Bones of the Earth

6. Feeding Strategies

Xanadu Station: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Gallic epoch. Turonian age. 95 My B.C.E.

Tom and Molly’s report lay unread on Griffin’s desk, the first of fifteen such from the team he’d assembled to deal with the creation terrorist threat. All fifteen were from different times, and they were all marked Urgent. He wasn’t sure yet which he would read, and in what order. He wasn’t sure how much he wanted to know.

The mere fact of opening a report had an almost metaphysical dimension. It collapsed the infinite range of possibilities that might yet be into a single unalterable account of what was. It turned the future into the past. It traded the lively play of free will for the iron shackles of determinism.

Sometimes ignorance was your only friend.

“Sir?” It was Jimmy Boyle. “The Undersea Ball is about to begin.”

Griffin hated fund-raisers. But it was his misfortune to be good at this sort of thing. “Is my tux in fashion?” he asked. “Exactly when is this lot from, anyway?”

“The 2090s, sir. Your suit is twenty years out of date, the same as everyone else’s. You’ll fit right in.”

“You haven’t seen the Old Man snooping around, have you?”

“Are you expecting him?”

“Good Lord, I hope not. But I’ve got a feeling about tonight. Something bad is going to happen. I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if this weren’t the night that the Unchanging finally decided to revoke our time travel privileges.”

Jimmy’s habitually sad face twisted into a homely smile. “You just don’t like formal affairs.” The older Jimmy got, the more comforting his presence was. He was close to retirement age now, ripe with wisdom, and, through experience, grown almost infinitely tolerant. “You always talk like this before one.”

“That’s true enough. Do you have my cheat sheet?”

Wordlessly, Jimmy handed it over.

Griffin turned his back on the reports, leaving them all unread. But as he did, his arm swung up and without thinking he glanced down at his watch: 8:10 P.M. personal time. 3:17 P.M. local time.

It was his own private superstition that as long as he didn’t know what time it was, things were still fluid enough for him to maintain some semblance of control over events. It seemed a poor omen to start the evening with this small defeat.

The view from Xanadu was like none other in the Mesozoic. Griffin knew. He’d been everywhere, from the lush green stillness of the Induan era at its outset to the desolation of Ring Station, a hundred years into the aftermath of the Chicxulub impactor strike that ended it. Xanadu was special.

Sunk in the shallow waters of the Tethys Sea, Xanadu was a bubble of blue-green glass anchored and buttressed by rudist reefs that twenty-second-century biotechnicians had shaped and trained to their purposes. From the outside, it looked like a Japanese fishing float partially encrusted in barnacles. Within, one stood bathed in shifting, watery light and immersed in a wealth of life.

It was altogether beautiful.

A pianist played Cole Porter in the background. Guests were arriving, being shown to their tables, politely considering the ocean around them, the giant strands of seaweed, the swarms of ammonites, the jewellike teleosts in rich profusion.

But then an armada of waiters swept into the room, trays held high, bringing in the hors d’oeuvres; pliosaur wrapped in kelp, beluga caviar smeared over sliced hesperornis egg, grilled and shredded enigmasaur on toast, a dozen delicacies more.

It was like a conjuring trick. Attention shifted and in an instant nobody was looking out at the wonder surrounding them.

Except for one. A thirteen-year-old girl stood by the window, drinking it all in. She had a pocket guide and, now and then when something flashed by, she’d hold it up quickly to catch the image and get an ID. As Griffin watched, a twenty-foot-long fish swam slowly up and eyed her malevolently through the glass.

It was ugly as sin. Sharp teeth jutted out between enormous lips of a mouth that thrust sharply downward. Those teeth, that mouth, and its unblinking, indignant gaze gave the fish a pugnacious appearance. But either the guide wasn’t working properly, or she couldn’t get the right angle, because whenever the girl looked down at it, her eyes flashed with annoyance and she held it up again.

Snagging a glass of champagne from a passing tray, Griffin strolled over to her side. “Xiphactinus audax,” he said. “Commonly known as the bulldog fish. For obvious reasons.”

“Thank you,” she said solemnly. “It’s a predator, isn’t it?”

“With those teeth? You bet. Xiphactinus is unusual in that, unlike a shark, it swallows its prey whole. The fish go down alive and struggling.”

“That doesn’t seem like a very good feeding strategy, does it? How do they keep their prey from damaging them?”

“Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they choke on something they swallowed, and then they die. The bulldog fish is not a perfect predator. Still, enough survive to keep the species going.”

