Bones of the Earth (2 page)

He was paying no attention at all to his auditor now, caught up once again in the drama of the fossil. Life pursued by death. It was an experience common to all creatures, but somehow it always came as a surprise when it actually happened.

“Could the apatosaur outrun them? It's possible. If it could get up to speed quickly enough. But something that big simply can't accelerate as fast as the allosaurs can. So it has to turn—
here
, where the three tracks converge—and fight.”

He double-clicked the trackball's right button to zoom up so that they could see a larger area in the screen.

“This is where things get interesting. Look how confused the trackway is—all these trampled places, all this churned-up mud. That's what makes this fossil unique. It's the actual record of the fight itself. Look at those footprints—hundreds of them!—where the apatosaur is struggling with its attackers. See how deep these paired footprints are? I haven't worked out the ergonomics yet, but it's possible the brute actually rears up on its hind legs and then falls forward again, trying to crush its tormentors. If it can only take advantage of its immense weight, it can still win the battle.

“Alas for our friend, it does not. Over here, where the mud is pushed every which way, is where poor Patty falls. Wham! Leaving one hell of a nice body print, incidentally.
This
and
this
are definitely tail thrashes. She's a game creature, is Patty. But the fight is all over now, however much longer it lasts. Once the apatosaur is down, that's it. These little beauties are never going to let her get up again.”

He zoomed outward again, revealing yet more of the mudstone that had once been ancient lakeside. The trackway was, all told, over half a mile long. His back still ached at the thought of all the work it had taken first to uncover it—unearthing representative samples for the first two-thirds, skipping and sampling until at the end it got exciting and they had to excavate the whole damned thing—and then, when their photographs were taken and measurements done, to rebury it under layers of Paleomat and sterile sand in order to protect the tracks from rain and snow and commercial fossil hunters.

“And then, over here—” This was the exciting part, and involuntarily his voice rose. There was nothing he loved so much as a scientific puzzle, and this trackway was the mother of all brain-teasers. Besides the allosaur prints, there were also traces of secondary scavengers—birds, smaller dinos, even a few mammals—criss-crossing one another in such exuberant profusion that it seemed they might never be untangled. He welcomed the challenge. He looked forward to the work. “—this section is where our unfortunate Patty dies, and is eaten by the allosaurs.

“The incredible thing, though, is that some of the scattered bones were pressed into the mud deeply and firmly enough in the process to leave clean impressions. We made rubber molds from them—an ulna, parts of a femur, three vertebrae—enough to make a positive identification. The first direct, noninferential identification of a dinosaur footprint ever!”

“That explains how you know it's an apatosaur. What about the allosaurs?”

Leyster grinned, and enlarged the image so that a single vertebra's imprint dominated the screen. A double-click of the trackball's left button and—God bless Ralph!—the boneprint inverted, changing it from a negative to a positive image. He zoomed in on the caudal articular process. “If you look closely, you can actually see an allosaur tooth embedded in the bone and broken off. No signs of healing. One of those bad boys lost it, either during the attack or while gnawing on the corpse.”

Those enormous hands applauded softly, sardonically. “Astounding.” There was a kind of disconnect between what Griffin said and the way he said it. He sounded like an actor in a dying play. He held himself like a man who had heard it all before. He was, Leyster realized with a shock that was almost physical, bored. Bored! How could anyone intelligent enough to follow his explanation possibly be bored by it? Carelessly, Griffin said, “Doubtless there's a book in it for you.”

“This
is
a book; it's better than any book! There's never been anything like it. I'll be studying it for years.”

Leyster had already consulted with ranchers who had lost livestock to wolves and mountain lions and were only too familiar with the physical trace of predation sites. A friend at the National Museum of the American Indian had promised to get him in touch with a professional guide, a Navajo who, she claimed, could track a trout through water or a hawk through a cloud. There was no telling how much information might yet be coaxed out of this one specimen.

