My mother's mission, late in life, has been to keep her children in touch with each other and with all our many relatives. She is compensating for the twenty years she lived as a military wife, following my father around the world at the Pentagon's whim, herding offspring the whole while.

The experience inculcated in her – and through her, in her children – an independent-mindedness which none of us probably would have acquired had we, too, grown up in her small hometown. Nevertheless, she always missed the company of her parents and other relations, and maintained lines of communication that sometimes stretched halfway around the world.

I too often yearned for the company of this large and varied lot of people. During our brief homecomings, with little time to make friends, I necessarily depended for playmates upon the family's considerable stock of first and second cousins.

By the time my father retired, I had gone out to make my own way in the world. My parents took a game stab at resettling in her hometown, an experience they afterward described as claustrophobic. "It was just like the old song says," my mother told me. "'How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?'"

In any event, after three years they had uprooted themselves one last time to take their place in a community notable for its high percentage of retired military couples. And, almost before I realised it, fifteen years passed during which I saw virtually nothing of aunts, uncles, and cousins. My mother, who genuinely liked her siblings though she could not bear to live among them, kept me apprised of their children's comings and goings.

I always received the information in the spirit in which she tendered it, but never had a use for it until I decided to spend one of my supposedly significant birthdays, evenly divisible by five, by the nearest great expanse of salt water, the Gulf of Mexico.

I had led an entirely landlocked existence as an adult, but spent my impressionable years near those largish bodies of water, the English Channel and the East China Sea; recently, I'd become conscious of a profound and irresistible longing to reconnect mystically with that other mother, Ocean. Friends of a friend offered me their condominium by the beach on an island not far from Corpus Christi – in the off season, the discount was substantial.

When I informed my mother of my plan, she said, "Be sure to call your cousin Trey when you get there." I hadn't laid eyes on Trey, Walker S. Brown III, since shortly after the onset of puberty. "He and his wife," my mother told me, "live in Corpus Christi."

"What's he doing in Corpus Christi? What is there to do in Corpus Christi?"

"Now don't you be snide. I'm sure it's a very nice place. He's something with the marine museum there." I admitted that I was impressed with that. "Anyway," she went on, "be sure to call him. Corpus is practically next door." She had looked it up on a map. "If you don't call him, you'll hurt your Aunt Dixie's feelings."

"Perish forbid that I should hurt Aunt Dixie's feelings."

"You laugh now, but wait till she cuts you out of her will."

###

Despite that threat, I forgot all about calling Trey until I had actually installed myself in the condo. When I did call, he sounded surprised, but delighted, to hear from me and invited me to come stay in Corpus.

I had already paid for the weekend, though, and was determined to remain on the island, because I couldn't get my money back. Trey then proposed that he come out the next day: "We can find you on the island easier than you can find us in Corpus anyway. But you will come into the city sometime. You have just got to see Lady Lex while you're here."

His wife Dianne had been listening in. She said, "He means the Lexington." I already liked her too much to point out that I knew about Lady Lex, a permanently moored twentieth-century aircraft carrier, in its day the biggest type of ship afloat. "That's the first thing Trey ever wants to show anybody from out of town."

"I love that old boat. I go there all the time"

"Eric, he makes going there sound like a big deal. It's moored right next to the museum."

"Sounds like fun," I said, rang off, then, familial obligations taken care of, collapsed into bed.

###

My cousin had put on some height and weight and lost most of his hair over the decades, and it took me a moment to see in his jowls and chins the boy I had once known. He introduced me to Dianne, petite, blonde, quite pretty, who greeted me warmly and revealed without prompting that Trey had been telling her all about me ever since I'd called. "He said when you were little kids you both wanted to grow up to be fossil-hunters or astronauts or something."

"Well, I am something."

I was in good spirits as we followed the path from the condo through the dunes to the beach. I asked about children; Dianne said they had a son, Walker IV, now in college. "We call him Quatro."

We walked for distance in the foam, till we came upon a boy of eleven or twelve, standing crouched by the water's edge, intent on what I first took to be only a large tangle of sea wrack. He looked up at us and grinned. "Come see the big ugly water bug I found."

The thing was about the size of my hand and lay on its back with its jointed limbs splayed brokenly.

"That's certainly a big ugly one," I told the kid.

Trey frowned as he peered down at the thing, nudged it cautiously with his foot, and flipped it onto its belly. He dropped suddenly to one knee and used a forefinger to scrape sand off the lozenge-shaped, segmented body. The seconds dragged out to a full minute.

Finally, I asked, "What is it?"

He didn't answer me immediately, but pointed to another, similar animal a few feet away, then to more just like it. "My God. They're all over the beach. There must be... Di, Eric, do you realise what these things are?"

"It seems familiar, but this is the first time I've been to the seashore since..."

"Eric."

"You're the marine biologist."

"These are trilobites, for crissake!"

"It's gotta be a mistake. Or..." I trained a suspicious eye on the boy. "Or somebody's trying to pull somebody else's leg."

Trey continued to poke and pry at the dead thing, but evidently he saw the look I was giving the boy.

"If it's a prank," he said, "it's a damn clever one. Too clever to have been cobbled up by a kid. You don't just doctor up a bunch of shrimp or crabs and pass 'em off as trilobites."

The boy swelled with triumph and defiance.

"Trey," I said, "have these things possibly been down there all this time, at the bottom of the bay?"

He shook his head helplessly. "No. Of course not. They have to have come from somewhere else."

"From way deep in the Gulf of Mexico, you think?"

