For a straight archaeologist dealing in the relatively recent cultural periods of the archaic and perhaps the late Paleo-Indian, the Time Slicer seemed a bit much—rather like driving the car pool in a

  Maserati. Tom had talked about the Smithsonian wanting some geological samples from the Greaf Basin in conjunction with the Rose- stone excavation, but then again Rosestone was a Harvard-run expedition. Hell, she didn’t know. Now she stood at her desk. Acetate sheets, color separations of the Seal Woman book, were still there. That was what she had been working on when the call came, that and some tiny panels for a thimble edition of Mother Goose. She traced with the nail of her index finger the outline of one of the children of the old lady who lived in the shoe. The child had that delicate curve of Charley’s cheek. Maybe she should have them all live in a sneaker. A boot was so common, really. She picked up the phone.

  “Hello.”

  All the condolences had begun to sound similar in her ear—a kind of white noise. Baldwin had been talking steadily since she had first said hello. She was not sure now how long that had been. Perhaps two minutes or more, but now she realized suddenly that he had stopped. The pause penetrated her brain at somewhat the same interval, she mused, as the arrival of the boom after a supersonic plane had passed. It was her turn to speak. What in the hell was she supposed to say? Thank him? The man who had asked Tom to go out there in the first place?

  “Mrs. Jacobs?” The voice was tight with concern.

  “Yes. Yes. I’m still here . . . uh . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Uh, Dr. Baldwin, did you know they call it Crotalus horridus horridus?” She spoke hoarsely, just above a whisper.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s Latin for rattlesnake.”

  Chapter 3

  Archie Baldwin’s hand remained on the receiver for almost a full minute after he had hung up. What actually had he expected from her? A muffled sound of grief? A voice constricted with the protocol of bereavement? An angry outburst? Anything but what he had heard —that ratchety noise of Latin coming through the receiver. There was something absolutely confounding in the dry sprocketed voice reciting the Latin nomenclature. He felt as he often did when he turned on the television news and saw footage of some dusty war-torn Middle Eastern village and the raw grief of the women rocking and keening over their dead. Had Latin ever sounded so hoarse, so primitive, so full of terror?

  There was a knock on his door. “Yes?” He removed his hand from the phone. A delicately molded bald head peeked around the door. “Ah Bill! You’re back.”

  “Indeed. May I come in?” Bill Carlisle, a diminutive elderly man, stood in a wide shaft of sunlight that poured in through a high window. Baldwin was suddenly fascinated by this bald and veined head which in the noon light appeared like a luminous porcelain vessel glazed according to some arcane Oriental formula that produced the tiny crackled lines when fired. “Did you hear about what happened out at Rosestone?”

  Baldwin suddenly realized that the bright blue Rosestone folder was lying fully exposed on his desk. “Uh, no. I mean yes. Yes, I did.” He quickly shuffled some papers over it and reached for his pipe. “Very odd.”

  “Yes, very.”

  “What the devil was a Harvard physicist doing out there anyway?”

  “Well, I don’t know.” Baldwin pulled on the pipe in his mouth with little satisfaction. It had gone out. “Well, actually, I can make a guess.” He removed the pipe from his mouth and scowled into the bowl. “This fellow Jacobs, you probably read about him in National Geographic. He’s the one with the new dating instrument.”

  “Ah yes! The fellow with the device—what did he call it?” “Time Slicer—very refined dating information extrapolated from magnetic variations in rocks and stuff.”

  “But I thought it was geologists who’d been using it.”

  “Well, nothing wrong with archaeologists calling him up.”

  “I should say not, and at the rate young Gardiner’s been proceeding out there, nothing wrong with buttressing his dates as he hurtles past us slow tortoises of the archaic into the Paleo. Quite responsible on Gardiner’s part.”

  “Hmmm.” Baldwin kept his gaze out the window.

