Suddenly, the forest erupted in frightening animal roars all around him. He glimpsed a large animal charging him. Richard Levine turned and fled, feeling the adrenaline surge of pure panic, not knowing where to go, knowing only that it was hopeless. He felt a heavy weight suddenly tear at his backpack, forcing him to his knees in the mud, and he realized in that moment that despite all his planning, despite all his clever deductions, things had gone terribly wrong, and he was about to die.
School
“When we consider mass extinction from a meteor impact,” Richard Levine said, “we must ask several questions. First, are there any impact craters on our planet larger than nineteen miles in diameter—which is the smallest size necessary to cause a worldwide extinction event? And second, do any craters match in time a known extinction? It turns out there are a dozen craters this large around the world, of which five coincide with known extinctions. . . .”
Kelly Curtis yawned in the darkness of her seventh-grade classroom. Sitting at her desk, she propped her chin on her elbows, and tried to stay awake. She already knew this stuff. The TV set in front of the class showed a vast cornfield, seen in an aerial view, the curving outlines faintly visible. She recognized it as the crater in Manson. In the darkness, Dr. Levine’s recorded voice said, “This is the crater in Manson, Iowa, dating from sixty-five million years ago, just when dinosaurs became extinct. But was this the meteor that killed the dinosaurs?”
No, Kelly thought, yawning. Probably the Yucatán peninsula. Manson was too small.
“We now think this crater is too small,” Dr. Levine said aloud. “We believe it was too small by an order of magnitude, and the current candidate is the crater near Mérida, in the Yucatán. It seems difficult to imagine, but the impact emptied the entire Gulf of Mexico, causing two-thousand-foot-high tidal waves to wash over the land. It must have been incredible. But there are disputes about this crater, too, particularly concerning the meaning of the cenote ring structure, and the differential death rates of phytoplankton in ocean deposits. That may sound complicated, but don’t worry about it for now. We’ll go into it in more detail next time. So, that’s it for today.”
The lights came up. Their teacher, Mrs. Menzies, stepped to the front of the class and turned off the computer which had been running the display, and the lecture.
“Well,” she said, “I’m glad Dr. Levine gave us this recording. He told me he might not be back in time for today’s lecture, but he’ll be with us again for sure when we return from spring break next week. Kelly, you and Arby are working for Dr. Levine, is that what he told you?”
Kelly glanced over at Arby, who was slouched low in his seat, frowning.
“Yes, Mrs. Menzies,” Kelly said.
“Good. All right, everyone, the assignment for the holidays is all of chapter seven”—there were groans from the class—“including all of the exercises at the end of part one, as well as part two. Be sure to bring that with you, completed, when we return. Have a good spring break. We’ll see you back here in a week.”
The bell rang; the class got up, chairs scraping, the room suddenly noisy. Arby drifted over to Kelly. He looked up at her mournfully. Arby was a head shorter than Kelly; he was the shortest person in the class. He was also the youngest. Kelly was thirteen, like the other seventh-graders, but Arby was only eleven. He had already been skipped two grades, because he was so smart. And there were rumors he would be skipped again. Arby was a genius, particularly with computers.
Arby put his pen in the pocket of his white button-down shirt, and pushed his horn-rim glasses up on his nose. R. B. Benton was black; both his parents were doctors in San Jose, and they always made sure he was dressed very neatly, like a college kid or something. Which, Kelly reflected, he would probably be in a couple of years, the way he was going.
Standing next to Arby, Kelly always felt awkward and gawky. Kelly had to wear her sister’s old clothes, which her mother had bought from Kmart about a million years ago. She even had to wear Emily’s old Reeboks, which were so scuffed and dirty that they never came clean, even after Kelly ran them through the washing machine. Kelly washed and ironed all her own clothes; her mother never had time. Her mother was never even home, most of the time. Kelly looked enviously at Arby’s neatly pressed khakis, his polished penny loafers, and sighed.
Still, even though she was jealous, Arby was her only real friend—the only person who thought it was okay that she was smart. Kelly worried that he’d be skipped to ninth grade, and she wouldn’t see him any more.
