“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.”