Echoes of an Alien Sky by James P. Hogan Page B

wiped perspiration from his forehead with a handkerchief. She was looking at Yorim as if what he had said was new to her. "Through electrical discharges in encounters with other bodies," Mowrak told her. "Gravity changes with charge." He looked at Yorim. "Is that right?"

    "Uh-huh. Exactly. And we know Earth had more than its share of them. There are arc discharge scars all over the surface. They gouged some of its most spectacular features. And there were huge animals and birds in earlier ages that couldn't function here today. The gravity must have been less in earlier times."

    Naseena finished drinking from a bottle of fruit juice that she had taken from her pack and passed it to Mowrak. He took a sip and offered it to Yorim. Yorim shook his head. Jenyn reached a hand out and nodded.

    "The Terran scientists knew about them too. But they never made the connection," Mowrak said.

    Yorim shrugged. "Well, that was Terrans, wasn't it?"

    "I wonder what made them that way," Naseena mused.

    "Trapped in deductive logic," Yorim said. It can't tell you what's true, only what has to follow from your assumptions."

    "You have to experiment," Mowrak supplied. "That's the only way to know what's true, what works and what doesn't. Call it experience."

    Yorim looked pointedly in Jenyn's direction. "But the Terrans made everything follow from principles that couldn't be questioned. They got hung up on ideologies that became more real than the reality in front of them, and ended up fighting wars over them." Even as he spoke, he wished he'd let the subject lie, but the gibe had been irresistible. He saw Jenyn squaring to pick it up again . . . and then the phone in Yorim's shirt pocket chimed and saved him. He pulled it out, snapped it open, and acknowledged. The caller was Kyal.

    "Say!" Yorim glanced around at the others. "It's Kyal—the guy you met in Rhombus. So how's it going? Where are you?"

    "Across in what they called Central Europe. It's all a bit funereal, but educational. How are the Himalayas?"

    "Oh, we had a change of plan and ended up going the other way."

    "Oh. . . . Okay, I guess. So where are you?"

    "At the southern end of the Mediterranean. There are some fantastic constructions here. In fact I'm sitting on the top of one. They remind me of the discharge attractor that we worked on at Dakon—but much bigger."

    "You're not telling me the Terrans had field riders?"

    "I doubt it. These things date back to long before the Western culture. Nobody's sure what they were. Mowrak thinks they might have been some kind of religious monument. There must have been a huge amount of work in them, though. Let's see if I can get you a shot of the one next to us. . . . There, are you getting it? The one we're on is even bigger."

    "Wow! Looks like you found yourself some mountains after all."

    "And sun and beaches too. But haven't I always told you Vizek works for me? So what's new with you?"

    "That was really what I called about. We were up north at Moscow yesterday, and met some people who said a few things about Froile that you should hear. . . ."

    "We?"

    "Yes. That was the other thing. I've a friend here that I met after I left Rhombus. She's heard all about you and wants to say hello."

    Yorim made no attempt to conceal a smirk. In fact he deliberately emphasized it. "She?"

    "Quit it. Her name's Lorili. Here."

    Yorim murmured at the others, "He's met a friend. They're up in Europe somewhere." Then louder, "Lorili? Hi, how are you doing? . . . Yes, this is he. I just can't let Kyal out of my sight for a day, can I? . . ."

    A few yards away, Jenyn had caught the name and was staring across fixedly.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

    They were walking among the ruins of what had been a major metropolis on the western side of Europe. It had not been devastated by war or buried by time, but decayed gradually into a broken landscape of overgrown concrete and remnants of walls, among which jagged pinnacles of concrete