He was going to be disciplined for this, he knew. Possibly he’d lose his job, get kicked out of the Service; probably he’d lose his current position. If he got Alison back it would be worth it.

Illegal parking was the least of his problems, when he reached the museum. That done, he faced the great edifice of the building, louring over the floodlit gardens, the butterfly tent, all quiet as they awaited the next day’s tourists and schoolchildren. If memory served, from when he’d brought John here two years before, the main hall was through those heavy front doors. Which simultaneously made it the most obvious and therefore risky entrance. He cursed indecisively.

Then the high windows over the paired entrance doors flashed with an unreal light, a radiance that put him in mind of sunlight through ice or deep water, of dead things phosphorescing as they decayed. Whatever it was, it was happening.

He remembered the side entrance—he’d gone in with John that way, to dodge the queue at the main doors, and so they’d missed the proper grand vista you were supposed to get when you visited. Well, this time whoever was keeping watch from that vista would miss him.

Sprinting round the corner up Exhibition Road, he also missed the pair who arrived ten seconds later at the main doors.

Interlude: The Aeronauts

Excerpt from Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence by Professor Ruth Emerson of the University of California

This branch deviates from the trunk of time in a barren world, ripe for the taking. A reptile world, where a dozen lineages of scaly beasts bellow and trumpet and roar. Crocodiles, lizards, even gracile runners whose lineages will explode into the great dinosaur dynasties.

But the terrible lizards will only ever be livestock in this world. Sentience will arise without them.

There is still a great deal of desert, as this Earth claws its way out of the Permian. While the coasts lengthen as the continents peel apart, much of the global real estate is barren. There is an archipelago of life scattered across a sea of dust: oases, rivers, the wind-shadows of mountains where meagre rain falls all at once and in one season. Nothing can grow too large or too numerous lest it starve or parch. Communities spring up where the resources pool, wither away when they are spent. Lives like tumbleweeds, constantly drifting. Slim pickings for an emergent civilization, surely. And yet…

This is truly the age of reptiles. They take to the seas, and test the land’s limits on speed, size and savagery. And the air, which represents a bounty of protein if you can only get to it. Insects remain plentiful, and a nimble airborne predator can eat its fill with a little aerobatics.