The rookie lieutenant who was supervising the squad sounded off the final checklist items confirming that the clamp pins were secured, upper feed hoses drained, set to Open, and stowed, and the Feed Hatch Auto Override was returned to Disenabled. "Boosters ready for Condition Yellow deployment and secured," he reported to the chief who was overseeing the operation.
"We're through, Colonel," the chief advised Nyrom.
"Good. Stand down," Nyrom acknowledged.
"Good work, and a pretty fast time," the chief relayed to the lieutenant. "Okay, you can stand the men down."
"Thank you, sir . . . Squad, stand down. Okay, that's it. Good job, guys. Free time until sixteen hundred."
Nyrom watched the lieutenant turn away as two of the others beckoned him over about something. His name was Delucey, one of the intense and dedicated kind who takes everything seriously—good material to have in something like the SA. Terran-born, he had escaped from Earth in the final days as a kid along with his mother and been brought back by the Osiris with the group that had shuttled up from Mexico. The intenseness that he brought to the job reflected an escape to the Security Arm from the containment, both physically and psychologically, of regular Kronian life, which he unconsciously blamed for robbing him of a future on Earth. At least, that was what the psychiatric advisers had concluded, who suggested that a long-distance mission to Jupiter might help break down the connections. In fact, quite a high proportion of the SA recruits aboard the Trojan were either confused Terrans with repressed hankerings to return to Earth, or young malcontent Kronians who felt the system didn't recognize them adequately. Nyrom had surprised many with his readiness to accept them.
His wrist compad buzzed as he was casting an eye silently over the scene to satisfy himself that all was as Delucey had reported. He raised the unit toward his face to address it. "Nyrom."
"Captain Walsh here." It responded in voice-only. The wording was Walsh's way of indicating "family" business.
"Captain?"
"We have news from home."
"We're just about through here. I'll come on up."
"At your convenience, Colonel." The circuit cleared.
"Carry on, Chief," Nyrom instructed.
"Aye, aye, sir."
Nyrom left the hoist compartment and moved inboard via a transverse gallery, at the same time using the compad to call a capsule to the base of the spoke elevator going "up" to the Command Module. Touch-gliding in a series of slow lopes using feet and handrails, he navigated the labyrinth of passages and shafts to a circum-Hub corridor that brought him to the access point. The door was open and the capsule waiting. He entered, and less than a minute later the capsule was ascending from the Hub structure. Above his head through the double-glass wall as he traveled feet-first he had a view of the intricate spoke pivot mechanism at the Hub, and beyond the bulk of the ship, a panorama of stars wheeling slowly. Saturn was still bright in the foreground among them.
The spoke mechanism was ingenious, yes; but as with just about anything involving large moving parts, high stresses, and extremes of environment, it could be temperamental. Lubricants leaked and sublimed away into the space vacuum; pivot arms jammed; the ring when maximally extended could suddenly begin oscillating with complex resonances that rippled around the entire structure. He liked solutions that were solid-state and compact. The Yarbat AG arrays that they were trying out on the Aztec that had just left Saturn sounded like the right way to go about it. If they worked out okay, it would make the Trojan as obsolete and cumbersome by comparison as the Cutty Sark. Lieutenant Delucey's profile said that his mother was returning to Earth with the Aztec. That had been considered a factor in his favor when considering him for selection. His mother had told the people that she had worked with previously in the Academy on Dione about her worry over his long, withdrawn moods and detachment from things she had tried to interest him in. It was amazing how these things got around.
Nyrom could sympathize with the resentments and frustrations of the kind of people he had tried to muster. He himself had felt the gratification of having his profession and military skills valued back in the days when Earth was feared as a threat, and Kronia prepared to defend itself. But then he had found himself relegated to little more than a trainer of new recruits and administrator in a local police force when the perceived danger passed. For him, that had been a personal disappointment as well as a career setback. In many ways, as a boy growing up on Titan, and for a while on Iapetus, he had felt deprived in never having known life on Earth, which he pictured as vibrant and alive, filled with exciting places and different ways to spend a life. After his father was killed in a construction accident when Nyrom was too young to remember him, he had been raised by an Earth-born uncle, a former military engineer who had migrated to Kronia with his family from somewhere in the Middle East. The uncle had grown to despise war and the suffering it brought to guiltless victims, and come out to Saturn to get away from it and put his skills at the disposal of a better cause. But his nephew had been captivated by his tales of tank duels in the desert, of going out on stealthy infantry patrols at night, of antiaircraft missiles streaking skyward, and he had yearned inwardly for adventure and the exhilaration of competing to exert mastery without pretensions, apology, or disguise. Even with all the space-oriented activity and the exercises on barren moons, the Security Arm had seemed a poor substitute. And then for a while, when the tension with Earth grew, the promise had been flaunted at him . . . only to be snatched away.
Yes, he could sympathize very easily with those who thought they could be worth more in a system that was different from this.
