Bones of the Earth

4. Cuckoo’s Nest

Bohemia Station: Mesozoic era. Jurassic period. Malm epoch. Tithonian age. 150 My B.C.E.

Salley awoke to the sound of camptosaurs singing.

She sighed and stretched out on her cot, one arm brushing against the mosquito netting, but did not get up. Salley never awoke easily. Not even on a day like today.

A day when she intended to change the world.

Nobody knew why camptosaurs sang. Salley thought it was out of joy, pure and simple. But that was going to be hard to prove. So she had other theories as well, some published and others she had simply made known. She had learned at an early age that it was not how often you were wrong that counted in science, but how often you were right. One startling hit covered a multitude of bad guesses.

So she had also posited that camptosaurs sang as a means of keeping the herd together. That their song was simply phatic noise, a way of reassuring each other that everything was okay. That by announcing their numbers, they warned predators away—be off, sirrah, we are too many for you! That they were comparing the taste and savor of the vegetation.

Honest to God, though, it sounded to her like joy.

Outside, an internal combustion engine roared to life. Two people walked past her tent, sleepily arguing the phylogenetic position of segnosaurs. Somebody rang the breakfast bell. Like a slumbering beast, the camp stirred lazily and shook itself out of its drowse.

Salley turned over on her stomach, reached under the netting, and felt around on the floor for her clothes. She really ought to do some picking up while the day was young—the tent would be hot as an oven by noon, and by the time it cooled down she expected to be long gone. But the way she saw it, you only had so much organization in your life. You had to choose: Invest it in your research, or fritter it away on housework.

Her socks were clean enough to wear for a second day, which seemed to her a particularly good omen.

The mess tent was filling up with chatter and coffee fumes. Salley snagged a tray and stood in line for sausages and grits.

She chose an empty table in an obscure corner of the dining tarp, half hoping Monk Kavanagh would sleep late and she could have some privacy for a change. But no such luck. She’d barely begun eating when he slid onto the bench beside her and flicked on his recorder.

The historian was a bald and hulking old man with a pink face as soft and crinkled as tissue paper and a tidy white mustache. He greeted her with an obnoxious little smirk that was evidently meant to be endearing. “You look like you’ve had a rough night.”

“Being in the field is a lot like Girl Scout camp. Except Girl Scouts usually don’t have next-door neighbors who like to invite their boyfriends into their tents and have screaming orgasms into the small hours of the morning.”

“Oh? Anybody of note?”

Salley shut her eyes and took a long sip of coffee. “Okay, where was I?”

“You’d just been asked to leave the university.”

“God! What a fucking mess. Do we really have to talk about that?”

“Well, it’s part of our history, after all.”

Four years ago, Salley had been caught up in an intellectual-theft scandal that almost destroyed her career. She had been sleeping with her advisor, a man better known for his fieldwork than his teaching skills, and some of his ideas found their way into one of her papers.

“Didn’t he go over the paper first?”

“Of course he did. We went over it together, discussing the issues, and he went off on one of his rants. That’s when he mentioned his ideas and their application to what I was saying. He as good as told me to use them.”

“There’s a story that you two were in bed together when he went over the paper.”

“Oh yeah. You’d have to know Timmy to understand. He said that sex helped to focus him. I know how stupid that sounds. But I was infatuated. I thought he was a cross between Charles Darwin and Jesus of Nazareth.”

Monk nodded encouragingly.

“I had no idea I was doing anything wrong. The notion that ideas could belong to people was—I thought that the truth belonged to everybody. And I honestly did try to show him the final draft. He just waved it off. He said he trusted me. The bastard.”

“You were asked to leave, and then the next semester you popped up at Yale. How did that happen?”

“I went to see the department head, and cried until he agreed to call in a favor.” She shoved a sausage in her mouth and chewed it to nothing. “It was the single most humiliating experience in my life.”

“That would have been Dr. Martelli, I believe.”

