Day of Disaster
By: Len Saculla
Kar-El went over the notes again, sighed, and then locked her gaze onto Faba-Djin.
"Well, after all my years of skepticism, it looks like I'm going to have to join your camp. The evidence for a crashing comet or wayward asteroid causing the great extinction stacks up pretty conclusively."
Faba-Djin allowed herself a grin. "I don't know why you ever doubted it, old friend."
Kar-El gestured at the screen, the printed reports, the carefully labelled samples all around her. "Each small stratum of rock represents thousands, often millions, of years. What seems like an instantaneous event to a cursory look could actually have been much more gradual and lasted many millennia." She smiled. "Or else, it's just my natural caution."
"Always your strength. What tipped the balance for you?"
"The impact crater site seems to have been incontrovertibly identified. But it was the spherules found in the latest fossils. Those poor dying creatures actually ingested parts of the crashing ball of rock, be it a comet or an asteroid. What a way to go."
Later Kar-El pondered again how the mounting evidence had impacted upon and eventually made her change her position. Perhaps that was the very definition of scientific enquiry.
With her third eye, she scanned a back-up copy of today's data then, with the second globule on her sixth tentacle, switched off the machine, thinking; so, we finally have proof of how the humans all died out so suddenly.
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