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Dr. Stick—Steck. It’s going on too long. Wouldn’t a crackpot get bored?”
    It depended perhaps on the width of the crack, Jerry suggested. But his tone, too, lacked assurance. The alternative was deliberate persecution—meaningless persecution. Why should anyone persecute a curator of fossil mammals?
    â€œParticularly,” Pam agreed, “a nice one. He is nice, isn’t he? In a jumpy, prickly way? In spite of the whiskers and those—those very strange glasses. I’d think you’d go crazy deciding what part to look through.” She paused. “You don’t think he has?” she asked.
    Jerry didn’t. He said Dr. Preson’s book—the popular book—was entirely sane. He said that Dr. Preson had proved sane enough in contract negotiations. He pointed out that Dr. Preson was being victimized, was not making it up—as evidence the authenticated arrival at the apartment hotel of four masseurs. He paused.
    â€œThis Dr. Steck,” Pam said. “Do you know him? The one he’s feuding with. The one he calls a ‘splitter.’”
    â€œBy correspondence,” Jerry said. “He looked over the manuscript for us—Preson’s manuscript. It was beyond us, so we called in Steck and a couple of others, just as a precaution. As specialists in a field we didn’t—”
    â€œAll right,” Pam said. “Did he like it?”
    Jerry did not at first remember. The Days Before Man had been, at any rate, not technically disapproved by the consultant scientists, which was all that was wanted. (Lay opinion was unanimously favorable.) He had a vague feeling one of the consultants had indicated certain reservations. Then he remembered.
    â€œIt was Steck,” he said. “Said the book probably was all right for the kind of people who would read it, since it didn’t make any difference what they thought anyway. Said Preson was a ‘lumper’ and unsound on something or other. The genera of the Felidae, I think. Oh yes—said there was no point to Canoidea since everybody knew what Arctoidea meant. I remember looking that up.” He stopped.
    â€œAll right,” Pam said.
    â€œCouple of names for the dog family, is all,” Jerry told her. “You can call it Ursoidea, too, but authority will be against you.”
    Other things would be against her also, Pam pointed out. She asked what kind of a man Dr. Steck had sounded like.
    â€œWas he feuding back?” Pam asked.
    It had not appeared from his letter, so far as Jerry could remember. But it was a couple of years ago.
    â€œAnyway,” he said, “I gathered from what Preson said that what you call the feud was pretty special—pretty private. Not anything you’d invite outsiders to. Anyway, would people really feud about—about the classification of extinct mammals?”
    â€œPeople will feud about anything,” Pam told him. “Don’t you know that, Jerry? Particularly about anything they’re enough interested in. Dr. Preson cares a great deal about old bones, probably. Probably Dr. Steck does.”
    It was a long way from an interest in old bones, however mammalian, to bushelmen, masseurs and Shetland ponies, Jerry pointed out. It was a long way from paleozoology to what Jerry, with some reluctance, brought himself to call crackpotism. He could, in effect, imagine no one less likely to annoy a distinguished mammalogist than another mammalogist.
    â€œThe trouble is,” Pam said, “that Dr. Preson doesn’t seem to think so.”
    There had been that, certainly, during the hours Dr. Preson had spent with the Norths—hours which included a cocktail or two and a dinner stretched by Martha from two to three; which included, also, a subsequent period of conversation in which living dogs, variety Doberman; animals that, a million years ago, approached dogdom; the taxonomic errors of Dr. Albert James Steck and the