“Majority vote, you mean?” Lai-tsz asked.

“No. I don’t think we should do anything unless everybody agrees on it. No dissenters, no abstentions.”

“Can that work?” somebody asked.

“A friend of mine did some linguistic work with the Lakota Sioux,” Daljit said. “She told me they were fiends for consensus. If they had a meeting to write up a press release, they insisted that everybody agree on the size of the envelopes and the color of the paper before they’d say a word about the actual content. My friend said it drove outsiders nuts. But it worked. She said that in the long run there was a lot less conflict that way.”

“That’s a lot of talking,” Patrick said dubiously.

“Well, we’ve got a lot of time,” Daljit said.

“I’m willing to cut down on my TV watching, if that’s what it takes,” Chuck offered.

A chuckle went around the circle.

Eventually, they adopted the motion by consensus. Then they moved on to the chores schedule. Grievances were aired, compromises proposed, and adjustments made. At last Jamal slapped his hands together and said, “Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve got work to do. So if there isn’t anything else on the agenda…”

“There’s just one more thing,” Leyster said. “I think we should be doing some real science. We’ve gotten so caught up in survival that we’ve forgotten why we’re here. We came to do research. I think we should.”

There was an instant’s astonished silence. Then—

“Well, I was wondering when somebody would say that!”

“About time, too.”

“I would’ve said it myself, but—”

“Okay,” Tamara said. “We’re all agreed. Fine. So how do we do this? What are we looking for?”

Everybody turned to Leyster.

He coughed, embarrassed. The authority of superior knowledge was different in kind from the authority of assumed power. Still, he felt a little awkward assuming it.

“That’s not how it works,” he said. “Konrad Lorenz didn’t say to himself, ‘I’m going to discover imprinting in baby ducks’ and set out to gather evidence. He very carefully gathered data and studied it until it told him something. That’s what we’re going to do. Observe, record, discuss, analyze. Sooner or later, we’ll learn something.”

Patrick grinned slyly. “Yeah, but there’s got to be stuff we’re hoping, somewhere in the backs of our heads, to find out.”

“Well, obviously, there’s always the problem of why the dinosaurs died out.”

“Whopping big rock. Tidal waves, firestorms, nuclear winter, no food. End of story.”

“Crocodiles survived. Some of them were enormous. Birds survived, and cladistically speaking, they are dinosaurs. What made the non-avian dinosaurs so vulnerable to the K-T disaster? I can’t help suspecting that it’s related to the fact that during the last several million years of the Mesozoic, dinosaurs underwent a radical loss of diversity.”

“There’s plenty of dinos out there!” Katie objected.

“Lots of individuals. But compared to the old days, only a fraction the number of species. Leaving those that remain particularly susceptible to environmental change.”

“I really can’t see that,” Patrick said. “They’re so robust. They’re so perfectly adapted to their environment.”

“Maybe too well adapted. The species that die out are those that adapt themselves so perfectly to a specific niche that they can’t survive if that niche suddenly changes or ceases to be. That’s why so many species went extinct in the twentieth century, even though the kind of indiscriminate slaughter of animals that hunters engaged in during the nineteenth had pretty much ceased. When humans destroyed their habitat, they had nowhere to go.”

They talked until noon. They could afford to. The long house was built, and they had enough food stored up for a week, even without dipping into the freeze-dried stuff. More, these were still students, however far they might be from a university. They needed the reassurance of learning, the familiar cadences of lecture and debate, to restore their sense of normality.

Finally, though, somebody realized that it was time for lunch and the dishes hadn’t been washed, and everybody scattered to their assigned cooking and setup chores.

Tamara lingered behind, to have a quiet word with Leyster.

“Well, my hat’s off to you. You pulled us all together. I really didn’t think you could do it.”

Leyster took her hand, gently kissed one knuckle, and did not let it go. He felt like a fraud. He had become a paleontologist at least in part because he found dinosaurs comprehensible in a way that people were not. It was a terrible thing to be so deceitful. “I think last night had a lot to do with it.”

“Last night was nice.” She smiled, and he fleetingly wondered if it was possible she was putting on an act too. Then rejected the thought as paranoia. “But it just happened. This morning was premeditated.”

“Maybe just a little,” he admitted. “The problem was that when all you’re trying to do is survive, the universe seems a cold and hostile place. We needed a purpose. To distract us from our awareness of being a single spark of human warmth in an infinite expanse of silence. One small candle in the infinite night of being.”

“Do you really think science is purpose enough?”

“Yes, I do. I always have. Maybe it’s because I was a lonely kid, and there were times when learning things was all that kept me going. The search for truth is not an unworthy reason to keep going.”

“You make it sound so arbitrary.”

“Maybe it is. Yet I persist in believing that knowledge is better than ignorance.” He was silent for a moment. “I was in Uppsala, Sweden, once. In the floor of the Domkyrka, the Cathedral, there, I found Linnaeus’s gravestone.”

“Carl Linnaeus, you mean? The inventor of binomial nomenclature?”

“Yeah. It was a fine-grained gray stone with two fossil belemnites swimming across its surface, like pale comets. Linnaeus didn’t even know what fossils were. During his lifetime, Voltaire quite seriously suggested they were the petrified remains of pilgrims’ lunches. But there they were, like guardians assigned him by Nature in gratitude for his work.” He let go of her hand. “Why should I find that comforting? Yet I do.”

After lunch, Leyster stayed behind to work on the smokehouse, while Katie took a party out to make the first observations. They were all laughing and chattering, as they left, as cheerful as children and as heedless of the danger. Watching them, Leyster felt the same sickening fear for them that he imagined a parent must experience the first time a child is allowed to leave the house by itself.

He wanted so hard to protect them, and knew he could not. They were all buoyed up by what had happened last night. But all their confidence, all their joy, would not be enough to keep them safe. They would have to be continually on their guard. In this world, the night might belong to mammals, but dinosaurs ruled the day.