Almost twenty years before, as a nineteen-year-old engineering student at college, Landen Keene had astounded drivers on the interstate near the campus by overtaking them with ease in a 1959 Nash Rambler body fixed to a reinforced chassis on racing suspension, mounting an L88 Corvette engine. He had also more than impressed the two state troopers who handed him a ticket, but they were unable to cite his handiwork on a single safety violation. One of them had even indicated interest if Keene ever found himself of a mind to sell. “Keep at it, kid,” he had told Keene. “One day you’ll make a damned good engineer-supposin’ you live long enough, of course, that is.”
These days, it seemed, things worked the other way around. Outdated engineering camouflaged in futuristic-looking shells was hyped as a wonder of the age, the best that taxpayers’ money could buy. Keene sat in the cramped crew compartment of the NIFTV-pronounced “Nifteev,” standing for Nuclear Indigenously Fueled Test Vehicle-wedged comfortably into the seat at the Engineer’s station by the mild quarter-g of sustained thrust cutting the craft across freefall orbits, and stared at the image on the main screen. It showed the elongated body, flaring into a delta tail-wing with tip-fins, of the spaceplane riding twenty-five miles ahead off the port lower bow, closing slowly as the NIFTV overhauled it. Officially, it was designated an “Advanced Propulsion Unit.” Its white lines were illuminated in direct light from the Sun showing above the silhouette of Earth, revealing the insignia of both the U.S. Air Force Space Command and United Nations Global Defense Force. (Exactly what the entire globe was to be defended from had never been spelled out.) The NIFTV, by contrast, with its framework of struts and ties holding together an assemblage of test engine and auxiliary motors, external tanks, and crew module, was ungainly and ugly. The APU looked sleek on the covers of glossy promotional government brochures and was pleasing to bureaucrats. The NIFTV was a creature of engineers-a space workhorse, born of pragmatism and utility.
Ricardo’s voice came over the circuit from the Ccom station-Communications and Computing. “We’ve got a beam from them now. I’m windowing onto the main screen, copying you, Warren.”
“Gotcha.” Warren Fassner, research project leader at Amspace Corporation’s Propulsion Division and coordinator of the current mission, acknowledged from the control room at Space Dock, at that moment orbiting twelve thousand miles away above the far side of Earth. “It looks like you guys are on stage. Make it a good one. We’re getting the hookups.” To avoid giving somebody officious somewhere an opportunity to interfere, Keene had persuaded the public relations people at Amspace to hold until the last moment before slipping word of the mission to the networks. Since it was something new and sounded exciting, the networks were interested.
A helmeted head and shoulders showing a gray flight suit with Space Command insignia appeared in a one-eighth window at the top right of the screen. “This is Commander Voaks from USAFSC APU to approaching craft U-ASC-16R. You are entering a restricted zone posted as reserved for official Space Command operations. Identify yourself and announce your intentions.”
Joe answered from the Pilot station, squeezed centrally behind the other two, which were angled inward to face the bulkhead carrying the screens. “Captain Elms from U-ASC-16R acknowledging APU. We are a private research vehicle owned and operated by the Amspace Corporation.”
“We are about to commence a high-acceleration test. For your own safety, my orders are to warn you off-limits.”
“We’re paralleling you outside the posted limit. Just taking a ringside seat. Don’t mind us. Let’s get on with the show.”
Ricardo cut in again: “We’ve got another incoming-military priority band prefix.”
“This is General Burgess, Space Command Ground Control Center, and I demand to speak to-”
Joe shook his head in the background behind Keene’s console. “We’re gonna be too busy here for this. I’m throwing this one to you, Warren.”
“Sure, switch him through. We’ll handle it,” Fassner said from the Space Dock. It had been expected. Ricardo clicked entries in a table on one of his auxiliary screens, and the irate general was consigned off to a string of comsat links around the planet.
“APU to Amspace 16R. You have been warned in accordance with regulatory requirements. Be advised that your continued proximity to this operation will not be taken as indicative of a desirably cooperative attitude. Negative consequences may result. This is APU, out.” The window vanished.
“Negative consequences, guys,” Keene repeated. “That’s it-it’s all over for us. They’ll find some bug in our parking lot that needs to be protected now. Close down the head office.”
“Where do they get those guys?” Ricardo asked as he scanned his displays and made adjustments. “I mean, do they have to be programmed to talk like that? . . .” His voice trailed off, and he leaned forward. “Okay, this is it. We’re registering their exhaust plume on thermal: preboost profile.” As Ricardo spoke, the APU’s image sprouted a tail of white heat, growing rapidly to extend several times the length of the vessel.
“Full burn,” Joe’s voice confirmed. “We’re looking at about, aw . . . two gee initial. Downrange radar is tracking.” The Air Force spaceplane was accelerating away, commencing its test. While Joe continued reading off time checks and numbers, Keene rechecked his own panel to make sure all the NIFTV’s systems were ready, then turned his eyes again to the image shrinking and foreshortening on the main screen. Advanced propulsion, he thought to himself scornfully. Pure hydrogen and whatever they called the latest oxidizer, it was still chemicals. NASA, circa 1960s, repackaged in an Air Force suit, its adequacy a giveaway of what it was intended for: a high-altitude police cruiser to patrol the envisaged one-world state. NIFTV had the potential to bring the Solar System into Earth’s backyard, but the powers that Earth’s destiny depended on weren’t interested. If the day ever arrived when their one-world order looked like becoming a reality, that, Keene vowed, would be when he’d leave it all and go out to join the Kronians. But with enterprises like Amspace still able to find backers, there was hope yet.
Fassner, having evidently passed the general on to someone else, reappeared on the beam from Space Dock. “Okay, that’s looking good now. Let’s go after ’em.”
“On standby at Fire-Ready,” Keene confirmed.
“Go, engine. Take it up to eighty,” Joe ordered.
Keene initiated the start-up and felt himself being squashed back in his seat as he increased reactant flow to bring the NIFTV quickly up to eighty percent power. Lead gloves encased his hands. He felt his cheeks and lips weighed back over his facial bones, baring his teeth. Smaller screens on the bulkhead in front of him showed deformed parodies of the faces of Ricardo and Joe.
“Lateral thrusters on. Pulsing to commence roll now,” Joe grated, his mouth barely moving.
“APU ahead low, declination twenty-seven degrees and increasing,” Ricardo reported. “We’re twelve-point-two miles off the axis and holding. Course projection is clear.”
It was a stunt to get the world’s attention. The news channels had publicized that the Defense Department would be testing a new propulsion system designed for low-orbit maneuvering and announced it as a breakthrough. While the spaceplane was now in its maximum acceleration phase, the NIFTV was not only overtaking it but tracing a spiral twenty-plus miles in diameter about its course-literally running rings around it. A comm beam latched on again to deliver another tirade. Ricardo looked questioningly at Joe; Joe made a tossing-away motion with his head; Ricardo grinned and switched the call over the detour link to Control.
“Yeaaah!” Keene whooped, smacking the armrests of his seat. “Was that a bird? Was it a plane? No, it was us, guys. Hey, look at that thing. It’s like a dead duck in the water out there.”
“Eat our dust, General,” Ricardo sang.
The APU went into a slow curve. Joe altered thrust parameters and stayed with it easily. He ran an eye over the monitors and gave a satisfied nod. “Okay,” he said to the others. “Take her up to full burn. Now let’s show them what we can really do.”
As the NIFTV accelerated along its continuing spiral course, a white haze of more distant light appeared along the top edge of the screen, moving slowly down to blot out the starfield background. It grew until it became part of a vast band extending off the screen on both sides, losing the APU spaceplane in its brilliance as it became a background to it.
The planetoid had come out of Jupiter. It was christened Athena.
For more than half a century, there had been astronomers dissenting from the mainstream view of planetary origins, trying to make themselves heard. The generally accepted nebular theory, in which the Sun, its planets, and their satellites all condensed together from a contracting cloud of primordial gas and dust, they maintained, was not tenable. The observed distribution of angular momentum did not fit the model, and tidal disruption by Jupiter would have prevented the accretion of compact objects inside its orbit. Some proposed an alternative mechanism for the formation of the inner planets based upon analysis of the fluid dynamics of Jupiter’s core. According to this theory, the giant planet’s rapid rotation and rate of material acquisition would result in periodic instabilities leading to eventual fission and the ejection of surplus mass. The bulk of the shed matter would most likely be thrown out of the Solar System, but lesser drops torn off in the process could go into solar-capture orbits.
In the main, the reaction of the scientific orthodoxy was to dismiss the suggestion as too much at odds with established notions and find arguments to show why it couldn’t happen. Then, after the onset of sudden irregularities in Jupiter’s rotation followed by several weeks of progressive deformation in shape beneath the gas envelope, it did.
Rivaling the Earth itself in size, white-hot from the energy that had attended its birth, and blazing a fiery tail tens of millions of miles long, Athena had been plunging sunward for ten months, all the time gaining in speed and brightness. Spectral analysis showed it to be composed of a mix of core and crustal materials trailing an envelope of ionized Jovian atmospheric gases. Currently crossing the Earth’s orbit sixty million miles ahead of the Earth, it was visible to the naked eye across a quarter of the sky before dawn and after sundown. During the next month it would accelerate into a tight turn around the Sun, bringing it to within a quarter of a million miles at perihelion, covering more than a million miles in an hour and practically reversing direction to pass little more than fifteen million miles ahead of the approaching Earth on its way back to the outer Solar System. It was predicted that the spectacle would dim into insignificance any comet ever before seen in history.
Space Dock was built in the form of a short, fat dumbbell passing radially through a cylindrical hub. Cramped and dirty, noisy and oily, it normally accommodated between twenty and thirty people. It had been built several years previously as a joint venture by a consortium of private interests, of which Amspace was one of the principals, to provide an orbiting test base for space vehicles and technologies at a time when depending on government to provide facilities had been too fraught with delay and political uncertainties to be reliable.
A stubby-winged surface lifter lay docked at the far end of the hub when Joe attached the NIFTV at one of Space Dock’s ports. A minishuttle bearing the Amspace logo was standing a short distance off. It was forty minutes since the NIFTV parted company from the Air Force spaceplane, by which time it had pulled fully a hundred miles ahead despite having traced its circular pattern continuously. The three crew were jubilant as they hauled themselves through the lock into the cluttered surroundings of pipes and machinery to the welcoming shouts and back-slaps of their waiting colleagues. Keene, coming first, waved and grinned in acknowledgment. Behind him came Ricardo, his mouth frozen wide, setting his teeth off white against his Mediterranean-olive skin, with Joe making a double thumbs-up sign as he floated out last. They were making the best of the enthusiasm around them while they had the chance. It was not exactly representative of the reaction they expected from the world in general, which for the most part would no doubt be shocked rather than appreciative. But that, after all, had been the whole idea.
Warren Fassner, in track pants and a red T-shirt, was waiting in the suiting chamber past the lock, where a technician began helping Keene out of his flight garb. Fassner had red hair with a matching, ragged mustache, and a large frame with an ample fleshy covering that gave the impression of sagging slightly when in gravity. Here, it was more evenly distributed, making him appear sprightlier, if maybe a little bloated, compared to normal.
“Great show, Lan!” he greeted. “That should make the high slots this evening. Looks like the baby performed just fine.”
“Just as much your show. It’s your baby.” Keene pushed himself forward to make room as Ricardo and Joe crowded in at the end of the chamber behind. “And how goes it with our friends?” He meant the branches of officialdom connected with the APU test.
Fassner pulled a face, grinning simultaneously. “Mad as hell. Corpus Christi has got lawyers from Washington on the line now.”
“Already?”
“Probably being aimed by wrathful agency heads. Marvin says they’re trying to come up with some kind of permission or approval that we should have obtained first.”
It had been expected, even though nothing had violated any explicit prohibition. Thanks mainly to the reticence of the Russians, Southeast Asians, and the Chinese, the world had not actually banned the launching of nuclear technology into orbit. It was just that nobody had thought that any organization outside government would contemplate doing it, while everyone on the inside was too vulnerable to pressure groups and public opinion to want to get involved. Now the regulatory agencies would be vying with each other to placate the eco lobbies by showing who had the most teeth.
“Anyhow, you’ve done your part,” Fassner said. “The Corpus Christi office can deal with Washington. That’s what it’s got a legal department for.” He clapped Keene lightly on the shoulder and used a handrail to haul himself past to say a few words to the other two. “Hey, Ric, can’t you do something about that grin? You’re dazzling my eyes here.”
Ricardo’s smile only widened further. “Didn’t we make a meal out of those turkeys, eh?”
“Joe, you were right on, all the way. So how did the modified RTs handle? Pretty good, I guess.”
“Like a dream, Warren, like a dream. . . .”
Keene stowed the last of his gear in an end locker and signed that the technician had retrieved the diagnostic recording chip from his suit. Feeling less restricted now in shirtsleeves and fatigue pants, he exited through a pressure door and transverse shaft outside Number Two Pump Compartment to enter the “Yellow” end of the Hub Main Longitudinal Corridor-the walls in different sections of Space Dock were color coded to help newcomers orientate. More well-wishers, some in workshirts and jeans, others in coveralls, one in a pressure suit, were waiting to add their congratulations as he passed through. He came to “Broadway”-a confusion of shafts and split levels leading away seemingly in all directions, where the hub and the booms connecting the two ends of the dumbbell intersected-and wove his way through openings and between guide rails to the “Blue” well. Several more figures were anchored or floating in various attitudes.
“You guys made the day, Lan,” one called out.
“Great stuff, man!”
“Still ain’t stopped laughin’. Even if it gets the firm shut down, it was worth it.”
Keene reversed to glide into the transverse shaft feet-first. He pushed himself off, using one of the hand hoops along the vertical rail, and felt the wall to one side nudge against him gently. As he progressed farther, the motion imparted by the rail grew stronger, causing him to move faster with a distinct, growing sensation of heading “down.” By the time he reached the three-level wheel forming the Blue end of the dumbbell, he was using the hoops to retard himself. He began using his feet to climb down ladder-fashion as he passed through the upper deck, and stepped off at the mid-deck to find Joyce and Stevie waiting for him outside Ccoms.
“Damned good show,” Stevie offered. He was thirtyish, British, and sometimes talked like an old movie. Keene nodded and returned a strained smile. He knew they all meant well, but this was getting a bit tiring.
Joyce was the senior comtech. She was one of those who did their best to look clean and professional, but her white shirt and sky blue pants, although no doubt clean that day, were showing grime, and there were flecks of grit in her black, close-trimmed hair. That was one of the facts of life that came with the territory. Dirt in zero-g didn’t fall obligingly to the floor and accumulate in out-of-the-way places to be removed when convenient. Despite all the ducts and filters and fans, space habitats tended to be smelly, too.
She smiled, managing to convey the suggestion of freshness in spite of it all. “Even better than you promised,” she complimented.
“Always make your surprises pleasant ones,” Keene said, yawning in the close air. “People forget bad predictions that were wrong. But tell them one time that things will be okay and be wrong, and they’ll never forgive you.”
“Getting philosophical? Is this a new postflight syndrome or something?”
“I don’t know. But I could sure use a postflight coffee.”
“I’ll get one,” Stevie said, and moved away along one of the passages.
Joyce nodded to indicate the doorway through to the Ccoms room. “We’ve got PCN on now, asking to talk to one of the crew. You want to take it?”
“Sure. Who is it?”
“Somebody called John Feld from their Los Angeles office. He’s linked through via Corpus Christi.”
“Uh-huh.” Keene followed Joyce between the communications equipment racks and control panels. “Have we a friendly native?”
“It’s difficult to say,” Joyce answered as they came to a live screen on one of the consoles. The face showing on it was of a man in his forties with clear blue eyes and straight, yellow hair brushed to the side. He turned to look out full-face as Keene moved within the viewing angle of the console pickup.
“Hello. I’m Landen Keene-NIFTV’s flight engineer; also one of the principal design engineers involved with the project.”
“John Feld, Pacific Coast Network news.”
“Hi.”
“You are with the Amspace Corporation, Dr. Keene?”
“In a way. I run a private engineering consultancy that Amspace contracts design work and theoretical studies to.”
Feld looked mildly surprised. “And does this relationship result in your going into space often?” he asked.
“Oh, Amspace and Protonix-that’s the name of my company-have known each other for a long time. I go wherever the job demands. A desk has more leg room, but this way we get to have more fun.”
“As we saw,” Feld agreed. “That was a spectacular performance you people gave up there earlier.”
“And it was in spite of everything this country has done in the last forty years, not thanks to any of it,” Keene replied.
“So what were you demonstrating? Obviously you were doing more than having fun. Is it another version of the message we hear from time to time about private enterprise being able to do things better than government?”
Keene shook his head. “Hell no. What we were telling you has to do with the whole future of humanity, not somebody’s political or economic ideology. The world is still burying its head in the sand and refusing to face what Athena is telling us: the universe isn’t a safe place. For our own good, we need a commitment on a massive scale to broadening what the Kronians have pioneered and spreading ourselves around more of space. What we showed today is that we can start doing it right now, without needing to negotiate any deals with the Kronians-although if you want my opinion, we should avail ourselves of any help they offer. We already have the technology and the industries. The vehicle that we demonstrated today was a test bed for a Nuclear Indigenously Fueled engine. That means it uses a nuclear thermal reactor to heat an indigenous propellant gas as a reaction mass. ‘Indigenous’: native to a particular place.”
Feld seemed to understand the term but looked puzzled. “Okay. . . . But where are we talking about, exactly, in this instance?”
Keene spread his hands. “That’s the whole point: anywhere that you’re operating. You see, it works with a whole range of substances that occur naturally just about wherever you might happen to be. Venus is rich in carbon dioxide; the asteroids and ice moons of the gas-giants give unlimited water; others, such as Saturn’s Titan and Neptune’s Triton have methane; you can also use nitrogen, carbon monoxide, hydrogen, argon. In other words, it opens up the entire Solar System by affording ready refueling sources wherever you go. Today we were using water, and you saw the results. Methane would perform about fifty percent better still.”
“So was today’s effort to get publicity for a new technology that you’ve developed? If so, it certainly seems to have been successful.”
“New? No way. It was being talked about back in the 1960s. But antinuclear phobia took over, and we’ve been at a standstill. What we’re trying to do is more wake the country up again.”
“Ah, but weren’t there good reasons?” Feld seemed on more familiar ground, suddenly. “Surely there are hazards associated with taking such devices into orbit that haven’t been resolved yet. Isn’t it true that if the radioactive material from just one reactor were spread evenly through the atmosphere-”
“It isn’t going to get spread evenly around the planet. There’s enough gasoline in every city to-” Keene broke off as he saw that Feld was glancing aside, as if taking directions from somewhere off-screen. He looked back.
“Thank you, Dr. Keene. Apparently Captain Elms is standing by up there in the Amspace satellite now, and we would like to hear a few words from him too while we’ve got the connection. That was very interesting. Let’s hope you have a safe trip back down.”
“My pleasure,” Keene grunted. The screen blanked to a test mode.
Joyce, who had moved away to talk to the duty supervisor on the far side of the room and then come back, stepped forward from where she had been watching. “See, you’ve scared them off again, Lan. You always have to start getting political.”
“Hell, the problem’s political,” Keene grumbled. “How is it supposed to get solved if we can’t mention it?”
Stevie reappeared carrying a plastic mug of black coffee and handed it to him. Keene nodded, sipped to test the heat, then took a longer drink gratefully. “But you’re right,” he told Joyce. “I should know better by now. It’s gotten to be something of a reflex, I guess.”
“Falling into patterns of habit is normal with advancing age,” she assured him cheerfully.
“Thanks. Just what I needed.”
The supervisor called over to them. “They’re on hold now, Joyce. Do you want it through there again?”
“Yes, we’re done with Pacific,” Joyce called back over the consoles. “You’ve got another call waiting,” she told Keene. He drank from his coffee mug again, as if fortifying himself. “Oh, I think you’ll like this one,” Joyce said. She gazed expectantly at the test pattern on the screen. It changed suddenly to present a face once again, this time a woman’s.
Keene blinked in surprise. “It’s Sariena!” he exclaimed.
She was in her early thirties, perhaps, with the finely formed features combining just the right amount of firmness with a softening of feminine roundness that fashion modeling agencies and cosmetics advertisers will scour a continent for. Her hair was shoulder-length, richly dark with a hint of wave at the tips, and her skin a clear dusky brown, setting off a pair of light gray, curiously opalescent eyes which at first sight jarred with such a complexion, but produced a strangely fascinating effect as one adjusted to them. Keene could have pictured her as an Arabian princess of fairy tale, or a rajah’s daughter. And that was just from electronic images; they had never actually met. For Sariena was not of Earth at all but from Kronia, the collective name for the oasis of human habitation established among the moons of Saturn. The name came from Kronos, the Ancient Greek name for Saturn, who had ruled the heavens during Earth’s Golden Age.
“Hello, Lan,” she greeted. “And is that Joyce with you there?”
“I’m here,” Joyce put in, coming closer.
“Ah yes, it is.” Sariena’s smile was restrained enough to preserve dignity, wide enough not to appear cold. “I just wanted to let you know that the shuttles are in orbit with us now, and we’ll be on our way down to the surface later today, arriving in Washington this evening.”
“Sorry if I’ve been out of touch,” Keene said. “I’ve been a bit busy lately, as you’ve probably gathered.”
Sariena was aboard the Kronian long-range transporter vessel Osiris, now parked in Earth orbit after a three-month voyage from the Saturnian system. In that time, the communications turnaround delay had decreased steadily from over two hours when the ship set out. With preparations for the NIFTV demonstration taking up all his time, Keene hadn’t talked with the Kronians at all during the past week. Now, suddenly, it was a pleasant change to find himself able to interact with them normally.
“Yes. We all thought that show of yours today was terrific,” Sariena said. “The timing was perfect. It’ll give us a good opening theme for the talks. Gallian asked me to say thanks, and that he’s looking forward to meeting you in person at last too.” Gallian was the head of the Kronian mission.
“You should thank the Air Force Space Command more than us,” Keene replied. “They picked today for their test. We just went along with it.”
“So do you have any idea yet when we’ll be able to meet you?” Sariena asked.
“Well, you’re probably going to be tied up with formal receptions and so forth for a while,” Keene said. “I try not to get involved in things like that. But I’ve made time to be in Washington for a few days, starting Monday. We could probably work something in then.”
“I’ll let Gallian know,” Sariena said.
Besides being a consultant to Amspace in Texas, Keene also acted as an advisor on space-related nuclear issues to various government offices, and maintained a Washington office for the purpose. He evaluated official reports and proposals, prepared recommendations, and testified before committees. A lot of congresspeople and other denizens of the Hill also consulted him privately for off-the-record views and background details. Most of them were better informed on issues that concerned them than the required public posturing sometimes allowed them to admit.
He looked at the face that he knew only from screens, outwardly so composed, yet what kind of agitation and uncertainties-fear even-had to be churning inside? In all her adult life, she had never seen an ocean, breathed a planet’s air, or walked under an open sky. She had been taken to Kronia as a child in the early days when the original base, named Kropotkin, was constructed on the moon Dione. Now she was returning for the first time as one of the deputation that the Saturn colony had sent to Earth following the Athena event to press the same case that Keene had summarized to Feld.
Keene raised his coffee mug. “And before any of those guys in tuxedos have a chance to get started with their toasts and speeches, let us be the first to say, Welcome to Earth, finally. The main thing you have to remember is that leaving the outside door open is okay. But don’t try walking on the blue stuff.”
Sariena laughed. “Will you be able to make it to Washington too, Joyce?”
“Sorry. Not for a while, anyhow. I’m stuck up in this grimy can for another three weeks.”
“Is that all?”
“Yeah, right, okay-you’ve got me. I was forgetting. What’s three weeks in space to you guys?”
“But their accommodation is probably a bit more roomy,” Keene said to Joyce.
“When are you going back down, Lan?” Sariena asked.
“In a couple of hours, probably. The firm’s bus is up here waiting already.” He gave Joyce a sideways look. “Then it’ll be a shower and a swim, clean clothes . . .” He watched the look forming on her face. “And maybe a good steak and some wine out somewhere nice tonight.”
“Pig,” Joyce muttered hatefully.
The Amspace minishuttle detached from Space Dock a little under three hours later. As the craft fell away, Keene was able to catch a glimpse of the Osiris passing above as an elongated bead of light in its higher orbit. Low to one side, partly eclipsed by the curve of Earth’s dark side, stretched the awesome spectacle of Athena’s braided tail streaming in the solar wind as the supercomet fell toward the Sun.
Amspace’s headquarters offices were located in Corpus Christi, southeast Texas, on North Water Street, a couple of blocks inland from the marinas on Corpus Christi Bay, at the fashionable, downtown end of Shoreline Boulevard. The company’s main manufacturing, engineering, and research center was twenty miles south of the city at Kingsville, with a launch facility thirty miles farther south at a place called San Saucillo, on the plain of sandy flats and sage brush between Laredo and the Gulf. It was Oil Country, and much of the company’s founding impetus had derived from the tradition of independence rooted in private capital and sympathetic local politics. All the same, taking an initiative toward developing the longer-term potential of space was a contentious and uncertain issue, and as insurance the corporation was constructing a second launch complex over the border in Mexico, on a highland plateau known as Montemorelos. Besides affording backup capability, Montemorelos would provide a means of continuing operations in the event that San Saucillo was shut down by politics.
It was late morning when the minishuttle carrying Keene and the other two NIFTV crew, along with several others from Space Dock who had been involved in the test mission, landed at the Saucillo site under a sun beating down through a dust haze that tinted the plain blue with distance. A bus carried the arrivals from the pad area to the assembly and administration complex at the far end of the landing field, where there was an interview session with waiting TV reporters. From there, a company helicopter flew them to the main plant at Kingsville for a post-mission debriefing over a burgers-and-fries lunch with senior technical staff in the office of the Technical Vice President, Harry Halloran. A lot of numbers and preliminary flight data were bandied about, and the NIFTV’s performance analyzed. The consensus was that the demonstration had comfortably exceeded expectations.
By rights, that ought to have been good news. But such were the circumstances of the times that negative reactions could be expected as a virtual certainty too. And, indeed, by afternoon the protest had already started, ranging from diplomatic notes being delivered in Washington to poster-waving in the street outside Amspace’s Corpus Christi offices. All the news channels were airing comments or polling views, and the company’s switchboard and electronic mail servers were overloading. So if it was true that there really is no such thing as bad publicity, and since the whole object had been to get attention, then there could be no serious grounds for complaint.
As it turned out, many of the incoming messages were supportive. The British government expressed the hope that the demonstration might mark the beginning of a turnaround in world opinion that was long overdue. A Russian corporation revealed that it was working along similar lines to the NIFTV and would be flying a test engine of its own within six months. By three o’clock, Amspace had received twenty-six inquiries from hopeful would-be pilots. The meeting ended with the hope that the coming weekend might afford a forced cooling-off period. After that, the case the Kronians had come to argue for Earth expanding its space effort would endorse Amspace’s position strongly. So all in all, events seemed to have worked themselves in quite a timely fashion.
While people were still collecting papers together and shutting down laptops, Wallace Lomack, the company’s Chief Design Engineer, came over to where Keene was sitting with Joe Elms and Ricardo. “It was the Rambler all over again, Lan,” he said jovially. “Right?”
Keene looked up, momentarily nonplussed. “Hi, Wally. What?”
“A long time ago, you told us that story about the Nash Rambler that you souped up and wiped out everything on the highway with back when you were a student. The stunt today was the same thing all over again, right? That was what gave you the idea.”
Finally, the penny dropped. “Oh, you still remember that story, eh?” Keene said.
“I never heard that one,” Joe murmured, tidying up his notes.
“Lan’s history of dreaming up crazy schemes and getting everyone to go along with them goes all the way back,” Wally replied. Then, to Keene, “I bet you never thought it would come to anything like this, though, eh?”
“You’re right. I never thought it would. . . .” Keene shrugged. “So what are you up to over the weekend, Wally? Anything wild and exciting?”
Lomack left his tie loosened and slipped on his jacket, not bothering trying to fasten it over his ample midriff. “Oh, bit of boating, bit of fishing-something to amuse the grandkids, you know. How about you, Lan?”
“We’re the mission crew. We don’t have no weekend,” Ricardo put in, next to Keene.
“They’ve given you the whole of tomorrow morning to rest up,” Keene pointed out.
“Oh, yeah. How could I forget that?”
“Then Les has got a press conference organized in town that we have to be at,” Keene replied to Wally. He was referring to Les Urkin, head of Amspace’s public relations. “Then I arranged to be in Washington next week. Things are no doubt about to start flapping there.”
“When are you flying up there?” Wally inquired.
“Probably Sunday night.”
Joe raised his eyebrows and made an O in the air with a thumb and forefinger. “Aha! And planning to meet the delectable Saturnian, I’ll bet. Can’t say I blame you, though, Lan.”
“Sure, if the schedules work out,” Keene agreed. “Why not? We’ve been talking to them long enough.”
“Is a romance between the planets about to happen?” Ricardo asked, grinning.
Keene shook his head. “Not me. I’ve been there already. Burned, bitten, and shy. You know how it is.”
Wally thought about that, then made a face. “Well, the first two, I might buy. Anyhow, have fun, young feller.”
“You too, Wally,” Keene said. “And don’t let those grandkids tip over your boat. You’re needed back here for the profile evaluations next week.”
Lomack moved away, while Keene finished stuffing his papers into a document case. As a matter of fact, he had forgotten all about his student escapade with the Nash Rambler. What had given him the idea for showing off the NIFTV when the Air Force was testing its APU was something he’d read about Charles Parsons, the English inventor of the steam turbine, who had used the celebration of the Queen’s Jubilee in 1897 to arouse the interest of the British Admiralty. On that occasion, the Royal Navy had assembled 173 warships to be reviewed by the Royal Yacht and a grand flotilla of craft containing the Lords of the Admiralty, various colonial premiers, the Diplomatic Corps, and members from both Houses of Parliament; but Parsons stole the show by roaring around the fleet in his 2,000 horsepower turbine-driven yacht Turbinia at thirty-four knots, which was faster than anything the Navy could send in chase. In fact, it was the fastest boat in the world at the time. Such was the spirit of the age, that the British Admiralty had responded by promptly ordering two turbine-powered ships. As he zipped up the document case and rose from his chair, Keene wondered if they could expect a similar display of magnanimity and perspicacity from the Defense Department.
After leaving Amspace, Keene stopped by his own company to show his face and check on how things had gone during his absence. Protonix occupied a five-room suite in an office park on the south side of Corpus Christi, near the interchange between the Crosstown Expressway and South Padre Island Drive. Besides himself as president, it had four other staff, all female. Vicki was Keene’s associate and second-in-command; Celia acted as her assistant; Judith had a math Ph.D. and looked after the computers, while Karen was the receptionist, secretary, and general errand-runner. The engineers at Amspace referred to the firm enviously as Keene’s Harem. In fact, as a point of professionalism and out of the sheer practical consideration of getting things done in an environment that was complicated enough already, Keene kept business strictly separate from anything personal. As with marriage, he had suffered the consequences of those kinds of involvements in earlier years. Sometimes he thought that the first half of his adult life had served partly as a rehearsal for the second, in which he was finally managing to get a few things right.
