The press conference was held in the boardroom of Amspace's headquarters building in downtown Corpus Christi. Ricardo Juarez and Joe Elms, the NIFTV's other two crew members, were present with Keene. Wally Lomack joined them at the table facing the cameras as the official corporate spokesperson. Les Urkin, who headed public relations, and Harry Halloran, the technical VP, were present also in off-screen capacities. The assembly they faced was a fairly even mix of print and electronic news journalists, some hostile, some supportive, most simply following to see where the story led. With the tensions of the previous day's test now over and preliminary evaluations of its results exceeding expectations, the Amspace team was in high spirits.
As had been expected, the initial questions involved the political furore being kicked up over the unannounced testing of a nuclear propulsion system in space by a U.S.-based company. Liberal and environmental groups were committed to protest on principle, and much of media opinion was sympathetic. Joe Elms and Ricardo ducked that issue on the grounds that their line was flight operations, happy to leave Keene the brunt of respondingwhich made sense, since it was a case he was used to presenting. For a while, he reiterated the line he had begun with John Feld the day before: the risks that had been propagandized for decades were exaggerated and trivial compared to others that the world accepted routinely; energy density, not just the amount, was what mattered if you wanted to do better things more efficiently; the densities involved with state-transitions of the atomic nucleus were of the scale necessary to get out into space in a meaningful way, whereas those associated with the so-called "alternatives" were not. None of this was particularly new. But Keene's main hope while they had the world's attention was to emphasize again that a commitment to such propulsion methods would be essential for the expansion across the Solar System that the Kronians were calling for, which was crucial to the security of the human race. The opportunity came when one of the network reporters asked for a response to allegations that Amspace was using the Kronian cause to promote its own commercial interests. Not being on the company's staff, Keene couldn't comment. Wally Lomack took it with a show of shortness.
"Obviously, it would be hypocritical to deny that we'd hope to benefit. But I'm getting tired of these people who seem to think that we're incapable of looking beyond the bottom line of the current quarter's balance sheet. If a serious space development program becomes our official policy, every contractor will be looking for a share of the action, and sure, we'd expect to take our place in line with everyone else who has something to offer. But the issue that should concern all of us is the safety and future of humanity. Look at the western sky tonight just after sundown if you've forgotten what I'm talking about. It's happened before, and now we've just come too close for comfort to seeing it happen again. Saying that you and I won't be around next time isn't an answer."
"The Kronians say it happened before," somebody at the back of the room called out. "But they're the ones on a limb out there who need Earth to bail them out. Is it just a coincidence that the line of business you're in happens to be what they're telling us we have to do?"
Ricardo shook his head violently, looking along the table for support. "They're not out on any limb. Hell, man, they've got drive systems that could run rings around what we put up."
"But Kronia is economically nonviable," somebody else threw out. "Admit it, their system's shot. They have to get Earth's support somehow or go under."
"That's just a line that the politicians take," Joe Elms retorted, sitting next to Keene on his other side from Lomack. "They don't want to think about what it might do to their budgets."
"Me neither. Would you want to pay the taxes?"
"It doesn't have to be a tax-funded thing," Joe answered. "Taken as a whole, this planet has enormous resources. We spend more on cosmetics, alcohol, entertainment, and pet food than"
"Corporate interests again," another voice chimed in. "That's the whole point that some people are questioning."
Keene didn't want this to degenerate into an airing of suspicions they had all heard before. There were vaster issues to be focusing on. "Look," he said, raising both his hands. "Can we just put all this aside in our minds for a minute? These things are trivial compared to what we should be talking about. What we should be talking about concerns all of us. . . ." He gave the mood a second or two to shift. "It isn't just the Kronians who are saying that Earth has undergone major cataclysms in its past from encounters with other astronomical objects. Scars and upheavals written all over the surface of this planet and its moon say it. Abundant records of violent mass extinctions say it. Evidence of sudden climatic changes and polar shifts say it. And records preserved from cultures all over the world say that it has happened within recorded human history. Traditionally, they've been dismissed as myths and legends, but they show too much corroboration to be coincidental. The facts have been there for centuries, but for the most part we've remained collectively blind to what they've been telling us. Athena is telling us that we can't risk that kind of blindness any longer."
"Exactly," Lomack pronounced, nodding vigorously.
A dark-haired man who was sitting near the front raised a hand, then pitched in. "Phil Onslow, Houston Chronicle. Do we take it, then, that you endorse this idea that the Kronians have been pushing about Venus being a new planet?"
For a moment, Keene was surprised. He had assumed it was obvious. "Well . . . sure. It's intimately connected with what we're trying to say, and what yesterday's demonstration was all about. Three and a half thousand years ago, the human race came close to being wiped out."
"And if we buy that, you're asking us to spend trillions of dollars," Onslow persisted. "But isn't it true that scientists have been refuting that claim for years?"
