The professor stopped pacing to and fro, lingered for a couple of nanoseconds, and then said, ‘Knowing the dinosaurs as we do, some of you may be anticipating what it is I’m about to say next. Would anyone care to tell me what that is?’

Field Marshal Jolie waggled her feelers tentatively but decided not to share her thoughts publicly. The rest of the ants just waited patiently for the professor to enlighten them.

Joya duly resumed her account. ‘This all happened at the height of the arms race between Gondwana and Laurasia. Consequently, both great dinosaur powers came up with a plan – plans that turned out to be identical, and completely insane. Independent of each other, the two powers both decided that they would collect some of the antimatter debris, bring it back to Earth and use it to create a super-weapon far more powerful than any nuclear bomb, in order to deter the other side—’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Kachika, interrupting Joya. ‘There’s an obvious flaw in the logic of that plan. If antimatter is annihilated on contact with matter, how did they store it and bring it back to Earth?’

‘Good question.’ Joya nodded. ‘The dinosaur astronomers discovered that anti-iron made up a substantial proportion of the celestial body. The debris they located in space was also made of anti-iron. Like ordinary iron, anti-iron can be affected by magnetic fields. This provided a potential solution to the storage problem. It made it possible for the dinosaurs to create a vacuum chamber and apply a powerful magnetic field to safely confine the antimatter to the centre of the chamber, preventing it from touching the interior walls. This would enable them to store, transport and deploy the antimatter. Of course, this was only a theoretical solution. To use such a container to bring the antimatter back to Earth would be an extraordinarily mad and dangerous endeavour. But, as we well know, dinosaurs are mad by nature, and their desire for global hegemony invariably trumps all other concerns. So they actually went ahead with it!’

This rather too literal bombshell came as a genuine shock to the ants, and there was an anxious stirring in the room. Even their in-depth knowledge of dinosaur behaviour could not have predicted such craziness.

‘It was the Gondwanan Empire that took the first step into the abyss. They built a magnetic confinement vessel comprised of a hollow sphere, split that in two and affixed the hemispheres to the mechanical arms of a spaceship. The spaceship then crept up on the antimatter fragment, slowly and with extreme caution, and trapped it between the two hemispheres. As soon as the hemispheres closed, a magnetic field generated by a superconductor was activated, confining the fragment to the centre of the sphere. The spaceship then flew back to Earth.