"Leo has enthralled us with his account of your escape," Foy said. He was soft spoken, with a hint of what could have been taken for an Asian accent. His eyes were alert and alive—the kind that seemed to take in much from a distance. "A remarkable story of tenacity and endurance. I've been looking forward to meeting you, Dr. Keene."
"I've been looking forward to meeting you, sir," Keene replied.
Another figure, dressed in a light purple jacket embellished with silky trim and braid embroidery over a black polo-neck shirt, had moved up beside Foy and was exchanging words with Dril and Marna. He was fiftyish, stockily built for a Kronian, with wavy, yellow-brown hair, golden skin—UV tanning was widespread among Kronians—and firmly defined features underscored by a heavy-set chin. His name was Mylor Vorse. He ran Engineering and Development, and had presided over some of the meetings there that Keene had attended. On his other side was a woman in a maroon tunic, who from the compad and document holder she was carrying, Keene guessed to be some kind of assistant.
"And you two know each other," Cavan said.
"Good to see you again, Dr. Keene," Vorse greeted.
"The pleasure's always mine."
The Kronian woman, whose name was Adreya Laelye, turned out to be not Vorse's assistant but his deputy.
"And how is Pang-Yarbat these days?" Vorse asked Keene.
"Always irrepressible. How else?"
"He and I have known each other for many years. I'm hardened to the gruesome puns now. But the last time we met him was . . . when?" He looked at Adreya inquiringly.
"At Essen," she supplied. "Suliman Besso's wedding."
"Ah, yes. We talked about gardening. I told Pang I thought that more space in the Swiss Cheese should be reserved for growing flowers. Wouldn't you agree? Coming from Earth, you must miss them."
"I think I do . . . agree that more space should be reserved," Keene said.
"Of course it should. We need them more than ever down in these mole-holes of ours. What would Besso's wedding have been without them?"
The group parted to make room for a last few who had been holding back. The man at the fore was of crusty complexion and sprightly build, with an upturned, puckish nose and a mirthful expression that broadened to a grin as Keene recognized him. It was Gallian, who had headed the Kronian delegation to Earth that had brought Keene and his companions back. Keene swung his head accusingly toward Cavan. "Leo, why didn't you tell me? You knew Gallian would be here!"
"Oh, you know I always like to have a surprise in store," Cavan returned unapologetically. "Especially if it's a pleasant one."
"Of course, you two know each other already," Foy observed.
"If it hadn't been for Gallian we wouldn't be here," Cavan said—although SOE people would be aware of the details. Gallian had insisted that the Osiris, the ship in which his delegation had traveled, remain in the vicinity of Earth when all hope for Keene's party seemed lost. "Idorf wanted to pull out." Idorf had been the ship's captain.
"Which was correct in his position. Safety had to be his first consideration." Vorse sighed. "It was a shame about Idorf. He was one of the best. The Osiris was a fine ship." Idorf had also commanded a later mission back to Earth to look for survivors, in which he and the Osiris were lost.
"So are you with SOE now?" Keene asked Gallian, to lighten the mood.
Gallian nodded. "I'm hoping to go with the return mission when one's finally authorized."
"Didn't you have enough last time?"
"But . . . to see a whole new world beginning. How could I stay out?"
The remaining few were SOE technical people and a couple from elsewhere who were interested in the AG program at Essen. Vorse, who seemed to be in charge, made a short introductory announcement, and the group spread out around the table to seat themselves. For the benefit of those who were new to the subject, Keene gave an overview of the AG work, describing the early experiments on Valkyrie, the formation of the enlarged group at Tesla, and the design aims of the scaled-up system now being built there. The listeners were quick to raise further speculations beyond the obvious applications of creating normal living conditions in space and on the surfaces of minor astronomical bodies. Was there potential for new methods of excavating and earthmoving, or moving heavy loads? One of the SOE scientists asked about shaping and manipulating the fields on a smaller scale, and if it proved feasible, what kinds of devices might such capability permit? None of this was new, since the team at Tesla spent many hours debating such issues. Keene responded, "Back in the nineteenth century, a Victorian engineer would probably have agreed that the electric motor was a great idea and every home should have one—and he'd have mounted it on a pedestal in the basement, with belts and shafts going all over the building to transmit the power. What he'd never have dreamed of is having motors in just about every tool and appliance he owned. Well, we might be talking about the beginnings of something just as revolutionary that'll be taken for granted a hundred years from now."
Vorse raised the question of how an electrical source of gravity could be reconciled with an alternative model that others were proposing, in which the force didn't arise within the gravitating body at all but resulted from collisions of momentum-transfer agents—analogous to photons carrying electromagnetic energy across space, but far smaller and moving much faster. A cosmic background flux of such agents was posited, acting somewhat like a gas, which an isolated object would feel equally from all directions, giving no net force and imparting no motion. But two objects would "shadow" each other to some degree, giving rise to an imbalance in which the excess forces on the outer sides would drive them together. The result would be an apparent attraction, diminishing with distance as the subtended shadow angle grew smaller. This disposed of the need for "missing mass" that had been vainly sought after for over half a century, since the effect ceased to approximate an inverse-square law over large distances. Vorse's point, however, was that the cosmic flux model put the cause outside the gravitating object, whereas Pang-Yarbat's electrical explanation held it to be inside. Both couldn't be true. How could one view be squared with the other?
