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“Oh brother,” Geoffrey groaned.

“Gee, I wonder if he wrote a book or something,” muttered Angel.

“But do you think it is a hoax? Or the real thing?”
persisted the newscaster.

“Well,”
Thatcher said,
“I wish it were true, of course—as a scientist, that is—but I’m afraid that, as a scientist, I have to say this is probably a hoax, Sandy.”

“Thank you, Dr. Redmond.” The
newscaster turned as the camera cut away from Thatcher.
“Well, there you have it…”

“No way,” Angel insisted. “It’s not a hoax!”

The others chattered about the controversy as they carried their lunches back to their offices.

“OK, Geoffrey, you’ve got to see this. I’ve got the clip right here.”

“OK, OK.”

Sitting beside Angel in their cramped office overlooking Great Harbor, Geoffrey watched the chaotic images of the last minutes of
SeaLife
that Angel had recorded.

If someone were trying to stage a schlocky horror film on a very low budget it would probably look something like this, Geoffrey decided. Frankly it looked like that movie
The Blair Witch Project
, as though the cameramen were deliberately trying to avoid taking a good look at the cheap special effects.

“I can’t make out much of anything,” Geoffrey said.

“Wait.” Angel punched the
PAUSE
button on the remote and then stepped the image forward. “There!”

He froze the frame as a group of sweeping shadows nearly blackened the screen. Angel pointed a pencil at a shape that looked like a crab leg.

“OK,” Geoffrey said. “So?”

“That’s a toe-splitter! That’s a
stomatopod claw.”

Geoffrey laughed and reached for his sandwich. “That’s a Rorschach test, Angel. And you’re seeing the species you’ve been studying for the past five years, because you see it in your dreams, your breakfast cereal, and the stains on the ceiling tiles.”

Angel frowned. “Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

Then Geoffrey noticed something. He stopped eating. As Angel advanced the frames, red drops splattered the camera lens—then a single light blue drop appeared, seconds before the camera went dark.

Angel opened a mini-fridge that had a sign taped to the door:
FOOD ONLY.
He took out a carton of milk and sniffed it. “So, are you going ahead with the Fire-Breathing Chat tonight?”

Geoffrey turned away from the screen and clicked off the video. “Uh, yep. The Fire-Breathing Chat will go on, despite the intense competition from reality TV shows.”

The Fire-Breathing Chat was a tradition Geoffrey had carried on since his Oxford days. It was a forum for heretical ideas, with which he could outrage his colleagues on a semi-regular basis. Afterward they could pummel him with derision to their hearts’
content. The public was invited to enjoy the spectacle and to join in.

“Everyone’s going to ask you about
SeaLife
, you know.”

“Yes, you’re probably right.”

“You should thank me for preparing you.”

“Duly noted.”

“Are you really going with the ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny thing tonight?”

“Yep. Fasten your seat belt, Angel, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

“When are you going to take home one of your groupies, Geoffrey? Everyone already thinks you’re a Don Juan, so you might as well cash in on your reputation. The girls are right there waiting after every talk, my man, but you always get into a ridiculous scientific argument with a bunch of geezers, instead.”

“Maybe tonight I’ll get into a ridiculous scientific argument with one of my groupies. That’s the kind of foreplay that would really turn me on.”

Angel frowned. “You’ll never get laid, my friend.”

“You’re a pessimist, Angel. And a chauvinist. Don’t think about it. I don’t.”

“But I do. And you don’t. Life isn’t fair! You need to get laid even more than I do, my friend. There’s more to life than biology. And there’s more to biology than biology, too.”

“You’re right, you’re so right.”

Whatever “Don Juan” reputation Geoffrey had was quite unearned. The scientist lacked the patience for friendly, mindless banter. He remained incorrigibly oblivious to traditional romantic signals. Ideas excited him, but he found the rituals of flirtation degrading and inexplicably obtuse.

He’d had nine sexual partners in his thirty-four years. All were short-lived romances, with long gaps in between. Geoffrey attracted would-be rebels, but when the women inevitably tried to force him into some orthodoxy, he had moved on.

While he worried sometimes that he might be lonely at the end of the day, he refused to trade his sanity for companionship.