With a sudden flick of its fins, the bulldog fish was gone. The girl turned to face him for the first time.

He offered his hand. “My name’s Griffin.”

They shook. “I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Griffin. My name is Esme Borst-Campbell. Are you a paleontologist?”

“I used to be, but I got promoted. Now I’m just a bureaucratic functionary.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointedly. “I was hoping you’d be sitting at our table.”

“I’m honored that you’d want me there.” Tickets to the Ball went for a hundred thousand dollars a seat, figured at year 2010 values, and in addition to the silent auction before the meal and the dancing afterwards, those who bought an entire table for six—as the Borst-Campbells had—were given their very own paleontologist, as a sort of party favor.

“I’m just afraid that I’ll be stuck with somebody boring who’ll want to talk about dinosaurs all evening.” She managed to invest the word with an immense amount of scorn.

“You don’t like dinosaurs?”

“It’s rather a boy thing, isn’t it? Killer monsters with dagger teeth, creatures so big they could crush people underfoot. What I like about marine biology is how connected everything is. Biology and botany, vertebrates and invertebrates, chemistry and physics, behaviorism and ecology, geology and tidal mechanics—all the sciences come together in the ocean. Visibly. No matter what you’re interested in, you can study it here.”

“And what are you interested in?”

“Everything!” Esme blurted. Then, embarrassed, “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

“No, no, you were right to say that.” It ranked, in Griffin’s estimation, among the best things he had ever heard anybody say. “But about your problem. Let me see.” He glanced at his cheat sheet. The first item on it, printed in his own neat hand, read Esme—Richard L. “You’re in luck. You have Dr. Leyster. The two of you will get along just fine.”

“He doesn’t like dinosaurs?”

“Well, he does, but I’ll tell you what to do.”

“What?”

“When you’re introduced, look him in the eye and tell him you think dinosaur paleontology is inferior to paleoichthyology.”

“Won’t that offend him?”

“He’ll be intrigued. He’s a scientist—he’ll want to know why. And he’s a natural teacher—by the time you’re done telling him, he’ll be itching to encourage your interest. Once he’s started talking about paleomarine life, you won’t be able to shut him up.”

Skeptically, Esme said, “Will that work?”

“Trust me, I know the man.” Griffin gestured with his glass toward the distant kelp forest. “Now look out there, where the water gets murky. See where the shadows seem to be moving? Those are plesiosaurs, feeding on shrimp. Every now and then, if you watch, you’ll see one lazily loop up to the surface for air, and back down for more food.”

In companionable silence, they stared into the depths together, watching the shadows move. Eventually it was time for him to give the opening address, and Griffin sent the child back to her table. The plesiosaurs were gone by then.

Somebody handed him a microphone, and he tapped it twice for attention. He was standing before the window with a galaxy of ammonites to his back, shells flashing as they jetted swiftly by, too many to count.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “let me welcome you to the Turonian Age—the time when clams ruled the seas!” He paused for polite laughter, then continued.

“Believe it or not, despite all the wondrous creatures that surround us—the plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and giant sharks—the primary purpose of Xanadu Station is to study the rudist clams that make up the reefs surrounding us.

“Why? Because these creatures achieved something remarkable and then mysteriously lost it. Rudist clams began as simple burrowers. But then they learned how to join together in colonies and form reefs. Their shells are corrugated with little bubbles, so it took them less time than other shellfish to lay down calcium. Because they grew fast, they quickly came to dominate the ocean ecosphere. Yet shortly before the end of the Cretaceous, for reasons we do not yet understand, they went extinct. It was only because of this that corals were later able to learn the same trick and filled the reef-building niche, where they remain into the modern age. We cannot explain why this happened. We’re here to find out.”

He paused, and flashed a sincere grin. “But that’s not to say you have to spend the evening watching clams! We have a lot of marine life scheduled for you tonight, beginning with a pair of mosasaurs that should be closing in on us right… about… now!”

The lights dimmed. Now the tables were illumined only by what sunlight found its way down through the water. Griffin lit up his microphone, swept it around to draw everyone’s eyes, and pointed it straight outward. Softly, he said, “Here they come.”

From the depths of the kelp forest, two mosasaurs swam straight toward the station. They were thirty-five feet long, demon lizard-fish with nightmare-toothed jaws and dark, sardonic eyes.

They were terrifying.

Even from the safe confines of the station, they were horrific things to see descend upon you. Diners stirred uneasily. Chairs scraped against the floor.

