Worlds in Chaos (17 page)

Keene nodded, his face splitting into a wide grin. “It’s real. So do you feel like celebrating? . . . Oh, and one more thing to add to your list. I want us to order a mixed crate of the best Californian wines to take up as a present to Gallian for organizing it. Did you know he’s partial to wines? They don’t make any of the real stuff on Kronia yet.”

14

Accelerating ever faster, Athena crossed Mercury’s orbit and vanished into the glare of the Sun. After attaining a million miles per hour at perihelion on the far side, it would reemerge and become visible again in just over two weeks. While Judith continued working with Jerry Allender and the Princeton advisers on the computations that it was hoped would throw new light on Venus’s early behavior, Halloran put Lomack’s proposition to Marvin Curtiss, and approval came down for extending the San Saucillo–Montemorelos operation to include a rendezvous with the
Osiris
in the way Keene had suggested. Keene’s and Vicki’s places were confirmed, and after some debate within the company, a draw between members of senior management and technical staff was announced for the remaining seats.

With that side of things going so smoothly, there had to be some negative news too. The opposition groups who had been stirred up by the NIFTV demonstration were still seething, and the forthcoming trial offered a timely opportunity to register their protest. That the vessel involved this time was not nuclear didn’t matter. The target for attack was the company name.

A couple of days before liftoff was due, Cavan called Keene at home in his townhouse on Ocean Drive. It was mid-evening. Keene had just been sharing a couple of beers by the pool out back with a neighbor from across the street.

“Hello, Landen. I’m returned at last to the land of the comparatively sane. Are you in the middle of anything? I have something that I’d like to show you.”

“No, I was taking it easy for once. So, welcome back. How were Hawaii and Japan? Did the Kronians survive it all intact?”

Cavan had been one of those accompanying the Kronian party. The strategy he had outlined for manipulating the public’s image of the Kronians had begun to reveal itself. Instead of the independent, free-thinking scientists that Keene had seen personally, they were typically shown as naive, trusting tourists.

“Most of them are bearing up well, a few feeling the strain,” Cavan replied. “They’ll be going back up to their ship in relays to take a break from the gravity before the negotiations start.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Keene agreed. “How’s Gallian? He has to be the oldest.”

Cavan snorted. “He’s got more energy in him than a football team. That’s one that you don’t have to worry about.”

“Now why doesn’t that surprise me?” Keene made an empty-handed gesture. “Anyway, what have you got?”

“I’ve been picking through what’s been going on. The name of your friend David Salio at the Aerospace Sciences Institute has been turning up a lot in the department here. The media seem to be showing an interest in him all of a sudden. It’s upsetting a lot of people.”

“The Amspace PR people have been busy,” Keene said. “I put them on to that guy Charlie Hu on the West Coast that Salio mentioned, too, and he’s proved a big asset.
Science
magazine might be running a friendly article, and
New Frontiers
is interested in putting together a documentary. It’s really moving along.”

“Did you know that Coast-to-Coast wants to get Salio on the
Russ Litherland Show
?” Cavan asked.

“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.”