“Yes,” Tuna told his supervisors. “I cannot tell a lie. I was fondling fourteen-year-old girls in 1968. But there was nothing wrong with it because I was only fourteen years old myself. I was a student at Victoria middle school, not a teacher at Lawrence.”

The explanation drew laughter but no reprieve; for the next obvious question was, “What did you do to get someone so angry at you? Why is someone willing to go through all this trouble to dig out a police report on a man with the same name—”

“But that’s not even my name,” Tuna pointed out. “My name is Richard, not Rick—”

“Doesn’t matter. Someone was angry enough to find it, copy it, and mail it. What other Tuna slanders are waiting in the wings to threaten the reputations of us all?”

Then, in one of science’s most disgraceful episodes since the McCarthy era of the mid fifties, Wells, assisted by an opportunistic editor and Pacific Tech’s chancellor for legal affairs, assembled an ad-hoc tribunal to charge Tuna with misappropriation from none other than Leslie Wells. Barred from submitting any words in his own defense, the verdict became crushingly predictable. Richard Tuna earned the curious distinction of being the only author known to have been punished for being plagiarized; for it was a sad fact of life in the 1990s that rumor and accusation added up to widespread perception, and that in the real world perception was the only truth that counted.

Drummed forever out of paleontological research and branded as a rogue by publisher’s row, Tuna was forced to watch from the sidelines as Wells picked up a MacArthur Fellowship and research grants that might otherwise have been his. But he had simply dusted himself off, remarked to those few true friends who stood by him that “the best defense against having one of your ideas stolen is having eight other ideas,” and spent the next decade of his life founding the Valkyrie Rocket and Verne Launcher programs with Jim Powell. As it turned out, it was the Verne Launcher, a system of Florida-based cannons, that finally made the orbiting of space hardware “dirt cheap,” and made the Valkyries feasible.

Meanwhile, Arthur C. Clarke, who had known Tuna when he first published the Jurassic Park saurian-cloning recipe, and who could see beyond accusation and rumor, found it necessary to add a fourth step to his often quoted three stages that any new and revolutionary idea must pass: One— you’re crazy. Two—you may be right, but so what. Three—I said it was a good idea all along. Four—I thought of it first! For a time Tima could enjoy the protection of men like Clarke and Powell; and as long as he remained in the field of rocketry and under their wings, Wells could harm him no further. But slowly and surely she drew her plans against him, awaiting the day when Clarke and Powell would be gone, when even the field of rocketry would not be far enough away for Tuna to hide. He would have been as helpless as Nikola Tesla against Thomas Edison—and sooner or later he should have been, if not for Wells’s insatiable appetite for headlines and glory.