I snapped off rolls of still pictures — I’d left our electronic camera back at the Sternberger — but I knew nonetheless that I’d have a hard time convincing Klicks of what I’d seen.

Triceratops fossils represented three-quarters of all di-nosaurian finds from Alberta and Wyoming during the last million years of the Cretaceous. I tried to imagine what kind of destruction a herd — an assault force — of these great beasts could inflict. That rasping voice of the Martian Het, spoken around bloody spit through the troodon’s mouth, came back to me. "We, too, came to this place because of the life here."

I’ll say.

I sat alone in the TRIUMF staff cafeteria for a while, nibbling at one of my stale vending-machine donuts, trying to understand why Dr. Huang had run off. It didn’t make any sense.

I threw out the second donut and made my way out of the room. I had a whole day to kill waiting for Ching-Mei to finish reading the diary, so I decided to take a tour of the research facility. I identified myself to the old man at the front desk as a curator from the Royal Ontario Museum and suddenly found the red carpet being rolled out for "a distinguished visiting scientist." That was great because it meant that I got to see areas normally closed to the public.

My guide, an enthusiastic young Native Canadian named Dan Pitawanakwat, wanted to be sure I understood everything I saw, but most of it still went over my head. He showed me giant 30,000-kilogram magnets that looked like yellow Pac-Man characters, a room full of bright blue consoles with models of famous movie starships, including the Enterprise-F, Starplex, and the Millennium Falcon hanging by fishing line from the ceiling, and a Positron Emission Tomography scanner, used to take pictures of the insides of people’s brains. But the most interesting thing to me was the Batho Biomedical Facility, where cancer patients received concentrated beams of pions. According to Dan, this method caused less general damage than conventional radiation therapy. I watched, riveted, as a man lay under the pion beam for treatment of a brain tumor. His face was held steady by a transparent mask. The plastic obscured his features and my mind kept superimposing my father’s own craggy visage onto the head. It brought back the suffering and the torture and the loss of human dignity that Dad was going through. When they finally did remove the mask, I saw that the hairless head beneath belonged to a boy perhaps sixteen years old. I had to look away from the effusive Dan to wipe my eyes.

Later on, I said, "Dan, do they do any studies here about the nature of time?"

"Well, the thrust these days is always toward practical applications," he said. "That’s the only way we can get the grant money to keep coming in." But then he nodded. "However, we’ve typically got four hundred researchers here at once, so some of them are bound to be doing work in that area. But it was really Ching-Mei’s — Dr. Huang’s — forte. She even wrote a book on it with Dr. Mackenzie."

"Time Constraints: The Tau of Physics." I nodded knowingly and was pleased to see that the young man was impressed. "But that was ten years ago. What’s happened since?"

"Well, when I came here in 2005, everybody thought Ching-Mei was going to make some kind of breakthrough. I mean, there was talk of a trip to Stockholm, if you catch my drift." He winked.

"You mean her work was important enough to win her a Nobel Prize?"

"That’s what some people were saying. ‘Course, she probably would have shared it with Almi at the Weizmann Institute in Israel — he was doing similar work. But he was killed in that freak earthquake, and nobody there was able to pick up where he left off."

"That’s a shame."

"It’s a friggin’ crime is what it is. Almi was the new Einstein, as far as a lot of us were concerned. We may never recover what he knew."

"And what happened here? Why did Ching-Mei give up her research? Wasn’t it going anywhere?"

"Oh, it was going places, all right. There was a rumor that she was close to demonstrating a stopped-time condition. But, well, then she…"

"She what?"

"You’re a good friend of hers, aren’t you, sir?"

"I came all the way from Toronto just to see her."

"So you know about her troubles."

"Troubles?"

Dan looked uncomfortable, as if he’d put his foot in something distasteful. I held him in my gaze.

"Well," he said at last, "don’t tell anybody, because I’ll get into a lot of trouble if you do, but, well, something bad happened to Ching-Mei about five years ago." Dan looked over his shoulder to see if anybody was listening. "I mean, she never talked about it to me, but the gossip got around." He shook his head. "She was attacked, Dr. Thackeray. Raped. Absolutely brutalized. She was in the hospital for a week afterward, and away on — you know what they call it — on ‘rest leave’ for the better part of a year. They say he attacked her for three hours solid and, well, he used a knife. She was all torn up, you know, down there. She’s lucky to be alive." He paused for a long moment. "Except, she doesn’t really seem to think that."

I winced. "Where did it happen?"

"In her house." Dan sounded sad. "She’s never been the same since. Frankly, she doesn’t do much of anything anymore. Her job is mostly scheduling other people’s access to the cyclotron, instead of doing any original work of her own. They keep her on here, hoping that one day the old Ching-Mei will come back, but it’s been five years now." He shook his head again. "It’s tragic. Who knows what she would have come up with if that hadn’t happened?"

I shook my head, too, trying to clear the mental picture of that defenseless woman being violated. "Who knows, indeed?" I said at last.

I went to TRIUMF again first thing the next morning. This time, strangely, Dr. Huang did invite me into her little office. There were awards and diplomas on the walls, but none with recent dates. Books and papers were piled everywhere. As soon as I’d entered, we realized there was a problem: the office only had one chair in it.

"I’m sorry, Dr. Thackeray. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a visitor here." She disappeared out the door and returned a few minutes later wheeling a stenographer’s chair in front of her. "I hope this will do."

I sat down and looked at her expectantly.

"I’m sorry about you and your wife," she said abruptly.

"We’re still together."

"Oh. I’m glad. You obviously love her immensely."

"That I do." There was silence for a time. "You’ve read the entire diary?"

"I have," she said. "Twice."

"And?"

"And," she said slowly, "based on dozens of little details that you couldn’t have possibly known, I believe it is genuine. I believe it really does describe what my studies would have made possible."

I sat up straight. "Then you could go back to your research! You could make stasis and then time travel possible. Hell, Ching-Mei, you could win your Nobel Prize!"

"No." Her face had lost all color. "That’s over. Dead."

I looked at her, still not comprehending. She seemed so delicate, so fragile. Finally, softly, I said, "Why?"

She looked away and I could see that she was rallying some inner strength. I waited as patiently as I could and, after

a minute, she went on. "Physicists and paleontologists," she said. "In a way, we’re both time travelers. We both hunt backward for the very beginnings."

I nodded.

"As a physicist, I try to understand how the universe came into being. As a paleontologist, you’re interested in how life began." She spread her arms. "But the fact is, both fields of endeavor come up short when you go right back. The origin of matter has never been satisfactorily explained. Oh, we talk vaguely about random quantum-mechanical fluctuations in a vacuum somehow spontaneously having given rise to the first matter, but we really don’t know."