“But—Judas priest!” Herries threw his cigarette to the ground; it was swallowed in mud and running water. He felt the heat enfold him like a blanket. “There’s the labor too, the machinery, and—How the devil am I expected to expand this operation if—”

  “Expansion will be temporarily halted,” cut in Symonds. “You will simply maintain current operations with skeleton crews. The majority of the labor force is to be reassigned to construction.”

  “What?”

  “The compound fence must be extended and reinforced. A number of new storehouses are to be erected, to hold certain supplies which will presently be sent to us. Bunkhouse barges for an additional five hundred are required. This, of course, entails more sickbay, recreational, mess, laundry, and other facilities.”

  Herries stood dumbly, staring at him. Pale lightning flickered in the sky.

  The worst of it was, Symond’s didn’t even bother to be arrogant. He spoke like a schoolmaster.

  “Oh no!” whispered Herries after a long while. “They’re not going to try to establish that Jurassic military base after all!”

  “The purpose is classified.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Classified. Arise, ye duly cleared citizens of democracy and cast your ballot on issues whose nature is classified, that your leaders whose names and duties are classified may—Great. Hopping. Balls. Of. Muck.” Herries swallowed: Vaguely, through his pulse, he felt his fingers tighten into fists.”

  ‘‘I’m going up,” he said. “I’m going to protest personally in Washington.”

  “That is not permitted, Symonds said in a dry, clipped tone. “Read your contract. You are under martial law. Of course,” and his tone was neither softer nor harder, “you may file a written recommendation.”

  Herries stood for a while. Out beyond the fence stood a bulldozer wrecked and abandoned. The vines had almost buried it and a few scuttering little marsupials lived there. Perhaps they were his own remote ancestors. He could take a .22 and go potshooting at them some day.

  “I’m not permitted to know anything,” he said at last. “But is curiosity allowed? An extra five hundred men aren’t much. I suppose given a few airplanes and so on, a thousand of us could plant atomic bombs where enemy cities will be. Or could we? Can’t locate them without astronomical studies first, and it’s always clouded here. So it would be practical to booby trap only with mass-action weapons. A few husky cobalt bombs, say. But there are missiles available to deliver those in the twentieth century. So…what is the purpose?”

  “You will learn the facts in due course,” answered Symonds. “At present, the government has certain military necessities.”

  “Haw!” said Herries. He folded his arms and leaned against the roofpost. It sagged a bit…shoddy work, shoddy world, shoddy destiny. “Military horses’ necks! I’d like to get one of those prawn-eyed brass hats down here, just for a week, to run his precious security check on a lovesick brontosaur. But I’ll probably get another visit from Senator Lardhead, the one who took up two days of my time walking around asking about the possibilities of farming. Farming!”

  “Senator Wien is from an agricultural state. Naturally he would be interested—”

  “—in making sure that nobody here starts raising food and shipping it back home to bring grocery prices down to where people can afford an occasional steak. Sure. I’ll bet it cost us a thousand man-hours to make his soil tests and tell him, yes, given the proper machinery this land could be farmed. Of course, maybe I do him an injustice. Senator Wien is also on the Military Affairs Committee, isn’t he? He may have visited us in that capacity, and soon we’ll all get a directive to start our own little Victory gardens.”

  “Your language is close to being subversive,” declared Symonds out of prune-wrinkled lips. “Senator Wien is a famous statesman.”

  For a moment the legislator’s face rose in Herries’ memory; and it had been the oldest and most weary face he had ever known. Something had burned out in the man who had fought a decade for honorable peace; the knowledge that there was no peace and could be none became a kind of death, and Senator Wien dropped out of his Free World Union organization to arm his land for Ragnarok. Briefly, his anger fading, Herries pitied Senator Wien. And the President, and the Chief of Staff, and the Secretary of State, for their work must be like a nightmare where you strangled your mother and could not stop your hands. It was easier to fight dinosaurs.

  He even pitied Symonds, until he asked if his request for an atomic weapon had finally been okayed, and Symonds replied, “Certainly not.” Then he spat at the clerk’s feet and walked out into the rain.