Keene was familiar with the momentum-transfer theory. He suggested that the AG model's electrical effects could arise from alterations of a particle's effective cross-section to blocking the external flux, thus influencing its "gravitating" capability indirectly. This led to an exchange across the table that brought in things like supra-luminal propagation velocities, the validity of curved-space models of gravitation, and local Lorentzian ether equivalents as the successor to Special Relativity, which the Kronians had discarded.
They never did get around to any of the space program and propulsion issues that Keene had assumed to be Foy's reason for asking him here, but he presumed that would come later. But he felt elated and gratified. Since coming to Kronia, he had seen what had been his small, relatively obscure engineering research group investigating a standard approach to power generation, become part of a major project that could open up a new realm of physics, and which was now being followed attentively by those responsible for the most far-reaching Kronian decision-making.
Under the intricate Kronian system of protocols and implications, it meant that Cavan's motives in bringing this about ran very deep. And Cavan understood the system very well. Whether or not a scientific venture went ahead and was supported, and if so to what degree, was decided not by funding committees or decree, but by the standing and effectiveness of those who believed in it and chose to support it—from leading theoreticians who attracted scientific talent, to managers of the workshops that made essential instruments and parts. Keene's presence and presentation amounted, in effect, to a funding application.
But a funding for what? Not the AG project itself, since Pang-Yarbat already took care of that. As seemed inevitable whenever Cavan was involved, something devious was going on.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Jon Foy hadn't said a lot during lunch. Physics and technical issues were clearly
not his line. Afterward, Cavan excused himself, saying he had things to take care of elsewhere. Foy steered Keene aside, presumably getting down finally to the matter that had been the object of bringing Keene to Foundation. Mylor Vorse joined them.
They ascended in an elevator from the underground part of the Congressional complex and walked a short distance to what appeared to be Foy's workplace—a combination of study and office located in one of the pinnacles by the Hexagon, like a turret flanking the keep of an ancient castle. The suggestion of Gothic sombreness outside was enhanced by the fortress-like lines of the structures outlined in the lights beyond the windows, and the dim form of a nearby crater rim, craggy and black like a Transylvanian skyline against the red-streaked clouds.
The inside, by contrast, was bright and colorful, with an L-shaped desk console facing a mini-conference arrangement of chairs set around a low table, a larger worktable to one side, and a mixture of artwork and Earth scenes surrounding several display screens on the walls. A miniature flower and rock garden stood in a planter below, and the wall opposite the window carried an array of bookshelves—now rare on account of the uneconomic use of space and the effect of more convenient technologies. A large, black, long-haired cat opened its eyes to survey the newcomers suspiciously from a chair by the work table. After a few moments it lost interest, yawned, and went back to sleep.
Foy grinned as he followed Keene's gaze from the bleak scene outside, then back to the interior. "I need the window to remind me that there's still a real universe out there that we need to be concerned about," he said. "It's easy to become focused on the immediate and the immaterial if one's attention is always directed inward—down underground."
"What's the farther-away and the material, then?" Keene asked.
"For a start, a whole world to rebuild. The world that you last saw as radar images scanned through a cloud canopy"—Foy gestured at the window—"a bit like that outside. Would you like to see what's been happening back there?" Before Keene could answer, Foy voiced a command to the room's house manager and motioned toward the table set at a T with his desk. Keene took a chair facing the display wall as one of the screens came to life. Vorse sat down across a corner from him. Foy himself remained standing.
"This is the latest from the probes that we've been keeping in high orbit," Vorse commented. It sounded as if this had been intended—not something that had just occurred to Foy in response to Keene's question.
Earth still looked much as it had from the shuttle in orbit after the escape from Mexico—a dark ball of smoke and cloud stirred into whorls and streamers by storms that could still be ferocious in places. But the chasms cutting down into the murk were less pronounced and sharp than they had been, indicating that the winds were dropping. Debris from Athena's tail was coalescing into the beginnings of a visible ring system. The last time Keene had talked to Charlie Hu, estimates were that the rings would take several centuries or more to decay away.
A pattern in pale blue appeared superposed on the globe, outlining the familiar oceans and continents as they had existed through recorded history. Then a new set in red added themselves, showing the reconstructions from radar mapping of the surface as it had become. Keene still found the implications as stupefying as if he were seeing such images for the first time. Foy and Vorse remained silent, giving him a moment to absorb the meaning fully.
He was looking, literally, at the birth of a new world. It was now no longer questioned that the whole theory of planetary geology as it had been accepted on Earth would have to be rewritten from the beginnings. In the course of three years—and mostly in the early part of that!—Earth's surface had undergone changes which according to the previous doctrine should have taken hundreds of thousands of years or even more to unfold. But the doctrine had been wrong. What had been taken as evidence of slow processes operating over immense spans of time had turned out to be results of a period of relative quiescence between cataclysmic upheavals during which mountains rose, continents were split asunder, and oceans raged across the landscapes, renewing the world not once but several times within the span of human experience. The trifling measures of erosion, sedimentation, and plate movements wrongly extrapolated back to yield time scales in the order of millions of years were just the final, dying phases of events that had happened with terrifying speed—like shrinking puddles and trickles in ditches as all that remains to tell of yesterday's storm.
