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Around dusk, Trey wandered in from the beach, starving and dirty. Dianne had gone back into Corpus Christi to see to their cats. Trey and I took our dinner out onto the terrace.

I let him eat in peace for a time, then asked, "So what's the verdict?"

"Damned if they aren't trilobites. A distinct genus of mid-Palaeozoic vintage called Phacops, according to Bart. Only they can't be. But they are. Even though they can't be. And we found some other things washed up, too. Little cephalopods of a type that's supposed to be extinct, and even a primitive kind of fish with an armored head and no jaws."

"Just like someone dipped a big net into a Palaeozoic ocean."

"Yeah. Maybe you're right, Eric. Maybe it does mean...oh, I don't know what it means, except that some branch of science is about to be shaken up. Maybe several branches. I don't know."

"Bet you anything it's a time warp."

Trey rolled his eyes. "This thing does go beyond marine biology and palaeontology. Way beyond. I think I'd actually prefer a time warp to a colony of survivors from the Palaeozoic. But let the physicists get ulcers worrying about the how of it."

While he continued eating, I tuned in the TV news, and we watched a local feature about the activity on the beach; virtually all that survived of Trey's interview was "something unusual." Although I squawked in protest, Trey only shrugged and muttered something about par for the course and went on eating.

Then, a tall, thin, hawk-nosed gentleman looked out of the screen at me and said, "I am only too familiar with the marine museum, and I have never agreed with the secular-humanist slant it puts on things. There are lots of eminent scientists who refuse to swallow the conservative-scientific-establishment line on evolution," and across the table from me Trey set his fork down with a sharp clack and said, "Not good scientists."

I looked at him quizzically.

"Jim Farlough," he said. "Corpus Christi's own creation quote scientist unquote."

"Whatever they've found," Farlough was saying, "it's certainly no more prehistoric than you or I. What this discovery proves – or, more accurately, disproves all over again – is the whole evolutionist view of the history of life on this planet. Every life-form in earth's history dates back to an act of creation that happened approximately 6,000 years ago."

I glanced at Trey again and saw and almost felt the warmth creep up his neck and spread across his cheeks and forehead.

"All the different water-dwelling creatures we know," Farlough went on, "and many we don't know, are alive now. Until the nineteen-thirties, scientists didn't know the coelacanth was 'down there.' They thought it was extinct because it was missing from the fossil record. Now we have proof there are trilobites down there as well, and who knows else is down there? Probably Leviathan itself is down there, living in the deepest part of the ocean and rarely if ever coming to the surface."

"Turn it off," Trey growled.

I turned it off. He pushed his plate away and leaned forward on his crossed forearms.

"How come a crackpot gets more facetime than you do?"

"That was Farlough's own show, especially for crackpots. But are they still crackpots if more of them listen to him than listen to me?"

"Yes. Back home, I teach, or try to teach, general science to middle-schoolers. Bad enough that I have to compete for their attention with entertainment media and what-have-you specifically designed as a distraction from learning. Worse that I sometimes find myself under fire from irate parents who don't want me teaching their kids that the Earth isn't only a few thousand years old, that... that the value of pi is either three or four but not something in between."

"And do you also tell them that the Earth orbits the Sun?"

"God gave us brains."

"He gave some people crappy ones. You know, Eric, I think sometimes, given the resources at their disposal, Americans must be the most shamefully, willfully ignorant people in the world."

After sundown we walked back out to the beach, and while Trey and his colleagues worked by lamplight I sat brooding at the base of the dune. Finally, I flipped open my phone and called my mother. She asked, "How's the mortality tour?"

"I haven't actually had a chance to dwell on birthdays since I got here."

"Well, happy birthday, son."

I had almost forgotten that it was my birthday.

She said, "Is that the sea I hear?"

"That or just static."

"You are calling from down on the beach, aren't you? How's the condo?"

"Kind of noisy around here right now."

"You can probably get your money back, you know."

"It's not that big a deal."

"Did you get to see Trey?"

"I'm looking at him right now. But he's too busy now for talk. Mum, don't worry, this is the most fun I've had since I discovered dinosaurs in Granddad's cow pasture."

After a long moment, she said, quite good-naturedly, "Eric, you are just about the strangest of my children. You always have been."

"I probably always will be, too."

After I had said goodbye to her, I sat listening to the surf, feeling the breeze on my face, inhaling Mother Ocean's own tangy breath, and gazing at the stars and the rising half-moon.

Something had been dancing around the edge of my consciousness for hours, possibly ever since I'd waded in the foam with Trey and Dianne that morning; now, finally, I figured I knew or almost knew what it was, and used the phone to run a quicksearch and make sure.

Quicksearch duly spat back a couple of lines from the first chapter of Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native: "Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the Sun, kneaded by the Moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour."

And not just the sea, I thought, but the world, the universe, space-time, all of creation was vast and magnificent and full of wonderful things. I said, quietly, gratefully, "Happy birthday to me."