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.