Bernard looked at him uncertainly. “I’m not with you, Jerry. Why should it escalate to anything like that? The Chironians don’t have anything in that league anyway.”
“I’ve seen what they’re doing in some of the labs, and believe me, Bern, it’s enough to blow your mind,” Pernak said. “Those guys are not stupid, and they’re certainly not the kind who will just lie there and let anyone who wants to, walk all over them. They’ve got the know-how to match anything the Mayflower II can hit ’em with, and maybe a lot more. They’ve known for well over twenty years what to expect. Well figure the rest out yourself.”
Bernard stared at his glass for a few seconds, then shook his head again. “I can’t buy it,” he said. “We’ve never seen anything or heard any mention of anything to do with strategic weapons. Where are they supposed to be?”
“We’ve only seen Franklin,” Pernak replied. “There’s a whole planet out there.”
“Ghosts in your head,” Bernard said. “Come on, Jerry, you’re a scientist. Where’s your evidence? Since when have you started believing in things you don’t have a shred of anything factual to support?”
“Gut-feel,” Pernak told him “The weapons have to exist. I tell you, I know how these people’s minds work.”
Jay stood up and left the room quietly. Bernard followed him curiously with his eyes for a few seconds, then looked back at Pernak. “But it’s a hell of a thin case for shipping everyone off to Iberia, isn’t it? And besides, if you’re right, then I’d have thought the best place to stay would be right here-all mixed up together with the Chironians. That way nobody’s likely to start throwing any big bombs around, right?” He turned his head to grin briefly at Jean. “I think Jerry made my point.”
Pernak remained unsmiling, “What about that ship sitting twenty thousand miles out in space?’ he said.
Before Bernard could reply. Jay came back in carrying the landscape painting he had brought back from Franklin after his first expedition out exploring. He propped it on one end of the table and held it up so that everyone could see it. “Do you notice anything unusual about that?” he asked them.
Pernak and Jean looked at each other, puzzled. Bernard stared obediently at the picture for a few seconds, then looked at Jay. “It looks like a nicely done painting of mountains,” he said. “Is this supposed to have something to do with what we’re talking about?’
Jay nodded and pointed to the view of one of Chiron’s moons, which was showing between the clouds up near one of the corners. “That’s Remus,” he said. “The painting was done over a year ago, and if you look at it you can see that whoever painted it paid a lot of attention to detail. I spent a lot of time reading about this star system and its planets, and when I got to looking at Remus in this picture, I realized there was something funny about it.” Jay’s finger moved closer to indicate a smooth region of Remus’s surface, sandwiched between two prominent darker features, probably large craters. ~’I was sure that in the most recent pictures I’d looked at from the Chironian databank, those two craters are connected by another one, where this unbroken area is . . . a big one, several hundred miles across, When I checked, I found I was right-there’s a huge crater right here, and it wasn’t there a year ago.”
Bernard frowned as the implication of what Jay was suggesting sank in. “Did you ask Jeeves about it?” he inquired.
“Yes, I did. Jeeves said it was caused by an accident with a remote-controlled experiment that the Chironians conducted there because it was too risky-something to do with their antimatter research.” Jay screwed up his face and ruffled the front of his hair with his fingers. “But that’s the kind of thing you’d expect somebody to say, isn’t it?, and Chironians don’t make a lot of mistakes.” He looked around the circle of appalled faces staring back at him. “But what you were saying made me think that that crater could he just what you’d get from testing some kind of big weapon