Corrupting Dr. Nice (2 page)

The man looked up toward her in dismay. "Excuse me." After a moment he muttered, "Will you please be quiet? I'm not an idiot."

She couldn't decide whether he was homely or cute, in an ungainly way. She helped him to his feet. "I don't doubt it," she said. "But we have to stop meeting this way."

TWO: BRINGING
UP BABY

In the evening he would walk out onto the plains, carrying the sack of cat food down to the muddy edge of the lake where the young sauropods nested. Careful not to disturb the snoozing adolescents, he would kneel beside their nest and hold out a handful of cat chow. The hatchlings, no more than half a meter long, large-eyed and alert, would nuzzle the food out of his palm with their flexible snouts. They were covered in short down, like pinfeathers, that they would lose as they grew older. One of them, the one he called Betty, would hold the pieces between her teeth, then throw them to her back molars with a toss of her head before grinding them. Betty's short snout, Owen suspected, was an evolutionary adaptation supposed to make her look cute enough that the adult apatosaurs would protect her. Although some of his colleagues disputed the psychological impact of neoteny.

The young had come to expect this snack. Charming and clumsy, remarkably intelligent, their descendants would one day have come to rule the earth, were it not for the unfortunate fact that soon they would all be extinct.

On the day he was due to go back, Owen waited there past the feeding as the sun dipped below the treetops and shadows crept out over the mirror-smooth water, ascending beneath the screw pines and fan palms until the outlines of the trees stood out like black paper cutouts against the orange sky. It still amazed Owen how much the dogwoods, palmettos and magnolias resembled those of 70 million years in the future. The late-Cretaceous wasn't any hotter than Virginia, or except during the rainy season, any wetter. It wasn't the tropical jungle he'd imagined as a boy. He watched a pterosaur far across the lake, circling on the wind, at this distance no bigger than a hawk. It was looking for its home for the night. Owen upended the canvas bag, shook the last crumbs of food out onto the soft brown earth. "All gone," he said.

The larger young poked their snouts at the food, heads bobbing like chickens. One by one they turned away and trotted off toward the lakeshore. Betty snuffled through the last bits, then looked up at him. She was a lot bigger than the three-kilogram hatchling she had been a couple of months before. She must be two thirds of a meter tall now, and she reached out to gently clutch his wrist with her open mouth. Owen wadded up the bag. "No more," he said. He felt depressed. Betty let go of him, chirped, turned, and scampered off into the darkness.

A few minutes later Bill began to pester him. =It's 19:20,= the voice whispered in his ear. =Time to go.=

"Don't rush me," Owen sub-vocalized.

=You spend too much time out here alone with these things,= the voice in his head insisted. =One of these days you're going to get eaten by one of your pets.=

"You'd karate chop them into insensibility before they could get a nibble." Owen muttered aloud this time. "Besides, sauropods aren't meat eaters."

=The ones that eat them are. A young fellow like you ought to be chasing other kinds of tail.=

Owen stood up, slung his rifle over his shoulder. The soles of his mood boots, currently pea green, had picked up a coating of mud. "All right." He clumped back toward the glow of the research station's lights on the hill.

=You've packed your iguana up nice and tidy?= Bill asked.

"She's no more an iguana than you are."

=I bet she tastes like iguana.=

"Well, we'll never find out, will we."

The wind rustled a copse of fan palms down the watercourse a hundred yards to Owen's right, and despite his bravado to Bill he hoped a pair of raptors weren't watching him from the cover. He unslung the rifle and slipped off the safety.

But the predators seldom came this close to the station's floodlights. He reached the top of a little swale and followed the jeep track toward the compound's gate.

Vannice Station consisted of five prefabricated buildings, the largest of them housing the labs and the time travel stage, set down on a leveled hillock. It was the highest ground around in the mosaic of lakes, rivers and the vast floodplain that would one day become the arid Great basin of Nevada, Arizona and western Utah, but now was a Serengeti-like plain. A great number of ferns, conifers and cycads crowded around the watercourses, and herds of sauropods followed the rains to root out new plant growth. Only in nesting season did they stop long enough to produce a flock of young.