But the mosasaurs were safely under control. In a little room not far away, two wranglers sat, joysticks in hand, controlling the creatures. Biochip interfaces had been planted deep in the reptiles’ brains, so that the wranglers could see through their eyes and move their bodies as easily as their own. This pair were their primary herding tools, used daily, and through practice grown assured and responsive.

The mosasaurs twisted, parted, and then converged again. With startling speed, they bore down upon Xanadu and the diners within.

Griffin glanced over at the Borst-Campbell table. While her parents and their guests were intent upon the show, Esme had eyes only for Leyster. She leaned raptly into his murmured words. The paleontologist’s hands moved in a circle, describing the flat, lid-like top of a rudist clam, then fluttered underneath that lid to depict the rudist’s mantle, which formed a friendly home for complex colonies of symbiotic algae.

The mosasaurs rushed down upon the station with such reckless force that it seemed they must surely crash into the glass walls. But at the last possible instant, they parted to barrel-roll left and right, simultaneously slashing their heads in a savage (and utterly gratuitous) display of teeth. The diners gasped. Then they were gone.

Esme hadn’t even looked up.

The worst of it was that she was right. This wasn’t science, any more than stunt flying was war. It was merely the whimsical exercise of power.

“There’ll be more surprises throughout the evening,” he said. “In the meantime, enjoy your meal.”

Griffin faded back to applause, and began the round of table hopping. A joke here, a word of praise there. It’s banana oil makes the world go round.

Mostly he wanted to keep an eye on the scientists. Griffin thought of them as his problem children. He knew all their faults. This one drank too much and that one was a terrible bore. The meek-looking one was an aggressive womanizer, and the grandmotherly one swore like a sailor. They were all gaping at the lighting fixtures, clusters of museum-grade coiled clams and flaring trumpet shells polished to translucence and appointed with brass fittings. Griffin was sure they were wondering how big an expedition they could fund if they were ripped down and sold.

Waiters slipped in and out of existence. They’d scurry behind the screen hiding the entrance to the time funnel and then pop out immediately on the other side with heavily-laden trays. Pentaceratopsian steaks smothered in mushrooms for those who liked red meat. Confuciusornis almondine for those who preferred white. Radicchio and truffles for the vegetarians.

All to the accompaniment of music, pleasant chitchat, and a view that could be matched nowhere else.

Gertrude Salley had been assigned a table as far from Leyster’s as Griffin could arrange. The seating plan seemed to be working out well. She certainly was charming her patrons. Right now she was flapping her arms to demonstrate how pteranodons managed to take off from the surface of the ocean. Everyone was laughing, of course, but in a respectful way. Salley knew exactly how far she could go without losing her audience.

Then Griffin’s silent beeper went off, and he had to duck out of the late Cretaceous and back into the kitchen, up home in the year 2082.

Young Jimmy Boyle was waiting for him.

Where the old Jimmy Boyle by his very presence radiated competence and calm strength, his younger version was a real pain in the ass. He had a loud mouth, and a special talent for creating chaos.

This time was no exception. The kitchen was swarming with police. In one corner, a man stood very straight, eyes raised, repeating the Lord’s Prayer while his hands were glue-cuffed behind his back. A woman lay, on the floor, weeping and clutching her leg as a medbot built a stretcher around her. Both the man and the woman were dressed as waiters. Somebody who had to be the chef was saying, “—outrageous! You must get all these people out of my kitchen. I cannot work with them underfoot!”

“Fucking Americans,” Jimmy Boyle said. He meant his two captives. “Think they still own the world.”

“The kids in Bomb Disposal will be wanting these, sir,” an officer said politely. He held several pieces of what had been a coffee samovar. “For analytical purposes.”

“Yeah, right, go ahead.” To Griffin, Jimmy Boyle said, “Almost touchingly old-tech, sir. Gelignite, a wind-up clock, and a friction striker. Still, enough to punch a hole right through every window in Xanadu. If you hadn’t notified me—”

Griffin waved him silent. “Good work, Boyle,” he said, in a voice meant to be heard by everyone in the room. He clapped a hand over the man’s shoulder, turning him away from the others. In a voice so low Jimmy Boyle was forced to bow his head to hear, he added, “You asshole. This isn’t this way it’s done. You were supposed to write up a report afterwards, and forward it to me the day before the Undersea Ball. Then, if I thought it was important to do so, I’d‘ve put in an appearance. It wasn’t your place to make this decision.”

“Well, I thought you’d be wanting to know about this as soon as possible.”

