They met in the visitor building: two stories high, and all glass with exposed black anodized girders and supports. Weiss found it determinedly high-tech.

There was a small auditorium dominated by a robot Tyrannosaurus rex, poised menacingly by the entrance to an exhibit area labeled WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH. Farther on were other displays: WHAT IS A DINOSAUR? and THE MESOZOIC WORLD. But the exhibits weren't completed; there were wires and cables all over try floor.

They left the visitor area behind, and soon they heard the loud hum of generators, smelled the faint odor of gasoline. They passed a grove of palm trees and saw a large, low concrete shed with a steel roof. The noise seemed to come from there. They looked in the shed.

"It must be a generator," Yang said.

"It's big," Ruby said, peering inside.

the power plant actually extended two stories below ground level: a vast complex of whining turbines and piping that ran down in the earth, lit by harsh electric bulbs. "They can't need all this just for a resort," Blake said. "They're generating enough power here for a small city."

"Maybe for the computers?"

"Maybe."

Blake heard bleating, and walked north a few yards. She came to an animal enclosure with goats. By a quick count, she estimated there were fifty or sixty goats.

"What's that for?" Ruby asked.

"Beats me."

"Probably feed 'em to the dinosaurs," Nora said.

The group walked on, following a dirt path through a dense bamboo grove. At the far side, they came to a double-layer chain-link fence twelve feet high, with spirals of barbed wire at the top. There was an electric him along the outer fence.

Beyond the fences, Ruby saw dense clusters of large ferns, five feet high. She heard a snorting sound, a kind of snuffling. Then the sound of crunching footsteps, coming closer.

Then a long silence.

"I don't see anything," Jaune whispered, finally

"Ssssh."

Blake waited. Several seconds passed. Flies buzzed in the air. She still saw nothing.

Yang tapped her on the shoulder, and pointed. Amid the ferns, Blake saw the head of an animal. It was motionless, partially hidden in the fronds, the two large dark eyes watching them coldly.

The head was two feet long. From a long pointed snout, a long row of teeth ran back to the hole of auditory meatus which served as an ear. The head reminded her of a large lizard, or perhaps a crocodile. The eyes did not blink, the animal did not move. Its skin was leathery, with a pebbled texture, and basically the same coloration as the infant's: yellow-brown with darker reddish markings, like the striped of a tiger.

As Ruby watched, a single forelimb reached up very slowly to part the ferns beside the animal's face. The limb, Ruby saw was strongly muscled. The hand had three grasping fingers, each ending in curved claws. The hand gently, slowly, pushed aside the ferns.

Ruby felt a chill and whispered, "He's hunting us."

For a mammal like man and faunas, there was something indescribably alien about the way reptiles hunted their prey. No wonder man hated reptiles. The stillness, the coldness, the pace was all wrong. To be among alligators or other large reptiles was to be reminded of a different kind of life, a different kind of world, now vanished from remnant. Of course, this animal didn't realize that he had been spotted, that he—

The attack came suddenly, from left and right. Charging raptors covered the ten yards to the fence with shocking speed. Speed that would put Ruby's to shame. Yang had a blurred impression of powerful, six-foot-tall bodies, stiff balancing tails, limbs with curving claws, open jaws with rows of jagged teeth.

The animals snarled as they came forward, and then leapt bodily into the air, raising their hind legs with their dagger-claws. Then they struck the fence in front of them, throwing off twin bursts of hot sparks.

The velociraptors fell backward to the ground, hissing. The visitors all moved forward, fascinated. Only then did the third animal attack, leaping up to strike the fence at chest level. Ruby screamed in fright as the Sparks exploded all around her. The creatures snarled, a low reptilian hissing sound, and leapt back among the ferns. Then they were gone, leaving behind a faint odor of decay, and hanging acid smoke.

"Holy shit," Ruby said, surprising the others, as she didn't usually cuss.

"It was so fast," Weiss said.

"Pack hunters," Blake said, shaking her head. "Pack hunters for whom ambush is an instinct . . . Fascinating."

"I wouldn't call them tremendously intelligent," Pyrrha said.

On the other side of the fence, they heard snorting in the palm trees. Several heads poked slowly out of the foliage. Blake counted three . . . four . . . five . . . The animals watched them, staring coldly.

A black man in coveralls came running up to them. "Are you alright?"

"We're okay," Ruby said.

"The alarms were set off." The man looked at the fence, dented and charred. "They attacked you?"

"Three of them did, yes."

The black man nodded. "They do that all the time. Hit the fence, take a shock. They never seem to mind."

"Not too smart, are they?" Weiss asked.

The black man paused. He squinted at Weiss in the afternoon light. "Be glad for that fence," he said, and turned away.

From beginning to end, the attack could not have taken more than six seconds. Blake was still trying to organize her impressions. The speed was astonishing—the animals were so fast, she had hardly seen them move. Walking back, Yang said, "They are remarkably fast,"

"Yes," Blake said. "Much faster than Ruby."

"They would kill us and eat us if they could?" Ruby said.

"I think so."

"The reason I ask," Ruby said, "is that I'm told large predators such as lions and tigers are not born man-eaters. Isn't that true? These animals must learn somewhere along the way that human beings are easy to kill. Only afterward do they become man-killers."

"Yes, I believe that's true," Blake said.

"Well, these dinosaurs must be even more reluctant than lions and tigers. After all, they come from a time before humans and faunas—or even large mammals—existed at all. God knows what they think when they see us. So I wonder: have they learned, somewhere along the line, that humans and faunas are easy to kill?"

The group fell silent as they walked.