Worlds in Chaos

by James P. Hogan

  Cavan was already nodding. “And now they’re waking up to reality and finding themselves overextended,” he completed. “This story about supercomets and the end of the world is a concoction dreamed up to exploit the Athena event and milk support from Earth’s governments. That’s our line. And naturally the establishment’s scientific big guns will have their act coordinated to back it. We wouldn’t want to let down the people who ladle out the honors and write the checks, after all, now, would we?” Cavan spooned the last of his soup into his mouth—thin and straight, sparing on the lips—and watched, seemingly until Keene was just recovering sufficiently to tackle his food again. Then he added, “One of the big guns they’ll be wheeling up is a certain professor of astron-omy and faculty head at Yale, recently nominated for the presidency of the International Astronomical Union. I wouldn’t imagine he needs any introduction.”

  “You don’t mean Voler?”

  “I do, of course.”

  Keene’s fork dropped slowly back to his plate. For Herbert Voler was the paragon of perfection that his own former wife, Fey, had fled to and later married when Keene confounded her social ambitions by abandoning the prospect of scholastic accolades to return to the grubby world of engineering.

  “I’m not quite sure how that might be relevant at this stage,” Cavan confessed. “But conceivably the situation could take a turn whereby the social connection offers possibilities unavailable in the purely formal context. In any case, it was an option that would apply to nobody else, so my first thought was to approach you.”

  Keene made an inviting motion with his free hand. “Approach me for what, Leo? You still haven’t told me what this is all about.”

  “Let me first give you an idea of how they intend playing it,” Cavan suggested. “Then it will be clearer. The softening-up program to condition the public has already been going on for a while. Did you see your friend Voler on TV yesterday?”

  “No, I have been kind of busy, as you pointed out. What was this?”

  “He gave a talk at Columbia, ridiculing the claims about all those ancient records. . . . But it was planned months ago to coincide with the Kronians’ arrival.” Cavan produced a compad from his jacket pocket. “Let’s watch him.” He activated the unit, fiddled with commands to retrieve a stored playback from the net, then turned it the right way around for Keene to see and passed it across. Keene’s features remained neutral as he gazed at the familiar figure.

  Voler was fortyish, maybe—on the young side for the titles and credentials that he was able to brandish. He had a full head of black hair styled collar-length like a media celebrity, and a tanned complexion which with his pugnacious jaw emphasized a strong set of white teeth that his mobile features put to good effect, constantly splitting into broad smiles and grimaces. To Keene, he had always come across as a little too smooth and slick for a figurehead of academic excellence—but then, perhaps such qualities helped the political image equally necessary to attaining the rarified heights. Keene could have seen him as a pushy prosecution counsel, maybe, or a hustler on Wall Street. Behind him on the screen was a chart carrying names of planets and ancient deities, presumably referred to earlier. Keene turned the volume up just enough to avoid being an annoyance to nearby tables.

  “ . . . four ways in which the same legend could come to be found among widely separated cultures. One, Common Observation: all of the cultures witnessed a common event and interpreted it in a similar way. Two, Diffusion: the legend originated in one place but traveled to others with the wanderings of humankind. Three, Commonality of Psychology: Humans everywhere are so alike that their brains create similar legends reflecting common hopes and fears. And Four, Coincidence.” Voler paused, grasping the podium, and surveyed his audience. “I think everyone would agree with me that we can reasonably discard the last. And we simply don’t know enough to propose number three, Common Psychology, with any confidence—although in my view it seems unlikely.” Due court having been paid to reasonableness and modesty, the focus narrowed to the brass tacks. Voler’s confident smile broadened, stopping just short of open derisiveness. “The Kronians, of course, are saying that we are therefore forced to accept the Common Observation hypothesis, as if it were the only alternative. But in this they are surely dismissing far too casually—one hopes in their impetuousness—the second possibility, namely that as various peoples dispersed across the globe, they took their myths and legends with them, just as they did their languages, their religions, and their technical skills. . . .”

  “You can see what the game plan is,” Cavan broke in from across the table. “The Kronians will be projected into roles of sincere but misguided children. After a few days of recuperation from the voyage, they’ll be taken on a whistle-stop tour of some selected spots around Earth. None of them can remember much of Earth, and some were never here at all. So we’ll see pictures of them gaping at the Grand Canyon and the Amazon, or gawking like tourists in London and Paris, with chaperones like myself pointing out this and explaining that. Earth will have been magnanimous; Earth will have been accommodating. But you see what it will do for their image. They arrive here naive, and we have to acquaint them with reality. The same image will carry over to what the world will perceive as the science, and their case won’t have a prayer.”

  By now, Voler was expounding on details of various human migrations. Keene had heard enough and snapped the unit off. “And what about the evidence written all over the surface of this planet?” he demanded. “None of that counts?” He meant the anomalies in the geological, fossil, and climatic records—all independent of anything that any humans of long ago had to say. There were such things as marks of sudden sea level changes, in some cases measuring hundreds of feet, found the world over; agricultural terraces close to sea level when they were cultivated, now disappearing under the snow line eighteen thousand feet up in the Andes; the remains of millions of animals and trees, torn to pieces and broken, found piled in caves and rock fissures from Europe to China and across the Arctic, in some places forming practically the entirety of islands off northern Siberia; huge herds of mammoths, buffalo, horse, camel, hippopotamus, and other beasts wiped out abruptly a thousand miles or more from any vegetation growing today that could support them. And all in the middle of that same mysterious millennium that the writings of old had chronicled. Was all that to be ignored?

