Worlds in Chaos (10 page)

Keene nodded. “But I’ve got too much going on right now. In any case, I need my own space.”

Cavan indicated the upward direction with a motion of his head. “You mean there isn’t enough for you out there?” He studied Keene for a few seconds, swirling his glass. “Are you sure you’re not keeping your options open until you see how the land lies with that other lady you’ve had hovering on the fringes of your life for a while?” Keene frowned at him, perplexed. “The one who’d be a natural for the lead in a Queen-of-Sheba movie,” Cavan hinted.

Keene stared. “My God! Are you talking about Sariena?”

“I am, of course. Why act surprised?”

“What on earth makes you think that?”

“Excitement. Something different. The allure of the alien and unknown.” Cavan’s talonlike hands broke apart a bread roll and commenced buttering one of the pieces. “A perfectly understandable reaction, Landen—especially for somebody of your adventurous disposition. I mean, you’ve been in communication since before the
Osiris
left Saturn.” He paused, glanced up as if to be sure Keene was listening, and then went on, making his voice casual. “I could see your point, after all. She really is stunning. Everyone I talked to thought so when we were with the Kronians last night.”

“
What?
” It hit Keene only then that this was Cavan’s strange way of leading around to the subject he had wanted to discuss. And it had worked. Keene couldn’t deny that his first reaction was a twinge of resentment. “You’ve met her already?”

The meals arrived then, and Keene was able to let his surprise abate while plates and dishes were positioned, covers removed, and the glasses refilled. Having had his fun, Cavan became more serious. “I was at another dinner on Friday: the official White House reception for the Kronians—to be introduced to my ‘marks,’ for want of a better word.” He eyed Keene suggestively for a moment, as if inviting a response. Keene waited. Cavan explained, “The department has come up with a new angle on what an investigator does. Now, it appears, I’m supposed to cultivate the confidence of our guests of state, the purpose being to spy on them. It’s getting to be a tacky world that we live in, isn’t it, Landen?”

Unable to make anything of this so far, Keene merely motioned for him to continue.

“I’m one of several persons who have been assigned positions as official host representatives—tour guides, if you will—who will have constant contact with the Kronians. Our brief is to get close to them in order to get as much advance information as we can to help our own negotiators shoot them down.” Keene’s hand stopped with his fork halfway to his mouth. Cavan nodded somberly. “It’s a nonstarter, Landen. A policy ruling has already been made that Earth isn’t buying the Kronian line. Our side’s only interest is to discredit the whole business and get it out of the public limelight as quickly as possible.” For the moment, Keene was too stunned to do more than stare. He looked down at his plate and found that suddenly he didn’t feel so hungry anymore. Cavan added after a few seconds, “Sorry if I’ve spoiled your dinner. The tab’s on me, if that helps.”

There was a silence. Finally, Keene said, “What’s going on, Leo? Are they all blind or something?”

“It’s not so much a case of being blind as of not wanting to see,” Cavan replied over his soup. “You know the way things work in this business. The academic establishment sees the Kronians as invaders of its turf and a huge potential threat to traditional funding—which has been thinned down in recent years in any case. Government science sold out long ago to become an instrument for justifying government policy, and nobody on the Hill wants to talk about the expense. For the private sector the investment would be colossal, and the return on it just isn’t there. That’s why the space program was shifted to a lower gear in the first place.”

Keene shook his head disbelievingly. “One day, none of that’s going to matter. This is something we can’t afford
not
to do. I mean, we’re not talking about selling laundry detergent here, Leo. Maybe we have to learn something from the Kronians. The know-how and the ability is there, and it’s something that
needs
to be done. So you forget all the shopkeeper economics, and you just
do
it.”

“Logical enough, and eminently sensible,” Cavan agreed. “But the powers who run things here can’t think like that.”

It didn’t need to be spelled out further. Keene stared at his glass and sighed. “So what’s the line going to be? The one we’ve been hearing for a while: The whole Kronian venture was ill-conceived from the start; imagining that a society could function viably at that kind of distance was ridiculous all along . . . ?”

Cavan was already nodding. “And now they’re waking up to reality and finding themselves overextended,” he completed. “This story about supercomets and the end of the world is a concoction dreamed up to exploit the Athena event and milk support from Earth’s governments. That’s our line. And naturally the establishment’s scientific big guns will have their act coordinated to back it. We wouldn’t want to let down the people who ladle out the honors and write the checks, after all, now, would we?” Cavan spooned the last of his soup into his mouth—thin and straight, sparing on the lips—and watched, seemingly until Keene was just recovering sufficiently to tackle his food again. Then he added, “One of the big guns they’ll be wheeling up is a certain professor of astron-omy and faculty head at Yale, recently nominated for the presidency of the International Astronomical Union. I wouldn’t imagine he needs any introduction.”

“You don’t mean Voler?”

“I do, of course.”

Keene’s fork dropped slowly back to his plate. For Herbert Voler was the paragon of perfection that his own former wife, Fey, had fled to and later married when Keene confounded her social ambitions by abandoning the prospect of scholastic accolades to return to the grubby world of engineering.

“I’m not quite sure how that might be relevant at this stage,” Cavan confessed. “But conceivably the situation could take a turn whereby the social connection offers possibilities unavailable in the purely formal context. In any case, it was an option that would apply to nobody else, so my first thought was to approach you.”

Keene made an inviting motion with his free hand. “Approach me for what, Leo? You still haven’t told me what this is all about.”

