Worlds in Chaos Read online

  “He’s got an image to keep up for the faithful,” Keene replied. “It’ll never happen. The Defense people need to keep an option open to match the Chinese if they have to, and the Chinese will never buy it.”

  Robin attended to his eggs and bacon, his mind roaming in whatever realms it turned to when grown-ups got into politics. Keene watched Vicki refilling the coffee cups and then let his gaze wander over the kitchen, searching for a change of subject. Sam, the household dog, lay in the doorway watching him with one eye open, still unable, quite, to figure out whether or not Keene belonged. Labrador and collie contributions were discernible, with various other ingredients stirred into the mix. Vicki had originally christened him “Samurai,” but he just didn’t have the image. The parakeets squawked noisily in their cage from the kitchen beyond.

  There were a few more pictures and drawings adorning the wall. A model of a tyrannosaurus had appeared on top of the refrigerator. “Oh, what’s this?” Keene murmured. He remembered what Vicki had said at the office the previous evening. “Is Robin going through his dinosaur phase? I guess he’s at just about the right age.” Robin returned immediately from wherever, registering interest.

  Vicki nodded with a sigh. “His room is practically papered with prints that he’s downloaded. It’s like one of those science-fiction-movie theme parks. I think he must have checked out every book on them in the local library.”

  “I hope that won’t mean more additions to the private zoo, CR,” Keene said, looking at Robin. Keene had dubbed him Christopher Robin, after the character from the British children’s books.

  Robin appeared to mull over the possibility, then shook his head. “Too much cleaning up after. And they’d probably bother the neighbors.”

  “What’s this I hear about them not being real?” Keene asked. “Has everyone been imagining things all these years?”

  “Oh, did Mom tell you about that?”

  “Right.”

  “Theoretically they ought to be impossible,” Robin agreed. “They couldn’t exist.” Keene waited, then showed an open palm invitingly. Robin went on, “Well, you’re an engineer, Lan. It follows from the basic scaling laws. The weight of an animal or anything increases as the cube of its size, right?”

  Keene nodded. “Okay.”

  Robin shrugged. “But strength depends on the cross-section of muscles, which only increases as the square. So as animals get bigger, their strength-to-weight ratio decreases. All this stuff you read about insects carrying x times their own body weight around isn’t really any big deal. At their size you’d be able to walk around holding a piano over your head with one hand.”

  Keene glanced at Vicki with raised eyebrows. “Robin’s been doing his homework.” Keene was familiar with the principle but had never had reason to dwell on its implications regarding dinosaurs.

  “That’s Robin,” Vicki said.

  Keene looked back at Robin. “Go on,” he said.

  “As you get bigger, it works the other way. Do you know who the strongest humans in the world are?”

  “Hmm. . . . Oh, how about an Olympic power lifter?” Keene guessed.

  “Right on. Now, take one, say, doing dead-lift or a squat. The most you’d be talking about would be what—around thirteen hundred pounds including body weight?”

  Keene shrugged. “If you say so. It sounds as if you’ve checked it out.”

  “Oh, he has,” Vicki threw in.

  “Now scale him up to brontosaurus size, and his maximum lifting capability works out at under fifty thousand pounds,” Robin said. “But the brontosaurus weighed in at seventy thousand; the supersaur even more than that, and the ultrasaur at—would you believe this—three hundred sixty thousand pounds!”

  “My God.” Keene sat back in his chair, staring hard as the implication finally hit him. “Are you sure they were as heavy as that?”

  Robin nodded. “I got those estimates from a guy called Young, who’s Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the museum in Toronto. And I checked it with somebody else at the Smithsonian, too.” It sounded as if Robin had been picking up tips from Vicki. His expression remained serious. “But the point is, the strongest man in the world wouldn’t have been able to stand under his own weight, let alone move—and that’s when you’re talking about practically being made of muscle. These other things were all digestive system. So how did they do it? See what I mean—they couldn’t exist.”

  Keene looked across at Vicki quizzically. It was a challenge for any engineer. Vicki tossed out her free hand and shook her head. “Maybe they had better muscles,” Keene offered as a starter, looking back at Robin.