“I swore to myself then and there that I’d never cry in public or sleep with another paleontologist again, so long as I lived. And I haven’t.”

“Well, you’re young. Martelli was one of your on-line mentors, wasn’t he?”

“Everybody was. I mean, not to be immodest, but when I was a teenager, I was everybody’s favorite wannabe. God bless the Web. I was in correspondence with half the vertebrate paleontologists in the world.”

“Here. Look this over.” Monk placed a sheet of paper by her plate. “Tell me if I got anything wrong.”

Salley shifted the spoon to her left hand so she could keep on eating, picked up the paper, and read:

Everyone who knew her agreed that Gertrude “gave good daughter.” Except, of course, her own parents. At age five she took a pair of shears to the family Atlas and made silhouette dinosaurs. That same year she told her mother she wanted to marry a stegosaur when she grew up. At age seven she threw a fit when her parents wouldn’t take her to China to dig for fossils for summer vacation. It was a relief to them when, in junior high, she discovered the listservs on the Web and jumped in with both feet, asking naïve questions and posing wild hypotheses. One of these—her notion that dinosaurs were secondarily flightless—she wrote up and submitted to the scientific journals when she was fifteen. To her outrage, it was not accepted. By then she was the indulged and spoiled daughter to a generation of paleontologists. At eighteen she was accepted by the University of Chicago. At twenty-one she was involved in a serious academic scandal. At twenty-three she was briefly famous when she announced her discovery of a “feathered pseudosuchian” fossil. Though initially accepted by the popular press, it was met with skepticism in the scientific community. At age twenty-four she met and took an instant dislike to Richard Leyster. At twenty-five her “pseudosuchian” had been widely discredited, the paper she published criticizing Leyster’s work, though controversial, was not highly regarded, and Gertrude, no longer the youngest dinosaur expert in existence, was staring hard into the abyss of failure.

Salley mopped up the last of her grits with a bit of toast, and returned the paper. “I never use my given name. I’d prefer you called me Salley, okay?”

“Ah.” He made a note on the paper. “Anything else?”

“Monk, are you going to have any actual science in your book?”

“Science? It’s all science.”

“What I’ve seen so far is just chitchat and gossip.” She finished her coffee and picked up her tray. “Come on. I’ve got something to pick up over to the animal colony, and then I’ll show you some real research. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

The animal colony was a windowless prefab with corrugated metal walls and a noisy air-handling system. “We call this Bird Valhalla,” Salley said. She opened the door, and the warm scent of bird droppings touched their faces. “Looks like the 4-H poultry shed at the state fair, doesn’t it?”

Archies screamed and lashed the bars of their cages with clawed wings as the door slammed shut. They were boldly patterned birds with long feathered tails, vicious little teeth, and dispositions to match. Their plumage was orange and brown and red.

An absorbed-looking young man put down a sack marked Archaeopteryx Chow, turned, and blinked with surprise to see them there. “Hey, Salley.”

“Monk, this is Raymond. Raymond, Monk—he’s writing a book about Bohemia Station.”

“Oh, yeah? He should’ve been here yesterday. We pumped the hall full of tiny helium-filled bubbles, and flew a couple of archies down it, so we could photograph the vortices of their flight. Got some nice shots. National Geographic quality. Not that we’re allowed to submit anything to a public forum.”

“Let me guess—they were all continuous vortexes, right?”

“Uh… yeah.”

“So you’ve just proved that an archie can fly fast, but not slow. Brilliant. It would’ve taken me ten seconds of direct observation to tell you the same thing.”

Birds, with the exception of hummingbirds, which flew unlike anything else, had only two modes of flight—slow and bat-out-of-hell fast. The slow mode left pairs of loop-shaped whorls in the air behind them, while the disturbance of the fast mode was continuous. Slow flight was the more difficult mode to achieve, a refinement of primal flight that wouldn’t appear for tens of millions of years yet.

