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authoritative voice to think of others who might be sleeping. The guard followed him.
    Bodenland was alone with the thing in the coffin.
    In the frail light, the thing seemed almost to have acquired a layer of skin, skin of an ill order but rendering it at least a few paces nearer to life than before. Bodenland felt an absurd temptation to speak to the thing. But what would it answer?
    Overcoming his reluctance, he thrust his hand down into the ocher. Although he was aware he might be destroying valuable archaeological evidence, curiosity led him on. The thought had entered his mind that after all Clift might somehow have overstepped the bounds of his madness and faked the evidence of the rocks, that this could be a modern grave he had concealed in the Cretaceous strata at some earlier date—perhaps working alone here the previous year.
    Much of Bernard Clift’s fame had sprung from a series of outspoken popular articles in which he had pointed out the scarcity of earlier human remains and their fragmentary nature in all but a few select sites round the world. Is Humanity Ten Million Years Old? had been a favorite headline.
    Orthodoxy agreed that Homo sapiens could be no more than two million years old. It was impossible to believe that this thing came from sixty-five million years ago. Clift was faking; and if he could convince his pragmatic friend Joe, then he could convince the world’s press.
    â€œNo one fools me,” Bodenland said, half aloud. He peered about to make sure that Clift and the guard were not returning.
    Crouching over the coffin, he scraped one shoulder against the rock wall and the stained line that was the K/T boundary.
    The ocher was surprisingly warm to the touch, almost as if heated by a living body. Bodenland’s spatulate fingers probed in the dust. He started to scrape a small hole in order to see the rib cage better. It was absurd to believe that this dust had lain undisturbed for all those millennia. The dust was crusty, breaking into crumbs like old cake.
    He did not know what he was looking for. He grinned in the darkness. A sticker saying MADE IN TAIWAN would do. He’d have to go gently with poor old Clift. Scientists had been known to fake evidence before.
    His finger ran gently along the left floating rib, then the one above it. At the next rib, he felt an obstruction.
    Grit trickled between his fingers. He could not see what he had hold of. Bone? Tugging gently, he got it loose and lifted it from the depression. When he held it up to the light bulb, it glittered dimly.
    It was not bone. It was metal.
    Bodenland rubbed it on his shirt, then held it up again.
    It was a silver bullet.
    On it was inscribed a pattern—a pattern of ivy or something similar, twining about a cross. He stared at it in disbelief, and an ill feeling ran through him.
    Sixty-five million years old?
    He heard Clift returning, speaking reassuringly to the guard. Hastily he smoothed over the marks he had made in the ocher. The bullet he slipped into a pocket.
    â€œA very traditional fracas,” Clift said quietly, in his academic way. “Two young men quarreling for the favors of one girl. Sex has proved a rather troublesome method of perpetuating the human race. If one was in charge one might dream up a better way … I advised them both to go to bed with her and then forget it.”
    â€œThey must have loved that suggestion!”
    â€œThey’ll sort it out.”
    â€œMaybe we should hit the sack too.”
    But they stood under the stars, discussing the find. Bodenland endeavored to hide his skepticism, without great success.
    â€œExperts are coming in from Chicago and Drumheller tomorrow,” Clift said. “You shall hear what they say. They will understand that the evidence of the strata cannot lie.”
    â€œCome on, Bernie, sixty-five million years … My mind just won’t take in such a span of time.”
    â€œIn the history of the universe—even