He was greeted with laughter and applause, a bottle of Bushmills Black Bush Irish whiskey, and an old astronaut-style cap from the souvenir shop at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The girls had watched the demo that morning and said it was terrific. Karen thought that Keene looked great on TV-that unshaven, mildly haggard look was exactly what movie producers were hunting for. He ought to apply for a part, she told him. Keene assured her that there had been nothing mild about it.
Although Protonix hadn’t been named in any of the coverage, the political and media insiders who knew Keene were already clamoring to get ahold of him, and Shirley, who ran the office that he used in Washington, had called with a tentative list of meetings scheduled for Monday. But the big news was that Naomi had presented Celia with five kittens: two tabby, one black, one gray, and one “kind of stripey something,” Celia said. . . . Oh, and yes, apart from that, Judith had left early to attend the computer show in Dallas tomorrow; there were problems with machining some of the parts for the reactor Westinghouse was fabricating in San Diego, that Vicki needed to talk to him about next week; the guy in Japan who had done the thermal studies had downloaded the reports that Keene was interested in; and the parking lot would be closed next Friday and over the weekend for resurfacing. When a few more minor items were disposed of, Vicki followed Keene into his office with a list of things to check for Monday, leaving Karen and Celia clearing desks, organizing purses, and exchanging plans for the weekend.
Vicki had light brown, almost orange hair that contracted itself into wiry curls no matter how she tried to comb or wave it, and a freckled, angular face accentuated by a pointy nose, sharp chin, and straight mouth. Her body was petite and lean-limbed, shaped by that chemistry that can eat anything all day and metabolize energy without an ounce of gain. She lived for her work, and she was good. Originally a radiation physicist at Harvard, she had met Keene when he moved there to become a theoretician from conducting plasma physics research at General Atomic in San Diego. She had grown disillusioned with the academic scientific community at about the same rate as he, and rejoined him back in the real world soon after he quit, moved south to Texas, and set up the business that later became Protonix. She had a fourteen-year-old son called Robin, whom she had raised from toddlerhood by herself, and Keene had become something of a father figure as well as a business colleague.
“So . . .” Vicki stared across the office from one of the two visitor chairs below a wall of framed pictures of launch vehicles and satellites, including a spectacular shot of the Kronian Osiris.
“So,” Keene echoed. They were both flopped loosely, unwinding, happy to forget the week’s routine events for the time being.
“You get to go again. I told you, the others can take care of the office. Why do I get this impression that male animals are fickle?” One of their standing jokes was that Keene would get Vicki up on a mission too one day. It had long been a dream of hers to go into space.
Keene put on a mock pained look. “If I didn’t know you better, I might think you didn’t believe me.”
“How can you say that? You know I have undying trust.”
“And I have an image of mystique to keep up. You know how the guru thing works: always promise nirvana tomorrow.”
Vicki turned her eyes resignedly toward the ceiling and changed the subject. “Did I hear you say they’re actually giving you tomorrow morning off to rest up?”
“The galley slaves have to get some air sometime,” Keene replied. “Les has got a press conference fixed for the afternoon.”
“You want to stop by for a late breakfast at the house on your way in? Robin has been asking after you. I think he wants to show you some of the latest that he’s been getting into.”
Keene rubbed his chin. “Sure, why not? . . . So how is Robin?”
“Just fine.”
“What’s he been getting into this time?”
“Dinosaurs. Apparently they couldn’t have existed.”
“Oh, really? A mass hallucination, then. . . . So how come?”
“It gets involved. Why not ask him tomorrow?”
“Okay.”
Vicki searched her mind for anything else. “Did you talk to Sariena? I was at Kingsville when they redirected the call from the Osiris. That was just after your spot with John Feld ended.”
“Yes, I got it,” Keene replied. “She just wanted to let us know that Gallian was happy with the way things went; also, that they’d be on their way down to the surface pretty soon.”
“They’re down,” Vicki said. “It was on the news this afternoon-while you were at the debriefing. Big reception dinner at the White House tonight. Everybody who thinks they’re somebody is going to have to be there.” She tossed a hand out in a motion indicating both of them. “So how come we didn’t get invitations?”
“We left the rarified academic heights, don’t you remember? People would probably worry that we might show up in coveralls, carrying wrenches.” Keene rubbed his chin. “We could stop for a quick one while it’s still happy hour at the Bandana,” he offered. “Not exactly black tie, but do you think it would do instead?”
Vicki smiled and gave a snort. “The company might be an improvement, though-I’ll say that.” She stretched, held the position for a few seconds, then relaxed. “So never mind the pageantry over the weekend. How will things go when they get down to the real talking? Any guesses? . . . I know we’ve got a lot of the world’s attention, but is it really going to take any notice? I mean, okay, Athena’s there. But most people are treating it like a spectator sport, not something that actually connects to their lives. Are the Kronians going to be able to change that?”
“They must think they stand a chance, otherwise they’d hardly have come this far.” Keene showed his palms briefly. “All they have to do is get the powers that shape science in this world to see the obvious.”
“Wow,” Vicki said dryly. “Now I really feel better.”
Kronia’s scientists had reached the conclusion that the conventional picture of a stable and orderly Solar System repeating its motions like clockwork since the time of its formation, was-simply put-wrong. Cataclysmic encounters between planetary and other bodies had, they maintained, occurred through into recent historic times, and there was no reason to suppose that such events would not continue. The Kronian leaders accepted this view and for years had been exhorting Earth to put a greater investment of effort and resources into spreading a significant human presence across the Solar System. For as long as the human race remained concentrated in one place, they insisted, it was vulnerable, literally, to extinction. In fact, they claimed it had almost happened in the not very distant past.
But Earth’s institutions remained wedded to their dogma of gradualism, which maintained that only the processes observed today had operated in the past, and, apart from temporary local fluctuations, had done so at the same rates. Extrapolating backward the currently measured rates of such processes as sedimentation and erosion had yielded the immense ages assigned to geological formations, which had come to be regarded as unquestionable.
In the main, Earth’s policymakers had rejected the Kronian urgings in preference for the orthodox view. With the military no longer able to press as compelling a case as in the days of superpower rivalry, and other lobbies jostling for a share of largesse at the federal trough, expansion of the space sciences and industries had not been a high government priority. For the private sector, ventures much beyond the Moon were too massively demanding in outlay and too risky to interest the major institutional investors, who looked to areas of secure returns such as launch systems for satellites and limited scientific payloads-which conventional technologies served adequately. Comfort and security had become the world’s foremost concerns. Only fringe outfits like Amspace, and a few visionaries who were prepared to back them, had continued pushing for a general commitment to broadening what the Kronians had pioneered, and were calling for the enterprise that advanced, long-range, spacegoing capability would open up: colonization. Hence, organizations like Amspace had found themselves natural allies of the Kronians, communicating and cooperating for the same end: the Kronians to impart a cultural imperative; the Keenes of the world-and the Joyces, spending weeks on end in a cramped, orbiting boiler room; the Wallys, hoping to create a better world for their grandchildren-pursuing lifelong dreams.
Then Athena happened-and surely, they had all believed, that would change everything. But astoundingly, it had changed things hardly at all. Of course, the early months had seen a media orgy of sensational pictures of the planetoid and a deformed Jupiter gradually regaining its shape; hurried explanations by scientists; and endless lurid articles and documentaries that the public eventually grew weary of. Sales of amateur telescopes, astronomy books, and videos soared; related college classes reported record enrollments; catastrophism saw a dramatic revival. And yes, the scientific community conceded, with some hemming and hawing and smoothing of ruffled plumage, that their theories needed revising-and then clamored for more funding to support the new research that needed to be done. But the kind of research they had in mind involved bigger and more lavishly equipped departments, computers that even the particle physicists would envy, more chairmanships and committees, and appointments to oversee unmanned missions to various parts of the Solar System. The mainline contractors got in their bids where they saw opportunity, but practically without exception the equipment and techniques envisaged were all safe, proven, and more of the same. Nothing they talked about anticipated any meaningful move toward getting people in significant numbers out there anytime soon. Finally, in desperation, the Kronians dispatched a political-scientific delegation to present their case firsthand in an attempt to shake Earth out of its complacency.
There was a tap on the door, and Celia stuck her face in. “We’re off now,” she said to Keene and Vicki. “Have a good weekend.”
“ ’Bye,” Karen’s voice called from the outer office beyond.
“Take care with those cowboys out there,” Keene called back. One of the ongoing news topics of the office was Karen’s latest boyfriend. He nodded a goodnight to Celia. She disappeared, closing the door. Keene looked back at Vicki. “We’ll just have to wait and see what the next few weeks bring,” he told her.
As he saw things, it was the last chance. If this didn’t bring about a change in Earth’s outlook and policies, nothing would. Then he and Vicki might well end up applying for jobs at the Bandana instead of just stopping by for happy-hour drinks.
Thirty years earlier, the world had scoffed and said it was impossible when two extraordinary personalities got together and announced an intention to establish a human settlement among the moons of Saturn. After the parade of mediocrity that had marked the closing decades of the twentieth century, it seemed that leader figures with the charisma to inspire followings had conceded the stage to rock stars and sports idols. Then, one day, a disenchanted California trial attorney with the unremarkable name of Thomas Mondel gave up a promising career to denounce the world’s economic system with the contention that humans were made-created, evolved, or “just there”; whatever one chose to believe-for better things. There was something wrong with a society that spent millions trying to make computers and robots imitate humans while at the same time raising humans to behave like robots. California had seen more than a smattering of fads and cults before, of course. But this was different in several ways that mattered. Mondel was not another beard with sandals and beads, reaching out to lost sheep and adolescents of all ages desperate to find escape from the hopeless corners of life that they had painted themselves into. He was professional, articulate, wise to the ways of the world, and he knew how to get attention. His appeal was to the slowly atrophying cost accountant stuck in traffic twice a day, two-hundred-fifty days every year, with the IRS waiting to mop up whatever of his year’s income survived Christmas; to the marketing wage slave sitting out a four-hour layover at O’Hare, looking forward to a microwaved TV meal in a solitary apartment and wondering what happened to the glamorous, high-powered executive that she’d created out of movie images in the years she was at college; to the frustrated who had worked to be scientists or teachers or ministers or healers, but found themselves turned into full-time form-fillers and fundraisers instead. In short, to all those people to whom it didn’t make sense to have to labor year-in, year-out in dismally unfulfilling ways in order to be allowed a modest share of the produce in a world whose biggest preoccupation seemed to be with moving overproduced merchandise that nobody really needed. And it was amazing how many people like that there turned out to be.
It was hardly the first time that somebody had denounced money value as the sole measure of worth of all things. In the past, Mondel claimed, some such indicator to keep track of who owed what to whom had always been necessitated by scarcity. But knowledge and the limitless capacity that it equated to in today’s world made that no longer true. In terms of ability, humanity’s material problems were solved. What hadn’t been solved was finding the right incentive to induce people to realize that ability. Trying to mesh twenty-first-century technology with nineteenth-century notions of economics produced the constant clashing of gears that the world had been hearing. When the wants of those with the means to pay determined the demand that was supplied, and not what the rest of the people needed, eventually the ones with the needs would resort to force to satisfy them, which was why war, unrest, and rebellion refused to go away.
“Mondelism” caught the mood of the times and spread, attracting followers from all stations in life committed to creating a mutual support network based on principles of obligation and trust, service and duty, instead of buying and selling. But it also attracted a lot of free riders too, as the skeptics had said it would, giving rise to hostility within and ridicule without, and in general the movement wasn’t a success. But neither was Mondel a quitter. The problems didn’t reflect on the soundness of the idea, he insisted, but resulted from its having to be sown in fields already choked by weeds. The followers continued to believe, and sustained by a core of tireless disciples and some quite influential backers, tottered on through intermittent triumphs and crises for several years. And then Tom Mondel met a geneticist-entrepreneur by the name of Clement Waltz.
Waltz had started a biological engineering company called Genenco that hit on a method for detecting and correcting a number of common genetic birth defects. Health-care systems worldwide rushed to license the process, since the cost of screening was significantly lower than that of the treatment programs avoided later. The result was that Waltz became a multibillionaire before he was thirty, upon which he grew bored with it all and cast around for something more meaningful to occupy himself with than continuing to make money, which he had come to despise. Some scientific and business colleagues introduced him to Mondel, and Waltz was immediately captivated. Mondel, by this time, had reached the conclusion that what his system needed was a clean start in an untainted environment removed from Earth. Accepting the irony that in a money-dominated world, money was necessary to gain freedom from the contamination of money, Waltz assembled sufficient assets from his own resources and sympathetic backers to solicit the Guatemalan government’s cooperation in constructing an assembly and launch center at a place called Tapapeque. He imported scientists from Japan, manufacturing know-how from China, disgruntled rocketry experts from NASA and the former Soviet military, and announced that he was going to establish a Mondelist colony elsewhere. The world chortled and jeered-until test shots from Tapapeque circled the Earth, and three months later a four-man lander touched down fifty miles from the UN experimental base at Tycho in a single-stage jump from an Earth-orbiting platform. Here was an illustration of what dedication and human creativity untrammeled by power-lust and greed could achieve, Mondel and Waltz told the astonished world. In the isolated Central American microcommunity, Mondelism worked. They then announced that the promised extraterrestrial colony would be founded not on Mars, as most commentators had assumed, and where a tiny international scientific reconnaissance group lived a hardy life with visitations twice a year; not among the Asteroids, which would be bypassed and exploited later; not even above Jupiter, whose high-radiation environment posed uncertainties; but all the way out at the remoteness of Saturn. This time the world didn’t jeer, although there was no disguising that its credulity was strained. . . . And, by God, they made it!
Thereafter, despite the distance and the infrequency of return voyages by the first ship, and-later-more departures by others, the colony grew at a surprising rate. The stories that came back of science free to function as an instrument of pure inquiry, unconstrained by establishment dogmas or the political agendas of funding agencies, attracted a particular kind of mind-not just physicists and engineers but builders, inventors, philosophers, explorers: the curious, the restless, the innovators of every kind. They were drawn by the accounts they heard of a society-in-miniature that seemed to function without budgets or accounting, where value was reflected in what an individual contributed to the common enterprise. Some gave the closest description they could find for the social order there as “monastic.” The measure of worth-“wealth”-was knowledge and competence. It couldn’t be stolen, hoarded, taxed, or counterfeited. If left to lie unused it effectively didn’t exist.
Invariably, there were those who couldn’t fit in and came back. And the vast majority on Earth, even if they ever thought about such matters and could relate to them, were unable to comprehend how anyone would choose living amid ice deserts and breathing machine-dispensed air to taking in a movie after a day’s shopping at the mall, lying on the beach, or harvesting corn in Iowa in October. But just a few here and a couple there from places scattered the world over proved sufficient to fill the transports lifting out from orbit and establish further bases on Tethys, Rhea, Titan, and Iapetus in a time period that confounded all the experts. Nevertheless, it was still widely regarded as a crazy venture destined eventually to peter out or come to an abrupt end. Earth’s commercial and political institutions made no rush to follow, since for them there was nothing to be gained. It was only in the surreal system of economics that Mondelism had created, where a huge infusion from altruistic benefactors had put up the stake money and some of the best talent that Earth had produced was prepared literally to work for nothing, that any significant investment in operations over such a distance could be contemplated.
