Keene didn’t want this to degenerate into an airing of suspicions they had all heard before. There were vaster issues to be focusing on. “Look,” he said, raising both his hands. “Can we just put all this aside in our minds for a minute? These things are trivial compared to what we should be talking about. What we should be talking about concerns all of us. . . .” He gave the mood a second or two to shift. “It isn’t just the Kronians who are saying that Earth has undergone major cataclysms in its past from encounters with other astronomical objects. Scars and upheavals written all over the surface of this planet and its moon say it. Abundant records of violent mass extinctions say it. Evidence of sudden climatic changes and polar shifts say it. And records preserved from cultures all over the world say that it has happened within recorded human history. Traditionally, they’ve been dismissed as myths and legends, but they show too much corroboration to be coincidental. The facts have been there for centuries, but for the most part we’ve remained collectively blind to what they’ve been telling us. Athena is telling us that we can’t risk that kind of blindness any longer.”
“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 termin
al 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.
Keene nodded. “But I’ve got too much going on right now. In any case, I need my own space.”
Cavan indicated the upward direction with a motion of his head. “You mean there isn’t enough for you out there?” He studied Keene for a few seconds, swirling his glass. “Are you sure you’re not keeping your options open until you see how the land lies with that other lady you’ve had hovering on the fringes of your life for a while?” Keene frowned at him, perplexed. “The one who’d be a natural for the lead in a Queen-of-Sheba movie,” Cavan hinted.
Keene stared. “My God! Are you talking about Sariena?”
“I am, of course. Why act surprised?”
“What on earth makes you think that?”
“Excitement. Something different. The allure of the alien and unknown.” Cavan’s talonlike hands broke apart a bread roll and commenced buttering one of the pieces. “A perfectly understandable reaction, Landen—especially for somebody of your adventurous disposition. I mean, you’ve been in communication since before the Osiris left Saturn.” He paused, glanced up as if to be sure Keene was listening, and then went on, making his voice casual. “I could see your point, after all. She really is stunning. Everyone I talked to thought so when we were with the Kronians last night.”
“What?” It hit Keene only then that this was Cavan’s strange way of leading around to the subject he had wanted to discuss. And it had worked. Keene couldn’t deny that his first reaction was a twinge of resentment. “You’ve met her already?”
The meals arrived then, and Keene was able to let his surprise abate while plates and dishes were positioned, covers removed, and the glasses refilled. Having had his fun, Cavan became more serious. “I was at another dinner on Friday: the official White House reception for the Kronians—to be introduced to my ‘marks,’ for want of a better word.” He eyed Keene suggestively for a moment, as if inviting a response. Keene waited. Cavan explained, “The department has come up with a new angle on what an investigator does. Now, it appears, I’m supposed to cultivate the confidence of our guests of state, the purpose being to spy on them. It’s getting to be a tacky world that we live in, isn’t it, Landen?”
Unable to make anything of this so far, Keene merely motioned for him to continue.
“I’m one of several persons who have been assigned positions as official host representatives—tour guides, if you will—who will have constant contact with the Kronians. Our brief is to get close to them in order to get as much advance information as we can to help our own negotiators shoot them down.” Keene’s hand stopped with his fork halfway to his mouth. Cavan nodded somberly. “It’s a nonstarter, Landen. A policy ruling has already been made that Earth isn’t buying the Kronian line. Our side’s only interest is
to discredit the whole business and get it out of the public limelight as quickly as possible.” For the moment, Keene was too stunned to do more than stare. He looked down at his plate and found that suddenly he didn’t feel so hungry anymore. Cavan added after a few seconds, “Sorry if I’ve spoiled your dinner. The tab’s on me, if that helps.”
There was a silence. Finally, Keene said, “What’s going on, Leo? Are they all blind or something?”
“It’s not so much a case of being blind as of not wanting to see,” Cavan replied over his soup. “You know the way things work in this business. The academic establishment sees the Kronians as invaders of its turf and a huge potential threat to traditional funding—which has been thinned down in recent years in any case. Government science sold out long ago to become an instrument for justifying government policy, and nobody on the Hill wants to talk about the expense. For the private sector the investment would be colossal, and the return on it just isn’t there. That’s why the space program was shifted to a lower gear in the first place.”
Keene shook his head disbelievingly. “One day, none of that’s going to matter. This is something we can’t afford not to do. I mean, we’re not talking about selling laundry detergent here, Leo. Maybe we have to learn something from the Kronians. The know-how and the ability is there, and it’s something that needs to be done. So you forget all the shopkeeper economics, and you just do it.”
“Logical enough, and eminently sensible,” Cavan agreed. “But the powers who run things here can’t think like that.”
It didn’t need to be spelled out further. Keene stared at his glass and sighed. “So what’s the line going to be? The one we’ve been hearing for a while: The whole Kronian venture was ill-conceived from the start; imagining that a society could function viably at that kind of distance was ridiculous all along . . . ?”
Worlds in Chaos Page 6
