The Anguished Dawn Page 4

  "You're talking about huge currents," Wernstecki commented distantly. He was visibly excited, his mind racing over the implications.

  "One of the problems with the early experiments was to deliver enough without getting friction or reaction effects that would have swamped the measurements," Pang agreed. "Solid conductors were unworkable. In the end we resorted to pinch-stabilized mercury bridges. Doing it in zero-g eliminated a lot of spurious background, and the electromagnetic shielding had to be a hundred percent. That was why we stayed so long up in Valkyrie. But in the end, the effect we achieved exceeded the attraction of normal matter by a factor of over fifty. We were measuring tens of nanograms, but it was there. It was real. We could switch it on and off." He inclined his head to indicate the direction behind. "With power flowing, we can make that array act like a twelve-ton mass. And even with that array, we could improve the figure by a factor of a million . . . if the structure could stand it."

  As Wernstecki leaned back in the chair, thinking, his eyes came unconsciously back to Keene. Keene could almost read him fitting the pieces together. Artificial gravity had been talked about for much longer than Kronia had existed. The immediate applications would be in spacecraft and satellites, eliminating the need for ungainly simulations by rotating structures or whirling modules at the ends of booms and tethers. Later, larger-scale booster systems could perhaps be implanted in low-gravity bodies like asteroids or the gas-giant moons to create Earth-normal conditions at the surface. And after that . . . who knew? Whole new technologies of matter manipulation, weight neutralization, freight handling, earthmoving . . .

  But taking it beyond the research stage that Pang had described would require lots of electrical power. Hence, the Tesla Center was the obvious place to continue the work. That was why the project had relocated here and why Pang had brought Keene's group into it. He had needed power engineers, and nuclear-proficient ones at that—the watts to induce normal bodyweights on spacecraft flight decks or increase Titan's effective mass thirtyfold weren't going to come from any other source. The source would need to be efficient and compact, suitable for being built onto space vehicles. Keene's spaceborne MHD concept had fitted the need perfectly.

  "So how far are you now toward a more advanced stage than that prototype?" Wernstecki asked finally. Pang let Keene answer.

  "We have a one hundredfold scaled-up engineering proving model almost built here," Keene said. "Down in one of the heavy equipment bays." He looked inquiringly at Pang. "I assume we'll be taking Jan to see it?"

  "Naturally, naturally." Pang kept his gaze directed at Wernstecki. "This will open up a totally new realm of physics. New industries will follow one day, revolutionizing engineering, leading to full colonization of the Solar System." In Kronian terms, he was saying that the payoff for being part of such an undertaking, if it succeeded, would be fabulous.

  Watching Wernstecki's face, Keene had the feeling it would be only a matter of time before the project acquired a new talent. Wernstecki himself addressed the issue directly, avoiding any pretenses. "When would you want some kind of decision?" he asked Pang-Yarbat.

  Pang waved a hand carelessly. "Take your time. I know that the work you're doing at present is important too. Be sure in your own mind what you want." He paused for a moment, tried but was unable to resist it, and grinned an insincere apology at Keene and Shayle. "It's a weighty matter, after all."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Keene had arranged to meet Grasse in the bar attached to an eating place called the Rhinehaus, located in Essen's subsurface central area not far from the Tesla Center. A ramp down from one of the pedestrian ways brought him to an open lobby in front of the dining area. The bar seating was off to one side, down a few more stairs. . . .

  He remembered an evening when he'd met Cavan in a hotel restaurant in Washington. One wall had been of windows looking out over lawns sloping down to a water's edge shaded by trees. He had nursed a drink and watched ducks swimming close by the shore as he waited for Cavan to arrive. . . .

  "Can I help you, sir?"

  Keene returned abruptly to the present of false-window walls with fake scenery, to find a girl in a pastel blue work-coat looking at him. He realized that he had come to a halt and was standing, lost in his revery.

