The Aerospace Sciences Institute was both a research and educational establishment, set up jointly by a consortium of contractors and allied interests. It was funded privately and made no appeals to the public purse, the goal being to ensure an adequate supply of competent specialists in the fields essential to the industry, without complications arising from any yielding of standards to political agendas. NASA layoffs and the ensuing contraction of the Johnson Center had provided much of the initial recruitment and been one of the reasons for choosing Houston as the location.
Keene was no stranger there, although he had not dealt previously with the Planetary Studies section, which was where David Salio worked. The principal interests of the founder corporations were commercial and defense-related, leading them to focus essentially on launch and Earth-orbit activities, with some involvement in lunar pilot schemes and the scientific endeavor on Mars, the latter of which was a small-scale operation in any case. But putting some effort into theoretical studies of longer-term possibilities bolstered the image of exploration and adventure that excited the public, gratified stockholders, and worked wonders for recruiting ads. And besides, despite their stereotype to the contrary, many of the executives responsible for policy were genuinely curious.
The Institute was run in a spirit that conformed to the open-door tradition of regular universities, more sensitive and secretive work being conducted elsewhere. Accordingly, a little over ten minutes ahead of the appointed time, Keene sauntered in from where the airport cab had dropped him in front of the Glenn Building, verified from the lobby directory that Salio’s office was on the fifth floor, and went on up without need of signature, badge, or security check. The elevator delivered him to a carpeted area with plants, padded leather seating arranged around a glass-topped table, and a wall of picture windows looking out over one of the Houston freeway interchanges. A sign directed him past a vending area into a corridor of similar-looking numbered doors and occasional bulletin boards, where eventually he arrived at 521, with a nameplate alongside indicating it to be the office of David R. Salio. Keene tapped, waited for a moment, and then eased the door open. A voice from inside called out, “Dr. Keene? Yes, do come on in. I won’t be a second.”
The office was the familiar combination of overflowing desk, computer work station, raggedly packed bookshelves, and wall board that seemed to characterize the natural habitat of Homo sapiens technicus the world over. Salio was at the computer, clicking through a series of data-contour images on the screen, pausing to flag a point here and there or add a comment to the caption. “Must get this off to somebody at JPL right away. It won’t take a minute. Could you use a coffee or soda or something?”
“I’m fine, thanks. I had plane-food on the way.”
Keene judged Salio to be in his mid-twenties to maybe thirty. He had straight black hair, a shadowy chin, and heavy-rimmed glasses, giving him a studentish look that seemed mildly incongruous in combination with the plaid shirt, blue jeans, and pointy cowboy boots. There was an intense, birdlike nervousness about the way he peered at the screen, pecking at icons and hammering quick staccatos on the keys. The desk to one side bore a framed family print showing an attractive woman and two young, happy-looking children. On the wall behind was a poster showing climbing routes up the face of El Capitan in Yosemite, and beside it a cork board with departmental notes, postcards from various places, and a cartoon collection.
Finally, a mail screen appeared and Salio sent the package off to its destination with a flourish. Then he stood and extended a hand. “Sorry about that. One of those things that couldn’t wait. Let’s see . . . we need to make some room for you.” He lifted a pile of books and papers from a chair by the wall and cleared some space for them on top of a file cabinet. Keene sat down, and Salio moved around to pull up his own chair on the far side of the desk. He looked across and pushed his hair up from his eyes. “Well, I admit I was flattered when you got back to me so quickly. I never expected to see you here in person. We don’t exactly get a lot of celebrities stopping by in this office.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t attach too much significance to that,” Keene said. “You know how it is. They’ll all have found someone else by the end of the week.”
“What’s your title with Amspace, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I’m not exactly with Amspace. I run a technical consultancy on nuclear dynamics that’s been working with them for a number of years: Protonix-also based in Corpus Christi.”
“Ah . . .”
“That’s what I really do. The stunt and commercial last Friday were coincidental.”
“It’s stirring up a lot of hostility out there,” Salio said. “But you knew that had to happen.”
“If you hope to do anything, you have to be visible,” Keene answered. “As I said when we talked, Amspace, myself, and various other interests that we’re associated with are trying to help promote the Kronian case because we believe it’s too important an issue to let politics and scientific dogmatism get in the way of the truth-which is what’s happening. You said you’d like to help. We’re interested enough that I’m here.”
“This is all very gratifying, Dr. Keene. It’s something I’ve been battling over for years.”
“ ‘Landen’ is fine. So can we talk about the kind of work that you and the other scientists that you said you’re in touch with have been doing? Particularly about Venus being a young planet. You said a lot of evidence points to it.”
“I can’t say whether or not it had anything to do with Moses,” Salio cautioned. “Things like that aren’t written in thermal signatures or atmospheric compositions. But what I can show you is that practically everything we know about Venus is consistent with the notion of a young, recently very hot body.” Salio tilted his chair back and clasped his hands behind his head. “The first thing every schoolkid knows is that what the first American and Russian probes found back in the nineteen sixties came as a big surprise-at least it did to the orthodox theory. The expectation had been that since Venus was about Earth’s size and had clouds, it would be pretty similar-maybe a little warmer through being nearer to the Sun. What they found was virtually a volcanic cauldron: surface temperature seven-hundred-fifty degrees K and more-enough to melt lead-and an atmosphere of acids and hydrocarbon gases at ninety times the pressure of Earth’s. Not the kind of place to put on your list of vacation spots.”
“Supposedly a runaway greenhouse effect,” Keene supplied. It was what all the texts said, and not something he had ever had much reason to doubt or look into.
Salio pulled a face. “Yes, ‘supposedly’-a good choice of word, Mr. . . . Landen. That theory was contrived as an attempt to square the facts with the established assumption of an ancient planet. But it really doesn’t stand up. The main weakness is quite simple: a real greenhouse has a roof that stops the hot air inside from convecting upward and being replaced by cooler air circulating down from above. A planet doesn’t have such a lid, and so there’s nothing to stop the hot surface gases from mixing with the freezing upper layers. A greenhouse process might raise the temperature some, but maintaining a difference of over seven hundred degrees just isn’t credible. You’d reach thermal equilibrium through convection and radiation back into space long before it got anywhere near that. The only way such a difference could be maintained is if the heat source is the planet itself, not the Sun.”
“A young, recently very hot body,” Keene repeated.
“Exactly. And enough heat doesn’t get down to the surface in any case. In fact, hardly any does. For a start, most of the sunlight is reflected off the cloud tops thirty miles up-which is why Venus is so bright. And what does penetrate diminishes rapidly with depth in an atmosphere that thick, so that any solar heating you do get occurs at the top. Thermally it’s more like shallow seas on Earth, where sunlight is absorbed primarily in the upper three hundred feet. Venus’s surface pressure is about equivalent to that three thousand feet down in the ocean. Even at the equator, the temperature at that depth is only about eight degrees above freezing. You see, the greenhouse effect can’t simply be magnified without limit. Increasing the insulation also reduces the amount of sunshine that’s transmitted. Taking things beyond a certain point becomes self-defeating: The loss in transmission is no longer compensated for by the extra insulation, and the temperature begins to drop. None of the heat from the bottom of the ocean can escape into space, but it isn’t boiling hot.”
Keene thought it through but couldn’t fault it. He nodded for Salio to continue.
“This all fits with other things that have been known since the earliest U.S. and Russian space shots,” Salio said. “The planet isn’t in thermal equilibrium as the greenhouse explanation would require. It radiates twenty percent more energy out than falls on it from the Sun. Its dark side isn’t cooler, even though night lasts fifty-eight days. In fact, it’s slightly warmer. We’re talking about a planet with a lot of residual heat.”
“Has a cooling-curve model been worked out that’s consistent with this kind of temperature from an internal source?” Keene queried.
“Oh yes-and it’s quite interesting. If you start out with the assumption of an incandescent state three and a half thousand years ago, which is what the Kronians are saying, the calculated temperature today works out at seven-fifty degrees K-precisely what’s observed.”
“Why not radioactivity in the rocks?” Keene queried. “It warms us up here. Why not there too?”
“Generating ten thousand times more heat than Earth does?” Salio shook his head. “No way.”
Keene frowned as he thought back over what had been said. “And this has been known for years? . . . So why do we keep hearing the same story?”
Salio shrugged. “Once people are trained in a particular theory, they become emotionally wedded to it. They can be literally incapable of seeing anything that contradicts it, and will invent the most amazing rationalizations. That’s why you have to wait for a generation to die off before you can move on.”
“But how can that be?” Keene invited. “Science is objective, impartial, and self-correcting. All the textbooks say so.”
Salio returned a thin, humorless smile. It was clear that they spoke the same language. Keene sensed the way to real communication opening between them. It occurred to him what a lonely professional life Salio must lead. Salio went on, “And then you have the anomalies in atmospheric composition. For example, as most people know there’s the sulfuric acid in the upper clouds-probably formed out of sulfur trioxide from the hydrocarbon gases binding with what little water ever existed. But sulfuric acid in the cloud tops ought to have a short life due to decomposition by solar UV. If Venus were over four billion years old, there shouldn’t be any sulfuric acid left. But there is.
“The middle atmosphere is rich in carbon dioxide. That should have been dissociated in a few thousand years into carbon monoxide and oxygen, which don’t recombine again easily and ought to be abundant. They’re not.
“And where are Venus’s oceans? In billions of years it ought to have outgassed enormous volumes of water. The conventional explanation is that it was dissociated into oxygen, which combined with the rocks, and hydrogen, which escaped. But a lot of us can’t buy that. For one thing, the depth of surface you’d need to ‘garden’ to absorb the amount of oxygen indicated just isn’t credible. And for another, if dissociation produced oxygen, the oxygen should recombine into upper-atmosphere ozone the way it does on Earth, shutting out that UV band and terminating the process. How can you postulate one mechanism and ignore the other?”
Keene could tell there was more. “Go on,” he said, staring wonderingly.
Salio tossed out a hand idly, as if inviting Keene to take his pick. “Ratios of argon isotopes. Argon-40 is a decay product of potassium-40 and should increase over time-to a level comparable with Earth’s, you’d think, if Venus were as old as the Earth. But in fact it’s around fifteen times less. On the other hand, argon-36 is primordial and should have decayed to a level like Earth’s. It turns out to be hundreds of times more. Both figures are about what you would expect in a young planet’s original atmosphere. . . . And if you want, we could talk about the lack of erosion that you’d expect from dense, corrosive winds, and the absence of a regolith; the flatness of the surface; and the enormous lava flows with huge numbers of collapsed volcanic formations. The books say Olympus Mons on Mars is the biggest known volcano. I think they’re wrong. Venus is. The whole planet’s a cooling volcano.”
Keene had already accepted Salio as the kind of person who took his work seriously and would get his facts right. He sat back and massaged his brow. After a few seconds he looked back up. “I assume you can point me to sources for all this?” he said.
“Oh, sure,” Salio replied. “And I’ll include some on the Moon as well. Obviously, if something came close enough to the Earth to cause polar shifts and all kinds of devastation, the Moon should show signs of it as well.”
“And it does?”
“Yes-all the signs of something passing close by and subjecting it to intense tidal stress and heating on one side. The formation of the maria lava sheets is consistent with melting by tidal forces. If they were extrusions of molten material from billions of years ago, they ought to be covered by a deep layer of regolith. It’s practically nonexistent.”
Keene nodded slowly. He remembered reading somewhere that some of the scientists who planned the original Apollo missions had been worried that the landers might sink in the dust.
“The maria extend across one side in a huge great-circle swathe, which is what you’d expect from a passing encounter,” Salio went on. “And moonquakes are concentrated along two matching belts, six to eight hundred kilometers down. If the Moon has been dead for billions of years, there shouldn’t be any moonquakes. What it says is that something deformed the structure recently, and it’s still recovering. That would account for the bulge on the maria side too, which has been a puzzle for centuries. If it were primeval, it should have sunk under gravity long ago.” Salio spread his hands in a gesture of finality. “You’ve got volcanic activity that shouldn’t be there today. And the maria lavas have a coherent magnetism that means they cooled in the presence of a field far too strong to have been either terrestrial or solar. So where did it come from? . . . Do you want me to go on?”
“It’s okay, David. I’m getting the picture. I can check the rest out myself from your references.” Keene stood up and flexed his arms, as if it would help him digest all this information better. There was a chart on one of the walls showing a depiction of the Milky Way Galaxy. Somebody had added an arrow with the caption: You are here . . . or maybe somewhere near here-Werner Heisenberg. Salio sorted some of the papers on his desk, allowing Keene time to think.
At length, Keene turned. “So why hasn’t your thinking been channeled along the standard lines that we keep hearing?” he asked. “You seem pretty free to follow where your inclination leads. How come the difference?”
Salio’s intense look softened for the first time into something approaching a grin. “Well, it’s really what you might call a hobby interest, so nobody around here cares that much. We’re not part of the establishment. The concerns that run this institute are interested in technology as opposed to what you and I think of as science. Ruffling academic feathers isn’t something we have to worry about.” Salio licked his lips and indicated the door. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink of some kind? I’m going for one. But then I’ve been doing all the talking.”
“Okay, maybe a cup of coffee,” Keene conceded.
“Splendid.” Salio rose from his chair. “We can go to the visitors’ area by the elevators where you came in, or if you don’t mind muck and squalor, there’s our own cubbyhole which is closer-but the coffee’s better.”
“I’ll take that. Probably feel more at home anyhow,” Keene said. He looked at the poster of El Capitan while Salio was coming around the desk. “Is that something you do-climb?”
“I used to. These days, though, other things tend to take up more of life . . .” Salio looked back at the photo on his desk. “Or maybe I’m just getting older.”
“Nice family,” Keene complimented as he waited for Salio to lead the way out the door. “What’s your wife’s name?”
“Jean. She’s Canadian-also an emergency-room nurse at one of the hospitals here. I’ve been offered a sabbatical at a university in England, which will mean moving there for two years. She’s very excited about it-well, I suppose we both are. It will be her first time in Europe.”
“Sounds terrific.”
They followed the corridor and came to a double door. Salio stopped, opened one side, and ushered Keene through into laboratory surroundings. “Now I’ll show you what I really do,” he said.
The centerpiece of the room was a complex assembly of machined parts housing an array of electronic units, wiring forms, lenses, and mechanisms. The whole stood about the size of a kitchen table and was supported in a wheeled cradle. Two technicians in lab coats, one male, one female, were working over it. A youth who looked like a student was sitting at a console by the far wall.
“Looks like satellite instrumentation,” Keene remarked.
“Exactly right. This is a package that we’re putting together to go into low orbit over Saturn,” Salio said. “There will be some descent probes too.”
“Is it part of some deal to do with the Kronians?” Keene asked. A number of concerns on Earth had worked out cooperative ventures with the colony where they could be of mutual service.
Salio nodded. “They’ll transport the modules there for us and deploy them. Don’t ask me what the reciprocal arrangement is. I’m only interested in the scientific side.”
A discussion of technical details followed. Keene commented that walking in off the street to find himself looking at a sophisticated piece of equipment like this seemed, somehow . . . “casual.”
“Oh, this is just a prototype that we’re testing design ideas on,” Salio told him. “The one that’ll actually be going is being assembled in California. And you’re right. There, it’s clean rooms, gowns, filtered air-the works.”
Salio led the way through to a workshop area at the rear, where a bench below the windows ran the length of one wall. There were racks for tools and materials, and shelves bearing an assortment of containers, boxes, and pieces of unidentifiable gadgetry. Several tubular steel chairs standing loosely around a scratched plastic-topped table, and a small refrigerator supporting a coffee maker denoted the lunch area. Salio filled a mug for Keene, waved a hand at the milk and sugar containers for him to help himself, and got himself a can of lemon soda from below.
“So, do I take it you’re with the Kronians about Venus being an earlier Athena?” Keene asked, getting back to the subject as they sat down.
“Well, it fits with the heat, the hydrocarbon gases-all the other things we talked about,” Salio replied. “Also, its whole atmosphere is in a state of super-rotation in an east-west direction at about a hundred times the speed of the surface, which is consistent with the idea of a dense tail wrapping itself around the planet and still dissipating angular momentum.” He peeled open his drink. “And then you’ve got the comets. The shower of new comets that accompanied the ejection of Athena is forcing a revision of the idea that comets come from outside the Solar System-which, personally, I never had much time for anyway. I mean how else are you going to get material compressed to the density of rock out in space?
“But it goes further. The whole question of how the Solar System was formed might have to be rethought. There’s work going back to the last century that no one has ever refuted, saying that neither of the traditional tidal or accretion models can be right. Because of its disrupting effects, none of the inner planets could have formed inside the orbit of Jupiter. If so, then where did they come from? An obvious thought is that if Venus and Athena originated by fission from Jupiter, then maybe the others did too, which makes Jupiter not just a comet factory but a planet factory too. And that’s exactly where the Kronian line of thinking is taking us.” Salio took a drink at last and paused again to think for a moment. “The biggest problem is to account for the circularization of orbits. Conventional theory doesn’t do it, and that’s where the Church of Astronomy is going to be digging its heels in.”
Keene sat back and looked at him, amazed. They had converged totally. “Would you believe I was talking to the Kronians about just that very thing last Monday night?” he said.
“You’ve actually met them?”
“That was one of the reasons why I was in Washington.”
Salio looked impressed “And do they have any ideas?” he asked.
“Yes,” Keene answered. “I think they might.” He paused, waiting for a reaction. Salio waved for him to continue. “Well, go on. Now I’m the one doing the listening.”
“What would you say to the suggestion that the orbits aren’t always determined purely gravitationally?” Keene replied. “Suppose an event like Athena could alter the electrical environment to create a temporary regime in which charge-induced forces became significant. Mightn’t that make a difference?”
Salio didn’t answer at once but stared at him long and fixedly. “Is there some reason to suppose that’s true?” he asked finally.
“I think the Kronians might have some good reasons, yes,” Keene replied. He went on to summarize what Sariena had said about the Kronian findings and the arrangements being made in Corpus Christi to compute the implications. Naturally, Salio was intrigued. Keene promised to keep him posted on the outcome.
Back in Salio’s office, Keen finally got around to asking the question that had been his prime reason for coming to see Salio. “If Amspace were to arrange media coverage and so forth, would you be willing to go public with the kinds of things you’ve been telling me this morning?”
“I’d be happy to,” was Salio’s reply. “Wasn’t that why I got in touch with you in the first place?”
“It wouldn’t create problems with the people you work for here?” Keene checked.
“No. As I said before, as far as they’re concerned it’s just a hobby. As long as it doesn’t affect their budgets, contracts, or completion dates, no one here is going to worry too much.”
Salio offered lunch, but Keene’s flight departure time didn’t allow for it. He called for a cab to take Keene to the airport, and, to stretch his legs and get some air, said he’d accompany Keene down to the front entrance.
“So what’s your version of why so many astronomers don’t want to think about it?” Keene asked as they stood waiting. He was curious to see how Salio’s view compared with Cavan’s. “I mean, you and I don’t have a problem. If you tell the ordinary guy in the street that we nearly got wiped out by Venus once, he says ‘Say, that’s interesting. Tell me more.’ Why the difference?”
Salio stared into the distance. Having to ponder the psychology of such things seemed to be something he was not used to. “Maybe if your whole world is built on certainty and prestige, the thought of losing it is something you can’t face,” he offered finally. “Ordinary people accept uncertainty and insecurity every day.”
“Maybe,” Keene said. It was a thought, anyway.
Salio went on, “And in any case, it’s not true of all astronomers. There’s a lot of politics that I try not to get mixed up in. The astronomers I know out on the West Coast would like to see all this debated more openly. But the International Astronomical Union, headquartered at the Harvard-Smithsonian center in Cambridge, sets the official line. That’s where the lines and Web links from around the world come in to report observations, coordinate announcements, and so on. Its ties are to Washington investment capital and the defense establishment, both of whose horizons are conservative and Earth-centered.”
Keene nodded slowly. Cavan had mentioned Voler’s recently being nominated for presidency of the IAU. “So what happens on the West Coast?” he asked.
“There’s a kind of parallel information clearinghouse at JPL in Pasadena,” Salio said. “The IAU is primarily NSF-supported. JPL is operated for NASA by Cal Tech, which, being a private institution, gives it more autonomy. Certainly, a lot of scientists there would love to start launching stuff all over the Solar System again the way the Kronians want us to, but the catch is being tied to government money.”
“Who’d be the person to talk to out there?” Keene inquired curiously.
“The best I can think of would be a guy called Charlie Hu at JPL. He runs their communications center and big number-crunching operations. I wouldn’t be surprised if he talks to the Kronians on a direct line the same as you do, but doesn’t publicize it much. Anyhow, sure, I can put you in touch with him.”
There was only one more thing. As the cab appeared in the gateway to the parking lot, Keene remembered Robin’s theory of dinosaurs arriving with impacting bodies and asked Salio what he thought. At the time Robin mentioned it, Keene had thought it outlandish; now it seemed rather tame.
“Well, it’s different,” Salio said-with an effort to be tactful, Keene thought. “Is it your idea?”
“No. The son of a friend of mine. He’s fourteen.”
Salio looked surprised and at the same time impressed. “Well, as I say, it’s different-but I can see a few problems. Let me think about it. Can you give me his e-mail code? It would probably make him feel good if he got a response from the Institute directly, don’t you think?”
The TV had been left on in the passenger compartment of the cab. Keene was about to turn it off, but paused when he realized that the item that had just come on featured a senator from New York giving his views on the Kronians.
“They’re overextended with no credit in the bank. If you ask me, this whole line they’re pushing is a ploy to sucker us here on Earth into bailing them out of a foolhardy venture that should never have been attempted in the first place. Well, I’m sorry but my answer is, we have problems of our own to take care of. No, sir, I will not be voting my support.”
Judith was spending a year at Protonix to gain commercial experience before going back to university to continue her postdoctoral work. She confounded all the jokes and stereotypes by being blond, pretty, busty, and leggy, and modeled for girly magazines when she wasn’t computing reactor thermal dynamics or charge distributions in ionized gas flows. Her fiancé was from a family that owned a chain of Texas automobile dealerships, but he had passed on his share of the fortune to study and compose music. Keene had never found life to be short on incongruities.
“We need to modify some orbital mechanics programs that Jerry’s people downloaded,” she told Keene when he stuck his head in her office to ask about progress on his return to Corpus Christi. “I talked to Neuzender at Princeton and he said he’ll help out, but can’t until something he’s working on is done. He asked me to say hi, by the way.”
“Okay.”
“I’d say, maybe a week or two.”
“Um.” Keene pulled a face. “I was hoping we’d have it before the Kronians get down to serious business. Is that the best we can do?”
“I’ll keep pushing. Maybe we can shave it down a bit.”
“Whatever you can do. How was the computer thing in Dallas on Saturday?”
