Dead as a Dinosaur (12 page)

“Oh,” Pam North said. “Did you know Dr. Preson thought he was being—well, persecuted?”

“Preson?” Dr. Steck rumbled. “Nonsense.” He looked with scrutiny at Pamela North, then at Jerry North. “Then he was being,” Dr. Steck said. “He didn't imagine it. Does somebody think he had delusions?”

They told him enough to explain what had happened.

“He didn't imagine it,” Dr. Steck told them.

That was obvious. What else was obvious, they also explained. “Doing it all himself?” Dr. Steck said. “I don't believe it. Why should he?”

“I'm afraid,” Pam North said, “because he wasn't as sane as you think he was. You see, he did, in the end, take the sleeping medicine. The police are sure of that. So there isn't much choice about what to believe, is there? Whether he meant actually to kill himself or not, he fixed the milk and drank it and put stickers on those bones—” She broke off. “What happened to the bones?” she asked.

“They're here,” Dr. Steck told her. He waved toward the long table under the window. He shook his head. “It's all to be done again, incidentally,” he said. “The labeling, I mean. Almost all the labels came off.” He paused, obviously in thought. “I guess you're right,” he said, after a moment. “He wasn't himself. He never did anything halfway. Not even sticking a label on. It's still hard to believe.” He shook his head again.

“About the book,” Jerry said. “I'd like you to think it over, Dr. Steck. I'll have a look at it, get a general idea what we need, and then perhaps—”

“No,” Steck said. “I'm afraid not. For one thing, as it looks now I probably won't be around for—oh, quite a few months, probably. This expedition I spoke about. It's not certain, but probably I'll head it up, now that Preson's—” A shrug of very broad, very heavy shoulders, finished the sentence. “The money he's left us will make the thing possible and—well, his death changes other things. He was anxious to have a young chap—good man, named Auerbrecht—in charge. Agee wasn't too enthusiastic. Felt that Auerbrecht ought to go as second, not first. I don't deny I think Agee's right. Auerbrecht's very young. So—”

“You'll take over,” Jerry said.

Steck thought so; was pretty sure of it. There would first be the business of taking over as curator, getting the department running under his direction. Then the preparations for the expedition; then the expedition itself. Even if he felt himself qualified, as he did not, to finish the Preson book, where was the time to come from? He assumed that they didn't want to wait indefinitely for the book.

Jerry agreed to that, supposed he would have to seek further. Perhaps Dr. Steck had suggestions?

He had suggestions; he had several suggestions. As he made them, Pam North left her chair and walked around the room, looking at the books on the shelves, as she always looked at books on shelves. Few of these offered light, or even comprehensible, reading. She wandered to the end of the room—passing a door set into the book shelves of the right wall—and looked at the bones on the table. They seemed to be roughly grouped. The labels had, certainly, come off most of them. Either Dr. Preson, in his last few hours, had grown very careless or he had used very poor labels. He should have used Dennison's. Like those in the box on the table that Dr. Steck obviously had handy for a second relabeling. I must have Martha put on new shelf paper, Pamela North thought, and worked her way up the other side of the room, passing more books, another door. Obviously, a paleozoologist needed to do a great deal of reading. When she was back at the desk again, Jerry was standing up, thanking Dr. Steck. Pam smiled at the large mammalogist and made appropriate sounds. She and Jerry went back up the corridor, past Dr. Agee's office, and down by elevator to the Great Hall and Tyrannosaurus.

It was after noon, by then, and time to think of lunch. Before that, Jerry thought, he ought to stop by his office, or, at the least, call his secretary. He was told to call, and went in search of a telephone booth. Pamela, meanwhile, viewed the distant past, as re-created in the Great Hall of the Broadly Institute.

It was re-created in glass-fronted alcoves, so that antiquity lived, in effect, in show windows. Strange creatures posed in most of them, artfully reconstructed. There was something which looked like a rhinoceros, and probably had thought itself one; there were camels with necks like giraffes; there were animals with three horns, and one with a long horn on his nose and another who wore his third horn in the back of his head; there was an animal as much like an elephant as like anything living, but with tusks merged into a shovel at his lower lip. There were also very small horses, some of them with toes. All these creatures, the explanatory placard told Pamela North—who was suitably astonished—were native Nebraskans some seven or eight million years gone by.

