Bones of the Earth

2. The Riddle of Achilles

Crystal City, Virginia: Cenozoic era. Quaternary period. Holocene epoch. Modern age. 2012 C.E.

Leyster was the only person in the van who wasn’t peering out the windows, excitedly drawing attention to advertisements and the new Metrobuses, leaning into the glass when they passed a construction site. They’d all been given the day’s Washington Post at the Pentagon, and it was a toss-up whether the comics or the editorial pages amused them more. He could understand their nostalgia, but he couldn’t feel it.

To him, it was just the present.

The man beside him turned a cheerful round face his way and stuck out a hand. “Hi! I’m Bill Metzger, and this is my wife, Cedella. We’re from ten years forward.” The woman, smiling, leaned over her husband to shake hands as well. She was noticeably younger than he. It was, if not a May-December marriage, at least a June-October one. “I’m not on the program, but Cedella’s going to be reading a paper on the nasal turbinates of lambeosaurine hadrosaurs.”

“Really? That’s interesting. My paper deals with the nasal turbinates of stegosaurs. And their throat and tongue structure. And a little bit about their brains.”

“That sounds familiar.” Cedella flipped rapidly through her abstracts. “Wasn’t that one I wanted to…” She stopped. “Oh! You’re Richard Leyster! Oh, my goodness. I want to tell you that your book was so—”

Her husband cleared his throat meaningfully.

“Book?”

“Oh, right. It wouldn’t be out yet.” She turned to look out the window again. “Can you imagine wearing such hideous clothes? And yet they didn’t seem so bad at the time.”

Cedella had the most gorgeous Jamaican accent Leyster had ever heard, as rich as caramel pudding, as clear and precise as an algebraic equation. It was a pleasure just to hear her speak.

“Maybe I should hop out and look you up,” Bill said. The marine in the front seat glanced sharply at him, but said nothing. “You were a hot little number then, funky clothes or no.”

“What do you mean were?” She swatted him with her newspaper, and he laughed. “I ought to let you try, old man. I wasn’t all tired out looking after you back then—you’d have a heart attack for certain. And it would serve you right.”

“At least I’d die happy.”

“But what about me? What would I do with the rest of my evening? After the ambulance had hauled your worthless carcass away?”

“You could watch TV.”

“There’s nothing good on that early in the evening.”

The two of them were so happily, sweetly absorbed in each other that Leyster felt sour and crabbed by contrast. He couldn’t help marveling at how fluidly and naturally the words flowed between them. Conversation was never easy for him. He never knew what to say to people.

Bill turned back to him. “Forgive my wayward wife. This is our first trip through time, and I think everybody here’s a little giddy.”

“Not everybody. Some of us live here.”

“Yes, yes, that’s hard to keep in mind, forgive me.” Bill looked out the window again, marveling at what seemed to Leyster a perfectly ordinary tract of row houses. “I can’t believe how much has changed in only ten years. So very many things are going to happen in the next decade!”

“Anything important?”

“Compared to this? Compared to time travel? Nothing. Nothing at all.”

The marine guard who, they’d been told, had orders to shoot anyone who tried to leave the van before being told to, and to whom they had also been directed to say nothing of their origins or destination, looked uncomfortable.

Orientation was held in the Crystal Gateway Marriott. It was easily the strangest conference Leyster had ever attended.

In some ways it was the best. One advantage of time travel was that the Proceedings could be made available at the beginning of the conference. It still took a year or more for the papers to be assembled, edited, and printed, but the books themselves could then be shipped back and sold at the registration table, so they could be carried from talk to talk, and annotated as the papers were presented.

On the negative side, Leyster recognized only a fraction of those present. Paleontology was a small world—there were only two or three thousand professionals in existence at any given moment. Most conferences, he knew everyone of importance, and was at least vaguely familiar with the faces of the rest. Here, though, with professionals recruited across the span of twenty-some years, there were many who were strange to him. Even those he thought he knew had aged and changed to the point where he didn’t feel comfortable approaching them. He was no longer certain who anybody was.

He snagged a bear claw from the buffet, and joined the line for coffee. Bill and Cedella got in line behind him, Bill with a slap on his shoulder, and Cedella with a bright flash of teeth. He was grateful for their company.

