'Wait a moment, please.'
He stood up, steadied himself with a hand on the back of the chair, and took a deep breath. The moment of dizziness passed, leaving him strangely hyperalert. He looked around the lab. It was as silent as a tomb, with only the faint hiss of air, the hum of the fan in the computer, the smell of epoxy, plastic, and heated electronics. Everything was as it was before-and yet the world had just changed. The future flashed through his mind-the awards, the best-selling book, the lectures, the money, the prestige. Tenure was only the beginning.
He looked at Crookshank. Did she, too, see it? She was no fool. She was thinking the same kinds of things, imagining how her life had now changed- forever.
'Melodie . . .'
'Yeah. It's awesome. And I'm not done. Not by a long shot.'
He managed to sit down. Could there really be more?
Crookshank rapped a key. 'Let's go to the electron micrographs.' A black and white image leapt into sharp focus. 'Here's endoplasmic reticulum at l.OOOx. You can see now the crystalline structure of the replacement mineral. True, you can't see much-we're at the limit. The structure is breaking down at this magnification- fossilization can't preserve everything. But the fact you can see anything at a thousand x is incredible. You're looking at the microbiology of a dinosaur, right there.'
It was extraordinary. Even this little sample was a paleontological discovery of the first water. And to think that there was probably a whole dinosaur like that, if his information was correct. The perfectly fossilized carcass of a T. Rex, complete-the stomach, no doubt with its last meal, the brain in all its glory, the
skin, the feathers, the blood vessels, the reproductive organs, nasal cavities, liver, kidneys, spleen-the diseases it had, its wounds, its life history, all perfectly duplicated in stone. It was the closest they were going to get to JurassicPark in the real world.
She clicked to the next image. 'Here's the bone marrow-'
'Wait.' Corvus stayed her. 'What are those dark things?'
'What dark things?'
'Back in the last image.'
'Oh, those.' She backed up to the previous picture. Corvus pointed to a small thing in the image, a small black particle.
'What is it?'
'Probably an artifact of the fossilization process.'
'Not a virus?'
'It's way too big. And it's too sharply defined to be part of the original biology anyway. I'm pretty sure it's a microcrystalline growth, probably hornblende.'
'Quite right. Sorry. Keep on.'
'I could zap it with the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, see what it's made of.'
'Fine.'
She clicked through another series of micrographs.
'This is stupendous, Melodie.'
She turned to him, her face flushed, radiant. 'Can I ask a question?'
He hesitated, collecting himself. He was going to need her help, that much was clear, and doling out a few grains of glory to a female lab assistant would be a lot better than cutting another curator in on the deal. Melodie had no contacts, no power, and no future, just another underemployed Ph.D. grunt. So much the better that she was a woman and wouldn't be taken as seriously.
He put his arm around her, leaned close. 'Of course.'
'Is there any more of this out there?'
Corvus couldn't help smiling. 'I suspect, Melodie, that there's a whole dinosaur like this out there.'
24
SALLY FELT A lot more disturbed than elated at the computer-plotted image Tom had spread out on the kitchen table.
'This just gets worse and worse,' she said.
'Better and better, you mean. This is exactly the kind of information I needed to identify the man and find his daughter.'
This is Tom all over, Sally thought-stubborn, operating from some kind of deep-seated moral conviction that landed him in trouble. It had nearly gotten him killed in Honduras.
'Look, Tom-this man was illegally prospecting for fossils on public land. He was certainly involved in the fossil black market and maybe with organized crime. He was a bad guy and he got murdered. You don't want to be messing around with this. And even if you found his daughter, the fossil wouldn't belong to her. You yourself said it belongs to the feds.'
'I made a promise to a dying man and that's the beginning and the end of it.'
Sally sighed in exasperation.
Tom circled the table like a panther prowling around a kill. 'You haven't said what you think of it yet.'
'It's amazing, of course, but that's not the point.'
'That is the point. It's the most important paleontological discovery ever made.'
Despite herself, Sally was drawn to the strange image. It was blurry, indistinct, but it was clearly a lot more than just a skeleton. It was a dinosaur, complete, entombed in the rock. It lay on its side, its neck thrown back, jaws open, its two front limbs raised up as if trying to claw its way free.
'How did it fossilize so well?'
'It had to have been an almost unique combination of circumstances, which I don't even begin to understand.'
'Could there be any organic material left? DNA?'
'It's at least sixty-five million years old.'
'Amazing how fresh it looks, almost as if it should stink.'
Tom chuckled. 'It's not the first mummified dinosaur found. Back around the turn of the century a dinosaur hunter named Charles Sternberg found a mummified duck-billed dinosaur in Montana. I remember seeing it as a kid at the natural history museum in New York, but it isn't nearly as complete as this one.'
She picked up the plot. 'Looks like he died in agony, with his neck twisted back and his jaws open like that.'
'It's a she.'
'You can tell?' She looked closely. 'I don't see anything down there but a blur.'
'Female tyrannosaurs were probably bigger and more ferocious than the males. And since this is the biggest T. Rex ever found, it's a good guess it was female.'
'Big Bertha.'
'That twisting of the neck was caused by the tendons drying and contracting. Most dinosaur skeletons are found with contorted necks.'
Sally whistled. 'What now? You have a plan?'
'I sure do. Very few people realize this, but there's a thriving black market in dinosaur fossils out there. Dinosaur fossils are big business and some dinosaurs are worth millions-like this one.'
'Millions?'
'The last T. Rex that came on the market sold for over eight million, and that was ten years ago. This one's worth at least eighty.'
'Eighty million?'
'Ballpark.'
'Who would pay that kind of money for a dinosaur?'
'Who would pay that kind of money for a painting? Give me T. Rex over Titian any day.'
'Point taken.'
'I've been reading up on this. There are a lot of collectors out there, especially in the Far East, who'll pay almost anything for a spectacular dinosaur fossil. So many black market fossils were being smuggled out of China that the country passed a law declaring dinosaurs to be part of their national patrimony. But it hasn't stopped the flow. Everybody wants their own dinosaur these days. The thing is, the biggest and best-preserved dinosaurs still
