* * * * *
The three men went upstairs to the master bedroom, where Dr. Heuvelmann quickly locked the door. He then gestured to the bed, and the two other men sat down.
"So!" began the naturalized veterinarian: "What is it, precisely, you want of me, Herr Oberst?"
Colonel Phillips told him. When he had concluded, Dr. Heuvelmann ruefully smiled.
"It would be far less time-consuming to tell you what we did _not_ find! But, in answer to your question; how about specimens of Limax flavus...almost twice the size of L. cinereoniger?* Or, adults of S. keyserlingii that looked more like...half-grown Japanese giant salamanders? Or, round gobies....as big as American bullfrogs?!"
Both of the older man's visitors were momentarily dumbfounded.
"How do you account for that, doctor?" Phillips finally managed to inquire.
Heuvelmann shrugged: "It is as you read in Liebenkraft's diary. Something in the 1909 meteorite ultimately contaminated the ground water, and it ultimately ascended through the food chain. The Limax snails absorbed it through consumption of the aforementioned mushrooms. The salamanders fed on the snails; the round gobies fed on them (in their tadpole form); and the snakes..."
"Snakes???" echoed Atkins: "In Siberia?"
"Ach! Ja; I was saving the best for last. In addition to everything else, we found a relict population of Natrix maura pseudocerastes! The horned viperine water snake. A non-venomous Batesian mimic of the true horned viper, previously considered extinct after 'the Year Without A Summer.' Also known, more erroneously, as 'the Little Ice Age of 1815.' "
"And, how abnormally big did these snakes prove to be?" asked the colonel (sensing the pattern).
"About as long as a South American bushmaster."
Phillips now got to his feet, and looked Heuvelmann right in the eye.
"Did any members of your expedition partake of that ground water?"
There was an awkward pause before the latter replied:
"Ja; indirectly."
"Define 'indirectly.' "
"Our guide--a German widow from Konigsberg--was examining a late-blooming specimen of Limonia bicolor, when, suddenly, she got bee-stung. By a member of the Osmia species that had been gathering pollen from one of the blossoms! The allergenic swelling that ensued was...highly unexpected...to say the least."
"You mean, she swelled upward rather than outward?"
Heuvelmann nodded: "To a height of approximately...twenty-seven meters."
"Roughly one hundred feet," Phillips translated for Atkins.
Whereupon, he turned back to Heuvelmann and asked what that German widow's name was, and what had happened to her after the expedition. The naturalized veterinarian could not answer the second question. But, he had no trouble answering the first one, as there was no way he could ever forget a hundred foot-tall naked blonde!
"Her name...was Hertzmann. Gertruda Hertzmann."
Twenty-fours after Phillips had returned to Baltimore, he got a call from one of his operatives in East Berlin.
"An Air Force RB-58, out of Alaska, was making a routine photo-recon flight over one of the Soviet missile bases in the Kurils. And, they took the following from thirty thousand feet."
The photograph that emerged from the Telefax on his stateside desk showed--in full living color--a blonde giantess. Skinny-dipping...near a fleet of Soviet naval vessels.
tbc
Giantess World
Author's Chapter Notes:
HEUVELMANN RESIDENCE,
NEW BERN, NORTH CAROLINA
(NOV. 17, 1962)
NEW BERN, NORTH CAROLINA
(NOV. 17, 1962)
Chapter End Notes:
* Limax flavus: the yellow garden slug.
Limax cinereoniger: the giant keel-backed slug.
Salamandrella keyserlingii: the Siberian salamander.
Year Without A Summer: nickname given to the year 1815 because of severe climate changes caused by the eruption of volcanic Mount Tambor in what is now Indonesia.
Konigsberg: former German name for what is now the Baltic Sea port of Kaliningrad, Russia.
Limax cinereoniger: the giant keel-backed slug.
Salamandrella keyserlingii: the Siberian salamander.
Year Without A Summer: nickname given to the year 1815 because of severe climate changes caused by the eruption of volcanic Mount Tambor in what is now Indonesia.
Konigsberg: former German name for what is now the Baltic Sea port of Kaliningrad, Russia.