Cedella made a face when she took her first sip of coffee. “This stuff is as bad as ever. If we can put a man on the moon and travel a hundred million years into the past, why can’t we make a decent cup of coffee?”

“If you think that’s bad, you should try the decaf.”

“How this man suffers.” She turned to Leyster. “Do you see how he suffers?”

“I’ve been thinking about my book. It’s almost done, only I’m stuck on a title. I was thinking maybe Tracks of Time—”

“Oh, but that’s not the—”

Bill cleared his throat, and Cedella fell silent. “We’re really not supposed to say,” he said gently. “I do apologize, but they were quite firm on that score.”

“Come! The morning keynote speech starts in a few minutes. I want to get a good seat.”

Leyster trailed after them into the Grand Ballroom. There was a happy buzz of anticipation in the room. Everyone was anxious to get things started. When the conference was over, they’d begin preparations for their first field trips back into deep time, to encounter in the flesh what they now knew only from impressions in stone. They were like so many fledglings nervously standing on their cliff face ledge, knowing that soon they would step over the edge, spread wings, and fly.

The seats filled up. Somebody dimmed the lights.

Griffin took the podium. He looked much older than Leyster recalled him being.

“First slide, please.”

The slide showed the cartoon caveman Alley Oop, caressing the head of his faithful dinosaur mount, Dinny. There was light laughter.

“In just a moment we’ll get to what I believe is technically known as ‘the good stuff.’ And what we have is spectacular. In addition to the papers, there will be a film program tonight—actual footage of live dinosaurs from the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. The film has been chosen by your fellow vertebrate paleontologists from generation two, and they’ve taken care that all your favorites will be there. I can guarantee you—there will be surprises.”

Several in the audience applauded.

“However, before we can proceed, I am required to share with you a few of the rules of the road. Everyone here has already been told the penalties for violating secrecy. Today I’m going to explain why those penalties are so Draconian. Now, our physicists have requested that I share with you as little of the mechanics of time travel as possible. Slide?”

The new slide showed a dense throng of mathematical notations. Leyster assumed they were not taken from the actual equations of time travel, but they could have been no more incomprehensible if they had been.

“No problem.”

Laughter.

“In order to hold such conferences as this one, we will be shuttling researchers back and forth across a period of the next century or so. It’s bound to occur to a few of you that there’s a wealth of information to be gleaned from a copy of next year’s newspaper. Lottery numbers. World Cup winners. Stock prices. What’s to keep you from jotting down a few numbers and taking advantage of them? Only one thing:

“Paradox.

“A paradox is anything self-contradictory and yet irreconcilable. For example, the barber of Seville, who shaves everyone in town who doesn’t shave himself. Does he shave himself or not? The statement, ‘This sentence is a lie.’ True or false? A little closer to the bone, a man goes into the past and kills his grandfather as a child, thus preventing his own birth. How can he exist, then, to commit the murder in the first place?

“Without time travel, paradoxes are pleasant logical puzzles which can be neatly dispatched with a tweak in the rules of logic dealing with self-reference. However, once it’s possible to physically invade the childhood of one’s grandparents, the resolution of paradoxes becomes vitally important. So we’ve given this some serious thought.”

Griffin paused, frowning down at his notes for a beat. Nobody made a sound. Leyster did not feel any particular warmth or charisma from the man, but he was clearly alone in this. The entire room was with Griffin.

“It turns out that paradox is deeply embedded in the nature of existence. The two are profoundly interrelated.

“Third slide.” Another cartoon, this one of an athletic man in Greek skirt and lace-up sandals running furiously toward a turtle crawling away from him on the road ahead.

“Consider Zeno’s first paradox. Achilles, the fastest man in the world, wishes to overtake a tortoise on the road ahead of him. He races toward it as swiftly as he can. However, by the time he reaches where the tortoise was, the tortoise is no longer there. It has moved a little further down the road. No problem. He simply races to that new spot. However, when he arrives there, he finds again that the tortoise has moved away. No matter how many times he tries, he can never catch up with the tortoise.”