  “They’ll stay away from all that if they can,” Cavan said. “The Kronians make some good points, and many scientists outside the political-academic orthodoxy are siding with them. Nobody argues much anymore that terrestrial catastrophes have happened. Where they’ll try and draw the line is with planetary catastrophes—that Venus could have been an earlier Athena. If that’s allowed, then the whole foundation of the economic power structure as we know it would have to change, which in effect is what the Kronians are saying. But of course that would be unacceptable. So the line will be to discredit the Kronian arguments by any means until Athena has disappeared out of the Solar System and been forgotten—apart from as an anomaly that will generate Ph.D. theses for years—and then we’ll all be able to get back to the safe, comfortable lives that we know.”

  Finally, Cavan took back the compad. He went on, “The reason I wanted to talk to you before you meet them tomorrow, Landen, is that the Kronians need to be made aware of this. But I can hardly bring it up in my position. You, on the other hand, are not saddled with having to wear an official hat. And being in touch with the Kronians already . . .” He left the obvious unsaid.

  “Sure, I’ll handle it,” Keene agreed. There really wasn’t anything to have to think about. He picked up his knife but sat toying with it.

  “I was sure you would,” Cavan said. He paused and refilled Keene’s glass. “Oh, do stop staring and try some dinner, Landen. You’ve come all the way from Texas for it, and it looks so delicious.”

  9

  For a desk and a base to work from in the Washington area, Keene rented space at an agency called
Information and Office Services. Shirley, who ran the facility and acted for him when he was away, had arranged several Monday appointments from the calls that had begun coming in on Friday. The first was not until 10:00, and Keene spent the first part of the morning returning other calls that Shirley had listed. One was to a David Salio, who described himself as a planetary scientist at the Aerospace Sciences Institute in Houston, which Keene had visited on occasion. The Kronians had been getting attention in the Web news groups and independent media of many like Salio who were not among the circle of academic and government scientists fearful of money being diverted into the space corporations. Salio had favored the young-planet theory of Venus for some time and possesed a sizable collection of facts and data supporting it from modern-day space and scientific researches, independent of what ancient writings said. Athena was a clear warning that action had to be taken along the lines that the Kronians were calling for, and he wanted to know what he could do to help. Keene was immediately interested to hear more and suggested stopping by on his way back to Corpus Christi, which would be via Houston in any case. He would let Salio know when he had a firm return date.

  Next was somebody called Barney from one of the Washington-based news services, who had tracked Keene down through his connection with Amspace. “What, you’re in Washington now!” he exclaimed when Keene called. “Hey, never mind taping an interview over the phone. We’ll send a couple of guys over to the hotel. It works for a better atmosphere. How would four o’clock suit? It’ll still be going out by this evening. Don’t worry, we do it all the time. No problem.”

  Keene checked with his schedule and agreed. A couple of other concerns were happy to tape from the hotel, and a science magazine with a local office arranged to send a feature writer over that evening, after the TV taping. Keene spent some time confirming and fixing more appointments for the next two days that he would be in town, then left for his first meeting that day, which was with one of the senators for Texas in an office in the Senate Building.

  In a TV interview over the weekend, the senator had told the reporter of the need to bring companies like Amspace to heel and enforce a greater compliance with “social responsibility.” He explained to Keene that he had to talk that way in order to preserve an acceptable public image. “But I want the people at Amspace to know that they can count on me to be realistic too.” Which could be taken as a warning or a wink and a nod, but either way translated into: “Keep the contributions coming and pray.” Keene tried to broach issues that went beyond appeasing activist groups while at the same time keeping the corporations sweet, but made little impression. The senator lived in his own world.

  Lunch was with a documentary producer called Charles McLaren, whom Keene had known amiably for about two years. McLaren wondered if Friday’s event might resurrect the general nuclear-antinuclear controversy for a while and was thinking of putting together a fast tie-in for the public-affairs channels and newsnets. Would Keene be willing to act as a consultant again on short-call if they went ahead? Sure, Keene agreed. McLaren put accuracy before sensationalism and was meticulous in trying to get his facts right; Keene knew he could be sure of getting fair representation. But it was with weary assent. The discussion was pitched at helping a good technician do a job relating to a topic that was expected to be transient. There was no suggestion of a documentary to tell the world that it had come close to seeing the end of its civilization.