This was not vanity, or some noble sacrifice in the name of principle. It was simply a fact he had come to acknowledge about himself. As a result, he knew he might well end up alone.

So, love was the one mystery he’d had to approach with faith—faith that he would meet someone, faith against evidence, a necessary irrationality that kept him going, kept him looking toward the next horizon with open-ended hope. Because he had to admit to himself he was lonely… and Angel had an irritating way of reminding him of that.

“So what’s the ceremonial garb for tonight’s riot?” Angel asked.

The Fire-Breathing Chat tradition required the speaker to wear a random piece of clothing of exotic or historical origin—a Portuguese fisherman’s hat, an Etruscan helmet, a Moroccan burnoose. Last time Geoffrey had worn a fairly pedestrian toga, and the crowd had loudly expressed their disappointment.

“Tonight… a kilt, I think.”

“My friend,” Angel said, “you’re crazy.”

“Either that or everyone else is. I haven’t figured out which yet. Why does everyone wear the same thing at any given place and time? We all have minds of our own, and yet we’re afraid to be unfashionable. It’s an example of complete irrationality and fear, Angel.”

“Uh, sure. That sounds good.”

“Thanks. I thought it sounded pretty good, too…”

Geoffrey reversed the video clip. He paused the image as they spoke, pondering the single drop of pale blue liquid at the right edge of the frame.

Someone clever might have added two compelling clues—a stomatopod claw and a splash of blue blood—simply to fool the scientific community and keep a publicity stunt simmering, he mused. But somehow it didn’t seem likely that such sophisticated clues would be known to the producers of a trashy reality TV show. Or that they would count on such subtle evidence being picked up by the handful of experts who would notice.

Geoffrey shrugged and put the puzzle away, unsolved.

Enthusiastic applause greeted Geoffrey as he strode onto the stage of Lillie Auditorium.

The hall was packed with a mixture of young students who had fallen under the spell of the dashing evolutionary scientist and elderly skeptical colleagues who were itching for a scientific rumble.

An ageless thirty-four years old, Geoffrey Binswanger was a physically striking man who remained an enigma to his colleagues. His West Indian and German parentage had produced an unlikely mix of islander’s features, caramel complexion, and sky-blue eyes. His dreadlocked hair and athletic physique undermined his academic seriousness, in the view of some of his fellow academics. Others, intrigued, wanted to count him in their political corners.

His theories, however, showed an utter lack of allegiance to anything but his own judgment—a result, perhaps, of never thinking of himself as part of a group. For whatever reason, Geoffrey had always needed to see things for himself. He wanted to draw his own conclusions without obligation to anything but what could be demonstrated and replicated under laboratory conditions.

Ever since he was a child, and as long as he could remember, Geoffrey was a scientist. Whenever adults had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he literally did not understand the question. He was conducting formal experiments at the age of four. Instead of asking his parents why some things bounced and some things shattered, he tested them himself, marking his picture books with a single heavy dot next to illustrations of things that survived the test of gravity and a swirly squiggle next to things that did not, which his mother had discovered to her mixed horror and delight.

His parents, who raised him in the upper-class Los Angeles suburb of La Cañada Flintridge, finally conceded that they had a very special child on their hands when they had come home from
work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab one night to find the babysitter curled up on the couch asleep in front of the television and their six-year-old son sitting on the back patio holding a running garden hose. “Welcome to Triphibian City,” he’d said as he presented his engineering feat with an imperious wave of his hand.

Geoffrey had flooded the entire backyard just as millions of toads from the wash of Devil’s Gate Dam had spawned. Thou sands of the tiny gray amphibians had stormed under the fence through Geoffrey’s little tunnel and now inhabited a metropolis of canals and islands presided over by ceramic garden gnomes.

From that point forward, Geoffrey’s parents did all they could to occupy their son’s curiosity in more constructive ways. They sent him to a camp on Catalina Island, where he was nearly arrested for dissecting a Garibaldi, the pugnacious State Fish of California, although his campmates had already speared as many of the fish as possible, because it was illegal, and had flung them on the rocks.

