in a frenzy of panic when all sorts of inexplicable things had been happening to it and the only reason it could see for them was two tiny creatures that were just barely visible to it!
But the patient’s species had roamed its home planet for a hundred million years, and it personally was immensely long-lived. Although its two brains were tiny it was really much smarter than a dog, so that very soon Conway had it trying to sit and beg.
And two hours later the brontosaurus took off.
It rose rapidly from the ground, a monstrous, ungainly and indescribable object with its massive legs making involuntary walking movements and the great neck and tail hanging down and waving slowly. Obviously it was the brain in the sacral area and not the cranium which was handling the levitation, Conway thought, as the great reptile approached the bunch of palm fronds which were balanced tantalizingly two hundred feet above its head. But that was a detail, it was levitating, that was the main thing. Unless—“Are you helping?” Conway said sharply to Arretapec.
The reply was flat and emotionless by necessity, but had the VUXG been human it would have been a yell of sheer triumph.
“Good old Emily!” somebody shouted in Conway’s phones, probably one of the beam operators, then, “Look, she’s passing it!”
The brontosaur had missed the suspended bundle of foliage and was still rising fast. It made a clumsy, convulsive attempt to reach it in passing, which had set up a definite spin. Further wild movements of neck and tail were aggravating it.
“Better get her down out of there,” said a second voice urgently. “That artificial sun could scorch her tail off.”
And that spin is making it panicky,” agreed Conway. “Tractor beam men …!”
But he was too late. Sun, earth and sky were careening in wild, twisting loops around a being which had been hitherto accustomed to solid ground under its feet. It wanted down or up, or somewhere. Despite Arretapec’s frantic attempts to soothe it, it teleported again.
Conway saw the great mountain of flesh and bone go hurtling off at a tangent, at least four times faster than its original speed. He yelled, “H sector men! Cushion it down, gently.”
But there was neither time nor space for the pressor beam men to slow it down gently. To keep it from crashing fatally to the surface — also through the underlying plating and out into space outside — they had to slow it down steadily but firmly, and to the brontosaurus that necessarily sharp braking must have felt like a physical blow. It teleported again.
“C-sector, it’s coming at you!”
But at C it was a repetition of what happened with H, the beast panicked and shot off in another direction. And so it went on, with the great reptile rocketing from one side of the ship’s interior to the other until …
“Skempton here,” said a brisk authoritative voice. “My men say the pressor beam mounts were not designed to stand this sort of thing. Insufficiently braced. The hull plating has sprung in eight places.”
“Can’t you—”
“We’re sealing the leaks as fast as we can, Skempton cut in, answering Conway’s question before he could ask it. “But this battering is shaking the ship apart …
Dr. Arretapec joined in at that point.
“Doctor Conway,” the being said, “while it is obvious that the patient has shown a surprising aptitude with its new talent, its use is uncontrolled because of its fear and confusion. This traumatic experience will cause irreparable damage, I am convinced, to the being’s thinking processes …
“Conway, look out!”
The reptile had come to a halt near ground level a few hundred yards away, then shot off at right angles toward Conway’s position. But it was traveling a straight line inside a hollow sphere, and the surface was curving up to meet it. Conway saw the hurtling body lurch and spin as the beam operators sought desperately to check its velocity. Then suddenly the mighty body was ripping through the low, thickly-growing trees, then it was plowing a wide, shallow furrow through the soft, swampy ground and with a small mountain of earth-uprooted vegetation piling up in front of it, Conway was right in its path.
Before he could adjust the control of his anti-gravity pack the ground came up and fell on him. For a few minutes he was too dazed to realize why it was he couldn’t move, then he saw that he was buried to the waist in a sticky cement of splintered branches and muddy earth. The heavings and shudderings he felt in the ground were the brontosaurus climbing to its feet. He looked up to see the great mass towering over him, saw it turn awkwardly and heard the sucking and crackling noises as the massive, pile-driver legs drove almost knee deep into the soil and underbrush.
Emily was heading for the lake again, and between the water and it was Conway …
He shouted and struggled in a frenzied attempt to attract attention, because the anti-gray and radio were smashed and he was stuck fast. The great reptilian mountain rolled up to him, the immense, slowly-waving neck was cutting off the light and one gigantic forefoot was poised to both kill and bury him in one operation, then Conway was yanked suddenly upward and to the side to where a prune in a gob of syrup was floating in the air.
“In the excitement of the moment,” Arretapec said, “I had forgotten that you require a mechanical device to teleport. Please accept my apologies.”
“Q-quite all right,” said Conway shakily. He made an effort to steady his jumping nerves, then caught sight of a pressor beam crew on the surface below him. He called suddenly, “Get another radio and projector locus here, quick!”
Ten minutes later he was bruised, battered but ready to continue again. He stood at the water’s edge with Arretapec hovering at his shoulder and his fifty-foot image again rising above him. The VUXG doctor, in rapport with the brontosaur under the surface of the lake, reported that success or failure hung in the balance. The patient had gone through what was to it a mind-wrecking experience, but the fact that it was now in what it felt to be the safety of underwater-where it had hitherto sought refuge from hunger and attacks of its enemies-was, together with the mental reassurances of Arretapec, exerting a steadying influence.
At times hopefully, at others in utter despair, Conway waited. Sometimes the strength of his feelings made him swear. It would not have been so bad, meant so much to him, if he hadn’t caught that glimpse of what Arretapec’s purpose had been, or if he had not grown to like the rather prim and over-condescending ball of goo so much. But any being with a mind like that who intended doing what it hoped to do had a right to be condescending.
Abruptly the huge head broke surface and the enormous body heaved itself onto the bank. Slowly, ponderously, the hind legs bent double and the long, tapering neck stretched upward. The brontosaurus wanted to play again.
Something caught in Conway’s throat. He looked to where a dozen bundles of succulent greenery lay ready for use, with one already being maneuvered toward him. He waved his arm abruptly and said, “Oh, give it the whole lot, it deserves them …
… So that when Arretapec saw the conditions on the patient’s world,” Conway said a little stiffly, “and its precognitive faculty told him what the brontosaur’s most likely future would be, it just had to try to change it.”
Conway was in the Chief Psychologist’s office making a preliminary, verbal report and the intent faces of O’Mara, Hardin, Skempton and the hospital’s Director encircled him. He felt anything but comfortable as, clearing his throat, he went on, “But Arretapec belongs to an old, proud race, and being telepathic added to its sensitivity- telepaths really feel what others think about them. What Arretapec proposed doing was so radical, it would leave itself and its race open to such ridicule if it failed, that it just had to be secretive. Conditions on the brontosaur’s planet indicated that there would be no rise of an intelligent life-form after the great reptiles became extinct, and geologically speaking that extinction would not be long delayed. The patient’s species had been around for a long time — that armored tail and amphibious nature had allowed it to survive more predatory and specialized contemporaries — but climatic changes were imminent and it could not follow the sun toward the equator because