“Not bad. I found the perfect replacement for this machine. It’s just what we need: image-tank driver, voice directable, and with math-pro conditioning.”
“Sounds great, but I’m up to my ears saving the world right now.”
“Vicki has the brochures, specs, and prices.”
“Okay, I’ll take a look. How’s everything else?”
“Celia’s moving along with the Karisaki thing. We should get the draft done by tomorrow.”
“Great stuff. Catch you later.”
Back in his own office, he reviewed his messages. A note from Karen confirmed a meeting the next morning with Curtiss and other senior Amspace management to update them after his talk with Salio. Wally had called to say that Harry Halloran’s proposal was now officially accepted, and the tentative date set for the hybrid shuttle trial out of San Saucillo, followed by a landing at Montemorelos, was in two weeks. Pretty quick. Keene nodded in silent approval. Then a header lower down caught his eye, saying that a recording from Gallian had been filed around midday. Keene activated it, and a moment later the familiar white-haired features were addressing him from the screen.
“Hello, Landen Keene. You’re probably busy, so I’ll just leave this for when you get back and not chase you around on your personal number. We’re leaving Washington for the tour, finally, and looking forward to it-surely the whole planet can’t be as hectic as this city. But I just wanted to let you know that I haven’t forgotten my promise on Monday to arrange for you to see the Osiris. In fact, I have talked to Captain Idorf and asked him to get in touch with you. It is his ship, after all, and he should be the one issuing invitations.” Gallian looked away for a moment. “Well, they’re hounding me again. Got to go. Be our guest, as we are yours. Sariena sends regards. More when we’ve a moment. Bye.”
And, indeed, the message from Idorf up in the Osiris, inviting Keene to visit the ship, was four items farther down. Idorf regretted that he would have to leave it to Keene to get himself up there, however. Any others that Keene might wish to bring too would also be welcome, since right now there was plenty of space aboard. Keene killed the screen, leaned back, and thought it over. No doubt there would be official vessels shuttling up and down between the ship and the surface for one reason or another that he could probably get a place on, but if his experience was anything to go by it would be a tedious and officious business. The Amspace trial that Wally had said was scheduled to take place in two weeks offered an obvious alternative possibility. Keene warmed to the idea as he mulled over it. If they could kill two birds with one stone, then why not three? He wasn’t listed to go on the trial as things stood, since it involved simply a conventional type of engine that didn’t involved him, but that could be changed. They were using a minishuttle; there would be plenty of spare room. . . .
He sat forward to the screen again and called Wally Lomack at Kingsville.
“Lan, say, what’s up? How’d it all go in Washington?”
“Pretty good, Wally. There’s been more since, too. I’ll be over at Kingsville tomorrow after I talk to Marvin and his people in town in the morning, so I’ll fill you in then. Right now, I wanted to talk about the hybrid and Montemorelos mission.”
“It’s going ahead-targeted for two weeks from now. I sent you a note.”
“I know. I’ve seen it. I don’t suppose you were planning on flying yourself, right?”
Lomack looked surprised. “Why, no. It’s just a regular trial. Why would I want to go? I’ve done enough of all that in my time. That’s what we have crew for.”
“But you’re CDE. You could change the flight roster if you had a good reason.”
“Lan, quit playing games. What’s this about?”
“How would you like to see the inside of the Kronians’ ship?”
“The Osiris?”
“Right. I’ve got us an invitation. The fee is that you provide the transport up there.”
It took Lomack several seconds to satisfy himself that Keene was serious. He shook his head in amazement. “Hell, you were only with them one evening. What did you do, offer them some free consulting?”
Keene grinned. “As if they needed any. . . . Oh, come on, you know me, Wally. Smooth operator when the occasion calls. So what do you think? Can do?”
Lomack thought, inclined his head, and pursed his lips. “It’s a tempting thought, all right. . . .”
“We can offer other places too,” Keene said. “Any number up to what a minishuttle can carry. That should help make it more popular.”
“That’s true enough.” Lomack chewed his lip for a moment longer, and then nodded. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do. No promises, mind, but I’ll put it to Harry. Good enough?”
“Good enough. Take care, Wally.”
“You too.”
Keene cleared down and sat staring at the blank screen, savoring for a few moments the rare feeling of everything in life going right for a change. Murphy’s Law also operated on itself, which meant that it didn’t always work . . . which meant that it did work. He’d never quite been able to figure out the logic. He got up and sauntered into Vicki’s office, where she was busy over pages of program code that she had been working on with Judith. “How’s life on the lower decks?” he inquired, scanning casually over the sheets.
“It’s going to be tight, but with Neuzender’s input from Princeton I think we’ll make it.”
“Good.” Keene let it hang for a second. “Maybe we’ve a cause for celebration, then. Never say that the firm doesn’t appreciate the galley slaves.”
Vicki glanced up. “What does that mean, Lan? Another happy hour at the Bandana?”
“Well, it would give you a chance to tell me about Robin’s mammoths, which you were going to send and never did,” Keene said.
“That’s right, I never got around to it. Well, we have had this little thing to work on while you’ve been seeing the sights around Washington, you know.”
Keene grinned and studied her curiously for a few seconds. “Suppose I said I can fix that trip into space for you that you’ve been waiting for? Would that beat a beer at the Bandana?”
Vicki stopped and looked at him as if she couldn’t have heard him right. Her eyes interrogated him silently. They had worked together long enough that Keene had the feeling she could bypass sensory intermediaries and verify directly what was going through his mind. “You’re serious, aren’t you,” she pronounced finally.
Keene made a gesture that was at the same time both nonchalant and expansive. “Even better. How about seeing the Osiris as well?” This time Vicki did come close to looking as if she thought this might be a sick joke after all.
Keene nodded, his face splitting into a wide grin. “It’s real. So do you feel like celebrating? . . . Oh, and one more thing to add to your list. I want us to order a mixed crate of the best Californian wines to take up as a present to Gallian for organizing it. Did you know he’s partial to wines? They don’t make any of the real stuff on Kronia yet.”
Accelerating ever faster, Athena crossed Mercury’s orbit and vanished into the glare of the Sun. After attaining a million miles per hour at perihelion on the far side, it would reemerge and become visible again in just over two weeks. While Judith continued working with Jerry Allender and the Princeton advisers on the computations that it was hoped would throw new light on Venus’s early behavior, Halloran put Lomack’s proposition to Marvin Curtiss, and approval came down for extending the San Saucillo-Montemorelos operation to include a rendezvous with the Osiris in the way Keene had suggested. Keene’s and Vicki’s places were confirmed, and after some debate within the company, a draw between members of senior management and technical staff was announced for the remaining seats.
With that side of things going so smoothly, there had to be some negative news too. The opposition groups who had been stirred up by the NIFTV demonstration were still seething, and the forthcoming trial offered a timely opportunity to register their protest. That the vessel involved this time was not nuclear didn’t matter. The target for attack was the company name.
A couple of days before liftoff was due, Cavan called Keene at home in his townhouse on Ocean Drive. It was mid-evening. Keene had just been sharing a couple of beers by the pool out back with a neighbor from across the street.
“Hello, Landen. I’m returned at last to the land of the comparatively sane. Are you in the middle of anything? I have something that I’d like to show you.”
“No, I was taking it easy for once. So, welcome back. How were Hawaii and Japan? Did the Kronians survive it all intact?”
Cavan had been one of those accompanying the Kronian party. The strategy he had outlined for manipulating the public’s image of the Kronians had begun to reveal itself. Instead of the independent, free-thinking scientists that Keene had seen personally, they were typically shown as naive, trusting tourists.
“Most of them are bearing up well, a few feeling the strain,” Cavan replied. “They’ll be going back up to their ship in relays to take a break from the gravity before the negotiations start.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Keene agreed. “How’s Gallian? He has to be the oldest.”
Cavan snorted. “He’s got more energy in him than a football team. That’s one that you don’t have to worry about.”
“Now why doesn’t that surprise me?” Keene made an empty-handed gesture. “Anyway, what have you got?”
“I’ve been picking through what’s been going on. The name of your friend David Salio at the Aerospace Sciences Institute has been turning up a lot in the department here. The media seem to be showing an interest in him all of a sudden. It’s upsetting a lot of people.”
“The Amspace PR people have been busy,” Keene said. “I put them on to that guy Charlie Hu on the West Coast that Salio mentioned, too, and he’s proved a big asset. Science magazine might be running a friendly article, and New Frontiers is interested in putting together a documentary. It’s really moving along.”
“Did you know that Coast-to-Coast wants to get Salio on the Russ Litherland Show?” Cavan asked.
“We’ve got this launch coming up. I haven’t been following all the details.”
“He received a call recently to confirm that he was interested in participating. But the call didn’t come from anyone at Coast-to-Coast. It was from a woman called Maria Hutchill, who had gotten wind of their intention. Does that name mean anything to you, Landen?”
Keene felt unease and let it show. “Leo, this makes me nervous. I thought SICA’s business was supposed to be national science policy. But it seems we can’t mail a letter without you knowing about it. It makes me feel really glad that you’re on my side. . . . At least, I hope you are.”
“I told you, Landen, we’re all spies now. It’s a tacky world. Science has been taken over by the mentalities that run everything else. The only way to feel secure is to know everyone else’s secrets and think they don’t know yours.”
“I get by okay just managing my own business,” Keene said.
“But you’re not neurotic. You had the sense to get out.”
“If you say so. Anyhow who’s this Maria . . .”
“Hutchill. She’s effectively Herbert Voler’s second in command at Yale.” Keene’s eyebrows lifted at the mention again of his former wife’s present husband. Now he was all attention. Cavan went on, “Voler has emerged as the coordinator of the campaign to discredit the Kronians. The verdict is political and has already been decided, but the case for the jury needs to be made to look scientific.”
Keene stared hard at the image on the screen. “Did you guess that this would happen, Leo? Was that why you came to me?”
“It seemed fairly certain early on that Voler would be involved, yes,” Cavan admitted. “The job dovetails well with his own personal agenda.”
Keene nodded without needing to be told what Cavan meant. Voler’s credentials and professional ambitions had made him the ideal for Fey to turn to when Keene committed the great betrayal of turning his back on the prospects of social eminence and distinction in academia. Keene had suspected a certain bedazzlement on Fey’s part in that direction before he announced his decision, but he hadn’t made an issue of it since his guess had been that she wouldn’t be around for too much longer after that in any case. Voler’s sights at that time had been set on becoming Director of Observational Astronomy at NASA, which meant running all their ground-based, orbiting, and lunar observatories. The position was coveted by several notable figures in the academic world, and success in the current task of defeating the Kronian mission would significantly improve his chances.
“Have you been keeping track of him over the years since your paths crossed?” Cavan inquired.
“Oh, come on, Leo,” Keene snorted. “Why should I have? You know I got out of all that. I’ve got better things to do than play the jealous, stalking ex. In any case, I wasn’t jealous.”
“His pet scheme that he’s been trying to get Congressional action on is for a new federal overseeing agency to coordinate all major research in government, the academic centers, and major industrial labs,” Cavan said. “With himself chairing the supervisory board, of course.”
“Of course,” Keene agreed sarcastically. “We really need another one.”
“Ah, yes. But the line he’s pushing is that science has been getting sloppy, letting in New Age and Mother-Earth mystics, and what’s needed is an office with clout that can clean up the faith and reinstate proper discipline. He’s got the ear of a lot of people with problems they can blame on deteriorating scientific standards. So you can see what an opportunity this Kronian situation is for him to show everyone he’s the man for the job. And it would be particularly valuable to him at the present time, in view of his bid to become NASA’s astronomy supremo. He has the support of the academics, but there are other rivals that many of the scientists within NASA itself would prefer-in JPL, for example.”
Keene nodded. “I heard something about that from Salio. So where does this call to him from Maria . . . Hutchill come into it?” he asked again.
“She’s a disciple in the cause,” Cavan replied. “If Herbert makes it big-time, she flies high too. I just happen to have a recording of the call. . . .” Keene shook his head but said nothing.
The screen split vertically to show Salio on one side, and a woman speaking in front of a background of bookshelves and part of a window on the other. Showing just his mop of black hair and heavy-rimmed spectacles, with no jeans or cowboy boots to offset the image, Salio looked even more the student than when Keene had met him. Hutchill was probably in her thirties, a little on the plump side with rounded features, and short, unpretentiously cut hair. Her eyes had a sharp look, however, and her voice was firmer than her appearance would have suggested. Keene sensed a potential antagonism being consciously kept under restraint.
“Dr. Salio?”
“Yes.”
“I hope I’m not calling at a bad time. Do you have a few minutes?”
“Not if it’s insurance, siding, or you want to lend me money.”
Hutchill forced a smile. “No, I’m not selling anything. My name is Dr. Hutchill, from the Department of Astronomy at Yale. It’s in connection with the plan to put you on the show with Coast-to-Coast.”
Salio looked more interested. “Well, it’s not exactly firm yet.”
“Yes, I understand that. What I’m concerned with is getting an idea of the probable content to assess its suitability.”
“Oh . . . okay. What would you like to know?”
“Note how she’s giving the impression of being connected with the show as if she’s some kind of official advisor,” Cavan put in from his side of the screen.
“Yes, I did pick that up,” Keene replied.
The conversation opened with a trading of views on theories of the formation and stability of the Solar System. Salio was candid in the way he had been with Keene, maintaining a humorous note and declining to be unduly deferential. Eventually, they closed over the matter of comets originating from Jupiter. Hutchill’s manner became more penetrating. The issue, basically, was whether the shower of new comets that had been born with Athena provided adequate evidence that the previously existing short-period comets-the ones with aphelia showing a statistical clustering at the distance of Jupiter’s orbit-had originated in a similar episode involving Venus. Salio’s answer was, sure they did. You didn’t need the other mechanisms that been speculated about over the years and could throw them away. Hutchill was determined to see them as exceptions.
“There simply aren’t grounds for making such a sweeping generalization on the basis of an event that has been observed only once,” she insisted. “You’re ignoring the transfer of long-period comets to short-period trajectories by perturbation, which is still the dominant process on any significant time scale.”
Salio grinned, evidently having expected it. “That’s what the textbooks say,” he agreed. “But when has it been observed even once? I can point you to a string of papers going back to before 1900 which show that such a mechanism isn’t viable. It’s a myth that has been exposed now for well over a hundred years.”
Displeasure showed through Hutchill’s demeanor for the first time. “I think I’d advise caution before dismissing something that’s so widely accepted,” she said.
“But if acceptance were the thing to go by, then a popular but wrong theory could never be changed,” Salio pointed out. “Let’s try plausibility instead. All the estimates that I’ve seen agree that the probability of Jupiter deflecting incoming comets from vast distances on parabolic orbits to an elliptical one is about one in a hundred thousand. So that’s the ratio of short-period to long-period that you ought to get. In fact what you have is close to sixteen percent. The number of long-periods is far too small. How many comets are there in the Jupiter family-about seventy? And the typical lifetime would be what . . . four thousand years?”
“Hmm. . . . Maybe.”
“Let’s take that figure, then, and suppose that Jupiter has to replenish them by capturing long-period arrivals at the rate of one in a hundred thousand. To give seventy in four thousand years would require seven million long-period arrivals, which works out at seventeen-hundred-fifty a year, or five every day. Allowing for the transit time in and out of the Solar System would give us about nine thousand present in the sky by my calculations, of which let’s say half would be brighter than average. A pretty spectacular sky.” He shrugged and waved a hand, seemingly enjoying himself. “So where are they? And then you’ve got the problem that all of the short-periods orbit the Sun in the same direction as the planets, as they should if they came from Jupiter. But by capture, some should be retrograde-in theory half of them. You see, the numbers just don’t work out.”
“Sufficient long-term comets can be produced by periodic disturbances of the Oort Cloud, as I’m sure you’re aware,” Hutchill said.
Cavan interjected, “It’s the same as what I’m supposed to be doing with the Kronians. She’s leading him on to sound out his arguments. The idea is to have one of their own people on the show as well, ready to take him on in a debate.”
“She looks like she might be getting more of a debate than she expected,” Keene commented. “This guy’s good.”
On the screen, Salio’s grin had broadened. “What Oort Cloud?” he challenged. “It’s never been actually observed, has it? And it’s supposed to extend maybe halfway to Centauri. Comets from interstellar distances would arrive on wide hyperbolic orbits. The short-period comets that they’re supposed to turn into don’t exhibit the distribution of orbits and inclinations you’d expect from an all-sky parent population.”
“I wasn’t referring to short-period,” Hutchill said shortly. “They are postulated as coming from the Kuiper Belt, near the planetary plane.”
“Postulated,” Salio echoed. “You’ve still got the problem of velocity mismatch, which tells against capture. Whatever way you look at it, the number of short-periods is still far too high.”
“Dark matter in the galactic disk would put more of them onto an injection trajectory,” Hutchill said.
Salio’s face registered delight. “So now we have an unobserved Oort Cloud and a postulated Kuiper Belt that’s influenced by invisible dark matter. And even if all of them existed, they wouldn’t produce the distribution and prograde consistency that we see. Yet what the Kronians are proposing fits all the facts without any inventions. All you have to do is throw out some ideas you’ve grown up with. So isn’t it time we changed the textbooks?”
The rest of the exchange went into more details that didn’t change the essentials. Hutchill ended by thanking Salio for his time and hanging up visibly disturbed.
“Interesting,” Keene pronounced when Cavan had expanded back to fill the screen. “It’s going to be quite a show. Are they just going to let it go, do you think? She obviously wasn’t happy. What can they do?”
“All I’m going to say at this point is, don’t underestimate anything,” Cavan replied. “And that was really why I called. Your man is bright and knows his stuff, Landen, but he’s too trusting. Maybe it’s just his way of telling the world that he has nothing to hide, but it’s giving the opposition a lot of free information. The Kronians make the same mistake consistently.”
“You want me to talk to him?” Keene asked.
“Precisely. I can’t intervene-you know my situation. But someone should wise him up a little on the ways of the world. In particular, caution him on who he talks to and how much he says to people he doesn’t know. If he’s going to take on the big guys in front of a couple of hundred million people, he needs to learn something about the rules.”
But then Keene became embroiled in last-minute details connected with the impending space shot, and somehow he never did get around to calling Salio before the day arrived for the launch.
The coverage that the San Saucillo launch received, and the distances over which throngs came to join in the protest, suggested coordination on a national scale. By early morning, the site was already besieged by crowds disgorged from cars, trucks, and campers that had been arriving all night. Tents and sunshades had been set up, several bands were in action, and the atmosphere would have approached that of a rock festival were it not for the angry undertones and the cordon of state and county police and vehicles maintaining a perimeter. Amspace security reported that the approach by road was problematical, and the sheriff was calling on the company to act with minimum provocation. Accordingly, Keene and Vicki were directed to the Kingsville plant to join the rest of the flight complement who were not already at the launch site, and lifted out by helicopter.
Keene looked down somber-faced as the administration and assembly buildings of the San Saucillo site came into view ahead. The launch area itself was situated two miles farther west, at the far end of the landing field with its two vehicle transporter tracks running along one side. Although some problems had been reported with groups trying to breach the security fence marking the two-mile safety zone south, west, and north of the pad area, the crowds were mainly concentrated around the east end of the complex and its approach road. As the helicopter descended, a ripple of hand-waving and gesturing followed it among the upturned faces below. In some places, signs that were being displayed were turned to point upward, although it was impossible to make out what they said. The pilot commenced a pattern of evasive weaving.
“What’s happening?” Vicki asked tensely from her seat next to Keene.
“Just a routine precaution. It isn’t always like this, you know. You just picked a bad day for your first space hop.”
“The story of my life. It never fails.”
They landed among an assortment of helicopters and small aircraft on the concrete apron in front of the control building at the end of the landing field. A raucous cadence of several thousand voices chanting in unison reached them from the far side of the main gate and the perimeter fence as they boarded the bus waiting to take them to the assembly and flight preparation area. There was a little under three hours to go before the scheduled launch time.
In one of the admin buildings they met the others who would be going. There were twelve in all: the regular test crew of three, expanded to include Wally Lomack and another engineer from the design team named Tim; Keene and Vicki; and the five winners of the Amspace lottery. They were: Milton Clowes, the financial vice president; Alice Myers from one of the secretarial offices, already uncontrollably jittery-she said the only reason she was doing it was to keep face with her three teenage children; Les Urkin’s assistant, Jenny Grewe-much to the chagrin of Les, who had missed by one number; Phil Forely from marketing; and a new hire to the Navigation Systems Group, Sid Vance, who was barely out of college and had been with the firm less than a month. All of the five, like Vicki, would be making their first trip into space.
After changing from regular clothes into flight suits and taking time for a snack, they met with representatives from the mission management team for a final briefing and update. Weather conditions were good at the downrange emergency abort sites in Florida and Algeria, and a “Go” was expected. Demonstrators on the north side of the pads had attempted to compromise the launch by crossing the boundary river in boats, but were being contained by police landed from choppers. The group went back out to the bus and left the main complex to be driven along the edge of the airfield, beside the tracks that carried the heavy vehicle-transporter platforms to the pad area.
For the most part they were quiet as the spires of silver and white ahead loomed closer and taller. By the time they arrived and climbed out from the bus, service trucks and other vehicles were beginning to pick up and withdraw. Ground crew conducted them to the access elevator and across the entry bridge when they emerged a hundred feet above the ground. Minutes later, they were securing themselves into harnesses to settle down for what Keene knew from previous experiences could be the Long Wait-although the latest update was that they were still on schedule. The ground crew who had come aboard to make final checks left the cabin, and the lock was closed. TV shots from outside showed the last vehicles filling up and departing.
In the forward stations, the captain and flight engineer exchanged prelaunch jargon and offhand remarks with ground control. Farther back and below, in the passenger section of the cabin, the first-timers cracked nervous inanities to show they weren’t nervous. Beside Keene, Vicki looked around the cramped surroundings of bulkheads, control panels, equipment racks, and cabling. A whirr of machinery sounded through the structure, followed by the clunk of a hatch closing somewhere. “We need your seven-dee markoff,” a voice said from a speaker up front.
“Roger,” the captain replied. “We have, ah, seven-oh-ten, nineteen-zero-four, and . . . four-six showing on two and five-one on ten.”
“Okay, gotcha.”
“And how’s it going with the Oilers and the Bears? Any news?”
“Let’s see . . . last we had was Oilers ahead by six points.”
“Yeah, right-on!”
“Guys!” Vicki breathed.
Keene grinned. “Life’s great once you weaken.”
“I think some of it must be rubbing off. I mean, what am I doing here, Lan? You let them strap you to the top of a ten-story bomb that nobody who knows what’s going on will stay within two miles of. . . . Is that the kind of behavior that would normally qualify as sane?”
