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?”