CHAPTER I- Dodd's
Discovery
Only two young explorers stand in
the way of the mad Bram's horrible revenge - the releasing of his trillions of
man-sized beetles upon an utterly defenseless world.
Out
of the south the biplane came winging back toward the camp, a black speck
against the dazzling white of the vast ice-fields that extended unbroken to the
horizon on every side.
It
came out of the south, and yet, a hundred miles further back along the course
on which it flew, it could not have proceeded in any direction except
northward. For a hundred miles south lay the south pole, the goal toward which
the Travers Expeditions had been pressing for the better part of that year.
Not
that they could not have reached it sooner. As a matter of fact, the pole had
been crossed and re-crossed, according to the estimate of Tommy Travers,
aviator, and nephew of the old millionaire who stood fairy uncle to the
expedition. But one of the things that was being sought was the exact site of the
pole. Not within a couple of miles or so, but within the fraction of an inch.
It
had something to do with Einstein, and something to do with terrestrial
magnetism, and the variations of the south magnetic pole, and the reason
therefore, and something to do with parallaxes and the precession of the
equinoxes and other things, this search for the pole's exact location. But all
that was principally the affair of the astronomer of the party. Tommy Travers,
who was now evidently on his way back, didn't give a whoop for Einstein, or any
of the rest of the stuff. He had been enjoying himself after his fashion during
a year of frostbites and hard rations, and he was beginning to anticipate the
delights of the return to Broadway.
Captain
Storm, in charge of the expedition, together with the five others of the
advance camp, watched the plane maneuver up to the tents. She came down neatly
on the smooth snow, skidded on her runners like an expert skater, and came to a
stop almost immediately in front of the marquee.
Tommy
Travers leaped out of the enclosed cockpit, which, shut off by glass from the
cabin, was something like the front seat of a limousine.
"Well,
Captain, we followed that break for a hundred miles, and there's no ground
cleft, as you expected," he said. "But Jim Dodd and I picked up
something, and Jim seems to have gone crazy."
Through
the windows of the cabin, Jim Dodd, the young archaeologist of the party, could
be seen apparently wrestling with something that looked like a suit of armor.
By the time Captain Storm, Jimmy, and the other members of the party had
reached the cabin door, Dodd had got it open and flung himself out backward,
still hugging what he had found, and maneuvering so that he managed to fall on
his back and sustain its weight.
"Say,
what the – what - what's that?" gasped Storm.
Even
the least scientific minded of the party gasped in amazement at what Dodd had.
It resembled nothing so much as an enormous beetle. As a matter of fact, it was
an insect, for it had the three sections that characterize this class, but it
was merely the shell of one. Between four and five feet in height, when Dodd
stood it on end, it could now be seen to consist of the hard exterior substance
of some huge, unknown coleopter.
This
substance, which was fully three inches thick over the thorax, looked as hard
as plate armor.
"What
is it?" gasped Storm again.
Tommy Travers made answer, for
James Dodd was evidently incapable of speech, more from emotion than from the
force with which he had landed backward in the snow.
"We
found it at the pole, Captain," he said. "At least, pretty near where
the pole ought to be. We ran into a current of warm air or something. The snow
had melted in places, and there were patches of bare rock. This thing was lying
in a hollow among them."
"If
I didn't see it before my eyes, I'd think you crazy, Tommy," said Storm
with some asperity. "What is it, a crab?"
"Crab
be damned!" shouted Jim Dodd, suddenly recovering his faculties. "My
God, Captain Storm, don't you know the difference between an insect and a
crustacean? This is a fossil beetle. Don't you see the distinguishing mark of
the coleoptera, those two elytra, or wing-covers, which meet in the median
dorsal line? A beetle, but with the shell of a crustacean instead of mere chitin.
That's what led you astray, I expect. God, what a tale we'll have to tell when
we get back to New York! We'll drop everything else, and spend years, if need
be, looking for other specimens."
"Like
fun you will!" shouted Higby, the astronomer of the party. "Lemme
tell you right here, Dodd, nobody outside the Museum of Natural History is
going to care a damn about your old fossils. What we're going to do is to march
straight to the true pole, and spend a year taking observations and parallaxes.
