“You like it?”

“It doesn’t matter whether I like it. What is this approval you keep looking for?” I was sounding harsh, but I didn’t care. She wouldn’t have believed me if I hadn’t been harsh. “I want you to send this out right away. Don’t ask me where. Talk to Flint. It’s his area. Has he seen this?”

“No.”

“Show this to him. Please, show it to him.” I dropped the folder on her desk with a loud plop. “I’ll go have a word with the chair.” I walked out, muttering. I thought the muttering was a nice touch.

Bg5 Bb4

Odd for a paleontologist, my having to deal necessarily with not only the past but the distant, fossilized past. My philosophical method in most situations was to proceed without any consideration of the past, to forget the history of the problem, to forget all that came before, and to operate solely by investigating what facts were present at the time. I didn’t care that Hilary Gill might have been seen as pissing away her six years of tenure clock. I didn’t care that she, for whatever reasons, had sabotaged herself. I cared only that a scientist down the hall from me was making good work. Fuck clocks.

I went directly to Mitch Rosenthal’s office. “I understand that you’re the chair of this carnival.”

“For a while, anyway.” Mitch was a petroleum geologist, more suited for Exxon than academe. Though he was decent enough, he was no overachiever, though he could be a stickler.

“I just looked at Hilary Gill’s research.”

“It’s sort of a done deal, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think,” I said. “She’s made some good work. It’s not just the raw data she advertises. She’s going to take it to Flint. He’ll know what to do for her.”

“She’s done nothing in the past six years.”

“Apparently, that’s not true. The work didn’t come out of thin air. I don’t know why she kept it to herself. Maybe dudes like us scare the hell out of her or some shit. I really don’t care. You need to go to bat for her.”

Rosenthal twisted his fat ass in his fatass chair and embarrassed himself with a fatass sound. “I don’t know.”

I was getting angry. Of course, I had come into his office fully prepared to be angry. “If you won’t go to the dean, then I will. Flint will go with me.”

“You’ve talked to him?”

“No, but I know him. He’s got these things that hang down between his legs. I think they’re called balls.”

“I’ll talk to the dean.”

“She needs a little more time,” I said.

“Okay, I’ll talk to her.”