Worlds in Chaos

by James P. Hogan

  “We’ve got this launch coming up. I haven’t been following all the details.”

  “He received a call recently to confirm that he was interested in participating. But the call didn’t come from anyone at Coast-to-Coast. It was from a woman called Maria Hutchill, who had gotten wind of their intention. Does that name mean anything to you, Landen?”

  Keene felt unease and let it show. “Leo, this makes me nervous. I thought SICA’s business was supposed to be national science policy. But it seems we can’t mail a letter without you knowing about it. It makes me feel really glad that you’re on my side. . . . At least, I hope you are.”

  “I told you, Landen, we’re all spies now. It’s a tacky world. Science has been taken over by the mentalities that run everything else. The only way to feel secure is to know everyone else’s secrets and think they don’t know yours.”

  “I get by okay just managing my own business,” Keene said.

  “But you’re not neurotic. You had the sense to get out.”

  “If you say so. Anyhow who’s this Maria . . .”

  “Hutchill. She’s effectively Herbert Voler’s second in command at Yale.” Keene’s eyebrows lifted at the mention again of his former wife’s present husband. Now he was all attention. Cavan went on, “Voler has emerged as the coordinator of the campaign to discredit the Kronians. The verdict is political and has already been decided, but the case for the jury needs to be made to look scientific.”

  Keene stared hard at the image on the screen. “Did you guess that this would happen, Leo? Was that why you came to me?”

  “It seemed fairly certain early on that Voler would be involved, yes,” Cavan admitted. “The job dovetails well with his own personal agenda.”

  Keene nodded without needing to be told what Cavan meant. Voler’s credentials and professional ambitions had made him the ideal for Fey to turn to when Keene committed the great betrayal of turning his back on the prospects of social eminence and distinction in academia. Keene had suspected a certain bedazzlement on Fey’s part in that direction before he announced his decision, but he hadn’t made an issue of it since his guess had been that she wouldn’t be around for too much longer after that in any case. Voler’s sights at that time had been set on becoming Director of Observational Astronomy at NASA, which meant running all their ground-based, orbiting, and lunar observatories. The position was coveted by several notable figures in the academic world, and success in the current task of defeating the Kronian mission would significantly improve his chances.

  “Have you been keeping track of him over the years since your paths crossed?” Cavan inquired.

  “Oh, come on, Leo,” Keene snorted. “Why should I have? You know I got out of all that. I’ve got better things to do than play the jealous, stalking ex. In any case, I wasn’t jealous.”

  “His pet scheme that he’s been trying to get Congressional action on is for a new federal overseeing agency to coordinate all major research in government, the academic centers, and major industrial labs,” Cavan said. “With himself chairing the supervisory board, of course.”

  “Of course,” Keene agreed sarcastically. “We really need another one.”

  “Ah, yes. But the line he’s pushing is that science has been getting sloppy, letting in New Age and Mother-Earth mystics, and what’s needed is an office with clout that can clean up the faith and reinstate proper discipline. He’s got the ear of a lot of people with problems they can blame on deteriorating scientific standards. So you can see what an opportunity this Kronian situation is for him to show everyone he’s the man for the job. And it would be particularly valuable to him at the present time, in view of his bid to become NASA’s astronomy supremo. He has the support of the academics, but there are other rivals that many of the scientists within NASA itself would prefer—in JPL, for example.”

  Keene nodded. “I heard something about that from Salio. So where does this call to him from Maria . . . Hutchill come into it?” he asked again.

  “She’s a disciple in the cause,” Cavan replied. “If Herbert makes it big-time, she flies high too. I just happen to have a recording of the call. . . .” Keene shook his head but said nothing.

  The screen split vertically to show Salio on one side, and a woman speaking in front of a background of bookshelves and part of a window on the other. Showing just his mop of black hair and heavy-rimmed spectacles, with no jeans or cowboy boots to offset the image, Salio looked even more the student than when Keene had met him. Hutchill was probably in her thirties, a little on the plump side with rounded features, and short, unpretentiously cut hair. Her eyes had a sharp look, however, and her voice was firmer than her appearance would have suggested. Keene sensed a potential antagonism being consciously kept under restraint.

  “Dr. Salio?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope I’m not calling at a bad time. Do you have a few minutes?”

  “Not if it’s insurance, siding, or you want to lend me money.”

  Hutchill forced a smile. “No, I’m not selling anything. My name is Dr. Hutchill, from the Department of Astronomy at Yale. It’s in connection with the plan to put you on the show with Coast-to-Coast.”

  Salio looked more interested. “Well, it’s not exactly firm yet.”

  “Yes, I understand that. What I’m concerned with is getting an idea of the probable content to assess its suitability.”

  “Oh . . . okay. What would you like to know?”

  “Note how she’s giving the impression of being connected with the show as if she’s some kind of official advisor,” Cavan put in from his side of the screen.

  “Yes, I did pick that up,” Keene replied.

