Vigil (17 page)

For a second, Russo looked stumped, as if he were even aware that he was lighting a cigarette at all, then flicked the match out. “Yes, of course.”

“I’ve read that they found some fossils in Madagascar,” Katie interjected, “that showed some kind of animal that had feathered forearms, like a bird. But it also had the kind of claws that made it seem more like a dinosaur.”

“Yes, and I believe that a mistake has been made. I believe that the excavation there has uncovered pieces of separate creatures. For me,” Russo said, glancing apologetically over at Carter, “there are still too many, how do you say . . . gaps. I do not see in birds, for instance, the beginning of a thumb”—he held up his own and wriggled it—“that we can see in dinosaurs. I see that there are similarities, yes, between the birds and one branch of the dinosaur tree—”

“The theropods?” Katie said, showing off.

“Yes. You have been paying attention to your professor,” Russo said, with a smile, “but even with these theropods, these meat eaters, I do not yet see the definite link.” He shrugged. “But that is what science is all about. Debate, discussion, discovery. I could be wrong, and my friend Carter could turn out to be right. It is possible. But since you are in his class, and not mine, I think that you should agree with his views.”

There was scattered laughter around the lecture hall, and Carter was about to step forward to take control again when one of the other students said, “Is there a European consensus about all this, and is it different from the American one? What does the Italian scientific community, for instance, think?”

“You want me to speak for all of Europe, or even Italy?” Russo said, wide-eyed, and Carter said, “Go for it. Nobody’s taping, as far as I know. The stage is yours.”

Russo walked more toward the center, and Carter retreated into the shadows toward the rear—which was right where he wanted to be today; he’d had a bad night’s sleep, and even now his thoughts kept returning to the events surrounding the delivery of the fossil.

Free at last to start his own investigation, Carter had gone to work with a vengeance. He’d removed the chains that anchored the rock to the platform and stripped away the wide bands of yellow tape that held the plastic sheathing in place. Then he’d carefully cut away the plastic itself, from the top first, so that the pieces fell away from the rock like the petals of a flower opening wide and drooping down. In the end, the plastic sheets lay in a pool around the base of the stone. The rock itself was a miracle—a massive, bumpy, granular block, striated, studded, and sparkling all over with a score of different minerals. Geology had never been Carter’s greatest strength, but even with the naked eye he could see—hell,
anyone
could see—that this particular specimen had led a very long and eventful life.

“In Italy, perhaps because we do not have so much access to technology—the government is very stingy with its resources—we like to
think,
to work on
theory,
” Russo was saying. “Then later we try to make the evidence prove it.”

The students laughed again, another one asked a question, and Carter was relieved to see that Russo was warming to the task; Carter could tell he was a good lecturer, and guessed he was popular with his own students back in Rome.

But that first night, in the lab, he’d shown a lot less interest and enthusiasm than Carter would have expected—maybe the whole thing was just anticlimactic for him. Russo had stood back, making occasional comments and observations, while Carter had clambered all over the rock, like a kid climbing a tree. At one point, he’d lain flat on the top of it, just trying to imagine what was fossilized inside, which way it lay, what bones were preserved, what they might be able to tell him about evolution and the prehistoric world.

“You should be careful, lying on a ticking bomb like that,” Russo had said, referring to the pockets of volatile gas that they both suspected were embedded in the stone.

“Long as I don’t puncture the damn thing, I should be safe,” Carter had replied, though the time for that, he knew, would come. Eventually, they would have to figure out a way to chisel, sand, hack, blast, or laser away the stone encasing the rest of the fossil within. For now, all that could be seen, all that had ever been seen, were those long, twisted talons that seemed to be struggling to claw their way out of the very rock. Carter, who’d seen countless fossils from all over the globe, had never seen anything like this one; it would have been nearly impossible to put into words, or to convey to someone who hadn’t seen it first-hand, but this fossil carried a kind of ineffable
vitality
. There was no other way to say it. When Carter stroked the prehensile claw—and he could not resist doing so—he didn’t feel that he was touching some long-dead specimen, some calcified, ossified, petrified thing. He felt that he was touching something . . . dormant. And though he knew this had to be wrong, there was no way it could be true, he felt that the thing was perceptibly, maybe even measurably, warmer than the surrounding stone.

