Omoro was a hunter who, upon penetrating deep into the brush one afternoon, found himself being called by an old human skull. They talked late into the night, Omoro and the skull. And finally Omoro asked, “What brought you here?”

“Talking brought me here,” said the skull.

When Omoro returned to the village, he told his family and his friends and anyone else who would listen to him about the miracle of the talking skull. And the word went forth from village to village, and finally there came to Omoro a summons from the king.

“I hear that you have made a great discovery,” said the king.

“Yes,” replied the hunter. “I found a dry human skull in the bush. It asks you how its father and mother are.”

Ignoring the cryptic question, the king said, “Never since my mother bore me have I heard that a dead skull can speak.”

He then summoned the Alkadir, the Saba, and the Degi and asked them if they had ever heard the like. None of the wise men had heard the like, and they decided to send a detachment of the king’s guards along with the hunter to find the skull, learn if the story was true and, if so, to learn the reason for it. The guards accompanied Omoro into the bush with orders to flay his head to the bare bone and leave him to rot if it turned out that he had lied.

Omoro led them to the skull, demanded that it speak, and was greeted with utter silence.

He asked as before: “What brought you here?” The skull did not answer.

The whole day he begged and pleaded for the skull to speak, and when night came with not a whisper of a reply, the guards flayed his head bare with oyster shells.

After they had gone the skull opened its jaws and asked the dying hunter, “What brought you here?”

Omoro replied, “Talking brought me here!”

Richard Tuna, toward the end of his life, might have sympathized with Omoro. In 1977 he and paleontologist Gerard Case had made a remarkable discovery in a New Jersey clay pit; and had Tuna never talked about it, others might never have laid the foundations for the appalling conditions that did much to explain why only two billion human beings were living on the day the relativistic bombs came.

From New Jersey’s amber beds, Tuna had plucked a flesh-feeding fly whose every eye facet and hair, even the soft tissue of its mouth, had been preserved for ninety-five million years; and the find started a train of thought. By 1982, this strange paleontologist who occasionally designed rockets was speculating loudly to anyone who would listen about flesh-feeding flies of the Mesozoic era drawing skin and blood from dinosaurs and then, minutes later, becoming trapped in sun-warmed, tissue-penetrating pools of tree sap. “Is it possible,” he asked, “that saurian genetic codes might still exist in amber and that we might one day be able to read them and resurrect them?”