“It was Dr. Jorgenson’s experiment. I just helped run it.” To Monk, he said, “If you’re writing a book, that means you’re from later in the century than we are. How long do we have to wait before we can publish our work?”

“I’m really not allowed to say.”

“This idiot secrecy really screws up everything,” Raymond said sullenly. “You can’t do decent science when you can’t publish. That’s all fucked up. We had a group from the Royal Tyrrell through here last week, and they’d never even heard of our work. What kind of peer review is that? It’s nuts.”

Monk smirked. “I agree with you completely. If it were up to me—”

“Much as I enjoy listening to you guys whine,” Salley said, “Lydia Pell’s expecting me to spell her at the blind. You want me to pick up another archie while we’re there?”

“Uh… yeah, thanks. We can always use more. Jorgenson keeps letting ours go.”

“You got it.” She snagged an animal carrier and turned to leave. “Come on, Monk. Let’s go look at the wildlife.”

It was a glorious day to be trudging along the dunes. The sky was purest blue and a light breeze came off the Tethys Sea. Every now and then an archie would burst screaming out of the shrubbery at the edge of the trees and flap wildly away, low over the sand. An archaeopteryx rarely flew higher than the treetops. The upper air still belonged to pterosaurs.

Occasionally they flushed a small feathered runner of one variety or another from the brush, but these were rarer. Once they saw two sandpeepers—small compsognathids, not much larger than crows—fighting over a scrap of rotting meat on the beach.

Salley pointed them out. “Dinos. Small. No feathers. What does that tell you?”

“There are lots of feathered dinosaurs. Even you won’t deny that.”

“All birds have feathers. But only some dinosaurs. That’s because feathers are a primitive condition for the ancestors of dinosaurs and birds. Birds kept the feathers, dinosaurs mostly lost ‘em.”

“Secondary featherlessness?” He laughed. “Is this anything like your secondarily flightless Apatosaurus?”

“Cut me some slack—I was fifteen when I wrote that paper suggesting that dinosaurs were descended from volant reptiles.”

“But they’ve gone back to the Triassic, and nobody’s found a living specimen of your hypothetical ancestor. How do you explain that?”

“Tell me something, Monk. How many important scientists—important ones—do you think made it to the senior prom?”

“I honestly can’t say I’ve given it much thought.”

“Hardly any. Here’s something I’ve observed—the most popular kids in high school never become much of anything. They peak in their senior year. It’s the dweebs, geeks, and misfits, the fringe types, the loners, who grow up to be Elvis Presley or Richard Feynman or Georgia O’Keeffe. And, similarly, it isn’t the successful organisms that evolve into totally new forms. The successful organisms stay where they are, growing more and more perfectly adapted to their ecological niche until something shakes that niche and they all die. It’s the fringe types that suddenly come up out of nowhere to fill the world with herds of triceratopses.”

“Well, that’s one way of looking…”

“The first feathered animal, whatever it was, was small and obscure. It developed something that gave it a very slight edge in a very marginal niche, and then it stayed in the shadows for a long time. Until God rolled the dice again, and scrambled all the niches. Dinosaurs were like that, back in the Triassic—just one nerdy group of archosaurs out of many, and far from the most successful one. My feathered pseudosuchian, too.

“Those guys back in the Triassic are looking in all the obvious places. Wrong. If I ever get the goddamned bureaucracy to post me back that far, you can bet I’ll be poking around behind the bleachers and out on the fire escape.”

Monk shook his head admiringly. “You never give up, do you?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Admit it. The evidence so far is all against you. Odds are, you’re completely wrong.”

“Wait and see, Monk. Wait and see.”

From ahead, where the dunes gave way to salt marshes, came the low warbling sound that a camptosaur herd makes when something spooks it.

Monk shivered and glanced nervously inland, where the brush gave way to scrub pines. “It’s not dangerous out here, I hope?”

