By the spring of 1995 it was becoming clear that if Wells were going to keep the funding rolling in, she had to produce a newsworthy result suggesting that extinct species would not remain so forever. The age of People magazine and “A Current Affair” science was rolling over her—which meant she had to make a sensational announcement, and sooner rather than later. Spielberg’s film was already two years old, the public was beginning to forget, and she could already feel symptoms of the dreaded Morton Downey, Jr. fade. Yes, she had to produce results soon; but Tuna’s projected timetable for success, about thirty years from 1982, was beginning to look real to her—too real. The best computers and scanners in the world were not fast enough to piece together the genetic code of a fly, much less a whole dinosaur. Even a bacterium was beyond Leslie Wells’s means.

But she had to prove that something from the past could be brought back. Had to. Even if this meant shooting at a smaller target.

“We’re beginning to look at different kinds of viruses in saurian blood,” she announced. “The smallest ones can be made to replicate quite easily, simply by inserting the naked DNA into a host cell, which then produces complete viral particles.”

These were the words that brought Tuna storming out of seclusion and into the halls of Pacific Tech.

“Madness!” he said, confronting Wells in her office, where she had retreated and unsuccessfully barred her door. “Can’t clone a saurian? Why not try saurian chicken pox? Just what the world needs!”

“Don’t go alarmist on me!” Wells retorted. “What’s a little chicken pox?”

“Ask the Aztecs and the Sioux. That little herpes virus was just a minor annoyance in Europe; but over here, where no human had been exposed to it for thousands of years, it proved far more deadly than European cannons. This isn’t a harmless endeavor, like cloning dinosaurs. There will never be cause to worry about Tyrannosaurus rex getting out and terrifying people. If the saurians hadn’t become extinct by the time we evolved, they’d now be in as much trouble as the whales and the wolves and the mountain gorillas. But there’s just no predicting what an undead germ may do when you disturb its sleep. What was a minor case of chicken pox to the dinosaurs might be lethal today.”

“Tuna, you’re either a liar or a fool. My labs are designed to contain pathogens, and it’s a fact of nature that most viruses are totally harmless. The odds of a Mesozoic virus being dangerous and breaking out of my lab are as small as your odds of walking into a Las Vegas casino, pulling the lever on a slot machine, and hitting the progressive jackpot on the first try.”

“People do that all the time,” said Tuna, and by then a couple of security guards had arrived to usher him forcefully out of Leslie Wells’s office. No one took him seriously, especially at Pacific Tech. They dismissed his concerns as “jealousy and sour grapes,” and in the autumn of 1995, as uncountable birds migrated south through California, Leslie Wells hit the jackpot.