"Jeff Hecht - Extinction Theory" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hecht Jeff)

wasn't the samples he sent in from the field. They never came. The postdoc who
had worked with him before would have noted their absence, but her replacement
didn't. Nor did I.
He was gone for three solid months. I never heard from him, and I don't
think anyone in geology did, either. There were rumors he'd fallen off a
mountain in Afghanistan, or been arrested for having alcohol in Iran, but his
American Express statements still kept coming. He missed a deadline for filing
some paperwork that got the accounting department _very_ upset. He was
supposed to be teaching a couple of fall courses, and the geology department
was about ready to panic about that when he finally returned.
By the time he arrived at my lab, Wasserman had stopped to bathe,
shave, and put on some fresh clothes. He had also stopped elsewhere. His eyes
were bloodshot, his face burned brown by the summer sun, and his hands were
shaking. The summer had aged him, and I had never seen anyone so drunk outside
of my family.
"Your little project sent me all over the world," he grumbled in
greeting.
I was astounded. "I thought you had..."
"Just because I said it was ridiculous didn't mean I wouldn't
investigate it. It was a rational enough idea to test. I didn't for a minute
think that there could have been intelligence behind the extinctions at the
end of the Cretaceous, but there were plenty of other things happening then,
and you'd given me some new ideas."
"You never sent me any samples!"
"They'll come. Slow boat, I'm afraid, but you won't need them now." He
patted the sample case in his lap. It was battered and dusty, with a plastic
airline ID hanging from the handle. "This should be enough. It hasn't been out
of my sight in a week." He popped open the latch.
I watched in uneasy suspense as he unrolled plastic foam packaging
material from the rocks in the case. I had no idea what to expect. I knew so
little geology that I doubted I would recognize whatever conclusive evidence
he had found that I was wrong.
The rock was grey, with bits of slightly lighter rock scattered
throughout the parts that peered above the clean white plastic. The lighter
rocks were about the size of broken pencil stubs. "Fossils?" I asked.
Wasserman nodded. "You catch on fast for a physicist. They're bones, 65
million years old. I found them just under the K-T boundary layer in a
terrestrial deposit. I was trying to calibrate the time scale of extinctions
more carefully. We don't have a good way to tie the extinctions in the oceans
with those on land. Some people think they happened at the same time. Others
say they were ten thousand or a hundred thousand years apart." He rambled a
bit more about people who thought they had found dinosaur teeth shed after the
end of the Cretaceous, and why that might not prove anything at all.
I didn't see any pattern to the bones. When he paused in his drunken
monologue, I asked, "What do you see in them?"
"What will somebody see of us after we finally kill ourselves?" he
grumbled as if it should be obvious. He looked at me, then looked down at the
sample and moved the plastic. A glint of yellow metal caught my eye next to
one of the bones he uncovered. I stared at it, trying to understand.
"It was a ring," he said. "A sixty-five million year old ring. I don't