Bone Hunter Page 21

  “So what?” asked the bearded man irritably.

  “So what? So what is we did something a whole lot worse. We just closed ranks on him. Squeezed him out of every job. Shot him down behind his back every time he proposed a symposium. Left him out in the cold.”

  “But he never showed us his data,” said Allison. “No one ever even saw anything he collected until it was in final mount and delivered to a museum—sign here, and here’s your bill for some astronomical sum. And God only knows where it really came from.”

  As Allison spoke, I saw another familiar face peeking from behind the back of a seat several rows behind her. It was Lew, the department tech. He smiled smugly, gorging on this new gossip.

  I turned my gaze away from him and focused back on Earthworm Magritte. Playing devil’s advocate again, I said, “So why didn’t you all just consider him a commercial collector? Don’t some of them have Ph.D.’s?”

  Magritte said, “Because when you make money the issue, the system is corrupted. Because he started out as one of us, and we all feel betrayed.”

  “Aren’t you being a little dramatic?” asked the bearded man. For him, the conversation had gone beyond intellectual sport, and he looked nervously toward the front of the bus, to see if Dan was listening.

  Magritte said, “But it was betrayal. Like all the times he published something fanciful or preposterous, just to disagree with Dan. Or like the time he rushed Dan’s ideas about that prosauropod into print, shoving it into the newspapers before Dan could get it through the rigors of colleague review. It took Dan two and a half years to get that one out, and by that time, it looked like Dan was stealing from George. And what do we have as a result? We have Dan running a field trip like this one, dragging the press out to the site quick before someone scoops him. Dan wasn’t always like this. George goaded him into it; we all know that. Like I say, the system was corrupted.”

  I tried to imagine how Dan might have felt about a stunt like that. It must have eaten at him, plagued him like a yowling cat who stands six inches beyond the reach of a chained dog.

  “So why didn’t anyone say anything?” I asked.

  Magritte shoved his glasses up his nose. “Because it wouldn’t have been very scientific of us to drum him out of the corps; it would smack too much of the Salem witch trials. Science is an open debate. The burden of proof is on the presenter. Salem was a closed debate, where the burden of disproof was on the accused. In science, we don’t practice blood atonement.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “That’s where the blasphemer’s blood is spilled into the earth to atone for his sins. We aren’t as direct about things. Instead, we just bury our sinners alive. You don’t agree with the status quo, you better damn well bow and scrape and kiss butt until you’ve mollified your elders and they can retire gracefully and maybe claim you as a brilliant protege. You see, that’s how it really all got started. Dan kissed ass and George kicked butt, and guess who got the grants?”

  The bearded man said, “Magritte, you took too much acid back in college.”

  “You didn’t take enough.”

  The bearded man laughed.

  Magritte’s eyes brightened behind his Coke-bottle glasses. He grabbed the bearded man in a half nelson and proceeded to give him a Dutch rub. The bus broke into roars of laughter. Bits of wadded paper flew through the air from a group of young wags in the back of the bus.

  Someone from a few rows away hollered, “What you selling, Worm? You working undercover for the New Age dickheads out there in California?”

  Magritte grinned, showing a row of his short, narrow teeth. “Yeah, I’m pushing Amway. I was just working up to that.”

  “You’d do better with Mary Kay cosmetics,” someone suggested.

  “Leave the cosmetics to Allison,” Magritte replied. “The Church of the Dinosaur Footprint and Baptismal Cologne.”

  Allison gave him a Bronx cheer. “Cologne? I use only perfume, Worm. But it’s all toilet water to you!”

  “Wait!” roared another. “The Worm was just getting warmed up. I want to hear his gospel.”

  Magritte turned and spread his short, thick fingers across his chest. “I think whoever made this place signed Her name on every rock and flower.”

  “So you’re a Goddess worshiper?” asked the bearded man.

  “I give equal time to every paradigm,” said Magritte.

  “That even rhymes,” the bearded man rejoindered. “But you couldn’t convince me for an instant that someone just stepped up here and built this ball of rock and tissue in just six days. That’s fatuous. You know it and I know it.”