Camptosaurs were skittish beasts, as likely to be frightened by their own imaginations as by a carnivore. But Salley felt no obligation to spell things out to Monk. “You’re not much of a field man, are you?” she said amiably.

They walked on in silence for a time. The trail across the dunes was faint, but definite. In all the world, only humans made trails like that, running parallel to the seashore. Salley thought of all the human trails the researchers had made, radiating out in a dwindling fan from Bohemia Station. It got her to thinking about dino trails. There were thousands of them in the brush. If they could be mapped and classified by user species, what a wealth of behavioral information it would reveal! Too much and too tedious work for her to do by herself, of course. But if she could get a couple of grad students assigned to her…

“At age twenty-three, you were almost famous.”

“Huh? Oh. Yes.”

“Why don’t you tell me the whole story?”

“Well, I had the fossil, and nobody would even look at it. So I decided to do an end-run around the process. I spent a day calling up every major news outlet in the hemisphere and saying, ‘This is Dr. G. C. Salley, of Yale University. I’m calling to announce an extraordinary discovery.’ Then I’d very carefully explain to them that since the last quarter of the twentieth century it has been generally accepted by the scientific community that birds were directly descended from dinosaurs and that therefore dinosaurs were no longer extinct. You have to spell things out for the press—you can’t rely on them to know even the simplest things.”

“And then?”

“Then I explained about my fossil. I told them that this meant that birds were not descended from dinosaurs, but from animals that existed before dinosaurs evolved. That birds were at best a sister clade to dinosaurs. And I capped it by declaring, ‘Dinosaurs are extinct again!’ They ate it up and licked the spoon afterwards.”

The musky smells of the dunes, with their hints of cinnamon and bayberry, took on a darker tinge of sulfur and rotting vegetation. They’d come to the edge of the salt marsh. The trail divided here into two barely-visible tracks, one leading into the marsh and one into the woods. “We head inland here.”

Cycads and low conifers rose up to either side of the trail. They passed into green shadow, walking single file and listening for predators.

Salley wondered how much it would cost to put a Global Positioning System in place. Then anytime a researcher used an animal trail, it could be automatically tracked and recorded, and dumped in a database for analysis back in the twenty-first century. The only trouble would be how to identify which individual trails were made by which animals. But that was grad student work again, and it was easier to get grad students when you didn’t have to arrange funding to take them out into the field.

“How would you handle it today?” Monk asked abruptly.

“Handle what?”

“Your feathered fossil. If you had it to do all over again.”

She pretended to think, briefly, though she’d gone over the scenario in her mind so many times it almost felt as though it had already happened. “Well, today I’ve still got a touch of residual fame, so I’d call a press conference instead of working the phones. I’d get myself all glammed up to help ensure they gave the story some coverage. And this time I’d make sure I had a real good specimen. The one I had was too fragmented. They said it was a mosaic of different species jumbled together. They said the feather trace was just dendrites. I should’ve gone back out and dug until I found something complete. Something flashy. Something that nobody could deny.”

“That’s the key, then?”

“A killer specimen. You got it.”

The trail twisted, and there ahead of them was the blind. The walls were made of small tree trunks lashed together, and the roof was thatched with cycad leaves. It sat at the edge of the woods, overlooking a browse plain that had recently been eaten clear by sauropods and now held only low vegetation. “Last man-made structure for 7,900 miles,” Salley said. “Lydia built it herself with a hatchet and a ball of twine.”

Lydia Pell was sitting in her blind, knitting and reading a book propped up on the shelf beneath the window slit. She put down her knitting and turned off the book when they came in. Salley introduced her to Monk, and then said, “Tell him what you’re up to here.”

Lydia was round-faced and plump, in a middle-aged way. She opened up two camp chairs for her guests, and said, “Well, it’s quite a story. I was making my rounds and, among other things, I had in mind to check up on a widow fisher whose nest I had found, when—”

“Widow fisher?” Monk asked.

