Joshua had always thought. His saying it took Blair by surprise.
“Ah, a full-fledged paleontologist in attendance,” the Great Man said, peering into the twilight grayness of the hall. “Or perhaps a crossword addict.”
The audience laughed.
“No, no, I don’t mean to joke. Who among you has done his homework, pray? That industrious and discerning soul deserves his own name spoken aloud. It would be fitting, I think, if he announced it for himself. Come on, then, speak up.”
Joshua said, “My name, address, and telephone number are in your pocket, sir.”
Discomfited by this intelligence and perhaps by his memory of the young man who had accosted him outside the hall, Blair was unable to find Joshua. “Sounds as if our expert handed me a bill of lading, doesn’t it?” The audience chuckled only tentatively at this riposte, and the Great Man turned back to the screen. Joshua noted that he was patting a trouser pocket, as if trying to reassure himself that he still had that address slip on his person. He seemed to fear that it had mutated into something unpleasant, like a hernia or a hand grenade.
“Chalicothere means ‘fossil beast,’ ” Blair gingerly resumed, facing the hall again. “I used to know a little ditty about the creature. ’T went, I believe, something like this:
“The chalicothere, that vulgar beast,
Applied his toes to Nature’s feast,
Et with élan but not -iquette,
So fell to Darwin’s dread brochette.
To spare yourself a like retreat,
Eat with your fork and not your feet.”
This was well received. Blair had overcome a moment of perplexity by falling back on a show-biz schtick that had undoubtedly served him well in the past. It consigned the voice of Joshua Kampa to oblivion and permitted an effortless segue into pure lecture:
“Baron Cuvier, the father of modern paleontology, held that any animal with teeth shaped like the chalicothere’s and showing wear patterns indicative of vegetarianism—well, he said that any animal of that sort must certainly have hooves. The operative word here, of course, is ‘must,’ for it ultimately betrayed the poor Baron to the profligacy and the unpredictability of Mother Nature.
“Cuvier died in 1832. The discovery, soon thereafter, of the remains of a chalicothere proved him dead—D.E.A.D.—wrong. Here was a herbivore with monstrous claws on its feet, and no one could satisfactorily explain what the creature used them for. A standard speculation is that the chalicothere dug roots and tubers out of the ground with its nails and so occupied an ecological niche quite distinct from that of most of its fellow ungulates.”
“It also ate flesh,” Joshua said quite loudly.
“Oh, my goodness,” Blair murmured. At his insistent beckoning the lights were turned back on, and, shielding his eyes, he scanned the floor for his kibitzer. “That, I’m afraid, is quite a ridiculous assumption.”
“It’s a simple statement of fact.”
Blair, having finally found Joshua, dropped his hand from his brow and addressed the young man expert to upstart. “The microwear patterns on the chalicothere teeth available to us for examination don’t support that ‘simple statement of fact.’ ”
“Then maybe you’ve got the wrong damn chalicothere teeth, sir. I’ve seen them scavenging, using their claws as a civet or a hyena might.”
“Seen them?” The Great Man was broadly incredulous.
Joshua wrapped his arms around his middle, like a patient in a straitjacket. A photographer from the News-Journal rose from one of the metal folding chairs, crept forward from the front, and exploded a flash bulb in his eyes. From other angles the man took other photographs.
“Yes, sir,” Joshua said, blinking, an audible quaver in his voice. “What I mean is —” He had erred, saying that aloud, but he did not want to back down. The crowd, he could feel, was against him. Having one of the few black faces in the hall did little to endear him to Blair’s outraged partisans, but challenging the Great Man in public was the more heinous offense. Joshua could feel their stares going through him like unmetered dosages of radiation. A crazy nigger had interrupted their soirée. “All I’m saying,” he resumed, feeling the heat, “is that the chalicothere isn’t quite what you people with your microscopes and calipers have imagined it. That’s all I’m saying. Is that such an unspeakable heresy?”
“Sit down!” a man in the middle of the auditorium shouted. “Shut your mouth and sit down!” A low murmuring of approval greeted this suggestion. When Joshua refused to budge, however, the murmurs turned into catcalls.
“No insults or abuse!” Blair roared from the stage. “Insults and abuse are to