The mood among the workers at JPL, when Hu took the arrivals from Washington out to meet them, was very different, ranging from numbed shock through restless nervousness to open fear barely being kept under control. They hadn’t had the distraction of the activity going on in Washington, and they were under no illusions as a result of contradictory accounts. After spending the night in consultation with Russian astronomers at the Pastukhov observatory, they knew. And although a direct collision with Athena was not indicated, some of the further consequences of the close pass that was expected exceeded even the horror stories that Keene had heard before leaving the East Coast. A white-haired astrophysicist whom Hu introduced as Margaret Ikels explained in a room where about a dozen somber-faced scientists and assistants were gathered:
“What they told you before about the electrical effects might be only part of the story. You see, the plasma tail streaming ahead of Athena generates an intense magnetic field. Earth’s iron core passing through it at the distance that’s predicted will become a gigantic induction generator of huge circulating electrical currents. According to our estimates, the heat generated could open up fault lines in the mantle and melt through to the crust.” Ikels nodded her head to indicate a lanky, yellow-haired young man in shorts and a sweatshirt, sprawled across one of the chairs, his arm draped along the back of another, one foot resting on a third. “John has some interesting thoughts on plate tectonics that you might like to hear.” Keene merely jerked his chin inquiringly. This latest revelation had left him momentarily incapable of saying anything.
“The conventional picture might be wrong by orders of magnitude,” John said. “The ocean floors didn’t take millions of years to spread from the rifts. That’s just the answer you get when you extrapolate back the cooled-down rate of spreading that we measure today. If the Kronians are right about Venus—which is what a lot of us here have thought for a long time—it happened only thousands of years ago, maybe in days or weeks.”
For several seconds, Keene stared, aghast. If the upswelling of the sea-floor ridges and sideways spreading that created the ocean floors had taken place on the kind of timescale that John was talking about, the rates of lava flow had to have been immensely greater than anything previously imagined. So, therefore, would the amount of heat necessary to produce it—which was what Margaret Ikels was saying.
“You’re talking about boiling oceans, here,” someone threw in from the side, as if confirming Keene’s thoughts.
“So . . . in that case, what wrote the stripes?” Keene asked, finding his voice at last. He meant the parallel lines of alternately directed magnetism found across seabeds the world over. The generally accepted theory was that they had been produced by unexplained reversals of the Earth’s field, occurring at intervals of thousands of years or more.
John shrugged. “The Russians think they’re also tied in with all the electrical activity somehow. I guess we’re about to get some interesting lessons in planetary physics. Too bad nobody will be taking notes.”
A silence fell over the room. Keene saw hopelessness written on every face. Charlie Hu looked uncomfortable, as if aware on the one hand that the morale of the group was his responsibility, yet at the same time unable to insult their intelligence by trying to tell anyone that things mightn’t be as bad as everyone knew they were.
“Maybe these guys should get some rest,” Keene suggested, looking at Hu. In case they hadn’t been informed, he added, “The President is due to make a national statement at three o’clock Pacific Time today. The main input regarding what’s to be expected will come from here. Maybe we could get together at, say, around ten to compare notes and check numbers? That would give us about four hours to get a final line together.”
John straightened up suddenly, his feelings now venting themselves as anger. “What’s the point?” he demanded. “Do you think there’s anything they can do that’s going to make a difference? Look, if they want to make speeches and play survival games, that’s okay by me—but don’t drag me into it. I might decide I wanna spend my time getting drunk, getting high, or getting laid, but I’m not gonna pretend anything.” Charlie Hu looked at his shoes. He knew that John was out of line but apparently couldn’t argue.