Worlds in Chaos (33 page)

Keene and Lomack were asked to wait after the meeting ended. For about forty minutes they talked intermittently and drank coffee with others who were still around, and then were called into a side room where Hayer wanted to see them privately. “I kept you back because I want you two on the team,” he informed them. He looked at them searchingly. “Give me your opinion on something. This argument of Voler’s about needing the Kronian ship. What do you make of it?”

Keene and Lomack looked at each other. Keene took it. “I can’t see that it’s justified. Sure, from the guesses we’ve just listened to, the world is in for a bad time, all right. . . . But enough to warrant getting the leadership off the surface? Either he’s overreacting, which I find hard to believe. Or he knows more than he’s letting on.”

Hayer nodded and looked satisfied, as if that was all he had been waiting to hear. “And I suspect that this move to send a boarding party was not unconnected. There was more to that than we were told.” He paused. “The AAAS thing and everything before it are history, but the fact remains that you were right and the experts I’d relied on were either wrong, or they deceived me. Either way, how can I put any trust in what they tell me now? I need somebody whose word I can depend on to talk with those who are in a position to assess the situation, and report back to me independently of the people you just heard in there. That’s you, Dr. Keene. Transportation, authorization, access to anywhere you need to go—name it and you’ve got it. Mr. Lomack, you’ve been up to the
Osiris
too and met Captain Idorf. I want you to help us defuse the situation with the Kronians before he starts sending the world messages from the ship. Do I have your cooperation, gentlemen?”

What else was there for them to do but agree? It was past 3:00 a.m., and Hayer was weary. He still hadn’t adjusted fully to the responsibilities he found himself with suddenly, and there was no denying the edge of fear that Keene detected in his voice. But Keene also noticed something else. Though he might feel fear as much as any human, Hayer was able to control it. And there was a resoluteness in his face that Keene had never seen before in all the public images that had filled the telescreens and news magazines in the last six years.

Voler and Tyndam had left by the time Keene and Lomack came out from their interview with the President. So had Vincent Queal, the intelligence-agency official, and several others who had sided with them. Keene remembered Cavan saying something about the East Coast academic interests that Voler represented having ties to the defense and investment sectors, but what it might signify he wasn’t sure. Neither was he in a condition to think too much about it. The time was after dawn, and Keene dragged himself away to one of the White House guest rooms to grab a few hours of sleep that could no longer be put off. It was afternoon when he awoke. After showering and shaving, he emerged to join others who had also stayed over and more arrivals who were being introduced to the situation. The President was elsewhere, reportedly at the Pentagon. Lomack had left with a group who had gone to the Engleton to repair relationships with the Kronians and prepare the way for more cooperation between Terran and Kronian scientists.

The world was still unsuspecting. While emergency and mobilization orders had begun going out as agreed the previous night, and similar measures were being initiated in other nations whose leaders had been informed, few people were as yet discerning the wider pattern and starting to talk in ways that would arouse the media. At the same time, high-level contacts in the news organizations had been notified to be ready for announcements of national importance, probably within the next twenty-four hours.

Meanwhile, reports were being logged worldwide of increasing radio disturbance and unusually bright auroras at higher latitudes due to high incoming fluxes of the particles that cause ionization in the upper atmosphere. The first whispers of Athena’s approach were already reaching Earth.

26

The two primary focal points into which observational data poured from astronomers worldwide were the IAU center in Cambridge, where Voler’s associate Tyndam was based and seemed to command a lot of influence, and the parallel operation at JPL in Pasadena, both of which Salio had mentioned. The dependability and possible motives of the authorities responsible for the official reporting from those centers was precisely what Hayer was uneasy about, and Keene’s task, basically, was to carry out some checks by going back to the main locations where the inputs to such collecting points originated. He was given office space at the White House and assigned two secretarial staff, Barbara and Gordon, as helpers. The eventual list that they came up with in the limited time available included NASA’s Laboratory of Astrophysics at the nearby Goddard Space Flight Center, where data came in for processing from the orbiting and lunar laboratories; the Palomar, McDonald, Kitt Peak, Lick, and USN observatories in the U.S., the NASA, UCLA, and Caltech observatories on Mauna Kea in the Hawaiian Islands; the British Herschel Observatory, located in the Canary Islands; the European Astronomical Center in Geneva; and the Russian network centered on the Pastukhov Institute. Keene also called David Salio for suggestions as to possible sources in the private sector.

Salio stared somberly from the screen after giving Keene some names for him to follow up, including one at the Aerospace Sciences Institute where Salio worked. “It’s Athena, isn’t it?” he said finally, keeping his voice low.

Keene answered guardedly. “Why do you say that?”

Salio gave one of his humorless smiles, only this time coming closer to a grimace. “I know what kind of an object it is, and I saw how your case was being undermined from the beginning in that charade in Washington. Jean was telling me over dinner tonight about rumors she’s been hearing at the hospital of emergency measures being activated on a major scale. Its orbit has shifted, hasn’t it? It’s going to come closer than they thought.”

Keene nodded mutely. Laughter from one of Salio’s children sounded somewhere in the background and was answered by a female voice calling something about it being way past time for bed. It was eleven-thirty in Washington, an hour earlier in Houston.

