Worlds in Chaos Read online

  Worlds in Chaos

  James P. Hogan

  Two classic novels from a best-selling master of SF.

  Cradle of Saturn

  Discoveries made by colonists on the moons of Saturn show that the Solar System has undergone repeated cataclysms and the last was only a few thousand years. This flies in the face of accepted scientific dogma, and is dismissed by Earth’s authorities—until the planet Jupiter suddenly emits a white-hot Earth-sized protoplanet that hurtles sunward on a collision course with Earth.

  The Legend That Was Earth

  The alien Hyadeans have showered high-tech gifts on the population of Earth and are offering to make a paradise of the planet. But when wealthy socialite Roland Cade discovers the dark underbelly of the alien presence, and learns that his ex-wife is one of the so-called terrorists who are fighting against the alien takeover, he’s forced to choose sides. Soon, he’s caught up in a terrifying conflict that threatens the very existence of the Earth.

  Books by James P. Hogan

  THE GIANTS SERIES

  The Two Moons

  The Two Worlds

  Mission to Minerva

  Code of the Lifemaker

  The Immortality Option

  The Cradle of Saturn

  The Anguished Dawn

  Bug Park

  Echoes of an Alien Sky

  Endgame Enigma

  The Genesis Machine

  Inherit the Stars

  The Legend That Was Earth

  Migration

  Moon Flower

  The Multiplex Man

  Paths to Otherwhere

  The Proteus Operation

  Realtime Interrupt

  Thrice Upon a Time

  The Two Faces of Tomorrow

  Voyage from Yesteryear

  Worlds in Chaos (omnibus)

  Cyber Rogues (omnibus, forthcoming)

  COLLECTIONS

  Catastrophes, Chaos and Convulsions

  Kicking the Sacred Cow

  Martian Knightlife

  Minds, Machines and Evolution

  Rockets, Redheads & Revolution

  WORLDS IN CHAOS

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by the estate of James P. Hogan.

  Cradle of Saturn copyright © 1999 by James P. Hogan.

  The Legend That Was Earth copyright © 2000 by James P. Hogan.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-3694-5

  Cover art by Kurt Miller

  First Baen paperback printing, December 2014

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hogan, James P.

  [Novels. Selections]

  Worlds in chaos / James P Hogan.

  pages ; cm

  "A Baen Books Original."

  ISBN 978-1-4767-3694-5 (softcover)

  1. Life on other planets--Fiction. 2. Human-alien encounters--Fiction. I. Hogan, James P. Cradle of Saturn II. Hogan, James P. The legend that was Earth. III. Title.

  PR6058.O348A6 2014

  823'.914--dc23

  2014034547

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-336-2

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  CRADLE OF SATURN

  Dedication

  To the work of Immanuel Velikovsky and the untiring efforts of Charles Ginenthal.

  Acknowledgments

  The help and advice of the following people is gratefully appreciated:

  Doug Beason, USAF; Jim Dorris; Steve Fairchild; Andrew Fraknoi, Astronomical Society of the Pacific; Charles Ginenthal; Jackie Hogan; Les Johnson, NASA, Marshall Spaceflight Center, Huntsville, AL; Frank Luxem; Melinda Murdock; Jeffrey Slostad; Brent Warner, NASA, Goddard Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt, MD; Betsy Wilcox, USAF

  PROLOGUE

  Times had always been plentiful. Since the beginning of the age when their ancestors first walked in the world, the People had lived in harmony with the spirits and the elements. Their language had no words for war or want, famine or drought. The forests were vast, the plains fertile. Fair winds brought rain from warm oceans. All of life flourished in abundance.

  No memory had been handed down of where the People came from.

  Some taught that they were born of Neveya, who ruled the skies during the times of lesser light when the smaller but brighter Sun was absent, and at the end of mortal life they would return to her across the Golden Sea in which the world floated. They learned to farm the lands and tame animals; to study the ways of wood, and stone, and metals; to admire and create music, likenesses, and things of beauty. Their sages pondered over the mysteries of mind and the senses, life and motion, of number and the nature of things. Communities grew under social imperatives and marketplaces for ideas, and became centers of government and commerce.

  Iryon stood near the mouth of a broad river, between arms of green hills rising to distant mountains. It was not the largest of cities, but its buildings had been shaped and ornamented with a care that made the whole as much an expression of art as the carved gates and gilded window traceries, or the marble reliefs surrounding the central square. At the summit of one of the five hills on which Iryon was built stood the Astral Temple, where priests of Neveya charted the cycles of the heavens.

  Each day began with the world looking out across the immensity of the celestial Ocean that extended away to Neveya’s orb, dividing it equally like the plane of a blade halving a water-fruit so that only the upper hemisphere of Neveya was visible. Then the Ocean would rise, tilting and narrowing as it did so until it became an edge crossing past the world to reveal briefly all of Neveya’s countenance; from there, now above, it broadened again to expand its underside, at the same time obscuring Neveya’s upper part to reach its half-day low, after which it would fall and cross back again. This cycle repeated 5,623 times in the year that the stars took to turn through their constellations.