  “Well, it’s all quite tragic now, however.” Carlisle had sat, or rather alighted as a butterfly might, on the corner of Baldwin’s desk. He picked up a rectangular Lucite box which contained a series of projectile points—arrowheads and dart tips. “He has arrived right here, hasn’t he, in a rather definitive way?” Carlisle’s thin curved index finger indicated a stone point at the extreme left-hand side of the box. It was a Clovis fluted point, the earliest of the Big Game Hunting tradition, exquisite in design, workmanship, and beauty with its concave base and fluted channeling that continued from the base one-quarter of the way toward the tip. An elegant lithic premonition of forms to come in rocketry eleven thousand years later. It had been hafted onto a spear and used for bringing down mammoths about 10,000 years B.C.

  “Yep. He’s back to Clovis.” Baldwin picked up his pipe once more and sighed at the thought of commencing the interminable and messy ritual of relighting it.

  “Ought to have a nice Asiatic chopper by spring if he’s on schedule?” Baldwin said.

  “Are you joking?” Carlisle laughed. “What schedule?” he said, raising a white minnow of an eyebrow.

  Baldwin saw a shadow of reproach in Carlisle’s eye as if to suggest that he were being a mite too proprietary about the Great Basin and issues of Clovis points. It was the old scholar’s warning to the middle- aged one—brace yourself: there are younger, smarter ones out there.

  “Well, I do have to admit I’ve never seen anything like it, certainly not this far west. Of course that’s your territory, Arch, but . . .”

  “It’s stratigraphically impeccable.”

  “And it’s a true assemblage, isn’t it?”

  “A true assemblage.” Baldwin nodded. “Associated bones, seed stuff", pollen analysis, midden analysis, flotation analysis. It reads perfectly.”

  “And at this rate he’ll certainly get a textbook out of it for all of us to read.” Could it have been Carlisle’s pacemaker? Poor circulation in the brain? Those were Baldwin’s first thoughts. It was not only an insensitive remark considering that Baldwin’s work in the Great Basin had resulted in the definitive text for this area, but it was so unlike Carlisle. Baldwin sensed that he, Carlisle, had regretted it, the moment he had said it. It was simply one of those unedited moments of cranial activity that slip into articulation. It was impossible to be angry with a man like Bill Carlisle. Still the remark smarted.

  Baldwin was now digging out the pipe bowl with the corkscrew from his Swiss Army knife. “Don’t worry. We boy wonder emeriti never die. We just fade into department chairmen.” As he gestured with his pipe toward the door of his office, a scattering of tobacco drifted down onto his desk. The legend on the door’s frosted window that appeared in mirror image from his side read “Archibald Baldwin, Chairman, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology.” Baldwin busied himself with his pipe again, jabbing at it with the corkscrew.

  “Why’d you start smoking that thing? You look quite awkward with it.”

  “It’s my attempt for an end run around lung cancer. Maybe I’ll get mouth cancer instead.”

  “Don’t be dismal, Arch.”

  “Huh.” Baldwin opened another instrument on the knife and continued the operation with his pipe.

  Carlisle got up to leave. “You know, Archie, they make tools for that,” he said, nodding toward the pipe.

  “I refuse to succumb to the extraneous paraphernalia of bad habits or good sports.”

  “Oh, you Dartmouth men!” Carlisle waved a hand in a gesture of dismissal and walked out of the chairman’s office.

  Baldwin cleared the papers off the blue folder and picked it up. “Rosestone!” he muttered, then slammed the file down on his desk and spun around in his chair to the window which overlooked the Mall. It was broiling hot outside, but the heat did not deter the summer hordes in dogged pursuit of their nation’s culture. The best thing about becoming interim chairman of the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, indeed the only good thing, was this office, which gave him an excellent view of the life-size fiberglass dinosaur. He could watch children play on it through the seasons, sprawling across its back, sliding down its enormous head and tail. Right now three kids totally oblivious to the 101 degree heat were clambering up its backbone. Their heat-dazed parents melted on benches.