When they enrolled him in a neurobiology class for gifted children at nearby Caltech, he had never felt more at home. He explored the campus with his genius friends and snuck into the labyrinth of steam tunnels beneath the campus, for which he almost got arrested, yet again.

Geoffrey graduated from Flintridge Prep at the age of fifteen and immediately qualified for Oxford, much to his parents’ horror. His mother finally acquiesced, and Geoffrey stayed at Oxford for seven years, earning degrees in biology, biochemistry, and anthropology.

Geoffrey had won a variety of awards through the years since university but he never displayed them in his office, the way so many of his colleagues did. Looking at them made him queasy. He was deeply suspicious of any strings that might be attached to such honors. He accepted them out of politeness, but even then at arm’s length.

His latest book had become something of a bestseller for a scientific tome, though to his literary agent’s chagrin he resisted opportunities to become what he called a “sound-bite scientist,”
pontificating on TV about the latest scientific fad and mouthing the majority position with no personal expertise in the plethora of matters journalists asked scientists to expound upon. He cringed when he saw colleagues placed in that position, even though they usually seemed pleased to have appeared on television.

For his part, Geoffrey preferred a forum like this one tonight. The storied Lillie Auditorium at Woods Hole was one of the true churches of science. Through the last century this humble hall had hosted more than forty Nobel laureates.

When the small auditorium was built around the end of the nineteenth century, Woods Hole was already a thriving community of loosely affiliated laboratories with a progressive campuslike culture. Here, men and women had found remarkable equality from the start, the men in their boater hats and white suits and the women in their bodices, bustled cotton dresses, and parasols, hunkering down in the mud together and digging for specimens.

Lillie Auditorium cozily held an audience of about two hundred people, its high ceiling supported by wide Victorian pillars painted a yellowing white like fat tallow candles. Under its wood-slatted chairs one could still find the wire fixtures where men used to store their boaters.

The Friday Night Lectures were the most anticipated of the summer lectures at Woods Hole. They regularly drew top scientists from around the world as featured speakers. The Fire-Breathing Chats, however, traditionally took place on Thursday nights.

Geoffrey’s first presentation eight years ago had caused a near-riot—so naturally the directors had reserved some prime Thursday night slots for his visit this year in hopes of a repeat.

Geoffrey had invented the Fire-Breathing Chats so that he and some other young turks at Oxford, after persuading the proprietor of the King’s Head Pub to set a room aside every Thursday night, could commit scientific sacrilege on a regular basis. Their enthusiastic audience had soon swollen to standing room only and had proved a thumping good time regardless, in retrospect,
of how risible most of the theories advanced had been. But the object was not so much to be right as to challenge conventional wisdom and to engage in scientific reasoning, even if it led to the demolition of the theory being proposed. They had a special prize for that, in fact—the Icarus Award, for the theory that was shot down the fastest.

It was rapid-fire science, theory in action, method in motion, and often in the flaming death of a hypothesis could be seen the embers of a brilliant solution. Pitching a bold idea to the wolves had a thrilling appeal to Geoffrey. When it didn’t destroy his theories it improved them, so he had carried the tradition with him wherever he went as a test for his most unscrupulous ideas. He thought of these lectures as “peer preview.”

Now he strode across the stage in a Black Watch tartan kilt and held out a hand to calm the applause as he reached the lectern and tapped the microphone. Whoops and wolf whistles rose from his audience, and Geoffrey stepped out from behind the lectern for a bow.

With the kilt, he wore a T-shirt dyed rust-red by the mud of the island of Kaua’i. Green block letters across his chest read, “Conserve Island Habitats.” Geoffrey had spent half a dozen summers on the small Hawaiian island, vacationing at his uncle’s stilted house tucked in the narrow strip of rain forest between a vine-strangled cliff and Tunnels Beach. He had found no better way to escape civilization than to don a mask, snorkel, and fins. He’d shoot through the ancient lava vents, chasing Moorish Idols, following nonchalant sea turtles, and feeding urchins to the brash
Humuhumunukanukaapuaha’a
fish that took them right out of his hands. He had worn this T-shirt on dozens of his swims through those tunnels, and it was the only common denominator for every Fire-Breathing Chat: he wore it for every talk.