The Anguished Dawn

by James P. Hogan

  And he knew Gallian would have wanted it that way.

  * * *

  After they had helped close the last of the festivities down, Keene and Vicki walked with Cavan and Alicia back toward the newcomers' room in what had been the dorm blocks, which was on the way to the residential area. With all the day's business, it was Keene's first chance to talk with Cavan about anything other than incidental matters. Keene fell quiet as they approached the point where the walkway leading to the building left the path that he and Vicki would continue along. Alicia was talking about her reactions to the first day of being back on Earth.

  "Yes, everything was almost totally destroyed, and it will be a long time recovering. But there's a . . . feeling that I can't describe. It hit me when I saw the water and the areas starting to turn green again from the shuttle on the way down."

  "I know. I felt it too," Vicki said. "It's like suddenly being in touch with Life again. You said it happened to you after you left the base area with Charlie, didn't you, Lan?"

  No response.

  Alicia nodded. "Yes, that's it exactly! Being part of a living world. All of a sudden you realize how sterile Kronia was. I mean, of course we couldn't have done without it. It preserved knowledge and technology when everything else was lost. And I'm sure that when we expand out of the Solar System, that's where it will be from. But for all the other things, human things, we have to rebuild the center of the new civilization here. Kronia will be an outpost. Don't you think so?"

  She directed her last words at Keene and Cavan. They had come to the intersection with the path and halted. But Keene was looking at Cavan, as if not hearing her. Cavan was taking in the night scene of the base with its geometric shapes and lights, as if leaving Keene to come to his own conclusions in his own time—but somehow giving the impression of having an intimation of what they might be.

  "That was why you did it, wasn't it, Leo," Keene said finally. Cavan turned on a look of feigned innocence that would have been an offense to Keene's intelligence if they hadn't known each other for years. "Why you wanted me on the Earth mission. It was political. You guessed something like that would happen. You tried recruiting me that time when you and Alicia came to Dione, but I said I wasn't interested in politics. So you set me up with Vorse and Foy. You wanted me to know more about what Kronia meant and where it was heading."

  "You'd have stayed on Titan, content to let your work on the AG program justify your existence," Cavan agreed, dropping the pretense.

  "That whole line of Vorse's about my being needed to supervise Agni's MHD system was part of it. It wasn't necessary. Shayle could have done it."

  Vicki was looking from one to the other, puzzled. "Leo had some ulterior agenda for sending you to Earth? Why?"

  "I think I can see it now. . . ." Alicia said. "Leo never discussed it with me."

  "Not the kind of thing one talks about when the person concerned isn't there," Cavan remarked.

  "See what?" Vicki asked again. She had never pretended to harbor any political instinct.

  "Look at what Lan did in those last days back on Earth," Cavan said to her. "If you'd had a good idea that Valcroix's people were going to pull off something like they did, wouldn't that be exactly the kind of person you'd want to have here? I'm sorry if it was using you, Lan, and that it put you in personal danger. But as you can see now, a lot more was at stake." He shrugged in a way that said life had to be that way sometimes. "Anyway, as you yourself said a moment ago, I did give you the opportunity to volunteer."

  Keene just shook his head, for the moment too taken aback by the enormity of the whole picture that was opening up to respond.

  "Are you saying you knew what the Pragmatists were planning?" Alicia asked Cavan.

  He shook his head. "Not specifically. If I had known, and could prove it, I'd have taken the evidence straight to Urzin. But I'd been around those kinds of people long enough to be pretty sure they'd try something. They don't concede power easily. The Kronians can work miracles in some areas, but they've got their weak spots too. We saw some of them when they came to Earth. No security-minded government would ever have let the SA become compromised in the way it was. I tried getting it across to people like Urzin and Foy, but they just didn't have the experience."

  Now Keene was more confused than offended. "But that's not the way it was, Leo," he objected. "The reason I said I didn't want to get mixed up in political things back then was because I didn't think Valcroix had a chance. And you agreed!"

  Cavan gave one of the devious smiles that always marked finally getting to the bottom of something he had been involved in. "I agreed he could never have succeeded at Kronia," he confirmed. "But I never said anything about their making a bid for control on Earth. The warning signals were there: the SA being packed with disgruntled Terrans; the way Harvey Mitchell was pulled from the Trojan mission after I got him assigned to it. They'd always had their sights set on Earth. The whole business about calling for a say in running the Directorates was to create an appearance of legality having failed. It was the obvious target—undefended and too far away for any timely intervention." Cavan sighed and shrugged apologetically, this time at Vicki. "Of course, I didn't know exactly what would be called for. So I arranged to have someone there who I knew from personal previous experience would keep his head in a crisis, know how to improvise when one thing after another went wrong, and who doesn't know how to give up. And look what he did here. How many more people do you know who could have pulled it off?"

