Worlds in Chaos (29 page)

Vicki handed him the keys. He opened the passenger door for her and saw her in, then walked around and got in the driver’s side.

“I’m surprised they didn’t stay on in Washington longer,” Vicki said as they moved out. “I can see why you and Jerry would be out of it now. But doesn’t the legal mess up there need attention?”

“There wouldn’t be any point,” Keene said. “The Kronians aren’t interested. They’re going back—either to work on their theory or figure out how else they’re going to save their colony. I don’t know which. It depends on whether they’re genuine or not. The last I heard, Idorf was bringing the
Osiris
up to flight readiness.”

“Ouch. I didn’t realize it was so soon. It’s really that hopeless?”

Keene sighed. “Well, if you and I have trouble buying it, the establishment isn’t even going to want to hear. If they really are genuine, then Gallian is probably right in thinking that getting tangled up in legalities would just be a waste of time. He told Murray that no law firm would take Kronians on anyway. After Voler’s act, they’d be too worried about the bill being paid in faked money.”

Vicki smiled and snorted, but remained serious, staring out into the night in silence for a while. Then she said, “You know, there’s a lot more at stake here than I realized before. If the whole thing is a scam, the only thing that makes sense as to why the Kronians should have gone to such lengths is to get a share of the real power structure instead of being just an outpost on the fringes. Because if they’d gotten Earth behind them in this program they came here to sell, that’s what it would have meant. It does makes a crazy kind of sense.”

Keene shook his head. “It’s not crazy at all. That’s the jackpot question, Vicki. If it was a scam, and we bought it but the people we thought we were so much smarter than didn’t, Kronia is finished. But if it’s straight . . .” he sought for a phrase, “then they could be the next leap in the social evolution of the human species.”

Vicki fell silent again while she thought about it. “You don’t really believe them, though, do you, Lan?” she said finally. “The Kronians. Deep down, you’re not convinced.”

Keene looked across at her, surprised. “I said I don’t know what to believe. What makes you say that?”

Vicki shrugged lightly. “You’re here, back in Texas. You didn’t stay around to see them off. What does that tell you?”

They pulled into the parking lot in front of the Bandana and parked next to a pickup, where a group of a half dozen to a dozen youths and girls were standing around talking in the flickering glow from the neon signs. The sound of heavy-beat country music from inside greeted them as they climbed out of the car. The air was warm and close after Washington, but with a fresher scent coming in with the breeze off the coastal plain. Keene stretched his arms and looked up at the sky. All that could be seen of Athena now was a pale glow over the western horizon. Even though the time was approaching midnight, a matter of days ago it would have been a bright column climbing halfway up the sky. It meant that the tail was foreshortening as Athena came around from perihelion, swinging around like a lighthouse beam to sweep past Earth before Athena crossed Earth’s orbit in just a few weeks time. Between now and then it would become the most spectacular object to fill the sky ever in human history—unless, of course, the Kronians were right about the Venus encounter.

“How ya doin’?” one of the youths inquired genially as Keene walked around the car to join Vicki. He was tall and lean, wearing jeans with a plain shirt and vest, and had a white ten-gallon tipped to the back of his head.

“Doing okay,” Keene replied. “How about you guys?”

“Oh, just fine. It’s busy in there tonight, I’m tellin’ ya.”

“We’ll risk it.”

“Take care, now.”

Keene followed Vicki up a few steps up to the entry porch. “I think I’ll get a hat and some boots,” he said as he stepped ahead to hold the door. “The prettiest girls always seem to hang around with the cowboys.”

“Those could be your granddaughters,” Vicki told him. The noise intensified suddenly as they went through.

“Even better. . . . Which reminds me, have we heard anything more about what Karen’s doing?”

“Yes, she’s definitely moving to Dallas. It might be a bit sooner than she thought, though.”

“Um.” Keene stood looking around. The dance floor was filled, and a mostly male crowd was clustered in the vicinity of the bar. It wasn’t going to be easy to get a booth or a table in the front lounge. Keene looked across to the far side. “Maybe we could go through into the restaurant,” he said. “They look as if they’ve got more room in there. I never thought to ask, have you eaten?”

“I did earlier—but I could use something with a drink, sure.”

They made their way through the bar and dance area to the restaurant and grabbed a corner table just as another couple were vacating it. A waitress came to clear the dishes and give them menus, announced that she was Julie, and took an order for drinks. Keene decided he wasn’t up to a full meal or in the mood for a burger. The steak sandwich sounded good. Or maybe something lighter, like a salad. . . . “I suppose we get the recitation about the specials when she gets back,” he said, scanning the Mexican section. “Have you ever noticed? They don’t listen. ‘I’m Julie, your server. How are you today?’ And if you say, ‘Suicidal,’ it’s, ‘That’s nice. Our specials are . . .’ I’ll show you when she gets back. . . . But I guess it’s not really surprising when they have to say it probably a hundred times a day.” There was no response. He looked up and realized that Vicki wasn’t listening either, but was staring past him with a strange, fixated look on her face. “Hello?” he said. “Anyone home?”

Vicki answered after several seconds, seemingly from a million miles away. “Dinosaurs. . . .”

“What?” Keene waited, but that was all he got. He turned to see what she was staring at. On the wall behind him was an old movie poster from the nineties or thereabouts advertising something called
Jurassic Park
. It showed a tyrannosaurus, various characters and a truck, and a pack of smaller dinosaurs bounding across a grassy landscape. “What about them?” he asked, turning back.

