The Aerospace Sciences Institute was both a research and educational establishment, set up jointly by a consortium of contractors and allied interests. It was funded privately and made no appeals to the public purse, the goal being to ensure an adequate supply of competent specialists in the fields essential to the industry, without complications arising from any yielding of standards to political agendas. NASA layoffs and the ensuing contraction of the Johnson Center had provided much of the initial recruitment and been one of the reasons for choosing Houston as the location.
Keene was no stranger there, although he had not dealt previously with the Planetary Studies section, which was where David Salio worked. The principal interests of the founder corporations were commercial and defense-related, leading them to focus essentially on launch and Earth-orbit activities, with some involvement in lunar pilot schemes and the scientific endeavor on Mars, the latter of which was a small-scale operation in any case. But putting some effort into theoretical studies of longer-term possibilities bolstered the image of exploration and adventure that excited the public, gratified stockholders, and worked wonders for recruiting ads. And besides, despite their stereotype to the contrary, many of the executives responsible for policy were genuinely curious.
The Institute was run in a spirit that conformed to the open-door tradition of regular universities, more sensitive and secretive work being conducted elsewhere. Accordingly, a little over ten minutes ahead of the appointed time, Keene sauntered in from where the airport cab had dropped him in front of the Glenn Building, verified from the lobby directory that Salio's office was on the fifth floor, and went on up without need of signature, badge, or security check. The elevator delivered him to a carpeted area with plants, padded leather seating arranged around a glass-topped table, and a wall of picture windows looking out over one of the Houston freeway interchanges. A sign directed him past a vending area into a corridor of similar-looking numbered doors and occasional bulletin boards, where eventually he arrived at 521, with a nameplate alongside indicating it to be the office of DAVID R. SALIO. Keene tapped, waited for a moment, and then eased the door open. A voice from inside called out, "Dr. Keene? Yes, do come on in. I won't be a second."
The office was the familiar combination of overflowing desk, computer work station, raggedly packed bookshelves, and wall board that seemed to characterize the natural habitat of Homo sapiens technicus the world over. Salio was at the computer, clicking through a series of data-contour images on the screen, pausing to flag a point here and there or add a comment to the caption. "Must get this off to somebody at JPL right away. It won't take a minute. Could you use a coffee or soda or something?"
"I'm fine, thanks. I had plane-food on the way."
Keene judged Salio to be in his mid-twenties to maybe thirty. He had straight black hair, a shadowy chin, and heavy-rimmed glasses, giving him a studentish look that seemed mildly incongruous in combination with the plaid shirt, blue jeans, and pointy cowboy boots. There was an intense, birdlike nervousness about the way he peered at the screen, pecking at icons and hammering quick staccatos on the keys. The desk to one side bore a framed family print showing an attractive woman and two young, happy-looking children. On the wall behind was a poster showing climbing routes up the face of El Capitan in Yosemite, and beside it a cork board with departmental notes, postcards from various places, and a cartoon collection.
Finally, a mail screen appeared and Salio sent the package off to its destination with a flourish. Then he stood and extended a hand. "Sorry about that. One of those things that couldn't wait. Let's see . . . we need to make some room for you." He lifted a pile of books and papers from a chair by the wall and cleared some space for them on top of a file cabinet. Keene sat down, and Salio moved around to pull up his own chair on the far side of the desk. He looked across and pushed his hair up from his eyes. "Well, I admit I was flattered when you got back to me so quickly. I never expected to see you here in person. We don't exactly get a lot of celebrities stopping by in this office."
"Oh, I wouldn't attach too much significance to that," Keene said. "You know how it is. They'll all have found someone else by the end of the week."
"What's your title with Amspace, if you don't mind my asking?"
"I'm not exactly with Amspace. I run a technical consultancy on nuclear dynamics that's been working with them for a number of years: Protonixalso based in Corpus Christi."
"Ah . . ."
"That's what I really do. The stunt and commercial last Friday were coincidental."
"It's stirring up a lot of hostility out there," Salio said. "But you knew that had to happen."
"If you hope to do anything, you have to be visible," Keene answered. "As I said when we talked, Amspace, myself, and various other interests that we're associated with are trying to help promote the Kronian case because we believe it's too important an issue to let politics and scientific dogmatism get in the way of the truthwhich is what's happening. You said you'd like to help. We're interested enough that I'm here."
"This is all very gratifying, Dr. Keene. It's something I've been battling over for years."