“Women!” Keene threw back. He made an appealing gesture to Wally, strapped in farther across, who had heard and was smiling. “For years she gives me a hard time about wanting to come on a mission. Now I’m getting one for bringing her. What does a guy do?”
The captain’s voice came over the internal address speaker. “Attention, folks. We’ve had a slight hold because of the trouble on the north perimeter, but things seem to be under control there now. We’re looking at a little over fifteen minutes. The skies are pretty clear across most of North Africa and Asia. We should get some good views.”
Places halfway around the world, Keene reflected as he lay back in the harness, waiting. He had expected he might get used to the thought, but he never had. It hadn’t been so long ago when people had spent years of their lives traveling distances like that; now they were talking as nonchalantly as if it were a bus ride. In a way it would be little more than just that. The boost into orbit would be measured in minutes; then there would follow nine circuits around Earth for testing the hybrid engine and putting the shuttle through its paces; a day’s visit to the Osiris; and then back down in time for dinner tomorrow. The Kronians were already talking about going anywhere in the Solar System in ninety days.
Vicki seemed to be thinking along similar lines. “You know, we’ve worked together all this time,” she said to Keene. “I think I’m only starting to realize how frustrating it must be to believe in something as much as you do and have so much of the world not understanding it. Especially when they all stand to gain in the long run.”
“Hm. . . . Yes, I think Christ and Giordano Bruno probably knew the feeling,” Keene said.
“When I was at Harvard, we had the same kind of thing. It was practically impossible to convince people that low radiation levels are not only harmless but essential for health. We used to call it Vitamin R.”
“Should I look for it in the health food store?” Clowes asked from the far side behind Wally.
Anxieties rose as the countdown entered its final phase, and the cabin fell silent. The crew recited their final check dialogue with control. And then the voice from the speaker up front was sounding off the final seconds.
Liftoff came with an all-enveloping roar and sudden force squashing the occupants back in the seat moldings. Vicki’s hand groped over the armrest instinctively to find Keene’s, and squeezed. A screen in front showed the craft sliding up past the gantry amid clouds of red and white smoke, while another gave a more distant view of it emerging on top of a column of light, with demonstrators on their feet, waving and gesticulating in the foreground. The force intensified, stretching flesh back over face bones. Ground fell away and was replaced by ocean. And already-Keene never ceased to be amazed at how rapidly the perspective changed-the outline of the Gulf was taking shape, glimpsed in parts below an immense whirl of banded cloud. Up front, the exchange between dispassionate voices and ground control continued. The boosters detached and fell away to deploy extendable wings for remote-piloting down to a recovery field in Cuba, while the orbiter engine continued driving the main vessel faster and higher. Florida and the Caribbean passed by below, followed by the huge, unfolding, speckled expanse of the Atlantic. . . .
Suddenly, the sound inside the cabin cut and was replaced by stillness and quiet. It was if they had been transported from the world of humans and machines to some different, ethereal realm. The shuttle was no longer a creature of violence fighting its way free from gravity, but floated serenely now-content, seemingly; at ease in the element it was meant for. The pressure that had pinned everyone immobile was no more. Gradually, the hum of unseen machinery and the subdued hiss of air being drawn into the extraction filters impressed themselves as the only sound breaking the silence. Then the captain’s voice came again over the internal circuit:
“That’s it, folks. Welcome to orbit.”
The faces in the passenger compartment looked about them wonderingly. Milton Clowes let his arms hang weightless in the air in front of him. “Well, I’ll be darned,” he told the others. “Look at that.”
Alice finally let go of her armrests, which she had gripped, white-faced throughout the launch. “I don’t believe we’re still here,” was all she could manage.
“How many times is this for you, Wally?” Tim, the engineer who was with Lomack, asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve lost count. I thought I’d retired from any more of this kind of nonsense.”
The captain spoke again: “Yes, I know the first thing you’re all dying to try is the zero-g. Anyone who feels inclined to experiment now, go right ahead. Take it easy, though. It works better than you think. People who turn into missiles inside here don’t make themselves too popular.” It was just a reminder. They had been through it all in the preflight briefings.
The passengers exchanged glances. None of them really wanted to be the first to risk being a spectacle. Finally, Vicki felt for the buckle securing her harness, then hesitated and gave Keene a questioning look. He nodded encouragingly. “Nobody here’s gonna laugh,” he told her.
She released the catch and eased herself cautiously out of the harness to float above the gee-couch, turning slowly. A touch on the cabin wall stopped her and sent her turning the other way; a push on the wall made her drift toward Wally. Clowes gave her some handclaps by way of applause, and a couple of the others followed.
“This is fantastic!” Vicki told them as she started to get the feel of it. “It’s like being a whale with a whole ocean to frolic in. I want to leap and dive.”
“Doesn’t it make all that business back at the complex seem kind of unimportant now?” Jenny Grewe mused distantly. Vicki drifted down the center of the cabin, turning in a slow cartwheel.
“Hey, that looks cool,” Phil Forely said. “I have to try it too.”
One of the flight crew had unhitched and was moving back. “Okay, but let me give you a few tips first,” he told them. “Just a couple of you at a time, guys. You’ll all get a turn, don’t worry.”
Keene had seen it enough times to leave them to it for a while. He turned his eyes back toward the screen in front and watched the image of the deserts of northeast Africa and the Middle East passing by below. So much had been written about the proliferation of life on Earth. But the planet’s real potential for life had never been really grasped because in recent times there had been nothing to give a measure of it. Earth was still only recovering from its devastation.
He remembered how, years ago, when he first started making regular airline flights eastward from the West Coast, it had amazed him that after leaving the oases of human habitation around San Diego, Los Angeles, or the San Francisco Bay Area, there would be nothing for a thousand miles to the Mississippi valley-just parched mountains, deserts, and canyons; everywhere, the dryness. It was only later, when he began grasping the true scale of the planet by seeing it from orbit, that he realized that had been just a small part of the picture. The vastness of the wildernesses extending from Mauritania on the Atlantic side of Africa to Afghanistan, then onward through Mongolia, and in the southern hemisphere, those of southwestern Africa and virtually all of Australia, staggered the imagination.
It hadn’t always been that way. There had been times when the Sahara was green, Arabia and Iran fertile; what were now the deserts of northwest India and Afghanistan had supported flourishing civilizations. The Sphinx was older than the great pyramids and showed water damage and erosion that couldn’t be accounted for by the conditions that had existed through recorded history.
What it all pointed to was that Earth’s climatic bands had been different then, with narrower tropics and broader temperate zones that had brought rain where there are now deserts and caused grasslands and forests to extend into what is today the Arctic. Such conditions were consistent with the Earth’s axis being more perpendicular to its orbital plane around the Sun. Something, then, had caused it to shift and increased the planet’s tilt, creating the northern and southern desert belts and extending the polar regions.
The flight crew got busy commencing the engine trials that had been the original purpose of the mission. Wally and Tim spent much of the time forward, following events, and Keene got involved in the technical proceeding, too. Vicki made the best of the opportunity to get to know more Amspace people. She seemed to get along especially well with Jenny, Les Urkin’s assistant in public relations, Alice, and Phil from Marketing. Sid, the new hire straight out of college, was still too mesmerized by the torrent of events that had overtaken him to be capable of much coherent thought.
“Are things always like this here?” he asked when the group was struggling to master their first peel-wrappered, squeeze-bottle lunch. “I mean, after the way things were at Berkeley, I expected life in the commercial world to be kind of dull. They haven’t found me a permanent desk yet, and I’m in orbit already.”
Later, he got to talking with Vicki, and then her and Keene, about the Kronian theories and Keene’s work with Amspace. Sid was enthusiastic about space development, which was why he had sought a position with Amspace in the first place, but he’d had no inkling of the deeper implications of what was at stake. It all came as a revelation, which he devoured avidly. A solid recruit to the cause, Keene decided.
However, as hours passed by and the novelty wore thinner, weariness akin to that of a long airline flight set in. While at the forward end of the compartment the voice exchanges with ground control at San Saucillo and other stations monitoring the flight continued against a background of electronic beeps and bursts of static, conversation in the rear section lapsed. Some of the passengers dozed or tried to read. About halfway through the mission the Osiris made contact to get confirmation that the Amspace vessel would be on schedule; also, there was a message for Keene from Sariena letting him know that she would be one of the Kronians up resting from terrestrial gravity while his party was visiting. Soon after, he found himself with Vicki and Sid, watching yet another turn of the globe sliding by on the cabin screen.
“Did I tell you that Robin got an e-mail from Salio?” Vicki asked. “My eternally curious fourteen-year-old son,” she added for Sid’s benefit. They had told Sid about Salio briefly when talking about the Kronians’ planetary theories.
“I don’t think so. He said he would,” Keene said.
“Robin was thrilled to bits. Salio knocked a few holes in his dinosaur theory, but it was nice of him to find the time to respond.” She explained to Sid, “Robin came up with this idea that the dinosaurs were on the body that impacted Earth, since he doesn’t think they could have existed in Earth’s gravity.”
Sid pulled a face. “A bit farfetched, isn’t it?”
“Give him a break. He’s fourteen.”
“David Salio’s an okay guy,” Keene said. “He’s going to be dynamite on the shows . . . which reminds me, I was supposed to call him.” He thought for a moment about calling Salio right there, from orbit, but then decided that the topic wasn’t appropriate for an audience. “You never did tell me this business about Robin and the mammoths, either,” he told Vicki instead.
“Oh, that’s right. I never did, did I?”
“He’s not saying that they came from someplace else too, surely?” Sid said.
Vicki shook her head. “Oh no. It’s just that in following his inquisitiveness, he stumbled on a lot of controversy that’s been going on for years-that even I didn’t know about-about when they died out.”
Keene made an inviting gesture. “Well, we’re listening. I always thought it was supposed to have had something to do with over-hunting.”
“Somewhere around ten or eleven thousand years ago, wasn’t it?” Sid said.
“That’s the conventional line,” Vicki agreed. “That date was thought to have been soon after the arrival of people. But now it seems pretty certain that humans were in the Americas much earlier. So they and the mammoths had coexisted for a long time. That theory doesn’t really hold up.”
“I never thought it made much sense, anyway,” Keene said. “Elephants are notoriously dangerous and difficult to bring down even by hunters equipped with iron and horses. But they were never hunted to extinction. Yet a sparse population armed with stone-tipped spears was supposed to have done it? All those millions of mammoths, mastodons, giant deer, you name it . . . piled up in thousands in some places? They’d have needed nuclear weapons.”
Vicki looked at him dubiously. “So why are you asking me about them? It sounds like you pretty much know the problem already.”
“It was something I came across when I got interested in evidence for catastrophes,” Keene said. “I was curious to hear Robin’s take on it. What else did he come up with?”
“Do you know about varves?”
“No. What are varves?”
“Layers of sediment that are deposited in lakes and so on, which change color from summer to winter and can be counted like tree rings. They contain pollen grains, which tell you what vegetation grew in the area over the years. And in the Arctic during the Ice Age, which is when standard thinking says the mammoths and all those other animals were supposed to have been around, there simply wasn’t anything growing there that they could have lived on. It was all just frozen desert.”
Keene nodded, at the same time looking puzzled. “Well . . . okay. What else would anyone expect to find in the Arctic in an Ice Age? Am I missing something?”
“I sometimes wonder if I am,” Vicki said. “Do they really make people professors for coming up with ideas that it could have been different?”
Sid looked from one of them to the other. “So what it sounds like you’re saying is, when the mammoths and all those other animals did live there, it couldn’t have been an Ice Age.”
Vicki nodded. “Exactly.
“So when was that? Do we know?”
“It has to have been during a much warmer period that came later,” Vicki said. “They couldn’t have been buried eleven thousand years ago under Arctic conditions. The soil below a few feet down is permanently frozen. So how could all those bodies and bones and trunks of trees have been buried under it? A few might have been caught by things like slides and collapsing crevasses, maybe, but nothing on the scale that’s found. And even if they did, nonfossilized bones and body tissue would never have survived degradation through thousands of years when the warming occurred. So they must have been wiped out and quick-frozen much more recently, in some event that marked the end of that warm period.”
Keene and Sid looked as if each was waiting for the other to fault it. It seemed that neither of them readily could. “What about carbon-14 dating?” Sid asked finally. “I thought that supports the Ice-Age extinction theory.”
“The data that have been published over the years do,” Vicki conceded. “But now it’s beginning to look as if maybe the indicated dates were too high.”
“How’s that?” Keene asked.
“The Arctic has huge natural carbon reservoirs-permafrost soil, peat deposits, methane hydrate in the oceans-that would release lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere if a mild warming occurred for any reason. We’re talking about billions of tons a year. . . . And that ‘old’ carbon would be breathed and ingested and find its way into plant and animal tissues, making all the dates too high if today’s levels with a cooler climate are assumed as the reference.”
“How do you know the climate’s cooler today?” Keene challenged.
“We don’t have big herds of large animals inhabiting the Arctic today.”
Keene stared at her. There it was again. If the conventionally accepted dates were high by a significant factor, then once again they were led to the conclusion of tremendous and destructive happenings worldwide around that same mysterious time, several thousand years ago.
Sid drifted away across the cabin to listen to Clowes telling Alice and Jenny some anecdotes from Amspace’s history. Keene and Vicki remained buckled into the restraint harnesses in one of the corners, watching the screen. They talked about the time when she had left Harvard after he and Fey split up, and the support they’d found in each other that had led her to follow him south when he set up the consulting deal that had grown into Protonix. They talked about Karen’s succession of cowboy boyfriends, Judith’s odd mix of talents and even odder-seeming engagement, about David Salio and his case for Venus, and Celia’s cat. Keene was glad to have a chance for once to ramble on with Vicki about whatever took their fancy, free from the pressures that never seemed to let up when they were in or anywhere near the firm. The loyalty that she had always shown to everything he did and the things he believed in had played a big part in enabling him to keep going through the rough parts, but he had never found a way of expressing adequately how much it had meant. Hence, it was gratifying that he had been able to keep his word to get her up on one of the missions one day, even if whenever he mentioned it he had made it sound like a joke. Flippancy came naturally as part of his armor for dealing with the world, and sometimes, he feared, brought the risk of having things like promises not taken seriously. It was nice, even if over so small a thing, to be able to feel that it wasn’t so.
The UN shuttle that had brought the Kronians up from the surface was in the process of detaching from the Osiris when the Amspace vessel arrived, climbing from a lower orbit. The captain waited several miles off in a matching orbit while the maneuver was completed.
As well as being larger than the types of craft that Keene was used to, the Osiris had a unique variable geometry design that combined linear and rotational accelerations to provide a normal internal gravity simulation whether the vessel was in freefall or under drive. Its basic form was of a wheel attached to one end of an axle. The axle formed the main body of the vessel and was shaped like an old-fashioned potato masher, with a handle projecting from one end of a thicker cylinder. The “handle” consisted of the reactant tanks and propulsion system, while forward of it, the “masher” section contained other heavy equipment, cargo bays, and the docking port. Four booms projecting radially from the masher carried the accommodation modules at their ends and were interconnected by a circular communication tube to complete the wheel. The booms pivoted freely to trail back like the spokes of an umbrella when the craft was under acceleration, the angle automatically finding a value such that, whatever the combined motion, the resultant of the forces generated by rotation and forward thrust was always perpendicular to the decks. Telescopic sections in the connecting ring compensated for changes in the wheel’s circumference when the trailing angle of the booms altered. The engineers among those studying the details on the screen aboard the minishuttle were impressed. “It makes you wonder if those guys out there are still taking applications,” Tim commented to Keene.
Eventually, the UN craft cleared the vicinity and fired a retro burn to begin falling back toward Earth, and the Amspace minishuttle was cleared to approach. Its lock connected with a coupling extended from the Osiris’s front-end docking port, and minutes later the occupants were hauling themselves along guide rails into the Kronian ship.
Two Kronians who introduced themselves as Baur and Semad were waiting for them. The first item on the agenda would be an introductory tour of the hub and propulsion section while they were in the central body of the ship, they informed the visitors; after that, they would ascend one of the boom elevators to meet Captain Idorf and the other Kronians in the Command Module, which was the only module being occupied while the Osiris was parked in Earth orbit. Refreshments would be available there, in the crew messroom.
In many ways the maze of galleries, shafts, and machinery compartments was reminiscent of Space Dock. But in the unity of expression that he saw in its design-perhaps fitting for a vessel that could cross the Solar System as opposed to a service platform constructed in Earth orbit-Keene sensed a work of inspiration that had found form, rather than a collection of compromises of the kind he had seen too often, hammered out by committees working in semi-isolation to imposed deadlines. It was the difference between a chateau and a shantyville, a patchwork of trailer lots and a landscaped park. If this was an example of what a tiny colony of misfits and dissidents could do, given simply the freedom to become what they were capable of, then what, he asked himself, might the potentials of all the peoples of Earth be capable of achieving?
He and Wally had been curious about two housings on the outside of the wide end of the axle that they had noticed as the shuttle closed in. They were perhaps the size of an average automobile, located diametrically opposite each other at the rear end of the wider hub section, overlooking the projecting spindle forming the tail. They didn’t seem to be communications mountings or external tanks, and seemed unrelated to the propulsion system. The locations seemed unlikely places to put machinery associated with the spoke elevators, and they seemed too small to accommodate independent vehicles of some kind, say for external maintenance.
Keene had more or less forgotten about them and was lagging behind the others to study the layout of an instrumentation bay that they were passing through, when a low voice sounded from a short distance behind him. “Hey, Lan.” Keene turned and looked back. Wally had drifted off the route and gone through a steel door to one side that he had apparently tried and found open. Now he had come back to the opening and was beckoning. “What do you make of this?”
Keene aimed himself in a slow bound through the microgravity and peered inside. Most of the chamber was taken up by what looked like some kind of hoist mechanism connecting from an enclosed structure below, visible through a stairwell beneath ducting and floor plates. There was more machinery above, crammed into the base of something extending upward. Keene looked back the way they had come, reconstructing in his mind the route they had taken and estimating distances. Unless he was mistaken, they had to be right under one of the strange housings.
Wally indicated the walls of the structure they could see part of below. “Look at the thickness of those sections there and all over there . . . and those panels under the walkway. We’re in a hub location here-built for permanent virtual zero-g, right?” He looked at Keene oddly. “This isn’t for structural strength, Lan. It’s containment. But what’s it doing here?”
Keene was a nuclear engineer too, and recognized radiation shielding when he saw it. As Wally had said, the layout didn’t add up. They were in the wrong part of the ship for it to have any connection with the propulsion reactors or fuel and waste storage. He looked around, trying to make sense of it. There were signs reading launch coolant, emergency flood valve, and auto eject. A panel at what appeared to be a local control station carried the legends: Door Sequence, Inner/Outer, Destruct Override, Acquisition/Director. Before he had a chance to voice any thought, however, Baur came hurrying back, obviously looking for them.
“That door should be secured. . . . You shouldn’t be in there.” His voice was short. He seemed agitated.
“Oh . . . sorry.” Wally came out, smiling. “I wasn’t sure which way you’d gone.”
Baur closed and fastened the door, entering a code into its electronic lock. “There’s nothing to see in there anyway,” he said, ushering them to follow the rest of the party. “Just auxiliary power plant.”
Not saying anything, Keene and Wally exchanged glances as they moved on. Each read the same in the other’s eye. The Osiris was armed. And whatever the weaponry was that it was carrying, it had been devised with a lot more in mind than turkey shoots.
* * *
Idorf, not long back from visiting the surface himself, was waiting on the Control Deck with a female officer called Dayda, the remaining member of the skeleton crew, to welcome the visitors. He was characteristically tall, with a lean build bordering on scrawny, a mop of unruly reddish hair, and one of the few beards, short and ragged, that Keene recalled seeing on a Kronian. His face was hollow-cheeked and hawklike, but was saved from an appearance of gauntness by the unwavering eyes and a ruddy, weathered-looking complexion that was perplexing considering the environment he was from. Keene could have pictured him as the captain of a Louisiana shrimp boat, or maybe an old-time frontier-era itinerant preacher. “I’m not yet recovered from being in a place that counts its people in billions,” he told the arrivals as Baur and Semad conducted them through from the spoke elevator. “This kind of number, I think I might be able to handle.”
With Idorf and Dayda, still wearing orange flight suits, were Sariena and the two other Kronians who had just transferred from the UN shuttle. One of them was called Vashen-a planetary scientist with the delegation, whom Keene had spoken to briefly at Gallian’s reception. The other was Thorel, the crew member that Keene had also met on that occasion. Thorel waved an arm to indicate the surroundings. “So you come to see some quality engineering at last, eh, Dr. Keene?” he joked. “Here we can move. Not like those doll-house spaceships you make us squeeze into.” Keene couldn’t argue with that. Designed for people of Kronian proportions, the Osiris was spacious compared to Terran-built craft.
There was a round of introductions for those who had not already met, and then Idorf showed the way to the messroom where the food and drink had been laid out. A lot of it looked familiar, presumably shipped up. It seemed that Earth food was a hit with the Kronians. Rather than make speeches and have his guests paraded around like tourists, Idorf left them to mingle and wander off to be shown other parts of the ship as suited their interests. Wally and Tim stayed with the Amspace crew to learn more from Idorf and Dayda about the Osiris’s control and communications systems. The other five Amspace people, with Baur, Semad, and Thorel, drifted off in smaller groups, which left Keene and Vicki with Sariena. The two women knew each other from video exchanges while the Osiris was in transit, and for a while they swapped small talk while getting better acquainted. Keene thought that Sariena looked surprisingly fresh for having just been through the rigmarole of launch and the flight up. He said so, wondering if it was due to her being out of surface gravity or escaping from the demands of the official schedule. “Just being back in familiar surroundings after so much strangeness,” she told him. “The Osiris got to feel like a second home during the voyage out. It probably seems like metal boxes full of pipes to you, but we lived here for almost three months.”
“Was Earth really so much stranger than you expected?” Vicki asked curiously.
“I’m still awed by the sheer numbers of people wherever you go,” Sariena replied. “We all are. Nothing in Kronia prepares you for that. You see the pictures, yes, but there’s a . . . a mood created by so many being present all together in the same place, that you feel only from being there. . . . And the ocean! Hour after hour of it. I never imagined so much water existed in the universe. The waves at the beach in Hawaii were terrifying.”
“Was the gravity very tiring?” Keene asked her.
“Well, I won’t pretend it isn’t nice to be back up in the ship. But I’ve had an easier time than some of us. I think that having been born on Earth must make a difference.”
“Do you find you’ve remembered much?” Vicki asked.
“Not as much as I thought I had. A lot of what I thought I remembered must have been imagination.” Sariena moved a few paces away and turned, flexing her arms and stretching her head back as if exhilarated by not being weighed down anymore. “I also have feelings that the talks with your governments will go well. The people we’ve met had a lot of questions. The preliminary tour was a good idea, even if a bit exhausting.”
