Worlds in Chaos (34 page)

People had begun arriving to start the day when he emerged into the entrance lobby. The sky outside had cleared, but to Keene the morning still had a cold, bleak feel about it. His pilot was in the reception office, on the far side of a glass partition wall, leaning on the counter and talking to a woman who had taken off her coat but not yet hung it. The pilot said something as Keene came into view, and the woman looked in his direction. It seemed she had been waiting for him. Keene entered. A sign on the counter carried the name Christie Jones.

“Hi. Are you Dr. Landen Keene?” she greeted as he entered.

“I am he.”

“What’s going on? Anything exciting? From what I’m hearing, it sounds as if half the place has been up all night.”

“It’ll have to keep for now, I’m afraid. What can I do for you?”

Christie consulted a scribbled note. “I’ve got a strict instruction not to let you go. Somebody wants to talk to you.”

“Who?’

“It doesn’t say. Not someone who works here. He’s waiting in Room 108. I’ll show you the way.”

“I’ll try and keep it brief,” Keene told the pilot.

“No hurry, Doctor. The coffee’s pretty good here. So’s the company.”

Christie led Keene back out across the lobby floor, past the elevators, and along one of the ground-floor corridors. There was a display featuring models of orbiting space observatories and placards showing samples of images and other data obtained from them. “Your face looks familiar,” she said as they walked. “I’ve seen it on TV recently, haven’t I?”

“Sometimes I lecture on the College Channel,” Keene said.

“Yes, that must have been it. Wow, a real celebrity.”

“Hardly.”

They came to Room 108 and stopped. Christie tapped a couple of times. “Come in, please,” a voice called from inside. She opened the door, stood aside while Keene entered, and closed it behind him. A figure was standing by the window, wearing brown cords and a shapeless green sweater that looked as if they could have been for working in the yard. He was obviously tense, which perhaps explained why he hadn’t availed himself of one of the chairs while he waited. Keene’s jaw tightened. It was Herbert Voler.

The room had the basic furnishings of an office but was bare and devoid of the personal effects that denoted permanent occupancy. It looked like a room set aside for use by visitors, chosen for privacy. What was Voler, dressed this casually, doing here at such an hour, looking as if he too had been up all night? Keene waited.

“So now you know,” Voler said.

“I’d phrase it the other way around,” Keene replied. “It’s what we’ve been telling you for years happened once before. Now
you
know.”

Voler held up a hand as if to stay an attack. “Very well. Before we waste time getting into accusations, I admit to them. We refused to see what might threaten the things we had come to regard as the whole point of existence. Since losing them was unthinkable, we were unable to think it. Does that satisfy you? The collective psychology would doubtless make a fascinating study, but it will be a long time before this world will enjoy the luxury of being able to embark on serious psychological studies again.”

“Maybe so. I don’t have much time to think about it just now,” Keene said.

“Of course you don’t. So what are you going to do?”

“It’s funny, I was just asked the same thing upstairs. I don’t know.”

“It should be obvious to you by now that the President has no understanding of the scale of what’s going to happen,” Voler said. “None of them do. Oh yes, they’re counting their candles and checking the first-aid boxes like good Boy Scouts, but none of it is going to make a nickel’s worth of difference one way or another. It’s over, Dr. Keene—the works, the whole ball of wax. Before long, the surface of this planet may not be habitable for anything much bigger than cockroaches. Is that how you want to die—choking on smoke while you grub under rocks or fight over roots for something to eat?”

Keene answered woodenly, “I said, I haven’t had time to think much about it. You do what you can do, and that’s it. What’s your solution—find a friend in Congress who’ll cut you a better deal? That won’t work this time, Herbert.”

“There is one place where at least the semblance of civilized life will be able to continue,” Voler said. “I tried to be realistic about it the other night, but the minds involved weren’t capable of grasping what is necessitated. You’re not like them, Keene. You understand reality too, even if we have seen it from different sides in the past.”

Even now, Voler could consider himself among the rare few able to perceive reality—after he had been blocking it out for years? Again, Keene found himself listening to a distortion that he couldn’t quite believe. The psychology at work was indeed fascinating. “Are you talking about Kronia?” he asked.

“Of course I am. Look, the only people who are going to survive this with any chance of a life worthy of the word, and perhaps raise a generation with a hope for any kind of future, will be the ones who can make it there. And the only means of getting there is the one that’s in orbit over our heads right now.” Keene was already staring incredulously. Voler raised a hand before he could say anything. “I admit that the suggestion of using coercive measures to gain the cooperation of the Kronians was imprudent and hasty. There’s no need for anything so drastic. We can make a bargain with them that would be in their own best interests. Their ship has space available. We can offer knowledge and abilities invaluable to their colony, as well as other material resources that they’ll probably never get the chance to see again. All it would need is a competent mediator whom the Kronians know and trust. Someone such as yourself, for example. . . . You see my point.”

Keene did, quite clearly. Voler was unable to conceive of a situation that was beyond his ability to manipulate. He actually believed he could induce Keene to bargain a passage on the
Osiris
for himself and his friends. Keene remembered the military and intelligence people who had seemed close to Voler at the White House meeting. He was beginning to see now where the idea of sending a boarding party up to the
Osiris
had come from.

