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"Ugly things, weren't they?" Diane said from over their shoulders.



Helen opened her mouth to defend Bemmie reflexively, then grinned. "I did name him Bemmius for a reason, you know."



Diane frowned.



"From the old science fiction term, Diane," A.J. explained. "Bug-Eyed Monster, BEM."



Diane laughed at that, and smiled at A.J.



Helen wasn't surprised. She'd noticed already that when Diane acted just a bit clueless, it was whenever A.J. was nearby—and always about something A.J. could explain.



That annoyed her intensely, for some reason. Perhaps just the natural feminism of a woman in a man's profession. Or . . . She chewed on the problem for a moment, and was a little disturbed when she realized that the annoyance was something very old-fashioned. Archaic, even.



Pure and simple jealousy. Argh!



She shook it off. "Yes, I don't think I'd have wanted to meet Bemmie in a dark alley, to be honest."



"Or even in a lighted one," A.J. concurred. "He would've weighed in at, um—"



"Something over a ton," Helen supplied.



"—right, something over a ton, and had a hell of a reach to boot. If you're right about those thorn things . . . Well, the thought gets ucky. He could do quite a number on you."



Diane winced. "And probably eat you afterwards."



"Doubtful," A.J. said. "If he could catch you in the first place— Bemmie was obviously not built for speed—he probably didn't have chemistry within light-years of ours. Couldn't eat us, anyway."



"You never know," Helen said, getting a surprised glance from



A.J. "Preliminary analyses from the fossil site . . . well, it's hard to be certain, given all the time that's passed, bacteria, and so on. But it appears that Bemmie was based on DNA or RNA rather like our own. We eat an awful lot of things that aren't very closely related to us—mushrooms, for instance—and some of them are pretty darn nutritious. But I'd agree that there's a matter of more orders of magnitude involved in this probability."



"That argument didn't go over with you well a few years ago, Helen," Glendale pointed out from the consultant's station he'd been given at Helen's insistence. "What's a few orders of magnitude between friends?"



"Well, to turn your own argument back—and hope that I have to eat my words, so to speak, like you—if you can find a set of dinosaur bones with knife and fork marks on them, I'll agree that Bemmie's people could've found us tasty eating."



Glendale laughed. "Fair enough. And I agree, it's damned unlikely."



"I wonder if they were hostile or friendly types?" Diane mused. "I mean, if we'd been able to meet them."



"Maybe we still can," A.J. replied. "They certainly didn't come from this solar system."



Diane looked at him. "What? How can you be sure? Maybe they were Martians."



"Because—oh, let's let the expert explain." He glanced at astrophysicist Larry Conley. "Larry?"



The big, slightly portly scientist shook his head. "No way."



"But I thought Mars had tons of water way back then."



"Not that recently, Diane. Hundreds of millions of years—and please note the plural—back to maybe a billion or two. Mars wasn't much different in the age of the dinosaurs than it is now. And if Dr. Sutter's right, Bemmie started out aquatic, so . . . No. I doubt very much that even if we had magic space drives we could meet any of them today. It's been sixty-five million years, remember. If they still had any interest in this place, they'd not only have been here, they'd have taken everything over. No, by now, they've evolved into something completely different, or gone extinct altogether."



Despite the fact that he'd summoned the expert opinion himself, A.J. choked at it. "Hey, now, that's a couple of big-ass assumptions. I thought evolution stopped once we started controlling the environment."



Conley raised an eyebrow and ran his fingers through unruly dark hair—which, unfortunately for him, looked much more sloppy and less "artistic genius" than did A.J.'s mop.



"That's one theory—we came along, invented civilization, and when we found out about Darwin said 'oh, we won't be having any more of that!' But, as other people have pointed out, what we've really done is just created a new environment with new pressures. And even tiny, tiny pressures, over sixty-plus million years, will add up to one hell of a lot of change. And so far no civilization we've had has lasted recognizably more than a few thousand years. You want me to believe these aliens made one that lasted ten thousand times longer than that? I don't think so."