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is now."
Keene looked at her, coming back from his own line of thought. His brow
creased. "How?"
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"I don't know. But if it wasn't, dinosaurs couldn't have existed. Yet they
did. So what other explanation is there?"
Robin massaged the hair at the front of his head in the way he did when he had
some way-out suggestion to offer. "I can think of one. Maybe it wasn't Earth's
gravity that was different," he said.
"Huh?" Keene frowned. "What else's, then? I mean, where else are we talking
about?"
"You know how what wiped the dinosaurs out was supposed to be an asteroid or
something. . . ."
"Uh-huh."
"Well, suppose they weren't on Earth at all before it hit, the way everyone
assumes. Suppose they came here with it."
"Came with what? You mean with the asteroid?"
"Yes or whatever it was." Robin made an appealing gesture. "If Earth's gravity
was too big for them to have existed, then they must have existed on something
else. That's logic, right? Well, suppose the something else was whatever Earth
got hit by. It doesn't have to be an asteroid like we think of them you know,
just a chunk of rock. It could have been, maybe, like something that had an
atmosphere they could live in."
"Wouldn't it need to have been pretty huge, though, to have an atmosphere?"
Keene queried.
"Not necessarily, if it was cold with dense gases. Titan has an atmosphere. .
. . And in any case, the whole thing didn't have to hit the Earth. Maybe it
got close enough to break up, and only part of it did."
Keene's first impulse was to scoff, but he checked himself. Wasn't that just
the kind of automatic reaction that he was having so much trouble with from
the regular scientific establishment? He could see reasons for not buying the
suggestion, but simply the fact that it conflicted with prior beliefs wasn't
good enough to be one of them. Robin was trying. Keene paused long enough not
to be dismissive.
"What about the impact?" he asked. "These things explode when they enter the
atmosphere, like that big one over Siberia, oh . . . whenever it was. Or
imagine what must have happened when that hole in Arizona was dug. You're
talking about bones being preserved intact enough to be put together again.
Eggs. . . . And we've even got footprints. Would they really be likely to
survive something like that?"
"That was what I wondered when Robin put it to me," Vicki commented.
"Maybe, if they were encased inside chunks of rock that were large enough say
that came down across a whole area like a blanket," Robin persisted. "The air
might act as a cushion."
"So you're saying they might not actually have lived here at all," Keene said,
finally getting the point.
"Exactly. They lived on . . . whatever." Robin looked from him back to Vicki
as if to say, well, you asked for suggestions.
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Keene sat back and snorted wonderingly. Ingenious, he had to grant. But being
ingenious didn't automatically mean being right. There was still that other
small factor known as "evidence" to be considered.
"I don't know, but I'll tell you what I'll do," he said. "I'll put it to a
couple of the planetary scientists that I know. We'll see what they say."
Robin deserved that much.
"Really?" Robin looked pleased. "Hey, that would be great!"
"Sure. Why not?"
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After breakfast they watched a replay of the Kronian landing and motorcade
into Washington from the day before. Seeing the Kronians alongside native
Terrans for the first time brought home something that Keene had never really
registered before: they were tall. Sariena was a natural for the cameras to
single out for close-ups, and she came over well when taking her turn to
respond to the welcoming address by the President. Keene noted that the
Kronians remained seated, and all of them wore sunglasses outside.
Keene and Robin spent an hour experimenting with a new electronic paint board
that Robin had just added to his computer. Playing father figure was good for [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]