Griffin produced a tennis ball from the pocket of his jacket. He tossed it lightly into the air, caught it on the way down. “Consider also, Zeno’s third paradox. Achilles draws his bow and shoots an arrow at a tree. The tree is not far distant. But in order for the arrow to reach the tree, it must first travel half the distance from the bow to the tree. In order to reach that midway point, it must travel half of that distance. And so on. In order to arrive anywhere, the arrow must perform an infinite number of operations. Which will take it an infinite amount of time. Obviously, it can never move.”

Suddenly he threw the ball as hard as he could. With a soft boom, it hit the closed ballroom doors and bounced away, up the aisle.

“Nevertheless—it moves. Paradox can and does happen. This is the riddle of Achilles. How can the seemingly self-contradictory exist so easily in this world?

“And to this riddle we have no answer.

“Now, in just a minute, I’m going to leave the room, and take a limo back to the Pentagon. The trip takes roughly half an hour. I’ll travel an hour into the past—so that I’ll emerge from the Pentagon exactly one half hour ago. A car will be waiting for me. I’ll ride it back here to the Marriott. The driver will let me off at the front door. I’ll walk through the lobby, down the hall, and to the closed doors of the Grand Ballroom.”

Heads were already beginning to swivel.

“And I’ll enter the room… now.”

The doors opened and Griffin strode in, smiling jauntily and waving as he made his way to the stage.

The two identical men shook hands.

“Griffin, good to see you.”

“Good to see you, Griffin.” The earlier Griffin addressed the audience: “As you can see, it is indeed possible for the same object to be in two places at the same time.” He handed the later Griffin the microphone. “And now I must leave to take that limo I told you about earlier, because—well, I’ll let my one-hour-older self tell you why. With age comes wisdom, you know.”

Down the aisle Griffin went. He stooped to pick up the tennis ball along the way, and then disappeared through the double doors.

His other self reached into a pocket and set that same tennis ball atop the podium. “There goes the pragmatic resolution of our dilemma. By making a simple loop in time, I was able to witness the same moment from two different perspectives. Causality was not violated. There was no paradox involved.

“Similarly, all your actions in the past—all your future actions, everything you will do—have already existed for millions of years, and are a part of what led inevitably to this present moment. Don’t obsess about the repercussions of simple actions. Step on as many butterflies as you wish—the present is safe.

“However, suppose when I entered the room just now, I decided to behave differently than I had witnessed myself behaving the first time. Suppose that rather than shake hands, I’d decided to punch myself out. Suppose then my earlier self had become so irate that he refused to travel into the past. What then?”

“It couldn’t have happened!” somebody called from the audience. “It didn’t—so it couldn’t.”

“So common sense would tell you. However—slide!” The incomprehensible physical equations again filled the screen. “Common sense has very little to do with physics. Unhappily, paradox is only too possible.

“Let’s imagine that when I came into this room, with this tennis ball in my pocket, I kicked the original of it out of my way in the aisle, sending it skittering in among this amiable sea of friendly faces. This would have prevented my earlier self from picking it up in the first place. Where, then, would this tennis ball have come from? Suppose also that I subsequently took this ball and gave it to my earlier self to take back in time so I could bring it here to pass back into time.” He tossed the ball back and forth between his hands. “Where did it come from? Where does it go? If it came spontaneously into being, as a miracle of quantum physics, then why does it have the Spalding logo stamped into its side?”

Nobody laughed. A few in the audience cleared their throats uncomfortably.

“Either of those instances—the refusal to perform a previously witnessed act, or the tennis ball from nowhere—would have been a massive violation of cause and effect. There are extremely good reasons why this cannot be allowed to occur. I am not permitted even to hint at these reasons, but I can assure you that we take them very seriously indeed.

“The bottom line is simply this: Could you go back in time and kill your own grandfather? Yes and no. Yes, it could happen. There’s nothing in the physical nature of reality to prevent it. No, we won’t permit it to happen.

“We have means of detecting a paradox before it actually happens—and, again, I won’t tell you what they are. But any threat to this precious and fragile enterprise will be nipped in the bud, I can assure you that. And those responsible will be punished. No exceptions. And no clemency, either.”

He slipped the tennis ball back in his pocket. “Any questions?”

A spry old gent who might have been the father of someone Leyster once worked with, stood. “What if, in spite of your best efforts, a paradox slips by you?”

“The entire project would be canceled. Retroactively. By which I mean that this wonderful opportunity will then have never been placed before you. It’s harsh, but—I have been assured by those who know—absolutely necessary.”

