She couldn’t help but feel saddened by that.
She had been happy in the Maastrichtian. It had been a lot of work and suffering, sure. But there were satisfactions. Time and again, she had proved her own competence both to herself and to the others.
She might not be the jock Tamara was, but she had good survival skills. She knew how to make seven different kinds of snares and deadfalls. She could catch fish by hook, spear, or by hand. She could skin and butcher a fresh-killed hadrosaur and get away with as much meat as she could carry in less time than it took for the predators to arrive. She might not be the paleontologist Leyster was, but she could identify almost any dinosaur by sight or sound or, in some cases, smell. Most of the herbivores she could identify by flavor. She could pick up a shed tooth and identify not only its former owner, but where it had been in the jaw, and make a few shrewd guesses as to the creature’s age and health.
She could build a house and know it would stand up. She could sing a song in an entertaining manner. She had re-invented the loom, working from half-forgotten memories of a model she had made as a girl, and then she had taught herself and the others how to use it.
More than that, she had gone rafting down the Eden. She had faced down the largest animals ever to walk the Earth. She had tended to a dying woman in her final days and nursed an ailing man back to health. She had known tears and laughter, toil, love, sweat, and danger.
These were the primal satisfactions, the things that made life matter. What did Washington, D.C., in the twenty-first century have to offer that could compare with them?
Patrick came up from behind and linked arms with her.
“Come on,” he said. “This poor, deluded fool is my editor”—the man smiled and nodded—“and, being pig-ignorant of the drinking habits of paleontologists, he has rashly promised to buy us all the beer we want. There’s an Orioles game going on right now, and he tells me the bar has a wide-screen TV with state-of-the-art speakers. It just doesn’t get any better than that.”
She let herself be led away. “Do they have baskets of those little pretzels?” she asked anxiously. “It’s not really a proper game without them.”
“Not to worry,” the editor said soothingly, “If they don’t, we can always send out for some.”
Leyster had spotted Griffin standing against the far wall of the auditorium, and automatically taken the stone out of his pocket. Now, unobtrusively, he put it back. Whatever inchoate plan he might have had for vengeance had disappeared in an instant. He was in a different world now. That wasn’t how things were done here.
There were people everywhere about him, hands grabbing at him, voices making demands on his attention. It was hard sorting them all out. Somebody thrust a pen and an open copy of Science at him, and it was only after several had been signed and snatched away that it registered on him that he was autographing copies of the infrasound paper.
He needed air.
“Excuse me,” he said, moving toward the hall. “Excuse me, please. Excuse me.” He’d always hated crowds; how had he gotten away from them in the past? “I need to use the men’s room.”
“End of the hall to the left,” somebody said.
“Thanks.”
He fled.
There were people in the hall too, though not nearly so many as in the ballroom. Most were strangers. One, however, he recognized.
Salley.
He walked straight toward her, heart pounding, not knowing what he was going to do when he arrived. She stared at him, her eyes stricken, fearful, like a sacrifice waiting for the knife, or a woman who knows that someone is about to hit her.
Wordlessly, he took her hand and led her away.
They went into a blind fuck on the floor of the hotel room, just inside the door. It was fast and hard, and when they were done, their clothes were in tatters and Leyster realized that the door was not entirely closed. He kicked it shut, and in so doing found that he still had his shoes on.
So they untangled themselves and began removing those items of clothing that had been pushed out of the way rather than removed or (in some cases) ripped to shreds. “My poor blouse,” Salley said. She wriggled out of the panties that Leyster, too impatient to wait, had ripped down the crotch. “I’ll have to send out for new clothes.”
“Don’t do it for my sake,” Leyster said. “I like you just fine the way you are.”
“Beast,” she said lovingly. “Brute.” She picked up the complimentary newspaper they’d kicked aside on their way in, and aimed a swat at his head.
Leyster wrestled the paper from her hand, kissed her, kissed her again, kissed her a third time. Then he glanced at the paper and burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“The date. It’s only been five days since the first time I was here. That first conference after I was recruited, when Griffin explained about time travel.” He stood. “You gave the keynote address. Of course, you were older then.”
“Hey. Where are you going?”
“To do the other thing I’ve been thinking about every day of my life for the past two-and-a-half years.”
Leyster ran a bath, while Salley pretended to sulk. Then, as he lay soaking, she climbed in after him. By the time they were done screwing, there was more water on the floor than in the tub. After which, they dried each other off with the thick hotel towels, and finally made it all the way to the bed.
There, at last, they made love.
Afterwards, Leyster said, “Now I feel complete. All my life, I’ve had a kind of tension. A feeling that there was something I really ought to be doing but wasn’t. Now… well. I guess I’m finally happy.”
Salley smiled lazily. “You were waiting for me, dear heart. You and I were fated to be together from the beginning of time, and now here we are.”
“That’s a pretty thought. But I don’t believe in fate.”
“I do. I’m a Presbyterian. Predestination is dogmatic.”
He looked at her curiously. “I didn’t know you were religious.”
“Well, I don’t knock on people’s doors and give them pamphlets, if that’s what you mean. But, yeah, I take my faith pretty seriously. Is that a problem?”
“No, no, of course not.” He took her hand, kissed the knuckles one by one. “Nothing about you is a problem for me.”
She drew her hand away. “There’s something you have to know. I’ve been putting off telling you. But now it’s time.”
Leyster listened patiently, while Salley told him about the Bird Men’s decision, and all that had led up to it. When she was done at last, she said, “You don’t look surprised.”
“Of course not. I’ve known from the beginning that none of this was possible. The numbers never did add up on the whole time travel thing. Maybe the others could kid themselves about it. Not me.”
“Then why did you go along with it? Why didn’t you just refuse to play?”
“And miss out on seeing dinosaurs?” He laughed. “I’ve lived my life as I wanted, I’ve gotten answers to questions I thought I’d never know, and now I’ve had your love and known your body. Why should I want more? Why should I…say. Whose room is this, anyway? Yours or mine?”
“It’s yours.”
“Then my things should be in here somewhere, right?” He began opening drawers, rummaging through piles of clothes. “And if my things are here, then there ought to be… Aha! Here it is!”