  The proportions of light and dark making up the days changed according to whether the Sun was visible as well as Neveya, and in what situation—which varied with the seasons. The “blue hours” came when the Sun shone from the far side of Neveya, transforming its normally orange glow into a black shadow cast across the Golden Ocean. At certain times in the course of the year, as the Ocean crossed past the world during the blue hours, the Sun would vanish behind Neveya completely, turning day abruptly into darkest night. These were the times when the other worlds that moved about Neveya revealed themselves in their full glories of form and color. They were known as the days of “Dark Crossings.” Multitudes would come from afar to Iryon to attend the rites and ceremonies that took place on these occasions.

  The pyramid was built such that, from the Eye Stone at the center of the semicircle of astronomers and priests where the Speaker of Neveya stood, the orb was seen as if supported on its apex like a cloud grazing a mountain. Since Neveya never changed her position in the sky, the disk remained balanced in that manner always, varying only from yellow jewel through shrinking face to waning crescent as the Sun rode its distant course about both her and the world, and the celestial Ocean rose and dipped through its daily cycle. As the moment of the Dark Crossing approached, she glowered at
the world with full face, black and featureless, fading into the glare as the Sun touched her shoulder.

  The crowds assembled on the slopes were hushed as the Speaker intoned the Verses of Passage. Around the temple and across the city below, torches had been lit in readiness for the Darkness. At the top of the pyramid, Neveya reappeared suddenly out of the glare as a black arc sliding across the Sun, her shadow lying now like a black ray cut out of the Ocean, moment by moment advancing closer. When it fell across the world, connecting it to Neveya like a bridge spanning the Ocean, then, it was taught, the souls whose time had come to return would depart on their journey.

  A murmuring of awe and wonder, more a wind than a sound, stirred through the crowd as the sky darkened. The astronomers readied their instruments and recording tablets, while the Speaker turned, opening his robed arms wide to greet the spectacle. For an instant Neveya’s outline flared into a thin curve of light as if the extinguishing Sun were trying to claw its way back around the edge. . . .

  And then all the light went from the sky, and the stars appeared. Above and to one side of Neveya, the pink globe of Jenas became visible, while beyond it Sephelgo’s white-veined features shone as crescents of crystal. Lower was Aniar, graying and mottled, swimming to the side of Neveya, transfixed by the spear of the celestial sea seen edgewise, with the white speck of Delem farther out still along the same line. As the astronomers peered and recited their measures, scribes marked the stone that would later be cut for incorporation into the records.

  The picture showed a disk pierced by a shallowly sloping line, standing on an arrowhead. Smaller circles showed the other visible worlds and their dispositions, with major stars represented by their symbols. A table incised beneath the design gave precise directions and elevations.

  PART ONE

  JUPITER:

  CREATOR OF WORLDS

  1

  Almost twenty years before, as a nineteen-year-old engineering student at college, Landen Keene had astounded drivers on the interstate near the campus by overtaking them with ease in a 1959 Nash Rambler body fixed to a reinforced chassis on racing suspension, mounting an L88 Corvette engine. He had also more than impressed the two state troopers who handed him a ticket, but they were unable to cite his handiwork on a single safety violation. One of them had even indicated interest if Keene ever found himself of a mind to sell. “Keep at it, kid,” he had told Keene. “One day you’ll make a damned good engineer—supposin’ you live long enough, of course, that is.”

  These days, it seemed, things worked the other way around. Outdated engineering camouflaged in futuristic-looking shells was hyped as a wonder of the age, the best that taxpayers’ money could buy. Keene sat in the cramped crew compartment of the NIFTV—pronounced “Nifteev,” standing for Nuclear Indigenously Fueled Test Vehicle—wedged comfortably into the seat at the Engineer’s station by the mild quarter-g of sustained thrust cutting the craft across freefall orbits, and stared at the image on the main screen. It showed the elongated body, flaring into a delta tail-wing with tip-fins, of the spaceplane riding twenty-five miles ahead off the port lower bow, closing slowly as the NIFTV overhauled it. Officially, it was designated an “Advanced Propulsion Unit.” Its white lines were illuminated in direct light from the Sun showing above the silhouette of Earth, revealing the insignia of both the U.S. Air Force Space Command and United Nations Global Defense Force. (Exactly what the entire globe was to be defended from had never been spelled out.) The NIFTV, by contrast, with its framework of struts and ties holding together an assemblage of test engine and auxiliary motors, external tanks, and crew module, was ungainly and ugly. The APU looked sleek on the covers of glossy promotional government brochures and was pleasing to bureaucrats. The NIFTV was a creature of engineers—a space workhorse, born of pragmatism and utility.

  Ricardo’s voice came over the circuit from the Ccom station—Communications and Computing. “We’ve got a beam from them now. I’m windowing onto the main screen, copying you, Warren.”