“Let me tell you something. When I uncovered this, when I first realized what I had, it was the single most profound moment of my life.” That was out on Burning Woman Ridge, with the mountains to one side of him and hardscrabble ranchlands to the other, and the hottest, bluest sky in all creation overhead. He'd felt everything draw away from him then, the happy chatter of his crew, the grate of shovels in dirt, leaving him alone in a kind of holy stillness. There wasn't a sound or motion anywhere, not even a puff of wind. He felt the presence of God. “And I thought finding this,
all by itself
, justifies my existence on Earth. And you want me to give it up? Oh, no. I think not.”

“On the contrary,” Griffin said. “I have a much clearer idea of the value of your find than you do. And what I have to offer is better. Much better.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Griffin …”

Griffin raised both hands, palms forward. “Please. Hear me out.”

“All right.”

The room was empty and Griffin had closed the door behind him on entering. He slowly looked around him before speaking anyway. Then he cleared his throat, apologized for doing so, and said, “Let me begin by spelling out the terms of the contract, just to save me the trouble later on. You'll be allowed to stay in your present position, and arrangements will be made to borrow your services for the project six aggregate months out of the year. You'll continue to be paid by the government, so I'm afraid there won't be any increase in your salary. Sorry.”

He's enjoying this, thought Leyster. Science bores him to death, but having opposition to overcome brings him back to life. Ordinarily, Leyster didn't find people very interesting. But Griffin was different. He studied the impassive planes of the man's face, looking for a point of entry, a beginning to understanding, the least flicker of a hint as to what made him work. Leyster knew himself to be a methodical researcher; give him one end of a tangled thread and he wouldn't let go until he'd unraveled the entire snarl. All he needed was enough time and that one loose end.

And then Griffin did an extraordinary thing. It was the smallest of gestures, one Leyster wouldn't have noticed under ordinary circumstances. Now he found it riveting. Without looking, Griffin brushed back his sleeve to reveal a thick stainless steel watch. He clamped his hand over it, hiding the dial completely. Then he glanced down at the back of his hand.

He didn't release the watch until he had looked away.

Leyster had found his opening. Prodding gently, he said, “So far, you haven't made much of a case.”

“It gets worse,” Griffin said. So he had a sense of humor! Astonishing. “There are restrictions. You won't be allowed to publish. Oh, findings based on your own fieldwork, of course”—he waved a dismissive hand at the HDTV screen—“that sort of stuff you may publish whenever. Provided it is first cleared by an internal committee to ensure you're not taking advantage of information gained while working for us. Further, you won't even be allowed to talk about your work with us. It will be classified. We'll need your permission to have the FBI run a security check on you. Strictly routine. I assure you, it will turn up nothing embarrassing.”

“A security check? For paleontology? What the hell are you talking about?”

“I should also mention that there is a serious possibility of violent death.”

“Violent death. This is going to start making sense any minute now, right?”

“A man comes into your office”—Griffin leaned forward conspiratorially—“and suggests that he has a very special job to offer you. By its very nature he can't tell you much about it until you've committed yourself heart and soul. But he suggests—hints, rather—that it's your chance to be a part of the greatest scientific adventure since Darwin's voyage on H.M.S.
Beagle.
What would you think?”

“Well, he'd certainly have my interest.”

“If it were true,” Griffin said with heavy irony.

“Yes,” Leyster agreed. “If it were true.”

Griffin smiled. On his coarse-featured face, it looked sad. “Well, then, I believe I've told you all you need to know.”

Leyster waited, but he said no more.

“Forgive me for saying so, but this is the damnedest pitch I've ever heard in my life. You haven't said one thing to make your offer attractive to me—quite the opposite. You say that I'll need FBI clearance, that I won't be allowed to publish, that I might … Frankly, I can't think of a set of arguments that would be less conducive to my coming to work for you.”

There was an amused glint in Griffin's eye, as if Leyster's reaction were precisely what he had been hoping to provoke.

