Bones of the Earth Read Free Page B

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:
    Opening the cranial cavity reveals that the brain is short and deep with strong cerebral and pontine flexures and a steep caudodorsal edge. The small cerebral hemispheres have a transverse diameter slightly in excess of the medulla oblongata. Though the optic lobes and the olfactory lobe are quite large, the cerebellum is strikingly small.
    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.
    â€œI’ve got to stop,” he said aloud. “The condition I’m in, I can’t be trusted not to screw things up.”
    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