“The pelvic bones, the pubic bones too, are all quite primitive in the Madagascar fossil,” Russo was explaining. “For the late Cretaceous, this is unusual.”

“Any reason why you think this could have happened?” Katie asked.

“Isolation, possibly. On an island, a species could survive longer than it might be able to do on the mainland. It might be able to evolve in its own way, at its own rate, and in its own . . . niche.”

True enough, Carter thought, and it might explain some of the anomalies in the Madagascar find. But their own prize fossil, from Lago D’Avernus? Over the eons, the Italian boot, like every other present-day country and continent in the world, had migrated and changed, but for more than two hundred million years it had remained an integrated part of what was known by earth scientists as the Laurasian land mass. Nor had it ever been made, in any way, impervious to extraterritorial influence or mutation; even the Alpine folding that took place in the Cenozoic era was, geologically speaking, no big deal.

“Can I ask a sort of personal question?” Katie asked, and Carter’s ears perked up.

“Ask it, and then we will know,” Russo replied good-naturedly.

“Why are you here, in New York? Are you just visiting with your old friend Professor Cox, or are you here doing work of some kind?”

Odd, how on target that kid could be. Even Russo looked nonplussed, and glanced over at Carter just as the class bell went off.

“A little of both,” Carter said, over the din. “The good news is, Professor Russo will be at your disposal, on an informal basis. And the bad news is, the work we’re doing is—to put it professionally—none of your beeswax. See you all next week; don’t forget to leave your term papers in my box at the departmental office.” He turned to Russo, as the students made for the exits. “So how do you like teaching in the States?”

Russo wagged his head back and forth. “Not so bad. But it would be better if I could smoke.”

“You’d have to apply to the department head for a special dispensation.”

“I could do this?”

“Not really.”

 
After lunch in the faculty dining room, where Russo
had the dubious pleasure of meeting the departmental chair, Stanley Mackie, Carter spent the rest of the day working in the lab; the argon laser had been delivered, and a techie from the medical sciences department spent several hours walking Carter and Russo through its operating procedures. On the whole Carter figured he knew how to use it, but he wasn’t about to try it out until the following week, and even then he’d only test it on the
Smilodon
specimens recently donated to the university. Not only were they unremarkable—they were also free of any dangerous gas pockets.

At six o’clock sharp, while he was still immersed in the laser manual, there was a honking outside, just beyond the metal doors to the lab.

“Carter?” Russo said.

“Huh?” Carter replied, without looking up.

“Your friends, I think, are here?”

Carter couldn’t believe it; he glanced at his watch. He’d agreed with Beth that he’d be ready to leave for the country at six, and to make it easier on him, she told him she’d get Ben and Abbie to bring their car around to the very door of the lab.

Carter threw the manual into the duffel bag with his other things, then pulled on his leather jacket. “You going to be okay?” he said to Russo.

“I am a big boy,” Russo said. “And tonight, I have a New York party to go to,” he said, brandishing the invitation to Bill Mitchell’s pre-Halloween bash. “Have a good time.”

The car honked again, and Carter slipped out the side door.

Beth was in the backseat, and Carter slid in beside her. “Sorry, hope I didn’t keep you all waiting,” he said, propping his feet on the duffel bag.

“No problem,” Ben said, turning to look out the rear window as he backed up.

“We were planning to stop on the road and have dinner,” Abbie said, from the front seat. “There’s a great little place, with a moose head over the bar and all that, about an hour and a half away.”

“Sounds great,” Beth said, squeezing Carter’s hand in the backseat. These days, she reflected, the only time they were in the backseat of a car together, it was a taxi, and then they were holding on for dear life. This was a lot more romantic.

