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“You were asked to leave, and then the next semester you popped up at Yale. How did that happen?”
“I went to see the department head, and cried until he agreed to call in a favor.” She shoved a sausage in her mouth and chewed it to nothing. “It was the single most humiliating experience in my life.”
“That would have been Dr. Martelli, I believe.”
“I swore to myself then and there that I’d never cry in public or sleep with another paleontologist again, so long as I lived. And I haven’t.”
“Well, you’re young. Martelli was one of your on-line mentors, wasn’t he?”
“Everybody was. I mean, not to be immodest, but when I was a teenager, I was everybody’s favorite wa
“Here. Look this over.” Monk placed a sheet of paper by her plate. “Tell me if I got anything wrong.”
Salley shifted the spoon to her left hand so she could keep on eating, picked up the paper, and read:
Everyone who knew her agreed that Gertrude “gave good daughter.” Except, of course, her own parents. At age five she took a pair of shears to the family Atlas and made silhouette dinosaurs. That same year she told her mother she wanted to marry a stegosaur when she grew up. At age seven she threw a fit when her parents wouldn’t take her to China to dig for fossils for summer vacation. It was a relief to them when, in junior high, she discovered the listservs on the Web and jumped in with both feet, asking naïve questions and posing wild hypotheses. One of these—her notion that dinosaurs were secondarily flightless—she wrote up and submitted to the scientific journals when she was fifteen. To her outrage, it was not accepted. By then she was the indulged and spoiled daughter to a generation of paleontologists. At eighteen she was accepted by the University of Chicago. At twenty-one she was involved in a serious academic scandal. At twenty-three she was briefly famous when she a
Salley mopped up the last of her grits with a bit of toast, and returned the paper. “I never use my given name. I’d prefer you called me Salley, okay?”
“Ah.” He made a note on the paper. “Anything else?”
“Monk, are you going to have any actual science in your book?”
“Science? It’s all science.”
“What I’ve seen so far is just chitchat and gossip.” She finished her coffee and picked up her tray. “Come on. I’ve got something to pick up over to the animal colony, and then I’ll show you some real research. Maybe you’ll learn something.”
The animal colony was a windowless prefab with corrugated metal walls and a noisy air-handling system. “We call this Bird Valhalla,” Salley said. She opened the door, and the warm scent of bird droppings touched their faces. “Looks like the 4-H poultry shed at the state fair, doesn’t it?”
Archies screamed and lashed the bars of their cages with clawed wings as the door slammed shut. They were boldly patterned birds with long feathered tails, vicious little teeth, and dispositions to match. Their plumage was orange and brown and red.
An absorbed-looking young man put down a sack marked Archaeopteryx Chow, turned, and blinked with surprise to see them there. “Hey, Salley.”
“Monk, this is Raymond. Raymond, Monk—he’s writing a book about Bohemia Station.”
“Oh, yeah? He should’ve been here yesterday. We pumped the hall full of tiny helium-filled bubbles, and flew a couple of archies down it, so we could photograph the vortices of their flight. Got some nice shots. National Geographic quality. Not that we’re allowed to submit anything to a public forum.”
“Let me guess—they were all continuous vortexes, right?”
“Uh… yeah.”
“So you’ve just proved that an archie can fly fast, but not slow. Brilliant. It would’ve taken me ten seconds of direct observation to tell you the same thing.”
Birds, with the exception of hummingbirds, which flew unlike anything else, had only two modes of flight—slow and bat-out-of-hell fast. The slow mode left pairs of loop-shaped whorls in the air behind them, while the disturbance of the fast mode was continuous. Slow flight was the more difficult mode to achieve, a refinement of primal flight that wouldn’t appear for tens of millions of years yet.
“It was Dr. Jorgenson’s experiment. I just helped run it.” To Monk, he said, “If you’re writing a book, that means you’re from later in the century than we are. How long do we have to wait before we can publish our work?”
“I’m really not allowed to say.”
“This idiot secrecy really screws up everything,” Raymond said sullenly. “You can’t do decent science when you can’t publish. That’s all fucked up. We had a group from the Royal Tyrrell through here last week, and they’d never even heard of our work. What kind of peer review is that? It’s nuts.”
Monk smirked. “I agree with you completely. If it were up to me—”
“Much as I enjoy listening to you guys whine,” Salley said, “Lydia Pell’s expecting me to spell her at the blind. You want me to pick up another archie while we’re there?”
“Uh… yeah, thanks. We can always use more. Jorgenson keeps letting ours go.”
“You got it.” She snagged an animal carrier and turned to leave. “Come on, Monk. Let’s go look at the wildlife.”
It was a glorious day to be trudging along the dunes. The sky was purest blue and a light breeze came off the Tethys Sea. Every now and then an archie would burst screaming out of the shrubbery at the edge of the trees and flap wildly away, low over the sand. An archaeopteryx rarely flew higher than the treetops. The upper air still belonged to pterosaurs.
Occasionally they flushed a small feathered ru
Salley pointed them out. “Dinos. Small. No feathers. What does that tell you?”
“There are lots of feathered dinosaurs. Even you won’t deny that.”
“All birds have feathers. But only some dinosaurs. That’s because feathers are a primitive condition for the ancestors of dinosaurs and birds. Birds kept the feathers, dinosaurs mostly lost ‘em.”
“Secondary featherlessness?” He laughed. “Is this anything like your secondarily flightless Apatosaurus?”
“Cut me some slack—I was fifteen when I wrote that paper suggesting that dinosaurs were descended from volant reptiles.”
“But they’ve gone back to the Triassic, and nobody’s found a living specimen of your hypothetical ancestor. How do you explain that?”
“Tell me something, Monk. How many important scientists—important ones—do you think made it to the senior prom?”
“I honestly can’t say I’ve given it much thought.”
“Hardly any. Here’s something I’ve observed—the most popular kids in high school never become much of anything. They peak in their senior year. It’s the dweebs, geeks, and misfits, the fringe types, the loners, who grow up to be Elvis Presley or Richard Feynman or Georgia O’Keeffe. And, similarly, it isn’t the successful organisms that evolve into totally new forms. The successful organisms stay where they are, growing more and more perfectly adapted to their ecological niche until something shakes that niche and they all die. It’s the fringe types that suddenly come up out of nowhere to fill the world with herds of triceratopses.”