Then suddenly he lost his appetite. For three days he left the bananas and bamboo untouched. By the fourth day the brontosaur lay on the bottom of the pool and rested his small black head on the plastic rim. Everyone could see he was getting ready to die. This was something we could not permit to happen. There was only one brontosaur in all the world, and we had him. The best doctors in the world helped us. But all in vain. Bronty refused grass, vitamins, oranges, milk… Everything!

Alice knew nothing of this tragedy. I had sent her off to her grandmother’s at Vnukovo. But on the fourth day she happened to turn on the television just at the moment when the news about the brontosaur’s worsening health was read. I still don’t know how she convinced her grandmother, but non the same morning Alice ran into the pavilion.

“Papa!” She shouted. “How could you not tell me? How could you?”

“Later, Alice, later.” I answered. “We’re having a meeting.”

We were in fact having a meeting at the time. It had been going on for the last three days.

Alice said nothing more and ran out. And a few minutes later I heard a great deal of gasping, ooh-ing, and ah-ing from close by. I turned and saw that Alice had already crossed through the barrier, wormed her way into the enclosure and had run up to the brontosaur’s head. She had a bulky roll from lunch counter in one hand.

“Eat, Bronty.” She said. “Or you’ll starve yourself to death here. If I were living here, I’d get sick of bananas too.”

I hadn’t even made it to the barrier when something unbelievable happened. Something which was greatly to Alice’s credit and which strongly soiled our, the biologists, reputations.

The brontosaur lifted his head, looked at Alice, and carefully took the dinner roll in her hands.