“Just stay right here and don’t go anywhere.” I told her, and I headed for the hood covering the newborn brontosaur.

All that evening Alice an Is aid absolutely nothing to each other. I utterly forbade her to go anywhere near the incubator, but she just said to me, as though she had not heard a word that I said, “I feel so sorry for Bronty,” and the very next day she was right beside the incubator again. Some of the space men from the Jupiter-8 mission brought her. The space men were heros, and no one was going to refuse them anything.

“Good morning, Bronty.” She said, standing right next to the hood.

The baby brontosaur looked at her with a squint.

“Whose is that child?” Professor Yakata asked me. I tried to make myself invisible and failed..

But Alice was not one to slink away at mere words.

“Don’t you like me?” She parried.

“Oh no, it’s not that. Quite the contrary. I just was thinking, er, that maybe, hm, you had gotten lost….” The professor was quite unable to carry on a conversation with a little girl.

“Too bad.” Alice said. “But I’ll be back tomorrow to see you, Bronty. Don’t be bored.”

And Alice did in fact come back the next day, and she came nearly every day. Everyone liked her and let her through without a word. I quite washed my hands of the matter. After all, our house sits right next to the Zoo and, we could hardly bar the road or build a wall.

Brontosaurs grow very quickly. After only a month his was two and a half meters long, and we moved him to a specially constructed pavilion. The young brontosaur roamed throughout the fenced enclosure and munched on young bamboo shoots and bananas. The bamboo was brought in on the freight rocket from India but the bananas came from local hothouses. We put a cement wading pool in the middle of the enclosure and filled it with hot, salty water. The baby dinosaur loved it.