Cretaceous Sea

'Not here!' said Rick. 'In your quarters. Here, take my hand. You can show me that thing on your wall.'

'Eduardo's mysterious decoration. Yeah. We could do that. Did you see my shoes?' Rick helped Con up, then found her shoes. He offered Con his arm to steady her, but she refused it. As they walked, she seemed to stumble less as her sped-up meta-bolism broke down the alcohol. When they reached her quarters, Con groaned. 'My head hurts.'

'How much did you drink?'

'I don't know. Four . . . maybe five glasses. Daddy was toasting me. Toasting me!' she said with fierce satisfac-tion.

'He should have. That was quite a gift.'

'Yeah,' said Con proudly.

'So let's see this thing.'

Con lead Rick into the storeroom and moved the large cycad frond she had placed on her dresser and propped against the wall. The yellow design gleamed in the dim room:

'Whaddaya think?' asked Con.

'I don't know yet, but it seems to be a line of symbols of some sort.' Rick silently studied the symbols for a couple of minutes. 'There's a pattern here. The symbols always change in the same order. They've got to be num-bers.'

'Numbers?'

'Yes. Some of them even look like our numbers—the zero, the one, the seven, and the eight. The upside-down 'V is two; the equilateral triangle is three ...'

'Three sides,' said Con. 'Bet the square's four.'

'Pretty sharp for a drunk.'

'I'm not drunk. Just a little tipsy. The square with the line, that's gotta be five.' Con emphasized her certainty by sticking out her tongue.

'Okay, then—what's six?'

'The pointy down triangle?'

'That's nine,' said Rick. 'Six is the pie-shaped one.'

'I was gonna say that. So ... what is it?'

'Beats me,' said Rick. 'It's counting something.'

'Daddy's credit limit.'

Rick laughed. 'The zeroes are in the wrong places.' He studied the numbers some more. 'The numbers to the left don't seem to change.'

'Yeah,' said Con. 'No, wait. Maybe the number before all the zeroes was different yesterday. I'm not sure. I can't remember.'

'Maybe it's a clock.'

'It doesn't look like a clock.'

'The numbers at the right could be counting seconds.'

Con looked at the numbers. 'No, silly. There aren't eighty-seven seconds in a minute.'

'Different numbers, maybe it's a different system. A metric clock.'

'No ... no ...' said Con sleepily. 'It's all wrong. The numbers are counting down, not up.' She yawned. 'I gotta go to bed.'