  * * *

  After the shipment and guards were seen to, Herries dismissed his men. There was an uneasy buzz among them at the abnormality of what had arrived; but today was mail day, after all, and they did not ponder it long. He would not make the announcement about the new orders until tomorrow. He got the magazines and newspapers to which he subscribed (no one up there “now” cared enough to write to him, though his parents had existed in a section of spacetime which ended only a year before he took this job) and wandered off to the boss barge to read a little.

  The twentieth century looked still uglier than it had last month. The nations felt their pride and saw no way of retreat. The Middle Eastern war was taking a decisive turn which none of the great powers could afford. Herries wondered if he might not be cut off in the Jurassic. A single explosion could destroy the main projector. Five hundred womanless men in a world of reptiles—he’d take the future, cobalt bomb and all.

  After lunch there was a quiet, Sunday kind of atmosphere, men lay on their bunks reading their letters over and over. Herries made his rounds, machines and kitchen and sickbay, inspecting.

  “I guess we’ll discharge O’Connor tomorrow,” said Dr. Yamaguchi. “He can do light work with that Stader on his arm. Next time tell him to duck when a power shovel comes down.”

  “What kind of sick calls have you been getting?” asked the chief.

  Yamaguchi shrugged. “Usual things, very minor. I’d never have thought this swamp country would be so healthful. I guess disease germs which can live on placental mammals haven’t evolved yet.”

  Father Gonzales, one of the camp’s three chaplains, buttonholed Herries as he came out. “Can you spare me a minute?” he said.

  “Sure, padre. What is it?”

  “About organizing some baseball teams. We need more recreation. This is not a good place for men to live.”

  “Sawbones was just telling me—”

  “I know. No flu, no malaria, oh, yes. But man is more than a body.”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” said Herries. ‘‘I’ve seen the latest headlines. The dinosaurs have more sense than we do.”

  “We have the capacity to do nearly all things,” said Father Gonzales. “At present, I mean in the twentieth century, we seem to do evil very well. We can do as much good, given the chance.”

  “Who’s denying us the chance?” asked Herries. “Just ourselves, H. Sapiens. Therefore I wonder if we really are able to do good.”

  “Don’t confuse sinfulness with damnation,” said the priest. “We have perhaps been unfortunate in our successes. And yet even our most menacing accomplishments have a kind of sublimity. The time projector, for example. If the minds able to shape such a thing in metal were only turned toward human problems, what could we not hope to do?”

  “But that’s my point,” said Herries. “We don’t do the high things. We do what’s trivial and evil so consistently that I wonder if it isn’t in our nature. Even this time travel business…more and more I’m coming to think there’s something fundamentally unhealthy about it. As if it’s an invention which only an ingrown mind would have made first.”

  “First?”

  Herries looked up into the steaming sky. A foul wind met his face. “There are stars above those clouds,” he said, “and most stars must have planets. I’ve not been told how the time projector works, but elementary differential calculus will show that travel into the past is equivalent to attaining, momentarily, an infinite velocity. In other words, the basic natural law which the projector uses is one which somehow goes beyond relativity theory. If a time projector is possible, so is a spaceship which can reach the stars in a matter of days, maybe of minutes or seconds. If we were sane, padre, we wouldn’t have been so anxious for a little organic grease and the little military advantage involved, that the first thing we did was go back into the dead past after it. No, we’d have invented that spaceship first, and gone out to the stars where there’s room to be free and to grow. The time projector would have come afterward, as a scientific research tool.”

  He stopped, embarrassed at himself and trying awkwardly to grin. “Excuse me. Sermons are more your province than mine.”

  “It was interesting,” said Father Gonzales. “But you brood too much. So do a number of the men. Even if they have no close ties at home—it was wise to pick them for that—they are all of above-average intelligence, and aware of what the future is becoming. I’d like to shake them out of their oppression. If we could get some more sports equipment—”

  “Sure. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Of course,” said the priest, “the problem is basically philosophical. Don’t laugh. You too were indulging in philosophy, and doubtless you think of yourself as an ordinary, unimaginative man. Your wildcatters may not have heard of Aristotle, but they are also thinking men in their way. My personal belief is that this heresy of a fixed, rigid time line lies at the root of their growing sorrowfulness, whether they know it or not.”

