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6

Southeast of Corpus Christi, a bridge connected across an inlet to a peninsula called Flour Bluff, at the end of which lay the Naval Air Station. Beyond the peninsula, a causeway continued to Padre Island, one of the chain of sandy offshore islands fringing the Gulf shore from west Florida to Mexico. That was where Vicki lived, in an aging but well-kept and homey single-family house that she had acquired when she moved from the northeast to join Keene after he set up Protonix. Robin's father, a Navy man, had been killed some years before in a political bombing incident in the Middle East. Keene's slipping into the role of family friend and father substitute filled a vacant space in both their lives, as well as making a big difference for Robin.

He arrived shortly before ten, after a twenty-minute drive from his townhouse on Ocean Drive, facing the Bay on the southern side of the city, clad in a sport shirt with slacks that he could throw a jacket over for the press conference later. Vicki greeted him in a weekend casual top and shorts. Robin joined them, and they sat down to breakfast in the glass-enclosed summer room that had been added as an extension of the kitchen. Keene had always thought Robin a great kid with a natural ability to get along with anybody, who deserved to have known a natural father. He was fair like his mother, although his hair was more yellow, and his skin, unlike hers, kept a year-round tan. His features seemed to alternate between deep frowns when he was intent on something, to wide-eyed vistas of distant blankness when he was off into the realms of . . . wherever he went. Keene sometimes wished he had kept a notebook to list the questions Robin had come up with in the time they had known each other. For a while, someone at Robin's school had formed the opinion that he had an attention-deficiency problem, but Vicki thought it was more the result of a communications failing somewhere; any kind of communications channel has two ends. It hadn't been Keene's place to interfere, but in his own mind he had agreed with her. He knew from his own experience that Robin was capable of fearsome and sustained concentration on things that interested him.

Besides her job with Protonix, Vicki had a sideline creating advertising graphics at home. When she wasn't breadwinning or single-parenting, she managed to find time for a mix of interests that never ceased to amaze Keene, ranging from biology and medieval history to pen-and-ink drawing and decorating, in between which she desk-published the newsletter for a local church group, made sure that Robin fed and looked after his menagerie, and amassed books on seemingly every subject imaginable. She believed nothing on TV or in newspapers that was of interest, and had no interest in the things she did believe. When she seriously wanted to know something, she dug and pestered until she found sources that were reliable, or she went to someone who knew. She had first entered Keene's world of awareness through tracking him down when they were both at Harvard, to answer questions she had about the electromagnetic properties of space after finding the theories of dark matter to account for anomalous motions of galaxies unconvincing.

"The hounds are baying," she told Keene, referring to reactions that had been building up to Amspace's stunt the day before. "But we knew that would happen. Have you caught much of it?"

Keene shook his head. "I've been screening those out. That's what Amspace has a PR department for. No doubt I'll get my share this afternoon. Who's saying what?"

"The EA secretary was bilious," Vicki said—the name of the former EPA had been shortened, after some thought the original form sounded too alarmist. "He called it criminally irresponsible and wants a formal ban on space nukes to be declared internationally."

"He's got an image to keep up for the faithful," Keene replied. "It'll never happen. The Defense people need to keep an option open to match the Chinese if they have to, and the Chinese will never buy it."

Robin attended to his eggs and bacon, his mind roaming in whatever realms it turned to when grown-ups got into politics. Keene watched Vicki refilling the coffee cups and then let his gaze wander over the kitchen, searching for a change of subject. Sam, the household dog, lay in the doorway watching him with one eye open, still unable, quite, to figure out whether or not Keene belonged. Labrador and collie contributions were discernible, with various other ingredients stirred into the mix. Vicki had originally christened him "Samurai," but he just didn't have the image. The parakeets squawked noisily in their cage from the kitchen beyond.

There were a few more pictures and drawings adorning the wall. A model of a tyrannosaurus had appeared on top of the refrigerator. "Oh, what's this?" Keene murmured. He remembered what Vicki had said at the office the previous evening. "Is Robin going through his dinosaur phase? I guess he's at just about the right age." Robin returned immediately from wherever, registering interest.

Vicki nodded with a sigh. "His room is practically papered with prints that he's downloaded. It's like one of those science-fiction-movie theme parks. I think he must have checked out every book on them in the local library."

"I hope that won't mean more additions to the private zoo, CR," Keene said, looking at Robin. Keene had dubbed him Christopher Robin, after the character from the British children's books.

Robin appeared to mull over the possibility, then shook his head. "Too much cleaning up after. And they'd probably bother the neighbors."

"What's this I hear about them not being real?" Keene asked. "Has everyone been imagining things all these years?"

"Oh, did Mom tell you about that?"

"Right."

"Theoretically they ought to be impossible," Robin agreed. "They couldn't exist." Keene waited, then showed an open palm invitingly. Robin went on, "Well, you're an engineer, Lan. It follows from the basic scaling laws. The weight of an animal or anything increases as the cube of its size, right?"