  Magritte looked thoughtful. “I don’t go for the literalist translation of the Book of Genesis any more than you do, but there isn’t a man or woman on this bus who isn’t completely knocked out by the perfection of natural systems, the way they all dovetail and work together. We look out through the windows of our five senses and see such marvelous systems, design, and order, such themes and variations, from the basic structure of matter up to the paths of the celestial bodies, that we can never get enough. The evidence within the laws of nature are god enough, even without the beliefs and liturgy that comes packaged with most religions.”

  Conversations sprang up in surrounding rows, returning the bus to its earlier state of hubbub. Then Allison’s voice cut through the chatter again: “So, Worm, you got God’s numbuh; what does Huh business card say?”

  Magritte thought a split second and replied, “GOD: No Job Too Large or Small.”

  Appreciative laughter erupted, and the bus bubbled into intellectual chaos again.

  “Nah!” cried a voice, “It’s ‘GOD ASSOCIATES: A Rhyme, Reason, and Spirit in Every Rock, Tree, and Squirrel.’”

  “No! Try ‘GOD, INC.: Arcane Knowledge on a Need-to-Know Basis,’” suggested a third.

  Yet another voice offered, “GOD, INC.: Sacrifice That Fatted Calf or You’re Toast!”

  “Nah, too Old Testament!” yelled a heckler farther back in the bus.

  “Equal time for Buddhists!” squealed another woman.

  “Just phone 1-eight hundred-four-A-DJINN!”

  “Or 1-eight hundred-ENLIGHTENMENT!”

  “That’s too many letters!”

  “Then I’m damned for all eternity!”

  There were peals of laughter. Paper wads started flying again.

  “How about an E-mail address,” someone hollered.

  “Perfect!” said Magritte. “E-mail is pure energy! The metaphysical utmost.”

  “God at universe dot com,” began another voice.

  “Dot net!”

  “Dot E D U!”

  The busload of happy intellects roared with academic frivolity, spitting out one ticklish idea after another.

  My mind wandered quickly from their rowdiness. I was too overtired to stay with it, and too troubled by everything that had been said about the war between George Dishey and Dan Sherbrooke. I fiddled with these new pieces of information in my mind, trying to fit them together with what I had learned from the FBI agent that morning. From what he had said, Dan Sherbrooke was only peripherally involved. Or was he? Was I a coyote chasing the wrong rabbit?

  Settling back in my seat, I watched out the window for a while. We had turned off the interstate at a town called Spanish Fork and were heading southeast through a deep canyon that wound up through the mountains. The slopes blushed with the turning leaves of a thousand oaks, punctuated here and there by the gilding of groves of aspens. “Where do you think we’re going?” I asked John.

  “The San Rafael Swell,” he replied.

  “How do you know?”

  John smiled and ticked his evidence off on his fingers. “Simple deduction. Point one: We are off to see a dinosaur specialist present his current field location, so that means we are going to dinosaur-bearing strata. Point two: We are traveling southeast from Salt Lake City. That means we are heading toward the Morrison Formation. The Morrison is famous as Utah�
�s ‘Dinosaur Diamond,’ which refers to the localities within the three corners described by Dinosaur National Park, Colorado National Monument, Moab, and the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry, which last is in the San Rafael Swell. Point three: This is a one-day field trip—in, out—so we can’t be going very far. The San Rafael Swell is really the only place close enough.”

  “That’s terrific,” I said, impressed. “You ought to be a detective.”

  “I am,” John replied. “But I spell that word paleontologist.”

  I smiled. “What do you think about what our friend Magritte was saying about George Dishey?”

  John’s face softened, and he thought a while before replying. “Let me answer by telling you one of the things I like best about working in the sciences: We can presume everyone to be telling the truth, at least as he or she knows it. In the realm of pure science, what would be the point in lying?”

