The Dinosaur Feather

breath.
    Finally Jack said: ‘All right, we’ll be there.’
    Kay was delighted that the famous Jack Jarvis and his wife were coming for dinner.
    ‘What an illustrious guest,’ she said, thrilled. ‘What will we give them?’
    Clive took the cookbook from his wife’s hand and led her into the living room where he told her the whole story. Or, almost the whole story. Kay was fascinated.
    ‘He must have been like a son to you. Why didn’t you ever tell me? Fancy them moving away like that,’ she added. ‘That poor boy must have felt like he was losing his father all over again.’
    Clive nodded.
    That Saturday Jack and Molly arrived right on time. Molly was radiant and very beautiful. She shook Clive’s hand energetically and said what a pleasure it was to meet such a legendary scientist. Her husband had talked so much about him over the years, she said, but she had no idea that they had known each other since childhood.
    ‘I was sorry to hear about the recent turbulence,’ she carried on, cheerfully, ‘but Jack says that’s how it is with natural science. All storms blow themselves out eventually.’
    Clive smiled and took their coats. What a chatterbox she was. He wasn’t entirely sure what he had imagined, but definitely not this.
    ‘Odd,’ Kay said when the evening was over and Molly and Jack had left. ‘Molly is as outgoing and sparkling as Jack is closed.’
    Clive nodded. Jack had seemed a little sullen, but then again with the women nattering away, it had been hard to get a word in edgeways.
    At the start of July 2007, Clive developed an earache and decided to leave work early. He had been troubled by a cold since Kay and he had spent two weeks in their holiday cabin, and it was getting worse, not better.
    The study of cartilage formation in embryonic chickens was looking very promising. Clive didn’t want to get his hopes up, but he had butterflies in his stomach as he followed its progress. He thought about Tybjerg and Helland. Helland still published, but it was nothing compared to Tybjerg who was firing off papers left, right and centre. Even now, while Clive was awaiting the outcome of the condensation experiment and thus not publishing much himself, Tybjerg wrote one article after another and in every single one of them he distanced himself from Clive’s views.
    Neither Tybjerg nor Helland had commented on the incident in Toronto. Clive was amazed that Helland had managed to restrain himself. Helland still e-mailed Clive every nowand then with references to papers he thought Clive ought to read, or attaching silly natural history cartoons. But he never once mentioned Tybjerg. The outcome of the cartilage condensation experiment filled Clive with rapture. Neither Helland nor Tybjerg had any idea of what was about to hit them.
    By now he had cycled through the forest. He looked forward to reading the latest issues of
Science, Nature
and
Scientific Today
in his bag. When he got home, he made himself comfortable on the sofa and started with
Nature
.
    And there it was. ‘Helland et al.’ jumped out at him as early as page five, a lengthy and infinitely trivial description of the discovery of a dinosaur tooth on the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea. Obviously, his esteemed colleagues couldn’t help but remark how this find yet again proved the direct ancestry of modern birds to dinosaurs. Clive let the journal fall from the sofa.
    Then he opened up
Science
. He had to flick as far as page seventeen before ‘Helland et al.’ leapt from the page. What the hell? Again, the article’s point of departure was some – in Clive’s opinion – utterly insignificant excavations on Bornholm, and the article was riddled with guesswork and conjectures, bordering on waffle. Clive scanned a few more pages before letting the journal slide to the floor.
    Finally, he started on
Scientific Today
.
    Jack’s beaming face greeted him from the editorial on page three, and Clive smiled back at him. They had seen each other only last Saturday and the atmosphere between them had been really good, as it had been over the last six months. Kay and Molly had become firm friends and Jack had been lessdefensive and recalled many of the things they had done together when Jack was a boy. Last Saturday he had mentioned the tree house. It must have been a big job to build, he had asked, and both women had turned to look at Clive. Clive’s heart started pounding, but Jack was relaxed and smiling, and