Vicki remained distant, speaking almost to herself. “They couldn’t have existed unless conditions then were very different. Gravity had to have been smaller. The whole scale of the engineering was wrong. . . .” She focused back on Keene slowly. “Lan, how easy is it to figure an estimate of this in your head. Suppose Earth were orbiting a giant primary like Saturn just outside its Roche limit, with one side phase-locked toward it. How far out would that be? And at that distance, how much would the primary’s gravity reduce Earth’s surface gravity by on that side? Could it be enough to allow things like that to live and move around? And if Earth escaped, the gravity would increase. Could that explain why all of the giant forms died out, and the things that replaced them were smaller?”

Keene looked at the poster again, turned slowly back toward Vicki, but already he wasn’t seeing her. In his mind he was picturing a world of gigantic beasts, with enormous plants and trees, and a huge, mysterious globe ever-present in the sky. Gradually, he became aware of a voice saying, “ . . . with our own, homemade, Bandana peppercorn sauce. . . . Gee, I don’t know why I bother. Nobody listens. Would you like me to give you another couple of minutes?”

“Er, yes . . . please, Julie. Sorry, we were away on something else.” Keene picked up his beer, which had arrived unnoticed. “My God,” he breathed when Julie had gone.

“They
were
right!” Vicki said in an awed voice. “Earth was out there when those artifacts were made. The Kronians were right. . . . It means they’re genuine, Lan. Oh, my God, and look how they’ve been treated here. Even you didn’t believe them in the end, and came back. And they’re right. . . . I’d be going back too. Their science might get to the bottom of this. Here, it wouldn’t even get a hearing.”

Keene pushed himself back from the table, all thoughts of eating suddenly gone. “We have to talk to them about this,” he said. “I can’t do any figuring or call them with this noise. We need to go back to the office.”

“You’re going to call them now? It’ll be nearly one a.m. in Washington.”

“This can’t wait. They could be shipping out in the morning for all I know. Come on, we have to leave.”

Vicki nodded and rose without protest. Keene took a ten from his billfold and put it on the table. They met a confused Julie coming the other way when they were halfway back across the bar area. “Oh, you’re leaving? Was there something wrong?” she asked them.

“No, nothing to do with you. We’ve taken care of you,” Keene told her. “We’ll be back another time. Just a rain check.”

“It’s the story of my life,” Vicki murmured to Julie as she followed Keene toward the door.

23

Keene didn’t want to wake up the entire Kronian mission at this hour by calling the general number. So, reversing his earlier decision of keeping to a more formal level of dealings, he called the direct personal code that Sariena had given him. She answered sleepily in voice-only mode, obviously having already retired. Her first reaction was surprise. She clearly hadn’t been expecting to hear from Keene again—at least, not for a while.

“I’ll be honest,” Keene told her. He was in his office in the darkened Protonix building. Vicki sat listening in a chair pulled up to one end of the desk, which was littered with scrawled diagrams and calculations. “I left because I didn’t know what to believe. I had doubts; I admit it. It’s embarrassing to look back at, but it’s the way it was. What else can I say?”

“Well . . . I’m glad that you seem to be having second thoughts about us,” Sariena said. “And I don’t want to sound ungrateful that you called, or disinterested. But couldn’t it have waited until morning?”

“That could,” Keene agreed. “But there’s more that couldn’t. I’m with Vicki in the office in Corpus Christi.”

“In the
office
! At this time? . . .”

“I think she might have hit on something that clinches your case. It’s something she and I have talked about before, but there was never any reason to connect it with Saturn. The whole age of gigantism with the dinosaurs and everything—I don’t know if you’ve ever gone into the scaling implications, but nothing of those sizes could function in the conditions that exist on Earth today. The gravity is too strong. But suppose those conditions didn’t always exist. Suppose Earth were a phase-locked satellite, close-in to a giant primary. The primary’s attraction would reduce the value on the facing side. Combine that with what you’ve told us about Rhea. . . . It all fits.”

There was a long silence. Finally, Sariena said, “Let me put something on and get to a real phone. Stay on the line. I’ll be about a minute.”

“Seems like it got her attention,” Vicki murmured.

Keene looked across at her. “Boy, isn’t Robin going to be pleased.”

They waited. Then the screen of the desk unit brightened, and Sariena appeared against a hotel-room background, wearing a dark wraparound robe. She had evidently been doing some hurried thinking. “It appears to make so much sense,” she said, then mustered an awkward smile. “It’s
I
who ought to be apologizing, Lan. You
can
think like Kronians.”

“Thank Vicki,” Keene grunted. “Or, maybe we should all thank Robin.”

“Who’s Robin?”

“Vicki’s son. He’s fourteen. He’s the one who’s been telling us that dinosaurs couldn’t have existed.”

“Are you there, Vicki? Robin sounds like quite a person. Life must be interesting at your house.”

“Tell me about it,” Vicki called from where she was sitting. “I’m sorry things in Washington went the way they did.”

“Well, no doubt we shall survive it. What it tells us is that Kronian and Terran science can’t work together. And maybe that was something that needed to be seen and understood plainly. So perhaps, if for no other reason than that, the mission served its purpose. In the long run, it might be for the better in any case. These things that we’re still only touching on will lead to a whole rewriting of just about everything we thought we knew. We’re probably better off being free to pursue it in our own way.”