Weston’s office called today, and you’ve got an appointment there next Saturday morning.”
To have his virility tested. Carter contemplated it with dismay as they walked the last few blocks toward home. Already he could feel the performance anxiety kicking in.
Their third-floor apartment, in an old red brick building, faced directly onto Washington Square Park, and in the madness that was Manhattan real estate it would ordinarily have fetched several thousand dollars a month. But fortunately the university owned the building and made the apartments available to faculty members at a bargain rate.
Carter unlocked the door and flicked on the lights while Beth hung her coat on the wooden hat rack that stood in the foyer.
“You want the shower first?” she asked.
“No, you go ahead,” he said, already pulling at the flap of the FedEx envelope.
“That’s what I figured.”
Carter went into the living room and plunked himself down in his favorite armchair, a worn leather wingback that he’d had since college, and tore the envelope nearly in two. Some glossies immediately started to slide out of a folder and onto his lap, and he had to grab them before they scattered on the floor. With his foot, he pulled the coffee table closer, and poured everything out onto its mottled surface.
On top was a letter typed on the letterhead of the University of Rome, and he picked that up first. “Dottore,” it began, which was the salutation Russo had always used for Carter, “I send to your attention all the materials enclosed. Also my greetings. I will tell you now the story of these things, which I think will greatly interest you, and we will then talk about them after.” His English, Carter could see, had improved a lot. It still had that wonderfully stilted quality—Russo never used contractions, for instance—but the document, so far, was perfectly comprehensible. Carter flipped through the rest of the letter—it was six pages, single spaced—before starting again at the beginning.
It began, mysteriously enough, with an account of the water levels at a place called Lago d’Avernus, which Carter had never heard of. Apparently, they had dropped to a point not seen for perhaps several million years. A cave, which would have been underwater all that time—maybe even hundreds of feet deeper than it was today, having been pushed up slowly by the seismic forces active in that region—had for the first time become accessible, and a young American couple had been the first to happen upon it. In a parenthetical, Russo mentioned that the man had accidentally drowned there.
In that cave, a fossilized creature had been discovered. Russo apologized for the use of the vague word creature, but explained that this very uncertainty was why he was contacting his old friend Carter in the first place. “It is not clear, from the parts of the fossil which we see, what at all we are dealing with.” There were what looked like distended talons, the letter went on, suggesting this might be a moderately sized raptor of some sort, but the talons also appeared to display an articulated metacarpal and phalanx—features that could only suggest a hominid ancestor. “But a hominid that, in the scheme of evolution, is too old to be possible.”
Carter could see already why Russo was so puzzled. But why not do a simple carbon-14 test on the specimen and see what it revealed? That’s where Carter would have started.
But so, it seems, had Russo. In the very next paragraph, Carter read, “As you would expect, we have employed the standard radiocarbon-dating techniques. While we do not here have the access to AMS”—accelerated mass spectrometry, which, Carter knew, was seldom available outside the United States—“we have isolated 5 grams of pure carbon from the base material and conducted repeat tests on that sample. The laboratory reports on those tests are enclosed—see Appendix A.”
Carter riffled through the materials until he
To have his virility tested. Carter contemplated it with dismay as they walked the last few blocks toward home. Already he could feel the performance anxiety kicking in.
Their third-floor apartment, in an old red brick building, faced directly onto Washington Square Park, and in the madness that was Manhattan real estate it would ordinarily have fetched several thousand dollars a month. But fortunately the university owned the building and made the apartments available to faculty members at a bargain rate.
Carter unlocked the door and flicked on the lights while Beth hung her coat on the wooden hat rack that stood in the foyer.
“You want the shower first?” she asked.
“No, you go ahead,” he said, already pulling at the flap of the FedEx envelope.
“That’s what I figured.”
Carter went into the living room and plunked himself down in his favorite armchair, a worn leather wingback that he’d had since college, and tore the envelope nearly in two. Some glossies immediately started to slide out of a folder and onto his lap, and he had to grab them before they scattered on the floor. With his foot, he pulled the coffee table closer, and poured everything out onto its mottled surface.
On top was a letter typed on the letterhead of the University of Rome, and he picked that up first. “Dottore,” it began, which was the salutation Russo had always used for Carter, “I send to your attention all the materials enclosed. Also my greetings. I will tell you now the story of these things, which I think will greatly interest you, and we will then talk about them after.” His English, Carter could see, had improved a lot. It still had that wonderfully stilted quality—Russo never used contractions, for instance—but the document, so far, was perfectly comprehensible. Carter flipped through the rest of the letter—it was six pages, single spaced—before starting again at the beginning.
It began, mysteriously enough, with an account of the water levels at a place called Lago d’Avernus, which Carter had never heard of. Apparently, they had dropped to a point not seen for perhaps several million years. A cave, which would have been underwater all that time—maybe even hundreds of feet deeper than it was today, having been pushed up slowly by the seismic forces active in that region—had for the first time become accessible, and a young American couple had been the first to happen upon it. In a parenthetical, Russo mentioned that the man had accidentally drowned there.
In that cave, a fossilized creature had been discovered. Russo apologized for the use of the vague word creature, but explained that this very uncertainty was why he was contacting his old friend Carter in the first place. “It is not clear, from the parts of the fossil which we see, what at all we are dealing with.” There were what looked like distended talons, the letter went on, suggesting this might be a moderately sized raptor of some sort, but the talons also appeared to display an articulated metacarpal and phalanx—features that could only suggest a hominid ancestor. “But a hominid that, in the scheme of evolution, is too old to be possible.”
Carter could see already why Russo was so puzzled. But why not do a simple carbon-14 test on the specimen and see what it revealed? That’s where Carter would have started.
But so, it seems, had Russo. In the very next paragraph, Carter read, “As you would expect, we have employed the standard radiocarbon-dating techniques. While we do not here have the access to AMS”—accelerated mass spectrometry, which, Carter knew, was seldom available outside the United States—“we have isolated 5 grams of pure carbon from the base material and conducted repeat tests on that sample. The laboratory reports on those tests are enclosed—see Appendix A.”
Carter riffled through the materials until he
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