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The operator glanced anxiously across the site. In the distance he could see other workers running toward the crane. He wondered whether he should try to placate his employer in case he’d become suddenly mentally unstable.
“Just feel it. I have to know.” Gavin’s voice was choked.
Tentatively the crane operator reached out and, fearing there might be hidden homosexual tendencies in the burly man sitting next to him, very lightly touched his palm.
“Feels totally normal to me. Maybe you just froze—you know, nerves. Happens to a lot of blokes when they haven’t driven for a long time. It’s only natural,” he said carefully.
Gavin, normally such a controlled man, seemed to collapse into himself, his shoulders slumped, his face liquefying as if he was struggling not to cry.
“Don’t worry about it, mate, we’re still upright, no harm done,” the operator added softly, the status dissolving between them.
“Mr. Tetherhook to you!” Gavin jerked himself upright. “Mention a word of this to the others and you’re out of a job, understand?”
The crane operator nodded curtly. A second later Shortstuff was at the door, helping Gavin down.
Back in the safety of the Merc, the property developer pulled on his driving gloves and left them on all day, despite the warm temperature.
Later that day, when at last the air began to cool and the evening sprinklers were throwing out their incessant rainbows, Gavin headed to the State Library. There, under the fluorescent lights, still wearing the gloves regardless of the severe itching at his wrists, Gavin scanned the shelves of the Natural Sciences section. It was the middle of the school exam period so the place was packed with groups of adolescents restlessly trying to focus while the air jumped palpably with pubescent hormones. Irritated by the bursts of giggling and deliberate rustling of paper Gavin fought the urge to scream.
Finally he located a book on Australian flora. He scanned the room, looking for a place where he wouldn’t be spotted by anyone else. There was a single empty desk behind the Theology section. Once seated he stealthily slipped off his gloves. He kept his palm turned downward as he flicked through the pages with an uncomfortable sense of furtiveness, as if he were viewing pornography.
He found a diagram of a leaf that vaguely resembled the strange foliage on his palm. Slowly, heart racin
g, he turned his hand over. Yes, it was still there: a perfect imprint. Hidden behind the raised book he held his palm against the illustration. It didn’t correspond with the image at all. Disheartened, he turned page after page until he came to a chapter on the prehistoric flora of Australia.
Under the subheading Triassic Period of the Mesozoic was a drawing of a fern with conelike seeds attached to the end of its main leaf. It was called a Dicroidium. The imprint on his palm was very similar except the seed pods looked more jagged. Staring closely at his skin, Gavin realized each tiny section was a hexagon.
He tore the page out and slipped it into his breast pocket, then put the gloves back on and exhaled. Somehow, by defining the image he felt he had regained a level of control.
Outside he walked straight over to the Queensland Museum. It was a Thursday and he knew it would be open until eight. At reception he asked to be put through to a staff member who knew about paleontology. The receptionist, a round woman in her fifties squeezed into a plastic stool, her abundant flesh rippling out of the sleeves of her blouse, blushed as she recognized the property developer from the social pages she scanned religiously every morning.
“Mr. Tetherhook,” she stammered. “Stanley Jervis is our resident paleontologist. I’ll call him immediately.”
They both stared at the rough pencil sketch Gavin had made of the footprints. Stanley Jervis—a clean-cut individual who looked like a corporate version of a Scientologist—snorted suddenly in ridicule. “Saturday sent you, right?” he barked derisively.
“Saturday who?”
“Saturday Honeywell. Oh, come on, mate, this whole thing stinks of those madcap conspiracy theories of hers. You can’t believe the number of times I’ve had to sit through one of her dumb diatribes. She even implicated the museum in one of her crazy theories—something about repressing information about coastal erosion. We had to let her go after that. Now she’s one of those radical greenies.”
“I don’t know any Saturday, and I certainly wouldn’t know an environmentalist. Do you know who I am?”
“Should I?”
“Yes, you fucking should. I sunk twenty thousand into the renovation of this building.”
“Tetherhook…Gavin Tetherhook, the property developer?”
Gavin nodded, staring him out. The paleontologist swallowed, his protruding Adam’s apple bobbing like a buoy.
“I shouldn’t imagine property developers are usually given to these kinds of delusions….”
“I’m not asking you to pass judgment. All I want is a description of what kind of animal, primordial or otherwise, could have made those prints.”
Jervis looked at the sketch again, then at the illustration of the leaf.
“This,” he pointed to the leaf, “looks like a Dicroidium, very common in this area during the Triassic period of the Mesozoic. As for the footprint, the fauna around at that time included three-toed theropods. They were bipedal nasty carnivorous dinosaurs with particularly sharp curved claws at the end of each toe.”
The scratches on Gavin’s back tingled suddenly.
