A.J. for wallpaper hadn't been self-defense, it had been to make a point as forcefully as possible. So, readily, Madeline returned the smile. And, as she always did whenever Helen was around, felt more relaxed.
"Quite a grouping. What's so important?"
"We think we've made a discovery that rather changes our entire outlook on these people and what they were doing here," Jane said without preamble. "You will recall, I think, that in our attempts to translate the language of Bemmius secordii we found certain symbols and words which we believed to represent 'craters'?"
"Yes. I think by now I could even sketch the symbols. And you found that they'd already labeled the dinosaur-killer crater, too. Chix—whatever. I can never pronounce that name correctly."
"Yeah," A.J. said. "And, you know, that bothered me. For quite a while. The problem with it was a matter of the probabilities involved. Improbabilities, rather. First, look at the timing. If we're right, within days of the disaster that killed Bemmie and helped finish off the dinosaurs, something else hit this base—inside or outside—and killed off everyone inside, or at least a lot of someones. That's a pretty funky coincidence, isn't it?"
"Well, yes, but . . ."
"Wait up, there's more. Something about the whole situation bothered me, so I went to talk to our astrophysicists.
"These Bemmie guys crossed a hell of a lot of space to find this solar system, right? And they brought enough stuff with them to carve out bases in asteroids and apparently explore at least parts of two planets and other parts of the Solar System. Either they had some magic space-drive technology we don't even have the words for, or they used some kind of tech we can imagine. If the latter, the only methods we know of would require lots of energy. Lots and lots and lots of energy. Which means they'd be past masters of knowing how to 'watch the skies,' so to speak, for dangerous stuff."
A.J. loved dramatics, and Madeline didn't begrudge him the habit. So she waited patiently for him to get to the point. At least, with A.J., there almost always was a point. Eventually.
"So what the hell are the odds that they wouldn't see a friggin' asteroid long, long before it approached a planet they were studying? And that they also couldn't do something to stop it?"
Madeline frowned. "You're saying that either the impact shouldn't have happened, or that Bemmie shouldn't have been on the planet when it did hit."
"Bingo. And then we get to Joe and Harry's little room. Well, big room."
"The firing range?"
"Yes," Rich Skibow said. "Joe and the engineering department went over that area very carefully, given its potential for military significance. Since there wasn't all that much written material in the location, they didn't call me or Jane in for quite a while. But when they did, we noticed something immediately."
On the wall screen, a picture popped up of a storage bin. On the bin were a series of markings, ones that looked somehow familiar. Another bin or chute had other markings, some of them the same. One of the images from the back wall areas, downrange from the shooting booths, was shown; again, alien script, some of the markings identical to the other two.
Then the image of the Earth map appeared; at the crater site, among other markings, the same sequence.
"We no longer believe that this sequence of symbols represents a word meaning either 'crater' or 'site of interest," Jane Mayhew said. "Based on their occurrence on the firing range in the locations they were found and their association with certain objects, it is now our professional opinion that we have found a far superior and much more likely translation for this word.
"The word is target."
For a moment, Madeline couldn't quite take it in. "Target?"
Then it connected. "They were using asteroids as missiles! But what were they shooting at?" A thought suddenly occurred to her. "Hey, this may sound crazy, but could it be that it really was a literal 'dinosaur killer'—that some kind of dinosaur might have had a civilization and they were bombarding the planet?"
"Nice idea, and I thought of that one too," A.J. said. "But Helen says—"
"It's completely out of the question," Helen stated firmly. "For a number of reasons. The main one is that if a civilization large enough to be interesting or threatening to something like Bemmius existed on Earth at that time, we'd have found traces of it by now. Lots of traces. Consider the fact that we found traces of high tech around the original Bemmie, and he was just one fossil of one visiting technological race. I suppose a fantasy writer might be able to come up with some explanation as to how the entire fossil record could be wrong or missing just those critical pieces of data, but no paleontologist would believe it for an instant.