Universe Twister - Keith Laumer [57]
There was a sound from ahead, startling in the stillness. Ah, there he was now! O'Leary stopped and cocked his head, listening. The sound came again, a scrape of hoof on rock. He smiled broadly and tried out the whistle Roy Rogers used for calling Trigger. With his parched lips, it came out a weak tweet. Far up the pass, a shadow moved.
Something grotesquely tall detached itself from the deep shadow of a buttress of stone at the side of the ravine—a shape that stood fifteen feet high, slender necked, great bodied, stalking on two massive legs like a monstrous parody of a Thanksgiving turkey, except that the knees bent forward. A head like a turtle's turned his way, eyed him with bright green eyes. The lipless mouth opened and emitted a whistling cry.
"Th-that wasn't exactly wh-what I had in mind," O'Leary announced to the landscape. It occurred to him to run, but somehow his feet seemed frozen to the spot. Through them he could feel a distinct tremor in the rock at each step of the titan. It came on, moving with ponderous grace, its relatively small forearms folded against a narrow chest, the great curve of the belly gleaming pink in the failing light. Fifty feet from O'Leary, it halted, staring over his head and out across the desert as though pondering some weighty problem unrelated to small, knee-high creatures who invaded its domain. O'Leary stared, rooted to the spot. The seconds were ticking past with agonizing slowness. In a moment, O'Leary knew, the iguanodon—he recognized the type from an admirable illustration he had seen in a recent book on dinosaurs—would notice him again, remember what had started it lumbering in his direction. He pictured it wandering on, an odd leg hanging carelessly from the corner of the horny mouth, half swallowed, already forgotten.
He caught himself. No point in helping disaster along with vivid imaginings. He wasn't dead yet. And maybe he wouldn't be, if he could just think of something—anything!
A second lizard, to engage the first in mortal combat while he scuttled away to safety? Too risky; he'd be squashed in the sparring. How about a tank—one of those German Tiger models, with the big 88mm. gun! No, too fantastic. A diversion, perhaps—a herd of nice fat goats wandering by. But there weren't any goats out here. Just himself and the dinosaur—Lod's dragon, the thought dawned suddenly! And he'd dismissed the whole thing as a superstitious fancy. He'd been wrong about that—and about a lot of other things. And now he'd never have a chance to correct his errors. But he couldn't give up yet. There had to be something.
The great reptile stirred, swung his head about; O'Leary clearly heard the creak of scaled hide as it moved. Now it was turning back, dropping its gaze, fixing on the small figure of the man before it. A low rumble sounded from its stomach; it raised a foot, came striding forward.
O'Leary reached to his back pocket and yanked out a handful of taffy kisses. With a roundhouse swing, he hurled them straight at the oncoming monster's snout. The mouth opened with the speed of a winking eye and engulfed the tidbits. O'Leary turned to run, twisted an ankle, fell full length. The shadow of the giant fell across him. He tried to evoke the image of Colby Corners, willing himself there. Even drowning in the bay was preferable to serving as hors d'oeuvre to an oversized Gila monster—but his mind was a shocked blank.
There was a peculiar, sucking sound from above, like a boot being withdrawn from particularly viscous mud. He turned his head, looked up; the monster was poised above him, chewing thoughtfully, strings of sticky taffy linking the working jaws. O'Leary hesitated. Should he lie still and hope the monster would forget him or try a retreat while it was occupied?
A pointed tongue