  By early afternoon, he was in the cocktail lounge of a hotel off Pennsylvania Avenue to meet one of the technical aides to President Hayer. He wanted Keene to convey unofficially back to the management of Amspace, and through them to other allied interests, that as a sop to domestic outcries and world opinion it might be necessary to pass a bill banning the launching of nuclear devices from U.S. territory by private corporations. But the message was to keep up the development effort because provision could be engineered for a repeal in circumstances deemed vital to national security—but not until after the presidential election next year. In fact, the defense agencies were stressing the Chinese threat and could probably be induced to channel in some discreet funding to compensate for the shorter-term inconveniences. The aide paused to assess Keene’s reaction, then asked, lowering his voice to impart a note of confidentiality, “Out of curiosity, what would be the chances of matching the kind of propulsion the Kronians have, say within five years—given a suitable financial incentive? The Air Force already has an eye on extending its activities to trans-lunar distances. I can tell you that they for one are particularly interested.”

  “Give me the top ten names in contained plasma dynamics, superconducting cryogenics, spontaneous vortex computational theory, and nuclear transition phases, get rid of all the political obstructionism, and you can have it in three,” was Keene’s answer.

  The aide looked intrigued. “Really? And you know who these people are?”

  “Sure I do. It’s my field.”

  “Just suppose, for argument’s sake, that we decided to try and get them to come over to work for us here, in the States. What do you think it would take? Is it something you might be able to help us organize?” The aide paused as if pondering a point of some delicacy. “I’m sure we could see fit to being . . . extremely generous.”

  “I’m not sure it’s something that we have options on anymore,” Keene replied. “They all moved to Saturn.”

  Keene grabbed a half hour to stop by at the agency and check on things with Shirley, then returned to the Sheraton to freshen up and change before the Kronian reception at seven. By that time he had consolidated his thoughts sufficiently to call Marvin Curtiss, Amspace’s president and CEO, to update him on the situation that Cavan had described the evening before, and Keene’s further impressions after his day in Washington. It was all pretty much in line with what Curtiss had been finding out independently.

  “It doesn’t look as if we’re going to be able to count on much support from the main contractors,” he told Keene from the hotel room’s terminal screen. “They’re taking the line that it isn’t the business of corporations to decide what’s scientifically true or not. That’s what we’ve got universities and national laboratories for.” He didn’t have to add that it also meant they could look forward to a continuation of low-risk contracts that referees from those same universities and laboratories would feel comfortable with and approve, and which wouldn’t frighten investors.

  “I don’t know, Marvin,” Keene sighed, tired after a long day. “How do you deal with it?”

  “Just keep saying what we’ve always said: that we believe the claims the Kronians are making deserve serious consideration, and everyone should forget their vested interests and try to be open-minded to what appear to be the facts.” That was what Keene had expected. If Curtiss weren’t a fighter, he would hardly have been running an operation like Amspace to begin with. Curtiss went on, “One thing we might try is getting Les working on organizing more voice and visibility for the scientists out there who have been taking a more independent stand—like this character Salio that you talked to. We need people like him.”

  “I’ve arranged to meet him on my way back,” Keene said.

  “Good. Find out what his story is and who else he talks to. Maybe we don’t have to let the establishment have a monopoly on the media.”

  “What about the political side?” Keene asked. “How much do you trust this talk about a defense loophole and Air Force money coming through the back door if that bill goes through?” That news hadn’t come as a total surprise to Curtiss, who had apparently heard something similar from another source.

  “If it happens, then fine, but I’ve always believed in insurance,” Curtiss answered. “I’ve been talking to the people here about bringing forward the schedule for getting Montemorelos operational.” He meant the backup launch and landing facility being constructed in the highlands not far south of the border—outside U.S. jurisdiction. “Not marginally, but making it our top priority.”

>   “That makes sense,” Keene agreed. “But it might only tide us over for a while. The Mexicans are still vulnerable to pressure from our side.”

  Curtiss nodded. “I know. Beyond that, we’re reviewing the options we’ve negotiated on possible sites farther from home.”

  “I think there’s some for lease at the original Tapapeque complex in Guatemala,” Keene said.

  “There is?”

  “So I heard around a month or two ago.”

  “We’ll look into it.” There was a blur in the foreground on the screen as Curtiss checked his watch. “I’m due for another appointment, Lan. It should be interesting meeting the Kronians tonight. Call me tomorrow and let me know how it went.”

  “I will,” Keene said. “Take care, Marvin.”

  Keene still had some time before the TV reporters were due. Out of curiosity, he scanned the news searcher for items relating to the Kronians and selected one of the current leaders, which turned out to be an NBC panel hookup to debate whether ancient sources constituted a valid basis for formulating scientific beliefs.

  “Absolutely not!” was the opinion of a speaker, captioned as Dr. William Ledden, an astronomer at the University of California. “Repeatable observations and measurements determine what is properly termed science. What writers of old manuscripts say happened, or think happened, or think ought to have happened simply has no place . . .” He waved a hand agitatedly, as if too exasperated to be capable of further coherent thought.

  A gray-haired woman, president of an archaeological society in Vancouver, agreed. “It has taken centuries to establish reliable methods and standards for disentangling fact from fancy. I agree with Dr. Ledden. This kind of thing will probably sell some Sunday supplements, and we’re going to be hearing a lot about it in the news, but it has no place in science.”

  “So you’re saying we should be good hosts and neighbors, but not get carried away by this,” the moderator checked sagely.