Keene frowned as he listened. No doubt the people asking the questions had been informants placed close to the Kronians in the way Cavan had described. The Kronians didn’t seem to be picking up on the negative rumblings sounding in the media, or else they were being shielded from them. He couldn’t see them dealing adeptly with Earth-style politics. It wasn’t that they were incapable, so much as never having needed to learn how. Their politics back home-or whatever word better described the managing of Kronian social affairs-presumably worked differently.
“How are those orbital calculations going?” Sariena asked.
“What’s the latest from Judith?” Keene asked Vicki.
“There were a few delays, but the last I heard was that we could be seeing some of the results anytime,” she replied.
Sariena looked around. “We don’t have to stay here among things that you see every day. Come on. Let me show you more of the Command Module . . . and something spectacular.”
They left the messroom to reenter the Control Deck and walked along one side, past a row of empty crew stations. Sariena described the functions briefly, giving Keene and Vicki an idea of the Osiris’s operating procedures. At the far end was a cross-passage with metal stairwells leading to levels above and below. Beyond, they descended some steps into a recess containing low tables with padded seats set around and against the wall, where the low lighting contrasted abruptly with the brightness they had just left. It seemed to be a kind of viewing gallery, perhaps a rest area, with one wall of glass looking out at the slowly wheeling stars. The window was on the module’s forward side, with no other part of the Osiris’s structure in sight.
“I don’t know how much you got to see from the shuttle,” Sariena said. “But this has only become visible in the last few hours. Wait . . .” The sky turned for about a quarter of a minute. Then, the shadows inside the gallery sharpened as the Sun came into view low on the right. The window material darkened to suppress the glare as the light intensified, revealing the sharp edge of the solar disk. One side of it had what appeared to be a bump, from which a finger of whiteness streamed away fully half the width of the window, pointing almost horizontally left. “Athena, just emerging,” Sariena said. “The tail is over thirty million miles long now.”
Keene and Vicki stared, spellbound. After the close pass at perihelion the tail would be at its longest. They were seeing it virtually from the side as it pointed away from the Sun. In the following month its tip would sweep past Earth like a searchlight as Athena swung into its return path, growing even more spectacular as it crossed Earth’s orbit fifteen million miles ahead.
“We saw a shot of it on the screen but it was nothing like this,” Vicki murmured, not taking her eyes of the scene. “And you’re right. That was a few hours back, and it’s grown even in that time.”
“How does this compare to when we were looking at the stars in Washington, Lan?” Sariena asked. She studied the sky as the Sun and Athena disappeared from view at the top of the window and the glass lightened again. “I don’t think we’ll be able to see Saturn this time, though-not from this side of Earth, anyway. You know, it’s strange. I still haven’t gotten used to seeing it looking so small.”
“Tell me something about life there,” Vicki said. “I’ve never quite followed it. You have all those talented people moving out. What is it they’re looking for? Do they find it?”
“People have always sought something bigger than themselves,” Sariena replied. “Something that will give their lives meaning that makes sense, that will still be there after they’re gone. Why else did medieval masons pass their skills down through sons to grandsons who would complete the cathedrals that they began?”
Keene turned his face away from the window. “Is that really true? I don’t know. It sounds too idealistic, somehow. . . . I thought ideas like that pretty much went out of style two hundred years ago.”
“True, for the most part,” Sariena agreed. “And look at the disaster that followed. The civilization that could have enlightened the world degenerated into conflicts of squabbling fanatics. Humanity should have become a vigorous, spacegoing culture by now, expanding across the Solar System and gathering itself for the move out to the stars. Instead, it has turned back within itself. We represent what could have been, and we’re considered misfits. But there are some from Earth who will never succumb to whatever the disease is. And so they come to us.”
“Maybe you’re in too much of a hurry,” Keene suggested. “Earth is tired. It’s played its part. Maybe the culture you’re talking about will have to grow from Kronia. But that won’t be for a while.”
“Maybe.”
There was a silence. Keene got the feeling that Sariena didn’t entirely agree but was not of a mind to press the subject just at the moment.
“So how does it work?” Vicki asked. “You all have this shared vision, and that somehow provides an alternative reward system to what we have? Is it something like that?”
Sariena’s brow creased. “I’m not sure I know how to explain it. I have no experience of your money systems, so it’s difficult to find the right terms. I don’t expect any overt reward for what I do. I do the things that need to be done.”
“But how do you know what’s needed?” Keene asked. He was curious himself. “Money’s only a common way of measuring obligations. What do you have instead? How do you know who owes what?”
“Owes? . . .” Sariena shook her head. “Owes to whom?”
“To each other, to society in general. . . .” Keene searched for an example. “Look, you told me you’re a planetary geologist. That involves a lot of study and ability, knowledge, hard work. Why do you do it?”
“Why? . . . It’s, simply . . . I told you. It’s what needs to be done.”
“But why?” Vicki pressed. “What’s in it for you? What do you get in return?”
Sariena looked at them uncertainly, as if hesitant to state the obvious. “In return, I am alive. I experience life. It was not I who designed and built this ship that we are talking in. Others did. Others made the clothes that I wear and produced the food that sustains me. And when we return to Kronia, the same will apply to everything there that keeps me alive: the habitats we live in, the machines that provide our needs. All those things exist because of the work and skills of thousands of people. And you ask me what I get in return?” Sariena shook her head again, this time with an expression of amazement. “You want me to measure how much I owe in return? The only answer can be, the best that I am capable of. That is my worth.”
Keene had the uncomfortable feeling that it was something she would have expected a child to understand but was being too polite to say so. But they were too close now to so many things that he too had wondered about for a long time for him to feel offended. “But wouldn’t you still have all those things if you didn’t put in the effort?” he said. “I mean, what are they going to do-throw you out on the ice?”
“Of course not-no more than they would an invalid or a mental incompetent.” Sariena shook her head again. “But why would anyone do that deliberately-deprive themselves of the fulfillment of being needed? That’s surely what the essence of being human is all about. Has Earth really forgotten?”
Keene stared at her. The message was finally getting through.
“Kropotkin,” Vicki murmured distantly. “The first base that they established on Dione was called Kropotkin, wasn’t it?”
“Some Russian, oh . . . way back, wasn’t he?” Keene said. He was still digesting what he had heard from Sariena.
“Peter Kropotkin,” Sariena confirmed, nodding. “Mondel adopted a lot of his ideas. He was a revolutionary who tried to change the face of revolution by arguing that people need each other. The necessity of mutual aid should be sufficient to guide human affairs. On Earth, he failed. But . . .” She waved a hand resignedly and let the sentence hang. Maybe it had just needed the different environment, the gesture seemed to say.
A system that measured success by giving, not taking; where “wealth” was assessed not by possessions but by what one was able to contribute. Perhaps such a scheme came naturally in an environment where the survival of all depended on the competence of each. Keene tried to visualize what it would feel like to be part of such an order, to be motivated by its values. But he was unable. He didn’t have the conditioning. Inwardly, he was also skeptical. Such utopian-sounding ideas had been tried through the ages-often with some success in the early phases-but always, invariably, as numbers grew, the ideals of the founders became diluted, and the realities of human nature asserted themselves, such experiments had ended in eventual strife and disintegration. Maybe, as Sariena said, in a new environment removed from Earth and its legacies from the past, the social dynamics could evolve differently. Time would tell.
Vicki seemed fascinated. Perhaps being away from Earth for the first time and seeing it in a new perspective against the vastness of everything else was affecting her. “Is it just a social structure?” she asked Sariena. “Or is there some deeper belief system involved too?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Oh . . . it sounds pretty close to what all the great religions tried to teach for thousands of years-originally, I mean; not the political counterfeits that always end up taking over.”
“Kronia doesn’t have anything like a formal church,” Sariena replied. “It’s more of an internal, personal thing.” She waved an arm at the panorama outside. “But most of our scientists believe that all of that and our being here talking and wondering about it suggests design for a purpose more than the meaningless, impossible accident that your systems teach. It means that our sciences operate within a different intellectual climate. If you insist that ‘science’ only deals with the mechanical and material by definition, you might turn out to be excluding it from the only questions that really matter.”
Sariena’s answer surprised Keene and touched a skeptical note. “So is this intelligence behind it all the same God that armies hacked each other to pieces for, and people used to get burned at stakes over?” he asked dryly.
Sariena shook her head-a trifle impatiently. “Of course not. Those are results of the political counterfeits that Vicki mentioned, when the heirs of a religious tradition sell out to the power structure and give them a means of social control. I doubt if the intelligence I’m talking about has any concern with the day-to-day affairs that we imagine are so important.”
Keene fell silent with a nod. It was close to what had been happening with the heirs of the scientific tradition on Earth, too.
“But you think it has a purpose?” Vicki said to Sariena, before Keene could pick up on the political aspect again.
Sariena’s expression became distant, highlighted by the glow from the turning pattern of stars outside. “I believe so. It all seems too directed to be otherwise: stars manufacturing elements, fine-tuned to eject them at the end of the production run; planets as assembly stations for complex organisms programmed to evolve toward the expression of consciousness; consciousness, the instrument for accumulating experiences. And if we accept whatever our role happens to be as contributing a stone to the cathedral of eventually bringing the universe to life, then maybe yes, I suppose you could say that Kronians have their religion.”
All very fine idealistic stuff; but it caused Keene’s misgivings to return. He just couldn’t see these people negotiating effectively, Earth-style with hostilely disposed Terrans. The very concept of starting with maximum demands in return for the minimum they thought they could get away with would be alien to them. Instead, they would offer the best they could afford and expect reciprocation. It was by willingness to give, not the power to take, that they valued each other.
“Is Gallian a visionary like that too?” he asked Sariena. “You know, the people that you’re going to be dealing with when you go back down there aren’t going to be exactly falling over themselves to find reasons for diverting resources out to Saturn. They’ve got too many other concerns that are closer to home. I’d just like to be sure that Gallian is mindful of things like that.”
“You sound as if you might be trying to warn me of something,” Sariena said.
“It’s just . . . What I’m trying to say is, attitudes here won’t be the way you’re used to. Hiding one’s hand is considered a mark of shrewdness on Earth. You can’t take everything you’re told at face value.”
“We have studied Terran history and ways,” Sariena said.
“And that’s good,” Keene agreed. “But I’m not sure it can be the same as living them.”
Sariena gave him a long, thoughtful look, as if she were weighing up something. Then she said, “There is something more, that we haven’t made public yet or brought up with your people so far-but nobody has specifically forbidden us from talking about it. We didn’t come here expecting to outdo Terrans at Terran political games. Our objective is a scientific one: to gain acceptance for our beliefs on the basis of the evidence, not through debating tricks.”
Keene smiled, but with an effort not to appear condescending. “That’s a nice sentiment. Maybe you manage to keep science and politics in separate compartments out at Saturn, somehow. But life here is more messy. They have this tendency to get mixed up.”
“We’re aware of that,” Sariena said. “And that was why we chose to bring our case formally to Earth now, when we did. It wasn’t just to take advantage of the Athena event-although that was certainly timely. It was to present what we think is our strongest item of proof.”
Keene frowned. This was an unexpected turn. “Proof? . . . You mean about Venus being the comet of the Exodus?”
Sariena shook her head. “Much more radical than that. I’m talking about the stability of the entire Solar System, not just a single event in Earth’s history. We’ve believed for a long time that the planets had different configurations in previous ages. Now we’re certain of it.” She shifted her eyes to look at Vicki, who was waiting just as intently. “Let’s go back. I’ll show you what I mean.”
Keene and Vicki followed Sariena back the way they had come, into the deserted part of the Command Deck. She led the way to one of the consoles and activated it. The layout was unfamiliar, but a standard communications format appeared on one of the screens. “I just want to get Gallian’s okay first,” Sariena murmured by way of explanation. Moments later, Gallian was looking out at them.
“Sariena!” he exclaimed. “I presume you’re back up in the ship by now. No problems, I trust? Have Landen and his friends arrived yet?”
“Yes. He’s here with me right now, and so is Vicki.”
“Ah, good. You have my unmitigated envy at being up off the surface, if only temporarily. Walking down here still makes me feel as if I am carrying a dead horse. Is that the correct figure of speech? Never mind. I only have a moment and must be brief. What can I do for you?”
“I’d like to show them the Rhea finds,” Sariena said. “They’re relevant to something we’ve been talking about. I just wanted to check first that you have no objection.”
“The Rhea finds,” Gallian repeated. His eyebrows rose. “I didn’t want any announcement until we’ve had the reactions next week.”
“This will be strictly unofficial. You know how Lan and his associates have supported us. I don’t think we need have any fear that the information will go further.”
Were Gallian leading a political deputation on Earth, it would probably have been pointless even to have asked the question in such circumstances. The Kronian, however, thought for no more than a few seconds, then nodded. “Very well. If you think it desirable, Sariena, I bow to your discretion.” He remained on the line long enough to greet Keene and Vicki, asked them what they thought of the Osiris, and then excused himself and was gone.
Sariena shut down the console and moved toward a doorway leading from the main floor area. “This way,” she said over her shoulder. Keene and Vicki exchanged curious looks and followed her again, this time into a small room filled with electronic equipment, screens, and panels, with a worktop extending along one wall. Sariena sat down in the chair at a station in front of a glass enclosure looking somewhat like a small fish tank and began touching buttons and entering commands. A misty glow appeared in the space, which was obviously a holo-viewer. “The articles themselves are in freeze storage in one of the Osiris’s other modules,” Sariena said as the glow brightened. “We’ll be taking them down to the surface with us when we return. For now I can just show you the images. We sent the same images ahead some time ago for evaluation by your experts. As Gallian said, we’re hoping for some kind of public announcement next week.”
She manipulated a control on an adjacent screen, and a form materialized behind the glass. It looked like a tablet of dark stone with fine white veins, shaped into a semicircle at the top and with a corner missing below. Sariena rotated the image slowly, bringing into view a design etched into the surface. It suggested a disk standing symmetrically on an arrowhead, pierced by a shallowly sloping line. Smaller circles and other shapes appeared to the sides, while below was what looked like the top part of a tabular array of strange symbols.
Keene shot a mystified look at Vicki, frowned, and peered closer over Sariena’s shoulder. What they were looking at was clearly a product of an artistic culture. “Did you say Rhea?” he asked her, baffled. Rhea was one of Saturn’s moons. Vicki said nothing at once, but stared at the image with an odd expression on her face.
Sariena nodded, keeping her eyes ahead. “A number of items and fragments like this were discovered in the ice fields there. Obviously they are artifacts. We have no idea what the markings mean. There is no life there today, nor even the conditions to permit the emergence of any, let alone an advanced race. So what are these objects doing there?” She turned her head finally to regard the two visitors. “You see what this means. The Solar System hasn’t been the same for billions of years as your scientists believe. Some things about its past were very different from what we see today. And if that’s true, they could become very different again.”
After eight hours of sleep aboard the Osiris, the visitors breakfasted with the Kronians before departing. The descent back to the surface and landing at the new Montemorelos facility went smoothly, and an Amspace plane flew the passengers and crew back to the San Saucillo site in Texas. After the postflight debriefings and changing back into their own clothes, Keene and Vicki were among the group that left by helicopter to return to Kingsville, where they had left Keene’s car on the way out. The demonstrators were gone by then, since the mission had terminated elsewhere, and work crews were busy around the site and along the sides of the approach road, clearing up the trash left behind.
“Courtesy of our friends of the environment,” Keene quipped to Vicki, who was staring fixedly out as the helicopter rose and headed north. She didn’t seem to hear. He moved a hand up and down in front of her face. “Hello. Earth to Vicki. You can come back now. The rest of you is already here.” She blinked and smiled faintly. “Where were you-still up in the Osiris?” Keene asked.
Vicki didn’t answer at once. “In a way. . . . I was thinking about those markings on the things Sariena showed us from Rhea. I know this sounds crazy, Lan, but I’m sure I’ve seen them before . . . or something close. I just can’t put my finger on where.”
That was crazy. How could she have seen markings from objects only discovered within the last year that hadn’t even arrived at Earth yet? “Maybe they got into some transmission from Kronia somehow, that you saw,” was the only thing he could think of to suggest.
Vicki shook her head. “No, I’m sure it wasn’t anything like that. It was in a book or something. I’ve been dabbling in so many different things lately: Venus and Mars, dinosaurs and mammoths, Biblical history, ancient legends. . . .”
“Yes, but it couldn’t possibly have been-” The phone in Keene’s pocket beeped and cut him off. “It’s started already,” he sighed, taking it out and activating it. “Hello, Landen Keene here.”
“Lan, it’s Judith. You should be down by now. Are you anywhere near getting away yet?”
“We’re on our way to Kingsville in a chopper right now.”
“Vicki’s there?”
“Of course, sitting right next to me.”
“How’d it all go?”
“Just great. But that obviously isn’t whatever couldn’t wait. What’s up?”
“I just heard from Jerry. He’s finished the preliminary run and sent me the figures. They’re dynamite. I’m on my way over to Kingsville right now to see the complete outputs. So I guess I’ll see you there.”
“All right!” Keene pocketed the phone and clapped Vicki’s shoulder. “That was Judith. Jerry’s finished the first run. She’s leaving the office now and coming up to Kingsville. It sounds as if there might be some interesting news.”
After clearing more formalities at Kingsville, Keene and Vicki went straight to Jerry Allender’s section. Judith still hadn’t arrived from Corpus Christi, but Allender took them into his office and showed them the preliminary results. Essentially, tidal pumping induced through combined electrical and gravitational forces in a hot plastic body of the kind Venus was theorized to have been would drive an initially eccentric orbit toward a minimum-energy state, circularizing it much more rapidly than anything in conventional theory permitted. It didn’t prove that Venus had originated that way; but it showed that it was possible.
Keene was jubilant. Added to what he and Vicki had seen aboard the Osiris, this was a powerful argument for taking the Kronians seriously. Judith arrived and joined them while Allender was still expounding on the details. Keene, however, had already seen enough. Leaving the others still poring over the printouts and putting more images up on the screens, he went into an empty office and called Les Urkin at the downtown building.
“Hey, Les. First, I just wanted to let you know that we brought Jenny back okay. We’re at Kingsville now, in case you haven’t heard from her already. It went well. She did real good.”
“Yes, she called me about half an hour ago. . . .”
“The other thing, Les: I’ve just talked to Jerry, who’s got the results of those computations. It really puts the whole thing on a solid foundation. Jerry says the buzz is going around among the astronomers already. I think we should try for some good general coverage at the same time to tie in with the start of the Kronian talks. Let’s get some exposure for Salio, Charlie Hu at JPL, all the other guys we’ve been talking to who don’t buy the party line, and . . .” Only then did Keene register the solemn expression on Urkin’s face, and that he wasn’t reacting to Keene’s enthusiasm. Keene’s expression changed. “What is it, Les?”
On the screen, Urkin shook his head and looked bleak. “It’s all changed, Lan. Things have been going on that I don’t understand. We’ve lost Salio. He’s not going to be in it anywhere. And I don’t think he’ll be the only one either. I-”
“Lost him? What do you mean, lost him? How can we . . . ?”
“He-” Somebody interrupted Urkin from one side. He looked away and muttered something. More voices sounded indistinctly in the background. “Lan, look, I’m sorry but we’re right in the middle of something right now. Why don’t you give him a call, and I’ll talk to you about it later-say, thirty minutes to an hour. Can we do that?”
“Why, sure, Les. . . . Shall I call you back?”
“Sure. . . . Or we could grab a sandwich. I still haven’t had lunch.”
“Okay. Want me to come into town?”
“If you wouldn’t mind. My treat.”
“See you then, Les.”
Keene got the number from the directory in his pocket phone and called Salio right there via the office unit he was using. Salio was at once awkward, as if he had been expecting the call and not looking forward to it. There was no point in beating around the bush. “I’m just down from orbit and talked to Les,” Keene said. “He tells me there’s some kind of trouble.”
“There isn’t going to be any appearance on Coast-to-Coast, Dr. Keene,” Salio said heavily.
“Why not? What’s happened? Are you saying you were dropped?”
Salio shook his head. “It was me. I canceled out. . . . I got a letter from the university in England raising questions about my legitimacy to conduct what they termed ‘serious scientific investigation,’ and hinting not very subtly that the invitation for the two-year sabbatical might be subject to reconsideration.” He looked embarrassed. “It’s more than just a job. Jean’s got her heart set on going there, and it would be so valuable for the children. . . . I know it’s important to you, but . . .” Salio shook his head. “I’m sorry, Dr. Keene. I don’t think I can help you. I’m sure you won’t have too much trouble finding someone else.”
Vicki looked up from studying a plot of field intensity contours when Keene came back out into the main computing lab. “This is astounding, Lan. If we’d had probes out there too, our scientists would have known about this too, months ago.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh. And Judith says that Karen is probably going to be leaving us. It seems the current boyfriend is from Dallas and can get a job for her, so she’ll be moving there. Just when she was beginning to fit in and get the hang of things, too. It’s a pity. She’s been doing a good job. I guess we have to start going through the replacement routine again.”
“Um. How long have we got?”
“About two months, apparently, so it could be worse. . . .” Vicki saw that Keene was only half listening. “Lan, what is it, Lan?”
“I’ll tell you later. Look, can you get a ride back with Judith? I’ve changed my plans. I have to dash into town to see Les.”
“It’s not just with Salio,” Urkin said tiredly across the table of the booth. They had walked a block from the headquarters building to a coffee and sandwich shop that a lot of the downtown Amspace staff used. “There’s a campaign being orchestrated from somewhere to kill our side of the story. And it’s not just your neighborhood eco club saving bugs or weeds. Look how high they went to persuade Salio to back off-and were able to get attention.”
Keene had a pretty good idea where from. He nodded grimly. “Okay. So what else have we got?”
Urkin tossed up a hand while he stirred his coffee. “Two talk-show appearances mysteriously canceled at the last minute in the last few days. You remember that guy Herrenberg that I told you about-the astronomer from Hawaii that we were putting on last Saturday night?”
“The one Charlie Hu organized. Yes, sure.”
“We’d flown him into LA. He was actually waiting in the green room when the interview was scratched.”
Keene was incredulous. “You’re kidding!”
“Herrenberg was just as much in the dark too. He was just told that there had been a schedule change, and he was paid off. Obviously, somebody got leaned on by somebody somewhere with a lot of weight. I couldn’t get anything out of them that made any sense when I called, although the producer’s assistant let something slip about one of the science agencies in Washington. . . . Oh yes, and you know the book that we were waiting for to appear this month?”
“Seymour’s book?” Keene said. Entitled Gods, Myth, and Cataclysm, it was a popular-level treatment supporting the Kronian cause, which had been scheduled months before to hit the stores when the subject was topical.