Keene looked as if he were experiencing a bad taste. “Even supposing that they offered me a place, what makes you think I’d want to take you along?” he asked.

Voler licked his lips. “Let’s not allow past personal animosities to affect things at a time like this,” he said. “I don’t have to remind you that I possess powerful connections who would be permanently in your debt as a consequence. The future position that you could expect to enjoy in the new setting could be, shall we say, very advantageous.”

New setting?

So that was it. Voler had given himself away. Already, he was talking about not merely getting to Kronia as a refugee but aspiring to running things there. Keene could guess the nature of some of the friends who would be on the list. He shook his head and smiled, managing to enjoy the moment despite the circumstances.

“No deal, Herbert. You don’t seem to understand. Your kind of influence doesn’t count anymore. Kronia doesn’t need friends like yours. They don’t have anything to offer that’s wanted there. I guess you’d better go home and start boarding up the windows of that mansion of yours.”

With that, he turned and left the room.

Ten minutes later, Keene was staring down at the morning commuter traffic filling the Beltway. News announcers were describing widespread radio interference and attributing it to Athena’s tail fanning out wider than had been expected. There was some risk of meteorite showers, and emergency services were being ordered to take precautionary measures accordingly.

27

The first matter, as opposed to accelerated charged particles, to begin arriving was in the form of molecular clouds and microscopic dust swept ahead of Athena by the solar wind, recorded by satellite-borne instruments and measuring stations on the lunar surface. On Earth, the effect was seen in spectacular sunsets worldwide, followed, as the grain size increased, by brilliant displays of burnup trails in the upper atmosphere. From California to Calcutta, people threw barbecue parties or just ate outside to relax in the cool while watching the shooting “stars” and electrical displays. Others took the warnings of meteorite showers more seriously by putting a fire extinguisher or two in the attics and making sure to park the car in the garage.

Not all reactions were that complacent, however. Astronomers around the world were comparing results and beginning to realize that something was amiss. While some were cautious and unsure what to make of the new factors affecting orbital calculations that had been claimed at the Washington conference, others were quick to take their fears to the media. Observational data were shared over the Web as a matter of routine, and there were thousands of amateurs and enthusiasts with the software to determine that what had been predicted wasn’t happening. Some were already connecting the rumors with visions of Athena being a repeat of Venus, and news stories appeared in Germany, Taiwan, and Australia asking if something was being covered up. Very soon it would be noticed that public and emergency services everywhere were shifting into higher gear, and then the stampede to get information would begin. In fact, more than a few news reporters, journalists, commentators, activists, and others who made a business of sensing things in the wind were already asking questions. President Hayer’s policy, in which he had asked the other world leaders’ cooperation, was still to avoid risking a premature panic by deferring an official statement until the scientific community could at least present a consensus as to the scale and extent of what should be expected.

The problem was that the stories Hayer was getting were contradictory. Hixson at Goddard, for example, was now giving figures less daunting than the ones he had supplied to Keene and had backpeddled to a position of saying that perhaps his initial fears had been exaggerated. Reports from the IAU’s Cambridge center, where Tyndam was based, were confusing and seemed to vary between Hixson-like hopes for things perhaps being not be so bad, to violent disagreement, depending whom one asked. This contrasted with the input from JPL, which was consistent and bad—worse, in fact, than the predictions that Keene had heard from Hixson to begin with. And in this, the JPL line agreed with the picture Keene was getting from the other sources that he was in contact with directly.

The Russians in particular were taking the Kronian probe measurements and revisions of the electrical properties of free space in the inner Solar System very seriously, and had calculated that Earth and Athena would come close enough for their magnetospheres to intersect. This would result in titanic electrical discharges from a white-hot body that had just picked up additional charge in its grazing course around the Sun. Nobody knew what the effects on Earth’s atmosphere or surface might be. The JPL scientists had reached similar conclusions. In one of Keene’s conversations with Pasadena, Charlie Hu said it would be like “sitting on one of the electrodes of a carbon arc.” Beyond that, the gravitational upheaval of a pass at that range would cause tides that would make the earlier estimates based on large offshore impacts seem puny. According to some European and Japanese estimates, it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Earth’s orbital and rotational motions could be affected, in which case entire seas could slop across continents.

All a terrifying and appalling prospect. But was it true? JPL said it was, and the collective view emerging from the sources that Keene had been polling directly seemed to agree. But Hixson disagreed, and the main center that was supposed to be the official source kept vacillating. When Voler was sought for an explanation of what was going on in Cambridge, no one could find him. Hayer’s predominant fear remained that of precipitating a wild overreaction needlessly. But with the media now converging on the scent and starting to bay, he only had so much time. Many of his advisors were amazed that a general panic hadn’t broken out already.

“This is what we’re going to do,” Hayer told a progress meeting late in the evening of the day Keene returned from Goddard. He looked spent, having been up, as far as Keene knew, since the last time they’d spoken and probably taking something to stay awake. He had stated that this would be his last function today.