Worlds in Chaos (9 page)

“Exactly,” Lomack pronounced, nodding vigorously.

A dark-haired man who was sitting near the front raised a hand, then pitched in. “Phil Onslow,
Houston Chronicle
. Do we take it, then, that you endorse this idea that the Kronians have been pushing about Venus being a new planet?”

For a moment, Keene was surprised. He had assumed it was obvious. “Well . . . sure. It’s intimately connected with what we’re trying to say, and what yesterday’s demonstration was all about. Three and a half thousand years ago, the human race came close to being wiped out.”

“And if we buy that, you’re asking us to spend trillions of dollars,” Onslow persisted. “But isn’t it true that scientists have been refuting that claim for years?”

“Yeah, right,” Ricardo scoffed. “The same scientists who said that comets couldn’t be ejected by Jupiter, let alone a planet-size body. Then look what happened ten months ago. And they’re
still
saying it!”

“Not quite. They’re saying there’s no proof that it happened before,” someone pointed out.

“Then they’re still in as much a state of denial as they have been for years. That’s all you can say,” Keene answered.

What the Kronians had been trying to get accepted since before Athena’s appearance was that around the middle of the second millennium b.c., Earth experienced a close encounter with a giant comet. Its axis was shifted and its orbit changed, causing seas to empty and flow over continents, the crust to buckle into mountains, and opening rifts that spilled lavas as much as a mile deep across vast areas of the surface. Climates changed abruptly, bringing ice down upon grasslands and turning forests into desert; civilizations collapsed; animals perished in millions; entire species were exterminated. These, the Kronians maintained, were the events glimpsed by the Hebrew scriptures in their descriptions of the “plagues” inflicted on Egypt, along with the events recorded subsequently.

The “blood” that turned the lands and the rivers red, followed by rains of ash and burning rock and fire, were consistent with the proposition of Earth moving into the comet’s tail to be assailed by iron-bearing dust, then torrents of gravel and meteorites, and finally infusions of hydrocarbon gases that would ignite in an oxygen-laden atmosphere. Then came the enveloping darkness as the smoke and dust from a burning world blanketed out the sun. The same succession of events was described not only in writings from across the entire Middle East, but in legends handed down by the peoples of Iceland, Greenland, and India; from the islands of Polynesia to the steppes of Siberia; and places as far apart as Japan and Mexico, China and Peru. The accounts of shrieking hurricanes scouring the Earth and tides piling into mountains read the same in the Persian
Avesta
, the Indian
Vedas
, and the Mayan
Troano
as in
Exodus
, and were similarly narrated by the Maori, the Indonesian, the Laplander, and the Choctaw. And finally, the titanic electrical discharges between the comet’s head and parts of its deformed, writhing tail became clashes of celestial deities depicted virtually identically whether as the Biblical Lord battling Rahab, Zeus and Typhon of the Greeks, Isis and Seth of the Egyptians, the Babylonian Marduk and Tiamat, or the Hindu Shiva or Vishnu putting down the serpent.

“I don’t think you’re being fair,” Onslow objected. “A lot of scientists now agree that something extraordinary occurred around that time. A close flyby by a large comet is proposed in a number of models. But Venus is much bigger than any comet.”

“Any comet seen in recent times, anyway,” Joe said.

“It’s a lot like Athena could look three and a half thousand years from now if it lost its tail,” Lomack suggested.

The mood of the room pivoted on an edge. The three just back from space were heroes for the day, and the journalists’ professional instincts were not to put them down. Onslow was still frowning but seemed disinclined to press his negative sentiments further. On the other hand, they had been heavily influenced by the official line heard over the years. Keene sensed a chance to bring them closer and perhaps win one or two of them around if the case could be put persuasively. He studied his clasped hands for a moment and looked up.

“You’re all media people. How do you refer to that thing out there in the sky that’s not the same as anything we’ve seen before? One of the most frequent descriptions I’ve seen over the past few months is ‘giant comet.’ Well, people in ancient times were no different, except they thought of celestial objects as gods. In the languages of race after race and culture after culture, the names of the gods they associated with these events turn out to be not only interchangeable with or identical to their word for ‘comet,’ but also the name that they applied to Venus.” Keene looked around. The room was noticeably stiller, eyes fixed on him.

“I hadn’t realized that,” a new voice said. “This is interesting.” Onslow busied himself noting something in his pad and didn’t comment.

Keene answered, “It is, isn’t it. And I’ll tell you something more that’s interesting. Old astronomic tables from places as far apart as Egypt, Sumeria, India, China, Mexico—and the accuracy of some of those tables wasn’t equaled until the nineteenth century—all show
four
visible planets, not five. And in each case, the missing planet is Venus.” He waited a few seconds for that to sink in. Here and there, heads were turning to glance at each other. He concluded, “They all added Venus at about the same time. They all showed it appearing as a comet. And they all described it losing its tail to evolve into a planet. So come on, guys. How much more do you want?”

Afterward, they all agreed that it had gone well. In the chat session that followed over refreshments, most of the questions conveyed genuine curiosity and interest to learn more. Keene felt more than satisfied with the way things had gone, and Harry Halloran was looking pleased. As the session was breaking up, Les Urkin returned from taking a call outside and drew Keene to one side.

“You’re still going up to D.C. tomorrow night, Lan, is that right?”

