'
Ann Smythe found her hands were shaking as she sat at her computer to begin her research. As a freelance marketer, she was used to demanding clients, even abusive ones. It came with the territory. Yet, Green unnerved her. She relied on her instincts, and she trusted them. They told her to be cautious; there was something going on.
THREE DAYS LATER, Ann Smythe was picking her way through the cluttered basement of Horner Hall on the campus of the University of Montana. She was annoyed with Rick Clements already, and they hadn't even met. They were supposed to have met an hour ago, but he hadn't shown up. She had been forced to track him down. A series of inquiries had led her first to the paleontology department, then to the preparation lab in the basement. She was not pleased to be there. Disorder irritated her, and the ubiquitous rock dust had soiled her expensive suit. There, amid cartons of specimens and scattered tools, she located a muscular, sandy-haired young man staring intently through a stereo macroscope. Despite his youth, he had a weathered look, as if he spent a lot of time in the sun. He was using a needlelike tool to deli-cately remove the rocky matrix from a fossil, grain by grain.
'Rick Clements?'
'Yeah?' said Rick, not removing his eyes from the ma-croscope.
'I'm Ann Smythe, we had an appointment.'
Rick suddenly started back from the macroscope, glanced down at his watch, then looked up at Ann.
'I'm sorry. I lost track of the time.' He rose and wiped his dusty hand on his pants before extending it to Ann. He had a disarming, guileless smile that made her decide to forgive him. 'It's a
'What?'
'The fossil, it's ...'
'Never mind,' said Ann. 'I've come a long way to talk, but not here.'
'Sure. Is the commons okay? Look, I'm really sorry about...'
'It must be someplace where we won't be overheard.'
'There's my room, but it's a mess.'
'Your room sounds fine.'
Rick's dorm room resembled a more compressed ver-sion of the paleontology department's basement. Rick cleared some books and rocks off a chair, then offered Ann the seat. She decided to stand.
'Professor Harrington said you had some kind of job offer,' said Rick, 'but he didn't say much more than that.'
'I didn't tell him more than that,' said Ann. 'The peo-ple I represent are starting a new venture and they're not ready to make it public yet. It's an opportunity for you to get in on the ground floor.'
'New venture ... ground floor ... are you sure you're talking to the right person? I study fossils. This doesn't sound like my line of work. Besides, I've already lined up some fieldwork this summer.' Ann ignored his question. 'You should be a senior this semester,' she said, 'except you haven't fulfilled the core requirements. Just biology, geology, comparative anat-omy, and paleontology courses, some of them on the graduate level. You won't get a degree that way.'
Rick sighed. 'I've heard this before. Did my brother put you up to this?'
'No, I brought it up to make a point. Single-minded people like you generally have a hard time in this world. If you ever want academic work, you'll have to study literature and history also.'
'Now I
'No, quite the contrary, I'm here to offer you a way out. To do what you love without the compromises.' She pulled a small viewer from her pocket and inserted a disk. 'This is raw input, straight from the datacam. Take a look.'
Rick peered at the screen and saw an aerial view of an open landscape dotted with clumps of trees. The ground was covered with low vegetation upon which a herd of large animals grazed. The view zoomed in closer on the herd, and soon Rick recognized them. 'They're ceratop-sids.