“Eogripeus hoffmannii. It means ‘dawn-fisher.’ Named after Phil Hoffmann because it was one of his students who identified it as a basal spinosaur, maybe even the node taxon for the clade.” She put a finger to her chin and smiled so he would understand that the student was herself. “A great big thing with a narrow little snout like a crocodile’s. Out in the field, we just call them fishers. This particular fisher was a widow because her mate had been eaten by allosaurs a couple of days before.”

“Ahh. I see. Go on.”

“Well, anyway, I spotted an allosaur behaving oddly. I thought at first she was injured because she was moving so awkwardly. Like this.” She stood up and leaned forward, arms tucked up and butt thrust out backward, and made a few comically clumsy steps. “I quickly realized that what I had here was a gravid allosaur—one that was heavy with eggs. But what made her movements so strange wasn’t the fact that she was pregnant, but that she was peering around like this.” She swung her head back and forth, in a furtive and guilty manner. “Believe it or not, she was sneaking around!”

Salley laughed and, after an instant’s hesitation, so did Monk.

“Well, exactly. An eleven-meter-long carnivore trying to look inconspicuous is one funny sight. But also an interesting one. Just what was she up to? Why was she sniffing and searching around like that?

“It turned out she was looking for the fisher’s nest. When she found it, I thought she would eat the eggs—which would’ve been intriguing in itself—but instead, she squatted down over them and with surprising delicacy deposited one egg of her own. And then she left.”

“Nest parasitism?” Monk asked.

“Yes. Just like a cuckoo. I picked out a good site, built this blind, and hunkered down to observe.”

“Show him the nest,” Salley suggested.

Obligingly, Lydia Pell handed Monk her binoculars. “Straight out,” she said, “where the land begins to rise. You see that little stand of cycads? Good. Right in the middle of it, there’s a darker green spot, and that’s the widow. Can you make her out?”

“No.”

“Be patient. Keep looking.”

“I don’t… whoah! She just sat up.” A bright streak of blue rose up from the cycads—the silvery underbelly of the fisher. She craned her neck to its utmost, peering anxiously into the woods. Then, with a clumsy surge, she stood. Her narrow snout turned one way and then the other. “What’s she doing?”

“She’s looking around for her mate. A fisher is not a brilliant animal, I’m afraid. Just look at those big-mama hips! All butt and no brain.”

“Her back blends in with the shrubs perfectly.” He returned the glasses. “But why is her belly that color?”

“A fisher spends a lot of its time crouching over the water,” Salley said promptly. “The light belly makes it less noticeable to the fish.” To Lydia Pell, she said, “Tell him the rest of your story.”

“Oh, yes. Well, eventually her eggs hatched. The poor widow had to go fishing to feed her hatchlings, and that meant leaving them alone several times a day. Life is not easy for a single mom. Still, it was convenient for me. I was able to monitor the nest on a daily basis.

“The allosaur hatched a good two days later than the others. It was a little bigger than its siblings, and it seemed to me—though I wasn’t close enough to be sure—that it got more than its share of fish.

“The next day, there was one fewer hatchling in the nest.”

Monk whistled.

“Cain-and-Abel syndrome, exactly right! Every day since, there’s been one fewer fisher hatchling. Like clockwork, one fewer every day. Now there’s only the one overfed allosaur chick and still the poor misguided widow fisher keeps bringing it fish. How long will the hatchling keep working this scam? Will the widow ever wise up? It’s quite a soap opera, you’ve got to admit.”

“How much longer does it have to run?”

“Well, fisher chicks normally leave the nest three weeks after they hatch, so not very long I expect. Unfortunately, I’m expected to be back at Columbia tomorrow, prepping for this year’s classes. Which is why I asked Salley to take over here for me.”

Monk looked sharply at Salley. She said, “You’d think it would be just as easy to return you to the opening of the school year two weeks from now as it is today.”

