Worlds in Chaos (37 page)

It all answered a question that Keene had sometimes pondered, of how people had coped and somehow managed to get through such things as genocidal war, mass bombing, political terror, earthquake, plague, and other situations of devastation and terror, and in particular how he himself would behave if ever faced by the kind of inevitability they were seeing now. The short answer seemed to be that you pretty much carried on as normal as best you could, for the simple reason that there wasn’t a lot else that you could do.

Since they had also grabbed some sleep on the plane, they spent the small hours going over the work done so far and preparing a general form for the report to be sent that afternoon, details to be filled in when the scientists returned later. Charlie Hu stayed up to guide them through and offer what other help he could. It made horrendous reading. When dawn came, Keene found himself by the window, watching the line of the San Gabriel Mountains slowly taking form in the first pink hint of day. The night had been hazy, and the now constant display of meteorite trails flashing across the sky, which had been awesome seen from the plane on the way from Andrews and was apparently all the talk among jet travelers, was obscured. He stared at the lights of the still sleeping city below, and for a moment the picture came into his mind of foaming walls of water brimming up behind the peaks and bursting through the gaps between to roll over the towns in the valley like breakers sweeping away footprints on a beach. Then he put it firmly out of his mind and turned to Hu, who was explaining some calculations to Colby.

“Charlie, is there a phone with a screen somewhere that I can use?” It would be a reasonable hour of the morning back east, even if on the early side.

“Sure.” Hu showed him into one of the empty offices and left, closing the door. A minute or so later, Keene was talking to a sleepy-eyed Marvin Curtiss. With all the things that had been going on, they hadn’t talked for two days.

“Lan, finally. I was going to call you priority today if I didn’t hear anything. Where are you?”

“At JPL in California.”

“Good God. What do you know about the confusing stories we’re hearing from everywhere? No two sources seem to be saying the same thing.”

“That’s what I’m here to straighten out. It seems there’s politics involved, even at a time like this. Don’t ask me to go into it.”

“I won’t. But is it as bad as some people are telling us?”

“Worse. I don’t know if it’s general knowledge yet, but the President will be making a statement at six tonight, Eastern Time.”

“Yes, they announced it last night.”

“It probably won’t go into everything. . . . Look, Marvin, major evacuation and emergency measures are going to be set into motion very soon. When it starts, the public authorities are going to be swamped. I think Amspace should start putting a plan together now to get its own people out to somewhere safer and then take care of them for a while. There isn’t going to be much for them to do at Kingsville.”

Curtiss compressed his mouth and nodded. “We might really lose some of the coastal areas, then?”

“Marvin, we might be losing all of the Central Plains. This is what I’m urging you to do. Collect all the transportation you can muster—the firm’s trucks and buses and whatever people have got that’s sturdy and rugged, and also anything that can fly. If things deteriorate rapidly, it may be a question of use it before you lose it. Try to keep the people together before they start scattering, and have them sort out things they’re going to need from stuff that can be left, and have it packed and ready. The rule is, travel light. Begin now on stocking food, fuel, and so on before the restrictions. Stake a claim on any piece of real estate you can get them to that’s high. I’d like to include my people over at Protonix in it too.”

Curtiss nodded his head and swallowed. “Yes . . . yes, of course.” His eyes had a glazed look. “I’ll start on it today. . . . When will you be back?”

“I don’t really know yet. But here’s a priority code that will get me if they start restricting the public system. I’ll talk to you again tonight, after we hear what Hayer has to say.”

“Very well, Lan. And thanks. . . .” Curtiss took in a long breath and shook his head. “Phew! . . . I don’t know. All of a sudden you find you have to rethink everything. I’m not really sure what’s the thing to say.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Keene replied. “I’ve been seeing it a lot lately.”

Next, he called Vicki, who had also been wondering what had become of him. He summarized his call to Curtiss and asked her to let the girls at the office know to begin their own preparations accordingly. Apparently Karen hadn’t shown up the day before. Vicki thought she might have changed her plans and gone to Dallas already.

Uncharacteristically, Vicki seemed to be looking for something further to say when there really wasn’t a lot more, as if she wanted to keep him there just a little longer. Keene realized with a start that, for the first time in the years he had known her, he was seeing her close to tears. “Oh . . . it’s not so much me, it’s Robin,” she told him. “You give your whole life and do everything you can for them, and it comes to this. . . . What did he ever do?”

What was Keene supposed to say? “What do any of the kids ever do?” he grunted. “Or most of any of the people, come to that? There was never any contract that said it has to be fair. This is the way the deal came out.” He wanted to be consoling, but to his own ears it came out gruff and callous. Maybe he was weary of the subject already; or just tired. It seemed to help, nevertheless.

Vicki nodded and brushed her cheek quickly with a knuckle. “Sorry, Lan. I’m being silly.”

“Not a bit of it. We’re all going to be getting a lot sillier before very much longer,” he told her.

