by B. C. CHASE
Doctor Martin had not expected it to happen so quickly. He was frozen in his chair. There was supposed to be some long introductory speech, some politicians were supposed to wax eloquent for far longer than anyone had the forbearance to listen... Then, when everyone was properly stupefied, Doctor Martin thought, he would be called upon to take the chair. Not like this: not the opening act.
“Doctor Matthew Martin?” the Australian repeated, staring at him.
His fiancée gave his hand another squeeze and he regained control of his body. He reached down for the pile of paperwork underneath his chair and, rising, stepped up to the front, feeling every eye upon him.
The auditorium was engulfed in total silence and his footsteps echoed off the giant walls. He reached the tiny desk that sat facing the large circle of representatives and set his papers down, one fluttering off to the floor. The audience laughed. Paper was so rare that, apparently, its appearance floating in the air was amusing to the modern imbeciles, Dr. Martin thought. As he knelt to retrieve the stray sheet, the gray-haired man said, “We can provide you with a tablet...”
“Yes, thank you. I prefer good old paper.” The chair behind the desk squeaked as he sat in it. He cleared his throat and stared up at the circle of power-brokers.
Suddenly, he was frantic. His eyes darted from person to person. Where is she? He spun around and found her. His fiancée was smiling encouragement from the front row in the mass of humanity.
Somehow, the longer he had known her, the more dependent upon her he had become. In a way, it was odd. In another, disconcerting. All he really knew is that this woman had suddenly appeared in his life just when he needed her, and without her he was nothing. He couldn't help but love her, whether she was in charge or not.
He turned back around and hesitantly tapped the microphone. Hearing the loud reverberation it caused, he leaned forward and spoke softly, “Thank you, Secretary Kwame Aidoo, for inviting me to this pivotal meeting. As you know, when I spoke at TED, my talk was censored, that is, removed, so I am grateful for this opportunity. Thank you, members of the Security Council, for indulging me with your time. And thank you, all of you who are here or watching remotely, for lending your ears to this subject, a subject which is quite certain turn your little worlds,” he giggled, wiped sweat from his forehead, “upside down.”
Jet Conference Room
Maggie met Aubrey outside the now-closed double doors of the jet's conference room. “Henry said he would like you to sit in this meeting, but they're about to start. If you listen, you might learn something.” She led Aubrey into the room where they took seats against the wall, off to the side of a table where there were seven men in suits, including Henry, and one elderly woman in an elegant-looking emerald-green pantsuit. Seated at the head of the table, she had a hawkish nose, but this feature was grandstanded by her large, piercing eyes.
“Are we quite ready to begin?” she inquired impatiently. Receiving nods from around the table, she tapped her hand and said, “Good.” Then she declared, “Let me be abundantly clear: What we have received for our trouble is an utter catastrophe.” Her small lips curved downward into a sneer of disgust, “When my feckless nephew came to me and asked for a considerable investment in this scheme, I didn't have the foresight to cast him from my threshold like the black cat he was. His sales antics were far better than his business acumen proved to be. So, alas, I invested. And when that investment was brought to nothing, he exploited the good faith I had placed in him to bewitch all of you,” she motioned to the men around her, “who invested. And when that was lost, and he had the nerve to come cooing around my doorstep once more, what do you think I did?” She waited expectantly for an answer.
Henry Potter, resting his chin on his hand with one elbow on the table, raised his other hand and offered, “Invested again?”
“No indeed I did not! Merciful heavens,” she scowled at him. “I plucked the toy from the infant's grasp and took up the chairmanship of this miserable board.” Her comment received looks of gloomy agreement from the men.
“Unfortunately, I was far too late,” she continued. “Waste, exorbitance and no plan whatsoever to earn a single farthing back has been our return on investment. This aircraft itself—” she made a sweeping motion to their luxurious surroundings “a corporate jet the size of a commercial airliner—is evidence of my nephew's excesses.
