He listened to the words carefully, and decided that they made sense. Wearily, he wrapped up the head in aluminum foil and placed it in the refrigerator, ejecting a month-old carton of grapefruit juice and a six-pack of Diet Pepsis to make room for it. He didn’t have a padlock, but a little rummaging came up with a long orange extension cord, which he wrapped around the refrigerator several times. With a Magic Marker he wrote, Danger!!! Botulism experiment in progress—DO NOT OPEN!!! on a sheet of paper, and taped it to the door.

Now he could go home.

But now that the head—the impossible, glorious head—was no longer in front of him soaking up his every thought, he was faced with the problem of its existence.

Where had it come from? What could possibly explain such a miracle? How could such a thing exist?

Time travel? No.

He’d read a physics paper once, purporting to demonstrate the theoretical possibility of time travel. It required the construction of an extremely long, large, and dense cylinder massing as much as the Milky Way Galaxy, and rotating at half the speed of light. But even if such a monster could be built—and it couldn’t—it would still be of dubious utility. An object shot past its surface at exactly the right angle would indeed travel into either the past or the future, depending on whether it was traveling with the cylinder’s rotation or against it. But how far it would go, there was no predicting. And a quick jaunt to the Mesozoic was out of the question—nothing could travel to a time before the cylinder was created or after its destruction.

In any event, current physics wasn’t up to building a time machine, and wouldn’t be for at least another millennium. If ever.

Could someone have employed recombinant engineering to reassemble fragments of dinosaur DNA like in that movie he used to love back when he was a kid? Again, no. It was a pleasant fantasy. But DNA was fragile. It broke down too quickly. The most that had ever been recovered inside fossil amber had been tiny fragments of insect genes. That business of patching together the fragments? Ridiculous. It would be like trying to reconstruct Shakespeare’s plays from the ashes of a burnt folio, one that yielded only the words never and foul and the. Except that the ashes came not from a single folio, but from a hundred-thousand volume library that would have included Mickey Spillane and Dorothy Sayers, Horace Walpole and Jeane Dixon, the Congressional Record and the complete works of Stephen King.

It wasn’t going to happen.

One’s time could be better spent, alas, trying to restore the Venus de Milo by searching the beaches of the Mediterranean for the marble grains that had once been its arms.

Could it be a fake?

This was the least likely possibility of all. He had cut the animal apart himself, gotten its blood on his hands, felt the grain and give of its muscles. It had recently been a living creature.

In his work, Leyster followed the biological journals closely. He knew exactly what was possible and what was not. Build a pseudodinosaur? From scratch? Scientists were lucky if they could put together a virus. The simplest amoeba was worlds beyond them.

So that was that. There were only three possible explanations, and each one was more impossible than the next.

Griffin knew the answer, though! Griffin knew, and could tell, and had left behind his card. Where was it? It was somewhere on his desk.

He snatched up the card. It read:

Nothing more. There was no address. No phone number. No fax. No e-mail. It didn’t even list his organization.

Griffin had left no way to get in touch with him.

Leyster grabbed the phone, punched up an outside line, and dialed directory assistance. Simultaneously, he booted up his Internet account. There were millions of records out there. The days when a man could accomplish anything at all without leaving any trace of himself behind were long gone. He’d find Griffin for sure.

But after an hour, he had to admit defeat. Griffin’s name was listed in no directory Leyster could locate. He worked for no known government agency. So far as Leyster could tell, he had never posted a comment of any kind on any subject whatsoever, or been referred to, however fleetingly, by anyone.

The man did not seem to exist.

In the end, Leyster could only wait. Wait, and hope that the bastard would return.

And what if he didn’t? What if he never came back?

These were the questions that Leyster was to ask himself a hundred times a day, every day for a year and a half. The time it took Griffin to get around to ending his silence with a phone call.

Crystal City, Virginia: Cenozoic era. Quaternary period. Holocene epoch. Modern age. 2012 C.E.

Leyster was the only person in the van who wasn’t peering out the windows, excitedly drawing attention to advertisements and the new Metrobuses, leaning into the glass when they passed a construction site. They’d all been given the day’s Washington Post at the Pentagon, and it was a toss-up whether the comics or the editorial pages amused them more. He could understand their nostalgia, but he couldn’t feel it.

To him, it was just the present.

The man beside him turned a cheerful round face his way and stuck out a hand. “Hi! I’m Bill Metzger, and this is my wife, Cedella. We’re from ten years forward.” The woman, smiling, leaned over her husband to shake hands as well. She was noticeably younger than he. It was, if not a May-December marriage, at least a June-October one. “I’m not on the program, but Cedella’s going to be reading a paper on the nasal turbinates of lambeosaurine hadrosaurs.”

“Really? That’s interesting. My paper deals with the nasal turbinates of stegosaurs. And their throat and tongue structure. And a little bit about their brains.”

“That sounds familiar.” Cedella flipped rapidly through her abstracts. “Wasn’t that one I wanted to…” She stopped. “Oh! You’re Richard Leyster! Oh, my goodness. I want to tell you that your book was so—”

Her husband cleared his throat meaningfully.

“Book?”

“Oh, right. It wouldn’t be out yet.” She turned to look out the window again. “Can you imagine wearing such hideous clothes? And yet they didn’t seem so bad at the time.”

Cedella had the most gorgeous Jamaican accent Leyster had ever heard, as rich as caramel pudding, as clear and precise as an algebraic equation. It was a pleasure just to hear her speak.

“Maybe I should hop out and look you up,” Bill said. The marine in the front seat glanced sharply at him, but said nothing. “You were a hot little number then, funky clothes or no.”

“What do you mean were?” She swatted him with her newspaper, and he laughed. “I ought to let you try, old man. I wasn’t all tired out looking after you back then—you’d have a heart attack for certain. And it would serve you right.”

“At least I’d die happy.”

“But what about me? What would I do with the rest of my evening? After the ambulance had hauled your worthless carcass away?”

“You could watch TV.”

“There’s nothing good on that early in the evening.”

The two of them were so happily, sweetly absorbed in each other that Leyster felt sour and crabbed by contrast. He couldn’t help marveling at how fluidly and naturally the words flowed between them. Conversation was never easy for him. He never knew what to say to people.

Bill turned back to him. “Forgive my wayward wife. This is our first trip through time, and I think everybody here’s a little giddy.”

“Not everybody. Some of us live here.”