“How bad is it going to be?” Salio asked.

“Nobody’s sure yet. That’s why I need to talk to these people. I’ve been asked to report independently of the official channels . . . as a check.” There wasn’t much else Keene could say.

Salio nodded that he understood, then hesitated. “Look . . . this may sound pathetic after what happened before, but if there’s any way I can help . . . Well . . .”

“It’s okay,” Keene said. “It wasn’t just you. That was part of something much bigger. . . .” He bit his lip and hesitated. “But if they start talking about evacuation, don’t wait for the panic and congestion. Get inland, away from the coast. In the meantime, if I need more help, sure, I’ll give you a call. Okay?”

The Goddard Space Flight Center was located twelve miles northeast of Washington center in Greenbelt, on a sprawling site of office and experimental facilities interspersed with grassy open spaces and woodlands occupying approximately two square miles. The shapes of the buildings outlined in pools of light and patterns of orange lamps marking the roadways and parking lots expanded out of the night as the helicopter bringing Keene descended beneath an overcast of cloud. Goddard had been the planning and management center for NASA’s Earth-orbiting missions and space-based observatories since its inception, and later assumed the coordinating role for all the agency’s astronomical work.

A security guard was waiting to drive Keene and the pilot from the grassy landing area to Number Two Building, a long, three-story, edifice of brick walls and a white frontage with black tinted windows, where much of the work on extraterrestrial science was concentrated. They left the pilot with the supervisor in the night office and went up to a part of the top floor which, unlike the rest of the building, was brightly lit and full of people working at screens or poring over printouts and images strewn across desktops. Waiting in his office to receive Keene was Dr. Jeffrey Hixson, who headed the Interplanetary Physics branch.

Hixson was a big, fleshily built man with a flabby neck and second chin, red-eyed and unshaven. He spoke while eating a mixed plate from a batch of hamburger meals and breakfasts that someone brought in from McDonalds just as Keene arrived. There was a hollowness in his voice, and he seemed to have a haunted look. “It’s going to come close—maybe even inside the Earth–Moon system. Never mind what they talked about yesterday night at the White House. Those were just guesses based on what they know about comets. This animal is in a different league from comets—I mean, totally. What we’re in for is going to be
big
.”

“You mean more than just meteorite storms and big dust infusions?” Keene said.

“That’s a piece of Jupiter coming at us. We’ve never known what’s really down under the gaseous envelope, but the core material that was ejected took part of what appears to be a rocky crust with it that has broken up and elongated into a stream of debris moving ahead of and trailing the main body. When that gets funneled down into Earth’s gravity well, it’ll be enough to obliterate whole regions.”

For the first time, a measure of the panic that Hixson was struggling to control communicated itself. Perhaps the clamminess on his brow wasn’t due just to his being overweight. “What kind of regions?” Keene asked.

“Let’s put it this way. A month from now, countries the size of England and Japan might not be here.” Hixson snatched another bite of hamburger and went on, “And it’s not just the impacts that you have to worry about. Athena carried away parts of Jupiter’s atmosphere, which make up a large part of the tail—heavy in hydrocarbon gases. Vaporized crude oil, Dr. Keene. If that penetrates and mixes with our oxidizing atmosphere, you’ve got fuel-air munitions on a continent-wide scale. They can burn at a temperature that will melt stone. With hot incoming and exploding meteorites to ignite it, a cloud like that could incinerate everything from here to the Rockies.”

Keene had in fact been prepared for something like this. The Kronians and their supporters had been reconstructing this kind of scenario for years from interpretations of ancient records and geophysical evidence written all over the planet, and they had been ridiculed or ignored. Now Keene was hearing it as if it had all been discovered the previous night. What he needed now was actual figures for how close the encounter would be, magnitudes and intensities, estimates of what they would mean on the scale of events. Hixson walked him around the other offices and lab areas to meet the scientists and analysts, some with computers on-line to the tracking stations, who summarized the latest findings and provided printouts. One of them produced a series of telescopic images of Athena moving clear from the disk of the Sun. The body of the planetoid itself was obscured by the enormous tail now pointing Earthward, twisting and contorting into fantastic plumes and braids. It brought to mind, uncannily, ancient depictions of the grotesque, multi-armed goddess, Kali, advancing across the heavens to wreak destruction upon the world. More images taken at radio wavelengths revealed structures of magnetic fields and particle streams extending across half the sky and already engulfing Earth.

They went back to Hixson’s office to discuss the implications and for Keene to complete his notes. Hixson’s last words as Keene was about to leave were to ask when a public announcement would be made. “I don’t know,” Keene replied. “That’s what this information is wanted for. I just report back.”

“What are your own plans?” Hixson asked him. He made it sound as if he was hoping to hear of something official that he might be included in.

“Plans?” Keene could only return a blank look.

It was only when he was in the elevator on his way back down to the lobby that the full realization finally sank home that this was real. It was going to happen, and he was going to be here when it did. And for the last thirty-six hours he had been too busy and too tired to give any thought to what he intended to be doing about it.