There had been times when Keene too had thought about going in one of those ships-not during the early days, for he had been too young, but later, when he would have had something to offer out there. The period following the breakdown of his marriage had been one such time. Others were when he despaired that no Earth-based initiative would ever follow to build on the unique combination of circumstances that had founded Kronia-at least not while he was still a young man. But he had stayed, knowing those moods would pass-and they always had.
It would have felt too much like giving up. Big changes were never easy, and always they depended on the rare kind of people who seemed capable of believing in anything except the impossible. And besides, he liked to watch sunsets too-and to scuffle through autumn leaves, eat out at a good waterside restaurant, and lie on beaches. Why should he have to leave all that to people he disagreed with when he could fight them for it? And right now, the prospects for finally getting official recognition that expansion outward was imperative to the security of Earth’s culture looked better than ever. He wasn’t prepared to become an exile just yet.
The colony’s original intent had been to maintain a cooperative relationship with Earth based on some kind of exchange of Kronian technological innovations in return for products and materials that Earth could supply more conveniently. But when Kronia went on to realize in twenty years advanced propulsion systems that Earth had put on hold, attitudes on Earth became more wary, causing the Kronians to withdraw and manage their own affairs. Mondel and Waltz both died together in a craft that broke up on reentry over Titan eight years previously, making them instant martyrs of the movement. But by that time Kronia was established and virtually self-sufficient. The Tapapeque complex was handed over to the Guatemalan government, who maintained shuttle operations to ferry up departing emigrants when a Kronian ship was in orbit, and at other times leased surplus capacity to various national and private interests, providing a welcome supplement to the country’s income.
Did Keene really believe that a bunch of mavericks and misfits that most of the world dismissed as deranged or incomprehensible could reroute human destiny? “Sure,” he told innumerable reporters and interviewers who called him throughout the rest of the evening. “Just the same as we can run rings around the Air Force.”
Southeast of Corpus Christi, a bridge connected across an inlet to a peninsula called Flour Bluff, at the end of which lay the Naval Air Station. Beyond the peninsula, a causeway continued to Padre Island, one of the chain of sandy offshore islands fringing the Gulf shore from west Florida to Mexico. That was where Vicki lived, in an aging but well-kept and homey single-family house that she had acquired when she moved from the northeast to join Keene after he set up Protonix. Robin’s father, a Navy man, had been killed some years before in a political bombing incident in the Middle East. Keene’s slipping into the role of family friend and father substitute filled a vacant space in both their lives, as well as making a big difference for Robin.
He arrived shortly before ten, after a twenty-minute drive from his townhouse on Ocean Drive, facing the Bay on the southern side of the city, clad in a sport shirt with slacks that he could throw a jacket over for the press conference later. Vicki greeted him in a weekend casual top and shorts. Robin joined them, and they sat down to breakfast in the glass-enclosed summer room that had been added as an extension of the kitchen. Keene had always thought Robin a great kid with a natural ability to get along with anybody, who deserved to have known a natural father. He was fair like his mother, although his hair was more yellow, and his skin, unlike hers, kept a year-round tan. His features seemed to alternate between deep frowns when he was intent on something, to wide-eyed vistas of distant blankness when he was off into the realms of . . . wherever he went. Keene sometimes wished he had kept a notebook to list the questions Robin had come up with in the time they had known each other. For a while, someone at Robin’s school had formed the opinion that he had an attention-deficiency problem, but Vicki thought it was more the result of a communications failing somewhere; any kind of communications channel has two ends. It hadn’t been Keene’s place to interfere, but in his own mind he had agreed with her. He knew from his own experience that Robin was capable of fearsome and sustained concentration on things that interested him.
Besides her job with Protonix, Vicki had a sideline creating advertising graphics at home. When she wasn’t breadwinning or single-parenting, she managed to find time for a mix of interests that never ceased to amaze Keene, ranging from biology and medieval history to pen-and-ink drawing and decorating, in between which she desk-published the newsletter for a local church group, made sure that Robin fed and looked after his menagerie, and amassed books on seemingly every subject imaginable. She believed nothing on TV or in newspapers that was of interest, and had no interest in the things she did believe. When she seriously wanted to know something, she dug and pestered until she found sources that were reliable, or she went to someone who knew. She had first entered Keene’s world of awareness through tracking him down when they were both at Harvard, to answer questions she had about the electromagnetic properties of space after finding the theories of dark matter to account for anomalous motions of galaxies unconvincing.
“The hounds are baying,” she told Keene, referring to reactions that had been building up to Amspace’s stunt the day before. “But we knew that would happen. Have you caught much of it?”
Keene shook his head. “I’ve been screening those out. That’s what Amspace has a PR department for. No doubt I’ll get my share this afternoon. Who’s saying what?”
“The EA secretary was bilious,” Vicki said-the name of the former EPA had been shortened, after some thought the original form sounded too alarmist. “He called it criminally irresponsible and wants a formal ban on space nukes to be declared internationally.”
“He’s got an image to keep up for the faithful,” Keene replied. “It’ll never happen. The Defense people need to keep an option open to match the Chinese if they have to, and the Chinese will never buy it.”
Robin attended to his eggs and bacon, his mind roaming in whatever realms it turned to when grown-ups got into politics. Keene watched Vicki refilling the coffee cups and then let his gaze wander over the kitchen, searching for a change of subject. Sam, the household dog, lay in the doorway watching him with one eye open, still unable, quite, to figure out whether or not Keene belonged. Labrador and collie contributions were discernible, with various other ingredients stirred into the mix. Vicki had originally christened him “Samurai,” but he just didn’t have the image. The parakeets squawked noisily in their cage from the kitchen beyond.
There were a few more pictures and drawings adorning the wall. A model of a tyrannosaurus had appeared on top of the refrigerator. “Oh, what’s this?” Keene murmured. He remembered what Vicki had said at the office the previous evening. “Is Robin going through his dinosaur phase? I guess he’s at just about the right age.” Robin returned immediately from wherever, registering interest.
Vicki nodded with a sigh. “His room is practically papered with prints that he’s downloaded. It’s like one of those science-fiction-movie theme parks. I think he must have checked out every book on them in the local library.”
“I hope that won’t mean more additions to the private zoo, CR,” Keene said, looking at Robin. Keene had dubbed him Christopher Robin, after the character from the British children’s books.
Robin appeared to mull over the possibility, then shook his head. “Too much cleaning up after. And they’d probably bother the neighbors.”
“What’s this I hear about them not being real?” Keene asked. “Has everyone been imagining things all these years?”
“Oh, did Mom tell you about that?”
“Right.”
“Theoretically they ought to be impossible,” Robin agreed. “They couldn’t exist.” Keene waited, then showed an open palm invitingly. Robin went on, “Well, you’re an engineer, Lan. It follows from the basic scaling laws. The weight of an animal or anything increases as the cube of its size, right?”
Keene nodded. “Okay.”
Robin shrugged. “But strength depends on the cross-section of muscles, which only increases as the square. So as animals get bigger, their strength-to-weight ratio decreases. All this stuff you read about insects carrying x times their own body weight around isn’t really any big deal. At their size you’d be able to walk around holding a piano over your head with one hand.”
Keene glanced at Vicki with raised eyebrows. “Robin’s been doing his homework.” Keene was familiar with the principle but had never had reason to dwell on its implications regarding dinosaurs.
“That’s Robin,” Vicki said.
Keene looked back at Robin. “Go on,” he said.
“As you get bigger, it works the other way. Do you know who the strongest humans in the world are?”
“Hmm. . . . Oh, how about an Olympic power lifter?” Keene guessed.
“Right on. Now, take one, say, doing dead-lift or a squat. The most you’d be talking about would be what-around thirteen hundred pounds including body weight?”
Keene shrugged. “If you say so. It sounds as if you’ve checked it out.”
“Oh, he has,” Vicki threw in.
“Now scale him up to brontosaurus size, and his maximum lifting capability works out at under fifty thousand pounds,” Robin said. “But the brontosaurus weighed in at seventy thousand; the supersaur even more than that, and the ultrasaur at-would you believe this-three hundred sixty thousand pounds!”
“My God.” Keene sat back in his chair, staring hard as the implication finally hit him. “Are you sure they were as heavy as that?”
Robin nodded. “I got those estimates from a guy called Young, who’s Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the museum in Toronto. And I checked it with somebody else at the Smithsonian, too.” It sounded as if Robin had been picking up tips from Vicki. His expression remained serious. “But the point is, the strongest man in the world wouldn’t have been able to stand under his own weight, let alone move-and that’s when you’re talking about practically being made of muscle. These other things were all digestive system. So how did they do it? See what I mean-they couldn’t exist.”
Keene looked across at Vicki quizzically. It was a challenge for any engineer. Vicki tossed out her free hand and shook her head. “Maybe they had better muscles,” Keene offered as a starter, looking back at Robin.
Robin was clearly prepared for it. “No, that doesn’t work. The maximum force that a muscle can produce is set by the size of the thick and thin filaments and the number of cross-bridges between them,” he replied. “It turns out they’re about the same for a mouse as for an elephant-and it holds true across all the vertebrates. That means the only gain you get from larger size is what comes from the bigger cross section.”
“There’s no increase in efficiency,” Keene checked.
Robin shook his head. “In fact, it goes the other way. Gets worse.”
“Okay. . . .” Keene searched for another way to play devil’s advocate. “They were aquatic. I saw a picture in a book once that showed them snorkeling around in lakes and swamps.”
“Nobody believes that anymore,” Robin countered. “They don’t show any aquatic adaptations. Their teeth were worn down from eating hard land vegetation, not soggy watery stuff. They left tracks and footprints. That doesn’t happen under water.”
“Did he find all this out by himself?” Keene asked, turning back to Vicki.
“I helped him with some of it,” she told him-which Keene had guessed. “But it does seem to be a real mystery-a big one. You just don’t hear about it.” She made a vague gesture. “On top of the things Robin’s mentioned, you’ve also got the problem with the circulatory system of the sauropods-those were the ones that were all neck and tail. How did they get the blood up to their brains? A giraffe’s head might be twenty feet up, and it needs pressure that would rupture the vascular system of any other animal. Giraffes do it by having thick arterial walls and a tight skin that works like a pressure suit. But a sauropod’s brain was at fifty or sixty feet. The pressure would have needed to be three or four times that of a giraffe. The people who’ve studied it just can’t see it as credible.”
“Hmm. Maybe they didn’t hold their necks upright, then,” Keene tried. “What if they walked around with them horizontal? . . . No.” He shook his head, not even believing it himself. What would have been the point of having them? And in any case, even without knowing the exact numbers, his instinct told him that the stress generated at the base would be more than any biological tissue could take.
Robin concluded, “And then you’ve got things like the pterosaurs that somehow flew with body weights of three hundred fifty pounds, and predatory birds of up to two hundred. The most you get today is about twenty-five, with the Siberian Berkut hunting eagle. Breeders have been trying to improve on that for centuries, but that’s as far as you can go and still get a viable flier.”
Keene looked at Vicki. “Any bigger, and you end up with a klutz,” she said. “The big gliding birds like albatrosses aren’t good flyers. They often need repeat attempts to take off, and they can be real clowns on landing.”
Robin nodded. “That’s why they’re called gooney birds.”
Vicki sat back and finished her coffee while Keene thought about what she and Robin had said. There didn’t seem any further line to pursue. “And the people in the business know these things?” he said finally. Of course they did. It was more for something to say.
“Well, we sure didn’t make them up,” Vicki replied. “I guess they put it out of their minds and get on with cleaning up the bones and fitting them together or whatever. So what’s new?”
It was Athena all over again-the reason Keene had quit physics to return to engineering. Most workers just got on with the day-to-day job that brought in the grants and kept the paychecks coming, without worrying too much about what it all meant. It was safer to write papers and textbooks about things that everyone agreed they knew than go dragging up awkward questions whose answers might contradict what people in other departments were saying they knew. Before long the whole edifice would be threatened, and the result would be trouble from all directions.
“There must have been something vastly different about the whole reality that existed then,” Vicki said distantly. “I don’t mean just with the dinosaurs, but about everything: the plants, the insects, the marine life. Walk around the museums and look at the reconstructions. It was all on a different scale of engineering. You can’t relate it to the world we know today. Something universal has altered since then. And the only thing that makes sense is gravity. Earth’s gravity must have been a lot less back in those times than it is now.”
Keene looked at her, coming back from his own line of thought. His brow creased. “How?”
“I don’t know. But if it wasn’t, dinosaurs couldn’t have existed. Yet they did. So what other explanation is there?”
Robin massaged the hair at the front of his head in the way he did when he had some way-out suggestion to offer. “I can think of one. Maybe it wasn’t Earth’s gravity that was different,” he said.
“Huh?” Keene frowned. “What else’s, then? I mean, where else are we talking about?”
“You know how what wiped the dinosaurs out was supposed to be an asteroid or something. . . .”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, suppose they weren’t on Earth at all before it hit, the way everyone assumes. Suppose they came here with it.”
“Came with what? You mean with the asteroid?”
“Yes-or whatever it was.” Robin made an appealing gesture. “If Earth’s gravity was too big for them to have existed, then they must have existed on something else. That’s logic, right? Well, suppose the something else was whatever Earth got hit by. It doesn’t have to be an asteroid like we think of them-you know, just a chunk of rock. It could have been, maybe, like something that had an atmosphere they could live in.”
“Wouldn’t it need to have been pretty huge, though, to have an atmosphere?” Keene queried.
“Not necessarily, if it was cold with dense gases. Titan has an atmosphere. . . . And in any case, the whole thing didn’t have to hit the Earth. Maybe it got close enough to break up, and only part of it did.”
Keene’s first impulse was to scoff, but he checked himself. Wasn’t that just the kind of automatic reaction that he was having so much trouble with from the regular scientific establishment? He could see reasons for not buying the suggestion, but simply the fact that it conflicted with prior beliefs wasn’t good enough to be one of them. Robin was trying. Keene paused long enough not to be dismissive.
“What about the impact?” he asked. “These things explode when they enter the atmosphere, like that big one over Siberia, oh . . . whenever it was. Or imagine what must have happened when that hole in Arizona was dug. You’re talking about bones being preserved intact enough to be put together again. Eggs. . . . And we’ve even got footprints. Would they really be likely to survive something like that?”
“That was what I wondered when Robin put it to me,” Vicki commented.
“Maybe, if they were encased inside chunks of rock that were large enough-say that came down across a whole area like a blanket,” Robin persisted. “The air might act as a cushion.”
“So you’re saying they might not actually have lived here at all,” Keene said, finally getting the point.
“Exactly. They lived on . . . whatever.” Robin looked from him back to Vicki as if to say, well, you asked for suggestions.
Keene sat back and snorted wonderingly. Ingenious, he had to grant. But being ingenious didn’t automatically mean being right. There was still that other small factor known as “evidence” to be considered.
“I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “I’ll put it to a couple of the planetary scientists that I know. We’ll see what they say.” Robin deserved that much.
“Really?” Robin looked pleased. “Hey, that would be great!”
“Sure. Why not?”
After breakfast they watched a replay of the Kronian landing and motorcade into Washington from the day before. Seeing the Kronians alongside native Terrans for the first time brought home something that Keene had never really registered before: they were tall. Sariena was a natural for the cameras to single out for close-ups, and she came over well when taking her turn to respond to the welcoming address by the President. Keene noted that the Kronians remained seated, and all of them wore sunglasses outside.
