Minutes to Burn

"I am sorry. It is hard for me to be in the lab now, you see." Juan fid-dled with his wedding ring nervously, rotating the gold band around his thick knuckle. Despite his warmth, he exuded a gentle sadness. "I do not know how much longer it will exist. There is no funding. I've had to let go my assistants. Many of the experiments will not be finished. And the islands are in bad shape, my friends. I was doing a longitudinal study, tracking a population of masked boobies on Espanola…"Heshook his head. "But with the feral goats taking over the past few years…"

"They're bad?" Cameron asked. "The goats?"

"Animals aren't good or bad. They're just sometimes in the wrong place. If they don't belong, they can threaten the entire ecosystem. Gala-pagos are especially fragile. Many of the animals evolved on the islands with no enemies, so they have no way to contend with predators if they arrive. And man has brought many predators, most of them seemingly benign, protected by their very…how do you say?…banality. Puppies and kittens, hamsters…all killers. All capable of wiping out whole pop-ulations of endemic species. Like the goats on Espanola with my masked boobies…eating the eggs, the chicks…" He sighed heavily. "All dead. I received a report from a friend at the Darwin Station telling me not to bother coming back." He tapped his hand against the corner of a nearby gravestone, his wedding band making a soft clicking noise. "There's so much we've lost." He looked away, his eyes growing moist.

Tank dug something out of his teeth with a finger.

"We really should get back," Rex said.

Cameron reached out and touched Juan gently on the sleeve. "I'm sorry," she said.

Juan's smile was a faint, dying thing. He looked back up at the hillside. "Those graves up there, those are the graves of the poor." Evidently, the families of the dead buried on the hills couldn't afford marble; the gravesites were decorated with bright fabrics and flowers. A number of these plots were recent additions, with dark, freshly turned soil. "So much death, so quickly."

"Let's be honest," Rex said. "This is nothing new. Life has always been cheap here. Children succumbing to preventable diseases, poison-ous snakes in the Oriente, buses colliding on windy pueblo roads. Death happens here."

Juan shook his head, studying the fresh graves in the hills. "Not like this."

A church bell tolled somewhere in the distance, and Rex glanced down at his watch. "I need to get back and check in with Donald." He shoved a slip of paper with the flight time and survey procedures into Juan's hand. "See you tomorrow."

Juan nodded and walked off a short ways, sitting on the ledge of a particularly broad mausoleum. Cameron found Rex's abruptness in the face of Juan's grief to be offensive. "Tank'll escort you back," she said. "I'll be along in a minute."

Tank followed Rex into the darkness. Cameron walked over and pulled herself up on the ledge beside Juan. The echo of the church bells lingered in the darkness. The air was thick, humid, foreign. It smelled sharply of bark, burning wood, and stale food.

"I come here often at night," Juan said softly.

Cameron gave him the silence, listening to the rush of cars beyond the high cemetery wall.

Juan pulled off his wedding band and set it on his knee. He regarded it for a few moments. "I lost my wife," he finally said. "And my baby girl. I was teaching at Universidad when the apartment building collapsed. That was…that was almost three years ago, but still I feel it sharply on quiet nights like this." He picked up the ring, tilted it so that he could catch the blur of his reflection in the gold, then slid it back on his finger.

When she realized that he was crying, Cameron wasn't sure what to do. She popped a stick of gum in her mouth and worked it over, waiting uncomfortably through the silence. Juan finally wiped his cheeks and raised his head.

"I am sorry. You do not need this. There's just something in your eyes, some softness that lets me talk where I haven't before. That's unusual for Americans. They often come down here and see our ways and the vio-lence, and think us primitive." He shook his head. "Death is part of our culture. During the conquest, half our population was killed by disease, civil war. But no country can endure this kind of disruption, this kind of…" With a sweeping gesture, he indicated the cemetery before them. "Loss."

A man stumbled by, his head lowered, carrying an armful of flowers. When he passed Cameron and Juan, he paused and looked up at them. Cameron couldn't make out his face, because he was wearing a hat pulled low over his eyes. "No, gracias," she said, waving him away.

The man spoke back to her in a soft but angry voice. He gestured at her several times, and she felt for the pistol, just to make sure it was still there.

"What did he say?" she asked Juan when the man finished speaking.