Within the big gray ship's boat bay, they had simply driven the truck down a ramp onto the barge. On its bow, the barge's civilian owners, Walton & Wicket, had emblazoned the name Karen in gilt-edged script. Now, as Navy men lowered the rest of the cargo, the mate, a big, blocky man who was in fact the subordinate half of Walton & Wicket, secured it. Throughout, another man, about forty years old, of average size and trim-looking in a tropical suit, took particular interest in the treatment accorded the truck and several crates stenciled with various caveats; he stood watching with his hands thrust into the pockets of his jacket and occasionally issued an instruction which the mate blithely ignored. The third man aboard Karen, Walton himself, middle-aged, very spare of frame, very sparse and white of hair, watched from the pilothouse.

The mate suddenly paused halfway through the motion of manhandling a crate into position; his expression of intense concentration did not change, but his gaze became fixed on a point beyond the pilothouse. Walton turned and saw a woman standing on the lowest rung of the access ladder. She called out to him, "Permission to come aboard?"

Without thinking, momentarily incapable of doing so, Walton nodded assent, and she stepped down lightly onto the deck. There she paused and posed for his inspection. She wore canvas shorts, a faded blue work shirt, and scuffed hiking boots. A seabag rested against her slim leg, a professional's battered camera case swung against her opposite hip. Beneath a broad-brimmed hat pulled down tight over close-cropped hair, she had a full, round face, almost high-school-girlish in its unfinished prettiness. Her dark hair and eyes contrasted nicely with her fair skin. She sounded all of nineteen years old when she asked, "Are you Mister Walton?"

"Yes," he said slowly and after a moment more, "I am."

"My name's Michelle Kelly." She offered her right hand, which he automatically shook, then her left to present an envelope with his name written upon it. "I have a letter of introduction. Kevin Barnet recommended you very highly."

Walton said, "Ah," and grimaced, "Kevo," and peered upward expecting to see the man himself grinning down at him from the catwalk. He saw only the Navy men who had been loading cargo onto Karen; now they regarded the young woman with obvious and approving interest. Walton snatched the envelope from her. He split it open with his thumb and frowned as he read:

Bud—
This is to introduce Michelle Kelly, another damn nature photographer, but she's bright, opinionated as only someone her age can be, and as you'll undoubtedly notice has a behind like a good fresh peach. She wants to have a look-see upriver, and you owe me a favor, so please take her away with you and return her in one piece.
Best, Kevo

Walton's frown etched itself deeper into his face. He sighed profoundly. "I'll just go have a word with Mister Barnet," he said.

"Oh, he's back at Stinktown."

Walton worked his frown into a full scowl. "Miz Kelly, as you can plainly see, this is not really an excursion boat. As for sightseeing, there's not much more to look at upriver than there is here. We are going into the despoblado. The unpeopled land. There're no electric lights, no showers, no mess tents, no amenities. And no handsome young Navy men."

Now she scowled. It should have made her look like a balked child but did not. Instead, hard angles revealed themselves within the creamy unblemished skin, and the lips, rather than distending into a pout, compressed into a firm straight line. "I'm not just sightseeing, I'm working. I'll pay for my passage, of course, and I've already signed a dozen waivers relieving everybody of responsibility for me." She nudged her seabag with the side of her foot. "I've got a gallon of sunscreen and my own food and everything else I'll need right here. I just want to hitch a ride. Sort of like Darwin."

"Darwin."

"On the Beagle."

"Darwin was invited to go along on that trip."

"Oh, let her come along, Walton." This was the man in the tropical suit, who stood leaning against one of his worrisome crates. He had sand-colored hair and a good profile, and he looked amused. He stepped forward and introduced himself as John Moen. He gave her a conspiratorial wink and said to Walton, "She doesn't look like she'll take up much space at all. Let her come."

Encouraged, she said, "I can even make myself useful if you need me to be. Swab the bo'sun, squeegee the fo'c'sle, whatever."

"A comedienne," Walton growled. "My insurance doesn't cover passengers who try to be helpful—or funny." He had no sooner spoken these words than he realized that he had ceased to scowl. He tried not to look abashed as he said, "But if you'll promise to behave yourself, come on, stow your gear below."

She stepped past him. Moen turned in place to watch as she went by, then gave Walton a look of astonished delight. Wicket looked at her and then turned quickly away as she passed.