“I switched to an earlier flight,” Keene replied. “I’m meeting someone for dinner.”

“Good. The Kronians are having an informal reception at their suite in the Engleton on Monday evening. Gallian heard you’d be in town, and he wants you to know you’re invited. Want me to confirm? Or I can give you their number.”

“Sure, I’ll be there,” Keene said. “Let me call them, Les. I get a kick out of talking to them without any turnaround delay now. So now we get to meet them finally, eh?”

Things were looking better and better.

8

The next day, Sunday, Keene arrived at Washington’s Reagan National Airport around mid-afternoon, and caught a cab to a Sheraton hotel that he often used when in the area, overlooking the Potomac outside the city on the far side of Georgetown. After checking in, he called Cavan to confirm that everything was on schedule. That gave him a couple of hours to shower, change, and catch up on some of his backlogged work via the room terminal before Cavan was due to arrive.

Leo Cavan worked as an “investigator” in what was effectively an internal affairs department of a bureaucratic monstrosity called the Scientific and Industrial Coordination Agency, or SICA, charged with planning and overseeing the implementation of a national scientific research policy. Keene had gotten to know him when Keene was at General Atomic. Cavan had started out in the Air Force hoping for a life of travel and excitement, and ended up instead preparing quality control reports and cost analyses in an accounting office. When he put in for a transfer to Space Command to get a chance to go into orbit before he was too old, he was drafted to Washington to review regulations and procedures instead. He had never fit the role well in Keene’s experience, being too technically knowledgeable to project the ineptness normally expected from officialdom, and too ready to overlook transgressions of no consequence when his judgment so directed. The result was that the two of them had gotten along splendidly and remained friends after Keene’s exasperation with the politics of government-directed science returned him to the world of engineering to develop nuclear drives for Amspace.

Cavan had taken to him, Keene suspected, somewhat in the manner of a father figure seeking to live through a surrogate son the life he would have wished himself. He led a strange kind of double existence. Outwardly a diligent creature of the system, he apparently found a pernicious satisfaction in subverting that same system by leaking inside knowledge that might help its opponents and compensate its victims. It seemed to be his private way of getting even with the forces that throughout his own life had deceived and then entrapped him. He also had one of the oddest senses of humor that Keene had ever encountered.

The restaurant was at the rear of the hotel, looking out over lawns sloping down to the tree-shaded riverbank. Keene had found a window table and was sipping a Bushmills while watching a flotilla of ducks on inshore maneuvers, when Cavan appeared through the entrance from the lobby. He spotted Keene and came over. Keene stood to shake hands, and they sat down. A waiter came to the table to inquire if Cavan would like a drink, and Cavan settled for a glass of the house Chablis. “I assume you wouldn’t risk your reputation by fobbing us off with a bad one,” he told the waiter. “Or have the accountants taken over writing the wine lists these days, like everything else?”

Cavan couldn’t have been far away from retirement. Everything about him suggested having been fashioned for economy, as if over the years the idealizations of his profession had infused themselves and ultimately found physical expression in his being in the way that was supposed to be true of owners and dogs. He had thinning hair and a sparse frame, on which his plain, gray suit hung loosely, a thin nose and sharp chin formed from budgeted materials, and a bony, birdlike face that achieved its covering with a minimal outlay of skin. Even his tie was knotted with a tightness and precision that seemed to abhor extravagance of any kind. But the pale steely eyes gave the game away, alive and alert, all the time scanning for new mischief to wreak upon the world. Of his private life Keene knew practically nothing. He lived somewhere in the city with a Polish girlfriend called Alicia whom he described as crazy without ever having said why, although sounding as if they had been together for years.

Cavan had followed Friday’s event, of course, and added his own congratulations. He pressed for details that hadn’t appeared in the news coverage, enjoying immensely Keene’s descriptions of the spaceplane’s robotlike commander and the splutterings of the Air Force brass, and expressing approval that the media reactions were not all hostile. The wine arrived and was pronounced acceptable. For the dinner order, Keene had worked up enough appetite after traveling to try the prime rib and a half carafe of Sauvignon to go with it. Cavan settled for Dover sole. “And I see they’ve been keeping you busy since,” Cavan resumed when the waiter had left. “I saw that clip that Feld did with you while you were still up on the satellite, and then the press coverage of all of you together yesterday. You came over well there, Landen. That should give a lot of people something to think about.”

“I got the feeling that for once we were getting through,” Keene said. “You can say the same thing to reporters for months, spell out all the facts, and nothing will prise them away from the official line they’ve been given. But this time we got them listening.” Cavan nodded, but without seeming as gratified as Keene would have expected. Keene could only conclude that what Cavan had wanted to talk about offset the good news.

“And are you still finding time in all this for the ladyfriend?” Cavan inquired, evidently choosing not to go into it just at that moment. His eyes were twinkling.

“You mean Vicki?”

“Of course.”

Keene sighed. “Leo, you know very well we’re just business partners. And sure, over the years we’ve become good friends as well. Why do you keep trying to make something more out of it?”

“Well, it’s none of my business, I suppose, but a fellow at your stage of life could do worse than consider stabilizing things a little.” Cavan sipped his wine. “She has the young son, and does ad work, yes?” Probably through habit, Cavan always sought confirmations and cross-references of information, Keene had noticed. In another life Keene could picture him as a tax auditor.