“That’s exactly what I said. But would they do it for me? No. Bureaucrats! ‘One day home time for every day deep time. No exceptions.’ ”

“I hate that kind of thinking. I hate dishonesty. I hate deception. Most of all, I hate secrecy. If I were in your position, I’d hunker down and make them drag me away.”

“Well, that’s you, isn’t it, Salley? Not all of us are such terrible rebels. My things are packed and waiting by the time funnel. This time tomorrow I’ll be facing a campus full of freshly-scrubbed, vacuous young faces. I—well! No use dragging things out. It’s time I left.” She slapped her knees and stood.

They followed her outside.

“Have I left anything? Hat, water bottle… You can have the camp chairs. I see you’re collecting archies again. Jorgenson doesn’t appreciate you, Salley.”

“Is there anything I need to know?”

“The widow leaves her nest three or four times a day. Wait until she’s out of sight—you’ll have at least twenty minutes before she returns. You only need to check on the nest once a day, I expect. When the allosaur leaves, write up your notes and ship them forward. I’ll see you get second credit on the paper.”

“I look forward to it,” Salley said.

Lydia Pell gave Salley a quick hug. “I’m so grateful,” she said. “This work means so much to me, and I wouldn’t trust it to anyone else.”

At last, she left.

“Okay,” Salley sighed. “Now we wait. Switch on your machine. We might as well make the most of it.”

Hours passed. The interview droned on.

“Where did you find the fossil in the first place?”

“I acquired it at a mineral and fossil shop. On the drive home from a summer dig. I stopped off in—well, never mind where—and struck up a conversation with the proprietor. Naomi was an amateur fossil hunter, and she asked me to identify a batch of specimens she’d picked up, and this was among them. I asked where she’d acquired it, and she got out the maps, and promised to lead me to the spot in the spring.”

“You told her how valuable it was, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But she just gave it to you, anyway.”

“Yes.”

“You must’ve hit it off pretty well.”

They’d set up business at a table in the enclosed porch in back of the shop—Naomi lived in back and upstairs of the store—going through shoe boxes and coffee-cans of fossils, and slabs of rock wrapped in newspaper. After two hours, with almost everything classified, Salley leaned back in her chair and, staring through the screens, saw a few cottonwoods, a car up on cinder blocks, and the empty gravel parking lot behind a shabby roadhouse some distance down the highway.

Naomi returned from the kitchen with a teapot, and saw her glance. “Not much to look at, I’m afraid,” she said. “It gets pretty lonely out here sometimes.”

“I’ll bet.” Salley held a rock up to the light and put it down with the other miscellaneous crocodilian scutes. “How’d you get stuck here?”

“Oh, well, you know.” Naomi wore a sleeveless top and a loose skirt that brushed against her ankles. She was a lean woman with sharp features, angular and nervous, with large brown eyes. “See, I bought this place with a friend, but she…”

Salley unwrapped one final slab. She took one look, drew in her breath, and stopped listening.

The bones had fossilized in a disarticulated jumble, and then been further damaged by Naomi’s clumsy extraction. But they were still readable. One fragmentary ulna was broken open, revealing a hollow interior. The skull had held together better than might be expected, and showed avian hallmarks in lateral aspect, including what might be a modified diapsid condition. There was a fragment of jaw nearby with distinctly unavian teeth.

And winding through the matrix, like a halo around the mangled remains, was a dark feather trace.

“Where did this come from?” she asked, hiding her excitement.

“Up Copperhead Creek, there’s a Triassic outcropping. It’s one of my favorite fossiling sites. I could take you there, if you like.”

Salley, bent low over the fossil, said, “Yes, I’d like that very much.”

“You would? You can? Really?” Naomi set down her cup so rapidly that Salley jumped at the sound. She looked up, expecting to see it shatter.

Their eyes met.