"It'll be nice," Moen said to Walton, "to have someone to talk to on this beamy scow of yours." He inclined his head ever so slightly to indicate Wicket. "For a change."

"I should've asked her if she had a note from her mother."

"Oh, I dunno," Moen said easily, "that jilleroo is older than she looks."

The frown began to reassert itself on Walton's face. "If I were you," he snapped, "I'd make damn sure she's of legal age." He turned away from Moen and told Wicket to finish securing the cargo and called out for the lines to be cast off. Then he went to the wheel, and with a thrum of diesels the boat moved smoothly out of the bay and away from the ship.

Without, the view disappointed. The peneplained land appeared only as an off-white band separating the sea from the sky; the single emphatic note was provided by bright orange buoys marking a navigable channel among the delta's myriad braided courses. The Navy ship had stood well offshore to avoid the risk of running aground, for there was no abyssal ocean deep here, but inundated continental interior, with a gradient so slight that the land seemed simply to slip beneath the edge of the water like one sheet of paper under another.

Moen appeared beside her and held out a bottle of water beaded with condensation. She hesitated, then accepted it and thanked him. She rolled the cool plastic across her forehead before she drank. "I could've stayed in Stinktown and been this hot and sticky. May I ask how far upriver you're going, Mister Moen?"

"Please call me John. We'll reach my camp tomorrow. We make better time once we're out of this swamp." He regarded her with frank curiosity. "You can't just be rattling around loose here."

"I'm not. What do you do, John?"

Her using his first name evidently made up for her evasiveness, for he smiled at her and said, "I'm a geologist."

She nodded toward the great yellow truck lashed to the deck. "So that's yours?"

"Yes. Fair being fair, tell me what you're doing here."

"I'm working, too. Seeing as much of this world as I can, while I can."

"Who's your sponsor?"

"I'm privately funded."

"So'm I."

"I'm here because my father has the money and my Uncle Ivan has the clout. Ivan Kelly?"

Moen shook his head.

"Before your time, I guess. He was the first man to go through the hole. And my dad's a Hollywood screenwriter, so the pressure was really on me to make something of my life. So here I am."

"Here you are."

"Once I leave, I'll never get to come back. You don't get to come back unless some multinational's footing the bill. You, for instance, will get to come back all you like. You're looking for oil."

He was taken aback but recovered quickly. "Yes, I'm looking for oil."

She nodded gravely. "What else would you be doing? I've seen aircraft flying around everywhere towing those little gliders with the magnetometers. And that"—she nodded at the truck again—"is a vibrator truck."

He looked at the truck as though it had suddenly materialized from thin air. "Why, so it is. And that salesman swore it was a rec vehicle."

She made a visible effort not to smile. "You jack it up on a central pedestal and make it vibrate, and then you use the sound waves in rock to make subsurface maps."

"You don't say."

Now she did smile, excellently.

The boat entered the mouth of the channel. The brown, turbid water was choked with broad algal mats, some of them more than a yard across. Built of delicate interlaced filaments, they looked more solid than they were; they disintegrated into their constituent strands as the boat eased through them. Here and there low muddy islets supported other algal growth. The air was heavy with a stench of decomposition.

"A pomander would be handy right about now," she said.

Moen nodded. "Or nose plugs. But it smells ten times worse when the tide's out. The mud here's of such fine consistency that it feels like oil when you rub it between your fingertips. You'd sink right into it, over your head. The particles in it are all that's left of a mountain range. It's all been worn away and dumped here in a geosyncline. And it's full of decaying stuff."

"Charles Darwin said a wide expanse of muddy water has neither grandeur nor beauty."

"Smart old Charlie."

They saw a large, honey-colored arthropod, with bristly black grasping appendages outstretched, that had pulled itself onto an islet. It lay perfectly still among intorted tendrils of foliage and might have been looking around or listening or simply basking. Moen observed unnecessarily that there was little for it to see and nothing for it to hear. He opined that the creature's eyes probably did not work very well, and he expressed doubt that it even possessed ears.

She asked, "Are you an expert on sea scorpions?"

He shook his head. "No, not really. I was just repeating what some paleontologist said. I know my forams and conodonts—those are the index fossils I use in my work—but I don't know all that much about other Paleozoic life-forms and don't have much interest in them, frankly."

"Just in oil."

"Oil's fascinating. It's a product of a chain of improbable occurrences."