  Vicki was staring at him fixedly. "When Mitch was pulled . . ." she said slowly. "Robin was your substitute, wasn't he? You'd already set him up as your insider in the SA. He told us the whole story."

  Cavan nodded candidly in a way that said there was no point in hiding anything now. "I know it caused you and Landen a lot of grief," he said. "But we were up against professionals who knew all about infiltration and undercover techniques, and hampered by the naivete of people who were too trusting and knew nothing. I needed someone in the SA to keep tabs on what was going on. We didn't dare let you or Landen know. It was imperative for everyone to act naturally. Especially Robin. They had dossiers going way back on everyone they recruited."

  "I didn't even know," Alicia informed them.

  "What, exactly, did you expect Robin to do?" Keene asked.

  "There was no way to be specific," Cavan answered. "But he's from the same kind of mold as yourself. The main thing was for him to just be there. Whatever developed, he would come up with something."

  For a moment Keene felt the beginnings of indignation. But then he remembered that what they were talking about here was something that was bigger than individuals, that he had been ready to put before himself when Jon Foy opened his eyes on that day long ago in the tower room at Foundation to the things that Kronia stood for. And in any case, would he have preferred staying back there, immersed in his own world, while Earth was lost and the whole future course of human events set on a path of repeating its same sorry saga all over again?

  No. It wasn't in his nature. His inability to strike a compromise between what was right and what wasn't, and the accompanying compulsion to hurl himself totally into doing what needed to be done, regardless of the odds, had caused him to give up a career to spend half his life fighting the establishments of a degenerate science in the world that was gone, and to bring a dozen people out to the new world beginning. And the same qualities had emerged again, when the new world he had pledged himself to was threatened.

  As Cavan had known he would.

  * * *

  Keene and Vicki carried on walking slowly between the glinting forms of the domes and structures after Cavan and Alicia had left them. The base didn't look so much like a construction site these days. With the essentials taken care of, a lot of cleaning up had been going on, and Serengeti center was taking on a little style and color. Sapling trees that had been found in some of the lower regions had been brought in and replanted, and plots of grass and shr
ubs were being carefully nurtured. In the day, bright streaks and patches of iridescent blue in the thinning cloud were becoming commonplace, and flowers were beginning to appear in greater numbers. Beds of them were being fertilized and planted around and through the residential area.

  "So did Vorse try to tempt you today with all that exciting work waiting back on Titan?" Vicki said, glancing at him. It was a veiled way of asking if he was going back to Saturn. Vicki would be staying on, to continue her work with Luthis.

  Standing policy was to keep at least one long-range vessel stationed at Earth at all times. Surya had departed for Kronia some time ago with a consignment mainly of flora and fauna, but with Aztec now in orbit, the Varuna was being readied for a return trip, to be refitted to more permanent standards and equipped with Yarbat arrays. A recurring topic between Vicki and Keene had been the question of whether, with Earth's immediate emergency now over, he would return to resume his work with Pang Yarbat's group on Titan. Inwardly, Keene had thought he would, since that had been the pattern of his life since coming to Kronia; but he knew too that Vicki had her own personal reasons and hopes for asking, and he hadn't wanted to deal with the issue until it became necessary. So, he had never voiced a final decision one way or the other.

  But as he turned over his feelings in his mind, he became aware that somehow the equations didn't come out the way they had before. On Earth, before and during the Athena crisis, and all through his years at Kronia, always there had been a sense of an overriding imperative that placed its own demands above personal wants and worldly things. Now, suddenly, he felt . . . free. It was as if some power that had laid first claim on him acknowledged that his dues were paid, and was releasing him from its service.

  He was being unusually long in replying. Vicki looked at him. When he answered, it was from a completely different direction.

  "Do you still have this Kronian belief that you used to talk about with Sariena, of some intelligence, guiding principle—whatever you want to call it—at work behind what goes on, shaping the way it all unfolds?"

  Vicki looked surprised. "Yes—more so than ever, after what we're finding out about living things. What . . . ?" But her beginning of a question trailed away, as if she saw there was no reason to complete it.

  "Do you think it sometimes reaches down to individuals and enlists them to its purpose when it needs to, and lets them go when it's done? Or do we just project outward something that's really in ourselves?"

  "Does it matter? The outcome's still the same."

  "We might be building a civilization to go out among the stars looking for something that's not there," Keene said.

  "Maybe it isn't where you go, but what you have to do to get there that finds you the answers," Vicki replied.

  "The things I had to do are done," Keene told her. "What Alicia said was right. The future we need to be thinking about now is here, not at Saturn."

  In the light from the lamps, he saw her eyes moistening. "You're not going back with the Varuna?" she said, her voice catching.

  He shook his head and slipped an arm around her waist, drawing her closer as they walked. "And anyway, you and I have got a lot of lost time to make up, haven't we?"

