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.

  The tyrannosaur staggered in the other direction, spilling its entrails. Its screams took on a ghastly human note. Somebody stopped and picked up Worth. Somebody else came to Herries and gabbled at him. The tyrannosaur stumbled in yards of gut, fell slowly, and struggled, entangling itself.

  Even so, it was hard to kill. The cars battered it for half an hour as it lay there, and it hissed at them and beat the ground with its tail. Herries was not sure it had died when he and his men finally left. But the insects had long been busy, and a few of the bones already stood forth clean white.

  * * *

  The phone jangled on Herries’ desk. He picked it up. “Yeh?”

  “Yamaguchi in sick bay,” said the voice. “Thought you’d want to know about Worth.”

  “Well?”

  “Broken lumbar vertebra. He’ll live, possibly without permanent paralysis, but he’ll have to go back for treatment.”

  “And be held incommunicado a year, till his contract’s up. I wonder how much of a patriot he’ll be by that time.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Can it wait till tomorrow? Everything’s so disorganized right now, I’d hate to activate the projector.”

  “Oh yes. He’s under sedation anyway.” Yamaguchi paused. “And the man who died—”

  “Sure. We’ll ship him back too. The government will even supply a nice coffin. I’m sure his girl friend will appreciate that.”

  “Do you feel well?” asked Yamaguchi sharply.

  “They were going to be married,” said Herries. He took another pull from the fifth of bourbon on his desk. It was getting almost too dark to see the bottle. “Since patriotism nowadays…in the future, I mean…in our own home, sweet home…since patriotism is necessarily equated with necrophilia, in that the loyal citizen is expected to rejoice every time his government comes up with a newer gadget for mass-producing corpses…I am sure the young lady will just love to have a pretty coffin. So much nicer than a mere husband. I’m sure the coffin will be chrome plated.”

  “Wait a minute—”

  “With tail fins.”

  “Look here,” said the doctor, “you’re acting like a case of combat fatigue. I know you’ve had a shock today. Come see me and I’ll give you a tranquilizer.”

  “Thanks,” said Herries. ‘‘I’ve got one.” He took another swig and forced briskness into his tone. “We’ll send ’em back tomorrow morning, then. Now don’t bother me. I’m composing a letter to explain to the great white father that this wouldn’t have happened if we’d been allowed one stinking little atomic howitzer. Not that I expect to get any results. It’s policy that we aren’t allowed heavy weapons down here, and who ever heard of facts affecting a policy? Why, facts might be un-American.”

  He hung up, put the bottle on his lap and his feet on the desk, lit a cigarette and stared out the window. Darkness came sneaking across the compound like smoke. The rain had stopped for a while, and lamps and windows threw broken yellow gleams off puddles, but somehow the gathering night so thick that each light seemed quite alone. There was no else in the headquarters shack this hour. Herries had not turned on his own lights.

  To hell with it, he thought. To hell with it.

  His cigarette tip waxed and waned as he puffed, like a small dying star. But the smoke didn’t taste right when invisible. Or had he put away so many toasts to dead men that his tongue was numbed? He wasn’t sure. It hardly mattered.

  The phone shrilled again. He picked it up, fumble-handed in the murk. “Chief of operations,” he said pleasantly. “To hell with you.”

  “What?” Symonds’ voice rattled a bare bit. Then: “I have been trying to find you. What are you doing there this late?”

  “I’ll give you three guesses. Playing pinochle? No. Carrying on a sordid affair with a lady iguanodon? No. None of your business? Right! Give that gentleman a box of see-gars.”

  “Look here, Mr. Herries,” wasped Symonds, “this is no time for levity. I understand that Matthew Worth was seriously injured today. He was supposed to be on guard duty tonight—the secret shipment. This has disarranged all my plans.”

  “Tsk-tsk-tsk. My nose bleeds for you.”

  “The schedule of duties must be revised. According to my notes, Worth would have been on guard from midnight until 4 A.M. Since I do not know precisely what other jobs his fellows are assigned to, I cannot single any one of them out to replace him. Will you do so? Select a man who can then sleep later tomorrow morning?”