If Einstein's brochure, in which he links up gravitation with magnetism, is
correct -"
"Fossil
beetles!" Jim Dodd burst out, ignoring the astronomer. "That means
that in the Tertiary Era, probably, there existed forms of life in the
antarctic continent that have never been found elsewhere. Imagine a world in
which the insect reached a size proportionate to the great saurians, Captain
Storm! I'll wager poor Bram discovered this. That's why he stayed behind when
the Greystoke Expedition came within a hundred miles of the pole. I'll wager
he's left a cairn somewhere with full details inside it. We've got to find it.
We -"
But
Jim Dodd, suddenly realizing that the rest of the party could hardly be said to
share his enthusiasm in any marked degree, broke off and looked sulky.
"You
say you found this thing pretty nearly upon the site of the true pole?"
Captain Storm asked Tommy.
"Within
five miles, I'd say, Captain. The fog was so bad that we couldn't get our
directions very well."
"Well,
then, there's going to be no difficulty," answered Storm. "If this
fair weather lasts, we'll be at the pole in another week, and we'll start
making our permanent camp. Plenty of opportunity for all you gentlemen. As for
me, I'm merely a sailor, and I'm trying to be impartial.
"And
please remember, gentlemen, that we're well into March now, and likely to have
the first storms of autumn on us any day. So let's drop the argument and
remember that we've got to pull together!"
Tommy
Travers was the only skilled aviator of the expedition, which had brought two
planes with it. It was a queer friendship that had sprung up between him and
Jim Dodd. Tommy, the blasé ex-Harvard man, who was known along Broadway, and
had never been able to settle down, seemed as different as possible from the spectacled,
scholarly Dodd, ten years his senior, red-haired, irascible, and living, as
Tommy put it, in the Age of Old Red Sandstone, instead of in the year 1930 A.
D.
It
was generally known - though the story had been officially denied - that there
had been trouble in the Greystoke Expedition of three years before. Captain
Greystoke had taken the brilliant, erratic Bram, of the Carnegie Archaeological
Institute, with him, and Bram's history was a long record of trouble.
It
was Bram who had exploded the faked neolithic finds at Mannheim, thereby
earning the undying enmity of certain European savants, but brilliantly
demolishing them when he smashed the so-called Mannheim stone pitcher (valued
at a hundred thousand dollars) with a pocket-axe, and caustically inquired
whether neolithic man used babbit metal rivets to fasten on his jug handles.
Bram's
brilliant work in the investigation of the origin of the negrito Asiatic races
had been awarded one of the Nobel prizes, and Bram had declined it in an
insulting letter because he disapproved of the year's prize award for
literature.
He
had been a storm center for years, embittered by long opposition, when he
joined the Greystoke Expedition for the purpose of investigating the marine
fauna of the antarctic continent.
And
it was known that his presence had nearly brought the Greystoke Expedition to
the point of civil war. Rumor said he had been deliberately abandoned. His
enemies hoped he had. The facts seemed to be, however, that in an outburst of
temper he had walked out of camp in a furious snowstorm and perished. For days
his body had been sought in vain.
Jimmy
Dodd had run foul of Bram some years before, when Bram had published a
criticism of one of Dodd's addresses dealing with fossil monotremes, or
egg-laying mammals. In his inimitable way, Bram had suggested that the problem
which came first, the egg or the chicken, was now seen to be linked up with the
Darwinian theory, and solved in the person of Dodd.
Nevertheless,
Jimmy Dodd entertained a devoted admiration for the memory of the dead
scientist. He believed that Bram must have left records of inestimable
importance in a cairn before he died. He wanted to find that cairn.
And
he knew, what a number of Bram's enemies knew, that the dead scientist had been
a morphine addict. He believed that he had wandered out into the snow under the
influence of the drug.
Dodd,
who shared a tent with Tommy, had raved the greater part of the night about the
find.
"Well,
but see here, Jimmy, suppose these beetles did inhabit the antarctic continent
a few million years ago, why get excited?" Tommy had asked.
"Excited?"
bellowed Dodd. "It opens one of the biggest problems that science has to
face. Why haven't they survived into historic times? Why didn't they cross into
Australia, like the opossum, by the land bridge then existent between that
continent and South America? Beetles five feet in length, and practically
invulnerable! What killed them off? Why didn't they win the supremacy over
man?"
Jimmy Dodd had muttered till he
went to sleep, and he had muttered worse in his dreams. Tommy was glad that
Captain Storm had given them permission to return to the same spot next morning
and look for further fossils, though his own interest in them was of the
slightest.
