“I have to be back at Yale by Tuesday,” she said carefully.

“Oh.” Naomi stared down at her hands, clasped about the tea cup.

“Still… maybe this spring?” Despising herself, she looked the woman direct in her eyes and smiled. “I bet it’s lovely out here in the springtime.”

Those eyes lit up with hope. Next time, they said, she would surely be bolder, braver, able to seize the opportunity. “Of course,” she said. “I’ve got camping equipment, a tent. We could spend a few days.”

“Good. I’d like that.” Standing, Salley reached out and squeezed Naomi’s hand. The woman actually shivered. Oh God, Salley thought, you’ve got it bad. She picked up the fossil.

Casually, she said, “Mind if I borrow this? I’ll return it next time I’m through.”

None of which she told Monk, of course. He’d‘ve put it in his book—and where was the science in that?

There was a sudden flash of blue on the far side of the browse plain. “Whoops, there she goes!” Salley waited until the fisher had disappeared into the forest, and grabbed the carrier. “Come on!”

They ran across the browse plain.

The nest was a shallow depression scratched in the dirt and ringed with the dead leaves and forest litter with which the fisher had covered the eggs while they were hatching. A flattened area beside it was where she had rested while shading her children from the sun and protecting them from predators.

In the center was the allosaur.

The hatchling was appalling and adorable all at once. Looking at it, one saw first the downy white fluffy that covered its body and then those large and liquid eyes. Then, with a shreep like a giant’s fingernails scraping slate, that horror of a mouth opened to reveal its needle-sharp teeth. It was an ugly little brute, and at the same time as cuddly as a children’s toy.

She leaned over the nest to admire the appalling creature. “Watch this,” she said to Monk. “Here’s how you handle an allosaur hatchling.”

She fluttered one hand in front of the creature, and when it lunged forward, snapping, whipped it away. Her other hand swooped down to nab it behind the neck.

Deftly, she popped it into the carrier, and snapped shut the door.

“You’re just going to take it? I thought—”

She turned on him, sternly. “Okay, Kavanagh. I’ve shown you my dirty laundry, I’ve answered every question you could think of, down to the color of my pubic hair. I haven’t held back a thing. Now it’s payback time. How are we going to do this?”

He took a deep breath. “I’ll bring the carrier with me—I’m rated to bring back living specimens to any time period after 2034. In transit, we swap ID cards—they don’t check them as closely when you’re returning from deep time—and I’ll hand off the specimen to you. You get off at 2034. I’ll go on to your originally planned time.”

Doubt touched Salley then, and she said, “It sounds pretty touch-and-go to me. You’re sure this will work?”

“In my time-frame—it already has.”

Fierce elation filled her, like liquid fire, and she blurted out, “You know! You know what I’m going to do, don’t you?”

That irritating little smirk again. “My dear young lady. Why do you think I’m here in the first place?”

College Park, Maryland: Cenozoic era. Quaternary period. Holocene epoch. Modern age. 2034 C.E.

Richard Leyster returned from the Triassic sunburned, windswept, and in a foul mood. All the way to the University of Maryland, he stared sullenly at the passing traffic. It was only as the driver pulled into the ring campus that he roused himself to ask, “Have you ever noticed how many limos there are in the D.C. area with tinted windows?”

“Ambassadors from central Africa. Assistant Deputy Secretaries of HUD. Lobbyists with delusions of importance,” Molly Gerhard said casually. She had observed the same thing herself, and didn’t want Leyster to move on to the next questions: How many time travelers were there loose in the world? From when? For what purposes? It didn’t do to ask because Griffin wouldn’t tell, and once you became sensitized to the possibilities, paranoia invariably followed. Molly had a mild case of it herself.

To distract him, she said, “You’ve been staring out the window as if you found the modern world horrifying. Having trouble readjusting?”

“I’d forgotten how muggy the summers here could be. And the puddles. They’re everywhere. Water that sits on the ground and doesn’t evaporate. It feels unnatural.”

“Well, we just had a rainstorm.”

“The midcontinental deserts of Pangaea are the bleakest, emptiest, driest land anybody’s ever seen. There are cycads adapted for the conditions, and they’re these leafless, leathery-black stumps sticking up out of nothing but rocks and red sand. That’s all.

“But every so often, a storm cloud manages to penetrate to the supercontinental interior. Rain pours down on the sand and washes through the gullies, and the instant it stops, the desert comes to life. I almost said ‘blooms,’ but of course it doesn’t bloom. Flowering plants don’t appear until the late Cretaceous. But that doesn’t matter. The cycads put out leaves. Desert ferns appear—ephemeral things, like nothing living today. The air is suddenly full of coelurosauravids.”

“What are those?”

“Primitive diapsids with ribs that stick way out to either side, supporting a flap of skin. They scuttle up the cycads and launch themselves from the tops, little stiff-winged gliders. I’ve seen them as thick as mayflies.

“Burrowers emerge from the sand—horn-beaked eosuchians the size of your hand. They frolic and mate in lakes a mile wide and an inch deep, so many that they lash the water to a froth. There’s something with a head like a block of wood that’s not quite a proper turtle yet, with the plates of its shell still unfused, and yet with its own clunky kind of charm. It’s a day of carnival, all bright colors and music, flight and feeding and dropping seeds and depositing eggs. And then, just as suddenly as it began, it’s all over, and you’d swear there was no life anywhere this side of the horizon.

“It’s a beauty like nobody has ever seen.”

“Wow.”

“You bet wow. And I got dragged away from there to—” Leyster caught himself. “Well, it’s not your fault, I suppose. You’re just one of Griffin’s creatures. What’s my schedule?”

The driver parked the limo in one of the student lots and hurried around to open Leyster’s door. An undistinguished brick building squatted behind some low bushes nearby. Save for the remnants of the old Agricultural College, the campus dated back to the 1960s and it looked it. As they walked across the lot, Molly flicked open her administrative assistant and began to read.

Leyster was first scheduled to meet informally with an honors colloquium of generation-three grad students. Then there was tea with the head of the Department of Geology. After which he’d give a formal talk to a gathering of generation-two recruits. “Both groups are still time virgins,” Molly said. “The gen-two kids have been brought forward from the recent past, and the gen-three guys were shipped back from the near future. But none of them have been to the Mesozoic yet. So they’re all pretty excited. Oh, and neither batch is supposed to know about the other.”

“Why on earth would you schedule two separate groups for the same time?”

Molly Gerhard shrugged. “Probably because this is when the university let us have the buildings. But it could just as well be simply because that’s what we did. A lot of the system runs on predestination.”

Leyster grunted.

“For the colloquium, all that’s expected of you is to mingle with the kids. Larry”—that was the driver—“will be on hand to make sure nobody tells you anything you shouldn’t know. I expect you’ll find the gen-three group pretty interesting. They’re the first to be recruited knowing that time travel exists. They grew up with titanosaurs on TV and ceratopsians in the zoos.”