CRADLE OF SATURN BY JAMES P. HOGAN

Vicki and Alicia talked about science, history, life in America and in Poland, and personal reminiscences involving Keene and Cavan. Charlie and Cynthia continued getting to know one another, making an effort to forget the lives that were gone and swapping stories about Kronia as if deliberately rejecting any possibility that they might not be on the threshold of new lives about to begin. Charlie was also intrigued by Robin’s novel thoughts on such things as planetary evolution and biological origins, and they talked about the Venus encounter, the Joktanian discoveries of humans who had lived beneath a sky dominated by Saturn, and the science that would have to be rewritten.

“I was just starting to get to know a planetary scientist in Houston when . . . you know, it happened,” Robin said. “His name was Salio. He said the whole time scale that all the books teach was much too long—that it had been invented that way to justify theories that don’t hold up anyway. Everything happens much more quickly. It’s all going to have to be rethought. Is that what you think?”

“Well, I never thought about it much at all until the last few days,” Charlie answered. “But you saw how it happened: new oceans starting to open up, mountain chains lifting while we watched! And it must have gotten even worse after Athena closed in and we lost track. But the information that we’ve got will be keeping scientists busy for years. You saw how those lava sheets were pouring up out of the rifts in those last images?”

“Yes.” Robin shuddered at having to remember.

“I’ve been thinking about them ever since. There were huge electrical discharges going on between Athena and Earth all the time the sheets were spreading. I figure that’s what could have caused the magnetic stripe patterns on the old sea beds. The conventional line is that they were written over millions of years by unexplained reversals in the Earth’s field. Well, maybe it didn’t take millions of years at all. Maybe it was just days!”

Vicki was listening, looking skeptical. “Could it have cooled quickly enough in that short a time?” she asked dubiously.

“We don’t know what was going on down there under all that cloud,” Charlie pointed out. “Hundreds of feet of ocean had been boiled into the atmosphere. Suppose that under the smoke cover it precipitated out again as ice. Maybe that could cool a surface skin sufficiently to retain magnetism. I don’t know. I haven’t analyzed the numbers yet.”

Keene clipped to an anchor line on the wall and stretched out to rest, tired of following it all. Or was it the carbon dioxide level? He looked around the cabin and yawned. Most of the others were settling down except Dash, who was busy with his narrative, and Cavan and Alicia up front, talking in low voices. . . . And an irritating clanging that he’d just noticed.

It stopped for a few seconds, then started again.

“Is that you, Legermount?” Keene grumbled irritably. “Stop rattling the cage. We’re trying to settle down.”

“It’s not him this time. He’s out of it,” Reynolds’s voice mumbled.

“Then what?” Keene straightened away from the wall, alert suddenly.

Colby turned and showed his empty palms. “It’s not me.” Joe looked up from something he had been fiddling with close to one of the lights and shook his head.

It came again: Clang, clang, clang. . . . Clang, clang, clang. . . .

Keene’s head jerked around sharply. There was nobody in the direction that it was coming from. . . . Just the entry hatch. His and Joe’s eyes met for a second.

“Oh my God!” Joe whispered. He tore free from his anchor line and hurled himself forward to the flight deck section with Keene following.

“Hallelujah!” Reynolds murmured.

Cavan and Alicia were already moving out of the crew positions to make room. Joe’s trembling fingers raced over the touchpad to activate the imagers; Keene powered up the controls for the external cameras. A screen came to life showing a drifting starfield as the shuttle turned. Keene rotated the camera outward to get the view abeam of the ship. And, slowly, the most beautiful sight he had ever seen moved into the frame: one of the Osiris’s surface landers riding parallel perhaps half a mile off.

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