" `Landen' is fine. So can we talk about the kind of work that you and the other scientists that you said you're in touch with have been doing? Particularly about Venus being a young planet. You said a lot of evidence points to it."
"I can't say whether or not it had anything to do with Moses," Salio cautioned. "Things like that aren't written in thermal signatures or atmospheric compositions. But what I can show you is that practically everything we know about Venus is consistent with the notion of a young, recently very hot body." Salio tilted his chair back and clasped his hands behind his head. "The first thing every schoolkid knows is that what the first American and Russian probes found back in the nineteen sixties came as a big surpriseat least it did to the orthodox theory. The expectation had been that since Venus was about Earth's size and had clouds, it would be pretty similarmaybe a little warmer through being nearer to the Sun. What they found was virtually a volcanic cauldron: surface temperature seven-hundred-fifty degrees K and moreenough to melt leadand an atmosphere of acids and hydrocarbon gases at ninety times the pressure of Earth's. Not the kind of place to put on your list of vacation spots."
"Supposedly a runaway greenhouse effect," Keene supplied. It was what all the texts said, and not something he had ever had much reason to doubt or look into.
Salio pulled a face. "Yes, `supposedly'a good choice of word, Mr. . . . Landen. That theory was contrived as an attempt to square the facts with the established assumption of an ancient planet. But it really doesn't stand up. The main weakness is quite simple: a real greenhouse has a roof that stops the hot air inside from convecting upward and being replaced by cooler air circulating down from above. A planet doesn't have such a lid, and so there's nothing to stop the hot surface gases from mixing with the freezing upper layers. A greenhouse process might raise the temperature some, but maintaining a difference of over seven hundred degrees just isn't credible. You'd reach thermal equilibrium through convection and radiation back into space long before it got anywhere near that. The only way such a difference could be maintained is if the heat source is the planet itself, not the Sun."
"A young, recently very hot body," Keene repeated.
"Exactly. And enough heat doesn't get down to the surface in any case. In fact, hardly any does. For a start, most of the sunlight is reflected off the cloud tops thirty miles upwhich is why Venus is so bright. And what does penetrate diminishes rapidly with depth in an atmosphere that thick, so that any solar heating you do get occurs at the top. Thermally it's more like shallow seas on Earth, where sunlight is absorbed primarily in the upper three hundred feet. Venus's surface pressure is about equivalent to that three thousand feet down in the ocean. Even at the equator, the temperature at that depth is only about eight degrees above freezing. You see, the greenhouse effect can't simply be magnified without limit. Increasing the insulation also reduces the amount of sunshine that's transmitted. Taking things beyond a certain point becomes self-defeating: The loss in transmission is no longer compensated for by the extra insulation, and the temperature begins to drop. None of the heat from the bottom of the ocean can escape into space, but it isn't boiling hot."
Keene thought it through but couldn't fault it. He nodded for Salio to continue.
"This all fits with other things that have been known since the earliest U.S. and Russian space shots," Salio said. "The planet isn't in thermal equilibrium as the greenhouse explanation would require. It radiates twenty percent more energy out than falls on it from the Sun. Its dark side isn't cooler, even though night lasts fifty-eight days. In fact, it's slightly warmer. We're talking about a planet with a lot of residual heat."
"Has a cooling-curve model been worked out that's consistent with this kind of temperature from an internal source?" Keene queried.
"Oh yesand it's quite interesting. If you start out with the assumption of an incandescent state three and a half thousand years ago, which is what the Kronians are saying, the calculated temperature today works out at seven-fifty degrees Kprecisely what's observed."
"Why not radioactivity in the rocks?" Keene queried. "It warms us up here. Why not there too?"
"Generating ten thousand times more heat than Earth does?" Salio shook his head. "No way."
Keene frowned as he thought back over what had been said. "And this has been known for years? . . . So why do we keep hearing the same story?"
Salio shrugged. "Once people are trained in a particular theory, they become emotionally wedded to it. They can be literally incapable of seeing anything that contradicts it, and will invent the most amazing rationalizations. That's why you have to wait for a generation to die off before you can move on."
"But how can that be?" Keene invited. "Science is objective, impartial, and self-correcting. All the textbooks say so."