A woman stood. “What would become of us, then?”

“Cut free from causality, our entire history from that moment onward would become a timelike loop and dissolve.”

“Excuse me. What does that mean?”

Griffin smiled. “No comment.”

Leyster thrust up his hand.

“Mr. Leyster. Somehow I knew that you would be one of those asking questions.”

“This technology—whatever it is—must be expensive.”

“Extremely so.”

“So why us?

“Is that a complaint?” Griffin asked. Amid laughter, he clamped a hand over his watch, glanced down, and then up again. “Any further questions?”

Leyster remained standing. “I just don’t understand why this technology is being made available for our use. Why paleontologists? Why not the military, the CIA…” He fumbled for another plausible alternative, “…politicians? We all know how little money was spent last year on fieldwork, worldwide. Why are we suddenly important enough to rate the big bucks?”

There were annoyed sounds from the audience.

Griffin frowned. “I fail to see why you’re opposed to this project.”

“I’m not—”

“No, listen to me! I’ve come here bearing the greatest gift that anyone has ever received, and it’s being presented to you at no cost whatsoever. Yes, there are a few strings attached. But, my God, they’re extremely light, and what you get—the opportunity to study real, living dinosaurs—is so extraordinary, that I’d think you’d be grateful!”

“I only—”

People were actually shouting at him now. The crowd belonged to Griffin. It was more than the fact that he controlled access to the one thing they all wanted more than anything else. He knew how to manipulate them. A salesman had once told Leyster that the first thing he did was to find out a prospect’s name. Once the name was dropped into the spiel, he said, the prospect was halfway to being sold. What Griffin was doing was more complex than that. But no more sincere.

They don’t want to know, he thought. They’ve received something they know they don’t deserve, and they’re not willing to ask the price. They’re afraid it might be too high. “I really feel that we—”

“Sit down!” somebody shouted.

Blushing with confusion, he sat.

Griffin held up both hands for calm. “Please. Please. Let’s remember that in science, no questions are forbidden. Our Mr. Leyster had a perfect right to ask. Unfortunately, reasons of security prevent me from answering. Now, as I mentioned before, there will be films tonight, and if you’ll look at your schedules, you’ll see that you have three hours for dinner. I must ask you not to leave the hotel.

“In the meantime—a lot of you have been working with materials provided from the Mesozoic past. Let’s hear those papers.”

The applause was enthusiastic. Griffin leaned forward into it, almost bowing.

After lunch, Leyster returned to the Grand Ballroom for the afternoon keynote. He looked around for the Metzgers. Only a few of the seats were filled, but there were plenty of people in the back of the room, networking and politicking, leaning against walls and looking skeptical, speaking earnestly up at those leaners, and reaching into paper bags to bring forth the polished skull of a troodontid or the brightly feathered wing and toothed beak of an Archaeopteryx.

There was no use trying to be a part of the influence-swapping until he sorted out who was who, the major players from the bright young grad students who would hang in for a season or three before realizing that the money was elsewhere, the influential patriarchs of major institutions who spent so much time in administration they never published anything from the shy nondescripts who averted their heads to hide the eyes that burned with passionate insight.

A husky man with white hair cropped short over his pink scalp to disguise his incipient baldness came up behind Leyster and pounded him on the back. “You bastard! You look so young! I don’t know how you do it.”

“I think I am young. This is my home year, so—Monk? Is that you?”

James Montgomery Kavanagh—Monk to his friends—had studied with Leyster at Cornell. At one point they’d even been roommates, though neither of them recalled that year with much fondness. But he looked so haggard! So tired. He must have been recruited a full twenty years in the future.

Monk squeezed his shoulder, released him. “Quite an exciting morning, hey? I enjoyed your paper, by the way. Couldn’t stay for the questions, unfortunately. Too bad more people didn’t turn out for it.”

“I’ve had fewer.”

“You were up against a Tyrannosaurus hatchling. Nobody thinks all that highly of Hitchcock’s work, but she had slides everybody wanted to see. Hell, I only came because it was you. Which papers are you planning to take in this afternoon?”