"I don't know what to think right now."

"But isn't it possible..."

"I don't know. Until this very moment there's never been the slightest reason not to believe that trilobites died out completely in Palaeozoic time. Their closest living relatives are horseshoe crabs, and there's no mistaking the one for the other. But there's no mistaking these, either. Di, did you bring your phone?"

"No. Sorry."

"Eric, I need to call the museum from the condo."

I handed over my keys.

"Stay right here," he said, "keep the birds away, don't let anybody move any of these things," and he jogged away heavily.

###

The boy positioned himself possessively between us and the greater part of the stranded arthropods. "I found them," he said, "they're mine."

"Looks like there are plenty here for everybody," Dianne said. "Surely, you can spare us a few."

He looked around as though computing just how many he might be able to spare us.

"My husband's a scientist. He wants to study them."

The boy did not seem too impressed. "Are they worth a lot?"

"No," I put in flatly. "Not in the way you're thinking. But if you help us keep the birds off so he can collect some for his museum, he might end up naming them after you."

Interest flickered in his face. "He can do that?"

"Yes. And once a scientist officially names something, nobody can name it anything else."

"First I wanna show my mum and dad." He nodded toward a couple who were approaching at a purposeful pace, then ran off toward them.

"Thanks for deflecting the money question," Dianne said.

"I deal with tougher questions from kids his age all the time."

Some distance away, the boy and his parents drew up in a knot, and there ensued much gesticulating on the boy's part and some sharp looks in our direction on theirs. I asked Dianne out of the corner of my mouth, "Can we actually not let anybody move any of these things? It's a public beach."

The kid and his parents drew near, and he looked around and said, "Where's the other man who's gonna name these things after me?"

Dianne essayed a smile that would have disarmed me in a hot second but somehow glanced right off the kid's parents. "He means my husband," she said, gesturing vaguely. "He's a marine biologist at the marine museum in Corpus."

The man ran his tongue around the corner of his mouth as he considered the dead arthropod. "What is this thing?"

The boy piped up precociously, "The man said it was a prehistoric trilobite!"

"It does appear," I said to his father, "to be a type of animal supposed to have become extinct hundreds of millions of years ago. Even before the dinosaurs."

###

The man regarded me with a mixture of incredulity and disdain, and looked as though he meant to challenge my remark, but then his wife, evidently a veteran observer of past encounters, made an abrupt show of consulting her watch and broke in chirpily with, "Dear, I just remembered, we have that thing to go to this afternoon."

The man exhaled harshly. "What thing is that, honey?" he asked, not taking his eyes off me.

She didn't explain what thing it was but instead said to me, "I'm sorry, I'm such a ditz for forgetting, but we've really got to get moving if we expect to be ready in time."

As they moved off, I asked Dianne, "Should I have handled that better- whatever it was?"

"I won't even venture to guess what it was."

Trey returned. "Carl and Bart are on the way. Bart knows this stuff better than I do." He grimaced at his wife. "He says I am, and I quote, nuts. Well, it is nuts. Trilobites."

"Maybe," I said, "they really are from someplace else. From some time else, I mean. As in time travel. The fabric of space-time tore open and let these things through."

"Eric, Eric, give me a break, Eric. Please."

"Well, right now, it's as likely as anything else."

"No, it's about as unlikely as anything else." He glared at me in exasperation. "Even when we were kids, you always were into some weird damn thing or other."

"We both were."

"No. I was into science. Prosaic, down-to-earth science. You were into weird science – romantic science-fiction."

"Well, if this isn't a weird science-fiction thing..."

"Well, it is weird, but whatever it is, it's science, Eric. Some way or another, there is a logical, scientific explanation."

"I know from logical, scientific explanations," I told him, more heatedly than I probably intended. "After all, I am..."

"Guys," Dianne said evenly.

Trey and I looked at her and at each other, and both of us were abashed.

"Still," I said in a calmer tone, "the obvious logical, scientific explanation is there's a lost colony of trilobites at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Why not? The coelacanth was swimming around off Madagascar all that time before anybody knew it was there."

"Yes, and stromatolites have survived in Australia, and Lingula is still around, too. And they're both a lot older than the coelacanth. But people have fished and shrimped in these waters for generations without hauling up even a single trilobite. Never mind a mess of the things."

"Which brings us right back to the only other logical scientific explanation I can think of. These trilobites were hurled out of their own time, into ours, and the shock killed them."

"Ah, God, Eric! I am not going to stand here arguing about time warps with somebody who used to pretend that Granddad's cows were dinosaurs."

"Hey! You pretended right along with me."

Dianne cocked an eyebrow, probably at both of us. Trey shrugged embarrassedly, and I said, "Until you come up with a better explanation, this is lost-world stuff or time-warp stuff." He turned his back on me. "Trilobites fresh enough to use as fish bait, Trey."

Looking out over the bay with his fists on his hips, Trey said, almost wistfully, "There's just not much room left anywhere on earth for macro survivors from prehistoric times. No lost worlds, no dinosaurs hanging on in Darkest Africa or the Amazon jungle. Darkest Africa's been fully illuminated."

Dianne nodded. "Fully and sometimes horrifyingly."

"Yeah. And the Amazon jungle's been turned into grazing land for cattle. And even the sea bottoms are no haven. They're home to some extraordinary life forms, but there's no part of the ocean floor that's older than one hundred million years. There's no stable marine environment where trilobites could have hung on since the Paeleozoic."

He did not sound entirely convinced now.

###

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."

###

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."

---