  I looked down the aisle of the bus toward the long, narrow strip of blacktop over which the bus was rolling, eating up the miles between civilization and the wilderness to which we were heading. John had put his finger on something. He had put his finger on exactly what made it inspiring to work in the sciences. It was first and foremost an exercise in reaching toward the truth.

  But George Dishey was a liar. Aside from the deceits his colleagues were telling me about, he had lied to me about speaking in a symposium—of that, I was certain—and if what he’d told Nina about the natural history of the earth wasn’t made up out of whole cloth, then he had been lying to everyone on this bus, making a mockery of their rules, or, as Magritte might say, blaspheming their beliefs.

  So, then, why and about what else had George Dishey lied? And which lie had gotten him killed?

  18

  JOHN WAS RIGHT. THE BUSES CAME OUT OF THE CANYON at Price and turned south toward the beautiful, bald, “castle” country of the western San Rafael Swell. It was warming into a splendid day, all deep blue sky and long views down along the Book Cliffs to the east and south into the center of the swell itself. Only a thin haze from a distant coal-fired power plant muddied the air between the swell and the tan cliffs of Cretaceous-aged sandstone and shales that stair-stepped down from the west, but I saw the beginnings of thunderheads building far beyond them over the mountains. I hoped they would stay where they were, at least until we had completed our visit; I didn’t savor the idea of pushing a bus up a dirt road soaked by a sudden rain. The Morrison Formation and several of the strata we would cross to access it were largely composed of swelling clays, and roads characteristically followed the valleys cut into the softest layers.

  Excitement mounted as the buses swung off the highway onto local pavement at Castle Dale and then headed deep into the country, dropping onto broad dirt roads. Turning at a sign that had been blown into oblivion by shotgun target practice, we branched onto a lesser road, slowed to a near crawl as the buses wallowed over sections that had been washed and rutted once or twice since the grader had last passed through, eased carefully over cattle guards, and finally stopped by a line of low cliffs. Our driver set the brakes of our bus and opened the door at the bottom of the coach steps.

  Dan Sherbrooke, who had been talking boisterously with colleagues throughout the ride, rose from his throne at the front of the bus and faced the other passengers. He had added a much-abused fishing hat with the legend STAN’S BAR AND GRILL to his already unorthodox appearance, and its flat crown and narrow brim did nothing to make his rather chubby cheeks look any sleeker. “Make sure you bring your water bottles and hats,” he said. “It shouldn’t rise above a pleasant seventy-five degrees this time of year, but it is quite dry, and the sun is strong at this elevation. And we have long a hike ahead of us. Sorry that we can’t get the buses any closer, but at the same time thank God for that. If this site were any closer to a graded road, it would have been vandalized. Follow me!” he cried jubilantly, and climbed down onto the road.

  As I followed the paleontological multitude down off our bus, I saw Vance run off the second bus and dash along the road to catch up with Dan Sherbrooke. His gait was awkward, as he was struggling to carry a collection of poster boards that had conspired to slither apart. His face was set in hard, angry lines, a jack-o’-lantern scowl, not unlike a three-year-old who is gauging a kick he is about to plant in his older brother’s behind. His chest was contracted even farther than the last time I’d seen him, and it struck me that for Vance, anger was an armor that provided incomplete covering over a deep, pervasive fear. I wondered what had him so frightened.

  I stepped down onto the road and followed him over to where Dan had everyone gathering. “Esteemed colleagues!” Dan cried. “You are about to see something the quality of which a paleontologist sees only once in a lifetime, and that only if he is lucky! One mile and a half from here lie fossil remains so startling that I wanted you to see them for yourselves, to judge them for yourselves. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words,” he continued, his voice swelling and beginning to sound like a carnival barker’s. “But a picture has only two dimensions. How many more words can be gleaned from the original three-dimensional reality of fossil remains! Couple those three dimensions to the fourth dimension of time, and the picture tells us even more. We as paleontologists comprehend the value of seeing those remains in situ, in the full context of the environmental clues of the rocks and other fossils deposited around them.”