“What I wanted was for you to be capable of taking care of this sort of fiasco by yourself. Now, can you do the job or not?”

Jimmy Boyle stiffened. “By damn, sir, you know I can.”

“Then do it.”

With Griffin looking on, Jimmy Boyle spoke with the chef. First he offered to hire another caterer to finish the supper if she wasn’t up to the job. It would be easy enough for him to go a week or two into her past and have somebody waiting outside ready to take over right now. Then he asked what additional resources would be needed to keep things on track. Finally, he assured her that she’d have replacement waiters in five minutes.

Boyle then signed off with the police and let them take the two creation terrorists away. He called the waitstaff together, and spoke briefly and intensely about what had happened, and the need to maintain their professional standards. Then he routed a call for two replacements several hours into the local past, and had them briefed and on duty within the time he’d promised the chef.

Then, finally, Griffin felt free to leave.

It had been an ugly one. And a close one, too. But he didn’t mention either fact to Jimmy Boyle. The boy had to learn to think for himself, and the sooner the better.

Before going back down the funnel, Griffin dropped into his office and wrote two memos: One was to the woman responsible for the seating arrangements, telling her to shift Leyster to the Borst-Campbell table and Salley to the furthest table from him. The second was to Leyster himself, two days before the Ball, directing him to drop a shark’s tooth in his pocket when he went. A big one. The sort of thing a precocious thirteen-year-old marine biologist wannabe would like.

Then he returned to Xanadu.

He arrived just as the tables were being cleared for dessert and coffee. He nodded to the pianist, who began to play. Another cue, and the lights faded to nothing.

On the surface above, it was bright afternoon. The dinner was an evening function and neatly calculated for a local time when just enough light filtered down this deep into the water to provide a dim, sunset-level illumination.

Griffin took the microphone out of his pocket and moved to the front of the room. “Folks, we just got lucky.” Heads craned.

Outside, a pod of plesiosaurs flew lazily by the window like great, long-necked, four-winged penguins, drawing a murmurous ooh from the diners. They were the most graceful creatures Griffin had ever seen, and that included whales. In his estimation, compared to plesiosaurs, whales were all bulk and no beauty.

“Here before you, we have three adults and five juvenile Elasmosaurus, the largest of the plesiosaurs, and the greatest of the reptiles ever to grace the seas. They’re neither as fast, nor as fierce as the mosasaurs we saw earlier. Yet I think you’ll agree with me that the sight of these animals alone makes tonight memorable.”

He didn’t mention that it was skillful use of the biochipped mosasaurs that had gently herded the plesiosaurs inward, toward the station. The reefs were rich with life here and the mosasaurs were out of sight, so the creatures began to feed. Plesiosaurs had almost no memory. They lived in the moment.

Griffin paused for a count of ten, relishing the beauty of those long, long necks as the plesiosaurs darted about, catching fish. Then he said, “There’ll be dancing soon. In the meantime, please feel free to stand and walk over to the windows. Enjoy.”

Somebody stood, a second and third followed, and then the room was filled with pleasant confusion. Griffin pocketed the microphone and checked his cheat sheet. Then he walked over to Esme’s table.

The adults were gone. Only Leyster and Esme remained. She was speaking to Leyster so earnestly she didn’t even notice his approach.

“But my teacher said that men and women pursue different reproductive strategies. That men try to scatter their seed as widely as they can, but women have more at stake, so they try to limit access to a single male.”

“With all due respect,” Leyster said, “your teacher is full of it. No species could survive very long if the males and females had different reproductive strategies.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s—oh, hello, Mr. Griffin!”

“I was just checking up to make sure our Mr. Leyster wasn’t boring you.”

“He could never do that!” Esme spoke with such conviction that Leyster actually blushed. “He was telling me about Dr. Salley’s work with plesiosaurs. Have you heard of that?”

“Well…” He had, but was surprised Leyster would bring it up.

One of the oldest puzzles in paleontology was whether plesiosaurs were viviparous or oviparous—whether they gave birth to their young alive or laid eggs. Fossil mosasaurs had been found which had died in the act of giving birth. Nothing like that had ever been found for plesiosaurs. Nor had fossilized plesiosaur eggs been found.

Salley had tagged a dozen females with radio transmitters, and spent several months out in small boats, observing them. Whenever one showed up with a newborn tagging alongside her, she went over the GPS maps to see where it had been.