  “Why?” asked Herries.

  “Why? Because—because—”

  “I know. Because Washington said so. Washington is afraid some nasty dinosaur from what is going to be Russia will sneak in and look at an unguarded crate and hurry home with the information. Sure, I’ll do it. I just wanted to hear you sputter.”

  Herries thought he made out an indignant breath sucked past an upper plate. “Very good,” said the clerk. “Make the necessary arrangements for tonight, and we will work out a new rotation of watches tomorrow.”

  Herries put the receiver back.

  The list of tight-lipped, tight-minded types was somewhere in his desk, he knew vaguely. A copy, rather. Symonds had a copy, and no doubt there would be copies going to the Pentagon and the FBI and the Transoco personnel office and—Well, look at the list, compare it with the work schedule, see who wouldn’t be doing anything of critical importance tomorrow forenoon, and put him on a bit of sentry-go. Simple.

  Herries took another swig. He could resign, he thought. He could back out of the whole fantastically stupid, fantastically meaningless operation. He wasn’t compelled to work. Of course, they could hold him for the rest of his contract. It would be a lonesome year. Or maybe not; maybe a few others would trickle in to keep him company. To be sure, he’d then be under surveillance the rest of his life. But who wasn’t, in a century divided between two garrisons?

  The trouble was, he thought, there was nothing a man could do about the situation. You could become a peace-at-any-cost pacifist and thereby, effectively, league yourself with the enemy; and the enemy had carried out too many cold massacres for any halfway sane man to stomach. Or you could fight back (thus becoming more and more like what you fought) and hazard planetary incineration against the possibility of a tolerable outcome. It only took one to make a quarrel, and the enemy had long ago elected himself that one. Now, it was probably too late to patch up the quarrel. Even if important men on both sides wished for a disengagement, what could they do against their own fanatics, vested interests, terrified common people…against the whole momentum of history?

  Hell take it, thought Herries, we may be damned but why must we be fools in the bargain?

  Somewhere a brontosaur hooted, witlessly plowing through a night swamp.

  Well, I’d better—No!

  Herries stared at the end of his cigarette. It was almost scorching his fingers. At least, he thought, at least he could find out what he was supposed to condone. A look into those crates, which should have held the guns he had begged for, and perhaps some orchestral and scientific instruments…and instead held God knew what piece of Pentagonal-brained idiocy…a look would be more than a blow in Symonds’ smug eye. It would be an assertion that he was Herries, a free man, whose existence had not yet been pointlessly spilled from a splintered skull. He, the individual, would know what the Team planned; and if it turned out to be a crime against reason, he could at the very least resign and sit out whatever followed.

  Yes. By the dubious existence of divine mercy, yes.

  * * *

  Again a little rain, just a small warm touch on his face, like tears. Herries splashed to the transceiver building and stood quietly in the sudden flashlight glare. At last, out of blackness, the sentry’s voice came: “Oh, it’s you, sir.”

  “Uh-huh. You know Worth got hurt today? I’m taking his watch.”

  “What? But I thought—”

  “Policy,” said Herries.

  The incantation seemed to suffice. The other man shuffled forth and laid his rifle in the engineer’s hands. “And here’s the glim,” he added. “Nobody came by while I was on duty.”

  “What would you have done if somebody’d tried to get in?”

  “Why, stopped them, of course.”

  “And if they didn’t stop?”

  The dim face under the dripping hat turned puzzledly toward Herries. The engineer sighed. ‘‘I’m sorry, Thornton. It’s too late to raise philosophical questions. Run along to bed.”

  He stood in front of the door, smoking a damp cigarette, and watched the man trudge away. All the lights were out now, except overhead lamps here and there. They were brilliant, but remote; he stood in a pit of shadow and wondered what the phase of the Moon was and what kind of constellations the stars made nowadays.

