Worlds in Chaos (46 page)

“Why not try and get some rest?” Keene said. “Even when they get the repairs finished, nobody’s going anywhere until the weather lets up.”

“Oh, I’ll try and hold out until we get back to the ship. Then I’ll sleep for a week. I’m sure all of us will.” Sariena’s eyes flickered over him briefly. “At least we were just sitting around most of yesterday and last night, waiting for something to happen. You should be just about ready to collapse when we get up there.”

Keene grunted and shuffled restlessly, looking away. He knew that Sariena had made the remark deliberately to sound out the discontentment that she sensed in him. Keene wasn’t sure himself why he felt it.

Following the example of their commanders, none of the Marine contingent or the Special Forces rescue team had put themselves on the list for the draw. Keene had been one of the six named by the Kronians for guaranteed places, but he had declined to be privileged and opted to go into the draw along with everyone else. Nevertheless, his name had come up anyway. It didn’t sit well with him. The other five had been Charlie Hu, who had accepted; Cavan and Alicia, who had accepted only because Cavan had insisted on Alicia’s accepting, and she had refused flatly to do so without him—but he didn’t seem happy with it; the engineer who had foregone a place on the last evacuation plane in order to supervise the hydraulics repairs; and Colby Greene, who, like Keene, had opted for the draw instead but been unlucky. Gallian admitted that perhaps it had been a mistake to offer any nominated places, but it was done now and couldn’t be changed.

“It’s not a time to feel ignoble,” Sariena told him. “Sending the women and children first might have some point on a sinking ship, where there’s an intact civilization for them to go back to, but in this situation we’re going to have to rebuild civilization. It’s going to need people like you every bit as much as new blood. You’re an engineer and a scientist, Lan. What will you do here when it’s over? Charlie can see the logic of it. He’s only being realistic.”

Keene was reacting to an instinct that he was unable to articulate and so took the opportunity to steer the talk onto a different tack. “I used to be a scientist,” he said. “But that was only until I saw what it was turning into.”

“What Earth turned it into,” Sariena replied. “What’s at Kronia is different—the way you’ve always said science should be. We’ve talked enough about it. Don’t you want to be a part of that?”

Keene leaned his elbows on a guardrail beside an access pit leading down under some machinery and sighed, giving her a tired smile. She was still selling hard—and doing a good job. “The beginnings of a whole new science,” he said. “It was just starting to get interesting too, wasn’t it? Did you ever think any more about the dinosaurs? When did Vicki and I call in the middle of the night? Five days ago, was it? I’ve lost all track.”

“We had some exchanges with the Kronian scientists while we were in Washington,” Sariena said. “Basically, they’re intrigued by the idea. They’ve got a possible theory about why that estimate of yours didn’t work.” She meant the rough calculation that Keene had made of how much Earth’s surface gravity would be reduced in a phase-locked orbit close to Saturn.

“What?” Keene asked.

“They think Earth may have gone through not one phase of gravity increase, but two. You only covered one of them.”

“Two?” Keene repeated, looking puzzled.

“Somebody there came up with the thought that maybe the account of an impacting body wiping out the dinosaurs, is only half the story. If it was high in density, say, five to ten times that of the crust, and large enough, then absorbing it into the Earth’s core would cause a significant increase in surface gravity. So before the impact,
two
factors were operating: the mass was smaller,
and
you had the effect of being close to the giant primary. When the gravity increased due to the extra mass being added, none of the giant life-forms that had existed previously could survive.”

Keene stared at her, trying to visualize what she was saying. It did make a strange kind of sense. A planet like Earth was molten inside a sticky bag of mantle, topped by a crumbly crust—not solid all the way through in a way that would shatter. A small, dense object penetrating and being absorbed would certainly have been possible. “But we’re still a satellite of Saturn,” he checked.

“Right. Maybe knocked out to a looser orbit.”

“So life is reduced in size, but still bigger than what we’ve got today.”

