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Molly had less than an hour before she had to escort Leyster back to D.C. She filled it as well as she could.
On the way to the limo, they turned a corner and almost walked into Salley. Leyster turned his head away. Salley’s face went white.
You’ve given her a knife, Molly thought. Then you spat in her face, and dared her to use it. That would be bad enough. But now you’ve turned your back on her. As if she were harmless.
Leyster really was a royal screw-up. But Molly didn’t say that. Nor did she tell him that he was a primary target of the Ranch’s terrorists. Molly never said anything without a definite end in mind.
6. Feeding Strategies
Xanadu Station: Mesozoic era. Cretaceous period. Gallic epoch. Turonian age. 95 My B.C.E.
Tom and Molly’s report lay unread on Griffin’s desk, the first of fifteen such from the team he’d assembled to deal with the creation terrorist threat. All fifteen were from different times, and they were all marked Urgent. He wasn’t sure yet which he would read, and in what order. He wasn’t sure how much he wanted to know.
The mere fact of opening a report had an almost metaphysical dimension. It collapsed the infinite range of possibilities that might yet be into a single unalterable account of what was. It turned the future into the past. It traded the lively play of free will for the iron shackles of determinism.
Sometimes ignorance was your only friend.
“Sir?” It was Jimmy Boyle. “The Undersea Ball is about to begin.”
Griffin hated fund-raisers. But it was his misfortune to be good at this sort of thing. “Is my tux in fashion?” he asked. “Exactly when is this lot from, anyway?”
“The 2090s, sir. Your suit is twenty years out of date, the same as everyone else’s. You’ll fit right in.”
“You haven’t seen the Old Man snooping around, have you?”
“Are you expecting him?”
“Good Lord, I hope not. But I’ve got a feeling about tonight. Something bad is going to happen. I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if this weren’t the night that the Unchanging finally decided to revoke our time travel privileges.”
Jimmy’s habitually sad face twisted into a homely smile. “You just don’t like formal affairs.” The older Jimmy got, the more comforting his presence was. He was close to retirement age now, ripe with wisdom, and, through experience, grown almost infinitely tolerant. “You always talk like this before one.”
“That’s true enough. Do you have my cheat sheet?”
Wordlessly, Jimmy handed it over.
Griffin turned his back on the reports, leaving them all unread. But as he did, his arm swung up and without thinking he glanced down at his watch: 8:10 P.M. personal time. 3:17 P.M. local time.
It was his own private superstition that as long as he didn’t know what time it was, things were still fluid enough for him to maintain some semblance of control over events. It seemed a poor omen to start the evening with this small defeat.
The view from Xanadu was like none other in the Mesozoic. Griffin knew. He’d been everywhere, from the lush green stillness of the Induan era at its outset to the desolation of Ring Station, a hundred years into the aftermath of the Chicxulub impactor strike that ended it. Xanadu was special.
Sunk in the shallow waters of the Tethys Sea, Xanadu was a bubble of blue-green glass anchored and buttressed by rudist reefs that twenty-second-century biotechnicians had shaped and trained to their purposes. From the outside, it looked like a Japanese fishing float partially encrusted in barnacles. Within, one stood bathed in shifting, watery light and immersed in a wealth of life.
It was altogether beautiful.
A pianist played Cole Porter in the background. Guests were arriving, being shown to their tables, politely considering the ocean around them, the giant strands of seaweed, the swarms of ammonites, the jewellike teleosts in rich profusion.
But then an armada of waiters swept into the room, trays held high, bringing in the hors d’oeuvres; pliosaur wrapped in kelp, beluga caviar smeared over sliced hesperornis egg, grilled and shredded enigmasaur on toast, a dozen delicacies more.
It was like a conjuring trick. Attention shifted and in an instant nobody was looking out at the wonder surrounding them.
Except for one. A thirteen-year-old girl stood by the window, drinking it all in. She had a pocket guide and, now and then when something flashed by, she’d hold it up quickly to catch the image and get an ID. As Griffin watched, a twenty-foot-long fish swam slowly up and eyed her malevolently through the glass.
It was ugly as sin. Sharp teeth jutted out between enormous lips of a mouth that thrust sharply downward. Those teeth, that mouth, and its unblinking, indignant gaze gave the fish a pugnacious appearance. But either the guide wasn’t working properly, or she couldn’t get the right angle, because whenever the girl looked down at it, her eyes flashed with a
Snagging a glass of champagne from a passing tray, Griffin strolled over to her side. “Xiphactinus audax,” he said. “Commonly known as the bulldog fish. For obvious reasons.”
“Thank you,” she said solemnly. “It’s a predator, isn’t it?”
“With those teeth? You bet. Xiphactinus is unusual in that, unlike a shark, it swallows its prey whole. The fish go down alive and struggling.”
“That doesn’t seem like a very good feeding strategy, does it? How do they keep their prey from damaging them?”
“Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they choke on something they swallowed, and then they die. The bulldog fish is not a perfect predator. Still, enough survive to keep the species going.”
With a sudden flick of its fins, the bulldog fish was gone. The girl turned to face him for the first time.
He offered his hand. “My name’s Griffin.”
They shook. “I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Griffin. My name is Esme Borst-Campbell. Are you a paleontologist?”
“I used to be, but I got promoted. Now I’m just a bureaucratic functionary.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointedly. “I was hoping you’d be sitting at our table.”
“I’m honored that you’d want me there.” Tickets to the Ball went for a hundred thousand dollars a seat, figured at year 2010 values, and in addition to the silent auction before the meal and the dancing afterwards, those who bought an entire table for six—as the Borst-Campbells had—were given their very own paleontologist, as a sort of party favor.
“I’m just afraid that I’ll be stuck with somebody boring who’ll want to talk about dinosaurs all evening.” She managed to invest the word with an immense amount of scorn.
“You don’t like dinosaurs?”
“It’s rather a boy thing, isn’t it? Killer monsters with dagger teeth, creatures so big they could crush people underfoot. What I like about marine biology is how co
“And what are you interested in?”
“Everything!” Esme blurted. Then, embarrassed, “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”
“No, no, you were right to say that.” It ranked, in Griffin’s estimation, among the best things he had ever heard anybody say. “But about your problem. Let me see.” He glanced at his cheat sheet. The first item on it, printed in his own neat hand, read Esme—Richard L. “You’re in luck. You have Dr. Leyster. The two of you will get along just fine.”
“He doesn’t like dinosaurs?”
“Well, he does, but I’ll tell you what to do.”
“What?”
“When you’re introduced, look him in the eye and tell him you think dinosaur paleontology is inferior to paleoichthyology.”