CHAPTER 7
fter breakfast Dippy seemed depressed, very depressed, so he and Jacob Two-Two didn’t set off on their usual gallop. Instead they sat down together in a clearing, Dippy lowering his head to the grass so that it was just at Jacob Two-Two’s height.
“The professor’s nutty as a fruitcake,” Dippy said. “I am so a dinosaur. Not a hoax. Not a figment of your imagination. But a Diplodocus, just like you said.”
“Dippy, you can talk! You can talk!”
“Of course I can talk, but you mustn’t reveal that to anybody else. Or next thing I know they’ll expect me to go to school or get a job.” Dippy shed a huge tear.
“Today is my birthday.”
“Many happy returns. How old are you, Dippy?”
“Sixty-five million two hundred thousand and two hundred and twenty-two years old. I can talk and I can read, but I can’t write.”
“Oh, my, aren’t you ashamed? I mean, at your age?”
“Please, don’t you start criticizing me,” Dippy said, shedding another tear. “You’re the only friend I’ve got in the whole wide world.”
Jacob Two-Two hugged Dippy and kissed him on the cheek.
“How could I be expected to hold a pen or a pencil in these ridiculous hands?” Dippy said, raising an enormous claw.
“I see what you mean.”
“No, you don’t. The truth is, I’m an airhead. A real bubble-brain.”
“Me too,” Jacob Two-Two sang out. “Me too.”
“That’s why my species has been extinct for sixty-five million years, so far as I know.”
“Everything’s going to be okay, Dippy.”
“No, it won’t. I wish I were still frozen in that block of ice.”
Dippy explained that he had been a mere babe when that slight earthquake in Kenya had dislodged him from his sixty five-million-year-old prison, shooting him up from far below the surface of the earth, through the steam jet, right onto the chest of Jacob Two-Two’s father.
“My good luck,” Jacob Two-Two said.
“But possibly not mine. This is the wrong age for me, Jacob. The way I see it, the future is in computers and I can’t even hold a pencil. Professor Kilowatt is right. I’m a freak of nature. Ugly beyond compare.”
“No, you’re not, Dippy. No, you’re not. In fact, I think you’re handsome.”
“Do you think they’re going to use me for target practice, Jacob?”
“Not so long as I’m here they won’t.”
“I’m willing to put my shoulder to the wheel, but who would hire me? In order to even apply for a job as a messenger boy I could no longer gallop about stark naked. I’d have to buy a suit and tie. Gosh, Jacob, do you know what that would cost? I mean, it would take hundreds of yards of material. I’ll bet they couldn’t find anything to fit me even in the outsize shop.”
Dippy began to sob again. It was amazing. Jacob Two-Two had heard the expression “weeping buckets,” but he had never actually seen it before.
“And I’m always hungry,” Dippy moaned. “I’m just not getting enough to eat.”
“But Dippy, my father brought you two station wagons full of rubbish only yesterday.”
“I know, I know. I don’t blame him. Having me around must be very difficult for him. I think it would be best for everybody if I just ran away.”
“Oh, no, Dippy. Please don’t. Please don’t.”
“I like you, Jacob. I think you’re terrific.” Dippy blushed a darker green. “But sometimes I wish I had a girlfriend.”
“Aw, who needs girls,” Jacob Two-Two said, irritated.
“It’s okay for you to talk – you’re only eight. But I’ll bet when you get to be sixty-five million-plus years you’ll be interested in girls too.”
“It’s no use brooding about it, Dippy. You’re the only dinosaur left on the planet.”
“Maybe yes and maybe no.”
“One day when everybody in the house was out and I was still small enough to slip through the door, I sneaked into your father’s library. I found a picture book about Canada, and there were all those high, high mountains. If there are any of us left I figure that’s where they’d be hiding out.”
“Oh, you mean the Rockies out in B.C.,” Jacob Two-Two said.
“B.C. Right, right!” Dippy began to beat the earth with his forelegs. “B.C. is where I come from and B.C. is where I’m a-heading for. Yippee for B.C.!”
“Dippy, you’re getting things mixed up. I know that in other countries B.C. stands for the years before Christ, but in Canada it stands for the province of British Columbia, which isn’t quite the same thing.”
“It’s a good sign, though, isn’t it? B.C., B.C. If there are any of us left, that’s where they’ll be.”
“Please stay here with me, Dippy.”
“I’d like to, Jacob, honestly. But if I am the last of my species it just wouldn’t do for me to sit still and wait to be blown to oblivion.”
“What are we going to do, Dippy?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m a pea-brain. Thinking is your department.”
“Don’t worry,” Jacob Two-Two said without conviction.
“I’ll come up with something.”