Nyrom felt the pressure under his feet increasing as the capsule neared the ring and his body took on weight. He emerged into the Command Module walking normally and made his way past the Communications Room and Power Direction Center to the Control Deck. Walsh was by the watch console, talking with the First Officer. He saw Nyrom enter, murmured something to excuse himself, and nodded to indicate the door leading aft to the duty officers' day room. It was unoccupied. Nyrom closed the door behind them.
Gray-haired, crusty, square-jawed, and stocky, Walsh was a former brigadier general with the U.S. Army who had also been brought back by the Osiris. He had brought a lifetime of military experience that many felt the operations arm of the Space Operations Executive could use more of, and obviously he had not done badly for himself.
There had been some protests back on Titan at the proposal to put a Terran in command of an SOE vessel like the Trojan. One of the main objectors had been the other American, Cavan, which had seemed strange to Nyrom then, and he still didn't pretend to understand it. Why wouldn't a Terran, versed in Terran ways, want to see Terran influence expanded in Kronia? But the Triad had ruled against the protests, presumably to placate Valcroix and the Pragmatists in their demands for greater Terran representation in positions of prominence; and then, to appease Cavan and the protesters, they had sent Walsh far from Saturn and out of the way at this politically sensitive time. The more Nyrom saw of political compromise solutions that ended up appeasing nobody and antagonizing everyone, the more he liked the military's simple and straightforward ways of doing things.
Walsh checked the room's monitor panel to make sure that it had not been left with a microphone or recorder on, and then turned to face Nyrom across the table in the room's center, his knuckles resting lightly on the top. "I've received a confidential assessment from Acrobat. His reading of the situation is that it's not going to go through—not by a long way. So we can take it that Blue Moon is a virtual certainty. I'm authorizing you to advance your preparations accordingly."
Nyrom nodded. "Acrobat" was a reference to Ludwig Grasse. Valcroix's bill to amend the procedure for making appointments to the Directorates was about to come before the Congress, and the message meant that the inside word was it had little chance of passing. The news wasn't exactly a surprise. But the record could now be made to show that a constitutional attempt at r
eform had been rebuffed, and that was the kind of thing that tended to impress Kronians.
The eventuality had been anticipated, and of course there was a fallback plan. The Trojan's part in it depended on being able to persuade a significant number of the SA contingent to come over and throw their lot in with the covert Pragmatist group aboard the ship. That had been Nyrom's reason for seeking out the particular kinds of personnel profile that he had. But that had been about as far as anyone could go toward guaranteeing success, for obviously no actual intimation of intentions could be risked in advance. Hence, Nyrom could use all the time he could get now to begin sounding out the potential support. That was what he understood Walsh was telling him.
Nyrom felt a surge of excitement, the anticipation of action he had always dreamed about. And, if he was honest, relief. Only now did he admit to himself that he had been inwardly worried that the politicians would find some last-minute compromise. New horizons were beckoning, about to open up.
Walsh must have seen it on his face, and smiled thinly with a snort. "Just can't wait, can you, Birt?" he said.
"I envied you, you know, John. I'd always wanted to be a Terran. Suddenly it feels like going home."
"What, even for you?"
"Especially for me."
For, yes, at a time when critical policy decisions were being made that many had strong feelings about, it was understandable why Kronians, thinking the way they did, would send the Trojan with its military capability far out of the way to a place like Jupiter when its presence at Saturn could be problematical. And even more so if a goodly portion of those judged to be potentially supportive of the upstart power bid were arranged to be consigned away with it. Of course, Nyrom had seen what was going on when the selection committees pushed all those square pegs and oddballs at him.
But he had been watching and listening and learning to think like a Terran, not a Kronian. True, with the Trojan and its complement at Jupiter, life at this politically charged moment would be easier for those involved with calming the waters back at Kronia. But if, on the other hand, the Trojan wasn't going to Jupiter at all, then that could make it a very different matter indeed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
They called the band of survivors simply the "Tribe," for want of anything better. Nobody had lined them up for an exact count, but there seemed to be between forty and fifty souls, including numerous children. From the progress that Naarmegen was making in establishing a kind of pidgin that mixed their speech with parts of a South African dialect that he'd had some familiarity with and a smattering of English as seemed to suit the occasion, they called their settlement Joburg—obviously after the city that had once existed in the now-snowy region to the south.
The leader, Rakki, had led a small band who arrived from elsewhere and asserted their supremacy over an initial group who seemed to have numbered around a dozen. The rest had appeared in ones, twos, and odd groups since. Far from being among the elders of the assortment of still largely dazed and disoriented individuals who made up the Tribe, Rakki maintained his primacy through ruthlessness and sheer battling prowess despite his physical handicap—evidently the ruling currency of the times. Guesses put him in his mid or even lower teens. He himself was unable to give any account of his years, since for a time that the hapless inhabitants wandered among erupting landscapes and falling storms of fire, the notion of "year" had lost all meaning. Most astounding of all was his virtually total loss of all memories prior to the catastrophe, which seemed to be the case with all the younger people. Only a few of the oldest survivors seemed to possess any coherent recollections at all of the world that had once been.