The
dogs were being harnessed next morning when the two men hopped into the plane.
The thermometer was unusually high for the season, for in the south polar
regions the short summer is usually at an end by March. Tommy was sweating in
his furs in a temperature well above the freezing point. The snow was crusted
hard, the sky overcast with clouds, and a wind was blowing hard out of the
south, and increasing in velocity hourly.
"A
bad day for starting," said Captain Storm. "Looks like one of the
autumn storms was blowing up. If I were you, I'd watch the weather,
Tommy."
Tommy
glanced at Dodd, who was huddled in the rear cockpit, fuming at the delay, and
grinned whimsically. "I guess I can handle her, Captain," he
answered. "It's only an hour's flight to where he found that fossil."
"Just
as you please," said Storm curtly. He knew that Tommy's judgment as a
pilot could always be relied upon. "You'll find us here when you
return," he added. "I've counter-manded the order to march. I don't
like the look of the weather at all."
Tommy
grinned again and pressed the starter. The engine caught and warmed up. One of
the men kicked away the blocks of ice that had been placed under the skids to
serve as chocks. The plane taxied over the crusted snow, and took off into the
south.
The
camp was situated in a hollow among the ice-mountains that rose to a height of
two or three thousand feet all around. Tommy had not dreamed how strongly the
gale was blowing until he was over the top of them. Then he realized that he
was facing a tougher proposition than he had calculated on. The storm struck
the biplane with full force.
A
snowstorm was driving up rapidly, blackening the sky. The sun, which only
appeared for a brief interval every day, was practically touching the horizon
as it rose to make its minute arc in the sky. A star was visible through a rift
in the clouds overhead, and the pale daylight in which they had started had
already become twilight.
Tommy
was tempted to turn back, but it was only a hundred miles, and Jimmy Dodd would
give him no peace if he did so. So he put the plane's nose resolutely into the
wind, watching his speed indicator drop from a hundred miles per hour to
eighty, sixty, forty - less.
The
storm was beating up furiously. Of a sudden the clouds broke into a deluge of
whirling snow.
In
a moment the windshield was a frozen, opaque mass. Tommy opened it, and peered
out into the biting air. He could see nothing... The plane, caught in the
fearful cross-currents that swirl about the southern roof of the world, was fluttering
like a leaf in the wind. The altimeter was dropping dangerously.
Tommy
opened the throttle to the limit, zooming, and, like a spurred horse, the
biplane shot forward and upward. She touched five thousand, six, seven - and
that, for her, was ceiling under those conditions, for a sudden tremendous
shock of wind, coming in a fierce cross-current, swung her round, tossed her to
and fro in the enveloping white cloud. And Tommy knew that he had the fight of
his life upon his hands.
The
compasses, which required considerable daily adjusting to be of use so near to
the pole, had now gone out of use altogether. The air speed indicator had
apparently gone west, for it was oscillating between zero and twenty. The turn
and bank indicator was performing a kind of tango round the dial. Even the
eight-day clock had ceased to function, but that might have been due to the
fact that Tommy had neglected to wind it. And the oil pressure gauge presented
a still more startling sight, for a glance showed that either there was a leak
or else the oil had frozen.
Tommy
looked around at Dodd and pointed downward. Dodd responded with a vicious
forward wave of his hand.
Tommy
shook his head, and Dodd started forward along the cabin, apparently with the
intention of committing assault and battery upon him. Instead, the
archaeologist collapsed upon the floor as the plane spun completely around
under the impact of a blast that was like a giant's slap.
The
plane was no longer controllable. True, she responded in some sort to the controls,
but all Tommy was able to do was to keep her from going into a crazy sideslip
or nose dive as he fought with the elements. And those elements were like a
devil unchained. One moment he was dropping like a plummet, the next he was
shooting up like a rocket as a vertical blast of air caught the plane and
tossed her like a cork into the invisible heavens. Then she was revolving, as
if in a maelstrom, and by degrees this rotary movement began to predominate.
Round
and round went the plane, in circles that gradually narrowed, and it was all
Tommy could do to swing the stick so as to keep her from skidding or
sideslipping. And as he worked desperately at his task Tommy began to realize
something that made him wonder if he was not dreaming.
The
snow was no longer snow, but rain - mist, rather, warm mist that had already
cleared the windshield and covered it with tiny drops.