  "Oh . . . It's all right. I'm meeting someone there." He indicated with a nod.

  "Would you like to take a menu through with you?"

  "Maybe later. Thanks."

  The bar decor was more subdued, with dark carpeting and upholstery and lots of imitation wood—an attempt at injecting a Terran touch. The walls carried framed prints of ships and harbor scenes along with plastic replicas of portholes, ships' bells and lights, rope fittings, and other items of maritime equipage. Grasse was sitting in an alcove booth in a far corner, partly screened by a pillar and plant trellis. He hadn't said anything about bringing company, but there was another man with him whom Keene would have known instinctively to be Terran also, even if the face had not been familiar. Keene carried on over and joined them. The bartender glided across as Keene sat down.

  Grasse was a small man with a snub nose, prominent ears, and features that seemed somehow compacted into pink folds and horizontal lines that put Keene in mind of an overripe fruit slightly squashed. The other was long of build and face, with droopy, spaniel-like eyes, and sallow skin stretched into hollows between bony cheeks and a protruding, blue-shadowed chin. Grasse waited while Keene ordered a Celtic Dark—one of the Rhinehaus's preferred beers, brewed in the agroplex on Mimas. The bartender departed. Keene looked across the booth expectantly.

  "Dr. Keene, I'd like you to meet General Claud Valcroix," Grasse said. "One of the survivors like ourselves, before with the French defense ministry. We have worked together on and off over many years. We were with the same group that escaped together." He meant in the Eurospace orbital lifter from Algeria.

  Although Keene had little inclination to get involved in such matters, he knew Valcroix's face from news screens and a few social functions that he had attended. Valcrois was emerging as spokesman for the Terran evacuees and representative of their interests in the Kronian political scene. The European clique had risen to prominence in this respect, a disproportionate number of their American political and military counterparts having been lost in incidents following the general escape from Earth.

  Valcroix and Keene shook hands across the table. "I have heard your story," the Frenchman said. "Amazing."

  "Amazing stories were happening everywhere in those times," Keene answered. "I didn't know mine was so famous."

  "Your friend, Leo Cavan, told me about it."

  Keene's eyebrows rose. "Are you and Leo old friends from the past too?"

  "We've had certain dealings since coming to Kronia," Valcroix said.

  That fitted. After younger years spent in the Air Force, Cavan had led a shady life as a denizen of the Washington political underworld, but as far as Keene knew his haunts hadn't extended to the European scene.

  "Your visit to LORIN 5 was useful?" Grasse inquired.

  Keene nodded. "It answered a lot of questions that I'd been wondering about. More to do with the organizational aspects than anything technical." He meant about operation of the Security Arm, which ran the LORIN stations and came closest to fitting a military role. It also functioned as something of a safety valve to disperse the excess energies of Kronians stifling from their life of containment and routine. Many of the younger Terran evacuees had volunteered for the Security Arm. Keene went on, "Did you know that their officers are appointed by consensus from below, not imposed from above?" General Valcroix nodded that he was aware of that, then shook his head in a way that said it made no sense.

  The Austrian glanced at his watch. "Anyway, Dr. Keene, the reason I asked to talk to you has to do with matters that some of us feel concerns about. So I decided to invite the opinions of others as well." Keene waited. Grasse cast an eye around as if making sure they were not being overheard. His voice dr
opped. "Our concerns are with the way of organization here in Kronia. You take my point? Not so much the day-to-day routines of things, but the idealizations that make the foundation underneath it all."

  He paused for a reaction.

  "I'm listening," Keene said.

