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7:30 P.M.

Enthusiastic applause greeted Geoffrey as he strode onto the stage of Lillie Auditorium.

The hall was packed with a mixture of young students who had fallen under the spell of the dashing evolutionary scientist and elderly skeptical colleagues who were itching for a scientific rumble.

An ageless thirty-four years old, Geoffrey Binswanger was a physically striking man who remained an enigma to his colleagues. His West Indian and German parentage had produced an unlikely mix of islander’s features, caramel complexion, and sky-blue eyes. His dreadlocked hair and athletic physique undermined his academic seriousness, in the view of some of his fellow academics. Others, intrigued, wanted to count him in their political corners.

His theories, however, showed an utter lack of allegiance to anything but his own judgment-a result, perhaps, of never thinking of himself as part of a group. For whatever reason, Geoffrey had always needed to see things for himself. He wanted to draw his own conclusions without obligation to anything but what could be demonstrated and replicated under laboratory conditions.

Ever since he was a child, and as long as he could remember, Geoffrey was a scientist. Whenever adults had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he literally did not understand the question. He was conducting formal experiments at the age of four. Instead of asking his parents why some things bounced and some things shattered, he tested them himself, marking his picture books with a single heavy dot next to illustrations of things that survived the test of gravity and a swirly squiggle next to things that did not, which his mother had discovered to her mixed horror and delight.

His parents, who raised him in the upper-class Los Angeles suburb of La Canada Flintridge, finally conceded that they had a very special child on their hands when they had come home from work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab one night to find the babysitter curled up on the couch asleep in front of the television and their six-year-old son sitting on the back patio holding a running garden hose. “Welcome to Triphibian City,” he’d said as he presented his engineering feat with an imperious wave of his hand.

Geoffrey had flooded the entire backyard just as millions of toads from the wash of Devil’s Gate Dam had spawned. Thou sands of the tiny gray amphibians had stormed under the fence through Geoffrey’s little tunnel and now inhabited a metropolis of canals and islands presided over by ceramic garden gnomes.

From that point forward, Geoffrey’s parents did all they could to occupy their son’s curiosity in more constructive ways. They sent him to a camp on Catalina Island, where he was nearly arrested for dissecting a Garibaldi, the pugnacious State Fish of California, although his campmates had already speared as many of the fish as possible, because it was illegal, and had flung them on the rocks.

When they enrolled him in a neurobiology class for gifted children at nearby Caltech, he had never felt more at home. He explored the campus with his genius friends and snuck into the labyrinth of steam tunnels beneath the campus, for which he almost got arrested, yet again.

Geoffrey graduated from Flintridge Prep at the age of fifteen and immediately qualified for Oxford, much to his parents’ horror. His mother finally acquiesced, and Geoffrey stayed at Oxford for seven years, earning degrees in biology, biochemistry, and anthropology.

Geoffrey had won a variety of awards through the years since university but he never displayed them in his office, the way so many of his colleagues did. Looking at them made him queasy. He was deeply suspicious of any strings that might be attached to such honors. He accepted them out of politeness, but even then at arm’s length.

His latest book had become something of a bestseller for a scientific tome, though to his literary agent’s chagrin he resisted opportunities to become what he called a “sound-bite scientist,” pontificating on TV about the latest scientific fad and mouthing the majority position with no personal expertise in the plethora of matters journalists asked scientists to expound upon. He cringed when he saw colleagues placed in that position, even though they usually seemed pleased to have appeared on television.

For his part, Geoffrey preferred a forum like this one tonight. The storied Lillie Auditorium at Woods Hole was one of the true churches of science. Through the last century this humble hall had hosted more than forty Nobel laureates.

When the small auditorium was built around the end of the nineteenth century, Woods Hole was already a thriving community of loosely affiliated laboratories with a progressive campuslike culture. Here, men and women had found remarkable equality from the start, the men in their boater hats and white suits and the women in their bodices, bustled cotton dresses, and parasols, hunkering down in the mud together and digging for specimens.

Lillie Auditorium cozily held an audience of about two hundred people, its high ceiling supported by wide Victorian pillars painted a yellowing white like fat tallow candles. Under its wood-slatted chairs one could still find the wire fixtures where men used to store their boaters.

The Friday Night Lectures were the most anticipated of the summer lectures at Woods Hole. They regularly drew top scientists from around the world as featured speakers. The Fire-Breathing Chats, however, traditionally took place on Thursday nights.

Geoffrey’s first presentation eight years ago had caused a near-riot-so naturally the directors had reserved some prime Thursday night slots for his visit this year in hopes of a repeat.

Geoffrey had invented the Fire-Breathing Chats so that he and some other young turks at Oxford, after persuading the proprietor of the King’s Head Pub to set a room aside every Thursday night, could commit scientific sacrilege on a regular basis. Their enthusiastic audience had soon swollen to standing room only and had proved a thumping good time regardless, in retrospect, of how risible most of the theories advanced had been. But the object was not so much to be right as to challenge conventional wisdom and to engage in scientific reasoning, even if it led to the demolition of the theory being proposed. They had a special prize for that, in fact-the Icarus Award, for the theory that was shot down the fastest.

It was rapid-fire science, theory in action, method in motion, and often in the flaming death of a hypothesis could be seen the embers of a brilliant solution. Pitching a bold idea to the wolves had a thrilling appeal to Geoffrey. When it didn’t destroy his theories it improved them, so he had carried the tradition with him wherever he went as a test for his most unscrupulous ideas. He thought of these lectures as “peer preview.”

Now he strode across the stage in a Black Watch tartan kilt and held out a hand to calm the applause as he reached the lectern and tapped the microphone. Whoops and wolf whistles rose from his audience, and Geoffrey stepped out from behind the lectern for a bow.

With the kilt, he wore a T-shirt dyed rust-red by the mud of the island of Kaua’i. Green block letters across his chest read, “Conserve Island Habitats.” Geoffrey had spent half a dozen summers on the small Hawaiian island, vacationing at his uncle’s stilted house tucked in the narrow strip of rain forest between a vine-strangled cliff and Tunnels Beach. He had found no better way to escape civilization than to don a mask, snorkel, and fins. He’d shoot through the ancient lava vents, chasing Moorish Idols, following nonchalant sea turtles, and feeding urchins to the brash Humuhumunukanukaapuaha’a fish that took them right out of his hands. He had worn this T-shirt on dozens of his swims through those tunnels, and it was the only common denominator for every Fire-Breathing Chat: he wore it for every talk.

He raised a hand to the easel beside him that announced tonight’s topic: