«How’s things at home?» asked Herries, anxious for another subject.
The boy kindled. «Oh, terrific!» he said eagerly. «Miriam, my girl, you know, she’s an artist, and she’s gotten a commission to—»
The loudspeaker coughed and blared across the compound, into the strengthening rain: «Attention! Copter to ground, attention! Large biped dinosaur, about two miles away north-northeast, coming fast.»
Herries cursed and broke into a run.
Greenstein paced him. Water sheeted where their boots struck. «What is it?» he called.
«I don’t know… yet… but it might be… a really big… carnivore.» Herries reached the headquarters shack and flung the door open. A panel of levers was set near his personal desk. He slapped one down and the «combat stations» siren skirted above the field. Herries went on, «I don’t know why anything biped should make a beeline for us unless the smell of blood from the critter we drove off yesterday attracts it. The smaller carnivores are sure as hell drawn. The charged fence keeps them away—but I doubt if it would do much more than enrage a dinosaur—Follow me!»
Jeeps were already leaving their garage when Herries and Greenstein came out. Mud leaped up from their wheels and dripped back off the fenders. The rain fell harder, until the forest beyond the fence blurred; and the earth smoked with vapors. The helicopter hung above the derricks, like a skeleton vulture watching a skeleton army, and the alarm sirens filled the brown air with screaming.
«Can you drive one of these buggies?» asked Herries.
«I did in the Army,» said Greenstein.
«Okay, we’ll take the lead one. The main thing is to stop that beast before it gets in among the wells.» Herries vaulted the right-hand door and planted himself on sopping plastic cushions. There was a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on the hood before him, and the microphone of a police car radio hung at the dash. Five jeeps followed as Greenstein swung into motion. The rest of the crew, ludicrous ants across those wide wet distances, went scurrying with their arms to defend the most vital installations.
The north gate opened and the cars splashed out beyond the fence. There was a strip several yards across, also kept cleared; then the jungle wall rose, black, brown, dull red and green and yellow. Here and there along the fence an occasional bone gleamed up out of the muck, some animal shot by a guard or killed by the voltage. Oddly enough, Herries irrelevantly remembered, such a corpse drew enough scavenging insects to clean it in a day, but it was usually ignored by the nasty man-sized hunter dinosaurs which still slunk and hopped and slithered in this neighborhood. Reptiles just did not go in for carrion. However, they followed the odor of blood…
«Further east,» said the helicopter pilot’s radio voice. «There. Stop. Face the woods. He’s coming out in a minute. Good luck, boss. Next time gimme some bombs and I’ll handle the bugger myself.»
«We haven’t been granted any heavy weapons.» Herries licked lips which seemed rough. His pulse was thick. No one had ever faced a tyrannosaur before.
The jeeps drew into line, and for a moment only their windshield wipers had motion. Then undergrowth crashed, and the monster was upon them.
It was indeed a tyrannosaur, thought Herries in a blurred way. A close relative, at least. It blundered ahead with the overweighted, underwitted stiffness which paleontologists had predicted, and which had led some of them to believe that it must have been a gigantic, carrion-eating hyena! They forgot that, like the Cenozoic snake or crocodile, it was too dull to recognize dead meat as food; that the brontosaurs it preyed on were even more clumsy; and that sheer length of stride would carry it over the scarred earth at a respectable rate.
Herries saw a blunt head three man-heights above ground, and a tail ending fifteen yards away. Scales of an unfairly beautiful steel gray shimmered in the rain, which made small waterfalls off flanks and wrinkled neck and tiny useless forepaws. Teeth clashed in a mindless reflex, the ponderous belly wagged with each step, and Herries felt the vibration of tons coming down claw-footed. The beast paid no attention to the jeeps, but moved jerkily toward the fence. Sheer weight would drive it through the mesh.
«Get in front of him, Sam!» yelled the engineer.
He gripped the machine gun. It snarled on his behalf, and he saw how a sleet of bullets stitched a bloody seam across the white stomach. The tyrannosaur halted, weaving its head about. It made a hollow, coughing roar. Greenstein edged the jeep closer.
The others attacked from the sides. Tracer streams hosed across alligator tail and bird legs. A launched grenade burst with a little puff on the right thigh. It opened a red ulcer-like crater. The tyrannosaur swung slowly about toward one of the cars.
That jeep dodged aside. «Get in on him!» shouted Herries. Greenstein shifted gears and darted through a fountain of mud. Herries stole a glance. The boy was grinning. Well, it would be something to tell the grandchildren, all right!
His jeep fled past the tyrannosaur, whipped about on two wheels, and crouched under a hammer of rain. The reptile halted. Herries cut loose with his machine gun. The monster standing there, swaying a little, roaring and bleeding, was not entirely real. This had happened a hundred million years ago. Rain struck the hot gun barrel and sizzled off.
«From the sides again,» rapped Herries into his microphone. «Two and Three on his right, Four and Five on his left. Six, go behind him and lob a grenade at the base of his tail.»
The tyrannosaur began another awkward about face. The water in which it stood was tinged red.
«Aim for his eyes!» yelled Greenstein, and dashed recklessly toward the profile now presented him.
The grenade from behind exploded. With a sudden incredible speed, the tyrannosaur turned clear around. Herries had an instant’s glimpse of the tail like a snake before him, then it struck.
He threw up an arm and felt glass bounce off it as the windshield shattered. The noise when metal gave way did not seem loud, but it went through his entire body. The jeep reeled on ahead. Instinct sent Herries to the floorboards. He felt a brutal impact as his car struck the dinosaur’s left leg. It hooted far above him. He looked up and saw a foot with talons, raised and filling the sky. It came down. The hood crumpled at his back and the engine was ripped from the frame.
Then the tyrannosaur had gone on. Herries crawled up into the bucket seat. It was canted at a lunatic angle. «Sam,» he croaked. «Sam, Sam.»
Greenstein’s head was brains and splinters, with half the lower jaw on his lap and a burst-out eyeball staring up from the seat beside him.
Herries climbed erect. He saw his torn-off machine gun lying in the mud. A hundred yards off, at the jungle edge, the tyrannosaur fought the jeeps. It made clumsy rushes, which they side-swerved, and they spat at it and gnawed at it. Herries thought in a dull, remote fashion: This can go on forever. A man is easy to kill, one swipe of a tail and all his songs are a red smear in the rain. But a reptile dies hard, being less alive to start with. I can’t see an end to this fight.
The Number Four jeep rushed in. A man sprang from it and it darted back in reverse from the monster’s charge. The man—«Stop that, you idiot,» whispered Herries into a dead microphone, «stop it, you fool»—plunged between the huge legs. He moved sluggishly enough with clay on his boots, but he was impossibly fleet and beautiful under that jerking bulk. Herries recognized Worth. He carried a grenade in his hand. He pulled the pin and dodged claws for a moment. The flabby, bleeding stomach made a roof over his head. Jaws searched blindly above him. He hurled the grenade and ran. It exploded against the tyrannosaur’s belly. The monster screamed. One foot rose and came down. The talons merely clipped Worth, but he went spinning, fell in the gumbo ten feet away and tried weakly to rise but couldn’t.