Sariena nodded again. “And how’s this for a coincidence? Taking the figures I used a moment ago, with the impacting body a fifth of Earth’s initial volume, the amount you’d have to shrink a dinosaur by to get back to the same strength-weight ratio that you had under the lower-gravity conditions, works out at about forty percent. That gets you just about down to the size of the
titanoheres
—the giant mammals that lived until the end of the Pliocene.”

The implication was clear. Keene scanned her face, as if looking for a hint that he wasn’t jumping ahead prematurely. “So are you saying that was when Earth detached from Saturn—and gravity increased a second time to become what we’ve got now?” He nodded slowly to himself as he thought about it. And by that time, humans could have existed to witness it—the Joktanians and very likely others, long predating what had been thought to be the earliest civilizations. Huge, too. The giant humans had existed along with the giant mammals.

“We don’t know what caused it to detach,” Sariena said. “Maybe another impact event—enough to have ejected the artifacts that were found on Rhea. That’s just a guess, of course, but it fits. . . . In fact, it fits with a lot of things.” Keene stared at her again. And so the temporarily orphaned Earth would have begun falling toward the Sun, away from the cradle that had seen its life begin, and warmed it benignly and nurtured it. For how long would it have fallen inward?

“The ice age,” he murmured.

“Yes. And when Earth found a stable orbit the ice melted, and Earth entered an age where grasslands and forests flourished where there are now nothing but deserts, temperate belts extended up into what today is the Arctic, and animals of every kind flourished in millions. The axis was more perpendicular to the orbital plane. We think those times lasted about five or six thousand years, through to three and a half thousand years ago.”

“And then Venus happened,” Keene said. The axis was tilted more. The climatic bands shifted and became narrower.

“Well, maybe. Some of our scientists have suggested that it could have been the Venus encounter that detached Earth from Saturn—which might explain why astronomy didn’t reemerge as a science for nearly two thousand years. All kinds of things become possible once you free yourself from the insistence on gradualism that has been stifling science here for two centuries.” Sariena moved forward to grip his arm. “These are the things we will be working on through the years ahead, Lan. A new science of Earth, written around a new history of humankind and its origins. Who knows what more it may turn up? The old, sterile ideas are dead. They were the products of a world that’s over. A new world is being born out there. And one day Kronia will rebuild Earth, but that might be generations away. It first has to build itself. There’s nothing for you to do here in the meantime. The place where you can do something that will matter is with us.”

Keene looked across at the children playing among the piping. He still didn’t feel at ease and wasn’t sure why. “I don’t know. . . . Somehow it feels like running out. A lot of people are going to need help,” was the best he could manage.

Sariena stopped short of scoffing. “From doctors and priests. And maybe later, anyone who can catch a fish, grow a potato, or throw together a shack that will stand up. But it’s going to be a long time before they need nuclear engineers again.”

Cliff, the Rustler’s young Flight Electronics Officer, who along with the pilot, Dan, made up its two-man crew, appeared at the top of a metal stairway nearby. He looked down over the machinery bays, spotted Keene and Sariena, and waved to get their attention. “You’re wanted upstairs,” he called to them. “They’ve just got a connection to the
Osiris
. There’s no telling how long it might last.”

The global satellite system had suffered appalling attrition, causing havoc with the official networks. A connection had eventually been established via the ground line to NORAD and Space Command’s underground city at Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, and a still-operational AWACS flight, to Amspace’s tracking facility, which was still managing to get through when the
Osiris
was above the horizon.

Idorf was on a screen in a local control room in the OLC complex, patched through from the main communications center. Colby and Charlie Hu were there with a group of comtechs and engineers, watching infrared views, taken from orbit during a temporary thinning of the haze, of the devastation farther down the coast from Los Angeles to San Diego and beyond. Marina Del Rey, Venice, and Long Beach no longer existed. Whole waterfront districts had been washed away, with street after street of wind-flattened houses farther inland looking as if they had been carpet bombed. LAX looked like an aircraft breaker’s yard, and JPL was a mess of collapsed buildings, upended and scattered vehicles, and demolished communications hardware—which explained why there had been no success in getting a link in that direction.