Salio returned a thin, humorless smile. It was clear that they spoke the same language. Keene sensed the way to real communication opening between them. It occurred to him what a lonely professional life Salio must lead. Salio went on, "And then you have the anomalies in atmospheric composition. For example, as most people know there's the sulfuric acid in the upper cloudsprobably formed out of sulfur trioxide from the hydrocarbon gases binding with what little water ever existed. But sulfuric acid in the cloud tops ought to have a short life due to decomposition by solar UV. If Venus were over four billion years old, there shouldn't be any sulfuric acid left. But there is.
"The middle atmosphere is rich in carbon dioxide. That should have been dissociated in a few thousand years into carbon monoxide and oxygen, which don't recombine again easily and ought to be abundant. They're not.
"And where are Venus's oceans? In billions of years it ought to have outgassed enormous volumes of water. The conventional explanation is that it was dissociated into oxygen, which combined with the rocks, and hydrogen, which escaped. But a lot of us can't buy that. For one thing, the depth of surface you'd need to `garden' to absorb the amount of oxygen indicated just isn't credible. And for another, if dissociation produced oxygen, the oxygen should recombine into upper-atmosphere ozone the way it does on Earth, shutting out that UV band and terminating the process. How can you postulate one mechanism and ignore the other?"
Keene could tell there was more. "Go on," he said, staring wonderingly.
Salio tossed out a hand idly, as if inviting Keene to take his pick. "Ratios of argon isotopes. Argon-40 is a decay product of potassium-40 and should increase over timeto a level comparable with Earth's, you'd think, if Venus were as old as the Earth. But in fact it's around fifteen times less. On the other hand, argon-36 is primordial and should have decayed to a level like Earth's. It turns out to be hundreds of times more. Both figures are about what you would expect in a young planet's original atmosphere. . . . And if you want, we could talk about the lack of erosion that you'd expect from dense, corrosive winds, and the absence of a regolith; the flatness of the surface; and the enormous lava flows with huge numbers of collapsed volcanic formations. The books say Olympus Mons on Mars is the biggest known volcano. I think they're wrong. Venus is. The whole planet's a cooling volcano."
Keene had already accepted Salio as the kind of person who took his work seriously and would get his facts right. He sat back and massaged his brow. After a few seconds he looked back up. "I assume you can point me to sources for all this?" he said.
"Oh, sure," Salio replied. "And I'll include some on the Moon as well. Obviously, if something came close enough to the Earth to cause polar shifts and all kinds of devastation, the Moon should show signs of it as well."
"And it does?"
"Yesall the signs of something passing close by and subjecting it to intense tidal stress and heating on one side. The formation of the maria lava sheets is consistent with melting by tidal forces. If they were extrusions of molten material from billions of years ago, they ought to be covered by a deep layer of regolith. It's practically nonexistent."
Keene nodded slowly. He remembered reading somewhere that some of the scientists who planned the original Apollo missions had been worried that the landers might sink in the dust.
"The maria extend across one side in a huge great-circle swathe, which is what you'd expect from a passing encounter," Salio went on. "And moonquakes are concentrated along two matching belts, six to eight hundred kilometers down. If the Moon has been dead for billions of years, there shouldn't be any moonquakes. What it says is that something deformed the structure recently, and it's still recovering. That would account for the bulge on the maria side too, which has been a puzzle for centuries. If it were primeval, it should have sunk under gravity long ago." Salio spread his hands in a gesture of finality. "You've got volcanic activity that shouldn't be there today. And the maria lavas have a coherent magnetism that means they cooled in the presence of a field far too strong to have been either terrestrial or solar. So where did it come from? . . . Do you want me to go on?"
"It's okay, David. I'm getting the picture. I can check the rest out myself from your references." Keene stood up and flexed his arms, as if it would help him digest all this information better. There was a chart on one of the walls showing a depiction of the Milky Way Galaxy. Somebody had added an arrow with the caption: You are here . . . or maybe somewhere near hereWerner Heisenberg. Salio sorted some of the papers on his desk, allowing Keene time to think.
At length, Keene turned. "So why hasn't your thinking been channeled along the standard lines that we keep hearing?" he asked. "You seem pretty free to follow where your inclination leads. How come the difference?"
Salio's intense look softened for the first time into something approaching a grin. "Well, it's really what you might call a hobby interest, so nobody around here cares that much. We're not part of the establishment. The concerns that run this institute are interested in technology as opposed to what you and I think of as science. Ruffling academic feathers isn't something we have to worry about." Salio licked his lips and indicated the door. "Are you sure you wouldn't like a drink of some kind? I'm going for one. But then I've been doing all the talking."
