Worlds in Chaos

by James P. Hogan

  Cavan shook his head. “We were already on our way by that time—just about over Nevada?” He looked inquiringly at Mitch, who was tilting his chair back with his feet on the table on the far side of the room.

  “We were close to Vegas when we got the report from LAX,” the major confirmed.

  Keene looked at Cavan, even more perplexed. “So what are you telling us, Leo? You’d left Washington two hours or whatever before? Without knowing where they were or when they were going to show up? You help yourself to a plane and a bunch of guys, and just decide to go joyriding west with the end of the world going on, just in case something turns up. Is that what you’re telling us?”

  The others around the room could do little more than shake their heads at each other, too much out of it all to really follow what was being said.

  “Ah, well, it wasn’t really like that, now,” Cavan said.

  Alicia raised her eyebrows at Keene, then looked at Cavan. “Maybe you don’t know him so well, even after all these years, Lan,” she said. “You’re being too modest, Leo. I’d say it was pretty much like that, yes.”

  “Not at all, not at all. We knew they were heading for LAX. And something had to happen pretty soon after they got there. All we needed was to be in the vicinity and equipped to react quickly.” Cavan looked around the room and appealed as if to a jury. “All right, I took the law into my hands and cut a few corners. So I’ll take the reprimand when it comes, right? But if I’d stopped to try it the proper way, we’d still be in Washington waiting for the right rubber stamps even now. There’s an old piece of Irish philosophy that says contrition is easier than permission. The service doesn’t agree, of course. But I don’t think they’ll be doing too much worrying for a while. As I said, I’ll take the reprimand when it comes.”

  Keene leaned back in his seat, managing a thin smile and shaking his head. “Okay, Leo, go on. Then what?”

  Cavan was about to reply, when the crashing sound of something large striking the building came from above. The lights flickered, then stabilized again. Several people started or raised their arms protectively. Others exchanged strained looks. Everyone was getting jumpy. Several seconds went by, but apart from the ongoing background of wind gusts thudding and the rattle of sand scouring the walls, nothing further happened. Cavan went on, “We got them on radar as they climbed out from LAX—another nice thing about that machine I borrowed. They headed north, and seemed to rendezvous with another plane that appeared from somewhere inland.”

  “Which had to be carrying the Kronians,” Colby completed, nodding in a way that said he could see it all now.

  “Exactly. Both of them headed out to sea for a while, and then went into a wide turn that brought them back lined up on Vandenberg. The one carrying the hostages was in the lead, obviously intending to land first. And there was our chance. If we could get in ahead of the second plane and grab the Kronians while they were separated from the Society of Friends, there would be nothing for anybody to bargain over. And the rest you know. . . . We weren’t aware at the time that an orbiter had already been seized, of course. But it worked out all right. Without the hostages to get them a safe passage aboard the Osiris, what could Delmaro and his force inside do with it? I must say, our young lieutenant friend from the Marines couldn’t have timed things better. His move at the gate clinched it. Where is he?” Cavan looked around, but Penalski was not in the room.

  “I think he’s with General Ullman,” one of the technicians said.

  The Launch Supervisor came in through the doorway. All the heads turned, waiting. “It looks as if we might be able to get two Boxcars off if this mess ever eases up,” he announced. “Forget the rest. Nothing else is getting off the ground. We’ve got forty-eight places in each one. There are thirteen Kronians. The Kronians have nominated six individuals for places on the Osiris. We have two children separated from their families, who get to go. There are eight more children with mothers only—six mothers—and they get to go. We have one expectant mother; she gets to go. That means there’s room for sixty more, assuming the Osiris confirms that it can take them. We think it’s likely that it will, since not much is going to be going up from Guatemala—but we haven’t made contact yet. In the meantime, we’re taking names now in the office outside of all those who want to be on the list. The places will be decided by drawing lots. Immediate family groups—that’s parents with children—get one chance, but if it comes up they all go. I’ve got my name down. Anyone else who wants to leave the planet, step along. It’s open to all. General Ullman and his family are there, just the same as the rest. Nobody’s playing God over this. For once, that job’s being left where it belongs.”

  36

  Keene stood with Sariena on one side of a concrete-walled space full of motor housings, cables, huge pipes, and color coded valves in the lower levels of the complex serving the Boxcar launch bays. People were camped around and under the machinery, and children were having fun climbing about on the pipes. Those who could, kept themselves busy preparing soup, sandwiches, and hamburgers, or bringing pieces of furniture or other comforts from the offices and labs higher up; others played chess or cards, read, or tried to entertain the children. An area had been set aside for treating the growing number of casualties, from people venturing outside and being hit by flying debris to lacerations from imploding windows.

  Not being as big as most of the Kronians, Sariena had managed to find some Air Force fatigues to change into from the clothes she’d been wearing since the abduction in Washington, and so looked a little fresher, if obviously tired. She had told Keene their side of the story, not that there was a lot to it. They had been collected from the Engleton by what everyone assumed to be the official bus to take them to Andrews AFB, but the escorts turned out to be captors who took them to another airfield somewhere. From there they flew several hours to a landing strip in a desert location, where the plane was covered under an awning until departing an hour or so before its arrival at Vandenberg. Their escorts were all military, following instructions, and couldn’t or wouldn’t disclose anything beyond what the Kronians could see for themselves. The Kronians had been held in a couple of trailers under guard. All in all they had been treated well and courteously, if firmly.

  “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 situ
ation 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 beac
on 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?”