Storm World of the Dragon

Bolon had a familiar problem: he needed money and he needed it fast.  As a newly hired management consultant for a company that had just lost a big contract, he was expected to find replacement revenue somewhere, somehow.  Unfortunately, the more he studied the problem the more it seemed that a miracle was required.

Fortunately Bolon lived in a miraculous age.  That age was sixty-five million years ago near the end of the Mesozoic Era and he and his kind were intelligent dinosaurs who were about as big as humans, with hands like ours and big brains.  They called themselves dragons.  At the time, one of the most powerful nation-states—or Great Nests as they were also known—had sent an expensive robot to Titan, a moon of Saturn.  The dragons were fascinated by Titan because it was the only moon in the known universe with a dense Earthlike atmosphere and possibly liquid on the surface, although it was ten times farther from the Sun and very cold.  But one day the robot stopped working.  The Great Nest posted a sizable reward for anyone who could fix it for a reasonable cost.  No one could because sending a second robot would double the expense and a crewed mission to the outer solar system would cost many times beyond that.

No one could, that is, until Bolon had a bizarre idea….

Bolon was not a rocket scientist but like a bolt out of the blue he figured out how to send a crew of dragons out to Saturn for less cost than a robotic mission.  Back then no one believed him and even today NASA has never tried his approach.

Bolon’s idea—strange as it was—turned out to make a crazy kind of sense and in the end no one could shoot it down.  The mission was launched and Bolon waited for the results.  His tail twitched with excitement because the reward money was practically in his clawed hands.

Or was it?  The experts of the day were sure that the faraway moon was a tranquil place because it received too little heat from the distant Sun to generate wind or weather.  But experts can be wrong and when the rescuers got to Titan they found that it was really the Storm World of the Dragon!