Carnivores lived in another show window, with a background of prehistoric vegetation. There was a creature called—the placard insisted—“Hemicyon” which was as large as a black bear, and was indeed a little like a bear, but which was also a good deal like a dog. There were several cats, all with improbable names, and one of them was a saber-tooth. And in another alcove, a giant sloth went ugly on hooklike claws. He had lived in Florida when ice pushed life to the south. Pam gazed at him, shaking her head. Nature had, from time to time, made itself ridiculous. She moved on and found apes behind glass and, beyond them, a creature which was trying to be man and making what appeared to be minimal progress. He, with his mate, were at the entrance of a simulated cave. Something like a dog was with them, and a cat looked down, skeptically, from a tree. The cat, it was clear, had already made great progress in felinity when man began a—why, not more than a million years ago! A johnny-come-lately to the giant sloth; a freshman to the already feline cat. Pamela passed along, and found Jerry looking for her. She regarded Jerry.

“My, but you've improved,” she told him. “You used to be shaggy.”

“Got a haircut yester—” Jerry began and then, looking beyond Pam and getting a glimpse of early humanity, said, “Oh.” He walked back a few steps. “Improved yourself,” he told Pam. He rejoined her.

“It will have to be a fairly quick lunch,” he told her, leading her toward the exit. “I've got an appointment at two.” They went down the stairs and found the rain had stopped. “An appointment with one of the Presons,” Jerry told Pam, when they were in the car. “With the nephew—what's his name? Wayne. Wayne Preson. He says he thinks there is something I ought to know about.”

There was, they both agreed, no use in speculating as to Wayne Preson's message, since they would hear it shortly. So they speculated on it only so far as the Algonquin and, once at a table in the Oak Room, reconsidered the Broadly Institute and its occupants, antique and recent. Pam supposed, doubtfully, that it was useful to know that Tyrannosaurus had once lived, and what he had looked like. It made one, at any rate, glad that he was not alive today. The prehistoric man indicated, she presumed, progress, at least toward diminished shagginess.

“On the other hand,” Pam pointed out, “he only had a club, didn't he? Like the one he was leaning on in the showcase. And now look at him.” They drank, perhaps to antiquity and simpler weapons.

“I suppose,” Pam said then, “that they like to go on expeditions.”

“They?” Jerry said. “Oh—paleontologists. Why yes, I suppose so. Be inconvenient if they didn't.”

“And being curators,” Pam added. “So it isn't quite true that everybody lost, is it? Dr. Steck didn't.”

“Listen, Pam,” Jerry said, slowly and carefully, “Dr. Preson died of a self-administered overdose of phenobarbital, presumably while of unsound mind. Why not admit it?”

She did, Pam said. Of course she did. She would have eggs benedict.

“I know there isn't any way around it,” Pam said, then. “All I say is that, if there were, it would be interesting about Dr. Steck. Or about Mr. Landcraft. He's the one it ought to be, really. Since Dr. Preson did it himself, Mr. Landcraft is sort of wasted, isn't he? I mean, he would be so available.”

There wasn't, Jerry told her again, any vacancy. There was no value in suspects when there was no crime.

“The trouble with you,” he told her, “is that you've been spoiled. Another drink?”

Pam shook her head and then looked faintly surprised. She did, however, adhere to her decision. “After all,” she explained, “we've got Wayne Preson coming up.”

It occurred to Gerald North some time later that he might well have been surprised that Wayne Preson was a situation coming up not, simply, for Gerald North, as a publisher, but for the Norths as—well, as a unit. That he had not been surprised indicated (he realized, walking from the Algonquin toward his office, with Pam beside him) that he had, himself, some residual uncertainty about the whole matter. There was, he told himself resolutely, no reason why he should have, or why anyone should have. Wayne Preson had, or thought he had, some point to discuss about his uncle's book. It would be a point of seeming importance to him, of little to his uncle's publisher. It would be—

“Mr. Preson here?” Jerry asked his secretary, passing her desk.

