And so millions of years passed. The great monsters disappeared and gradually the world became as it is today; but still the Brontosaurus went on searching, its spirit ranging everywhere and watching everything.
And it was watching when, in the little seaside town of Marshdene, Mr. Brown set up his building firm.
Mr. Brown was a hardworking man, and Jimmy, his son, was a nice, ordinary kind of lad who went to help his father in the business as soon as he left school.
I don’t suppose that Mr. Brown and Jimmy were really any better than the other builders around, but they were cheerful and helpful, and they pleased the people they worked for by always arriving at the exact time they said they would and working steadily on until the job was finished. Also, being built on marshy land, the homes of Marshdene had a habit of tilting and cracking so that there was always a great deal of extra work for builders to do, shoring them up and cementing them together again; but the people did not move away from Marshdene, because they liked the sea and the beach with its soft yellow sand, and the long wooden jetty where they could sit and watch the fish swimming in the clear water.
As his business grew more and more prosperous, Mr. Brown began to buy all kinds of machinery to help with the work. He bought lorries, cement mixers, rollers, bulldozers. Mr. Brown was very proud indeed of all these machines, and Jimmy liked them too, especially one of the diggers, which was painted red and had broad, newly-tyred wheels and a large shovel worked by an impressive array of levers in the comfortable cabin.
The more machines Mr. Brown bought the more efficient he became, and nobody was surprised when he was given the contract to build a block of flats for the council. The Mayor of Marshdene had recently been on an official visit to New York, and people said it had given him delusions of grandeur because the first thing he did when he returned home was to talk about swapping the mayoral Rolls-Royce for a helicopter, and the second was to decide to build the tallest block of flats in the country.
This worried Mr. Brown considerably, because the only spare land near Marshdene that was big enough was a very muddy, damp sort of place, not really suitable for building on at all.
It worried the surveyor, too, when he came to check over the site. After trying for many hours to persuade even one wooden stake to stand up straight in the mud, it worried him so much that he wandered round saying, “Can’t be done, can’t be done, can’t be done,” like a gramophone record stuck in the groove.
“Of course it can be done,” answered Jimmy. “Surely there must be solid earth or rock or something down there somewhere.”
“I doubt it,” said the surveyor, but Jimmy ignored him and went on. “We might manage it with a very large crane with a big grab on the end. If the crane was big enough it could reach right over and scoop the mud out. We’ll have to buy one—anyway, we can use it afterwards for building the flats.”
Mr. Brown was feeling so desperate by now that he agreed to have a huge crane made to order specially for the job.
The crane was so large that it had to be brought along the road to Marshdene during the night to prevent a traffic hold-up, and it was accompanied by a police motorcycle escort. The two men from the manufacturers had great difficulty in controlling the transporter it had been loaded on to: they completely demolished the sign saying “Welcome to Marshdene-on-Sea”, and they twice drove up on the pavement, narrowly missing the great crowd of onlookers that had gathered.
And the evil spirit of the monster, which had been watching and waiting and growing more and more terrible for hundreds of millions of years, saw the crane with its great body and long, long neck; and the spirit swooped down, and settled itself inside, and waited.
The men parked it in the field where Mr. Brown kept his building materials, and staggered from the cab. “Cor!” said one, mopping his brow. “I’ve never handled a crane as big as that before, I could do with a good strong cup of tea, I could really.”
So Mr. Brown took the men home with him to make them some tea, and, as it was getting dark, the crowd gradually dispersed, leaving Jimmy alone with the crane. It really was massive, he thought; indeed, very much larger and somehow bulkier than he had imagined it would be. In the gathering dusk the cabin looked shadowy and the metal jib, towering above him, gleamed with a sinister silver lustre, and for one moment he thought he saw the great grab suspended from its tip open its steel jaws and snap them closed again.
“A trick of the light,” Jimmy said to himself, and he went across to the hut in which the night watchman was settling himself by his fire. Nearby were the building materials: iron girders, concrete blocks, long lengths of timber. “You might be kind enough to keep an eye on the crane as well,” he said, and then made his way home to bed.
He did not sleep very well, and in the morning he was awakened before dawn by the sound of shouting in the street outside and a hammering and banging on the front door. He made his way hastily downstairs and let in the night watchman, who had been running so fast and was trembling so much that he could scarcely stammer out, “Mr. Jimmy, sir, it’s that crane, it’s gone berserk—it’s knocked over the piles of concrete blocks as though they were ninepins, the girders are all bent and the wood’s in splinters. I tried to stop it—shouted out—but it was no good, it just went rampaging up the hill to the High Street.”
“But someone must be driving it,” Jimmy said.
“I couldn’t see a driver at all—if it hadn’t been going up hill I’d have said the brakes had failed.”
“Well, standing here won’t stop it,” answered Jimmy. “I’d better get after it.”
“You won’t have any difficulty following it—” said the night watchman, looking drawn and anxious, “but you won’t be able to get along in a car because it’s torn great holes in the road.”
Jimmy, as he ran into the street, had to admit that the man was at least correct about tracking it down. The crane was clearly visible even above the tallest buildings in Marshdene, and as he watched he saw the great grab dip, come up full and then open again, dropping a pile of crushed rubble on to the roof of the town hall.
Jimmy ran along the lane and leaped into the small red digger which with its cross-country tyres was the best vehicle to negotiate the cratered road surface. His progress was slow, but the monster crane had been too preoccupied with destroying things to travel far. He passed a gaping hole from which a burst water main sent up a fountain fifty feet into the air, a street where all the telephone wires had been wrenched out and carried up over the rooftops, festooning the houses like untidy Christmas decorations, and another where all the parked cars were stamped right down into the tarmac.
Jimmy found it very difficult to make his way through all this but eventually, coughing in the dusty air and shaken by his lurching ride, he came out into the square around which the main shopping centre was built. The shopping centre had been new, the pride of Marshdene. Smart rows of shops, freshly-painted, with offices above, bounded the neat lawns with their wooden seats and pleasant flower-beds. There are a good many ways of destroying a shopping centre and it seemed to Jimmy that the crane had tried out every one. In some places the glass of the shopfronts was smashed into powder, in others the counters and cabinets had been lifted up and dropped through the roofs. Some buildings had been torn down by the huge grab, others just flattened completely as the great caterpillar tracks ground onwards. Desks, sometimes still with typewriters balanced precariously on their surfaces, hung from the broken floors of the offices, filing cabinets spilled their contents which floated down like large confetti to blow about amidst the ripped bags of flour, spilt sugar, tins, vegetables, fruit, crushed china, clothes and a mass of other debris.