Can Zworkyn be right? he asked himself. Was that city destroyed only two million years ago?
He leaned back in his sofa and rubbed his eyes. Two million years ago. Was Uranus knocked sideways then, not during the much earlier Late Bombardment? Could that be possible?
Taking in a deep breath, Gomez pushed himself to his feet. All around him, display screens showed scraps of metal, chips of stone, bits and pieces of the ruined city from the bottom of Uranus’s worldwide ocean. The city was destroyed two million years ago, he told himself. That’s what the evidence says and that must be what had happened.
But is that true? Could it be true? If it is, it flies in the face of all we’ve told ourselves about the history of the planet—of the whole damned solar system.
Yet that’s what the evidence shows.
With a dogged shake of his head, Gomez stepped past the accumulation of sensors and computers and headed toward his bedroom. Get yourself cleaned up and then call Zworkyn. Talk it over with him. And then—maybe—face Abbott with your evidence.
Briefly he thought about calling Raven. Then he decided against that. I’ve bothered her enough with this problem. She listens, but this is way above her level of understanding. I’ll talk to her tomorrow, when we have dinner.
Twenty minutes later, showered and dressed in clean clothes, he started for Zworkyn’s quarters, in Haven II.
For one of the rare times in her young life, Raven felt nervous about going out on a date.
Dacco had called her at the boutique and asked to take her to dinner. Raven knew that the man had much more than dinner in mind, but she also understood that Waxman would shut down their boutique if she refused Dacco.
To the man’s image on the shop’s desktop screen, she had said carefully, “Yes, I’ll go to dinner with you. But please don’t expect anything more.”
Dacco had smiled toothily. “Dinner at seven P.M.”
“In the main restaurant here in Haven,” Raven had said.
“Fine. I’ll call for you at your quarters at six forty-five or so.”
Before Raven could reply, he cut off the connection.
Raven said nothing about her dinner date to Alicia. They closed the store at 5:00 P.M.—actually shooing out a pair of women who’d been browsing through the skirts and blouses for the better part of an hour.
“Time wasters,” Raven muttered as she and Alicia turned off the display lights.
“Oh, they’ll be back,” Alicia said, with a smile. “Sooner or later.”
“To waste more time.”
“Patience. You have to be patient. And remember that the customer is always right.”
Alicia’s smile was infectious. Raven grinned back at her. “Whether she’s right or wrong.”
“Exactly.”
Raven rushed home and changed into one of the boutique’s outfits: a sleek pale pink dress with knee-length skirt and round-necked bodice, attractive without being overtly seductive. You want to keep Noel happy, she told herself, but not salivating.
Dacco rang her door buzzer precisely at six forty-five, wearing a one-piece form-fitting outfit of white and gold.
His eyes brightened when Raven opened the door.
“You look beautiful!” he said, then amended, “You are beautiful.”
“And you look dashing,” answered Raven, as she closed the door behind her. “Very handsome.”
Dacco offered his arm. Raven took it, smiling sweetly, and together they walked to the restaurant.
“Do you really think so?” Zworkyn asked.
Gomez shrugged. “I don’t know. All the evidence we’ve dug up so far leads to the conclusion that Uranus was clobbered only a couple of million years ago. But…”
Gomez had ridden over to Haven II and gone straight to Zworkyn’s quarters. Despite the piles of equipment arrayed from wall to wall, the engineer’s living room was as tidy and precisely arranged as a military barracks. Everything in place, neat and well-ordered. Even the coffee urn that Zworkyn had brought in from the kitchen seemed to be polished and standing at attention.
Now they sat on the living room sofa, side by side, frustrated and unhappy.
“But?” Zworkyn prompted.
“But it’s kind of fantastic to think that some alien invaders wiped Uranus clean of life.”
“That’s what the evidence is telling us.”
Gomez shook his head slowly. “Maybe that’s what we want the evidence to say, and we’re fooling ourselves.”
Zworkyn stared at the younger man. “Maybe,” he conceded.
“We should try to come up with an alternative scenario,” Gomez mused.
“Like what?”
Gomez shrugged elaborately. “Damned if I know.”
“There isn’t any other possibility!” Zworkyn shouted, startling Gomez. “It happened two million years ago, not four billion.”
Staring into space, Gomez muttered, “Aliens entered the solar system—”
“About two million years ago,” Zworkyn added.
“And they found an intelligent civilization on Uranus.”
“And wiped it out.”
“Why?”
“That’s not our problem,” Zworkyn said. “Our problem is to prove that our dating is correct.”
Gomez nodded wearily. But suddenly he brightened. “Wait a minute. If I remember my classroom studies correctly…”
He got up and threaded his way through the rows of equipment, heading for Zworkyn’s desk. “May I use your desktop, Vincente?”
With a gracious nod, Zworkyn replied, “Be my guest.”
Sitting at the engineer’s desk, Gomez tapped the computer’s ON button and said, “History of Neptune’s moons, please.”
Zworkyn got up from the sofa, puzzlement showing on his face. “Neptune?”
It took a few minutes of jiggering the program that the desktop brought up, but at last Gomez leaned back in the desk chair and gestured at the computer’s screen.
“I thought I remembered this from my history lessons.”
Zworkyn bent over Gomez’s shoulder and stared at the screen.
“Display system of Neptune’s moons, please,” Gomez commanded.
“Thirteen moons,” Zworkyn read off the computer’s monitor. “Only one big one, Triton. The rest are just little chunks of rock.”
“Show history of Neptune system,” Gomez commanded.
The screen blinked once, then showed the planet Neptune with a retinue of twenty-five tiny moons, bits of irregularly shaped rock and metal too small to pull themselves into spherical bodies.
Then a much larger body—perfectly spherical—swung through the system, tossing the tiny moonlets into a wild jumble of looping, asymmetrical orbits. As the two men watched, twelve of the moonlets were hurled out of the picture entirely, while the rest settled into new orbits around Neptune. As did the much larger body.
“That’s Triton,” Zworkyn said, awed.
“Right,” Gomez agreed. “According to present thinking, that interaction happened during the time of the Late Bombardment.”
“Some four billion years ago,” said Zworkyn.
“But what if it happened only two million years ago? What if this cataclysm forced a much larger moon into a collision with Uranus?”
“But the analysis doesn’t show a big moon.”
“That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a major-sized moon in the system. A moon big enough to knock Uranus sideways.”
Zworkyn reached for a chair and dropped into it. “Orbital analysis might be able to prove the dating.”
“Maybe,” said Gomez.
“And if the dating shows it happened two million years ago…”
“We’ve proved my theory,” Gomez said.