Michelle crossed her arms, leaned against the rail with her hip, and faced him. "I don't understand," she said, "how you propose to get the oil back even if you do find it. You can't pump it through the hole, and taking it out by the barrel would be prohibitively expensive."

He shrugged. "I'm sure there're people trying to figure that out. My job is just to find it. So. Can't we be friends in spite of everything?"

She gave him an appraising look. "I'm not sure I could be friends with anybody who thinks the way you do."

He laughed pleasantly. "Well, you're young, and I work for a big old evil multinational. We're supposed to have extremely definite opinions. But wait till we get to my camp and you meet Dews. You'll love Dews. Dews," and he laughed again, "is pure unreconstructed slash-and-burn, suck-it-dry, throw-it-away."

"Can't wait," she murmured.

When she returned, she indicated the pilothouse and its occupant with a nod and said, "Give me your extremely definite opinion of Walton and Wicket. There's more to them than meets the eye."

"You might better ask Walton about Walton. I've known him a while now. I've spent maybe eight years here, if you add up my field time, and in all that time I don't think I've ever seen or heard of him venturing more than a quarter mile from water. He's got the boatman's view of the world—a navigable body of water bounded on one to three sides by terra incognita. There're probably sea scorpions with drier feet than Walton's."

"What about Wicket?"

"I've never been able to decide if he's not all there or if he just tunes me out. Or some combination of the two. He may be mentally handicapped or something. I'm surprised he got past screening."

"Interesting library they've got on this tub."

"Mm?"

"Books. Voltaire. The Wind in the Willows. Someone on this barge reads books."

"Well, what else is there for someone to do on a barge?"

Moen gave Michelle a grin and gestured expansively. "Our home away from home! And there's our charming and lovely hostess, the Dame Paleontologist herself."

Walton, carrying a handful of mail, stepped onto the platform, with Michelle and Moen right behind. Walton gruffly introduced Michelle to Merry Grenon, who regarded her with undisguised amazement. After a moment, the older woman said, "What brings you this way?"

"I hope to get a book of photos out of this."

"Well, I hope you don't break a nail or anything."

Michelle's smile never wavered. "Would you mind if I took pictures and asked questions?"

"Not at all."

Close by, Moen favored the two women with a smile, and to the older he said, "Be careful what you say to her, Merry, she's got a sociopolitical agenda."

Merry Grenon said to Michelle, "Come on, I'll show you around," and then, by some means the young woman did not quite understand but had to admire, effortlessly detached her from Moen and, preceded by Walton, steered her toward a shed used as both laboratory and operations center. Moen obviously wanted to follow, but then he noticed that Wicket had begun unloading supplies onto the platform, and he quickly reboarded Karen to watch over his crates like a mother hen.

On one side within the shed sat radio equipment, and a small cabinet in a corner held cooking utensils. Two dented but clean-looking refrigerators stood in opposite corners; the door of one bore an emphatically hand-lettered sign: NO FOOD!!!, and an excellent reproduction of Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte; the door of the other bore an equally emphatic sign: FOOD ONLY !!!, and an equally good reproduction of a van Gogh, The Potato Eaters. The rest of the cramped space was given over to a long workbench and racks of specimen trays.

Walton asked, "Where're the others?"

"Helen's ashore. Pete took the other boat upriver to try and catch himself some sharks."

Surprise and alarm struggled for supremacy in Walton's expression. "There are sharks here?"

Grenon plainly savored the moment. "Spiny freshwater sharks."

"Well, I wish to hell somebody'd told me. I've been known to dangle my feet in this river."

Merry Grenon offered him a pitying look. "We didn't know there were sharks here until about an hour ago. There're tons of things we don't know about this place, Bud. That's why we're here. Anyway, Pete found a decomposing spiny shark washed up on the bank, and now he's all excited. Here, I'll show you." She went to the refrigerator marked NO FOOD!!!, opened it, withdrew a metal tray. There was a thick odor of decomposition and preservative. In the tray lay a desiccated fish carcass about six inches long, blunt-headed, with ganoid scales and paired rows of spikelike fins along its belly.

"What's this," Walton demanded, "the chihuahua of the shark family?"

"It's Climatius," Grenon said proudly, "or a first cousin. The order of Climatiiformes, in any case. Not really sharks at all, but the earliest vertebrates with jaws that we know about."

"Well, I'll be go to hell," Walton drawled. He looked askance at the mouth, frozen in a fierce toothy miniature grimace. "What does it eat?"

