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“Well, I thought you’d be wanting to know about this as soon as possible.”
“What I wanted was for you to be capable of taking care of this sort of fiasco by yourself. Now, can you do the job or not?”
Jimmy Boyle stiffened. “By damn, sir, you know I can.”
“Then do it.”
With Griffin looking on, Jimmy Boyle spoke with the chef. First he offered to hire another caterer to finish the supper if she wasn’t up to the job. It would be easy enough for him to go a week or two into her past and have somebody waiting outside ready to take over right now. Then he asked what additional resources would be needed to keep things on track. Finally, he assured her that she’d have replacement waiters in five minutes.
Boyle then signed off with the police and let them take the two creation terrorists away. He called the waitstaff together, and spoke briefly and intensely about what had happened, and the need to maintain their professional standards. Then he routed a call for two replacements several hours into the local past, and had them briefed and on duty within the time he’d promised the chef.
Then, finally, Griffin felt free to leave.
It had been an ugly one. And a close one, too. But he didn’t mention either fact to Jimmy Boyle. The boy had to learn to think for himself, and the sooner the better.
Before going back down the fu
Then he returned to Xanadu.
He arrived just as the tables were being cleared for dessert and coffee. He nodded to the pianist, who began to play. Another cue, and the lights faded to nothing.
On the surface above, it was bright afternoon. The di
Griffin took the microphone out of his pocket and moved to the front of the room. “Folks, we just got lucky.” Heads craned.
Outside, a pod of plesiosaurs flew lazily by the window like great, long-necked, four-winged penguins, drawing a murmurous ooh from the diners. They were the most graceful creatures Griffin had ever seen, and that included whales. In his estimation, compared to plesiosaurs, whales were all bulk and no beauty.
“Here before you, we have three adults and five juvenile Elasmosaurus, the largest of the plesiosaurs, and the greatest of the reptiles ever to grace the seas. They’re neither as fast, nor as fierce as the mosasaurs we saw earlier. Yet I think you’ll agree with me that the sight of these animals alone makes tonight memorable.”
He didn’t mention that it was skillful use of the biochipped mosasaurs that had gently herded the plesiosaurs inward, toward the station. The reefs were rich with life here and the mosasaurs were out of sight, so the creatures began to feed. Plesiosaurs had almost no memory. They lived in the moment.
Griffin paused for a count of ten, relishing the beauty of those long, long necks as the plesiosaurs darted about, catching fish. Then he said, “There’ll be dancing soon. In the meantime, please feel free to stand and walk over to the windows. Enjoy.”
Somebody stood, a second and third followed, and then the room was filled with pleasant confusion. Griffin pocketed the microphone and checked his cheat sheet. Then he walked over to Esme’s table.
The adults were gone. Only Leyster and Esme remained. She was speaking to Leyster so earnestly she didn’t even notice his approach.
“But my teacher said that men and women pursue different reproductive strategies. That men try to scatter their seed as widely as they can, but women have more at stake, so they try to limit access to a single male.”
“With all due respect,” Leyster said, “your teacher is full of it. No species could survive very long if the males and females had different reproductive strategies.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s—oh, hello, Mr. Griffin!”
“I was just checking up to make sure our Mr. Leyster wasn’t boring you.”
“He could never do that!” Esme spoke with such conviction that Leyster actually blushed. “He was telling me about Dr. Salley’s work with plesiosaurs. Have you heard of that?”
“Well…” He had, but was surprised Leyster would bring it up.
One of the oldest puzzles in paleontology was whether plesiosaurs were viviparous or oviparous—whether they gave birth to their young alive or laid eggs. Fossil mosasaurs had been found which had died in the act of giving birth. Nothing like that had ever been found for plesiosaurs. Nor had fossilized plesiosaur eggs been found.
Salley had tagged a dozen females with radio transmitters, and spent several months out in small boats, observing them. Whenever one showed up with a newborn tagging alongside her, she went over the GPS maps to see where it had been.
“She found that when it’s time the female will leave the ocean, not onto land, but up a freshwater river,” Esme said. “The male follows after her. She goes as far as she can, until the river’s so shallow she can’t go any further. That’s where she gives birth. The land carnivores can’t get at her in the water. There aren’t any aquatic carnivores large enough to threaten her that far upriver. And the male swims back and forth to the downriver side, to make sure nothing comes up after her.
“Isn’t that neat?”
Griffin, who had read Salley’s original paper, as well as the later popularization, had to agree. Aloud, however, he said, “You know why I’m here, don’t you, Esme?”
It was as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. “It’s time for me to leave.”
“Alas.”
Somebody came up to the table and stood silently waiting for the conversation to end. A servant. His posture was too good for him to be anything else.
“This was the best night of my life,” the girl said fervently. “When I grow up, I’m going to be a paleoicthyologist. A marine ecologist, not a wrangler or a specialist. I want to know everything about the Tethys.”
Leyster was smiling mistily. The kid had really gotten to him. He must’ve been a lot like her when he was that age. “Oh, wait. I almost forgot to give you this.” His hand dipped into a pocket, emerged with the shark’s tooth, dropped it in her palm.
She stared down at it in wonder.
The stranger offered Esme his hand. Evidently, her parents were staying to dance.
The girl left.
She’d had a conversion experience. Griffin knew exactly how it felt. He’d had his standing in front of the Zallinger “Age of Reptiles” mural in the Peabody Museum in New Haven. That was before time travel, when paintings of dinosaurs were about as real as you could get. Nowadays he could point out a hundred inaccuracies in how the dinosaurs were depicted. But on that distant sun-dusty morning in the Atlantis of his youth, he just stood staring at those magnificent brutes, head filled with wonder, until his mother dragged him away.
Thinking about Esme and what would become of her made him sad. For an instant he felt the weight of all his years, every petty accommodation, every unworthy expedience.
Minutes after Esme left, a young woman in a short red dress arrived. She hadn’t been here earlier—Griffin would have noticed. He snatched out his cheat sheet and, stomach souring, read the final item.