“Right. Well, now it looks as if it’s being put on hold because scientific buyers are threatening to boycott the publisher’s textbook division, which is a big line with them. They’re also being subjected to a letter and e-mail campaign protesting about the book. . . . And listen to this. I got the name of one of the scientists who sent in the letters-a geologist in Minnesota, called Quine-and I called him out of curiosity to ask what it was, specifically, in the book that he objected to. Want to know what he said, Lan? He admitted he didn’t know too much about it. He never got an advance copy, so he’d never actually read it.”
“What? Then how . . .”
“He said he tried to tell them that, but they said that was all right. They’d write the letter; all he had to do was sign it.
“ ‘They’? Who’s ‘they’?” Keene demanded.
“He wouldn’t tell me. He just said they included someone who sits on the review committee of just about everything Quine gets published. You see what he was being told, Lan: his career could be on the line.”
Urkin sat back in his seat and toyed indifferently with his salad, while Keene munched silently on a sandwich. Les was normally upbeat and buoyant, managing to keep up an image that went with his PR function, but today all that had gone out of him. He stared morosely through the window by the booth at the early-afternoon mix of people out on the street, and then looked back at Keene. They had been pals socially for a number of years, mutually available for helping out with the fixing of cars and other new-improved-model gadgets, downing a few beers in the Bandana every now and again, and getting in the occasional game of golf. Also, when the pressures built up, Les sometimes used Keene’s male preserve across town as a temporary refuge from marital domestic bliss.
“I don’t know, Lan,” he sighed. “Sometimes you wonder what it’s all about. You think you’re getting somewhere, actually making a difference to something that matters, and then one day you wake up and look around, and you realize that all you’ve really been doing is hanging in there while most of what you made ends up in other pockets, and that’s about the way it’s always gonna be.” He took a gulp of coffee and shrugged. “And that’s it. That’s what it’s all about. And you find that some dumb ball game is the high point that you look forward to in your week. It doesn’t feel right. Does it to you? Don’t you get this feeling inside that we were meant for bigger things, better things? . . . What kinds of things could we be doing if we weren’t wiping ourselves out just trying to make ends meet all the time?”
Starting cathedrals to be completed two generations later, Keene thought to himself. Bringing a universe to life. He drank from his own mug and looked around. Three young children at a nearby table were laughing and giggling, having stopped in for an afternoon ice cream with their mother. Workers from a power-company truck parked along the street outside were closing off one of the traffic lanes with orange cones. “I guess if you leave things even a little bit better than you found them, it means it was worthwhile,” he said, looking back and trying to inject something positive. “Philosophers ask the wrong question. They spend years wanting to know if humanity is perfectible. Then, when they finally arrive at the conclusion that the answer is no-which should have been obvious in the first place-they get depressed and commit suicide or something.”
“So what should the question be?” Les asked.
“Whether humanity is improvable. And since the answer will always be yes, there’s always something worthwhile to be doing.”
Urkin stared hard as if trying to fault it, apparently couldn’t, and settled for a snort. “All right. So how do we improve this situation we’ve been talking about?” he asked. “Have you figured out what’s going on? It isn’t science.”
“Now you want me to play psychologist. That’s not my line, Les. I build nuclear drives for spaceships.”
“I’d still like to hear your take, anyhow.”
“Well . . .” Keene drew a long breath while he thought about it. “I guess it’s the old story of the in-club being threatened by a heresy that’s getting attention. You could lose your standing as the official church and all the gravy that comes with it, and then your disciples will desert to the other side. So you fight it with everything you’ve got.”
“Everything?” Urkin objected. “You mean scruples don’t matter? I thought there were supposed to be civilized rules of discourse and conduct.”
“Oh, those only apply between gentlemen who are in the club,” Keene explained. “They don’t count if you’re on the outside.”
“But we’ve got flagrant censorship going on. Suppression of facts. What happened to all this I heard about impartial weighing of evidence; seeking objective truth?”
Keene waved a hand. “Like with all religions: it was a nice thought in the early days. Then different people move in and take over, and in the end it’s the power dynamics that matter. The rest makes good reading for indoctrinating the initiates.”
Urkin looked across curiously. “But that’s not true with everyone, is it?” he said. “I mean, how about you? You still seem to care about those things.”
“Sure. And that’s why I run a five-person office that works with a maverick outfit somewhere in the south of Texas instead of handing out the contracts in Washington. But at least that gives me a reason. What’s yours?”
Urkin just shook his head in a way that gave up trying to understand it.
Keene knew he was drifting into being flippant again. It was his reflex defense mechanism while he absorbed the impact of what had happened to Salio and the other things he had heard. But underneath it, now, he could feel his anger rising, like the slow building up of wind before a storm. And he wasn’t going to accomplish anything to alleviate it here, or with people like Salio, or by talking to the Kronians, or flying stunts around the planet. The only place to take it was where the source of the problem lay.
Could Cavan have really seen this coming all along?
Keene arrived at Protonix the next morning with a mood that hung over the office like a temperature inversion. The girls got on with their tasks and stayed out of the way.
He was in the kind of situation that irked him the most: of not being in control of the things that affected him the most profoundly. His professional future was tied to the fortunes of Amspace, which hinged on decisions that would eventually come out of Washington, and he had done all he could do to influence the process that would determine those decisions. And the premonitions he was getting weren’t good. To make matters worse, the focus of priorities at Amspace had shifted for the time being from engineering matters that involved him to internal administrative details of getting Montemorelos ready to relaunch the shuttle that had landed there, giving him no ready outlet for his energies.
His approach to life had always been to suspect himself as the first candidate for blame when things went wrong-which put the capacity for learning something and doing whatever needed to be done squarely in his own hands. That was the first prerequisite to being in control of one’s life as opposed to a helpless victim of it. The Kronian affair was as far as he was prepared to go in knocking himself out, he decided. If this didn’t work out, then to hell with it. He would chuck it all in and go back with them when the Osiris departed.
He was still mulling over the thought when Vicki came into his office holding a blue folder and set it down open in front of him. One of the pages showed a contour map of rugged terrain with various locations marked by crosses, squares, and other shapes. The facing sheet had reproductions of what looked like a piece of pottery, a slab that could have been from the base of a statue, and a section of mural relief carving, all with lines of peculiar symbols inscribed, fragmented and obliterated in some parts, others tolerably clear.
“There,” she announced, indicating the symbols. Keene stared at them. He knew what she was getting at but acted dumb and looked at her questioningly. “That’s where I saw them,” she said. “Robin’s science project on the Joktanians. I’m sure they’re like that script that Sariena showed us on the Osiris. I can still picture some of them. The similarities can’t be coincidental. They have to be related.”
Keene could only point out the obvious. “I’m sure you mean it, Vicki, but I don’t have to tell you it’s preposterous. How are artifacts from Arabia supposed to have gotten to Saturn? Ancient sea-going cultures making accurate maps of Antarctica before the Ice Age, I can buy. But are they supposed to have built-”
Vicki raised a hand for him to stop. “I know, Lan. I know it’s crazy. All I’m telling you is what I saw. I do ad graphics. I’ve got an eye for things like that.”
He made a conciliatory gesture, indicating that he wasn’t going to argue about it. “So, what do you want me to do?” he asked, leaning back from the desk.
“I’m not really asking you to do anything. But I saw the way you looked at me when I mentioned it in the chopper yesterday, and I just wanted you to know that I hadn’t been having hallucinations or something.”
Keene nodded obligingly. “Okay. . . . So you weren’t being daffy-headed after twenty-four hours in orbit. But I never thought that anyway.” He waited for her to nod, having made her point, pick up the folder, and leave. She didn’t.
“Although . . .” She looked at him as if something had just occurred to her, which Keene didn’t believe for a moment.
“What?”
“Well, it’s got me curious. You said you met this woman from the Smithsonian when you were in Washington, who’s involved in the excavations and so on. . . .”
“Catherine Zetl?”
“Right. Couldn’t we get those images sent through for her to have a look at? Surely that would settle it. If I’m wrong, then that’s the end of it. But if not . . .” Vicki didn’t have to complete it. It would add a whole new dimension of impossibility to something already complex enough.
Keene was not enthusiastic. “I’m not sure it’s our place to go showing that material around,” he said. “Even Sariena checked with Gallian first, remember. And I don’t really know Zetl well enough to go involving her in something like that. We exchanged a few words at a cocktail party. I can see your point, all right, but . . .” He finished with another wave.
Vicki straightened up, looked at him reluctantly for a few seconds, then sighed. “You’re right. We’re not even involved officially, I guess. It’s just . . . Well, it’s so darned bewildering!”
“Yes, I know, I know.” Keene drummed his fingers on the desk. “Tell you what I’ll do. Sariena said those images had been sent ahead, so people here will already be going over them. If there really are similarities to the Joktanian script, surely you can’t have been the only one to spot it. Let’s wait and see what’s said next week when the Kronians bring the artifacts up at the talks. Once their existence has been made public knowledge anyway, I’d feel better about bringing it to Zetl’s attention if nothing else is mentioned-because then it would seem very strange. Asking questions would be legitimate. How would that sound?”
“You mean I have to wait a whole week?”
“Think you can stand it? Come on-I fix you a visit to a spaceship from Saturn and all I get is a hard time? What is this?”
“Well, if you put it like that, I suppose-” The call tone from Keene’s desk screen interrupted.
“Excuse me,” he said, sitting forward to accept. “Hello?”
“Catch you later, Lan.” Vicki picked up the folder and left, closing the door.
The caller was Jerry Allender from Kingsville. He was red-faced and shaking his head, and had to wave a hand in the air several times before he could speak. “Lan, do you know what’s happened? They’re throwing them out . . . just tossing them out as inadmissable! It’ll be like they never happened. They won’t even be a factor to take into consideration-not even worth a can of beans.”
“Jerry, calm down. What are you talking about? Who are throwing what out?”
Allender paused to collect his breath. “I just got word from an astronomer called Tyndam, who’s on the scientific committee that’ll be meeting with the Kronians next week-chaired by somebody called Voler.”
Keene nodded tersely. “And?”
“The orbital calculations that we ran. They aren’t accepting them.”
“What?”
“Voler has ruled that until corroboration can be provided by properly organized studies and review, they’re not material to the case. And you know how long that could take for anyone with a mind to stretch things out. But in any case it means that as far as next week is concerned, forget it.”
Keene felt himself trembling in outrage. “The Kronians ran them. We already corroborated them! There’s no reason not to accept them tentatively. Every precedent demands it. Is he trying to say that we and the Kronians are both incompetent? . . . Or worse: that we faked it?”
Allender mouthed awkwardly for a second or two, as if choking on something, and then nodded. “I think so, Lan. That was how it came across to me-and what they’re maybe putting around. I think they are insinuating just that.”
Minutes later, Keene exploded into the reception area, startling Karen, who was sifting through the morning’s mail at her terminal. “Yale University, Connecticut,” he barked. “I want to talk to Professor Herbert Voler, who runs their astronomy faculty. Either get me through to him or a number that’s close to wherever he is. I don’t care if he’s at his grandmother’s funeral. Find him.”
Vicki appeared, framed in the doorway of her own office behind him. “Lan, don’t you think it might be an idea to let it cool for half an hour before-”
“It’s gone far enough. First we get shoddy science. Then the kind of dirty tricks you’d expect in some tin-pot dictatorship somewhere. Now this. We are being accused of incompetence or dishonesty . . .” He shook his head, left the sentence unfinished, and stalked back into his own office, slamming the door. A moment later, he opened it again long enough to throw out, “By them!”
He still hadn’t begun cooling when Karen announced, “His department says he won’t be there for probably two weeks. The woman I talked to isn’t at liberty to give out his personal code. She did give me a Washington number, but he won’t be accessible through it until tomorrow or the day after. I have got a home number for him in New Haven, though.”
Of course, Keene thought to himself. Voler would be getting ready for the circus in Washington. “That’ll do,” he growled. “Maybe someone there might know where he is. . . . And thanks, Karen.” Moments later, he found himself staring at the features of his one-time wife, Fey.
She looked cool, sophisticated, her hair shorter than he had known it, more composed and organized-altered in the same direction as her life, no doubt. She was wearing a powder blue blouse with a sparkling brooch that looked both stylish and expensive, and what looked like a loose, black cardigan. Glimpses of subdued wallpaper and wooden paneling in the background completed the image of polish and refinement-a fitting setting for a senior academician who was going places.
Surprise flickered barely long enough to be visible before being brought under control. The eyes scanned and recorded, extracting in a matter of moments all the information to be had from the screen confronting her. In the way that happens with people who have spent years together, his mood had communicated itself already.
“Well,” she said. “The face from a former life. I had a premonition it might only be a matter of time. You’ve been in the news a lot lately. But I see it hasn’t done anything to sweeten your temper. What do you want, Lan?”
Keene drew a long breath in an effort to steady himself. “Hello, Fey. You’re right. . . .” As she always was; it infuriated him. “I wish I had some pleasantries to swap, but I’m not in the mood. I need to talk to him. Is he there?”
“By ‘him,’ I presume you mean my husband. His name’s Herbert.”
Keene nodded curtly. She was right again. Whatever the grievance, incivility wasn’t called for. In any case, it would only be giving away free ammunition. “Yes. Your husband, Professor Voler. If he’s there, I need to speak to him . . . please.”
“I’m afraid he’s not. He’s in Washington, preparing for the talks next week with your . . . friends. I’ll be joining him tomorrow morning. Didn’t they tell you that at his office? You must have tried there first.”
“Do you have a number that will get me through to him?” Keene said. “I presume I don’t need to spell out that it is extremely important.”
Fey eyed him critically for a few seconds. Finally she shook her head. “I don’t think so. You’re clearly spoiling for a fight over something. I’m not going to be the one to expose him to such disruptive influences with this business next week coming up.”
“Dammit, isn’t it obvious that the business next week is what I want to talk to him about?” Keene said shortly.
A hint of mockery played on Fey’s lips, just for an instant. “I really don’t think Herbert would be concerned with engineering details.” She made it sound like the chauffeur’s job.
Keene felt his blood rush, knew his buttons were being pressed, but was powerless to stop it. “Look, some work that’s crucial to those talks has been recently completed here in Texas,” he fumed. “I’ve just heard that the committee has been instructed to disregard it, and that the instruction came from him. This isn’t a trivial matter, Fey. It’s a travesty of science and deliberate sabotage of affairs vital to the interests of every person in this country. He won’t be allowed to get away with it. If he tries, the effects could be very damaging to that precious career of his. Do you understand that?”
“Oh, how pompous. And now I do believe you’re making threats. Please tell me you are, because dealing with them is very simple and straightforward. Make my day, as they say.”
“Take it any way you want,” Keene retorted. “But if you won’t let me tell him myself, then convey this to him: That deliberately misrepresenting scientific evidence by someone in his position is bad enough; but we have a truckload of evidence that goes beyond that to organized disinformation and manipulation of the media on a scale that for my money qualifies as criminal conspiracy. I’m talking about things like denial and suppression of dissenting views; intimidation of hostile witnesses; organized censorship. Those things would be criminal if the subject of a court case. Well, how is the public going to judge it when they find out? Because that’s what’s going to happen if he’s not willing to reconsider. I’m talking about full exposure of the whole shit heap. And I’m serious. So you just tell Herbert that.”
Fey’s expression had frosted over while Keene was speaking. The eyes had turned to steel encased in ice. “I think you’ve made yourself clear,” was her response. “If you have any more to say, I suggest you direct it through your attorney.” And with that she cut the connection.
Keene was still simmering late that afternoon when Karen put a call through from Sariena. She was still aboard the Osiris, due to come back down in two days’ time. Gallian, in Washington, had told her the news about the Terran scientific committee’s ruling, and she was distressed. The whole Kronian delegation was in disarray. They had been trying to get some guidance from their scientists back at Saturn, who had worked feverishly to have the probe data available in time, but the two-hour communications delay was making things impossible. So Gallian was trying to organize some defense locally. Neuzender at Princeton had declined to speak at the conference on the grounds that his part had been purely to advise on the mathematics, but Gallian was pushing to have Charlie Hu and a couple of his people from JPL attend. Keene had arranged the corroboration run at Amspace, and Allender had performed it. Would he and Jerry be willing to come to Washington next week and testify on the nature and validity of the work they had done?
“Of course I’ll be there,” was Keene’s immediate response.
He called Allender while Sariena was still connected from the Osiris, and Allender’s answer was equally unhesitating and affirmative. So at least it seemed they were back in with a chance. But it was going to be a nasty fight.
Leo Cavan confirmed as much when he called Keene at home late that night. He’d heard that Keene had been recruited to help the Kronian cause. “I don’t know what else you’ve been saying, Landen, but you’ve certainly stirred up a hornet’s nest,” was the further piece of information he had to proffer. “I’ve been hearing your name all over the place today, and not with the friendliest of connotations. I have a bit of advice: Tread very carefully, Landen. Check that none of your library books are overdue, make sure not to roll through any stop signs, and don’t even look in the direction of a female who’s under age. There are departments in the bureaucratic netherworld of this fair capital of ours that specialize in dredging up sleaze, and some of the things they come up with would astound you. You are targeted for anything they can get on you. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with the scientific case. If I can find anything specific that they’re onto, I’ll let you know, but it’s hardly the kind of information they leave lying around. In any case, don’t underestimate these people, Landen. They can be frighteningly effective.”
Keene found himself constructing visions of gleaming metal cities and icy landscapes under star-filled skies; of strange habitats orbiting above distant moons; the hugeness of Saturn seen from outside its ring system. He tried to imagine life where science was not dominated by preconceptions, and to grasp the puzzling yet alluring culture with its different concept of value.
All he was trying to do was get Earth’s institutions to acknowledge the possibility that they could be wrong about something vitally important to the entire future of the human race. Yet the response was to be ridiculed, shouted down, and now, it seemed, viewed like some kind of political threat to the nation’s security. He analyzed his own feelings to ask himself if he was serious about giving Earth up as a lost cause if this attempt failed, and leaving to start anew in Kronia.
He didn’t try to deny that his thoughts about a new world and a new life included an element of intrigue for Sariena. Talking to Fey had brought home how fully he had immersed himself in his work at the expense of any meaningful personal life since they split up-not that it had been remarkably great before. So perhaps new challenge and adventure in a different direction was just what his life needed. It surely wouldn’t be before time. He thought back over his conversations with Sariena, looking to see if there was anything that, with a bit of wishful thinking, he could read as hints or leaders that might have failed to permeate his pragmatic engineer’s filter of awareness. With someone from a culture that had to be described as alien, it was difficult to tell. At other times he grew impatient with himself, asking what reason she might have for harboring any interest in him that went beyond the professional. . . . But on the other hand, why should that have to be a prerequisite to anything? These things had to start somewhere. Sometimes he caught himself half hoping that the talks would come to nothing and give him a reason for making the break.
Yet, for all that, another part of him deeper down was uncomfortable, and the only honest admission was that he didn’t know why. He wanted to rationalize that it would be quitting and he wasn’t a quitter, but he knew there was more to it. Because it would be “abandoning” Vicki and Robin, somehow? There was no reason, really, why that should be. He had never let a relationship develop with Vicki in a way that might have implied some kind of commitment, and certainly she had never indicated that she felt he owed her any. And yet it was true that he had drifted into something of a role with them, he supposed, especially where Robin was concerned, even if as little more than an emotional anchor and a psychological prop over the years. But reason and emotion communicate on different wires that don’t cross. Had he anticipated this situation a long time ago and avoided any involvement with Vicki precisely to give himself a moral escape hatch now? If so, then had the entire part he’d been acting out for months about caring what Earth did been a charade manufactured to prop up his self-respect, while all along he waited for the time to come when he would follow the course that he had already chosen?
He didn’t know. But the effort of thinking about it gradually brought the realization that even if a mental switch were to flip and reveal that going to Kronia was a decision he had already unconsciously taken, suffering defeat here first wasn’t necessary as a pretext for a motive. If going there was what he wanted, then that was good enough. In other words, there was no reason why he shouldn’t win the battle here first, and still go anyway-and with Earth committed to full cooperation, the prospective future out at Kronia would be immeasurably more promising.
He liked that way of looking at things, he decided. Thereafter, his demeanor brightened considerably. His optimism regarding the forthcoming Washington conference climbed again, and the atmosphere in the offices of Protonix returned to its normal level of productive geniality.
The Kronian hearings had been in progress for two days, staged in the conference theater of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s new building on New York Avenue. The active participants fell into three broad categories: the Kronian delegation and Terran scientists from various places and disciplines who supported their position; specialized committees representing the prevalent scientific opinions on Earth in such areas as Solar System astronomy, recent geology, Ice Age chronology, climatology, cultural mythology, and the other subjects under debate; and an assortment of political advisors and delegates concerned with the policies that would come out of it all-potentially international in scope, although it seemed agreed that the lead set by the United States would be generally followed. The move to have two of Hu’s scientists from JPL added to the astronomy committee had been contested on the grounds that it would produce internal divisiveness. The committee chairman-Herbert Voler-had concurred and upheld the previously agreed arrangement.
These groups occupied three sections in the front part of the auditorium. The dais facing the room had been furnished with a panel table to accommodate the group concerned with the current topic, and a podium for a principal speaker. Some seats and tables in the center at the front were reserved for the current AAAS president, Irwin Schatz, a physics Nobel Laureate, who was nominally hosting and chairing the event, along with several officials from major scientific agencies and their administrative assistants. The rows across the middle were taken up by journalists, science correspondents, and reporters. The remainder of the hall was by invitation only for anyone with the right connections who had managed to get a pass. Since the event had as much to do with world policymaking and public opinion as with science, there were lots of cameras and microphones around.
Although the work that Keene and Jerry Allender had been involved in was not scheduled for discussion until the third day, they had been present from the beginning. Keene recognized a number of familiar faces from his dealings over the years and was able to catch up on events with some of them in the chat room between formal sessions. Also, he noticed Leo Cavan putting in an intermittent presence, usually in a seat to the side of the hall or standing near one of the doors.
So far, the floor had largely been ceded to the Kronians to recapitulate the work that had led them to their conclusions. Practically all of the material they cited had been available before, but-apart from the more sensational items that the media had been popularizing since Athena appeared-fragmented among specialized journals and for the most part obscure. Gallian had wanted it all consolidated for the record, and there were really no grounds on which that could be denied. They went over the parallels between ancient accounts of terrestrial disruptions and violent celestial events, and the implied connection with cataclysms written into the geological and biological records. They pointed to the evidence for major disturbances to both the Moon and Mars in recent times as showing that the upheavals on Earth had been caused by some external agency, and hence the cherished notion of a stable and orderly Solar System was in error. Finally, they recounted the reasons for supposing that agency to have been an earlier Athena-like object ejected from Jupiter, which had since evolved into the planet Venus.
