Worlds in Chaos by James P. Hogan Page A

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.