And
that white, opaque world into which he was looking was no longer snow but fog -
the densest fog that Tommy had ever encountered.
Fog
like white wool, drifting past him in fleecy flakes that looked as if they had
solid substance. Warm fog that was like balm upon his frozen skin, but of a
warmth that was impossible within a few miles of the frozen pole.
Then
there came a momentary break in it, and Tommy looked down and uttered a cry of
fear. Fear, because he knew that he must be dreaming.
Not
more than a thousand feet beneath him he saw patches of snow, and patches of - green
grass, the brightest and most verdant green that he had ever seen in his life.
He
turned round at a touch on his shoulder. Dodd was leaning over him, one hand
pointing menacingly upward and onward.
"You
fool," Tommy bellowed in his ear, "d'you think the south pole lies
over there? It's here! Yeah, don't you get it, Jimmy? Look down! This valley - God,
Jimmy, the south pole's a hole in the ground!"
And
as he spoke he remembered vaguely some crank who had once insisted that the two
poles were hollow because - what was the fellow's reasoning? Tommy could not remember
it.
But
there was no longer any doubt but that they were dropping into a hole. Not more
than a mile around, which explained why neither Scott nor Amundsen had found it
when they approximated to the site of the pole. A hole - a warm hole, up which
a current of warm air was rushing, forming the white mist that now gradually
thinned as the plane descended. The plateau with its covering of eternal snows
loomed in a white circle high overhead. Underneath was green grass now—grass
and trees!
The
fog was nearly gone. The plane responded to the controls again. Tommy pushed
the stick forward and came round in a tighter circle.
And
then something happened that he had not in the least expected. One moment he
seemed to be traveling in a complete calm, a sort of clear funnel with a ring
of swirling fog outside it - the next he was dropping into a void!
There
was no air resistance - there seemed hardly any air, for he felt a choking in
his throat, and a tearing at his lungs as he strove to breathe. He heard a strangled
cry from Dodd, and saw that he was clutching with both hands at his throat, and
his face was turning purple.
The
controls went limp in Tommy's hands. The plane, gyrating more slowly, suddenly
nosed down, hung for a moment in that void, and then plunged toward the green
earth, two hundred feet below, with appalling swiftness.
Tommy
realized that a crash was inevitable. He threw his goggles up over his
forehead, turned and waved to Dodd in ironic farewell. He saw the earth rush up
at him - then came the shattering crash, and then oblivion!
CHAPTER II - Beetles
and Humans
How
long he had remained unconscious, Tommy had no means of determining. Of a
sudden he found himself lying on the ground beside the shattered plane, with
his eyes wide open.
He
stared at it, and stared about him, without understanding where he was, or what
had happened to him. His first idea was that he had crashed on the golf links
near Mitchell Field, Long Island, for all about him were stretches of verdant
grass and small shrubby plants. Then, when he remembered the expedition, he was
convinced that he had been dreaming.
What
brought him to a saner view was the discovery that he was enveloped in furs
which were insufferably hot. He half raised himself and succeeded in unfastening
his fur coat, and thus discovered that apparently none of his bones was broken.
But
the plane must have fallen from a considerable height to have been smashed so
badly. Then Tommy discovered that he was lying upon an extensive mound of sand,
thrown up as by some gigantic mole, for burrow tracks ran through it in every
direction. It was this that had saved his life.
Something
was moving at his side. It was half-submerged in the sand-pile, and it was
moving parallel to him with great rapidity.
A
grayish body, half-covered with grains of sand emerged, waving two enormously
long tentacles. It was a shrimp, but fully three feet in length, and Tommy had
never before had any idea what an unpleasant object a shrimp is.
Tommy
staggered to his feet and dropped nearer the plane, eyeing the shrimp with
horror. But he was soon relieved as he discovered that it was apparently
harmless. It slithered away and once more buried itself in the pile of sand.
Now
Tommy was beginning to remember. He looked into the wreckage of the plane. Jim
Dodd was not there. He called his name repeatedly, and there was no response,
except a dull echo from the ice-mountains behind the veil of fog.
He
went to the other side of the plane, he scanned the ground all about him. Jimmy
had disappeared. It was evident that he was nowhere near, for Tommy could see
the whole of the lower scope of the bowl on every side of him. He had walked
away - or he had been carried away! Tommy thought of the shrimp, and shuddered.