  “Gotcha.” Warren Fassner, research project leader at Amspace Corporation’s Propulsion Division and coordinator of the current mission, acknowledged from the control room at Space Dock, at that moment orbiting twelve thousand miles away above the far side of Earth. “It looks like you guys are on stage. Make it a good one. We’re getting the hookups.” To avoid giving somebody officious somewhere an opportunity to interfere, Keene had persuaded the public relations people at Amspace to hold until the last moment before slipping word of the mission to the networks. Since it was something new and sounded exciting, the networks were interested.

  A helmeted head and shoulders showing a gray flight suit with Space Command insignia appeared in a one-eighth window at the top right of the screen. “This is Commander Voaks from USAFSC APU to approaching craft U-ASC-16R. You are entering a restricted zone posted as reserved for official Space Command operations. Identify yourself and announce your intentions.”

  Joe answered from the Pilot station, squeezed centrally behind the other two, which were angled inward to face the bulkhead carrying the screens. “Captain Elms from U-ASC-16R acknowledging APU. We are a private research vehicle owned and operated by the Amspace Corporation.”

  “We are about to commence a high-acceleration test. For your own safety, my orders are to warn you off-limits.”

  “We’re paralleling you outside the posted limit. Just taking a ringside seat. Don’t mind us. Let’s get on with the show.”

  Ricardo cut in again: “We’ve got another incoming—military priority band prefix.”

  “This is General Burgess, Space Command Ground Control Center, and I demand to speak to—”

  Joe shook his head in the background behind Keene’s console. “We’re gonna be too busy here for this. I’m throwing this one to you, Warren.”

  “Sure, switch him through. We’ll handle it,” Fassner said from the Space Dock. It had been expected. Ricardo clicked entries in a table on one of his auxiliary screens, and the irate general was consigned off to a string of comsat links around the planet.

  “APU to Amspace 16R. You have been warned in accordance with regulatory requirements. Be advised that your continued proximity to this operation will not be taken as indicative of a desirably cooperative attitude. Negative consequences may result. This is APU, out.” The window vanished.

  “Negative consequences, guys,” Keene repeated. “That’s it—it’s all over for us. They’ll find some bug in our parking lot that needs to be protected now. Close down the head office.”

  “Where do they get those guys?” Ricardo asked as he scanned his displays and made adjustments. “I mean, do they have to be programmed to talk like that? . . .” His voice trailed off, and he leaned forward. “Okay, this is it. We’re registering their exhaust plume on thermal: preboost profile.” As Ricardo spoke, the APU’s image sprouted a tail of white heat, growing rapidly to extend several times the length of the vessel.

  “Full burn,” Joe’s voice confirmed. “We’re looking at about, aw . . . two gee initial. Downrange radar is tracking.” The Air Force spaceplane was accelerating away, commencing its test. While Joe continued reading off time checks and numbers, Keene rechecked his own panel to make sure all the NIFTV’s systems were ready, then turned his eyes again to the image shrinking and foreshortening on the main screen. Advanced propulsion, he thought to himself scornfully. Pure hydrogen and whatever they called the latest oxidizer, it was still chemicals. NASA, circa 1960s, repackaged in an Air Force suit, its adequacy a giveaway of what it was intended for: a high-altitude police cruiser to patrol the envisaged one-world state. NIFTV had the potential to bring the Solar System into Earth’s backyard, but the powers that Earth’s destiny depended on weren’t interested. If the day ever arrived when their one-world order looked like becoming a reality, that, Keene vowed, would be when he’d leave it all and go out to join the Kronians. But with enterprises like Amspace still able to find backers, there was hope yet.

  Fassn
er, having evidently passed the general on to someone else, reappeared on the beam from Space Dock. “Okay, that’s looking good now. Let’s go after ’em.”

  “On standby at Fire-Ready,” Keene confirmed.

  “Go, engine. Take it up to eighty,” Joe ordered.

  Keene initiated the start-up and felt himself being squashed back in his seat as he increased reactant flow to bring the NIFTV quickly up to eighty percent power. Lead gloves encased his hands. He felt his cheeks and lips weighed back over his facial bones, baring his teeth. Smaller screens on the bulkhead in front of him showed deformed parodies of the faces of Ricardo and Joe.

  “Lateral thrusters on. Pulsing to commence roll now,” Joe grated, his mouth barely moving.

  “APU ahead low, declination twenty-seven degrees and increasing,” Ricardo reported. “We’re twelve-point-two miles off the axis and holding. Course projection is clear.”

  It was a stunt to get the world’s attention. The news channels had publicized that the Defense Department would be testing a new propulsion system designed for low-orbit maneuvering and announced it as a breakthrough. While the spaceplane was now in its maximum acceleration phase, the NIFTV was not only overtaking it but tracing a spiral twenty-plus miles in diameter about its course—literally running rings around it. A comm beam latched on again to deliver another tirade. Ricardo looked questioningly at Joe; Joe made a tossing-away motion with his head; Ricardo grinned and switched the call over the detour link to Control.