“What led you to think of Mars?” Charlie Hu asked curiously.
“Various lines in the Sanskrit texts that fit too neatly to be a coincidence,” Farzhin replied. He smiled faintly. “But one of the things that first pointed us in that direction was Robin.”
Sariena looked puzzled. “You mean Vicki’s son?”
“Robin?” Charlie repeated.
“He was in one of my classes,” Farzhin said. “Some time after he and Vicki arrived in Kropotkin, he came to me with ancient depictions of the deity Shiva that we had been discussing, and pointed out how they could describe features on the surface of Mars. And he was right. The similarities were uncanny.”
“It’s the kind of thing he comes up with.” Vicki sighed resignedly, at the same time shrugging in a way that was almost apologetic.
“We’ll show you some examples later of what I mean,” Farzhin said. “They fit with things in the Egyptian, Sumerian, and Greek accounts too.”
“But this is where we need your input,” Vicki told Sariena and Charlie. “Why I wanted you to come here and talk about this. You’re the orbital mechanics specialists. We’ve just been looking at ancient mythologies—and maybe reading too much into them. Tell us if something along the lines of what we think happened is possible.”
Sariena and Charlie glanced at each other. Clearly, they were interested. “Try us,” Sariena invited.
Vicki looked at Farzhin, but he nodded for her to carry on. She began, “Venus came out of Jupiter on a highly eccentric orbit—possibly sun-grazing, like Athena. After the two close flybys that scorched Earth, it commenced a series of interactions with Mars, which originally occupied an orbit inside Earth’s.”
“Inside Earth’s orbit?” Charlie repeated, raising his eyebrows. Farzhin and Vicki nodded. Sariena stared intently but didn’t interrupt. Vicki continued, “This is what we want your opinion on. Could the two bodies have exchanged angular momentum in such a way as to progressively lift Mars to more distant orbits, at the same time reducing and circularizing Venus’s to an inferior one?”
She watched Charlie in particular as she said this. One of the reasons why Terran astronomers had opposed the young-Venus theory so strongly was the problem of how it could have circularized its orbit in a mere few thousand years. The Kronians had proposed two mechanisms for accomplishing this: the effect of electrical forces in the modified space environment induced by Venus’s electrically active plasma tail; and the gravitational pumping of a hot, plastically deformable body to reduce tidal stresses. Charlie had never been convinced that these on their own would be sufficient, maintaining that something else was needed in addition. Well, Vicki was saying in effect, maybe here it is.
Charlie was staring back at her with the incredulous half-smile of somebody who wasn’t quite sure whether or not he wanted to believe it. He looked sideways at Sariena in an unspoken question. “It’s an intriguing thought,” she said. Evidently, she had no such problem.
Farzhin came back in at this point. “From what we can make of the Vedic records, it seems that some kind of recurring pattern established itself, in which the three bodies kept coming back into mutual proximity.” He made an appealing gesture at the two planetary scientists. “Could something like that happen?”
Sariena pursed her lips. “A three-way resonance? Yes, it’s possible in principle. But whether or not this particular configuration meets the necessary conditions would depend on the numbers. We’d need to set up a simulation with a credible range of limits and run the calculations.”
“Would you do that for us?” Farzhin asked.
“Of course . . . How long do you think this pattern lasted? Have you any idea?”
“Almost two thousand years . . . until the beginnings of the Roman Period, about 2700 b.p. So the visitation that brought the Exodus plagues and afflictions wasn’t by Venus but by Mars, which if we’re right, had by that time already been interacting with Earth for around sixteen hundred years. Although these approaches heralded times of trouble and destruction that the priests and prophets of many religions learned to read, they didn’t cause anything like the global devastation that Venus had earlier—”
“And Athena,” Vicki put in.