One week after our harrowing escape from the Miocene, Dianna and I were at the social function for our new sponsor. At the entrance of the museum, we encountered a strange group of people. One was a slight Asian woman, who looked to be about 45. She wore a short, black dress, a white vest and an antiquated pair of spectacles. I immediately pegged her as a professional scientist. Her companion could not have seemed more incongruous, resembling nothing so much as an over-the-hill biker. He was over 6 feet tall, with a barrel chest and heavily muscled arms. His scalp was completely bald, and there were no traces of a beard, making his age difficult to judge. I guessed that he was well over 50. The strangest thing about him was that he was still wearing sunglasses and gloves, even though the sun was setting and he was indoors. Close behind him were two identical short and stocky young men.

The woman spoke first. “Hello, I am Dr. Sara Marcos,” she said. “You must be Ted Flockman and Ms. Gonzalez.”
“Soon to be Mrs. Flockman,” she interjected.

Dr. Marcos gave a disdainful frown. “My companions are Albert Schwartz and his sons, Harold and Henry,” she said. I took another look at the twins. Their pallor and features were almost Asiatic. Their “father”, on the other hand, was the quintessential Nordic, with skin so pale he might be mistaken for an albino. I decided that they had to be adopted, though I was struck by a fundamental similarity in build. In spite of his greater height, the elder had the same stout build as the twins. Marcos noticed me looking at her companion’s sunglasses, and gave him a nudge. He hastily took them off, though the gloves stayed on. She then continued, “We are working for Charles Hodges on the upcoming expedition.” I recognized the name, and was immediately impressed. Hodges was one of the wealthiest men in the world. Given his reclusive reputation, I was surprised that he was hosting a dinner.

I was decidedly put off by Dr. Marcos, and was glad when Lou came over. “I see you’ve met Marcos and the Schwartzes,” he said. “Come on to the dining hall and meet the host.”

Counting ourselves, there were 33 people at the dinner. Dianna and I were seated as guests of honor at the same table as our host. Drs. Werner, Marcos, and Ling, the Schwartzes and an unfamiliar man in a wheel chair were also seated there. The man in the wheel chair was introduced as Dr. Paulus. Hodges himself required no introduction.

The billionaire was very different from what I had expected. The first thing I noticed was that he wore frameless sunglasses with mirror-like lenses that wholly concealed his eyes. The spoon-like lenses distorted and fractured what they reflected, like the eyes of an insect. I immediately felt embarrassed for staring at Schwartz. The second thing I noticed was how youthful he looked. I had known he was young, only 27, but his appearance and especially his behavior was more fitting for a nine-year-old boy. His child-like qualities were reinforced by an unusually large head and a disorderly mop of a haircut. He tended to talk quickly, on a bewildering range of topics, and as he spoke, he would nod his slightly oversized head like a living bobble head doll.

“I’m very glad to meet you,” he said on introduction. “I’ve read all about your work. Would you like some soy steak? I’m a vegetarian. I don’t eat animal meat or products. If you wanna real steak, I can tell my cook to fix you one. It’s wonderful to meat you, just wonderful.”

“The soy steak is fine,” I said.
“I would like a real one,” Di said.
“Very well,” said Hodges. “Waiter! Two steaks, one soy and one beef. It’s unfortunate that Dr. Wrzniewski could not be here. I was looking forward to meeting him.”
“Carlos was injured on our last expedition to the Miocene,” I said. “He’s decided to take time off until he recovers.”

“Unfortunate. Unfortunate,” Hodges said. “I was looking forward to meeting him.”
He then began to enquire into my various adventures. I was pleased by his interest, but his limited attention span kept me off-balance. Many times, when I began to answer a question, he would say something like, “Fascinating, fascinating,” and then ask another question about a completely different topic.

