they could plant thorn bushes. He sighed. There was so much to do! Chances that were worth taking for a month’s stay just weren’t tolerable over the span of a lifetime.
He stepped into the clearing around the long house. A thin curl of smoke rose up from the fire they kept banked to preserve the wood and their limited supply of matches.
“Hello!” Leyster called. “Anybody here?”
Jamal was standing on the ridgepole of the long house, shirt tied around his waist and a kerchief around his head. He waved jubilantly when he saw Leyster coming, and shouted, “We’ve finished thatching the roof! I’m putting up the satellite dish now. Come up and take a look. The others have gone out for more leaves.”
Jamal, for all his faults, had extraordinary powers of organization and persuasion. He’d worked his faction hard and well. The long house frame was complete, and the palm-frond roof looked convincingly rainproof. Gazing up at it, Leyster for the first time actually believed in his heart of hearts that they were here for good. That they were never going home to the Cenozoic. That, for good or ill, this was their home now.
Leyster took his glasses off, ran a hand over his face, and put them back on. “Come on down!” he shouted. “I have something important to tell you!”
Jamal went to the edge of the roof and looked down at him. “What?”
“It’s better said face-to-face,” Leyster said. “Really.”
With a puzzled scowl, Jamal squatted down and reached over to grab the frame.
At that moment, the rain began to pelt down harder. Leyster quickly stepped under the shelter of the half- built long house. The sky opened then, and the rain came down torrentially. It was dry in here, though. Jamal’s gang had built a good roof.
With a rattle of dried fronds, Jamal jumped down from a crosspiece of the frame. He landed with a thump. The momentary elation he had displayed on the rooftop was gone. His features were sullen and flooded with shadow. “Well?” he said challengingly. “What is it?”
9. Trace Fossils
They held the paper autopsy in a conference room that looked like every other conference room Molly Gerhard had ever seen.
Griffin’s people had been given administrative space in the Herbert Hoover Building on Constitution Avenue. It was an inadequate run of offices squeezed from the Department of Commerce by DOD functionaries anxious to keep Griffin at arm’s length from the Pentagon and the actual workings of time travel. Occasional use of the conference room was only grudgingly permitted by the Bureau of Export. But it had a snazzy new Japanese whiteboard, and a conference table, and that was all she really needed.
“Don’t get your hopes too high,” Tom Navarro said. “We have a very weak case here.”
“I think it’s stronger than you think,” she said. “I’m betting we can sell it.”
She laid the papers out on the table in strict chronological order, with Robo Boy’s birth certificate in the upper left-hand corner, and her summary brief in the lower right.
She was reminded of a fossil slab that Leyster, in one of his mellower moods, had once shown her. It held the traces of pterosaurs dabbling in the mud of a shallow lake. To her uneducated eye, it had looked like nothing but random scratches. Leyster, however, had wanted to show her how paleontology had been done before time travel in order to demonstrate how much could be known from the very smallest of clues. So he had shown her the places where, swimming in shallow water, the pterosaurs had scuffed their feet against the lake bottom, leaving small parallel grooves with the occasional claw-tip shape among them. Here was a full pes print, and over there several manus prints. The pock marks were the imprints of beaks prodding in the mud for invertebrates. He had shown her the pterosaurs, no larger than ducks, dabbling in the water, disappearing suddenly as they dove for food, genially squabbling with each other for space. It had taken him an hour, but in that time he had recreated a world.
This, however, was her field of expertise, and within it she was as skilled as Leyster or any of his compatriots were in theirs. She knew how to trace a life and discern its hidden significance from the papers left behind in its wake. To another, they might be no more than scratches in mud. To her, they were the fossil trace of human emotion.
Griffin entered the conference room with Jimmy Boyle and Amy Cho in tow. Somehow, and despite the fact that he held the door for Amy Cho, he made them seem his entourage. Solicitously, he helped Amy down into a chair. He did not sit down himself, nor did Boyle. “All right,” he said. “Impress me.”
Molly started with the birth certificate. “Raymond Lawrence Bois. Born 9:17 A.M., February 14, 2019, in Akron City Hospital, Akron, Ohio. Father: Charles Raymond Bois. Mother: Lucinda Williams Bois, born Finley.”
She tapped on the whiteboard, drew a time line down one side, and with her pointer squirted the date to one end:
“He grew up in a vintage split-level in Franklin Township. Typical suburban childhood. Riding lawnmowers, memberships at the local pool.”
Next came a series of school records, starting with Turkeyfoot Elementary. As she read through each one, she squirted the dates onto the time line. Hidden in here were the mysterious origins of personality, and if they left no trace, there was nothing to be done about it. She would have to go with externalities. “Look at those grades. This is one bright kid.”
“Any disciplinary problems?” Griffin asked.
“Some. Nothing out of the ordinary. Now right here, sophomore year at Firestone High, he hits adolescence hard, and his grades go into a slump. Drops his AP classes and all extracurriculars. This continues until his senior year, when he finally realizes he needs the numbers to get into college, panics, and brings them back up.
“Fall of 2036, he enters Illinois State University. Normal, Illinois.”
“So he finally got his act together, did he?”
“He was placed on academic pro his first semester, and never got out of it. At the end of his freshman year, he was in danger of flunking out. So he transferred to the University of Akron.”
“Do they normally accept underachieving students?”
“His mother was a chemist at the Polymer Science Institute there. It seems likely she pulled a few strings.”
“Ah.”
“His grades remained lackluster. He was picked up by the campus police a couple of times for drunken behavior, once for public urination, once for grabbing a young lady’s breast in a manner she found offensive.” She put the individual dates up on the time line. A neat, unbroken row of numbers marched across the board. “No charges filed either time.
“I think by now we’ve got a pretty good picture of the sort of guy he was. Weak. Directionless. There was nothing he particularly wanted to do or achieve or become. He had the mental equipment, but lacked any goal that would make him actually exert himself. The only reason he didn’t drop out was that his parents were paying the tab and college provided him with a comfortable existence. Nevertheless, it was as good as written that he was never going to get his degree. He was on a downward spiral.
“Now look here.” She put an enlargement of the transcript up on the whiteboard so they could all see it, and circled the relevant numbers. “Out of nowhere, he pulls himself up out of his tailspin. Look at those grades! He got an A in French! How he managed that after such a sloppy beginning, I’ll never know. He can’t have gotten much sleep. Where did that kind of discipline come from?”
She put the date of his finals up on the board, but left an open space before it, where she inserted a large