29

While it was still morning in California, a train of meteorite impacts stitched its way like a gigantic bombing run over the tip of South America and across the southern Atlantic to beyond the Falkland Islands. Shortly afterward, a similar fall peppered the South Island of New Zealand, and satellites reported another shower in the North Pacific. The areas affected were thinly populated in all cases, but unconfirmed reports spoke of damage and some casualties in a couple of townships on the Chilean coast. An airliner on a scheduled flight from Wellington to Dunedin had disappeared, and a NASA observation satellite was no longer transmitting. On the Moon, seismometers were picking up steady impact activity; outside excursions were being limited to crews using earth-moving machinery to cover exposed parts of the bases with protective layers of regolith. Space transporters and personnel carriers were being readied to be brought back to Earth. It was evidently dawning on people in various places that life at the bottom of a deep gravity well could soon become distinctly hazardous.

“Have you ever heard of the Carolina Bays?” John asked Keene across a paper-strewn table in the lab after they had watched the latest news update on one of the terminal screens. All of the scientists had returned on time. There had been little talk among them.

“Sounds like a foxhunt somewhere,” Colby Greene murmured without looking up from what he was doing.

“No. What are they?” Keene asked.

“A lot of elliptical depressions in the ground and offshore all the way from New Jersey to Florida but mainly in the Carolinas—thousands of them; over a million by some counts if you include all the smaller ones. They’re all aligned in parallel from northwest to southeast, with a raised rim at the southern end. You get similar things in other places around the world too. They have to be from bombardments by huge meteorite swarms. And they’re recent—a few thousand years.”

Keene tossed down his pen and looked back sourly. “Well, that’s just great to know now. Where were you guys a couple of weeks ago and in the years before that when the Kronians needed some support?”

“That’s not really fair, Lan,” Charlie Hu said, turning from the wall board. “John was one of the people trying to get us into the Washington thing. We were cut out.”

Keene nodded tiredly. “You’re right. I take it back. Sorry, John. I guess we’re all a bit edgier than we think.”

“Forget it,” John told him.

Cavan called around lunchtime to report what he had, using the landline connection from Washington and a personal encryption code for security, since regular communications channels were getting erratic. Keene talked to him in an empty office.

“This character Queal that Voler seems to know is with Air Force Intelligence, so I was able to get a couple of things from nameless friends at my former employer that I remember so fondly,” Cavan said. “He’s involved with high-level security at Space Command, which gives him connections. A look at message traffic over the past forty-eight hours turns up a hive of activity between Queal’s office and a section of the Pentagon that handles FAST operations, headed by a Colonel Winter. And Winter turns out to be the person that Beckerson was visiting at the Pentagon the night before last, when you were at the White House meeting. In fact, it seems that Beckerson was instrumental in getting Winter the position.”

“Interesting,” Keene pronounced. The Facilities Security Teams were the Air Force’s assault and infiltration units, trained for the penetration of air bases, launch sites, and other installations in the event of seizure by terrorists or other such situations. Not only did Keene’s suspicion of something being planned that involved Voler appear to be well founded, but now it was beginning to look as if the Vice President might be part of it too.

“It gets more interesting,” Cavan said. “As of this morning, your man Hixson at Goddard has gone missing too. Now that strikes me as strange, seeing as how he’s supposed to be near the center of a crisis situation. So what do you make of that?”

“Something extreme, and sometime soon,” Keene replied. “Any ideas?”

“Not really,” Cavan confessed. “One thought I had was that they could be fixing to grab themselves a ready-equipped bolt-hole somewhere deep and safe, but it didn’t add up. Voler would have no trouble getting onto the official lists anyway.”

“Maybe they’ve glimpsed what’s coming and prefer to control their own private guns,” Keene suggested.

“Will it really be as bad as that, Landen?”

“Afraid so. Worse than anything you’ll hear tonight. If you get a chance to get on a list for one of those deep shelters yourself, go for it.”

Cavan nodded slowly and somberly. “And what about yourself?”

“I’m not sure where I go after the job’s done here, Leo. Maybe back to Texas to help Marvin with whatever can be done there.”

“The Kronians lift off tomorrow morning. You should have gone with them. They would have found you a place, I’m sure.”

“Gallian offered me one. There were things to be done that I couldn’t leave.”

Cavan shook his head. “You are aware that you’re crazy, I hope, Landen?”

Keene snorted. “First Alicia, now me? It must be you, Leo. You just attract crazies. That’s what it is.”

Something exploded in the upper atmosphere above Mali, showering debris over the western Sahara and heard from Upper Volta to customs posts on the southern Algerian border. Another breakup occurred over the Sinkiang province in Central Asia, where a hysterical surveyor on a road-building project described in a phoned interview cabins and trucks at a construction camp being set ablaze, and fleeing workers cut down in a rain of red-hot fragments. In Western Australia and parts of Indonesia, red, ferruginous dust was coming down out of the sky and turning rivers and lakes the color of blood. Herd animals from Africa’s veldts to the Canadian tundra were seen moving in huge, restless, undirected surges, and swarms of birds everywhere, numbering millions, fluttered agitatedly in the trees long into the night.

Not just America but practically the entire world was watching or listening when President Hayer at last went on the air from the White House to acknowledge officially what most people by now were sensing. Grave-faced leaders of Congress flanked him on either side, along with defense chiefs and scientific advisors. Celia Hayer stood a little back and to one side with their two young children, a son and a daughter.