Worlds in Chaos (18 page)

“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.

15

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: