Creations by William Mitchell

taken, were questions that John and his colleagues were about to try and answer.
    “How much material have they got now?” Max said.
    “About twenty tonnes so far, with bacterial fossils all the way through. But it’s the diversity that’s really got people worked up.They’re too varied for something this old. I mean
way
too varied.”
    “How accurately do we know their age?”
    “Almost four billion years. It’s the closest thing to the beginning we’ve ever seen.”
    “Yeah, and the closest we’re ever likely to see. So what are you going to do next?”
    “Radiological scans first, then we’ll start layering them and loading them into the ‘scope.’”
    “Well, just make sure you tell me first if you find anything.”
    “Of course I will.”
    * * *
    Max went home after that, going in through the garden entrance where he knew he’d find Gillian. She was in the small workshop she used as a studio, doing the roughing-in for a forest background on one of her latest pieces. Max drew up a stool and perched off to the side where he wouldn’t get in her eye line.
    “So you’ve seen your lumps of rock then?” she said, a sarcastic edge to her voice. “We’ve got more out there in the flowerbeds if you’re really interested?” That had pretty much been her tone ever since Max had said no to ESOS: subdued rather than angry, distracted rather than argumentative, her rarely-seen cynical side coming to the fore. He knew she still wished he’d said yes, as much as he knew she understood his reasons for saying no.
    “Yeah, I’ve seen them,” Max said. “It looks like they’ve got some interesting times ahead of them.”
    “Do you wish you were there too?”
    “Maybe. I seem to have no shortage of projects I could go for right now, one more choice wouldn’t hurt.”
    Max was inwardly glad that his transition from evolutionary biologist to evolutionary engineer had happened so smoothly.Even now it let him cherry pick interesting jobs from his old line of work, when time permitted.
    “Did you get everything done today?” he said, watching her work.
    “Pretty much,” she said. “The bigger canvases are in the gallery’s store room, they’ll be slotting the smaller ones in today and tomorrow. Friday was our last proper day. Busy though. Must have had fifty people come through just in the afternoon.”
    “Some kind of last minute rush?”
    “Maybe. Someone was trying to take pictures though, it set the detectors off. No way of telling who with that many people in there.”
    “Is that even a problem if the show’s almost over?”
    “It’s gallery policy. And anyway I’d prefer it if I didn’t see unauthorised prints turning up on the grid, don’t you think?”
    “Yeah, I suppose. You do have to sell the things after all.”
    She didn’t reply.
    “Do you want a drink?” he said. “I’m going to get some juice.”
    “No, Max, I’m fine.”
    He got off the stool and made his way out into the garden, then in through the back of the house. And that was when he saw the envelope, sitting on the mat under the front door.
    He knew what it was the moment he saw it up close, its printed address label showing the source point somewhere in rural Idaho. The location seemed a random one, almost deliberately random when compared to the previous ones, as if whoever was sending them was going out of their way to avoid any telltale patterns.
    Though, until now, they’d never sent one to his home.
    He listened out for Gillian, the unopened letter in his hands; she was still out there, busy on her picture. He offered silent thanks that she hadn’t got to the letter first, then looked over the outside of the envelope while he decided what to do.
    He felt its weight and flexibility; there was no indication ofanything other than paper in there. He thought about taking it to the campus for the security staff to check it over, or even straight to the police, but something inside him wanted to know what it was