  I noticed that Lew had planted himself next to Dan and was scanning the crowd, his thumbs hooked contemptuously into his pockets. As I was trying to imagine what had him looking so smug, I felt someone’s breath against the back of my neck, and smelled mint. Without even turning, I knew that Earthworm Magritte had drawn up close behind me and was bending to speak intimately into my ear. “I’ll be damned,” he whispered hoarsely. “He’s going after Dishey after all; hammering him for never showing his locations to anyone.”

  Dan paused, hands clasped a few inches in front of his broad, rounded chest. He appeared to be deep in thought. His hands began to move sensuously in each other’s embrace, the palms sliding back and forth in an unconscious parody of greed. At length, he said, “When fossils are removed from their lithic context—removed from the history recorded in the rocks around them—much is lost. Here, we will see pristine specimens in their stratigraphic context. Vance, give us the stratigraphy, will you?”

  Vance all but tumbled over himself in the act of scrambling up to where Sherbrooke was standing. He elbowed Lew to one side and stood there, dwarfed by his expansive mentor, pathetically shuffling a selection of poster boards that were pasted up with charts and illustrations enlarged for the benefit of those of us who were standing at the back of the throng. He awkwardly shuffied his first illustration to the top of the stack and handed it to Dan. There was a moment’s arbitration as Vance attempted to get Dan to hold the board in front of his chest, covering Dan’s face, but at last Dan accommodated him by standing to one side and holding the poster at shoulder height.

  Vance cleared his throat. “What we have here is a geologic map of the San Rafael Swell.” He pointed to the center of his map. It showed each rock layer in a different color, broad bands of blues, greens, and yellows indicating the expanses where each layer met the surface of the earth. “As you can see, the swell is a big honking dome structure, with the older Permian-aged rocks heaved up at the center leading outward to the younger Cretaceous-aged stuff forming the cliffs we see to the west and north here. Just your little old three-hundred-million-year slice of the earth sandwich.” He pointed to each feature on his map. Some titanic force had buckled the earth’s crust skyward across this territory, fracturing the rocks along the axis of the hump. It was as if a huge hippopotamus had risen from the depths, and the rock layers stretched across its back had heaved, cracked, and eroded away. This lifting and erosion had removed the layers from the center outward. On Vance’s map, the pattern made by the outcroppings of the different-aged bands of rock made an elliptical bull’s-eye, oldest at
the center and getting younger toward its edges.

  Vance took down the map board and lifted another into its place. “Okay, this is the Mesozoic stratigraphic sequence,” he said. He was now pointing to a layer-cake illustration depicting the rocks as the flat layers they were before the hippopotamus humped them into a dome. “I’ll make this simple for you press people. Sedimentary rock like this is deposited in layers, and you can interpret how they were deposited by the composition of the rock and so forth. The Mesozoic was the Age of Reptiles. It began two hundred and forty-five million years ago with Triassic time; then you have the Jurassic, and finally the Cretaceous, which ended sixty-five million years ago. A hundred eighty million years of time recorded in the rocks. So here are the rocks that were deposited in the Triassic and the Jurassic. Down here at the bottom, we have the Moenkopi Formation. It was deposited under marine conditions to the west and on dry land to the east. Okay, that ocean receded to the west, because next above that, we have the Chinle Formation, which is entirely terrigenous, river and lake sediments deposited higher up from the coast. Then we move into Jurassic time. As you all know, climates were unusually warm during the Jurassic. No ice ages. Utah, where we are here, was about ten or fifteen degrees of latitude closer to the equator, which puts it in the trade-wind belt. Dry, descending air, lots of wind, and we’re above sea level, so that puts us in a desert. Think Sahara Desert, with the sea coast a couple hundred miles west of here.”

  Vance stopped to look around and make sure his audience was following him. Those paleontologists in the group who were first trained as geologists were tightly focused on his illustration. Those primarily trained in biology were listening with polite interest. The press were beginning to look around at the scenery, except for one science reporter I had seen at the conference the morning before, who was scribbling notes like mad and no doubt thinking up a more eloquent way of restating what Vance was telling him.