The First Flight

by Joseph W. Skidmore

Release: November 1934
Format: Short Story
Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: Adults
Content: Definite Time Travel
Original Language: English

Mystical Professor Oliver Kent, who first appeared in “The Beetle in the Amber,” is at it again. This time he gives pilot Donald Calvert a globule of concentrated liquid with the advice that drinking it may be a life-saver if he runs into inexplicable physiological changes during his high-speed round-the-world flight. Indeed, the changes happen, Donald swallows the globule, and he finds himself in the body of his prehistoric ancestor, Dowb, who undertakes a similarly difficult flight of his own on the back of a Pterodactyl.

It struck Dowb high in the thigh, hurling him skyward like a stone from a catapult. With an inherited instinct from ancestors who had clutched at tree-tops, Dowb sailed through the air, hands outstretched, claw-like, ready to grasp.

For a moment the slow brain of Dowb fancied he had been hurled into a tree, as his sinewy arms and legs grasped an obstruction that had brought him up abruptly in mid-flight. But the object moved and swooped crazily, and Dowb realized that he had grasped the neck of the beast directly below its repulsive head.

DEBUT

“The First Flight,” in Amazing, November 1934.

VARIANTS

1 English variant

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