Earth's passage through Athena's magnetosphere had induced enormous electrical currents in the metal-bearing regions of the mantle and crust, producing heat that had opened up rifts and poured lava sheets over huge expanses of the surface, melted much of the polar ices, and in some places caused the seas to boil. But then, sudden cooling under the pall of smoke and dust from widespread surface conflagrations fed by Jovian hydrocarbons had caused massive precipitations of snow and ice from the saturated atmosphere, in some areas hundreds of feet deep within days. With the Earth's axis shifted ten degrees, new polar regions were appearing, centered on northern Alaska and the area south of Africa, and a corresponding shift and tilt was anticipated for the yet-to-emerge climatic bands. Sea level had not altered significantly. The changes that had occurred in coastlines were due mainly to the lateral movements, uplifts and depressions, of land masses.
Athena's main gravitational effect had been a jolting of the Earth's rotation, producing a general pattern of north-south fracturing of the crust. (The similar alignment of major preexisting rifts and mountain chains was likewise attributed to the earlier Venus encounters.) The American continent was generally broader, less pinched in the middle, and shortened. To the north, the still-forming ice cap closed the Pacific, bridging to Siberia apparently on top of a plateau formed by the squeezing out of existence of what had been the Bering Strait. Farther south, the Caribbean was a system of swampy lakes with an arm extending up into the former American Midwest, while the Panama isthmus had broadened toward the Pacific. Land west of the San Andreas fault had not sunk into the Pacific as celebrated in the popular mythology of years, but instead hinged outward to become part of a new land area of uplifted seabed fringed by a chain of mountainous overthrust to the west. On the inland side, the Gulf of California had opened and extended, reaching almost to the wastes of ash and cooling lava fields that covered the sites where Seattle and Vancouver had stood. South America too, had broadened west of the Andes, but to the east large tracts of Argentina were submerged, leaving a truncated mountain spine crumbling into a chain of islands.
The Atlantic had changed beyond recognition. In both the northern and southern basins, large portions of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge had risen to become new, elongated islands of almost subcontinental proportions, with smaller groups forming a chain curving eastward around the tip of Africa to the shifted and reforming South Polar ice sheet. Except that the tip of Africa was no longer where it had been before. Like California's gulf, the Great African Rift had opened into a new arm of ocean cutting north through the Middle East and cleaving Jordan and Syria before curving east to join the Caspian Sea. West of this new arm of ocean, the main body of Africa was pivoting north on huge upswelling lava flows, piling crust and sediment into a coastal mountain chain separated only by narrows from the Mid-Atlantic islands in the south, and in the north forming a mountain barrier below the lakes that were all that was left of the Mediterranean. The eastern side of Africa, meanwhile, had become a jagged peninsula thrusting south from Arabia and bordering an archipelago of new islands extending to a much-elongated India.
Farther east, the western Pacific trench system had propagated southward and cut Australia in two. The western portion, again following the general pattern of north-south shock lines imparted by Athena, was swinging northwest into the Indonesian region to produce an incredible tangle of islands, lakes, land bridges, and channels, while the eastern part seemed to be merging into an area of new southwest Pacific uplift that embraced most of the former island groups and New Zealand.
Although s
till vastly greater than anything remotely suspected previously, the motions of the new fragmenting and merging tectonic plates were already slowing measurably. It seemed that a new mini-continent was beginning to form in the southwest Pacific, with the west part of Australia destined to become a southern extension of Asia. Elsewhere, the widening of the African rift northward showed signs of meeting another fault opening down from the Siberian coast and dividing the Eurasian land mass to create what might become a new ocean. A number of studies had produced maps of how the face of Earth might evolve over the centuries ahead—all of them highly speculative.
Seeing all this brought back feelings that Keene had experienced in the shuttle above Earth as he watched the false-color radar images change hour by hour, telling their story of cities disappearing beneath mile-high walls of advancing water, nations consumed by infernos of burning air hot enough to melt stone, humans and animals dying in billions. Even now, what else might be happening below the veil of dust and vapor could only be guessed at.
"How low have the probes gone?" he asked finally, forcing his eyes away and looking at the other two. "Are there any signs of survivors?" In his numbness it was the automatic thing to say. He didn't really think so. Any such news would have been known immediately all over Kronia.
Vorse shook his head. "We put landers down at a few places. The views they sent back could have been from Hades." He shrugged as if to say all was still not lost. "But the fraction of the surface that we've sampled has been tiny. There could be other conditions elsewhere."
"Our kind has survived comparable events before," Foy put in. "And they didn't possess the technical resources that the industrialized world had. It's early days yet, Dr. Keene." The cyclic theme of old worlds destroyed and new worlds being born recurred in the myths of ancient cultures as far back as they were recorded. The Biblical Old Testament was not alone in its injunction to go forth and replenish the Earth.
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