Worlds in Chaos (19 page)

“That’s it, folks. Welcome to orbit.”

The faces in the passenger compartment looked about them wonderingly. Milton Clowes let his arms hang weightless in the air in front of him. “Well, I’ll be darned,” he told the others. “Look at that.”

Alice finally let go of her armrests, which she had gripped, white-faced throughout the launch. “I don’t believe we’re still here,” was all she could manage.

“How many times is this for you, Wally?” Tim, the engineer who was with Lomack, asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve lost count. I thought I’d retired from any more of this kind of nonsense.”

The captain spoke again: “Yes, I know the first thing you’re all dying to try is the zero-
g
. Anyone who feels inclined to experiment now, go right ahead. Take it easy, though. It works better than you think. People who turn into missiles inside here don’t make themselves too popular.” It was just a reminder. They had been through it all in the preflight briefings.

The passengers exchanged glances. None of them really wanted to be the first to risk being a spectacle. Finally, Vicki felt for the buckle securing her harness, then hesitated and gave Keene a questioning look. He nodded encouragingly. “Nobody here’s gonna laugh,” he told her.

She released the catch and eased herself cautiously out of the harness to float above the gee-couch, turning slowly. A touch on the cabin wall stopped her and sent her turning the other way; a push on the wall made her drift toward Wally. Clowes gave her some handclaps by way of applause, and a couple of the others followed.

“This is fantastic!” Vicki told them as she started to get the feel of it. “It’s like being a whale with a whole ocean to frolic in. I want to leap and dive.”

“Doesn’t it make all that business back at the complex seem kind of unimportant now?” Jenny Grewe mused distantly. Vicki drifted down the center of the cabin, turning in a slow cartwheel.

“Hey, that looks cool,” Phil Forely said. “I have to try it too.”

One of the flight crew had unhitched and was moving back. “Okay, but let me give you a few tips first,” he told them. “Just a couple of you at a time, guys. You’ll all get a turn, don’t worry.”

Keene had seen it enough times to leave them to it for a while. He turned his eyes back toward the screen in front and watched the image of the deserts of northeast Africa and the Middle East passing by below. So much had been written about the proliferation of life on Earth. But the planet’s real potential for life had never been really grasped because in recent times there had been nothing to give a measure of it. Earth was still only recovering from its devastation.

He remembered how, years ago, when he first started making regular airline flights eastward from the West Coast, it had amazed him that after leaving the oases of human habitation around San Diego, Los Angeles, or the San Francisco Bay Area, there would be nothing for a thousand miles to the Mississippi valley—just parched mountains, deserts, and canyons; everywhere, the dryness. It was only later, when he began grasping the true scale of the planet by seeing it from orbit, that he realized that had been just a small part of the picture. The vastness of the wildernesses extending from Mauritania on the Atlantic side of Africa to Afghanistan, then onward through Mongolia, and in the southern hemisphere, those of southwestern Africa and virtually all of Australia, staggered the imagination.

It hadn’t always been that way. There had been times when the Sahara was green, Arabia and Iran fertile; what were now the deserts of northwest India and Afghanistan had supported flourishing civilizations. The Sphinx was older than the great pyramids and showed water damage and erosion that couldn’t be accounted for by the conditions that had existed through recorded history.

What it all pointed to was that Earth’s climatic bands had been different then, with narrower tropics and broader temperate zones that had brought rain where there are now deserts and caused grasslands and forests to extend into what is today the Arctic. Such conditions were consistent with the Earth’s axis being more perpendicular to its orbital plane around the Sun. Something, then, had caused it to shift and increased the planet’s tilt, creating the northern and southern desert belts and extending the polar regions.

The flight crew got busy commencing the engine trials that had been the original purpose of the mission. Wally and Tim spent much of the time forward, following events, and Keene got involved in the technical proceeding, too. Vicki made the best of the opportunity to get to know more Amspace people. She seemed to get along especially well with Jenny, Les Urkin’s assistant in public relations, Alice, and Phil from Marketing. Sid, the new hire straight out of college, was still too mesmerized by the torrent of events that had overtaken him to be capable of much coherent thought.

“Are things always like this here?” he asked when the group was struggling to master their first peel-wrappered, squeeze-bottle lunch. “I mean, after the way things were at Berkeley, I expected life in the commercial world to be kind of dull. They haven’t found me a permanent desk yet, and I’m in orbit already.”

Later, he got to talking with Vicki, and then her and Keene, about the Kronian theories and Keene’s work with Amspace. Sid was enthusiastic about space development, which was why he had sought a position with Amspace in the first place, but he’d had no inkling of the deeper implications of what was at stake. It all came as a revelation, which he devoured avidly. A solid recruit to the cause, Keene decided.

However, as hours passed by and the novelty wore thinner, weariness akin to that of a long airline flight set in. While at the forward end of the compartment the voice exchanges with ground control at San Saucillo and other stations monitoring the flight continued against a background of electronic beeps and bursts of static, conversation in the rear section lapsed. Some of the passengers dozed or tried to read. About halfway through the mission the
Osiris
made contact to get confirmation that the Amspace vessel would be on schedule; also, there was a message for Keene from Sariena letting him know that she would be one of the Kronians up resting from terrestrial gravity while his party was visiting. Soon after, he found himself with Vicki and Sid, watching yet another turn of the globe sliding by on the cabin screen.

“Did I tell you that Robin got an e-mail from Salio?” Vicki asked. “My eternally curious fourteen-year-old son,” she added for Sid’s benefit. They had told Sid about Salio briefly when talking about the Kronians’ planetary theories.

“I don’t think so. He said he would,” Keene said.