"Invertebrates and maybe small jawless fish. Sea scorpions probably consider it a delicacy."

A thickset middle-aged woman entered, set down her collecting case, removed a sun hat. Michelle was introduced to Helen Wheeler, who greeted her warmly and said, "It's always a pleasure to see a new face."

"I've just been admiring your sharklet," Michelle said, "and the art collection. Is this the Paleozoic version of the Louvre?"

"I'm afraid so. There're more in the bunkhouse. Merry and I wouldn't let Pete put up girlie pictures in there, so we got him a Modigliani nude instead. Now he claims he's in love." Wheeler gestured at the Seurat picture and said, "I saw the original once. It's stunning. You know about pointillism? Up close, it's just all these individual points of color that seem unconnected with one another. Step back, and you notice two things. First you notice that all those dots become a whole greater than its parts. Then you notice that each figure, each group of figures seems to have its own light source. You think it shouldn't work, and yet somehow it does work." She turned and indicated The Potato Eaters and gave a soft little laugh. "And that's my idea of a religious print. I first came to the Paleozoic when I was a grad student, probably not much older than you. I kept coming back, and then one time I found God here. I mean God the source, the everywhere-spirit. I'm not talking about Jesus and religion. Some people turn to holy books and fairy stories—I don't know how else to put it. I don't care if Jesus walked on water or rose from the dead. Even if I did care, I still wouldn't believe it. I don't need to hear about miracles like those. The real miracles are life and spacetime and art. I can feel God's presence in art. Literature, too, sometimes. And music."

"Oh, yes," Michelle managed to say; she had been unprepared for the turn Helen Wheeler's monologue had taken. While she tried to think of something to say, she peered at the picture as though seeking out hidden meaning. Then memory came to her rescue. "My mother told me once she'd always thought Bach and Mozart must've felt the presence of God."

The other woman nodded. "Absolutely. But I'm partial to painters. God spoke through the great painters, at least into the twentieth century."

"My guess would be that God lost interest after Cubism."

"Maybe. But, oh, the Impressionists."

"Van Gogh," Michelle murmured, "was very disturbed, of course, but how could God's presence not be disturbing?"

Wheeler shook her head. "No. God's presence brings peace and joy. Poor van Gogh was mentally ill."

"Can't mentally ill people know God?"

"I believe anybody can know God. But looking at it realistically, I've got to admit that it seems easier for some people than for others."

Michelle and Walton returned to the barge. As Karen pulled away from the platform, Michelle, standing next to the pilot house, exchanged waves with the two women on the platform, then turned to Walton and asked, "Is Helen Wheeler always like that? Kind of, you know—"

"Goofy and mystical?" Walton snorted with amusement. "Helen's a case."

Michelle frowned slightly. "I liked her, but—"

"I like her, too, but she's still a case."

"Does she always start talking about God with people she's just met?"

"Well, it's not like she's decided that it's her personal mission in life to lead all her hell-bent colleagues to Jesus Christ. She isn't trying to convert anybody. I think God is just one of the really interesting things in her life, like bugs and plants." Walton shrugged. "God's presence is disturbing. You said so yourself."

"It's okay to leave stuff sitting there on the bank like that?"

"Who is there to steal it? Nothing's going to come along and eat it."

Vegetation on the floodplain gradually retreated from the land to the splash zones along either bank, exposing barren flatlands that stretched away to the horizon. The silvery phantom pools shimmering out on the baking white surfaces looked more inviting than the muddy water at hand.

Wicket occasionally replaced Walton in the pilothouse for substantial lengths of time, during which Walton might disappear below or needlessly inspect the cargo or simply watch the land as it rolled by. Whenever he passed near Moen or Michelle, which was as rarely as possible, he acknowledged their presence with a nod and tried not to make eye contact and to hurry on without seeming to hurry. Once, however, when he did inadvertently meet Moen's look, he was certain that he saw a glint of smugness in it, and he felt his eyebrows draw together. The reaction puzzled and annoyed him. What the hell does it matter to me, he thought fiercely, what these two get themselves into? Don't approve of shipboard romances or workplace romances, and here it's practically the same thing. He retreated quickly to the pilothouse and sent Wicket to do busywork.

He put the boat in close to shore for the evening. When the diesel engines were shut off, the silence was almost stunning. Wicket busied himself in the galley, filling the tiny space from side to side and front to back; he seemed to have room only for his hands, which worked expertly at transforming dried vegetables and meat bar into stew.