He was; he had just arrived.

“There's a Miss Preson with him,” the secretary said.

They were to be asked in. They came in. They were strikingly alike in appearance—both dark, neither tall, both slender. At a guess, they were both in their middle twenties. If he had first seen them out of context they would, Jerry realized, still have looked like people he had seen before. In context, it was simple—both of them resembled the late Dr. Orpheus Preson. About the girl, particularly, there was, in addition to a familiarity of feature, of bodily structure, an intensity of approach which was very like that of her uncle. She regarded both the Norths with anxiety, as if she were, somehow, thinking of them as problems which must instantly be solved.

“I'm Wayne Preson,” the dark young man said. He spoke quickly, almost hurriedly, in a deep voice. “This is my sister, Emily. As my uncle's publisher, in view of the book, we—”

“We're going to contest the will,” Emily Preson said. She said this very rapidly, as if it could not, because it was so urgently of importance, be said soon enough. “He wasn't competent. He—he hadn't been for months. He wasn't
sane
.”

She stopped speaking, but it was as if she had not stopped. It was as if she were still, but not inaudibly, demanding of the Norths some response adequate to the urgency of her statement.
Don't just stand there
, she seemed to insist.
Don't you hear what I have just said? Don't you know that you must share this urgency with me?
She was screaming in silence.

“That's it,” Wayne Preson said. “Our lawyer will communicate with the Institute, of course. But we—”

“Sit down,” Jerry North said to both of them. “This is my wife. She knew your uncle.”

“Well—” Wayne Preson said, doubtfully. “Well—” But he motioned his sister to a chair. She looked at him, and again there was a kind of trembling in the air. But she did sit down. “We talked it over,” Wayne Preson said. “My father was opposed, at first. Aunt Laura said she didn't care one way or another. But Emily and I—”

“It isn't fair,” Emily Preson said. “Don't you see that? Don't you both see it? He didn't know what he was doing.”

I suppose, Pam thought, that decisions must be terribly important to her—the making of decisions, even about things not really vital in themselves. I suppose that is it. But at the same time Pam, unable to respond as Emily Preson demanded, was conscious of resenting the girl, resenting this unjustified demand on her and her own resultant sense of inadequacy—almost of dullness. Diminished in their own estimation are the dull of spirit, Pam thought. What does she want of us?

“Well,” Jerry said. “It's up to you, of course. That is, I suppose it is really up to your father and aunt, isn't it? Since they're the next of kin?” He paused. “Up to all of you,” he said. He was, he thought, saying nothing. What was he supposed to say?

“We realized you were concerned,” Wayne Preson said. “Because of the book.”

Jerry North considered. He shook his head slowly.

“Interested,” he said. “Naturally. But not actually concerned, Mr. Preson. If you mean involved, as I suppose you do. As far as the book goes, it doesn't make any difference. We'll merely pay the royalties to—well, to whomever the court finally directs. That's the legal situation.”

“Father said he would say that,” Emily said to her brother. She stood up quickly. “What are we doing here?”

“Wait a minute, Miss Preson,” Jerry said. “What is it, precisely, that you and your brother want?”

The girl looked at Wayne Preson and he, for a moment, seemed uncertain.

“Well,” he said, “we're going, of course, to claim that my uncle was mentally irresponsible. You know he was, don't you? Didn't everything show it?”

“A good many things showed it,” Jerry said. “I suppose—yes, a good many things recently. Did he make this will during that period? When these odd things were happening?”

“Yes,” the girl said. “Of course. But it started long before that. Tell them, Wayne!”

“She's right,” Wayne Preson said. “Doesn't this new book show it?” He looked at Gerald North, and now he was insistent, almost as his sister was.

“I haven't read it,” Jerry said. “I've dipped in here and there. It seems all right; seems very good, very clear. You're afraid that may upset your case?”

“I told you how it would be,” the girl said. She had gone to a window and was looking out over the city. “Doesn't anybody ever learn?” She seemed to demand an answer from all the buildings below the window, and all the people in them.