“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 closer—but 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 do—climb?”
“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 Canadian—also 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 it—well, 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 air—the 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 gases—all 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 System—which, 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.”