  She was a parent, Baldwin thought suddenly, remembering the terrible croaking voice on the phone, the throat crammed with the jagged Latin. They had a kid. Jacobs had told him. So now there was a little boy without a father, a wife without . . . “Oh shit!” Baldwin mumbled and crunched his hand into a fist against his temple. He watched some more children slide down the triceratops’ neck. He wondered—did she know that her husband had died on his back? It had not seemed terribly significant at the time, but now it did. He should have told her. You see, he imagined himself telling this to her, you see Mrs. Jacobs, we know that he crawled, dragged himself from the tent heading toward the car. The marks, the blood were there on the ground. He stopped several yards before the car, too sick to continue. When he collapsed from crawling he would have been face down. It’s only logical, he must have turned himself over. He died on his back facing a star-dense sky. It seemed important that she know that.

  Chapter 4

  She was not sure exactly how the conversation with Baldwin had ended. She thought that she might actually have thanked him for calling. She did not know how that might have slipped out about the snake. It was awkward, but she didn’t regret saying it. She remembered reading someplace that when Jack Kennedy was shot Jackie had refused to change her bloodstained clothes on the plane back to Washington because she wanted the people to see the blood. Was this why she had spoken those words over the phone? Was it a way of forcing people to confront the horror?

  The fourth night. Alone.

  The first night, after her parents had arrived, her mother had asked if Calista wanted her to sleep in with her. When Calista had said no, Dorothy Cohen had turned to Charley. Finally she had settled into the guest bedroom with her husband, Harry, and felt guilty about being an old lady with an old husband, both in relatively good health. Survivor nuptial guilt. It was written all over her face. Calista saw it.

  Just past midnight on that first night Charley had awakened and come stumbling into Calista’s bedroom dragging his sleeping bag. He camped out at the foot of her bed. This had happened for the first two nights. On the third night he had slept through. Calista, however, did not sleep through. Around one-thirty on the first night she finally took a Dalmane. She took one at eleven on the next two nights and now on the fourth she decided not to take one at all. She wanted to be awake and still and suspend herself in the night.

  The heavy humid August weather had been cleared out by cool northwest air. “That Canadian air”—the weatherman always referred to it in almost reverential tones—“is moving right down here and going to push out all the humidity.” In New England they talked about Canadian air the way some people talk about richer, more elegant relatives. The slightly aristocratic air current from the northwest had in fact arrived and cleared out the heavy clouds. The sky was like black silk outside Calista’s window, and appeared sequined with stars.

  She had painted so many starry nights in illustrations. Early on she had gone through her Van Gogh phase—globs of thick swirling paint. But her best skies recently had been done with a sponge, water- color, gouache, and bleach. Sometimes an air brush for Magellanic clouds. She had drawn all those star formations of the new astronomy that Tom talked about, all the cosmic fireworks from the star-thick cores of galaxies that mesmerized astrophysicists yet still only existed in formula, figments of equations, tentative models with spellbinding names. The words themselves dared one to paint the images—galactic fountains, starbursts, starsprays, black holes, whirlpools. She repeated their names now, a small whispered litany in the cool black silk night.

  “Starspray.” She stopped. Was it pray or spray? Why had she never thought of that before? A group of stars praying or a single star spraying. A praying star? She would draw a tiny cluster of stars praying. A single star praying would be a small, small boy with incandescent red hair kneeling at a toy xylophone tapping out “Twinkle, twinkle. ...” Calista drew her knees close to her chest. She began to shake. She clutched her knees harder. She could not stand it when her body did this. This horrible shaking, these tremors. Was this the opposite of feeling like nothing, this kind of seismic grieving? She drew a shallow breath and exhaled. Another, a deeper one. She would do rhythmic breathing and look out the window. Because.... Because why? She blew the air out in a slow flat stream between her lips. Because. . . . Because. . . . She repeated the command in her head to be awake and still and suspended in. . . .