What other fearsome monsters might inhabit that extraordinary valley?
He
sat down, leaning against the wreck of the fuselage, and tried to adjust his
mind, tried to keep himself from going mad. He knew now that the flight had
been no dream, that he was a member of his uncle's expedition, that he had
flown with Jim toward the pole, had crashed in a vacuum. But where was Jim? And
how were they going to get out of the damn place?
Something
like a heap of stones not far away attracted Tommy's attention. Perhaps Jim
Dodd was lying behind that. Once more Tommy got upon his feet and began walking
toward it. On the way, he stumbled against the sharp edge of something that
protruded from the ground.
It
cut his leg sharply, and, with a curse, he began rubbing his shin and looking
at the thing. Then he saw that it was another of the fossil shells, half-buried
in the marshy ooze on which he was treading. The ground in this lower part of
the valley was a swamp, on account of the very fine mist falling from the fog
clouds that surrounded it impenetrably on every side.
Then
Tommy came upon another shell, and then another. And now he saw that there were
piles of what he had taken to be rock everywhere, and that this was not rock
but great heaps of the shells, all equally intact.
Hundreds
of thousands of the prehistoric beetles must have died in that valley, perhaps
overcome by some cataclysm.
Tommy
examined the heap near which he stood; he yelled Dodd's name, but again no
answer came.
Instead,
something began to stir among the heaps of shells. For a moment Tommy hoped
against hope that it was Dodd, but it wasn't Dodd.
It
was a living beetle!
A
beetle fully five feet high as it stood erect, a pair of enormous wings
outspread. And the head, which was larger than a man's, was the most frightful
object Tommy had ever seen.
Jim
Dodd would have said at once that this was one of the Curculionidae, or snout
beetles, for a prolongation of the head between the eyes formed a sort of beak
a foot in length. The mouth, which opened downward, was armed with terrific
mandibles, while the huge, compound eyes looked like enormous crystals of cut
glass. Immediately in front of the eyes were two mandibles as long as a man's
arms, with feathery processes at the ends. In addition to these there were
three pairs of legs, the front pair as long as a man's, the hind pair almost as
long as a horse's.
Paralyzed
with horror, Tommy watched the monster, which had apparently been disturbed by
the vibrations of his voice, extract itself from among the shells. Then, with a
bound that covered fifteen feet, it had lessened the distance between them by
half.
And
then a still more amazing thing happened. For of a sudden the hard shell
slipped from the thorax, the wing-cases dropped off, the whole of the bony
parts slipped to the ground with a clang, and a soft, defenseless thing went
slithering away among the rocks.
The
beetle had moulted!
Tommy
dropped to the ground in the throes of violent nausea.
Then,
looking up again, he saw the girl!
She
was about a hundred yards away from him, very close to the fallen plane, and
she must have emerged from a large hole in the ground which Tommy could now see
under a ledge of overhanging rock.
She
seemed to be dressed in a single garment which fell to her knees, and appeared
to fit tightly about her body, but as she came nearer, Tommy, watching her,
petrified by this latest apparition, discovered that it was woven of her own
hair, which must have been of immense length, for it fell naturally to her
shoulders, and thence was woven into this close-fitting material, a fringe an
inch or two in length extending beneath the selvage.
She
was about six feet tall, and apparently made after the normal human pattern.
She moved with a slow, majestic swing, and if ever any female had seemed to
Tommy to have the appearance of an angel, this unknown woman did.
She
was so fair, in that flossy, flaxen covering, she moved with such easy grace,
that Tommy, gaping, gradually crept nearer to her. She did not seem to see him.
She was stooping over the very sand heap into which he had fallen. Suddenly,
with lightning-like rapidity, her arms shot out, her hands began tunneling in
the sand. With a cry of triumph she pulled out the shrimp Tommy had seen, or
another like it, and, stripping it off the shell, began devouring it with
evident relish.
In
the midst of her meal the girl raised her head and looked at Tommy. He saw that
her eyes were filmed, vacant, dead. Then of a sudden a third membrane was drawn
back across the pupils, and she saw him.
She
let the shrimp drop to the ground, uttered a cry, and moved toward him with a
tottering gait. She groped toward him with outstretched arms. And then she was
blind again, for the membrane once more covered her pupils. It was as if her
eyes were unable to endure even the dim light of the valley, through whose
surrounding mists the low sun, setting just above the horizon, was unable to
diffuse itself save as a brightening of the fog curtain.
