THE WORLD IN A BOX, by Carl Jacobi

Jimmy Blane stopped his car, switched off the lights and paced to the door of the brownstone building. It was a huge many-windowed house of antique architecture, and the brass plate under the post box said: PROFESSOR SCOT HILLIARD.

Blane pushed the bell button, took a last puff at his cigarette and flung the butt over his shoulder.

“Sick of these Sunday supplement assignments,” he muttered to himself. “They’re all dry as dust. Wonder if McGraw’ll ever give in and let me have the police run.”

Presently heavy steps sounded within. A latch rasped and the door was thrown wide.

A huge, bulking figure stared out at the reporter. The man was dark-haired with a ragged, unkempt beard and thick-rimmed spectacles. An acid-stained rubber apron hung from his chest to his shoes, accentuating his height, and a green eye-shade was pushed far back on his forehead.

“Professor Hilliard?” Jimmy asked.

“Yes.”

“My name is Blane—of the Star-Telegram. I came in regard to an address you made before the Gotham Science Club, an address in which you declared you could reproduce in living miniature the prehistoric life of the earth. The University science staff has denounced your assertions as being false in every detail. Could I have a statement from you, please?”

For a long moment Scot Hilliard made no answer. Then he shrugged, curled his lips and nodded scornfully.

“Come in.”

Jimmy followed the man into the entrance-way and from there up a flight of stairs. At the second level he halted before a large double door that opened on the right, hesitated, and whirled abruptly.

“If I grant you this interview,” he said, “I must insist you write only the facts as I give them to you. I’ll show you my invention, yes, but I’m not interested in having it introduced to the general public in a sensational manner, colored by idiotic journalism. Understand?”

Blane nodded. The door swung open, and he passed into a brilliantly illuminated room. Two feet over the sill he stopped short, turning his eyes slowly about him.

The chamber was a huge laboratory, occupying apparently the full width of the house. From ceiling to floor the walls were lined with shelves, jammed with vials, tubes and glasses. Strange-looking apparatus glittered on all sides. The center floor was occupied by an enormous square-shaped object, fully fifteen feet across, its nature hidden by a loosely draped canvas.

But there was something else that stopped Blane’s roving gaze and held it while his heart thumped a little faster. Directly across from the door, bent over a zinc-topped table, stood a young girl. A girl with a satin complexion, black, lustrous hair and large, brown eyes. Even in the dark-colored smock, with her hands swathed in heavy rubber gloves, she was a vision of feminine loveliness.

Hilliard slid a stubby briar pipe between his lips and waved his arm stiffly in introduction.

“My niece, Eve Manning,” he said. “Mr. Blane is from the press. He’s come to ask me about my invention.”

A frown furrowed across the girl’s face as she heard these words. Her eyes narrowed.

“But Uncle,” she protested, “you’re not going to demonstrate that machine tonight! You haven’t tested it yet, you know, and something might happen.”

Hilliard smiled and patted her hand. “No danger,” he said easily. “Mr. Blane is just the type of witness I’ve been waiting for, and everything is in readiness.” He turned again to the reporter. “Your hat and coat, please, and make yourself comfortable while I get you a pair of colored sunglasses. I’m using a new kind of mango-carbon arc, and the glare might injure your eyes.”

He shoved a chair forward, turned and disappeared through a connecting doorway. Jimmy sat down and looked at the girl.

She was even prettier than first glance had showed. There were attractive dimples on either side of the mouth, and the mouth itself was a delicate carmine bow with just the right touch of cosmetics. For a moment she stood there, answering his gaze silently. Then, darting a look over her shoulder, she stepped closer and spoke in a low, hurried whisper.

“Mr. Blane,” she said, “you must leave here at once. Now, before my uncle returns. I’ll tell him you were suddenly called away on another matter. I’ll tell him you were—”

“Go?” Jimmy stared at her curiously. “Why, I’ve just come. Why on earth should I go?”

“You must go, I tell you. You’re in great danger. Greater danger than you possibly could imagine. Uncle has been holding off his experiment until he found a man of your type. A young and athletic man. If you stay here you may never leave this laboratory. Oh, I know all this sounds mad, senseless, but please believe me.”

Jimmy crossed his legs and glanced thoughtfully at the array of equipment surrounding him. A long interval passed while he groped for words to answer the girl.