“So Beth tells us you’re working on something very exciting,” Ben said, as the car crawled westward, through heavy traffic, on Houston Street.

“Can you say what it is,” Abbie asked, “or is that information classified?”

Beth wondered what Carter would say; he was normally so secretive about his research—this project especially—and she felt guilty that she’d said anything about it at all.

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” he said, the wonder in his voice surprising even Beth. “A massive sample of primarily igneous rock, but with what appears to be a perfectly preserved fossil embedded inside it.”

“And that’s rare?” Ben asked over his shoulder, as he navigated through a crush of cars, all of them no doubt trying to make their way, as he was, to the West Side Highway.

“It’s not only rare, it’s basically impossible. Especially since from all the empirical evidence so far, the rock is almost as old as the molten core of the planet, as old as the earth itself.”

“So how could something that old hold a fossil?” Ben asked. “Even an investment banker knows that life came along a whole lot later.”

“That’s what makes it so puzzling,” Carter said.

When he talked like this, leaning forward in his enthusiasm, he looked to Beth like a little boy.

“We’ve taken a specimen from the fossil itself—”

“I thought you hadn’t used the laser yet?” Beth interjected.

“We haven’t—we did it the old-fashioned way, with a chisel, removing just a small fragment from the end of one talon.”

“And what do you hope that will prove?” Ben asked.

“We sent it over to the medical sciences lab, and with carbon dating, maybe we’ll be able to get a fix on its relative age. The weird thing is, all the tests so far have come back with completely untenable readings.”

“What do you mean,” Abbie said, “untenable?”

“It means that the fossil predates every form of life that ever existed, anywhere in the world; it predates the dinosaurs, the lowest plankton or moss or amoeba. It existed, if you want to put it that way, before the dawn of time.”

There was a momentary silence in the car.

“Sounds like an
X-Files
case to me,” Ben finally said.

“Or an extraterrestrial,” Abbie added.

Carter leaned back. “It does, doesn’t it?” He looked out the window. “I’ve brought some books and reports to study this weekend,” he said, “so maybe I’ll crack it, once and for all, at your place.”

Beth’s heart sank; she’d imagined long walks in the woods, holding hands and sharing intimate thoughts, followed by cozy evenings in front of a crackling fire. But now, suddenly, she saw herself walking in the woods, alone, while Carter hunkered down in the house with his lab reports. That had not been part of the plan. Her plan was for time together, time outdoors . . . and time spent working on that little idea they’d had about starting a family. Still, unless Carter had changed utterly, there was one thing she could count on; the boy in him loved dinosaurs, but the man in him loved Victoria’s Secret. And she had picked up a few naughty little surprises there on her lunch break.

The score was going to be lingerie one, dinosaurs nothing.

When they got to the restaurant, it was just as Abbie had advertised it—dark booths, basic fare, and a mournful-looking moose head over the bar. But things between Ben and Abbie were going downhill fast; they’d started bickering in the car, and now, after Ben had thrown down a few too many drinks, they only got worse. Maybe it was the accumulated stress of buying the new house, driving out of the city in crazy weekend traffic, trying to start a family—Beth could understand where it was coming from, but it didn’t make it any more comfortable to be there to witness it. After dinner, Abbie insisted on driving the rest of the way, and after a little tussle with Ben over the car keys—which they pretended was playful, but wasn’t—she won.

The drive got darker and lonelier the farther they went, and the towns they passed through became more desolate and forlorn. Beth began to wish she’d never agreed to this plan—would Carter ever forgive her?—but it was too late to do anything about it now.

After they’d been on a winding, pitch-black, two-lane road for about fifteen minutes, Ben said, “Slow down—it’s right there!” and Abbie said, “Where? I don’t see it!”

“There, there, behind the big oak!”

She slowed the car. “What’s an oak? I can’t tell an oak from an elm, even in the daylight.”

“It’s the big tree you just passed,” Ben said. “I told you I should drive.”