“Now for your part, Mr. Potter,” she fixed her eyes on Henry in a stony glare, “your miraculous history of resurrecting corporate debacles seems too miraculous to be true. But our expensive consultants have told us that you are the man of the hour. So here we are, throwing ourselves upon your mercy.
“I have contributed my largest and, I expect, last infusion of currency to keep the fiasco afloat for now. Please accept my sincerest wishes for your success. So tell us... What is your plan?”
Aubrey watched as Henry sat there for a moment, listlessly gazing out the window. Then, clearing his throat, he straightened his posture and said, “Lady Shrewsbury, you call your nephew feckless, but in fact it was you who was feckless.”
She hardly had a moment to take offense before he continued, “Has he ever done anything positive with money before he came to you for it? My guess is 'no;' otherwise he would have had no need for your patronage. Yet you knowingly shared your considerable wealth with him. Without any logical evidence that his proposition was worthy of the slightest consideration, you invested. This, this was feckless indeed. So do not castigate your nephew for doing what anyone would have done in his shoes. Everyone spends money freely that is freely given. Now you tell me, am I wrong in this?”
Lady Shrewsbury looked aghast, “You have very stingy words for your new employer. I suppose you've never heard the phrase 'do not bite the hand that feeds you...'” she stared directly at Henry, “...lest you be flung from the jetliner.”
Henry appeared fatigued, like a professor with a classroom of unmotivated students, “I ask the question, my feckless Duchess, because in order to be entirely motivated to redressing your mistake, you must, entirely, take the blame for it.
“Time and time again I've seen it. Every person in your situation begins with the same problem: they blame others for their errors. 'My accountant wasn't paying attention, politics got in the way, I had twins, the bank wouldn't give me a loan, my father was abusive, I ran out of cash, my wife divorced me, my partner was an idiot, there was a drought, my parents died...'” He looked the duchess directly in the eye for his next sentence: “‘My nephew was feckless.' These are all wonderful sentiments if one wants to sooth feelings of self-loathing, but they do nothing to fix problems. So I ask you again, do you want to fix your mistake? Were you a feckless duchess?” He swung his finger like a conductor, “Say 'I was a feckless duchess.'”
“I will not soil the honor of Shrewsbury by including my title in the matter. However, I will acknowledge that my actions were unseasonable.”
Henry raised a single eyebrow, unimpressed, “And do you agree your nephew cannot be blamed?”
She grinned patronizingly at Henry, “I think you will discover, as I have, that my nephew is extraordinarily gifted. Regrettably, his gift is not making people money; it is making people smile.” She raised herself up in her chair, “So, to the extent that I placed my trust in him for the wrong reason, he cannot be blamed.”
Henry mumbled, “I'll accept that.”
She said, “So, my nephew makes people smile; you make people money. The question is if combining your gifts produces results we can all smile at. This, Mr. Potter, is my chief concern.”
She leaned back, her nose upturned slightly, a coy grin playing on her lips, “I am placing my good faith in you. And make no mistake: I will be watching, I will be listening, I will take note of every whisper that I hear. For the first time in my very long life I have been made a fool, and if I come under the slightest impression that you could turn once into twice, let there be no doubt:” her eyes grew large, “hell has no fury like an o
ld woman scorned.”
4085 Woodbridge Street
Wesley knew something beyond the miscarriage was happening to his wife, now leaning back against the bath surround. The whites of her eyes had turned sallow. This terrified him, but he went into a total panic when they began sporadically rolling up in her head. Every a few seconds, her head dropped to her chest and he found himself shaking her to wake her. He cried her name to her face, but she was disoriented and breathed, “My baby...”
Wesley lifted her up and laid her on the bed, the only thing he could think to do. To his relief, the blue and red lights of the police sent shadows across the bedroom walls, and he left her to let them in.
When he returned with them, she was slumped over the side of the bed, her head and arms dangling. She had vomited on the floor, and now she was unconscious.