"Yeah, right," Ricardo scoffed. "The same scientists who said that comets couldn't be ejected by Jupiter, let alone a planet-size body. Then look what happened ten months ago. And they're still saying it!"
"Not quite. They're saying there's no proof that it happened before," someone pointed out.
"Then they're still in as much a state of denial as they have been for years. That's all you can say," Keene answered.
What the Kronians had been trying to get accepted since before Athena's appearance was that around the middle of the second millennium B.C., Earth experienced a close encounter with a giant comet. Its axis was shifted and its orbit changed, causing seas to empty and flow over continents, the crust to buckle into mountains, and opening rifts that spilled lavas as much as a mile deep across vast areas of the surface. Climates changed abruptly, bringing ice down upon grasslands and turning forests into desert; civilizations collapsed; animals perished in millions; entire species were exterminated. These, the Kronians maintained, were the events glimpsed by the Hebrew scriptures in their descriptions of the "plagues" inflicted on Egypt, along with the events recorded subsequently.
The "blood" that turned the lands and the rivers red, followed by rains of ash and burning rock and fire, were consistent with the proposition of Earth moving into the comet's tail to be assailed by iron-bearing dust, then torrents of gravel and meteorites, and finally infusions of hydrocarbon gases that would ignite in an oxygen-laden atmosphere. Then came the enveloping darkness as the smoke and dust from a burning world blanketed out the sun. The same succession of events was described not only in writings from across the entire Middle East, but in legends handed down by the peoples of Iceland, Greenland, and India; from the islands of Polynesia to the steppes of Siberia; and places as far apart as Japan and Mexico, China and Peru. The accounts of shrieking hurricanes scouring the Earth and tides piling into mountains read the same in the Persian Avesta, the Indian Vedas, and the Mayan Troano as in Exodus, and were similarly narrated by the Maori, the Indonesian, the Laplander, and the Choctaw. And finally, the titanic electrical discharges between the comet's head and parts of its deformed, writhing tail became clashes of celestial deities depicted virtually identically whether as the Biblical Lord battling Rahab, Zeus and Typhon of the Greeks, Isis and Seth of the Egyptians, the Babylonian Marduk and Tiamat, or the Hindu Shiva or Vishnu putting down the serpent.
"I don't think you're being fair," Onslow objected. "A lot of scientists now agree that something extraordinary occurred around that time. A close flyby by a large comet is proposed in a number of models. But Venus is much bigger than any comet."
"Any comet seen in recent times, anyway," Joe said.
"It's a lot like Athena could look three and a half thousand years from now if it lost its tail," Lomack suggested.
The mood of the room pivoted on an edge. The three just back from space were heroes for the day, and the journalists' professional instincts were not to put them down. Onslow was still frowning but seemed disinclined to press his negative sentiments further. On the other hand, they had been heavily influenced by the official line heard over the years. Keene sensed a chance to bring them closer and perhaps win one or two of them around if the case could be put persuasively. He studied his clasped hands for a moment and looked up.
"You're all media people. How do you refer to that thing out there in the sky that's not the same as anything we've seen before? One of the most frequent descriptions I've seen over the past few months is `giant comet.' Well, people in ancient times were no different, except they thought of celestial objects as gods. In the languages of race after race and culture after culture, the names of the gods they associated with these events turn out to be not only interchangeable with or identical to their word for `comet,' but also the name that they applied to Venus." Keene looked around. The room was noticeably stiller, eyes fixed on him.
"I hadn't realized that," a new voice said. "This is interesting." Onslow busied himself noting something in his pad and didn't comment.
Keene answered, "It is, isn't it. And I'll tell you something more that's interesting. Old astronomic tables from places as far apart as Egypt, Sumeria, India, China, Mexicoand the accuracy of some of those tables wasn't equaled until the nineteenth centuryall show four visible planets, not five. And in each case, the missing planet is Venus." He waited a few seconds for that to sink in. Here and there, heads were turning to glance at each other. He concluded, "They all added Venus at about the same time. They all showed it appearing as a comet. And they all described it losing its tail to evolve into a planet. So come on, guys. How much more do you want?"
Afterward, they all agreed that it had gone well. In the chat session that followed over refreshments, most of the questions conveyed genuine curiosity and interest to learn more. Keene felt more than satisfied with the way things had gone, and Harry Halloran was looking pleased. As the session was breaking up, Les Urkin returned from taking a call outside and drew Keene to one side.
"You're still going up to D.C. tomorrow night, Lan, is that right?"
"I switched to an earlier flight," Keene replied. "I'm meeting someone for dinner."
"Good. The Kronians are having an informal reception at their suite in the Engleton on Monday evening. Gallian heard you'd be in town, and he wants you to know you're invited. Want me to confirm? Or I can give you their number."
"Sure, I'll be there," Keene said. "Let me call them, Les. I get a kick out of talking to them without any turnaround delay now. So now we get to meet them finally, eh?"
Things were looking better and better.
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 |