“Let me first give you an idea of how they intend playing it,” Cavan suggested. “Then it will be clearer. The softening-up program to condition the public has already been going on for a while. Did you see your friend Voler on TV yesterday?”

“No, I have been kind of busy, as you pointed out. What was this?”

“He gave a talk at Columbia, ridiculing the claims about all those ancient records. . . . But it was planned months ago to coincide with the Kronians’ arrival.” Cavan produced a compad from his jacket pocket. “Let’s watch him.” He activated the unit, fiddled with commands to retrieve a stored playback from the net, then turned it the right way around for Keene to see and passed it across. Keene’s features remained neutral as he gazed at the familiar figure.

Voler was fortyish, maybe—on the young side for the titles and credentials that he was able to brandish. He had a full head of black hair styled collar-length like a media celebrity, and a tanned complexion which with his pugnacious jaw emphasized a strong set of white teeth that his mobile features put to good effect, constantly splitting into broad smiles and grimaces. To Keene, he had always come across as a little too smooth and slick for a figurehead of academic excellence—but then, perhaps such qualities helped the political image equally necessary to attaining the rarified heights. Keene could have seen him as a pushy prosecution counsel, maybe, or a hustler on Wall Street. Behind him on the screen was a chart carrying names of planets and ancient deities, presumably referred to earlier. Keene turned the volume up just enough to avoid being an annoyance to nearby tables.

“ . . . four ways in which the same legend could come to be found among widely separated cultures. One, Common Observation: all of the cultures witnessed a common event and interpreted it in a similar way. Two, Diffusion: the legend originated in one place but traveled to others with the wanderings of humankind. Three, Commonality of Psychology: Humans everywhere are so alike that their brains create similar legends reflecting common hopes and fears. And Four, Coincidence.” Voler paused, grasping the podium, and surveyed his audience. “I think everyone would agree with me that we can reasonably discard the last. And we simply don’t know enough to propose number three, Common Psychology, with any confidence—although in my view it seems unlikely.” Due court having been paid to reasonableness and modesty, the focus narrowed to the brass tacks. Voler’s confident smile broadened, stopping just short of open derisiveness. “The Kronians, of course, are saying that we are therefore forced to accept the Common Observation hypothesis, as if it were the only alternative. But in this they are surely dismissing far too casually—one hopes in their impetuousness—the second possibility, namely that as various peoples dispersed across the globe, they took their myths and legends with them, just as they did their languages, their religions, and their technical skills. . . .”

“You can see what the game plan is,” Cavan broke in from across the table. “The Kronians will be projected into roles of sincere but misguided children. After a few days of recuperation from the voyage, they’ll be taken on a whistle-stop tour of some selected spots around Earth. None of them can remember much of Earth, and some were never here at all. So we’ll see pictures of them gaping at the Grand Canyon and the Amazon, or gawking like tourists in London and Paris, with chaperones like myself pointing out this and explaining that. Earth will have been magnanimous; Earth will have been accommodating. But you see what it will do for their image. They arrive here naive, and we have to acquaint them with reality. The same image will carry over to what the world will perceive as the science, and their case won’t have a prayer.”

By now, Voler was expounding on details of various human migrations. Keene had heard enough and snapped the unit off. “And what about the evidence written all over the surface of this planet?” he demanded. “None of that counts?” He meant the anomalies in the geological, fossil, and climatic records—all independent of anything that any humans of long ago had to say. There were such things as marks of sudden sea level changes, in some cases measuring hundreds of feet, found the world over; agricultural terraces close to sea level when they were cultivated, now disappearing under the snow line eighteen thousand feet up in the Andes; the remains of millions of animals and trees, torn to pieces and broken, found piled in caves and rock fissures from Europe to China and across the Arctic, in some places forming practically the entirety of islands off northern Siberia; huge herds of mammoths, buffalo, horse, camel, hippopotamus, and other beasts wiped out abruptly a thousand miles or more from any vegetation growing today that could support them. And all in the middle of that same mysterious millennium that the writings of old had chronicled. Was all that to be ignored?

“They’ll stay away from all that if they can,” Cavan said. “The Kronians make some good points, and many scientists outside the political-academic orthodoxy are siding with them. Nobody argues much anymore that terrestrial catastrophes have happened. Where they’ll try and draw the line is with
planetary
catastrophes—that Venus could have been an earlier Athena. If that’s allowed, then the whole foundation of the economic power structure as we know it would have to change, which in effect is what the Kronians are saying. But of course that would be unacceptable. So the line will be to discredit the Kronian arguments by any means until Athena has disappeared out of the Solar System and been forgotten—apart from as an anomaly that will generate Ph.D. theses for years—and then we’ll all be able to get back to the safe, comfortable lives that we know.”

Finally, Cavan took back the compad. He went on, “The reason I wanted to talk to you before you meet them tomorrow, Landen, is that the Kronians need to be made aware of this. But I can hardly bring it up in my position. You, on the other hand, are not saddled with having to wear an official hat. And being in touch with the Kronians already . . .” He left the obvious unsaid.

“Sure, I’ll handle it,” Keene agreed. There really wasn’t anything to have to think about. He picked up his knife but sat toying with it.

“I was sure you would,” Cavan said. He paused and refilled Keene’s glass. “Oh, do stop staring and try some dinner, Landen. You’ve come all the way from Texas for it, and it looks so delicious.”

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