It was surreal to him, like a nightmare. He felt oddly disconnected from the events around him, as if this just wasn't happening. It couldn't be happening.
But it was.
The paramedics came right behind the police and rushed into the room to transfer Sienna onto a stretcher. He was powerless and lost as he followed them out the door and down the driveway to the ambulance. Then they were in the ambulance, siren blazing down the road.
The paramedics asked him a flurry of questions about her medical history as they worked, and he answered in single words.
Then he was there by the stretcher, his face near hers, and she was awake again, saying “My baby! My baby!” through breaths but in a horrifying world of her own. He touched her cheek, but had to jerk his hand back. She was boiling up. She turned her face to him and met his gaze.
“Wes,” she breathed. “I'm sorry...our baby...”
“It's not your fault,” he said.
“No, I wanted...to make a baby for you,” she strained to speak, a tear formed in her eye.
Wesley had no words. He wanted to say something, but he couldn't find a way to say what he felt. All he could do was gaze into her eyes, which were flaming yellow now. She raised her head back up and gasped as if in terrible pain. Her skin was pink.
He touched her again; she was blazing hot. This was a fever out of control. Wesley was horrified as he saw her arms beginning to tremble and her chest literally, violently pounding with a powerful, rapid heartbeat. The paramedics were a blur of chaos around her feminine form. She was scalding hot; her breaths were coming out as vapor in the cold air, ever more rapidly.
Until they stopped.
“SIENNAAAAAA!” he screamed.
She was in cardiac arrest. All the paramedics' efforts to revive her were meaningless.
She was dead. The baby was gone.
As he stood in the ER watching her body being rolled away on the stretcher, Wesley could not believe that his small family had been taken from him in a single night.
St. Joseph's Medical Center
“You were aware of the fetus's condition...” Doctor Richard Kingsley said, a statement, not a question.
“It was healthy.” Wesley said, his black-ringed eyes belying the lack of sleep and tremendous stress he had endured over the night.
“Yes, but I mean its genetic condition.”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes the mother's body senses that there is a problem, even if it won't show up until later in the child's life. So it expels the fetus. In a way, it's mother nature's way of preventing suffering.” Doctor Kingsley sighed, “I am very sorry.”
“I understand that, but if she had a miscarriage, where did the baby go?”
“I'm sorry, Mr. Peterson, but, from my perspective, there is only one possible explanation. And I know you're grieving now and it's hard. But your wife must have disposed of the fetus,” the doctor placed a hand on Wesley's back.
“But I told you, she didn't know where it was. She thought it was in the bed. She told me to look for it.”
“She was in a state of horrible shock.” Doctor Kingsley said quietly, “Most women who endure a miscarriage suffer denial, in the beginning.”
“Well I checked the toilet myself, if that's what your suggesting,” Wesley's voice was testy. “It wasn't there.”
The physician appeared about to say something, but then sealed his lips.
“You think she flushed it, don't you?” Wesley accused.
“I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Peterson.” He looked empathetic, paternal, “It was small enough.”
“She knew what was going on, and she said it was on the bed. She didn't start losing consciousness until later,” Wesley said loudly.
The doctor simply nodded sympathetically. “I am so very sorry. My advice is don't obsess over what happened to the fetus. Seek some counseling. And rest. You need to rest.”
Wesley was angry, he swore, “Don’t call it a fetus!”
Doctor Kingsley stepped back, raising a brow.
“I’m going to find out what happened to my son!” he spun around to storm away.
Doctor Kingsley shook his head sadly as he watched Wesley go. He called after, “I'm here if you need anything. Please take care of yourself, Mr. Peterson!”
Gobi Desert, Mongolia
Unlike many deserts, the Gobi was cool in the summer and outright cold in the winter. His team of students wore coats and hats as they worked. Dealing with finger-numbing temperatures on a dig was not ideal, but, in Doctor Ming-Zhen's mind, anything that drove others away served to save more fossils for him and his teams.
