"Don't shoot!" The girl's hands tightened swiftly about his wrist, dragged it down as he drew a careful bead on the towering beast that, from the edge of the grassy glen, surveyed the two through tiny, myopic eyes.
An incredible mountain of flesh it was. More than eighty feet long with a rubbery, elephantine hide that draped its ugly carcass in sinewy ripples. Its long neck, surmounted by a ridiculously minute head, twitched nervously from one side to the other as its inadequate nostrils strove to identify this strange, tantalizingly foreign scent.
As Larry watched spellbound, the gigantic monster broke into lumbering motion. Its huge feet created thunder as it crashed blindly through the forest, leaving in its wake a swath of broken young trees and trampled underbrush.
"It won't attack us," explained the girl in answer to Larry's questioning stare. "It's herbivorous. That is, if it's what I think it is. It was probably more frightened than we were. But how it ever got here, in this age—"
"For Pete's sake, what was it?"
The girl shook her head. "Unless," she answered slowly, "I've gone completely mad—and I may easily have done so—it was a brontosaurus! An ancient reptile of the Mesozoic Age. The last one should have died over a hundred million years ago!"
"Preposterous!" gasped Larry.
"I know it's preposterous. But we saw it. Which means—" The girl turned a puzzled face to him. "Do you know anything about Time?"
"Time?" Larry glanced at his watch. "Why, it's exactly 10:59. Say, that's funny! It was just 10:59 when I was running up those steps."
"I don't mean that kind of time. Though that may have something to do with it. I mean, do you know anything about the scientific theory of Time? For if our experience means anything ... if that really was a brontosaurus we saw ... and if your wrist-watch has stopped at 10:59...."