"Okay, maybe a cup of coffee," Keene conceded.
"Splendid." Salio rose from his chair. "We can go to the visitors' area by the elevators where you came in, or if you don't mind muck and squalor, there's our own cubbyhole which is closerbut the coffee's better."
"I'll take that. Probably feel more at home anyhow," Keene said. He looked at the poster of El Capitan while Salio was coming around the desk. "Is that something you doclimb?"
"I used to. These days, though, other things tend to take up more of life . . ." Salio looked back at the photo on his desk. "Or maybe I'm just getting older."
"Nice family," Keene complimented as he waited for Salio to lead the way out the door. "What's your wife's name?"
"Jean. She's Canadianalso an emergency-room nurse at one of the hospitals here. I've been offered a sabbatical at a university in England, which will mean moving there for two years. She's very excited about itwell, I suppose we both are. It will be her first time in Europe."
"Sounds terrific."
They followed the corridor and came to a double door. Salio stopped, opened one side, and ushered Keene through into laboratory surroundings. "Now I'll show you what I really do," he said.
The centerpiece of the room was a complex assembly of machined parts housing an array of electronic units, wiring forms, lenses, and mechanisms. The whole stood about the size of a kitchen table and was supported in a wheeled cradle. Two technicians in lab coats, one male, one female, were working over it. A youth who looked like a student was sitting at a console by the far wall.
"Looks like satellite instrumentation," Keene remarked.
"Exactly right. This is a package that we're putting together to go into low orbit over Saturn," Salio said. "There will be some descent probes too."
"Is it part of some deal to do with the Kronians?" Keene asked. A number of concerns on Earth had worked out cooperative ventures with the colony where they could be of mutual service.
Salio nodded. "They'll transport the modules there for us and deploy them. Don't ask me what the reciprocal arrangement is. I'm only interested in the scientific side."
A discussion of technical details followed. Keene commented that walking in off the street to find himself looking at a sophisticated piece of equipment like this seemed, somehow . . . "casual."
"Oh, this is just a prototype that we're testing design ideas on," Salio told him. "The one that'll actually be going is being assembled in California. And you're right. There, it's clean rooms, gowns, filtered airthe works."
Salio led the way through to a workshop area at the rear, where a bench below the windows ran the length of one wall. There were racks for tools and materials, and shelves bearing an assortment of containers, boxes, and pieces of unidentifiable gadgetry. Several tubular steel chairs standing loosely around a scratched plastic-topped table, and a small refrigerator supporting a coffee maker denoted the lunch area. Salio filled a mug for Keene, waved a hand at the milk and sugar containers for him to help himself, and got himself a can of lemon soda from below.
"So, do I take it you're with the Kronians about Venus being an earlier Athena?" Keene asked, getting back to the subject as they sat down.
"Well, it fits with the heat, the hydrocarbon gasesall the other things we talked about," Salio replied. "Also, its whole atmosphere is in a state of super-rotation in an east-west direction at about a hundred times the speed of the surface, which is consistent with the idea of a dense tail wrapping itself around the planet and still dissipating angular momentum." He peeled open his drink. "And then you've got the comets. The shower of new comets that accompanied the ejection of Athena is forcing a revision of the idea that comets come from outside the Solar Systemwhich, personally, I never had much time for anyway. I mean how else are you going to get material compressed to the density of rock out in space?
"But it goes further. The whole question of how the Solar System was formed might have to be rethought. There's work going back to the last century that no one has ever refuted, saying that neither of the traditional tidal or accretion models can be right. Because of its disrupting effects, none of the inner planets could have formed inside the orbit of Jupiter. If so, then where did they come from? An obvious thought is that if Venus and Athena originated by fission from Jupiter, then maybe the others did too, which makes Jupiter not just a comet factory but a planet factory too. And that's exactly where the Kronian line of thinking is taking us." Salio took a drink at last and paused again to think for a moment. "The biggest problem is to account for the circularization of orbits. Conventional theory doesn't do it, and that's where the Church of Astronomy is going to be digging its heels in."
Keene sat back and looked at him, amazed. They had converged totally. "Would you believe I was talking to the Kronians about just that very thing last Monday night?" he said.
"You've actually met them?"
"That was one of the reasons why I was in Washington."
Salio looked impressed "And do they have any ideas?" he asked.
"Yes," Keene answered. "I think they might." He paused, waiting for a reaction. Salio waved for him to continue. "Well, go on. Now I'm the one doing the listening."