  The shaking had stopped, ebbed away like the ruffled swags of tidal foam on a beach, sure to return, but gone for an interval. Calista looked out into the night. There was out there, six thousand light years from earth, Tom’s focus, the object of his intellectual energies, the constellation Cygnus X-l, “premier candidate for a black hole.” The words were from Tom’s lecture given three weeks before at the New York Academy of Science on receiving the Pregel Prize. Calista was very quiet now. She felt the calm steal over her body like night vapor over a still lake. There were certain events that were not mere figments of equations, but were evidenced and as such were true. It is true, Calista thought, that stars do often travel in pairs called binaries which orbit a common center of gravity. It is true that if there is such an event as a black hole it is detectable through its gravitational embrace on its visible mate. In Cygnus X-l the visible star is the blue one, stretched and distorted into an egg shape, as Tom had written, by the tremendous gravitational pull of a black hole—its dark mate. And what is a black hole anyway but the final stage in the death of a star. “I am the blue star,” Calista whispered. And she lay awake through the invisible heart of the night and into the dawn.

  Chapter 5

  Calista Jacobs walked out into the October sunlight, and for the first time in the 425 days since her husband’s death did not say “Fuck it” as she looked up at the clear light of the sunny day. A few seconds later she had thought it but she still hadn’t said it. She must be getting better, she thought. Healing as they say. How very shrinky. There was a plethora of psychiatrists in Cambridge, and a disproportionate number lived in Calista’s neighborhood. She was flanked on either side by psychiatrists, at Number 5 and Number 9 James Street. She saw their patients troop in and out daily. She had never gone to a shrink, probably for the same reasons she had never gone to an astrologist. In many ways it seemed an oversimplification of things. She had in fact never really thought out the analogy between psychiatrists and astrologists, but she had once said that at a cocktail party years ago when they had first come to Cambridge.

  At the time, her interrogator, a shrink, naturally, was curious about her comparison. Calista had brushed him off. “Just being sassy, I guess.”

  “Sassy?” This choice of words he found even more intriguing than her thoughts about psychiatry, especially from this tall, oval-faced woman with an abundance of prematurely gray hair. “Where are you from?” he asked wondrously.

  Sassy? The midwestern charm, it always worked. They immediately stopped asking why you hadn’t been to a psychiatrist once they heard you were from Indiana. Of course, in all fairness, she had to admit that she was ripe for a shrink’s inquiries. As an author and illustrator of children’s books, she had carved out a bit of a niche for herself in the retelling and illustration of classic fairy tales. Her elegant pen-and-ink illustrations, as the New York Times's children’s book critic put it, possessed a quiet sexual power. There had been a time after Snow White had come out and just before she had started Sleeping Beauty when everybody was bugging her about doing Beauty and the Beast. It was a couple of years after they had moved to Cambridge. Everybody was saying, “Why don’t you do Beauty and the Beast? When are you going to do Beauty and the Beast?" The answer was simple. It was too damn weird. She wasn’t comfortable with the sexuality of the story. She learned very quickly not to say that in public. One cocktail party on Brattle Street was enough. The next time the Brattle Street shrinks were around she simply said, “Look, dwarfs are one thing, but animals—forget it!”

  Anyway, today, a bit over a year since Tom had died, she felt the October sun and it felt warm and good. So what did it mean? She was healing? Getting better? What little psychic milestone had she passed? What corner had she turned at which her resiliency, her mental health would be applauded? She had hated sunny days since Tom had died. Resented the sun’s light. Found it intrusive, meddlesome. A sob swelled in her throat; the autumnal gold blurred. It wasn’t survivor guilt that made her cry, or the guilt of feeling better or healing. She was mending, but she would always miss Tom.

  Two weeks before, Charley had found a second Time Slicer in Tom’s basement workshop, a slightly more refined, advanced model that they had both now remembered him talking about.

  She thought back on that day. Charley had been so excited when he had found the second Time Slicer that he had actually called up Harrison himself. For a somewhat shy kid this was a rather landmark occasion in personal development. Calista had been in the study and heard him on the phone jabbering away to Harrison. Then he had hung up, rather abruptly it had seemed to Calista. “What happened, Charley?” She had hoped Harrison hadn’t just cut him off. He could be a bit of an oddball at times but he had always been nice to Charley and she trusted he was still interested in the Slicer.