THE CALL CAME in at 11:00 P.M. Even though Melodic had been waiting for it, she jumped when the phone trilled in the silent, empty lab.
'Melodic? How's the research going?'
'Great, Dr. Corvus, just great.' She swallowed, realizing she was breathing hard into the mouthpiece.
'Still working?'
'Yes, yes, I am.'
'Those results come in?'
'Yes. They're-incredible.'
'Tell me everything.'
'The specimen is riddled with iridium-exactly the type of iridium enrichment you find at the K-T boundary, only more so. I mean, this specimen is saturated with iridium.'
'What type of iridium and how many parts per billion?'
'It's bound up in various isometric hexoctahedral forms in a concentration oi over 430 ppb. That, as you know, is the exact type identified with the Chicxulub asteroid strike.'
Melodic waited for a response but it didn't come.
'This fossil,' she ventured, 'it wouldn't happen to be located at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary . . . would it?'
'It could be.'
Another long silence, and Melodic continued.
'In the outer matrix surrounding the specimen, I found a tremendous abundance of microparticles of soot, of the kind you get from forest fires. According
to a recent article in the Journal of'Geophysical Research, more than a third of the earth's forests burned up following the Chicxulub asteroid strike.'
'I'm aware of the article,' came the quiet voice of Corvus.
'Then you know that the K-T boundary consists of two layers, first the iridium-enriched debris from the strike itself, and then a layer of soot laid down by worldwide forest fires.' She stopped, waiting yet again for a reaction, but there was another long silence on the other end of the phone. Corvus didn't seem to get it-or did he?
'It seems to me . . .' She paused, almost afraid to say it. 'Or rather, my conclusion is that this dinosaur was actually killed by the asteroid strike-or it died in the ecological collapse that followed.'
This dynamite conclusion fell into the void. Corvus remained silent.
'I would guess that this would also account for the fossil's extraordinary state of preservation.'
'How so?' came the guarded response.
'While reading that article, it struck me that the asteroid impact, the fires, and the heating of the atmosphere created unique conditions for fossilization. For one thing, there'd be no scavengers to tear apart the body and scatter the bones. The strike actually heated up the whole earth, making the atmosphere as hot as the SaharaDesert, and in many areas the air temperature reached two, even three hundred degrees-perfect for flash- drying a carcass. On top of that, all the dust would trigger gigantic weather systems. Immense flash floods would have quickly buried the remains.'
Melodie took a deep breath, waited for a reaction-excitement, astonishment, skepticism. Still nothing.
'Anything more?' asked Corvus.
'Well, then they're the Venus particles.'
'Venus particles?'
'That's what I call those black particles you noticed, because under a microscope they look sort of like the symbol for Venus-a circle with a cross coming out of it. You know, the feminist symbol.'
'The feminist symbol,' Corvus repeated.
'I did some tests on them. They're not a microcrystalline formation or an artifact of fossilization. The particle is a sphere of inorganic carbon with a projecting arm; inside are a bunch of trace elements I haven't yet analyzed.'
1 see.
'They're all the same size and shape, which would imply a biological origin. They seem to have been present in the dinosaur when it died and just remained
in place, unchanged, for sixty-five million years. They're . . . very strange. I need to do a lot more work to figure out what they are, but I wonder if they aren't some kind of infectious particle.'
There was that strange silence on the other end of the telephone. When Corvus finally spoke, his voice was low. He sounded disturbed. 'Anything else, Melodie?'
'That's all.' As if that wasn't enough. What was wrong with Corvus? Didn't he believe her?
The Curator's voice was so calm it was almost spooky. 'Melodie, this is fine work you've done. I commend you. Now listen carefully: here is what I want you to do. I want you to gather up all your CDs, the pieces of specimen, everything in the lab connected with this work, and I want you to lock it all up securely in your specimen cabinet. If there is by chance anything left in the computer, delete it using the utility program that completely wipes files off the hard disk. Then I want you to go home and get some sleep.'
She felt incredulous. Was that all he could say, that she needed sleep?
'Can you do that, Melodie?' came the soft voice. 'Lock it all up, clean the computer, go home, get some sleep, eat a nourishing meal. We'll talk again in the morning.'
'All right.'
'Good.' A pause. 'See you tomorrow.'
AFTER HANGING UP the telephone, Melodie sat in the laboratory, feeling stunned. After all her work, her extraordinary discoveries, Corvus acted as if he hardly cared-or didn't even believe her. I commend you. Here she'd made one of the most important paleontological discoveries in history, and all he could do was commend her? And tell her to get some sleep?
She looked up at the clock. Clunk went the minute hand. Eleven-fifteen. She looked down at her arm, at the bracelet winking on her wrist, her miserably small breasts, her thin hands, her bitten nails, her ugly freckled arms. Here she was, Melodie Crookshank, thirty-three years old, still an assistant without a tenure-track job, a scientific nobody. She felt a growing burn of resentment. Her thoughts flashed back to her stern university-professor father whose oft-stated goal was that she not grow up to be 'just another dumb broad.' She thought of how much she had tried to please him. And she thought of her mother, who resented having a career as a homemaker and wanted to live vicariously through her daughter's success. Melodie had tried to please her too. She thought about all the teachers she'd tried to please, the professors, her dissertation adviser.
And now Corvus.
And where had all this agreeableness and pleasing gotten her? Her eye roved about the oppressive basement lab.
She wondered, for the first time, just how Corvus planned to handle their discovery. And it was their discovery-he couldn't have done it on his own. He didn't know how to work the equipment well, he was practically a computer illiterate, and he was a lousy mineralogist. She had done the analysis, asked the right questions of the specimen, teased out the answers. She had made the connections, extrapolated from the data, developed the theories.
It began to dawn on her why Corvus wanted to keep it all so very secret. A spectacular discovery like this would set off a furor of competition, intrigue, and a rush to get the rest of the fossil. Corvus might easily lose control of the discovery-and with it lose credit. He understood the value of that concept, credit. It was the cold cash of the scientific world.
Credit. A slippery concept, when you really thought about it.
Her mind felt clearer than it had in months-maybe years. Maybe it was because she was so tired-tired of pleasing, tired of working for others, tired of this tomblike lab. Her eye fell on the sapphire bracelet. She took it off and let it dangle in front of her eyes, the gems winking seductively. Corvus had driven one of the best bargains of his career, giving her that piece of jewelry, thinking it would buy her silence and a mousy, feminine agreeableness. She shoved it in her pocket in disgust.
Melodie now began to understand why Corvus had reacted the way he had, why he had been so unforthcoming-even disturbed-on the telephone. She had done too well with her assignment. He was worried that she had found out too much, that she might claim the discoveries as her own.