Or was this only what he wanted Leyster to think?

No, that was a paranoid line of reasoning. It was not the way Leyster normally thought, not the way he
liked
to think. He was accustomed to questioning an essentially impassive universe. The physical world might be maddeningly close-lipped about its secrets, but it didn't lie, and it never actively tried to deceive you.

Still, the corrupting influence of the man was such that it was hard
not
to think along such lines.

Again, Griffin clamped his hand over his watch. Glancing down at it, he said, “You'll take the position anyway.”

“And the reasoning upon which you base this extraordinary conclusion is—?”

Griffin put the cooler on Leyster's desk. “This is a gift. There's only one string attached—you will not show it to anyone or tell anybody about it. Beyond that—” He twisted his mouth disparagingly. “Do whatever it takes to convince you it's genuine. Cut it open. Take it apart. There are plenty more where that came from. But no photographs, please. Or you'll never get another one to play with again.”

Then he was gone.

Alone, Leyster thought: I won't open it. The best possible course of action would be ditch this thing in the nearest Dumpster. Whatever Griffin was peddling, it could only mean trouble. FBI probes, internal committees, censorship, death. He didn't need that kind of grief. Just this once, he was going to curb his curiosity and leave well enough alone.

He opened the cooler.

For a long, still moment, he stared at what was contained within, packed in ice. Then, dazedly, he reached inside and removed it. The flesh was cool under his hands. The skin moved slightly; he could feel the bones and muscles underneath.

It was the head of a
Stegosaurus.

A gust of wind made the window boom gently. A freshet of rain rattled on the glass. Cars hummed quietly by on the street below. Somebody in the hallway laughed.

Eventually, volition returned. He lifted the thing from the cooler and set it down on the workbench, atop a stack
of Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology
reprints. It was roughly eighteen inches long, six inches high, and six inches wide. Slowly, he passed his hands over its surface.

The flesh was cool and yielding. He could feel the give of muscles underneath it, and the hardness of bone beneath them. One thumb slipped inadvertently onto the creature's gums and felt the smoothness of teeth. The beak was like horn; it had a sharp edge. Almost in passing, he noted that it
did
have cheeks.

He peeled back an eyelid. Its eyes were golden.

Leyster found himself crying.

Without even bothering to wipe away the tears, not caring if he were crying or not, he flipped open a workbook, and began assembling tools. A number four scalpel with a number twenty blade. A heavy pair of Stille-Horsley bone-cutting forceps. A charriere saw. Some chisels and a heavy mallet. These were left over from last summer when Susan What's-Her-Name, one of the interns from Johns Hopkins, had sat quietly in the corner week after week, working with a komodo dragon that had recently passed away at the National Zoo to prepare an atlas of its soft tissues. Exactly the kind of painstaking and necessary work one prays somebody
else
will perform.

He swept the worktable clear of its contents—books and floppies, a pair of calipers, paper cutter, bags of pretzels, snapshots from the dig—and set the head in its center.

Carefully he laid out the tools. Scalpel, forceps, saw. What happened to those calipers he'd had out here? He picked them up off the floor. After a moment's hesitation, he tossed the mallet and chisel aside. They were for speedy work. It would be better to take his time.

Where to begin?

He began by making a single long incision along the top of the head, from the edge of the beak all the way back to the foramen magnum—the hole where the spinal cord leaves the braincase. Gently, then, he peeled away the skin, revealing dark red muscles, lightly sheened with silver.

Craniocaudal musculature
, he wrote in the workbook, and swiftly sketched it in.

When the muscular structure was all recorded, he took up the scalpel again and cut through the muscles to the skull beneath. He picked up the bone saw. Then he put it down, and picked up the forceps. He felt like a vandal doing so—like the guy who took a hammer to Michelangelo's
Pietà.
But, damn it, he already
knew
what a stego's skull looked like.

He began cutting away the bone. It made a flat, crunching sound, like stiff plastic breaking.