Keene and Robin spent an hour experimenting with a new electronic paint board that Robin had just added to his computer. Playing father figure was good for Keene’s self-image in enabling him to claim the capacity to be socially responsible if he chose. All in all, it was a relaxed, easygoing morning-the perfect way to recharge after the past week and prepare for the equally demanding one ahead. And then, just as Keene was getting ready to leave to go back over to the city for the press conference, Leo Cavan called from Washington, rerouted from Keene’s private number, with some news he said he’d rather not go into just now, but which had to do with the Kronians. Was Keene still planning on coming up to D.C. first thing the coming week? Keene confirmed that he was-probably flying up tomorrow night. Fine, Cavan said. Could he make it earlier in the day so that they could meet for dinner? Sure, Keene agreed. It sounded important. Cavan said yes, he thought it was. And Cavan wasn’t the kind of person who did things without good reason.
The press conference was held in the boardroom of Amspace’s headquarters building in downtown Corpus Christi. Ricardo Juarez and Joe Elms, the NIFTV’s other two crew members, were present with Keene. Wally Lomack joined them at the table facing the cameras as the official corporate spokesperson. Les Urkin, who headed public relations, and Harry Halloran, the technical VP, were present also in off-screen capacities. The assembly they faced was a fairly even mix of print and electronic news journalists, some hostile, some supportive, most simply following to see where the story led. With the tensions of the previous day’s test now over and preliminary evaluations of its results exceeding expectations, the Amspace team was in high spirits.
As had been expected, the initial questions involved the political furore being kicked up over the unannounced testing of a nuclear propulsion system in space by a U.S.-based company. Liberal and environmental groups were committed to protest on principle, and much of media opinion was sympathetic. Joe Elms and Ricardo ducked that issue on the grounds that their line was flight operations, happy to leave Keene the brunt of responding-which made sense, since it was a case he was used to presenting. For a while, he reiterated the line he had begun with John Feld the day before: the risks that had been propagandized for decades were exaggerated and trivial compared to others that the world accepted routinely; energy density, not just the amount, was what mattered if you wanted to do better things more efficiently; the densities involved with state-transitions of the atomic nucleus were of the scale necessary to get out into space in a meaningful way, whereas those associated with the so-called “alternatives” were not. None of this was particularly new. But Keene’s main hope while they had the world’s attention was to emphasize again that a commitment to such propulsion methods would be essential for the expansion across the Solar System that the Kronians were calling for, which was crucial to the security of the human race. The opportunity came when one of the network reporters asked for a response to allegations that Amspace was using the Kronian cause to promote its own commercial interests. Not being on the company’s staff, Keene couldn’t comment. Wally Lomack took it with a show of shortness.
“Obviously, it would be hypocritical to deny that we’d hope to benefit. But I’m getting tired of these people who seem to think that we’re incapable of looking beyond the bottom line of the current quarter’s balance sheet. If a serious space development program becomes our official policy, every contractor will be looking for a share of the action, and sure, we’d expect to take our place in line with everyone else who has something to offer. But the issue that should concern all of us is the safety and future of humanity. Look at the western sky tonight just after sundown if you’ve forgotten what I’m talking about. It’s happened before, and now we’ve just come too close for comfort to seeing it happen again. Saying that you and I won’t be around next time isn’t an answer.”
“The Kronians say it happened before,” somebody at the back of the room called out. “But they’re the ones on a limb out there who need Earth to bail them out. Is it just a coincidence that the line of business you’re in happens to be what they’re telling us we have to do?”
Ricardo shook his head violently, looking along the table for support. “They’re not out on any limb. Hell, man, they’ve got drive systems that could run rings around what we put up.”
“But Kronia is economically nonviable,” somebody else threw out. “Admit it, their system’s shot. They have to get Earth’s support somehow or go under.”
“That’s just a line that the politicians take,” Joe Elms retorted, sitting next to Keene on his other side from Lomack. “They don’t want to think about what it might do to their budgets.”
“Me neither. Would you want to pay the taxes?”
“It doesn’t have to be a tax-funded thing,” Joe answered. “Taken as a whole, this planet has enormous resources. We spend more on cosmetics, alcohol, entertainment, and pet food than-”
“Corporate interests again,” another voice chimed in. “That’s the whole point that some people are questioning.”
Keene didn’t want this to degenerate into an airing of suspicions they had all heard before. There were vaster issues to be focusing on. “Look,” he said, raising both his hands. “Can we just put all this aside in our minds for a minute? These things are trivial compared to what we should be talking about. What we should be talking about concerns all of us. . . .” He gave the mood a second or two to shift. “It isn’t just the Kronians who are saying that Earth has undergone major cataclysms in its past from encounters with other astronomical objects. Scars and upheavals written all over the surface of this planet and its moon say it. Abundant records of violent mass extinctions say it. Evidence of sudden climatic changes and polar shifts say it. And records preserved from cultures all over the world say that it has happened within recorded human history. Traditionally, they’ve been dismissed as myths and legends, but they show too much corroboration to be coincidental. The facts have been there for centuries, but for the most part we’ve remained collectively blind to what they’ve been telling us. Athena is telling us that we can’t risk that kind of blindness any longer.”
“Exactly,” Lomack pronounced, nodding vigorously.
A dark-haired man who was sitting near the front raised a hand, then pitched in. “Phil Onslow, Houston Chronicle. Do we take it, then, that you endorse this idea that the Kronians have been pushing about Venus being a new planet?”
For a moment, Keene was surprised. He had assumed it was obvious. “Well . . . sure. It’s intimately connected with what we’re trying to say, and what yesterday’s demonstration was all about. Three and a half thousand years ago, the human race came close to being wiped out.”
“And if we buy that, you’re asking us to spend trillions of dollars,” Onslow persisted. “But isn’t it true that scientists have been refuting that claim for years?”
“Yeah, right,” Ricardo scoffed. “The same scientists who said that comets couldn’t be ejected by Jupiter, let alone a planet-size body. Then look what happened ten months ago. And they’re still saying it!”
“Not quite. They’re saying there’s no proof that it happened before,” someone pointed out.
“Then they’re still in as much a state of denial as they have been for years. That’s all you can say,” Keene answered.
What the Kronians had been trying to get accepted since before Athena’s appearance was that around the middle of the second millennium b.c., Earth experienced a close encounter with a giant comet. Its axis was shifted and its orbit changed, causing seas to empty and flow over continents, the crust to buckle into mountains, and opening rifts that spilled lavas as much as a mile deep across vast areas of the surface. Climates changed abruptly, bringing ice down upon grasslands and turning forests into desert; civilizations collapsed; animals perished in millions; entire species were exterminated. These, the Kronians maintained, were the events glimpsed by the Hebrew scriptures in their descriptions of the “plagues” inflicted on Egypt, along with the events recorded subsequently.
The “blood” that turned the lands and the rivers red, followed by rains of ash and burning rock and fire, were consistent with the proposition of Earth moving into the comet’s tail to be assailed by iron-bearing dust, then torrents of gravel and meteorites, and finally infusions of hydrocarbon gases that would ignite in an oxygen-laden atmosphere. Then came the enveloping darkness as the smoke and dust from a burning world blanketed out the sun. The same succession of events was described not only in writings from across the entire Middle East, but in legends handed down by the peoples of Iceland, Greenland, and India; from the islands of Polynesia to the steppes of Siberia; and places as far apart as Japan and Mexico, China and Peru. The accounts of shrieking hurricanes scouring the Earth and tides piling into mountains read the same in the Persian Avesta, the Indian Vedas, and the Mayan Troano as in Exodus, and were similarly narrated by the Maori, the Indonesian, the Laplander, and the Choctaw. And finally, the titanic electrical discharges between the comet’s head and parts of its deformed, writhing tail became clashes of celestial deities depicted virtually identically whether as the Biblical Lord battling Rahab, Zeus and Typhon of the Greeks, Isis and Seth of the Egyptians, the Babylonian Marduk and Tiamat, or the Hindu Shiva or Vishnu putting down the serpent.
“I don’t think you’re being fair,” Onslow objected. “A lot of scientists now agree that something extraordinary occurred around that time. A close flyby by a large comet is proposed in a number of models. But Venus is much bigger than any comet.”
“Any comet seen in recent times, anyway,” Joe said.
“It’s a lot like Athena could look three and a half thousand years from now if it lost its tail,” Lomack suggested.
The mood of the room pivoted on an edge. The three just back from space were heroes for the day, and the journalists’ professional instincts were not to put them down. Onslow was still frowning but seemed disinclined to press his negative sentiments further. On the other hand, they had been heavily influenced by the official line heard over the years. Keene sensed a chance to bring them closer and perhaps win one or two of them around if the case could be put persuasively. He studied his clasped hands for a moment and looked up.
“You’re all media people. How do you refer to that thing out there in the sky that’s not the same as anything we’ve seen before? One of the most frequent descriptions I’ve seen over the past few months is ‘giant comet.’ Well, people in ancient times were no different, except they thought of celestial objects as gods. In the languages of race after race and culture after culture, the names of the gods they associated with these events turn out to be not only interchangeable with or identical to their word for ‘comet,’ but also the name that they applied to Venus.” Keene looked around. The room was noticeably stiller, eyes fixed on him.
“I hadn’t realized that,” a new voice said. “This is interesting.” Onslow busied himself noting something in his pad and didn’t comment.
Keene answered, “It is, isn’t it. And I’ll tell you something more that’s interesting. Old astronomic tables from places as far apart as Egypt, Sumeria, India, China, Mexico-and the accuracy of some of those tables wasn’t equaled until the nineteenth century-all show four visible planets, not five. And in each case, the missing planet is Venus.” He waited a few seconds for that to sink in. Here and there, heads were turning to glance at each other. He concluded, “They all added Venus at about the same time. They all showed it appearing as a comet. And they all described it losing its tail to evolve into a planet. So come on, guys. How much more do you want?”
Afterward, they all agreed that it had gone well. In the chat session that followed over refreshments, most of the questions conveyed genuine curiosity and interest to learn more. Keene felt more than satisfied with the way things had gone, and Harry Halloran was looking pleased. As the session was breaking up, Les Urkin returned from taking a call outside and drew Keene to one side.
“You’re still going up to D.C. tomorrow night, Lan, is that right?”
“I switched to an earlier flight,” Keene replied. “I’m meeting someone for dinner.”
“Good. The Kronians are having an informal reception at their suite in the Engleton on Monday evening. Gallian heard you’d be in town, and he wants you to know you’re invited. Want me to confirm? Or I can give you their number.”
“Sure, I’ll be there,” Keene said. “Let me call them, Les. I get a kick out of talking to them without any turnaround delay now. So now we get to meet them finally, eh?”
Things were looking better and better.
The next day, Sunday, Keene arrived at Washington’s Reagan National Airport around mid-afternoon, and caught a cab to a Sheraton hotel that he often used when in the area, overlooking the Potomac outside the city on the far side of Georgetown. After checking in, he called Cavan to confirm that everything was on schedule. That gave him a couple of hours to shower, change, and catch up on some of his backlogged work via the room terminal before Cavan was due to arrive.
Leo Cavan worked as an “investigator” in what was effectively an internal affairs department of a bureaucratic monstrosity called the Scientific and Industrial Coordination Agency, or SICA, charged with planning and overseeing the implementation of a national scientific research policy. Keene had gotten to know him when Keene was at General Atomic. Cavan had started out in the Air Force hoping for a life of travel and excitement, and ended up instead preparing quality control reports and cost analyses in an accounting office. When he put in for a transfer to Space Command to get a chance to go into orbit before he was too old, he was drafted to Washington to review regulations and procedures instead. He had never fit the role well in Keene’s experience, being too technically knowledgeable to project the ineptness normally expected from officialdom, and too ready to overlook transgressions of no consequence when his judgment so directed. The result was that the two of them had gotten along splendidly and remained friends after Keene’s exasperation with the politics of government-directed science returned him to the world of engineering to develop nuclear drives for Amspace.
Cavan had taken to him, Keene suspected, somewhat in the manner of a father figure seeking to live through a surrogate son the life he would have wished himself. He led a strange kind of double existence. Outwardly a diligent creature of the system, he apparently found a pernicious satisfaction in subverting that same system by leaking inside knowledge that might help its opponents and compensate its victims. It seemed to be his private way of getting even with the forces that throughout his own life had deceived and then entrapped him. He also had one of the oddest senses of humor that Keene had ever encountered.
The restaurant was at the rear of the hotel, looking out over lawns sloping down to the tree-shaded riverbank. Keene had found a window table and was sipping a Bushmills while watching a flotilla of ducks on inshore maneuvers, when Cavan appeared through the entrance from the lobby. He spotted Keene and came over. Keene stood to shake hands, and they sat down. A waiter came to the table to inquire if Cavan would like a drink, and Cavan settled for a glass of the house Chablis. “I assume you wouldn’t risk your reputation by fobbing us off with a bad one,” he told the waiter. “Or have the accountants taken over writing the wine lists these days, like everything else?”
Cavan couldn’t have been far away from retirement. Everything about him suggested having been fashioned for economy, as if over the years the idealizations of his profession had infused themselves and ultimately found physical expression in his being in the way that was supposed to be true of owners and dogs. He had thinning hair and a sparse frame, on which his plain, gray suit hung loosely, a thin nose and sharp chin formed from budgeted materials, and a bony, birdlike face that achieved its covering with a minimal outlay of skin. Even his tie was knotted with a tightness and precision that seemed to abhor extravagance of any kind. But the pale steely eyes gave the game away, alive and alert, all the time scanning for new mischief to wreak upon the world. Of his private life Keene knew practically nothing. He lived somewhere in the city with a Polish girlfriend called Alicia whom he described as crazy without ever having said why, although sounding as if they had been together for years.
Cavan had followed Friday’s event, of course, and added his own congratulations. He pressed for details that hadn’t appeared in the news coverage, enjoying immensely Keene’s descriptions of the spaceplane’s robotlike commander and the splutterings of the Air Force brass, and expressing approval that the media reactions were not all hostile. The wine arrived and was pronounced acceptable. For the dinner order, Keene had worked up enough appetite after traveling to try the prime rib and a half carafe of Sauvignon to go with it. Cavan settled for Dover sole. “And I see they’ve been keeping you busy since,” Cavan resumed when the waiter had left. “I saw that clip that Feld did with you while you were still up on the satellite, and then the press coverage of all of you together yesterday. You came over well there, Landen. That should give a lot of people something to think about.”
“I got the feeling that for once we were getting through,” Keene said. “You can say the same thing to reporters for months, spell out all the facts, and nothing will prise them away from the official line they’ve been given. But this time we got them listening.” Cavan nodded, but without seeming as gratified as Keene would have expected. Keene could only conclude that what Cavan had wanted to talk about offset the good news.
“And are you still finding time in all this for the ladyfriend?” Cavan inquired, evidently choosing not to go into it just at that moment. His eyes were twinkling.
“You mean Vicki?”
“Of course.”
Keene sighed. “Leo, you know very well we’re just business partners. And sure, over the years we’ve become good friends as well. Why do you keep trying to make something more out of it?”
“Well, it’s none of my business, I suppose, but a fellow at your stage of life could do worse than consider stabilizing things a little.” Cavan sipped his wine. “She has the young son, and does ad work, yes?” Probably through habit, Cavan always sought confirmations and cross-references of information, Keene had noticed. In another life Keene could picture him as a tax auditor.
Keene nodded. “But I’ve got too much going on right now. In any case, I need my own space.”
Cavan indicated the upward direction with a motion of his head. “You mean there isn’t enough for you out there?” He studied Keene for a few seconds, swirling his glass. “Are you sure you’re not keeping your options open until you see how the land lies with that other lady you’ve had hovering on the fringes of your life for a while?” Keene frowned at him, perplexed. “The one who’d be a natural for the lead in a Queen-of-Sheba movie,” Cavan hinted.
