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I thought over his request for a moment. “It won’t help us much. Any new hook gives the Bugle and others the opportunity to drag the whole thing through the mud again. But I appreciate being asked.”

“And it wouldn’t be the truth, would it?”

I rebuked myself inwardly for having neglected that most important consideration. But I said, “Perhaps it would be more effective for your purposes if you could announce new evidence at the same time.”

He turned thoughtful, then said, “I think you’re right. If the ME has anything new from those follow-up tests, we can do it then.” He smiled and rose to go. “Norman, thanks. And I’ll keep you updated.”

I wish I could be as positive about the special meeting of the University Oversight Committee I attended this afternoon, an ordeal by pettiness. There are people who ask me why I bother at all with the committee. Why do I mouth bromides about maintaining cordial relations with the university, why do we want to remain, however independently, a member of the greater Wainscott family? Especially since the museum has become, in their opinion, anyway, the institutional equivalent of the rich eccentric uncle everyone secretly hopes will pop off sooner rather than later and leave them a bundle.

In part it’s because I do want to continue the long and fruitful bond between the two institutions, a bond based on mutual respect. Indeed, I would not like it to become well known how highly I regard the faculty at Wainscott. Perhaps it’s because I am, at heart, an academic manqué, what Elsbeth calls a wannabe. I feel that the involvement of Thad Pilty and even Corny Chard, not to mention Father O’Gould and Izzy Landes, makes us, as an institution, an intellectual force to be reckoned with.

What I want to avoid in the museum is the management style of Wainscott, especially the forces represented by Malachy Morin. These are the people who would corporatize, to bastardize a perfectly innocent word, hell itself. They would bring in their systems, which never quite work, and their regimentation, which renders everything and everyone colorless, all the while basking in the glow of the work done by the scholars.

While independent in fact and in law (the university is challenging us in the courts, but that, we have good reason to believe, will come to nothing), we need Wainscott as a buffer between the outside world and ourselves, especially where the Genetics Lab is concerned. Groups such as the Coalition Against the Unnatural remain under the mistaken impression, which I do little to rectify, that the MOM is part and parcel of Wainscott. I know the public relations apparatus of the university would like to direct such obloquy toward us, but to do so would be to admit our independence. As may be obvious, after a few years of real institutional responsibility, I have turned into something of a Machiavel.

Ah, yes, the committee meeting. We assembled in the Rothko Room, one of those repellent boxy spaces filled with the kind of raw light you find in the upper reaches of modern buildings. It was designed to hold the paintings of the eponymous dauber, but thank God those have been stowed away. It’s the kind of place you would expect to find in Grope Tower, that offensive slab of concrete and glass that mars the redbrick gentility of the older Wainscott buildings surrounding it. (Why, I often wonder, has there been, in the long stretch between Gaudí and Gehry, such a paucity of architectural imagination?)

But I digress. The usual suspects, all getting a bit grayer, showed up for the meeting. Professor Thad Pilty, creator of the Diorama of Paleolithic Life that now graces Neanderthal Hall, has stayed on as a member. I don’t doubt his intentions, but I believe he’s being vigilant — and with good reason. Any changes in the models and the roles of the Neanderdroids, so to speak, still come in for close scrutiny by certain members of the committee.

Constance Brattle, the expert on blame, preened a little in accepting congratulations about the success of her latest