Barry, Mark, Dan and Fitzhugh were on the run from a whole squad of SID officers, who had narrowed their base camp down to being somewhere in the forest. After two years in the Land of the Giants, they had lost all their anonymity and many of their secrets, including the ability to come and go from the giant city undetected.
"I hope Steve and the girls are alright," panted Mark.
"The giants don't even know where they are," said Fitzhugh, "It's we who'll be done for if the SID men look under these shrubs."
"This is your Captain speaking. Sub orbital flight 612 is just landing at London Airport," said Steve.
"Steve," thought Barry, "He's not even with us. How could he say that? The others don't even seem to have heard him."
Once again he heard Steve's voice making the same announcement. Then he felt a hand stroking his forehead.
"It's time to see if your cousins got your letter, sleepyhead," said Betty.
Barry suddenly woke up to find that he was sitting in the passenger seats with the other four passengers in the Spindrift. Betty was smiling down at him, stroking his hair to awaken him.
"You slept for almost the entire journey," she said.
"Even through the big storm?" asked Barry, recalling what it was like when they had first approached the space warp.
Back on that day (1983, September), only the crew had seen the view from the cockpit window, which had later been described to an initially incredulous Mark Wilson. The engineer had made some glib remark about fairytales.
"There wasn't any storm," said Betty, "You must have been dreaming. Come on. Let's go to the terminal and see if they're waiting for you."
As Barry walked with Betty to the airport terminal, he recalled what had seemed like two years of adventures in a Land of Giant human beings much like himself only so big that he was the size of one of their fingers. He had learned to climb ropes and abseil, swing a matchstick with a razor blade fastened to it (as though it were an axe), and to run and hide whenever necessary. All of the passengers had been in the dreams, as well as the crew.
He had vague recollections of a dark haired woman seen arguing with the Captain and the Co-Pilot just near the VIP lounge, just before he'd been introduced to the others and led onto the ship. She'd been wearing a dark brown jumper, a creamy short skirt, black stockings, a light brown belt and an orange-brown vest. Barry had no idea who that woman had been. He hadn't seen her in the dreams, which had gone on for hours, changing scenes at a very fast pace.
Betty and Barry looked around, but could find no sign of his cousins. Maybe they had moved before he'd sent the letter explaining how he'd just become an orphan.
"Honey, I'm sorry," said Betty, kneeling down and hugging him, "But you can still come home to Los Angeles with me on the next flight back if you like. I told you you'd never be an orphan again."
"Thank you Miss Hamilton," said Barry, remembering that he'd only gotten familiar enough to call her Betty in the dreams.
"You can call me Betty, if you like," she said.
"Will Captain Burton and Mr Ericcson be taking us back?" asked Barry.
"Yes, they're the only ones who fly Spindrift at the moment. I'll have you booked on as family of mine," said Betty.
When they returned to America, Betty arranged to adopt Barry, and enrolled him in a public high school. He was one of the youngest students there. His form mistress was also his science teacher, Mrs A. Franzen. Two seats to the left of him, sitting next to the classroom wall was a girl with a startlingly familiar face. He stared at her and thought she looked identical to Ackman's granddaughter!
Ackman had been one of the first giants that the Spindrift team had met in Barry's dreams. He had conscripted them all to be residents of his model town, which happened to be scaled to their size. His granddaughter had been highly resentful of the attention that Ackman had paid to the earthlings, and unleashed a torrent of near homicidal cruelty on them in his absence.
The girl in the classroom now noticed him staring at her. She checked that Mrs Franzen was still writing on the blackboard with her back to the class, and that the rest of the class were concentrating on the blackboard. Then the girl stuck her tongue out at Barry in scorn.
"That's just what the giant girl did!" thought Barry, "I wonder if this girl is as cruel in real life. What would she do if she was a giant? I couldn't ask her. She'd never believe me about the dreams."
During lunch break, a slightly older girl with blond hair came and sat next to Barry on the playground seat and smiled shyly. She looked exactly like the giant camper's daughter who had befriended him and discouraged her father from pointing his friends' direction out to the rangers.
