Elaine walked in, strolled over to the desk and leaned across it. That finished any attempt at paperwork. When she noticed the tooth in front of him, she almost swallowed her gum.
‘My God, what’s that?’
149
WITH FRIENDS LIFE THESE . ..
“You’re a master’s candidate in marine bio. You tell me.” He handed it to her.
She examined it closely, and those pixie eyes got wider and wider.
“Some gag. It looks like a Great White’s tooth. But that’s absurd.”
“So was the coelacanth when it turned up in 1938,” he replied evenly.
“But it can’t be Carcharodon!” she protested. “It’s three times too big!”
“For Carcfarodon carcharias, yes. Not for Carcharodon megalodon.” He turned and dug into,the loosely stacked books that inhabited the space between desk chair and wall. In a teacher-student situation, he was perfectly comfortable with her.
“You mean the Great White’s ancestor? Well, maybe.” She took another look at the unreal weapon in her hand. “I found one in Georgia about half this size. And there was a six-incher turned up just a few years ago. Extrapolating from what we know about the modern Great White, carcharias, that would mean this tooth came out of a shark ninety fee—”
“Ah-ah,” he warned.
“Oh, all right. About, urn, thirty meters long.” She didn’t smile. “Kind of hard to imagine.”
“So are sharks attacking boats. But there are dozens of verified incidents of sharks, often Great Whites, hitting small craft. Happens off stateside waters as well as in the tropics. The White Death. The basis for a real Moby Dick, only ten times worse. Not to mention a few thousand years of sea-serpent stories.”