“She found that when it’s time the female will leave the ocean, not onto land, but up a freshwater river,” Esme said. “The male follows after her. She goes as far as she can, until the river’s so shallow she can’t go any further. That’s where she gives birth. The land carnivores can’t get at her in the water. There aren’t any aquatic carnivores large enough to threaten her that far upriver. And the male swims back and forth to the downriver side, to make sure nothing comes up after her.

“Isn’t that neat?”

Griffin, who had read Salley’s original paper, as well as the later popularization, had to agree. Aloud, however, he said, “You know why I’m here, don’t you, Esme?”

It was as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. “It’s time for me to leave.”

“Alas.”

Somebody came up to the table and stood silently waiting for the conversation to end. A servant. His posture was too good for him to be anything else.

“This was the best night of my life,” the girl said fervently. “When I grow up, I’m going to be a paleoicthyologist. A marine ecologist, not a wrangler or a specialist. I want to know everything about the Tethys.”

Leyster was smiling mistily. The kid had really gotten to him. He must’ve been a lot like her when he was that age. “Oh, wait. I almost forgot to give you this.” His hand dipped into a pocket, emerged with the shark’s tooth, dropped it in her palm.

She stared down at it in wonder.

The stranger offered Esme his hand. Evidently, her parents were staying to dance.

The girl left.

She’d had a conversion experience. Griffin knew exactly how it felt. He’d had his standing in front of the Zallinger “Age of Reptiles” mural in the Peabody Museum in New Haven. That was before time travel, when paintings of dinosaurs were about as real as you could get. Nowadays he could point out a hundred inaccuracies in how the dinosaurs were depicted. But on that distant sun-dusty morning in the Atlantis of his youth, he just stood staring at those magnificent brutes, head filled with wonder, until his mother dragged him away.

Thinking about Esme and what would become of her made him sad. For an instant he felt the weight of all his years, every petty accommodation, every unworthy expedience.

Minutes after Esme left, a young woman in a short red dress arrived. She hadn’t been here earlier—Griffin would have noticed. He snatched out his cheat sheet and, stomach souring, read the final item.

As he’d suspected, it was Esme again.

Esme, ten years older.

She’d been a beautiful child. It should be no surprise that she was a beautiful young woman.

She looked around the room anxiously. Her gaze passed right over Griffin. Evidently, she had forgotten him years ago. But when she saw Leyster, her face lit up and she headed straight toward him.

The band began to play. People began to dance. Griffin watched from the far side of the room as Esme explained to Leyster who she was.

She wore a shark’s tooth around her neck on a silken cord.

“Who’s the chippie talking to Leyster?”

Griffin turned. It was Salley. She was smiling in a way he couldn’t read. “It’s a sad story.”

“Then tell me it on the dance floor.”

She took his hand and led him away.

A slow dance is a slow dance the world around. Briefly, Griffin was able to forget himself. Then Salley said, “Well?”

He explained about the girl. “It really is a pity. Esme was so full of curiosity and enthusiasm when she was a child. She’d make a great biologist. But it was her misfortune to be born wealthy. She had dreams. But her parents had too much money to allow that!”

“She could’ve broken away,” Salley said dismissively. “Hell, she still could. She’s young.”

“She won’t.”

“How do you know?”

Griffin knew because he’d glanced through the personnel records for the next hundred years and Esme’s name wasn’t there anywhere. “It’s what happened.”

“Why’s she back here?”

“I suppose she’s reliving her moment of glory. The last time she seriously thought she might make a life for herself.”

Salley watched how the girl put her arms around Leyster’s neck, how she stared deeply into his eyes. Leyster looked spooked. He was definitely out of his depth. “She’s just a headhunter.”

“She doesn’t get to be what she wanted. Why not let her have her consolation prize?”

“So she gets her trophy fuck?” Salley said scornfully. “Much good it will do either of them. He looks ashamed of himself already.”

“Well, things don’t always work out the way we’d like them to.”

They danced for a time. Salley put her head on Griffin’s shoulder, and said, “How’d she get back here in the first place?”

“We don’t publicize it, but occasionally, we’ll make that kind of arrangement. For a considerable fee. Under carefully controlled circumstances.”

“Tell me something, Griffin. How did I get that Allosaurus hatchling past all your security people?”

“You were lucky. It won’t happen again.”

She drew back and looked at him coldly. “Don’t give me that. I waltzed right through. People turned their backs. Halls were empty. Everything fell into place. How?”

He smiled. “Well… thwarted, as I so often am, by bureaucracy, I came to feel that all this secrecy was… an unnecessary burden. So I may have given Monk a few hints and pointed him in your direction.”

