And a voice was saying indignantly, "Well, really! _If_ you don't mind--!" * * * * * In one hand Larry still clutched his bag. In the other--. He flushed, relaxed his grip in swift embarrassment. The girl was the one whom he had glimpsed before him on the steps of the Broad Street Station. It was her ankle that, in his moment of blind groping, his hand had clutched. "I--I'm sorry!" gulped Larry. "I didn't mean to be--" Then he stopped, staring about him transfixed. "But what's this? Where the he--I mean, where in blazes are we?" They were lying on a grassy plain horizoned by a forest of towering trees that reached aimlessly toward a wan and cloudless sky. The girl, her own blue eyes wide in astonishment, forgot her pique in amazement that matched his. "I don't know. I was running for the train--" "So was I. I saw you on the steps. Just then the staircase seemed to become strangely gray--" "And it moved!" added the girl. "I remember now. Something like a _ripple_ passed over it--" "I didn't see that," admitted Larry. "I was too busy running. But--but where are we, anyway?" A touch of panic flickered in the girl's eyes. "We--we couldn't be dead?" Larry shook his head. "I thought of that. But it isn't likely. Not both of us. One of us might have fallen down the steps and broken a neck--but not two, together. And there was no explosion or anything like that. I don't see--" Suddenly the girl gasped, clutching his arm. "Look! Over there in the trees!" Larry looked--and moved swiftly. With a jerk, he ripped open his bag, pawed through its contents, and came up with a snub-nosed automatic. "Get behind me!" he shouted. "I don't know what's going on here, but--" "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?"