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see if there’s a message or something. You don’t have to come. I can go on my own.”
    â€œOh, shit, I’ll come. You’ll be making me nervous next.”
    Back in the Bradford Palace, where they had now been staying for three days, everything was normal. Phoning down from their room to the reception desk revealed no message. Nothing had happened.
    â€œI’m sorry, darling,” Kylie said, nuzzling him. “I just had that silly feeling. You want to go back to the beach?”
    â€œNo, I don’t want to go back to the beach. Supposing you get another funny spell as soon as we’re down there. We could be bouncing back and forth like yo-yos all day. I’m going to drag a six-pack out on that balcony and tan. Forget it.”
    â€œDon’t be like that, Larry. I wish you wouldn’t drink so much.”
    He turned and grinned as he headed for the fridge. “You got some religious objections or something?”
    She stood in the middle of the room, nibbling an index finger. She said nothing to him when he returned, switching on the TV too loud on his way to a cushioned chaise longue on the balcony of the suite. She looked out past him, through the tall palms and over the busy road and the other hotels and the whole vulgar commercial razzmatazz of Hilo Bay, to the green line of ocean beyond the shallows where the swimmers and surfers sported, a line that offered at least the prospect of infinity.
    Sadly she turned away, changed into a loose caftan, and took a copy of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula over to a side sofa to read, out of range of the TV screen. She had marked her place with the wrapper of a Hershey bar.
    With a part of her mind, Kylie was aware of a commercial on television for the local Hedge’s Beer. “It’s slimming, it’s trimming—get a Hedge against inflation.” A news bulletin followed.
    Absorbed in her reading, she hardly took it in until Larry yelled from the balcony, “Bernie Clift!”
    There was Clift’s face on the screen.
    Against library pictures of desert, the announcer was speaking: “The scientific world—or at least that part of it meeting yesterday at a conference in Houston—was in an uproar over a statement made by famous paleontologist Bernard Clift. Clift claims he has discovered a race of humanlike beings who lived millions of years before the Stone Age.”
    Clift was seen at a microphone, brushing back a lock of hair from his forehead and speaking above a hubbub. “On the evidence of a pair of graves in Utah we cannot generalize too freely. But the workmanship of the coffins, which is surprisingly modern in technique, suggests a high degree of culture. Dating methods indicate beyond doubt a date of some 65.5 million years ago. This clearly places the coffins and the bodies they contain back at a period when the tyrannosaur and other giant dinosaurs were still roving the continents.”
    The clip ended. Back came the announcer, saying, “Later, Clift revealed that a preliminary analysis of the two fossilized bodies indicates strong shoulder development with much-enlarged shoulder blades—which leads to the hypothesis that Clift’s new discoveries could possibly have evolved from a flighted species, such as the pterodactyl or pteranodon, as shown in this artist’s impression.”
    Over the sketch, his voice continued, “A natural wave of skepticism greeted the Utah announcement …” By this time, Larry and Kylie were arm in arm before the TV set, jumping with excitement.
    â€œSkepticism!” Larry exclaimed. “What else?”
    â€œâ€¦ and it’s not only from the Bible Belt that these protests have come. Within the last hour, Professor Danny Hudson of the Smithsonian Institution has issued a challenge to Bernard Clift to put up or shut up. He is reported as saying he expects the evidence to become available to, quote, ‘unbiased scientific