  Grasse waved a hand. "Their priorities here are in the reverse order of what they need to be if the right things are to get done. And the way of going about achieving them is impractical. I give you as examples—Urzin is again talking about bringing forward the time to send missions back to Earth. He wants a permanent base there. And then it will be bases." Xen Urzin was President of the Triad that headed Kronia's governing body, formally known as the Congress of Leaders. Grasse continued, "But why do they want to send these missions? As the first step to return and begin rebuilding Earth's civilization? To survey for important resources?" Grasse shook his head. "No. It is for scientists to explore the changed surface and rewrite their geology textbooks. And the best scientists here on Kronia spend their time debating these things of how Venus was ejected from Jupiter and when the Earth was lost from Saturn, instead of how to support the population we will have fifty years from now. . . . I ask you, Doctor, is this a rational way that a tiny colony, isolated out here like this, should be thinking? The first need is to expand and consolidate our industries and their materials base. It is survival we are talking. That is what I mean by priorities."

  Keene's drink arrived. Valcroix took up when the bartender had departed again. "The Kronians are making science a religion. Back on Earth, science served practical ends—because it was controlled by people who understood policymaking. But here there is no effective control. Instead, we have this insanity of multiple competing operations all duplicating each others' efforts. We can't afford that—certainly not at the present time. This colony is strung out to its limits. It doesn't have the resources."

  Keene looked from one to the other as he took a draft of his beer. It didn't take a lot of imagination to guess who they—and the others that they had alluded to—considered more qualified to exercise that control.

  But Keene had seen enough on Earth to know what happened when science sold out and allowed itself to be conscripted to serve politics. The question of resources might be a valid one, but it didn't follow that the solution had to be some centrally directed policy. It was more likely, in fact, to impede finding the right solution. Bureaucratic control virtually guaranteed that the unorthodox and unpredictable—less amenable to forecasts and planning, but at the same time more likely to yield truly novel approaches—would never be attempted.

  Now Keene thought he was beginning to see what this was about. Grasse and Valcroix hadn't come here so much to invite his opinion as to sound him out as a prospective recruit to something that they weren't prepared to disclose for the present. Or to be marked as a potential enemy. He would need to play this carefully. He sought for a reply that would avoid commitment, while keeping open his options. Sometimes the Kronian way of going about things seemed so much cleaner and simpler.

  "Are you saying they shouldn't be planning on resuming missions back to Earth?" he replied. "For all we know, a general return there might eventually be forced. Or we could find we can't manage without its resources. Either way, it makes sense to have pilot bases there as soon as it's safe, if just for insurance. And then there's the simple humanitarian reason of doing what can be done for any survivors there might still be."

  "No, no . . . It's the kind of mission," Valcroix said. "They need properly formulated goals, relevant to the immediate interests of this colony. We can't allow such efforts to be misdirected into providing elaborate playgrounds for academics."

  Keene nodded in a neutral way. He could see no point in taking issue at the moment. "The Kronians seem to have done a pretty good job of surviving so far," he pointed out instead, taking up Grasse's other point.

  Grasse nodded his gnomish head and sighed. "Yes, yes . . . I agree. They are to be commended on a remarkable achievement. But let us remember, Dr. Keene, that it was done by a small population of self-selected idealists. The lack of an economic imperative might seem to work for a while among highly motivated people, all dedicated to their cause. But that will change now. As Kronia grows, all the different views and arguments that we know from Earth will reappear. There will have to be adopted a practical way for quantifying priorities and allocating resources. This we know from our own history of experiences. But the Kronians, they do not have the experience."

  "You mean by means of a monetary system," Keene said.

  "Yes, of course. Financial controls." Grasse indicated the glass that Keene was holding. "There is an example in your hand. You walk in; they give you the drink; you pay nothing. It is an absurdity. How can an economy of any sense grow from this basis?" Keene didn't know either. But looking around, he didn't see any drunks. He decided to let the point go. Grasse went on, "However, now it so happens that some of us with skills in just these areas have arrived here from Earth. It could mean the difference between life and death to this colony. So perhaps, when one thinks this through logically, it is not just that we can help the Kronians meet what will become a vital need by introducing our methods. Some would say we have a moral obligation to do so. Wouldn't you agree, Dr. Keene?"

