from a dull grey hide.

“Upon my word, I don’t understand,” the vicar objected, twisting around in his chair—and at the same time he caught sight of the stupendous dinosaur which had now reached the outside of the distant railings.

“It’s Herbert!” Joan cried, leaping up. “Who’d have thought it?”

“Herbert? But I understood you to say that Herbert is a relative of yours— Great heavens, Mrs. Brooks, that thing there is a prehistoric monster, similar to the ones who invaded us two years ago—” The reverend gulped slightly. “I must depart at once, if you’ll forgive me.”

He snatched at his clerical hat and was through the open french windows into the grounds before Joan could stop him. When she realised what had happened, she gave a cry of dismay.

“Reverend, come back! I told you to stay here and avoid all chance of being hurt. As it is— Oh, Lor’!” Joan gasped in horror as, in racing for the rear end of the grounds where lay the gate to the main roadway, the portly vicar tripped up suddenly and fell flat on his face.

This was quite enough for the eighty-ton beast beyond the railings. It had been watching the fleeing figure intently: now the behemoth feet smashed down the rail­ings and the dinosaur thundered towards the shouting, screaming cleric as he struggled to his feet and strove to race onwards again. That he could never make it to the gate was obvious.

Joan flashed through the french windows and sped across the lawn. She had never run so hard since she’d won the cup in her 800-yard dash in the school sports. She moved diagonally, doing her utmost to put herself between the shouting, stumbling vicar and the onrushing brute who had evidently taken a profound dislike to him.

“Herbert!” Joan yelled, at the top of her voice. “Herbert—stop! Stop, I say!”

She gambled everything on the possibility that by some fluke this brute was Herbert, a gamble she would never have taken but for Cliff’s message to her over the phone. And if she were wrong? But it was too late to think of that now, for she was straight in the path of those colossal feet. Her tiny form was all that existed between the angry dinosaur and the scurrying clerics.…

But the dinosaur slowed down! It even came to a slithering stop, the enormous feet gouging trenches in the smooth grass. Shaking in every limb, Joan stared upwards, past that mighty grey-ridged chest to the vast head. The mouth was as wide as a cavern and from its red depths came ground-shaking roars, either of fury or delight. Joan did not know which. Just at that moment she felt very much inclined to faint.…