CRADLE OF SATURN BY JAMES P. HOGAN

Keene could tell there was more. “Go on,” he said, staring wonderingly.

Salio tossed out a hand idly, as if inviting Keene to take his pick. “Ratios of argon isotopes. Argon-40 is a decay product of potassium-40 and should increase over time—to a level comparable with Earth’s, you’d think, if Venus were as old as the Earth. But in fact it’s around fifteen times less. On the other hand, argon-36 is primordial and should have decayed to a level like Earth’s. It turns out to be hundreds of times more. Both figures are about what you would expect in a young planet’s original atmosphere. . . . And if you want, we could talk about the lack of erosion that you’d expect from dense, corrosive winds, and the absence of a regolith; the flatness of the surface; and the enormous lava flows with huge numbers of collapsed volcanic formations. The books say Olympus Mons on Mars is the biggest known volcano. I think they’re wrong. Venus is. The whole planet’s a cooling volcano.”

Keene had already accepted Salio as the kind of person who took his work seriously and would get his facts right. He sat back and massaged his brow. After a few seconds he looked back up. “I assume you can point me to sources for all this?” he said.

“Oh, sure,” Salio replied. “And I’ll include some on the Moon as well. Obviously, if something came close enough to the Earth to cause polar shifts and all kinds of devastation, the Moon should show signs of it as well.”

“And it does?”

“Yes—all the signs of something passing close by and subjecting it to intense tidal stress and heating on one side. The formation of the maria lava sheets is consistent with melting by tidal forces. If they were extrusions of molten material from billions of years ago, they ought to be covered by a deep layer of regolith. It’s practically nonexistent.”

Keene nodded slowly. He remembered reading somewhere that some of the scientists who planned the original Apollo missions had been worried that the landers might sink in the dust.

“The maria extend across one side in a huge great-circle swathe, which is what you’d expect from a passing encounter,” Salio went on. “And moonquakes are concentrated along two matching belts, six to eight hundred kilometers down. If the Moon has been dead for billions of years, there shouldn’t be any moonquakes. What it says is that something deformed the structure recently, and it’s still recovering. That would account for the bulge on the maria side too, which has been a puzzle for centuries. If it were primeval, it should have sunk under gravity long ago.” Salio spread his hands in a gesture of finality. “You’ve got volcanic activity that shouldn’t be there today. And the maria lavas have a coherent magnetism that means they cooled in the presence of a field far too strong to have been either terrestrial or solar. So where did it come from? . . . Do you want me to go on?”

“It’s okay, David. I’m getting the picture. I can check the rest out myself from your references.” Keene stood up and flexed his arms, as if it would help him digest all this information better. There was a chart on one of the walls showing a depiction of the Milky Way Galaxy. Somebody had added an arrow with the caption: You are here . . . or maybe somewhere near here—Werner Heisenberg. Salio sorted some of the papers on his desk, allowing Keene time to think.

At length, Keene turned. “So why hasn’t your thinking been channeled along the standard lines that we keep hearing?” he asked. “You seem pretty free to follow where your inclination leads. How come the difference?”

Salio’s intense look softened for the first time into something approaching a grin. “Well, it’s really what you might call a hobby interest, so nobody around here cares that much. We’re not part of the establishment. The concerns that run this institute are interested in technology as opposed to what you and I think of as science. Ruffling academic feathers isn’t something we have to worry about.” Salio licked his lips and indicated the door. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink of some kind? I’m going for one. But then I’ve been doing all the talking.”

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