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29

While it was still morning in California, a train of meteorite impacts stitched its way like a gigantic bombing run over the tip of South America and across the southern Atlantic to beyond the Falkland Islands. Shortly afterward, a similar fall peppered the South Island of New Zealand, and satellites reported another shower in the North Pacific. The areas affected were thinly populated in all cases, but unconfirmed reports spoke of damage and some casualties in a couple of townships on the Chilean coast. An airliner on a scheduled flight from Wellington to Dunedin had disappeared, and a NASA observation satellite was no longer transmitting. On the Moon, seismometers were picking up steady impact activity; outside excursions were being limited to crews using earth-moving machinery to cover exposed parts of the bases with protective layers of regolith. Space transporters and personnel carriers were being readied to be brought back to Earth. It was evidently dawning on people in various places that life at the bottom of a deep gravity well could soon become distinctly hazardous.

* * *

"Have you ever heard of the Carolina Bays?" John asked Keene across a paper-strewn table in the lab after they had watched the latest news update on one of the terminal screens. All of the scientists had returned on time. There had been little talk among them.

"Sounds like a foxhunt somewhere," Colby Greene murmured without looking up from what he was doing.

"No. What are they?" Keene asked.

"A lot of elliptical depressions in the ground and offshore all the way from New Jersey to Florida but mainly in the Carolinas—thousands of them; over a million by some counts if you include all the smaller ones. They're all aligned in parallel from northwest to southeast, with a raised rim at the southern end. You get similar things in other places around the world too. They have to be from bombardments by huge meteorite swarms. And they're recent—a few thousand years."

Keene tossed down his pen and looked back sourly. "Well, that's just great to know now. Where were you guys a couple of weeks ago and in the years before that when the Kronians needed some support?"

"That's not really fair, Lan," Charlie Hu said, turning from the wall board. "John was one of the people trying to get us into the Washington thing. We were cut out."

Keene nodded tiredly. "You're right. I take it back. Sorry, John. I guess we're all a bit edgier than we think."

"Forget it," John told him.

 

Cavan called around lunchtime to report what he had, using the landline connection from Washington and a personal encryption code for security, since regular communications channels were getting erratic. Keene talked to him in an empty office.

"This character Queal that Voler seems to know is with Air Force Intelligence, so I was able to get a couple of things from nameless friends at my former employer that I remember so fondly," Cavan said. "He's involved with high-level security at Space Command, which gives him connections. A look at message traffic over the past forty-eight hours turns up a hive of activity between Queal's office and a section of the Pentagon that handles FAST operations, headed by a Colonel Winter. And Winter turns out to be the person that Beckerson was visiting at the Pentagon the night before last, when you were at the White House meeting. In fact, it seems that Beckerson was instrumental in getting Winter the position."

"Interesting," Keene pronounced. The Facilities Security Teams were the Air Force's assault and infiltration units, trained for the penetration of air bases, launch sites, and other installations in the event of seizure by terrorists or other such situations. Not only did Keene's suspicion of something being planned that involved Voler appear to be well founded, but now it was beginning to look as if the Vice President might be part of it too.

"It gets more interesting," Cavan said. "As of this morning, your man Hixson at Goddard has gone missing too. Now that strikes me as strange, seeing as how he's supposed to be near the center of a crisis situation. So what do you make of that?"

"Something extreme, and sometime soon," Keene replied. "Any ideas?"

"Not really," Cavan confessed. "One thought I had was that they could be fixing to grab themselves a ready-equipped bolt-hole somewhere deep and safe, but it didn't add up. Voler would have no trouble getting onto the official lists anyway."

"Maybe they've glimpsed what's coming and prefer to control their own private guns," Keene suggested.

"Will it really be as bad as that, Landen?"

"Afraid so. Worse than anything you'll hear tonight. If you get a chance to get on a list for one of those deep shelters yourself, go for it."

Cavan nodded slowly and somberly. "And what about yourself?"

"I'm not sure where I go after the job's done here, Leo. Maybe back to Texas to help Marvin with whatever can be done there."

"The Kronians lift off tomorrow morning. You should have gone with them. They would have found you a place, I'm sure."

"Gallian offered me one. There were things to be done that I couldn't leave."

Cavan shook his head. "You are aware that you're crazy, I hope, Landen?"

Keene snorted. "First Alicia, now me? It must be you, Leo. You just attract crazies. That's what it is."

* * *

Something exploded in the upper atmosphere above Mali, showering debris over the western Sahara and heard from Upper Volta to customs posts on the southern Algerian border. Another breakup occurred over the Sinkiang province in Central Asia, where a hysterical surveyor on a road-building project described in a phoned interview cabins and trucks at a construction camp being set ablaze, and fleeing workers cut down in a rain of red-hot fragments. In Western Australia and parts of Indonesia, red, ferruginous dust was coming down out of the sky and turning rivers and lakes the color of blood. Herd animals from Africa's veldts to the Canadian tundra were seen moving in huge, restless, undirected surges, and swarms of birds everywhere, numbering millions, fluttered agitatedly in the trees long into the night.

* * *

Not just America but practically the entire world was watching or listening when President Hayer at last went on the air from the White House to acknowledge officially what most people by now were sensing. Grave-faced leaders of Congress flanked him on either side, along with defense chiefs and scientific advisors. Celia Hayer stood a little back and to one side with their two young children, a son and a daughter.