* * *
"The best I can make of it is that it's some kind of mental defense mechanism," Beth said to Keene and Sariena as they stood by the landing-area-side windows in the OpComs Dome at Serengeti, watching the shuttle from the Varuna that had landed a short time previously being lowered to a horizontal position. The intermittently high winds and persistent ground tremors posed too much of a hazard to leave them standing vertically. The permanent pads to be built on the far side of what was currently the landing area would have silos.
The base was continuing to take shape, and Gallian and Charlie Hu had found time to come down to the surface at last. Keene and Sariena had come over from the now-finished mess facility to greet them. Beth was doing a valiant job as the mission's de facto psychologist and effective psychiatrist. "A collective amnesia is blocking out experiences that were too horrific to be retained consciously. They could have caused mental paralysis to the point of dysfunctionality. Survival needs had to come first."
"There were a lot of theories like that relating to the state of mind of humanity after the Venus catastrophes," Sariena said. "Repressed racial memories that found their expression in myths and religion."
Keene nodded. He'd heard suggestions himself that such buried traumas lay at the root of their reenactment in the senseless aerial bombardment holocausts of modern warfare, and twentieth-century terrors of nuclear annihilation, but had never known how far to believe it. It just seemed to him that the bulk of the human race never passed over any new way of wiping each other out at any opportunity. Or was that in itself another manifestation of what Sariena was talking about? If so, did the Kronians really stand a chance of ultimately producing anything different?
"This looks like them now," he said, staring out. A Scout carrier was emerging from the huddle of freight movers and forklifts around the shuttle. It turned and headed toward the Operations and Communications Dome.
Surprisingly, in view of the role that physical violence played in determining who would dominate, it was those of smaller stature among the survivors who seemed to have fared better. Presumably their lower minimum nutritional needs had given them the edge through the times when food had been all but nonexistent. From Maria Sanchez's observations, the newborns and infants were small by the standards that had applied previously, too. And similar things seemed to be happening among the strains of animals that were making a reappearance. Naarmegen's surveys had identified pygmy breeds of okapi, hog, eland, hyena, and another doglike species that he hadn't been able to identify, a number of them already showing adaptations to the cooling climate. Again, the animals that Rakki and a few other privileged individuals of the Tribe rode were "mule-like," but with signs of other odd traits being expressed that didn't belong.
In the short time that had gone by, this couldn't have come about through any process of gradual selection from random mutations. Rather, it pointed to the variability already having been there in the genomes, which was the conclusion the Kronians had been coming to for some time. This was what Vicki and Luthis, the biologist also from Dione, and Aztec's senior scientist, were coming out to investigate further. Keene could picture her impatience on reading the latest reports from Earth. The Aztec was under way from Titan now but not due to arrive for another sixty days.
"Do you think that everything you ever experience is locked away inside somewhere, the way some people say?" Sariena asked Beth. "Nothing is ever lost?"
"More or less," Beth replied. "But I don't think memory is localized in any place. That's why they were always having trouble finding it."
"So what do you think?" Keene asked.
"The information could be held in interference patterns of some kind of wave process in the brain," Beth said. "Kind of like a hologram."
"Huge capacities," Keene commented. He was intrigued.
"Yes, that's my point." Beth caught the faint smile on Sariena's face that seemed to carry a mixed message of maybe . . . and then again, maybe not. "What do you think?" she asked.
"I'm not sure," Sariena answered. "Maybe the information isn't 'in' there in any way at all. What if the brain is just an organ that accesses it from somewhere else?" She gestured at a screen on one of the nearby consoles. It showed a view of Joburg, coming in from a camera mounted on one of the vehicles that was there currently, and had been left transmittin
g. Kurt Zeigler had gone out with a group to see the place and make himself known. "It would be like looking inside there for a permanent representation of those huts and people. But you won't find any. The information that creates the picture is coming from elsewhere."
"Are we back to where the Kronian designer lives?" Keene asked, smiling. He meant it to be flippant, but Sariena's face remained serious.
"Maybe," she conceded evenly. "You know, Lan, science as the Terrans conceived it ended up really as just bigger telescopes, faster computers . . . better and cheaper extensions of technology. And that's wonderfully effective for understanding and manipulating the material, physical world. But only Terran scientists could have ended up believing that that's all there is to reality. All children know it isn't so."
Keene grinned. "And Kronians?"
"You already know the answer to that. We think things are there for a purpose."
Just then, Gallian, with Charlie Hu and several others just off the shuttle, entered from the level below, bubbling hellos and greeting to all. As was typical of Gallian's style, he was wearing a maroon flight-deck jacket and could have passed for one of the shuttle's crew instead of overall director of the mission. "Landen! Sariena!" he threw across, acknowledging their presence. And then, after an exchange with the Watch Officer and duty staff to check on the situation at Joburg and things in general, he came over to join them.
The puckish face was beaming as usual beneath the mantle of silver, wavy hair, but he was already puffing from the gravity and the stairs. "Well, so here we are back again. I'm not going to risk any comments, Landen—for fear of being in bad taste. But things have changed somewhat, yes?"
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