Corrupting Dr. Nice Read Free Page A

"Jim, take a look at this." They huddled over the controls.
    The room was getting dark. Behind them the Gödel stage hummed. Genevieve turned and watched as, within the delimiter, from a knot of darkness, a man expanded into shape. But instead of arriving stationary, when he reached full size he surged forward off the stage, frantically trying to keep his balance. Flailing his arms like a windmill he fell toward her, his face contorted into a comic mask of dismay. A metal case he'd carried tumbled forward as if it had been tossed from a moving train. The case bounced and skidded across the tiles. Genevieve danced out of the way and the man flipped over the railing, did a neat tuck-and-roll, and ended up crouched on his haunches, fingers touching the floor, nose inches from her legs.
    Slender, about thirty years old, he wore a dark green jumpsuit and hideous purple boots. His light brown hair was too long. A label on the front of his case repeated over and over, in red: "Caution! Contents--live animal."
    One of the transit technicians rushed to help. "Something's wrong with the momentum compensator," his partner behind the board said.
    "You made me let go of the case!" the traveler gasped. "Wilma!"
    Genevieve righted the carrier. The animal inside thumped against its sides. "The name is Genevieve."
    The man looked up toward her in dismay. "Excuse me." After a moment he muttered, "Will you please be quiet? I'm not an idiot."
    She couldn't decide whether he was homely or cute, in an ungainly way. She helped him to his feet. "I don't doubt it," she said. "But we have to stop meeting this way."

TWO: BRINGING UP BABY

    In the evening he would walk out onto the plains, carrying the sack of cat food down to the muddy edge of the lake where the young sauropods nested. Careful not to disturb the snoozing adolescents, he would kneel beside their nest and hold out a handful of cat chow. The hatchlings, no more than half a meter long, large-eyed and alert, would nuzzle the food out of his palm with their flexible snouts. They were covered in short down, like pinfeathers, that they would lose as they grew older. One of them, the one he called Betty, would hold the pieces between her teeth, then throw them to her back molars with a toss of her head before grinding them. Betty's short snout, Owen suspected, was an evolutionary adaptation supposed to make her look cute enough that the adult apatosaurs would protect her. Although some of his colleagues disputed the psychological impact of neoteny.
    The young had come to expect this snack. Charming and clumsy, remarkably intelligent, their descendants would one day have come to rule the earth, were it not for the unfortunate fact that soon they would all be extinct.
    On the day he was due to go back, Owen waited there past the feeding as the sun dipped below the treetops and shadows crept out over the mirror-smooth water, ascending beneath the screw pines and fan palms until the outlines of the trees stood out like black paper cutouts against the orange sky. It still amazed Owen how much the dogwoods, palmettos and magnolias resembled those of 70 million years in the future. The late-Cretaceous wasn't any hotter than Virginia, or except during the rainy season, any wetter. It wasn't the tropical jungle he'd imagined as a boy. He watched a pterosaur far across the lake, circling on the wind, at this distance no bigger than a hawk. It was looking for its home for the night. Owen upended the canvas bag, shook the last crumbs of food out onto the soft brown earth. "All gone," he said.
    The larger young poked their snouts at the food, heads bobbing like chickens. One by one they turned away and trotted off toward the lakeshore. Betty snuffled through the last bits, then looked up at him. She was a lot bigger than the three-kilogram hatchling she had been a couple of months before. She must be two thirds of a meter tall now, and she reached out to gently clutch his wrist with her open mouth. Owen