  "You really mean it?"

  He nodded.

  Vicki dropped her head against his shoulder, closed her eyes. Around them, the night breeze between the looming shadows of the base was fresh and cool, bringing a hint of rain with the scents and sounds of the new world.

  The new world beginning.

  FURTHER READING

  As requested by numerous readers, below are sources of further information pertaining to some of the topics alluded to in The Anguished Dawn.

  Gravity Electromagnetics

  The suggestion of gravity deriving from electromagnetism was inspired by the work of Dr. Andre Assis, Institute of Physics, Campinas, Brazil. See:

  Assis, A.K.T., 1992, "Deriving gravitation from electromagnetism," Canadian Journal of Physics, Vol. 70, pp. 330-340.

  Assis, A.K.T., 1995, "Gravitation as a Fourth Order Electromagnetic Effect," Advanced Electromagnetism—Foundations, Theory, and Applications, Editors T.W. Barrett & D.M. Grimes, World Scientific, Singapore, 1995, pp. 314-331.

  Dr. Assis's home page is at

  http://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~assis.

  Inertial Agent Model of Gravity

  Van Flandern, Tom, 1993, Dark Matter, Missing Planets, and New Comets, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA.

  Mars Encounter

  The Mars-encounters interpretation of the Sanskrit Vedas was based on the work Firmament and Chaos by John Ackerman. Copies can be downloaded from his web site at http://www.firmament-chaos.com.

  Problems with Darwinian Evolution

  and Related Issues

  Behe, Michael J., 1996, Darwin's Black Box, Free Press, NY.

  Dembski, William A., 1999, Intelligent Design, Intervarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL.

  Denton, Michael, 1986, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Adler & Adler, Bethesda, MD.

  Ginenthal, Charles, 1994, "Scientific Dating Methods in Ruins," The Velikovskian, Vol.2, No.1 pp. 50–79.

  Hoyle, Fred, 1983, The Intelligent Universe, Michael Joseph, London.

  Johnson, Phillip, 1991, Darwin on Trial, Regnery, Washington, D.C.

  Johnson, Phillip, 1995, Reason in the Balance, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL.

  Milton, Richard, 1997, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, Park Street Press, Rochester, VT.

  Spetner, Lee, 1997, Not By Chance! Judaica Press, New York, NY.

  Wells, Jonathan, 2000, Icons of Evolution, Regnery, Washington, D.C.

  Woodmorappe, John, 1999, The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods, ICR, El Cajon, CA.

  Impossible Dinosaurs

  Holden, Ted, 1993, "Giants of the Earth," The Velikovskian, Vol.1, No.4, p. 7.

  Also, various papers at

  www.aeonjournal.com.

  Catastrophism

  Ginenthal, Charles, 1995, Carl Sagan & Immanuel Velikovsky, New Falcon Press, Tempe, AZ.

  Over 400 pages presenting findings from space missions and other sources that are consistent with Velikovsky's claims, while contradicting the experts who vilified him.

  Velikovsky and Establishment Science

  A comprehensive rejoinder to the publication Scientists Confront Velikovsky, which followed the 1974 AAAS conference. What really went on, earning Velikovsky a standing ovation that the media didn't mention. 144 pp.

  Available from:

  Lewis Greenberg

  226 Richmond C

  Deerfield Beach FL 33442

  Raup, David M., 1991: Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? W.W. Norton, New York, NY.

  Velikovsky, Immanuel, 1950, Worlds in Collision, Buccaneer Books, Cutchogue, NY.

  Velikovsky, Immanuel, 1952, Ages in Chaos, Buccaneer Books, Cutchogue, NY.

  Velikovsky, Immanuel, 1955, Earth in Upheaval, Buccaneer Books, Cutchogue, NY.

  The Velikovskian

  A journal dedicated to studies of the evidence for global catastrophes in human times, along with such related issues as the ancient historic record, evolution and extinction, the dynamics of the Solar System, methods of chronology and dating. Normally 4 issues per year.

  Inquiries to:

  Charles Ginenthal

  Ivy Press

  65-35 108th St.

  Forest Hill NY 11375

  Tel: 718-897-2403

  Aeon

  A journal of myth, science, and ancient history, frequently exploring theories of different early Solar System configurations, including the Saturn hypothesis. Information at: www.aeonjournal.com or from Ev Cochrane, e-mail ev@ aeonjournal.com.

  Society for Interdisciplinary Studies

  Biannual catastrophist journal providing articles and papers on a wide range of related topics, books sources and reviews, and digest of Internet coverage.

  Inquiries to:

  The Membership Secretary

  SIS

&n
bsp; 10 Witley Green

  Darley Heights

  Stopsley Beds, LU2 8TR

  U.K.

  Web: http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/sis

  E-mail SIS@knowledge.co.uk

  THE END

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