Worlds in Chaos (28 page)

“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.

22

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.”