Naomi blushed, and turned away in confusion.

My God, Salley thought. She’s flirting. With me. Well, that explained those big, googly eyes. That explained her nervousness. That explained any number of odd things she’d said.

In a sudden flash of insight, then, she saw exactly how it must be for Naomi. This poor, lonely woman. Still carrying a torch for the friend who’d saddled her with this business, and then left. And now a hotshot young vertebrate paleontologist comes breezing through her life, bronze-skinned and windblown from a summer spent digging up Elasmosaurus skeletons, with a rusted-out old Ford Windstar crammed with fossils and a head full of sacred lore. Small wonder she’d be infatuated.

This kind of empathy was not typical of Salley, and she resented experiencing it now. It made her want to do something for the poor cow. It almost made her wish she were the type who’d feel obliged to give the woman a mercy fuck on the way out.

But she wasn’t. And what a mess that would be if she were. Salley didn’t believe in an irrational emotional life—not since that mess with Timmy. She firmly believed that if everyone were ruled by self-interest, there’d be a lot less human misery in the world.

“I have to be back at Yale by Tuesday,” she said carefully.

“Oh.” Naomi stared down at her hands, clasped about the tea cup.

“Still… maybe this spring?” Despising herself, she looked the woman direct in her eyes and smiled. “I bet it’s lovely out here in the springtime.”

Those eyes lit up with hope. Next time, they said, she would surely be bolder, braver, able to seize the opportunity. “Of course,” she said. “I’ve got camping equipment, a tent. We could spend a few days.”

“Good. I’d like that.” Standing, Salley reached out and squeezed Naomi’s hand. The woman actually shivered. Oh God, Salley thought, you’ve got it bad. She picked up the fossil.

Casually, she said, “Mind if I borrow this? I’ll return it next time I’m through.”

None of which she told Monk, of course. He’d‘ve put it in his book—and where was the science in that?

There was a sudden flash of blue on the far side of the browse plain. “Whoops, there she goes!” Salley waited until the fisher had disappeared into the forest, and grabbed the carrier. “Come on!”

They ran across the browse plain.

The nest was a shallow depression scratched in the dirt and ringed with the dead leaves and forest litter with which the fisher had covered the eggs while they were hatching. A flattened area beside it was where she had rested while shading her children from the sun and protecting them from predators.

In the center was the allosaur.

The hatchling was appalling and adorable all at once. Looking at it, one saw first the downy white fluffy that covered its body and then those large and liquid eyes. Then, with a shreep like a giant’s fingernails scraping slate, that horror of a mouth opened to reveal its needle-sharp teeth. It was an ugly little brute, and at the same time as cuddly as a children’s toy.

She leaned over the nest to admire the appalling creature. “Watch this,” she said to Monk. “Here’s how you handle an allosaur hatchling.”

She fluttered one hand in front of the creature, and when it lunged forward, snapping, whipped it away. Her other hand swooped down to nab it behind the neck.

Deftly, she popped it into the carrier, and snapped shut the door.

“You’re just going to take it? I thought—”

She turned on him, sternly. “Okay, Kavanagh. I’ve shown you my dirty laundry, I’ve answered every question you could think of, down to the color of my pubic hair. I haven’t held back a thing. Now it’s payback time. How are we going to do this?”

He took a deep breath. “I’ll bring the carrier with me—I’m rated to bring back living specimens to any time period after 2034. In transit, we swap ID cards—they don’t check them as closely when you’re returning from deep time—and I’ll hand off the specimen to you. You get off at 2034. I’ll go on to your originally planned time.”

Doubt touched Salley then, and she said, “It sounds pretty touch-and-go to me. You’re sure this will work?”

“In my time-frame—it already has.”

Fierce elation filled her, like liquid fire, and she blurted out, “You know! You know what I’m going to do, don’t you?”

That irritating little smirk again. “My dear young lady. Why do you think I’m here in the first place?”