They had so far exposed two twelve-foot skeletal forearms. The expectancy of his fledgling team was palpable. Veteran that he was, even he had some trouble containing his anticipation. Such a find was extraordinary even if the arms were not attached to anything.
One handsome member of the team, named Chao, was “studying” to be a paleoanthropologist[1], though from what Doctor Ming-Zhen had seen he had not exhibited any discipline, spending his time at the Academy in revelry and womanizing. His wealthy parents had paved the way to his success with golden bricks, paying for a lavish lifestyle at the Academy and bankrolling any project he undertook there, notwithstanding this dig in the Gobi (which is why Doctor Ming-Zhen allowed his participation despite personal disapproval).
Since the moment they had arrived, Chao had treated Doctor Ming-Zhen more like an employee than an esteemed professor. Now, with a tone of authority, he asked, “Are you able to identify the dinosaur from these bones, Ming-Zhen jiàoshòu?” (Jiàoshòu was the term of respect Doctor Ming-Zhen's students used when addressing him. Chao spit it out like a sour grape.)
Doctor Ming-Zhen arose from his crouched position and asked the rest of the team, “Is anyone ready to venture an identification?”
His team squirmed. He repeated, “Anyone?”
A young woman on her knees grasping a dental pick looked up. She speculated, “Well, tarbosaurus was discovered in this area, but these arms have three fingers, so we know it is not a tyrannosaurid like that.”
Doctor Ming-Zhen nodded with approval, “Very good, Jia Ling.” Of all the students he had ever guided, she had been his most promising; not because she was necessarily smarter than any of the others, but because she had shown the most patience. Probably the best example of this was her endless dedication to the hunks of earth they brought back after the excitement of digging them up was over.
Whenever possible on a dig, a fossil was removed by crane as part of the sediment in which it was contained—as a giant, multi-ton chunk of plastered earth. Loaded onto a huge truck, it was carried to a museum or other facility where the sediment was meticulously drilled, chipped, and brushed away until the fossil was fully exposed and analyzed. This process often took months or even years of exhausting, tedious labor.
For Jia Ling, though, it was the thrill of the hunt. Long after all the other students had bored of this mind-numbing work, she would work long into the nights, picking away endlessly under hot overhead lamps.
As a result of her tenacity, she had once discovered a cluster of eggs within a six by si
x rock that they had thought only to contain a fossilized adult. These eggs had revealed several interesting aspects of behavior: among them that the dinosaur had carefully laid its eggs in a spiral, and that the young would be born with fully functional claws and teeth, quite ready to kill.
Doctor Ming-Zhen rewarded her dedication by taking her under his wing and devoting special attention to her welfare at the Academy. She came from a poor family and her father had died in a construction accident when she was young, so she had no money to visit her mother in distant Chengdu (a metropolis of twenty million in southwestern China). At Doctor Ming-Zhen's invitation, she frequently spent evenings at his home with his wife and infant daughter. They had become very close.
So close, in fact, that Jia Ling was a second daughter to him in everything but law.
“Could it be a carcharodontosaurid?” another student asked.
Jia Ling said, “No, these arms are too long.”
The other student shot back defensively, “There isn't a fossil of carcharodontosauridae with arms, so how would you know?”
Jia Ling looked down, defeated, “Well, in the depictions I've seen I think it has shorter arms.”
Doctor Ming-Zhen contributed, “Actually, the holotype[2] of the most famous carcharodontosaurid, tyrannotitan, has a partial ulna and a scapulocoracoid
[3]. The depictions are based on that.”
Jia Ling asked, “What about an ornithomimosaur?” Ornithomimosaurs, known casually as “ostrich dino's” were small headed, frequently sporting beaks. They ate mostly vegetation or were omnivores, and were known for their long arms, though most of them were small.