There was a break in the conversation when a waitress served us soup. “Careful, it’s hot,” the waitress warned. I sipped a little from my own spoon. I had to disagree with the waitress: It was scalding! Beside me, I heard a loud slurp. I turned and saw the elder Schwartz drinking from his upraised bowl as if it were a coffee mug. He showed no signs of displeasure.
Dianna struck up a conversation with Dr. Marcos. “What kind of research do you do?” Dianna asked.

“I’m a Professor of Chiropterology at the Federal University of Jakarta,” Marcos replied. When she saw our confusion, she explained, “I study bats. In fact, I’m one of the premiere authorities on the subject. I have reason to believe that a fragmentary fossil mammal from Cretaceous Montana was either a bat or one of their immediate ancestors. If we can collect a living specimen, it could solve a lot of puzzles about bat evolution.”
I braced myself, expecting Di to challenge Marcos’s belief in evolution. Instead, she simply asked, “What puzzles?”

“For one thing, we aren’t sure whether bats evolved flight once or twice,” Marcos said. “The bats are divided into two suborders, the Megachiroptera and Microchiroptera, and we aren’t sure if they arose from a common flying ancestor or if the two suborders evolved flight independently. I lean toward the latter view. There are also questions about pre-adaptation. For example, the Microchiroptera hunt and navigate by sound. But, is the echolocation system one of their adaptations to flight, or did something like it already exist in a flightless ancestor?”

“Those are certainly some tricky questions,” Di said evenly. She saw my somewhat relieved expression, and squeezed my hand under the table.

“Mammal research will only be one facet of the expedition,” Hodges said. “We will also be conducting research on dinosaurs, of course, and particularly dinosaur behavior. We will be using some rather innovative methods. The Schwartzes will perform a demonstration tomorrow.”

The steaks arrived. The Schwartzes fell upon theirs like carnosaurs, quickly but methodically cutting away large bites and swallowing them after only a little chewing. I noticed another oddity about Albert. The middle finger on his right hand did not bend when he picked something up. This made his grip on his knife a little unsteady, and obviously made for social awkwardness. I concluded that he must have lost his finger somehow, and replaced it with a rigid prosthesis. That would explain why he wore gloves. I considered asking about it, but decided not to.

For the first time, Ling spoke. “Your kitchen staff is very good,” he said. “Are they your own staff?”
“Of course,” Hodges said. “My father gathered some of the best chefs in the world to serve in his household, but he made sure that others could enjoy their labors whenever possible. I continue that tradition.”

“I’m surprised you don’t hold dinners like this often,” Ling commented. “Your father was famous for holding extravagant social functions.”

Hodges laughed. “Quite true. I could put it down to humility, but the real truth is that I’ve never gotten used to crowds. I spent most of my childhood indoors do to health problems, and appearing in public tends to draw altogether negative attention. So, I keep a low profile.”

He did not say anything about what his illness was, and it certainly would be impolite to ask. I suspected that it was somehow connected to his bizarre behavior.

In between swallows, the Schwartzes conversed with each other and with Werner and Paulus in German. Though I didn’t understand them, they seemed cheerful and animated. However, I noticed that when the laughed, Werner would usually look upset. Albert also talked with Dianna, with a level of familiarity that made me a little resentful. I didn’t follow much of it. At one point, the conversation somehow turned to Friedrich Nietzsche, a subject on which the elder Schwartz spoke eloquently. “The main reason that Nietzsche is so misunderstood is that so many of his words are taken out of context,” he commented. “Take his most famous words, `God is dead.’ It is so frequently repeated as to be a cliché. But one almost never hears the second part of the statement: ‘—And we have killed him.’ Only then is his real thought clear. He was not really denying the existence of God- at least, that was not his primary intent. His point is, rather, that our idea of God was restrictive and sterile. And that says far more about us than it does about God.”

After a while, Hodges brought up the issue of changing the past. “Do you ever worry that time travel might destroy the present?” he asked.