"What would you say to the suggestion that the orbits aren't always determined purely gravitationally?" Keene replied. "Suppose an event like Athena could alter the electrical environment to create a temporary regime in which charge-induced forces became significant. Mightn't that make a difference?"
Salio didn't answer at once but stared at him long and fixedly. "Is there some reason to suppose that's true?" he asked finally.
"I think the Kronians might have some good reasons, yes," Keene replied. He went on to summarize what Sariena had said about the Kronian findings and the arrangements being made in Corpus Christi to compute the implications. Naturally, Salio was intrigued. Keene promised to keep him posted on the outcome.
Back in Salio's office, Keen finally got around to asking the question that had been his prime reason for coming to see Salio. "If Amspace were to arrange media coverage and so forth, would you be willing to go public with the kinds of things you've been telling me this morning?"
"I'd be happy to," was Salio's reply. "Wasn't that why I got in touch with you in the first place?"
"It wouldn't create problems with the people you work for here?" Keene checked.
"No. As I said before, as far as they're concerned it's just a hobby. As long as it doesn't affect their budgets, contracts, or completion dates, no one here is going to worry too much."
Salio offered lunch, but Keene's flight departure time didn't allow for it. He called for a cab to take Keene to the airport, and, to stretch his legs and get some air, said he'd accompany Keene down to the front entrance.
"So what's your version of why so many astronomers don't want to think about it?" Keene asked as they stood waiting. He was curious to see how Salio's view compared with Cavan's. "I mean, you and I don't have a problem. If you tell the ordinary guy in the street that we nearly got wiped out by Venus once, he says `Say, that's interesting. Tell me more.' Why the difference?"
Salio stared into the distance. Having to ponder the psychology of such things seemed to be something he was not used to. "Maybe if your whole world is built on certainty and prestige, the thought of losing it is something you can't face," he offered finally. "Ordinary people accept uncertainty and insecurity every day."
"Maybe," Keene said. It was a thought, anyway.
Salio went on, "And in any case, it's not true of all astronomers. There's a lot of politics that I try not to get mixed up in. The astronomers I know out on the West Coast would like to see all this debated more openly. But the International Astronomical Union, headquartered at the Harvard-Smithsonian center in Cambridge, sets the official line. That's where the lines and Web links from around the world come in to report observations, coordinate announcements, and so on. Its ties are to Washington investment capital and the defense establishment, both of whose horizons are conservative and Earth-centered."
Keene nodded slowly. Cavan had mentioned Voler's recently being nominated for presidency of the IAU. "So what happens on the West Coast?" he asked.
"There's a kind of parallel information clearinghouse at JPL in Pasadena," Salio said. "The IAU is primarily NSF-supported. JPL is operated for NASA by Cal Tech, which, being a private institution, gives it more autonomy. Certainly, a lot of scientists there would love to start launching stuff all over the Solar System again the way the Kronians want us to, but the catch is being tied to government money."
"Who'd be the person to talk to out there?" Keene inquired curiously.
"The best I can think of would be a guy called Charlie Hu at JPL. He runs their communications center and big number-crunching operations. I wouldn't be surprised if he talks to the Kronians on a direct line the same as you do, but doesn't publicize it much. Anyhow, sure, I can put you in touch with him."
There was only one more thing. As the cab appeared in the gateway to the parking lot, Keene remembered Robin's theory of dinosaurs arriving with impacting bodies and asked Salio what he thought. At the time Robin mentioned it, Keene had thought it outlandish; now it seemed rather tame.
"Well, it's different," Salio saidwith an effort to be tactful, Keene thought. "Is it your idea?"
"No. The son of a friend of mine. He's fourteen."
Salio looked surprised and at the same time impressed. "Well, as I say, it's differentbut I can see a few problems. Let me think about it. Can you give me his e-mail code? It would probably make him feel good if he got a response from the Institute directly, don't you think?"
The TV had been left on in the passenger compartment of the cab. Keene was about to turn it off, but paused when he realized that the item that had just come on featured a senator from New York giving his views on the Kronians.
"They're overextended with no credit in the bank. If you ask me, this whole line they're pushing is a ploy to sucker us here on Earth into bailing them out of a foolhardy venture that should never have been attempted in the first place. Well, I'm sorry but my answer is, we have problems of our own to take care of. No, sir, I will not be voting my support."
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 |