Rizzo admits that, indeed, he hasn’t been let in on the details. “But I know Dr. Oliver and I can promise you this,” he says with relish. “It’s going to stand the scientific world on its ear.”

“Oh, jeez,” Gideon said, slapping his copy of the Peninsula Daily News down suddenly enough to make a fellow diner, dozing over his English muffin and coffee two tables away, sit up with a jerk. “Look at this, will you, Julie?” He tapped the headline with his finger. “Sheesh.”

His wife, dressed in the trim, tan park ranger uniform in which she would be reporting to work in twenty minutes, paused in buttering a cinnamon-raisin bagel to read the article. Then she read it again.

“Nice going, prof,” she said, only barely managing to keep a straight face. “Did you really say that? ‘It’ll leave Piltdown in the dust’? Talk about over the top.”

The Piltdown hoax was the most celebrated deception in the history of anthropology, the sham discovery of the “missing link,” decisively proven only after forty years of widespread acceptance to be a combination of fossil human skull bones and the jaw of an orangutan. Even now, anthropologists found it painful to joke about, Gideon among them.

“No, of course I didn’t say that,” he said petulantly, “and this isn’t funny. Well, okay, maybe I did say it, but I was kidding. I mean, this reporter calls – Lester told me to expect it; he set it up – and the first thing out of his mouth, the reporter’s mouth, is: “Dr. Oliver, would you agree that this is really going to be the most sensational scientific expose in history?” I thought he was kidding. So I said… whatever the heck it says I said. It was a joke. Am I the kind of person who would go around saying things like ‘nosirreebob’ under conditions of anything but extreme stress or ill-considered jocularity?”

“Uh-huh,” Julie said. “And how was he supposed to know it was a joke? From the twinkle in your eye? It was a phone conversation.”