“I thought—”

“Skip the Baryonyx thing. Total nonsense. And Tom Holtz’s chat on taxonomy. Cladistics is like New York City. It’ll be something impressive, once they’re done building it. Good to see Tom still producing useful work after all these years, though. You’d think he’d be retired by now.”

“What do you know about the afternoon speaker?”

“Gertrude Salley? Oh, she’ll put on a show. What a character. Brilliant in some ways, but… well, she likes to take chances. Willing to publish her findings before they’ve been entirely found. She’s a splitter—never met a taxon she didn’t like. If she could, she’d assign her right and left hands to different species. And not too careful about where she gets her data, if you catch my meaning. You have to keep a sharp eye on your specimens when Rude Salley’s around.”

“I never heard of her. Where’s she from?”

“About thirty-forty years forward. I don’t know the exact date. She must be in grammar school or maybe junior high right now. She works a generation or two ahead of us.”

“Um. Then we’re not supposed to be talking about her in this kind of detail, are we? Griffin said…”

“They can’t stop gossip! They make a token attempt, but let’s get real. It’s tolerated. So long as no hard data get passed along with it. The impulse is too deeply embedded in human nature, hey?” Without pausing, he said, “Well, I could listen to you forever, Dick, but I’ve got a career to think about. People to suck up to and serious ass to kiss. Take care, okay? All right.”

And he was gone.

The Metzgers had come up to Leyster sometime during the encounter, and stood listening in silence. Bill stared wonderingly after him. Cedella shook her head. “Wow.”

“He’s mellowed,” Leyster said. “You should have seen him back in college.”

Gertrude Salley was a strikingly handsome woman. She wore a Nile green silk outfit with mid-length skirt and buttons up the side. Leyster had never seen clothes of quite that cut. But he didn’t need the string of pearls about her neck to tell him that they were, for her time, impeccably conservative. They just had that look.

Her address was entitled “The Traffic Moves the Policeman,” and according to the Proceedings it was about the co-evolution of the supersauropods—the seismosaurs and titanosaurs of such tremendous size that they made a camarasaur look dainty—and the Mesozoic forests. Leyster didn’t think much of the topic.

But then she began to speak.

“I know so much you need to know,” she said. “So very much! I’ve read all your books, and thousands of your papers, and in the forty-five minutes allotted to me, I have no doubt whatsoever that I could drop enough information to save you all decades of effort.

“But I am not allowed to do so, and even if I were, I wouldn’t. Why? Because so much of what I know is based on basic research that you yourselves will do. Good science is hard work, and everything we in generations two and three have achieved is built upon your efforts. If I told you your discoveries, would you be willing to sink half your life into verifying them? Or would you simply initial the data and pass ‘em forward? We’d end up with one of Griffin’s paradoxes… information that comes out of nowhere. And information that comes out of nowhere is not reliable, for it doesn’t connect anywhere with the facts.

“What can I offer you, then? Not facts, but modes of thinking. I can lay out for you a few theories I have which are, alas, unprovable, and through them, perhaps, indicate a few fruitful ways of looking at things.

“Consider the Titanosauridae. They were by far the predominant sauropods of the Late Cretaceous, and so ecologically pivotal that in their time a forest could be defined as a body of trees surrounded by herbivores…”

And she was off, leaping like a salmon from idea to idea. Hers was the kind of fast and playful intellect that enjoyed tossing a stone into the pond of received wisdom, just to see the frogs jump. And speaking, as she did, from a vantage of fifty years, it was impossible to tell which of her notions were crazy, and which were the result of radical new discoveries. When she spoke of mountains dancing to the music of sauropods, Leyster was positive that was metaphor at best; when she claimed that ceratopsians were farmed by their predators, he was not so sure. That guff about birds he didn’t buy at all.

Leyster was riveted.

Too soon, she finished, saying, “But if I can tell you nothing else, I can tell you how valuable your work is—or rather, will be. Sir Isaac Newton said, If I have been able to see farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants. Well, today I have the rare opportunity of standing in the presence of giants. And the even rarer opportunity of being able to thank them. Thank you. Thank you for all you will do.”

She stood down to tumultuous applause, and did not stay for questions.

Cedella leaned over and said in Leyster’s ear, “I just discovered who I want to be when I grow up.”