By the time Keene and Sariena arrived, Idorf had been updated on the freeing of the hostages and had confirmed that the
Osiris
would be able to accept the the two Boxcar loads of additional evacuees. “But you should begin boarding them now,” he advised. The wind you are getting is part of a general pattern that’s developing across the north-eastern Pacific, but a calmer center is moving south toward you right now. As soon as it gets there, you should be ready to go. We’ll transmit a beacon for you to home on.”

“What’s happening in other places?” Colby asked. “We weren’t prepared for the whole global system going down at once. Since Washington went off the air, we don’t know what’s been going on.”

“Visibility in most places is too bad to for me to say much,” Idorf replied. “There have been large bolide explosions over Eastern Europe and much of Asia. Our radar shows more to be expected in the next few days. Big waves caused by offshore impacts in the western Mediterranean have done a lot of damage along the French and Spanish coasts. Barcelona has been practically wiped out by a direct strike.

The room listened grimly. Nobody asked further questions. Keene licked his lips. “You’re coming in via Amspace?” he queried.

“Yes.”

“Is there anyone available on the circuit there? Can I see how they’re doing while we’ve got the connection?”

Idorf looked away and seemed to be asking somebody something about how long they’d got. “Yes, we have someone there,” he replied. “They’re putting him on. But keep it brief. We’re getting near the edge of our range.”

The screen faded for a moment, then stabilized again to show a begrimed figure with a bandaged head, wearing a forage cap and dust-streaked shirt. It took Keene a moment to recognize him as Harry Halloran. “Harry?” he said, just to be sure.

“Lan Keene. Since we’re linking the Kronians to their ship, I take it you’ve got them back.”

“Yes, but don’t ask me to tell you the story. Listen, Harry, we may not have much time. I just wanted to know how it’s going there. Did Marvin get the evacuation started?”

Halloran shook his head. “Everyone’s still here at Kingsville. When we began assembling them here, rumors started going around that Amspace was buying up food and gas and hoarding it, and we got invaded.”

“Invaded? Who by?”

“People coming in from the coast. Some of them just seemed to go crazy—tearing the fences down and taking whatever they could grab. It’s still ugly, Lan. We’ve had to fight to hang on to what’s ours. There’s been shooting. I don’t know what we’d have done without our own security guys. The police are too stretched to deal with it.”

“Shooting? Anybody hurt?” Keene asked.

“Sure. Some dead on both sides. The plant was like a battleground this morning. It’s calmed down now, but for how long, I don’t know. We’re still trying to organize the move to Lubbock but a lot of people here are quitting and just going with the general flow.”

Keene put a hand to his head. It had to come. But so soon? And it was going to get worse. “Harry, do you know anything about the people from my outfit—Vicki and the girls there? They were supposed to have come into Kingsville too. Have you seen them anywhere? Do you know where they are?”

Halloran shook his head. “I did see them here last night. But now? Who knows? They could be anywhere in this, if they’re still around. There are people showing up and leaving all the time.”

Keene stared at the screen. Sariena was watching him. Suddenly, he knew what it was that had held him back. It had been there all the time, for years, and he just hadn’t let himself see it. He needed to get back there. But once he did—if he did—there would be only one way out.

“Harry, do one thing for me,” he said. “Find Vicki and tell her to get to San Saucillo with whoever of the girls can make it there. And tell her to
stay
there. Whatever happens.”

“Lan, we’ve got about—”

“
Just do it, Harry. Find her, and tell her!
This one thing. Okay?”

Halloran gulped and nodded. “I’ll try.”

“Not good enough, Harry.”

Halloran nodded rapidly. “Okay. If she’s here I’ll find her and I’ll tell her. What are you going to do?”

“Did Wally ever get back from Washington?” Keene asked.

“We heard he was on a plane that had to put down in St. Louis. I don’t know where he is now.”

“He told me that Marvin was getting the shuttle down at Montemorelos checked out. You have to know about it.”

Halloran nodded. “But we never figured it into anything.”

“Well, that’s where we’re going,” Keene said.

“We?”

“Don’t you want to get out of this, Harry? You’ve seen how bad it’s getting already. You think that’s the end?”