“Fine, but what about the people who buy it expecting something fabulous? What about them? And what about me, how does that make me look?”

“Ah, yeah, that’s the beauty part, see? Eight months is perfect. Any more than that and they forget they ever heard of you. Any less than that, and they still remember what you said. Market research, buddy.”

With a sigh, Gideon dropped whatever it was he was going to retort. He and Lester went back a few years now, and Gideon knew there wasn’t much point in arguing. Lester Rizzo, the associate publisher of Javelin Press and the improbable executive editor of their Frontiers of Science imprint, had approached Gideon after an open lecture he’d given on scientific fraud at the university and asked if he’d be interested in expanding it into a book-length manuscript for the Frontiers series.

Gideon had accepted, partly because the manuscript wouldn’t be due for almost a year and anything that far away was always doable, and partly because he was flattered at the thought of joining the august roster of contributors to the series. The $15,000 advance, a delightfully unusual prospect to anyone accustomed to dealing with the academic presses, hadn’t hurt either. Besides, as opposed to the necessarily arcane monographs he turned out for the scientific journals (his contribution to the current American Journal of Physical Anthropology was “Sexual Dimorphism in Tibial Diaphysis Robusticity among Eastern European Upper Paleolithic Populations”), the idea of writing something for popular consumption seemed like fun.

And it had been. To Gideon’s surprise – but not, apparently, to Lester’s – the book had done well, and Gideon was now finishing up an expanded section on mythology and science (thus, his interest in Atlantis) for a new edition. But from the very beginning, there had been differences, and a long string of compromises, between his editor and himself. The title had been one such.