Reactions had grown more animated and vociferous as the two days went by. The Kronian appeals to ancient records and mythologies had elicited mainly pointed silences as the establishment scientists’ way of registering their disapproval. They didn’t think that this had any place in a scientific debate of the twenty-first century, but courtesy required that the Kronians be permitted a hearing if that was the way they insisted on playing it. The review of recent geological and biological catastrophes initiated more lively responses, not so much of denial that the evidence existed-for that much was generally accepted-but more of resistance to the suggestion that it testified to something universal and global rather than the unconnected, localized events that the mainstream theories still clung to. There was louder protest at revisions the Kronians wanted made to accepted historical chronology-for example, bringing forward the date for the ending of the last ice age, and doing away with the Greek 1200 to 700 b.c. “Dark Age” conventionally held to have separated the Helladic from the Hellenic periods. This, the Kronians asserted, had never happened but resulted from a misalignment of Greek and Egyptian chronologies stemming from faulty nineteenth-century research. The points of dispute were tabled to be covered during the specialized sessions later.
The real objections and choruses of “No!” “Never!” “Rubbish!” began when Gallian, Sariena, and several of the other Kronian delegates began challenging traditional notions of the origin, age, stability, and recent history of the Solar System. This, of course, was the Terran party line orchestrated by Voler finally emerging. The reality of Athena couldn’t be denied, but it was acceptable only as a freak event that would never occur again in the timespan of humankind. To suppose that it could be the latest instance of what in fact was the normal scheme of things, meaning that just about everything that had been believed for centuries would have to be torn up and discarded, was inconceivable. Again, according to the rules, points of dispute and contention were supposed to be deferred until later sessions; but this time the mood of the room had reached the point where frayed tempers and wounded egos wouldn’t wait, and matters boiled over. The media had a bonanza, capturing red-faced, spluttering professors hurling pejoratives from the floor, the AAAS president pulping a file folder on the edge of his table as he shouted for order, and Sariena at the podium, quiet and dignified, waiting while one mêlée after another erupted and subsided. In all this, it seemed to Keene that Voler played more a role of egging things along and loudly adding to the controversy rather than acting as any kind of moderating influence. It was in keeping with the significance of the Kronian affair to the career ambitions that Cavan had described. Seldom did anything become a focus of the political-scientific community’s attention like the current issue, and Voler was making sure to keep himself at center stage.
Eventually, matters spiraled to the inevitable clash over the origin of Venus. Gallian began summarizing ancient astronomical and mythological accounts again but was interrupted by astronomers protesting that this material was irrelevant and demanding that the proceedings be confined to science. Gallian handed over to Vashen, who presented evidence for a young planet along the lines Salio had described to Keene. Despite Schatz’s pleas for them to defer until later, several attendees rose to insist that the hypothesis was unnecessary since the accepted theory explained everything adequately. This led to the Kronians making comparisons with Athena, which was countered by reassertions that Athena was a totally different kind of object, moving in a class of orbit that Venus could never have possessed. Sariena contradicted this, stating that data collected over the past ten months by Kronian space probes showed a change in the electrical properties of the space medium sufficient to invalidate conventional models, and that calculations based on the revised model showed that orbits could indeed be circularized in the way postulated, within the requisite time frame. This caused something of a stir until Tyndam, the deputy chairman of the astronomy committee, no doubt following directions, called for the subject to be ruled inadmissable. At this point, Gallian jumped to his feet to protest that nothing pertinent could be excluded from a scientific debate and challenging the other side for a justification. Tyndam’s reply was that the claim was unverified-the equivalent of hearsay in a court of law-and had no standing as scientific evidence until either confirmed or contradicted by independent studies. The intransigence of this ruling caused some surprised mutterings. Sariena rose again and retorted hotly that the results had been verified, and the people who had conducted the corroborative study were right here-she indicated where Keene and Allender were sitting. Gallian demanded to the chair that they be heard. With curiosity mounting all round, and feeling himself under mounting moral pressure, Schatz, clearly with some reluctance, agreed.
Voler’s position was most vulnerable here, and he took it upon himself to defend it personally, assuming more the role of a trial lawyer, it seemed, than a delegate at a scientific conference, by coming out from his seat to address the dais from the floor immediately in front of the chairman’s table. Keene was at the podium at this point, having just finished describing his part in organizing the computations conducted at Amspace. Allender, Sariena, Gallian, Vashen, and Chelassey, a mathematician with the Kronian group, were at the table to his left, looking out over the hall.
Voler began, “So this wasn’t part of any research protocol agreed with the Kronian scientists from the outset. It was decided at a cocktail party after the Osiris arrived here. Have I got that right?”
“That’s correct,” Keene confirmed. He was getting irritated. Maybe that was the idea. It couldn’t have been agreed any earlier; the first results had only just come in from Saturn. Voler knew that.
“The data files were in the Osiris’s computers. You passed on the codes for accessing them so that the calculations could be repeated at Amspace.”
“Yes-at least, it was arranged by my business partner and a mathematical physicist employed by our company. Just the original raw data. We had no prior knowledge of what the Kronians’ results had been. The solutions computed at Amspace are in full agreement with them. My colleague, Dr. Allender, has complete details of the protocols and procedures.” Keene couldn’t keep himself from adding, “If you’re questioning the competence of Dr. Allender and his staff, their method and setup were worked out in conjunction with Professor Neuzender at Princeton, a specialist in celestial dynamics whose name I have no doubt is familiar to you.”
Voler stared for a few seconds and then nodded distantly, his mind seemingly on a different track. “Oh, I have no doubt as to the abilities of the people involved, and I’m sure that their computations were done validly. I’ve known Gary Neuzender for years, and if he’s given his approval I’ll grant the results provisional status.” He paused again and turned away briefly before resuming-clearly for effect, and succeeding in getting the room’s attention. “But it isn’t the quality of the computations that concerns me, Dr. Keene. After all, the outcome of a computation can be no more valid than the data that it’s based on; isn’t that so? And in this case, you’ve just told us that all of the alleged data came from one source only, and a source, moreover, that has a significant-to put it mildly-stake in the outcome. Isn’t that so?”
Exclamations of astonishment greeted the statement. Keene couldn’t believe his ears. Voler had as good as directly questioned the Kronians’ honesty. He shook his head, momentarily befuddled. “What are you trying to suggest, that the data weren’t real . . . ? That they’d been faked or something?” he asked incredulously.
Voler raised both arms in an empty-handed gesture. “I’m simply pointing out that these results which we are being asked to accept depend wholly on data that we have no way of verifying, supplied from a single source at the last moment; and that source hardly qualifies as a disinterested party. One cannot but be struck by how conveniently these results accord with the case that’s being argued, yet are incompatible with just about everything hitherto believed. An extraordinary coincidence, wouldn’t you agree? Extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proof. And you’re saying it should be accepted purely on assurances.”
Farther along the table to the side of the podium, Gallian was on his feet again, his face livid. “What kind of suggestion is this? We came here in good faith, believing this would be a debate of evidence, not an examination of our motives. Are we being called criminals now? Exactly what is Professor Voler insinuating?”
Keene had already seen Fey, sitting with a mixed group of people a couple of rows back from the front. She had a satisfied look, as if this whole thing had a personal dimension to it somehow and was settling some old scores. Keene had recovered sufficiently to think coherently again, perhaps, if not quite coolly. The audacity of the double standard being applied was staggering. After all the things that had been going on presumably with Voler’s approval, if not actually under his direct instigation, he was now questioning the integrity of the Kronians? Keene couldn’t swallow it. He had warned Fey that he was in a position and of a mood to expose what had been going on, and he had asked her to convey the message. Either she had ignored him, or Voler had. Well, Keene told himself, there would never be another opportunity like this.
He raised his head to address the whole floor. “This has gone far enough. If there were sound scientific reasons for questioning the claims that the Kronians are making, then of course this conference would be the place to hear them. But instead, it appears it’s being turned into a forum for making accusations that can only be described as scandalous.” Cries of “Hear, hear!” came from a few scattered places. Encouraged, Keene gripped the edges of the podium and looked around. “Very well. If that is the way it’s to be, then let’s have the full picture of things that have been happening, not unsupported insinuations or speculations about what might have happened. I would have preferred it if these matters had been referred to a more appropriate quarter.” Around the room, heads were shaking; others exchanged mystified looks. “However, since we have been turned in this direction, let’s talk about scientists I can name who have been intimidated by threats to their careers from voicing convictions to which years of intensive work have brought them; or about suppression of opposing views from the mass media by direct intervention to cancel already scheduled events at the last moment. Let’s talk about actual censorship of publishing conducted through organized boycotts and letter campaigns. . . . And I remind you all again, I’m referring to things that have taken place, not exercises in fancy about what might have.” Finally, Keene brought his eyes back down to where Voler was still regarding him from the floor, and pointed a finger. “And now the same person whose influence I can show as central to all the things I’ve just listed can stand here and make these kinds of allegations? . . .” Keene raised his hands in a brief appeal.
“I take it we’re referring to this wealth of evidence that would prove conclusive if the scientific community and the world at large were permitted to share it without prejudice. Is that it?” Voler fired up at him.
“Thank you. I couldn’t have put it better,” Keene acknowledged.
Voler seemed unfazed by Keene’s remarks but stood with his arms folded confidently. “ ‘Censorship.’ ‘Suppression,’ ” he repeated. “Our colleague, Dr. Keene, is quick in his use of strong words. We are accused of intervening in the activities of the media. But since when have the mass media constituted the proper channel for scientific discourse? It seems to me that what we’ve been seeing is more a case of the other side attempting to shortcut the regular process in order to create a jury of public opinion. When that happens, it’s inevitably because the case is incapable of withstanding rigorous scrutiny. Seen in that light, our actions would be more accurately described as moving to prevent the public from being stampeded into graphically and emotionally portrayed beliefs on the basis of suspect claims and half-baked evidence. Well, isn’t that what we have scientific institutions for? We’ve been reminded ceaselessly over recent months of the importance of the decisions that will be made as a result of these hearings. Very well, I’ll reiterate it. Let us be mindful of them.”
Approving murmurings came from the floor this time. Keene felt the foothold that had seemed so solid starting to slip. Gallian, still standing, was looking confused. Voler couldn’t be turning this around. “No!” Keene threw out over the hubbub. “This is not something out of the tabloids. We turned to a public forum precisely because the institutions that Professor Voler puts such trust in have refused to see the facts in front of them.” He extended an arm sideways. “The Kronians are scientists as competent as any in this room. The evidence they’re asking us to look at is as solid and verifiable as anything in your own laboratories.”
“Yes, we’ve just looked at an example of it,” Voler remarked derisively.
“You didn’t! You’re refusing to look at it!” Keene shouted.
“Based on data that no one this side of Saturn has seen; allegedly obtained from probes whose very existence we have to accept on faith. You call that verifiable?” Voler taunted.
“What you are insinuating is inexcusable!” Gallian protested again, recovering his voice and rallying with Keene.
“We brought you a lot more than just the data from the probes,” Sariena said from beside Gallian. Her face seemed flushed, even with her dark complexion. It was the first time that Keene had seen her registering anger. “Tangible evidence that you can hold in your hand. Was that supposed to be ‘alleged’? Did we imagine it? Is that not verifiable enough for you, Professor Voler? Tell us. What else would it take to convince you?”
Voler raised his head sharply and swung to face the hall in a way that said they had just heard something important, so that by the time he turned back toward the dais the room had fallen quiet. There was something triumphant in his manner, as if he had been leading up to this moment all along. Keene sensed that some unexpected turn was about to take place.
“Ah yes, the tangible evidence,” Voler repeated. He surveyed the room again, and then walked back to where he had been sitting, while the Kronians exchanged questioning frowns. Voler stooped to lift into view a large cardboard box about two feet along a side and set it down on the table. From it he produced an object wrapped in black cloth, which he uncovered and held aloft to reveal as what appeared to be a broken flake of brown rock, perhaps an inch thick and roughly the size of a dinner plate but with one straight side terminating at a distinct corner. “I assume we’re talking about these.” The Kronians looked horrified. Gallian started to protest, but Voler waved his other hand. “Oh, don’t worry. This is just a plastic replica. The originals are in safekeeping, naturally.” He moved back below the dais and turned to face the hall again. Sariena caught Keene’s eye but Keene could only shake his head.
“Some of you know about these already,” Voler said. “A public announcement was due to be made this week, so I don’t think I’ll be giving anything away if I bring the essence of it forward a little. Briefly, this is one of a number of objects that, we are told . . .” he paused and turned his head to look up at Keene pointedly for a moment “ . . . were discovered in the ice of Saturn’s moon, Rhea, around six months ago. They are clearly artifacts from an intelligent culture, and several of them carry samples of a distinct written script and other symbolic markings. . . .” Astonished gasps began breaking out immediately, but Voler raised his voice and concluded, “Holographic images were sent ahead for experts here on Earth to examine, and the actual articles were delivered a matter of days ago. They are offered as proof that the configuration of the Solar System was once very different from what we know today-once again apparently corroborating in a striking fashion the claims that the Kronians have come here to put to us.”
This time the flurry of voices took some time to die down. Voler moved back and rested casually against the edge of the dais while he waited. When he had the room’s attention again, he half-turned to look up at the podium. “Would you describe your relationship with our Kronian guests as cordial, Dr. Keene?” he inquired. Once again, he seemed to have projected himself into the role of a lawyer conducting a trial.
“Well, yes, I suppose you’d say so,” Keene agreed. He had no idea where this was going.
“Friendly, perhaps? You were in communication for many months. You and certain members of their scientific group got to know each other quite well, I understand.”
“I guess so. That’s natural enough for people who share professional interests. What of it?”
“Ah yes, sharing professional interests. Your interests are tied pretty tightly to whether or not the case that the Kronians are arguing is accepted, isn’t it? And the interests of Amspace Corporation, with whom your company does the bulk of its work. If Earth were to initiate a large program of long-range space development in the way we are being urged, then not only would the future of the Kronian colony be assured but the prospects for success and fortune of both yourself and Amspace would be permanently guaranteed. Isn’t that so?”
“Kronia’s future doesn’t need any assurance from Earth,” Gallian fumed from behind the table, where he had finally been induced to sit down. “That’s a pernicious myth that-”
“Please let Dr. Keene answer the question,” Voler requested.
Keene’s patience was getting close to its limit. “Yes, it’s true,” he replied curtly. “So what? Exactly what are you suggesting?”
Voler straightened up and moved forward so that while still addressing Keene, he was facing the auditorium. He raised the piece of imitation tablet aloft again. “Why was the specimen only delivered two days ago? The Osiris has been here for almost four weeks. Did somebody somewhere imagine that thorough physical tests wouldn’t be possible in that time? If so, they must be getting desperate. Or was it more a case of simple naiveté and inexperience in terrestrial geology?”
By now, Keene was totally flummoxed. “Look, I don’t . . . What is this? Will you just tell us what-”
Voler’s voice resounded suddenly, cutting him off. “By every test of composition, chemistry, isotope ratios, spectral, neutron activation, and thermoluminescent analysis to which it has been subjected, the original specimen corresponding to this replica that I am holding in my hand is indistinguishable from Lower Cretaceous sandstone laid down here, on our own planet, approximately one hundred and thirty million years ago. Yet we’re told it was found eight hundred million miles from Earth on a moon of Saturn. Now, how could that possibly be?”
“I . . . I . . . That’s not possible.” Keene shook his head.
The Kronians were in consternation. “But we brought them here ourselves,” Gallian insisted. “Your analyses can’t be as specific as you believe them to be.”
Voler nodded and looked pleased. “Yes, I was waiting for that. Of course, the Solar System is just awash with oceans that could have laid down sandstone. Or are our experts supposed to be so inept that they mistake igneous lavas for sandstone? But fortunately, we don’t have to rely solely on the word of our geologists. The script that I alluded to has been identified. It turns out to be a version of late Joktanian angular, clearly related to that found in the region of southwest Arabia and the African Horn in recent years, which is yet to be deciphered. In short, there can be no doubt that it came from the same planet that we are standing on, and the people who carved these symbols were of a culture that existed here and not out at Saturn.” Voler turned to face the dais again, finally. “And how, Dr. Keene, do you explain that?”
Keene couldn’t. Snippets of what Vicki had said flew disjointedly through his mind, but he was unable to assemble them into anything coherent. His thought processes had seized up. Farther along at the table, Gallian was looking dazed. “But how could it have?” he asked. “We brought them here ourselves, from Saturn.”
“From the same place as the probe data, maybe?” Voler suggested, stopping short of openly jeering but evidently enjoying himself.
“Are you trying to suggest that we faked that too now?” Gallian gasped. By now, the whole floor was listening in disbelief. The reporters at the back were having a field day, some already muttering into phones. At the central table, Schatz was shaking his head despairingly. This was unprecedented.
“I’m simply asking how objects from Earth could turn up on a moon of Saturn,” Voler replied. He walked back to the center table and set the tablet down on the wrapping that he had removed. Then he looked up again. “But then, of course, we don’t actually have independent, verifiable evidence that they ever were at Saturn, do we?” He turned to look back at the Kronians, as if half expecting an outburst. “The only indisputable fact is that they were brought down from the Osiris two days ago by the shuttle that returned a group of Kronians to the surface after spending a rest period up there. Everything else that we are told rests totally on assurances-just as with the data from the probes.” Gallian started to rise again, his face crimson beneath his white hair. Vashen and Sariena pulled him back down, but then Voler turned away abruptly, picked up some papers from the table, and moved back to the front of the floor to look once more up at Keene. “And for that one, simple, indisputable fact, I think maybe we do have a simple possible explanation. Do you not think so, Dr. Keene?”
Keene was still trying to collect his wits. He shook his head impatiently. “I wasn’t involved in any of this. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, really? Then allow me to refresh your memory of a few things.” Voler consulted one of the pieces of paper that he was holding. “The Osiris arrived in Earth orbit on Friday, May 6. On the evening of the following Monday, the Kronians held an informal reception at their suite in the Engleton Hotel, which I believe you attended. Is that so?”
“Yes, I did. What about it?”
“You weren’t on the officially prepared list of guests, I see,” Voler commented.
“I was invited by the Kronians directly,” Keene retorted.
“Oh yes, of course. You’d been good friends for a while, hadn’t you? . . . And tell me, Dr. Keene, is it true that on that occasion, you were introduced to a certain Catherine Zetl, a paleoanthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution, who has been involved in the Joktanian excavations that have been in progress for some time now?”
“We met, yes,” Keene confirmed. What did this have to do with anything?
“And how would you describe Ms. Zetl’s attitude toward the Kronians and the case they are arguing?”
“I don’t recall that we talked much about it.”
“Oh, you didn’t. Well, I have it on record that she is extremely supportive of them and critical of what she likes to call ‘official stodginess.’ ”
“Very well, if you say so. Am I being accused of something, or can we get back to what was supposed to be the business of this conference?”
Voler summarized: “So, you have been friends with the Kronians for a long time, in part because your professional interests coincide with their agenda. They arrange for you to attend a social gathering at which you meet another scientist sympathetic to their position, whose work happens to have included studying, cataloguing, and storing the very objects we have been talking about. And now let’s move forward almost three weeks to May 24. On that date, isn’t it true that you took part in another space mission conducted by Amspace-your long-term business associate who shares the same interests?”
It hit Keene then where Voler was going with this. Sudden dismay jolted him and must have showed. “No,” he protested.
“What? Are you saying that you didn’t go on the mission launched on May 24?”
“I’m saying that what you’re suggesting is ridiculous.”
“I haven’t suggested anything, Dr. Keene. What was the purpose of the mission?”
“I tell you this is ridiculous!” Keene said again, his voice rising.
“Please answer the question.”
“What is this circus supposed to be? I came up here to describe our work in repeating the Kronian orbital calculations. Am I supposed to be on trial for something?”
The room had become solemn. “I think you should answer Professor Voler’s questions,” Schatz said from behind Voler, voicing the general mood.
Keene drew a long breath to calm himself. “It was to test a design of a hybrid engine,” he replied.
“A chemical hybrid,” Voler supplied. “This was a test of a conventional propulsion system?”
“Yes.”
“But you are a specialist in nuclear propulsion, are you not, Dr. Keene? What was your role in the mission?”
“I wasn’t involved in that part of it.”
“Oh?” Voler feigned surprise. “There was another part? And what was that?”
“You obviously know damn well.”
“Yes I do. And allow me to inform the rest of the people present here what it was.” Voler turned to address the hall in general. “At the last moment, the mission was extended to include an additional phase: After completion of the hybrid trials, the Amspace craft made rendezvous and docked with the Osiris, where it remained for over twelve hours.” Voler peeled off the last of the sheets of paper he was holding and held it high. “I have here a copy of the loading manifest of personal baggage items carried by the Amspace craft on that mission. It lists as an item forwarded for Doctor Landen Keene, one carton of weight fifteen point five kilos, described as containing twelve bottles of assorted wines.” Keene looked across at the center table, where Voler had left the box that he had taken the replica from. “Well, let’s see,” Voler went on, “in my estimation that would be about the size of the box over there. So, a couple of weeks after meeting Zetl, you took a box similar to that one up to the Osiris, and lo and behold, two days later the specimens that we are told came from Rhea are shipped down, just in time for this conference. Another amazingly convenient coincidence.” Voler wheeled to face Keene fully. Finally, he dropped the playfulness that he had been affecting, and his expression darkened. “Seriously, Dr. Keene, are you really expecting us to . . .”
But the rest was drowned in the rising pandemonium coming from all sides. Keene had no answer to offer anyway. Anything he tried to say would have sounded lame. The Kronians, too, were sitting in silence, stunned. Keene was vaguely aware of figures coming forward into the space below, jabbering, shouting, and gesticulating. Somehow, Cavan’s face materialized out of it all. “It isn’t true, Leo,” Keene said, still feeling this had to be some kind of dream. “You know it didn’t happen that way. I can’t explain it. Where do we start with something like this?”
“I don’t know either,” Cavan told him. “But I think that for the time being you need to forget any more arguing with scientists. What you’re going to need is a firm of lawyers.”
Until Voler’s allegations were either proved or refuted there could be no continuance under the guise of a scientific debate, and the conference was suspended until further notice. Marvin Curtiss was as bewildered by it all as Keene. It was bad enough that public attention should be so completely diverted from the original issue at this crucial juncture; but even worse was Amspace’s being implicated, calling into question the credibility and integrity of all the interests that the company was associated with. “Everything’s turned into a political show trial,” he groaned over the phone when Keene was finally able to talk to him. “It will take twenty years for this to wear off.”
