There was an amused glint in Griffin’s eye, as if Leyster’s reaction were precisely what he had been hoping to provoke.

Or was this only what he wanted Leyster to think?

No, that was a paranoid line of reasoning. It was not the way Leyster normally thought, not the way he liked to think. He was accustomed to questioning an essentially impassive universe. The physical world might be maddeningly close-lipped about its secrets, but it didn’t lie, and it never actively tried to deceive you.

Still, the corrupting influence of the man was such that it was hard not to think along such lines.

Again, Griffin clamped his hand over his watch. Glancing down at it, he said, “You’ll take the position anyway.”

“And the reasoning upon which you base this extraordinary conclusion is—?”

Griffin put the cooler on Leyster’s desk. “This is a gift. There’s only one string attached—you will not show it to anyone or tell anybody about it. Beyond that—” He twisted his mouth disparagingly. “Do whatever it takes to convince you it’s genuine. Cut it open. Take it apart. There are plenty more where that came from. But no photographs, please. Or you’ll never get another one to play with again.”

Then he was gone.

Alone, Leyster thought: I won’t open it. The best possible course of action would be ditch this thing in the nearest Dumpster. Whatever Griffin was peddling, it could only mean trouble. FBI probes, internal committees, censorship, death. He didn’t need that kind of grief. Just this once, he was going to curb his curiosity and leave well enough alone.

He opened the cooler.

For a long, still moment, he stared at what was contained within, packed in ice. Then, dazedly, he reached inside and removed it. The flesh was cool under his hands. The skin moved slightly; he could feel the bones and muscles underneath.

It was the head of a Stegosaurus.

A gust of wind made the window boom gently. A freshet of rain rattled on the glass. Cars hummed quietly by on the street below. Somebody in the hallway laughed.

Eventually, volition returned. He lifted the thing from the cooler and set it down on the workbench, atop a stack of Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology reprints. It was roughly eighteen inches long, six inches high, and six inches wide. Slowly, he passed his hands over its surface.

The flesh was cool and yielding. He could feel the give of muscles underneath it, and the hardness of bone beneath them. One thumb slipped inadvertently onto the creature’s gums and felt the smoothness of teeth. The beak was like horn; it had a sharp edge. Almost in passing, he noted that it did have cheeks.

He peeled back an eyelid. Its eyes were golden.

Leyster found himself crying.

Without even bothering to wipe away the tears, not caring if he were crying or not, he flipped open a workbook, and began assembling tools. A number four scalpel with a number twenty blade. A heavy pair of Stille-Horsley bone-cutting forceps. A charriere saw. Some chisels and a heavy mallet. These were left over from last summer when Susan What’s-Her-Name, one of the interns from Johns Hopkins, had sat quietly in the corner week after week, working with a komodo dragon that had recently passed away at the National Zoo to prepare an atlas of its soft tissues. Exactly the kind of painstaking and necessary work one prays somebody else will perform.

He swept the worktable clear of its contents—books and floppies, a pair of calipers, paper cutter, bags of pretzels, snapshots from the dig—and set the head in its center.

Carefully he laid out the tools. Scalpel, forceps, saw. What happened to those calipers he’d had out here? He picked them up off the floor. After a moment’s hesitation, he tossed the mallet and chisel aside. They were for speedy work. It would be better to take his time.

Where to begin?

He began by making a single long incision along the top of the head, from the edge of the beak all the way back to the foramen magnum—the hole where the spinal cord leaves the braincase. Gently, then, he peeled away the skin, revealing dark red muscles, lightly sheened with silver.

Craniocaudal musculature, he wrote in the workbook, and swiftly sketched it in.

When the muscular structure was all recorded, he took up the scalpel again and cut through the muscles to the skull beneath. He picked up the bone saw. Then he put it down, and picked up the forceps. He felt like a vandal doing so—like the guy who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta. But, damn it, he already knew what a stego’s skull looked like.

He began cutting away the bone. It made a flat, crunching sound, like stiff plastic breaking.

The brain case opened up before him.

The stegosaur’s brain was a light orange-brown so delicately pale it was almost ivory, with a bright tracery of blood vessels across its surface. It was a small thing, of course—even for a dinosaur, a stegosaur was an extraordinarily stupid brute—and he was familiar with its shape from the close examination of brain casts taken from the fossil skulls of its kindred.

But this was scientific Terra Incognita. Nothing was known about the interior of a dinosaur’s brain, or its microstructure. Would he find its brain similar to those of birds and crocodiles or more like those of mammals? There was so much to learn here! He needed to chart and record the pneumatic structures in the skull cavity. And the tongue! How muscular was it? He should dissect an eye to see the number of types of color receptors it had.

Also whether this thing had nasal turbinates. Was there room enough for them? Their purpose was to trap and recover moisture from each exhaled breath. A warm-blooded animal, with its high rate of respiration, would need complex turbinates to help keep the lungs from drying out. A cold-blooded animal, needing less rehydration, might not have turbinates at all.

The argument over whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded had been raging for decades before Leyster was even born. It was possible he could settle the whole matter here and now.

But first there was the brain. He felt like Columbus, staring at the long, dark horizontal line of a new continent. Here Be Dragons. His scalpel hesitated over the ruptured head.

It descended.

Weariness caused Leyster to stagger and briefly lose consciousness and recover himself all in an instant.

He shook his head, blankly wondering where he was and why he felt so tired. Then the room swam into focus and he felt the silence of the building around him. The Elvis clock an old girlfriend had given him, with its pink jacket and swiveling hips, said that it was 3:12 A.M. He’d been working on the brain without food or rest for over twelve hours.

There were several collection jars before him, each with a section of the brain preserved in formaldehyde. His workbook was almost filled with notes and drawings. He picked it up and glanced down at a page near the beginning:

He recognized the tidy, economical lettering as his own, but had no memory whatsoever of writing those words, or any of those on the dozens of pages that followed.

“I’ve got to stop,” he said aloud. “The condition I’m in, I can’t be trusted not to screw things up.”