  He waited. There was time enough for his rebellion. Too much time, really. A man stood in rain, fog about his feet and a reptile smell in his nose, and he remembered anemones in springtime, strewn under trees still cold and leafless, with here and there a little snow between the roots. Or he remembered drinking beer in a New England country inn one fall day when the door stood open to red sumac and yellow beech and a far blue wandering sky. Or he remembered a man snatched under black Jurassic quagmires, a man stepped into red ruin, a man sitting in a jeep and bleeding brains down onto the picture of the girl he had planned to marry. And then he started wondering what the point of it all was, and decided that it was either without any point whatsoever or else had the purpose of obliterating anemones and quiet country inns, and he was forced to dissent somehow.

  When Thornton’s wet footsteps were lost in the dark, Herries unlocked the shed door and went through. It was smotheringly hot inside. Sweat sprang forth under his raincoat as he closed the door again and turned on his flashlight. Rain tapped loudly on the roof. The crates loomed over him, box upon box, many of them large enough to hold a dinosaur. It had taken a lot of power to ship all that tonnage into the past. No wonder taxes were high. And what might the stuff be? A herd of tanks, possibly…some knocked-down bombers…Lord knew what concept the men who lived in offices, insulated from the sky, would come up with. And Symonds had implied it was just a beginning; there would be more shipments when this had been stored out of the way, and more, and more.

  Herries found a workbench and helped himself to tools. He would have to be careful; no sense in going to jail. He laid the flashlight on a handy barrel and stooped down by one of the crates. It was of strong wood, securely screwed together. But while that would make it harder to dismantle, it could be reassembled without leaving a trace. Maybe. Of course, it might be booby trapped. No telling how far the religion of secrecy could lead the office men.

  Oh, well, if I’m blown up I haven’t lost much. Herries peeled off his slicker. His shirt clung to his body. He squatted and began to work.

  It went slowly. After taking off several boards, he saw a regular manufacturer’s crate, open-slatted. Something within was wrapped in burlap. A single curved metal surface projected slightly. What the devil? Herries got a crowbar and pried one slat loose. The nails shrieked. He stooped rigid for a while, listening, but there was only the rain, grown more noisy. He reached in and fumbled with the padding… God, it was hot!

  Only when he had freed the entire blade did he recognize what it was. And then his mind would not quite function; he gaped a long while before the word registered.

  A plowshare.

  “But they don’t know what to do with the farm surpluses at home,” he said aloud, inanely.

  Like a stranger’s, his hands began to repair what he had torn apart. He couldn’t understand it. Nothing seemed altogether real any more. Of course, he thought in a dim way, theoretically anything might be in the other boxes, but he suspected more plows, tractors, discs, combines…why not bags of seeds…? What were they planning to do?

  “Ah.”

  Herries whirled. The flashlight beam caught him like a spear.

  He grabbed blindly for his rifle. A dry little voice behind the blaze said: “I would not recommend violence.” Herries let the rifle fall. It thudded.

  Symonds closed the shed door behind him and stepped forward in his mincing fashion, another shadow among bobbing misshapen shadows. He had simply flung on shirt and pants, but bands of night across them suggested necktie, vest, and coat.

  “You see,” he explained without passion, “all the guards were instructed sub rosa to notify me if there was anything unusual, even when it did not seem to warrant action on their part.” He gestured at the crate. “Please continue reassembling it.”

  Herries crouched down again. There was a hollowness in him, his only wonder was how best to die. For if he were sent back to the twentieth century, surely, surely they would lock him up and lose the key, and the sunlessness of death was better than that. It was strange, he thought, how his fingers used the tools with untrembling skill.

  Symonds stood behind him and held his light on the work. After a long while he asked primly, “Why did you break in like this?”

  I could kill him, thought Herries. He’s unarmed. I could wring his scrawny neck between these two hands, and take a gun, and go into the swamp to live a few days…But it might be easier all around just to turn the rifle on myself.

  He sought words with care, for he must decide what to do, even though it seemed remote and scarcely important. “That’s not an easy question to answer,” he said.

  “The significant ones never are.”

  Astonished, Herries jerked a glance upward and back. (And was the more surprised that he could still know surprise.) But the little man’s face was in darkness. Herries saw only a wan blank glitter off the glasses.