Worlds in Chaos (7 page)

It would have felt too much like giving up. Big changes were never easy, and always they depended on the rare kind of people who seemed capable of believing in anything except the impossible. And besides, he liked to watch sunsets too—and to scuffle through autumn leaves, eat out at a good waterside restaurant, and lie on beaches. Why should he have to leave all that to people he disagreed with when he could fight them for it? And right now, the prospects for finally getting official recognition that expansion outward was imperative to the security of Earth’s culture looked better than ever. He wasn’t prepared to become an exile just yet.

The colony’s original intent had been to maintain a cooperative relationship with Earth based on some kind of exchange of Kronian technological innovations in return for products and materials that Earth could supply more conveniently. But when Kronia went on to realize in twenty years advanced propulsion systems that Earth had put on hold, attitudes on Earth became more wary, causing the Kronians to withdraw and manage their own affairs. Mondel and Waltz both died together in a craft that broke up on reentry over Titan eight years previously, making them instant martyrs of the movement. But by that time Kronia was established and virtually self-sufficient. The Tapapeque complex was handed over to the Guatemalan government, who maintained shuttle operations to ferry up departing emigrants when a Kronian ship was in orbit, and at other times leased surplus capacity to various national and private interests, providing a welcome supplement to the country’s income.

Did Keene really believe that a bunch of mavericks and misfits that most of the world dismissed as deranged or incomprehensible could reroute human destiny? “Sure,” he told innumerable reporters and interviewers who called him throughout the rest of the evening. “Just the same as we can run rings around the Air Force.”

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.