Keene stared. “My God! Are you talking about Sariena?”
“I am, of course. Why act surprised?”
“What on earth makes you think that?”
“Excitement. Something different. The allure of the alien and unknown.” Cavan’s talonlike hands broke apart a bread roll and commenced buttering one of the pieces. “A perfectly understandable reaction, Landen-especially for somebody of your adventurous disposition. I mean, you’ve been in communication since before the Osiris left Saturn.” He paused, glanced up as if to be sure Keene was listening, and then went on, making his voice casual. “I could see your point, after all. She really is stunning. Everyone I talked to thought so when we were with the Kronians last night.”
“What?” It hit Keene only then that this was Cavan’s strange way of leading around to the subject he had wanted to discuss. And it had worked. Keene couldn’t deny that his first reaction was a twinge of resentment. “You’ve met her already?”
The meals arrived then, and Keene was able to let his surprise abate while plates and dishes were positioned, covers removed, and the glasses refilled. Having had his fun, Cavan became more serious. “I was at another dinner on Friday: the official White House reception for the Kronians-to be introduced to my ‘marks,’ for want of a better word.” He eyed Keene suggestively for a moment, as if inviting a response. Keene waited. Cavan explained, “The department has come up with a new angle on what an investigator does. Now, it appears, I’m supposed to cultivate the confidence of our guests of state, the purpose being to spy on them. It’s getting to be a tacky world that we live in, isn’t it, Landen?”
Unable to make anything of this so far, Keene merely motioned for him to continue.
“I’m one of several persons who have been assigned positions as official host representatives-tour guides, if you will-who will have constant contact with the Kronians. Our brief is to get close to them in order to get as much advance information as we can to help our own negotiators shoot them down.” Keene’s hand stopped with his fork halfway to his mouth. Cavan nodded somberly. “It’s a nonstarter, Landen. A policy ruling has already been made that Earth isn’t buying the Kronian line. Our side’s only interest is to discredit the whole business and get it out of the public limelight as quickly as possible.” For the moment, Keene was too stunned to do more than stare. He looked down at his plate and found that suddenly he didn’t feel so hungry anymore. Cavan added after a few seconds, “Sorry if I’ve spoiled your dinner. The tab’s on me, if that helps.”
There was a silence. Finally, Keene said, “What’s going on, Leo? Are they all blind or something?”
“It’s not so much a case of being blind as of not wanting to see,” Cavan replied over his soup. “You know the way things work in this business. The academic establishment sees the Kronians as invaders of its turf and a huge potential threat to traditional funding-which has been thinned down in recent years in any case. Government science sold out long ago to become an instrument for justifying government policy, and nobody on the Hill wants to talk about the expense. For the private sector the investment would be colossal, and the return on it just isn’t there. That’s why the space program was shifted to a lower gear in the first place.”
Keene shook his head disbelievingly. “One day, none of that’s going to matter. This is something we can’t afford not to do. I mean, we’re not talking about selling laundry detergent here, Leo. Maybe we have to learn something from the Kronians. The know-how and the ability is there, and it’s something that needs to be done. So you forget all the shopkeeper economics, and you just do it.”
“Logical enough, and eminently sensible,” Cavan agreed. “But the powers who run things here can’t think like that.”
It didn’t need to be spelled out further. Keene stared at his glass and sighed. “So what’s the line going to be? The one we’ve been hearing for a while: The whole Kronian venture was ill-conceived from the start; imagining that a society could function viably at that kind of distance was ridiculous all along . . . ?”
Cavan was already nodding. “And now they’re waking up to reality and finding themselves overextended,” he completed. “This story about supercomets and the end of the world is a concoction dreamed up to exploit the Athena event and milk support from Earth’s governments. That’s our line. And naturally the establishment’s scientific big guns will have their act coordinated to back it. We wouldn’t want to let down the people who ladle out the honors and write the checks, after all, now, would we?” Cavan spooned the last of his soup into his mouth-thin and straight, sparing on the lips-and watched, seemingly until Keene was just recovering sufficiently to tackle his food again. Then he added, “One of the big guns they’ll be wheeling up is a certain professor of astronomy and faculty head at Yale, recently nominated for the presidency of the International Astronomical Union. I wouldn’t imagine he needs any introduction.”
“You don’t mean Voler?”
“I do, of course.”
Keene’s fork dropped slowly back to his plate. For Herbert Voler was the paragon of perfection that his own former wife, Fey, had fled to and later married when Keene confounded her social ambitions by abandoning the prospect of scholastic accolades to return to the grubby world of engineering.
“I’m not quite sure how that might be relevant at this stage,” Cavan confessed. “But conceivably the situation could take a turn whereby the social connection offers possibilities unavailable in the purely formal context. In any case, it was an option that would apply to nobody else, so my first thought was to approach you.”
Keene made an inviting motion with his free hand. “Approach me for what, Leo? You still haven’t told me what this is all about.”
“Let me first give you an idea of how they intend playing it,” Cavan suggested. “Then it will be clearer. The softening-up program to condition the public has already been going on for a while. Did you see your friend Voler on TV yesterday?”
“No, I have been kind of busy, as you pointed out. What was this?”
“He gave a talk at Columbia, ridiculing the claims about all those ancient records. . . . But it was planned months ago to coincide with the Kronians’ arrival.” Cavan produced a compad from his jacket pocket. “Let’s watch him.” He activated the unit, fiddled with commands to retrieve a stored playback from the net, then turned it the right way around for Keene to see and passed it across. Keene’s features remained neutral as he gazed at the familiar figure.
Voler was fortyish, maybe-on the young side for the titles and credentials that he was able to brandish. He had a full head of black hair styled collar-length like a media celebrity, and a tanned complexion which with his pugnacious jaw emphasized a strong set of white teeth that his mobile features put to good effect, constantly splitting into broad smiles and grimaces. To Keene, he had always come across as a little too smooth and slick for a figurehead of academic excellence-but then, perhaps such qualities helped the political image equally necessary to attaining the rarified heights. Keene could have seen him as a pushy prosecution counsel, maybe, or a hustler on Wall Street. Behind him on the screen was a chart carrying names of planets and ancient deities, presumably referred to earlier. Keene turned the volume up just enough to avoid being an annoyance to nearby tables.
“ . . . four ways in which the same legend could come to be found among widely separated cultures. One, Common Observation: all of the cultures witnessed a common event and interpreted it in a similar way. Two, Diffusion: the legend originated in one place but traveled to others with the wanderings of humankind. Three, Commonality of Psychology: Humans everywhere are so alike that their brains create similar legends reflecting common hopes and fears. And Four, Coincidence.” Voler paused, grasping the podium, and surveyed his audience. “I think everyone would agree with me that we can reasonably discard the last. And we simply don’t know enough to propose number three, Common Psychology, with any confidence-although in my view it seems unlikely.” Due court having been paid to reasonableness and modesty, the focus narrowed to the brass tacks. Voler’s confident smile broadened, stopping just short of open derisiveness. “The Kronians, of course, are saying that we are therefore forced to accept the Common Observation hypothesis, as if it were the only alternative. But in this they are surely dismissing far too casually-one hopes in their impetuousness-the second possibility, namely that as various peoples dispersed across the globe, they took their myths and legends with them, just as they did their languages, their religions, and their technical skills. . . .”
“You can see what the game plan is,” Cavan broke in from across the table. “The Kronians will be projected into roles of sincere but misguided children. After a few days of recuperation from the voyage, they’ll be taken on a whistle-stop tour of some selected spots around Earth. None of them can remember much of Earth, and some were never here at all. So we’ll see pictures of them gaping at the Grand Canyon and the Amazon, or gawking like tourists in London and Paris, with chaperones like myself pointing out this and explaining that. Earth will have been magnanimous; Earth will have been accommodating. But you see what it will do for their image. They arrive here naive, and we have to acquaint them with reality. The same image will carry over to what the world will perceive as the science, and their case won’t have a prayer.”
By now, Voler was expounding on details of various human migrations. Keene had heard enough and snapped the unit off. “And what about the evidence written all over the surface of this planet?” he demanded. “None of that counts?” He meant the anomalies in the geological, fossil, and climatic records-all independent of anything that any humans of long ago had to say. There were such things as marks of sudden sea level changes, in some cases measuring hundreds of feet, found the world over; agricultural terraces close to sea level when they were cultivated, now disappearing under the snow line eighteen thousand feet up in the Andes; the remains of millions of animals and trees, torn to pieces and broken, found piled in caves and rock fissures from Europe to China and across the Arctic, in some places forming practically the entirety of islands off northern Siberia; huge herds of mammoths, buffalo, horse, camel, hippopotamus, and other beasts wiped out abruptly a thousand miles or more from any vegetation growing today that could support them. And all in the middle of that same mysterious millennium that the writings of old had chronicled. Was all that to be ignored?
“They’ll stay away from all that if they can,” Cavan said. “The Kronians make some good points, and many scientists outside the political-academic orthodoxy are siding with them. Nobody argues much anymore that terrestrial catastrophes have happened. Where they’ll try and draw the line is with planetary catastrophes-that Venus could have been an earlier Athena. If that’s allowed, then the whole foundation of the economic power structure as we know it would have to change, which in effect is what the Kronians are saying. But of course that would be unacceptable. So the line will be to discredit the Kronian arguments by any means until Athena has disappeared out of the Solar System and been forgotten-apart from as an anomaly that will generate Ph.D. theses for years-and then we’ll all be able to get back to the safe, comfortable lives that we know.”
Finally, Cavan took back the compad. He went on, “The reason I wanted to talk to you before you meet them tomorrow, Landen, is that the Kronians need to be made aware of this. But I can hardly bring it up in my position. You, on the other hand, are not saddled with having to wear an official hat. And being in touch with the Kronians already . . .” He left the obvious unsaid.
“Sure, I’ll handle it,” Keene agreed. There really wasn’t anything to have to think about. He picked up his knife but sat toying with it.
“I was sure you would,” Cavan said. He paused and refilled Keene’s glass. “Oh, do stop staring and try some dinner, Landen. You’ve come all the way from Texas for it, and it looks so delicious.”
For a desk and a base to work from in the Washington area, Keene rented space at an agency called Information and Office Services. Shirley, who ran the facility and acted for him when he was away, had arranged several Monday appointments from the calls that had begun coming in on Friday. The first was not until 10:00, and Keene spent the first part of the morning returning other calls that Shirley had listed. One was to a David Salio, who described himself as a planetary scientist at the Aerospace Sciences Institute in Houston, which Keene had visited on occasion. The Kronians had been getting attention in the Web news groups and independent media of many like Salio who were not among the circle of academic and government scientists fearful of money being diverted into the space corporations. Salio had favored the young-planet theory of Venus for some time and possesed a sizable collection of facts and data supporting it from modern-day space and scientific researches, independent of what ancient writings said. Athena was a clear warning that action had to be taken along the lines that the Kronians were calling for, and he wanted to know what he could do to help. Keene was immediately interested to hear more and suggested stopping by on his way back to Corpus Christi, which would be via Houston in any case. He would let Salio know when he had a firm return date.
Next was somebody called Barney from one of the Washington-based news services, who had tracked Keene down through his connection with Amspace. “What, you’re in Washington now!” he exclaimed when Keene called. “Hey, never mind taping an interview over the phone. We’ll send a couple of guys over to the hotel. It works for a better atmosphere. How would four o’clock suit? It’ll still be going out by this evening. Don’t worry, we do it all the time. No problem.”
Keene checked with his schedule and agreed. A couple of other concerns were happy to tape from the hotel, and a science magazine with a local office arranged to send a feature writer over that evening, after the TV taping. Keene spent some time confirming and fixing more appointments for the next two days that he would be in town, then left for his first meeting that day, which was with one of the senators for Texas in an office in the Senate Building.
In a TV interview over the weekend, the senator had told the reporter of the need to bring companies like Amspace to heel and enforce a greater compliance with “social responsibility.” He explained to Keene that he had to talk that way in order to preserve an acceptable public image. “But I want the people at Amspace to know that they can count on me to be realistic too.” Which could be taken as a warning or a wink and a nod, but either way translated into: “Keep the contributions coming and pray.” Keene tried to broach issues that went beyond appeasing activist groups while at the same time keeping the corporations sweet, but made little impression. The senator lived in his own world.
Lunch was with a documentary producer called Charles McLaren, whom Keene had known amiably for about two years. McLaren wondered if Friday’s event might resurrect the general nuclear-antinuclear controversy for a while and was thinking of putting together a fast tie-in for the public-affairs channels and newsnets. Would Keene be willing to act as a consultant again on short-call if they went ahead? Sure, Keene agreed. McLaren put accuracy before sensationalism and was meticulous in trying to get his facts right; Keene knew he could be sure of getting fair representation. But it was with weary assent. The discussion was pitched at helping a good technician do a job relating to a topic that was expected to be transient. There was no suggestion of a documentary to tell the world that it had come close to seeing the end of its civilization.
By early afternoon, he was in the cocktail lounge of a hotel off Pennsylvania Avenue to meet one of the technical aides to President Hayer. He wanted Keene to convey unofficially back to the management of Amspace, and through them to other allied interests, that as a sop to domestic outcries and world opinion it might be necessary to pass a bill banning the launching of nuclear devices from U.S. territory by private corporations. But the message was to keep up the development effort because provision could be engineered for a repeal in circumstances deemed vital to national security-but not until after the presidential election next year. In fact, the defense agencies were stressing the Chinese threat and could probably be induced to channel in some discreet funding to compensate for the shorter-term inconveniences. The aide paused to assess Keene’s reaction, then asked, lowering his voice to impart a note of confidentiality, “Out of curiosity, what would be the chances of matching the kind of propulsion the Kronians have, say within five years-given a suitable financial incentive? The Air Force already has an eye on extending its activities to trans-lunar distances. I can tell you that they for one are particularly interested.”
“Give me the top ten names in contained plasma dynamics, superconducting cryogenics, spontaneous vortex computational theory, and nuclear transition phases, get rid of all the political obstructionism, and you can have it in three,” was Keene’s answer.
The aide looked intrigued. “Really? And you know who these people are?”
“Sure I do. It’s my field.”
“Just suppose, for argument’s sake, that we decided to try and get them to come over to work for us here, in the States. What do you think it would take? Is it something you might be able to help us organize?” The aide paused as if pondering a point of some delicacy. “I’m sure we could see fit to being . . . extremely generous.”
“I’m not sure it’s something that we have options on anymore,” Keene replied. “They all moved to Saturn.”
Keene grabbed a half hour to stop by at the agency and check on things with Shirley, then returned to the Sheraton to freshen up and change before the Kronian reception at seven. By that time he had consolidated his thoughts sufficiently to call Marvin Curtiss, Amspace’s president and CEO, to update him on the situation that Cavan had described the evening before, and Keene’s further impressions after his day in Washington. It was all pretty much in line with what Curtiss had been finding out independently.
“It doesn’t look as if we’re going to be able to count on much support from the main contractors,” he told Keene from the hotel room’s terminal screen. “They’re taking the line that it isn’t the business of corporations to decide what’s scientifically true or not. That’s what we’ve got universities and national laboratories for.” He didn’t have to add that it also meant they could look forward to a continuation of low-risk contracts that referees from those same universities and laboratories would feel comfortable with and approve, and which wouldn’t frighten investors.
“I don’t know, Marvin,” Keene sighed, tired after a long day. “How do you deal with it?”
