There was no use trying to be a part of the influence-swapping until he sorted out who was who, the major players from the bright young grad students who would hang in for a season or three before realizing that the money was elsewhere, the influential patriarchs of major institutions who spent so much time in administration they never published anything from the shy nondescripts who averted their heads to hide the eyes that burned with passionate insight.
A husky man with white hair cropped short over his pink scalp to disguise his incipient baldness came up behind Leyster and pounded him on the back. “You bastard! You look so young! I don’t know how you do it.”
“I think I am young. This is my home year, so—Monk? Is that you?”
James Montgomery Kavanagh—Monk to his friends—had studied with Leyster at Cornell. At one point they’d even been roommates, though neither of them recalled that year with much fondness. But he looked so haggard! So tired. He must have been recruited a full twenty years in the future.
Monk squeezed his shoulder, released him. “Quite an exciting morning, hey? I enjoyed your paper, by the way. Couldn’t stay for the questions, unfortunately. Too bad more people didn’t turn out for it.”
“I’ve had fewer.”
“You were up against a Tyrannosaurus hatchling. Nobody thinks all that highly of Hitchcock’s work, but she had slides everybody wanted to see. Hell, I only came because it was you. Which papers are you planning to take in this afternoon?”
“I thought—”
“Skip the Baryonyx thing. Total nonsense. And Tom Holtz’s chat on taxonomy. Cladistics is like New York City. It’ll be something impressive, once they’re done building it. Good to see Tom still producing useful work after all these years, though. You’d think he’d be retired by now.”
“What do you know about the afternoon speaker?”
“Gertrude Salley? Oh, she’ll put on a show. What a character. Brilliant in some ways, but… well, she likes to take chances. Willing to publish her findings before they’ve been entirely found. She’s a splitter—never met a taxon she didn’t like. If she could, she’d assign her right and left hands to different species. And not too careful about where she gets her data, if you catch my meaning. You have to keep a sharp eye on your specimens when Rude Salley’s around.”
“I never heard of her. Where’s she from?”
“About thirty-forty years forward. I don’t know the exact date. She must be in grammar school or maybe junior high right now. She works a generation or two ahead of us.”
“Um. Then we’re not supposed to be talking about her in this kind of detail, are we? Griffin said…”
“They can’t stop gossip! They make a token attempt, but let’s get real. It’s tolerated. So long as no hard data get passed along with it. The impulse is too deeply embedded in human nature, hey?” Without pausing, he said, “Well, I could listen to you forever, Dick, but I’ve got a career to think about. People to suck up to and serious ass to kiss. Take care, okay? All right.”
And he was gone.
The Metzgers had come up to Leyster sometime during the encounter, and stood listening in silence. Bill stared wonderingly after him. Cedella shook her head. “Wow.”
“He’s mellowed,” Leyster said. “You should have seen him back in college.”
Gertrude Salley was a strikingly handsome woman. She wore a Nile green silk outfit with mid-length skirt and buttons up the side. Leyster had never seen clothes of quite that cut. But he didn’t need the string of pearls about her neck to tell him that they were, for her time, impeccably conservative. They just had that look.
Her address was entitled “The Traffic Moves the Policeman,” and according to the Proceedings it was about the co-evolution of the supersauropods—the seismosaurs and titanosaurs of such tremendous size that they made a camarasaur look dainty—and the Mesozoic forests. Leyster didn’t think much of the topic.
But then she began to speak.
“I know so much you need to know,” she said. “So very much! I’ve read all your books, and thousands of your papers, and in the forty-five minutes allotted to me, I have no doubt whatsoever that I could drop enough information to save you all decades of effort.
“But I am not allowed to do so, and even if I were, I wouldn’t. Why? Because so much of what I know is based on basic research that you yourselves will do. Good science is hard work, and everything we in generations two and three have achieved is built upon your efforts. If I told you your discoveries, would you be willing to sink half your life into verifying them? Or would you simply initial the data and pass ‘em forward? We’d end up with one of Griffin’s paradoxes… information that comes out of nowhere. And information that comes out of nowhere is not reliable, for it doesn’t connect anywhere with the facts.
“What can I offer you, then? Not facts, but modes of thinking. I can lay out for you a few theories I have which are, alas, unprovable, and through them, perhaps, indicate a few fruitful ways of looking at things.
“Consider the Titanosauridae. They were by far the predominant sauropods of the Late Cretaceous, and so ecologically pivotal that in their time a forest could be defined as a body of trees surrounded by herbivores…”
And she was off, leaping like a salmon from idea to idea. Hers was the kind of fast and playful intellect that enjoyed tossing a stone into the pond of received wisdom, just to see the frogs jump. And speaking, as she did, from a vantage of fifty years, it was impossible to tell which of her notions were crazy, and which were the result of radical new discoveries. When she spoke of mountains dancing to the music of sauropods, Leyster was positive that was metaphor at best; when she claimed that ceratopsians were farmed by their predators, he was not so sure. That guff about birds he didn’t buy at all.
Leyster was riveted.
Too soon, she finished, saying, “But if I can tell you nothing else, I can tell you how valuable your work is —or rather, will be. Sir Isaac Newton said, If I have been able to see farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants. Well, today I have the rare opportunity of standing in the presence of giants. And the even rarer opportunity of being able to thank them. Thank you. Thank you for all you will do.”
She stood down to tumultuous applause, and did not stay for questions.
Cedella leaned over and said in Leyster’s ear, “I just discovered who I want to be when I grow up.”
The afternoon passed in the usual happy blur, moved along by the surge and flow of attendees hurrying from room to room between sessions. There were three tracks running simultaneously and not a single paper that didn’t conflict with at least one more that Leyster needed to hear. When the last one ended shortly before five, he wandered out to the lobby, head abuzz with all he had learned, looking for someone to form a dinner party with. The Metzgers, or possibly old Tom Holtz. But when he got there, the lobby was crowded with police and security personnel.
The Metzgers were being arrested.
Cedella held her chin high, eyes ablaze with scornful defiance. Bill simply looked deflated, a little man in a suit suddenly too large for him. Knots of shocked scientists stood in the entryways and watched as the two were led away by state troopers.
“I’m sorry, sir, you can’t come in here,” said a young officer when he automatically moved toward his friends. An admonishing hand closed about his upper arm. Turning, he saw Monk.
“What happened?”
“It’s called note-passing,” Monk said. “They caught the woman red-handed. Leaned up against the mail slot and slipped the letter in behind her back while her husband pretended to have a heart attack. Sad thing, isn’t it?”
There was a brass mailbox built into the reception counter. The manager was unlocking it under the supervision of two FBI agents and a representative of the postal service.
“I was talking to one of Griffin’s people. He told me they got the memo a week ago detailing how to set up the sting. What happens is, Griffin will gather everybody’s reports, write up a memo summarizing them, and post it back to his people seven days in the past. Pretty slick, actually.”
“I don’t understand. They seemed like good people. I just can’t picture them doing something like this.”
“Well, that’s what makes it so sad. The wife’s mother has schizophrenia. Painful case, apparently.