“Robin was thrilled to bits. Salio knocked a few holes in his dinosaur theory, but it was nice of him to find the time to respond.” She explained to Sid, “Robin came up with this idea that the dinosaurs were on the body that impacted Earth, since he doesn’t think they could have existed in Earth’s gravity.”

Sid pulled a face. “A bit farfetched, isn’t it?”

“Give him a break. He’s fourteen.”

“David Salio’s an okay guy,” Keene said. “He’s going to be dynamite on the shows . . . which reminds me, I was supposed to call him.” He thought for a moment about calling Salio right there, from orbit, but then decided that the topic wasn’t appropriate for an audience. “You never did tell me this business about Robin and the mammoths, either,” he told Vicki instead.

“Oh, that’s right. I never did, did I?”

“He’s not saying that they came from someplace else too, surely?” Sid said.

Vicki shook her head. “Oh no. It’s just that in following his inquisitiveness, he stumbled on a lot of controversy that’s been going on for years—that even I didn’t know about—about when they died out.”

Keene made an inviting gesture. “Well, we’re listening. I always thought it was supposed to have had something to do with over-hunting.”

“Somewhere around ten or eleven thousand years ago, wasn’t it?” Sid said.

“That’s the conventional line,” Vicki agreed. “That date was thought to have been soon after the arrival of people. But now it seems pretty certain that humans were in the Americas much earlier. So they and the mammoths had coexisted for a long time. That theory doesn’t really hold up.”

“I never thought it made much sense, anyway,” Keene said. “Elephants are notoriously dangerous and difficult to bring down even by hunters equipped with iron and horses. But they were never hunted to extinction. Yet a sparse population armed with stone-tipped spears was supposed to have done it? All those millions of mammoths, mastodons, giant deer, you name it . . . piled up in thousands in some places? They’d have needed nuclear weapons.”

Vicki looked at him dubiously. “So why are you asking me about them? It sounds like you pretty much know the problem already.”

“It was something I came across when I got interested in evidence for catastrophes,” Keene said. “I was curious to hear Robin’s take on it. What else did he come up with?”

“Do you know about varves?”

“No. What are varves?”

“Layers of sediment that are deposited in lakes and so on, which change color from summer to winter and can be counted like tree rings. They contain pollen grains, which tell you what vegetation grew in the area over the years. And in the Arctic during the Ice Age, which is when standard thinking says the mammoths and all those other animals were supposed to have been around, there simply wasn’t anything growing there that they could have lived on. It was all just frozen desert.”

Keene nodded, at the same time looking puzzled. “Well . . . okay. What else would anyone expect to find in the Arctic in an Ice Age? Am I missing something?”

“I sometimes wonder if I am,” Vicki said. “Do they really make people professors for coming up with ideas that it could have been different?”

Sid looked from one of them to the other. “So what it sounds like you’re saying is, when the mammoths and all those other animals did live there, it couldn’t have been an Ice Age.”

Vicki nodded. “Exactly.

“So when was that? Do we know?”

“It has to have been during a much warmer period that came later,” Vicki said. “They couldn’t have been buried eleven thousand years ago under Arctic conditions. The soil below a few feet down is permanently frozen. So how could all those bodies and bones and trunks of trees have been buried under it? A few might have been caught by things like slides and collapsing crevasses, maybe, but nothing on the scale that’s found. And even if they did, nonfossilized bones and body tissue would never have survived degradation through thousands of years when the warming occurred. So they must have been wiped out and quick-frozen much more recently, in some event that marked the end of that warm period.”

Keene and Sid looked as if each was waiting for the other to fault it. It seemed that neither of them readily could. “What about carbon-14 dating?” Sid asked finally. “I thought that supports the Ice-Age extinction theory.”

“The data that have been published over the years do,” Vicki conceded. “But now it’s beginning to look as if maybe the indicated dates were too high.”

“How’s that?” Keene asked.

“The Arctic has huge natural carbon reservoirs—permafrost soil, peat deposits, methane hydrate in the oceans—that would release lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere if a mild warming occurred for any reason. We’re talking about billions of tons a year. . . . And that ‘old’ carbon would be breathed and ingested and find its way into plant and animal tissues, making all the dates too high if today’s levels with a cooler climate are assumed as the reference.”

“How do you know the climate’s cooler today?” Keene challenged.

“We don’t have big herds of large animals inhabiting the Arctic today.”

Keene stared at her. There it was again. If the conventionally accepted dates were high by a significant factor, then once again they were led to the conclusion of tremendous and destructive happenings worldwide around that same mysterious time, several thousand years ago.

Sid drifted away across the cabin to listen to Clowes telling Alice and Jenny some anecdotes from Amspace’s history. Keene and Vicki remained buckled into the restraint harnesses in one of the corners, watching the screen. They talked about the time when she had left Harvard after he and Fey split up, and the support they’d found in each other that had led her to follow him south when he set up the consulting deal that had grown into Protonix. They talked about Karen’s succession of cowboy boyfriends, Judith’s odd mix of talents and even odder-seeming engagement, about David Salio and his case for Venus, and Celia’s cat. Keene was glad to have a chance for once to ramble on with Vicki about whatever took their fancy, free from the pressures that never seemed to let up when they were in or anywhere near the firm. The loyalty that she had always shown to everything he did and the things he believed in had played a big part in enabling him to keep going through the rough parts, but he had never found a way of expressing adequately how much it had meant. Hence, it was gratifying that he had been able to keep his word to get her up on one of the missions one day, even if whenever he mentioned it he had made it sound like a joke. Flippancy came naturally as part of his armor for dealing with the world, and sometimes, he feared, brought the risk of having things like promises not taken seriously. It was nice, even if over so small a thing, to be able to feel that it wasn’t so.

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