“You shithead.” She pressed her body against his. They couldn’t have been any closer if they tried. “Why make me jump through hoops? Why make everything so convoluted and baroque?”

He shrugged. “Welcome to my world.”

“They say that once in her life, every woman should fall in love with a real bastard.” She looked deeply in his eyes. “I wonder if you’re mine.”

He drew back from her a little. “You’re drunk.”

“Lucky you,” she murmured. “Lucky, lucky you.”

Hours later, personal time, Griffin returned to his office. The lights were on. Other than himself, there was only one person he trusted with the key. “Jimmy,” he said as he opened the door, “I swear my body aches in places I never—”

His chair swivelled around.

“We need to talk,” the Old Man said.

Griffin stopped. Then he shut the door behind him. He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a shot of 90-proof Bulleit. The Old Man, he noted, had been there before him. “So talk.”

The Old Man lifted the top report from the stack and read: “ ‘Defector said priority was given to opportunities to assassinate high-profile individuals, to which end a short list had been made of opportunities. Primary among these were fundraisers.’ ”

He dropped the report on the desk. “Had you bothered to read this, you’d know that Holy Redeemer’s hit list of people they particularly want to take out has our two favorite media hounds, Salley and Leyster, in positions one and two. You should not have been taken by surprise today. You should have known to keep those two apart.”

“So? Jimmy caught the terrorists. You notified him to do so. The system worked as well as it ever does. Meanwhile, I get to keep my options open.”

The Old Man stood, steadying himself with one hand on the desktop. Griffin had to wonder how much he’d had to drink already. “We caught two fucking outside operatives, and we’ve still got a mole in our operation. How did they know about the Ball? Who told them which caterer would be handling it?” He slammed the pile of reports with his fist. “You have no options. Read these. All. Now.”

Griffin took his seat.

Griffin was a fast reader. Still, it took him over an hour to absorb everything. When he was done, he covered his eyes with his hands. “You want me to use Leyster and Salley as bait.”

“Yes.”

“Knowing what will happen to them.”

“Yes.”

“You’re prepared to let people die.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a god-damned filthy thing to do.”

“From my perspective, it was a god-damned filthy thing to do. You’ll do it, though. I’m sure of that much.”

Griffin stared long and hard into the Old Man’s eyes.

Those eyes fascinated and repulsed Griffin. They were deepest brown, and nested in a lifetime’s accumulation of wrinkles. He’d been working with the Old Man since he was first recruited for the project, and they were still a mystery to him, absolutely opaque. They made him feel like a mouse being stared down by a snake.

He hadn’t touched his bourbon yet. But when he reached for it, the Old Man took the glass and poured it back into the decanter. He capped it and put it back in the cabinet. “You don’t need that stuff.”

“You’ve been drinking it.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a lot older than you are.”

Griffin wasn’t sure how old the Old Man was. There were longevity treatments available for those who played the game, and the Old Man had been playing this lousy game so long he practically ran it. All Griffin knew for sure was that he and the Old Man were one and the same person.

Overcome with loathing, Griffin said, “You know, I could slit my wrists tonight, and then where would you be?”

That hit home. For a long moment the Old Man did not speak. Possibly he was thinking of the consequences of such a major paradox. It would bring their sponsors down on them like so many angry hornets. The Unchanging would yank time travel out of human hands—retroactively. Everything connected with it would be looped out of reality and into the disintegrative medium of quantum uncertainty. Xanadu and a score of other research stations up and down the Mesozoic would dissolve into the realm of might-have-been. The research and findings of hundreds of scientists would vanish from human knowing. Everything Griffin had spent his life working to accomplish would be undone.

He didn’t know that he’d regret that.

“Listen,” the Old Man said at last. “You remember that day in the Peabody?”

“You know I do.”

“I stood there in front of that mural wishing with all my heart—all your heart—that I could see a real, living dinosaur. But even then, even as an eight-year-old, I knew it wasn’t going to happen. That some things could never be.”

Griffin said nothing.

“God hands you a miracle,” the Old Man said, “you don’t throw it back in his face.”

Then he left.

Griffin remained.

Thinking of the Old Man’s eyes. Eyes so deep you could drown in them. Eyes so dark you couldn’t tell how many corpses already lay submerged within them. After all these years working with him, Griffin still couldn’t tell if those were the eyes of a saint or those of the most evil man in the world.

Griffin thought of those eyes.

His own eyes.

Loathing himself, he set to work.