"Ow!" Lex shouted, grabbing her hair. "He bit me!"
"He what?" Grant said.
"He bit me! He bit me!" When she took her band away, he saw blood on her fingers.
Up in the sky, two more dactyls folded their wings, collapsing into small dark shapes that plummeted toward the ground. They made a kind of scream as they hurtled downward.
"Come on!" Grant said, grabbing their hands. They ran across the meadow, bearing the approaching scream, and he flung himself on the ground at the last moment, pulling the kids down with him, as the two dactyls whistled and squeaked past them, flapping their wings. Grant felt claws tear the shirt along his back.
Then he was up, pulling Lex back onto her feet, and running with Tim a few feet forward while overhead two more birds wheeled and dove toward them, screaming. At the last moment, he pushed the kids to the ground, and the big shadows flapped past.
"Uck," Lex said, disgusted. He saw that she was streaked with white droppings from the birds.
Grant scrambled to his feet. "Come on!"
He was about to run when Lex shrieked in terror. He turned back and saw that one of the dactyls had grabbed her by the shoulders with its hind claws. The animal's huge leathery wings, translucent in the sunlight, flapped broadly on both sides of her. The dactyl was trying to take off, but Lex was too heavy, and while it struggled it repeatedly jabbed at her head with its long pointed jaw.
Lex was screaming, waving her arms wildly. Grant did the only thing he could think to do. He ran forward and jumped up, throwing himself against the body of the dactyl. He knocked it onto its back on the ground, and fell on top of the furry body. The animal screamed and snapped; Grant ducked his head away from the jaws and pushed back, as the giant wings beat around his body. It was like being in a tent In a windstorm. He couldn't see; he couldn't hear; there was nothing but the flapping and shrieking and the leathery membranes. The clawed legs scratched frantically at his chest. Lex was screaming. Grant pushed away from the dactyl and it squeaked and gibbered as it flapped its wings and struggled to turn over, to right itself. Finally it pulled in its wings like a bat and rolled over, lifted itself up on its little wing claws, and began to walk that way. He paused, astonished.
It could walk on its wings! Lederer's speculation was right! But then the other dactyls were diving down at them and Grant was dizzy, off balance, and in horror he saw Lex run away, her arms over her head… Tim shouting at the top of his lungs…
The first of them swooped down and she threw something and suddenly the dactyl whistled and climbed. The other dactyls immediately climbed and chased the first into the sky. The fourth dactyl flapped awkwardly into the air to join the others. Grant looked upward, squinting to see what had happened. The three dactyls chased the first, screaming angrily.
They were alone in the field.
"What happened?" Grant said.
"They got my glove," Lex said. "My Darryl Strawberry special."
They started walking again. Tim put his arm around her shoulders. "Are you all right?"
"Of course, stupid," she said, shaking him off. She looked upward. "I hope they choke and die," she said.
"Yeah," Tim said. "Me, too-"
Up ahead, they saw the boat on the shore. Grant looked at his watch. It was eight-thirty. He now had two and a half hours to get back.
Lex cheered as they drifted beyond the silver aviary dome. Then the banks of the river closed in on both sides, the trees meeting overhead once more. The river was narrower than ever, in some places only ten feet wide, and the current flowed very fast. Lex reached up to touch the branches as they went past.
Grant sat back in the raft and listened to the gurgle of the water through the warm rubber. They were moving faster now, the branches overhead slipping by more rapidly. It was pleasant. It gave a little breeze in the hot confines of the overhanging branches. And it meant they would get back that much sooner.
Grant couldn't guess how far they had come, but it must be several miles at least from the sauropod building where they had spent the night. Perhaps four or five miles. Maybe even more. That meant they might be only an hour's walk from the hotel, once they left the raft. But after the aviary, Grant was in no hurry to leave the river again. For the moment, they were making good time.
"I wonder how Ralph is," Lex said. "He's probably dead or something."
"I'm sure he's fine."
"I wonder if he'd let me ride him." She sighed, sleepy in the sun. "That would be fun, to ride Ralph."
Tim said to Grant, "Remember back at the stegosaurus? Last night?"
"Yes."
"How come you asked them about frog DNA?"
"Because of the breeding," Grant said. "They can't explain why the dinosaurs are breeding, since they irradiate them, and since they're all females."
"Right."
"Well, irradiation is notoriously unreliable and probably doesn't work. I think that'll eventually be shown here. But there is still the problem of the dinosaurs' being female. How can they breed when they're all female?"
"Right," Tim said.
"Well, across the animal kingdom, sexual reproduction exists in extraordinary variety."
"Tim's very interested in sex," Lex said.
They both ignored her. "For example," Grant said, "many animals have sexual reproduction without ever having what we would call sex. The male releases a spermatophore, which contains the sperm, and the female picks it up at a later time. This kind of exchange does not require quite as much physical differentiation between male and female as we usually think exists. Male and female are more alike in some animals than they are in human beings."
Tim nodded. "But what about the frogs?"
Grant heard sudden shrieks from the trees above, as the microceratopsians scattered in alarm, shaking the branches. The big head of the tyrannosaur lunged through the foliage from the left, the jaws snapping at the raft. Lex howled in terror, and Grant paddled away toward the opposite bank, but the river here was only ten feet wide. The tyrannosaur was caught in the heavy growth- it butted and twisted its head, and roared. Then it pulled its head back.
Through the trees that lined the riverbank, they saw the huge dark form of the tyrannosaur, moving north, looking for a gap in the trees that lined the bank. The microceratopsians had all gone to the opposite bank, where they shrieked and scampered and jumped up and down. In the raft, Grant, Tim, and Lex stared helplessly as the tyrannosaur tried to break through again, But the trees were too dense along the banks of the river. The tyrannosaur again moved downstream, ahead of the boat, and tried again, shaking the branches furiously.
But again it failed.
Then it moved off, heading farther downstream.
"I hate him," Lex said.
Grant sat back in the boat, badly shaken. If the tyrannosaur had broken through, there was nothing be could have done to save them. The river was so narrow that it was hardly wider than the raft. It was like being in a tunnel. The rubber gunwales often scraped on the mud as the boat was pulled along by the swift current.
He glanced at his watch. Almost nine. The raft continued downstream.
"Hey," Lex said, "listen!"
He heard snarling, interspersed by a repeated hooting cry. The cries were coming from beyond a curve, farther downriver. He listened, and heard the hooting again.
"What is it?" Lex said.
"I don't know," Grant said. "But there's more than one of them." He paddled the boat to the opposite bank, grabbed a branch to stop the raft. The snarling was repeated. Then more hooting.
"It sounds like a bunch of owls," Tim said.
Malcolm groaned. "Isn't it time for more morphine yet?"
"Not yet," Ellie said.
Malcolm sighed. "How much water have we got here?"
"I don't know. There's plenty of running water from the tap-"
"No, I mean, how much stored? Any?"
Ellie shrugged. "None."
"Go into the rooms on this floor," Malcolm said, "and fill the bathtubs with water."
Ellie frowned.
"Also," Malcolm said, "have we got any walkie-talkies? Flashlights? Matches? Sterno stoves? Things like that?"