Developed by Berkeley chemist Willard F. Libby in 1946, Carbon-14 is created in the earth’s upper atmosphere by the bombardment of cosmic particles from outer space that pass into the bodies of animals and plants through the food chain. Since it begins to decay as soon as it is formed, radiocarbon, as it is sometimes known, has proved to be a useful technique for dating the remains of once-living things. It marked the beginning of accurate geochronometry, a specialized field that now includes many even more sophisticated techniques and for which a department at Berkeley was also to be found in the Earth Sciences building.
Professor Stewart Ray Sacher was Berkeley’s outstanding geochronologist. The author of the standard textbook, Stratigraphic Geology and Relative Age Measurement, Sacher was also a highly respected paleontologist and had published several best-selling popular science books to do with the Paleozoic era, most notably Future World: Walcott’s Quarry and the Cambrian Explosion, his Pulitzer Prize-winning analysis of a famous Cambrian biota and its significance in the history of life on earth.
A bulky man, with a shock of untidy brown hair and a soup-strainer of a moustache, Sacher was working in his vast laboratory, surrounded by various configurations of spectrometer and assisted by an attractive-looking female postgraduate student, when Swift caught up with him.
As always, Sacher had a piece of choral music playing on his lab’s powerful sound system, and from time to time he would stop and conduct a phrase or movement he particularly enjoyed. He was in the middle of just such a moment when he caught sight of her in the doorway. Quite unabashed, he said in his strong Brooklyn accent, ‘True hope is swift, and flies with swallow wings.’
He grinned as if pleased with the dexterity of his capacity for quotation and then hugged her warmly. ‘How are you doin’, sweetheart?’
Swift kissed him on both cheeks and, noticing his trousers and vest, remarked on his continuing fondness for wearing leather.
‘I’m a biker, what do you expect?’
‘Sometimes I think it’s rather more fetishistic than that,’ she said, teasing him.
‘I would like to present an alternative explanation of what these so-called fetishisms mean,’ he declared. ‘If all our efforts, intellectual and sexual, represent a striving for godhead, then God has surely given all of us our sexual quirks and kinks to frustrate our efforts in this respect. But for panties and shoes and stinking primeval ooze, we would all of us be gods ourselves. What can I do for you, honey?’
‘I’d like to talk to you about a dating problem.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought a good-lookin’ gal like you would have much of a problem.’ He grinned and shook his head. ‘I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve made that lousy joke. Take a seat. Swift, and I’ll be with you in two shakes of a lead isotope.’
He pointed toward a leather swivel positioned in front of a rolltop desk and next to a trolley supporting several stories of stereo equipment.
Swift sat down and glanced over Sacher’s cluttered desktop, searching for the CD case. She recognized the music playing as Haydn’s Creation, only the recording was much better than the one she herself owned — the full-price choice as opposed to the budget. Unable to find it, she leaned back in the chair and, trying to ignore the baseball paraphernalia that covered the wall above and around the desk — Sacher was a dedicated fan of the Oakland Athletics — she let the music wash over her.
There was, she thought, an extra pleasure to be found in classical music when and where you were not expecting to hear it. At the same time, she wondered what a composer who had once remarked that whenever he thought of God it made him feel cheerful would have made of someone like Stewart Ray Sacher. Or, for that matter, herself. Whenever Swift thought of God she tried to imagine a biological predisposition in man to be religious that was like Chomsky’s theory of an innate capacity in human beings to learn language. Her own experience of God had been that He was merely a name to be invoked when you needed something urgently, like an all-night supermarket.
‘You like this?’
Swift opened her emerald green eyes.
‘Haydn? Yes. Of course.’
‘What’s your favourite part?’
She thought for a moment and then said, ‘The Representation of Chaos.’
‘Ooh, that’s dark. Says a lot about you, honey. Me, I like the bit when the worm finally shows up on the scene, but only after the tigers and the sheep have already put in an appearance. In langen Zügen kriecht am Boden das Gewürm. How’s about that for an evolutionary ladder?’
He laughed a heavy smoker’s laugh. Cigarettes were the principal reason his voice seemed to have no more range of modulation than the cawing of a bad-tempered crow — a dry, catarrhal rasp made him sound all the more like Al Pacino. His sentences were not so much spoken as expectorated.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘somehow I don’t think Franz Joseph Haydn would have accepted the idea that we’re all descended from a few simple land invertebrates.’
‘I was thinking the same thing.’
‘So what brings you to my time machine? Got something interesting for me to date?’
Swift opened her shoulder bag and handed him another copy of the confidentiality contract.
‘I’m sorry about this, Ray,’ she said. ‘Really I am. But I think you’ll understand the need for caution when you see what I’ve got. You can’t be too careful these days.’
‘This must mean you’ve found something important,’ he said, interrupting her, and without another word he signed the paper and returned it.
‘Well? Come on. Don’t keep me in suspense, honey. Where is it? Where’s the material?’
Swift glanced around the laboratory for Sacher’s lab assistant.
‘Helen?’ Sacher called to her. ‘D’you wanna take those books back to the Bancroft?’
‘Sure,’ she said, and having collected a pile of library books off the floor, went out the door, smiling a wry smile at her boss. ‘No problem.’
‘Ooh, did ya see that smile?’ said Sacher when Helen had gone. ‘I bet she thinks that you and I have a thing goin’. You know, this is going to be very good for my reputation.’ He laughed and took out a packet of Winston Select. ‘Thank God she’s gone. Now I can have a cigarette.’
‘You shouldn’t smoke so much,’ said Swift.
‘Et tu Brute.’
‘I worry about you.’
‘Hey, these must be safe. They advertise in Omni.’
Swift put her hand in her bag. First she took out a small plastic bag containing Furness’s rock and soil samples. Then she unwrapped a length of lint and laid the piece of lower jawbone on the desk.
‘It sure doesn’t look very old,’ Sacher grumbled, picking up the bone in his sepia-coloured fingers.
‘It does and it doesn’t. You’re right. It’s hardly fossilized at all, and yet it ought to be. According to the existing phylogenetic classification, this piece of jawbone ought to be over a million years old. Even if one discounts the possibility of intrusive burial, this mandible ought to look more obviously rocklike.’
‘Why discount it?’ said Sacher. ‘How did you come by this specimen?’
‘It came from a reliable source.’
‘How reliable? Has this person ever provided you with fossils before?’
‘Never. But he’s not the kind who would work some elaborate hoax, like Charles Dawson and his Piltdown man. Or could work one, for that matter. Dawson went to the trouble of treating the pieces of skull and jawbone to give them a suitable patina of age. If someone really wanted to put one over on me, they would surely have done the same.’ She paused, waiting for him to agree with her. ‘Wouldn’t you think so?’