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By Root 370 0

On Sunday mornings, Miss Dawson and Dr. Quinn would go walking together over the moors, returning to his little cottage to play at cooking Sunday lunch together. It was after Sunday lunch one day that Dr. Quinn told Miss Dawson that he had been down into the caves under the hills, and what he had found there. He had met, and talked to, a reptile man.

At first Miss Dawson refused to believe it. The Age of the Reptiles ended millions and millions of years ago. In any case, the reptiles never produced a species with a brain larger than that of a present-day kitten.

'I assure you it's true,' said Dr. Quinn, filling his pipe and settling back in an armchair, as though he was talking about nothing more extraordinary than meeting another potholer in the caves. 'He was well over six feet tall, with green scales instead of skin, and he had a third eye in the middle of his forehead.'

With a lifetime of scientific training, Miss Dawson was not one to accept the fantasy of a talking reptile. 'We know from the fossils that have been found that no such animal ever existed,' she said. 'You must have imagined it.'

'But I've been having conversations with them,' said Dr. Quinn, now lighting his pipe and blowing out a huge amount of blue smoke.

Miss Dawson persisted. 'The structure of the typical reptile mouth doesn't lend itself to speech. The most vocal reptile can only produce a very limited sound range.'

'I'm not going to say the fellow talked with an Oxford accent,'

smiled Dr. Quinn. 'More of a dreary monotone. What struck me particularly was how he could detect my language—English—and speak to me in it.'

Miss Dawson decided that possibly Dr. Quinn had gone mad.

Perhaps he had spent too much time alone since his wife had died.

She tried to change the subject. But Dr. Quinn just smiled, puffed at his pipe, and went on talking about his reptile men.

'Of course you can't believe it, Miss Dawson,' he said—she had never got him to call her Phyllis—'because we are educated to believe that the reptiles are a low class of animal with primitive brains. All the fossils tell us that. But what if something else happened, in pre-history, that we know nothing about? For some reason those reptile people are down in the caves, and they've been there for millions of years.'

Miss Dawson asked, 'Then why haven't the potholers found them? There are always people trooping down into the caves.'

'Because,' said Dr. Quinn, 'the reptile people live in some special shelter they've got there. The one I met showed me the entrance, after I'd promised to be their friend.'

'Their friend?' said Miss Dawson. It was at this moment that Miss Dawson really started to worry.

'They want information,' said Dr. Quinn, 'about how we humans live, and where, and how many there are of us.

'Are you going to give them that information?'

Dr. Quinn slowly shook his head. 'I shall play them along, that's all. You see, what interests me is the information that I can get from them.'

'But surely,' said Miss Dawson, at last believing Dr. Quinn might not be mad, 'if you've found these creatures you must let everyone know! It's the most remarkable discovery since...' She was not a zoologist so she didn't know quite who had discovered what living species. 'Well, you know, that fish they found off the coast of South Africa.'

'The coelacanth,' said Dr. Quinn, as though giving a lecture,

'caught off Natal in 1938, and thought to have been extinct for seventy million years.' His memory for facts always amazed her.

'Yes,' she said, 'that fish.'

'Tell me,' he said, 'do you know who discovered the coelacanth?'

Miss Dawson shook her head. 'I thought you'd know, since you know all the other details about it.'

'But you know who discovered steam, and gravity, and electricity and evolution?' he said, more as a statement than a question.

'Of course,' she said. 'I don't understand what you're getting at.'

Dr. Quinn sat back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling. 'I've given all my life to science, Miss Dawson. But somehow I've always been someone else's assistant, just as I