“Just keep saying what we’ve always said: that we believe the claims the Kronians are making deserve serious consideration, and everyone should forget their vested interests and try to be open-minded to what appear to be the facts.” That was what Keene had expected. If Curtiss weren’t a fighter, he would hardly have been running an operation like Amspace to begin with. Curtiss went on, “One thing we might try is getting Les working on organizing more voice and visibility for the scientists out there who have been taking a more independent stand-like this character Salio that you talked to. We need people like him.”
“I’ve arranged to meet him on my way back,” Keene said.
“Good. Find out what his story is and who else he talks to. Maybe we don’t have to let the establishment have a monopoly on the media.”
“What about the political side?” Keene asked. “How much do you trust this talk about a defense loophole and Air Force money coming through the back door if that bill goes through?” That news hadn’t come as a total surprise to Curtiss, who had apparently heard something similar from another source.
“If it happens, then fine, but I’ve always believed in insurance,” Curtiss answered. “I’ve been talking to the people here about bringing forward the schedule for getting Montemorelos operational.” He meant the backup launch and landing facility being constructed in the highlands not far south of the border-outside U.S. jurisdiction. “Not marginally, but making it our top priority.”
“That makes sense,” Keene agreed. “But it might only tide us over for a while. The Mexicans are still vulnerable to pressure from our side.”
Curtiss nodded. “I know. Beyond that, we’re reviewing the options we’ve negotiated on possible sites farther from home.”
“I think there’s some for lease at the original Tapapeque complex in Guatemala,” Keene said.
“There is?”
“So I heard around a month or two ago.”
“We’ll look into it.” There was a blur in the foreground on the screen as Curtiss checked his watch. “I’m due for another appointment, Lan. It should be interesting meeting the Kronians tonight. Call me tomorrow and let me know how it went.”
“I will,” Keene said. “Take care, Marvin.”
Keene still had some time before the TV reporters were due. Out of curiosity, he scanned the news searcher for items relating to the Kronians and selected one of the current leaders, which turned out to be an NBC panel hookup to debate whether ancient sources constituted a valid basis for formulating scientific beliefs.
“Absolutely not!” was the opinion of a speaker, captioned as Dr. William Ledden, an astronomer at the University of California. “Repeatable observations and measurements determine what is properly termed science. What writers of old manuscripts say happened, or think happened, or think ought to have happened simply has no place . . .” He waved a hand agitatedly, as if too exasperated to be capable of further coherent thought.
A gray-haired woman, president of an archaeological society in Vancouver, agreed. “It has taken centuries to establish reliable methods and standards for disentangling fact from fancy. I agree with Dr. Ledden. This kind of thing will probably sell some Sunday supplements, and we’re going to be hearing a lot about it in the news, but it has no place in science.”
“So you’re saying we should be good hosts and neighbors, but not get carried away by this,” the moderator checked sagely.
“Exactly.”
That line seemed to be the consensus of the others. The converse view-rather timidly put, Keene thought-came from a historian and author somewhere in England. “I hesitate to cast the dissenting vote here, but is it unthinkable that peoples of ancient times might have described events that they actually witnessed, and maybe have something important to tell us?”
“It’s scandalous that we should even be discussing this!” Ledden fumed. “Why are people who call themselves scientists concerning themselves with Biblical quotations? Are we going to be talking about walking on water and dead bodies coming back to life next? The Kronian phenomenon grew from a quasi-religious cult. This whole business is an attempt to give credibility to scriptures by means of concocted pseudoscience. Very possibly there’s fundamentalist money behind it. They’ve got to be supporting themselves out there somehow.”
Keene grew more perplexed as he listened. The Kronians had never made any appeal to scriptural beliefs. They used Biblical references purely as accounts of historical events, and then only where corroborated by other sources. The Englishman tried to make that point but was ineffective.
Barney’s TV crew showed up on time, but the interview, conducted on the grassy riverbank at the back of the hotel, was aimed too much at trying to provoke Keene into admissions of the dangers of nuclear devices in space. The journalist who arrived afterward had a more balanced approach, but they got deeper into technicalities than Keene had anticipated and ran out of time, arranging to continue over breakfast the next morning. Finally, Keene boarded the cab that had arrived to take him to the Engleton.
“So how was your day?” the cabbie asked over his shoulder as they pulled out from under the lobby canopy.
“Never a dull moment,” Keene told him with feeling. “How about you?”
“Aw, not so bad. You know how it is. Just a couple of years more of this to bring a bit more money in, and then it’s retirement. Just me and the wife now. We figure we’ll move to Colorado. Got some grandkids there. Mountains, scenery. Nice place to take it easy.”
“Sounds great,” Keene said from the back seat. Sometimes he had to remind himself that most people-probably the vast majority on the planet-didn’t think too much about Athena, or care-one way or the other.
The Kronian mission, along with the security and administrative staff attending them, were on the top two floors of the Engleton, which had restricted access from the general part of the hotel and was one of the regular accommodations for official visitors to the city. In all, there were twelve delegates and eight crew members, the numbers having been kept low to leave capacity for the Osiris to carry emigrants back on the return trip. Some of the crew, however, had been left to maintain a skeleton presence on the ship and would get their chance to come down to the surface later.
On arriving, Keene went straight up to the eighth floor as he had been directed and checked with the security people in room 809. A personable young man in a dark suit verified that he was expected and escorted him to one of the larger suites on the floor above, where two more security men in suits admitted them through the doors. From the hubbub of voices, the party was evidently already in progress. Keene recognized the white-haired figure of Gallian, the leader of the Kronian delegation, seated a short distance inside, talking to an Oriental couple who looked as if they had also just arrived-apparently he was greeting everyone personally. Gallian spotted Keene and waved him over, introducing the couple as a Japanese space-technology administrator and his wife. He apologized for the unusual way of receiving guests. “It’s the gravity, of course-and then two days of functions and presentations on top of it. Your people are working us hard already. But anyway, why am I making excuses? At my age one doesn’t need any excuses.” Keene grinned, told Gallian that he didn’t know how many times this had been said already but “ . . . welcome to Earth,” and shook hands heartily. The Japanese couple exchanged pleasantries and were then ushered on to meet others in the room by another Kronian, who Gallian said was Thorel, from the Osiris’s regular crew, and who must have stood at around seven feet.
Gallian turned back to regard Keene. He had a crusty, puckish-nosed face with eyes that were clear and mischievous. From their few long-delay message exchanges, Keene had formed an impression of bustling energy and a person who could never be content doing one thing at a time. Already, everything he saw was starting to confirm it. “Well, Lan, hello,” Gallian said. “So here we are. You see, we made it. And so did you. Les Urkin obviously got the message through. I’m glad.”
“I heard they’re taking you off on a tour,” Keene said.
“Yes, New York City to start with, then Niagara Falls . . .” Gallian waved a hand. “I’m not sure where after that.”
“When will this start?”
“Well, it was supposed to be first thing tomorrow . . .”
“So soon? You’re kidding.”
“ . . . but that may have to be postponed.”
“Oh?”
“Allergic reactions,” Gallian said.
“Yes, of course. I’d forgotten about that.” It was a known risk for Kronian-born making a first-time visit to Earth. Keene shrugged sympathetically. “There’s nothing anyone can do?”
“Not much, apparently. Immigrants like me don’t have a problem. We prepared the first-timers with the recommended drugs, but several of them are affected all the same. Two are in bed, knocked off their feet. We’ll know in the morning what the situation is.”
There was a tap on the doors; one of the security men opened them, and two men and a woman were shown in. Gallian extended an arm. “Anyway, I must press on with my hostly duties. Go on in and meet the others. Sariena’s around somewhere. We’re informal tonight. There’s a buffet in the suite. All of us agree, by the way, that whatever its other problems, Earth food is exquisite. And I’m finding that I’m particularly partial to wines. Vineyards are a luxury that we haven’t graced Kronia with yet. Our synthetic efforts really don’t compare. I’ll definitely try to get that changed when we return.” Gallian caught the attention of another Kronian, brown skinned and distinguishable by her tall build and casual, brightly colored trouser suit-distinctly not customary Washington dinner wear. “Polli, this is Landen Keene, an old friend of ours. Look after him and introduce him around, would you?” He looked back at Keene as the three arrivals approached. “I’ll seek you out and pin you down with more serious questions to spoil the party with later, I promise.”
The buffet was set up in the center of the suite, dispensed by hotel staff-a salad bar selection, cold cuts and cheeses, several hot dishes, dessert trolley, and a beverage bar. There were between one and two dozen people so far, Keene estimated, although the far end of the suite had an L-bend so there could have been more out of sight. Sariena was with a group on the far side by the windows, perched on an arm of a couch. And on the far side of the bar, to Keene’s mild surprise-although it shouldn’t have been, given the kind of job he had described-talking with two men, was Leo Cavan.
Polli was also an Osiris crew member, she told Keene as he selected a plate of cold assortments and took a glass of wine from the bar. Four of the ship’s eight-person complement had come down with the delegation. The four who had stayed aboard included the captain, whose name was Idorf. Polli was astonished and delighted to learn that Keene was one of the three who had been in the news the previous Friday, and called Thorel over as he passed near after depositing some used plates on a side table. “You know who we have here, Thorel? Landen is one of the Terrans that we saw, who raced with the spaceplane the day we arrived.”
Thorel was perhaps thirtyish, curly-headed, sallow-faced yet hefty, with an open and amiable manner. His field area was engineering too, and for several minutes he and Keene talked technicalities about the NIFTV and its performance. “So how is it you have all this trouble trying to convince your governments of things that should be obvious?” he asked in conclusion. “It seems such a waste of energies. And here you need all the energy you can get, just for standing up.”
Keene had noticed that nearly all the Kronians around the room were sitting. “Is that how you’re finding it?” he asked Polli.
“Also, it is bewildering,” she told him. “Already I have seen more human beings than in all the rest of my life put together. And I still get attacks of . . . What is it when you fear going outside?”
“Agoraphobia?”
“Yes, that is right. We trained for the gravity, but it doesn’t really prepare you for it. But the brilliance of the daylight is the most astounding. Nothing on screens can come close. But then, at night you have hardly any stars.”
Thorel went to collect some more arrivals from Gallian, and Polli took Keene around to meet more of the guests. Besides other Americans, he was introduced to more Japanese, two Russians, and one each German, Chinese, Brazilian, and Australian. Sariena saw him from across the room and acknowledged with a wave. While still tall by Earth standards, she was smaller than average for the Kronian group. Keene remembered her as saying that she had gone to Saturn as a child, with most of her rapid-growth and developmental years completed. The younger ones, born to the environments of Saturn’s moons or the low-g orbiting habitats, were uniformly one to two feet taller.
The word went around that one of the space crew from “that thing last Friday” was present, “The one who was on the news this evening-didn’t you see it? That’s him over there,” and Keene found himself much in demand.
“Do you really think it has a future-foreseeably, in the practical sense?” one of the Americans asked dubiously. He was a director of Chase Manhattan, it turned out. “Where’s the payoff? What can you bring from out there that we don’t have already, and cheaper?”
“It iss interesting zat your ship can connect viss der UN shuttle zat brings you down,” Keene overheard the German saying to one of the Kronians, who had a blotchy face and was sneezing intermittently. “Do you build to der same mechanical mating specifications zat you exchange maybe, ja?”
Everything inside Keene wanted to lean in and murmur, Ve haff vayss of making it dock. But he behaved himself, bit his tongue, and refrained.
Gallian appeared again and sought him out, accompanied by a man called Druche from an office of the Defense Department that dealt with space matters, whom Keene had met before on one or two occasions. “This is the man you should have building spaceships for you,” Gallian told him. “Landen understands how long-range systems have to work. Lan, you would appreciate a real spaceship. Before we go back to Saturn, we must show you the Osiris.”
Keene blinked at him, surprised. “Are you serious?”
“I don’t play jokes on my friends. We’ll sort out something for you, don’t worry. Make sure you talk to me later about it,” Gallian told him.
Gallian and Druche moved on, and Keene was promptly buttonholed by three more Japanese who seemed to be together. “Who are the other companies partnering Amspace?” the one who appeared to be the senior asked when they had been talking for a few minutes. “We could be interested in discussing further funding. How can we get in touch with the correct people?”
Keene mentioned Marvin Curtiss and offered to arrange an introduction. The Japanese seemed pleased. As Keene detached himself, Cavan drifted by, nursing a glass. “Just doing my job, you see,” he murmured. “ ‘Pump them when they don’t suspect it,’ is what I was told. A tacky world we live in, Landen. Tacky world.” And then he was gone again.
Before anyone else could pounce on him, Keene made his way over to Sariena. They had managed to exchange barely a few words so far. She was sitting on the arm of one of the couches, still managing to do justice to the unpretentious but stylish dress that she was wearing-black and sleeveless, with a high, oriental-style neck and just the right touch of trim-but closer he could see that weariness was beginning to show. A slim woman in a light green dress, with graying hair tied high, was standing talking to her. Keene remembered her being introduced earlier as with the Smithsonian but couldn’t recall her name. Sariena smiled as he approached.
“Lan, do join us. Have you two met yet?”
“Oh, we all know who he is,” the woman said.
Keene smiled uneasily for a moment. “Smithsonian,” he managed.
“Catherine Zetl,” the woman said, getting him off the hook. “I’m the historian.”
“Oh, right.”
“Ancient-the history, not me. Well, I hope not too much, anyway.”
“Catherine has been telling me some fascinating things,” Sariena said. “She’s just back from Arabia-involved with the Joktanian discoveries there.”
Keene searched his memory. There had been a stir in the news a couple of years back, and occasional mentions since in the scientific literature. “Some civilization they found from way back, isn’t it? Caused some surprises for the specialists.” Which about exhausted his knowledge of the subject.
“That’s putting it mildly,” Zetl said. “It’s turned all our ideas upside down. The Sumerians and Babylonians were supposed to have been the earliest to settle and build, but these people date from much earlier. Yet some of their architecture and workmanship appears more sophisticated. And there’s no obvious relationship to the cultures that came later. It’s as if they represent some lost age that flourished long before it should have been possible. For some reason it ended abruptly, and then what we’ve always thought was the beginning of civilization was a second start that came much later.”
“Isn’t it fascinating, Lan?” Sariena said again.
“So do we know what ended it?” Keene asked, getting more interested. “Was it your Kronian supercomet again?”
“Oh, I’m impressed by the Kronians’ arguments, but I refuse to be dragged into any of that tonight,” Zetl said, holding up a hand. “In any case, it couldn’t have been the comet, Venus, or whatever. This race existed long before the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and the Exodus. And I use the word ‘race’ deliberately. They were large-comparable to the Kronians around here.”
“The name Joktanian comes from Noah’s grandson,” Sariena informed Keene. “I didn’t know that.”
“That’s who the ancient Arabic legends say the first people of the southwest peninsula were descended from,” Zetl said, nodding. “Their word is Qahtan.” She glanced away. “Oh, there’s somebody about to leave that I must catch. Excuse me.” She laid a hand briefly on Sariena’s arm. “Sariena, we do have to talk more about all this. Do call me when they give you a moment-if they ever do.”
“I certainly will.”
Zetl excused herself again and hurried away.
Sariena looked at Keene, sighed, and rotated her face slowly to stretch her neck. “Oh my. Is this what it’s like to be what you call a celebrity? You do it all the time? Where do you get the stamina? What’s the secret?”
“Not really,” Keene said. “Most of the time I deal with reactors and engines. This is just temporary, since Friday. Attention spans on this world tend to be short.” He looked at the glass that Sariena was holding. “Want me to get you another? Save your feet.”
“Oh, please. Any kind of fruit juice with a touch of vodka. . . .” She handed him the glass. “Do I look unladylike up here on the arm like a bird on a perch? If I sit down in this couch I can’t get up again. It digests you.”
