I met a mine foreman who has a piece of coal with a 1909 gold sovereign embedded in it. I saw an ammonite, apparently squashed in the fossil footprint of a sandal.

There is a room in the basement of the Natural History Museum which they keep locked. Among other oddities in there are the tyrannosaurus with a wristwatch and the Neanderthal skull with gold fillings in three teeth.

What are you going to do about it?

Dr Carl Untermond

The Overcrowded Eden

It was, of course, a beautiful day -- a Company brochure day. At the moment Kin's office overlooked a palm-fringed lagoon. White water broke over the outer reef, and the beach was of crushed white coral and curious shells.

No brochure would have shown the nightmare bulk of the pontoon-mounted strata machine, the small model for islands and atolls under fifteen kilometres. As Kin watched, another metre of beach spilled out of the big back hopper.

She wondered about the pilot's name. There was genius in that line of beach. A man who could lay down a beach like that, with the shells just right, deserved better things. But then, perhaps he was a Thoreau type who just liked islands. You got them sometimes; shy silent types who preferred to drift across the ocean after the volcano teams, dreamily laying complicated archipelagos with indecent skill. She'd have to ask.

She leant over her desk and called up the area engineer.

'Joel? Who's on BCF3?'

The engineer's lined brown face appeared over the intercom.

'Guday, Kin. Let me see now. Aha! Good, is it? You like it?'

'It's good.'

'It's Hendry. The one who's the subject of all those nasty depositions you've got on your desk. You know, the one who put the fossil dino in--'

'I read it.'

Joel recognized the edge to her voice. He sighed.

'Nicol Plante, she's his mixer, she must have been in on it too. I put them on island duty because, well, with a coral island there is not the temptation--'