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Within the hour, Carl and Bart and two other people had arrived from the museum. Trey hustled them down to the beach, made cursory introductions, then pointed at the litter of dead arthropods.

They oohed and aahed and whooped and wowed for a time, then fell to methodical work. Dianne and I helped the least-senior member of the team collect dead arthropods and seal them in refrigeration packs after they had been photographed and tagged.

We didn't get every one; a small crowd had gathered to watch, and now and then somebody further down the beach would step out and grab a trilobite and bear it away. I couldn't have said I blamed the souvenir hunters, and wondered what my own chances were of getting one. There were hundreds of the things.

And there was another puzzle: we found that the trilobites were restricted to a zone measuring just about two hundred yards in length; on either side of this definite boundary, we found no trilobites at all.

Inevitably, the local news team showed up and succeeded at collaring Trey long enough to wring from him the admission that he and his colleagues were from the marine museum and had come to the island to investigate "something unusual."

Trey was cool and collected in front of the camera. "In the days and weeks and, who knows, years to come," he said, "this discovery will be the focus of intense study. Science is about finding out things, constantly finding out. That's both good and bad from an individual's standpoint. You can never run out of things to learn, and you can never learn absolutely everything about anything. The universe is just too big and old and deep for us to fully comprehend. But we try because that's the kind of insatiably curious apes we are."

"Nice speech," I murmured to Dianne.

"He's an old hand at this," she said. "You should see him work a crowd at the museum."

"Doesn't look like I'll get the chance."

"Sorry about the Lady Lex."

"Don't apologise. This is worth a whole fleet of aircraft carriers."

The interview concluded, the news team withdrew, and we conferred with Trey. Dianne was hungry, but he and his team members were too excited to eat. I allowed that I was hungry, too, so she and I went down the beach, around the near end of the island, and lunched in "town" – the island didn't seem big enough for a town without quotation marks.

As we hovered over the wreckage of our seafood, she said, "Was that true about you two pretending cows were dinosaurs?"

"Yes," I admitted after a moment. "As boys we were irresistibly drawn to, fascinated by, crazy in love with dinosaurs. And with plate tectonics, the periodic table, the possibility of life on other planets, the possibilities of planets orbiting other Suns: not just for life, but intelligent life. But the first great weird thing of all was dinosaurs. We discovered dinosaurs when we were six or seven years old, and immediately the dear dim departed beasts led us straight into the first philosophical quagmire of our lives. We set out to reconcile what we read in our first dinosaur books with what we read in a big, lavishly illustrated book of Bible stories for children that must have been handed down through the family for generations."

She grinned. "I'm sure you approached the problem with all the seriousness of medieval scholars trying to decide how many angels could dance on the head of a pin."

"I don't think either Trey or I could live in some cramped, impoverished, medieval cosmos. No more than my parents could live out their lives in a small town. Anyway, Trey and I came down firmly on the dinosaurs' side. We were convinced that God fashioned them for our personal delight. To a milder degree I still am. Well, naturally, various relatives reacted variously to our prehysteria, as one of them so cleverly dubbed it. Our great-grandmother couldn't look at a picture of dinosaurs without muttering about 'those tormented creatures.' Our grandfather, he was a lay preacher, he listened patiently to our questions and speculations that the geologic ages corresponded to the days of creation."

"Our parents, Eric's and my own, seemed to enjoy the impression we made on company, whether singly or in concert. My mother would tell people, 'Our son knows Greek and Latin words, don't you, Eric?' and I would happily roll Triceratops, Ankylosaurus, Iguanodon off my tongue. My male cousins 'n' Trey's tolerated our consuming passions as we tolerated theirs. Deals were struck, though sometimes only very grudgingly kept. If we played soldiers or cowboys this time, next time we had to go look for prehistoric monsters in the lost world of the cow pasture. Sometimes they reneged on the deals, but I believe Trey's and my childhood fantasies must have been mutually supporting. I could not and still cannot imagine any kid not wanting to go look for live dinosaurs, even in a cow pasture."