Beside her, Arby still frowned. He looked up at her and said, “Why isn’t Dr. Levine here?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe something happened.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something.”
“But he promised he would be here,” Arby said. “To take us on the field trip. It was all arranged. We got permission and everything.”
“So? We can still go.”
“But he should be here,” Arby insisted stubbornly. Kelly had seen this behavior before. Arby was accustomed to adults being reliable. His parents were both very reliable. Kelly wasn’t troubled by such ideas.
“Never mind, Arb,” she said. “Let’s just go see Dr. Thorne ourselves.”
“You think so?”
“Sure. Why not?”
Arby hesitated. “Maybe I should call my mom first.”
“Why?” Kelly said. “You know she’ll tell you that you have to go home. Come on, Arb. Let’s just go.”
He hesitated, still troubled. Arby might be smart, but any change in plan always bothered him. Kelly knew from experience he would grumble and argue if she pushed for them to go alone. She had to wait, while he made up his own mind.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s go see Thorne.”
Kelly grinned. “Meet you in front,” she said, “in five minutes.”
As she went down the stairs from the second floor, the singsong chant began again. “Kelly is a brainer, Kelly is a brainer. . . .”
She held her head high. It was that stupid Allison Stone and her stupid friends. Standing at the bottom of the stairs, taunting her.
“Kelly is a brainer. . . .”
She swept past the girls, ignoring them. Nearby, she saw Miss Enders, the hall monitor, paying no attention as usual. Even though Mr. Canosa, the assistant principal, had recently made a special homeroom announcement about teasing kids.
Behind her, the girls called: “Kelly is a brainer. . . . She’s the queen . . . of the screen . . . and it’s gonna turn her green. . . .” They collapsed in laughter.
Up ahead, she saw Arby waiting by the door, a bundle of gray cables in his hand. She hurried forward.
When she got to him, he said, “Forget it.”
“They’re stupid jerkoffs.”
“Right.”
“I don’t care, anyway.”
“I know. Just forget it.”
Behind them, the girls were giggling. “Kelly and Arby . . . going to a party . . . take a bath, in their math. . . .”
They went outside into the sunlight, the sounds of the girls thankfully drowned in the noise of everyone going home. Yellow school buses were in the parking lot. Kids were streaming down the steps to their parents’ cars, which were lined up all around the block. There was a lot of activity.
Arby ducked a Frisbee that whooshed over his head, and glanced toward the street. “There he is again.”
“Well, don’t look at him,” Kelly said.
“I’m not, I’m not.”
“Remember what Dr. Levine said.”
“Jeez, Kel. I remember, okay?”
Across the street was parked the plain gray Taurus sedan that they had seen, off and on, for the past two months. Behind the wheel, pretending to read a newspaper, was that same man with the scraggly growth of beard. This bearded man had been following Dr. Levine ever since he started to teach the class at Woodside. Kelly believed that man was the reason why Dr. Levine aske
d her and Arby to be his assistants in the first place.
Levine had told them their job would be to help him by carrying equipment, Xeroxing class assignments, collecting homework, and routine things like that. They thought it would be a big honor to work for Dr. Levine—or anyway, interesting to work for an actual professional scientist—so they had agreed to do it.
But it turned out there never was anything to be done for the class; Dr. Levine did all that himself. Instead, he sent them on lots of little errands. And he had told them to be careful to avoid this bearded man in the car. That wasn’t hard; the man never paid any attention to them, because they were kids.
Dr. Levine had explained the bearded man was following him because of something to do with his arrest, but Kelly didn’t believe that. Her own mother had been arrested twice for drunk driving, and there was never anybody following her. So Kelly didn’t know why this man was following Levine, but clearly Levine was doing some secret research and he didn’t want anybody to find out about it. She knew one thing—Dr. Levine didn’t care much about this class he was teaching. He usually gave the lecture off the top of his head. Other times he would walk in the front door of the school, hand them a taped lecture, and walk out the back. They never knew where he went, on those days.