Keene nodded. "Okay."

Robin shrugged. "But strength depends on the cross-section of muscles, which only increases as the square. So as animals get bigger, their strength-to-weight ratio decreases. All this stuff you read about insects carrying x times their own body weight around isn't really any big deal. At their size you'd be able to walk around holding a piano over your head with one hand."

Keene glanced at Vicki with raised eyebrows. "Robin's been doing his homework." Keene was familiar with the principle but had never had reason to dwell on its implications regarding dinosaurs.

"That's Robin," Vicki said.

Keene looked back at Robin. "Go on," he said.

"As you get bigger, it works the other way. Do you know who the strongest humans in the world are?"

"Hmm. . . . Oh, how about an Olympic power lifter?" Keene guessed.

"Right on. Now, take one, say, doing dead-lift or a squat. The most you'd be talking about would be what—around thirteen hundred pounds including body weight?"

Keene shrugged. "If you say so. It sounds as if you've checked it out."

"Oh, he has," Vicki threw in.

"Now scale him up to brontosaurus size, and his maximum lifting capability works out at under fifty thousand pounds," Robin said. "But the brontosaurus weighed in at seventy thousand; the supersaur even more than that, and the ultrasaur at—would you believe this—three hundred sixty thousand pounds!"

"My God." Keene sat back in his chair, staring hard as the implication finally hit him. "Are you sure they were as heavy as that?"

Robin nodded. "I got those estimates from a guy called Young, who's Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the museum in Toronto. And I checked it with somebody else at the Smithsonian, too." It sounded as if Robin had been picking up tips from Vicki. His expression remained serious. "But the point is, the strongest man in the world wouldn't have been able to stand under his own weight, let alone move—and that's when you're talking about practically being made of muscle. These other things were all digestive system. So how did they do it? See what I mean—they couldn't exist."

Keene looked across at Vicki quizzically. It was a challenge for any engineer. Vicki tossed out her free hand and shook her head. "Maybe they had better muscles," Keene offered as a starter, looking back at Robin.

Robin was clearly prepared for it. "No, that doesn't work. The maximum force that a muscle can produce is set by the size of the thick and thin filaments and the number of cross-bridges between them," he replied. "It turns out they're about the same for a mouse as for an elephant—and it holds true across all the vertebrates. That means the only gain you get from larger size is what comes from the bigger cross section."

"There's no increase in efficiency," Keene checked.

Robin shook his head. "In fact, it goes the other way. Gets worse."

"Okay. . . ." Keene searched for another way to play devil's advocate. "They were aquatic. I saw a picture in a book once that showed them snorkeling around in lakes and swamps."

"Nobody believes that anymore," Robin countered. "They don't show any aquatic adaptations. Their teeth were worn down from eating hard land vegetation, not soggy watery stuff. They left tracks and footprints. That doesn't happen under water."

"Did he find all this out by himself?" Keene asked, turning back to Vicki.

"I helped him with some of it," she told him—which Keene had guessed. "But it does seem to be a real mystery—a big one. You just don't hear about it." She made a vague gesture. "On top of the things Robin's mentioned, you've also got the problem with the circulatory system of the sauropods—those were the ones that were all neck and tail. How did they get the blood up to their brains? A giraffe's head might be twenty feet up, and it needs pressure that would rupture the vascular system of any other animal. Giraffes do it by having thick arterial walls and a tight skin that works like a pressure suit. But a sauropod's brain was at fifty or sixty feet. The pressure would have needed to be three or four times that of a giraffe. The people who've studied it just can't see it as credible."

"Hmm. Maybe they didn't hold their necks upright, then," Keene tried. "What if they walked around with them horizontal? . . . No." He shook his head, not even believing it himself. What would have been the point of having them? And in any case, even without knowing the exact numbers, his instinct told him that the stress generated at the base would be more than any biological tissue could take.

Robin concluded, "And then you've got things like the pterosaurs that somehow flew with body weights of three hundred fifty pounds, and predatory birds of up to two hundred. The most you get today is about twenty-five, with the Siberian Berkut hunting eagle. Breeders have been trying to improve on that for centuries, but that's as far as you can go and still get a viable flier."

Keene looked at Vicki. "Any bigger, and you end up with a klutz," she said. "The big gliding birds like albatrosses aren't good flyers. They often need repeat attempts to take off, and they can be real clowns on landing."

Robin nodded. "That's why they're called gooney birds."

Vicki sat back and finished her coffee while Keene thought about what she and Robin had said. There didn't seem any further line to pursue. "And the people in the business know these things?" he said finally. Of course they did. It was more for something to say.

"Well, we sure didn't make them up," Vicki replied. "I guess they put it out of their minds and get on with cleaning up the bones and fitting them together or whatever. So what's new?"

