subject, you’ll have to wait for the autopsies. ... I want to emphasize that there’s been no official statement made by the police. ... Until you stop shouting I won’t answer any more questions. ... No, I said we do
The press began to fan out, heading past Wright into the Museum proper.
Wright turned angrily toward the security director. “Where the hell were the police?” Margo heard him snap. As he turned, he said over his shoulder, “if you see Mrs. Rickman, tell her to come to my office immediately.” And he stalked out of the Great Rotunda.
= 6 =
Margo moved deeper into the Museum, away from the public areas, until she reached the corridor called ‘Broadway.’ Stretching the entire length of the Museum—six city blocks—it was said to be the longest single hallway in New York City. Old oaken cabinets lined the walls, punctuated every thirty feet by frostedglass doors. Most of these doors had curators’ names in gold leaf edged in black.
Margo, as a graduate student, had only a metal desk and a bookshelf in one of the basement labs.
A security guard at the bottom of the stairwell waved her on, and she moved down a dim tunnel, flanked on [33] both sides by mounted horse skeletons in ancient glass cases. No police tape was in sight.
In her office, Margo dropped her carryall beside her desk and sat down. Most of the lab was actually storage for South Seas artifacts: Maori shields, war canoes, and cane arrows stuffed into green metal cabinets that stretched from floor to ceiling. A hundred-gallon fish tank, a simulated swamp belonging to the Animal Behavior Department, perched on an iron frame underneath a battery of lights. It was so overpopulated with algae and weeds that Margo had only rarely been able to catch sight of a fish peering out through the murk.
Next to her desk was a long worktable with a row of dusty masks. The conservator, a sour young woman, worked in angry silence, spending what seemed barely three hours each day at her task. Margo figured it took her about two weeks to conserve each mask, judging by the slow turnover. The particular mask collection she was assigned to contained five thousand such masks, but it didn’t seem to concern anyone that, at the rate she was going, the project would take close to two centuries to complete.
Margo logged onto her computer terminal. A message in green letters appeared, swimming into focus out of the depths of the CRT:
HELLO MARGO GREEN@BIOTECH@STF
WELCOME BACK TO MUSENET
DISTRIBUTED NETWORKING SYSTEM,
RELEASE 15-5
COPYRIGHT © 1989-1995 NYMNH
AND CEREBRAL SYSTEMS INC.
CONNECTING AT 10:24:06 03-27-95
PRINT SERVICE ROUTED TO LJ56
YOU HAVE NO MESSAGE(S) WAITING
[34] She went into word-processing mode and called up her notes, preparing to review them before her meeting with Frock. Her adviser often seemed preoccupied during these weekly meetings, and Margo was constantly scrambling to give him something new. The problem was, there usually wasn’t anything new—just more articles read, dissected, and stuffed into the computer; more lab work; and maybe ...
When Frock had first agreed to act as her adviser two years before, she half suspected some mistake had been made. Frock—intellect behind the Callisto Effect, occupier of the Cadwalader Chair in Statistical Paleontology at Columbia University, Chairman of the Evolutionary Biology Department at the Museum—had chosen her as a research student, an honor awarded to only a handful each year.
Frock started his career as a physical anthropologist. Confined to a wheelchair by childhood polio, he had nonetheless done pioneering fieldwork that was still the basis of many textbooks. After several severe bouts with malaria made further field research impossible, Frock diverted his ferocious energy to evolutionary theory. In the mid 1980s, he had started a firestorm of controversy with a radical new proposal. Combining chaos theory and Darwinian evolution, Frock’s hypothesis disputed the commonly held belief that life evolved gradually. Instead, he
