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.”