  The conversation opened with a trading of views on theories of the formation and stability of the Solar System. Salio was candid in the way he had been with Keene, maintaining a humorous note and declining to be unduly deferential. Eventually, they closed over the matter of comets originating from Jupiter. Hutchill’s manner became more penetrating. The issue, basically, was whether the shower of new comets that had been born with Athena provided adequate evidence that the previously existing short-period comets—the ones with aphelia showing a statistical clustering at the distance of Jupiter’s orbit—had originated in a similar episode involving Venus. Salio’s answer was, sure they did. You didn’t need the other mechanisms that been speculated about over the years and could throw them away. Hutchill was determined to see them as exceptions.

  “There simply aren’t grounds for making such a sweeping generalization on the basis of an event that has been observed only once,” she insisted. “You’re ignoring the transfer of long-period comets to short-period trajectories by perturbation, which is still the dominant process on any significant time scale.”

  Salio grinned, evidently having expected it. “That’s what the textbooks say,” he agreed. “But when has it been observed even once? I can point you to a string of papers going back to before 1900 which show that such a mechanism isn’t viable. It’s a myth that has been exposed now for well over a hundred years.”

  Displeasure showed through Hutchill’s demeanor for the first time. “I think I’d advise caution before dismissing something that’s so widely accepted,” she said.

  “But if acceptance were the thing to go by, then a popular but wrong theory could never be changed,” Salio pointed out. “Let’s try plausibility instead. All the estimates that I’ve seen agree that the probability of Jupiter deflecting incoming comets from vast distances on parabolic orbits to an elliptical one is about one in a hundred thousand. So that’s the ratio of short-period to long-period that you ought to get. In fact what you have is close to sixteen percent. The number of long-periods is far too small. How many comets are there in the Jupiter family—about seventy? And the typical lifetime would be what . . . four thousand years?”

  “Hmm. . . . Maybe.”

  “Let’s take that figure, then, and suppose that Jupiter has to replenish them by capturing
long-period arrivals at the rate of one in a hundred thousand. To give seventy in four thousand years would require seven million long-period arrivals, which works out at seventeen-hundred-fifty a year, or five every day. Allowing for the transit time in and out of the Solar System would give us about nine thousand present in the sky by my calculations, of which let’s say half would be brighter than average. A pretty spectacular sky.” He shrugged and waved a hand, seemingly enjoying himself. “So where are they? And then you’ve got the problem that all of the short-periods orbit the Sun in the same direction as the planets, as they should if they came from Jupiter. But by capture, some should be retrograde—in theory half of them. You see, the numbers just don’t work out.”

  “Sufficient long-term comets can be produced by periodic disturbances of the Oort Cloud, as I’m sure you’re aware,” Hutchill said.

  Cavan interjected, “It’s the same as what I’m supposed to be doing with the Kronians. She’s leading him on to sound out his arguments. The idea is to have one of their own people on the show as well, ready to take him on in a debate.”

  “She looks like she might be getting more of a debate than she expected,” Keene commented. “This guy’s good.”

  On the screen, Salio’s grin had broadened. “What Oort Cloud?” he challenged. “It’s never been actually observed, has it? And it’s supposed to extend maybe halfway to Centauri. Comets from interstellar distances would arrive on wide hyperbolic orbits. The short-period comets that they’re supposed to turn into don’t exhibit the distribution of orbits and inclinations you’d expect from an all-sky parent population.”

  “I wasn’t referring to short-period,” Hutchill said shortly. “They are postulated as coming from the Kuiper Belt, near the planetary plane.”

  “Postulated,” Salio echoed. “You’ve still got the problem of velocity mismatch, which tells against capture. Whatever way you look at it, the number of short-periods is still far too high.”

  “Dark matter in the galactic disk would put more of them onto an injection trajectory,” Hutchill said.

  Salio’s face registered delight. “So now we have an unobserved Oort Cloud and a postulated Kuiper Belt that’s influenced by invisible dark matter. And even if all of them existed, they wouldn’t produce the distribution and prograde consistency that we see. Yet what the Kronians are proposing fits all the facts without any inventions. All you have to do is throw out some ideas you’ve grown up with. So isn’t it time we changed the textbooks?”

  The rest of the exchange went into more details that didn’t change the essentials. Hutchill ended by thanking Salio for his time and hanging up visibly disturbed.

  “Interesting,” Keene pronounced when Cavan had expanded back to fill the screen. “It’s going to be quite a show. Are they just going to let it go, do you think? She obviously wasn’t happy. What can they do?”

  “All I’m going to say at this point is, don’t underestimate anything,” Cavan replied. “And that was really why I called. Your man is bright and knows his stuff, Landen, but he’s too trusting. Maybe it’s just his way of telling the world that he has nothing to hide, but it’s giving the opposition a lot of free information. The Kronians make the same mistake consistently.”

  “You want me to talk to him?” Keene asked.

  “Precisely. I can’t intervene—you know my situation. But someone should wise him up a little on the ways of the world. In particular, caution him on who he talks to and how much he says to people he doesn’t know. If he’s going to take on the big guys in front of a couple of hundred million people, he needs to learn something about the rules.”

  But then Keene became embroiled in last-minute details connected with the impending space shot, and somehow he never did get around to calling Salio before the day arrived for the launch.

