Free Extinct by Charles Wilson

of methane gas being released, been pushed to the top of the sea floor. Vandiver guessed any coincidence was possible. Any set of coincidences: the coincidence of that particular tooth being upthrusted, the coincidence of the dredge then sampling the particular few-square-feet area where it lay out of all the tens of thousands of square miles of the Marianas Trench. Maybe hard to believe, but possible.
    But he had also continued to wonder. And, driven by that wonder, he had begun to research and found that there was much more coincidence than he would have ever dreamed. So much more it became almost a mathematical impossibility for it all to indeed by coincidence. At least that was how he started to believe.
    And that had caused him to form a pet theory. Of course not one that he shared openly with most people—it was a little too far out. But, on the other hand, not any farther out than was the thinking of a handful of scientists some years before who had decided the majority of their colleagues were wrong in the decades-held philosophy that dinosaurs had been cold-blooded animals. Now enough evidence had come forward to make the warm-blooded theory the prevailing one.
    And his conclusion was that the megalodon hadn’t become extinct over a million years ago, but rather at least a number of them had lived up until the last few hundred years, maybe longer—maybe much longer.
    And he knew that there was now not only coincidence that pointed to that possibility, but, as in the case of the advocates of the warm-blooded dinosaurs, mounting evidence.
    Then he thought again of the tooth Gus had called about. It might not have been washed out to where it lay by the action of a river or uncovered by a hurricane. It could conceivably.… He smiled at his thought. Surely he was grasping now. Especially with the tooth in such shallow water so far from the great depths. But then there was always a possibility, wasn’t there? He spent a moment longer thinking, the idea of what could be possible growing in his mind, then he leaned forward and pressed the panel at the base of his intercom.
    “Yes, sir?”
    “Have Ensign Williams report in here straight away, please.”
    “Sorry, sir, but he’s in the process of delivering Senator Lott to Andrews.”
    “Very well. Get word to him I want him to report in here as soon as he returns—no matter how late it is.”
    *   *   *
    “She’s not doing right by Paul,” Mr. Herald said as he watched Carolyn in her Ranger turning out of the driveway with Paul sitting in the front seat beside her. “She ought to go ahead and take him on out to the islands like she planned, do whatever else she can think of to get him back around water before he gets scared of it. It’s a horrible, horrible thing that happened to those boys, but when is the last time a shark ever attacked anyone around here, much less killed anybody? I can only remember once in my lifetime. What’s happened is a terrible, terrible tragedy. More than terrible. It makes me sick to my stomach. But it’s a terrible tragedy when lightning strikes somebody, too. And I’ve heard of lightning killing people a lot more often than once over the years. But you don’t stop going outside. You use common sense. Stay under cover when it’s storming and you’re pretty well home free. What does she want Paul to do, never go in the water again? Maybe even never want to be around it—because she’s scaring him to death telling him he can’t go to the islands now.”
    His wife lowered the magazine she was reading to her lap. “She’s not doing any such thing, Fred. She’s his mother. When she was a little girl, would you have wanted her to go on to the islands and swim right after a shark attack?”
    “Of course not. I don’t want her to go into the water now, for God’s sake. But she can still anchor out with him; what does she think the sharks are going to do—jump in the boat?”
    “Fred, she’s just too depressed to be