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Rakki climbed through steep, slippery rain gullies gouged between walls of broken rock, picking his way through tangles of gray, leathery growth, moist from vapors carried by the wind from the swamps below. He moved surely but cautiously, avoiding the thorn thickets and turning aside the limbs of coarse leaves that tried to tear at his arms and legs. His feet were bare. On his body he wore just a loin covering of skin and a vest of some thick, stiff, Oldworld material, open at the chest and with holes for the arms, that he had taken from the body of an enemy dispatched long ago. There was still a blood-blackened patch on one side. Shifting veils of gray formed a permanent canopy overhead, thickening into a black murk above the fire mountains to the east that glowed red at night, where lightning flickered intermittently and nothing lived. Yesterday had seen snowflakes and squalls of wind-driven ice. Yet the rivulets of muddy water running down from the heights above were warm around his feet.

  He came up out of the ravine onto a more open slope of scrub and tilted boulders leaning in piles where they had tumbled down. Above him, the slope leveled out into a terrace of broken ground and rock falls along the base of a line of cliffs where the Cavers lived. In front of the openings, connecting surrounding mounds of high ground, they had built a rampart of earth and rocks that closed back to the cliffs on either side to form a walled-in area. The Swamp People had spent many hours watching the Cavers and their movements. The rampart was always guarded. Rakki sniffed the air but could read little from it up here, with the wind. The sound of barking erupted suddenly from above. The dogs had detected him. A barrier blocking a gap between two of the high points of the rampart, fashioned from limbs of dead trees and thorn bush, was raised. Rakki saw the dogs rush out, following them with his eyes in and out among the rocks as they ran down toward him. Human figures followed. He waited.

  The dogs emerged from cover—four of them, spreading out to close from all sides. Rakki backed against a boulder and tightened his grip on the edged club that he was carrying—another battle trophy, a length of Oldworld metal topped at one end by a crosspiece sharpened on stone, a grip woven from vine strands at the other. The dogs inched closer, keeping low near the ground, paws stretched ahead, fangs bared, growling and snarling. Five Cavers appeared, following them. Two looked to be no older than Rakki and were carrying spears. Neffers, like him—their minds formed by the things that were, knowing nothing of the world that had existed before the fire and the Long Night came, and the earth was torn asunder. The third was older, scrawny, with wild eyes and tufts of face hair, waving a club cut from root wood. But it was the last two that Rakki found himself staring at, for a moment dulling his normally ceaseless alertness to everything around him. T
hey were larger, with thick hair and deep lines covering faces that had seen many years. Oldworlders!

  Rakki had only seen dead Oldworlders before—who had lived as part of the world that had once been. Although his own earliest years must have gone back to those times, he had no real recollections of them, or of parents or anyone else he had been with then. At times there would come odd fragments of things, like a fading dream that no longer meant anything. Neffers did best in the world that now was. Shaped by it and attuned to it, they accepted its uncompromising reality and lived by its harsh rules instinctively. It was those who seemed to live with part of their mind in one world and part in another who tended to be ineffective and erratic, either withdrawing into long silences that could last for days, or sliding the other way toward craziness like the wild-eyed one pointing the spear. And then, Rakki had heard, there were some left from the Old World, usually older still, with a different kind of strength that had enabled them to pull through and carry on functioning.

  The two before him now wore coverings of material that was crinkly like his vest, but not as thick, torn and patched, extending over their upper arms and down their legs, with strange sheaths like animal paws around their feet. One of them was peculiarly pink, the color of hand palms. Rakki had heard of light-skinned humans but never seen one. While the others carried spears, the two Oldworlders were holding implements of intricately shaped Oldworld metal—something like Rakki's club, but without any weighted head or edge. Rakki took them to be the weapons that Jemmo had talked about. But on looking them over now, up close, he was puzzled. There was no way he could see that they could make an effective weapon. Yet Jemmo had said they possessed fearsome power.