Grandpa was sitting with his head between his knees. I walked towards him and put my hand on his shoulder. He looked up, his eyesfi lled with worry. "I should have told youthe truth," he said.
"It's all right. I know everything now," I said.
"How?"
"Jimmie. The me people told her…"
"Ah yes. Remember they wanted my secret for them to let me warn you about the judgment? I'm glad they put it to good use!" he smiled weakly. "When you came and told me about the dodos and how they'd told you about Anunirva, I wanted to tell you everything right then…but then, I was not sure how you'd take it."
I stayed silent. Grandpa continued, "Its true that I used to believe that the endsjustifi ed the means as long as we were makingscientifi c progress. But all that changed afterMayuri. I began to see how selfish I was being. And how much harm we could cause by going to another land with our greed. I tried to put an end to it…but Shantanu had already done the damage.
""What do we do now?"
"The Nile crocodile found out aboutMayuri's origin and he told the others. So they are all against me. "I looked at his tired eyes. Laddoo's tail was between his legs. He could sense the sadness in grandpa's voice. "Do you know about Mage?" I asked. "I made the blueprint* for creating him," said grandpa in a bitter voice.
"I had managed to procure the DNA of two extinct creatures and I had made plans to create a creature that would have the genes of several animalism it- some extinct, some from the present. A creature that could change form at will."
"But how did you do that?"
I knew that creatures in Anunirva could change form…there have been sightings of dragons and other strange creatures worldover.We keep hearing about someone who saw a gigantic fish or a freak animal. These sightings are usually brushed off as a figment of imagination or as an accident in Nature…but I realized that these were visitors from another land. I began to correlate these sightings with the disappearance of species. And to my surprise, I found that many of the extinctions occurred around the sometime that such a sighting was made. Nobody had made the connection because they happened in different parts of the world. But the Anunirvites can transport themselves very fast…" grandpa said.