Tommy
stepped toward the girl. His outstretched hand touched hers. It was
unquestionably a woman's hand he held, delicately warm, with exquisitely
moulded fingers, in whose touch there seemed to be, for the girl, some tactile
impression of him.
Again
that membrane was drawn back from the girl's pupils for a fleeting flash. Tommy
saw two eyes of intense black, their color contrasting curiously with the
flaxen color of her hair and her white skin, almost the tint of an albino's.
Those eyes had surveyed him, and appeared satisfied that he was one of her
kind. She could not have seen very much in that almost instantaneous flash of
vision. Queer, that membrane - as if she had been used to living in the dark,
as if the full light of the day was unbearable!
She
drew her hand away. Soft vocals came from her lips. Suddenly she turned
swiftly. She could not have seen, but before Tommy had seen, she had sensed the
presence of the old man who was creeping out of the hole in the mountainside.
He
moved forward craftily, and then pounced upon the sand pile, and in a moment
had pulled out another of the big shrimps, which he proceeded to devour with
greedy relish. The girl, leaving Tommy's side, joined him in that unpleasant
feast.
And
in the midst of it a flood came pouring from the hole - a flood of living
beetles, covering the ground in fifteen-foot leaps as they dashed at the two.
To
his horror, Tommy saw Jimmy Dodd among them, wrapped in his fur coat like a
mummy, and being pushed and rolled forward like a football.
For
a moment Tommy hesitated, torn between his solicitude for Jim Dodd and that for
the girl. Then, as the foremost of the monsters bounded to her side, he ran
between them. The vicious jaws snapped within six inches of Tommy's face, with
a force that would have carried away an ear, or shredded the cheek, if they had
met.
Tommy
struck out with all his might, and his fist clanged on the resounding shell so
that the blood spurted from his bruised knuckles. He had struck the monster
squarely upon the thorax, and he had not discommoded it in the least. It turned
on him, its glassy, many-faceted eyes glaring with a cold, infernal light.
Tommy struck out again with his left hand, this time upon the pulpy flesh of
the downward-opening mouth.
An
inch higher, and he would have impaled his hand upon the beak, with a point
like a needle, and evidently used for purposes of attack, since it was not
connected with the mandibles. The blow appeared to fall in the only vulnerable
place. The monster dropped upon its back and lay there, unable to reverse
itself, its antenna and forelegs waving in the air, and the rear legs rasping
together in a shrill, strident shriek.
Instantly,
as Tommy darted out of the way, the swarm fell upon the helpless monster and
began devouring it, tearing strips of flesh from the lower shell, which in the
space of a half-minute was reduced simply to bone. The most horrible feature of
this act of cannibalism was the complete silence with which it was performed,
except for the rasping of the dying monster's legs. It was evident that the
huge beetles had no vocal apparatus.
For
the moment left unguarded, Jim Dodd flung down the collar of his fur coat,
stared about him, and recognized Tommy.
"My
God, it's you!" he yelled. "Well, can you -?"
He
had no time to finish his sentence. A pair of antenna went round his neck from
behind. At the same instant Tommy, the old man, and the girl were gripped by
the monsters, which, forming a solid phalanx about them, began hustling them in
the direction of the hole. Resistance was utterly impossible. Tommy felt as if
he was being pushed along by a moving wall of stone.
Inside
the opening it was completely dark. Tommy shouted to Dodd, but the strident
sounds of the moving legs drowned his cries. He was being pushed forward into
the unknown.
Suddenly
the ground seemed to fall away beneath his feet. He struggled, cried out, and
felt himself descending through the air.
For
a full half-minute he went downward at a speed that constricted his throat so
that he could hardly draw breath. Then, just as he had nerved himself for the
imminent crash, the speed of his descent was checked. In another moment he
found that he was slowing to a standstill in mid-air.
He
was beginning to float backward - upward. But the wall of moving shells,
pushing against him, forced him on, downward, and yet apparently against the force
of gravitation.
Then
of a sudden Tommy was aware of a dim light all about him. His feet touched
earth and grass as softly as a thistledown alighting.
He
found himself seated in the same dim light upon red grass, and staring into
Jimmy's face.