It was Athena all over again—the reason Keene had quit physics to return to engineering. Most workers just got on with the day-to-day job that brought in the grants and kept the paychecks coming, without worrying too much about what it all meant. It was safer to write papers and textbooks about things that everyone agreed they knew than go dragging up awkward questions whose answers might contradict what people in other departments were saying they knew. Before long the whole edifice would be threatened, and the result would be trouble from all directions.

"There must have been something vastly different about the whole reality that existed then," Vicki said distantly. "I don't mean just with the dinosaurs, but about everything: the plants, the insects, the marine life. Walk around the museums and look at the reconstructions. It was all on a different scale of engineering. You can't relate it to the world we know today. Something universal has altered since then. And the only thing that makes sense is gravity. Earth's gravity must have been a lot less back in those times than it is now."

Keene looked at her, coming back from his own line of thought. His brow creased. "How?"

"I don't know. But if it wasn't, dinosaurs couldn't have existed. Yet they did. So what other explanation is there?"

Robin massaged the hair at the front of his head in the way he did when he had some way-out suggestion to offer. "I can think of one. Maybe it wasn't Earth's gravity that was different," he said.

"Huh?" Keene frowned. "What else's, then? I mean, where else are we talking about?"

"You know how what wiped the dinosaurs out was supposed to be an asteroid or something. . . ."

"Uh-huh."

"Well, suppose they weren't on Earth at all before it hit, the way everyone assumes. Suppose they came here with it."

"Came with what? You mean with the asteroid?"

"Yes—or whatever it was." Robin made an appealing gesture. "If Earth's gravity was too big for them to have existed, then they must have existed on something else. That's logic, right? Well, suppose the something else was whatever Earth got hit by. It doesn't have to be an asteroid like we think of them—you know, just a chunk of rock. It could have been, maybe, like something that had an atmosphere they could live in."

"Wouldn't it need to have been pretty huge, though, to have an atmosphere?" Keene queried.

"Not necessarily, if it was cold with dense gases. Titan has an atmosphere. . . . And in any case, the whole thing didn't have to hit the Earth. Maybe it got close enough to break up, and only part of it did."

Keene's first impulse was to scoff, but he checked himself. Wasn't that just the kind of automatic reaction that he was having so much trouble with from the regular scientific establishment? He could see reasons for not buying the suggestion, but simply the fact that it conflicted with prior beliefs wasn't good enough to be one of them. Robin was trying. Keene paused long enough not to be dismissive.

"What about the impact?" he asked. "These things explode when they enter the atmosphere, like that big one over Siberia, oh . . . whenever it was. Or imagine what must have happened when that hole in Arizona was dug. You're talking about bones being preserved intact enough to be put together again. Eggs. . . . And we've even got footprints. Would they really be likely to survive something like that?"

"That was what I wondered when Robin put it to me," Vicki commented.

"Maybe, if they were encased inside chunks of rock that were large enough—say that came down across a whole area like a blanket," Robin persisted. "The air might act as a cushion."

"So you're saying they might not actually have lived here at all," Keene said, finally getting the point.

"Exactly. They lived on . . . whatever." Robin looked from him back to Vicki as if to say, well, you asked for suggestions.

Keene sat back and snorted wonderingly. Ingenious, he had to grant. But being ingenious didn't automatically mean being right. There was still that other small factor known as "evidence" to be considered.

"I don't know, but I'll tell you what I'll do," he said. "I'll put it to a couple of the planetary scientists that I know. We'll see what they say." Robin deserved that much.

"Really?" Robin looked pleased. "Hey, that would be great!"

"Sure. Why not?"

 

After breakfast they watched a replay of the Kronian landing and motorcade into Washington from the day before. Seeing the Kronians alongside native Terrans for the first time brought home something that Keene had never really registered before: they were tall. Sariena was a natural for the cameras to single out for close-ups, and she came over well when taking her turn to respond to the welcoming address by the President. Keene noted that the Kronians remained seated, and all of them wore sunglasses outside.

Keene and Robin spent an hour experimenting with a new electronic paint board that Robin had just added to his computer. Playing father figure was good for Keene's self-image in enabling him to claim the capacity to be socially responsible if he chose. All in all, it was a relaxed, easygoing morning—the perfect way to recharge after the past week and prepare for the equally demanding one ahead. And then, just as Keene was getting ready to leave to go back over to the city for the press conference, Leo Cavan called from Washington, rerouted from Keene's private number, with some news he said he'd rather not go into just now, but which had to do with the Kronians. Was Keene still planning on coming up to D.C. first thing the coming week? Keene confirmed that he was—probably flying up tomorrow night. Fine, Cavan said. Could he make it earlier in the day so that they could meet for dinner? Sure, Keene agreed. It sounded important. Cavan said yes, he thought it was. And Cavan wasn't the kind of person who did things without good reason.

 

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Framed


Title: Cradle of Saturn
Author: James P. Hogan
ISBN: 0-671-57813-8 0-671-57866-9
Copyright: © 1999 by James P. Hogan
Publisher: Baen Books