The afternoon passed in the usual happy blur, moved along by the surge and flow of attendees hurrying from room to room between sessions. There were three tracks running simultaneously and not a single paper that didn’t conflict with at least one more that Leyster needed to hear. When the last one ended shortly before five, he wandered out to the lobby, head abuzz with all he had learned, looking for someone to form a dinner party with. The Metzgers, or possibly old Tom Holtz. But when he got there, the lobby was crowded with police and security personnel.

The Metzgers were being arrested.

Cedella held her chin high, eyes ablaze with scornful defiance. Bill simply looked deflated, a little man in a suit suddenly too large for him. Knots of shocked scientists stood in the entryways and watched as the two were led away by state troopers.

“I’m sorry, sir, you can’t come in here,” said a young officer when he automatically moved toward his friends. An admonishing hand closed about his upper arm. Turning, he saw Monk.

“What happened?”

“It’s called note-passing,” Monk said. “They caught the woman red-handed. Leaned up against the mail slot and slipped the letter in behind her back while her husband pretended to have a heart attack. Sad thing, isn’t it?”

There was a brass mailbox built into the reception counter. The manager was unlocking it under the supervision of two FBI agents and a representative of the postal service.

“I was talking to one of Griffin’s people. He told me they got the memo a week ago detailing how to set up the sting. What happens is, Griffin will gather everybody’s reports, write up a memo summarizing them, and post it back to his people seven days in the past. Pretty slick, actually.”

“I don’t understand. They seemed like good people. I just can’t picture them doing something like this.”

“Well, that’s what makes it so sad. The wife’s mother has schizophrenia. Painful case, apparently. Committed suicide eight, maybe nine years from now, just weeks before the new neural mediators came on the market. Ironic, hey? So when they learned they were coming back, the husband got hold of a few pills and the wife popped them into an envelope along with a letter to her younger self, and… well, what you saw.”

Leyster stared hard at Monk. “When did you have the time to learn all this?”

“This isn’t my first trip. People gossip. I told you that before.”

“You son of a bitch. You knew. You knew this would happen, and you did nothing to prevent it.”

“Hey. I couldn’t, remember? That would have created a paradox.”

“You could have told Bill. Just a word in his ear: ‘Griffin knows what you’re planning.’ ”

“Yeah, that would’ve worked just fine. It would’ve stopped them and the whole goddamned project as well! Do you want that? I sure as hell don’t.”

Leyster spun on his heel, and went into the bar.

The bartender poured him a single malt, and he carried it into a dim booth in the back. He thought about the Metzgers, and he thought about Monk. He thought about his own culpability. Finally, to keep himself from thinking about those things any more, he got out a pen and started to write words on the napkin. Burning Woman. Predators. Cretaceous. Death.

A woman slid into the booth opposite him.

It was Gertrude Salley. She was more than two decades older than he, but he couldn’t help thinking what a good-looking woman she was. The gloom was kind to her.

“You’re trying to think of a title for your book.”

“How did you know that?”

Her eyes were piercing, flatly lustrous, like a hawk’s. Amazing eyes that told him nothing about that hard intelligence burning within her skull. “I know quite a lot about you. I’m not permitted to tell you how.” She put an ironic spin on the word permitted, to let him know how little hold such rules had on her. “Nor who we were—or will be—to each other.”

“Who are we, then?”

There was a small silver scar, shaped like a crescent moon, by the corner of her mouth. It rose and fell with her predatory smile. “A week from now you’ll go back for the first time. I envy you that. The excitement of starting from scratch, of knowing that everything you see, everything you discover, is new and important.”

“Is it…” He couldn’t quite put his question into words. It wouldn’t come out right. “…as good as I want it to be?”

“Oh, yes.” She closed her eyes briefly, and when they opened they were amazing all over again. “The air is richer and the greens are greener and at night there are so many stars in the sky that it’s terrifying. The Mesozoic swarms with life. You can’t appreciate how thinned-out and impoverished our time is until you go back. Rain forests are nothing. They’re not even in the running. Stretch out your arm.”

He obeyed.

“With my own eyes, I have seen a plesiosaur give birth. This hand”—she held it up to show him, and then reached out to slowly stroke the length of his arm—“stroked her living neck as she lay quivering in the shallows afterward.” She offered her hand to him, palm upward. “You may touch it, if you wish.”

