Worlds in Chaos (15 page)

“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.