The Genial Dinosaur. John Russell Fearn

      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