“I’m a reporter,” he said at length. “I came merely to interview the professor, and I fail to see how any danger—”

The door slammed at the far end of the laboratory, interrupting further conversation, and Hilliard returned to the room. Striding to a switch-box on the near wall, the man made a careful adjustment to its contents, then crossed over to a chair opposite the reporter. In his hands were several pairs of green spectacles.

“Blane,” he said slowly, “I presume, since you were sent here to interview me, you know something of geology, something of the ancient rock-preserved history of the earth?”

Jimmy nodded, drawing forth pencil and paper. “I spent two years on the subject at Boston Tech,” he replied. “But I’ve probably forgotten as much as I ever learned.”

“You are acquainted with the divisions of time into which prehistoric world history has been divided, the Archeozoic era to the Cenozoic era?”

Jimmy nodded again.

“And which of those eras or periods strikes you as the most interesting, the most dramatic? Which one, if it were possible for you to pass back through the millions of years, would you choose to view with your own eyes?”

For an instant the reporter hesitated. Hilliard sat there far forward in his chair, eyes glittering with crafty determination. There were power and mental strength in that bearded face. And there was something else that brought a little chill coursing down the young man’s spine.

“The Mesozoic, I guess,” he answered. “What is more commonly known as the Age of Reptiles. I’ve always thought it would be an impressive sight to see those prehistoric monsters roaming about the scenery. Dinosaurs and pterodactyls, lizards as big as a house, and flying dragons.”

Hilliard nodded in satisfaction, then leaped to his feet and strode to the square-shaped object in the center of the room. With a single movement of his massive hands he flung back the canvas covering and motioned the reporter closer.

Momentarily Jimmy’s eyes were confused by a glaring light that burned before him. Then his eyes accustomed themselves to the blinding illumination, and he saw the object that housed the light. It was a glass-walled box, not unlike an ordinary showcase, save that the sides were of great thickness and the corners were fastened together with plates of riveted brass.

The light came from the middle of the case. At the near end, hanging in mid-air without support was an object that looked like a small ball of clay. Extending from the right exterior wall of the case was a black instrument panel, replete with dials, queer-shaped tubes and several switches.

Hilliard pointed into the interior. “Blane,” he said, “you are looking at an experiment that has been my work, my sole work, for almost five years. When I was still a member of the University faculty I postulated such a machine as this to my immediate superiors. They laughed at me, said I was an eccentric dreamy fool and that it would never work.

“The inside of this case is an absolute vacuum, the nearest parallel to the phenomenon of outer stellar space. In the center you see a mango-carbon arc, suspended by a slender wire and giving off an intense amount of heat as well as light. Here at this end is a very small globe. Together the two objects represent a portion of the solar system, a diminutive cross-section of a tiny part of our universe.

“The space between the arc and the globe is the ninety-three millions of miles which separate our earth from the sun, lessened to a few feet. The diameter of the globe is the diameter of our planet, reduced in proper ratio from over eight thousand miles. In short, you are looking at the manufactured equivalent of our sun and our earth on a dwarfed scale. Do you understand, Blane? A miniature sun and a miniature earth! Watch closely!”

The man’s hand slid downward, pushed a large switch into contact. Instantly there was a thundering roar and a pulsing vibration under the floor. The roar died away as the globe within the glass case trembled violently. Then it began to rotate faster and faster, moved and supported by some unseen power. Slowly it approached the arc in the center.

There was a note of suppressed excitement in the professor’s voice as he continued.

“The globe is now rotating on its axis and moving in an orbit around the arc, which constitutes its sun. The axis, just like the axis of the earth, is inclined to the plane of the orbit. That globe is now a living, growing world!”

With rising interest Jimmy squinted through the sun spectacles. He was thinking of the strange warning given him by the girl.

“A growing world?” he repeated slowly.

Hilliard nodded…

“But there are a hundred other things necessary to a planet’s growth which you could never manufacture,” Jimmy protested. “Things beyond your power, things—”

“Storms, wind erosion, climatic changes, volcanic up-thrusts?” Hilliard shook his head. “All has been taken care of. The globe is igneous, volcanic in nature, carefully made of powerful gases and molten rock, which will create an atmosphere. It is now in the first stages of the Archeozoic age, the beginning of a world. In a short time warm seas will form at the globe’s equatorial zones. Early single-celled life will live and die on a microscopic scale in a matter of seconds. The lowest type of jelly fish will give way to the higher forms of mollusks, arthropoids, and so to the amphibians. By nine o’clock, if my calculations are correct, the globe will have passed through the Proterozoic era and the Paleozoic era. By nine fifteen it will be far advanced into the Mesozoic.”