Carlton Murray, the head of Amspace’s legal department, left on an afternoon flight from Texas with two of the firm’s lawyers. They would meet with Keene that evening, and the following day make arrangements for representation by the company’s Washington law firm. An outraged Catherine Zetl issued a public denial and announced her intention to sue, which raised the possibility of acting jointly. After a brief conference in a private room at the AAAS building, Gallian, for once noncommittal and subdued, told Keene to let him know what the lawyers wanted the Kronians to do after Keene met with them that evening. Gallian and the rest of the Kronians then retired to the Engleton for the remainder of the day. Keene told Vicki to expect to be effectively in charge of Protonix for a while, and then stopped by Information and Office Services in D.C. to have Shirley take care of everything there. For the sake of privacy and sanity he changed his hotel to the one that the Amspace lawyers would be checking into and forbade Shirley from revealing to anyone where he had gone. Jerry Allender offered to stick around, but Keene told him the whole business had moved way out of his field and there was little further that he would be able to do. Allender left, accordingly, on the last flight that night connecting to Corpus Christi.
The two lawyers accompanying Murray turned out to be Sally Panchard, an old hand who had been with Amspace for years, and Cliff Yeaks, a relatively new recruit from law school but bright, personable, and enthusiastic. Only when he was able to sit down with them in his room, finally removed from the frenzy that had followed him all day, was Keene able to give any real thought to what it all meant.
And what it meant was shattering. The accusations against himself, damaging as they would probably be to the public perception of the Kronians and which constituted Curtiss’s main concern, were not what bothered him. Murray was confident that Voler had carried his theatrics too far, and if the true story were as Keene maintained, systematic investigation of the facts would eventually establish it. That didn’t mean that somebody else hadn’t taken the artifacts up to the Osiris, of course. It was hard to imagine any of the others on the minishuttle being involved, but Curtiss had authorized discreet background checks of all of them as a precaution. But all kinds of official craft had been shuttling up and down between the surface and the Osiris since its arrival, so there was plenty of room for the culprit to be elsewhere.
So did Voler really believe the line he had strung together about Keene? Or had he simply seized an opportunity to derail the Kronians when a convenient set of coincidences presented themselves, knowing that he would be able to admit hastiness and extract himself later? At this stage, it didn’t really matter. What remained-unless some of the world’s foremost experts were unable to tell terrestrial rocks and the work of an ancient human culture from things that had originated in another realm entirely-was that regardless of who had taken or sent them up to the Osiris, the artifacts had come from Earth, which could only mean that the story of their being found on Rhea was a fabrication. And if that were so, then what reliance could be placed on the probe data also? That, of course, had been Voler’s real point. The rest, as likely as not, had been staged to grab some limelight for himself and embarrass Keene and Amspace at the same time.
In all his dealings with them, it had never crossed Keene’s mind to question the integrity of the Kronians. Was it possible that he could have judged so wrongly? And if so, what else might he be wrong about? Maybe the Kronian colony was as stretched to its limit as the politicians and advisors on Earth had been saying all along, and desperation to the point of perpetrating a deception such as this was the result. Whatever their reasons or their situation, the fantasy Keene had toyed with of going back with them had exploded. His only desire now, after transferring all dealings to the lawyers, was to leave things in their hands from here on, get away from everything for a while, and then do some serious thinking about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. First, however, it would be necessary for him to introduce the lawyers to the Kronians.
Although he had the direct personal calling codes that the Kronians had been assigned for the duration of their visit, matters were more formal now and he called the general number for the suite. A security man answered, and after verifying Keene’s authentication put him through to the floor above. Vashen took the call, and when he saw that it was Keene, passed it over to Sariena. She was sleepy and not very communicative, which was hardly surprising. After checking with Gallian, she confirmed that tomorrow morning would be fine for a meeting with the lawyers. Since everything on their schedule had been canceled, there was little else for the Kronians to do anyway.
The next morning after breakfast, Keene was waiting in the hotel lobby, where he had arranged to meet the lawyers, when three men detoured by him while on their way toward the main doors.
“Aren’t you the guy who was all over the news yesterday-the one who took the fake tablets up to the space ship?” one of them said.
Keene was momentarily taken aback. “Excuse me? . . . Oh. No, what they said wasn’t true. There’s a lot to be uncovered. Don’t believe anything you hear at this stage.”
“Oh yeah? Well, you tell those kook friends of yours that if they want to go back where they came from and freeze, that’s okay. But don’t come here expecting us to make it work for them, because it can’t work. Especially when they have to lie about it. Okay?”
The three walked away before Keene could respond further. Just a month ago, he’d been a space hero taking on the Air Force. Already, he’d turned into a lackey of alien interests. Celebrity, it seemed, could be a short-lived thing.
* * *
The mood in the Kronians’ suite at the Engleton was very different from what Keene remembered of the last time he was there. Instead of a party atmosphere and optimistic talk of exciting changes to come, the tone was set by somber-suited lawyers with laptops, heavy briefcases, and legal pads. No longer did the Kronians joke about the strange sights and experiences of Earth. Instead, they were listless and reticent, volunteering little beyond what they were asked, giving the impression of going along with something they had no choice in but being already resigned to the futility of it.
Keene didn’t have a large part to play after making the introductions, having given his own story the evening before. Murray opened with general preliminaries, explaining Amspace’s relationship with the Washington law firm, and since Amspace and the Kronians were implicated together, outlining the advantages of arranging comprehensive representation for all of them. However, that would depend on the outcome of talking with partners of the Washington firm, which he hoped to do later that day or tomorrow. The Kronians had no real questions, and Murray got down to the business of going over the reports and transcripts of the previous days’ conference item by item to get the Kronians’ version and their verification where quotes were attributed to them. All the time, Sariena kept giving Keene curious looks, while he did his best to avoid her gaze. Gallian’s answers to the lawyers’ questions became shorter and more strained. He seemed to be containing himself only with difficulty against rising impatience.
Finally, Murray leaned back in his chair, his pen held lengthwise between his fingertips, and contemplated Gallian for several seconds as if weighing how to make a delicate point. Gallian scowled back unhelpfully. “Look, I appreciate that ways of going about things might be different where you’re from, and I’ve tried to allow for that,” Murray said. “But I have to say, the answers you’ve been giving aren’t exactly going to serve your best interests. You don’t seem to understand how the system here works. We are not your adversaries in this. We’re on your side. Our job is to put together a strategy that will get us through with the minimum of damage. But to do that, we need complete cooperation.”
Gallian’s jaw tightened. “I’m sorry. I thought we were cooperating,” he replied.
Sally Panchard put in, “I think what Carlton’s trying to say is that whatever else is admitted publicly, we need to know where those artifacts came from. But as far as the case itself is concerned, our position will depend on what we think the other side is able to prove. In other words, we give nothing away. Without proof, how can anyone know for sure if the artifacts were ever up in the Osiris at all? If they were given to you by someone here on Earth after you landed, who said they’d come out of the container that was shipped down, then Lan Keene, you, and everyone in your mission would be exonerated.”
“Yes, yes. Those are just the lines I was thinking along,” Murray interjected.
Sally went on, “There would still be the images that were beamed from Kronia to account for, but they could have originated here and been turned around. So the whole thing could have been engineered between a group of unknown parties here and in Kronia, and you were all used unwittingly.”
Vashen was shaking his head, trying to follow. “But that wouldn’t change what Voler was trying to say yesterday. You’d just be making others guilty instead of us.”
“That’s our job,” Cliff Yeaks said. “You and Dr. Keene are our clients. The other guys are not. If Voler can’t prove who did it, that’s his problem. The thing that matters is, you guys will be off the hook.”
Gallian emitted a loud sigh suddenly, got up from his seat, and stamped over to the window to stare out at the Washington rooftops. “ ‘The thing that matters,’ ” he repeated. “All this posturing and antagonism, obsessions over who will win and who will lose. When will the people of this world ever learn to stop fighting each other and do things together? Doesn’t it occur to anybody that the thing that matters might be truth?” He turned back to face the room. “Which side are you people on? All I’m hearing is nonsense about legal contortions and antics that don’t interest me that can be dragged out to divert attention from the real issue forever. Is that what you want? I thought this was supposed to be a scientific matter. When are we going to get back to that? The only one among you who speaks that language is Landen, and he has said practically nothing. So why don’t we stop talking about what stories we can invent and try concentrating on asking what really did happen?”
Keene answered, since Gallian was still staring at him. “I think that’s what Carlton is trying to do. As he said, he needs to know exactly at what point those objects-the actual objects, not some kind of container that they were supposed to be in-came into your hands.” Keene paused, then added as the thought struck him, “Come to that, did you ever actually see them outside of a container?”
“A good point,” Sally said, nodding.
Gallian frowned from one to another of them. “I don’t understand. I was quite familiar with them before they were crated. I was involved in some of the studies of them.” He waited, inviting some explanation.
“Gallian,” Keene said despairingly. “Now you’re starting to sound as if they really did come from Saturn. Carlton just told you: he and his people are on your side, yet you’re still giving them a hard time. I’m beginning to see his point.”
“We’re trying to get you out of a mess. This isn’t helping.” Yeaks groaned.
Total silence hit the room. Gallian stared at the Terrans first in noncomprehension, then with slowly growing incredulity. The rest of the Kronians were exchanging shocked looks or just sitting with dazed expressions. Involuntarily, Keene turned in Sariena’s direction with a what-did-I-say? look.
“Oh my God,” Sariena whispered. “Even you don’t believe it, Lan.” She faltered, looking at him in disbelief. “These fairy stories that you’re talking about; they’re not just for Terran melodramatics. You really imagine that some kind of alternative explanation has to be manufactured somehow.”
Keene almost started to laugh. “You’re not trying to tell us they’re genuine, that they really were found on-”
“Of course they’re genuine!” Sariena shouted. Keene blinked, feeling as if she had slapped his face. She raised a hand to her brow, started to say something, then rose, shaking her head. “I can’t believe . . . Lan, how long have you known us? How long have we communicated, worked together? You know something about our values, our commitment to truth. Could you really imagine we’d be capable of such a thing?” Gallian moved to a chair and sank down onto it.
Keene didn’t know how to respond. The two older lawyers saw that they were out of their depth and shut up. Yeaks looked at Sariena and showed his hands. “But how could that be possible? We’ve heard the evidence from yesterday. Nobody has even hinted of any doubts about it. We can hardly argue that those things didn’t come from Earth.”
“Oh yes, I’m sure you’re right. They came from Earth,” Sariena agreed tiredly.
Yeaks glanced at his colleagues as if checking that he hadn’t missed something, then looked back at Sariena. “Then how can anyone believe they were found on Rhea? You can’t go back out there and keep saying that. Nobody on Earth is going to believe it.”
“It’s as we said,” Gallian declared, speaking to the Kronians. “Getting involved in the complications here will just be a waste of time and achieve nothing. I say we pack up and go back. We’ll sort it out ourselves with our own scientists back in Kronia.”
“Leave now, just like that?” Vashen said. “What about the emigrants we were due to take back?”
“Get the word out for them to bring their plans forward. Speed things up at Tapapeque. We’ll wait for them in orbit,” Gallian replied curtly.
Now Keene was confused. “What is there to sort out?” he demanded. “Cliff’s point seemed pretty clear to me. You’re admitting that the artifacts came from Earth, but at the same time you want to stick to the story that they were found on Rhea. You can’t have it both ways, for heaven’s sake. It doesn’t make any sense. We’re here. Saturn is eight hundred million miles away. Are you telling us that the Joktanians are supposed to have had space travel now?”
Sariena came over to sit down across from Keene and looked at him. There was no aggravation in her eyes now but something deeper, sadder-for a moment, it seemed, almost pitying. “Oh, Lan,” she sighed. “You’ve tried so much to think like us, but you’re still a Terran underneath, locked into your preconceptions. You really can’t turn it around the other way, can you?”
“What do you mean?” Keene said. “Turn what around what other way?”
“We’ve been discussing it most of the night. Just believe the facts and accept their implication. Don’t try to force anything to fit with what you think you already know. And you end up with only one answer.” Keene looked to the lawyers for help. They shook their heads helplessly. He looked back at the Kronians.
Vashen raised a hand to enumerate on his fingers. “Fact one: those objects originated on Earth. Fact two: they were found on a moon of Saturn. Fact three: no interplanetary transportation existed at the time of creation.”
“In other words, they couldn’t have gone from here to there,” Sariena said.
Silence fell again. “Now turn it around the other way, as Sariena said,” Gallian told him from across the room.
Keene still couldn’t figure what they were driving at. He looked at Sariena and shook his head.
“Therefore, they must have been created there, not here,” she completed. “They were ejected off Earth in some kind of impact event, and later fell on Rhea.”
It took Keene a further three or four seconds to grasp the only way in which that could have been so. Then his eyes widened slowly. “Surely not,” was all he could manage.
Sariena nodded. “Their journey across space wasn’t from here to there, but from there to here. And since there wasn’t the technology to transport them, they must have come with the Earth itself. Earth was once a satellite of Saturn!”
Was it genuine? Or was it a face-saving ploy to let the Kronians extricate themselves from the affairs of Earth and depart? Keene didn’t know. His confidence was not bolstered when Gallian refused to throw the matter open for debate on the grounds that after seeing the reaction of Earth’s scientists to the Venus proposal, he wasn’t even going to try getting them to listen to something like this. The Kronians would go back and pursue the matter themselves, with their own scientists. They abandoned plans for any further serious discussion on Earth, and began making departure preparations accordingly.
So, what were they: true visionaries impelled by an ethic that would never be understood on Earth; or failures who had fooled even Keene for a year, pulling out under a contrived pretext when it became clear that their bid to enlist help from Earth had failed? And the Osiris: Was it really the exemplar of what freed science could accomplish, as he had believed, or just a one-time showpiece achieved by hurling everything into a single-purpose project? Had the Kronians known all along that their position was precarious, and that they could well end up with enraged authorities on Earth opposing their departure if things went wrong, and was that why the Osiris was armed? Keene still didn’t know what he believed when, a day later, with nothing more to be accomplished in Washington, he and the three lawyers boarded a plane at Reagan National Airport to head back to Texas.
The question nagged at Keene for days, allowing him to get little else done. Either the Kronians were guilty as charged and he had made one of the biggest misjudgments of his life, or one of the most stupefying scientific conjectures of all time was being missed because of politics and petty vanities. If the first, he was on the wrong side and it was time to redirect his life toward staking some claims in everything he had been missing out on. If the latter, then humankind’s way ahead lay with the different ethic of the Kronians, in which case Keene belonged out there and not here, and if they were already getting ready to leave he needed to make his mind up soon if he intended doing something about it.
It all hinged on the proposition that Earth had once been a moon of Saturn. If that were credible, then so were the Kronians. So how believable was it? Keene decided that he needed somebody suitably knowledgeable to help him untangle the questions clogging up his head. Most of the astronomers he knew-especially after the recent happenings in Washington-wouldn’t want to get within a mile of something like this. In the end, he called David Salio. At first, Salio was still embarrassed after what he felt had been a betrayal, but his manner eased when it became clear that Keene was calling about something entirely different. Keene’s opening sentences were enough to get him hooked, and they arranged a meeting for that same afternoon. Keene flew up to Houston on the midday flight and spent the afternoon and evening with Salio. Salio couldn’t guarantee to Keene that the latest Kronian proposition was not a line they had fabricated to extricate themselves; but neither did he dismiss it as impossible. Certainly, the suggestion that the motions of other planets too, not just Venus, might have been different in times gone by didn’t offend him in the way it had other astronomers Keene had talked to.
“There’s good reason for supposing that Mars moves differently from the way it used to,” he told Keene. “The Kronians think that after Venus’s close pass with Earth, it went into an orbit that brought it close again periodically-though never with anything like the devastation of the first encounter, of course. That was why just about every ancient culture watched it so closely, keeping charts to track its every movement and viewing its approaches in trepidation as a portent of destruction. Finally, somewhere around 700 b.c., it came close to Mars in an event once again recorded everywhere as a celestial combat of gods, altering Mars’s orbit and afterward settling down to the circularized orbit we see today.”
“Cooled down from the plasma state, with the electrical effects dissipated,” Keene remarked.
Salio shrugged. “We don’t know enough about that yet to say. But if something as recent as that is at least plausible, who’s to say what the situation might have been in this more distant era that the Kronians are talking about? Without knowing the truth about those artifacts, I can’t tell you that the Kronians didn’t make it up. That’s for your lawyers to figure out. But it’s certainly not grounds for writing them off, either.”
Keene caught the last flight back to Corpus Christi, where Vicki met him at the airport-he had lent her his car that day since hers was in the shop. She looked trim and classy in a cool summer dress and greeted him with a hug that felt nice after a long, hectic day. “We could redeem one of the outstanding rain checks at the Bandana,” she said as they walked out past Baggage Claim. “Robin’s overnighting with a friend, and I can live it up-the life I’ve always dreamed about.”
“You must read minds too,” Keene said. “Sure, I could use a beer. Planes and peanuts always make me dry.”
“So how did it go with Salio?” she asked as they began crossing the parking lot. “What did he have to say?”
“He was fascinated. Said it was the most exciting thing he’d heard for years. He even came up with some thoughts of his own about it that could answer a number of puzzles that have been going around for a long time. For example, Saturn could have provided a more benign environment for life to have gotten started in than here, close to the Sun. No fierce ultraviolet to break up early, fragile molecules before there was ozone.”
“He didn’t think it would be too cold out at that distance? That was one of the things that bothered me.”
“Not necessarily. If Saturn was a protostar at one time that didn’t make it to fusion ignition, it might still have radiated enough to warm its satellites.”
“What about when Earth escaped?”
Keene shrugged. “Maybe there’s your Ice Age. . . . In any case, with all the other things going on that we’ve been talking about, Saturn might not have been at the same distance then. I can see why Gallian thinks there’s enough new science to keep them busy for fifty years.”
Vicki glanced at him silently as they walked. Her expression still held a touch of skepticism. “Could it really have been that recently?” she queried. “Enough for humans to have seen it?”
“Well, it’s beginning to look as if things could change a lot quicker than has always been thought. Salio thinks the whole geological and astronomic time frame is screwed up.”
“Don’t tell me 4,004 b.c. is true after all.”
“No. But he’s pretty certain that the conventional figures are going to have to be drastically revised downward, all the same.”
“So does he buy the idea of a one-time satellite of Saturn?” Vicki asked.
“Until we know for sure one way or the other about the artifacts, he can’t say,” Keefe replied. “It could be a scam; it could be straight. That’s where Murray and the lawyers ought to have been pitching in. Where we go next, I’m not sure.”
Vicki handed him the keys. He opened the passenger door for her and saw her in, then walked around and got in the driver’s side.
“I’m surprised they didn’t stay on in Washington longer,” Vicki said as they moved out. “I can see why you and Jerry would be out of it now. But doesn’t the legal mess up there need attention?”
“There wouldn’t be any point,” Keene said. “The Kronians aren’t interested. They’re going back-either to work on their theory or figure out how else they’re going to save their colony. I don’t know which. It depends on whether they’re genuine or not. The last I heard, Idorf was bringing the Osiris up to flight readiness.”
“Ouch. I didn’t realize it was so soon. It’s really that hopeless?”
Keene sighed. “Well, if you and I have trouble buying it, the establishment isn’t even going to want to hear. If they really are genuine, then Gallian is probably right in thinking that getting tangled up in legalities would just be a waste of time. He told Murray that no law firm would take Kronians on anyway. After Voler’s act, they’d be too worried about the bill being paid in faked money.”
Vicki smiled and snorted, but remained serious, staring out into the night in silence for a while. Then she said, “You know, there’s a lot more at stake here than I realized before. If the whole thing is a scam, the only thing that makes sense as to why the Kronians should have gone to such lengths is to get a share of the real power structure instead of being just an outpost on the fringes. Because if they’d gotten Earth behind them in this program they came here to sell, that’s what it would have meant. It does makes a crazy kind of sense.”
Keene shook his head. “It’s not crazy at all. That’s the jackpot question, Vicki. If it was a scam, and we bought it but the people we thought we were so much smarter than didn’t, Kronia is finished. But if it’s straight . . .” he sought for a phrase, “then they could be the next leap in the social evolution of the human species.”
Vicki fell silent again while she thought about it. “You don’t really believe them, though, do you, Lan?” she said finally. “The Kronians. Deep down, you’re not convinced.”
Keene looked across at her, surprised. “I said I don’t know what to believe. What makes you say that?”
Vicki shrugged lightly. “You’re here, back in Texas. You didn’t stay around to see them off. What does that tell you?”
They pulled into the parking lot in front of the Bandana and parked next to a pickup, where a group of a half dozen to a dozen youths and girls were standing around talking in the flickering glow from the neon signs. The sound of heavy-beat country music from inside greeted them as they climbed out of the car. The air was warm and close after Washington, but with a fresher scent coming in with the breeze off the coastal plain. Keene stretched his arms and looked up at the sky. All that could be seen of Athena now was a pale glow over the western horizon. Even though the time was approaching midnight, a matter of days ago it would have been a bright column climbing halfway up the sky. It meant that the tail was foreshortening as Athena came around from perihelion, swinging around like a lighthouse beam to sweep past Earth before Athena crossed Earth’s orbit in just a few weeks time. Between now and then it would become the most spectacular object to fill the sky ever in human history-unless, of course, the Kronians were right about the Venus encounter.
“How ya doin’?” one of the youths inquired genially as Keene walked around the car to join Vicki. He was tall and lean, wearing jeans with a plain shirt and vest, and had a white ten-gallon tipped to the back of his head.
“Doing okay,” Keene replied. “How about you guys?”
“Oh, just fine. It’s busy in there tonight, I’m tellin’ ya.”
“We’ll risk it.”
“Take care, now.”
Keene followed Vicki up a few steps up to the entry porch. “I think I’ll get a hat and some boots,” he said as he stepped ahead to hold the door. “The prettiest girls always seem to hang around with the cowboys.”
“Those could be your granddaughters,” Vicki told him. The noise intensified suddenly as they went through.
“Even better. . . . Which reminds me, have we heard anything more about what Karen’s doing?”
“Yes, she’s definitely moving to Dallas. It might be a bit sooner than she thought, though.”
“Um.” Keene stood looking around. The dance floor was filled, and a mostly male crowd was clustered in the vicinity of the bar. It wasn’t going to be easy to get a booth or a table in the front lounge. Keene looked across to the far side. “Maybe we could go through into the restaurant,” he said. “They look as if they’ve got more room in there. I never thought to ask, have you eaten?”
“I did earlier-but I could use something with a drink, sure.”
They made their way through the bar and dance area to the restaurant and grabbed a corner table just as another couple were vacating it. A waitress came to clear the dishes and give them menus, announced that she was Julie, and took an order for drinks. Keene decided he wasn’t up to a full meal or in the mood for a burger. The steak sandwich sounded good. Or maybe something lighter, like a salad. . . . “I suppose we get the recitation about the specials when she gets back,” he said, scanning the Mexican section. “Have you ever noticed? They don’t listen. ‘I’m Julie, your server. How are you today?’ And if you say, ‘Suicidal,’ it’s, ‘That’s nice. Our specials are . . .’ I’ll show you when she gets back. . . . But I guess it’s not really surprising when they have to say it probably a hundred times a day.” There was no response. He looked up and realized that Vicki wasn’t listening either, but was staring past him with a strange, fixated look on her face. “Hello?” he said. “Anyone home?”