Almost jokingly, he touched her palm with his fingertips. She closed her hand around them. Her knee brushed against his, and for a second he thought it was an accident.

“Touch my face,” she said.

He touched her face. Her flesh was softer than a young woman’s, not near so taut. She raised her chin and moved her head against his palm, like a cat, and he felt himself harden. He wanted her.

Salley smiled. Those wide lips moving up in slow synchronicity with the lidding of her eyes. He felt the passion radiating from her like heat from a flame. He wanted to look away. He could not look away.

“Who are we to each other? Are we—?”

“Shhh.” The sound was so soft and low as to be a caress. “You always ask too many questions, Richard.”

“I need to know.”

“Then find out,” she said. “Come to my room. I know what you like. I know where to touch you. I know I can make you happy.”

As if in a dream, he left the bar with her. They went up the elevator together, fingers intertwined, bodies not quite touching. They drifted hand in hand down the hall to her room. The difference in their ages added a touch of perversity to the whole thing which, strangely enough, he found himself liking. Leyster was not a sexual adventurer. He had summer affairs when he was in the field, and videotapes to get him through the winters. This was utterly unlike anything he’d ever done before.

How serious was their relationship, he wondered, in the shared time that lay in his future and her past? It was serious enough for her to go into her own pre-history in search of him. Maybe they were married. Maybe she was his widow. He wanted it to be real. He wanted everything from her.

At the door Salley released his hand to get out her key. He seized her and spun her around. They kissed, his tongue in her, and then hers inside him. Her body was soft and matronly; she ground it hard against his. He touched her face, that magical silvery moon of a scar. She did not close her eyes, not even for an instant.

He saw how she looked at him. It took his breath away.

At last, with a contented sigh, she pulled away. “I have a gift for you.”

“Mmmm?”

“The title for your book. I brought along a copy of it.”

She opened the door.

A small table had been set up so that it would be the first thing he saw on entering the room. A light shone down upon the book set on end upon it.

First he saw his name, and then he saw the strip of black electrician’s tape covering the title. Then he saw the man in the chair behind it.

It was Griffin. He looked considerably younger than he had that morning.

Three security men materialized in the hall behind them. Two took Salley by the arms. The third pushed Leyster into the room and pulled the door shut behind them both.

“Once again, Mr. Leyster, you’ve made a terrible mess of things.” Griffin tipped the book over, and stood. “Leaving it for others to clean up after you.”

Muffled by the door, Salley’s angry voice dwindled down the hall. “What are they going to do with her?” Leyster demanded. He made a move toward the door. But the security man stood between him and it, sad-eyed and competent. Leyster had never been much of a brawler. He turned back to Griffin.

“Nothing bad. A limousine has been called to take her back to the Pentagon. They’ll return her to her proper time, and that’s it. Oh, a reprimand will be placed in her file for trying to leak information back in time. But Ms. Salley doesn’t much care about that.”

“You had no right!” Leyster found he was quivering, with shock, with fear, with anger. “No right at all.”

“You, sir, are a fucking idiot.” Griffin reached into his jacket and took out a folded sheet of paper. “A woman twice your age tells you a couple of lies and you waltz right up to her bedroom. You think Dr. Salley is your friend? Well, think again.” He unfolded the paper and thrust it at Leyster. “Read it and weep.”

It was a photocopy of a page from Science, dated April 2032. At the top of the page was the title, “A Re-Evaluation of the Burning Woman Predation Site.” The paper was authored by G. C. Salley.

Leyster read the abstract, disbelieving, and as he read, the room grew unsteady around him. There was a roaring noise in his ears, as if all the universe were laughing at him.

“That paper is the single most virulent refutation of your book ever printed. And the woman who wrote it almost got to screw you twice. You can open the door now, Jimmy.”

Leyster made no move toward the doorway. “You’re letting me off with a warning. Why didn’t you do that with the Metzgers?”

“The—?”

“Husband-wife team, attempted causal violation,” the security man said quickly. “Captured 2012, convicted in 2022, released in 2030.”

Griffin seized his wrist and stared down at it, hard. “The world is not a fair place, Mr. Leyster.” He looked up again. “We did it the way we did because according to the records, that’s the way we did it. The rules against paradox bind us as tightly as they do you.”