  “Heresy?” The engineer lifted thick sandy brows. “It’s been proved. It’s the basis of the theory which showed how to build a projector: that much I do know. How could we be here at all, if the Mesozoic were not just as real as the Cenozoic? But if all time is coexistent, then all time must be fixed—unalterable—because every instant is the unchanging past of some other instant.”

  “Perhaps so, from God’s viewpoint,” said Father Gonzales. “But we are mortal men. And we have free will. The fixed-time concept need not, logically, produce fatalism; after all, Herries, man’s will is itself one of the links in the causal chain. I suspect that this irrational fatalism is an important reason why twentieth-century civilization is approaching suicide. If we think we know our future is unchangeable, if our every action is foreordained, if we are doomed already, what’s the use of trying? Why go through all the pain of thought, of seeking an answer and struggling to make others accept it? But if we really believed in ourselves, we would look for a solution, and find one.”

  “Maybe,” said Herries uncomfortably. “Well, give me a list of the equipment you want, and I’ll put in an order for it the next time the mail goes out.”

  As he walked off, he wondered if the mail would ever go out again.

  * * *

  Passing the rec hall, he noticed a small crowd before it and veered to see what was going on. He could not let men gather to trade doubts and terrors, or the entire operation was threatened. In plain English, he told himself with a growing bitter honesty, I can’t permit them to think.

  But the sounds which met him, under the subtly alien rustle of forest leaves and the distant bawl of a thunder lizard, was only a guitar. Chords danced forth beneath expert fingers, and a young voice lilted:

  …I traveled this wide world over,

  A hundred miles or more,

  But a saddle on a milk cow.

  I never seen before!…

  Looking over shoulders, Herries made out Greenstein, sprawled on a bench and singing. There were chuckles from the listeners, Well-deserved: the kid was good; Herries wished he could relax and simply enjoy the performance. Instead, he must note that they were finding it pleasant, and that swamp and war were alike forgotten for a valuable few minutes.

  The song ended. Greenstein stood up and stretched. “Hi, boss,” he said.

  Hard, wind-beaten faces turned to Herries and a mumble of greeting went around the circle. He was well enough liked, he knew, insofar as a chief can be liked. But that is not much. A leader can inspire trust, loyalty, what have you, but he cannot be humanly liked, or he is no leader.

  “That was good,” said Herries. “I didn’t know you played.”

  “I didn’t bring this whangbox with me, since I had no idea where I was going till I got here,” answered Greenstein. “Wrote home for it and it arrived today.”

  A heavy-muscled crewcut man said, “You ought to be on the entertainment committee.” Herries recognized Worth, one of the professional patriots who would be standing guard on Symonds’ crates; but not a bad sort, really, after you learned to ignore his rather tedious opinions.

  Greenstein said an indelicate word. ‘‘I’m sick of committees,” he went on. “We’ve gotten so much into the habit of being herded around—everybody in the twentieth century has—that we can’t even have a little fun without first setting up a committee.”

  Worth looked offended but made no answer. It began to rain again, just a little.

  “Go on now, anyway,” said Joe Eagle Wing. “Let’s not take ourselves so goddam serious. How about another song?”

  “Not in the wet.” Greenstein returned his guitar to its case. The group began to break up, some to the hall and some back toward their barges.

  Herries lingered, unwilling to be left alone with himself. “About that committee,” he said. “You might reconsider. It’s probably true what you claim, but we’re stuck with a situation. We’ve simply got to tell most of the boys, ‘Now it is time to be happy,’ or they never will be.”

  Greenstein frowned. “Maybe so. But hasn’t anyone ever thought of making a fresh start? Of unlearning all those bad habits?”

  “You can’t do that within the context of an entire society’s vices,” said Herries. “And how’re you going to get away?”

  Greenstein gave him a long look. “How the devil did you ever get this job?” he asked. “You don’t sound like a man who’d be cleared for a dishwashing assistantship.”

  Herries shrugged. “All my life, I’ve liked totalitarianism even less than what passes for democracy. I served in a couple of the minor wars and—No matter. Possibly I might not be given the post if I applied now. I’ve been here more than a year, and it’s changed me some.”

  “It must,” said Greenstein, flickering a glance at the jungle.

  “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.