"Would you like a cookie?" she asked, taking one from her lunch box, "I'm Kimberly."
"Thank you. I'm Barry," said Barry shyly, remembering that the giantess had offered him a giant cookie, much to the concern of Captain Burton when Steve had learned of it. Valerie had referred to her as his giant girlfriend in the dream, and she had seemed the sweetest of all the giants that he'd met in those dreams.
He took two dried apricots from his own lunch box, placed one onto the cookie, and offered her the other one. Then he ate the combination of biscuit and apricot and enjoyed the mixture. He'd wanted to do it at home, but Betty didn't stock many biscuits around the house. Kimberly copied his cuisine.
"They're good together," she said, just after swallowing a mouthful of cookie and apricot, "Which way do you go home?"
He told her his train route, and she said that she went in the same direction, just a few suburbs further than Barry, and asked if they could meet on the station and sit in the same carriage together. Barry enjoyed her friendship, but didn't know how to broach the subject of him having dreamed up her giant counterpart first. Kimberly was friendlier, both in real life and in the dreams, it seemed, than the girl who resembled Ackman's granddaughter.
As the weeks went on, one thing that amazed Barry was the extent to which he had recalled the rope skills that he had only learned in a series of dreams (all during his first flight on Spindrift). He had been careful to stay awake during the return flight with Betty, so that he could observe anything unusual that happened to the ship, and to ask Betty to warn Steve of the dreams of a giant warp, if the ship should encounter any turbulence. Yet nothing had happened.
Now Barry had an insatiable craving for abseiling and rock climbing. He bought some equipment on a Sunday morning, and then caught the bus to a small national park that afternoon. He walked through the park and came to a cliff with a cave entrance at the bottom. Remembering the dream use of the giant safety pins as grappling hooks, he tied a real grappling hook to one end of a long rope, threw it high up the cliff at an angle, so that it went around the base of a tree at the edge of the cliff top. It fell to the ground, bringing the rope with it. He had knotted it in several places first, so that it resembled the knots in the giant pieces of string, which had acted as the ropes in his dreams. Now he was able to tie both ends off around a suitably shaped rock structure beside the cave entrance, and begin to climb.
Barry reached the top of the cliff and looked out at the whole park below. There was a picnic table nearby, where a woman and her son were sitting. Other things were going on in various places, and nobody had paid him any attention. He saw a small girl wander into the cave entrance far below him. After a while, the boy at the picnic table left his mother sitting there, and walked off too. There were trees between the picnic table and the cave entrance, so that the mother couldn't see it. From his overview, Barry could see everything, as the boy entered the cave as well.
Barry left them to it and made his descent back down the cliff, and then heard a scream from inside the cave. The boy came out calling, "Mommy!" and then Barry saw the mother come running through the trees. The mother was an exact double of the giantess Mrs Bara whom the Spindrift team had met in the park in his dreams.
"Mommy, Leeda fell down a hole in the cave. The ground opened up!" said the boy.
"Show me where, Teddy!" said the woman.
"Just like what happened to both the giant kids in the dream!" thought Barry, as he quickly followed them into the cave entrance.
The hole was close to the entrance, which let in a bit of sunlight. They could see the top, but not the bottom. Barry took out a penlight torch, which he usually carried in his backpack. He'd not expected to need it for a daytime outdoor rock climb, but now it would be very helpful.
"I'll go down," he said, and clipped the torch to his shirt pocket and turned it on.
Barry secured one end of the rope to a suitable stalagmite in the cave, and dropped the rest down beside the fallen girl.
"Are you hurt?" called the woman.
"No. It's squishy!" called the girl.
Barry climbed down the rope and comforted Leeda, and then got her into a piggy back position, advising her to hold on, while he climbed back up the hole. The woman hugged her daughter and led them out of the cave.
"Thank you so much," said the woman, kissing Barry's cheek, "Their father and I are divorced. I don't know what I would have done without you. We'd better get that cave looked at and closed off by the park rangers."
"I'm meeting normal sized versions of the people in my dreams," thought Barry.