  15

  The coverage that the San Saucillo launch received, and the distances over which throngs came to join in the protest, suggested coordination on a national scale. By early morning, the site was already besieged by crowds disgorged from cars, trucks, and campers that had been arriving all night. Tents and sunshades had been set up, several bands were in action, and the atmosphere would have approached that of a rock festival were it not for the angry undertones and the cordon of state and county police and vehicles maintaining a perimeter. Amspace security reported that the approach by road was problematical, and the sheriff was calling on the company to act with minimum provocation. Accordingly, Keene and Vicki were directed to the Kingsville plant to join the rest of the flight complement who were not already at the launch site, and lifted out by helicopter.

  Keene looked down somber-faced as the administration and assembly buildings of the San Saucillo site came into view ahead. The launch area itself was situated two miles farther west, at the far end of the landing field with its two vehicle transporter tracks running along one side. Although some problems had been reported with groups trying to breach the security fence marking the two-mile safety zone south, west, and north of the pad area, the crowds were mainly concentrated around the east end of the complex and its approach road. As the helicopter descended, a ripple of hand-waving and gesturing followed it among the upturned faces below. In some places, signs that were being displayed were turned to point upward, although it was impossible to make out what they said. The pilot commenced a pattern of evasive weaving.

  “What’s happening?” Vicki asked tensely from her seat next to Keene.

  “Just a routine precaution. It isn’t always like this, you know. You just picked a bad day for your first space hop.”

  “The story of my life. It never fails.”

  They landed among an assortment of helicopters and small aircraft on the concrete apron in front of the control building at the end of the landing field. A raucous cadence of several thousand voices chanting in unison reached them from the far side of the main gate and the perimeter fence as they boarded the bus waiting to take them to the assembly and flight preparation area. There was a little under three hours to go before the scheduled launch time.

  In one of the admin buildings they met the others who would be going. There were twelve in all: the regular test crew of three, expanded to include Wally Lomack and another engineer from the design team named Tim; Keene and Vicki; and the five winners of the Amspace lottery. They were: Milton Clowes, the financial vice president; Alice Myers from one of the secretarial offices, already uncontrollably jittery—she said the only reason she was doing it was to keep face with her three teenage children; Les Urkin’s assistant, Jenny Grewe—much to the chagrin of Les, who had missed by one number; Phil Forely from marketing; and a new hire to the Navigation Systems Group, Sid Vance, who was barely out of college and had been with the firm less than a month. All of the five, like Vicki, would be making their first trip into space.

  After changing from regular clothes into flight suits and taking time for a snack, they met with representatives from the mission management team for a final briefing and update. Weather conditions were good at the downrange emergency abort sites in Florida and Algeria, and a “Go” was expected. Demonstrators on the north side of the pads had attempted to compromise the launch by crossing the boundary river in boats, but were being contained by police landed from choppers. The group went back out to the bus and left the main complex to be driven along the edge of the airfield, beside the tracks that carried the heavy vehicle-transporter platforms to the pad area.

  For the most part they were quiet as the spires of silver and white ahead loomed closer and taller. By the time they arrived and climbed out from the bus, service trucks and other vehicles were beginning to pick up and withdraw. Ground crew conducted them to the access elevator and across the entry bridge when they emerged a hundred feet above the ground. Minutes later, they were securing themselves into harnesses to settle down for what Keene knew from previous experiences could be the Long Wait—although the latest update was that they were still on schedule. The ground crew who had come ab
oard to make final checks left the cabin, and the lock was closed. TV shots from outside showed the last vehicles filling up and departing.

  In the forward stations, the captain and flight engineer exchanged prelaunch jargon and offhand remarks with ground control. Farther back and below, in the passenger section of the cabin, the first-timers cracked nervous inanities to show they weren’t nervous. Beside Keene, Vicki looked around the cramped surroundings of bulkheads, control panels, equipment racks, and cabling. A whirr of machinery sounded through the structure, followed by the clunk of a hatch closing somewhere. “We need your seven-dee markoff,” a voice said from a speaker up front.

  “Roger,” the captain replied. “We have, ah, seven-oh-ten, nineteen-zero-four, and . . . four-six showing on two and five-one on ten.”

  “Okay, gotcha.”

  “And how’s it going with the Oilers and the Bears? Any news?”

  “Let’s see . . . last we had was Oilers ahead by six points.”

  “Yeah, right-on!”

  “Guys!” Vicki breathed.

  Keene grinned. “Life’s great once you weaken.”

  “I think some of it must be rubbing off. I mean, what am I doing here, Lan? You let them strap you to the top of a ten-story bomb that nobody who knows what’s going on will stay within two miles of. . . . Is that the kind of behavior that would normally qualify as sane?”

  “Women!” Keene threw back. He made an appealing gesture to Wally, strapped in farther across, who had heard and was smiling. “For years she gives me a hard time about wanting to come on a mission. Now I’m getting one for bringing her. What does a guy do?”

  The captain’s voice came over the internal address speaker. “Attention, folks. We’ve had a slight hold because of the trouble on the north perimeter, but things seem to be under control there now. We’re looking at a little over fifteen minutes. The skies are pretty clear across most of North Africa and Asia. We should get some good views.”