Prophet of Bones Read Free Page A

invented?”
    “In 1906, but the results were rejected for years.”
    “Rejected by whom?”
    “By evolutionists.”
    “Good.” She flipped to the next card. “In what year did Darwin write On the Origin of Species ?”
    “In 1859.”
    “When did Darwin’s theory lose the confidence of the scientific community?”
    “That was 1932.” Anticipating the next question, Paul continued: “When Kohlhorster invented potassium-argon dating.”
    “Why was this important?”
    “The new dating method proved the earth wasn’t as old as the evolutionists thought.”
    “When was the theory of evolution finally debunked completely?”
    “In 1954, when Willard F. Libby invented carbon-14 dating at the University of Chicago.”
    “Good,” his mother said and flipped another card. “And why else was he known?”
    “He won the Nobel Prize in 1960, when he used carbon dating to prove, once and for all, that the earth was fifty-eight hundred years old.”

3
    Paul wore a white lab coat when he entered the attic. It was one of his father’s old coats, so he had to cut the sleeves to fit his arms. Paul’s father was a doctor, the PhD kind. He was blond and big and successful. He’d met Paul’s mother after grad school while consulting for a Chinese research firm in Nanjing. Paul’s mother had been one of the scientists at the university there, and she sometimes told Paul stories about working in a lab, about her home in China, and about meeting his father. “He was so handsome,” she said.
    After they married, they’d continued to work on the same projects for a while, but there was never any doubt that Paul’s father was the bright light of the family. The genius, the famous man. He was also crazy.
    Paul’s father liked breaking things. He broke telephones, and he broke walls, and he broke tables. He broke promises not to hit again. One time, he broke bones; and the police were called by the ER physicians who did not believe the story about Paul’s mother falling down the stairs. They did not believe the weeping woman of porcelain who swore her husband had not touched her.
    Paul’s father was a force of nature, a cataclysm. As unpredictable as a comet strike or a volcanic eruption. Over the course of his childhood, Paul became an expert on his father’s moods. He learned to interpret the tone of a brooding silence, could read whole volumes of meaning into a single blue-eyed glance around the side of a clenched periodical. He had two fathers, he learned. One who smiled and charmed and made people laugh. And another, who stormed. The attic over the garage was a good place to retreat to when the dark clouds gathered.
    Paul studied his mice like Goodall’s chimps, watching them for hours. He documented their social interactions in a green spiral notebook. At first he gave them names, borrowed from characters from his favorite books. Names like Algernon and Nimh. Later, as the population grew, he started giving them numbered codes instead, saving names for only the most special.
    Mice are social animals, and he found that within the large habitats, they formed packs like wolves, with a dominant male and a dominant female—a structured social hierarchy involving mating privileges, territory, and almost-ritualized displays of submission by males of lower rank. The dominant male bred most of the females, and mice, Paul learned, could kill each other. Mice could war.
    Nature abhors a vacuum, and the mouse populations slowly expanded to fill the new territories he’d created for them. The habitats thronged. The babies were born pink and blind, and as their fur came in, Paul began documenting coat colors in his notebook. There were fawns, blacks, and grays. Occasional agoutis. There were Irish spotted, banded, and broken marked. In later generations, new colors appeared that he hadn’t purchased, and he knew enough about genetics to realize these were recessive genes cropping up.
    Paul was fascinated by the concept of