“That’s a tricky question,” Dr. Werner said. “In our one experiment, we recovered an artifact intentionally planted by one of our expeditions. However, there is disagreement as to the import of the experiment. Most of my colleagues take it as evidence that any action by time travelers is already part of our time line. Therefore, it would be changing the past NOT to go. But I am not convinced. It is my own opinion that time travel may genuinely alter history, but the universe works to dampen any such effects.”

“Dampened how?” Dianna said critically. “Do you think the timeline actually defends itself, the way a body defends itself from disease?”

“A lot of people take that possibility very seriously,” Werner said. He chuckled. “I recall reading a story from the mid-20th century about a time traveler who saves himself from being shot, only to be killed by a meteorite. Of course, that begs the question why the universe would behave that way. I suppose a pantheist like Dr. Wrzniewski would say that the universe itself is sentient, and I assume you are suggesting that the universe is controlled by an outside intelligence.”

“Why should we content ourselves with only one intelligence?” Dr. Marcos said. “I know the story you’re talking about. It was one of several about a `change war’, where two rival armies of time travelers are trying to change history toward their own ends. It parallels the common religious idea of two opposing supernatural powers—God and Satan, Ormazd and Ahriman, Yin and Yang. Perhaps the supernatural conflict is fought through changes in what we perceive as history.”

“I’ve thought about this before,” I said, “and what bothers me is, if the past changes, what happens to the time traveler. To use the classic scenario, suppose somebody kills his own grandfather, and his own birth is erased. In that case, who will go back and kill his grandfather? It’s an irresolvable paradox.”

Albert spoke up, much to my surprise. “I read a story once with a very interesting solution to that problem,” he said. “It goes like this. A scientist uses a time machine to send a small metal cube five minutes into the past. After the cube arrives five minute in the past, the scientist decides to perform an experiment: He will not send the cube the cube to himself five minutes later, and see what happens to the cube from five minutes in the future. And what does happen?” He paused, and grinned. “The cube from the future stays. But the rest of the universe…vanishes!” He continued to grin, but everyone else frowned. Dr. Ling seemed especially disturbed.

Partway through the meal, Dianna and I stepped out into the museum. We wandered through the trophies. Di stopped beneath the Dunkleosteus, and let it make its tinny screams. “It’s not really the same, is it?” she said clinically. “The real thing, we could feel in our guts.”
I put an arm around her. “Do you really want to stand under…that?”
“Yes,” she said. “And I want you here with me.”

I don’t know how long we had been standing there when we heard another scream. I remember hearing it as a weird whistle. The next clear recollection is being on the museum floor with Dianna pinned under me. The doorway to the museum was smashed, and a thin, acrid smoke still hung in the air. I traced a plume of especially thick smoke to a mounted Saurolophus. Something was embedded in the dinosaur, and its tail was still burning. I jumped to my feet and threw Di over one shoulder, and ran for the ravaged door. A second projectile came in, whipping right past my face. I staggered from the deafening noise and the blinding, stifling smoke. I ran on. There was an explosion behind us, just as I did a flying dive through the glass.

I lay next to Di, gasping for air. “You’re very sweet,” Di whispered in my ear, “but I actually can walk.”
Lou came racing over. He wore a gas mask. “Get back! Get back!” he said. I could barely hear him. A cloud of smoke was rolling lazily through the museum. I pulled Dianna to her feet and kept running. “All staff clear!” he shouted into a radio. There was a loud bang and a bright flash from the museum. It was an implosion grenade, designed to suck air out of a room. The tide of gas was pulled back. “Are you all right?” Lou said.

“My ears are ringing something fierce, and my face feels like it just went through a cheese grater,” I said. “But under the circumstances, yes, I suppose I’m okay. What was that?”

“Home-made rockets, fired from an improvised projector,” Lou said. “Who knows what they were loaded with… We already have it traced back to a spot 300 meters beyond the fence, but there’s no sign of the operator.”
“We don’t really need to find him, do we?” I said.
“Right. Modus operandi tells us enough. The Keystone Kommies are back.”