Vicki answered after several seconds, seemingly from a million miles away. “Dinosaurs. . . .”
“What?” Keene waited, but that was all he got. He turned to see what she was staring at. On the wall behind him was an old movie poster from the nineties or thereabouts advertising something called Jurassic Park. It showed a tyrannosaurus, various characters and a truck, and a pack of smaller dinosaurs bounding across a grassy landscape. “What about them?” he asked, turning back.
Vicki remained distant, speaking almost to herself. “They couldn’t have existed unless conditions then were very different. Gravity had to have been smaller. The whole scale of the engineering was wrong. . . .” She focused back on Keene slowly. “Lan, how easy is it to figure an estimate of this in your head. Suppose Earth were orbiting a giant primary like Saturn just outside its Roche limit, with one side phase-locked toward it. How far out would that be? And at that distance, how much would the primary’s gravity reduce Earth’s surface gravity by on that side? Could it be enough to allow things like that to live and move around? And if Earth escaped, the gravity would increase. Could that explain why all of the giant forms died out, and the things that replaced them were smaller?”
Keene looked at the poster again, turned slowly back toward Vicki, but already he wasn’t seeing her. In his mind he was picturing a world of gigantic beasts, with enormous plants and trees, and a huge, mysterious globe ever-present in the sky. Gradually, he became aware of a voice saying, “ . . . with our own, homemade, Bandana peppercorn sauce. . . . Gee, I don’t know why I bother. Nobody listens. Would you like me to give you another couple of minutes?”
“Er, yes . . . please, Julie. Sorry, we were away on something else.” Keene picked up his beer, which had arrived unnoticed. “My God,” he breathed when Julie had gone.
“They were right!” Vicki said in an awed voice. “Earth was out there when those artifacts were made. The Kronians were right. . . . It means they’re genuine, Lan. Oh, my God, and look how they’ve been treated here. Even you didn’t believe them in the end, and came back. And they’re right. . . . I’d be going back too. Their science might get to the bottom of this. Here, it wouldn’t even get a hearing.”
Keene pushed himself back from the table, all thoughts of eating suddenly gone. “We have to talk to them about this,” he said. “I can’t do any figuring or call them with this noise. We need to go back to the office.”
“You’re going to call them now? It’ll be nearly one a.m. in Washington.”
“This can’t wait. They could be shipping out in the morning for all I know. Come on, we have to leave.”
Vicki nodded and rose without protest. Keene took a ten from his billfold and put it on the table. They met a confused Julie coming the other way when they were halfway back across the bar area. “Oh, you’re leaving? Was there something wrong?” she asked them.
“No, nothing to do with you. We’ve taken care of you,” Keene told her. “We’ll be back another time. Just a rain check.”
“It’s the story of my life,” Vicki murmured to Julie as she followed Keene toward the door.
Keene didn’t want to wake up the entire Kronian mission at this hour by calling the general number. So, reversing his earlier decision of keeping to a more formal level of dealings, he called the direct personal code that Sariena had given him. She answered sleepily in voice-only mode, obviously having already retired. Her first reaction was surprise. She clearly hadn’t been expecting to hear from Keene again-at least, not for a while.
“I’ll be honest,” Keene told her. He was in his office in the darkened Protonix building. Vicki sat listening in a chair pulled up to one end of the desk, which was littered with scrawled diagrams and calculations. “I left because I didn’t know what to believe. I had doubts; I admit it. It’s embarrassing to look back at, but it’s the way it was. What else can I say?”
“Well . . . I’m glad that you seem to be having second thoughts about us,” Sariena said. “And I don’t want to sound ungrateful that you called, or disinterested. But couldn’t it have waited until morning?”
“That could,” Keene agreed. “But there’s more that couldn’t. I’m with Vicki in the office in Corpus Christi.”
“In the office! At this time? . . .”
“I think she might have hit on something that clinches your case. It’s something she and I have talked about before, but there was never any reason to connect it with Saturn. The whole age of gigantism with the dinosaurs and everything-I don’t know if you’ve ever gone into the scaling implications, but nothing of those sizes could function in the conditions that exist on Earth today. The gravity is too strong. But suppose those conditions didn’t always exist. Suppose Earth were a phase-locked satellite, close-in to a giant primary. The primary’s attraction would reduce the value on the facing side. Combine that with what you’ve told us about Rhea. . . . It all fits.”
There was a long silence. Finally, Sariena said, “Let me put something on and get to a real phone. Stay on the line. I’ll be about a minute.”
“Seems like it got her attention,” Vicki murmured.
Keene looked across at her. “Boy, isn’t Robin going to be pleased.”
They waited. Then the screen of the desk unit brightened, and Sariena appeared against a hotel-room background, wearing a dark wraparound robe. She had evidently been doing some hurried thinking. “It appears to make so much sense,” she said, then mustered an awkward smile. “It’s I who ought to be apologizing, Lan. You can think like Kronians.”
“Thank Vicki,” Keene grunted. “Or, maybe we should all thank Robin.”
“Who’s Robin?”
“Vicki’s son. He’s fourteen. He’s the one who’s been telling us that dinosaurs couldn’t have existed.”
“Are you there, Vicki? Robin sounds like quite a person. Life must be interesting at your house.”
“Tell me about it,” Vicki called from where she was sitting. “I’m sorry things in Washington went the way they did.”
“Well, no doubt we shall survive it. What it tells us is that Kronian and Terran science can’t work together. And maybe that was something that needed to be seen and understood plainly. So perhaps, if for no other reason than that, the mission served its purpose. In the long run, it might be for the better in any case. These things that we’re still only touching on will lead to a whole rewriting of just about everything we thought we knew. We’re probably better off being free to pursue it in our own way.”
“You sound as if you could buy this idea of Vicki’s, then,” Keene said.
“I could in principle,” Sariena replied. “It would be nice to see something quantitative that at least fits the picture.”
“I did some rough calculations here before we called,” Keene said. “To be frank, they don’t look too promising. Even with the most extreme assumptions that I can justify, the answers I get aren’t anywhere near big enough. . . . But I could be missing something. You’re the planetary scientist. I’ll leave it with you.”
“Well, all we can do is pass all of this new material back to the scientists in Kronia,” Sariena said. “They know more about the dynamics of the Saturnian system than anyone. I don’t know where it will go from here. We might have to wait years before anything can be answered with confidence.”
Even after dealing with Kronians for a year, Keene was astonished at the ease with which Sariena was able to adjust her horizons to accommodate these new possibilities. Already he could sense an entire new program of research about to take shape out at Saturn after the Osiris returned. Now that his fears were allayed, all doubts had fled that he should have been going too. But the moment was gone. He had wavered at the crucial juncture, and the effect couldn’t be undone. Doubtless, there would be another ship, another time-but not this time. All the same, it was nice to think that until that time, whatever transpired out there now, in a way he would still be part of it.
“Well, I guess that for a while we’ll have to leave it with you people,” he said. “Do I take it you’ll continue staying in touch and keep us posted on developments?”
“But of course.” Sariena sounded surprised that he should have thought it necessary to ask.
Keene was relieved. “Do you know when you’ll be leaving yet?” he asked.
“No. There’s some kind of administrative complication. The arrangements are on hold right now. I’m not sure of the details.”
“Maybe if it’s going to be a day or two, we could come back up and say so long to all of you properly,” Keene offered.
Sariena smiled. “I appreciate the thought, but it isn’t really necessary. I’ll convey it to Gallian.”
“I guess you’ve got something more to throw at him when you see him in the morning,” Keene said. “How’s he bearing up under all this?”
“Oh, he’s not asleep. He and Vashen are away at some meeting somewhere. They’ve been gone for several hours.”
“At this time? What kind of a meeting, for heaven’s sake? Who with?”
“I really don’t know. Some people came here earlier this evening and talked to him in private, and then he and Vashen left with them. I don’t know what it’s about. Whatever it was, Gallian was looking very serious.”
Mystified, Keene looked across at Vicki as if for suggestions. “Maybe they’re billing him for the rooms and just wanted to make sure nobody got away first,” she suggested dryly. Sariena didn’t quite seem to follow the remark.
“It doesn’t look as if you’ll be leaving anytime soon, then,” Keene said, looking back at the screen showing Sariena. “We thought it might be tomorrow morning. That was why I didn’t want to put off calling you.”
“Well, I don’t think you need worry about that,” Sariena answered. “As I said, I really don’t know what’s going on. But if it’s something important, I’ll let you know. I’m sure Gallian would want to talk to you again before we leave, anyway.”
“Yes, do. I’d like that. Well . . .” Keene made a casting away gesture. “There we are. In case we don’t get another chance to say so before you go back, it was an experience meeting you and the others face-to-face finally. Working with you even for this short time has been a revelation. I’m only sorry that your mission here didn’t produce a more positive result. But maybe we all realize now that perhaps that could never have been. I get the feeling there’s going to be lots going on that we’ll be talking about. It’s just a pity that it’ll be from so far away again.”
“And it has been an experience for us,” Sariena replied. “This is truly an amazing world. Our whole race is amazing. And it will continue to expand and grow despite these setbacks. That’s what we should all remember, and work toward making happen. . . .” She hesitated for a moment. “I’m glad that we didn’t part on a note of misunderstanding and bitterness, Lan. Take good care of him, Vicki.”
“I just run a business with him.” Vicki smiled, got up and moved around the desk so that she was in the viewing angle with Keene. “But I like the things you say, Sariena. And I’m sure you’ll be proved right one day. Have a safe voyage.”
“Make sure you take care of Robin, then. Perhaps we’ll even see him at Saturn one day-at least for a visit. It sounds as if he has the makings of a Kronian already.” There was a drawn-out moment of silence. Then Sariena raised a hand. “Good-bye, Lan . . . Vicki, for the time being, anyway. And thanks for all you’ve done. It won’t be in vain. You’ll see.”
The screen blanked out.
Keene slept late and arrived back at Protonix around mid morning. He had already talked to Marvin Curtiss, Les Urkin, Carlton Murray, Harry Halloran, Wally Lomack, Shirley in Washington, and everyone else who had been looking for him during his absence the previous day, so there were relatively few surprises waiting to pounce. Neither, to his mild disconsolation, was there any message from Gallian or Sariena. He waited until noon and then decided to call them, using the general number. The manner of the security man who answered was cool and detached.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Keene, but I can’t connect you. You’re name isn’t on the cleared list.”
Keene was flabbergasted. “What? But that’s ridiculous. I was one of their guests. . . . I mean, I’ve been there. You put me through yesterday.”
“A restricted policy is in force now. I’m not authorized to give you access.”
“But, but . . . they’re personal friends of mine. This is insane. I demand to speak with Gallian, head of the Kronian delegation there.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Keene, but I have strict orders. I can give you the number of my superior if you wish.”
Keene noted the number but sat staring at it for several minutes after he hung up. Deciding he had better things to do than get involved in arguments with layers of officialdom he tried Sariena’s personal number, only to get a recording: We’re sorry, but the number you have called, 202-555-3325, is not currently in service. If this appears to be in error, please check with the directory or press 611 for assistance.
His apprehension rising, he clicked to his own directory and retrieved the off-surface code to connect with the Osiris. A jarring tone told him the channel was unavailable. Now certain that something was wrong, he punched in the digits for the long-distance operator.
“I’m sorry, sir, but that service is temporarily discontinued,” she advised.
“What do you mean, discontinued? It’s the trunk beam up to the Kronian spaceship that’s in orbit. I’m a personal acquaintance of the captain.”
The robotlike voice repeated, “I’m sorry, sir, but all I can tell you is that the service has been temporarily-”
Keene cut the connection with a snarl, pounded the arm of his chair, and sat staring exasperatedly at the screen for several seconds. Then he rose to his feet, paced over to the door and back, glowered at the screen some more, finally turning for the door and storming through into the corridor just as Vicki was coming out of her own office on the other side. “Oh, not again,” she groaned, stepping back a pace to stay out of the way.
Keene strode through into the reception area, where Karen was helping Celia check some figures. “Karen, look up the numbers for Leo Cavan of SICA and track him down, wherever he is, would you? I need to talk to him now, right away, maintenant, jetzt, ahora, adesso. If you can’t find him, find Herbert Voler.”
“Lan, what are you doing now?” Vicki asked despairingly as he turned to head back to his office.
“There’s something strange going on,” he told her. “I don’t like the feel of it. I can’t get through to the Kronians or their ship. There are two kinds of people that they won’t let you talk to: ones who don’t want publicity, and prisoners. The Kronians came eight hundred million miles to try and get publicity. So what does it tell you?”
Karen got through to Cavan ten minutes later on a permanently open personal code that he had given Keene, only to be used in emergencies. He was on his way to a meeting in the SICA offices and had to keep things brief. “I’m not sure what’s going on, Lan,” he said. “Something’s in the wind here, but nobody’s talking. I do know it goes all the way to the top. There’s an information blackout in force, which obviously includes the Kronians. Even I haven’t been able to get access to Gallian this morning. Somebody doesn’t want the world talking to them. It was ordered by a security official in the middle of the night. But what seems significant to me is that it’s still being applied. It hasn’t been rescinded.”
“It’s more than just an attempt to stop them leaving in such a hurry, then,” Keene concluded, which had been his first thought.
“It would be a pretty drastic way of going about it,” Cavan agreed.
“Any guesses?”
“I’m afraid not. For once in your life, you have me at a loss, Landen.”
Keene drummed his fingers on the desk and hesitated. “The other thing might be to try Idorf,” he said, finally. “If it involves their plans or something to do with Saturn, he’d know about it, surely.”
“You won’t get through. The Osiris is restricted to an official channel only,” Cavan said.
“I know, I already tried calling. But Amspace can bypass the regular net and get it on a direct beam when it’s above the horizon. We’ve still got the access protocols they gave us to get into their file system. It might be possible to create a message link from there.”
There was short silence. Then, “Give it a try, Landen. Keep me posted. And if I learn anything more at this end, I’ll do likewise. Must go now. Why does life happen in tidal waves?” Cavan hung up.
Keene went through into Judith’s office and found Vicki there. He waited in the doorway for them to finish speaking.
“Oh, is the beast fed?” Vicki checked warily.
“Yes, it’s safe. . . . Judy, do something for me when you’re through, would you? Lines to the Osiris are being blocked. I want to bypass the public system and try getting through direct. Would it be possible to create a connection via a beam from Amspace, using the access codes we’ve got for the file system?”
Judith thought for a few seconds. “It should be. . . . But with just a skeleton crew up there, it mightn’t be set up to get attention at their end.”
“Okay, well, get onto Amspace and find out when the ship’s due overhead, and give it a try. If it works, I want to talk to Idorf.”
“What are you getting us into now, Lan?” Vicki asked suspiciously.
“I’m not getting us into anything. I’m just trying to find out what’s going on.”
Vicki gave a resigned nod. “That’s how it always starts.”
Cavan called back around mid afternoon to say that Voler and a number of other leading astronomers had been called to a meeting at the White House, as well as top officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Departments of State and Defense, NASA, and the principal security agencies. It was being given a low profile to avoid media attention, but a lot of encrypted communications traffic was passing between departments involved in orbital and lunar operations and space agencies overseas, and all kinds of routine business was being canceled. There was a lot of strain and tension in the air. That was about as much as Cavan knew.
An hour later, Judith called Keene in his office to say she had Idorf on a link through Amspace. “You did it!” Keene got up to close the door with a foot and then resumed his place before the screen. “Good girl. I knew you’d hack it.”
“It wasn’t me,” Judith told him. “I was still working on it. This is incoming. He’s calling you.” Moments later, Keene found himself looking at the lean, hawkish features with the reddish hair and raggedy beard. Idorf didn’t look in the friendliest of moods; neither did he have time for social pleasantries.
“Dr. Keene, I’m sorry if this is inappropriate, but I don’t pretend to understand how things work in your world. I’m contacting you because you are a person who gets attention and can convey a message to the proper people; also, I respect you as someone whose word can be relied upon. I cannot say the same for many of the others that I’ve been hearing recently. My impression is that they are likely to say anything they think I want to hear if they believe it might get them what they want. I’m told this is what you call politics.”
Play this ree-al easy, Keene told himself. He tried to look composed. “I appreciate the compliment, Captain Idorf. How can I help?”
“Are you aware that the departure of our delegation is being obstructed?”
“No, I wasn’t. I knew there was a block on communications, and in fact was trying to get through to you via Amspace to find out more. I’m back in Texas now, away from it all. What’s happening?”
“The transportation that was supposed to be made available to bring them back up to the Osiris is not forthcoming. I am also informed that the emigrants who have been booking earlier flights to the Tapapeque base in Guatemala have been put on hold.” Keene started to inject that he knew something strange was going on in Washington, but Idorf went on, “Today, I announced that if your government was not going to provide a shuttle to bring our delegation up, I would send one of our own surface landers down to get them. I was warned off by Terran defenses, Dr. Keene! They advised me that any such unauthorized landing would be treated as a hostile act, and the craft seized. So, are we at war now, eh? Does Earth jump to the only kind of solution it has ever been able to conceive for any problem?”
Keene was aghast. “My God! Look . . . I know something’s been-”
“Ah, but that’s not the end of it. Two hours ago, I was advised of an intention to send a military boarding party up to this ship and asked to cooperate peacefully ‘for our own security and protection,’ whatever that is supposed to mean. . . .”
“Jesus Christ! I-”
Idorf’s hand appeared in the foreground on the screen, pointing a finger. “Very well, they have made their rules clear. Now this is what I would like you to convey, if you would, to whoever down there should hear it. Years ago, when relations between our two societies were more strained than in recent times, there seemed a real possibility that Earth might send an expedition to take over Kronia forcibly. We devoted considerable effort of the kind that produced vessels such as this one to the development of advanced defense systems, and it has been our policy ever since to build all new ships with a dual-role capability. The Osiris is armed, Dr. Keene. The weapons that it carries are of extreme potency. We will fire upon any craft, manned or otherwise, that attempts approaching closer than one hundred miles without authorization, whether or not it acknowledges further warnings. I trust you will have gathered by now that I am not of a mood to make jokes. I’m hesitant to put this to the people I’ve listened to today, because I fear they might attribute the same slipperiness to my words as appears to apply to their own. But as I said, you strike me as someone who will put it in the right way, to the right persons. Have I been clear enough? And if so, will you do as I ask?”
Keene eased himself back in the chair and exhaled a long, silent whistle. “Yes. Perfectly clear, Captain. . . .” He thought furiously about how much it might be wise to divulge. Finally, he decided that the way to respond to candor was with candor. “I already knew that the ship was armed,” he said. “When we visited you, a colleague and I strayed off the path we were supposed to be on, and saw inside one of the hub cupolas. The machinery looked like an ejector, and whatever it launches is obviously nuclear. What is it? At a guess-some kind of fission-pumped, multipointing beam device? X-ray laser, maybe?”
Idorf’s eyebrows arched. “I respect your frankness, Dr. Keene. And you are remarkably well informed. Each capsule deploys a gigajoule charge and generates multiple, independently targetable beams at a ten-thousandth of an Angstrom. I don’t think I have to spell out what that would do to a target at a hundred miles.“
Or a thousand, Keene thought to himself. “I am a nuclear engineer,” he said. “And I worked in plasma physics research for a while. In fact I’ve been involved in studies of that kind of system. How much of the specification are you prepared to release?”
Idorf shrugged. “As much as it takes to convince them.”
“I think I can do that for you,” Keene said dryly. “Okay, let me ask you for some numbers.” He paused and looked at the screen quizzically. “But first . . .”
Idorf waited. “Yes?”
“What’s going on? Do you know any more than I do? . . . What is this all about?”
“Nobody’s told you yet, eh?”
Keene showed his palms. “I’ve been trying to find out all day. It’s almost like you said. The whole of the Washington’s acting as if there is a war about to break out.”
Idorf regarded him fixedly for a few seconds; then, he seemed to make up his mind and nodded. His expression was grim. “Yesterday evening, I passed some news down to Gallian that had just come in from Saturn. Our observatories there have been able to make measurements that won’t be possible here for a few more days until Athena moves farther out from the glare of the Sun. It seems we can forget further speculating about whether the electrical environment can be altered, Dr. Keene. Athena has come out from perihelion on a changed orbit. It isn’t going to cross fifteen million miles ahead of Earth as was previously thought. It’s coming straight at us!”
Keene called Cavan on a secure channel to inform him as he had promised he would. Cavan seemed too stunned to make much by way of reply just for the moment. However, he wouldn’t be the person to send Idorf’s message through, since doing so would invite questions about his and Keene’s previous dealings. Instead, on Cavan’s recommendation, Keene contacted a presidential defense advisor called Roy Sloane and passed on Idorf’s warning. To back it up, he quoted the figures that Idorf had revealed, adding a few pertinent observations that he and Wally Lomack had made during their visit. He kept strictly to the script that Idorf had indicated, making no mention of Athena. Sloane was familiar with Keene’s name, took the warning seriously, and asked Keene to leave it with him. Thirty minutes later, he called back.
“You say that you and your colleague Wallace Lomack actually saw these weapons with your own eyes, Dr. Keene?” he checked.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“You can describe the construction and layout, detail the main assemblies, give performance estimates?”
“Not of the actual pods, which were in shielded storage. But of the hoist and ejection systems, yes. And some idea of functions from the local backup controls.”
“We need both of you here, Dr. Keene. Can you contact Mr. Lomack down there and tell him he needs to get ready to travel tonight? Or would you rather we have one of our people call him?”
“Tonight? I don’t know if we can get a flight at that notice,” Keene said.
“Oh, we’ll take care of that. When you’re coming to meet the President, it’s on Uncle Sam’s tab.”
Keene called an astonished Wally Lomack and told him the minimum that was necessary at that point. He debated with himself about telling Vicki everything but decided that until he knew more than he did, there was little purpose to be served. So, giving her just the Idorf’s-warning part of the story, he entrusted the office into her charge once again and drove home. He just had time to pack his bag once again before a staff car with a lieutenant and a WAVE driver arrived from the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station at the end of Flour Bluff to collect him. From Keene’s place they went on to Lomack’s house to pick up Wally, and from there to the airfield, where an executive jet with Navy markings was warmed up and waiting. They flew to Andrews Air Force Base, Washington, and were met there by a car from the White House vehicle pool. The radio was running a program about vacation spots in South America for the rest of summer and fall. Athena was due to intercept Earth in less than three weeks.