Owen passed through the electrical fence that surrounded the station. Both of the jeeps were in the garage. The lights were on in the abbatoir, and Owen detoured over to the opened corrugated-metal door.

The concrete floor was smeared with mud and drying blood from the corpse of the adolescent Bactrosaurus Fiona O'Connor had dragged in with the bobcat. Fiona had on a virching helmet and was directing a couple of robot moles she had inserted into the carcass to orbit around the animal's internal organs doing CAT scans. The place reeked of rotting dinosaur, but when it came to devotion to her work the Fiona had a cast iron stomach.

When Owen tapped her on the shoulder she jumped a foot. She flipped up the helmet's visor and took off the gloves. "Owen! What do you want?"

"I'm leaving now. Did you forget?"

Fiona was a thin woman, her straight dark hair cut very short. She turned from him and picked up an electric saw. She flicked it on the and began to assault the back of the dead dinosaur's thigh. "Have you seen these dorsal ligaments?" she said above the saw's whine.

Owen put his hand on her arm. "Don't you have anything to say?"

Fiona turned off the saw. She looked at her shoes. "Owen, it was fun. But I'm a scientist first."

"And I'm not?"

"I didn't say that. You've done excellent work here. Without your support--"

"Without my father's money."

"I didn't say that, either."

"You didn't have to."

"I like you Owen. You are a scientist. I look forward to seeing the results of your experiment. When I get back to Boston I'll be sure to look you up."

Owen should have known better than to try to say goodbye; Fiona had more than once made it clear that his leaving was a matter of indifference to her. "Sure," he said. "Well--goodbye, then."

She pecked him on the cheek and turned on the saw again. "Goodbye. Have a safe trip back. Don't forget the shower."

Owen fled the building.

The rest of the place was pretty quiet; most of the others must be testing their own cast iron stomachs at dinner, which Owen had skipped in order to prepare Wilma for the trip. And avoid an embarrassing farewell scene at which his colleagues would fawn over him and Dunkenfield would press requests for him to pass on to his father.

In his room Owen sat down at his desk to scrape the mud off his boot soles. When he turned up the right boot he found a glittering butterfly flattened against his heel. Shining green and gold in the light of his desk lamp, it was of a species he hadn't seen before. It was also quite dead.

=Another species down the tubes.=

"There are probably thousands of these things in a one kilometer radius."

=If they're smart they'll stay that far away from those killer feet of yours. You're lucky some Brontosaurus hasn't returned the favor.=

Owen peeled the insect from his boot.

He was gathering up his suitcase and notebook when Bill whispered in his mind, =I trust naked free screaming obsessive art women!= For perhaps the one thousandth time Owen cursed his father for implanting the AIdvisor in him. The internal AI had proved useful hundreds of times since Owen had gotten him as a boy, but Owen had long since come to realize it was just another attempt by his parents to protect their investment. It would not do for the only male heir to the world's fifth largest private fortune to face the world without a competitive advantage--and a parent-programmed conscience. Bill had been modeled on the bodyguard Owen had until he was seven--William Oakley, head of security at Thornberry, the Vannice estate. Oakley was an ex-spook martial arts specialist with a mysterious past. Bill even had Oakley's voice. Worst of all, in a perceived crisis, for the purposes of protecting his charge, Bill had the power to overrule Owen's voluntary muscles and take control of his body.

His father's picking a spook for the job had been a bad idea. Bill's protectiveness was getting out of hand, and his gruff banter was slipping toward abuse. Of late Bill had taken to generating nonsense sentences that he would project into Owen's ear at arbitrary times. The prevailing sentiments seemed to have something to do with naked women, sex and god. Owen did not see how this in any way applied to him. Add to this Bill's increasing paranoia and the result was Owen was determined to take him into the shop when he got back to the 21st century.

From the live animals lab Owen took the lightweight opaque case holding Wilma, another infant Apatosaurus megacephalos, and headed for the transit building. It was full night now. Out in the woods his shrew-like ancestors had emerged from burrows to hunt insects. Clouds of moths swarmed in the perimeter lights. He passed between the twin fan palms that marked the edge of the clearing. Down the slope toward the lake a stand of pines obscured the scar where Pike had been stepped on while examining the rhamphorhynchus. They'd planted a dogwood to mark the spot.

