Herries threw the gun to his shoulder and fired. The long sleek form took the bullet—somewhere—and screamed. The raw noise hurt the man’s eardrums.
Feet thudded over the wharf. Two guards reached Herries and began to shoot into the dark water. The door of the shack opened and a figure stood back against its yellow oblong, a tommy gun stammering idiotically in his hands.
«Cut it out!» bawled Herries. «That’s enough! Hold your fire!»
Silence fell. For a moment, only the ponderous rainfall had voice. Then the brontosaur bellowed again, remotely, and there were seethings and croakings in the water.
«He got away,» said Herries. «Or more likely his pals are now stripping him clean. Blood smell.» A dull anger lifted in him, he turned and grabbed the lapel of the nearest guard. «How often do I have to tell you characters, every gangway has to have a man near it with grenades?»
«Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.» Herries was a large man, and the other face looked up at him, white and scared in the wan electric radiance. «I just went off to the head—»
«You’ll stay here,» said Herries. «I don’t care if you explode. Our presence draws these critters, and you ought to know that by now. They’ve already snatched two men off this dock. They nearly got a third tonight—me. At the first suspicion of anything out there, you’re to pull the pin on a grenade and drop it in the water, understand? One more dereliction like this, and you’re fired—No.» He stopped, grinning humorlessly. «That’s not much of a punishment, is it? A week in hack on bread.»
The other guard bristled. «Look here, Mr. Herries, we got our rights. The union—»
«Your precious union is a hundred million years in the future,» snapped the engineer. «It was understood that this is a dangerous job, that we’re subject to martial law, and that I can discipline anyone who steps out of line. Okay—remember it.»
He turned his back and tramped across the gangplank to the barge deck. It boomed underfoot. The shack had been closed again, with the excitement over. He opened the door and stepped through, peeling off his slicker.
Four men were playing poker beneath an unshaded bulb. The room was small and cluttered, hazy with tobacco smoke and the Jurassic mist. A fifth man lay on one of the bunks, reading. The walls were gaudy with pinups.
Olson riffled the cards and looked up. «Close call, boss,» he remarked, almost casually. «Want to sit in?»
«Not now,» said Herries. He felt his big square face sagging with weariness. «I’m bushed.» He nodded at Carver, who had just returned from a prospecting trip further north. «We lost one more derrick today.»
«Huh?» said Carver. «What happened this time?»
«It turns out this is the mating season.» Herries found a chair, sat down, and began to pull off his boots. «How they tell one season from another, I don’t know—length of day, maybe—but anyhow the brontosaurs aren’t shy of us any more—they’re going nuts. Now they go gallyhooting around and trample down charged fences or anything else that happens to be in the way. They’ve smashed three rigs to date, and one man.»
Carver raised an eyebrow in his chocolate-colored face. It was a rather sour standing joke here, how much better the Negroes looked than anyone else. A white man could be outdoors all his life in this clouded age and remain pasty. «Haven’t you tried shooting them?» he asked.
«Ever tried to kill a brontosaur with a rifle?» snorted Herries. «We can mess ’em up a little with .50-caliber machine guns or a bazooka—just enough so they decide to get out of the neighborhood—but being less intelligent than a chicken, they take off in any old direction. Makes as much havoc as the original rampage.» His left boot hit the floor with a sullen thud. «I’ve been begging for a couple of atomic howitzers but it has to go through channels… Channels!» Fury spurted in him. «Five hundred human beings stuck in this nightmare world and our requisitions have to go through channels!»
Olson began to deal the cards. Polansky gave the man in the bunk a chill glance. «You’re the wheel, Symonds,» he said. «Why the devil don’t you goose the great Transtemporal Oil Company?»
«Nuts,» said Carver. «The great benevolent all-wise United States Government is what counts. How about it, Symonds?»
You never got a rise out of Symonds, the human tape recorder; just a playback of the latest official line. Now he laid his book aside and sat up in his bunk. Herries noticed that the volume was Marcus Aurelius, in Latin yet.
Symonds looked at Carver through steel-rimmed glasses and said in a dusty tone: «I am only the comptroller and supply supervisor. In effect, a chief clerk. Mr. Herries is in charge of operations.»
He was a small shriveled man, with thin gray hair above a thin gray face. Even here, he wore stiff-collared shirt and sober tie. One of the hardest things to take about him was the way his long nose waggled when he talked.
«In charge!» Herries spat expertly into a gobboon. «Sure, I direct the prospectors and the drillers and everybody else on down through the bull cook. But who handles the paperwork—all our reports and receipts and requests? You.» He tossed his right boot on the floor. «I don’t want the name of boss if I can’t get the stuff to defend my own men.»
Something bumped against the supervisors’ barge; it quivered and the chips on the table rattled. Since there was no outcry from the dock guards, Herries ignored the matter. Some swimming giant. And except for the plesiosaurs and the non-malicious bumbling bronties, all the big dinosaurs encountered so far were fairly safe. They might step on you in an absent-minded way, but most of them were peaceful and you could outrun those which weren’t. It was the smaller carnivores, about the size of a man, leaping out of brush or muck with a skullful of teeth, which had taken most of the personnel lost. Their reptile life was too diffuse: even mortally wounded by elephant gun or grenade launcher, they could rave about for hours. They were the reason for sleeping on barges tied up by this sodden coast, along the gulf which would some day be Oklahoma.
Symonds spoke in his tight little voice: «I send your recommendations in, of course. The project office passes on them.»
«I’ll say it does,» muttered young Greenstein irreverently.
«Please do not blame me,» insisted Symonds.
I wonder. Herries glowered at him. Symonds had an in of some kind. That was obvious. A man who was simply a glorified clerk would not be called to Washington, for unspecified conferences with unspecified people, as often as this one was. But what was he, then?
A favorite relative? No… in spite of high pay, this operation was no political plum. FBI? Scarcely… the security checks were all run in the future. A hack in the bureaucracy? That was more probable. Symonds was here to see that oil was pumped and dinosaurs chased away and the hideously fecund jungle kept beyond the fence according to the least comma in the latest directive from headquarters.
The small man continued: «It has been explained to you officially that the heavier weapons are all needed at home. The international situation is critical. You ought to be thankful you are safely back in the past.»
«Heat, large economy-size alligators, and not a woman for a hundred million years,» grunted Olson. «I’d rather be blown up. Who dealt this mess?»
«You did,» said Polansky. «Gimme two, and make ’em good.»
Herries stripped the clothes off his thick hairy body, went to the rear of the cabin, and entered the shower cubby. He left the door open, to listen in. A boss was always lonely. Maybe he should have married when he had the chance. But then he wouldn’t be here. Except for Symonds, who was a widower and in any case more a government than company man, Transoco had been hiring only young bachelors for operations in the field.