He did not deny any of the rumors and predictions that were circulating; neither did he go out of his way to dwell on any of them unduly in a way that would make anxieties even worse. His line was in essence a more professional and resounding version of what Keene had said to the scientists at JPL that morning. In fact, as he listened, Keene got the feeling that his own effort had perhaps been unconsciously inspired by what he had known instinctively, after meeting him, the President was going to say.

Hayer called upon everyone, individuals and organizations of every kind, to forget all the things that weren't important anymore, and perhaps never had been: paychecks and promotions, prices and profits, prestige and pretenses. All that mattered now was helping each other get through. And he was insistent on making the point that some, maybe a lot more than the world was being told from some quarters, would get through—and, again as Keene in his own words had anticipated—that anyone listening might be among them. It appeared that humanity had faced a comparable crisis in its earlier history and pulled through. And that had been without modern technical resources and knowledge. Surely their descendants could do at least as well. They owed that much to the descendants who would follow. He concluded by quoting a paraphrasing of Winston Churchill's words from 1940, in Britain's darkest days of World War II:

"Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey; hardship our garment; constancy and valor our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted, we must be inflexible. . . . Let us, then, brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that those descendants and their descendants a thousand years from now will say of us, `This was their finest hour.' "

It was hardly a moment for applause. But the nation, as it listened, had never before stood so solidly as one. But why, the question came to Keene's mind, should it have taken something like this to do it?

Afterward, while Hayer was exchanging words with the diplomatic representatives who had attended, a TV reporter managed to get a moment with the First Lady and asked her if there was any truth to a rumor that a shuttle was being prepared specifically to evacuate children of the privileged off the surface when the danger reached its worst. She seemed taken by surprise at having to make a public comment, but recovered herself rapidly.

"Well, speaking only for my own, I can hardly do better than follow my husband's example and give you the British Queen Mother's response when she was asked the same thing about moving her children out of London to escape the German bombing. And what she said was, `They won't go unless I go. I won't go unless the King goes. And the King won't go under any circumstances whatsoever.' "

* * *

By late afternoon California time, the country was already responding. Airlines, railroads, bus and trucking companies placed their equipment and services at the disposal of the evacuation authorities. Hotels, schools, malls, and office buildings inland began working on plans to accommodate influxes from the coasts and the lowlands. The mayor of Denver virtually opened the entire city as a refugee camp. Switchboards were swamped with calls from householders offering accommodation. Late in the evening, a White House aide called to ask Keene if he would stay on in California to assist Beckerson's staff in briefing state administrators on the nature and scale of what was to be expected. Keene could hardly refuse. For the time being anyway, it seemed that much of the world was finally preparing to pull together. How much good would come of it in the long run was something he wasn't prepared to brood about. The last thing anyone needed was discouragement. John was detailed to drive Keene and his companions to the hotel they had been booked into on the outskirts of Pasadena a few miles away. On reaching the parking lot, they found his car and all the others covered with a sooty ash that stuck to the windshield and needed wiping with a wet cloth to clear. The air was muggy and smarting to the eyes, and Barbara had to hold a handkerchief to her face. Colby found a dent in the roof and another in the hood. The parking lot had a grainy feeling underfoot. "Don't hold your breath waiting if you decide to claim on the insurance," he told John laconically. John said something about topping up with gas as soon as he got a chance.

Although it was late by the time they reached the city, the streets were restless with people emerging from their isolation to seek security in numbers. There was a lot of hurrying this way and that, groups standing and talking, others carrying things out of houses and loading up cars. At one corner, some people were trying to restrain a struggling man shouting obscenities at a woman with a bloody face, who was screaming hysterically. Farther on, a line of cars was backed up into the street from the pumps at a convenience store, where three big men carrying baseball bats were positioned conspicuously, watching the forecourt. John tried calling the hotel to confirm the rooms but was unable to get through.

The situation when they arrived in the lobby was chaotic, with a frantic manager trying to deal with guests unable to get credit card verification, as well as a swarm of unexpected arrivals who seemed to be under the impression that rooms should be available to anyone on demand. Having reservations from JPL helped, and Keene and the others obtained two connecting rooms. For safety, they decided to have Gordon take one of the beds in the double room allocated to Barbara, and keep the connecting door open. When he showered before turning in, Keene found that he had to scrub thoroughly to shift the sticky orange dust from his skin and hair. People he'd heard in the lobby had been talking about rivers and reservoirs from Arizona to Illinois turning red.

Despite his fatigue, he slept sporadically and uneasily. He was awakened before dawn by Charlie Hu hammering on the door. Keene's personal phone was dead like everyone else's, and the hotel switchboard hadn't answered. Roy Sloane had called from Washington and needed to talk to Keene immediately. Leaving Colby Greene in charge at the hotel, Keene drove back with Hu beneath a luridly flaming sky along roads already beginning to fill with loaded-down vehicles. He found Sloane in a highly agitated state. The entire Kronian delegation had vanished from the Engleton. It appeared they had been kidnapped.

 

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Framed


Title: Cradle of Saturn
Author: James P. Hogan
ISBN: 0-671-57813-8 0-671-57866-9
Copyright: © 1999 by James P. Hogan
Publisher: Baen Books