The Dinosaur Feather(34)

Whenever Clive opened Scientific Today looking for his contributions, his joy at seeing them was diminished. Clive appreciated the expensive layout, the graphs, and the illustrations, but he felt no real pleasure. Jack and Clive had met in their passion for nature. Now he was alone.

Clive thought about the situation for a week, then he called Jack and invited him and Molly over for dinner. He practically pleaded with Jack to come.

“Jack,” he said. “Let’s put the past behind us. Let’s do the right thing, let’s not mix science and friendship.” Jack replied with silence.

“I can’t stand not seeing you,” Clive suddenly burst out, and held his breath.

Finally Jack said: “All right, we’ll be there.”

Kay was delighted that the famous Jack Jarvis and his wife were coming to dinner.

“What an illustrious guest,” she said, thrilled. “What will we serve them?”

Clive took the cookbook from his wife’s hand and led her into the living room where he told her the whole story. Or, almost the whole story. Kay was fascinated.

“He must have been like a son to you. Why didn’t you ever tell me? Fancy them moving away like that,” she added. “That poor boy must have felt like he was losing his father all over again.”

Clive nodded.


That Saturday Jack and Molly arrived right on time. Molly was radiant and very beautiful. She shook Clive’s hand energetically and said what a pleasure it was to meet such a legendary scientist. Her husband had talked so much about him over the years, she said, but she had no idea that they had known each other since childhood.

“I was sorry to hear about the recent trouble,” she carried on, cheerfully, “but Jack says that’s how it is with natural science. All storms blow themselves out eventually.”

Clive smiled and took their coats. What a chatterbox she was. He wasn’t entirely sure what he had imagined but definitely not this.

“Odd,” Kay said when the evening was over and Molly and Jack had left. “Molly is as outgoing and sparkling as Jack is closed.”

Clive nodded. Jack had seemed a little sullen, but then again with the women chirping away, it had been hard to get a word in.


At the start of July 2007, Clive developed an earache and decided to leave work early. He had been troubled by a cold since Kay and he had spent two weeks in their vacation home, and it was getting worse, not better.

The study of cartilage formation in embryonic chickens was looking very promising. Clive didn’t want to get his hopes up, but he had butterflies in his stomach as he followed its progress. He thought about Tybjerg and Helland. Helland still published, but it was nothing compared to Tybjerg, who was rapidly firing off papers. Even now, while Clive was awaiting the outcome of the condensation experiment and thus not publishing much himself, Tybjerg wrote one article after another, and in every single one of them he distanced himself from Clive’s views.

Neither Tybjerg nor Helland had commented on the incident in Toronto. Clive was amazed that Helland had managed to restrain himself. Helland still e-mailed Clive every now and then with references to papers he thought Clive ought to read, or attaching silly natural history cartoons. But he never once mentioned Tybjerg. The outcome of the cartilage condensation experiment filled Clive with rapture. Neither Helland nor Tybjerg had any idea of what was about to hit them.

By now he had cycled through the forest. He looked forward to reading the latest issues of Science, Nature, and Scientific Today in his bag. When he got home, he made himself comfortable on the sofa and started with Nature.

And there it was. “Helland, et al.” jumped out at him as early as page five, a lengthy and infinitely trivial description of the discovery of a dinosaur tooth on the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea. Obviously, his esteemed colleagues couldn’t help but remark how this find yet again proved the direct ancestry of modern birds to dinosaurs. Clive let the journal fall from the sofa.

Then he opened up Science. He had to flip as far as page seventeen before “Helland, et al.” leapt from the page. What the hell? Again, the article’s point of departure was some—in Clive’s opinion—utterly insignificant excavations on Bornholm, and the article was riddled with guesswork and conjectures, bordering on fluff. Clive scanned a few more pages before letting the journal slide to the floor.

Finally, he started on Scientific Today.

Jack’s beaming face greeted him from the editorial on page three, and Clive smiled back at him. They had seen each other only last Saturday, and the vibe between them had been really good, as it had been over the last six months. Kay and Molly had become fast friends, and Jack had been less defensive and recalled many of the things they had done together when Jack was a boy. Last Saturday he had mentioned the tree house. It must have been a big job to build, he remarked, and both women had turned to look at Clive. Clive’s heart started pounding, but Jack was relaxed and smiling and seemed to have no hidden agenda. Yes, Clive had replied, it had taken some time. How annoying that we had to move so soon afterward, Jack continued. They were having dinner in Clive and Kay’s freshly painted dining room when, out of the blue, Jack mentioned that his older brother had just been released from prison. “Is that right?” Clive said, relieved to let the tree house slip back into the past where it belonged.