"Will Hubbell - Cretaceous Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hubbell Will)

THREE DAYS LATER, Ann Smythe was picking her way through the cluttered basement of Horner
Hall on the campus of the University of Montana. She was annoyed with Rick Clements already, and
they hadn't even met. They were supposed to have met an hour ago, but he hadn't shown up. She had
been forced to track him down. A series of inquiries had led her first to the paleontology department,
then to the preparation lab in the basement. She was not pleased to be there. Disorder irritated her, and
the ubiquitous rock dust had soiled her expensive suit. There, amid cartons of specimens and scattered
tools, she located a muscular, sandy-haired young man staring intently through a stereo macroscope.
Despite his youth, he had a weathered look, as if he spent a lot of time in the sun. He was using a
needlelike tool to deli-cately remove the rocky matrix from a fossil, grain by grain.

"Rick Clements?"

"Yeah?" said Rick, not removing his eyes from the ma-croscope.

"I'm Ann Smythe, we had an appointment."

Rick suddenly started back from the macroscope, glanced down at his watch, then looked up at Ann.
"I'm sorry. I lost track of the time." He rose and wiped his dusty hand on his pants before extending it to
Ann. He had a disarming, guileless smile that made her decide to forgive him. "It's a Multituberculate
from the Upper Cre-taceous," he said by way of explanation.

"What?"

"The fossil, it's ..."
"Never mind," said Ann. "I've come a long way to talk, but not here."

"Sure. Is the commons okay? Look, I'm really sorry about..."

"It must be someplace where we won't be overheard."

"There's my room, but it's a mess."

"Your room sounds fine."

Rick's dorm room resembled a more compressed ver-sion of the paleontology department's basement.
Rick cleared some books and rocks off a chair, then offered Ann the seat. She decided to stand.

"Professor Harrington said you had some kind of job offer," said Rick, "but he didn't say much more than
that."

"I didn't tell him more than that," said Ann. "The peo-ple I represent are starting a new venture and
they're not ready to make it public yet. It's an opportunity for you to get in on the ground floor."

"New venture ... ground floor ... are you sure you're talking to the right person? I study fossils. This
doesn't sound like my line of work. Besides, I've already lined up some fieldwork this summer."

Ann ignored his question. "You should be a senior this semester," she said, "except you haven't fulfilled
the core requirements. Just biology, geology, comparative anat-omy, and paleontology courses, some of
them on the graduate level. You won't get a degree that way."