“I don’t think you could look unladylike in a boiler suit,” Keene replied. “Something more to eat?”
“Thanks, but I’ve had enough.”
He went over to the bar and got a refill, along with a straight Scotch for himself. He wasn’t driving tonight. Might as well make the most of it, he figured. “Anything else for you, sir?” the cocktail waiter tending the bar asked. He peered at Keene more closely. “Say, aren’t you one of those three guys who-”
“You’ve got it,” Keene murmured, covering his mouth and slipping a ten into the glass set aside for tips. “But don’t spread it around.”
He went back, handed Sariena her drink, and looked at her while he sipped his own. There had been so many things he’d listed in his mind that he wanted to ask her when they finally met. He wanted to know about her world and what it was like to live out there; how it felt to be without a planet that automatically self-renewed and replenished everything necessary for life; to be totally dependent for survival itself, every moment, on machines. He wanted to know how a moneyless system could function and still sustain-evidently-all the complexities of a technological society. What motivated people to provide for each other in place of the penalties and rewards that just about every authority on Earth insisted were indispensable? . . . So many things. And now here they were, and suddenly none of it felt appropriate.
“Well, you’ve certainly created some attention,” Sariena said. “Let’s hope it’s a good omen for the talks.”
“We can but try,” Keene said.
“So what brought you to Washington so soon? Was the President so impressed that he wants you to put together a real space program for them at last?”
“I wish.” Keene sipped his Scotch and saw that Cavan was watching them inconspicuously from across the room. “As a matter of fact, somebody wanted me to talk to you while I was here. Not the President, but it was to do with your mission.” Sariena waited, curious. Keene looked around. The suite was in the penthouse, with an exterior balcony all the way around. “Let’s go outside,” he suggested. “Gallian says you need to get used to the air.”
Sariena rose and moved toward one of the sliding glass panels that had been opened. Keene picked up a chair and followed her along the balcony to a corner, away from the others who were outside talking. Keene placed the chair by the wall and leaned an elbow on the rail while Sariena sat down. He began: “The person that I mentioned is on the inside here. And I’ve seen something myself today of what reactions are going to be.” He shook his head. “Earth isn’t going to buy this line about Venus being an earlier Athena. Yes, Athena happened and the standard theories were wrong. Nobody can deny that. But they’re going to fight any suggestion that the two have anything in common. As far as they’re concerned Venus is a planet and moves like a planet. Athena is a one-time anomaly that will be a spectacle for a year until it leaves the Solar System. . . .” Keene paused, thinking for a second that Sariena wasn’t listening. She was sitting back against the window glass, staring up at the sky with a faraway, almost rapturous expression.
“I love stars,” she said.
Keene looked away and turned his head upward. “Polli told me we don’t have any,” he replied. It was a clear night, not bad by Washington standards. The angle of the walls faced roughly north, making just a wisp of Athena’s tail visible behind the building to their left. It only occurred to Keene then that until the last couple of days, Sariena’s only recollections of seeing a sky had probably been from inside some kind of enclosure or a helmet.
“Paltry,” she agreed. “But you know that, Lan. You’ve been out there too. . . . But what you’ve never seen is Saturn from one of its moons. This sky has nothing to compare with it. Pictures don’t come close-any more than they can show sunshine. It’s like . . .” She turned her face up again. “All the rainbows you’ve ever seen stirred together into a glowing ball ten times as big as the Moon. And you’re looking at it across the rings seen edge-on. It seems to be floating in a golden ocean that extends away into the sky. If you’re on one of the moons that has a tilted orbit, the ocean seems to be rising and falling.” Sariena looked back at him. “Did you know that there are many legends from the distant past-before the beginnings of our literate age, like those people that Catherine was talking about-that make Saturn the greatest god in the sky and describe it as rising out of an ocean? Isn’t that strange? It’s almost as if they’d seen it too.” Keene frowned at the city lights, searching for a way of turning the subject back to more immediate matters. “Can you pick out Saturn in the sky?” Sariena asked him.
“Er, no. . . . I guess not. It isn’t really one of my things.”
“Not many people can-nor any of the other planets. And isn’t that strange too? They’re such insignificant pinpoints that most people can’t even find them. And yet in just about every system of religion and myth from times gone by, they filled people with awe and terror and were associated with gods fighting titanic battles in the sky-mightier even than the Sun and Moon. Why would that be?” Sariena went on before Keene could respond, “Because the planets moved in different orbits then, that brought them much closer.”
She hadn’t strayed off the subject, he realized. It was just a roundabout way of addressing the issue he had raised.
She went on, “They saw Venus being ejected by Jupiter. To the Greeks it was Pallas Athene springing from the brow of Zeus. The Hindus have Vishnu being born of Shiva. The Egyptians, Horus. All names for the same planets, associated with events in the sky that are described the same way everywhere, over and over. Now tell me that Athena isn’t the same thing happening again.”
“You don’t have to convince me,” Keene said. “I’m already on your side, remember? But the scientists who’ll determine what our governments decide aren’t interested in old myths and legends. They’re going to want to see facts and evidence and numbers before they’ll budge, and none of them wants to budge because they’re happy with the ideas they’ve got and things the way they are.”
Sariena looked at Keene dubiously. “Is that really all that matters here?” she asked. “Comfortable livings and safe jobs? Prestige and promotions? Don’t things like where we’re all heading in the longer term, and wanting to know the truth count?”
“Maybe they did once-I don’t know; you hear these things. But people have always thought things were better in the past. Today, the creed is ‘Make what you can now and grab as much as you can get.’ There might not be a tomorrow.”
“One day, that could turn out to be a gruesome self-fulfilling prophesy,” Sariena observed. “I don’t understand how a system can function that seems to be based on nothing but antagonism.”
Keene smiled humorlessly. “Most people here can’t understand how your system can, that isn’t.”
“We couldn’t afford anything else out there,” Sariena said. “Everyone’s survival is at stake. We have to work together. And look what it’s achieving.” She paused, waiting, but Keene had nothing to add just then. After a short silence, she said, “Of course we have more than just ancient myths and records. They’re just the beginning. We have as much fact and evidence as anyone could reasonably need. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.”
“I know about the mass-extinctions and geological upheavals,” Keene agreed. “But there are plenty of other theories going around as to what could have caused all that. How do you positively connect it all with Venus?”
“Venus is a young planet,” Sariena answered. “It hasn’t been there for billions of years. The evidence has been piling up for decades. A lot of scientists on Earth that we know of are aware of it.”
“I’ll be meeting one of them on my way back,” Keene said. “But even if you’re right, that doesn’t mean it nearly sideswiped Earth. That’s the biggest single problem you’re going to have to deal with: how an orbit that could take it from Jupiter to an Earth-encounter could circularize to what we see today. All of conventional theory says it couldn’t happen. That’s why people here are saying that Athena is something different. No mechanism known to science could reduce its eccentricity to almost zero in under four thousand years. That’s what they’re going to tell you. How are you planning on answering it?”
Sariena studied him for a moment. “Do you know about the electromagnetic changes that have been occurring all over the Solar System since Athena was ejected?” she asked curiously.
Keene looked at her uncertainly. “Electromagnetic changes to what?”
“The space environment itself. Its properties are being altered.”
Keene was still frowning, but with a new interest. “No . . .” He told her. “I don’t think I do. Suppose you tell me.”
“I don’t think it’s something that most scientists here are informed about,” Sariena answered. “Earth hasn’t been putting enough deep-space probes out to get the picture. We have. We must be getting a better perspective.”
“What’s been happening?” Keene asked.
Sariena motioned upward with an arm to indicate the night sky. “This white-hot mass, hurtling in from Jupiter for the last ten months, pouring out a tail of highly ionized particles that extends for millions of miles, orders of magnitude denser than that of any comet ever known . . . It’s turning space in the inner Solar System into an electrically active medium-at least, temporarily. Now move an incandescent body in a plasma state through that medium at high velocity. . . .” She left the suggestion unfinished.
The expression on Keene’s face told her there was no need to say any more. A charged body moving through an electrically active medium would be subject to forces that in those conditions could conceivably rival or even exceed gravity. Forces that conventional astronomic theory, based on the assumption of a pre-Athena, electrically quiescent Solar System, had never taken into account.
Sariena nodded, seeing that Keene had made the connection. “Our scientists in Kronia have been running some calculations. The preliminary results came in to the Osiris just before we came down to the surface. They’re being rechecked before we present anything here officially. But perhaps you could arrange for them to be duplicated independently here on Earth as well-the more confirmation we get, the better. We’ll give you the codes to access the files of original data from our probes. I think you’ll find the results interesting.”
Next morning, the over-breakfast continuation of the interview with the science journalist went well, and Keene was happy that the treatment would be accurate. Afterward, he went back up to his room and called Marvin Curtiss as promised. Although Texas was an hour behind Eastern Time, he found Curtiss already in his office. Apparently, Halloran, Lomack, and most of the other engineering and project managers were at work already over in the Kingsville plant too, working out figures for a proposal that Harry Halloran had come up with for getting the Montemorelos site operational sooner, as Curtiss had wanted.
Instead of the conventional above-ground pads as used at San Saucillo, where final testing and any last-minute servicing had to be conducted out in the elements, the Montemorelos facility used an experimental design of silo in which all preparations and launch would be effected in one blastproofed location. Equipment installation was virtually complete, and the next phase called for a live test of the launch systems. A live test meant actually launching something. For something to be launched, it would first have to be there. The existing plan called for a regular (chemical powered) vehicle to be moved in sections by road from Kingsville and assembled in one of the silos. However, a separate surface-to-orbit trial was also due to be conducted in the near future from Saucillo, involving a minishuttle fitted with a modified hybrid engine using solid propellant and a liquid oxidizer. Halloran had proposed combining the two programs by landing the minishuttle at Montemorelos after its orbital trials, where it would then be available for the launch test without anything needing to be shipped by road. The planning committee would be meeting that morning to consider it.
Keene agreed the suggestion made sense, but it was an internal Amspace affair and not something that concerned him directly. He went on to summarize his impressions after meeting the Kronians. The most important thing to come out of it was Sariena’s disclosure of the changes the Kronian scientists had detected in the solar environment and the need to verify their calculations of what it implied. “I was hoping Jerry could set it up somewhere on one of the big computers you’ve got access to,” Keene concluded. Jerry Allender was the head of research at Amspace. “If he needs some help from a specialist in celestial mechanics, I could probably put him in touch with a couple of people I know.”
“How soon do we need this?” Curtiss asked, not looking enthralled. “We’re going to be swamped here with this Montemorelos business as things are.”
“I think it’s absolutely crucial to have the results confirmed or otherwise by the time the Kronians get back from their tour,” Keene pressed. “That means we ought to get moving now. I could get Vicki to take care of liaising with the Kronians and getting the files and material together. Judith could even help with running it and tackling a specialist-she’s pretty hot. All Jerry would need to do would be to set things up.”
“What results did the Kronians get?” Curtiss asked. “Do we know?”
“No, they’ve just offered to let us have their raw data. That’s the way it should be done. Sariena just said she thought we’d find them interesting.”
Curtiss drew a long breath, then nodded. “Okay, we’ll see what we can do,” he promised. “Talk to Harry. I’ll tell him to expect to hear from you. Now I have to rush. We’ve obviously got one of those days ahead of us, and I’ve a commitment in the city tonight.”
“What’s on?” Keene asked. “Business dinner? Press Club? Some kind of civic function?”
“My stepdaughter Anna is playing the cello. It’s her first appearance in public, and it would be more than my life’s worth not to be there.” Curtiss looked pleased that Keene had asked. He seemed quite proud. Keene liked it when tycoons showed a human touch. It meant there was hope for the race yet.
He called Vicki immediately afterward and caught her at the house just as she was about to leave for the office. “Something came up at the Kronian party last night that could be important,” he told her. “Can you pull Judith off that Japanese project and ask her to take a look at it-maybe give her a hand. I want you to access the Kronian research files and find some data they’ve been collecting on changes in the electromagnetic properties of the space environment during the past ten months. You can get it from the databank in the Osiris-no need for all the delays in dealing with Saturn. I’ll send details and access codes to you at the office.”
“Changes?” Vicki repeated, looking surprised.
“Yes. It seems that all that stuff that Athena’s spewing out has been altering the inner-system free-space permeability and permittivity-for a while, anyway, until the solar wind blows it away. But in the meantime we’re in a more electrically active neighborhood. I want to compute the forces that would act on a hot, massively charged body and how they would affect its orbital characteristics.”
“You want us to do this . . . ?”
“No, no-not all on your own, there, anyway. I’ve just talked to Marvin. He’s going to have Jerry Allender set it up in his department over there. But they’re all in a panic this morning over something else that’s going on. I just want us to do the go-betweening with the Kronians for them. You might need to involve a specialist too. I can think of a couple of names you could try. I’ll send them with the other stuff.”
Vicki stared at him for a few seconds, thinking rapidly. “Are we talking about Venus?” she asked at last.
“Could be,” Keene answered noncommittally.
“Are you saying that our scientists here don’t know about this already?”
Keene shrugged. “All too busy writing begging letters to Congress or getting themselves into the Washington black-tie cocktail-party circuit.”
The significance was slowly sinking in. Vicki shook her head, looking disbelieving. “Lan . . . do you realize that what you’re talking about could upset half of astronomy all the way back to Newton? I mean, you just call on the phone when I’m leaving for work and mention it as casually as if it were a bookshelf you want ordered. . . .”
“Yes, I know, but I haven’t got time to go into raptures over the philosophy of it right now. There’s probably a cab waiting for me downstairs already.”
Just then, a blurred voice called something in the background behind Vicki. She looked away. “I said on the table in the kitchen,” she directed to somewhere off-screen.
“Robin getting ready for school?” Keene said.
Vicki turned back again. “You guessed. How do you do it, Lan?”
“And how is he? Anything new with the dinosaurs?”
“It’s led into mammoths. But don’t ask me right now; I’ll mail you a note if you’re interested.”
“Sure, I’m interested.”
“You want to say hi to him?”
“Sure.”
“Robin, it’s Landen on the line. Like to say hello for a second?”
A few seconds went by, and then Robin moved into the view alongside the image of Vicki. “Hi, Lan. How’s Washington? Did you get to meet the Kronians?”
“Sure did. I’ll tell you all about them next time I stop by.”
“Is that it?” Vicki asked Robin, gesturing at a blue folder that he was holding.
“Yes. I was sure it was upstairs.”
“What’s in it?” Keene inquired.
“Oh, a project we’re doing at school, in the science class. We have to write an essay on the Joktanians and the kinds of things that have been turning up in the places they’re digging at.”
“That’s the old civilization from around Arabia and Ethiopia that was only discovered in the last few years,” Vicki supplied for Keene’s benefit. “So give the school system some credit-they’re keeping up to date.”
“Ah yes,” Keene was able to reply airily. “Named after Noah’s grandson. Legend says the earliest peoples of southern Arabia were descended from him. The Arab word is Qahtan.”
Vicki stared hard and blinked. “I didn’t think you’d know that.”
Keene managed to keep a straight face and replied nonchalantly, while inside enjoying every moment of it. “Why not? I thought everyone did.”
She shook her head. “Lan, you never cease to amaze me.”
“Just call it talented. Got to go. Check your mail when you get in. I’ll probably stay in town tomorrow too. See you Thursday.”
The final thing Keene did before leaving the hotel to begin his schedule for that day was call David Salio. Salio was surprised to hear back from him so soon, but pleased. Yes, it turned out that he was flexible that week and could be available. Keene arranged to see him on Thursday and changed his flight arrangements to stop off in Houston on his way back to Corpus Christi. Things seemed to be moving along.