“You mean;” interposed Jimmy, his eyes wide with amazement now, “that the globe will develop life? You mean that there will be plants, trees, reptiles—living creatures?”

Hilliard nodded. “On a minute microscopic scale, that is exactly what I mean,” he said.

He seized a dial on the instrument panel and twisted it to its farthest marking. Beneath Blane’s eyes the globe leaped into faster motion, changed from a crystal clear object slowly passing about the arc-sun to a blur of light. Each revolution in the orbit constituted one year, and the decades and centuries were dropping into the discard like grains of falling sand.

For a moment Scot Hilliard watched the process intently. Then he jerked erect.

“With the globe moving as fast as it is,” he said, “it is impossible to study its surface without the aid of a specially designed rotating microscope. I have one in my other laboratory. One moment.”

He went out, closing the door, behind him. Silence swept into the white ceilinged room. Jimmy stood there, staring at the glass case, frowning. It wasn’t possible, this mad story he had heard. One man claiming he could reproduce in a few moments what nature had taken millions of years to accomplish. The reporter looked up as Eve Manning laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Will you go now?” she asked, a note of dread in her voice. “You have all the information necessary for your newspaper, and you can leave before Uncle returns. Please.”

Jimmy studied the pretty face deliberately.

“Just what,” he asked, “are you driving at?”

Her cheeks were ashen, her fingers trembling.

“Listen,” she said. “It’s not the geologic development of that little globe that Uncle is interested in alone. It’s something bigger, more dreadful, more horrible. He wants to see how man, civilized man of this age and generation, would act if he were suddenly thrown back to the Mesozoic age, the time of prehistoric reptiles. He wants to see if man’s brain would protect him against the hideous dangers which would then surround him.”

“He wants what?” repeated Jimmy blankly.

“Oh, don’t you understand, Mr. Blane? If you stay here, Uncle will use you for this experiment. He’ll put you on that little world in the glass case. He’ll insert you on that miniature planet and watch you through his microscope as if you were a worm or an insect.”

The Telegram reporter burst forth in a harsh, dry laugh. “You’re talking riddles. I could drop that globe in my pocket.”

She looked at him quietly for a moment, then turned and led the way to a far corner of the laboratory. There she pointed a shaking finger to a large cabinet affair fashioned of sheet metal with an ordinary door at one side. At the front a flexible cone-like projector tapered to a needlepoint.

“That,” she said hoarsely, “is a size reducer. Uncle calls it something different, something scientific. But it too is his own invention. Once in it and the power turned on, a full-grown dog will emerge a creature of microscopic size, so small our most powerful glass is barely able to detect it. It will act the same with a man, with a human being. Uncle—”

Her words died off, and she stared past Jimmy, eyes suddenly wide with terror.

The reporter whirled. And what he saw made his heart skip a beat. Five feet away, swaying sardonically on the balls of his feet, stood Scot Hilliard. The man’s face had lost its friendly smile now. It was contorted into a leer of fanaticism, grotesque with craft and cruelty. In his right hand was a leveled revolver.

“Since my niece has so inadvisedly told you of my plans,” he said, “I need go into no further explanation. Blane, pace slowly backward, open the door of that cabinet and stand on the center of the contact platform inside.”

Rigid, the reporter stared at the man. “You’re crazy,” he said. “Put down that gun.”

“Uncle!” cried Eve. “You’re mad.”

Hilliard’s black eyes narrowed to thin crescents.

“Back into that cabinet,” he said again, “or I fire.”

Jimmy’s heart was racing now as he shot a look about him, searching for a way of escape. Suddenly he leaped forward and slammed his fist hard against the professor’s arm. The automatic clattered to the floor, and the man reeled backward in fury.

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, broken 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.

On to the girl’s side he ran, glancing over his shoulder at the approaching monster. They were hemmed in. Ahead was the sea, filled with dangers even more fearful than this theropod. Behind rose the ridge. And flanking the sea in both directions, the jungle. Their only alternative was the sandy shore which stretched far into the distance. But Jimmy and Eve knew that before they had covered two hundred yards of that shore the hideous thing behind them would have closed in and made its attack.