  Robin was clearly prepared for it. “No, that doesn’t work. The maximum force that a muscle can produce is set by the size of the thick and thin filaments and the number of cross-bridges between them,” he replied. “It turns out they’re about the same for a mouse as for an elephant—and it holds true across all the vertebrates. That means the only gain you get from larger size is what comes from the bigger cross section.”

  “There’s no increase in efficiency,” Keene checked.

  Robin shook his head. “In fact, it goes the other way. Gets worse.”

  “Okay. . . .” Keene searched for another way to play devil’s advocate. “They were aquatic. I saw a picture in a book once that showed them snorkeling around in lakes and swamps.”

  “Nobody believes that anymore,” Robin countered. “They don’t show any aquatic adaptations. Their teeth were worn down from eating hard land vegetation, not soggy watery stuff. They left tracks and footprints. That doesn’t happen under water.”

  “Did he find all this out by himself?” Keene asked, turning back to Vicki.

  “I helped him with some of it,” she told him—which Keene had guessed. “But it does seem to be a real mystery—a big one. You just don’t hear about it.” She made a vague gesture. “On top of the things Robin’s mentioned, you’ve also got the problem with the circulatory system of the sauropods—those were the ones that were all neck and tail. How did they get the blood up to their brains? A giraffe’s head might be twenty feet up, and it needs pressure that would rupture the vascular system of any other animal. Giraffes do it by having thick arterial walls and a tight skin that works like a pressure suit. But a sauropod’s brain was at fifty or sixty feet. The pressure would have needed to be three or four times that of a giraffe. The people who’ve studied it just can’t see it as credible.”

  “Hmm. Maybe they didn’t hold their necks upright, then,” Keene tried. “What if they walked around with them horizontal? . . . No.” He shook his head, not even believing it himself. What would have been the point of having them? And in any case, even without knowing the exact numbers, his instinct told him that the stress generated at the base would be more than any biological tissue could take.

  Robin concluded, “And then you’ve got things like the pterosaurs that somehow flew with body weights of three hundred fifty pounds, and predatory birds of up to two hundred. The most you get today is about twenty-five, with the Siberian Berkut hunting eagle. Breeders have been trying to improve on that for centuries, but that’s as far as you can go and still get a viable flier.”

  Keene looked at Vicki. “Any bigger, and you end up with a klutz,” she said. “The big gliding birds like albatrosses aren’t good flyers. They often need repeat attempts to take off, and they can be real clowns on landing.”

  Robin nodded. “That’s why they’re called gooney birds.”

  Vicki sat back and finished her coffee while Keene thought about what she and Robin had said. There didn’t seem any further line to pursue. “And the people in the business know these things?” he said finally. Of course they did. It was more for something to say.

  “Well, we sure didn’t make them up,” Vicki replied. “I guess they put it out of their minds and get on with cleaning up the bones and fitting them together or whatever. So what’s new?”

  It was Athena all over again—the reason
Keene had quit physics to return to engineering. Most workers just got on with the day-to-day job that brought in the grants and kept the paychecks coming, without worrying too much about what it all meant. It was safer to write papers and textbooks about things that everyone agreed they knew than go dragging up awkward questions whose answers might contradict what people in other departments were saying they knew. Before long the whole edifice would be threatened, and the result would be trouble from all directions.

  “There must have been something vastly different about the whole reality that existed then,” Vicki said distantly. “I don’t mean just with the dinosaurs, but about everything: the plants, the insects, the marine life. Walk around the museums and look at the reconstructions. It was all on a different scale of engineering. You can’t relate it to the world we know today. Something universal has altered since then. And the only thing that makes sense is gravity. Earth’s gravity must have been a lot less back in those times than it is now.”

  Keene looked at her, coming back from his own line of thought. His brow creased. “How?”

  “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.

  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?”