"You are welcome to join us for dinner," Walton said to Michelle, so stiffly that she visibly recoiled.

"We're having Walton's speciality," said Moen. "Meat bar in fusel oil."

"Thank you," she said, "but I brought my own food."

Moen grinned. "Coward."

She seemed to relax. "But if I can bring my veggie bars, I'd be delighted to sit with you."

There was little conversation at table, though. After dinner, the three of them paused on deck amid the quietude and watched the great cold moon's stately emergence from a vast bank of clouds. No mosquitoes vexed them. There were no insect noises, no frog choruses, no sounds at all but that of the backwash. There was not a breath of air. Wicket sat quietly by himself on a stack of pallets, reading a book by the light of a lantern.

Walton said, "Will you please read to me, Wicket?" The mate ducked his head sheepishly. "Please? No?" Walton gave Michelle an apologetic glance. "I like him to read to me before I turn in at night, but—in front of company …"

Before he retired, Walton showed Michelle where she could string a hammock. Moen, a frequent passenger, had a bunk belowdecks as well; he was still on deck with her, however, and the two of them were listening to music from a chip pack when Walton made to go below. He paused and listened and decided that it was one of Brahms's overtures, the Festival or the Tragic—it had been some time since he had heard either, and they always had tended to run together in his mind. The music was punctuated by laughter. Michelle Kelly had a rich, uninhibited laugh, but it had the effect of making Walton go to his bed muttering about foolish young women. But he suddenly knew, and was not surprised to know, that the real problem was jealousy, pure and simple, and both the knowledge and its unsurprising nature only made him angrier. Dammit, he told himself, I refuse to feel jealousy over some little thing who's half my age, if that. Before he fell asleep, however, he heard Moen come below—alone—and turn in—alone—and, strangely gratified, he thought, Well, at least she's not a pushover.

As they moved upriver, Michelle pointed out a small fish swimming at the surface. "Spiny shark," she said.

Moen peered over the side. "There're sharks here?"

"That seems to be the standard reaction. These are freshwater spiny sharks. Merry Grenon showed me a dead one at the base camp yesterday. She told me the scientific name, but I don't think I can pronounce it right."

They reached the oil geologists' camp before noon. It consisted of a few tents and an area marked off as a helipad, and total present population evidently comprised three more or less sunburnt men. Two were dressed in old clothes; the third, wearing only boxer shorts and boots, darted into a tent when he saw Michelle and promptly re-emerged wearing a more nearly complete ensemble. Moen displayed his previous particularity about his crates, and this time Wicket appeared to heed his instructions during the unloading. Then, laughing, boyishly happy, Moen personally drove the vibrator truck onto the bank, leaving deep tracks in the loose, crumbly marl. He invited Walton and Michelle to stay for dinner, and they accepted. Wicket's exclusion seemed to Michelle to be taken as a given.

Moen was clearly in charge and in his element. The camp's working day ended when he said so. This, as it turned out, was an hour before sundown, which gave the junior member of the geology team, a sweating red-faced man named Bloodworth, little time to wash up and prepare some kind of meal—"for up to a dozen people," Moen explained, "depending on whether the helicopter's brought some in or taken some out"—and seemed to leave Moen himself and his guests barely enough time to wash up and have drinks in hand when the edge of the sun dipped behind the far edge of the world. They sat with the other two members of Moen's crew, Dews and McCampbell, at a long camp table in the mess tent; the tent flaps were turned back so that they could watch the sun set.

"All I want out of life," Moen said as the harried Bloodworth placed a steaming tureen on the table, "is to be able to sip good whiskey and watch spectacular sunsets. No, actually, I want a good deal else. I want this team to produce the results I want to take back to my bosses. I want to be ten times richer than I am and ten years younger than I am, and to weigh ten pounds less than I do. I want to have back all the hair I've lost." He paused as Bloodworth set dinner before him. "I want a decent meal." He regarded the food. "Meat bar in fusel oil," he said, "my favorite," and laughed.

Bloodworth looked apologetic and backed away. Dinner was eaten with a minimum of talk, most of it having to do with the arcana of oil geology. Michelle dutifully chewed overcooked reconstituted vegetables and made no attempt to join in the conversation, nor did Moen's men make any attempt to draw her into it. It was obvious to Walton that she was conscious of the appraising looks they gave her whenever they thought she was not looking. Moen seemed thoroughly amused by the effect she was having on them.