The reporter seized the girl’s arm. “Run!” he cried. “I’ll keep the thing’s attention until you’ve got a start.”

She hesitated.

“Run!” he repeated. “We wouldn’t have a chance together.”

Face white, lips drawn, she broke into a quick, jerky stride and raced down the beach.

Jimmy whirled, poised his second rock and looked at the monster. The theropod, moving kangaroo-like on its hind legs, was only a few feet away now. Its mouth was open, showing the dead, white interior. Its eyes were gleaming like hot coals, and the tail was lashing from side to side.

Again the reporter drew back his arm and let fly the stone. Brain filled with only one thought, the safety of the girl who had cast herself on this horrible planet to quicken his rescue, he watched the heavy object smash full force on the armored skull.

But the theropod only shook its head clumsily at the concussion. It paused an instant, then came on at renewed speed.

For a fleeting instant despair shot through the reporter like a bolt. Then he darted aside, thrust his body out of the theropod’s path and circled completely around the reptile. It was a trick of counted seconds, and he accomplished it with only the scantest of margin.

Heart racing, he ran twenty feet before the theropod was aware of the maneuver. Then he turned and hurled a third rock. The heavy missile caught the monster a crashing blow in the left eye, drew instant blood and half blinded it.

Now was the momentary advantage Jimmy had been waiting for, and with a frantic lunge he shot past the reptile, threw caution to the winds, and ran headlong down the shore.

Far ahead he could see Eve standing motionless, waiting for him to join her. The girl had seized a wooden cudgel, a dead branch from a tree, and was urging him on. Behind, though he did not look back, he could hear the theropod thundering in pursuit.

As he ran, turmoil pounded through the brain of the reporter. How long would they have to fight against these hideous dangers? How long before Professor Hilliard became aware of his niece’s action and took steps to rescue her?

And then suddenly as if in answer to his thoughts, a mighty shadow leaped down from sky to earth. A low, droning roar, tingling his whole body with its vibrations, sounded above. From somewhere in the upper reaches of the heavens that same cone-shaped tube of steel descended to eclipse the whole eastern horizon.

Down toward the water’s edge it came; resting on a wider patch of sand, a few yards from the shore.

With an exultant shout Jimmy increased his speed. “The projector!”

The theropod seemed to sense what was happening. A quick glance behind showed Jimmy that it was advancing at a terrific rate now.

Could he make it? The reporter made a frantic survey of the distance that lay between him and the entrance of the projector. He waved his arm at the girl, motioned her forward. But stubbornly she refused to move until he was abreast of her. Then silently, side by side, they raced toward the safety that seemed so near yet so far away. Twenty yards from the steel opening Eve tripped over a submerged stone and plunged headlong. The reporter bent downward, seized the girl and with the added weight continued onward in his flight.

But at length they were in the wider patch of sand, the projector rising up like some geometric inverted mountain before them. With one last lunge Jimmy shoved the girl into the opening and slipped in beside her.

Instantly blackness closed in on him, and a great roaring like the fury of a hundred maelstroms smote his ears. He had a momentary feeling of the projector leaping upward at sickening speed, of his body being hurled into the upper reaches of the tube by some unseen power…

* * * *

Scot Hilliard was seated in one of the stiff-backed metal chairs in his laboratory.

His face was white and drawn, his eyes glazed and bloodshot. For ten minutes he had sat there in silence, staring across at the trim figure of his niece, Eve Manning, and at the reporter, Jimmy Blane.

At length he rose heavily; paced forward and extended his hand.

“I—I deserve no consideration,” he said haltingly. “But will you accept my deepest regrets and apologies, Mr. Blane? I’m sorry. I must have been mad, out of my mind. I didn’t realize the terrible thing I was doing when I placed you on that planet. It took the courage of my niece to show me what a fiend I was. If there is any way in which I can make amends, anything I can do—”

The Star-Telegram reporter looked at Eve and smiled. “Bygones are bygones,” he replied. “We came back safely, that’s all that matters. But what are you going to do with the globe, the little world in the glass case?”

Hilliard started and shook his head. For a moment he stood there, gazing blankly into space. “The globe,” he repeated. “Ah, yes, the globe. I have extinguished the arc-sun, Mr. Blane, turned off its heat and light. The little globe is no longer a living world. Until I choose to stop it, it will continue to rotate on its axis and revolve in its orbit, but it is as lifeless and cold as the moon.”