  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 Keene’s self-image in enabling him to claim the capacity to be socially responsible if he chose. All in all, it was a relaxed, easygoing morning—the perfect way to recharge after the past week and prepare for the equally demanding one ahead. And then, just as Keene was getting ready to leave to go back over to the city for the press conference, Leo Cavan called from Washington, rerouted from Keene’s private number, with some news he said he’d rather not go into just now, but which had to do with the Kronians. Was Keene still planning on coming up to D.C. first thing the coming week? Keene confirmed that he was—probably flying up tomorrow night. Fine, Cavan said. Could he make it earlier in the day so that they could meet for dinner? Sure, Keene agreed. It sounded important. Cavan said yes, he thought it was. And Cavan wasn’t the kind of person who did things without good reason.

  7

  The press conference was held in the boardroom of Amspace’s headquarters building in downtown Corpus Christi. Ricardo Juarez and Joe Elms, the NIFTV’s other two crew members, were present with Keene. Wally Lomack joined them at the table facing the cameras as the official corporate spokesperson. Les Urkin, who headed public relations, and Harry Halloran, the technical VP, were present also in off-screen capacities. The assembly they faced was a fairly even mix of print and electronic news journalists, some hostile, some supportive, most simply following to see where the story led. With the tensions of the previous day’s test now over and preliminary evaluations of its results exceeding expectations, the Amspace team was in high spirits.

  As had been expected, the initial questions involved the political furore being kicked up over the unannounced testing of a nuclear propulsion system in space by a U.S.-based company. Liberal and environmental groups were committed to protest on principle, and much of media opinion was sympathetic. Joe Elms and Ricardo ducked that issue on the grounds that their line was flight operations, happy to leave Keene the brunt of responding—which made sense, since it was a case he was used to presenting. For a while, he reiterated the line he had begun with John Feld the day before: the risks that had been propagandized for decades were exaggerated and trivial compared to others that the world accepted routinely; energy density, not just the amount, was what mattered if you wanted to do better things more efficiently; the densities involved with state-transitions of the atomic nucleus were of the scale necessary to get out into space in a meaningful way, whereas those associated with the so-called “alternatives” were not. None of this was particularly new. But Keene’s main hope while they had the world’s attention was to emphasize again that a commitment to such propulsion methods would be essential for the expansion across the Solar System that the Kronians were calling for, which was crucial to the security of the human race. The opportunity came when one of the network reporters asked for a response to allegations that Amspace was using the Kronian cause to promote its own commercial interests. Not being on the company’s staff, Keene couldn’t comment. Wally Lomack took it with a show of shortness.

  “Obviously, it would be hypocritical to
deny that we’d hope to benefit. But I’m getting tired of these people who seem to think that we’re incapable of looking beyond the bottom line of the current quarter’s balance sheet. If a serious space development program becomes our official policy, every contractor will be looking for a share of the action, and sure, we’d expect to take our place in line with everyone else who has something to offer. But the issue that should concern all of us is the safety and future of humanity. Look at the western sky tonight just after sundown if you’ve forgotten what I’m talking about. It’s happened before, and now we’ve just come too close for comfort to seeing it happen again. Saying that you and I won’t be around next time isn’t an answer.”

  “The Kronians say it happened before,” somebody at the back of the room called out. “But they’re the ones on a limb out there who need Earth to bail them out. Is it just a coincidence that the line of business you’re in happens to be what they’re telling us we have to do?”

  Ricardo shook his head violently, looking along the table for support. “They’re not out on any limb. Hell, man, they’ve got drive systems that could run rings around what we put up.”

  “But Kronia is economically nonviable,” somebody else threw out. “Admit it, their system’s shot. They have to get Earth’s support somehow or go under.”

  “That’s just a line that the politicians take,” Joe Elms retorted, sitting next to Keene on his other side from Lomack. “They don’t want to think about what it might do to their budgets.”

  “Me neither. Would you want to pay the taxes?”

  “It doesn’t have to be a tax-funded thing,” Joe answered. “Taken as a whole, this planet has enormous resources. We spend more on cosmetics, alcohol, entertainment, and pet food than—”

  “Corporate interests again,” another voice chimed in. “That’s the whole point that some people are questioning.”