Wilma was heavier than Owen expected. Her last weigh-in she'd been only ten kilograms. When she moved about in her carrier he struggled to maintain his balance. He reached the main building and headed toward the transit stage. There he was greeted by a little going-away party: Drs. Marks, Dunkenfield and Bracken. Owen set down the carrier and rubbed his shoulder. The others helped load his suitcase onto the stage. Marks gave Owen a bear hug.

"So long, Owen," he said. "It's been a treat having you work with us. Give our regards to your father."

"Remind him about the new gene chromatographer," said Dr. Bracken.

"And the shower," said Dunkenfield. The others scowled at him. "Well, somebody has to look out for the common welfare," Dunkenfield protested. "Or the next academic they send back here will find a pile of corpses."

"Don't worry," Owen said. "I won't forget. I want to say--I want to tell you how much it's meant to me to work with a group of thinkers like you, so devoted to knowledge, and nothing else. It's been the most positive experience of my life." He was getting choked up; he ducked his head and stepped onto the Gödel stage.

"The apatosaurus!" Marks said, while Bill shouted the same words in his mind. It created a disconcerting stereo effect.

Owen turned sheepishly. He picked up the case. Through the case's sound baffles, he heard Wilma hiss.

=Moron,= Bill said.

"Sorry," said Owen to Marks.

"Please take the strictest care, my boy," his colleague said. "This is the fourth time we've tried to ship a viable sauroid. You know what happened the first three times."

Owen considered the contretemps at the Stonehenge station. "I remember."

He stepped onto the time stage, were made infinitely dense, shot out of the universe and returned via wormhole to the next stage, identical, thirty million years up the line. This was merely another research outpost, minimally staffed, and Owen didn't even step off the stage before being sent up the line another twenty million years. He wouldn't stop until he reached a historical period. He fell into the nausea-generating disorientation of repeated shot and return. Each leap forward involved a translation over light years of distance to compensate for the changed position of the earth, and the longer the leap the greater the uncertainties of residual position and momentum. As a result he swayed like a man on the deck of a tossing sailboat.

Owen concentrated on his plans for his arrival. First he'd check to see that Wilma had managed without serious damage. There would be a lot of reports to make at the university. But eventually he'd have to steel himself for a visit home. He'd have to confront his father, who wanted Owen to keep Wilma at his College of Advanced Thought. It was hard enough for him to be taken seriously as a scientist without having to associate with that circus. And his mother would organize a round of parties and visits to the relatives as a ruse to introduce him to someone's eligible daughter. In the aftermath of his affair with Fiona it was not something he looked forward to.

Owen's parents had converted the family to the New Victorianism when Owen was ten, and at thirteen sent him off to boarding school in Denton, New Hampshire. His father's idea of initiating Owen into sexuality was interactive erotic VR: get a sexual education without compromising your health or reputation. At school, Owen didn't date. The other preppies chased the townies with single-minded attention. Owen disapproved of his classmates' casual treatment of the working class girls, at the same time he envied their unselfconsciousness. They were not shy about wanting to sleep with girls, about the lies they told to do so, or about having contempt for the girls afterward. Perhaps when, awash in hormones, they told some girl they were in love, they believed it. Certainly Owen was awash in the same hormones. But he did little about it.

His first sexual experience was with one of these girls, Dahli Brown. She dated Owen's roommate, Adam Coverdale, whose father was the mayor of Hartford. Adam never ceased telling Owen about his sexual exploits with Dahli, but was sickeningly attentive, in a completely phony way, when he met her at a basketball game or virching party. Owen felt sorry for her. Yet he envied Adam.

One Saturday night Owen was standing outside the Town Mall when Adam screeched up in his Reagan and dumped Dahli on the sidewalk. Her eye makeup was smeared black but she acted like nothing was wrong. Owen called a cab and took her home. On the way she assessed Adam's character flaws with breathtaking accuracy, and then when they got to her house she took Owen in and seduced him. The next day she was back at Adam's arms, and she treated Owen as if nothing had happened.

He thought of her often after that, with longing, regret, rage, and confusion. Was Dahli using Adam, or was he using her? Owen could never figure women out. He still hadn't.